50. FOMO In The Big Easy
The Year Of Paying Attention
My day began in Queens, where an unsmiling employee of the Transportation Security Administration confiscated my moisturizer, and ended in the West Riverside neighborhood of New Orleans where my short-term landlord Jeff promised he’d find me a colander. I did a lot between those two moments.
After landing at Louis Armstrong International I cabbed to a remote location to pick up my month-long car rental. I turned the car radio to WWOZ and drove, ravenous, to Turkey & The Wolf, Bon Appétit’s Restaurant of the Year. [Author’s note: the year is 2017.] It seemed like a fitting first meal of my New Orleans epic. Between bites of a collard green melt, sitting outside in the sun, I chatted with Fern, an amiable fourth generation Hawaiian who’d flown here from Seattle days earlier to celebrate Hallowe’en in the Crescent City. She said she’d had a great time. Until that moment, I’d never considered flying across the continent for a pagan celebration.
Satisfied and re-energized, I bid Fern adieu, dropped my luggage off at my digs on Tchoupitoulas St., and drove across town to meet Ron, an easygoing local in a porkpie hat. Surrounded by dozens of bicycles inside and outside his house, Ron and I discussed how crazy every place is, whether it’s New York, where yesterday’s Hallowe’en terrorist truck attack killed eight pedestrians and injured many others, or Las Vegas, where Ron’s girlfriend slept through the recent high-rise hotel mass shooter horror, Ron dialing and redialing her cellphone until she woke up to hear about the nearby atrocity.
I bought a cruiser bike. Ron offered to buy it back at the end of November for half the purchase price. It cost double what I wanted to spend, but hey, it’s The Big Easy, and the good times must roll. He helped me remove the seat to fit it in the rental car, and I promised to return his wrench. I drove to the uptown Wynn Dixie for peanut butter and seltzer and blackberries, and left it all in the car to attend an early evening 12-step meeting. I was happy to see my friend Bonnie was chairing it. At last I returned to Tchoupitoulas St. to unpack my bags and the boxes I’d shipped ahead. I lined up the books I’ll never read, and set out two framed pictures, my little daughters in yellow slickers and green foam Statue of Liberty crowns from a rainy outing 23 years earlier, and a portrait of Sarah, sitting outdoors three years ago here in New Orleans.
Tomorrow I’ll get up before the sun, strap on my bike helmet and pedal to my favorite local morning meeting. There are people there I’ve known for more than twenty years. We mostly don’t know each others last names.
***
There’s a ghost of anxiety shimmering in this afternoon air. I should invite it in, offer it my attention, and see what it has to say.
This morning, I followed a few familiar faces across the street from a coffee shop and into the temporary new location of my favorite NOLA 12-step meeting. A few dozen of us sat and read and talked and listened to one another. Unlike New York, people here don’t compete to speak, so there’s more silence, at least at the beginning of the meeting. The quiet isn’t awkward anymore.
One man told a story I wouldn’t hear in Manhattan, about his relationship with a Cajun woman, whose French-speaking Acadian ancestors fled south after the British forced them out of Canada in the mid-18th century. In her family everybody knew everything about one another. No secrets. These people had good luck and bad, and struggled like everybody, but they were deeply happy, and firmly bound to one another. He thought their lack of secrets, the elimination of that source of shame, was central to their satisfied lives.
The sky was bright as I pedaled back to Toast, the breakfast place I’d cruised past an hour earlier. The tables outside in the rising humidity were full, nobody in a rush to go anywhere, so I sat in the nearly empty air-conditioned interior. It may be a trick of the mind, but my crepe, with mushrooms, onions, peppers, spinach and goat cheese, and one over-easy egg tucked in like a swaddled baby, tasted as good as anything I’d had for breakfast in a long time. I added Louisiana Hot Sauce. The friendly waitress kept pouring coffee, and I kept drinking it.
It was time to find a cheap guitar. A Craigslist seller had promised to hold one for me, but like so many things in New Orleans, this plan fell apart. I dialed around and left a message on a machine. The proprietor called back. He told me he had my guitar. After I slipped the bike wrench into Ron’s mailbox, I found the guitar store, stepping over a big, good-natured dog sitting in a sunny spot, and into the crowded, disheveled vintage guitar heaven. I presumed the guy moving around in back was the man on the phone. When he turned to greet me, it was the fellow who’d described the Cajun community in that morning’s meeting.
It was and wasn’t uncanny. We talked about guitars and meetings, and he opened up a beat-up guitar case to show me a 1960 Les Paul he said somebody was going to pay a quarter of a million dollars for. Then he restrung my cheap beginner’s guitar to play lefty.
The Iguanas are playing at Casa Borrega tonight, where they serve Mexico City street food in a garden out back. I’m going to text a friend I haven’t seen in a few years to go with me to the 7pm set. I’ll be home in plenty of time to get a good night’s sleep, before I walk the four blocks to an 8am Iyengar yoga class. One of these nights I’ll stay in. I know I’m avoiding being alone with myself, but it’s Mexico City street food and The Iguanas, so what am I supposed to do?
***
The lesson I relearned last night: going to a bar to listen to a bar band play for bar patrons can grow tedious quickly. My friend was out of town, so I sat alone in the Café Borrega garden and read the newspaper on my phone, declining the free tequila shots accepted by every other diner around me, each of whom donned a mask (yours to keep!) and posed for a picture. It was a liquor promotion. I resisted the urge to ask for a mask without taking the shot.
I wandered over to a boisterous crowd by the bandstand, some my generation (old), but mostly attractive (young) music lovers. When the band started playing, everybody just talked louder. When the tune ended, everybody kept drinking (more free shots were being passed out) and talking, and some even clapped. This early in the evening, it wasn’t rowdy, just boisterous. I was afraid somebody in a costume was going to ask me to dance. There was no need to worry. I missed the memo about the evening’s theme, and wasn’t wearing a skeleton costume or my Day of the Dead makeup, or a grinning skull blazer, like the one on a fellow with a thick shock of nicely coiffed graying hair. Blazer was cool. Guy was cool.
I dig The Iguanas. Tenor sax, electric guitar and bass, and a small drum kit. Professional. There to get the crowd dancing. After a few songs a manager-type got up to announce it was the tenor player’s birthday, at least that’s what I think he was saying over all the chattering patrons. I heard one more song, bid goodnight to the woman by the door who’d offered to paint my face Day of the Dead–style, and went home to bed.
This morning I chugged iced coffee, meditated, donned shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops and walked to yoga, where the teacher, Sabrina, led me and two women through poses. By the end of class I felt virtuous. I walked home to granola, a banana and Greek yoghurt on the front porch in the humid morning air, and watched an alarming number of big trucks rumble up Tchoupitoulas Street. I’m ten percent into my stay in New Orleans. I can’t let my friends back in New York down — I must have an amazing month!
My Fear Of Missing Out is strong, as I spend hours researching what I should do in my remaining 27 days. The Opera House? I haven’t been to an opera in years. Artist Kara Walker is reportedly creating an installation piece on the banks of the Mississippi, as part of a citywide contemporary art show. And didn’t I read about a Po’ Boy Festival? I closed my computer, straddled my bike, and set out for Casamento’s, serving oysters for 98 years, and there I sat at a table big enough for four extra-large Louisianans. I ate a cup of gumbo and half an Oyster Loaf, then pedaled clear around Audubon Park, in a vain effort to offset some of the lunch damage.
***
Don, my former Cambridge roommate and NOLA native sat next to me as we waited for the music to start at the Jazz & Heritage Foundation on Rampart Street. I told him he could have my used bike at the end of the month. His said his own bike had been stolen off his front porch when he momentarily forgot to lock it up, and he doesn’t want to buy another, because he may be going to prison. This is nearly impossible to believe; the man sitting next to me, who I’ve known for most of my life, lives in a hellish limbo, his court date constantly postponed, most of his friends no longer returning his calls since his arrest on child pornography charges. He has a menial job that keeps him busy, working in a horse stable. He’s in touch with his brothers, but they don’t sound like much of a comfort.
Months ago he told me over the phone about the expensive forensic computer expert he’d been paying, to provide irrefutable evidence that he wasn’t a child porn guy, which he said the expert was able to do, using his search history and evidence on his computer, which was now state’s evidence. He said his lawyer was pessimistic — since he technically broke the law, despite his ignorance of what was happening on his computer, he’d said all he can do was wait to see what the court decides. His resources are few, his bank account small, and his friends dwindling. How in god’s name did this happen? It’s too painful for me to probe in any depth. Don and I tacitly agree to act like that horror is unfolding in an alternate universe.
The situation is unthinkable. Don is an achiever, Ivy League educated, a business degree. He made his share of mistakes and bad choices, and a decade ago, now divorced, he’d endured the worst sort of tragedy, when his only son Ellis was struck and killed by a truck. Now Don is hanging by a thread, working at a stable, not sleeping, waiting to learn whether he’s going to prison. After he told me the latest, we changed the subject, talking about the musicians about to play, and where he and I should have dinner before I return home to New York.
Next week: A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam
The Year Of Paying Attention, 2017, begins here.
