Big Easy

I am tired. Exhausted. This morning, knowing full well that I would get a ticket for my illegally parked car on street-cleaning day, I struggled out of bed, straggled toward the door and weighed the cost of a ticket with an extra 20 minutes of sleep. I chose sleep and crawled back under the covers. The weekend took too much out of me.

Before I left, Sunday afternoon, sitting in the airport, I started to drift. Reading my book, I closed my eyes for longer and longer periods. Looking up, rubbing my eyes, I glanced around the waiting area, wondering if anyone saw. I hunched over my backpack. If I could have made myself comfortable, I would have slept, but the armrest kept getting in the way. I resigned myself to reading, sleeping in brief little spurts and jerking awake with the feeling of falling, with the certainty that my book was tumbling from my hands and I was tumbling from the seat.

I don’t suppose I started the weekend well. Packing on Friday night led to putting away my laundry and organizing my closet, pulling out the clothes I don’t wear and shouldn’t wear and rotating my summer and winter wardrobes. Mere hours after giving up on the whole thing, on piling clothes next to my trunk in lieu of eking out closet space or sorting through sweaters I haven’t worn in many moons and many months, the alarm clock sounded.

Shower. Unpack and repack my bag, rather creatively. I refused to wrap my mind around the idea of checking a bag for an overnight trip. I filled my contact lens case with solution and planned to use hotel shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer and face soap. I figured I was taking a bit of a chance but it was a nice, expensive hotel. The product couldn’t be half bad.

I ran through a mental list: dress, shoes, necklace. Non-liquid makeup. Appropriate undergarments and inappropriate undergarments and a bra that wouldn’t make me look like a hooker under the white button-down shirt I packed for Sunday. A couple of T’s. Book. Another book. That should be it.

Zipping up the bag, I sat down at my computer to read my email for one last time, preparing to go cold turkey for 36 hours. Offline. Email. Blogs. The phone rang.

“I just woke up!”

“Okay…”

“I have to get Denise’s car. She just called me. I just woke up!”

Somewhat garbled, the story came out. Kayla had forgotten to set an alarm. Fortunately, a friend called, the friend whose car she planned to borrow for the trip while someone else borrowed her car and my brother borrowed mine. She donned running clothes and literally ran the mile or so to the car, with her clutch in hand. “A girl never knows when she’s going to need her purse!”

She almost fell on the way, arms, legs and purse flailing. She caught herself with a skip and a jump. Watching her pantomime the fall in the car on the way to the airport, I laughed. Hard. We made it to Dulles on time and I checked in, making it through security and to the gate in time for the first boarding call. Economy Plus and a little bit of napping my way to New Orleans.

It was the first time I’d been back. It was the first time I’d been to New Orleans since the hurricane. It was never my town, but I stayed there for a while a lifetime ago and had been back to visit a half a dozen times since then. This time it was different and the same and completely heart-wrenching all at once.

I went back for a wedding, the wedding of the man with whom I stayed a lifetime ago. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He was never my boyfriend. He was a friend and part of the reason I left Colorado. I hated my job. I loved the mountains but it wasn’t enough to make me stay. I saw him at a wedding and he suggested I quit. Just like that. And I did. I quit my job and drove around the country for months, staying with him in New Orleans for a month, give or take.

We drove to Mexico with the guy who lived downstairs. Actually, we drove to Brownsville, Texas and hopped a bus to the heart of Veracruz, to a fishing village surrounding a nuclear power plant. We almost killed each other on that trip and he almost killed himself with free pork or creamed corn or tequila. Actually, when he lists the things that could have made him sick, nobody wonders that he did get sick.

Going back to New Orleans for his wedding, or rather the reception (he married two weeks earlier, on my birthday, in Mexico, the only girl good enough for him), the memories came back. They came back with a vengeance; they came back as they’d never really come back before, on earlier visits.

I never really thought about New Orleans after the hurricane. I never really considered what changed. I saw the pictures. I knew the devastation, but it never really sunk in and altered the place in my mind. Riding the shuttle into the city, I thought about a store I knew and how I wanted to find a red bead necklace to go with my dress. I realized the store might be gone. We drove past the Superdome, bannered and awaiting the first home game since before the storm.

“So that’s where everyone was?” asked the woman next to me on the shuttle.

“There and on this bridge.” Shivers ran up my spine.

Walking through the quarter, I noticed all the empty storefronts, and there were a lot. The store I liked, the store with the funky jewelry, was there, though. And Café du Monde. And the bar on Bourbon Street with a man in a giant, inflatable hand grenade costume.

Walking through the quarter, I remembered the apartment we rented for Jazz Fest and the hotel where I stayed before Kayla and Michelle arrived. I actually got scared walking through some of the neighborhoods I had known. (I live in DC. I’m not afraid of much, but the empty streets were scarred and angry.)

Throughout the weekend, I remembered more than the city, though. I remembered things I hadn’t thought in years. The naked woman lighter/key chain Joe gave me with the spare keys. He insisted I carry it. Going to get mice for a snake that wasn’t his and stopping to get a beer in Buddha's Belly Bar, kitty corner from the Nine Inch Nails compound. I remembered staying in bed, reading all day, and staying out all night. I remembered Rebirth Brass Band and Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers. In the morning, I'd find Joe's girlfriend's bras in the bathroom as she marked her territory.

I remembered why I don’t drink hurricanes and why the carpet’s gone from the bedroom in the back of the apartment where I used to live, if only for a little while and where his brother now lives. I remembered meeting his brother, 11 years old on the stairs outside a college party on Little Sibs weekend. He’s grown up now. We all are.

One of Joe’s clients asked me what he was like in college. I laughed. If they only knew…

Remembering exhausted me more than travel and the drinking and everything else. On the plane, on the way home, I slept deeply. Soundly. I slept in a bit this morning. I napped on the couch. I tried to catch up but I am tired. Happy, but tired.


Tag: New Orleans Travel Memories Exhaustion