As I sat bleary-eyed in a hostel in New Orleans, I listened to two French men tell me how they had sneaked into a hotel room on the top floor to see the sunrise. Only when the bartender became suspicious of their crumpled T-shirts and picture taking did they decide the game was up. Time to move on to the next one. New Orleans is barely a place, barely real. It appears as one giant stage for all the worlds’ performers to step onto and begin to create an endless bank of unbelievable stories. To think that the circus never stops as the rest of America continues about their day is incomprehensible. This is a place far from anything real.
The only reality you can find there is from books and films. We did everything. We wandered hotel lobbies, watched the slow destruction of the mind and body through gin and jazz, and sat by the river to listen to the distant sound of trumpets as people paraded through the street followed by a personal marching band. We looked at art while surrounded by men in waistcoats and women who refused to shave their legs. After whirling through the city, dizzy with Bloody Marys, we entered the paranoid casino to assess the repetitive music, the constant neon and the dark faces of weary players. Everyone in this city is a player of some sort. We took on the role of the Europeans, each realizing a small part of home in the cafe culture and quaint streets.
But if the people make the city, then this one stretches far beyond the realms of geography. New Orleans sits as a series of contradictions and chaos, vaguely organized by concrete and tramlines. Even the buildings resemble the jigsaw of people, with piles of rubble and broken roofs standing, quite shamelessly, next to famous 30’s hotels. The poor sit on pavement sides next to the rich who fill their mouths with fresh seafood.
I cannot begin to piece together the destroyed reality of this city. It was everything I wanted it to be but everything I thought impossible. As a woman told me, while looking at a painting of the devil running down a street holding a bottle of liquor and a bag of money, “You can find him here honey.” That very same night, in the center of Bourbon Street, we watched the hopeless plight of a Christian group as they paraded a huge cross through the hoards of drunken tourists. Literally, you can see the embodiments of good and evil in New Orleans. Like the American dream, it has everything you could possibly want: you can be anyone, anything, everything.
I stopped trying to make sense of it all after a few hours and let my imagination run away with the other dreamers I passed on the street. I could so easily have been sucked in by the rich man in the bowler hat or the chef who offered to gamble the night away with me. But now, as I’m at my desk with my feet firmly on the ground, I realize that staying there any longer would have dissolved my dreams to an empty pocket and a dusty saxophone.
Lucy Cheseldine is a English international exchange student studying English literature. Her column runs on Tuesdays.
