Remembering New Orleans
By Debbie Stowe
October 2005
In 2000 my best friend Lucy and I arrived in New Orleans. Fresh faced graduates, we were going to spend three days there, as part of our round-the-world trip. Eleven days later, pale and exhausted, we left. We had drunk almost every night, sometimes to sickness and beyond. We had started smoking. We had barely seen daylight. Lucy had nearly poisoned a couple of crocodiles. It was a fitting introduction to the Big Easy.
New Orleans is an assault on the senses. On a rare daytime excursion, we walked round a market with a German friend. Lucy disappeared from the group, and I turned back to see her doubled up, red-faced, speechless and tearful. She had tasted one of the hot sauces on sale from a stall. Despite – or perhaps because of – her extreme discomfort, we all just had to try the sauce. It was beyond hot – making the scorching chillies you sometimes hit upon eating Chinese seem like a lettuce leaf in comparison. If there’s one thing New Orleans doesn’t do, it’s mild.
That goes for the people too. Fellow guests from our hostel waiting at a bus stop were warned by police to go inside as a gunman was on the loose. And while we were sitting on Bourbon Street, trying to sober up, a car pulled up and its driver asked us for some money for gas. It was the first drive-by begging I had ever heard of.
On our last day, I walked down Bourbon Street – for the first time when the sun was up. Something was different – it stank. We’d never noticed it before, too intoxicated on cheap daiquiris and the city’s joie de vivre to care.
The nightlife had sucked us in. We would sleep all day, then wake at 8pm, ready to cook some dinner and head out for more. Sometimes it was a dive in the middle of nowhere, playing pool with oddballs until 5am, while our fellow patrons slept on the tables or chairs; sometimes it was a mellow piano bar; sometimes it was a noisy tourist trap on Bourbon Street. In the latter, the singer invited us up on the stage, to join in with a line or two from the Summer of 69 and Paradise City. The two girls who followed us stripped off and performed an impromptu sex act. Lucy later apologised to the singer if we’d been a bit tame.
Everyone we met was superlative, more like caricatures than real people. Questioning a marine about the ethics of war, he yelled at us, entirely seriously, ‘I would kill any fucker who dared to fuck with the U-nited States of America.’ A group of lecherous Colombians backed us unsubtly into a corner at a cheesy karaoke bar, and we only effected an escape when the introduction of La Bamba heralded their turn to sing. It was New Orleans – if you wanted civility, calm and normality you were in the wrong city.
I haven’t been back to New Orleans on subsequent visits to the States – I didn’t think my health could take it. And despite the TV images, it is difficult to imagine it battered, destroyed and under water, all its diverse humanity scattered into desperate huddles on top of buildings and in sports stadia.
The Big Easy was patched together from years of history and influences, jazz, blues the Creoles, the French. Whether it can be resurrected deliberately in 2005 by Bush’s billions is doubtful. If not, America will have lost an unruly, but precious child.
