While here in purgatory, a.k.a. Houston, Texas, sleeping on strange futons, waiting to be let back into New Orleans, I’ve had the chance to really enjoy depression. And depression sometimes triggers my strip club reflex.
“Oh hell no, man. You kidding?” asked my driver and fellow evacuee, Ray Bong, a New Orleans musician I’ve previously described in print as “A 50-year-old ‘psychedelic guru’ who sweats gallons, twisting knobs on analog toys you’ve never heard of while huffing nitrous oxide gas from a silver canister.” Perfect description. Originally from El Paso before graduating from Rice, Ray Bong found refuge in Houston after Katrina, and claims to know every orifice of the city’s strip club scene. “But no way, man. I just got back to where I was before all that happened,” he reminded me, “back where I was before my life fell apart.”
Two years ago, Ray was robbed in Mississippi, while working on the road, staying at a hotel alone. She knocked on his door at a weak, lonely hour, demanded Ray’s car keys at gunpoint and drove away with all Ray’s business records, plus the entire collection of rare analog instruments he never leaves home without, and $500 worth of road trip intoxicants. One questionable lady had erased part of Ray’s life in a way not unlike Katrina has many of our friends and neighbors. And it wasn’t until we first met Ray, two Jazz Fests ago, that he’d finally re-purchased all his rare musical toys from pawn shops and off eBay, and replaced his car with an exact copy. “So I ain’t never messin’ with girls like that, ever again,” Ray pledged to me, here in Houston.
“But it’s my new job, Ray. I have to write about going out in Houston at night!”
Ray raised his palms: “I have free baseball tickets. Write about the Astros, man. I would get in trouble at a strip club,” he claimed in reference to his Belushi-like intensity when really partying. “At best I’d spend too much money…”
“But no! That’s my angle here! We’ve been getting all this free stuff in Houston, right? New Orleans discounts? Well I want to write a piece about going to a strip club—or a massage parlor—and when they solicit us for lap dances we tell them, ‘No, we can’t really afford it—just need to blow off a little steam but–yeah, evacuees—yeah, New Orleans…’ Then just see what happens, if they’ll buy us a drink or… whatever.”
We ended up at the Astros game. Houston’s rollback stadium feels so unlike Wrigley Field, where I attended the only baseball games of my life, as a child. A lot of palm pilots now. Raspberries. Even Wi-Fi. I never enjoyed sports, but the sports reporters were my only friends at the newspaper where I worked in Florida; the only reporters allowed to attend work in shorts and flip-flops—meaning, to me, that they’d won this game of life. And Wi-Fi must make the reporter’s jobs more enjoyable, and I was able to enjoy the slow game as background music.
Ray generously kept the intoxicants flowing, to insure a good time, in case we can’t have another one together again for a while; Ray drives home to Jefferson Parish tomorrow, to live with only electricity, water and mosquitoes, in Lafitte, Louisiana.
So he procured the best seats I’ve ever enjoyed at a sporting event. So close, a coach-versus-umpire argument was actually exciting! Then halfway through the game I realized Texas were playing my home state, Florida! I borrowed a gold cross pen from the woman in the row behind us, and enjoyed wearing the Sport’s Reporter’s flip-flops, taking many notes on the event (rather than watching it). I decided I must interview the stadium DJ, whoever played those two-dozen, 4-second drum-breaks from songs by Bjork and Peter Murphy. I scribbled in my pad: fans fight for foul balls like tourists fight for beads during… And again I missed home.
Finally (expensively!) drunk and maudlin and bored, I commandeered Ray’s cell phone and began dialing 504 numbers that hadn’t worked since Katrina—close friends and neighbors I still hadn’t heard from. Our last New Orleans moments had been spent at my photographer friend Jonathan Traviesa’s first-ever solo exhibit. As we failed to kill a keg of Dixie Light on its rickety front porch, the gallery’s owners boarded its windows. At 10:30 p.m. that Saturday night, the thermometer in Ray Bong’s car read 91-degrees. Johnny still wasn’t answering his cell phone.
But Rusty! “Holy shit! Rusty!” I shouted over the roaring baseball fans. “Rusty hang on! I’m in the Astrodome! Fucking loud!”
“In the Astrodome! How the fuck! What?”
“Hang on!” I ran up the loud arena steps past the vendors into the bathroom, in search of the quietest place to gush. Past an unusual number of stalls, I ducked into a small nook—still not quiet enough but “Man! Rusty! Thank fucking god! It’s so good to hear your voice!” Into the breaking cell-phone I explained that no, I wasn’t in the Astrodome, but Minute Maid Park, formerly Enron park. Rusty told me about his job in New York. In New Orleans Rusty waited tables, despite his degree from Vassar. A lot of post-Katrina New Orleanians have landed on our feet in new pairs of shoes.
But we both sounded pretty dumb now, Rusty and I repeating each other’s names and just laughing a lot—until I noticed my loud little nook featured a changing table? “Oh, Rusty. Hang on.” I popped my head out into the bathroom. Only women frowned back. “I have to call you back!”
I rang off and walked fast, out to the line of waiting police.
The night ended with a 4-2 Astros loss, and a mere dream about what she might have done, half-price, Since you’re from New Orleans baby… poor, poor baby…