Where Y'at?

I understand there are some people who missed out on their chance to see New Orleans, and that is a shame, now that it seems much of it is gone. I can't say I spent a
great deal of time there, but I was there for a bit in March of 1992, just after Mardi Gras. I was driving back and forth cross-country (with
a diversion into Mexico), and I definitely wanted to see this place I had heard so much about. I was driving my $400 car and camping in a tent
every night. Let me think... Alexandria, Charlottesville, Comer's Rock, Lake Hartwell, Talladega Nat'l Forest, Hattiesburg, then Waveland, Mississippi, which is
just a half an hour east of New Orleans. So I had been just a week on the road. Still, I thought it would be nice to be in a city after
spending so much time in the woods and thickets along my path, and this was my first time in the deep south.

I found out New Orleans wasn't really the deep south, as far as I could tell, it wasn't really like it belonged to any country. It was a city-state given over to its own creed and colors. I rolled down I-10 east after pitching my tent in Waveland, MS, and pulled up at a pay lot. There was a guy there, sweating in his booth, one leg crooked, chewing on a toothpick. "Where Y'at Chief"? I had seen some movies and read a bit so I knew this meant, really, "How are Y'all"? but I figured I would play along and said "Well I reckon I'm in New Orleans". I suppose he thought I was a rube, seeing my Virginia tags and all the camping gear. It was early afternoon; I walked around a bit and returned to Waveland, got some cube steak, cooked it up and slept pretty well.

Ever since I had hit Hattiesburg, I had noticed a lot of standing water around. It was pretty difficult to find dry high ground to pitch a tent. There was just so much water everywhere, it was either standing here and there or falling out of the sky, or dripping off of leaves, or there was dew, plus it was just in the air: humidity. Now it was not a rain forest, I have since then been to a few of those. However, it was clear there was no dry season here. The place never truly dried out. Lots of mosquitoes.

So to that rule, there was this exception: The French Quarter. It was high and dry as far as I could tell. There were no mosquitoes. I would wake up early and come into the Quarter in the late mornings, go into the 24 hour bars that had no doors since they never closed and drink lots of coffee and scribble in my journal. I wish I still had that journal.

I saw the tourist gift shops and they seemed to sell a lot of crap about being drunk. "I got drunk in Nawlins". Truly tacky stuff. I stuck to my schedule for a couple of days, coffee in the French quarter and walking around until early afternoon, when the college boys started rolling around, and the men in black who would part them from their money and their lives possibly later on, that was when I would get on I-10 East back to Waveland, back to my tent and the dampness, to cook up some more cube steaks and have some beers and try to pull in the local radio stations.

One day I was walking around the quarter and I saw a flatbed truck pull up at an intersection and stop. Two guys piled out and one pulled a keyboard off the back, the other hung up some speakers from the rear views. It happened very quickly and before I knew it they had launched into "Honeybee", by Muddy Waters:

"Sail on, sail on my little honey bee, sail on
Sail on, sail on my little honey bee, sail on
You gonna keep on sailing till you lose your happy home

Sail on, sail on my little honey bee, sail on
Sail on, sail on my little honey bee, sail on
I don't mind you sailing, but please don't sail so long

All right little honey bee...

I hear a lotta buzzing, sound like my little honey bee
I hear a lotta buzzing, sound like my little honey bee
She been all around the world making honey
But now she is coming back home to me"

The man on the mouth harp was great and the singer belted it right out, it was great. Delta blues in the delta, these guys had no contract, they just drove around. One guy ambled around with a big blue top hat upside down and the crowd that had gathered tossed money into it; I did so too, in a distracted way because I wanted to hear the whole song. Then, like that, they were gone. Speakers off the rear views, keyboard back up into the flatbed and off they went, waving and smiling.

I'm not sure that was legal, but it sure was fun. So I figured ah what the heck let me get a beer. I ordered up a Dixie, then another and a few more. They tend to add up. I went back out into the streets and had a mercantile disagreement with a lean tall light skinned fellow who claimed to be a member of the merchant marine. He said he had to ship out in just a couple of hours and pointed at a big ship sitting in the river.

I figured to settle this mercantile disagreement it would be best if we tasted the wares on my turf, in my car, which I had parked on the street, I think on Bourbon street, only a few blocks from everything, but a little out of the way. No pedestrians. He got in and he really stuck to his story. Since I had a knife in my left boot, a CNS depressant like they don't sell anymore in my right pocket, and a hatchet under my seat, skinny had some big stones. Or, maybe he didn't know any better. Or, maybe I had the big stones. I was not sober at this point. I studied that, figured he might be armed in a more lethal way so I kicked him out of the Oldsmobile, and not in a polite way, then drove off toward Uptown, down twenty bucks.

I was tired and found a parking spot under the live oaks and their graybeards of epiphytes in an unlighted neighborhood, locked the doors, put the hatchet on the seat near my belly, slumped over onto the Oldsomobile bench seat and slept.

I woke up with that yellow old beer staleness in my mouth at near midnight, straightened up behind the wheel and began scratching my head, then my arms, then the small of my back. Mosquitoes from Waveland. I grabbed the water jug and drank a bunch all at once. I knew it was time for me to get out of the bottomland and onto higher ground. I have wise blood, ask anyone, ask Flannery O'Connor, if you're dead and reading this in heaven, I am always bit the most and with great and misplaced vehemence by mosquitoes. Put me in a crowd, they will kill one another to find me and shove their proboscis into me like junkies for the finest fix.

I was a hived up mess as I found the on ramp, I-10 West to Lake Charles, Beaumont, Houston. I spent a night in a rest stop west of Houston, the sky paling as I woke, I resumed West, I did not stop until I was just short of Austin. High ground, dry ground. I spent close to a week there, waiting to go to Mexico and healing up.

New Orleans can take the blood out of a man and leave poison in its stead, or if she is in a hissy mood just take all of his blood, leave him dead, and just save the poison. I got out with a minor bloodletting and a mild case of poisoning, so I can't complain.