So it's been a week. What are you going to do? Kill me?

I got a freelance web job, which is cool. This led to my getting lost in Bartlett in a driving rainstorm last Wednesday, which was odd. I was in the Eclipse, though, and I had some good CDs, so the trip was fairly pleasant.

But do you really care about that? Of course not. You want to know about Mardi Gras, don't you? Well, let me tell you...

Friday night we ran to West Memphis (after I made a stop at PetCo to make a tag for Roxy - it's got her name, my in-law's phone number and the word "reward" stamped on it; you can't be too careful) and dropped the dog off. She likes Sonya's parents and happily sniffed around their house, almost oblivious to our departure.

We went back Downtown and picked up Donna The Pharmacist, our friend and travelling companion for this trip. We drove through Burger King and hit I-55, heading south.

A note on the transport: we were in the aforementioned Eclipse; specifically, a 1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse RS, maroon in color. I can say with a good deal of experience that it is a comfortable road trip car from a driver's perspective. And a passenger's perspective. The backseat, though, she is not so big. Or comfortable. I sat in it for about three minutes one afternoon last week so I could tell Sonya that if two people had to sit in the backseat they would be two sad, miserable bastards. There was, for a while, a chance that our friend Christy The Good Witch was going to go as well, but prior commitments forced her to decline.

So on the trip down Sonya was wedged in the backseat. I drove while Donna - who is tall - sat in the front seat. The drive to Jackson was good. We discussed Donna's relationship woes and listened to Elvis Costello. We stopped in Jackson, got coffee and gas, and continued on our way.

Sonya went to sleep in the back seat while Donna and I stayed awake and she filled me in on the details of being a pharmacist. A neat little fact she told me is that Robitussin with codeine is available over the counter, but you have to ask for it and most pharmacies in Memphis don't carry it because of the potential for abuse. Also, you can still get paregoric but I think they frown on giving it to children nowadays.

So we made Hammond a little after midnight and I wanted to get on to Covington, which sits on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain. I pressed on. Around one I pulled into the Best Western in Covington.

"I'm sorry, sir, I don't have anything available."

Then the Super 8.

"We're all booked up."

Damn. This was beginning to look like the Kentucky Fiasco of the summer of '98. I went to the next hotel within sight, a Holiday Inn.

"All we have are suites, sir, but since you're coming in late I'll give you a good rate..."

Which he did. I took it.

The suites were in a separate building. We drove around and dragged our shit inside. A kitchen! Fold-out couch! Two big-screen TV's!

The TV's didn't work, actually, but the management tried to compensate for that.

Sonya was changing clothes for bed and Donna was in the bathroom while I was snooping around. I do that. I figure if I pay for the room I have the right to explore every inch of it. So I'm in the kitchen, and I open all the cabinets. Four plates, three saucers. I open the cabinet above the refrigerator. I see the other saucer. I pull it down.

The saucer was full of tiny pieces of green leafy bits, with a few seeds threw in. I was immediately suspicious. I sniffed it; there was no smell at all. I took it to Sonya.

"What do you think is?" I asked her, showing her the saucer.

She sniffed it. "There's no smell," she said, "but it looks like pot. Where did you get it?"

"Above the refrigerator."

We showed it to Donna. She sniffed it.

"It's looks like pot. Or oregano," she added.

Unsure of what the mystery substance was (and having no Zig Zag papers on us) we put the saucer back where I found it.

"Now if we were hard core drug users we'd find some papers and smoke it, just to see what it is," Donna said as she climbed into bed. Sonya and I bid her goodnight and retired to the master bedroom. Personally, I wasn't willing to smoke something that strange. God knows what could have been in it. A cyanide laced trap for travelling potheads, perhaps. Who can say?

Not too terribly early the next morning we got ready to cross the lake. While Donna was getting ready and Sonya was reading the hopelessly outdated local hotel magazine I was snooping around some more. This is when I found out that the kitchen table had a leg that was not attached - it was just kind of wedged under the table. I carried it around for a while, menacing Sonya and Donna. Sonya took a picture.

And then we crossed the lake.

"I don't know," Donna observed as New Orleans came into view on the horizon, "there's something about being on all this water that makes my stomach feel weird."

"But I'm hungry, so that could be it, too," she concluded.

Once in the city I had a daunting task ahead of me: find, while driving a car during the day, a restaurant that I'd only ever been to before at night, on foot and by a roundabout route. I drove us almost Directly to it and found a parking spot nearby. I was immensely proud of this.

Strange Sight #1: We were sitting at a window seat at La Peniche, our chosen eatery in the Faubourg Marigny. I was distracted for a second - studying the specials, getting the gravy out of my jeans, something - and when I looked up Sonya and Donna were looking out the window and laughing. I followed their gaze to where two old couples, who had been sitting near us a few seconds before, were walking away and getting into separate cars.

"What?" I demanded.

"They were all hugging," Donna said, "and I thought they were having a prayer service or something...and after-lunch prayer, you know..."

"...and then the couples kissed each other," Sonya picked up, "and then the women kissed each other, and then the men kissed each other."

We concluded it was either an ethnic thing or a sexual thing we could not possibly understand.

"You just don't see married men kiss each other that often," Donna said.

After lunch we went to the hotel (which we found effortlessly, I might add - driving in town was a pleasure this trip) and checked in. We parked the car, anyway, and stashed our bags with the bellman, 'cause the room wasn't ready yet. Then it was time for a ferry ride, where I confessed my fear of losing my glasses or wallet into the river ("It would just go 'plunk' and then it's gone forever.") and Donna shivered from the cool river breeze.

We made our way back inland after a stop by an ATM and headed for the hotel. Then I was harassed! I had on the classic Bela Lugosi Bauhaus t-shirt, and this crazy old guy standing outside Deja Vu started yelling at me, talking about demons trying to take his soul and everything. He got very close to me, and he was very loud. I discreetly slipped my knife out of my pocket and held it, watching the guy the whole time. He kept his distance, though.

Then, in the hotel garage, some friendly drunk complimented me on my shirt and told me "don't take any shit. You're free, man!"

I changed shirts.

Everything in the room was for sale, including the terrycloth robes and body pillows. We all three agreed that the room had the most well-stocked mini-bar any of us had ever seen. Champagne, soda, disposable camera, shaving cream, vodka...it was all there. We resisted its temptation, though, because it carried a heavy price.

Besides, People's Grocery was just a block away. That's where we stopped on our way to the first parade of the day. A buck-o-nine for sixteen ounces of King Cobra malt liquor! Yes, sir.

I know I've talked about the greasy, slimy guys who line up under the balconies on Bourbon Street to take pictures of the girls who bare themselves for beads. I was in line at the grocery store, studying the guy in front of me. All I could see was his back, some slicked-back hair, a camera strap and a journalist's vest, full of pockets and zippers.

"This is one of those guys who takes the pictures of the girls of Bourbon," I whispered to Sonya.

"How can you tell?" she asked.

Just then, the guy turned to walk out, revealing beady, bloodshot eyes and a bushy booger-catching moustache. He looked oily.

"Oh, yeah," Sonya said, convinced.

We decided to watch the parade - the Krewe of Ponchartrain - from Canal, 'cause it was close. We crowded in with a bunch of locals and some very, very loud-and-annoying drunken yankees. When people roll their eyes and mutter "tourists" this is who they're talking about.

The parade was not so very good, and the floats were pitiful little things. We caught a few beads, though, and decided it was time to hit the Riverwalk. Sonya wanted fun socks from this sock joint they have there. We got some food - fried chicken, po boys, muffaletta - and then caught the Riverfront streetcar down the Storyville. Donna needed to pee, so we had to go in Molly's and have a few drinks with those folks.

I recommend Molly's, by the way. The drinks are relatively cheap and quite strong. And I liked the way the bartender handled himself. A bunch of drunken fratboys came in and demanded Jaegermeister shots.

"We don't serve Jaegermeister," the bartender said, his voice rich with contempt. They all got Coors Light instead, and I bet they paid five bucks each for them.

On down Decutur, then, to Gargoyles shoe store. Donna and I both found some shoes (I had the coolest boots ever - lots of straps around the upper part and a platform sole about four inches tall; I would have been huge!) but they didn't have anything in either of our sizes. And the boots were reasonably priced, too.

Strange Sight #2: The clerk at Gargoyles shoes, whom I saw but Donna and Sonya did not. This person was a transsexual, and yet neither pronoun really works. Imagine, if you will, a pear-shaped, butt-ugly man. Now give him long blonde hair and boobs. And a tight t-shirt. Frightening, isn't it? Obviously a work in progress.

No shoes, so we walked down the block to Gargoyles clothing store. We all tried on stuff (strappy plaid pants for me, a slinky rubber dress for Donna, lots of skirts for Sonya) but no one got anything. On down the street to Limbo, where Sonya got a tiny zebra-print purse and Donna considered buying a shirt with "BITCH" written on it in sparkly letters.

A big lesbian was working in the store and helping customers. She had one of those long hook-poles in hand for getting things off of the high racks. If she saw kids lingering outside she'd open the door and say "no kids, no kids."

"And if they do come in," I said to her, "you've got a stick to beat them with."

She laughed at that.

Strange Sight #3: So Donna and Sonya are shopping at Limbo and I'm idly looking through their selection of men's pants. In front of me is the dressing room.

Limbo obviously caters to the stripper market, as their plentiful inventory of wispy, gauzy outfits plainly shows. So. This one girl - a stone-cold knockout, I tell you - keeps trying on outfits and then coming out of the dressing room to show her friend. It's a tiny store, now - there really was no place to look but at her. Some of the outfits were about the size of a small bathing suit, but perfectly legal. Others, though, had all the mass and opacity of a few lengths of dental floss and a sandwich bag.

For the record, her thong was aquamarine in color.

Then back to Gargoyles. I got the plaid pants with the straps and the zippers. They are very cool.

Back over to the riverfront, then, to catch the streetcar down to Poydras, where we would walk down to St. Charles and watch the night parades. We waited for the streetcar. It didn't come. We waited some. No car. We walked down to the next stop. Nothing. Finally, one car came rattling along. The front door was broken so the driver had to overshoot the stop, turn the car off, walk to the back, turn the car back on, open the door, let the people on, close the door, turn the car off, walk back to the front, restart the car and continue on to the next stop. The trip to Poydras was interminable, and we were afraid we might have missed the parades.

A silly worry, it turned out. We mixed into the crowd at Poydras and St. Charles just as Sparta, the night's bigger parade, rolled up. We did okay, bead-wise, but not spectacular. We went to a nearby vendor and got beer and corn dogs. We sat on the curb by the food stand, eating and drinking.

"This is a fantasy come true for me," Donna said, "sitting in the gutter, drinking."

I picked a superball out of the trash in the gutter and pounced it across Poydras.

"And picking things up out of the gutter," Donna said, "and playing with them!"

Pegasus was the next parade, and about halfway through an icy-cold wind started to blow. Two floats later and the rain started pouring down, great battering sheets of rain. The crowd diminished rapidly as the three of us sprinted for the awning of a nearby hotel. The parade kept rolling, though, and we kept dashing back out into the downpour whenever a float came by. We got plenty of beads, but by the time the firetruck came at the end we were all three thoroughly soaked. We walked up to Le Pavillon, last year's hotel of choice, to catch a cab.

The cab driver was a bitter second-generation Pakistani, angry because the parades had all the streets closed and he couldn't make any money. It wasn't terribly far from where we were to our hotel, but it would have been one miserable motherfucker of a walk with the rain falling and the wind blowing. the driver drove us as far into the French Quarter as he could and we walked the rest of the way. I had to pee like a racehorse and walking in the rain was a grim and cheerless thing.

Things were improved, though, when we got back to the hotel. Everyone took a shower, had a drink and got warmed up. Sonya, bundled up in one of the aforementioned terrycloth robes, got under the covers and refused to budge. Donna and I, though, decided to go out. After all, I had such cool new pants.

Let me stop here for a second and say that I looked great. You should have seen me: Bauhaus t-shirt, the pants, combat boots.

Coming Tomorrow: Hurricanes on Bourbon Street - Dancing Amongst the Homosexuals - A Comatose Girl - Smelly Punks - Conversations (and Breakfast) at Deja Vu - The Angry Wife - Driving Home

Stay tuned, won't you?

back'ard

latest

archive

for'ard