1.3.02

Happy New Year, Monkeys! Hope your celebration was as good as mine - but let’s face it, it wasn’t. Were you standing on Bourbon Street in New Orleans when the clock struck midnight!? Were you sprayed heavily with over-priced champagne amongst a crowd of thousands of strangers who suddenly became your best friend once the new year dawned!? Did you drink frozen daiquiris out of a big plastic cup molded into the shape of a naked woman!? I don’t think so. But, either way, hope you had fun.

Funny thing about the New Year – you never hear anyone say “Man, this year kicked ass!” Everyone is hoping that things will get better with the coming of the New Year. Obviously this year is especially bad, but really I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sad to see the last year die a painful, fiery death once the ball drops in Times Square. Weird, huh?

As you might have noticed, I’ve revamped the site in a major way. Now when you come in all you’ll see on the first page is the latest entry. If you want to read archives, click the archives button and you’ll see a list of dates, all of which are clickable and each will open up its own, separate web page that only contains that entry. If you want to get back to the archives again, just click the archives button. If you want to get back to the latest entry, just click the monkey at the top. Easy as pie and something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time and I figured the New Year was as good a time as any.

Ok, so no more messing around – I’ll tell you about New Orleans.

This is going to be a long one, so those of you with short attention spans will probably want to stop reading now, but don’t expect me to tell you all about this later on – this is it, folks. Oh, and if you’re offended by frank discussion of strip clubs, public indecency, public intoxication, swear words, or Elvis Presley’s decorating tastes, you might as well leave now, too.

Friday, December 28
I pack stuff into my suitcase early that evening. Clothes: two pairs of khaki pants and a pair of shorts (because the news says we should see temps in the sixties!), a few short-sleeved shirts (weather should be nice according to weather.com), boxers, socks, toiletries, new cheapy camera from Walgreens and five rolls of film, and all my pipe paraphernalia (five, individually bagged ounces of tobacco in one big zip lock baggie makes me look like a drug dealer, but I’m more concerned about keeping it dry and fresh than answering questions on the off-chance I get pulled over and searched). I’m in bed by 8:00PM somehow.

Saturday, December 29
3:00AM – I wake up. 3:45AM – I’m leaving the QuikTrip with a 1-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, a vanilla long john and a yard gnome wearing Mardi Gras beads seat-belted in next to me. As I drive down I-55, the main vein on my trip, I see a billboard that reads: “Elvis Never Leaves THIS Building. See Graceland Exit 5B”. Oh, I’m making a pit stop!

By 7:00AM, the sun is coming up and I’m somewhere in Arkansas.

At 8:15, I stop in Memphis to get gas for the first time and to release a rather urgent deluge of approximately 1-liter of Mountain Dew.

I pull into the parking lot at the fabled home of The King and, much to my sadness, they have winter hours from 10AM – 6PM. Since it’s only 8:30, an hour and a half seems a bit long to wait on this side trip. However, the lady at the parking gate says those hours are the set hours, if the weather is decent, they’ll open earlier – and today the first tour starts at 9AM!

You hear of people traveling from Hawaii to Memphis just to see this place. It’s gotta be pretty special, right? It must be an expansive estate like the ones you see in British Royalty with acres upon acres of statues, a mansion where the number of bathrooms alone goes into the teens and lush extravagance in every corner. Really, all it is is a nice-sized house with some cool, retro décor.

Don’t get me wrong, it was money well-spent to see the place – even for someone who really isn’t a huge Elvis fan – and be able to say I’ve been there, but I guess my only advice should you ever find yourself in Memphis is, “Don’t believe the hype”.

After purchasing a shot glass at Graceland with Elvis’ signature on it (you have to buy SOMETHING when you go G-land, don’t you?), I got back on the road to New Orleans around 10:00AM.

At 3:30PM, twelve hours since I pulled out of the QuickTrip in O’Fallon, MO, I’m driving across the beautiful wonder of modern engineering that is I-55 by Lake Pontchartrain. An interstate road that’s at least 30 feet above the swamps of The Bayou for miles on-end is simply an amazing site to behold. Every time I drive over it I wonder how many men gave their lives to see this road built. Scary thought.

I pull into NO and my Yahoo!/MapQuest instructions, which up to this point have been dead-on perfect, throw me for a loop. I’m to take Route 90, but – oops – there are two Route 90’s, East and West. I take a chance and, much to my non-surprise, I take the wrong one.

I find myself driving through what is surely the absolute worst part of NO, which is sort of like having a ticket to a 2001 Detroit Lions game in the nosebleed section behind a pole, between Roseanne Barr and Steve Urkel. Finally, around 5:00, I find the hotel, get checked in, valet parked for $10 per day (quite a bargain, really, for a secure garage), and meet up with my roommate Monte, the poor bastard who arrived earlier that day from Destine, Florida. Despite over 12 hours in the car, I’m refreshed and ready to hit the town. We catch the free shuttle from the hotel to Bourbon Street and we’re in business.

Bourbon Street is just cool. People wander the street with their choice of liquid poison, often in a novelty-shaped container such as a naked woman, man or almond-eyed alien, and bounce between the various bars, strip clubs, and shops that sell only t-shirts with crude phrases or graphics printed on them. Music, especially blues, jazz and poorly-sung karaoke versions of “Mustang Sally”, mix in the air like the gumbo you can buy from one of the many up-scale restaurants on the strip. It’s a right-wing republican’s worst nightmare and a bad dream even for those who lean to the left. Therefore, I like to call it “Heaven”. Honestly, words cannot describe Bourbon Street; it just has to be experienced.

We did some spelunking around the side streets and found this great little tobacco shop owned by a father and son. Monte bought a few cigars and I checked out their pipe tobaccos. The father was really cool with me. After selling me his personal favorite blend, he told me I could load up my pipe right there in the store. I proceeded to fill my bowl from the baggie I had just purchased, but he said “No, No. Fill up from the canister. No need to use your own.” I did so and attempted to burn the bowl with my lighter, only to find it was out of gas. Well, the owner wouldn’t stand for that and filled it up with butane for me for free! Really cool guys and a perfect example of the hospitality you can find in New Orleans. When you’re in the French Quarter, everyone’s your best friend. It’s a very cool vibe.

Monte and I stopped at a restaurant called The Cajun Cabin and watched a good ol’ Bayou band strum out the swamp country tunes. This little kid, couldn’t have been more than 6, had his own mini-washboard vest and was playing that thing with gusto along with the band. According to our waitress, he’d gone outside on the street the night before and had hauled in quite a bit of cash in tips. I got his picture, so I’ll definitely post it whenever I get the film developed. So, we sat and listened to the music while we dined on our meal of chicken po’boy for Monte and fried alligator for me (Yes, you read that correctly!)

After dinner, we mainly drank frozen daiquiris and hung out in front of Temptations - a gentlemen’s club where, through a strategically- placed window and spotlight inside, the silhouette of a woman dancing on stage can clearly be seen from the street. Not only did we get a pretty decent, albeit rated PG-13 show, but we got to watch the people go by, which is most of the fun of Bourbon.

We expected to see some Champaign people we knew there. However, as we’re standing with our naked woman-shaped cups in hand, staring at the silhouette of a naked woman in the window, Monte says, “There’s the chief!” I try to find a guy in an orange and blue headdress and face paint, but see nothing of the sort. I begin to wonder if I need to cut Monte off the daiquiris already. Well, it ends up he’s talking about the Chief of Police from O’Fallon, MO! He was down there chaperoning some high school band kids who were performing at the Sugar Bowl. Small damn world, huh? However, after speaking with The Chief for a while, we were a bit worried about his duties – as of that moment, he had no idea where any of his students were. Those kids are so lucky.

By midnight when we got to the hotel, we were both pretty wiped out and ready for a good night’s sleep. It was especially momentous for me as I had been up for 21 hours now and was going to experience my only night of sleep in a bed for the next four days.

Sunday, December 30
Monte and I got up around 10:00 – I needed the 10 hours of sleep, that’s for sure – and waited for the rest of our crew to come rolling into town. Right about 11:30, a seven-month pregnant Amy, her US Army husband, Joshua, Joshua’s sisters Carrie and Sarah and Carrie’s boyfriend, Brad, and some un-related friends, Paul and his girlfriend, Trisha, came into our hotel room. After the initial Hey, how ya doin’s, we left to grab a bite to eat.

On this trip we had all pretty much said we didn’t want to eat anywhere that we could eat at home. Therefore, our first stop was to Bourbon Street’s “Original Papa Joe’s Restaurant” for some $10 burgers, Southern-fried chicken, and po’ boys.

We wandered Bourbon and found ourselves at the Cat’s Meow. Inside was quite possibly one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my 26, almost 27 years. This short, ugly little man named Donnie, who was either mildly mentally retarded, severally inebriated or, most likely, a combination of the two, was singing (and I use the word lightly) karaoke. He was flanked by two women, who I believe moments before were peering into a cauldron to tell MacBeth about his future.

This unholy trio (yes, worse than The Dixie Chicks), were singing a rendition of Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places”, that was reminiscent of the sound one would imagine they’d hear if they slaughtering baby kittens on stage with a can opener. But the highlight of the performance was the staggering, barely standing Donnie, who had no idea where he was at the time, let alone what song he was singing. However, he was so entertaining, the crowd kept chanting his name to “sing” and he was more than happy to oblige.

The true pinnacle of Donnie’s performance came during the song “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”, by David Alan Coe. The original chorus to the country classic goes:

And I’ll hang around as long as you will let me
And I never minded standin’ in the rain
But you don’t have to call me darlin’…..darlin’
You never even called me by my name

Donnie felt that the chorus didn’t quite convey the anguish experienced by the singer well enough. So as the witches sang the first three lines of the chorus as well as they could muster, Donnie then barked in with his only contribution to the song:

SUCK MY DICK!!!!

As you can see, this addition made the song much more memorable and amusing.

After a few hours of checking out the main strip and a few of the side streets where some of the true secrets of New Orleans lie, we went to Jackson’s Square – the art district. Here we got plenty of pictures of the statue of Andrew Jackson and the cathedral that overlooks it. And more than once considered getting our palms read or tarot card fortunes told by the many card table psychics that outline the park.

Around 3:00, we crammed the eight of us into a Chevy Suburban taxicab and got back to the hotel. There, everyone got checked into our three hotel rooms and waited for our good friend, Jeff, who was flying in from Georgia.

Once Jeff arrived, we went downstairs to the hotel’s 2-for-1 happy hour in the lounge. I mainly played pay-for-play billiards with the tall, lanky hayseed Paul from Oakland, Illinois. He was a good guy. He’s from a small town much like me, attended the same college I did and we both knew a little about our respective fields. So we had a good time shooting 8-ball, downing glasses of the local brew called “Abita Turbodog”, while the others played cards in the other room.

That night, after adding Jeff to our party, we hit Bourbon again. This time decked in light coats as the weatherman’s predictions from the days before were slightly off and it was dipping down into the 30s overnight; well, all except me, who rarely wears a coat even when he probably should. However, every one of us was representing Illini; some wearing predominantly orange and blue. Even I had on my one and only Illini article, my Illini Hockey hat (remember that fact for later in our story).

I swear 90% of Champaign-Urbana was on Bourbon Street. The chant “I-L-L” echoed through the French Quarter like the mating call of a man with no tongue, and the proper reciprocal of “I-N-I” was always quick to come in chorus. It was like we’d driven ten hours to be in Champaign, but only with better strip clubs. However, this also gave a feeling of camaraderie; you knew you had some friends in this town if nothing else. It was especially funny whenever someone from LSU would start a chant spelling out the acronym and it would quickly be followed by a curt “SUCKS!!” from twice as many people. We had invaded the Big Easy.

Sunday was THE night for us, really. We meandered down Bourbon until we’d get to these pockets of rowdiness below the fabled balconies that line the street. The balconies, with their ornate, decorative wrought ironworks, are where you see most people selling quick peeks at their bodies for the miniscule payment of cheap, plastic beads. Women flash their breasts, men drop trou (personally, I think we’re getting ripped off in the deal), camera bulbs flash, and beads go flying with precision tosses. Well, as precisely as you can when you’re seeing four pairs of breasts after a few of New Orleans’ signature drink, The Hurricane.

We found ourselves at an opportune moment around 9:00. A weathered, old, black man was standing in the doorway to a bar called “Johnny White’s”. He was holding a black magic marker-handwritten sign on a small slab of roughly cut cardboard. The sign read the words I’d been waiting to read: Balcony Open.

Now, getting onto a balcony is a big deal on Bourbon Street. Not only do you get a bird’s-eye view of the debauchery, but also where you’re most likely to get flashed or see flashes up close and personal. Well, we got to experience the latter more than the former.

One member of our party, the spunky, laid back Trisha, had been commenting all night about how stupid the girls were that wouldn’t flash. She yelled, “Where do you think you are, bitch? Show some tits!” whenever some priss would refuse the callings of a male balcony member who was dangling beads like a carrot. However, when someone below began dangling beads, preparing to throw them to our lofty perch for a peek at her rack, she buttoned up rather quickly. But, I’m happy to say, Jeff and I gave her much crap for her sudden change in tone, and she succumbed to her better judgment three times for quite a bounty of beads.

We lost a few people to fatigue over the next couple of hours so that by 11:00, it was only myself, Jeff and Monte left on Bourbon Street. By midnight when the three of us left the balcony, Bourbon had become a literal sea of bodies. For almost three quarters of a mile, all you could see were heads and shoulders. Again, this is something you just have to experience to believe, but I do have pictures to help you visualize, just give me some time to get them developed.

The Mecca in our pilgrimage through the crowd was Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club back towards the mouth of Bourbon Street. Twenty dollars for a VIP pass, seventy dollars in one-dollar bills between the three of us, and we were inside.

Shortly after we entered the house of ill repute (not THAT ill, mind you), Monte got a call on his cell phone. Unable to hear well among the thumping beats and gyrating hips, he could barely make out Ben, a friend who couldn’t make the trip due to budgetary constraints say, “I’m on I-55! I’ll be there by 8:00!”

You would think that in New Orleans, the birthplace of sin, the strip clubs would be wild, crazy and worth every penny. Well, you would be greatly disappointed if you went to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. We stayed for about an hour, mainly just to be inside to warm up, before leaving to the streets again, surprisingly satisfied with the strip clubs in our hometowns.

Jeff, Monte and I were simply not tired, despite it being about 2:00AM. Since we’d already committed about four of the seven deadly sins in the span of six hours, we decided that a bit of gambling couldn’t do us any more harm. A brief walk to Harrah’s and then, what seemed like moments later, I was down $26 in nickels. Jeff was up and down, but ended the night only $10 in the hole at roulette. Monte was our big winner with about $50 on the quarter slots.

We took a cab back – Monte paying for the ride, of course – and were in bed around 4:00AM.

Monday, December 31
Remember I said that Saturday was going to be my only night sleeping in a bed? Well, yeah, that sucked. I woke up Monday morning after accumulating maybe two hours of sleep from 4:00AM till 10:00AM. I was on a concrete floor covered by very thin carpeting wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. Through the night I put on socks, then the khaki pants I’d worn that day, and my coat in an effort to stay somewhat warm. Needless to say, I was worthless when I got up on Monday.

The party split up during the day. Some of us went to the D-Day Museum (I wish I had gone, but the $10 entry fee was pushing it a bit for me. Sounds like the lines were insane anyway). Others I have no idea what they did, but they weren’t around Monte, Jeff, Sarah and I, who were trying to find a good place to eat lunch.

After lunch, we went back to our room to relax a little after a rough night on Bourbon. I immediately hit the pillow while other people were watching Bowl games and The Shawshank Redemption. I woke up around 4:00 to an empty hotel room. Didn’t take long for me to find the rest of my crew and we headed out once again for the heart of the city – Bourbon Street.

We took yet another Chevy Suburban taxi to a restaurant we’d found in the Yellow Pages – The Olde Nawlins Cookery. It was a cool little joint just off Bourbon that promised down home, Bayou cuisine – definitely not food we could get back home. Here we met up with Ben and his friend, Lindsey, who had made the all-night drive to New Orleans from St. Louis, screaming down the deserted interstate highway well above the speed limit, I’m sure.

Although we all wanted that Cajun cooking, very few of us wanted to spend the money for it. Sure, there were some who got half-chickens smothered in a peach barbecue sauce that was to die for, some even got red beans and rice and alligator sausage. The rest of us choked on the thought of spending $15 on anything but frozen daiquiris, so we got overly priced appetizers and side dishes instead. My meal consisted of bread, water, and a baked potato with butter on it. Grand total for that meal fit for a King’s jester - $7 including tip.

We didn’t wander Bourbon much this chilly, rainy evening; we had a goal and we stuck to it. The bar was Fritzel’s “The Official Bar of the Fighting Illini”. Now here were some folks with marketing sense. They knew all us Illinoisans were going to invade from our icy domain in the north and would want to congregate somewhere to be with our ilk. They must have made a mint that weekend.

We met up with some friends who had made the trip – primarily Nate, Liz and LeAnn – and chatted the night away inside. I smoked my pipe to the compliments of many a folk who said it smelled delicious (quite the opposite reaction I used to get when I smoked cigars) and we all stood in line in the enclosed alley behind the bar to use the shoddy bathrooms, irregardless of which was the men’s and which was the women’s. Through the evening I was called a hobbit twice thanks to my ever-present pipe and was told I looked like Kevin Smith AKA Silent Bob three times. I’m still not sure if any of these were supposed to be compliments or not, but I took joy in them.

Many a Hurricane later, the hour we’d all been waiting for was almost upon us. Monte had splurged and purchased six $4 bottles of no-name champagne at $36 a piece from Fritzel’s, and we took to Bourbon at about 11:45.

Almost immediately upon my exiting the bar into the mass of humanity in front of us, a girl wearing a yellow feather boa and speaking with a thick Irish accent spots Floyd The Drunken Yard Gnome, my constant companion for this evening. She wants a picture with him and I happily oblige. After I snap her image, she seems to think this entitles her to beads and begins to take a strand from my neck. I figure, “Why not?” and try to help her. Well, the beads are somehow all tangled so much so that Houdini himself couldn’t get them undone, so we struggle for a bit to free one for her.

During this time, a friend of mine takes Floyd so I don’t drop the little bugger and my ever-present Illini Hockey hat is snatched from my head so I can remove the lump of beads easier. I think my friend that took Floyd also has my hat, but it ends up it was some girl who was with the Irish lassy I was standing there with. Here I am trying to do her friend a favor and she’s taking my hat from my head! I didn’t see it, but apparently she took the hat and immediately brought it down behind her back as if she passed it to another friend waiting behind her. I finally said screw it to the Irish girl once I found out her buddy had stolen my hat and tried desperately to grab hold of the thief who was still standing nearby, trapped amongst the crowd.

I had a firm grasp on her jeans jacket, pulled her towards me and quite harshly demanded she return my hat. She said she didn’t have it. Trisha and some of my other girl-friends who witnessed the theft screamed at her to “just give it back, bitch”, but to no avail. The girl no longer had the hat in her possession, so there was little I could do about it.

As soon as it had happened, I’d forgotten about it, relieved that it was only my hat and not Floyd the Drunken Yard Gnome that had disappeared into the clutches of the wily Irish. However, my friends were still quite pissy about it even after the countdown to the New Year had ended, our bottles of champagne had been sprayed, hugs and kisses had been exchanged, and we were on Bourbon Street for the event. I calmed them down reiterating my feelings of “Well, what’s done is done”, averting a major political fiasco, as they would have surely beaten down some Micks in a darkened alley of New Orleans.

Around 1:00AM, some of our party wandered home, leaving only Ben, Lindsey, Jeff, Monte, Trisha and I to fend for ourselves in the chaos that was New Orleans on New Years Eve. By 2:00AM we were back at Harrah’s, but since I was carrying a yard gnome, I didn’t think they’d let me in; besides, I really didn’t want to waste any more money than I had to. So, I sat outside smoking my pipe, watching the people walk by who were trying to catch a cab, which was virtually impossible it was so busy that night. I had originally intended to go back to the hotel, but I ended up waiting for them until they came out at 2:45; only Jeff, Monte and Trisha as Ben and Lindsey had snuck out shortly after our arrival.

We took a cab home – our driver only charged us $6 a head as opposed to the $10 most cabbies were charging – and we fell into bed after a good night welcoming the New Year. By the way, I'd learned my lesson from the night before and had the heat turned on in the room before we'd left that day. So although my sleeping on the floor was uncomfortable, at least I wasn't as cold as a week-old corpse for the rest of the stay.

Tuesday, January 1
Frankly, we didn’t do much Tuesday because it was rainy, cold, and not a very good day to be out running around. Besides, everyone but Ben, Lindsey and I had tickets for the Sugar Bowl game that night – the Illini versus LSU. So, it was a day pretty much spent at the hotel, watching football. That was ok by me, as I needed the rest.

At 6:00, Ben and Lindsey came by; we caught the hotel shuttle to Canal and walked down to Bourbon in the cold rain. We stopped off at a restaurant, which I can’t remember the name of now, and had cheesy garlic bread for Lindsey, jambalaya for Ben, blackened catfish with an appetizer of a half dozen raw oysters for me. Mmm-mmm, good. After the first quarter of a horrible football game, we jumped to our next bar, the legendary Pat O’Brien’s, Home of the Hurricane.

I had two of Pat O’Brien’s famous drinks and purchased a take-home Hurricane glass for only $3. We watched more of the horrible football game and then at half time, I ran down by Fritzel’s to see how the Illini crowd was living.

Bourbon was virtually empty so it was a quick, easy, unmolested walk to Fritzel’s, the Official Bar of the Fighting Illini. Although it was populated, it wasn’t too crowded, so I thought I’d recommend we head back down there when I returned to Pat O’Brien’s where Ben and Lindsey waited.

The real reason I went down by Fritzel’s was to go next door to the voodoo shop. I’d been inside earlier that weekend and was struck by the large assortment of tribal masks they have inside. Being a tribal art fiend, I wanted to see if I could afford one to add to the piece I had at home. I found a long, orange and white painted piece from Cameroon, meant to bring protection to the home in which it hung, and it was mine. I have pictures, so you’ll see it sometime.

After my purchase, I went back to Pat O’Brien’s and we three made our way to Fritzel’s. We watched what was left of the game around other disappointed Illini fans, then decided to drown our sorrows in a few bars on the way back to Canal and then went on home.

Wednesday January 2
That was pretty much it. Monte and I got our showers and were on the road by 10:00AM. On our way out of town I took a picture of a billboard we’d all been referring to the whole weekend; it was a Pepsi billboard with Britney Spears next to the words “The Pride of Louisiana” (she’s from LA in case you didn’t know), however, the “P” in “Pride” had been painted out with hilarious results.

Long story short, there was confusion on which road we needed to take to get back to Missouri – not Destine, Florida – but 11 hours later we were back home in O’Fallon, MO. Weary, but happy to have gone.

Ok, that’s obviously enough, so I’ll see you next week!

Space Monkey X