New Orleans Day Three

Here is the third installment if my travel journal from my 1999 trip to New Orleans. When I look back on the trip I really recall it a lot more fondly than when I wrote about it. Time really does heal all wounds, although I would love to have the $3,000 I lost on the trip back.

But then, that would be true for a lot of things.

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Saturday May 29.

The show goes poorly for yet another day. My expectations were that we would come here and break even, or come close. We're not even close and this is turning into the financial debacle of the year. Over two days we've taken in about $400, and we've made more money than most of the exhibitors in the place. I'm going to have to ship almost everything back, and that sucks. This show was reasonably well promoted, so I'm not sure what to blame the poor attendance on. Even Adam West was wandering around scratching his head. He walked up to our table and said “Where is the crush? The crushing crowds?” which made sense, but just barely. I find myself in complete agreement with another exhibitor who said that if something didn't’ save this show on the last day, it would be a long time before New Orleans ever saw another comic book convention. We spent most of the morning playing You Don't Know Jack on my laptop.

The lack of business has become a distraction for me and I'm finding it difficult to enjoy what is easily the biggest party city in the world. I took a side trip into an area of the city on Magazine street which was the home to a bunch of funky shops. This is a little antique shop area off the beaten path. I wandered into a place called the House of Lounge which turned out to be a “Distinctive Lingerie Store” and not what I was expecting.

That night, we ventured back into the French Quarter looking for a place to have dinner. Travis has a narrow spectrum of food that he will eat, so we wandered from place to place until we found someplace that would serve something other than seafood, cajun or Creole food. We wound up at a place called Original Papa Joe's on Bourbon street. The food was good, I had a dish of gumbo while Bob had the jamblaya. I wouldn't put this on the top of my list of places to eat, but I wasn't disappointed either. Up the street about a block is the Court of Two Sisters, a place which came highly recommended. The weeks business has, however, made the prospect of eating there very dim.

Venturing back onto the street we come face to face with the unbiqutos shouts of “Show us your TITS!” and a shower of beads descending onto the streets from the balcony above. I had always thought about this little ritual as something that only happened during Mardi Gras but apparently this happens on a nightly basis and picks up some steam on the weekends when the crowds are big. We stand and watch for a while, I thought about trying to buy some beads, but as I said before the total lack of business has distracted me to the point of becoming a buzz kill. This is what happens when you sign on to own your own business. You make a bad decision and it follows you for a long time. Believe me, it takes a lot to distract me from a street full of naked breasts, that should give you an idea of my frame of mind. Not that I didn't notice them, however, just that I wasn't into it.

What I was into, but didn't really sample, was the various slurpee-style cocktail bars lining the streets. New Orleans is a 24 hour city with an open container law that allows you to carry booze up and down the street as long as it isn't in a glass or aluminum container (all the restaurants serve booze in plastic cups so you can just get up and walk out with it.) Its probably the best and worst place in the world for someone like me. It was probably a good thing that I wasn't feeling well, otherwise there's no telling how much I might have drank.

As we walked along Bourbon street the night before, Travis commented how it seemed odd that we hadn't seen any vermin yet, no cockroaches or rats of any kind. Well, that streak ended today when Travis saw a huge cockroach run onto the sidewalk where we were standing. He stomped the little bigger with his giant, steel-toed boots. When he lifted his foot we were shocked to discover that the thing was still alive. It had been pretty much crushed from the head down, yet it waved its little cockroach legs at Travis like it was flipping him off and saying “Screw you, skinhead. I'm gonna crawl off and breed a million more just like me. One day, I'll own you and this town.” It crawled off on two legs yelling for a little cockroach medic. A few blocks down we saw a rat big enough to put a leash on being chased by a voodoo witch-cat from a churchyard a few blocks away.

Needing a place to pee Bob and I wandered into a bar that looks like it was set up inside someone's living room. Outside we could still hear the hoots and hollers of the “show us your tits” crowd but I still wasn't into it and was just happy to have a place to pee. We walked back to Cafe Du Monde for more beignets and then we caught a cab and went home.

I wish I had come here on vacation, because I would be having one hell of a time. Right now all I can think about is trying to cut my losses and getting home. It occurred to me that the rental car we got has been basically sitting in the garage unused because we've taken cabs everywhere. I've spent money stupidly before, but that was knowing that it was going to be stupid going in. I keep coming back to the fact that, if this convention hadn't happened I probably would never have come to New Orleans, but if I can't enjoy myself, what's the point of coming.

I found myself looking for the Queen of Actor (or whatever) again, but she was nowhere to be found. I wanted to hold her accountable for her bogus fortune, but I guess even that little bit of retribution wasn't in the cards. When we got back to the hotel, both Travis and Bob heard chicken death-screams, vindicating me from the day before when both of them said I was nuts. I should have known there was something weird going on when I saw that the hotel gift shop sold Voodoo for Beginners kits. Maybe that's what went wrong with the Big Easy Con, bad hotel mojo.

This may not be the last comic convention ever held in New Orleans, but its probably the last one we're coming to.