Mardi Gras in New Orleans Part 2

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original post date: Monday, March 03, 2008.

To view my pictures from Fat Tuesday, click here. (Click "Slideshow" if it doesn't open in slideshow view)

Much of Fat Tuesday and the day prior doesn’t lend itself to detailed transcription, being that I drank my weight in adult beverage. Needless to say, many bars opened their doors to us and many fine culinary and cultural adventures were enjoyed. Here are my most sober remembrances:

The Corner Pocket is a male strip bar in the French Quarter. It’s a small joint longer than it is wide, most of it a stripper catwalk with just enough room along its sides to crowd in around it. In the back of the bar is a prefunctory pool table, lonely and unlit, used to sink more eight balls through the noses of employees than in the corners of its pockets. When I was a kid old men sat around its long circle of bar to watch, fondle, and hire the young men who danced on it in their underwear. Some of the kids were underage, many of them were tweakers, nearly all of them were for sale. The only thing definitive about the place is that is was impossible to figure out who the vultures were—the old farts perched on the stools, or the young birds circling above them. After 30 seconds of reacquaintance, I see things haven’t changed a bit. The boys are running around in their underwear trying to seduce anyone that might part with a dollar, and avoiding their eye contact is nearly impossible. Without a word spoken, a kid no older than 19 walks up to me and my boyfriend (C), and in spite of the dead focus of far away eyes he manages with impressive ambidexterity to find a handle inside our pants. As the kid tries to jerk us off at the same time, C looks at me for a cue. I pull out two dollars and the C does the same, and we both slip them behind the elastic of his underwear. He gives us both a kiss and a thank you, and he’s on his way, thus ending my first experience of paying someone to not have sex with me. Moments later, a young man walks into the bar and starts talking with a young patron. C finds him attractive, and it provides me with an opportunity to inform C of the basic signs by which one can identify a drug dealer, particularly one in a strip bar.

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The costumes are fantastic, and my party feels foolishly underdressed. Overdressed, depending on how you look at it. The quarter is a nexus of multi-directional chaos, an Escher drawing of flowing fun, and we need to do little more than stand in its shifting corners and drink it in without tumbling backwards.

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After coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde we walk over the adjacent levee and rest in the grass along the bank of the mighty Mississippi. The riverwalk stretches parallel to the water but we are too full of laughter and residual spirits to pay attention to the small groups of people strolling its path several feet behind us. A young vagabond approaches us and asks if we want to buy a hit of acid, and I politely turn him down, both surprised and charmed that 1) he would offer me a drug that hasn’t been available to the general public in over a decade and 2) that he would do so as a team of swat members with full armor and assault weaponry walk toward us with not 10 feet of space between us.

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You never know what you will find when walking through the open doorways of this city. We step through one of them and find Big Chief Doucet on stage, backed up by three young white boys on drums, bass, and guitar. He’s easily 70 years old, drunk, and wearing a sparkling canary yellow suit. It’s the end of his set and his hat is literally being passed around for tips, but in that moment I can’t think of anywhere I would rather be at four o’clock in the afternoon than in a dusty old dive with a dozen similarly content people, drinking a whiskey sours and hearing Big Chief sing “Iko Iko.”

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The Fabourg Marigny. I love this part of the city. There is a sizeable gypsy community here, and mostly artists, gays, and musicians reside in the neighborhood. It has taken a hit since the storm, as most of the cheap housing that made it so attractive to the bohemian and creative class has been snapped up by desperate families, which also drives prices through the roof. Regardless, the spirit is still unmistakably New Orleans. A drum circle commands the intersection, and I slither past it into the Spotted Cat, where I sit on the floor and watch two energetic gypsies--an accordionist and a guitarist--play joyful drinking songs while freaks shuffle past my feet on their way to the bar. Later, we sit at DBA and watch the Klezmer All-Stars. New Orleans legend Anders Osborne jumps on stage to play guitar, but he’s quickly overshadowed by the guest vocalist, a caucasian man wearing a white wedding gown (and carrying a white shotgun) who raps like a Jamaican. We’re not drunk enough for this level of chaos so we walk back out on Frenchmen street where we join a dance party that started in the afternoon and extends into the night.

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The gay bars in New Orleans are quaint and small, much like the community that supports them. Also like the community, they aren’t very pretty. There is no equivalent in NOLA to decoratively appealing venues like Halo or Cobalt, nor the physically attractive men one would find in such places. I remember a day when bars like OZ and Parade were defined by the beauty of its men, but those days seem ancient now. Brain drain and hurricanes depleted this city long ago, leaving only those who can’t escape or won’t. While the rest of the quarter is vibrant, the pagan revelry distinct to homosexual excess is muted in the areas once marked by it. I rationalize the current state of Bourbon and St. Anne with caveats like “this is the earliest Mardi Gras since 1983” or “it was because of superbowl weekend”, but behind that line is a fear that the quarter of my youth may be lost to the past, and the future. The New Orleans of my youth was always a hooker, but she was a hot bitch, and in spite of her dirty knees and whiskey breath you wanted to sleep with her regardless of your sexual orientation. In contrast, the girl I see now is showing her age and getting by on residual legend. Every year the crowds are smaller, the strippers uglier, and the public sex more a novelty than an institution. It saddens me to see so many of her worn out locals mixing hard liquor with survival, their faces in the crowd contrasting those of first time travelers who look slightly lost and several years too late to party like it’s 1999. It’s different now, you can feel it, but not all feels lost. Music still streams from all points on the compass and bohemian spirit places a footprint on the quarter deep enough for a romantic to assume that the Mississippi is the edge of the universe, and a single step back an assurance of freefall into the abyss. The party is still lit and her exotic presence is everywhere, but it feels as though she hasn’t made her way to the street. Somewhere away from the masses on the outskirts of Bourbon, she sits at the end of the bar in a small candle-lit café with her back to the crowd. Men send her drinks and she accepts them with a gracious smile, but she does not recognize their affections. Heavy with thought, she waits, and we patiently wait for her.

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It’s very late, and I’m alone and making my way to the bank of the river. The fog is the heaviest I’ve experienced, so thick you can’t see more than 10 feet in front of you. When I reach the bank I find that the great river has become a vast cauldron, the water invisible beneath undulating waves of ghostly smoke. It is magnificent, and my thoughts are arrested by the shock of it. The world at this moment is transitory between the real and the supernatural, and the wind is possessed by the strong convictions of the old man’s deepest thoughts. It pushes them forcefully across the water, over the rocks, through my legs and into the dreams of the sleeping children of New Orleans.

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We ride the streetcar down St. Charles and have breakfast at the Camelia Grill, followed by a fabulous day at the Audubon Zoo, but mostly the days after Mardi Gras are sleepy. We walk through the now deserted city and see the reality previously masked by the crowds. Signs of disrepair are everywhere, and the city feels like a ghost town. Earlier in the week I walked down St. Anne at night and wondered why the dazzling lights of the Armstrong Park entrance were missing from the horizon of Rampart Street. I later found out in the daylight that like most areas of the city, repairs were needed. It’s depressing.

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Our last evening in the quarter is much like the day--quiet and often somber. It’s after midnight and we spend the last hours in a gay bar with several dozen locals, the last remaining survivors of Carnival spirit. There is a talent show tonight, which seems an odd bookend to the madness of the past week, but by this point I feel that my confederates are beginning to understand that the bizarre has a special relationship with this place. I scan the faces of the motley collection of local color and see everything I once ran from, and while I say nothing to my friends my heart feels heavy with the undeniable reality that this place will never be home again, and that I can never make a life here.

I walk to an adjacent room and sit on a big leather couch and watch two tall, husky young black kids prepare a small, skinny black kid for his turn on stage. The skinny boy, Tyrell, is adorable, barely 18, and wears nothing but a pair of white spandex underwear. He closes his eyes, raises his arms over his head, and his friends take out two cans of spray glitter from a plastic Wal-Mart bag and spray him relentlessly until his entire body matches the sparkle of his nervous smile. He’s visibly excited and apprehensive about his big moment to shine, and my party can’t help but take up his cause. We walk back to the other room and watch him take his place on the small dark stage, where he proceeds to twirl two batons with such speed, skill, and charm that I quietly admonish myself for giving up on this city. No doubt there are those like Tyrell being born here every day, I think. As long as that remains true, there’s hope, and on the periphery of the tiny crowd I feel some of it as we scream our support for Tyrell, superstar and savior.