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.
Still reacting to the mustiness of my environs, I picked up the magazine laid out for guests:
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.
Though by the end of that trip it felt like my girlfriend and I had overstayed our welcome, that was more our weariness.
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.
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:
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.
