Clinton's ong history of sexual assaults (page 23 Google): https://www.albertpeia.com/oxfordassault.htm
Thursday, August 25, 2022
Thursday, December 18, 2014
The French Quarter
Shock and Awe in the Big Easy
"Spend
money or keep moving." It is the
commercial imperative at the heart of all tourist destinations though it is
seldom articulated so bluntly. Whether you prefer the family friendly theme
parks of Orlando, or seek the immaculated vice of the Las Vegas Strip, the high
tech engineering and crowd management systems are all there to keep you
pacified while you spend money. The good
news is, that while you are there, you never have to leave the secure bubble of your
own comfort zone, but the problem with
engineered destinations is their artificiality.
The more time you spend at them, the less appeal they have. In time they can become as numbingly familiar as green signs along the interstate.
What makes the
Big Easy so refreshingly different is that the gritty, irreverent ambiance of
the French Quarter is not something manufactured for the tourists. It is simply
and unapologetically there. It emanates from each crack in the sidewalk
and from every garbage can in the alley.
The real shock lies in its seductive ability to strip even casual visitors of their provincial notions of self restraint and public decorum. "What happens in New Orleans..." would never fly in your suburban neighborhood
back home.
My first
exposure to the Big Easy was in 1970. I
was 21 and temporarily assigned to the Naval Communications Training
Center at Pensacola. Another trainee, a
recent UF grad and past president of his fraternity, had invited me to ride with him over to New Orleans for
Mardi Gras weekend. He said that it was
the kind of place I needed to see. We could
have free lodging at a Tulane fraternity house, so my only expense would be
to split the gas money and pay for whatever I ate or drank. The memory of what followed is the disjointed
residue of an alcohol soaked weekend set against a backdrop of sanctioned public
debauchery on an unimaginable scale.
The foot
traffic in the Quarter that Saturday was so thick people seemed to swarm like
schools of baitfish. Pilgrims who got too close to the center of the street got
swept up in a flow of human traffic that could move them in the opposite
direction from where they wanted to go. A
random event on the street could trigger vocal response from so many people
that the noise would resonate for the length of the whole block. The vibration was like being inside a
football stadium after a touchdown.
On Bourbon
Street there was a black sailor in a dress blue uniform who had just turned
up a big jug of Bali Hai wine and had started to drink. The
street began to chant, "CHUG-CHUG-CHUG-CHUG." Stirred by his sudden notoriety, the sailor
managed to empty the bottle in a series of heroic efforts. At the end of each marathon chug, the sailor would raise his arms and the crowd
would roar its approval.
On the other
side of the street there was a parked hearse.
Someone had put two boxed wooden speakers on the its hood that were blaring
music from the "Easy Rider" soundtrack. The movie had been released just the year
before and featured cuts of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in an LSD laced romp
through the Quarter. The movie
was well on its way to becoming a cult
classic and its sound track was an in-your-face anthem for the counter culture. A young woman climbed up on top the hearse
and began to dance. Within seconds the
street erupted in another chant, "STRIP-STRIP-STRIP-STRIP." As her clothes came off, the chant
intensified. When a uniformed cop on horseback started blowing his whistle and moving in the direction of the
hearse, a wall of revelers instantly formed
between the hearse and the horse, blocking the cop's advance. The performance continued.
In the mean
time, someone had found a large blanket and a group of revelers, encouraged by the cheering, had
grabbed the edges of the blanket and were tossing the severely impaired sailor
into the air and catching him like a limp rag doll. The street registered its collective approval
with each toss. I saw a flamboyant reveler dressed in little more than a
feathered mask kissing men on the mouth, and a topless girl clad mostly in
body paint and layers of Mardi Gras beads.
She was dancing in the street and squirting wine from a goat skin bag
into the mouths of strangers. I ducked
into an alley to relieve myself and saw another man similarly occupied, or so
it seemed, until I noticed the woman kneeling in front of him. And so the day passed.
From about
dark thirty on the celebration escalated.
There was a parade with floats, costumes, beads and doubloons, but from
this point on my story begins to lose continuity. I'm not Hunter Thompson nor was I meant to be. I don't remember sleeping at all that
night. I got separated from the group I
was with and missed my ride back to Tulane.
I do remember being slumped against a bus stop bench, shivering in the
pre dawn chill of a very gray morning. There
was only a narrow strip of asphalt near the crown of the street that was not completely
covered with wine bottles, beer cans, and Mardi Gras trash. The trash in the gutter was so deep that it
completely obscured the curb line. There
were still a few people out, some of them still drinking. I remember thinking, "Where the (bleep)
am I?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Almost twenty years later, my interest in the off-beat or the unusual hadn't diminished, but the notion of being in New Orleans during Mardi Gras with its raucous crowds had lost some of its former appeal. By then, my attention had shifted to the sub rosa sport of cockfighting. I was writing a series of articles for the game fowl journals, and it was about that same time that I had begun to notice the petty tyrannies and ironic intolerance associated with the emerging dogma of political correctness.
In 1986, Governor
Bob Graham signed a bill into law making it a felony to fight chickens in the state of
Florida. To avoid the penalties and
stigma of becoming convicted felons, members of Florida's cocking fraternity
began commuting to Louisiana where their sport was still perfectly legal. The closest major pit to the Florida border
was in Pearl River. Many in the group would stay
in Slidell and run up to Pearl River for the cocking derbies, then drive
down into New Orleans to spend their evenings in the French Quarter.
The last
time I was in the Quarter I remember walking down an alley and seeing someone
dump a pail full of restaurant garbage into
a dumpster. It was full of bright green
lettuce, oyster shells, ice, and daubs of red cocktail sauce. It looked and smelled more like food than
swill. I remember thinking that even
garbage in the Quarter was strangely appealing.
Farther
along in the alley, I noticed an attractive woman in a short red satin robe. She was standing at the back door of a building,
leaned over a wrought iron stoop rail, smoking a cigarette. As I neared the platform, I noticed that except for the loose fitting robe, she was stark naked. I lifted my gaze up to the woman's face and realized that she was probably on break, a performer from one of the live sex show bars that fronted Bourbon Street. Oblivious to, or perhaps just ignoring my gape, she was there to suck as much pleasure as she could from her
cigarette before it was time to get back to work.
"No
problem, she just needs to use the rest room."
"The
restrooms here are for patrons only."
"That's
fine, I'll buy a drink so she can use the lady's room."
"This
is a bar for GAY PEOPLE."
My companion was standing on one foot and then the other now.
My companion was standing on one foot and then the other now.
"It'll
be okay, she's seen fags before."
I should have avoided the slur, but rudeness in the street is best addressed with terse dispatch - or not at all. And after all, we were still in the Big Easy, right?
I should have avoided the slur, but rudeness in the street is best addressed with terse dispatch - or not at all. And after all, we were still in the Big Easy, right?
Friday, April 18, 2014
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Articles from The Gamecock, March 1995 - November 1996
In keeping with a long standing custom of game fowl journals, the following articles all appeared under the nom de guerre or "pit name" of the author. Pit names can be assumed or conferred by the cocking fraternity. In the second case, it is usually best to embrace them as an "honorific" and roll with it.
Gamecock, October, 1995 |
The Cock Pit by William Hogarth, engraved 1759 Gamecock, December, 1995 The Game Breeder, February 1900 (an extremely rare original) |
Gamecock, March, 1996 Gamecock, July 1996
|
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