Sunday afternoon as the media looked for its pre-disaster stories, one of the Fox buzzards, Shephard Smith, took his cell phone and filed reports from Bourbon Street. For some reason, he couldn't believe that hundreds of people were taking this opportunity to have a hurricane party. Has he never been to New Orleans? This is a city that looks for any excuse to throw a party. That's a big part of the Big Easy's charm. So Shep walked around and asked people why they weren't evacuating. He then started getting a little preachy in that Fox News "We Report, You Decide" sort of way. Then, apparently he spotted a guy walking his dogs and asked him why he was staying. The answer was priceless: "None of your fucking business."
I hope that by tomorrow morning we'll all learn that this was another false alarm, that New Orleans will have dodged another bullet. But it isn't looking good. I've spent a lot of time in the city over the years. I'll never forget my first visit when as a ten-year-old boy I saw my first public nudity as I walked the streets of the French Quarter with my aunt. A few years later, I had my first beer in a bar. I was sixteen. When I moved to Baton Rouge in the mid-nineties, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans as part of my job, walking the streets going door-to-door in the Garden District and the West Bank. Then I would spend my evenings getting battered by the French Quarter's hurricanes. I would occupy my Sunday's hanging out with a paranoid acid dealer in the French Market listnening to his tales of spending too much time in prison because he sold a few sheets too many to an undercover cop. There were many, many nights of sleeping in my car in a public parking garage, waiting for my system to contain more blood than alcohol.
But nothing beats watching the sun come up over the Mississippi or while waiting for that sitting at the Cafe du Monde, sipping chicory coffee, and trying to keep the vision clear enough to jot down a few things in my notebook. Or being shouted at by a homeless guy, "Who are you, Jack Kerouac?" And then the homeless guy giving me a drunkards tour of the Quarter, telling me that he was an old friend of Allen Ginsberg's, every few steps looking at me with way-gone eyes and saying "I'm fucked up," before ending up in Louis Armstrong Park where he would pass out with the bottle of rot gut that I bought for him secured under his arm.
And there's Pirate's Alley where Faulkner lived.
And seeing Jesus walk through Lafittes, holding a plastic lamb under each arm.
And smoking weed with complete strangers upstairs at that Thai place off Esplanade.
And getting lost on my honeymoon, ending up in one of the numerous bad parts of town at a bad hour of my wedding night where we were greeted by a sign that simply said, "THOU SHALL NOT KILL!"
And the first hours after the sunrise when all of the tourists are in bed nursing their hangovers and shame and you can walk through the Quarter, through its alleys and side streets just after they've been sprayed off and swept clean, and the serenity, so much calm, and you can see why people have always been attracted to the city despite its numerous flaws.
And so much that I can't remember, will never know that I should remember.
If you pray, pray for New Orleans.
{Buk poem below the fold.}
Young in New Orleans
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the llights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.
--Charles Bukowski
Ah...my birthplace. May the number of hurricanes drank outnumber the speed of the gales.
I got drunk off daquiris in the Quarter when I was ten. Good times. Still have family there. Hope they all get out in time.
Posted by: Lisset | August 29, 2005 at 06:08 AM