Stay Out of New Orleans

New Orleans in the ’90s. Before Katrina. A seedy Bohemia for street hustlers, pimps, punks, junkies, murderers, musicians, and suckers out of town.

An old world of hushed tones and voodoo and taboo tricks. Shadows and shotgun houses, whores and lovers and death. Among the grit, characters strive for a day of food and shelter and work, barely surviving but still laidback, easygoing in struggle, aware of being fully alive in the presence of decay.

Drinking, fucking, shooting pool, shooting dope, groaning in moments of easy pleasure and working in the hustle, knowing every local down in the French Quarter, waking up sweating with a fat head, walking on familiar roads where beads wedge into cracks of concrete, smiling at a steaming scent of Gumbo wafting through the Mississippi winds, pickpocketing a tourist and slipping away, falling in love with the same woman every month only to come home itching, ending up far away from where you were born, called to move to New Orleans through a dream, or from a vision in the arched light of bone angels, or because you had to escape the curse of your hometown, all to make a buck, smoking a joint outside a bar, dressing shiny and traditional to dance at Mardi Gras, living, living, living, like the reaper won’t ever show for you. But when death does come, after exhausting all the possibilities of where you’ve ended up, you hope that your family and friends will celebrate on the night of your grave.