Mapquest said it would be 9 hours from Atlanta to New Orleans, so Gianmarco was up at 8 in the morning cooking everyone breakfast (from Wholefoods, of course). After a tearful goodbye to the big comfy house, it was back on the road trailing the Uhaul for another day of praying it would stay hitched. At a rest stop in Alabama I smell tested the National Eye van against our car: Van = sweat, Car = broccoli.
A few hours into the drive the van started to slow down. They pulled over onto the shoulder and coasted for five more minutes at less than 10mph before stopping. Will jumped into our car, explained that the van’s gas gauge was less than reliable, and had us drive him to a nearby gas station. The rest of the band piled out of the van to make phone calls and was soaked by a flash downpour.
The gas did the trick and we made it the rest of the way to Louisiana. There was free coffee in the state welcome center, but the weather was too hot and muggy to drink it.
To get into the city of New Orleans we had to cross a long, skinny, metal bridge choked with fog that was so long for a few minutes both the beginning and the end of it were invisible.
As the bridge snaked back onto land, the trees became flattened like stepped-on blades of grass. The first mark of civilization was the skeleton of a Six Flags sign, dangling tatters of something that used to entice tourist families in for a day of fun. The rest of the drive to the center of the city was filled with abandoned shopping centers, crumbled brick walls and blue tarp roofs. A Sav-A-Lot sign sat bent in an arc after crushing the store’s roof like a giant sledgehammer. All along the sides of the elevated highways giant billboards contradicted the horrors that surrounded them with peppy, positive messages about rebuilding and taking back the city.
Outside the Howlin’ Wolf while the Teeth and National Eye unloaded their gear (there were so few cars on the street that they could double park without problems), a painter touched up the faded mural of a jazz trumpeter on the side of the venue.
Howlin’ Wolf was a huge venue and both bands were surprised and dissappointed to be playing there. “We’ll never fill it,” Peter announced. Because of the lack of touring bands playing in New Orleans, National Eye and The Teeth had been bumped up twice in venues from a bar to the overly-spacious Wolf whose interior was decorated to look like an old watering hole in the Bayou. The dressing room had a house front on it and a completely unnecessary crowd barricade to protect the bands from the 30 attendees, who were mostly friends of Park the Van from its New Orleans infancy.
Before the show we followed Jonas and Brian to a creepy cajun bar a few blocks away that was advertising GREAT FOOD on a wooden sign. Brian told us over a basket of popcorn shrimp that camping next to a stream the night before almost made him pee his pants in his sleep. Back at the venue Peter was a little crabby from not eating, so he hid out on the couch in the fake house/dressing room.
The crowd made up for its size by being really enthusiastic for both bands, and at the end of the show they led us down to the French Quarter to see some real New Orleans bars. All Doug could think about was food. He sidetracked for benets, coffee, and a hot Po’ Boy.
Everyone was ready for a huge night out. From the first bar, a hipster hangout with goofy memorabilia on the walls, we headed to a formerly ritzy jazz bar where four young guys were jamming offensively. People started to peel off to different places until our group was down to Rick, Will, Doug, Jonas, Aaron and I, wandering through empty, balcony-laced neighborhoods until we stumbled onto Bourbon Street.
Like the world’s biggest frat party, Bourbon Street was teeming with drunk, tan girls in tiny skirts and big, macho guys in button-down shirts. There were lit up porn stills covering the fronts of buildings, people leaning off balconies shaking handfuls of beads, and huge ads everywhere for booze, booze, booze. The only good sight was a brass band blowing their sousaphones and trumpets in the street for a dancing crowd of locals.
Coming out of the pukey bathroom at a creepy, neon tourist trap bar I saw Will and Rick at the counter sampling seriously alchoholic, rainbow-colored slushies. Will’s face contorted in disgust when he tried the “Jester” (the sewage-green house specialty), so Rick bought the biggest size they had, which he poured into smaller cups for everyone.
The “Jester” dyed our mouths green and also made us wander into the courtyard of an expensive hotel to see if we could get into the pool. Pool was locked, so Will shouted out numbers, and Doug tried them as Jonas, Rick and Aaron conducted a sort of meeting at a patio table. When none of the combinations worked, Will got bored and decided to splash around in the foutain, which also happened to be on fire. Before they could kick us out, we left and headed in all the different directions we thought the rest of the group might be in until Brian finally called and we tracked them back to the original bar.
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