i'll meet you here tomorrow, independence day

I realize that so far I've only written about the negative aspects of New Orleans... the missing cars... the adamantly not-missing vermin. I haven't written about the bright colors of the buildings, the oaks that lean over the streets dripping with spanish moss and strings of beads, the brief, furious thunderstorms, the amazing seafood, the Southern-Brooklyn accents, the sensation of walking through a world perched precariously between cultures and times.

I was here a few days alone before Brie arrived on the fourth of July. That day I hung out with a guy named Paul Andre, whose family has lived in New Orleans since his ancestors fled the Haitian slave revolts in the late 18th century. We ate shrimp po' boys at Parkway Brewery near St. John's Bayou and drove through the city. He showed me the shotgun houses Uptown, built with no hallways, one room after the other, the big houses in the Garden District, built by Americans to show up the French in the Quarter, and the high water marks on the sides of the creole cottages in the Bywater.

We stopped at a potter's field Uptown. Paul thought that slaves were buried there, but we got out and walked around and couldn't find any markers that old. The flooding and unevenness of even fairly new tombstones show why most of the graves in New Orleans are built above ground.


Later that evening I set off to pick up Brie from the airport. This about sums up that little drive:


I didn't get out of the car much, so I don't have a picture of me waiting for roadside assistance again. Although I do have the Roadside Assistance Guy:


I'm beginning to think Isaac is mad at me. Did she not want to go on this road trip? I mean, she could have said something two months ago, instead of just being passive-aggressive about it.

I also managed to break the strap on my flip flop while I was talking to the R.A.G. Though I can't really blame that on Isaac, so maybe it's someone else who didn't want me to go on this road trip and is trying to tell me something.

Isaac and I pulled up about 45 minutes late to pick Brie up from the airport. I still really wanted to try to make it to the fireworks on the river, so even though it was now past 8, I drove a fast 50 mph on the spare tire back to the Quarter, hunted around for a while for parking, found parking, borrowed shoes from Brie because of the flip flop debacle, walked to the apartment, sprayed on poisonous amounts of OFF, grabbed a tripod, and we set off down to the river to see the fireworks. The fireworks started when we were only a couple of blocks from the apartment and stopped when we were a block from the river. So, this is what they looked like to us:


(Thanks to Ry for help with the photos and to Steph for the generous lending of the tripod.)

We decided to go ahead and walk down and pretend we were watching fireworks. People were still sitting on the riverbank, drinking (you can drink outside here,) talking, and "cooking broccoli," as our pastor's daughter Mei Li says.

Me and Brie, doing none of the above:


After that we got dinner at Crescent City Brewery, where the bill came out to:


God bless America.

Everybody knows
You only live a day
But it's brilliant anyway

I saw you in a perfect place
It's gonna happen soon but not today
So go to sleep and make the change
I'll meet you here tomorrow

Independence Day

~"Independence Day"
Lyrics by Elliott Smith

pound puppy

Tuesday morning (OK, OK, afternoon) I left Jessica’s and hit the open road again. Unfortunately I was tired of driving and I kept making up reasons to stop (“oh, look, there’s a Wal-Mart, I need a dry erase board” or “I wonder if Jack-in-the-Box serves 'cupcake in a shake'?”) and it took me forever to get to New Orleans.

I arrived at around 11. I was intimidated about finding it at night, and about parking, which I knew was going to be difficult. But I found parking right in front of where it was supposed to be, and then couldn’t find the number or really figure out if I was even picking the right gate, but I guessed, and tried my key, and it worked. (My gate is the one under the flag.) So I opened it and there was this long narrow alley leading to the back, where my apartment door was. I didn’t figure out until later that there was a switch you could hit at the one end that would turn a light on over my door. This picture of the apartment and the alley looks much more cheerful at night. At the time, I was kind of spooked, and had to tell myself to just walk, to just keep moving forward and everything would be okay. I got to a doorway in the back of the building and tried another key, and that worked too, which was a relief. I'll post some pictures of the inside later.

The next morning I got up and mostly just worked on doing laundry and settling in. The grocery stores near me are little markets so I actually drove six miles to Metarie, a big suburb of New Orleans, so I could go to a Winn-Dixie with a lot of options and a big parking lot. That's right, I went out of my way to go to a chain. That's what I do. Later for dinner I went to a diner called "Clover Grill" where I worked on arbitration stuff and had a big hamburger that I watched being fried under a hubcap. To keep in the juices. I was later informed that this diner is a big drag queen hangout, but there weren't any there when I was there.

The parking in front of my building is two hours only from 7 to 7. The owner of the apartment told me this could be pushed a bit, so I decided to move my car every three hours, at 10, 1, and 4. This worked fine on Wednesday. But you may have noticed, in the complicated sign shown at left, a tiny little marker indicating street cleaning hours. If you did notice that, then good for you, because you probably wouldn't have come out at 10 am on Thursday and found your parking spot looking like this:


In New Orleans the nice areas are right next to the terrible areas. I'm living in the historic French Quarter, which is pretty nice and fairly safe. But two blocks up from the river from me is Rampart Street, and the Faubourg Treme, where if you walked outside and found your car missing it wouldn't be because it was towed. The owner of this apartment left a note telling me not to be tempted by the St. Louis Cemetries located in Treme, even though they're cool looking, because you will get killed in there. So I was pretty excited to see that the Claiborne Auto Pound, where the mean people took poor little Isaac, was on the other side of Treme, and that Google Maps thought it seemed like a good idea to take the path through the cemeteries to get there.


I decided just to walk down Bourbon St. all the way to Canal and then up to Claiborne and walk over. I was a little nervous about the Claiborne leg of the trip but I felt like if it looked really scary I could just stop and get a cab.

So I didn't carry a bag, and dressed scrappy looking, and set off. I took a picture of Canal Street with my phone and sent it to my mom so she wouldn't worry. But then when I got to Claiborne, it looked a little shady. The sidewalk bordered the walled cemetery on one side, which reminded me of going to visit Vicenzo on the east side of Termini Station last year. A old white guy rolled down his window and asked me where I was going in a disbelieving voice. But I just put on my best Napoli face and kept going, and found Isaac looking scared and alone (you can see the tops of the mausoleums behind her,) and bailed her out with $125. There was an option to rent a parking space for $200 with the apartment which I had turned down... so this went a long way towards not saving me any money on that decision. Now if I can just remember to move next Thursday.

wyatt, i am rolling

So it looks like I'm doing this thing. Two mornings ago I embarked on my Great Southern Road Trip Which Also Includes Some Midwest And Some Regular West, or GSRTWAISMASRW for short. This is me embarking with Isaac (my car):

If I don't die in a fiery crash on this trip as I did in the rather ominous dream of a friend who I hope is not a prophet, I'll drive to New Orleans by way of Phoenix and Austin, stay for a month on a writing sabbatical (which I am determined to protect after my experience last year in Italy, where I got no writing done) then hit Destin, Knoxville, and then Fayetteville, North Carolina, my home town, for a couple of weeks. Then New Bern, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Chicago, and Route 66 all the way back to LA by the fall.

After spending the night with my family in Reseda and saying good-bye to my aunt and grandma, I set out east. A few hours later, I took a detour off the 10 (though I think it's only called "the 10" in Los Angeles and the rest of the world calls it "I-10") to see the Salton Sea, which was fascinatingly photographed by my talented roommate Stephanie a few months ago.

The Salton Sea was created in 1905 when the Colorado River flooded and it took authorities two years to get it under control. Now the water is mostly agricultural runoff. Apparently, the tilapia in the water commit mass suicide every few years and wash up onto the "beaches," which would explain the strong smell of death and the very, very sharp fish bone sand that flipped painfully up into my sandals when I got out of the car to take a few pictures.

Where I walked:


Where I stayed:

(Just kidding, Mom.)

What I look like driving around:


I left Salton Sea, probably smelling like dead tilapia, and headed to Phoenix to see my old Taylor friend Pete and his wife Heather. They took me to dinner at a restaurant in Phoenix called Sam's Cafe, where they give you a little piece of white chocolate and pecan candy wrapped in a corn husk for dessert, and we caught up on our lives. They're moving to Durham next month so Pete can go to Duke for business school. And, as it has ever been and ever will be every single time I visit Phoenix, it was a hundred degrees out until the sun went down. That night I stayed in their lovely guest room, of which I am envious, and dreamt that my apartment was full of orange lizards and frogs. In my dream I thought, "Do lizards turn into frogs eventually? I guess they must." It's funny how our dreaming brains are sort of brilliant and sort of mentally handicapped.

The next morning started out well. I had breakfast with the VTs and set out for Tombstone, listening to an audiobook of Kerouac's "On the Road" and feeling grateful for my life. There was more good news - my doctor called to tell me that my heart murmur is nothing to worry about and I probably won't keel over any time soon - but that phone call happened to be timed perfectly to distract me from taking the last exit for fuel for hundreds of miles of Arizona desert.

Here's me waiting for roadside assistance:


For about ten minutes - which was just about 30 seconds after the moment that I realized that I really had better find a gas station soon to about 30 seconds before I actually ran out of gas - I had absolutely no service on my cell phone. I was having fantasies about walking for miles on the side of the road at noon in the desert and I couldn't help but notice that the scrubby desert landscape looked just about right for burying someone you never want to be found. But then, right as Isaac made a kind of clunky jerk and insisted that I pull her over (Isaac is a girl), I got one tiny heaven-sent bar of reception on my phone, and I was able to call for a truck. For the rest of the trip, I am going to be stopping for gas when I get down to three quarters of a tank. Or maybe just anything below F.

I figured I still had time to make it to the mining towns I wanted to see before stopping for the night, so I headed to Bisbee, an old copper mining town that was unexpectedly beautiful. I drove around the windy little streets for a while and then decided to be a true tourist and get a tour into the Queen Mine.

The tour was kind of interesting, because it was fun to ride on the tracks into the mine, but it was about an hour longer than I was interested in it. I think I actually know how to be a miner now. The guide had me hold two sticks of dynamite and a detonator for a demonstration, and told me not to let them touch. It seemed like a valid warning as he wrapped them carefully in separated cloth bags when I gave them back. Was it Milan Kundera who said the fear of heights is not so much the fear of falling as it is the fear that one will suddenly leap? I had an almost overwhelming urge to try to make them explode.

Because of the gas situation and the (inordinately long) tour, I didn't get to Tombstone until after 5, and everything was closing. I was surprised at how uncrowded it seemed... I don't know if it's just not a popular summer destination or if everyone else in the world has been scared off by the gas prices. It was still fun to walk the streets and imagine what it would have been like to have been Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, or some rustler or a prostitute, just trying to get by and stay alive.