I landed in New Orleans narrowly escaping a blizzard in Boston. Every plane after mine had been grounded. As the snowfall cleared twenty-six inches, I was landing in seventy-five degree sun.
My dearest friend of twenty years picked me up at the airport in a borrowed red convertible Cadillac, taking my bag with one hand and passing me a bottle of pink campange with the other. We were on the highway with funk blaring in the speakers, wind in my hair, laughing, ten o'clock in the morning in New Orleans.
Amanda lived on the seventh floor of a dorm overlooking the opulent Tulane campus on the left and the sprawl of broken-down shack houses and graveyards on the right. Four of her friends were skipping classes to throw me a welcoming party. We lifted her windows and climbed out onto the narrow ledge, hanging our feet over.
The graveyards in New Orleans are like everything there -- crowded, boisterous, old, whispering of ancient broken down things. Head stones were shoved in the ground haphazardly, crumbling, stacked on top of each other, competing for earth. Old candles bleached by the sun lined the winding, overgrown pathways. Dead flowers, silk carnations, empty glass vases littered the piles of ash. But it was not a depressing scene. It felt like everything in that city -- laughing, dancing, rejoicing even in the pain, becaue you're alive -- and celebrating death because there's little you're afraid of and little you can bring yourself to take seriously. They have gaudy, musical parades at the funerals instead of the sullen, black-veilved affairs of clinical New England puritans, where we shake earth onto polished coffins from little metal cans so we don't get our hands dirty. In New Orleans, everything is dirty.
It was eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning, and I was sitting seven stories up above this madcap city, drinking champage out of a bottle and eating cheese and crackers on the window sill of the dorm room. It was my birthday. I was nineteen.
The day I landed in New Orleans, they changed the legal drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen. I don't remember why. But I remember how. Chaos ensued on campus, the streets were filled with cheering, frat row exploding in a veritable carnival of carnage. The bars overflowed. And we had already started the celebration.
There was an impossible beauty to the first day there, having just hours before trudged through gray sky sleet to the cold plane, and now sprawled in the sunshine grass of the quad, staring up at the blue sky. Music poured out of every window. My oldest friend in the world was beside me. It was her duty, honor, and mission to show me a good time in this city of hers.
There is something magical in New Orleans that I can't quite put my finger on. It's in the air. I felt the electricity on my skin the moment I stepped off the plane. My fingers tingled. My ears were hungry for all of it. In the humid evening we wandered down to the French Quarter, stopping to have a drink at each bar on the way. In New England you can't buy liquor on Sundays. In New Orleans you can request it "to go". Hi, I'd like a large Margarita. To go. Open containers of alcohol are not allowed in moving vehicles so they leave the paper on the top of the straw. They bend the laws when they're not breaking them.
The city feels old. Some streets feel like a party at an abandoned amusement park. Others feel like the amusement park. Down Esplanade to Decatur, along the muddy river, hearing the out-of-tune ferry boats, drinking chicory from Café Du Monde. Up Bourbon, excruciatingly loud, horribly tacky, everything open air, open windows, open mouths. Each bar a different color. Each bar a different band. The music is everywhere in New Orleans. It's full of life. Even when it's full of pain, the Dixieland, Cajun, Zydeco, jazz, all of it is celebration.
Amanda had classes all day so I was left to my own devices. I spend most of my time alone. I always travel alone. To cities I've never been, places completely foreign to me. I love to roam by myself, discover my own treasures and then compare notes later with what the locals have to say. I wandered through the Quarter, in and out of shops, talking to the psychics, whispering in the ears of the mules that pull brightly painted carts. The mules wear feathered plumes on their heads and their silver shod feet ring like bells on the brick streets.
The voodoo dungeons fascinated me. I don't remember how the topic originally came up, but I got into an argument with this guy I worked with at the pet shop in Boston. We were arguing about nutrias. More precisely, their existence. Now you may not believe me any more than he did, but there's an animal called a nutria. And when it comes to animal knowledge, you don't fuck with Joy. So I tell this guy there's the nutria -- they're like giant beavers, but they don't swim as much, and they're rodents but they can grow to the size of a dog. And he thinks I'm crazy and starts giving me a hard time and making fun of me, telling everyone who comes into the store, "Ask her about the nutrias," with his eyebrows raised.
I went into a little Voodoo shop on Dumaine. It was tiny and crammed floor to ceiling with bizarre eye candy -- tiny mouse skulls, gems in velvet pouches, sage clippings you burn to make your ex-boyfriend impotent or your mother blind. And in tall a barrel, mounted on three-foot long bones, were nutrias' claws.
Now I probably would have thought they were mongoose feet or similar, except that the sign said, very clearly: Nutria's Claws. Underlined in black marker. In disbelief, I pulled one reverently from the barrel and held it at arms length. My immediate fantasy was returning to work with my claw and scratching out the eyes of my taunting coworker.
I bought several of those claws. One for my coworker and one for all the people who had been backing me up through the nutria harassment case.
It just occurred to me that I could have grabbed an encyclopedia and brought that to work with me.
When I returned victoriously to Upper Newbury Pet, I brandished my claw dangerously close to the eyes of said coworker, cackling maniacally and screeching, "SO THERE! Nutria's claw for you!"
Problem? It didn't say Nutria's Claw anywhere on it. I don't know what I was expecting. No signed and certified label stating that it was 100% Pure Mummified Voodoo-quality Nutria. And that was the first thing out of his smartass mouth. "Prove it."
My, that was a long tangent.
During my first ten days in New Orleans, we went to a lot of shows. The Funky Meters, one of my old favorites, were playing at Tipitinas. It was hot. We danced. We screamed. I met Amanda's friend Bradley and fell in love.
We left the club -- it was too hot and too loud, ears ringing the throng of us took to the streets. Bradley and I found a swing set parked on a street corner for no good reason so we put it to use. He grabbed my chain and tried to pull me up higher with him. I felt heady and light. We jumped off to the ground and he pulled me up. He held my hand for a moment, then opened my palm and placed an enormous handful of mushrooms in it. He gave me a sly smile and skipped ahead, looking back at me.
The next thing I know I was crammed into a shopping cart with Bradley's friend Justin, our knees pressed up to our chest, Bradley trotting along, pushing us down through the bad part of town. We sped through the warehouse district, where it's dark and the front doors are lit with broken gas lamps hung from wrought iron stakes. The city was streaming by insanely, and I had boombox wedged between my knees playing Phish, "Bouncing Around the Room." It was a live thirty-five minute version of the song. Bradley was giggling like a lunatic and shoving us down a hill, all three of us screaming; I was laughing so hard there was tears and snot all over my face. We were going at a breakneck speed, Justin and I pressed against each other in terror, unable to save ourselves from Bradley's evil plan because our arms were trapped at our sides inside the shopping cart.
Suddenly we couldn't hear Bradley laughing anymore.
Justin turned his head to look back, because I couldn't move, and Bradley had tripped and was rolling around on the pavement trying to get back on his feet to stop us. But he couldn't catch up because he was laughing so hard. Justin and I braced ourselves as we headed dead-on for Rampart, where there are no stop signs, even if a driver were to heed them.
It didn't matter; we were invincible.
We streaked across the intersection, "Bouncing Around the Room" still going, I was shrieking and Justin just kept saying, "Holyshit. Holyshit. Holyshit." And then, the yellow BMW convertible. I will forever remember that car. The rust over the back left wheel, the peeling paint on the driver's side door, and the enormous dent we left in the hood when our shopping cart, stuffed with humans streaking down a hill at ninety miles an hour, collided head on.
It was parked.
The shopping cart flipped over and we were silent. We were still stuck in it, upside down and almost sideways, Justin sitting on his hands and me with my arms stuck against the sides. The boombox was still shoved between my knees. It was still playing "Bouncing Around the Room."
The two of us, leggy and spindly limbed, could not free ourselves from the twisted metal. We awaited the Jaws of Life. Or Bradley. Whichever.
He danced up, circling us, giggling and slapping his knees, pulling the cart completely on its side and dragging me out by an ankle. Justin unfolded his 38" legs and we fled the scene of the crime. We had places to go before sunrise.
There were rooftops. There were jazz joints open 24 hours. We played pool with a posse of Harley guys. We drank hurricanes out of two-foot aliens. In the end Bradley and I wandered back to his apartment as the dawn broke. He kissed the road rash on my forehead. We curled up in his sunny corner studio overlooking a graveyard, his little plant hanging over the kitchen counter, and his neurotic, cross-eyed cat with the broken tail. "He's crazy," Bradley told me. "He was a mess when I found him. Old, falling apart, busted up, loud, insane. But I love him anyway."
Kind of like that city.
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