Crescent City Daze

G-Rob said post your own New Orleans memories, so here I am. Warning - while not Iggy-level uber, this is pretty wordy. Sing up for Empire Poker then settle in for a read.

Or there I was, 18 years old and bulletproof. The proud survivor of two whole months of college life, six bottles of Robitussion DX, about 3 pounds of marijuana, 6 gallons of Mezcal and an obscenely geeky number of hours of D&D (including one night involving rum & cokes, an ex-girlfriend, a papasan chair, memory loss and skinned knees, but that's for later). Jason, the Troll-guy from down the hall, and Steven, the elf-guy that was his roomie, had the brilliant idea to go to New Orleans for fall break.

"Great idea! How far away is it?"

"About 10 hours."

"Shit, that's a long way."

"Naah, man. We'll stop in my place in Montgomery, smoke up, and the next morning we'll cruise on to Nawlins."

"Alright."

I've always been a tough sell. So that's what we did. Note to the wise: when stoned, really, it's still important to REHEAT the spaghetti from lunch. I promise. Not that I speak from experience or anything.

So that's how I found my self rolling into New Orleans in a 1978 baby blue Chevrolet Impala that until that weekend had never seen the outside of the great state of South Carolina in October of 1991. Jason was our tour guide through our day in NO, including a walking trek through the Quarter, a fantastic art gallery where there was a framed photo of Tennessee Williams' dog on a balcony labeled "StreetDog named Desire," Marie Laveaux's House of Voodoo (where I bought a carved crystal skull for my goth-esque girlfriend), and eventually to Mecca, ahem, Bourbon Street.

So we did the standard touristy things that 18-year-old guys do in New Orleans, go into Pat O'Briens, get thrown out of Pat O'Briens, Go somewhere else and drink hurricanes, and eventually end up at a strip bar. Some patterns, once established, do not cary with age.

This particular establishment was entitled, subtly enough, Big Daddy's Topless & Bottomless, and promised no cover if over 21.

"Of course, don't we look 21?"

"Just don't start any shit, kid."

"Yes, Sir."

"Ma'am."

"Sorry"

SOOooo, that encounter behind us, we enter quite possibly the most exciting place in the world - MY VERY FIRST STRIP CLUB. The new does indeed wear off after you realize that they ALL have that same carpet, but remember, I was a newly minted 18 in a world where only 21 mattered. So we sat down with our 3-drink minimum, Steven commits the cardinal sin of actually collecting his change in quarters off the drink tray, and we settle in. We quickly figured out that fortunately, we were not going to see anyone resembling a Big Daddy disrobe, but there was very little truth in the advertising of "bottomless," unless the defining portion of "-less" was somehow different from "top" to "bottom." But we weren't complaining.

I can remember her like it was yesterday. Short black pageboy hair, sexy, half-Asian eyes, alabaster skin, and a tattoo of a dragon that started on the front of her right shoulder and curled all the way around her torso to just lick across her left hipbone. No idea what her name was, but she moved in ways I had never seen a woman move before. Admittedly, the combination of her dancing and my level of inebriation may have contributed to that inimicable movement.

All of us put together couldn't afford even one table dance, but the point at which she took Jason's racoon-tail hat off his head and ran it between her legs and across both tattoos was certainly more than we had bargained for. Jason bronzed that hat later.

When we could no longer afford the inflated prices for domestic beverages, and were all out of singles, we staggered out into the night and made our way to Mecca, wait, used that already, Wet Willies. Now Wet Willie's is apparently a chain of bars, as I once had an unfortunate grain alcohol/karaoke experience in a similar establishment in Charleston once, but this was my first encounter with a 40' wall of slushie machines and Everclear. I vaguely recall something called Rocket Fuel, which was a much better descriptor than Topless & Bottomless. Then I vaguely recall three 18-year-olds lined up in a row taking a piss in the middle of a public park (under a streetlight, of course), and somehow managing to find my car and make it back to a hotel for the night, where we discovered that hotel ashtrays will shatter under the heat of incense cones, and that inordinate amounts of beverage and weed do not typically make for a happy morning.

But that's my (hazy) memory of the city of New Orleans. She treated me well, introduced me to grain alcohol, voodoo and topless bars, and for that I'll always think of her kindly. May she rise again.