Most days, I would walk down Burgundy or Rampart to the air-conditioned paradise that is the New Orleans Athletic Club. From time to time, on Rampart, I’d see perhaps the most handicapped R.V. in the state. Possibly in the country. It seems unlikely that this four wheeled wreck of a home can crawl from parking space to parking space yet it must make longer journeys because it disappears for days – even months – at a time.
The one item that works is its generator, rattling merrily when I pass one way and still rattling when I return an hour or two later. Without that generator and air conditioning I doubt any human could survive an R.V. in New Orleans in the summer. And, always, parked right next to the R.V. – chained to it, I notice – is a ramshackle frame bungeed and zip tied to four mangled stroller wheels, empty cans randomly hung here and there.
Today, as I near the mystery wreck, a man maybe 60 but looking a lot more is peering at a parking meter. He’s scruffily dressed in a T shirt and shorts. Balding, his surviving hair tied in a ponytail, he’s overweight, handsome in his own way, and dentally challenged. His cologne is that powerful and ubiquitous eau de knee-walking drunk the night before.
He asks me what it costs to park in this two hour metered zone but neither of us can see a notice nor is the tariff obviously displayed on the meters we examine. We fall into conversation. He’s local and like most New Orleanians, he wants to know how I, a foreigner, like the French Quarter, the city, the state. He also volunteers a wry despair at the state of the nation. My experience is that many, perhaps most, Americans will do that if you let them take the lead. Despite the Clown Car presidential candidates, the fanatical fundamentalists and a high percentage of low information voters, this is not a stupid society. It knows something has gone terribly wrong even if it cannot agree how to make the repairs. If, on the other hand, you, a stranger with a funny accent, are the one to offer the first criticism, they generally play defense.
Looking more closely at the meters, I see the tariff in very small print: $1.50 for two hours. I tell my companion and he’s delighted.
“Cheapest rent in the city, man,” he says and only then do I realize he owns the R.V. and that it’s a permanent, rusting, cruising home. Apparently, he cannot remember from day to day what the meter charges. Eau de knee walking will do that.
Part Two follows within 48 hours