Streets swarming with French Maid-costumed hotties, Bourbon Street was quite the Halloween Party

The moment I realized I was for sure going to hell, I was watching Morgan rolling up a joint with a page from the Bible he’d found in the hotel drawer.

“We’re out of papers, dude,” he said. “And AJ broke the bowl in the car, and no one’s walking to the gas station from here anyway. It’s a blank page, who needs a blank page? They put this page here for desperate times like these.”

I wanted to tell him, Yeah, like writing a letter to mail home, or maybe putting your name and address in case the thing got lost, not using it to get high. But I didn’t. I just took another sip from my nasty screwdriver made from shitty O.J. and watched.

Looking around the hotel room, I realized this group of people only gets together when something fucked up is going on. I never hang out with Morgan, or Salsa, Nathan or AJ separately. And it’s only all of us together like this when we’re on a trip or on vacation or they all want to eat mushrooms and go to the petting zoo.

But here we are in New Orleans on Halloween. I barely remember the 13-hour trip except for the random gas stations in places like Mobile, Alabama where I evidently (I realized later) sent myself a post card saying “Just took the biggest shit ever at a rest stop outside Mobile, Alabama. Scary as fuck; don’t go back here. By the way, you’re high.”

The hotel is called La Quinta and it’s like twenty bucks a piece and maybe five miles outside town. The only thing Mexican about La Quinta is the housekeeping. No Tequila fountains or Corona bars by the pool. In the room the five of us hovering around Morgan as he rolls the joint with the last page of Revelation and holds it up for us to see.

“We can’t go to the French Quarter on Halloween without this,” he says, and flamboyantly kisses his joint. He lights it and breathes in deep, followed by a coughing fit. “Of biblical proportions!” he says and passes it on.

Later on in the car I wonder how the f**k we’re going to get back. Which one of us is going to have to drive this thing after loading up on whatever we just did and God knows what we’ll be doing once we hit the bars on Bourbon Street…on Halloween. And there was certainly more than weed in that god damn joint.

The first thing I realized after taking the elevator down from the parking garage in the French Quarter was that we were the only people who had forgotten to dress up. “This should be a trip,” Salsa says looking at us all, jeans, sweaters and me with sunglasses.

Doing his best Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson impression AJ jumps around and says “So when do we get…The Fear?” and we all tell him to shut the f**k up.

They only sell Hand Grenades in three places in the world. Some redneck bar in Texas, a hedonistic porn palace in Southeast Asia that only exists in the minds of delusional travelers… and New Orleans. But look down the plastic cup and dirty bead bloated gutters of Bourbon Street and you’ll see a green river of these yardstick sized hard-plastic green cylinders with a hand grenade shaped top. You drink two or three of those and see what happens. And for six bucks a pop, no drug addled vacation depraved college student can get a better deal.

After the first one, I started seeing French maids everywhere. These pretty little girls all done up to look like the kinds of maids Hugh Heffner has running around dusting his furniture, and if it can get that old man’s bone bobbing you should see what it did for us. Halloween in New Orleans looks like a porno shot in a fancy hotel in France and I really think all these girls bought their outfits at the same shop, then took scissors and knives to them just to see who had the estrogen enough to be the biggest tease. And this all going on under a terraced sky that rains plastic strings of colored beads like a hail storm.

Just as we go into our third bar, a deliriously drunk bead-laden girl slumps up to me and says right to my face “I get it! That’s a great costume!” and as I try to figure out which head is the one that’s talking to me, she shakes me by the shoulder and says “You’re dressed up like a gay guy!”

“F**k--The South,” is what I think.

And all my friends start laughing until she starts calling them off by their costumes as every dorky character from American Pie.

It’s clearly time for another Hand Grenade.

By two o’clock the streets are covered in bodies. Not dead bodies, but they might as well be. Instead, the sidewalks are like the banks of rivers choked with running salmon except that the people lying in the road are slightly louder in their groans and painful crawling. Beer cups crack and shatter under every footstep. Bottles break and spray glass off the top and sides of every green dumpster that sits on every corner like a discarded beast, trash bags overflowing from their gaping maws. People above scream and throw down beer and beads and patio furniture, and everywhere are people in costumes so it looks like a scene from Thriller.

The five of us have dragged ourselves to a table at an outside bar and are ordering light beers to settle our stomachs when Morgan comes up with the idea of snatching the hat of the Cowboy that walks in behind the guy dressed up as Scuba Steve.

“Ha HA!” He screams and takes off running, leaving the four of us bugging out, beers half way to our lips, eyes chinked out and bleary.

What happened from there, I still don’t know. I imagine he told AJ or Nathan sometime later on, sometime when they were alone or something, or when I was asleep on the long drive home, but me I never found out. All I know is that hours after we searched every alleyway and titty bar and never found him, hours after all the big street sweeping machines came in under the haunting sunrise to clean up the corrupt and decadent mess that was Halloween in New Orleans, and we drove the crawling five miles back to La Quinta at hangover speed, Morgan was just getting out of a Taxicab soaking wet and all but naked.

Both of his eyes were black and he looked like a dog that had been tied up and sent through a wood chipper with nine volt batteries stuffed in its mouth. He was limping, and shivering, his orange hair poking out at weird angles like it was glued to resemble some Anime character, and his pants and shirt were gone.

“F**k New Orleans,” he said as Salsa paid the taxi driver for him, and AJ shut the door.

“And f**k Hand Grenades,” he said, holding up one of his hands in a fist.

In it was one of the plastic grenades that had been at the bottom of every drink like a consolation prize. He threw it in the direction of the yellow Taxi as it climbed back onto the interstate.

I never went on any more wild trips with those guys after that though I think some of them graduated. The last time I heard anything about Morgan was when someone told me he’d done three hits of acid and tried to f**k his garbage disposal.

I still wonder what the hell happened to him during those five lapsed hours in New Orleans and what caused him to lose all his clothes.

I’d like to think the Cowboy got him. I have a feeling though, it’s something way better. Something that I might read about somewhere on a website or in another chapter in a book about college stories. Until then I’ll keep laughing every time I hear about someone using a page from the bible to roll up a joint. And I’ll picture Morgan holding his up and kissing it and smiling with no fear of God or hell or anything else. But I’m thankful for that last blank page in every Bible in every drawer in every shitty hotel off the interstate, because although the Bible is a pretty good story, without that last page I wouldn’t be telling this one.