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New Orleans
I pulled into the driveway at about 3pm that Friday. My birthday was the next day, so I had cut out of work early so I could catch up with friends and drink beer on a patio somewhere. When I drove up, I saw my girlfriend, Michelle, getting out of her car and coming to meet me.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” she said, a bit of a smile belying a secret she was trying hard not to tell, “How was your day?”
“Not bad,” I offered, “Ready to shut it down and get the party started.”
“Where you wanna go?” she asked.
“Surprise me.”
That was all she needed. “Ok, let’s go!”
She ushered me to her car and drove out of the neighborhood. We passed the regular drinking spots and I wondered what she had up her sleeve. Then she pulled onto the freeway and my curiosity was piqued. “Where are we going, baby?” I asked.
“Surprise!” she said, unable to keep it a secret any longer, “We’re going to New Orleans for your birthday!”
That was a surprise. “What? How?”
She laughed, “I got us a hotel for the weekend, right off of Bourbon Street. There’s a bag in the trunk with some clothes and stuff. I’ve been working on it for a while!”
“This is awesome! Thank you!”
“You’re welcome, Baby!” she said as we sped eastward.
New Orleans is about a six-hour drive from where we lived so we passed the time listening to music and pointing at all the alligator museums there are along I-10. Spanish moss hangs from ancient, sprawling oak trees along both sides of the freeway. There are crawfish farms and plantation tours and little package liquor stores the whole way there. The entire state feels stuck in the past somehow, like a Hollywood caricature of itself. It’s also quite obviously haunted. It’s the only state I’ve ever been to that has a “feel” about it. Not place to place or in a certain spot; When you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana, you can tell you’re someplace different. That differentness amplifies as you enter New Orleans. As you weave through the streets toward the French Quarter, you can feel hundreds of years of history on the wind.
We made it to the hotel a little before dark, changed, made love, then hit the streets. The Quarter was alive with zydeco and jazz intermingling with the raucous party music pouring from the various bars and nightclubs. Bachelorettes in wedding veils carried dicky sippers and flirted with frat guys to get free drinks. Everything was cheap and loud and wonderful. We sat in a dive bar drinking alcoholic fruity things and eating the best red beans and rice on the planet. I had landed in heaven and it was called The Big Easy.
The next morning, we were in hell. We rolled out of bed, heads pounding painfully, the hangover was one of the worst I’d ever had. I flailed around in the dark, wondering where I was and how I had gotten there. Oh yeah, this woman had kidnapped me, driven me here, and then spent the whole night poisoning me with smiling plastic bottles of death. I swore to god that I’d never drink again.
An hour or so later, we made our way down to have breakfast and a Bloody Mary to take the edge off. There are signs around town that point out that, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning.” It was my birthday, and I was in New Orleans. No half-conscious oaths in moments of pain would keep me from my task, which was to take this city up on as much as I could before we headed home in the morning. We asked the valet for a suggestion.
“Pere Antoine has the best Bloody Mary’s and the crawfish omelet is amazing,” he said, “But it’s raining pretty good right now. You want me to call you a cab?”
We looked outside. It was raining hard and didn’t look like it was going to let up. We took a cab to Antoine’s and discovered that the valet was correct- both those things were spectacular and every time we go back, we make a point of grabbing at least one round of Bloody Mary’s from Antoine’s on Royal Street. “So, the rain sucks, but what do we do about it?” Michelle asked.
“Well, I guess we get umbrellas. I don’t want to spend all our time and money waiting for and paying for cabs,” I said.
“Good call,” She agreed.
We bought a pair of umbrellas and some pullover ponchos at a gift shop and went on our way, checking out museums and shops, snacking on pralines and beignets, and popping into bars for the occasional cocktail. Street performers played washboards and trumpets under awnings, and every dark and cavernous hole in the wall promised new wonders to see or hear or taste.
We turned a corner and Michelle asked a shop girl, “Where’s the nearest restroom?”
The girl pointed down the street to a museum that was open to the public. It was new, modern, and clean. We walked to the building and went into the courtyard. Shiny walls of either marble or granite gleamed under security lights in the subdued sunlight. Two doors were marked Women and Men and we split off to take care of the call of nature.
My umbrella hung over my arm as I stepped up to the urinal and unzipped. I took a deep breath as I finally broke the seal on a morning’s worth of drinking. I rolled my neck, and someone entered the restroom and came to the toilet next to me. If you are not aware, ‘guy etiquette’ states that if there are unoccupied urinals in a bathroom, you space out one over. This person stood in the slot next to me and I could feel them staring. I tried to ignore it as I finished and zipped up, but here it was, a person standing right next to me, watching me pee.
In retrospect, I probably should have been more alert, but a bad hangover combined with morning drinks had left me a little fuzzy around the edges. I assumed it was a janitor or something come to clean the facilities, especially when I realized that it was a woman. I stepped back from the toilet and she turned and watched me, smiling, a strange gleam in her eye.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
She stared a second longer and the entire scene came into focus. She was wearing a red and white sleeveless blouse that… No, it was not red and white. It was white. The red was blood. I choked up on the umbrella, getting ready to use it as a weapon if need be. This woman stood staring at me, bleeding from a giant gash on her chin. Blood flowed from the wound and stained the top of her white shirt. I took a step back and asked, “Oh my god, are you okay?”
She continued to stare at me with that strange, vacant look in her eye and said, “Oh honey, I am just fine. I’m wonderful.”
Blood dripped from her chin and she came toward me. I stepped away from her and backed out of the restroom and into the suddenly empty courtyard. She followed me out, still smiling, ambling at me like something out of a zombie movie, blood flowing freely, her eyes flashing wildly.
“St-stay back!” I said, holding the sharp end of the umbrella at her, “You need help. Let me call you an ambulance.”
“What for?” she shrugged, the flow of red down her neck and chest growing darker, “Let’s see what we can find in here!” And she turned and walked into the women’s room.
“Michelle!” I called as loudly as I could, “Hey!”
“What?” she called back as she came walking out of the restroom. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the courtyard. “Ow! What’s with you?”
“Did you see that woman?”
“What woman?”
“The one who passed you in the doorway.”
“I don’t know, why?”
We continued to walk, and I chanced a glance over my shoulder. The bloody woman stood outside the museum staring at me and smiling. “Oh, shit, she’s following us.”
“Who?”
I told Michelle about the urinal and the woman and the staring and the blood.
“Oh my god.” She said.
“Yeah, and now she’s behind us,” I said as I pulled her into the first open storefront. We looked at the windows from behind a bunch of ballroom dresses as the puzzled sales clerk asked if she could help us. The bloody woman passed the shop and we waited a minute before going out and turning the other direction, and I stopped cold. Impossibly, she stood on the curb on the opposite side of the street and smiled at us. We turned again and moved to as highly populated an area as we could find, which was not easy, given the rain. The bloody woman appeared again and again on corners and under awnings, down alleyways, and on the street itself. At one turn I saw her dancing lazily as a pickup jazz band played, her eyes closed, her neck and shirt a wicked crimson, as the strange flurry of life that is New Orleans continued its steady, ethereal beat around her. We wandered for a couple of hours, trying and failing to lose our stalker, but every time I loosened my grip on the umbrella, we’d turn a corner and she’d be there, bleeding.
We finally lost her, or perhaps she just lost interest and found someone else to follow. Eventually, Michelle and I made it back to the hotel. Except for the incident in the restroom, the bloody woman never got close again and never said anything else; just followed us around town freaking us out. We rested and pulled ourselves together and went out later that evening without incident. We still joke from time to time about how I was ready and willing to use a five-dollar aluminum umbrella as a stabbing weapon against someone who obviously couldn’t feel pain.
I’ve been back to New Orleans a dozen or more times since that first trip, but every time I’m there, almost fifteen years later, I still expect to see the bloody woman turn the corner and stare at me with that strange, dead smile. And given the way New Orleans hangs onto history, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she was still there, still swaying to the beat of a jazz funeral, still bleeding, still just fine, still wonderful.