Encounter (Part 1)

As the years pass without a visit back to the city where I was born and lived for the first 21 years of my life, I tend to think of it a little less often, except for when I read something about New Orleans in the newspaper or hear about it on TV. Often it’s not good news. But that mysterious old city on the Mississippi haunts my dreams of childhood and growing up. My formative years were spent there, for better or worse.

As I’ve written before, it is a city whose sights, sounds and smells can be frightening and appalling to those uniniatiated in the ways of the world, as I certainly was as a teenager. I’m not just talking about the infamous Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, but the whole of downtown New Orleans, with its misfits, miscreants, and other deluded and forgotten souls who wander in search of their place in the world, if, in fact, there is any place left for them. I’d come home and be depressed for days sometimes by what I saw and heard in the midst of that chaotic stew that surrounded Canal Street on all sides. I’d hurry along the narrow streets of the Quarter, my inquisitive 16-year-old self trying to absorb the lessons of the street. I wondered how the Lucky Dog hot dog salemen could stand dragging those big, heavy and hot metal weiners all around the Quarter; why people went in those sleazy bars with the come-on barkers at the doors; why legless men were sitting on the street selling pencils.

I wondered who could be living up in those upper floors of the old wrought-iron balcony-festooned buildings that lined the streets of the Vieux Carre as if in some exotic European quarter. I always imagined that was what it would be like to be in a foreign country. New Orleans was very foreign in many ways, and I knew it even as a teenager.

At the same time, I was drawn downtown because of the excitement, the noise, the bustle, the stores, the endlessly fascinating architecture, the crowds of people. But, again, I remember being frightened and giving a wide berth to the raving, drunken and belligerent people you’d occasionally hear shouting at the top of the lungs into the sky, cursing their own darkness, but I didn’t realize that then.

And then there were the chance encounters and mysterious people one almost always saw riding across the Mississippi on the Algiers-to-Canal-Street ferry. This was an adventure when I was young. The river was so wide that you really got the feeling of being away from the city for awhile, out there on that roiling, muddy water, watching big logs, driftwood, and other junk and detritis rapidly funneling downstream on the currents. Once, when I was in college, I rode that ferry and observed what was going on with one individual in particular, and was affected so strongly by what I saw and perceived that I wrote about it in my journal. I include that entry here:

(Continued)