New Orleans, back then.
The weirdest part of being an adult for over 20 years is that I still remember 20 years ago with clarity.
“Sorry, John,” I said into my silver Samsung flip-phone. “There’s a horse going by.”
An empty carriage with huge rear wheels rolled past on the cobblestone street. It was January, 2003. Humid, but not hot, and misty, having rained a little earlier. Now, the rain was gone and people were out, and the horse and the carriage went past on the shiny cobblestones, and the streetlamps caught the mist and I was talking to John 1,200 miles away.
“I can hear it!” he said, excited to hear the horse. That’s what I liked about John. Such a simple moment, but we were both having fun with it. It was a novelty, being able to carry a phone as I walked around New Orleans. I think we both recognized it, because it was not of our childhood.
“Mr. Watson! Come here! I want to see you!”
Lots of new tech had come to market in the new millennium, beyond a phone I could use to talk to John from the Faubourg Marigny. I had an Olympus digital camera that required no film. I still printed my photos from New Orleans, and in a twist of irony lost most of the digital files but not the prints, which I later scanned.
I also installed XM Radio in my car and could listen to uninterrupted commercial-free satellite music from Philadelphia to West Virginia, south through Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi on my drive to Metairie, where I lived for four months. BPM was my favorite station. XM 81. Who Da Funk. Groove Armada. Narcotic Thrust. t.A.T.u. “Shiny Disco Balls” played when I parked my car in the casino garage one night.
Harrahs was brand new, and had posters touting 8x odds on craps. I always parked there. If I played the slots for a half hour, they’d give me free parking. I’d play the nickels as slow as I could, have a drink or two on the house, and end up spending about four bucks on parking for an entire day or night in the French Quarter. One night, I even scored a pair of Hornets tickets that way.
I was 25.
Vieux Carre
Sometimes I’d go to the French Quarter with my roommates, Heather and Aaditya and Denny. Aaditya and Denny worked with me—we were interns at Memorial Hospital, which later, during Hurricane Katrina, became infamous for euthanizing patients.
Nights in the quarter were unremarkable in that they lived up to stereotypes and stories told over and over by tourists—like when Aaditya bought a skateboard from a teenage runaway. He short-changed the kid, bad, which was sad because the kid was only about 14 and probably needed the money. He cruised back and forth on the board in Jackson Square in front of St. Louis Cathedral.
Tourist stories—beads and tits and whatnot—happen all the time. They are boring.
The French Quarter is different when you live near it as a resident. I spent a fair amount of time trying to get to know it outside its reputation. Early Sunday mornings were my favorite, when they hosed the vomit off the streets and everything was closed up and quiet, and everyone partying was sleeping it off and criminals were too tired to burgle and steal. I’d park at Harrahs at 7 AM, play the nickel slots until 7:30, and explore. Sunday morning was a good time for XM channel 84, Chill.
Philadelphia had a gayborhood—an urban center where I found a pretty sizable community of friends. New Orleans, though, was different. All the bars with the rainbow flags were in the Quarter, and tourists swamped the Quarter, and everything was fun but nothing was lasting and I wanted something less ephemeral, even then.
Coffee
I studied for my optometry boards at Cafe du Monde in Metairie, where I lived. Later, I discovered CCs, a coffeehouse chain like Tim Hortons on Veteran’s Boulevard. It was more conducive to reading and working. WiFi wasn’t yet a thing, but CCs had ethernet outlets under the tables, and customers could bring a cable.
New Orleans is where I became a coffee drinker, in part because of hours spent at CCs. What’s strange is that while half my brain acknowledges that hooking up an ethernet cable at a coffee shop is an ancient relic of a bygone era, the other half sees it as having just happened, as surely as I remember parking my Saturn SC2 out back by the dumpster. I cannot imagine life without coffee and have twenty years of stains on my teeth to prove it, but I still did not drink it daily, then, which is impossible to fathom.
I got to know the roads pretty well between the city and Metairie, Metairie and the airport. When I went back a few years ago, little had changed but everything was again unfamiliar. Funny how memory lets us remember waiting at CCs to pick Denny up late at the airport, but not the road to the airport itself, which I knew so well.
I wandered to many touristy places alone. City Park. New Orleans Museum of Art. Blaine Kearn’s Mardi Gras World. The Cabaldo and the Presbytere. Cemeteries and Confederate statues.
From Lafraniere Park in Metairie, I talked to my dad on my phone. He was envious of the pleasant weather I was having while he froze further north. On that day, he was healthy and well. Two years later, he died. I still remember that call, talking and watching birds fly overhead and people feeding the ducks on the ground.
At least a dozen other vignettes haunt me. Tours of plantations and Chalmette Battlefield. Nights at a coffeehouse called the Neutral Ground on Danneel St., next to St. Vincent dePaul Cemetery No. 1. Days at an ophthalmology practice. Evenings at a gym with a smoothie shop beneath it. I was ten pounds lighter than I am today, and in the best shape of my life.
I left about a week before the big Mardi Gras parades, but was able to attend one of the smaller ones, and it was big enough.
Just before leaving Louisiana, I bought a Yamaha Clavinova—a full-size electric keyboard—from an old man who had recently lost his wife. He cried when it went out the door. It had been hers, and I drove 1,200 miles back to Philly with it stretched between my back seats and my trunk. A year later, I pressed the button to turn it on. There was a crackle and a wisp of smoke, and it never worked again.
I remained an XM customer for another ten years. I still miss BPM, but now all the music’s different.
I loved BPM! :-)
From a native New Orleanian: this is beautiful and really brought me back home!