“There is a house in New Orleans, they call it the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, oh God well I know I am one.” -The Animals

This is it. The crescendo is behind me as I stand at the top. The grand finale and beginning of the end of this plan hatched many moons ago. Blessed and cursed, to be where I’ve been. Damn the beginning sure looks like the end.

Sit in the parking lot outside Angela’s a minute, let it all wash through me. The miles and mountains of creation and lands traversed like a prayer on the wind. Then leave the dry Texan heat behind, dust billowing in my rear-view.

Everything is heightened and running across my synapses one second at a time, but it’s like I’ve been here before, in a different life and am just now remembering the sensation. Nearing New Orleans and it feels like a different animal, this place. It feels a place bespelled. Before I ever even reach the heart of the city I’m on the verge of catching that fever, this Saturday night.

Almost forsake the whole damn place – parking is worse than freaking San Francisco. Round and round and round again over endless cobblestone circles flooded with foot traffic, blaring horns and obscenities abundant. Finally find a fifty dollar overnight lot, park the damn thing and hit the pavement.

I’ve no time this trip to explore the greater parts of the city, just a drive-by shot in the dark at the French Quarter and of course Bourbon St. I hit the Quarter first. Stomach rumbles…beef jerky and a Coca-Cola for breakfast. My kingdom my kingdom for a catfish po’boy.

Eat the aforementioned po’boy in a two-walled open air café, resembling many others on this block. It’s near five o’clock and the day walkers and nuclear family shoppers bustling through this shop and service part of town begin to head back to their homes and hotels, tuck the children in and give way to the madness awaiting upon the dusk.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” –Jack Kerouac

A palpable force of energy begins to creep into the warm air around me, with each intake of my lungs. I should really check into my hostel before I lose myself in the city. Head to Madame Isabelle’s House, twenty minutes southbound walk off the main scene and check in. I’m welcomed by a pink exterior, a turquoise interior, and a small Asian man.

Meet the crew that is holding court in the back patio yard, next to a concrete water fountain bubbling quietly against the chatter. A lot of these kids have been here for some weeks and there seems to be a high school like hierarchy among them, led by a tall blonde with wild hand gestures. Introduce myself and tag along for one bar on their guided pub crawl, and slip quietly back into the foot traffic solo. Team player I am not and Bourbon Street doth call.

Now Hollywood was pretty o ‘de ripe but N’oleans is downright putrid, like piss and burning garbage masked subtly by whiskey tinged vomit. Colors and senses swirl with reds and blacks and tall green plastic hurricane cups housing the puke juice and boys playing drums like an omen in the street, on crates for dollars and quarters.

Boom de boom de boom echoes and vibrates against the buildings and airspace already filled to the max with jazz, a chatterous uproar, and evening cicadas and crickets beginning their raucous choir. My guitar is across my back and I play three songs, but there’s no room for me in the din. Mayhaps today I simply listen. Welcome to the jungle baby, I’m gonna die. Cheers and challenge accepted.

There are people everywhere. Dodge gutters and various sludge patches – make my way down the length of Bourbon St. There are just so many bodies and the night has barely yet blossomed. Ask around and house bands don’t start til near 2 a.m. most places. It’s barely past 9 p.m. now. Let’s start this party with a bang…

Enter a dark a blue, low light tinted little joint on the corner, two walls open to the cross streets, three men on stage, tall fella on the stand-up bass, older fella, dark shades, grey salt and pepper close cropped hair on the drums smacking the snare tat tat tat, young fella greasing the mic in velvety lows and pure highs. Soul music and bourbon, neat.

Let the music take me and I sit on that bar stool for a two hour set, the next band’s through round 1 a.m. and I’ll be damned if I never did see the house headliner nor make it til’ 2 a.m.  I’d absorbed all I could possibly absorb and my wanderlust had me again and so I walk and walk down uneven sidewalks until my senses slow, my phone dies and I become lost in the night and my thoughts.

I should probably feel fear, but there is none. Only a mild sensation, like a phantom limb touching my shoulder, reminding me I’ve somewhere to be, that I have someone to be. Don’t pull me back yet.

I never do make it back to my hostel. I cross paths with a woman and a man. We walk for a time and the man eventually goes his own way. Talk for long hours at the woman’s home, well into the morning and wake suddenly on her couch, birds chirping, sun only just risen.

There’s a stark difference today, my mind sharp and completely clear, not just of the whiskey, of the clutter. Like seeing the real thing after knowing only the reflection thereof for a lifetime. Maybe I’m just happy. Or delusional from living in a van for six weeks – it could really go either way. Grab my sneaks and back to finding my damn hostel. I want the ten dollar deposit for my key back even if I didn’t sleep there.

Later I’d remember a parade with dragons and dancing and a voodoo shop that offered incense and shrunken heads and in a veiled corner in the back, dark relics and woven wicker and yarn pin dolls to offer to tourists wanting a strange keepsake. And being photobombed by a woolly Wookie. Yeah that happened. I’m wearing the black voodoo t-shirt I opted for, my sole purchase aside from the Technicolor NOLA sticker I snagged for the van.  Not in the market for hexing today.

For now I’m wandering endlessly, how did anyone ever get around without Google Maps? Fall in stride with two black gentlemen, maybe in their fifties and walking in no particular hurry, the morning sun warming the pavement and my bare shoulders and hands.

I ask them if they know where Madame Isabelle’s House is. Neither do.

“Want some breakfast child?” One says in that way that older southron folk address everyone as child whose anywhere from ten years to fifty years younger than themselves.

I’d long since burned off that po’boy and I wasn’t in any hurry to wander in the wrong direction anyways. We walk about ten more minutes and turn into a gap between dilapidated brick shops in pinks and greens. A small covered pavilion on a broken concrete lot with a sunlit yard, and mismatched picnic tables.

There’s one table against the building beside the pavilion, with two tall thermoses and a camp press style coffee pot, sugar in a dented, white Styrofoam cup to the left. Breakfast. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned on this trip is that coffee is the great uniter of the people -and usually bad coffee to boot.

In the Black Hills with Frank and Lilah, brought together by the bitter rain and steaming mugs spiked with Schnapps. With Benjamin to warm our hands in South Lake Tahoe forest whilst the winter chill crept up upon the last fire and yellow days of fall. Here with this man Mr. Darby Jr., and friends and breakfast in the form of black coffee with sugar and the grounds settling at the bottom.

Now Mr. Darby and I get to talking, after he’s made his rounds of course, the man seems to know everyone. ‘Hello’s,’ and ‘How’s the knee Tony?’ Or ‘Say hi to the wife and kids for me.’ Every single one met with a great smile.

He talked about his father Mr. Darby Sr. and just how good a father he was and how well he took care of his children. An honorable man, he said, by all accounts. We talked a little about what I was doing round’ these parts but more so about just people in general. Bless you Mr. Darby, for breakfast and the goodness of your heart and the great worth of your stories. Now I must be getting home.

Okay now the stupid key. Walking near these underpasses and risers tagged with graffiti some beautiful, most rubbish, more rubbish in the gutters on the streets, wild flowers and southern blossoms I have no name for grow in small patches of grass stark against the greyscale highway.

Flag someone down on their smartphone, asked them nicely but forcibly to google the address, note the cross streets and finally return the damn key. Peace out suburbia, take me back to Bourbon St. for just one more glimpse.

8 a.m. and the bars are merely turning their clientele over from the last standing night walkers, eyes glazed and dilated, stale smoke clinging to ruffled dresses, to a fresh round of morning mischief makers, myself included, early birds catching the buzzzz. Workers on the sidewalks with hoses literally wash the filth into the gutters to make way for a fresh round of “Sunday Funday” destruction and projectile vomiting. Seriously, disgusting.

I’ve got another long haul today though, so I settle for one Bud Lite at a very, very interesting little bar. The barkeeps nipple rings hang out over his near shredded wife beater, hair in liberty spiked blue. Chatted with two transgender girls who were just getting off shift dancing at the club down the street. Everyone was ever so friendly, but then I met this kid in a kilt, a rainbow feathered boa and combat boots.

Now talking to this guy was a trip. Anyone could tell he was on something but he told me within forty-five seconds that he was still flying on ecstasy and dancing in his mind, the thoughts sometimes transferring to a quick twitch or arm roll to an imaginary bass in his drawn out mind. Maybe thirty years old or so, I bought him a beer to hear a little more of his story and we walked somewhere in the general direction of the lot I parked in.

I’d come so far but had yet to stumble across this particular brand of human. So much… entitlement, yet he seems to have so little to offer. I can’t pinpoint the feeling at first because I’ve known only shades of bliss the last six weeks but I put my finger on it as he rambles on. Disgust.

“Man, the kickbacks down here are freakin’ great.” He brags. “Some rich old fag gave me 140 bucks when I told him I was traveling and homeless. This other bitch bought me new clothes after I told her about my daughter and my girl back home.”

Home was some small town in Minnesota. Where he left his woman and little girl to pursue….whatever the hell it was he was doing here. Couch surfing and banking on kickbacks, term I’d never heard before for free favors from the upper class. He was so proud of his pan handling.

I needed to hear this. Not every lost soul is a Mr. Darby, but I’ve been lucky enough in my travels to come across only the kindest sort of folk. My mind jumps to Catcher in the Rye and good ol’ Holden Caulfield. “Phonies,” he would say. This guy is definitely a phony, enough so that I’ve already forgotten his name.

This world is not so black and white, for only Sith Lords deal in absolutes, and mine hands are not so clean, but I’d not wash away the grit for a clean slate nor for wealth nor immortality. Life is messy. I’m in so deep and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Lift my foot to the driver’s side runners and hop up into the cab. Say goodbye to one last star on my map. An outline in blue from Minnesota to the Redwoods, down the coast, through the desert to the bayou and finally north again. I’ll have a lifetime to reflect, but right now I’m still immersed, swimming furiously against the undertow calling me back to a where my heart lay, sand dusted and beating slowly in the west where the waves pulse unceasingly against Venice Beach.

Now Mothers, tell your children. Not to do as I have done. Spend your lives, in sin and misery. In the House of the Rising Sun.