Our hotel is the St. Louis, a nicer place right off Bourbon St. It
tries hard to be nice, but is misses by much on some aspects.
Particularly, I'm impressed that the lady checking us in manages to
try and charge more than $100 too much. Whatever: as we roll in with
a large cooler full of alcohol and 2 book bags, I suppose we're not
ones to complain.
Heavy drinking with pauses for tasty Cajun food ensues through the day
and into the night. Particularly intoxicating is the hand grenade. A
registered trademark of the Tropical Isle bar, it claims to be New
Orleans' most potent drink. I doubt this upon tasting the sweetness
of my first one, but it seems more honest as I feel my lips go a bit
numb and start to taste what just may be Everclear. After I pass out
for an hour back at the hotel, I'm no longer prepared to argue.
Depressing is my first and last trip to a strip club. I'm drunk and
don't want to argue with what everybody else seems to want to do, so I
find myself in Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. Strippers have one of the
saddest jobs I can imagine. It's got to rob someone of their sense of
self to smile brightly and enthusiastically wrap your legs around some
old man's face for a dollar as your job. A dancer asks us if we'd
like lap dances with the same tone of voice and lack of emotion that a
waitress asks if you'd like a refill of coffee. $1,000 and the loss
of your dignity get you a bottle of Cristal and 2 dancers in a private
room for an hour. I'm ashamed to have even come in and really happy
that we don't stay long. Definitely left a little bit of my dignity
in New Orleans.
Speaking of sketchy things I've never before seen, there's a creature
here that sounds just like the "rodent of unusual size" in the movie
"The Princess Bride." Called nutria, they were supposedly imported
from somewhere to eat an overabundant plant species. With no natural
predators in their new home, the ~2-foot-long rodents flourished so
much that one can now apply for a license to hunt them. For permitted
nutria hunters, turning over the tails to local authorities earns you
$3 per, and the rest of a carcass can be sold for ~$0.50 to an
alligator farm. "Nutria hunter" is definitely towards the more
interesting and toothless end of the spectrum of jobs.
To be honest, some of the time becomes a drunken haze. A vivid memory
is meeting Bret's friend's sugar daddy. She's found a chubby guy 5+
years older than her, and we see them pull up in one of his 3
Ferraris. Apparently, he was the DJ for some rap group called the No
Limit Soldiers. Maybe his rap name was Chunky Cracker? I'd see
similarities between her dating an older guy and what the strippers
do, but it'd be extremely rude to point that out:)
Late night is drunken attempts to see how many hotel pools we can get
into. The first one we attempt is easy, but it's the only place we
succeed. A later attempt does get as far as Bret's buddy Trey, who's
in school to be a sheriff so he can do whatever he wants, picking a
lock to get us into a courtyard, but wrong courtyard: it doesn't
connect to the pool. We make it through the night without destroying
anything too important or getting arrested, although it's very
reassuring to be committing what is definitely trespassing and
possibly breaking and entering with somebody connected enough to law
enforcement to have a fighting chance at getting us out of any problem
we might have.