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?"

 

By sun-up a noisy steam roller was crushing cans and bottles along both sides of the street.  It was followed by a crew of men with wide shovels and push brooms who loaded mountains of flattened cans and crushed glass onto the flat bed of a big truck.

 

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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.

 

 

My last vignette is about walking through the Quarter with a woman who urgently needed to find a rest room.  She was making a bee line for the nearest bar when we were met at the door by an officious little person who immediately informed us,  "This establishment is a gay bar."

"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.

"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?