Back in the Big Easy Pt 1

The allusion has been made many times by blues musicians, but New Orleans is like a hot woman that’s way out of your league but for some reason keeps sleeping with you anyway. The blues guys say this much more skillfully than I - blues musicians can say things like “squeeze my lemon ‘til the juice runs down my leg” and make it sound saucy instead of ridiculous. The first time out, you’re just amazed you’re there. You don’t want to make any big mistakes or fuck it up (so to speak) so you take it easy and don’t go to crazy. Second time you figure you’ve got more leeway, so you go a little harder. Leaving the woman metaphor for a minute and returning to the Big Easy, you drink a little more, stay out a little later, and maybe even throw a couple of stings of beads off a balcony. Third time out (and each subsequent visit) you’re in a comfort zone. You’ve done the touristy stuff (hopefully we’re really away from the woman metaphor now) and you’re settled in, relaxed, and able to go at your own pace and enjoy the beauty and splendor of one of the finest places on earth (okay, maybe we are still with that metaphor).

I’m currently in New Orleans for the sixth time in my life, the fourth trip this year alone. I’ll be back one more time – maybe even twice – before the year is out. I am not guilty of hyperbole when I say I could probably pass for a native at this point. I know which streets go where, where the good, out-of-the-way restaurants are, and where the best music can be found. I can also tell you where to get your bike fixed. Where to buy three pounds of the best crawfish in the city. Where you should go running.

Bottom line, lost in all the post-Katrina hooplah is the fact that this is still one of the most fun cities in the world, Bourbon Street notwithstanding. Which isn’t to say that Bourbon isn’t good for a larf. My room here at the Hotel Monteleone is just a block away, on Royal Street. But there’s so much more to this city than boozing. Take this hotel, for example. I had a roster of hotels where I could have stayed, some closer to the convention center (where I’ll be spending most of my time over the next three days), and some nicer (I once stayed at the Ritz at the same time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I don’t know a lot of guys on that team by sight, but you could pretty much tell who was on the team and who wasn’t. If the dude was 6’6” and 350 pounds, odds are good he was on the team. Or just a local named Tiny who likes his alligator tail and bread pudding.) Instead, I chose the hotel that was haunted. Not just one of those “they say there’s occasionally a strange presence in room 237” type of haunted, but a flat-out, there-are-ghosts-everywhere-in-the-place haunted. No way I was gonna turn that down. So far I’ve been ghost free, though for some reason my room has five smoke detectors, all with spooky little green blinking lights. Perhaps the ghosts frequent this establishment because of all buildings in the French Quarter it’s the least likely to burn down.

They may be frightened away by my odor this evening though – I went to K-Paul’s restaurant tonight, third time I’ve eaten there. K-Paul’s is owned by Paul Prudhomme, a chef so astoundingly fat he is no longer able to stand up under his own power, instead wheeling around on one of those electric scooters you see advertised on daytime shows like the Price is Right. I’m in danger of catching Paul on the scale after just one meal – frog legs, onion rings, gumbo, jambalaya, a chicken leg stuffed with (really) a chicken breast, and bread pudding. And here I have ambition to run tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes. Tomorrow, a tour of the Superdome, a place of death, sorrow, and disappointment. And that’s just the Saints.