Zoobombing Out the Bubble

 
      Many friends suggested I wouldn't like Portland, that it was a liberal hyperbole of a city, hipsters and home gardens and Oregon progressivism--a whole lot of people living in an ideal bubble where nothing serious could burst it.  My friends were right and wrong.  The Northwestern cities of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are like bubbles.  As long as you don't mind the absence of sunshine, you can live a young person's life more or less the way you want it, working forty hours a week, drinking delicious craft beer, eating local foodie food everyday, taking drugs openly, hiking our country's greatest mountains and trails on the weekend.
        It's a good life, where the weird can blend into the mainstream while in other cities in other states you'd be looked at as a freak or criminal.  But even bubbles have their sub-cultures, the freaks away from the freaks.   In Portland, the city accepts them too.
       Every Sunday night, starting at 9 o'clock, a group of bike nuts called Zoobombers collect at 13th and Burnside downtown.  There was a pole on the corner the city built for them.  The pole was twenty feet tall and capped by a mini metal bicycle statue.  At the the base were thirty or more children's bicycles, or "mini's" chained to the pole.  Every Sunday the Zoobombers unchain the bikes and carry them onto the local train, the "Max," and then ride the elevator up to Washington Park.  They gather in a field above the zoo, one of the higher elevation points in the city.  Then they ride the mini's down the twisting roads to the bottom, several hundred feet below.  Sometimes the mini's have no brakes and they have to use their feet to stop.

          I didn't have a mini, but an adult bike I borrowed from a friend on my last night in Portland.  There was no one at the statue so I rode around until I saw a hipster riding a mini down Alder Avenue.  
        "You're lucky," he said.  "You would have never found the place on your own."
         Dave carried a motorcycle helmet with him on onto the Max.
         "A lot of us don't have dental insurance.  So if you fall and break your teeth..."
         I had preconceived bombing as a weekly recreation, a quirky Portland thing that quirky Portland hipsters do on Sunday nights, but for Dave and the other long-standing members, it was an attitude and lifestyle.  Dave had just come back from a month-long vacation in Hawaii.  Not to surf or scuba-dive but to bomb the hills of Honolulu and any other island town with steep semi-paved roads.   He had organized a small operation where a local driver would carry their bikes to the top with a truck and then pick them up at bottom and do it again.
          "A bunch of Asian girls wanted to join us, but they chickened out," he said.  'They left us a 12-pack though."  I thought of my own friends who did not come out with me.   Haley, my hostess and a serious biker in Portland had accidentally been caught in a group of zoobombers once before.  "It was terrifying," she said.  She stayed home this night, not wanting to chance injury.
          Dave explained the risk, how zoobombing is not as dangerous as people say it is.  No more dangerous than driving a car or commuting by bicycle.
         "I mean, you're going to crash if you keep doing it.  Even if you ride a bike regular, you have to crash eventually, like, you might might ride a 1,000 years but then you'll crash that one time."
         I thought about risk and my own tolerance for it compared to others.  What Dave said made sense.   We can all calculate risk in terms of where we are and what we're doing, but we can never account for the majority of other factors that determine the outcome, namely other people around us.  
       When we get to the top we take a dark trail through the woods to the top of the hill where we could see the city from opposite sides, but where nobody could see us.  The field was lit by the moon and everyone gathered in a circle in the grass and smoked and drank and listened to ideas about throwing a zoo-bomb block party which had to be called a community event since no one lived on that block.
        After an hour there were almost thirty of us.   Someone called "2 minutes.  Everyone finished their beer and cigarettes.  We picked up our bikes and went to the road where it crested.
       Dave explained the rules with a call and response:
      "What do you say if you see a car?"
      "Car!" everyone shouted.
      "If you see a cop?"
      "Pepper!"
       "What do you do if you crash?"
       "Get the fuck off the road!"

       The longboarders went first.  Then the min-bikes.  A veteran with a feathered mohawk on his helmet cleared his throat and halted the other mini's.
      "Listen!  I've been riding for a long time and if there's one thing everyone should know, it's that you look very gay when you zoobomb!" The mini-bikes took off.  Then the adult bikes lined up and went.  Most nights there was a medic in case of a crash. There was none tonight.
     

  
             The hills were less steep than I expected but the switchbacks were sharp and dark.  We ignored stop signs.  I tugged my coaster brakes at all the turns and when I got to the bottom five minutes later my brakes smelled like burning rubber.
         I went back up a second time.  At the top seven veterans announce a "hellway detour," and took a quick left to bomb again, this time using the highway.  The rest of us went back up into the park.  They form a circle again and drink and smoke for another hour.  It was midnight.  It began to rain.
       All the bombers picked up their bikes and boards and headed for the road.  But instead of bombing they sought "sanctuary" under a pavilion.  I was sober and restless.  Dave noticed me anxiously peddling in circles by the road.  He gave me directions to bomb the hill myself.  This time I kept off the brakes.  I howled and I whooped as I soared downward, turning and gliding, gliding and turning, down and out of the park, through downtown, past Powell's bookstore and the foodtrucks, past cops in cars and cops on bikes, across the bridge and back towards my bed for the night.
        The next day I got on the Cascades train bound for Seattle.  Haley, my hostess, got hit by a Portland cop car that pulled out of a parking garage without looking.  Her bike was totaled.  They blamed her.  

For more information check the BBC report video and report here

       
 
        
     

The Coast Starlight

"I sought trains; I found passengers."  - Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

 The Coast Starlight is a superliner Amtrak passenger train running from Los Angeles to Seattle.  It is 1,377 miles and was formerly known as the Southern Pacific Coast Daylight and you had to transfer to Union Pacific to get all the way up.  When Amtrak took over it merged the lines.  I took it from Emeryville, CA to Portland, OR overnight.  

The Coast Starlight out of Emervyille.  Departing 10:07 pm

       Paulo was tall and Canadian, and he didn't believe in bordeom.  "It's a first-world disease" he said.  He had homes in San Francisco and Vancouver and travels back and forth often, mostly by train.  He ate cheetohs, but calls them "cheesies."  He offered me some.  I ate them and offered him scotch.  It was 10:30 pm and the rest of our car was sleeping including an Amish family of twelve men, women, and babies.  Paulo went to find cups and ice and I headed to the observation car, the place people who can't sleep go at night. 

        The observation car, or lounge car, is adjacent to the dining car but above the snack car.  The observation car has wider windows and a second row of windows that curves into a dome-like extension of the ceiling, so that passengers can admire the Pacific sky.  The car is divided in half, with a section of containing a single row of seats facing the window like in a movie theatre, and lined with shallow window-side countertops.  The other section had dining tables and booths, not unlike a diner.   Something like it can be found on most trains, but it's more refined on the Coast Starlight, a 1,389 mile trip rail ride from Los Angeles to Seattle, and a model for commercial classism.  Passengers in sleeping cars have their lounge car with lacy drapes along the windows and flowers in the bathrooms.  They have wine and champagne tasting in the afternoon.  They were more peaceful and civil and that half of the train and if you tried to cross to the other side you'd have to show your ticket or turn around.  Our side was louder and nearly classless There were half a dozen men already drinking at the tables.   No man sat together.   The loudest were charming but vulgar.

         "If you sit together, you're gay!"  Paulo left my table.  They were all older than 30.  Everyone seemed to have their own liquor or beer.

         A young, stocky white guy with a white baseball cap and glasses leaned against the window with his feet out in the aisle.  He held a beer from the snack car in his hand. 

         "Alcohol is illegal on the reservation.  That's where I lived all my life.  I'm 29 years old now."  He sipped his beer like it was his first time drinking, his first time away from the reservation.  He sat in the booth next to Andrew.   Andrew was half-Egyptian, wore a blue cap, and was louder than anyone else at that hour.  He made fun of everyone in succession sitting in the car, but when asked about his racial identity he became more serious.

        "When I went to Egypt, I looked around, and realized, holy shit!  I'm not white!  It was one of the two most profound realizations, turning points really, in my life."  He didn't tell us the other one.  In his bag he had a bottle of 2 buck chuck wine which he poured into plastic cups of ice to make "wine spritzers."  He had four cups of ice.  

         Everyone on the lounge car was male and offensive.   They talked about the lack of women in the observation car constantly.  When Kenny, another white male in a baseball cap, arrived he asked, "Where all the women at, yo?"

        "What are you talking about?" Andrew said, "I'm getting my dick sucked by a hot-ass ghost right now.  Can't you see?"  

        All the most inveterate train travelers bring their own liquor.  They also realize the futility in learning the real names of each other, knowing we would likely never see each other again.  Mark became Paco because he was Mexican.  Billy became Sam Elliot because he dressed like a cowboy and looked like Sam Eliot from The Big Lebowski.  I became Klaus because I looked like an Austrian accountant, or a German internet mogul; they couldn't decide which.  Of all the travelers, Sam Eliot was the most veteran, the most wily.  He looks older than 60 maybe 70, and he spoke slowly and cryptically, sometimes with the intention of adding to his aura of old-man mystery and wisdom.  He was vulgar, charming, and without manners.   He had a wild grey beard and mustache, but shaved his sideburns, and wore a brown suede vest over a worn and faded blue linen shirt.  He wore boots and although he didn't have spurs, something metal on his body always jingled when he walked.  He carried a cowboy hat with a single white feather tucked into a rope around the inner-brim, but he only wore it when he got up to leave the car.  A knife stuck out of his back pocket.

       "So what are you?"  Andrew asked, pouring another wine spritzer, "a cowboy or an artist?"  

      "Well," he said with a drawl, "I'm a moonshiner.  Moonshiner by day, female escort by night."  Everyone laughed.  

      "How's business?" 

      "Lousy."  

      Somewhere before Davis, CA, James, a young black man going to see a girl in Sacramento, pulls out a napkin with marijuana in it.  The whole car smells.   He offers to sell it.   We tell him he should stay on the train, forget about the girl. 

      "Naw, man, I never leave California."   When he left the car Kenny put down his beer and pulled out a large bag of his own marijuana, more than an ounce, and offered to get everyone high at the next stop.  

     At Sacremento the train stopped for thirty minutes for what Amtrak unofficially calls a "smoke stop."  Everyone filed out behind Kenny.  I stayed behind in the observation car and poured another drink.  Andrew doubles back and shows me he has his own stash.  The two of us leave out a different car and smoke between the tracks, behind a truck, a couple grown men acting like teenagers in a state where it's practically legal.  An Amtrak employee filling the train's tank with gas spotted us.  He told us it is safer on the other side of the train.  

     By two in the morning Kenny was asleep and James had left us for his girl.  Frank, another stocky white man in a baseball cap, joined us.  He said he had some new property and a home in Washington.  

    "Where is it?" asks Paco.

    "I don't know.  All I know I get off the train and there's a bitch waiting for me in a car."  Paco explains that there is always a better woman out there then the one you have and talks about the pros and cons of sleeping with 19 year old's.  When he is out of rum he puts a banana and a condom on the table in front of me in exchange for my scotch.  I take the banana.  He has two more bananas which, after a couple more drinks, he starts to fondle and handle obscenely.  The more he drinks the louder he gets.  A pair of Amtrak employees come through and ask us to be quieter.  Sam Eliot puts his hat on and leaves.  He comes back with a guitar.

      "Now it's over," he says.  He sings folk songs about Paulo and Canada and Checkpoint Charlie's in New Orleans.  He sings about Egyptians and whiskey and marijuana and trains.  He sings about murder and betrayal and horses.   By two in the morning they herd around me because I'm the only one with alcohol left and the snack car is closed.  Sam Eliot is throwing money at me for my whiskey, which I don't accept.  I pass the bottle around until it's empty.  By three in the morning Andrew has gotten off the train, and Paulo, Kenny, and Frank are asleep.  Sam Eliot is still playing guitar and Paco is shouting amicably at some new fellows who joined us because there were too many crying babies in their car.  

Klaus, Paco, and Sam Eliot (not the real Sam Eliot)

        My bottle was empty and I was finally tired.  I left and fell asleep at my seat by the window.  

       When I woke up we were in Oregon and there was a wide rainbow sprouting from Upper Klamath Lake, the largest lake in Oregon  The rainbow climbed across the mountains and vanished behind a blanket of stratus clouds.  The Amish family was now awake and moving around the car, feeding babies, and eating hot noodle cups for breakfast.  There were twelve of them.  They had taken the train from Wisconsin to Tijuana where they went white water rafting, surfing, and rode jetskis across the Pacific shore.  They were headed back to their farm, where they are completely self-sufficient by growing all their own food.  For money they sell timber and chickens.  

      I went to the lounge car to drink coffee and write down some notes.  Two men with microphones narrated the sights outside the window:  "root beer falls," the longest covered bridge in Oregon, visual histories of landslides and their ability to disrupt and halt train service, Crater Lake National Park, lakes, mountains, rivers, falls, until it all seemed mundanely beautiful and green.  

        Sam Eliot was sitting at a table in the corner gambling with two older men and a young college student wearing University of Oregon swag.  By 10:15 Sam Eliot opened his first beer.   Paulo joined me after eating breakfast with the Amish.  He explained his theory in boredom, which is to say, he doesn't believe in it, unless he's in captivity.  The Amish sat next to us and spoke quietly in German, looking out the window and listening to the commentary.  Sam Eliot talked about them from the corner, "They're so quiet and dull.  Like sheep."  He felt they were his antithesis, the very opposite of himself and what he believes in, quiet people who could't enjoy life because they were square.  He hadn't talked to them yet; didn't know they had been on jet skis and rafts in Mexico. 

        When the commentators stopped their presentation at 11:30, Sam Eliot was on his third beer.  He picked up his guitar and howled.  This startled the Amish.  He began to sing a country bluegrass song about murder. 

        I got my bags ready as we headed into Portland.  The college kid was trying to sell a new iPhone 4 for $100 because he lost all his money in the morning poker game and didn't have enough to buy his next train ticket home.  Sam Eliot was irritated because he couldn't find liquor in Eugene and he is tired of beer.  He cornered the Amish men at the stop before to talk to them.  When they get back on the train they break from their English to make fun of him, "He says he is going to have a good time, and, try to stop him."  They laughed.  "He say nobody can stop him, nobody can stop him from having fun."  

       They all changed their appearance as they prepared to leave the Coast Starlight for the Empire Builder.  The men wore wide-brimmed tan hats and black vests and black shoes.  The women wore black dresses and a second black bonnet to cover their white one.  They even wrap their babies in black blankets that look like sacks that look like shrouds.  It looks disturbing at first until I see the baby that was just crying and is now silent and sleepy, so cozy in its layers that for a moment I have the infantile desire to go back twenty-six years in my life, to be that Amish baby, traveling by train from Tijuana up the green, watery Pacific coast, wrapped warmly in a series of black and white blankets.         

        They got off the train in front of me to wait inside Union Station.  Their next train headed East.  I helped them with their bags and waved goodbye.  I had two days in Portland.  Then another train North.   

        

In Portland. The Amish families on the right.

     

A Whole Different Animal

For the next month or two I will be documenting my travels across the country while on vacation from New Orleans.  Each segment will be amount my specific mode of transportation for that segment of the trip and the passengers I ride with.  This is my first post of the trip.      

       My train journey began on a plane.  I had sixteen days to travel the perimeter of the States, from California to Vancouver to New York, and the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles would take 48 hours of it.  So I flew to San Francisco instead.  It took three connecting flights to get there.  The first two were run by an airline company based out of Denver called Frontier.  They were newer, smaller, and their pilots less adept at landing planes without inducing extreme anxiety amongst their passengers. 
       When we landed in Denver the pilot thanked us.  "Thank you for flying Frontier: We're a whole different animal." 
      A female soldier in her uniform woke up in front of me.  "Did they really say that or did I just imagine it in my sleep?"
    "It's true," I told her.  "Look at the airplane tails."  There were two Frontier planes parked next to us.  On the tails they had painted large colorful photographs of wild animals.  A lynx, an arctic ram.  Ours had a bobcat. 
     In Kansas City International Airport there were designated tornado shelters, usually the sublevel corridors that lead to the underground parking garage.  In Denver's airport there were also tornado shelters, most often the men's bathroom, even though no one in Denver has died of a tornado in fifty years.  I used it, feeling safe, and hustled onto my final plane, through United.  They would not let a woman on because they couldn't identify where she got her boarding pass.  Frontier had issued it.  She had been the Frontier flight to somewhere in California until she refused to give up her seat so a mother and her daughter could sit together.  She caused a scene by protesting, not knowing that airports were poor places to be noticed, or take any kind of stand, political or personal.  Don't be noticed is the best rule of thumb.  She was asked to leave the plane.  The police were called.  Then they put her on United. 
       "I'm suing," she said into her phone.  "They can't treat me like that.  I didn't do anything wrong, yeah, I'm gonna sue."  Then she began to cry.  The person on her phone told her he wouldn't pick her up.  "Fine, I don't care, I'll just a take a cab.  I don't care anymore."  She cried for twenty minutes until she fell asleep.
      
         I arrived in San Francisco at night.  A friend picked me up and for the next two days I rode his bike along the coast, across the bridge, though parks, and up and down large hills.  At night we drank beer and walked around, reveling in the color of the city: hippies with dreads to their knees in the Mission, cross-dressing transexuals in the Castro, the erotic cookie shop, a guy who built lasers with things from his house with things from his kitchen, carpet-cleaning robots, and pubs with interiors made of glow lights and sheet metal.  
        I left on a Friday night after a final beer in the lower Haight.  I went to the back of the bus where I met Dylan, or Dylah the Killah, and a recently released felon celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend.  Dylah was thinking of opening a 4 Loko, but he had just "woken up on the beach, and was like, what the fuck?" after drinking one before.
        "Last time I drank one of those I cracked my rib," I told him. 
        "So you can appreciate the aeshetics of it."  Dylah was a rapper. He was high on cocaine and maybe acid. The felon was celebrating his birthday.  He spent his last five birthdays in jail and now he was arguing with his girlfriend. 
      "That's fucked up.  I don't care care about your feelings?!  How the fuck can you say I don't care about your feelings?  Of course I fuckin' care for your feelings.  And it's my birthday, goddamnit, my first out..." Dylah the Killah tells him he should fix his attitude and think more positively.  That this was a cause to celebrate and he was "going to fuck it all up with that negativity."  He offers to sell him acid to cheer him up. They agree to meet up later and then the felon and his girlfriend get off.
      I asked Dylah where I should get off to get to Emerville, but he didn't know. He raps about a blonde that is standing in the doorway.  He uses five or six-syllable words and improvises complex rhymes.  He raps about all the drugs he is on.  I ask the busdriver where I need to get off, but he doesn't know either.
       I figured it out, taking another MUNI bus, and wandering through a series of parking lots in the suburbs of Oakland to find an AMTRAK station with busted lights and a few people asleep in chairs inside.  I figured the train would be a step down in excitement, a relaxed footbridge to the next city.  I would ride the train and look out the window, reading, writing, drinking alone, thinking.  I was wrong. 

NOTES:  The felon was given that epithet, not in disrespect of citizens released from prison, but because I didn't catch his name or want to make it up here.  He was proud about his prison term just as he was proud to be free again.  Next post coming soon: The Coast Starlight and Portland

Leaving by Train

          

           There were 15,000 rubber duckies in the back of a dump truck parked at the edge of the bayou.  When the truck released them several firemen with hoses attached to hydrants fired at the ducks to help them move a little faster (bayou is Native American word for slow-moving water).  The finish line was 100 feet away.  The winning duck won its patron a new car.  My lucky duck number was 35431. 

           My duck didn't win but I was feeling auspicious anyway.  I have a good job, a caring girlfriend, I live in a nice neighborhood with good people, I see live music and dance almost everyday, most often in the streets, and it is sunny more than 200 days a year.   And now festival season had ended.  It began with Mardi Gras, the most epic of all holidays, which is hard to write about because it cannot be related to anyone that hasn't been.   I have tried many times to write about how I saw Jesus standing with a half-naked woman-rabbit on a truck or about the born-again Jew for Jesus who told my friends they would get "super-gonorrhea 3" and sang folk songs about my uncircumcised penis in the key of C while we drank on the levee on Lundi Gras, or the steel Trojan Horse that paraded the streets looking for battle, but none of it makes sense out of context, and there is little context to Mardi Gras except Mardi Gras itself.   You'll just have to see it to know it. 

          Three months later, with the dumping of the ducks, it was the end of Bayou Boogaloo.  This was important to me because it marked the anniversary of my arrival in New Orleans, and the first time in five years I had lived in a city for more than ten months without fleeing and taking all my things with me.  I have found a home for now, and that is significant, because I am always rambling in my mind and spirit.  So as the urge to flee struck me, I decided to take only a temporary leave instead.  By Train.  I fly to San Francisco today and then board my first train in Emeryville, CA on Friday night.  I will travel approximately 5,000 miles from coast to coast to coast.  Here are my stops in order below.  

Emervyille - Portland

Portland - Seattle

Seattle - Vancouver

Vancouver - Seattle - West Glacier (Montana)

West Glacier - Minneapolis

Minneapolis - Chicago - Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh - New York City

New York City - New Orleans

Take a break then back on the train...

New Orleans - Chicago

Chicago - Richmond

Fly back home

I am not taking any ipod, iphone, ipad, apple product, or computer.  Just my basic cell phone, clothes, notebooks, and books.  I hope to read and write often and if I have the chance to post anything here I will.  
 


 Big Chief Mondreaux and Honey Bannister ending my festival season

Approaching Mardi Gras

         

            I had been inside Studio 3 less than a minute when a naked woman came bounding across the warehouse floor doing cartwheels.  Her boobs were glittered purple and gold.  They sparkled as she rushed the stage.  Behind her was a young man dressed as an octogenarian.   He wore a Santa Claus beard and shuffled across the floor with his walker.  He also was naked, but without the glitter. 

            Mardi Gras morning was only ten days away but I could feel the anticipation of its arrival ascending steeply.  I have yet to experience it but I can feel it coming, and I can feel the microcosms of New Orleanian culture expounding with each approaching day.  In a city that prefers parties over politics, absurdity over etiquette, and is never shy to express its color and sound by parading itself in the streets, Mardi Gras is definitive.  It is hyperbole of this spirit actualized, the very real manifestation of everyone’s desire to deshackle social expectations and norms and walk freely in the streets as whatever the hell they feel like.  The streets are no longer the stuff of cars, but our venue of a good time, where everyone agrees to meet to dance and drink together and disregard all the normalcies of daily life.  After four weeks of eating King Cakes, its approach seems real and tangible, the magnetic field of the famous day pulling us all faster and faster toward it.   The approach is communal and exciting, as if everyone is together on a large ship accelerating toward some funky island filled with music, beer and costumes, but the ship is also fillled with these things and so the ride there is almost just as good.  

            Ten days before Fat Tuesday I walked out the door wearing sequin shorts, a tank top, swimming goggles, a purple inner-tube and a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers backpack filled with beer, whiskey and a foam kickboard.  The apocalypse ball was that night.  Costume was mandatory and people were encouraged to dress as if the world might end and the party would have to move skyward or hellward.  I thought if the world ended tomorrow I would want to take a swim first.  I put on sunscreen and my lifeguard whistle and headed out the door.

            Two hours later I was dancing underneath several colossal floats, including thirty-foot tall Greek gods and goddesses.  I was surrounded by people of various costumes and degrees of nudity.  The stage was filled with young revelers that proclaimed the world might end soon and everyone must be quiet or die to hear what they had to say about it.  They were lead by a half-naked drummer who called forth the High Priest, an old man wearing a red sparkling bikini.  They marched around the stage and several women convulsed on the floor in some improvised ritual dance.  The entertainers’ only objective was to stay weird, to stay in character.   The drum beat picked up and the women continued to gyrate as the high priestess pointed to a disco ball, now ascending toward the ceiling, and up the nose of a twenty-foot wide Mardi Gras mask that overlooked us all.   The revelry had already begun, but the high priestess now made it official.

            Everyone danced and drank for several hours.  Outside people strapped themselves to a large wheel designed to castigate party-goers with excessive tickling.  Four stuffed animals lay on the wet ground as part of the petting zoo.  Inside the warehouse space filled with smoke and the smell of marijuana.  The ground accumulated the moisture of sweat and beer and the only place warm was in front of the dance floor where everyone danced wildly, an extreme inter-meshing of sparkles, costumes, and colors, all moving freely under the direction of the Stooges Brass Band.

            When I danced I felt like a bumper car, my inner-tube bouncing against the hips of my neighbors until they spilled their beers. I ran away each time.  Revelers were getting sloppy, and I knew it was my duty as a pre-apocalyptic lifeguard to try to save them.  I wore the orange "guard" tanktop that legally obligated me to do so.   I attached a rope to the tube and threw it into the crowd hoping to save at least person from the sweaty turpitude of a doomsday dance party.  The innertube came back empty.  Nobody wanted to be saved.  

             “If the Rapture happened, I wouldn’t want to go.   Not before Mardi Gras,” a friend said.  Everyone agreed.  I ditched the innertube and pulled out my kickboard and swam back into the sweaty, glittering crowd.  Nowhere else did this scene seem possible. Nowhere else seemed as desirable.

              

            It took most of the next day to recover.  The world hadn’t ended. The Rapture had not selected anyone, at least no locals.  And Mardi Gras was now only nine days away.  The Krewe of ‘Tit Rex was scheduled to roll at 5:30 in the Bywater.  I rested until I felt good enough to travel again and then biked with friends across the train tracks and staked a claim on a corner of Burgundy.  ‘Tit Rex was possibly the most adorable parade in New Orleans.  Because everything is more precious when it is tinier.  While most Mardi Gras parades feature colossal floats, the kinds that overlooked the debauchery in Studio 3 the night before, ‘Tit Rex featured miniature floats, tediously crafted and detailed, each no bigger than a microwave.   Men and women in costume lead their floats by fishing line or remote control and distribued tiny coconuts, parasols and clothespins as throws.  A group of older residents dangled tiny spectator puppets who waved at the floats as they went by, all of it lead by a trio of jazz bands spaced evenly throughout.  Once again I found myself dancing in the street, and the same feeling came over me as always, “Here I am and Here we are….nowhere else…nowhere else…”  

            After, I walked with friends and found a bakery in the 9th Ward that opened at night,   We ate maple bacon scones on our way to a swanky art gallery party at a house that had been vacant and rotting only six months before.  Now it was a community art space in the middle of a poor neighborhood.  The beer was free and a smooth jazz band serenaded a room full of hipsters looking at photographs of naked men and peppers on the walls and floors.   Anywhere else the transitions between these activities and environments might seem impossible, if not jarring, but it all felt normal in the Bywater of New Orleans. 

           The next day the canine parade, Barkus, was scheduled to roll at 2:30.  The French Quarter filled with dogs wearing funny sweaters or being toted in decorated wagons.  The dog-walkers were not in costume, but they seemed crazy enough, all of them talking to each other through their animals.        

          "Is he potty-trained?" A woman asked  a friend in the French Quarter.  The dog was an English bulldog and it wore a blue, yellow, and purple sash around its neck while drooling heavily onto Chartres.  She leaned down toward it.

         "Are you potty-trained?"  she asked.  The dog looked blankly back. 

         "She's going through a program," the man said.  "Aren't you?" 

         "Yes, you are," the woman said, "You are a good dog, aren't you?"

         The parade was disappointing.  I spent an hour watching several hundred residents take their dogs for an elaborate walk on a designated route, wearing sweaters and sashes.  The dogs hadn't practiced and the spacing was terrible.  Dogs aren't good at parading.    It seemed too normal.  "Cats would be better," a friend suggested.  "That would be absurd enough." After the thousandth dog, I could not not stand it anymore, and I left to go home, hardly even stopping to dance to the lindy-hop jazz band on the corner.   

         I biked down Bourbon toward Esplanade ready to rest in my bed, knowing there would be a hard week of work before the partying began non-stop and I would need all my reserves to make it there and through.  I passed an older man wearing a golden robe and a Persian nobility’s hat.  He carried a golden pole with the flag of St. Ann.  He was drunk and the bells on his ankles jingled as he walked.  His stumble was rhythmic as he marched across the quiet end of Bourbon Street  He fell over in the middle of the intersection.  I heard the collapse of the pole and the smack of his bells ring against the pavement.  I turned around.  He was lifeless and prostrate in the street.  No cars were coming.  I approached him to help him up when he lifted his face and chest and then kissed the ground three times.  He bent his knees and bowed his head, and even though I could not hear him, I understood his reverence, the veneration of excess--he was praying to the streets.  Mardi Gras was finally here. 

THE APOCALYPSE BALL

Apocalypse Ball 2012

 

Naked (censored) octogenarian costume

'TIT REX

Horseman of the Apocalypse

'Tit Rex float

'Tit Rex

'Tit Rex

'Tit Rex

     

BARKUS

Barkus

Barkus

To view videos, click on hyperlinks in text ('Tit Rex and Barkus)

Football in New Orleans: The Saints, The Tigers, and a collective sigh of disappointment

            The New Superdome (great picture I can't legally post here)

            “If we win it’s a second-line; if we lose it’s a jazz funeral.”  This is always the spirit of any high-stakes Saints game in New Orleans.  I have lived in a couple football cities (Boston, Pittsburgh) and while the passion Steelers fans have for their football team is maximally equivalent, it is not expressed with as much heart and loving fervor anywhere else as it is in New Orleans.

            It is hard to understate how big football is in the United States.  It is no longer a Sunday activity, a way to pass the time with nachos and beers in a recliner.  In some ways it has even escalated beyond the Roman Coliseum’s spirit of bloody battles between titans, a mob group of men watching the physical collision of warriors and beasts in wild anticipation of a desired finish, a well-fought victory, despite the sure cost of injury and bodily loss.   It has that, too.  But no, it more than that now.  It is tribal.  

            Football gives a community colors.  It gives a community a united purpose that transcends socio-economic divisions.  It gives a community an excusable passion in cheering for the regulated violence exacted against rivals, against the other tribe.  It is dist

             When the college football season wound down to its close, New Orleans became a hubbub of collegiate traffic.  The Superdome was to host three important games in seven days:  The Sugar Bowl, the Saints vs. Lions, and the NCAA College National Championship featuring two local southern giants, Alabama and the home-state LSU Tigers. The population of New Orleans is around 350,000, but on that weekend it felt like it had doubled downtown.  The streets were flooded with young men donning their respective colors.   They were young and drunk and from out of town, many of them having rolled straight out of bed from sorority and fraternity houses.  They didn’t always play by the local rules of “Be Nice or Leave.”  Even on my block, purple tribesmen settled in and began to drink and cry and scream at one another. Everywhere, a steady traffic of angry human flotsam in crimson or purple paraded the streets with exotic drinks, yelling and shouting, each side delusional that the other side will have be the ones to go home stung and wounded. 

            The night of the championship game was quiet.  I biked to the Superdome just after kickoff.  Nearby in the Central Business District, LSU fans had set up tribal encampments.  Entire parking lots had been turned into outdoor theatres.  Large tents were set up with thirty foot projector screens hid underneath.  Smaller camps of families huddled around smaller televisions set up next to their RVs.   I could not see the game from my bike but I could hear the commentators narrating each play as I moved from camp to camp, large television to small television to large.   The Alabama tribe was nowhere to be seen.  Everyone had been convivial enough in the days before, but it was dangerous to intermingle during these critical hours.  The Crimson Tide camps had hid themselves away in secluded corners of downtown, or bought out entire floors of large bars so they could watch together in safety and numbers.

            The French Quarter appeared empty.  Nobody was on the street, but I could tell the temperature of the game by the simple outbursts that would surge through bar windows as I passed. 

            I arrived at a bar with friends in the second quarter of the game.  The tribe was purple and local.  Only a few women wearing Crimson were in the corner, closest to the television, were there.   They were lesbians and they were very loud.  Each time they cheered the rest of the bar was silent.  I have no allegiance to either tribe.  I am a pacifist.  But even then I wanted to throttle them.  They were audacious and out of place, but likely protected from danger because of their minority status, and because they were buff enough to beat the shit out of any man or woman who might tell them to tone it down.   We left at halftime, and I wondered if even that would be enough to protect them if LSU lost in the end.

            LSU did lose, badly.  There were no explosions.  No turning of cars.  No riot police.  The purple tribe had been stung, their pride wounded.   There would be a few fights on Bourbon Street.   I went home to my quiet neighborhood, now overtaken by fraternity boys.  Across the street a young man cursed expletives, calling his own tribe’s quarterback a “faggot” because he lost the game for “us.”  A friend told him it would be ok, to come back inside and have a drink and left him there.   He sat on the curb and began to cry softly.

            Saints fans aren’t prone to crying or fighting over a loss.  When the Vancouver Canucks lost in 2011 in Game 7 of hockey’s Stanley Cup, the city was upset enough to try to burn it down.  When the Steelers won Superbowls in 2006 and 2009, the city was happy enough to upturn cars and trashcans, to burn defenseless couches and break the windows of liquor stores.     New Orleans has already suffered enough damage.  Crime and murder and hurricanes have hurt the community enough that it is unfathomable to willingly accumulate its abuse because of a football game.  It is a party city, and so the party just gets bigger, the people happier.  

Alex Smith piñata beatdown

            When I woke up that morning my throat was closed up and my nose was stuffed.   I had a head-ache and my eyes were red.   I rested and drank enough chicken soup to feel decent enough to bike to the Marigny for the game.  I arrived at the R Bar, where you can get a shot of Jameson, a high life, and a haircut for $10 on Mondays.   This time the bar was packed, the pool table covered with a tarp and crockpots of chili.  A saints fan stood on the barber’s chair and rang a plastic cowbell.  A voodoo doll hung against the wall above the house liquors.   It looked like a drooping black turd wearing a 49ers jersey.  The Saints were down 17-0 and already the Voodoo doll had been stuck with several 9 inch needles.   At halftime, with the deficit marginalized, a piñata of the 49ers quarterback was hung on the corner outside.   Two birthday girls were given shots and the second exploded his torso, releasing a confetti of candy, whistles, and plastic mythical creature toys.   The act was not done with vitriol or resentment, instead it was a fun jab against our enemy, a simple way New Orleanians celebrate; nothing is sacred and nothing is serious.   We collected the plastic dinosaurs and whistles until the second half began.   The fans were not serious football people.  They did not comprehend or care about the nuances of the game; but they were serious Saints fans.  They cheered at incredible decibels when the Saints kicked an extra point, or completed a 4 yard pass short of a first down.   Everything was reason to celebrate.  When they felt a flag should have been thrown, they hurled lightly weighted yellow napkins at the screen.  They hurled them often.  Nobody cursed.  Nobody called the other quarterback a faggot, and nobody ever said a bad word about their own men, their black and gold tribe.    

            Toward the end of the game, the bartenders stood on the back counter and beat the voodoo doll furiously as the 49ers and Saints exchanged scores in the fourth quarter.  They beat the doll with a crutch.   Then a frying pan.  Then a skateboard.  They stabbed it with large kitchen knives, always with a smile and a laugh.  Each time they taped the weapon against the doll, a visual history of its abuse, and a promise that another weapon of torment was coming.  With two minutes left both bartenders completely abandoned their posts at the bar.  They stood on either side of the doll, and like pistons, beat the belly of the voodoo doll with crowbars.  When they were done, it was nearly severed.  They taped it back together to prepare for the possibility of overtime. 

49'ers voodoo doll beatdown with bat and crowbar

            When the Saints scored with 1:37 left, a mosh pit ensued in the bar.  My friend was accidentally punched in the face.  A young man stood on the bar and free fell forward into his friends’ arms.  People picked each other up and shook one another in the air.  The black and gold balloons above us seemed big and airy, and we were ready for the confetti and balloons above us to fall and for the real party of the night to begin.  Two minutes later the 49ers scored.   The entire bar was quiet.  The city itself was quiet.  It was the first time I could hear the audio of the game. It remained that way for a full minute until the Saints got the ball back.  There were four seconds left and 85 yards to go.  The cheers of “Who Dat, Who Dat” started up again.  If anyone was to be blessed with a miracle—it would be the Saints—it would be our tribe.  When the game ended and no miracle had occurred, everyone stood around stunned for a minute.  There was a collective sigh, knowing that any party that night would lack meaning and purpose.  Then the music began.  The bar played the iconic “When the Saints go Marching In,” almost in defiance of reality, and they released the balloons and confetti.  Those still in the bar began to dance, stomping on the balloons, not in anger, but with the irony of defeat and the bittersweet mixture of a spirit that not even strong disappointment can keep away for long.   I stomped on them too and swing-danced with a friend atop the confetti and spilt beer and whistles.  Outside a couple ran in the streets until the girl was hit by a bicycle.  She got up and started to run and dance again.  My throat began to close up once more and I knew there would be no great party that night.  That most people would eat their dinners and go to bed a little hurt, but also, there would be no violence or fires, no abuse of our own town and community.  That nothing would burn out of bitter insobriety, and in the end, we danced because we all knew it was just a game.  Because the passion runs deeper than football.  But it’s football that helps us express it best sometimes, together.   Until next season, when the tribe puts their colors back on and the voodoo dolls and balloons and piñatas restake their places on the walls of bars and homes, and everyone stands ready to break that small threshold our proud city has for another big  party, another reason among many to celebrate our tribe.  

The voodoo doll at the end.

Drawing Trees

This post was precluded by an introduction.  The theme of this and the next post is how the New Orleans' culture and arts scene provides opportunities for adults to play like kids again and to experience "wonder" and discovery. 

              When I first visited New Orleans I was enchanted with many things, but nothing impressed me more than its trees.  I spent my first morning sitting in a live oak reading Gogol and many hours after that entranced by the flora that uprooted sidewalks and streets and decorated the city in a way that no lights or arts or business ever could.  And then of course, there was the weirdness, the wider range of social norms and creativity that is so prevalent and expressed here.  But rarely is there opportunity for these two affinities to come together.

              It was at a Thursday evening wine tasting that I met Liana.  The wine was free and the store had more than its customary twelve freeloaders lining up at the tables to drink samples and feign cultivated pallets of fine things like wine.  I swirled my glass and sniffed it while I listened to Liana.  She was a sweet older lady with dark-rimmed and foggy glasses and a set of sharp teeth, now purpled with free wine.  She was constantly laughing and smiling.

            “Remember how the Saints won the Superbowl?” she asked me, also twirling her wine to mimic her neighbors.

            “Yes…”

            “Well I fed a whole bunch of them pot cookies the night before.  They ate them before the game.”  She laughed and finished her wine.  “That’s why we won.  My cookies.” 

            She said she was living at an art house on St. Claude  with a tree house and forty-foot aerial slip n’ slide out back, but that there was another art house on Esplanade with its own tree house.  On Saturday, they were hosting a “free market,” where second-hand goods were available for the taking and no money was to exchange hands.

            “Tree house?” I asked.

            Liana had another cup of wine now.  She laughed, “Oh, yes. Fifty feet tall with a big-ass slide.”    

Treehouses have always been gems of my imagination, a magical and natural play place to escape the safe domestic life of a boy indoors.  But treehouses are not just toys.  They began more than a thousand years ago as functional homes.  Some tribes of South Pacific islanders preferred to live in trees and made modest modifications to accommodate them.   Long since they’ve become the stuff of kids: small elevated homes for many generations of boys and girls (and their secret clubs) and the willing projects of their restless fathers eager to build shit in their dusty wood shops.   Ever since I watched Swiss Family Robinson on television, I have had an enduring fantasy of living and playing in a tree house.  Not just a small one-roomer fifteen feet up a magnolia tree, but to be isolated and dangerously elevated in the higher tiers of old wooden giants, hidden in their foliage and swinging from branch to branch, sleeping a hundred feet above my imagined enemies below, which were many.  It is the kind of fantasy that fades with the senescent practicality of young adulthood, but never completely disappears.

When I walked into the backyard of the Art House that Saturday, the fantasy was immediately revived.

            A fifty foot multi-colored tree house was woven in and out of the arms of a golden rain tree.   Ropes hung everywhere and an intricate system of tunnels secret hiding spots and apparatuses ready for reckless climbing was apparent even from a distance.  It was like the play-places at McDonald’s restaurants but bigger, taller, and arboreal.  A friendly young man in green, over-sized sunglasses led me up a set of shaking spiral steel stairs towards the top.  A satellite dish, shaped like a waffle-fry, supported the loading of people onto a slide that had likely been recovered from a fast-food playground after Katrina, when an abundance of these kinds of materials were available to those thrifty enough for the salvaging.  I bent back an open nail that scraped my leg on the way in and slid down to the bottom.  I suppressed the instinct to holler as the slide jumped and dipped several feet.  I climbed out and up and did it again.  The treehouse was constructed in several layers with staircases and tunneled passageways affixed in many places to assist in ascent.   Near the top was a bridge of mesh netting, ropes to swing from, satellite dishes for napping and several holes to climb through on the way up or across.  The creator, local artist Scott Pterodactyl (like the dinosaur), was too impatient to start from the bottom so he began in the middle.   He had even constructed a zipline from the top to the window of his bedroom.  It was no longer there.  His inspiration for the tree house was rooted in the same reasons I now reveled in climbing and swinging through his project: to play and create something that appeals to our child-like wonder, to feel like a kid again in do things that kids do that are still fun but inhibited by the law and adulthood.  It was a project of creation and discovery and hands-on sensory fun.  Here was my opportunity, everyone's opportunity, to climb, jump, shout, swing through a network of colorful tubes and structures without the self-conscious embarrassment of displacing children, the forever rightful patrons of such toys.  

 

I played and napped and played some more before descending back to ground level where I collected some free books and watched the vaudevillian hipster ensemble, Sweet Street Symphony Band, jangle through some old-timey tunes.   The small crowd watched and drank PBRs while collecting free things to stuff in their knapsacks and purses. 

           I later learned more about the house and its reputation: how it had been raided for drug trafficking and shut down for fire codes.  How its parties incite nudity and everyone has to sign a waiver in the case that the treehouse collapses or someone falls off after too many drinks.   It is not a play place that embraces safety, but this only increases my affinity for it.  Because only in New Orleans, relative to the strict enforcement of law and liability in other places in our country, could this toy exist.  
              A couple months later I received a call from a friend who had just moved to New Orleans.  She was living in the Art House.  I went over to visit.  The inside of the house, an old mansion in the Treme, housed fifteen artists of varying commitments to anarchy.  It looked like a cleaner rendition of the house from Fight Club.  Empty shopping carts littered the basement living room.  A glass case of baby pet cockroaches decorated the wall.  The refrigerator was orange and rusted, likely hauled from a supine position next to a dumpster, but its old motor purred and the inside had a few impressive treats created by divers of dumpsters of high-end natural food stores.

            We drank beers at the top of the tree house in the comfort of a yellow connecting-tunnel cube.  Everything seems more peaceful in a tree.  The air is open and the sounds of the nocturnal birds and insects are level while cars and headlights and the general noise of the streets is below you, like there is a layer between, separating the dream from the real life.  It was enough that I wanted to curl up there in the  mesh bridge net and sleep for several nights.  

I left soon after and rode my bike through the city.  I was headed home to sleep, but I was feeling content and childish and a little thirsty for more sensory discoveries, so I turned around again.   I found a 24 hour draw-a-thon in the Bywater where Press Street was encouraging residents to draw all hours of the night.  The scene took place in the Old Ironworks warehouse where several stations were set up to encourage drawing and sketching with various mediums.   The event was advertised to be kid-friendly but when I walked inside a man and woman were laying naked on a bed in the center of the room.   People circled around them, lying on their stomachs and scribbling away at long stretches of butcher paper with charcoal. Every minute someone with a timer called out, “switch” and the naked couple changed positions and then froze.  Another man in army fatigues, heavy boots and a drill sergeant’s brim hat paced around them.  His name was Gary Forbes, and he was also an artist, now impersonating the infamous training officer from Full Metal Jacket.  He folded his hands behind his back and looked downward as he paced, never at the nudes.  He commanded that we draw better.   “If you haven’t caught their essence in the first 10 seconds you failed.”   “Don’t think.  Draw.”  “Sketch the tension, never the bodies.”  I could not meet his demands.  I tried to draw better; I tried to capture their essence; I tried to encapsulate everything adult about the scene, the theater of sexual tension, the intersecting contours, the suggestive crude post-coital laziness, the storied relationship between all men and women and then between this man and woman, but more and more, my drawings looked like trees.  They were elementary and arboreal.  I gave up on the nudes.  I ignored the couple and the sergeant who demanded improvement and commitment.  I drew the images still slipping and sliding in my imagination, old childish fantasies that have endured any adult ones, and had now been given real dimensions in the city of New Orleans by a different set of artists.  I drew houses in trees. 

To read more about the treehouse check out these links
1) Partying at the tree house
2) About its creator

Tree House

The Draw-a-thon bed minus two nudes

Tree house

The backyard "free market"  The tree house is hidden in the foliage to the top right of the stage

Satellite dish naps

Sweet Street Symphony Band

The path to the top