New Orleans

New Orleans

I used to drive United Cab 170 around New Orleans with the expectation that somehow there would be some money involved that I would actually get to keep at the end of the week. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved it - sort of the way Catholics are about sex and Baptists about beer.

I was what they called a 10-2 specialist. I picked up the drunkest, most obstreperous customers from the dive bars and saloons and took them home - or occasionally to other bars – once to the airport, now and again to the train or bus stations. I carried passengers with great dark stains between their legs – greasy and shiny with piss. Once I carried a boy who inexplicably dug his finger into his collar, tugged himself a fair-sized hole in the clothes around his neck and poured a whole foaming Corona into his shirt. Another boy yanked the door open, tipped first his bottle, then his head back and rolled out of the cab onto Jackson Street.

I carried girls from Tulane who cried and clutched their clothes over their sad pointy breasts and told me frothy and wet stories about how their trust funds would be taken away if they couldn’t stop drinking and screwing inappropriate boys. I carried girls from Loyola who vomited half-digested ramen or macaroni or spaghetti noodles into the gutter on their way into and out of the cab (only once did one of them actually puke inside the cab…it was either Kraft Shells and Cheese or some kind of Farfalle with Alfredo sauce). Occasionally I carried home a girl who had passed out and thus imposed unforgivably on her friendships by becoming a burden to those of her dear friends who were ready to move on to the next bar.

One of them, I picked up as she lay unconscious on the sidewalk at Napoleon and Magazine in front of a bar called Miss Mae’s - her ridiculously short dress was hitched up around her waist and the flossy excuse of her underwear had surrendered any possibility of covering the curly red hair between her legs or the puffy pink lips of her…well, you know. She was lying in a puddle of light maybe ten feet from the front door – rangy men with boney wrists and prominent Adam’s apples slunk along the edge of the light like hydrophobic whippets, watching out of the corners of their yellow eyes for an opportunity to lurch in and do what…? Feel her up? Roll her over hoping to find a purse full of traveler’s checks? Drag her back into the shadows to fondle and fuck her, satisfying once and for all the necrophilliac curiosity that’d nagged them since puberty? Kick her in the neck? Having snatched her up did they expect to hump her bodily down to the port over Tchoupitoulas Street a few blocks away and into the hold of one of the great sea-going vessels there to be kept prisoner on board in the service of lonely Russian or Chinese or South African sailors…?

To amuse myself, I imagined an eerily sedated Marlon Perkins zoomorphically describing the scene as I tried to tuck her clothes around her and gave a marginal shoring up to her modesty if not her dignity. One of her friends - one who did not care enough to wait outside and keep the hyenas at bay, but was frantically worried about her money, Chap Stick, birth control and ID - kept her purse safe at the bar and was willing to root through her wallet and find an appropriate amount of money to get her home.

I promised drinks and the possibility of free cab rides and eventually enlisted the aid of some local barflies who rode along with me - mostly as witnesses. I wasn’t willing to carry her alone in my cab and potentially suffer bleary accusations of lechery or molestation the next morning and if I encountered stairs or even a high curb at any point in the process…well…my back never was what it used to be.

So we planted her on the linoleum next to the commode, washed her face with a cold wet cloth, covered her with a blanket, fumbled about for water and Tylenol which I arranged in a handy pile on the window sill and we left her there: supine, recumbent, insensate…still alive when the key snicked in the lock – I’m pretty sure she was…

Because I solved problems like these regularly for about a dozen different uptown bars, I had a hard time paying for drinks anywhere I liked to drink. Basically, though I’m painting this picture with a broad brush, there are two kinds of bars in New Orleans: bars for us - we who live here…and bars for…you - you who come from other places and behave in ways you would never think to at home. We drink obscenely large un-watered liquor drinks served in genuine glass tumblers and pay a dollar or two while you drink rubbing alcohol poured out of Tanqueray bottles into tiny plastic thimbles - assuming you can get a second mortgage for the third round.

Once I made the mistake of drinking with friends in a German bar on Bourbon Street…it was World Cup time, they had a satellite and despite what you’ve heard about me, I can be accommodating to my friends and loved ones for short periods of time…occasionally. I paid 23 bucks for three drinks and thereafter swore I’d never drink with the tourists again…

I never had to…

The London Lodge is a desperate place out on the edge of New Orleans…maybe it’s in Metairie - sort of a no-man’s land regardless. I carried a few rides out there, but not many. The Lodge doesn’t have the kind of clientele that rides in taxis if they can help it. If you ever wanted to meet a gold tooth pimp or a fourteen-year-old whore or the extended family of a death row inmate in New Orleans to make appeals at the federal courthouse or swarthy mustachioed men who sleep in shifts, taking turns sitting on the bumper of the refrigerated truck parked in front of their room, smoking cigarettes and paring their fingernails with a Greek spring-loaded stiletto, well…this is the place for you.

Were it not for Katrina I might eventually have drunk myself into a room at the London Lodge…