The New Orleans Dog Cage Story

May 2015

DISCLAIMER: This post contains depictions of “deviant sexual behavior”. If that kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, then probably don't read this. 

Our itinerary said the flight from SeaTac to Louis Armstrong would be somewhere in the ballpark of five hours long. So why, while drearily shuffling up the jetway, did my brother and I swear we were only in the air for one? Perhaps it was the spirited round of Airporting we had engaged in pre-flight. Or the doubles of Johnny Walker the flight attendant had so cheerfully obliged us with throughout our time in the air. I reflexively checked every sign I saw to make sure we hadn’t landed somewhere else by mistake. As if the humidity, heavy southern accents, tackily beaded necks and sudden sea of juicy booties we found ourselves swimming through weren’t altogether evidence enough. That night, our first night in New Orleans, will be very difficult to beat on any trip, ever, for a very long time.

I’ve never been on a trip to anywhere but back home to visit our folks with just my younger brother. This was our Christmas present to each other and we were eager to get the festivities started. To say we hit the ground running would be an unforgivable understatement. We checked into our hotel, dropped the bags on the floor and took off. Totally skipping over the usual exploration of our temporary home for the next four days. We had work to do. Leading up to the trip we had each compiled a mental checklist of the usual things to do and see while visiting anywhere anybody goes ever. One thing I’ve learned to get used to after telling anyone about the next adventure on my list, is having to politely indulge friends and acquaintances while they list off every single thing you need to do or not do whenever you get to wherever it is you’re going. As hard as it may be at times, I’ve learned to not tune them out. Not entirely. There are some valuable nuggets being thrown around in those conversations. And who doesn’t like to hear a story or two from the travelled or eager-to-be-travelled? You just have to learn to read your storyteller. The thing is, I know exactly what’s going to happen as soon as the destination is no longer the destination, almost all lists go out the window. Often I take the one thing about the destination that came up the most in the many conversations I’ve had leading up to the trip, and use that as a backup plan. Everything generally falls away unless it somehow naturally works its way into the adventure. So after heeding little advice, we headed for Frenchmen Street by way of Bourbon Street and figured we’d just give into whatever groove we found ourselves in..

We had both agreed long before our visit that we wanted to stay away from Bourbon Street for the most part. But we also knew that we had to at least see this place of myth and legend before moving on to other things. Within seconds of rounding the corner and entering the drunken stumbling flow of humanity we turned to each other land started aughing. The air was thick with sweat and action and we agreed that it reminded both of us of our first times on Khoa San Road in Bangkok, Thailand. Competing brass bands echoed off of the face of every building. People yelling, screaming, stumbling, selling, buying, groping, flashing, and happening generally all over each other. A motorcycle cop with a snubbed out large ring cigar between his teeth chirped and picked his way through the crowd next to us. An aged and leathered stripper shimmied towards us, giving each of us a look up and down before attempting to force flyers for peep shows into our hands, never quite making eye contact. We dodged with more laughter and pressed through the crowd to one of the curbside Hurricane stands. With highly flammable drink in hand it didn’t take long for either of us to fall into the rhythm of the spectacle we had found ourselves in.

Eventually we settled in at a table on the sidewalk across from Washington Square on the corner of Frenchman and Royal for a dinner of; fried green tomatoes, crawfish fritters, hot wings, and jars of moonshine chased by ice cold Miller High Life in a bottle. As far as dining experiences go, this may have been the most unique meal I've ever had. The family at the table next to us was from North Carolina and even though their names escape me now I will never, ever, forget them. Ever. After a very spirited conversation about I don’t know what, another member of their party swaggered up to the table. A mid 40’s (30’s?) ish year old woman, blonde, curvaceous, in a very fitted blue dress, very intoxicated and sporting a brand new “Marilyn” upper lip piercing. The lip glowed brightly with irritation from having a needle thrust through her face just moments before and the fact that she was obsessively picking and tonguing at it whole hiccuping, “It don’t even hur-urt!” Now, I still don’t know exactly how or why what happened next happened, but it did. My brother and I had at this point returned to our previous conversation on how undeniably taken we’d already become with this place, when suddenly the sixty-plus-year-old woman from North Carolina from the table next to us suddenly stands up, turns herself, and aggressively slams her doughy ass onto my lap with a muffled FWHUMPP! Her face was shrouded in a heavy haze of smoke from the Black and Mild plastic tip cigarillo she had been clinching in her teeth seconds earlier. Only now she was trying to get a bite of my ear. 

“Jesus, God, what the fuck?!”

“You look just like Adam Levine . . .” she growled.

I found myself offended.

I couldn’t decide where to put my hands. Or if I even wanted to put them anywhere at all. I looked for my brother and I found him over her shoulder. His eyes were the size of basketballs and his chin had dropped to the pavement. No help there. Shit. Standing behind my brother was this woman’s middle-aged son, cheering her on.

“Git it Mawwmma!”

The Blue Dress with the flaming upper lip chimes in “If it fills gewd due e-it!”

Before I figure out how I’m even going to begin to react, the sixty-plus-year-old woman from North Carolina now with the cigar clinched between bared teeth again, grabs my collar and rips my shirt open. As I begin picking this lady up to get her off of me she lets out a squeal and pinches both of my nipples. Her fingers like tiny lobster claws that will, not, let, go. Eventually she gets off, to dance, I guess, for me. If it weren’t such a sad sight it would have been hilarious. The Blue Dress swoops in and wraps an arm around Mawma’s waist, saving me from any continued advances before redirecting her attention back to the swollen beacon of poor choices on her face as they walk away. Thank Christ, I sigh.

I turned to my brother and found him, once again, laughing mouth agape with total puzzlement written everywhere else on his face. It had happened so quickly, and we were both so thoroughly inebriated, that clearly neither of us had fully registered the incident. I buttoned my shirt, and ordered another round of moonshine and High Life.

The crowd grew as the sun set. Sweaty herds of haggard vintage suits and clingy sundresses danced up and down the street to the competing waves of sound pouring from almost every door on the block. A band set up shop directly across the intersection from us at the entrance to Washington Square and started tuning up. Everything around us felt charged and palatable. Heavy with the ever-present brass, strings, gin and tobacco. I imagined reaching out and grabbing handfuls of distilled humanity to fill my pockets with. I wanted to hold that moment for the rest of my life. We lingered and enjoyed the band for about half an hour before we decided we’d better close our tab and pick our way back to the hotel. We’d been up since 5:30 that morning and the fact that both of us was still upright was more than a little surprising. In hindsight it seems fucking superhuman. Even still, on the way back we stopped for drinks at what looked like a quiet neighborhood bar, figuring we could catch the end of a basketball game and quietly sneak back to our beds before we burned ourselves out too thoroughly. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, we were plain, wrong.

The next three hours were spent getting to know the bartender on duty, the off-duty bartender of forty years sitting to my right, the busboy from Seattle, the weathered drug dealer with a face like an abused catcher’s mitt and his lady friend that lived in the apartment above the bar, and a host of other people that breezed through for one or two shots to help get them through the night. When it was all said and done, and after asking around a bit, the man with the catcher’s mitt face and his female companion told us they could hep us score few joints for the weekend. So we followed them upstairs to have a few drinks and complete our transaction.

Before long we lost track of why we had ascended the stairs that led us to the apartment above the bar, as so often happens during many late nights of overindulgence. We broke off into pairs and headed deep into separate conversations. My brother was outside on the balcony smoking and debating the man with the catcher’s mitt face over the subtle nuances of setting up the optimal studio environment for recording percussion. I was inside being lectured to by the lady of the house while she dug through an old cigar box full of matchbooks and empty rolling paper packets, on why traveling is a good way to see how people in other parts of the world roll joints. I was mostly ignoring her and waiting for the weed to happen so I could get to bed.

Eventually she found what she was looking for and started crumbling a small amount of marijuana onto a record sleeve she had pulled out from under the coffee table. As she extracted a rolling paper from one of the packets she had found in the cigar box she stopped abruptly, turned her head in my direction and stared at me intently, not blinking, mouthing something I couldn’t quite hear or decipher. It was jarring. More than a little unnerving. She shook her head and shifted her attention back to the small pile of crumbled weed in front of her. She started putting small pinchfulls of flower into the paper curved between her thumb index and middle fingers before asking . . .

“You into bondage?”

“What? Bondage? Um, I’m not not into bondage. I guess that depends on some pretty specific circumsta . . .”

“You look like the type. I can always tell.”

I shrugged.

She was still sitting on the couch but leaning forward onto her elbows. One hand was propped up holding the soon-to-be-doobie she was working on. The other was dangling casually between her knees, limp at the wrist, fingers hanging loosely. She was staring right through me. Her face appeared to be frozen in time. 

“I got me a sixteen year old pussy.” She continued casually.

“Oh, y-y-y-you do?” I started looking around for my brother. Life has taught me that this is precisely the time to boogie.

“I got me a nine year old son too but my pussy’s nice n’ tight. He’s a good kid. He’s with his daddy tonight.”

I didn’t say anything. Whatever I would have said evaporated before reaching my mouth. I just sat there, in the chair directly across from her, frozen. Unsure of whether or not she was fucking with me. 

Her eyes were locked on me. I was pretty sure she hadn’t ever blinked before. Ever. The edges of her mouth started to curl into an off-putting smile. “I used to live with a guy who would put me in a dog cage . . .” she mentioned casually as she rolled the joint together between thumbs and index fingers, licked the remaining edge, sealed it up, then looked back up at me “ . . . You wanna face-fuck me in a dog cage?”

Without thinking at all I answered “Wait, you have a dog?!” and decided I was over worrying about tact or smoothness. It was time to call it a night.

The man with the catcher’s mitt face’s girlfriend looked at me as if she were puzzled and started shaking her head as I stood up and walked out onto the balcony to grab my brother and leave.

“Hey man, where you guys disappear to? Careful with her . . .” the man with the catcher’s mitt face dropped his voice and looked at me intently “ . . . she’s a little coo coo. I just pay her to take care of my apartment and, like, do my laundry and stuff. We used to date, but, well, you know.” He stopped a minute to allow a thought for himself before continuing “But I think she’s on her meds now.” Then he mumbled something and turned to go back inside the apartment.

“What’s up, brother?” My brother was leaning on the railing of the balcony smoking calmly. It was obvious to me that his conversation had not derailed into the realm of face-fucking or dog cages. At least not together.

“We gotta go.”

“What, why?”

“That chick in there just asked me if I wanted to face-fuck her in a dog cage.”

Silence. Then “She what? In a dog cage? Like, both of you in a dog cage, or like, she’s in a dog cage and you like, put your wiener through one of the holes or something? That’s weird, man. Wait, she said what? Come on. Are you sure?”

“Yes. That's what I said ‘That lady in there asked me if I wanted to face-fuck her in a dog cage.’ She also told me that she has a sixteen year old pussy. I think we should go.”

“Ugh, what? What does that even mean? Oh, man, yeah, um, yeah, wait, really? Let’s go.”

I helped him finish his cigarette in silence. He snubbed it out, we looked at each other and simultaneously raised our eyebrows. Sibling sign language. We nodded and went inside. 

Inside the apartment smelled like they had smoked the joint dog cage lady had been rolling and our two hosts were in the kitchen rummaging through the cupboards. We moved for the door and were thankfully allowed to exit with little effort to delay us after the man with the catcher’s mitt face gave us the number of someone who might be able to help in our search for vacation weekend weed and we were on our way. It was almost three in the morning when we got back down to the street below. We stopped for second dinner at a diner on the way back to our hotel and ordered sandwiches with onion rings, something eggy and breakfast oriented, coffees, and Bloody Marys with crawfish and bacon garnish. We laughed about all of the weird shit that had happened.

After the food was gone and we were enjoying one more Irish coffee before shuffling back to our hotel, a bachelorette party came storming through the front doors of the diner. The future bride was propped up on one of her friend’s shoulders. Her plastic crown was tangled in what was left of her Up Due and she was carrying one of her high heels in her hand. The other one wasn’t in her hand or on one of her feet. We pushed our way through the party and back out onto the street, again.

We stopped to light cigarettes and unbutton our shirts. My brother stopped and snorted to himself, his eyes lit up “A dog cage?” he asked smiling.

“A dog cage” I replied.

He exhaled, chortled, and turned in the direction of our hotel.