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   Jazzfest
Friday, April 30 1999
It was my first morning in New Orleans, and how better to start it than with a little marijuana and an Abita, a local New Orleans microbrew from a brewery founded 1986 (during the height of the microbrew revolution, back when my parents were still swearing by Beck's Dark).
Kim and I decided to walk down to the nearest grocery store, "the funkiest Whole Foods" franchise in America, to get a few basic items. On the way, I marveled at the serene neighborhoods through which we passed. They most reminded me of St. Louis, Missouri (it must have been the river culture showing), but there was also a distinctly southern thing, and a distinctly eastern thing as well, both of which rather reminded me of Charlottesville. Those feelings were based largely on things such as the feel of the air, the vegetation, the architecture, the size and shape of the trees and the depth of the front yards. Of course, there was also a tropical quality to the environment, with a few isolated palms, bananas and other warm-loving trees amid the oaks, sycamores and magnolias. But for the most part the vegetation was familiar, not very different from that of the coastal plain of Virginia.
All the New Orleans locals have been quick to assure us that the cool mid-70s temperatures we've been experiencing is a welcomed, but unseasonable, aberration. Indeed, just a few days before, temperatures had been in the mid-90s with high humidity. A cold dry air mass had just passed through, making conditions closely resemble what I'd just left behind in San Diego.

(By the way, I think it's important for me to mention that I haven't counted myself among the many who love the San Diego climate and want to live there all the rest of my life. Frankly, I'm gradually finding (as my father once found) that the San Diego climate is a terrible bore. It's often just a little too chilly for comfort, but it's never an interesting sort of cold, and it's never hot enough to make me want to go swimming. I'm missing heat, humidity, and yes, even occasional periods of bitter cold.)

Beyond the vegetation and the dwellings, the fair-grounds region of New Orleans was completely unexpected demographically. You could never tell whether you were walking through a black neighborhood or a white neighborhood. Most of the houses were big and fancy and in some obvious stage of decay. The people passing by on the sidewalk were both black and white and evidently from all economic levels, and all the people, even strangers, were friendly to us as we passed.

We walked past a large crumbling building containing some sort of Catholic school, and the students, absolutely every one of them whom we could see in the gated recess area, were black. And they weren't just black, they were dark Caribbean black. They were all in uniforms: the boys in loose blue pants and the girls in checkered skirts. A group of the girls were up in the front of the recess area, leaning on the iron gate separating them from the festive streets of New Orleans. They called out to us, "Ya'all goin' to jazz fest?" "No, we're going to Whole Foods!" Kim assured them.
Now I can't say that this particular Whole Foods seemed any more funky than any other I've seen, except (perhaps) for the decidedly un-funky Whole Foods in Charlottesville, Virginia, the one whose discouragingly picayune corporate underbelly had been revealed to me in real time by Leah Hale back when she was my housemate. I will say this however; I was treated to quite a show, a simple patch of New Orleans texture, as I passed through the checkout line. The guy running the register was busting a quiet little hip hop vocal groove while the guy doing the bagging smacked out percussion with his hands upon his chest. And, at every appropriate moment in the rhythm, the overweight older lady standing behind them would moan out a short little high-pitch "Ohh!" It was so subtle, had I not been stoned I might have missed it entirely. And it was delivered so effortlessly, so completely without pretense, I had the feeling they barely knew they were doing it themselves.
On the walk home, every corner had its own little post-modern medieval street scene going on. Mostly these consisted of little black boys with cardboard signs advertising parking for the day. The going price was $15 for an allegedly "safe and secure" spot, though I did see some eyeball-to-eyeball capitalism going on between rival parking spot hucksters and some places could be had for as little as $10, though I don't know if they were exactly "safe and secure." That's an important consideration in a city known for its crime rate as much as for its food and music. (Just during our stay, someone broke into the rental car being driven by Charlotte and her boyfriend.) Then there was the plump middle-aged white woman seated out in front a crumbling remnant of a gas station shouting out (in the most horrendous voice you can imagine), "Ice cold wawrter! Get you some ice cold wawrter!"

The original plan for the bulk of the day was to walk directly down to the nearby New Orleans fair grounds and lose ourselves to Jazzfest. But when we and the others made it down to the fairgrounds, diligently being guarded by multiple levels of ticket-takers, police, barricades, fences, and frazzled security personnel, I realized I didn't want to disappear into that black hole quite so soon. Jazzfest is, you see, one of those events where you pay your $18 up front to enter, and once you're in, should you leave, you have to pay $18 all over again when you come back.
Kim agreed with me that we should do something else for awhile instead. So we headed off to find her good friend Lisa L@tter, whose connections in New Orleans are so deep and dendritic one of us could probably get into Jazzfest for free if only we could find her. We ended up a wild goose chase, eventually ducking into a coffee shop just to use the phone. The guy behind the counter, assuming we were just some Jazzfest people eager to use his facilities and split, angrily yelled at us, "May I help you?" So I bought two iced coffees for three dollars each. It was highway robbery, but I have to admit it was damn good coffee.
We stopped back at Lindsay's and chowed down on some Psilocybe mushrooms Kim had stowed for weeks. We wanted the day to have a slightly stranger edge than it was likely to have simply by default. The last time I ate mushrooms of this kind was in 1987. Twelve years is a long hiatus for all-natural psychedelics, and it wasn't that I was even trying to avoid them during that time. I don't think about drugs unless they're right in front of me, and I've been known to take action to avoid their appearance.
We met Lisa L@tter along with a couple of her friends, a guy and a girl who I took to be a couple, out in front of the New Orleans fairgrounds. It's important for me to mention that not only is Lisa an occasional fan of this journal (and you should measure my writing about her accordingly), but she's also the progeny of a very influential New Orleans family, one whose tendrils reach into a large fraction of New Orleans real estate commerce as well as the oldest operating restaurant in the city, Tuj@gues. Lisa is an active girl with unflinching, matter-of-fact hedonistic desires and the means satisfy them. Today she was a force in dark sunglasses, usually with her cellular phone to her head, communicating in a sophisticated New Orleans Jewish drawl, sometimes merely place calls to other members of our contingent still within sight.


Lisa L@tter (those are my legs in the background). Note the cell phone at lower left.

Lisa took Kim and the other girl around to a spot where she figured they could, using the special advantage of their total of six breasts, get into the fest for free. We two guys figured getting in for free was a lost cause, so we entered in the conventional manner, paying up $18 each. The dude I was with (I forget his name) was in a super-mellow, euphoric mood, having taken a drug similar to Ecstasy. He kept telling me about the well-honed New Orleans party tradition, how the ticket lines move swiftly and how everyone is always in a good mood.
When we finally met up with the girls along the racetrack, they had a traditional New Orleans tale of corruption to tell. Not only had the fat white new Orleans cop enthusiastically let all three girls in for free, he'd given Lisa a few pointers about how to "fix" a traffic ticket she'd recently received. If you run in the right New Orleans social circles, tickets aren't paid or adjudicated, they're fixed. That means they simply go away, but the right social/financial strings must first be pulled. I love that sort of corruption. It's so gloriously third-world.
We wandered about the fair, buying $2 beers in great batches. If we were lucky, we'd get a big chunk of ice and a box with our beers. Otherwise we'd carry the beers around until they were warm and trade them in for cold ones as needed.
The music wasn't especially important to me. It was jazz or blues or vaguely rock-tinged hillbilly. It was just sort of there. I was far more interested in the people, their figures pressed improbably into a no-perspective medieval tapestry by the Psilocybin coursing through my brain. Periodically I'd see a horrendous deformity on someone out of the corner of my eye, but when I'd turn to look the deformity would disappear. That's as crazy as my "mushroom trip" ever got.
Eventually we found our way to "the Gospel Tent," which is always a big attraction at Jazzfest. I was rather hoping for some rootin' tootin' fire & brimstone, but it was all soulful sounds with a strong rock and roll influence. There was no call and response, no tears in anyone's eyes. It wasn't exactly Dinosaur Jr., but it wasn't very uplifting either. It seemed rather contrived, especially when they suddenly had a wedding onstage.
We ended up on the edge of a massive throng of people before one of the featured acts, Widespread Panic, which is apparently one of those new traveling bands hoping to fill the shoes of the Grateful Dead. You know the formula: endless space jams that may or may not be simply the guitarist taking an extra long time to tune up. None of that was interesting to me, but I was somewhat intrigued by the banners being flown by people in the audience, "bookmarks" in the crowd, if you will. These consisted of long flexible poles with various icons and flags attached. Evidently these were to aid people trying to track down their contingents. When your crew has such a pole, you need only tell your chums something like "we'll be under the Brazilian flag with the green fish and shrunken head." Another vision that I found appealing was a beautiful buxom girl with jet black hair and piercing light blue eyes. She was dressed in an off-white slip with pants on underneath and dancing like the neo-hippie she no doubt was. She was so undeniably beautiful that Kim brought her up to me later, without my having ever said anything about her.
But that girl wasn't the source of stress in Kim's life. Lisa L@tter was. Lisa was on what she claimed to be "synthetic heroin" which was making her "extremely horny" as she put it. She kept touching me, running her fingers through my hair and telling me how cute I was. I didn't see anything wrong with this at all. I think sexuality is an integral part of human nature and too often repressed. This was, after all, a festival in the craziest city in America and we were fucked up. Sexual overtones and undertones seemed absolutely appropriate in my interactions, even those not involving my girlfriend. So I was flirting with Lisa too, even encouraging her a little. I wanted to be her friend, and sexual subtexts can facilitate that process enormously.
But Kim didn't like what she was seeing. She took me on a walk to score some food and, on the way, filled my head with catty talk designed to discourage me from being the way I'd been with Lisa. I told Kim that I didn't care about any of that catty stuff and that she should worry about more important things. Somehow, miraculously, the issue died there.
At the food booths, I found myself craving anything and everything containing crawfish. I don't remember exactly what I ate; it was several different things, each with a Cajun French name and plenty of hot spices. As I inhaled the stuff I kept proclaiming "This is yumpster!"

I don't remember exactly how, but somehow we all eventually left Jazzfest and hit the streets and returned to Lindsay's, where a barbecue eventually happened. All sorts of people showed up, many of them somewhat older big wheels in the New Orleans art museum scene. Lindsay works at the New Orleans Art Center (or some such place) and has lots of professional contacts in that world.
A group of us sat around and watched one of Henry's 28 minute movies, featuring as props many familiar objects: a pretzel-shaped marijuana pipe and old beat-up pickup truck, among other things.
Kim and I ate some more Psilocybe mushroom pieces in an attempt to motivate ourselves and, perhaps, stay awake. They had no effect on me, but they made Kim into a bossy, indecisive tyrant, demanding that I follow her as she stomped about Lindsay's apartment, repeatedly changing her mind as to how she wished to spend the night. We ordered a cab, hoping to see some band at some bar, but it never materialized. But Kim wasn't content to stay indoors or even in the courtyard; she wanted to be out on the street where an uncomfortably cold night wind was blowing. It was about 3:00AM before we hit the sack. We slept on an array of couch cushions which kept shifting like continental plates beneath us on the shiny wooden floors.

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