On Why Some Should Never Be Paid To Travel.

An essay for a class I'm not entirely enrolled in. Anyway, it's due in a week and thought I'd let strangers nitpick and insult me in preparation of my teacher.

I am in the vestibule of the Belmont train station. It’s morning. Half the people watching the televised weather report either don’t understand what the man is saying or simply don’t care. They already know it’s cold. It’s the kind of cold that only Midwesterner's appreciate and so everyone is racing to the turnstile so they can be first in line to board the train. There’s an unspoken rule about being wedged against the doors during the morning blitz: at every stop during rush hour you are expected to let commuters in or out by physically stepping in and out of the train yourself. And make no mistake, when you step out to let someone in you had better be willing introduce a little violence into your morning to get that spot back.

Today is the beginning of a break from all of that, though. I’m being sent to New Orleans to help support the company I work for.  From here on I will refer to them as Quigley’s. Quigley’s hauls in about sixteen-million dollars annually at their flagship in Chicago. Though there are three in the metropolitan area alone, where they are sending me to, it turns out, is a fresh market, and if only to give my anxiety a little nervousness, the only store in the entire state of Louisiana. I don’t want to get into the specifics of the job or why I have zero interest in this business but let’s just say the whole thing manifests itself, to me, as stress.  

I purposely arrived at the airport four hours early since I haven’t flown in almost a decade. I have a travel buddy they’ve assigned to me whom I am actively trying to evade. We’ll call him Dale. Dale is in his early twenties and still in the same phase of morning-after confusion that no doubt predated his decision to drop out of school and accept Quigley’s job offer in the first place. A decision so insidious to his well-being and free time his own personal and vapid mind is clearly in jeopardy. His head is shadowed by a colorful and poorly cultivated Mohawk that seems more like a parody than a fashion statement and when he finally arrives to check our bags in he is wearing a pair of chrome colored glasses that are styled like Jackie Onassis. The sky is overcast and I’m already regretting my decision to leave. 5663

But so anyway I lose him with some serious crowd-maneuvering gymnastics and with not a little help from a woman who embodies what Midwestern people call “congenital obesity.”  I navigate through the maze of turnstiles to check my bags and I find that the employees aren't nearly as unpleasant as everyone makes them out to be. The woman helping me is strangely patient as I discover that the piece of paper I have is not a boarding a pass and is s**t in terms of useful to her. I hold up the line and hurriedly search my phone for anything resembling a bar-code. As I walk away and head towards the terminals I notice a woman staring right at me. She turns to the man on her right and makes some comment I can only faintly hear, something about intelligence. The man she’s speaking to is clearly not a member of her group, but still�"in the way that people who have just witnessed a crime will do�"drops all pretenses and explains to her with serious interest, “That boy ought to at least buy a dime’s worth.” I think he’s referring to my intelligence.

Traveling took more out of me than I thought it would and it proved to be quite the b***h to keep my scent clear of the feckless Dale so I only jotted down notes in a time-frame style. They are what follow:
 
1200h: The plane lands at New Orleans International Airport. My seat was closer to the planes exit than Dale’s so I made some serious haste to avoid any uncomfortable conversation on the way to the baggage claim. Humidity is suffocating and I can literally feel the hair on my head start to stand up. I write down a reminder in my notebook to maybe buy a hat. I've been turned down by three cab drivers after asking if they take credit.

1400h: I was called by the store and told that I have to come straight to work and that my hotel would be taken care of and not to worry about checking in.

0300h: I found a cabby on Canal St. who insisted that his credit card machine was broken even though it had a smiley face and said Welcome across its marquee. He reluctantly drove me to Kenner where I would be spending a week before transferring to a hotel in the Warehouse District.

0340h I lost my hotel reservation. New Orleans' humidity is offensive and I'm taking it as a personal affront. The hotels concierge feels guilty for all the trouble I’m about to subject myself to and so has given me strict directions to maybe feel free and use the lobbies couch until morning but to please not put my feet up or lie down at all because they aren't that kind of hotel. The same piano melody keeps looping. This, I think, is what insanity sounds like. The lobby is totally deserted. I don’t feel entirely uncomfortable taking a nap, which given my aversion to sleeping in public is almost inspiring. I think this may have more to do with my exhaustion than anything else, like e.g., when you develop such high-grade fatigue that literally saying the word fatigue triggers a foul taste in your mouth. I decide to walk down the highway towards 24-hr IHOP to get coffee and see if I can’t find a vacant room somewhere. The coffee was almost as bitter as my waitress.

0500h. I came back to the hotel to collect my luggage and was stopped by a hyperactive shuttle driver named Marcel. Marcel is a middle-aged black man who described himself as someone who is “visible of opportunity” and said he had heard about my trouble from the concierge and wanted to help. I decided that he was either a) too stupid to be dishonest, or b) totally f*****g dishonest but too stupid to actually get away with it. And so I decided to let him help me.

0700h. Well, good old Marcel actually came through. It turns out there were a few flight attendants with early flights to catch. I got a room on the third floor that he himself actually cleaned under the condition that I personally hand-write 

a letter of Thanks to his manager for hiring him. I admire his modesty and make a mental note to start that letter.

 
When I was first asked if I was willing to travel to New Orleans to support Quigley’s French Quarter property I was practically salivating. A carousel of images spun through my mind: Alligators, gumbo, alligator gumbo, whiskey, all things Cajun! Everyone had their advice on what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be. Between the mandatory overtime and over indulgence the only advice I’m willing to follow is that of the alligator tour. And I can assure you, intentions are grim.

I was initially sent out to develop a team that would process shipments for the stores’ sales floor that the store had hired externally. Externally, they failed to mention, means teenagers from the Ninth Ward who have never stepped foot in a proper business and whom I assume have never actually stepped foot in a business they were getting paid to be in. This, of course, is probably an overstatement of their inadequacy, one that no doubt reeks of racism but is entirely unintended. It was all rather dark and I don’t very much like thinking about them. Pun absolutely not intended. Seriously. Given the paucity of direction, I was always in this fugue state of Where Am I Supposed to Be, or the more familiar, How Do I Get Out Here. I couldn't help thinking about my hometown during my stay in the sorrowful South.
`
 I grew up in Des Plaines, Illinois, aka the City of Destiny. It’s a town in the northwest suburbs of Chicago that has zero in terms of charm and a remarkable knack for being mocked by pretty much everyone who lives in it�"and understandably by the high-cost towns surrounding it�"for contributing nothing to the North Shore other than the original McDonald's and two trailer parks. The larger of the two trailer parks not surprisingly always has this No Vacancy sign, which is strange even to the locals because when you consider the population of the town and it’s median income (which for the record is somewhere around $55,000) and realize they, no shitting here whatsoever, share parking lot space with a used car dealership and a high school just doesn't add up no matter how you do the math.  Also, no one ever actually seems to know anyone that lives there. And the Original McDonald's�"being the only thing getting its attention paid per diem, comes from the pockets of those whose idea of coffee table decor is the 1986 ed. of Mastication and the History of Fast Food. And, if you want to start judging by where a*s meets thigh, a rather obsessive/compulsive interest in actually eating the food, which has caused many smoking-pipe discussions on where the proverbial line gets drawn between interest and addiction, which is the very same line I can’t seem to identify in my own personal interests since I often get confused as to which side I’m even on, or if maybe the line gets a little crooked and I’m trying a little too hard to keep my vessel planted firmly on both sides and homogenize the whole fiasco one Big Mac at a time. Culture like this inspired the whole move to Chicago in the first place and this makes New Orleans that much more dangerous for me.
 
Now like most people I've been around bars and drinking in general, but this place is on a level that, as a Midwesterner, I’m just not used to. The Hilton in Kenner I was staying in shared parking space with the airport which was a cluster f**k and a source of confusion for all but at least it meant easy cabs. I found a thin Romanian cab driver with a rubicund face named Mareuz to drive me to work. He seemed nice albeit a tad annoying since every time the light turned green he would shout out “Let’s spin the rubber!” I couldn't tell if his eagerness to help me was of his own good nature or if the makeshift webcam with the bright pulsating red light hanging from the Plexiglas had a very big, very involved boss on the other end. Maruez was a veritable encyclopedia and kept shouting historical facts through the divider�"which I thoroughly enjoyed. He asked for me to call whenever I needed a cab that could do anything (on my second day he personally carried my backpack to the hotel’s lobby from the car port which Why I do not know) but lost my business since he just wouldn't let me smoke like the other drivers did. Selfish, I know.

And so anyway, as we finally pulled off the highway and got into the French Quarter proper he turned to me and said “Look man, no matter what you do avoid bringing the beer in the street, and no matter how big her tits you must always be checking for the penis.” I tipped him eight dollars and walked the last three blocks to work.
 
The thing about tourist in places like this is that they suspended all attempts at any kind of modesty. It’s of like zero surprise to me that during these times when you're surrounded by overweight tourist who've clearly had one too many shots added to their Hurricane (an hard umbrella drink meant to rewire your brain) you never once saw a cameras flash. I don’t want to invest too much emotion into this whole thing but their bovine behavior was where I think I lost my nerve. Make no mistake about these people; the butter that drips from their food onto their face is of no concern, a situational blunder that gets ignored by the mouths that do not close. I would almost posit that they use it as a lotion since so many people eating the street vendors’ food showed a surprising degree of negligence and/or disinterest in their physical appearance. And I do not by virtually any means imply that they should be more vain, no, just aware of their own physical presentation. This is a city, not an eating competition. 

 

Author's Note

Positively unfinished. I'm only just posting it because I think we could all use a break from the typical suicidal poetry. And because I have no direction and keep jutting off on every possible tangent.