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 Honolulu Lite. Extra.  Charles Memminger |
Big Easy is a nice
break from paradiseEarly Sunday morning on Bourbon Street in New Orleans' French Quarter has a strange Western ghost town feel to it; the balcony-lined canyon mostly empty and the feeling hanging in the thick, humid air that something bad recently happened here. Also hanging in the air is the vague aroma of stale beer and, well, throw up.
In fact only seven hours before I had witnessed thousands of drunken revelers careening though the streets, sucker punching police horses and expelling lager onto the street from their overfilled plastic glasses and equally overfilled esophagi. Jazz, rock 'n' roll and blues blasted out of every door and window, mixing into a bone-shaking white noise that promised atrial fibrillation to anyone who stood in one place too long. In other words, it was a normal Saturday night in the Big Easy, where streets are closed to vehicular traffic so that the intoxicated may lurch from club to club in relative safety.
As I watched the surging madness on the street -- stuffed literally gutter to gutter with inebriates -- from the balcony of the Seaport Cajun-Creole Cafe and Bar, it was a mystery to me how former Hawaii state senator Milton Holt had managed to get himself arrested here in 1993 for public drunkenness. That must have been quite a feat.
But on Sunday morning, the bodies have been dragged away and regular old sober tourists walk the sidewalks. The Old West feel is heightened by a passing carriage drawn by a mule or donkey or something along the equine line.
What I don't see and haven't seen, since arriving in New Orleans for a conference of newspaper columnists, are street people or the so-called "homeless." As a tourist destination on par with Waikiki, you'd expect to see at least one disheveled person pushing a shopping cart.
I stopped to discuss this with a heavyset black cab driver wearing a gray beard and blue cap.
"They cleaned them out," Estavan Carter said.
As he and his cab-driver buddy, Robert Percy, explained, the city apparently made sleeping on the sidewalk illegal, hustling tourists for quarters illegal, pushing shopping carts down famous streets illegal ... basically making every bum-related activity illegal.
"And they convinced the stores not to sell cheap wine," added Percy.
I suppose that when you have 20,000 drunken tourists roaming the streets, you don't need the homeless to add any atmosphere.
Neither man seemed bothered by the political incorrectness of the situation. In fact, just a few yards from where their cabs were parked, antique stores were selling replica "negro lawn jockeys" and "Aunt Jemima" salt-and-pepper shakers. That didn't bother them, either.
"As long as people treat me with respect, I treat them with respect," said Carter.
IT TURNS OUT that Carter's son, Estavan Jr., and daughter-in-law, Tristan, are in the Army stationed at Schofield Barracks, although his son currently is deployed to Iraq. Estavan Sr. seems incredibly easygoing for a man whose son is half-a-world-away fighting in a war, and whose pregnant daughter-in-law is half-the-world-away the other way in Hawaii. No sweat. Life in the Big Easy.
The Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau could learn a few things from New Orleans, like, allowing tourists to walk around the streets with alcoholic beverages probably isn't a good idea. It's kind of unnerving to see people walking out of hotels carrying "Hurricanes," a particularly lethal booze concoction that makes the Mai Tai feel like a kiss on the forehead.
In the French Quarter, "barkers" like 21-year-old Tasany Lazard hold up "3 for 1" signs trying to coax visitors into particular bars. The trick to getting people into your establishment is to have great live music, lots of alcohol and lovely "barkers" like Tasany waving signs. The trouble is, most of the passing young men seemed more interested in Tasany than the establishment.
I entered the Famous Door club, where one beer cost $5.25 and two beers cost $5.25. So even if you only want one beer, you can't get one.
The Famous Door is famous because a lot of famous people have gone through its door and their names are written on a board by the door to prove it. I could give you names, but what's the point? Think of a couple of famous people. Yes. They were there.
Inside the Famous Door was a white kid singing blues and rock and playing saxophone with his band, the Unlucky Dogs.
Brandon Foret wears tennis shoes and a T-shirt and stands on his toes to hit the high notes. He just turned 21 but sings like he's Stevie Ray Vaughn's little brother and most of the women in the Famous Door are in love with him. I sat next to a woman who could have been his mother, who said, in a very non-motherly fashion, "Oooh, I just want to adopt him!" The band launched into "Play That Funky Music White Boy" and Brandon belted out a soulful sax riff that caused several women and a few extravagantly dressed young men to swoon. Definitely funky.
There are a lot of churches in New Orleans, but the best Sunday service is to be found at the "House of Blues" Gospel Brunch. While chowing down on biscuits and gravy, grits and jambalaya, the aloha-shirt clad Flint Cavaliers made a lot of converts of the crowd by performing a type of rocking gospel apparently saved only for the musically devout. We were told they were "just back from Hawaii" but drummer Marcus Peterson confided to me later that the Flint, Mich., group had never been to Hawaii and, in fact, had picked up their blue aloha shirts in Kentucky.
"They're more comfortable than regular shirts," he said.
TAKING AN open-air trolley out past Loyola and Tulane universities and through the "Garden District" punctuated with the type of large, gracious southern mansions you'd fully expect to be there, I came across another Hawaii connection.
At Camillia Grill, world famous for being a plain old diner serving great cheeseburgers and breakfasts, I found Debbie Samoson eating a waffle the size of raft. When we had dispatched our prodigious entrees, we rode the trolley back to town where I learned she had lived in Hawaii for six years and married a local boy, Lance. They now live in Austin, Texas. She was attending a convention of nurse practitioners, prompting me to make the ill-informed comment, "When are nurses going to quit practicing and just get to work?"
We talked about the difference between tourist areas like Honolulu and New Orleans. We came to the conclusion that you need places like New Orleans, with its casinos, liberal drinking policies, politically incorrect antique stores and incredibly diverse (not to mention, loud) music as a place to occasionally go wild. You need places like Hawaii to kick back, relax and enjoy the beauty of the place. Every person I talked to in New Orleans said they wanted to vacation in Hawaii.
So, as tourist destinations, Honolulu and New Orleans both have their points. But it's not surprising that the people living in one love to visit the other, but can't imagine actually living there.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com