By Beauty Damned

What's Done is Done

The story may have been told before, but that's not going to keep me from telling it again. About five years ago Darcie was living in New Orleans. I was living in Medford, Oregon and had a good job working for a criminal defense lawyer. I was 21 though, and I was a little tired of what was shaping up to be my life. I wanted something different, more exciting I guess. I contemplated moving to New Orleans. Judging from Darcie's emails, it sounded like a blast. We corresponded heavily and I yearned to move there. I had this fantasy of New Orleans - of this amazingly mysterious place that I'd only read about in Anne Rice and Zora Neal Hurston novels.

Then something really unexpected happened. I fell for this guy from New Jersey. He was a Chippendale Dancer passing through Oregon and the ironically driven hands of fate brought us together. I won't say how. I'll save it for my autobiography, but it was one of the more bizarre relationships in my dating career. He was nothing close to anything I'd ever even thought about, but before I knew it, he was asking me to move to New Jersey. Why did it sound appealing? No freaking idea. Looking back on it now, I think I must have been mildly insane. All my friends referred to him as "the Chipper." In Oregon I had my own apartment with a veranda and a swimming pool and a gym and nice laudry facilities. I had a good job and friends and my family nearby, and everything was beautiful. Why would I leave it all for some oiled up guido from New Jersey?

Then another unexpected thing happened. A friend of mine named Sue, a lawyer, and also my ex-roommate, told me she had a friend who was a partner at a firm in New York. She said that she could get me a job. And she did. Well, she got me on the phone and email with this lawyer, and before I knew it I was practically hired. He'd never even seen my face but he was sure enough that he said I should come to New York.

I packed up everything except the big furniture. Loaded it all up into my little white Toyota Echo and drove off with my mother who was brave enough to escort me, across the country, to New Jersey - a completely foreign place where I'd never set foot in my life - and went to live with a man that I had only spent a total of a few weeks with, in his apartment, which was fucking depressing. He turned out to have severe emotional issues and problems with pills and steroids. Not the best times. I can't say I didn't have a feeling that things weren't going to turn out peachy. Needless to say, I tired of his shit pretty quickly. My job was my only salvation. My days in midtown Manhattan, working with normal people, was my only escape from him. Every night when I got home it was another drama. Sometimes he was functional. Sometimes not. One night, when he was behaving particularly dysfunctionally (no details are really necessary, it was just never pretty when he flipped out), I packed all of my stuff back into my little white Echo, and I drove away in the dead of winter, in the wee hours of the morning to a hotel, where I stayed that night. The next day I bought a map and started driving towards New Orleans. I got there about three days later. I didn't rush. I enjoyed driving in the car by myself, through the snow of the NE and down into the temperate southern states that I'd never before seen, listening to the Ramones and Emenim and Dido and an incredible mix cd that Darcie had made me for Christmas. I was so thankful that I had enough money and lots of cds to listen to.

I called my boss in New York from Mississippi on Monday morning and told him I wasn't going to be in. Maybe not ever. I cried when I heard his voice because I felt so bad. I'd never left a job like that. Such an irresponsible act. But I didn't know what else to do at the time. The Chipper was out of his mind and I didn't feel safe. I had no friends, no family in New York. Only that fucking job. There was nothing else for me to do. By some incredible grace, my boss understood that. And he told me to come back any time and he would welcome me. That was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. One of. There have been so many others.

So I went and spent two months in New Orleans with Darcie. Living at the Cotton Mill apartments on Poeyfarre St (spelling? WTF?) and doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I took full advantage of the opportunity to have the time of my life. I worked a temp job at an insurance defense law firm and made enough money to live my partying lifestyle. We ate at great restaurants, got into VIP lounges, saw shows from the balcony at the House of Blues and threw beads off a balcony on Bourbon Street, went to fancy parties, strip clubs, jazz clubs, and enjoyed every minute during the day, staying at luxury hotels, wandering the french quarter, tipping the breakdancers and musicians, playing nickel slots at Harrahs, staying up until ten in the morning and sleeping until seven in the evening. Kathleen came to visit. My sister came to visit. I know you're dying to ask if I showed my tits. Everyone asks. No. I didn't. And neither did Darcie or Kathleen or my sister. We were all very composed ladies. Except for that one time when I mooned somebody...

We felt like veterans of New Orleans by the time Mardi Gras rolled around, we were already getting burned out on the party life we were living before Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras was almost an obligation at that point. I feel like we were able to see it from a different perspective than most visitors, just because we had so many friends there and little tiny roots already planted in the ground. I love New Orleans. I knew distinctly when it was time to leave there, but I've always dreamed of going back to visit. I ultimately ended up coming back to New York and have been here ever since. But New Orleans was still one of the most fun, educational, amazingly unique places I've ever been. It's sad to me that it had to change in this tragic manner. It was once the playground of so many dreams and whims and demented fantasies. Now it is broken. I pray that one day it resembles what it was. Certain parts of the history of New Orleans are irreplaceable, but at the same time those things are memorialized in the minds of all who had the chance to be a part of its former self.

This city will rise again.

From the Balcony on Bourbon Street

A view of downtown New Orleans

Me in the Yellow, Darcie in the Blue (Sorry! I know it's not the best angle!)

Kathleen's Funky Butt

Me on the right, Kathleen on the left

Kathleen looking radiant with her crown of beads

One of the things that affected me the most about New Orleans, besides what an endlessly captivating place it is, was how underprivileged it was. Darcie and I took a drive to the West Bank one day to rent a U-Haul and we saw things that, even in the ghettos of New York and Los Angeles, I had never seen - in terms of destitute conditions. Project buildings in New York are depressing. Project buildings in New Orleans were depressing and unbelievably desolate. I guess the difference is that in this city there's so much going on that no matter how bad things get, there is a socialization that takes place and an environment outside of the ghetto that encourages people to think about better options. On the West Bank it felt like there was no hope. It felt so far away from the ecstatic energy of downtown New Orleans. This was the land of the lost. It was obvious that the schools had no money at all. They were boarded up and the signs out front were misspelled and the projects looked like prisons.

Even during the Mardi Gras parades you could see the division in race and class as high school bands marched and performed, completely segregated. There is a huge divide. I've seen assholes on the internet all over the place, hating on the victims of Hurricane Katrina, using racial epithets and feeling justified to make blanket statements about the way that people have reacted to the disaster and about the social condition of many survivors. It angers me, how in denial people still are about racism and how unwilling to admit that we have a responsibility to these Americans who have received no restitution for the crimes their race has endured, especially in the south. It amazes me how ready some people are to judge and generalize based on certain negative incidents that should not in any way reflect on all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, nor even the majority of them. The same ignorant Americans were ready to slander muslims for the actions of a few after 9/11, and today they slander the victims of Hurricane Katrina based on the shitty actions of a few. It's really dispicable. All of it. And being racist doesn't help. I never stop feeling shocked that there are people out there who are so openly racist and don't feel the least bit of contention about spreading it around.

Regardless of these haters, I will always think of New Orleans as a place that taught me so much, hosted me as if I belonged, and inhabiting a people and a spirit unlike any other. Yes, there has always been an air of sadness in the social conditions of blacks in the south, but there is also a rich culture that deserves love and respect.

Posted by Maria at September 9, 2005 08:47 PM | TrackBack