Passing Through: The Big Greazy

Jed Ki and I are headed south to make typewriter money off the French Quarter Fest in New Orleans. We stop in Portland, OR to catch a R.A.P. Ferreira show with Rosalie. If you haven't heard this cat, ya oughta.

Prepping for NOLA, I throw pre-emptive pinches of Tony's Creole salt over my left shoulder before saying goodbye to Rosalie. I leave behind a portion of bad-tasting Korean plum-apple wine before getting in the TSA line.

The TSA Agent pulls my typewriter case from my bag,

"What do ya have in here?" asking me questions to guage whether I'm a fraud or not. She swabs it for explosive residues, clears it and hands it back.

"You know, that's probably the most dangerous thing in this airport today." I mutter.

We take off and touch down without trouble. The ride into Louis Armstrong airport is exceedingly bumpy. A few passengers are clutching their hands in prayer, wide-eyed.

The Lousiana humidity hits me like liquor vapors from the mouth of a kind panhandler. Soon I'm clammy with pit stains. I order a daquiri slushy while Hobo Dave runs erands in his straight-piped Camry. It rides like a go-kart and sounds like a lawn mower. We swagger into Home Depot, styrofoam liquor drinks in hand, searching for TV trays. None available.

Rounding up busking supplies is a bitch. Sure, we could steal a few milk cartons like a dirty kid poet of the French Quarter. No shame in that but we're after bigger bucks so we gotta look fresh. Like all things in consumer economies, half of this job is in the packaging. We could buy our gear from Wal-Mart but where's the fun in that?

We're doing this because it's fun. Because it's a kind of patronage, a right of passage. I'm here because of planned obsolescence. Because troubadours aren't outdated and neither is poetry. Maybe soon it will be. I'm a window display model hoping someone takes me home and wears me out. I'm here to remind strangers that poetry lives in unlikely places and I'm here because it pays better than a regular job.

Mining tourism economies is a lot like mining the miners. In this case, the miners are well-paid.

I'm tag-teaming with poetic metaphysicist & astronomer, Jed Ki. It's their first time working New Orleans and my second.

We get buckets from an abandoned naval facility near the river, a place referred to as "the End of the World". It's blown out. Jed remarks how these leftovers are telling of the schizophrenia of humanity. Beautiful graffiti murals tagged over with crass crackhead jargon. Tweaker number sequences. Phone numbers for bad people and worse times. Grounds littered with old syringes, living room furniture burned to a crisp, homemade skate ramps, and bloodstains. It’s a short walk from this bar,

Dave loans us a pair of bikes he purchased cheaply from crackheads. We stop at Rhubarb, a community bike shop & work space, for a tune-up. Dave smashes a lower spindle into place with a hammer, making a hell of a racket while 9th ward neighborhood kids cause ruckus in tandem. It's like a bike-junk daycare center where tools are toys.

My mutant Huffy has few original parts except for the frame. It's absent of functional brakes and has a large "Suicidal Tendencies" sticker on the frame. I drill holes into a five gallon bucket, using bailing wire to mount it like a basket on the front.

I stack two buckets which function as our stools when they're not bike baskets, as I add some of our gear inside. Jed patches a tube on a Schwinn beach cruiser. We tie our tv trays on its rear rack and head for the quarter.

French Quarter Fest: Day 1

We enter the festival on the river walk. There's a cumbia band we're hoping to set up near. The festival entrances are tossing backpacks, looking for guns. They run my pack harder than TSA.

A sassy local woman with gold teeth tears my bag apart. She doesn't mind the typewriters but really doesn't like the looks of our buckets and TV trays. She calls her supervisor and lets us know we need a vending permit.

I assure her we're not vending. This is always the correct answer when asked. I don't tell her that we accept Cashapp, Venmo, Zelle, Paypal, cash, grass, gold, silver, catalytic conveters, and just about anything that can be easily liquidated.

She tells us to beat it. I politely oblige, aiming to leave little impression upon her memory as I make alternate entrance plans.

While scouting, I notice that Jackson Square is hoppin'. We decide to take up residence there. A few typewriter poets are on the square so we make sure to give them room out of respect.

The square is loud and populated. Fake monks selling wrist-beads. Spraypainted humans posing as statues. Loudspeaker country singers playing top 40 hits for cash. Painters selling prints. Hustlers betting you $20 they know where you got them shoes at (Correct answer: under your feet, in New Orleans). It seems like all the tourists are either dunk, high, over-stimulated, or old, white, and from the midwest. Some are all of the above. We hardly make any sales.

French Quarter Fest: Next few days

We try out Royal St., down the street from the Rouse's corner market, just in front of Pirate's Alley. There's a jazz band busking on the street, which is blocked off by gates for the daily pedestrian marketplace. The band is The Dirty Rotten Vipers. They have a rotating cast of characters which includes a piano, a standup bass (both instruments painted loudly with, "This Machine Kills Fascists"), a trumpet, banjo, guitar, as well as a typewriter gang in tow (anywhere from 2-10 typewriters in a line).

The routine: band swings from noon til dark. Typewriters join the scene. Everyone has their own bucket for tips. Healthy competition. The band also has a collective bucket that they count up and split. They get drunker as the day gets hotter, heckling tourists while reminding them,

"The city doesn't pay us to be here but you do! Today is national twenty dollar bill day! If you want more songs, we need another $40 in the bucket, otherwise we're going to take a five minute break for ten minutes; in fifteen minutes we'll be back to start playing in twenty."

They draw a great crowd that coughs it up.

It's hard to communicate poetry biz near the band due to high volume, so we set up down the street. We later join the typewriter lineup when it isn't too crowded with other poets.

It's hot and we're not making much. Maybe $60 a day. Enough to eat. It's way easier to make money at this in San Francisco and LA. I look for something, or someone to blame: The festival. The voodoo. The heat. Myself.

We take a few days off to enjoy the music. Eat some acid. Snort some dexedrine. Chew on San Pedro. Drink tequila. Taste some molly. Dance. It does well for our morale.

We overhear dialogue in a corner store between locals,

"You going to French Quarter Fest, baby?"

"What, and hang with a bunch of stingy, white, old midwesterners? Hell naw!"

While eavesdropping in a coffee shop, we learn of a poetry festival happening next weekend. Perfect serendipity. This is why we're really here. Also, Hank's sauce and Frady's catfish Fridays. This is also why we're here.

And the Iron Rail zine library / DIY space. Those guys are dope. Check 'em out.

Back to the streets:

The festival is over and we're busking near Jackson Square. We make out well in front of Cafe Du Monde. Seems to be a famous place. The line for cafe au lait and beignets is incredibly long. Some guy is selling balloon animals, making belligerent offers to brides and grooms: cock and balls balloons, vagina balloons, titty balloons. Next he offers children a balloon bow an arrow to shoot each other with.

We break off and take the park inside of Jackson Square,

"Would you like a poem to go with your picture?" I holler to tourists photographing themselves in front of some famous cathedral. A wedding party consigns a few poems from us and the officiant hires me to transcribe his speech from his phone onto paper, tips me $50.

We notice there aren't any buskers inside the park. We cake for an hour before getting kicked out. Apparently, buskers aren't allowed inside the park gates. I test this rule a few days later and am immediately removed by the same guard.

In the square, we befriend another poet with a large sign that reads,

"Poems for Strangers". His birth name is Random. He takes a shine to us in a "keep your friends close, keep your competition closer" sort of way. We give him room to work, making out alright on Royal St. The brass marching bands and general busking chaos makes a nice backdrop.

While at Dave's house in the 9th Ward, I see Random come out of the yard next door. He's subletting a room there. He brings Jed and I out for some drinks. We share busker war stories.

Random lives in Mexico City and comes to New Orleans a couple months every year to make money for the rest of the year. He busks nearly every day and he's been doing this for seven years.

He speaks of the need to be a wolf in this game, regarding the sensitive nature of other poets with minor disdain, esp. when faced with territorial disputes. He regales us with a tale of treachery:

A typewriter poet Random had once mentored began encroaching upon his territory, as well as bullying other poets.

"There's enough room for us to spread out. I'm here to help as I can but if you fuck with my money, we're gonna have a problem." Random is transparent about his motives as a capitalist poet. He is not afraid of confrontation, and enjoys the clashing of swords while battle-rapping.

The competing poet set up in Random's territory, sending him a poem/letter, propelling events into motion.

Random approached swiftly, picking up the busker's 1900's Corona ultra-portable, raising it above his head all the while hollding eye contact with his perpetrator before spiking it into the cobblestone, obliterating a collectable machine and making a fine punctuation mark to end this and all further disputes for turf.

A few of the other poetry buskers thanked him for handling this snide bully character, who can still be seen about today.

We're glad Random is on our side, partially because we're only around for a couple of weeks. He invites us to share his spots when he's not using them. He even invites us to join him for a day, Jed and I taking turns sharing the spot with Random. A kind skill-sharing offering. His doctrine is consistently formulaic.

Random cuts his poems out in under two minutes. He uses colorful flash-cards. He doesn't bark or holler in order to attract patrons. His sign and tidy space do most of work, along with his patented "sparkle wave", a gentle wave with glittering fingers, accompanied by an easy smile, doing the trick for attracting patrons. Sometimes, he'll make eye contact and say,

"You look just like someone who wants a poem!" Random is good at what he does.

Each busker has a different tack and tactic. Dusty is a rowdy and raunchy cowboy jazz-cat who hollers crass calls at passerby, much like a carnival barker. I've seen it work wonders and I've seen it horrify onlookers. He just wants cheap thrills while fanning the flames of inspiration.

Through them all, we learn to apply different methods for different scenarios.

We apply this on Frenchman street at night, set up outside a blues bar while guitar and drum kit croon in low lonesome sounds. Unknown liquids drip from balconies onto sidewalkers, splattering passerby in grease, gutter, and rhythm.

We're beside a night market where I run into a Vermont friend selling metal-cut earrings under the moniker, Weaving Winds. Jed Ki and I trade poems for a set of buccaneer sword earrings. We trade poems for art prints. We trade poems for twenty dollar bills and 5 Euro bills.

The twenties start raining down as we trade poems for everything and for nothing, giving them away for free to beautiful strangers. Random happens to arrive by bicycle to continue charming a gorgeous traveling mage parked on Frenchmen street in her Toyota Dolphin RV.

They invite all of us in, offering us a home-cooked meal right there on Frenchmen street, parked in front of the Apple Barrrel amidst all the music and chaos. She is a sharp and dedicated mother, a traveling witch offering exorcisms, a soul retriever, and an extended tarot reader. It feels right to have fallen in with such powerful company.

New Orleans Poetry Fest:

The poetry festival starts off at Saturn Bar with local poets preforming. The first ones all have MFA's and are either totally insane, medicated, and beautiful, or else writing about mundane shit in sonnets and archaic structures. Feels like intellectualising splatter art. The last couple of poets are not academics and ring something fierce, sweet, dramatic, intense. It makes the room serene, makes the room uncomfortable.

The next night at Cafe Istanbul, we hear a panel of Korean poets and translators discussing the challenges of language compatibility. For one, the Korean language does not use gender-based pronouns. While translating, direct contact with the poet must be established in order to determine the subject of the poem. If the poet is dead, tough shit.

Next, they do a reading. Some of the poems deeply steeped in difficult-to-discern metaphors. They are dark and gutteral. Despairing yet hopeful. The translator reads a verse in English which is followed by the original verse in Korean, read by the poet. Back and forth. It's somewhat maddening and I like it.

The final poet comes from the gut, with humor. Not so serious but plenty existential and alcoholic. Talks about puking and enjoying the nights of total gutteral intoxication when one's sense of self suddenly becomes transcendant; through the abandonment of graceful ideals, one finds grace.

The Korean poets head off to a karaoke bar while we head off to our own maddening bouts with despair, not because the poets told us to do it, or because we're seeking something inspiring, but because sometimes, all of life's uncertainty and disappointment just fucking hurts and I want out. I feel guilty & ashamed that children are being slaughtered from here to Istanbul and all I'm able to do is bear witness in silent horror.

Perhaps I would've been better off singing about it but instead I ride my bike toward oncoming traffic while taunting tourist drivers. Tourists taunting tourists makes me feel a little better for some reason. We're all strangers here, 'til we become better acquainted.

The next night Jed and I use some of our busking money to buy tickets for an Aja Monet preformance at the Ashe Cultural Center. If you haven't heard of Aja Monet yet, consider yourself fortunate that you now have.

Traveling from city to city, Aja assembles a different ensemble of poets and musicians in each one. For this show, she brings together New Orleans poetry legends Frequency and Sunny Patterson. Amazing, prolific, profound poets helping weave the threads and fabric of humanity in reverence, reality, and romantic continuity. These poets are not necessarily in New Orleans for the poetry festival, but they are absolutely the highlight of it. Gladney backs on sax. The space is full of couches. Real cozy vibe. We highly recommend this venue.

Closing Out

We've explored the abandoned parts of the city and ourselves, emerged somewhat triumphant in spite of our own suicidal tendencies, and found steady patronage and support in this laid-back dirty south staple. I hate cities and I definitely hate New Orleans the least. It's right there with Hanoi.

A highlight reel streams through our memory, gratuitious in eloquence, belligerent with meaning-making. James, a random Deadhead elder incoming for jazz-fest (who I propositioned a poem to), reminded us not to give a fuck, that "motherfucker" is a gender-neutral term of endearment, and to always be our goofy, wacky selves no matter how embarassing. He reminded me that a well-written poem can buy you a $40 bottle of tequila... when the patron doesn't carry cash and for their Paypal login.

We throw our finale bottle back like a dusty poetry anthology, drafted in one evening. We give New Orleans a dirty, easy romp and board a flight homeward. Jed Ki and I are hungover, giggling, and ready to set up camp in the Denver airport for an eight hour layover camping sesh. Might even busk in front of the duty-free store, who knows.

--The Disonorable Rev. DD Bartholomew