Wednesday, June 22, 2005  

Bayou Style

In 1993, I had just graduated college with a shockingly useless degree and was spending six months driving around the country and living in my pickup truck. I drove more or less at random, and ended up making a wobbly circle around the US, heading from New Mexico down through Arizona, across Texas, and into the South before heading up the Atlantic Coast, into Canada, across the Great Lakes states and all the way to Washington, where the axle fell off my truck and a dishonest scumbag of a mechanic took all my remaining money.

I camped most nights, if you can call parking behind liquor stores and honky tonks "camping," but occasionally I'd do what I could to find more civilized digs. While driving through Louisiana and becoming increasingly disgusted with my own smell (at that time, an esoteric blend of Camel Lights and wet dog), I remembered that a kid I'd gone to that fourth-rate college with was from New Orleans. He was a crazy hippie, but I'd met his parents, and they seemed normal enough. They at least seemed clean enough to give me reasonable hope that they owned a working shower. So I rolled into town, found them in the phone book, and charmed my way into an invitation to stay with them for a couple days, even though my crazy hippie friend was at some "goddamned talking stick bullshit." They were kind and generous people, too much so, really. His mother thought my name was "Ted," and she was so nice, and fed me so many grits, that I could never find a polite time to correct her. So I went by Ted.

I'd been travelling with a co-dependent German Shepherd named Thelonious Mutt who manifested a whole rash of doggie dementia. At this particular stage of the trip, he'd decided to hide under my hosts' house, which was raised a foot or so off the ground because New Orleans tends to flood about a billion times a year -- it is below sea level and haunted by voodoo zombies, which always results in nasty, nasty weather. Anyway, try as I might, I couldn't get him out from under the house, so my visit kept getting extended. I felt a certain obligation to stay there and try to get the dog out, so I didn't do much sightseeing. Finally, though, I felt like a colossal schmuck for being in New Orleans and not seeing any sights, so I got my friend's mom to drop me off in the French Quarter ("Have fun, Teddie!" she yelled...) and I told her I'd get a cab home.

Well, not surprisingly, I ended up equally drunk and broke, since I didn't have much money and because the only thing New Orleans has more of than zombies is bars. I had about 5 bucks left, and I knew that wasn't enough to get me home, so I tried to find a cabbie that'd haggle. I found one, a crazy cajun motherfucker who looked like a greasy older version of Maynard G. Krebs, complete with pointy van dyke. Not only did he agree to drive me home for free, but he was so excited by the notion of a guy travelling the country with a dog and a truck that he offered to give me a tour of the "real" New Orleans. Thinking I was about to see some serious Angel Heart-style crazy black magic, I agreed in a heartbeat. What I got, though, was a tour of the toughest neighborhoods in town, where I saw boarded up windows, whores, and crack addicts packing Uzis. The trend at that time was for them to ride up on a mountain bike, rob you at machinegun-point, and then ride like hell back into the ghetto. Why poverty and drug addiction seems less "real" to me than zombies and voodoo, I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with my own shortcomings as a person.

So my beatnik cabbie is driving me around and talking incessantly, though I couldn't understand a word he said because (a) he was Cajun, and (b) he was drunker than I was. The only thing I understood was when he yelled, "Holy shit! Look at that!!!" And like an idiot, I looked.

What I saw was a gunshot victim, a very recent gunshot victim, spilling out of the front seat of a red car. His legs were still in the seatwell, but his torso lying in the street, covered with shattered safety glass. The top of his head was mostly gone, his brains splattered all over the place, and his face sort of caving into the vacant hollow of his skull. Skin flapped red and ragged at the edges, and his mouth was twisted in a painful-looking grimace. I noticed you could see all his teeth at once. Blood was pooling all around him faster than I would have thought, and even at night it looked black rather than red. One eye was open, and you could tell there was no soul left behind it. The cabbie drove by slowly, letting me get a lingering look before he took off like a bat out of hell, jabbering in crazy bayou French and smoking most of my cigarettes before dropping me back in the Garden District.

That dead and shattered body, falling out of that car, with its blood and brains and teeth was the single most horrible thing I've ever seen. It still shows up in my nightmares sometimes, and I never thought I'd see anything I could possibly call worse.

This weekend, I saw Star Wars: Episode III.

It's worse.

Friday and Saturday, I'm at the Portland Comedy Connection with Doug Stanhope, who's one of the only Real Comics working today. Sunday, I headline the Counterculture Show at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge. Come out and holla, yo.