stoweboyd

I lived in New Orleans for a six months, right after I graduated from college. I had been living in Amherst Massachusetts for five+ years, didn’t know where I was going to land for grad school - or even what I was going to study - and I really wanted a change. So, I took off for the Big Easy: a place where I had never been, and where I knew no one.

After a few days in a hostel, I found a "room" for rent—it was actually a bed built into the wall of the kitchen in a renovated loft apartment. And my landlady was a semipro prostitute. But I quickly came to love Marigny, the nieghborhood immediately abutting the French Quarter, and I got a job working as a "singing waiter" at a restaurant in the Quarter called Anything Goes.

The life in the Quarter was truly surreal. At first I reveled in the carnival atmosphere: an endless stream of boozy tourists, moving from jazz club to strip club, partying in the rubbishy and potholed streets; the aggressive but sexy hookers; the tap dancers and street musicians; the kitchy but moth-eaten charm of a former colonial outpost cum adult Disneyland. I stayed out till dawn, ate oysters and crawfish in the wee hours, danced with strange women and followed them home, and became enmeshed in a shifting crowd of waiters, bartenders, musicians, and strippers: the working class folks who make the pretty machine spin every night.

It was the year that the police went on strike, and Mardi Gras was "cancelled" - meaning that there was an informal Mardi Gras, with no cops, and National Guard on the corners. They were there to stop rioting, but the petty madness of an unrestrained Mardi Gras - dope smoking, public drunkeness, lewd behavior and nudity—went unchecked. As just one example, I recall walking through the edge of the Quarter one evening, on the way to a party, and a crowd in a gay bar had dragged a pool table onto the sidewalk, where several men were bent over, pants down, being boned by a line of partyers. On the balcony across the street, a party was going on, with the heterosexual equivalent taking place. And diagonally, on the far corner, two National Guardsmen were sharing a smoke.

The week was a blur of crazy partying, people sleeping in the streets, endless music, drugs, dancing, sex, and wildness. I generally hung with my buddy Huey, a creole from the restaurant, who I started rooming with afte Mardi Gras, but often I was in crowds of strangers, partying, moving around the quarter, bouncing from episode to episode. It was Felliniesque: public sex was common, drugs openly in use, and The National Guard stood to one side, ensuring that rioting, theft, and fighting did not start, but otherwise taking no part in enforcing the law. The Guard stopped me from finishing a fight with some trucker who brandished a broken bottle, and pulled a girl from my arms in a street front bar. I limped ten blocks to my home with a chunk of beer glass in my foot, but mostly angry that I had been stopped before smashing a chair on the trucker’s head. And I never saw the girl again, although we had spent a long half hour in a back room of the bar before the fight broke out; I am not certain that I had ever learned her name. For all I know, she was the trucker’s date.

Later that week, I was coming home from a late night dinner - I usually got out of work after 11pm, and during Mardi Gras, much much later - and was walking alone toward Marigny. A crowd of black teenagers were tipping along, at a fast pace, with an aggressive manner. I crossed to the other side of the street, and was followed by their catcalls. A few blocks later, I saw a man lying on the sidewalk in the doorway of an all night convenience store, his blood pooling around him like parentheses. The manager was still on the phone with the police, but I could hear that it was the same crowd of teenagers that had attacked, stabbed, and robbed the man, who would later die: a German tourist who mutely fought to keep his passport and traveler’s checks.

I have never traveled in the grimmer parts of the world: central Asia, Africa, or South America. Although I have spent a lot of time traveling, it has been limited to Europe and North America. But in those few months in New Orleans, I felt that I had seen the underside of the human condition. I think it was John Steinbeck who wrote that no group of men is more than three meals away from anarchy. During that lost Mardi Gras, the one that wasn’t supposed to happen, I sensed that the veneer of civilization is much thinner than I had believed, and that people are only too willing to throw off the ties of society given the chance. Including me.

I am not suggesting that New Orleans is some Sodom, where the citizens deserve retribution; not at all. It’s just that New Orleans was the place where I had that insight: that civilization, as we know it, is a fabric that is easily rent, and light enough for most to put aside completely, if only for a time. New Orleans seemed to be a place where misbehaving, within certain limits, had become the city’s major product, and once the icons of law and order - the police - had retreated, the institutionalized bacchanalia degraded into something much wilder, more claustrophobic, and more dangerous.

After the strike was broken, things went back to normal, if that is the right term, and New Orleans seemed the same old place, more or less. But I never snapped back into the same groove, having seen something deeper in the madness of that week, a half-silhouetted shape or form, a shadow behind the gaiety, music, crowds, and dancing. Something that had been checked, held back, now seemed to be trying to get out.

I left New Orleans a few months later, planning to return after the musty, boiling months of summer. But I took a computer course at BU in June, and fell into a different path, which I guess I am still on today, 20+ years later. I returned a few times - as an outsider, a tourist - but never again as a resident, as a denizen of that demi-monde, and I never again felt the hot breath of that mania down my neck, or in my own throat.

[tags: new+orleans]

One of the cities of Europe that I seem to return to again and again. Great people. Most recently, I was there in the summer of 2004, traveling with my buddy Greg Narain on a week-long tour: London, Amsterdam, Nice. What a trip. My buddies at Eyebees asked me to speak in Amsterdam. They are housed in the Olgivy building there, and we had a good turn out – like 20 folks.

An African island, Madeira is part of continental Portugal. An otherworldly place, the island has a strange out-of-time feeling to it. A dormant volcano, the island is steep, and driving to the top of the mountain that makes up it’s interior involves traveling through the clouds. Wild.

I flew to Lisbon, once, via the Azores (Terceira), and it looked totally beautiful. Next trip to Portugal - which I am scheming - I will go through the Azores again, and stay at least a week, checking out the various islands.

The Azores (os Açores, in portuguese, which means the Hawks) are fairly remote - 2000 miles from the US, 1,000 miles from Europe - and were uninhabited until the 1700s. Of particular interest to me are Pico (Peak), which has the tallest peak in Portugal, a dormant volcano, and Horta (Garden), whose harbor city, Faial, is an entrepot for the world’s yachting community. Suppposed to be a very laid back, quiet sort of lifestyle. Would be a great retreat, so long as they have internet!

I have passed through Barcelona several times, but never have had the chance to stay long enough to really get to know it well.

I spent a week in Vancouver in 1971, when I was hitchiking across Canada, and i have been back a few times since, most recently in 2005 for the NorthernVoice conference. Great town. I could imagine living there, partly because of the ambiance, and partly because I have a number of friends there, now.

I went to the University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa) for the summer course (curso das ferias) for two consecutive summers, 1978-1979. It was a strange time for me: I was breaking up with my wife - we had been married only a few years, as college students - and my first time studying abroad. Amazingly liberating, wonderful city, sudents from all over the world.

I intend to write a book - Return to Portugal - where I thread together travelogue and history, and get the chance to live in Portugal for a year: part of it in Lisbon, and much of it traveling around. While I was there in the ‘70s, I visited the area around Lisbon extensively, and took a long meandering car trip with pals into Oporto and the Serra das Estrelas.

I love the people - povo amavel - and had a great time. I can’t wait, but it will likely be 4 years before I can do it: two boys in high school!