The airport smells like red beans and rice with a healthy kick of Tabasco. We take a stretch limo because it is less expensive than taking a cab. From our tinted windows we look at New Orleans, which is poor and crumbled and dirty, or at least the part between the airport and the hotel. The driver is playing Staind and Linkin Park on the CD player and takes no fewer than eight cell calls while we all stare out the window and wish there was alcohol in the limo’s bar. I see beads strewn onto a barbed wire fence of a parking lot.
We pull up to the Ritz Carlton and crawl out, three people wearing business wear and black leather jackets and me with my Tinkerbell t-shirt and bootcut faded jeans. I pretend that I am the female Douglas Coupland, rock star writer extraordinaire, and Lori, Don and Esteban are my entourage. I try out the word ‘peeps’ in my head and decide that even my inner brain voice sounds like the whitest girl in the world.
> The hotel has a bouquet of cut flowers on every flat surface. Fleur de lis, fleur de lis, fleur de lis, I chant it to myself in my head. We take the elevator up to the lobby on the third floor. There is a table there with a floral arrangement of cut lilies and peach roses. I can smell it thirty feet in any direction. Mozart is piped in from somewhere and I dismiss the rock star writer fantasy and instead decide that I am Marie Antoinette. Showing humility by carrying her own laptop.
Our room is lovely but swims in patterns of strange colors. Magenta and pine pastoral scenes on a yellow background. There is a phone in the water closet, with a data port. The very high bed has a down coverlet over a down comforter over a feather bed. I lay on my stomach to study the map and feel as though I have fallen into a souffl’. There are six pillows propped against the carved wooden headboard. I read the hotel’s brochure, including the spa services, detailing the morning and nightly housekeeping. I learn that the sheets are 350 count, the toiletries are from a boutique in New York, and everything is available for sale in the lobby gift shop. The comforter has a corporate sponsor.
Followed by Esteban’s admonishments to ‘Not go wandering!’ I go wandering and find the St. Charles trolley. It is primarily empty this early in the day. A woman gets on with a gaggle of young boys. They are going to the zoo and she asks the driver to tell her when she needs to get off. She takes a picture of the boys on the trolley. I ask her if she would like me to take a picture of her with the boys. She declines but thanks me several times for offering. I can tell I’ve just been too friendly again. What is automatic at home is seen as abnormal or miraculous behavior abroad.
A man gets on with his’ something. Woman friend? Wife? Mother?’ taking her by the arm and helping her to a seat four up from me. He’s wearing a blazer and shirt unbuttoned too far, showing a middleaged chest with sparse black hairs. The hair on his head is slicked down, not wet but more purposeful. Hair tonic, I think, or Dapper Dan Hair Pomade. I can smell it from where I am sitting, spicy and masculine, like leather stored in cedar. He then sits next to her, then moves adjacent to her and then flits to the seat in front of her. He’s too anxious, too uncertain. She doesn’t move, just stares out the windows. She reminds me of an emaciated Rosario from Will & Grace. Her eyebrows are gone and she’s drawn on precise slashes with pencil onto her stony countenance. The man takes a picture of her and she does not move, simply stares out the window.
Everything is so bright in New Orleans, like an overexposed negative. There are some trees that are twisted with beads from last year’s Mardi Gras but they look antique, irradiated by the incredible light. I begin to wonder if the air is filled with powdered Mardi Gras beads, blinding me even with sunglasses on. I walk down First Street, up Chestnut, through garden paths and carriage lanes, past houses that must have twenty foot ceilings. I stand for fifteen minutes at the garden gate of a two hundred year old home, staring through the plate glass at the entry hall and the graceful curve of the stairwell, watching the Cajun ghosts run up and down. Fleur de lis, fleur de lis, fleur de lis.
I catch the trolley back to Canal street. This time, it is quite crowded, so I make my way to the back and sit next to a man who is wearing far too much cologne. I begin to wonder if everyone here wears too much cologne or if my sense of smell only turns on when I travel. Perhaps at home it is deadened by the smell of cow manure, paper mills and aging cheese? Or perhaps they eat so much spicy food that it deadens their own sense of smell? I don’t know. There is trolley grease and cheap cologne and smoke.
At the very end of the trolley by the door sits a punk guy, roughly my age, wearing knee high Doc Martens and pants with one leg ripped to his inner thigh. He is sitting very confidently. For a second I think he works for the transportation department because he owns this trolley and he surveys these people but he does not, he is just a passenger for $1.25. The trolley stops and lets on some folks and misses some others. They try to run for the trolley but the driver ignores them. The punk guy yells ‘HEY YOU’VE GOT PEOPLE RUNNING BACK HERE!’ but the driver does not listen, does not stop. He shakes his head and sighs. He has obviously given up responsibility for the trolley. There is a loud bang in the back of the trolley. It was hit by a delivery van, stopping the motor. The driver gets out and walks to the back to tinker with it. ‘Good thing we’re not on a hill.’ He sneers, which strikes me as insanely funny, so I give him a sardonic smile. We then exchange looks and I can see that he decides I am one of his people right then. Not crazy, not stupid, just cool. Or at least this is what I imagine he thinks. When I try to exit out the rear doors but don’t time it well and the trolley restarts, he shouts to the driver to stop again, just for me, and she does. Then he gallantly opens the door for me, his torn pants rippling in the breeze. I disembark from the trolley and feel as though the entire punk movement has appraised me and found me worthy. I feel like a hard ass punk fat grrl, ready to kick some ass, get something pierced, and then hate society. Then I remember that I’m staying at the damn Ritz Carlton and my punk rock girl sneers, turns away and walks off toward Bourbon Street.
The air is andouille. The air is gumbo. I walk by a beignet shop and smell a Parisian confectionary. I walk by an oyster bar and smell the ocean. I walk by a cigar shop and smell Cuba.
That evening, Esteban and I go to a corporate dinner, as he is here on business. We have a salad that looks like a mini structure, a child’s fort made of lettuce Lincoln logs and pungently sharp cheese that makes your cheeks hurt. For dessert, there is a dense little ball of chocolate ice cream and a shortbread cake with chocolate chocolatechocolatechocolate mousse, the kind that you can actually taste the fermentation of the cocoa, so infused with chocolate that it makes you somewhat high, as though you’ve just had sex. That is covered with a chocolate ganache and flecks of gold that sit on top like crumpled stars in a midnight sky. That is New Orleans, right there, chocolate on top of chocolate on top of chocolate with stars they’ve taken from the night.
We go to sleep between two layers of feathers, feeling like overfed baby birds. I dream that beignets are really deep fried baby down pillows. The next morning, I wake up early and get dressed, ready to explore the other direction. Esteban admonishes me to be careful and chastises me for not bringing the charger for my phone.
I take the first set of elevators down to the lobby and am greeted by the scent of roses. The mountain of peach roses and white lilies in the lobby. I walk through the room and I am Marie Antoinette, swimming through flower petals. I step outside into the insanely bright morning and blink, walk to the corner of Canal and Dauphine and turn toward the French Quarter, keeping an eye out for my Punk Girl along the way.
