The NOLA Trip: Leaving Potomac

Okay. Before I start getting into the craziness of New Orleans, I guess I should outline how we got there.

To be perfectly honest, I’m no longer certain whose idea it was to make New Orleans our destination. Andy and I had been talking for some time about making a road trip, possibly in order to celebrate our first year of legal drinking.

The usual places were brought up and quickly dismissed. New York’s too familiar. Vancouver’s too cold. San Francisco’s too far. Las Vegas is too tacky. And then somebody brought up New Orleans. The food, man. Bourbon street jazz. Cemeteries and voodoo and streetcars and liquor. Man oh man.

Being trapped as I was in the urban hell of Seoul during the planning stages of the trip, I guess I may be forgiven for spending such a ridiculous amount of time researching restaurants and bars and jazz clubs.

As it happened, I just barely made it to the States in time. I was on a waiting list for a program in which volunteers escort infant orphans to adoptive parents abroad. My flight came through just in time, and I made it to Dulles International only the day before our trip.

Man what a trip that was. 23 hours in Northworst Airline purgatory, clutching a baby who had just starting getting her teeth.

The day of, I woke up at 6 in the morning, partly because of the jet lag, but mostly because of the intense excitement. I was a bit dismayed to find that my back was hurting pretty severely because of the combined effects of the flight and a little problem I was having with spinal disc pressure. I took a handful of Tylenol, showered luxuriously, and started to pack, a rather ridiculous process of pulling things from my suitcase and stuffing them back into a smaller travel case.

Later in the morning, Andy and Mahmood arrived. Man oh man. I hadn’t seen them in months. It’s been pointed out countless times by better writers than yours truly, but there really is nothing like seeing old friends. I was grinning like a maniac when I opened the door for them.

I’ve probably written something about this before, but Andy and Mahmood, at first glance, are just too perfect. You could have picked them out of a movie or varying fashion magazines.

Andy, in his disheveled goofiness, was and still is an embodiment of apple-pie Americanism, in its most positive sense. I’m talking about the kind of quality that Abercrombie and Fitch try so desperately and artificially to convey. In high school, I once commented on his love of Rage Against the Machine: "What possible reason could you have to rage against the machine?" A friend standing next to us agreed. "Andy, you're the poster boy for the machine. You're what the machine wants everyone to be."

"Shut up," said Andy.

Mahmood, as anyone who knows him will testify, looks precisely like the intelligent law/history student who you just know will end up with an internship at the Heritage Foundation, accompanied by a great deal of admiration disguised as disgusted mockery from his ‘liberal’ friends (And for the record, yes, he did end up with an internship at the Heritage Foundation).

We sat down for some breakfast and respective sections of the Washington Post. Then we finally piled into the car with luggage and fresh banana brownies (courtesy of my sister). Giggling like schoolgirls we drove off to pick up Lauro.

We found him in front of his dentist’s office, impeccably well-dressed and well-groomed. I would soon find that Lauro always appears this way. On multiple occasions, we would wake up bleary-eyed and puffy-faced with hangovers of the most shit-faced variety, only to find Lauro looking more or less perfect. You’d think he dry cleaned and ironed his t-shirt and boxers in his sleep.

I hadn’t met Lauro before the first day of our trip, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we hit it off more or less immediately. I didn’t give this much thought at the time, but in retrospect, it was extremely lucky. You can start bitching and sniping at your best friend after only a day together, so a week-long road trip with a complete stranger would have been excruciating. Fortunately, Lauro and I were strangers for maybe all of two minutes.

The four of us first drove to a Starbucks for some much-needed caffeine. One of the million things I love about the States is the huge serving sizes of coffee. Believe it or not, Starbucks in Korea serves three sizes: short, tall, and grande. So it was, pathetic as it may sound, a minor thrill for me when we walked out with a wealth of coffee in venti cups.

That’s when the trip really began, I guess. We got onto the freeway pretty quickly, and I popped in one the many CDs I had burned for the trip, with songs organized by category, ie Speeding Ticket Rock, Acoustic, Chill, Martini Lounge, Frat Party, W Party, GQ Rock etc. I’m such a male Bridget Jones it’s really kind of disgusting.

It was a beautiful winter day, the kind where the sun is out and the sky looks really high, and the cold outside is really just a great foil to the warmth inside the car. It was, I think, a pretty good preview of all the great things to come.

We were sipping strong coffee, there wasn’t too much traffic on 495, and Buena Vista Social Club was playing on the stereo.



More later.

The NOLA Trip: An Introduction

Shortly after the four of us had been seated and given our menus, a pretty, smartly-dressed blonde waitress walked up to our table.

“You guys can take as long as you'd like with your menus, but I just wanted to let you know that we've got a nickel martini special for lunch,” she said.

I blinked.

We had gotten into our beautiful hotel room very late the night before, around 3 am. Being too exhausted after the long drive from Atlanta to really go out, we had mixed a couple of drinks in the room, chatted for just a bit, and fell dead asleep listening to Lauro's Oakenfold CD playing softly. We slept a bit late the next morning, but we were all still understandably woozy.

To make things worse, with the combined effects of my jet lag (from a 23-hour plane trip only three nights ago) and my cold medicine hangover (from a cold contracted during said trip) I was feeling pretty loopy.

Consequently, I was a bit confused by this bit of information the waitress had shared with us.

"I'm sorry, I thought you said you have a nickel martini special?"
"That's right."

Okay. Starting get my bearings. A 'nickel' martini must be their cute way of saying their martinis cost 5 bucks. I eyed the bar to the left. It was obviously stocked with only top-shelf liquor. I could vaguely make out the lovely blue Tanqueray bottles. Mmm. So 5 bucks for a martini didn't sound bad. Pretty damn good, in fact. This was, after all, a hotel restaurant.

Lauro and I had spotted it while walking through the lobby on our way to a quick morning stroll around the block for a breath of air and a cigarette while Mahmood and Andy finished showering and getting dressed. Normally, neither of us would have been particularly excited about a hotel restaurant, but this one had touted enough accolades (Esquire Magazine's Best New Restaurant of 2002, Food and Wine Magazine's Top 10 Best Hotel Restaurants List) that we decided to give it a shot.

"So your lunchtime martinis are 5 bucks? We were actually going to just order a bottle of wine."
"Nope, they're 5 cents apiece."

The waitress smiled patiently.

I tried to detect a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Or maybe some condescension towards these college kids who were obviously tourists from up North. I honestly tried. Nothing in the voice but honest good humor, and maybe just the tiniest bit of amusement.

I looked around the table at the boys, who were similarly dazed by this bit of information.

"Um, ok," I said, trying my best to sound like a suave, comfortable diner accustomed to being pampered with ridiculously low-priced martinis, instead of the stuttering freak that I was rapidly degenerating into. "That sounds great. I'll take a martini."

We went around the table specifying our preferences: gin or vodka, straight up or on the rocks. Mahmood, of course, ordered water with a wedge of lime.

I was expecting little more than a couple of olives just barely moistened with a drop or two of nicely chilled gin. I would have been satisfied with that. I'd gotten worse at bars in New York, and those drinks were a hell of a lot more expensive than a nickel.

What we actually got were monster-sized martini glasses filled so completely to the brim with perfectly mixed gin and vermouth (this was one of the few places where I ordered a martini and had the good fortune to receive something more than just cold gin) that we actually had to slurp some off the top before we could reasonably pick up the glasses.

We looked at each other and grinned.

That was the beginning of lunch at Rene Bistro, the first of a number of memorable meals in New Orleans during our winter road trip in 2003.


More later.