"Last Stop"

The last weekend of June, John Brock and I flew to New Orleans to secure ourselves a place to live. Our prospects, which were diminished by the general housing shortage, were spread across the city and, lacking a car, we intended to reach them all via ferry, foot and city bus. Transportation task #1 would be getting from the airport to where we'd be staying: Dara and Tony's apartment. We emerged from Louis Armstrong airport, pillows crammed under our arms and carrying backpacks into the uncomfortably still early afternoon heat, our new enemy. A helpful airport employee showed us the bus route, and explained that the stop at Carrollton & St. Charles was as close as we could get to where we needed to be. Being frugal students, we were pleased to hear that since Katrina, riding the buses was free. After a half hour of waiting on an empty bus while the driver smoked a cigarette, we headed east towards town on Airport Drive. Slowed by vehicular congestion and frequent traffic lights, the bus was soon packed as we passed the Saints training facility and deserted strip malls. Descending from an overpass, I felt a startling uneasiness as everyone else onboard shuffled about and started to stand up. The driver confirmed my suspicions with a garbled sentence that unmistakably included 'last stop'.



Shit. We were jetissoned from our air-conditioned nest only to land in hostile pedestrian conditions, the corner of Tulane & Carrollton. To our right, Carrollton dipped under several arms of I-10, and we were otherwise surrounded by empty businesses and parking lots. The only active building in sight was a Burger King across the street. Being on Carrollton was good but who knew how far north of St. Charles we were? Not us. We walked over to the parking lot to where people appeared to be waiting for a bus. After a long, quiet fifteen minutes, it came to my attention that we probably needed to be at the stop on the opposite side of the intersection, where a crowd of Mexican and Latin American construction workers were huddled in the shade. Thankfully we never got on the Burger King bus.










Our new ride got us directly to St. Charles and we walked the remaining ten or twenty blocks with shaken confidence. We knew we couldn't get into Dara and Tony's until they got home from work but we successfully stashed our now burdensome pillows and bags on their porch. Overcome with an increasing thirst, we spent the next two hours on a failed search for cold drinks, finding a different environment at every turn. Calhoun Street, on the border of Loyola University, was a street whose houses' guts lay piled on the curb or in the yard and whose telephone poles had amassed plenty of phone numbers for 'STUMP GRINDING' and 'MOLD REMOVAL'. The iron gates of St. Charles Avenue's robust mansions silently mocked our struggle. Even Magazine Street proved only a mirage of stores closed either for the evening or indefinitely. We gave up and headed back, our adventure ending after pit-stops in Audobon Park's hot dirt and the air-conditioned loung of Loyola's student center.

Hours later, I was at the Maple Leaf Bar, nursing a beer while two musicians I admire (George Porter Jr./bass/The Meters and Russell Batiste/drums/funky Meters/Vida Blue) sat next to me eating, drinking and talking about fried chicken with a Zephyr's baseball commentator. I was speechless, silenced by the combination of fatigue and the euphoric shock of hanging-out with such legendary musicians in their "home". Even before the music started, New Orleans had proven itself as a place where both the unavoidable and the unexpected would befuddle, excite and revive my spirit - Patrick Fromm