Teacher on Two Wheels

Taken from my journal, Thursday 11/8/07

By the time I met Melanie and Nathalie, two college students I contacted through Couchsurfing.com who are roommates and best friends, I was exhausted from a long day in the saddle and covered in dirt and grime. Nevertheless, Nathalie welcomed me into their apartment without hesitation and made me feel right at home.

Nathalie and Melanie are both students at Tulane University, a school that, according to Nathalie, was completely back to normal only four short months after The Storm made its arrival. Tulane is a beautiful school, as it should be—a student is charged $40,000 a year for tuition, room, and board. The campus is comprised of modern buildings and wide sidewalks lined with live oaks. Students with laptops and color-coded note cards study at all hours of the day and night in on-campus coffee shops and lounges. The university possesses the quintessential college vibe. Seeing its manicured lawns empty in the chill of dusk, devoid of Frisbee-throwing students, is like looking at a closed amusement park.

Simply knowing that Nathalie and Melanie will graduate and go out into the world and work and exist and influence people is comforting. They’re articulate, considerate, tolerant of and passionate about other cultures, and at peace with their intelligence.

Above: Nathalie and Melanie

Nathalie is French-American and is fluent in four languages. She’s on scholarship at Tulane and will graduate this December, only three and a half short years after she started her college career. She has strong teeth that make you want to say things that will make her smile just so you can look at them.

Melanie is from New Jersey and has a sense of humor that could put the most rigid of people at ease. She spent a transformative semester in South America during which she learned to speak Spanish by speaking with the housekeeper of her host family. A casual confidence that cloaks her allows her to speak honestly and give her opinion on any subject brought up in conversation. Her eyes are so brilliantly blue that the word ‘blue’ doesn’t suffice in describing them.

One night, The Storm made its way into our conversation. After New Orleans flooded, both girls spent one semester at universities in their respective home states, a period they refer to as their ‘storm semester’.

“My storm semester was incredibly difficult,” Nathalie said. “I couldn’t focus on studying, I got upset a lot, I missed New Orleans.”

“Yeah, I felt the same way,” Melanie added. “I used to stay up until three or four in the morning just watching CNN and staring at all the storm coverage. I felt like I needed to be in New Orleans but was stuck in New Jersey. It was horrible.” Pause. “And you know, everything before The Storm seemed so perfect. I just remember feeling so carefree in this city. When The Storm came it just ripped through everything. In a way, it not only blew through the city, but it tore through my life, too.”

Nathalie nodded in agreement.

They talked about how they discovered that life is random and chaotic, a realization thrust upon them like a mountainous pile of debris by The Storm. When they spoke of the pre-Katrina New Orleans they remember, it was as if they reminisced about a best friend from grade school whom they lost touch with.

“Everything changed after The Storm. There’s just a different feeling in the city now.”

Many Tulane students spent storm semesters at other schools and never came back. Like the thousands upon thousands of city residents who decided to start new lives somewhere else after Hurricane Katrina, the students became acclimated to their new surroundings and didn’t think that returning to New Orleans was worth the hassle. Why risk another flood and another drowned semester?

As Nathalie and Melanie went to class, I spent my days writing and riding around the city.

New Orleans, like any city, is a conglomeration of different areas. Each area contributes to the ambiance of the city as a whole just as a color contributes to a painting. Roads left dangerous by the city’s infrastructural acne, the countless deep potholes and sloppy pavement patches around manhole covers that one would have to be blind and comatose not to see and feel, tie all the areas together. (Melanie later explained that potholes are a result of the lack of property tax in New Orleans. According to her, wealthy people, people who no longer have children in public schools thanks to the perceived safety and racial homogeneity that private schools provide, don’t feel like they should have to pay taxes to cover the expenses of the city’s public school system. The potholes are a nasty consequence of the absence of property tax.)

Unfortunately, New Orleans’ poverty is stored away in the overgrown grass that surrounds abandoned houses in black neighborhoods, hidden under the colonies of white trailers populated largely with black residents, and stuffed in the empty bottles and take out trays that roll and blow past the feet of young black men who stand and talk in clusters in the afternoon on forgotten streets.

By contrast, St. Charles street, a potholed asphalt snake of affluence that winds and cuts through the city, is lined with looming mansions that, compared to the destroyed homes in other parts of the city that now only provide shelter for ghosts and waterlogged dreams, are offensively restored. Live oaks stretch their delicate limbs out over the smooth pillars and clean porches of homes that could pass as ornate hotels. Fresh paint makes high water lines undetectable. The Storm has passed for the people on St. Charles.

Above: Homes on St. Charles St.

The famous grid of streets known as the French Quarter looks just as it does in photos. Quaint bars and art galleries draw people down its picturesque avenues. Balconies overflow with ferns and hanging plants like architectural cornucopias. Musicians and psychics pepper it’s street corners offering up their skills for a donation.

Above: French Quarter

I found one street that was particularly saturated with art galleries and set out to stop in every one. Many of the gallery spaces seemed to be rented by a single artist displaying his/her art for sale. A few were local co-op spaces where art from a collection of artists was on display. In one gallery I visited, the artist who ran the place tried to convince me to buy his entire series up on the walls.

“I’d love to, but I’m in the middle of a long trip at the moment and I don’t have a job. I can’t really be making such big purchases.”

“Hey man, no problem. We ship nationally and internationally. Put the stuff in storage. Just think, when you get back from your trip and you’re setting up an apartment, you’ll have great art to hang on the walls.”

“Yeah, but I really am on a tight budget.” Pause. “But if I had the money, I would buy something,” I lied.

“Hey I’m flexible on prices. And you know what, you’re young. It’s good to invest in art now. When I make the cover of Art Forum, this stuff is going to be worth its weight in gold. Buying now is like investing in a mutual fund that is sure to appreciate.”

The artist’s cockiness was humorous for a few minutes. A few short minutes. The more he talked, the more his desperation made me feel uncomfortable. I left and made my way to the next gallery.

Above: French Quarter at dusk

“Your stuff is beautiful,” I said to the artist, a man who paints on the human body and then has pictures of his work printed in large format.

“Thank you. I pioneered the technique of body painting way back when people didn’t think it would turn into a respectable medium.”

“Wow. Is it difficult to get the paint to stick to the skin like that?” I asked as I pointed to someone’s painted belly button.

“Why would it be difficult, because it’s not canvass? Because it’s not in a frame?” The man sensed that he was coming off as defensive and laughed to try to break the tension. It didn’t work. “No, it’s easy to paint on skin. It’s my canvass.”

Because I didn’t see any photo credits for his pictures, some costing as much as $10,000, I asked him if he took the pictures himself or if he worked with a photographer.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “Look, when you listen to music, do you ask who produced it, who mastered it? No, you just enjoy the music and appreciate the song as a work of art. The bodies are my songs. Who records them is not important.” I could tell he had this conversation before with other people. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the man seemed like he was hiding something.

I got back on my bike and rode back to Tulane.

By the time I bid farewell to Nathalie and Melanie after three days and nights in New Orleans, I had had the chance to sit in on their African dance class that was fueled by a powerful drumming group, attend a concert/speech put on by the duo of musician John Legend and world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, do some sightseeing, speak at a school, and spend heaps of time with my interesting hosts. I left New Orleans feeling energized and ready to roll, and roll I did.

Above: Melanie, Nathalie, me