New Orleans, April 2024
wherever you go, there you are
Last month I went to New Orleans on a trip three friends and I had originally planned for May 2020. At the beginning of that year, we’d booked a large room at a bed and breakfast in the French Quarter, pinned locations of interest to a map, even started assembling a playlist. I had visions of a perfect hazy stumble from our door to a landmark to a show to a bar and back again. We’d live the platonic ideal of a vacation, without obstacles or much conscious thought at all.
Then, of course, a pandemic went global. Our own lives went through a series of graduations, moves, job changes, and assorted catastrophes. By the time the dust settled, we were down one original member of our crew who had to bow out due to work conflicts, up two romantic partners, and booked out at a Holiday Inn Express in Chalmette. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was (am) also generally wary of getting my hopes up too much about anything anymore.
When I hopped in the car for the overnight drive down, I had already spent the past several days trying to work through minor annoying financial and health issues, worried that either or both would throw a gray cloud over the vacation. Still, my carmates and I talked excitedly about making a 4am stop at Waffle House to devour a breakfast in the ideal liminal space. I was already envisioning the photos I would take and the things I would write when we hit the rotting corpse of some poor animal while changing lanes. We ended up at a 24-hour self-serve car wash in Blytheville, Arkansas with dampened appetites.
I’m always trying to write the story before it happens. This is a mistake.
-----
New Orleans is a place that revels in its existence in defiance of, or commitment to, a lack of control. Streets one block apart will have entirely different vibes, and neighborhoods smash and run into each other at odd angles. Music and art and alcohol spill out the doors, through the windows, and into the streets. Your rideshare driver will point out the colorful row of poles in the center of Claiborne Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward, informing you that they show the levels the flood waters reached. Many things don’t make sense, but almost everything is beautiful.
It is, in short, the destination I needed. Travel draws out something strange in me, a simultaneous pure revel in the moment and a petrifying self-awareness of all the ways in which I’m screwing up in my new environment. It takes some time for me to segue out of second-guessing hasty comments, or whether or not someone thinks I didn’t intend to tip because I hesitated too long in doing quick math, or if I’ve made myself an inconvenience somehow. Eventually I can merge into my surroundings and forget myself.
I think one of the many reasons I loved NOLA so much is because it reminds me of what I used to be and could maybe still be, given time.
-----
The other two members of our group arrived a few hours after our still-not-devoid-of-intestinal-matter car dragged its way to the hotel at long last. They very nearly missed their connecting flight, to the point where we started reworking the next morning’s plans. We joked about what a cursed trip this was, how badly New Orleans did not want us here.
Of course, the worst was over by then. The trip passed like a dream, in the way that dreams spiral off in directions you can’t anticipate.
The roadside snowball stand was closed, so we got popsicles at the bean museum (not a typo).
I took a poetry textbook from its Little Free Library as a souvenir.
We ping-ponged around the French Quarter, catching bands playing for that weekend’s festival in each park and plaza we passed through, indulging in the novelty of open drinks on the street. In between, we ducked into shops with pralines, free Plan B on the counter, children’s books about NOLA potholes, makeshift shrines to the beloved and the dead. We got split up, got street food and street poetry, reunited. Later that night, we fluttered between jazz bars and art bazaars on Frenchmen Street and back down Decatur, to the point where Saturday night was escalating from revelry to mayhem. We were suddenly too tired to go any further and waited for an Uber near a pile of horse shit in the street.
A visit to Mardi Gras World gave us the chance to see parade floats in their nursery, without the anxiety of so many people crushing in, but also without some of the joy of context. The creative process is fascinating enough in itself, though. I found myself longing and couldn’t put a finger on why.
Another day, I walked through St. Roch in midday sun to its namesake cemetery, passing endless road construction and houses that were works of art in themselves. Though I had resolved not to take pictures inside the cemetery gates out of some sense of respect, there was a tumbled and broken grave marker that seemed sadly forgotten, and I wanted to memorialize it somehow. The next picture I tried to take, of the chapel filled with relics of the sick and the healed, came out pitch-black in the scorching light. It may just have been heat exhaustion scrambling my thoughts, but I found myself compelled to get the fuck out immediately and delete the photos.
We made friends with the pack of cats who came to our hotel parking lot in the cooler hours. They loved us very much, as long as they thought we might have food.
Have I mentioned the food? So much food. Crawfish étouffée in a Garden District restaurant playing the Masters Tournament on an XXL-screen TV; alligator sausage in a Marigny hot dog joint with wrestling on the tube. Beignets under fluffy piles of powdered sugar snow, with chicory-laced coffee I knew I wouldn’t like but still felt the urge to order, because when in Rome, convince yourself you’re a new person entirely.
-----
(It wasn’t a full escape, of course. There was a fatal shooting in the Warehouse District that weekend, which we saw on the news in between watching Space Jam and Food Network reruns. I felt a pulling guilt about my decadence while so many people were striking and protesting that Monday, suffering and dying in Gaza all the days. When I tried to look up landmarks and local trivia on my phone, Google’s top search results kept insisting I needed to know about the death of a high school student in Boston, which had been reported only on the funeral home site and an outbreak of AI-fueled speculation pages. Cue Metric: the world won’t let me go.)
-----
On the Monday of our trip, the three of us (the Iowa contingent had flown out early that morning) took our car to Audubon Park. The drive gave us the chance to see the beauty of the surrounding neighborhood and learn about the potholes firsthand.
While my companions went to the zoo, I wandered off to find the labyrinth constructed in a southeastern part of the park. The older people talking around the benches nearby wandered off as I stepped onto the smaller of the two circles. Whether it was respect for the meditation in process or reluctance to continue the conversation around the rando, I neither knew nor cared, but I was grateful for the quiet.
It felt like I walked for hours, though even at my crawling pace it wasn’t more than twenty minutes. In those moments, with the sun beating down on me and an occasional breeze rising through the humidity, I felt expansive and endless, un-other. I think I’m always chasing that feeling, in labyrinths and live music and sudden detours. It is a curious feature of the Chartres labyrinth design that when you’re walking along its farthest edge, you’re almost to the center.
The peace of the labyrinth followed me to the Tree of Life nearby, and then all through my loop of the northern half of the park, past statues and turtles, buskers and backyard meditation gardens. As I waited to cross Magazine Street back to the zoo to rejoin my friends, a man hollered across the traffic at me: “Hey, you fat bitch! Where are you going? Don’t fuck with me!” I floated past him. Peace is everywhere and peace is nowhere.
-----
There are probably several lessons I should take away from this trip. Will I learn them? Almost certainly not, but I keep trying.
In the meantime, here are some more pictures worth more than any of my words.
Appendix
Bands/musicians I saw:
Matt Lemmler’s “New Orleans in Stride”
Read the Room ft. Rénaissa Avari, Rene, Aaniyah & Noa Jamir
Banu Gibson
Tuba Skinny
Dominick Grillo & The Frenchmen Street All-Stars
Many others, and there should have been more! These are just the ones I can pinpoint.
Other artists of note:
Etta Evans wrote me a sucker punch of a poem
@olive47 has a cool art house, or at least painted one
Cranky Chameleon makes cute postcards
Of course, my friend and travel buddy extraordinaire Cameraslinger, whose own zine on this trip will be out soon! (I hear some jerk contributed additional writing...)
On the list for my next trip:
Preservation Hall
City Park and its various attractions, especially the Botanical Garden and New Orleans Museum of Art
About a dozen more museums, tbh
Music Box Village
Dooky Chase (RIP my reservation for this trip, a victim of necessary compromise)
Louisiana Music Factory and Beckham’s Bookshop (both to shop and to meet the store cats)