A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Week of Halloween on Bourbon Street

Friday night, the last weekend of October. When our taxi from Louis Armstrong International Airport dropped Ann and me off in front of our hotel at the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets, we both had the sense that our lives, for the next week at least, were about to get weird. We’d touched down in the middle of a sybaritic bacchanal with costumes and everything.

The Astor Crowne Plaza was hosting DomCon, a convention of dominatrixes and their camp followers. Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly, I am my people-watching mother’s second son. I bear a strong resemblance to my father, but I got the rubber version of his visage, not the poker one. And it’s a constant, conscious effort to keep my unfiltered observations (Not judgments!) to Ann somewhere below Spinal Tap volume. Within the confines of an elevator, I figured the safest course of action was studying the tips of my blue Clarks shoes. But once our fellow guests leave the hotel and turn the corner onto Bourbon, they blend in with the crowd, and the crowd feels the pull of Larry Flynt’s sex shop and two Hustler-branded peeler palaces, one of which subtly differentiates itself from the other by guaranteeing BARELY LEGAL in red neon. You are free to be yourself in New Orleans. All it takes is what you’ve already got inside you, a little pride and a little self-esteem. Courage isn’t a required requisite here and shame need not apply because The Big Easy is that type of place.

New Orleans isn’t floating exactly, but it’s best not to dig too deeply. The city’s dead are interred above ground in mossy mausoleums: miniature cities populated with the dearly departed proximate to their lost brethren, the living desperate, wasting away in tents under the elevated cement channels of the Portchartrain Expressway and the I-10. Halloween summons the skeletons. My informal black t-shirt survey suggests the psychobilly Misfits are the biggest band in the world, their skull logo travels well. There’s voodoo Baron Samedi with his top hat from Meyer the Hatter on St. Charles (just off Canal and very close to our hotel) and his walking stick, grinning like a Misfits fan who’s never actually heard them. Thanks to novelist Anne Rice (Let's chat, Lestat!) all the vampires are Hollywood hunky or Vogue pale junkie elegant-no Nosferatu rat creatures in this port city except for the crazy ones who couldn’t be scrubbed clean with a firehose. The costumes that confused Ann and me were the referee zebra stripes worn by packs of frat boys. There’s some post-baby boomer generational joke with a mysterious setup and obscure punchline that we don’t get.

Halloween has transfigured in to something resembling a Boxing Day sale in Canada in that it lasts a week. This commercial, consumer pop culture shallowness is apparent on Bourbon Street, there are too many Darth Vaders on too many nights. The time of the season dictates there can be no Star Wars good guys though Jesus is all right. He manifests as His idealized Catholic version in this carnival of chaos, white and well groomed, possibly some beard oil. But the Son of God has always hung around the French Quarter, a Vatican spectre of European colonialism: “Touchdown Jesus,” His trick of light silhouette cast on the white board rear of St. Louis Cathedral towers benevolently, referee arms raised in supplication, over Bourbon Street sinners and the city’s football Saints. We also encountered a bald man wearing white Nikes under an ankle-length saffron robe. Great costume. Turns out he was a genuine Hari Krishna or some kind of inscrutably Zen monk. No bracelet beads, thanks.

Ann and I spent maybe a little too much time loitering in front of our hotel, doubling down on our nicotine intake. We’re not anthropologists but we understand the importance of empirical field work. While we discarded our butts in a solar activated trash bin, Ann and I were uncomfortably aware at times that the downtown streetsweepers in their tennis ball green uniform tops really, really earn their salaries. Like Bourbon Street, the red paving stone sidewalk in front of our hotel is power washed every morning because life’s rich pageant in New Orleans never ceases. Masquerades make messes: Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly, the human detritus. Tourists here have the world at their feet, dropped, tossed, previously digested or not so gently worn. My musical head mashes up Lou Reed’s “Halloween Parade” and “All Day and All of the Night” by the Kinks.

To reenter our hotel after dark (and the night’s last cigarette) Ann or I flash one of our room key cards to the armed sheriff. She seems a bit bulky, almost unfit for her job until we realize she’s wearing a bulletproof vest under her uniform jacket which is the same olive drab as the St. Charles tram car. After Halloween, once the DomCon participants have tied up their loose ends, the costume party reel keeps rolling beside the Mississippi as busloads of orange and navy festooned Chicago Bears fans blitz the Crowne Plaza for another weekend. I have never before seen a woman in elegantly cut couture patterned with a football team’s primary and secondary logos.

The first Saturday of November, departure day doesn’t have time to dawn. The alarm on Ann’s iPhone is synched with the relentless thrum from Bourbon Street. Rhythm. The white and gold, almost gaudy, Crowne Plaza lobby gleams pristinely at five a.m., mercifully empty and silent. There’s no sheriff, no bell captain. The two night clerks behind the front desk and their computer screens are chipper and cheery, efficient. The four of us are up and at it before the city’s sanitation department. The recessed main entry of the hotel is something of a swamp. Ann and I guess vomit and blood although it could maybe be takeout Mexican food- definitely not fried chicken. We gingerly tiptoe around the muck, careful to lift our carry-on suitcases. Wheels up!              

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.