Veni, Vidi….I Returned To Houston

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I came to some conclusions during my recent trip to New Orleans.   Namely in that in the seven years since I was last there, I had gotten considerably older and in the damnedest ways.    You see, I’ve lived a hedonist’s life.  I’ve done very little I didn’t want to do and I worked for 27 years in a career that completely aided and abetted this carefree attitude.    

But living the life of a libertine, pleasuremongering profligate and sybarite has aged me.   I had a nasty wreck 19 years ago and broke 11 major bones, so that makes me  feel old as I hobble from place to place walking like Quasimodo sans the lisping and drooling and the sanctuary seeking.   I can’t walk for long periods of time.

I’m also finding it much harder to recover from getting my swerve on.  In New Orleans, my 27-year-old niece and God-daughter and I went to some coven  on Bourbon Street where this witch, prepared a brew called a “Hand Grenade” that was in the simplest of terms, FUCKING RIDICULOUS in terms of its potency.   And yes, old Rock Gut Me drank three of the damned things.  The end result?  Me, very, very drunk.  

Yes, I was very drunk, but coherent and mentally cohesive enough to know when to stop, but while “fun”, in that I got to spend time with Becks on Bourbon Street, it hurt.   And it hurt more than ever before.   This was Thursday night people..the evening of Day Deux in Nawlins.   It was early.  Even so (and with the exception of a little smidge of Vodka at dinner at Antoine’s Friday night), I didn’t drink again the entire trip.    This was secured by the fact that Saturday morning while looking all over Chartres for a Voodoo store, I actually tripped over chunky vomit from the night before–a petrified and putrified beignet (or a doll’s pillow) in the middle of the street that somehow eluded all those corrosive digestive acids in that drunken schlub’s stomach.   Guess all those hurricanes didn’t help move things along either.      

 I  know that vomit and organic waste down in the Quarter is part of the landscape on Friday and Sunday mornings, but to slip on it, only to do an unwitting triple toe loop, a la Miss Brian Boitano, who I’m still more butch than, is just gross.

And I never stick the landing.

Honestly, I don’t know how long time alcoholics do it, other than in their disease, the need for alcohol supersedes every negative having too much of it in one’s system  can create.

It will take some time for me to recover and I will.   And of course, I offer you, Gentle Reader the same thing I always do when I swear I’ll never drink again.   I won’t go Faustian on any deal either, but I think it will be a while again before I have anything stronger than Earl Gray pass my lips (and that’s the English breakfast tea, perv, NOT the man). 

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Headin’ East

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Much has been written about New Orleans.

Recently, the falderal has been about her sainted Saints football team winning le grand-père of them all, the Super Bowl.

And before that, we all  read headlines about New Orleans because of Katrina and while that storm tried to remove the city from the map, what put her on it, is her rich history of explorers, fur trappers, gamblers, pirates and conquistadors–the Spanish kind and the others who deigned to tame her wild sultry ways.   The reality is, no one can.   But many have tried….like the Longs and their dynasty,  but they couldn’t.  

Betsy, Camille and Katrina tried to as well,  but the ‘workers’ in New Orleans would have none of that.  Gris-gris goes far if you know how to throw it.

And that’s what I’m talkin’ bout, cher.  That haunting, ‘witchiness” that translates into a languid and bittersweet heart and soul.   It’s palpable there.  You can feel it the minute you hit the Ponchartrain.   It is heart and it is soul.  

And that means, New Orleans ’pulses’ differently than any other city.  There’s a certain pace to her slow, deliberateness.    She breathes and bleeds.

I’ve been to New Orleans several times before and in about an hour,  I’m going back, this time with family.  Why?   Well, our response to that is why not?  

I’ve been hankering to breath different air.  Getting big ol’ snoot full of a world that smells and tastes like Creole and sounds like Yat ought to be exactly what the doctor ordered.  

So, I’m going to New Orleans to order oysters and crawfish and gumbo and Etouffee and drink all kinds of things that will all combine in my lower intestine the next day to create one of the biggest voodoos the Crescent City waste water system has ever had to deal with.

I’m even thinking of trying a Sazarac.  I hear Massengil makes one…or something that tastes like one.    I’ll spend all of Friday, skiing down that ski resort/mole on Aaron Neville’s face.     There will be music and a few ghosty things, too.  

Film at 11…and we’re probably talking about that which forms on inebriated teeth.

Back Sunday PM.    

I should have PLENTY of material to write about.   

In the meantime, groove to this to get in the mood for my triumphant return,  ad nauseum…and with the way I drink, probably so.

 

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