It was the year of the Bourbon Street sackful at Krystal’s, and Alabama had just won the “re-match of the century” game in the BCS National Championship. What could go wrong on the streets of bourbon during the celebration of a lifetime? The moment this question materialized itself was the precise moment when an exuberant fanatic pulled out his junk and rested his berries on the forehead of a passed-out LSU fan. Fortunately for my family we were exhausted after the game from the events leading up to the contest, and we were maybe not hungry for a sackful of sliders from Krystal, and if we had been in attendance, the New Orleans police would have arrested us on the spot for our cumulative transgressions against sports civility.
It was 2011 football and ‘Bama’s football team had faltered earlier in the season by losing the November 5th “Guy Fawkes” matchup to that grass eating PT Barnum-like-showman, Les Miles, in an epic defensive showdown. Tyrann “Honey Badger” Mathieu played some really gritty football and did not allow a single Alabama touchdown with the help of his teammates of course.
A little more than a decade ago, my family and I decided we wouldn’t be very good fans if we sat this title game out, so we paid for the expensive tickets and spent our Christmas funds on a National Championship re-match. The tickets were precious commodities that year, so Gigi hid the tickets in either a David Baldacci novel, or the Bible, but I honestly cannot remember which book it was. Gigi had received some pushback from her son, Blair, about our accommodations at the Hojo Inn in Chaulmette. Blair wanted to be near the action, and as always he seemed to know best, asserting, “we are staying in a roach motel.” I don’t want to give the impression that Blair was ever ungrateful, but honestly he was pretty astute, and pretty quickly I learned he was more aware of our situation in the Nola suburb than the rest of us.
We arrived innocently enough. There were some more Bama fans that seemed full of a puffed up confidence that bespoke Bama as a team in this year. We would be playing with a chip on our shoulders. You would think I actually suited up and played too, but that was part of the fantasy. The first evening on Bourbon Street the family and I were drinking in a bar that served some kind of egg based gin drink called— a “gin fizz.” Wes had explained its uniqueness in the bar we were resting our legs in. Then future pro lineman D.J. Fluker strolled by, and Blair gave chase. To this day, I wonder if Blair tried to pat him on the back and Fluker grabbed him up. Blair came back to the bar clutching his back, so if a walk was ever suggestive of a conflict this was the one that I will cite every time. He said, “DJ Fluker tried to eat me like a cheeseburger.” When I climbed into bed at the Hojo that night something impeded my feet splaying the way they typically do in a hotel bed with tightly tucked sheets. There was an obstruction. It was someone’s sock that got mixed up in the hotel sheets, but it made me feel pretty dirty too.
The next day, my father, Gigi, and I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art. I wanted to day drink if I recall my sentiments, but at the time I was applying to a PhD program in history, and my Dad wanted to test my resolve for that seven year commitment. Blair went to Harrah’s Casino, because he was not ever about putting on airs.
We were pretty sober when we left the museum and arrived to find a gridlocked traffic situation on Canal Street where we began calling Blair’s phone to get him to leave the tables and come to dinner with us. We were meeting some of Uncle Wes’s family in Metairie at the Sun Ray Grill, but Blair wouldn’t answer his phone. He was having the time of his life, since he got to say “not so fast my friend” to Lee Corso at a craps table. But the more he lost the more he drank, and conversely the more he drank the more he lost at blackjack. Blair’s favorite toddy was a Maker’s Mark with ice and a splash of water. He drank his share of these before he arrived at the grill.
A cascade of “Roll Tides” were spilled upon entering the establishment. It was a nice group of folks out to eat dinner, but there was a peculiar dynamic going on. Blair was yelling “Roll Tide,” and a group of LSU locals sent over a plate of egg rolls. Blair was a self-described “meat and cheese only” kind of person, but at this point he waved at them and ate the tasty morsels. When the waitress came back he asked her, “what was that I just ate?” She said, “You mean the egg rolls?’ Blair snapped his fingers at the waitress and demanded more cabbage based egg rolls.
By the end of the meal the two young ladies and my buddy Graham and I were ready to give Blair the slip. It seemed he was going to be ready for bed at the Hojo soon. Then the people at the other end of the table came down to our end of the table, and asked to take a photo with him, because he was the “drunkest person they had ever seen.” He tried to bring me in on the photo and the photographer said, “no I just want one of you.” Blair responded, “why?” Then the man said, “because you are the drunkest person i’ve ever seen.”
Graham, Wes’s daughter, her beautiful friend, and I left Blair at the Sun Ray Grille. We were fully expecting my father, Wes, and Gigi to take him home, and tuck him in, so that he could sleep it off. It was not more than an hour later that he called: “Hey brother, where are you?” At the moment I was trying to build up enough liquid courage to plant a kiss on the beautiful friend of Wes’s daughter. Before I could tell that I was going down a slippery slope Blair arrived, and became convinced that Graham’s Mobile born frat brothers wanted to fight him. So Dad and Gigi ushered him out of Pat O’Brien’s Bar. Then it was my turn to act like a hayseed Bama fan.
The tequila turned on me, and we made the mistake of leaving the Irish pub in search of some new friends. We were split from the ladies we arrived with, and all of a sudden the traffic on the street engulfed me. We could barely squirm through the clogged artery that was Bourbon Street on the night before the game. My bladder was totally full, and all I could think about was finding a restroom. I knew that to pee in an alley would be tantamount to public exposure, so in a Dumb and Dumber moment I was forced to “just go.”
I caught the next cab back to Chaumette in total shame. My jeans were already dark, but I sat in the way back of the taxi van hoping that I didn’t smell too pungently of urine. The filth and grime of the city was accumulating in my mind, and all I wanted to do was shower, and go to bed. When I reached the hotel door my key card would only flash red on the door’s tiny light bulb. Blair, I soon learned, had dead-bolted the door. I was forced to wake my Dad and Ginger who began helping me bang on the door. Neighbors were waking up, and coming outside. The Hojo concierge told us, “I am going to have to ask you to leave if you do not quit banging on this door.” We began calling him, but he had set everyone’s phone ring to the “yea, Alabama” fight song. Finally he was roused by his mother’s ring which he had not changed. She said in a slightly more stern than usual voice: “open the door.” He came to the door with sleep in his eyes and he just glared at us.
He climbed right into bed as I stiffly walked in feeling very cold and embarrassed. He had bought a Dominos Pizza and it sat on the table looking inviting. I devoured every slice. When he woke the next morning he looked at me incredulously and said, “Did you eat that pizza?” “Yeah, I ate it.” It was a resentful midnight snack that was still sitting heavy in my gut. Then Blair told me that “it fell out of the box onto the street last night. We picked it up and put it back in the box.”
At the 21-0 victory over Jordan Jefferson’s offense, Alabama executed a marvelous game on the field. AJ McCarron was accurate, and the defense was relentless. Other than a gruesome CJ Mosley injury the game went off without a hitch. For our family this night marked the first time Gigi would fall down, and it happened in a troubling way. She had not had much to drink after the trials of the night before, and she was in the bathroom in the Superdome and face planted. A security guard came to get my father, and they watched the remainder of the game from the top of the steps. This was the first sign that Gigi had an extremely rare illness called PSP where her eyes were losing the ability to track to the ground. We learned this over time. It was a trying road for my father over the next seven years of her life, especially since Blair’s alcoholism got the best of him.
I hate closing on this note, but it is just a part of our story. Roll Tide anyway!