| | Wally Gordon and the rest of New Orleans
I got back in to Terre
Haute from my Spring Break at about 6:30 this morning.
I had three options as to what I was going to do over SB08: (1) fly down to
Waco to find a place to live once I start my job, (2) go to Daytona, FL with
five of the guys in my chapter and drink beer on the beach for a week, or (3)
go on a trip organized though the Vineyard church with 16 of my Fraternity
brothers to New Orleans, LA and help rebuild houses for a week. I called the HR
lady at work with whom I do most of my talking about work.
Me: Hey Crystal, I was wondering when you wanted me to go down to Texas
to find an apartment. I have spring break coming up, but I have an opportunity
to go down to New Orleans with some of my Fraternity brothers to help build
houses.
Crystal: Oh, well just god bless your heart! We'll fly you down some
other time--you go do good work and you can deal with this stuff some other time. We definitely made a good choice in hiring you.
Me: Oh...awesome. Done deal.
The drive down was pretty uneventful. I learned that one of the new freshmen is the spaciest kid on the face of the planet. The number of times that we had to yell "GET IN THE FUCKING CAR! LET'S GO!" at this kid was obscene. Every time we stopped somewhere, we got held up by this kid. We told a lot of dirty jokes, etc--the standard roadtrip fare. Ended up getting in just after 10:30 central time. We stayed at a campsite set up by the Vineyard church in Kenner, LA (a suburb of New Orleans). Pretty standard stuff for camping--cots, sleeping bags, 30 dudes in a gigantic tent.
I found out Monday morning that I'd be working on framing a house for a man named Wally Gordon who is without a doubt the coolest crazy old Cajun guy I've ever met. His house wasn't very flooded by Katrina and the floods that came after Katrina. According to him, he had a gigantic Chestnut tree in his back yard which was torn from its roots by Katrina and smashed into the side of his house. His house was flooded a few weeks later by Rita, and virtually everything he owned was ruined after that. His entire home had to be demolished, which he was surprisingly happy about. He'd been wanting to redesign/rebuild his house for years. He's putting an elevator into his house, and when we asked him why, he said that though when most people look into what their life will be like in their 60s and 70s, they think that the might be in a wheelchair. He, however, knows he'll he in a wheelchair and is planning accordingly. Along with the elevator, he's also making all his doorways 4' wide so that he can fit said wheelchair through them easily.
Wally's best friend, Phil, lives next door to him. I noticed after day 2 that they both wore belts that said "Bandidos" on them, t-shirts that said the same with pictures of motor cycles on them, and that they both owned motorcycles. I asked Wally at lunch on Wednesday if he was in a motorcycle gang. His response: "No! I am not in a motorcycle gang. I am in a motorcycle club. It just so happens that some of our members have gone to jail for murder and drug dealing, which makes the police want to qualify us as a gang. I don't do any of that, I've never done any of that and I never will do any of that. The Bandidos ride together and party together. Beyond that, I don't care how anyone lives their life and I won't tell 'em how to either."
On Thursday, a guy I was working with named Mitchell and I were cutting out some of the rafters so that we could put in the chimney stack. We'd been up on the roof cutting away for awhile when I had to go down to the second floor to remove some of the fire-walling that was in the way of where the stack was going to go. Not twenty seconds after I had started, I hear "WHOA WHOA WHOA!" which to me means stop. Turns out that meant "Get the hell out of the way," because when I stopped, I got hit in the head with a hammer that Mitchell had accidentally dropped. It was only from about 7 feet up, so it could have been worse, but it still hurt like hell. I held on to a wall for a few seconds, and then decided to get back to work. Unfortunately, in my wooziness I wasn't watching where I was stepping and brought my foot down right onto a nail. It didn't penetrate too deeply, and I didn't hit a tendon or a vein or anything, but still. Ouch. It was at that point that Wally told me that I should go relax in his FEMA trailer, kick my feet up, drink a coke and watch some TV. It was at this point, sitting on his couch in his trailer, that I looked down and saw a hookah that smelled like double apple (my favorite flavor) and next to it, a big stack of Playboys. Wally Gordon is an American hero.
Monday and Wednesday night we went down to Bourbon Street. The first bar we went to was the Bourbon Cowboy, which had two things of note: (1) the beer was 3/$5.50, which is obscene given how expensive everything else on Bourbon Street is, and (2) they had a mechanical bull for drunk girls to ride. I've already been scolded by Kristen for objectifying women, but I mean, what am I supposed to do, not look? Yeah right. The number of bars that had downright amazing blues bands or rock bands playing was simply ridiculous. We went to a bar that was called, believe it or not, The Blues Bar. The band there was awesome enough for Cleve to want to buy their CD which we found out two days later was the biggest piece of shit ever made. It was entirely elevator music made on a synthesizer...gross. The only other bar that was special was the Old Absinthe House. It was the second time I'd done absinthe (for which a round of 5 costs $75, as Whit found out). I slammed mine down as soon as I got it...turns out no one else did. Whatever.
Tuesday we went to Tulane University. The first stop we made was at the Pike house there. We knocked on the door, did the whole introduction shtick hoping to get a tour of their house and maybe a few beers. Instead, we got this really shifty-eyed look from the guy who answered the door and were told "Yeah...we're doing uh...stuff with our pledges right now. You need to come back later." Hazing--awesome. We came back later and only the pledges were there, and they looked haggard as hell. We just opted to not come back. Way to go, Eta chapter. The nice thing about their house, though, was that it is right across the street from the best bar at Tulane, The Boot, where they had $1 beers and $0.50 well drinks. I took full advantage of this. Thursday we went to see the New Orleans Zephyrs, a AAA affiliate of the Mets, play the Nashville Sounds. It was pretty cool. I'm amazed we didn't get kicked out--we just heckled the center fielders and the guys in the bullpen the whole time.
Friday we went to the sweetest bar I've ever been to, The Boot. They had 48 beers on tap, and another 80 in bottles. The place was completely packed the whole night, and we met some Pikes from LSU who bought us all shots of whiskey after we told him what we were doing in New Orleans. Sweeeeet.
One of Cleve's cousins, Greg, is a dentist in New Orleans. Cleve had intended to just go see his family by himself, but after being told what we were doing down in NOLA, he demanded that all 17 of us come to his (gorgeous) house for dinner. He boiled somewhere in the range of 150-175 lbs of crawfish with corn, sausage and potatoes for us and it was, by far, the most delicious meal I had the entire week. Speaking of food, the one thing that really bothers me about the food in NOLA is the Po'-Boy sandwich. It's just a regular old sandwich except it's on french bread, and everyone down there flips their shit about it down there like it's the greatest sandwich ever made. I had one--it's not.
What really gets me about NOLA is how awesome and kind everyone is there. I didn't meet a single person who had a bad attitude about what had happened to them, even though they had every right to be furious at everyone and everything. One guy said "Yeah, after the flood I only had two feet of water--in my attic!" and then laughed his ass off about it. There's no way I'd have that good of a sense of humor about something like that. It's really an awesome place--I kind of want to end up there some day.
We also stopped in Memphis on the way back, which was an excellent choice. The guy whose van we took down there, Whit, is from Chapel Hill, NC and he refused the UNC/Kansas game. We got there right as Memphis won their game, and it was one gigantic party. Buddy, Whit and I got drunk enough so that the freshmen would have to drive the rest of the way, too. Awesome. We got back at about 6:30 this morning, and I didn't get out of bed until 5pm.
There are a ton of other stories about this trip. Just ask some time.
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