As the plane decended in broad sweeping circles above the muddy Mississippi, the elder couple next to me pointed out the fact that the river cuts an unusual curve north, south, west, then north again around the city which caused something in the city planning to fucked up (this my cousin would verify forty minutes later on the car ride home).
“The streets” he says “run in a bicycle spoke out from the center (the river) and the side streets run in a curve across the main roads”.. hmmm no foolin. I really couldn’t tell. The south is a very flat place around the coast, and though this is my second trip to the south, first going to Florida. New Orleans is a whole other strange beast.
In two of the books I am reading; the first “Why New Orleans Matters” and the second book which I picked up and added to my list while I was down there, “One Dead in the Attic” both start ( One dead in the Attic is all about, actually) the hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Now when I was down there, about ten years later, at first sight I had totally forgot about the disaster that happened when I was knee high to a grass hopper, so the streets looked like a demilitarized zone, there was construction on almost every street in the Jefferson Parish area, thats where my cousin lives off the Jefferson highway across from the Lowes.
We where driving down the streets of St. Charles Avenue on the second day and the road was beat to shit, there are all these nice houses, tall live oaks which I was told have a record in city hall where every oak was documented. Oh yeah, all the trees and powerlines and gates and other random tall petruding objects where infastated with a fake spanish lichen that grew in long plactic beads from the holy harvest of Mar di Gras… Where was I?..
Oh yeah, the decrepit roads! Damn, the roads are almost all battered to some extent, except this one night my cousin and I where leaving the Quarter and got lost en route to this psychedelic place called the church of pinball… Ill tell you more of that later, we drove through this nice, kinda not well light neighborhood where there where these newer houses and a nice paved road and my cousin looks over at me and he says “Hey see these houses? This is the ghetto of New Orleans”… No foolin.
Once I got off the plane we went back to his place. Showed me his pinball machines, I’m thinking about getting one now, their pretty bitchen and this one from the mid sixties called Williams Expo is the best, I hold the second and third highest score on there, beating his second highest and his fiances highest. So we shot pinball and the shit on music and art, that was mainly the topics of conversation, until his fiance came home, she’s studying gastro something at Tulane and interning at another hospital down there.. Anyway we went to this place to get Po Boys and let me tell you a soft shell crab (and the hot sausage) Po Boy, its too bad there are no Po Boy shops in Oly, that is what we are missing…