One of my favorite things about bartending in New Orleans was doing so during football season. As pitiful as most games were, the matchups were always epic, even if only in our own minds. The Saints have always been a hard-luck team, and their fans have grown accustomed to the pitfalls of following a side with such a seeming proclivity for ignominious defeat. There's a truism in sports that goes something like Win, and your fans drink to you; lose, they drink for you.Or maybe themselves. I forget.
Either way, when your city's Eleven can't even muster a .500 season, you tend to do more of the latter than the former. Too many of those seasons have passed in the forty since the Saints entered the league, but it's always been sorta kinda alright by their fans. Given the fact that there are something like 90,000 bars and taverns in the N.O. metro area in which to root and lament whilst watching the game, there has never been a shortage of rainy-day drinking and armchair analysis. Even when said comes from a barstool sans arms.
When I worked the German gig, there were some Sundays when R from around the corner would be the only Saints fan in the joint (myself, I was a mercenary fan whose alliances were dictated week-by-week by the arrival of new and different hordes of tourists, each a dislocated fan of some likely-better team), and he would be relegated to drinking his Beck's in one of the far corners of the room's modest squarefootage, one tiny television registering with tinny mono sound the drubbing his--our--Saints had brought upon themselves by agreeing to play American Football of a Sunday afternoon. I would sneak over in the rare free moment to brush up on scores and lowlights, as the bulk of the bar's four screens and satellite package was dedicated to sugartitting the out-of-town fans of more prominent clubs who had stumbled down Bourbon Street nursing hangovers only slightly smaller than their Saturday nights, each requiring refreshment of either the tomato or sudsy (and sometimes both) variety. R and I would commiserate and discuss in no brief terms the horrendous choices made by our team, be those choices our coach's, or our quarterback's, or our owner's, or a combination of the lot. More often than not, it was the lot.
And after the German gig, there was a time at the Patio when I was more free to nurture my love/hate relationship with our Saints, when our off-Bourbon crowd was more inclined to sit and indulge their native team during its sixteenish ramblings about the Superdome's and other gridirons. There was even a Playoff game in there somewheres, a by-the-book, standard write-off handed us by the Minnesota Vikings in one of the Twin Cities. Not sure which. And not that it matters.
This Saturday night past, however, there was a rumbling in New Orleans that was palpable (albeit faint and only then through the floor and the soles of one's shoes) even here in the Frozen North. The famously loud Superdome hosted a meeting of men, twenty-two at a time, after which the New New Orleans Saints prevailed and secured for themselves a chilly Next Sunday in Chicago (though that last part was technically determined on the following afternoon). In the forty years of the franchise, this was the first post-season win for the men in black and gold. Sadly, Joe "My Cell Phone Rings Like A" Horn was on the sidelines for the historic event, but Deuce and Reggie made up on the ground what the team lacked in airpower.
But mine is not a sports blog, and this is not an armchair analysis. I have no room in these webpages for play-by-play, and I don't intend to make such room. What I do have is mad space for the things that shake my rafters, that make me shout from the rooftops. And that kind of enthusiasm, at the moment, is reserved for my New Orleans Saints. I have never been moved to root such as I have during these past sixteen weeks for the N.O. Eleven. Seeing them play their first game back in the Superdome on a Monday night, even though I was stuck at the Indian gig, was emotional to the point of ridiculousness. I usually skip halftime shows, but I disregarded more than a few mango margaritas to hear Green Day and U2 pitch and wail in support of a city's rebuilding. Kudos. Bravo. Bravissimo. More power to. Were I at home, tears may have been shed.Putting my feelings for the city of my growings-up into words has not been easy since I watched it get wiped from off the map after Lady K. It's a feeling of loss that has impacted my being in a way I never expected, and probably more so for the fact that I had moved on by the time She hit. I've been back once since, and it was a rough week. My people were all safe and sound, none drowned in their attics, but there's something about driving through a town one calls home and seeing the Devil's Alphabet on every house in the Ninth Ward, watching the highwater funkline ebb and flow across the fronts of homes down Esplanade and Elysian Fields, knowing that Kermit's on a permanent Texan Tour and Henry's out Colorado way and Shorty's working L.A. in lieu of N.O. gigs because the venues don't exist no more, that makes a man shake out his bandanna and wonder what in the Fuck happened to his nestling place, to his sugarspot, to his home.
That's something for another day, though. On this fine bleary rainy New England morning, there are six days between me and the Saints-Bears game that will require much of my concentration, all of my face-painting skills, and more than a little of my scattershot wherewithal. So until and after then, my best to you and yours, and may your days include prayers and such for a city in Louisiana that was swamped but didn't drown, that died and was reborn, that may be flawed but won't be flogged.
Geaux Saints.
And Peace.
