From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:47:18 1991 To: wordy@Corp Subject: Part 44 of CAA #2 BORN TOULOUSE #44 in the second online CAA series by Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY) New Orleans, LA July 14, 1988 copyright 1988, Steven K. Roberts The energy is building: Journey 3 is mission, passion, obsession, religion. As we make our last swing through the Southeast, pausing to frolic in New Orleans with 15,000 sweaty librarians, I am loosing a barrage of proposals like seductive cruise missles into the hotbed of high-tech industry. And the results are trickling in, changing the bike beyond recognition. The Oki cellular phone is installed and ready for interfacing with fax, modem, and the 256-point crossbar switch. The components of my satellite station are arriving, frightening me with their combined weight while exciting me with communication potential. And a Createc dual-channel digital oscilloscope and signal computer is on board, obsoleting my previous mobile laboratory equipment and opening a 20 MHz window into the new electronics. Yeah, it's starting all over again. I'm pouring my passions into a blender and reaching for the puree button... * * * But the bike will still be there when I write to you from the BORING places. Today I want to talk about N'awlins. There's a sort of melancholy about this city, you know, a strange melancholy that excites the lusts and touches the soul... and every descent from our balconied French Quarter suite into street-level turmoil makes the keyboard fingers itch. Stories lurk in the dark eyes that glower from shadows, in the antics of children marked by street life, in the crenelated faces of those who were here to watch the first electric streetlights sharpen their familiar shadows. This is a rare thing in post-video America: a city's identity proclaimed by every street, every guitar lick, every face, every shot of Jagermeister swilled before breakfast in Molly's Irish Pub. And in the deep sultry night the rhythms of cultures mingle. Stand at Toulouse and Bourbon and let them shake you -- a thrumming confusion of blues, rock, jazz, Dixie, and a passing nuclear-powered automotive rap machine with enough oomph to perform CPR on the driver. Swirling through the violent acoustic crossfire is a motley fluid of drunken humanity, and if my metaphors seem mixed... it's no accident. So is the reality. People! Blacks from the projects, street-wise and native, white eyes darting between the blues man's golden sax and the tan legs that lure imaginations past the hem of a passing red miniskirt. Tourists of all flavors, ambling with too-deliberate ease along a path that avoids the ruffians -- eyes alert to the approach of hustlers, drunks, or the titillating shopfronts of commercial naughtiness. Sixties carryovers, ponytailed, attitudes revealed less by hard-rock style than by a sort of Rockwell hardness index of the eyes. Hawkers, luring people into doorways to glimpse nude women writhing on smoky stages. Cops, jaded and confident, frisking passers-by with a glance and arresting the city's descent into behavioral entropy by their very presence. The rich, too well dressed, slumming. The bottom out-of-sight poor, eyes pleading, slumped against dirty walls in visible dejection. Con artists, accosting the naive. Musicians, easy in their element but disturbingly ordinary-looking off stage, commuting the side streets with battered instrument cases. Mimes, eloquent and graceful, filling cash boxes with the wordless poetry of dance. Hookers swaying practised hips under the lacy incongruities of Frederick's. Librarians on furlough from the conference, walking in close wide-eyed groups in this place far from Kansas. Ordinaries, who could be up to the most hienous of evils and never show it. Gays, simpering down the street with hands on each other's bottoms. Cabbies lending a touch of hard-edged New York raucousness with ready honks and impatient driving styles. Whooping college students, hell-bent on having a good time, clutching their paper-cupped Hurricanes while getting down in coarse parody of the bloods who lend authenticity to what might otherwise degenerate into a Daytona Beach. Old coots, young nimble black break-dancers, lost drunk white high-school kids, businessmen recovering from business, toughs on missions of darkness and terror, brain-damaged druggies slurring curses, and the gaudy human echoes of Mardi Gras. And above all, such a variety of bodies and faces that no stroll through the maelstrom can fail to yield arousal, disgust, longing, fear, awe, nostalgia, and laughter (sometimes... all by the same person.) * * * Jackson Square. Jax Brewery. Cafe du Monde. The shops and museums of Royal Street. The city by day is awash in tourism, an economy based on T-shirts, biegnets, ceramic masks, artwork, and endless variations on the almighty souvenir. For 75 cents, you can knock back an "oyster shooter" -- a raw gob of glistening gray flesh swimming in a dollop of Bloody Mary mix. At Mr. B's Bistro, the bartender muddles an Old Fashioned while keeping up a running commentary on local food, music, and shops. At Molly's breakfast, fogged penitent eyes and tortured foreheads mark the hung-over. It's all here: portrait artists competing for sittings, joggers in the park, calliope toots under rising columns of riverboat smoke, sunsets over the cathedral, fleshy old women in ghastly pastels clutching beaded handbags, a pricey gallery of Lennon and Erte, bored horses with flowered hardhats standing before idle buggies, coarse propositions muttered to any female on the street, a capella falsetto soul scatting, mingled languages, heart-pounding glimpses of flesh and ecstasy, ripoffs, good deals, brutal humidity, and interludes of iced cappuccino to cool the sweat. And what delights me most in all this is that it knows itself, celebrates itself, procreates itself like a giant mutant amoeba. New Orleans is its own species, not a homogenized amalgam of malls, billboards, and suburban conformity; this city rejects the ordinary by seducing it, assimilating it, and changing it forever. * * * Our home for a week has been the Olivier Guest House on Toulouse Street -- a rambling place of eccentric hallways, surprise staircases, gardens, balconies, old N'awlins flavor, and a slowly-evolving family of international guests (mainstream American tourists, as a general rule, prefer the predictable carbon-copy motel motif). This place has taken on a sense of home -- not only because of its period furniture and shambling authenticity, but also because of its familiarity: I stayed here when I pedaled through four years ago. Our bikes have their own room -- the original parlor with its 16-foot ceiling, bronze chandelier, and blue velvet wallpaper. And an unexpected bonanza: they are guarded around the clock by guest house personnel and a New Orleans cop named Aaron... a source of colorful street stories if ever there was one. In this place where madness and booze mingle without discipline, it's comforting to have a friend on the force. The Olivier is an oasis -- a quiet retreat from the city nestled in its very midst. We lay around, skinnydip in the pool, stroll in the courtyard, neck on the balcony, frolic in the canopy bed, spy on the neighbors, play with the four kittens stumbling cutely around our room, and gaze out over the city's rooftops... all without the nervous excitement of street life itself. Yet with a few dozen steps we can switch modes and join the revelry, making the change with no more effort than idly fingering a TV remote control. The difference, of course, is that the TV is video and the city is an intense, involving experience that assaults all the senses. * * * Speaking of video, we've had a healthy dose of media exposure lately -- with CNN and CBS both splaying us across national screens within the same week. But last night's adventure added a different perspective to the CAA video collection... The bike stood parked against a blue wall. Behind glass, a mostly male crowd gawked and grinned; in the room, Maggie and I reviewed our loosely-choreographed script and took last-minute swigs from emergency Hurricanes. A wall of monitors and control panels was alive with images: the bike, a layer of swirling mist, color bars. Then the music started... ZZ Top's "Legs." Bouncing in hot pink, Maggie danced into the camera's view. In exaggerated motions, she mimed her astonishment at encountering the Winnebiko -- bending low to study it, eyes wide and innocent, hips rocking to the beat. The music moved her, and the men behind the glass risked not a blink as fabrics flowed under hot lights. Knowing well her body language, I could feel the growing tension... I chose my moment, and danced into view. "Who are you?" asked my eyes, and we looked each other over, circling like animals in season, touching in tentative intrigue. "She got legs -- she knows how to use them..." I knelt and felt, hands gliding over calves and thighs, eyes teasing, fabrics playing peek-a-boo. The dance grew ritual, erotic, its outcome obvious in every touch. I made my move. Climbing aboard the Winnebiko and fastening my helmet, I pointed at her and then curled my finger into a "come hither." "Moi?" questioned her look. "Vous!" answered mine. She stepped astride my lap, leaning into me as the music shook us -- video capturing in silhouette the lovers meeting, the first kiss, the bodies moving, the power, the beginning... and then the bike rolling slowly out of frame to leave only colors, guitars, desires, and an audience stunned by this unexpected blend of technology and erotic rock... * * * Yeah, it's hard to leave this place. I write now at a worn table in Molly's, dark walls around me plastered with yellowed business cards dating back to the 60's. The clientele is varied: hungover Smiley asleep against the pay phone, a woman in too- tight leather, a street-scarred longhaired Asian, a scattering of tattooed regulars. Another perfect omelette just met its match, and I alternate between coffee, water, and Jagermeister while trying to capture something of this town. And oddly, I find I don't want to go. Cities usually chase me away with noise and danger. This place has both in abundance, but I think there's no hurry... and I certainly don't miss the hot smelly bus and its load of clutter. I know this little place down on Decatur where the jambalaya can make you crazy... Cheers from the road! Steve