A Wanderer's Ode to New Orleans

I came back to New Orleans the first time I visited. On a spring break, after a long flight from the Middle East, I landed in the city of vagabonds, eccentrics, ghosts, magic, and turtle soup...

“But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.”

― Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

I first heard about new Orleans when I was 6. My mother got me a comic book in Prague. Called "Carnival in New Orleans". I saw drawings of steamboats and the mighty Mississippi, and wild crowds on ornate balconies, all the revelry and food and beautiful costumes — and I would think to myself "Ah! I want to go to New Orleans for the carnival!"

It was 1983, I was in the Soviet Union, and my mother had to wait 6 months just to be allowed to go to Japan for a scientific conference — after successfully passing 3 interviews with the KGB.

But a dream is a dream, can't stop anyone from trying.

I came to New Orleans 30 years later, trying to focus and take my life at 30 minute intervals because of events that had unfolded 24 hours prior. Haphazardly packed. Never checked for events and places to see, forgot my notes on the city and the assignment I was supposed to finish. Mostly indifferent to life. Oddly enough, not jet-lagged at all.

It was cold and gloomy, but it was New Orleans all right.

I took a bus from the airport and got off in the middle of nowhere. Scurrying past one-story wooden houses in all the faded colors of the rainbow, I dragged my suitcase on the cracked pavement in infernal chill that pierced through the bones. Heck, I'm in New Orleans. I am here. And it is just as I had imagined it to be.

The drag strip burlesque show in Allways Lounge looked like a scene from Fight Club. Somehow watching a plump stripper making parody of the tired genre, I realized the city is giving me the greatest gift imaginable. Then and there, for the first time, and from now on, I fully appreciated my life, my past, all that I was, all that I am and all that I wanted to be.

It was all of myself. I got myself back. Is that what soul retrieval feels like?

With time, the days merged into one. The energy would lift me up, and carry me, then knock me over and lead me to places unknown. I was always safe. But the city loves a broken heart. It was gentle to me. It has not been so gentle with others.

Everyone I met had a story to tell. A girl with a typewriter from 1926. It's authentic and real, she said. And you have to make an effort to change from one line to another. You can only make a maximum of 3 copies (with the blue copying paper) — which makes everything you type unique. So she travels with a typewriter and a saxophone.

I met a voodoo priestess in a place which I could have found blindfolded in the dark, so thick was the energy that suddenly jumped out at me. How do people live here, I wondered... The whole power of this that can either heal you in an instant, or chew you up and spit your out. New Orleans is not a "nice," warm, cozy, fuzzy love and light place. Oh no.

Like the great dark mother, she does as she wills. Perhaps, all the souls ever connected to her just keep coming back, never actually leaving the place?

Two people missed their buses and had to stay another night. One guy was supposed to leave, but then his laundry got stuck in the washing machine which broke down mid-cycle. He had to wait until the next day to get it out. So he had to stay because the city decided he had to stay.

One guy went downtown with me and played saxophone on Royal street, and was supposed to leave for the beaches of Florida the next day. I saw him three days later — but you left, man! Yeah... I left... And then I came back... So how long are you here for now? Eh... I was thinking, like — forever?

The city finds you, and sucks you in and never lets you go.

Or have we just been looking for it all our lives?

And what am I left with, after having lived and breathed it for 10 days, but a few empty words and pictures that don't do the place any justice?