Running with Roller Bulls; The Sin of Normalcy

The Reverend Psych Ward delivering his morning sermon

                          

The Roller girls gets ready

From the balcony, the Revered Psych Ward preached:

“Brothers and Sisters of a drunken God, we come here today with so much joy and for so many different reasons.  So many of you have sinned this past year and you have come here to be cleansed. You are guilty of one great sin and that is…you tried to be normal.  You went to work on time, you finished your degree, you did not get that tattoo.  But today is your day my friends, because let me tell you something, New Orleans ain’t for the normal!”

            San Fermin has been a festival for Spaniards for centuries, but in the last four years it has been celebrated simultaneously in New Orleans.  No one is sure when Spaniards started running from bulls.  The ritual began centuries ago when there were no drunks or foreigners crowding the streets of Pamplona.  It began as a functional thing, a way to transport the grand beasts from some common location in the city to the bull ring where they would be sportily killed.   After enough drinks, or perhaps to impress some ladies, young men started to run with, or from, the bulls to prove….well, something. 

            Last summer, having just returned to Pittsburgh, I started to construct my exit plans by applying to teaching programs, the first being a grant to teach English in Spain.  It was a stretch, but the fantasy was rewarding enough to entertain the process, and it allowed my imagination to forecast myself abroad, running the streets of Pamplona early in the morning, drunk with thousands of strangers and strangeness, participating in the absurd escape from a very real and pursuant pain.

“Today, our avenging demons, our horny girls in red, are going to beat the normal out of your backside!........Now every one of you must get down on your knee to receive the blessing.”

             I did not win the grant and did not move to Spain, but to New Orleans instead.  And so when I found myself kneeling down at the intersection of Fulton and Lafayette at eight in the morning, drinking cold sangria in the middle of ten thousand men and women, I had to laugh.  And then I had to run. 

                                                                                                   

“Oh San Fermin, Oh Patron Saint, Give us your blessing, guide us through the bull run, that we may drink together forever in heaven! Release the bulls!  Run!  Run!  Run!”

           

There were no bulls.  Instead there were the Big Easy Rollergirls.  They wore black leather shorts, fishnet stockings, and red bikinis.  They had longhorned helmets and carried plastic bats and paddles.  They growled and sneered, half-naked sadists, armed and on eight wheels.   The dichotomy was clear.   We were the pure.  They were the wicked.   But as Reverend Pysch Ward highlighted, purity and normalcy are the most simple but veritable sins in New Orleans.  And it was the job of the roller girls to punish us and remind us where we lived. 

I started to take pictures until the fog horn blew and the first team of roller girls was released.  Teams of four to eight roller bulls would fire into the crowd and begin to administer corporal consequences.  The run was a mile long, through the Central Business District and the French Quarter and back.  There were more than two hundred roller girls to elude on the way, some more zealous in their swings than others.  

I weaved and then doubled back to wait for a friend.   When the majority of the crowd had passed and the last of the roller bulls had been released, I began a mild sprint through the throngs.   I insisted on maintaining an unbruised ass; if a rollergirl was going to castigate me, she would have to earn it.   In maintaining my purity, I resisted the bars where many participants suspended their run.  I resisted the bags of wine and the early morning heat’s campaign to slow me.  I sprinted past the krewe of the elvi (multiple elvis’s that travel by motorcycle or scooters) towards the finish line, sweaty but unscathed as the battle sounds of dairy aerial collisions sounded off around me.   My comrades were falling, but I maintained my focus.

Until a cat-eyed roller girl, straight ahead, locked eyes with me.  Her horns were long and twisted, her bat thick and red like blood.  She wore no pants.  Only black fishnet stockings and All-American underwear.  She stood her ground and waited for me.  There was no way around her and so I charged, and then jumped, trying to dodge her fiery sadist blow.  Thwack!  I had been hit, my purity ruined, my good Virginian soul tainted on the backside by the black absurdity of a licentious local roller blader.  I continued on with my comrades.  Escape was futile; normalcy and purity impossible.   The finish line was preempted by a gauntlet of fifty roller girls who stood in a line and smacked the asses of every single passing pedestrian.  Some girls were gentle, but there were those, likely the frustrated back-ups on the team, that expressed their pent up rage with long drawbacks and forceful follow-throughs, excessively flogging every man, woman, and child.  I took a final blow in the shoulder blade by one of these girls as I crossed the finish line then left the crowd in search of some cool air and something to drink. 

I found no water during San Fermin.  Only empanadas and more wine.  Fatigued and filthy, a few friends offered me a ride in a customized hand-drawn rickshaw.  They pulled me through the streets of the New Orleans and my former comrades of the roller girl run, the peon pedestrians that we passed, looked at me as if asking, “what did you do that you deserved this?”  I winked at them.   After enjoying my illusion of self-importance, I hopped off where we began, at the corner of Lafayette and Fulton where a Latin jazz band was facilitating a salsa dance party at nine in the morning.

I talked to the roller girls who had put away their bats and whips unless someone was feeling naughty and requested more punishment.  I asked how many runners they had flogged, and estimates ran between a hundred and a thousand hits each.  By multiplying an approximate average of hits administered by each roller girl (500 x 200), it seems that at least 100,000 spanks were issued during the forty-five minute run.  That is more than 2,222 spanks a minute.

         I danced and ate empanadas, and thought of this number, and of Saint Fermin, who was pure in his beliefs and practices, and therefore punished with decapitation.  His mentor was tied to a bull and dragged through the streets.  I took a last sip of wine and rubbed my backside before wandering off to whatever abnormality was next. 

The Finish Line

At the bottom of Canal Street

 Saint Fermin

Black Elvis

Sweet onion, squash, and cheddar empanada

 A requested flogging

  

Some Normality and Leisure

Holidays and reason are inversely proportional in New Orleans.  The more reason and national tradition a holiday possesses, the less play this city gives it.  Therefore 4^th of July warranted little weirdness, but included the common affects: extensive alcohol, large crowds, lots of leisure, and a dangerous amount of city residents firing explosives from cramped backyard spaces.  

            I have little narrative to offer but while I work on my next piece, I thought I would share some photographs from the past week which also a tell a story, albeit lazily. I had added captions, but took them away to allow your own imaginative thread to pull them together. 

 

The Dichotomy of Imbalance; Work and Play in the Big Easy

The Golden Shoes

I have always been a yin and yang man, a big picture-everything comes together-is together kind of man. It has afforded me a perspective of fluidity, an ability to adapt to my environments and see the world broadly, but it has cost me some basic abilities, such as organizing ideas and information, balancing decisions that suggest divergent paths. And that’s because I am forever incompetent of separating things, removing the black from the white, the good from the bad, work from play.

In New Orleans this disposition can be advantageous. Unless you are preparing for something as requisitely unbalanced as first-year teaching in public schools.

A couple Saturdays ago, I was driving to the dollar store with a coworker to pick up teacher supplies when we had to stop the car at City Park Avenue. A week after Krewe de Palmyra, Mid-City was struck again with another afternoon parade.

The 610 Stompers, self-proclaimed to be “ordinary men with extraordinary moves” were leading the second neighborhood bar crawl in eight days. They were eighty male dancers that wore gold sneakers, tube socks, short blue shorts, headbands, and fake (or real) mustaches. They synchronized dance moves while marching behind a colossal traveling stereo on a truck. Three hundred people followed behind them, and they seemed to be stopping at every bar in the neighborhood.

I returned home and drank a beer on the balcony with my roommates, lamenting this issue of balance. I had just finished an eighty hour work week and was about to begin another to prepare my classroom for summer school. There seemed to be no time for play, but I felt uncomfortable letting a parade pass through my neighborhood without my participation.

I grabbed my old festival PBR shirt, bicycled to Parkway Bakery for a catfish po-boy, and joined the parade at Finn McCool’s. There was no live band, just the truck with speakers blaring pop songs and the troupe of male dancers following it, unifying modernized disco moves with deft hilarity. We danced our way down Banks Street and to the final stop at Bayou Beer Garden where a party was ready out back.

The Ghost, a founding member of the 610 Stompers, insisted on buying me a PBR because of my  shirt. We talked about banalities and how the Stompers got started. “We just got really drunk on MLK day a couple years ago and came up with this idea. I don’t show up to many practices. I’m in and out a lot, but it’s just, the truth is…. I can flat out fucking dance."

I went home soon after and started cutting stars from construction paper and preparing tests and quizzes while people drank on my porch. I would skip the party scheduled for a rooftop RV park across the street that night. I would skip the Cajun-Zydeco Music Festival and the Tomato Festival the next day. I would work from my bed the next Saturday while a thousand biking enthusiasts gathered in Abita Springs for the annual Louisiana Bicycle Festival.

There is no doubt that teaching, especially in the first and second year, is sacrificial in spirit and practice. There is hardly time to write, much less party. But if the 610 Stompers, and guys like Ghost, who are just ordinary men, busy men, can go out together "to flat out fucking dance" on hot Saturday afternoons, then I refuse to believe that balance is impossible. Even if the weights are tilted further towards service, New Orleans remains weird enough that there is always some strangeness marching down your street, waiting for you to put your work away and join it, even if only for a few colorful evening hours.

For videos and more info on the Stompers, check their website, it's great.      

The remaining Stompers at the end of the parade

610 ladies

Dinner

After-party dance competition.

With the Ghost