As soon as I step off the plane, everything is different. Stress and sense memory of the extended sickness I’ve been carrying around for the last few weeks is gone, as though deflated by descent into gulf air too thick for troubles to strain through. I walk off the plane and through the airport, and the world feels lighter. At baggage claim I see a woman fresh out of curlers. In a rebuke of Mid-Atlantic February that seems almost calculated, she’s wearing shorts and flip flops and holds a large “go-cup” full of something that keeps her eye-lids peeled back off her face. Inside me a switch flips on a history of recognition—I’m home.
The shuttle bus is filled with tourists. A proper English couple faced with the unwelcome inevitability of returning to their home country after 5 years in Arlington, A black couple from Southern Maryland that grew up in the district, a jaguar from San Diego who impresses upon me the life changing features of a “boizillian wax” (brazillian wax for guys apparently, only it strips hair from your ass), and an older military couple from Tucson that lived in DC back in the 70s. I’m feeling friendly so I engage the English couple about their Mardi Gras plans and I offer some advice about where they should go. They were taciturn while waiting in line for the shuttle, and they aren’t particularly chatty now, but I push a little and they open up some. They’re not interesting but I’m motivated to catch the carnival spirit and leave the district behind, and within minutes the entire shuttle is talking about all things DC, a conversation maintained for 20 minutes without much help from me. As I look at the brightly lit Superdome we pass on my left, the irony isn’t lost on me.
I’ve been to Mardi Gras each of the 7 years I have been in DC since leaving Louisiana, including the one after Katrina. Looking at the dome and its new roof, I remember driving past it two years ago with a shuttle full of insipid frat boys from New Jersey. From the moment I boarded the shuttle they indirectly informed me of the parameters of their forthcoming experience. Representatives of the highly fed and lowly taught, they would descend on Bourbon Street, get smashed, see some titties, and go home to their mediocre lives wondering what’s the big deal about New Orleans. Aware of the large sums of money they were likely to pump into the local economy by way of alcohol consumption and therefore disinclined to rush the driver and kill us all for my own idelogical purposes, I suffered through various abuses of good taste and proper thought until the moment we approached the massive complex, at which time they fell silent. In the absence of working street lights and in the presence of the iconic structure—its head shredded, body shrouded in darkness, and guts tainted with the memory of death, shit, blood, fear, and rising water, we shared a holy moment in the quiet of the great dome’s shadow. As we drove toward Canal Street the boys returned to their chatter, but not without the recognition that we were about to party in the middle of a graveyard. 2 years later, as I look at the party on St. Charles Street from the vantage point of a traffic jammed overpass, the feeling is different. Sounds of carnival rise up to meet us and the street is packed with flailing chaos impervious to memory, and I feel my heart jump. I’m the last to get dropped off because I’m staying at a guest house in the Garden District far from the tourist madness. I say goodbye to each of my new friends. Bags in hand, the shuttle ejects each passenger with the force necessary to forget the past and find new memories amid the brightly colored noise of the French Quarter.
The guest house is typical New Orleans. The wallpaper is peeling and old water stains on the ceiling are painted over gracelessly. There is no television in the room, the furnishings are from a now rusted part of my grandmother’s century and paint and plaster are replaced with plants as a primary means of decoration. The guest house is located in a residential area and the parade route is a block away. Of course, there is a bar on the corner. My traveling party doesn’t quite know what to do with itself, but I know it takes time to shift your mindset from Type A culture to one in which you can take your alcohol with you when you leave the bar. In a crowd five deep we watch part of Bacchus roll down St. Charles, but we catch few beads. I’m quickly reminded how gay this city is when I realize my party is in the middle of a troop of very large bears, with several young satellites (some of them cute) in drunk orbit around it. I consider it a good omen.
Hulk Hogan is the King of Bacchus this year, but we don’t stay long enough to toast him. We grab a cab to the other side of town, driving parallel to the levee on Tchiopitoulas, all the way to Tipitina’s, a popular neighborhood music venue that most tourists don’t know about. We walk the streets for a while and meet friendly people everywhere. I ask a man sitting on his porch if he knows who won the superbowl, and he tells us about the exciting Giants victory with a minute left to play. Two people later ask us the same question and are happy with the result, but like so many on this night the draw of the gladiators was far less appealing than that of Dionysius. While walking the bead festooned sidewalks shared with gnarled oaks and opened houses fresh with party and a lingering scent of jasmine, there is a feeling in our group that the rest of America is preoccupied but far less interesting.
Popeye’s or hookah bar? Popeyes. A black guy walks out and lifts bags above his head and screams to us “I got 40 pieces for 20 dollars!”, and we ask him to sell us some of it because the staff just locked the front door. The lady at the door let our moderately drunk asses inside anyway, and 5 minutes later, after a good natured attempt at extortion by a staff member who wanted us to pay a dollar to exit, we were wolfing down biscuits, red beans & rice, and chicken legs. The country-fried willingness of people to befriend and levy hospitality is a defining element of this place. I take an appreciative pull on the straw of my rum-heavy hurricane in the knowledge that if this were the Popeyes on 14th street, I would currently have no grease on my fingers.
The Hot 8 Brass Band opens the show, but Trombone Shorty, AKA Troy Andrews, is the headliner. Barely out of high school, the kid is a genius, mixing traditional brass with R&B and hip-hop. Separated from our voice and what was left of our energy after jumping and yelling for more than an hour, we took a cab back. Confused, my boyfriend asks me why the overwhelming majority of the young audience was white, knowing all too well that DC white crowds would never support music like this. It’s a good question, and my only answer is “The white people are cool here.”
The next morning we walk through the garden district on our way to lunch, passing lustful Italianate homes and Greek Revival mansions replete with delta foliage, hidden courtyards and columned faces behind ornate wrought iron fences of Spanish design. Streets bear the names of Greek muses, French heroes, and catholic saints, their names displayed on signs as well as on the dilapidated sidewalks broken by time and tree roots. Why the homes are so lavish but the sidewalks so ancient is a curiosity, but in this place, I assume the problem, absurd by traveler accounts, is not an issue because most don’t bother to ask the question. As a native, I can confirm that little things don’t much bother people here, particularly in the summer. To entertain such behavior during the assault of a Louisiana summer threatens to put one over an edge of madness that (in August in particular) recedes just beyond the front doorknob of any South Louisiana home. I suppose this explains many things about life down here, whether it be in regards to hospitality, sidewalks, or the murder rate.
We have 10 minutes until our reservation so we hang out at the cemetery next door to the restaurant. The cemeteries in much of South Louisiana are above ground, due to the water table. Tombs are passed on for generations. In this particular cemetery many of the tombs are over 200 years old. Some weirdo gravedigger tells us a few bad jokes and explains the entombment process of stone and mortar, how the loaves of dead rot in these brick ovens for at least one year and one day before their remains are swept to the side to make way when another family member joins the ancestral soup. The gravedigger tells us that everyone in this cemetery is buried in a wooden coffin in order to effectively aid the degradation process, and he makes a snide comment about how people up north use metal caskets, and how he “sure wouldn’t want to open up one of those things” when it comes time to make way for the latest family member. When I was a pallbearer for my step-sister, I distinctly remember slipping her metal casket horizontally into the family tomb, and feeling peaceful and strangely proper in my actions, as though she were simply being laid to sleep instead of being shrouded and weighted with earth. Then as now, I believed above ground entombment a more honorable way to be treated in death, and a more civilized process for the people tasked to carry it out. However, her entombment took place south of New Orleans. I never considered the ramifications for those who years in the future must deal with her metal receptacle.
I have lunch at Commander’s Palace, which is considered one of the best restaurants in the country. Among my choices is the turtle soup, made in the same pot that Commander’s has made turtle soup for over 100 years. The house jazz trio comes to the table, and after being stumped with my first two requests, plays “Carnival Time” by Al Johnson. When I was a kid, we always knew that carnival time was near because the radio would play it, “Mardi Gras Mambo” by the Meters, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”, and the “Audubon Zoo” song. I still remember the excitement I felt when hearing the first few chords of any of those tunes, because I knew that good times were just around the corner. Looking back, I still remember the moment of shock when realizing that in the rest of this apparently uncivilized country, kids didn’t get a week off school for Mardi Gras. I gave the bass player 5 bucks and simmered in the satisfaction that my week was just beginning.
Part 2 will be posted later in the week.
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