New Orleans

Talk about a city that can’t catch a break.
In New Orleans, Dorothy and I stayed at a nice hotel on St. Charles Street. You could spend hours walking up and down the street admiring the old colonial style mansions, but turn off that street and walk down two blocks, and you would find yourself in a run down neighborhood with people sitting around playing cards and drinking beer out of brown paper bags. New Orleans is a city of contrasts. We had a nice time there, but everywhere you turned there was a reminder of the city’s poor luck and its poverty. We had the obligatory po’boys and beignets—actually pretty much subsisted on them—and one nicer meal at Cochon where we had pig prepared in various ways, all of it good. We had alligator and frog legs. Yes, the frog legs did taste like that. The alligator tasted like a land animal that had spent its life marinating in swamp. In honor of the alligator, we went out to the swamp lands national park at the southern end of the city and took a look around. It was incredibly humid in the swamp area and almost otherworldly for us Californians. The vegetation was so thick that, at times, you couldn’t see the sky overhead. The water was covered so completely in little green plants that it almost seemed as if you could walk across it. And there were lots of animals. Large spiders wrapping up unlucky flies caught in their nets, florescent green lizards scurrying about underfoot, frogs croaking just out of sight, grasshoppers larger than any we had ever seen whizzing by us, and even a snake curled up on our path who cut our exploration short. The swamp was beautiful, fascinating, and definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in New Orleans.

As we closed in on our last night in New Orleans we realized that there was something important that we hadn’t yet done. We hadn’t gone to Bourbon Street. Because it was our last night, and we had to check out early (for us) the next morning and drive up to Mississippi, we decided that we would go to Bourbon, have a drink and come back before too late. We wanted to get a good night’s sleep before our checkout. That was our responsible plan. We obviously did not yet understand New Orleans. We hit bourbon, walked up down, saw the sights and had a strawberry daiquiri. Then we decided that we would go a couple blocks off bourbon where the drinks were presumably cheaper. We entered a little bar on a side street, ordered a couple drinks, and found out that they were not, in fact, much cheaper. No matter, our plan was to head back to the hotel after these anyway. And then we met Nick. Nick was a large, burly man with tattoos running up and down both arms. He was slightly intimidating sitting next to us surrounded by beer bottles that he had polished off, but his image softened considerably when he ordered us a round of shots called “gummy bears.” Nick was from Alaska and stopping over in New Orleans on his way to Florida. He convinced us to head back to bourbon street where, long story short, we patronized some more of the fine establishments there, with Nick generously doing most of the paying. After a while, we realized that we hadn’t asked our heavily tattooed new friend what he did for a living.
“So Nick, what is it that you do?”
“I work for BP.”
“Seriously though, what do you do?”
“I am serious,” he said with a straight face. “I work for BP.”
It took a minute for the realization to fully sink in. Dorothy and I were in New Orleans, summer of 2010, on its most famous street, drinking with a fellow visitor who worked for BP…the same BP whose oil pipeline was, at that very moment, spewing thousands upon thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Should we feel dirty about this? Was it our responsibility to report this man to the authorities? Did we need to repent for unwittingly consorting with the enemy? We managed to rationalize it by telling ourselves that Nick was spending so much money at the bars that he was essentially acting as New Orleans’ own, personal, tattooed stimulus god. Nevertheless, we figured we should head back to the room both for the health of our livers, as well as to avoid the stampede of people we were sure would come to beat up Nick if his dirty little secret ever got out.

We got back in time to catch a few hours of sleep before checkout the next morning, and went to bed that night convinced that New Orleans was a strange and wonderful city.