Forty-Four

New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans looks pretty much the same to me. I watched, as I came into town, for signs of the ordeal she’d survived and didn’t see much. The biggest indicators along the interstate were those of depopulation: an abandoned Wal-Mart, boarded up public housing, a general lack of population.

Christ, you couldn’t tell anything had happened on Bourbon Street. The last time I was here I never ventured into the Quarter at night. Had better things to do. Like sleeping. This time I’m a block off Bourbon and two blocks off Canal so I took a long walk through the Vieux Carre and down Bourbon to use up the evening.

What a friggin’ mess.

Drunken tourists acting the ass. Half-naked women in see-through bikinis – which might, depending on your point of view, qualify as all-naked – standing in doorways advertising the sins of the flesh to be found within. Loud music, loud people, and general tomfoolery. It’s as if someone took every club, bar and restaurant in New York and mashed it into a narrow street. Then went to South Street in Philly on a Saturday night, grabbed all the Jersey eedjits jumping around, multiplied them by three, tossed them in a container ship, doused them all with PCP and turned them loose along the Mississippi here in New Orleans.

It’s kind of a shame. The Quarter is beautiful: the food is good, the women are cute, there are no open container laws. You can walk down Dauphine or Chartres or wander around Jackson Square and have a pretty good time just walking and grooving on the rhythm of the street. At some point I bet the whole place was like that until some knucklehead saw a chance for profit and turned the worst part of Vegas loose on Bourbon. And now it’s a national landmark and – as in all things – you’ll never be able to get back what it used to be.

Tomorrow I’ll just go to the St. Charles and drink Purple Haze and eat Po Boys until my liver explodes. The sensation will be similar to a stroll down Bourbon Street but I’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot more.