Left My Blues Down In the Gulf

By Cassidy Elwood

We cut out of school early, during lunch, and sped down Broward Boulevard to my house in order to pack a few things: sleeping bags, beer, bread and pepperoni for sandwiches, a couple outfits, camera, harmonica, whisky, cigarettes, toothbrush. By two 'o clock me and my girl, Lola, were headed West on 75 through the hot and mucky gator swamps of our South Florida, bound for Mississippi and Louisiana's wetlands and finally the rusty old drunken streets of New Orleans. Once we hit the Gulf Coast I steered my pop's funny old Volks North to begin our journey. I felt good, the sun was high and the cool coastal air blew in through our windows; sipping a beer, I could really feel The Road and knew I'd write a story about this trip. We were en route to pick up my buddy, Jazz, in Sarasota. Jazz is a trip in his own, but I'll get to him later.

A big Halloween fest was taking place at Ringling, the school Jazz attends. We filled our empty bellies with free bratwursts, root-beer floats, and pumpkin pies. After meeting some nutty college mates and looking at Jazz's artwork, us three fled the sleepy town of Sarasota and were back on the freeway by dusk. It was a long, long, chilly drive up North Florida and West into the panhandle. Round midnight, as we approached Tallahassee, all of us were beat and decided to camp in the woods near Florida State University. College kids dressed up in costume were roaring in the streets, the bars, and out front of their frat houses. Our first time in Tallahassee, Jazz and I wanted to skate around and go down hills, but we had no time to dig this town. We stopped at a liquor store that was mobbed with drunken, rowdy, college meat-heads and got one of them buy us some wine. Wearily we ventured into the woods with our bags and started up a small fire with found logs and sticks. The three of us sat around, beat, drank the wine and passed out for a few hours until dawn. While packing up the car I saw a few kids, zombies, stumbling home down the empty street. While Lola slept, Jazz and I ate a small breakfast of sausage, hashbrowns, and coffee at a ramshackle joint run by college students. The three of us hopped in the car and left Tallahassee just as the sun began illuminating its treetops and casting shadows on the road.

Driving out of the panhandle, through Alabama and into Mississippi was smooth n' easy. Everyone in the True South drives comfortably, content with going just around seventy. Not like the deadly six-lane South Florida highways which are littered with mad foreigners and rotten teenagers constantly honking, screeching, cutting each other off, flipping the bird, and gunning it around the super-cautious elderly who just came there to die anyway. Lola played old 1930's blues music on the tape deck as we cruised above Mississippi's rivers and swamps. After giving her a quick run-down on how to drive stick, I got to sleep a little while in the back all bundled up in my Mexican blanket. Somewhere in Mississippi, just before we would cross into Louisiana, Lola stopped at a crowded rest-stop so I could take a leak. Rather than go over to the rancid port-o-john, behind a line of old hicks and tourists, I opted for the woods on the side of the road. As I was pissing on a tree, over waddled a uniformed figure looking irritated and trying to hustle toward me with his fat legs. The scruffily, pudgy little man was a rest-stop security guard, armed with a long revolver, but only a dinky golfcart and his chubby feet to chase down perpetrators with. This guy was an ass. He asked me, "Hey! Boy! Are you dumb?" I said, “Hmmmmaybe a little." He was not having it. "You been drinkin', boy?" "No." I lied. The stout old bastard made me show him my license, insurance, this and that before finally letting us off with a "warning." Jazz had been toking from his pipe the whole time. With him driving now and the security guard put of sight, off we went zooming past trucks and RV's on the two-lane Mississippi highway.

Jazz is a six-foot-four, long haired, lanky bastard that eats a strict diet of candy and is constantly toking grass from his pipe. He would get real frustrated with the mellow Southern drivers; every time we'd get stuck behind two slow cars he would start yelling things like, "What is it with these backwoods motherfuckers, probably screwin' their sisters while they pop the clutch!" or "This Southern bastard must think he's in Disney World! Drivin' so got-damn slow!" He was furious, but we were making good time. At a gas station just outside New Orleans I took the wheel again and attempted to navigate us to St. Vincent's Hostel. We were all a bit delirious, driving since seven a.m and running on only a few hours of sleep. In the mid-afternoon cluster of taxis, pedestrians, and dead-end roads I somehow wound up driving the wrong way on a one-way Magazine Street. With a Chevy Impala gunning it through a red and headed right for us, I made a swift left into a mud and gravel driveway surrounded by big Victorian spiked fences. The place we had entered looked like a redbrick haunted mansion. We'd found St. Vincent's Guesthouse.

Lola went inside and got us a thirty dollar room, which was the most we could afford for three nights, and we lugged our bags along with the giant cooler full of beer up to our room on the third floor. The place was warm n' musky, odd purple walls and ancient wooden beds that smelled like smoke. No maid service, it felt cozy, though; St. Vincent's had much more character than a Days-Inn. We ambled around the room drinking beers and cleaning up before heading out in the drizzling late-afternoon to catch The Black Keys at City Park. The park was about four miles from our hostel, since it was rainin', we hailed a cab and got to the entrance of Voodoo Festival just in time to hear The Black Keys opening up with "Girl Is On My Mind." This being my favorite tune of theirs, I began to run toward the stage. Jazz and Lola couldn't keep up, so I ran ahead of them through thick mud. It was pouring now. The Black Keys were rocking. I abandoned my soaked and tattered shoes in the mud and dashed by a bewildered security guard into the VIP section, behind the stage. As I was running I slipped, flew, and slid on my ass through a rill of mud. When I looked up, there were a bunch of sheltered VIPs looking at me. Here I was, caked in mud, no shoes, soaking wet, and clutching two Budweisers I'd smuggled in my jacket. Immediately I scrambled to my feet and made a run for the front of the stage. I dashed past more security guards that didn’t seem to notice or care, they were all drinking free Southern Comfort, a sponsor of the festival. I made it to the front row of people, left of the stage, just in time to applaud the band after their first song.

It became dark, the rain was howling, heavy wind blew The Key's long hair forward and occasionally knocked over the drummer's cymbal. Guitar player Dan Auerbach leaned into the microphone and said, "Let's embrace this darkness." I knew they would play a tune of Junior Kimbrough's, the best Mississippi drone-bluesman to have lived. Auerbach sang the number "Everryywhherre iii goo" over a sea of wind and rain and guitar fuzz. The voodoo monsoon didn't let up until they were on to their last song, "I Got Mine," which obliterated the whole crowd and left the stage smoldering. Everyone went wild and cheered, but there was no time for an encore. The festival was run oddly punctilious for a city that didn't seem to give a fuck about anything. The Keys killed it; they set the tone for two more days and nights of swampy tunes. After their set I caught up with Jazz and Lola, who had been watching from the opposite side of the stage, in the back. They chastised me for running ahead and losing them, said I was mad, I didn't care, though, I was high on the music. We eagerly roamed around different tents looking for more. Before long the three of us stood in front of a two-foot stage, watching an eighty-sometin' year old bluesman with no teeth called Little Freddie King. Little Freddie was no taller than five feet, he wore an oversized suit and played wonderful swamp-boogie blues. Each time he'd solo on the guitar, he flung his head back and rubbed his toothless gums together, all while bopping around on one foot or doing some funny dance. We heard improvised versions of "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Johnny B. Goode," where Little Freddie made up his own lyrics, "Waaay down the delta past the swamps n' trees, or high up on the levy over-lookin' New Orleans... Go, Go! Johnny Go! Go!" I was in such high spirits, so happy we'd made it to this mad city exploding with wonderful sounds. The last band we saw was Ween, they put on a wild show. Around midnight it was all shutting down. Beat, the three of us stumbled arm-in-arm across the mud and into the streets of New Orleans, all the way to St. Vincent's where we promptly passed out for the night.

At eight 'o clock the next morning I sprung out of bed. First thing I did was brush my beer-stained teeth and attempt to fix my hair, which looked like a bird's nest. Once Jazz and Lola awoke we went down to the coffee shop across from St. Vincent's, Mojo Cafe, where they had amazing pumpkin coffee and bagels cheap. It was early so we rambled around the old roads and hurricane plundered buildings. I took some photographs. Somewhere deep in our wandering, we came upon an old juke joint on a crumbling cobblestone street where locals and tourists were already getting drunk at nine a.m. Inside, a young jazz band sang, "Fiyyaaaa, on the baayoou." People know music here, just like Texas knows rodeos and Philadelphia knows cheesesteaks. It's fuel, New Orleans is run on jazz, funk, and blues. We passed stray cats and dogs, old fishing boats, abandoned trucks, canoes, and a string of warm folk smiling at us from their porches. Roaming, lookin’ at shit. It does do some good; people are hung up, cloistered in their cars or apartments worshipping their t.v's and ipods. Ramblin' around on a good day, can't beat it. On a poor old street this Turkish man in a grey suit and beret hat approached us. He said, "I sell many things, look!" Scattered all over the sidewalk were shoes, necklaces, cups, dusty books, hairbrushes, ancient little stamps or postcards, and a stack of checkbooks. I bought two etchings of cowboys battling Indians for 50c. We asked him, "Where'd ya get all this stuff?" To which he replied, "Old man die next-door, I sell everything." "Damn," I said. And we moved on.

Another hour later we found ourselves at City Park again. Lola and I sat under a tree, sucking on beers while Jazz paced around anxiously toking from his pipe. After a great deal of pleading, Lola and me walked with Jazz out of the shade and into the music; where among a thousand other crazies, Lola spotted her wild, border-line-lunatic friend, Juliana. Dressed in cheetah tights, with huge boobs jutting out of a torn Rolling Stones shirt, she ran over and gave us all passionate hugs. It was a bit weird for a moment, Jazz and Juliana had a thing back in high school. Her companion, Juan, was a six-foot Mexican who wore a tattered denim jacket and a black bandana tied around his curly mop. He was armed with two bottles of Jack, which I helped to polish off. The five of us found a contraption made of logs that looked like an upside-down merry-go-round, it ground up corn simultaneously as we ran around it, flinging our bodies into the air and flying while the thing spun atop a big tree-trunk. Some sort of art installation. The corn fell into a bowl. Around the bowl were ingredients: flour, eggs, milk, and honey. We mashed all the stuff up in a dirty pan and cooked it over a small wood fire. Before long, we had corn bread. After some more spinning, all five of us sat dizzily under an enormous oak and ate the corn bread with honey while swigging whisky in the sweet afternoon.

The rest of the day was all drunken bliss. There was nothing strenuous or difficult about this place. We'd come eighteen hundred miles purely for kicks and that's what we were getting. I wandered off from the pack with my flask and watched a guy called Walter "Wolfman" Washington who played smooth jazz and blues with a horn section. He did a tremendous cover of Bill Wither's "Use Me." Twelve hours after I'd awoke, at eight p.m, the sun went down and Voodoo erupted into a wilder, louder, funkier bop as George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic took stage. I found the rest of our gang and we wiggled up to the front row as all of Clinton's sidemen were coming out: an enormous dark man with a tenor horn, three young whorish female singers, a raspy-voiced tambourine-smacker with gray dreads and beard, three guitarists (one of whom was wearing only a diaper), a mellow bass player, drummer that looked like the black Uncle Sam, a white guy, the only one, on keys, and a slew of other singers and dancers that romped around the stage as Clinton delivered his cosmic funk. A man of nearly seventy, he came cavorting out on stage after all the other members with mardi-gras beads, gold chains, and neon hair shimmering under stage lights. He sang and danced some but chiefly conducted Funkadelic’s madness and involved the crowd in chants, "Shit! Goddamn! Get off yo' ass n' jam!" or "Make my funk the p-funk, I wants ta' get funked up!" I bumped into my buddies Tyler and Fez, who were mad on mushrooms, pupils the size of quarters. Funkadelic mesmerized us with "Maggot Brain," and drowned everyone in funk with "Cosmic Slop," "Atomic Dog," and "Free Your Mind...." Around eleven o' clock the Voodoo staff tried to boot Clinton and his boys off the stage, to which he said, "Ain't no party like a p-funk party and the p-funk party don't stop!" They funked on and on until the music got soft and everyone left the stage one by one. Only the drummer remained, keeping a beat, there hadn't been a moment of quiet for hours. The crowd kind of thinned, convinced it was all over. Then, at midnight, fireworks blew off from the other side of town as the tenor man played his fantastic horn introduction to "Not Just Knee Deep." We danced for a while longer, singing "She's a freak! The girl's a freak! The girl never misses a beat, yeaya!" until the bastards just began unplugging Clinton's equipment. He left the stage without a word.

We were all in such high spirits on the way home. The five of us bopped around a crowd of other Halloween crazies singing funk tunes. There were pirates, zombies, mummies, and vampires roaring in the streets as New Orlean's cops half-assedly directed traffic. We caught a ride back to the hostel with Juan and Juliana. They played a game: whenever we'd come up to a yellow light everyone had to smack the roof of the car, last person to smack the roof had to take off some clothes. Before long, all of us (excluding Juan, who is a master of this game) were riding stark-naked through crowded streets in an old Japanese jalopy on Halloween. Once at St. Vincent's, we put our clothes back on. It was real cold. A couple of black guys hollered at us from a fifth-story window, "Eyyyyy! Party up here!" We said fuck it and went on up. In the tallest room of the hostel stood a gang of thirty-to-fifty year old black dudes, swigging Olde English in long t-shirts and Dickies pants. Most of them were missing teeth, some had none at all. Around a puddle of one dollar bills, there were my friends: Fez and Tyler. They smiled at us as they danced in their underwear with two nude whores to 90's West Coast rap music. Looong base lines. We stood behind the doorway in awe. One of the whores, skinny and blond with enormous, round tits and an alligator tattoo on her back, rubbed her hairless bottom against Fez's crotch to N.W.A.'s "Express Yourself." The other, a thick black girl with an afro and a gorilla's ass, danced next to Tyler. We ran to our room to grab some beers, ran back, danced around, and smoked and drank whisky with the odd bunch. I couldn't really understand anything these toothless Louisiana negroes were saying. They seemed alright, though. Around one o' clock the hookers left, said they had other parties to hit. The old guys pleaded for them, "Aww baby please don't go.." They rustled up their cash and left. We stayed only a little while longer. It got weird. After hearing the old blacks petition for us to get our girls naked we split out of the smoky room.

Everyone was drunk as hell. Not a bad way to spend Halloween. Back at our room, Lola and I screwed while the others sat outside, enjoying doobies above rusted old Magazine Street. Once three a.m rolled around we were all hungry. Jazz, Juliana, Juan, Lola and me crammed once again into the little tan jalopy and rolled down Canal St in search of an all night diner. Not three hours ago we’d drove down this road naked, with our heads flung out the window, singing into the cool autumn wind. I dug it again. Felt like we’d hit gold when Jazz hollered “IHOP!” We were all sitting at the table, sleepy, but still buzzing a bit from the night’s madness when our waitress came over. A young black southern girl with drowsy eyes and no clear sight of emotion, she took our order after bringing the coffee. I ate a feast of strawberry pancakes with hash browns and bacon. Jazz got agitated when she said they couldn’t give him the “Smiley Face Pancakes” he had ordered, as it’s reserved for children under eleven. He sat next to me, grumbling, “damn….stupid…niggers...” Juliana made the smiley face for him with a couple of her strawberries and one of my bacon strips. As we crossed the street to get in Juan’s car I felt fat, warm, and a bit delirious. The way one feels after he’s pissed out most of his drunkenness and sucked up the rest with pancakes. At the room, it felt good to be sober for the first time in three days. While the others sat outside having after-dinner cigarettes, I curled up next to Lola and sunk into sleep at dawn.

After five or six or seven hours of rest I shot out of bed again and tried to rustle everyone else up. I felt alright, a small hangover, nothing a shot of whisky in my coffee wouldn’t cure. Jazz and Lola were sluggish to wake, said they felt shitty. Sometime in the early morning Juan drove Juliana back to his room in the French Quarter, probably to screw. Across the street, at Mojo, a strange, dopey woman spoke to us as she twitched and wiggled uncontrollably in her chair. She was having a hard time lighting a cigarette. Her round, olive-colored torso couldn’t keep from rolling side to side. I lit her cigarette with mine. She kept mumbling something about eating acid and shootin’ up at Voodoo. We left her squirming in her seat and said, at the same time, “wow.” “damn.” “meth.” Jazz and Lola had gotten high before we left St. Vincent’s, around noon, and they wanted to eat. I love to eat, so I didn’t mind, though I still had some pancakes left in me.

As we passed by a swanky hotel building, Jazz, in his nasally, bird-like voice asked, “Hey, where’s a cheap place to get some good eats?” The tall, black bellman pointed us down the street and said, “Duffys. Tell ‘em Bubba sent ya.” We stuck out like a sore thumb in the old diner among a lot of black, elderly couples eating jumbalaya and po’boys. A big-breasted skinny woman, wearing a Saints jersey and silver teeth, waited on us. She asked, “Where ya’ll from?” “Florida.” “Heeheehaha, Miami?” “Yup.” “We gon’ smoke ya’ll boys tomorrow, whataya be havin’?” The Saints, undefeated, were set to play our Dolphins on Monday. We ate chickenfried steak and Cajun fries for about five bucks apiece. It was good. Forgot to tell them Bubba sent us.

Jazz and Lola wandered off into an alley for a bit to get more stoned. I sat on the corner, taking swigs from my flask and enjoying an American Spirit. In the afternoon, especially, it’s better to be just a little buzzed than stupid-high, paranoid, and giggling. After they stumbled back, we missed two busses and I got annoyed with them. I wanted to hurry up, get our kicks at Voodoo and dig the final day of tunes. We ended up at the cable-car stop, dusk approaching, talking to a scraggly Canal Street bum. Freddie was thirty somethin’, light-skinned black, and drunk off his ass. He grinned his brown teeth at me as I offered him a cigarette. One tooth, half-rotten sideways, hung like a little dagger out of his gums. We all watched a white guy in some sort of lawn chair-cycle contraption peddle by. Freddie erupted in laughter, “HAHAH! I would BUST my ASS on that thing!” I had a good laugh as well, mostly just because of the enthusiasm in Freddie’s laughing. Jazz and Lola sat frightened of this man and pretended to smile. He told us a story ‘bout when he “had some moneys” and used to ride a bike of his own, “Man I used to ride that thing all ‘round this town. Up n’ down Canal, day an’ night, lookin’ for a sweet young thing. Then one day I was drunk an’ hit a curb, went flyin’ face down in the mud. I went into a bar to get drunk n’ watch the Saints an’ when I come out the bike was gone.” At the end of his story, the cable car showed up. I gave the poor bum Freddie another cigarette and bid farewell.

We showed up at City Park just in time to catch The Swampland Jam, a group formed by three of Louisiana’s swampiest bluesman: Tab Benoit, Big Chief Borderaux, and Cyril Neville. Benoit on guitar, Neville on drums, and Borderaux on tambourine and vocals, they boogied through a set of blues numbers and invited another musician on stage about every other song. By the end, there were harmonicas, saxophones, horns, cowbells, maracas, an organ, more guitars, and even more voices all rocking on the little two-foot stage. We heard effortless clap-your-hands songs like “Iko Iko,” which stems from an old slave chant, to wild, layered, rocking blues jams like “Louisiana Funk.” By the time it was over the sun had long gone down. There was a huge, blood-red moon above the mucky Voodoo lands. I stood barefooted in a few inches of mud; guitars, saxophones, and harmonicas ringing in all directions. Purposely I lost everyone and went into a tent that was really boogieing. Preservation Hall Jazz Band was killing it on the last night, a mad crowd danced around restlessly and got their kicks as the band blew and blew. They went from smooth, melodious tunes, all the way to frenzied acid-jazz that got fiercer after one bongo-man picked up a Gibson and began shredding through licks as the drummers and horn section built the sound up and up until it all exploded over a few glorious notes blown by the tenor sax-man. Sweat poured down their faces under the hot stage lights. Everyone hollered and yelled while their set was brought to a sweet demise. The roadies came out, unplugged chords, and it was all over.

Jazz and Lola found me, they had been dancing somewhere else. A lot of people called it quits and gone home. The vibe was calm, for a change, until we found a tent where the Meat Puppets were rocking. Dean Ween came out and played a couple of songs with them. Crazy people in a tent, playing and hearing loud rock n’ roll music, we all could dig it. Meat Puppet’s bass player is known for having spent years of his life shut up in an Arizona shack just shooting heroin and smoking crack, leaving the house only in order to obtain more crack and heroin. On stage, his face looked melted. He romped around, high as a kite, singing the wrong words and slapping his bass. People in the crowd handed him endless beers, which he downed in a second. By the end of it the man looked like he was going to keel over. He didn’t, though, cause they came back out and did an encore.

Afterwards, our gang found Tyler and Fez once again. They were staring at a giant ladder some artists had set up. They took mushrooms again, and we talked about the Meat Puppets, “Man did you dig that wax-faced bass player, he was crazy!” “Yeah, dude, yeah, we were right in the front. He was FREAKING ME OUT, MAN.” They said they had to make it to class at eight a.m, in Orlando, fifteen hundred miles. The mushrooms would help them. We said good-by and all five of us; Jazz, Lola, Juliana, Juan, and me hailed a cab on City Park Ave. to take us back to the hostel for one final night on bed-bugged mattresses.

The cab driver was a nut, a good nut, though. Just when I thought the madness had ceased, he starts roaring in my ear about all the gangs of six or seven or ten people trying to wave him down. He kept saying, “WHAT IS THIS SHIT? I AM NO FUCKING BUS!” I sat upfront, think he said his name was Guy or Elvis or something, a made up alias to tell Americans so he wouldn’t have to hear them try and pronounce his Muslim name. We passed by a big, purple, school bus with the windows blacked out and techno music blaring from inside. Elvis said, “Ho ho ho… now that’s what I need, that’s what I FUCKING need! HAHAH!” We laughed with Elvis at the thought of him driving one of those party buses. He went on, “If I had one of those, I just drive fucking naked. HAHA! You want a ride? You better get naked.” He swung around traffic and raced other cabs through yellows and reds all the way down to Magazine. It was the quickest any of us had ever flown through Canal Street. Elvis said, “Ooohh, you stay at St. Vincent?” “Yep.” “Oh yes, the babies cry over there. You hear them.” “What?” “Yes, used to be an orphanage, lot of dead babies crying. You hear them.” We hit some road work and had to cut through shady alleys, past dark bars and hollow faces, to get back on Magazine. Elvis asked us, “Where you from?” “Florida.” “Oooo, Broward County?” “Yeah, actually” “I FUCKING HATE BROWARD COUNTY!” “Haha, so do we.” “Lot of Jew down there. HAHAHA. But no, they throw me in jail in Broward County.” “Damn, for what?” “I used to drive truck, I tell the cop, I NO DRINK BEER, BEER IS FOR MY FRIEND” “Was your friend drunk?” “Hell yeah! But I wasn’t. I no drink beer.” “So what happened?” “I tell the judge, look, the beer was for my friend, and he lets me go. Still had to do three weeks in that fucking Broward County Jail!” About this time Elvis’s cab rolled up to the hostel. We paid and said good-by, he told us to ask for him next time we’re in New Orleans. He warned us to look out for the crying babies. It was just midnight and I was beat. New Orleans kills me. Juan and Juliana were going to dig Bourbon Street but we declined. Jazz and I sat up drinking whisky and making little drawings as Lola slept. From our old, rickety, little room we could hear the bums and raccoons digging through trash, the sleepless winos smoking and talking outside Mojo Café, and the faint sound of some jazz band blowing away on this dreary Sunday night.