Where Everybody Knows Your Name

                Transitioning into living in a new house completely different than what I was used to was an interesting challenge.  Don’t get me wrong, Will’s Mother’s house is spectacular.  It is an old style New Orleanian shotgun house that was erected in the 1930’s.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “shotgun”, it refers to the style in which the homes are built.  You walk in the front door and you are in the living room, you open the next door and you are in the dining room, the next door is a bedroom with a bathroom attached,  and the last door is the kitchen, all in linear progression.   In the case of Will’s Mother, rooms were later added to the side of the house as well as in the very back, thus; making it was a modified shotgun.  My first thought was, why would anyone build a house like this? THERE IS NO PRIVACY. PERIOD.  After a short period of thought, I remembered something from my architecture days.  During the time of no air conditioning, people had to get really creative with the way they built buildings.  The shotgun home was the perfect solution because when one opened the front door and the back door the house created its own ventilation.  Even during our modern times of central air and heat most houses in New Orleans only have window units, and the residents STILL stick to the front door/ back door method of cooling.

                Because this particular home has 14 ft. ceilings, it’s nearly impossible to cool the entire thing off at one time.  Usually, we would keep the door to the living room, where the television lived, closed off so that we could turn on the window unit.  The poor machine never really did make the room feel like an icebox, but it at least made the climate slightly more bearable.  I actually don’t ever remember feeling completely cooled off ANYWHERE I went in New Orleans.  Even the central a/c at the restaurant had trouble keeping up with the blistering temperatures.  I remember a few shifts where the whole unit just froze up completely, and we had to run around trying not to drip sweat on the plates.  New Orleans is truly “hawt as hell” in the summer.  Being from Texas, I am used to some heat, trust me.  The heat in New Orleans , however, is accompanied by 100% humidity every day.  In simpler terms, this just means that you constantly have a slight to severe sweat glaze over your entire body, no matter what the temperature, at all times.  I soon found that there really was no point in trying to put on makeup, as it would melt right off my face every time I attempted.

                Anyway, the entire interior of the house is lined with these beautiful beveled wooden panels, even the ceilings.  Sometimes I would lie on the bed looking straight up and wonder how difficult it must have been to put those things all the way up there.  Having a contractor’s daughter’s eye, I would also spot all of the discrepancies in the paneling, cleverly hidden to the naked eye.  The floor was real hardwood, not this fake stuff you see in a lot of modern day houses.  It creaked and moaned in some areas, making it impossible to go to the bathroom at night without someone hearing you.  The entire house created its own acoustics as well.  I could hear most of everything that was being said in the living room while standing all the way back in the kitchen.  GG, my nickname for Will’s Mom, has it all so cleverly decorated, too.  There are baker’s wracks full of books, and decorative snakes, fish, and crawfish on the walls in the living room.  In the dining room, there is a HUGE candelabra on the wall with pictures of Will’s Grandmother’s and relatives. In the kitchen there are hot chili peppers Christmas lights and a Salvador Dali print.  As eccentric as it all sounds, it is one of the warmest and inviting homes I still to this day have ever entered. 

                Every afternoon when I got home, that is if we weren’t down by the levy or at the fly, it was the same routine.  At 4 o’clock the local news would come on, by 6 GG was home and watching Brian Williams on NBC, and right after would switch the station over to Wheel of Fortune.  I can’t tell you how much we laughed at each other as we all sat there screaming out ridiculous solutions to the “things, phrases, people, and places”. 

                However, after my 21^{s t} birthday our afternoon time options changed up a little bit, and it was as if the flood gates to the adult world opened up like a snake’s unhinged jaw. I could now go to all of the places where people were REALLY hanging out.  For those of you who are familiar with the sitcom “Cheers”, it kind of hits the nail on the head for the ENTIRE population of the city.  Every neighborhood has what New Orleanians like to refer to as, “the home bar”. The “home bar” is the one you ALWAYS go to, usually in your neighborhood, where everybody knows your name.  In New Orleans, you are never more than 100 yards away from one.  In fact, where I was staying, there was one only a block away.

 Our “bro time” with Will’s friends eventually shifted into going to play pool in the evenings.  I had only ever played at our neighbor’s house a few times growing up, so I was literally starting from ground zero.  My first home bar, although it was not in the neighborhood, was The Buddha Belly on Magazine.  Will said that back in the day when no one really cared how old you were in Louisiana, they would all go there to play pool and try to score booze.  The Buddha Belly was one of six bars owned by Igor, a very well known entrepreneur in town.  If you went to one of Igor’s bars, it was like you had gone to all of them, really.  They were all kind of decorated the same, they all had pool tables and gaming, and they all had coin laundry.  Brilliant.  Need to do some laundry?  Why not grab a few beers or ten while you’re doing it.  We began frequenting the Buddha every day, because frankly, pool is fun.  As we all began to get a little more skill to our game, the competition in the air grew exponentially.  I was becoming a pool shark, a pool shark who despite my distaste for beer, was forced to settle for the $2 PBR.