Three Dances in New Orleans: Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

I’m not the first and certainly won’t be the last person to tell you how cool New Orleans is. How friendly its people. How spectacular the food. How grimy, and quaint and industrial chic its street are (sometimes all at once).

My first blush with the city was an extended five night stay north of the French Quarter, just east of Louis Armstrong park, in a dungeonous one bedroom bungalow.

My girlfriend (now wife) plotting her escape.

Still reacting to the mustiness of my environs, I picked up the magazine laid out for guests:

I knew I’d arrived somewhere special.

What followed was a sensory circus. Alligator swamp tour. Backyard crawfish broil. Whiskey Pete playing the Stones with a washboard and spoons on the curb fronting a shotgun home. He gave me a photo of himself and Magic Johnson. And yes – late night (and some late morning) stumbling in and around Bourbon street. And the food. Good lord, the food. I will get into that in a separate post – shortly(-ish) forthcoming.

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Though by the end of that trip it felt like my girlfriend and I had overstayed our welcome, that was more our weariness.

Full on Manhattan-walk.

New Orleans is like the giving tree. It’ll turn itself into a stump just so you can have a place to sit, to a brass band tune no less. Which is in a way what I needed at the time. After a rocky year looking for employment after graduating law school into the Great Recession, I’d painstakingly climbed out of an emotional and financial hole over the course of three years, booked this trip as a sort of celebration, immediately after which, but before our travels, I got knocked back on my ass.

The second time I went to NoLa was for a dear friend’s bachelor party the weekend before my own. My personal fortunes had improved insofar as I was back on something resembling terra firma, though a tremendous amount of angst still pervaded my sensibilities.

The wolf pack stayed at the tony Hotel Montaleone. The whole thing was cocktails, fine dining, and unrefined behavior. With these sort of trips, it’s the little thing – like a gym date with and old buddy overlooking the Mississippi or relaxing by a rooftop swimming pool.

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Or a intsy-wintsy pair of American flag speedos I kept around for the purposes of general shenanigans. I wore them to the rooftop pool. I wore them down to the front door of the Hotel Montaleone where I was approached as a photo-opp by a pack of bachelorettes on a scavenger hunt before a thin, overly-busty older gentle-lady had her husband take a photo of her with me, while she pinched my side as if I were a pig she were considering buying. From there, I wore them at the front of the second line parade held in honor of the groom, banging on a cowbell I also packed for the occasion. I wore them to the bar where the group quenched its thirst after the end of the parade, and, finally, I wore them the long eight minute walk back to the hotel, alone, bereft of any normalizing context in the cooling city dusk.

At the end of that weekend of merriment, it was time to go back to NYC and my fiancé, whom I was marrying in three weeks (my bachelor’s party was the next weekend, to be followed by a third before my wedding weekend – see first photo in this post).

Pulling into the airport, I noticed this admonishment gracing the dashboard of the cab I shared to Louis Armstrong International Airport:

Official signage of the New Orleans Taxi Authority

The third and last time I bounce through Nawlins was a few months back, ringing in 2017. Right off the bat, I need to give a shout out to St. Vader.

We stayed at the JW Marriott in what I understand is one of the finest suites the hotel offers, on 29th floor, overlooking the French Quarter.

But even at such lofty heights, the city is not immune from itself. Sitting down to brunch, I received a phone call that my wife and I needed to vacate our suite due to ” … um … a leak in your room”.

Me: “That doesn’t sound right.”

Hotel GM: “Well, it’s an air leak coming from the unit next to yours.”

Me: “That’s strange.”

Hotel GM: “Well, we don’t take any chances.”

When we returned in short order to re-pack and move our belongings, I could hear the people next door through the wall, talking loudly, drinking, not indicating at all they were being moved. Later that afternoon, I learned that another couple was occupying the suite with the “air leak”. Maybe it was magically fixed in a couple hours. Maybe…but probably not. But what did I expect? Somewhere in that room I still anticipated finding the latest copy of “B*TCH, GET OFF ME!” Magazine.¹

Shoot, on the way to brunch, a scattering of red Rorschach blots on the sidewalk morphed into a trail of spots that was so curious I asked, no one in particular, “What’s going on with these spots?”

“See the guy down the street there,” answered a lone roadworker standing on the corner, pointing a hundred feet down the road at a man walking, desperado-style, straight down its asphalt center, “he punched that window over there,” the roadworker pointed ten feet behind us at a restaurant so nice, the broken window had to be looked at directly to be believed, “and then started walking down the road.”

After a block of simultaneously avoiding and following a literal trail of blood, we crossed the street and continued on our way to shrimp and grits at the Ruby Slipper Cafe.

 

¹ The fine folks at Marriott ended up lobbing me 10,000 points for the *ahem* inconvenience.

Between the Lines

Descending into Dallas, I expected to pierce the clouds to find myself in the gloom that typically follows. Instead, after a second or two of wispy gray, I was bathed in soft light – blues, golds and pinks – and far, far below, stretching as far as I could see, was another layer of flat cotton.

Pleasantly surprise, I thought back on the couple at the LaGuardia terminal I had left hours earlier who were somewhere on this plane.

The gentleman, sitting in a tan trench coat over his suit, wearing soft suede shoes and an eye-catching tie, a field of yellow upon which arabesque patterns contorted in reds and blues, sported a mustache that said it all. It put Geraldo Rivera to shame. I imaged the colonel giving away his fried chicken recipe for those curled edges anchored by a soul patch from heaven.

The woman next to him, I presumed his wife, had her half-calf boots (also appearing to be suede) and orange pants swung confidently over the back of her carry-on while she ticked away at her phone. Her leather jacket exuded rambling-roads cool. Her suitcase tag was a striking rectangular yellow-tanned hide, below which another layer of brightly-colored leather was firmly affixed so that a magenta “D” was created by the cutting away of the top layer of leather.

Between them, alone on a chair, reclined a bottle of rum.

Just as I sat in front of them near the gate, a woman approached asking if I would fill an airport survey. I respectfully declined. Moments later, I overheard the following:

Mustache: “Did you put down Texas as your nation of origin?”

D: “Not until we secede.”

After which they moved on to small talk – family, the holidays; you know how it is.

Recently, for a variety of reasons, I have been thinking a lot about separation, stratification. About lines and layers that divide. It invariably reminds me of one of my favorite Quranic verses: “We … have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another” (49:13).

Continuing our controlled fall back to terra firma, the layer of clouds overhead dissipated into a blue sky. Along the horizon, the sun set a burnishing gold into the lower layer of clouds upon which it seemed we were now gliding.

That is until we fell, finally, through that bottom layer, into the gloomy brown-gray I had expected the first time around. Which altogether reminds me of another great bit of poetry: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

Why I Travel

As far back as I can remember, I have been compelled to travel. I do not know where or when this started – I have theories – but by my teenage years, this restless urge settled into axiomatic dogma. Uncritically, I assumed if you did not like/want/constantly feel the need to travel, there was something wrong with you – obviously.

And so, I took every and any excuse to explore. Over the years, I have crisscrossed Europe, eaten street food in Tokyo, bummed around Thailand, traversed South America, and rambled through Morocco, often alone. I was invited to the weekly Friday beheading in Saudi (RSVP: respectfully decline) on the same day I boarded a yacht on the Red Sea. I remember Damascus before the bloodshed.

To afford the unaffordable, I became adept at credit card sign-up bonuses and points and miles hacks. Finally, I was flying international first class on Asian carriers. I was staying at some of the world’s best hotels, the same hotels I longingly looked upon just a few years prior.

That led to this year. In 2016, I found myself in Portugal, Lake Como, San Sebastian, Bordeaux, Cap-Ferret, and (for the sixth time) Paris. Each an incredibly journey, and, yet, for the first time ever, I felt discontent. A bit of the magic that travel had always held had faded. It began to feel too touristic, and a tad bit manic.

As I traveled more, and more luxuriously, a strange alchemy diminished the sum of the parts. Spontaneity and adventure, cheap money-wise, became ironically difficult to experience staying in a five star property. I became sensitive, in a way I had never been before, to the endless lines, the traffic, the obsessive compulsive review of points and miles blogs – a death by thousands of logistical paper cuts.

I would be okay, I began to think romantically, in a barge sailing across the sea, working hard, eating poorly, breathing in the salty breeze daily. I would like to take a month or so, I fantasized as I cruised (relatively speaking) through TSA Pre, to work the rural French countryside in exchange for lodging and the chance to practice français.

But I still eye the Maldives – a private hut on a turquoise sea. And you better believe I will get there in a fully lie-flat seat, saver award, paying little more than a de minimis fee.

But, let me ask you this, what was I to see my sixth time in Paris? What compelled me to go? What would you do there after dutifully completing – at least once, but maybe twice or thrice – the top twenty recommendations of Fodor’s and Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor?

Why did I travel?

For some, it is all fresh, shiny and new. Adventure is easy if its your first trip to the Continent or you’ve never cliff-dived into a Lebanese lagoon. But for a more experienced peripatetic, that ceases to suffice. Traveling to see and photograph – that’s easy. But when you’ve seen enough of the world, traveling becomes solely about the experience, which begs the question: how much of what?

Why do I travel?

I have come to believe a deep, restless discontent motivates me. Seeing the new, experiencing the strange, interacting with the foreign – especially the uncomfortable, frustrating parts – force an immediacy of action and immersion in the present. I am changed by it, I grow because of it.

The moment my travels began to feel routine, tidy, conventional, something inside me responded. No, not this, it said, don’t let life’s ever-escalating indecencies and complications take away the only thing you’ve never really questioned. Do not let them take from you the thrill of the open road.

There are many places I have yet to go. Perhaps unrealistically, I want to be as enthusiastic to experience them as the first time I boarded a transatlantic flight, naively anticipating their novelty. I want to be excited because they will remind me of something old about this world or myself that I had almost forgotten. Returning to step foot again on home soil, I want to be able to answer the following question: how am I different today than the day I left?

Because I will change. I will grow, which is the flip slide of that discontent. And, the fun part, is I have no idea how I will change, what those experiences will do to me.

That is, really, what makes me curious.