Remembering Nawlins

(I had an opportunity to visit New Orleans a few years before Katrina. These are my recollections at the time.  In looking back some of my comments seem to carry a bad omen –MF)

The whole notion of fortune cookies seems somehow scary to me. Imagine: your entire destiny is linked to a paper message inside a cookie. Our local Chinese Buffet has become a favorite for the kids, in no small part because of the unusually profound fortune cookies: (“You must reserve time for quiet reflection”), (“You have the power to write your own fortune”) and so on. But I recently got an odd one: (“Don’t underestimate the significance of symbolic gestures”). If my destiny has just been predetermined how will I know if I can’t decipher the cookie obscura? It may come to me later.

Nawlins I won’t attempt to mimic other writings about New Orleans — many have written of her far more eloquently than I. But it couldn’t hurt; my words will merely add to a river muddied with the silt of a million tales.

I considered partaking of the kind of low-life, sleaze- bucket behavior that defines New Orleans, but I went to the Aquarium instead. I tried using my North Carolina Zoological Park membership card to get in free, but it’s sphere of influence had run out somewhere over Georgia. The iMAX theatre was running a documentary on Michael Jordan, creating for me a theatrical umbilical firmly attached to Chapel Hill.

I took a boat out on the Mississippi River. More than any other natural formation, the Mississippi defines and skewers America, drawing water from 31 of the 48 contiguous states. The New Orleans skyline reminded me of the Singapore skyline, although I cannot think of two more disparate cities – an adult Disneyland and a rebuilt Disneyland. Standing on the bow, I see huge barges and plucky tugboats fitting together like giant interlocking molecules of commercialism. I see immense flood control structures designed to keep the waters of the Mississippi from becoming the Rivers of New Orleans. My Corps of Engineer genetic code awakens and my fingers clutch a phantom slide rule.

A city of excess, New Orleans must have long ago surpassed its quota of brass instruments, not to mention that pesky critical mass of tambourines. I’m not sure what the penalties are for such crimes unless it’s a lifetime supply of Lycra and feathers, in which case we have a winner. I’m told that if a woman bares her breasts for you on the street, you are required by sleaze law to give her a necklace of plastic beads (or is it the other way round?). I did not personally witness this odd trade off but the scuttlebutt is that it’s not part of Mardi Gras at all, belonging instead to the French Quarter where Mardi Grasians do not venture.

If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times — I should never be allowed to drink alcohol. Yet there I was, consuming a drink on Bourbon Street called a Hurricane, so named because of the high winds and heavy rains … oh wait that’s a real hurricane. The drink is served in a robust 16-ounce mayonnaise jar with rum, vodka, and many other less cheerful liquids sloshing delicately over the side. If you can successfully consume one Hurricane the next one is free, and so one until the streets are filled with drunken losers, one of which may be you. I was unable to finish half of one, yet several in our group drank four and remained approximately vertical but with a blood alcohol level of 11000%.

The menu also boasted of a drink called a Tsunami, which costs US$175 and consists of 5 gallons of the above-mentioned Hurricane liquids, delivered to your table (I assume) in the bed of a tractor-trailer festooned with flexible straws. All this sloshing about guarantees a real good time assuming that you spend this time a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder. You and your fellow lemmings eventually careen out of the Hurricane bar and stumble down narrow alleyways, human barges going basically nowhere, all the while hoping that just around the corner we will find what it is we seek. Instead we find another bar, another drink and another sunrise, which may or may not involve tequila. When I awoke early the next morning, I looked out the window at the street below and saw a squad of professional revelers just coming home from the French Quarter, pausing to pick up and consume the contents of papers cups left lying in the gutter by less nimble barflies. Of all the things to see upon arising, I recommend this one the least.

It seems to me to be more than a little garish and sad, this single-minded pursuit of constitutionally guaranteed happiness. I wonder what trauma I endured in early life to make me incapable of seeing the point. Perhaps it was that time many years ago when I awoke after a night of carousing, my head encrusted with the remnants of a previously digested meal.

And that’s one symbolic gesture I didn’t underestimate.