xtcian

2/8/03 Day LXIX of the

2/8/03

Day LXIX of the Escape From the Belly of the Beast Road Trip of McIlhenny Island's Finest Tobasco Awaiting Us

Dallas, TX to New Orleans, LA

I lie now in one of my favorite places on earth, if not my favorite: the French Quarter of New Orleans. Curiously, I never came here to drink the first time I fell in love with the place, I was with Bud, Chip and Jon, and none of us had a good enough fake I.D. to get in anywhere (there had been a rumor that the drinking age was 18 in the Quarter in 1987, but we found that to be disappointingly false). I have no family here, and I'm certainly not Cajun by any stretch of DNA, and I have a seriously problem with humidity – but I love each and every millisecond I've ever spent in this unbelievable city.

A bunch of us got together about seven years ago and split an apartment for about $40 bucks a month in the Garden District, a fairy-tale land right off the St. Charles streetcar, surrounded by houses that are so beautiful that tourists walk among them with their mouths agape. I hardly ever got to come down that year from NC (I'd run out of money), but just knowing I had a place in New Orleans filled me with warmth. I know, it's irrational. What are you going to do?

We're not exactly in the Quarter this time, but only a few blocks east this bed & breakfast, bedecked with beads, 19-foot ceilings, and photographs from the 1860s, was also the only place that took dogs. I suppose it had to; this is the gayest neighborhood in the parish.

Our first stop, of course, was the Best Kept Secret in New Orleans, known to anyone who has been here with me as the Verti Marte. Not much more than a hole-in-the-wall convenience store stuck in a shotgun shack on the corner of Gov. Nicholls and Royal Street, they have a $4.25 shrimp po-boy that is the best thing Tessa and I have eaten since birth. I've been there drunk, I've been there sober, and the food is as good or better – than pricey ultra-Cajun Commander's Palace, Arnaud's, or anything Emeril Lagasse can cook up.

sated, almost post-coital after the Verti Marte cajun corn

Chopin the Dog is wearing his Mardi Gras beads (I didn't ask him how he got them; he must have shown his nuts to somebody) so I gave him a little piece of alligator meat from the jambalaya. He liked it so much he followed me around for an hour. Glad to see the town has another convert.