This past Mardi Gras was my 21st straight birthday party. I haven’t missed Fat Tuesday since I was born in 1987, a week before Mardi Gras Day. I won’t turn 21, however, until this coming Sunday. Curse the gods above for giving me Carnival 12 days before I can drink legally, as I knew this dilemma would later slap me in the face. It happened once over the break, this past Saturday, when I joined some friends at a bar in Metairie called Oscar’s. My two sorority acquaintances informed me that they were asking for IDs, but I wasn’t worried. When a random guy in a Jesuit hoodie came over to check our IDs, I gave him mine while looking calm and collected. He looks at my ID, then right back at me as he informs me, “Today’s not the 17th.” I looked shocked as I replied faux sincerely, “Oh really, is it not?” In my head I’m channeling Bill Engvall, saying, “I am 21 already. I just came back in a time machine from three weeks ago so I could have a beer during Mardi Gras. Here’s your sign.” Regardless, I was thrown out of Oscar’s. The aforementioned acquaintances decide to rendez-vous with me and my buddies at The Harbor, a bit closer to the lake but still remarkably Metairie. If you wonder about my placement of the word “remarkably,” ask someone who grew up in Uptown New Orleans just what it’s like to spend Mardi Gras in Metairie. There are no “Gretas” in Uptown. Our Greta, a 40-something-year-old soccer mom already drunk off Miller Lite, decided that we, the college crowd, were the perfect type of people to which lap dances should be given. She started with my buddy “James,” recovering from his own questionable pre-Mardi Gras hookup. She then moved to the ground, relatively quickly. After a tug-of-war in which she’s cursing at James while trying to steal the beer bucket, she leaves, cursing out anything that so much as looked at her funny. With my story from Saturday night intact, we depart from the Harbor to rest before Big Sunday. For me, it was Disaster Sunday. No person will ever stop me from catching something thrown off a float. If I want it, it shall be mine.
However, on Tchoupitoulas Street at the beginning of the Krewe of Thoth, when a little football was thrown, I jumped to catch it. When I came down, I bobbled it, moved to catch it again and crashed, right leg first, into the steel beam connecting the float to the tractor. I flipped over and down to the ground, where half the crowd met my acrobatics with horror, while the other half – appropriately – pointed and laughed. I made it back to my other seat, after breaking the first one with 290 pounds of me, and was bombarded with inquiries of “Are you alright?” mixed with “That was the funniest f#$%ing thing i’ve ever f#$%ing seen!” I still came down with the football. A long-time friend of mine, “Phil,” threw a plastic baggie off the float with eight Tylenol – I consumed four. I’m a big dude with some big pain. As no Vicodin was made readily available, four Tylenol circulated my blood stream, driving to devour my dismay like Ms. Pac-Man when all the enemies turn blue and run about screaming. Needless to say, I was in no condition to walk back and forth in hopes of catching a miscellaneous bead thrown by Hulk Hogan. I rode back to Metairie with James’ parents and little brother, with resting and watching the Super Bowl as my only priorities. Anyone who saw the Super Bowl and knows that I went to the same high school as the past two Super Bowl MVPs knows I enjoyed the game thoroughly. Soon after Giants wide receiver David Tyree’s helmet catch but before the game-winning touchdown in the fourth quarter, James’ little brother comes up to me and asks, “Is it bad if I eat a peanut if there’s already a hole in it?” A year ago, if someone told me I’d be watching the Super Bowl in a random family’s house in Metairie, nursing a bum leg and not going to Bacchus while being pestered about the inner workings of a peanut, I’d have called shenanigans. It made even less sense two days later when, instead of second-lining with my drum and 20 of my closest friends behind the krewes of Zulu and Rex, I watched election returns on the rest of the country’s Fat – or Super – Tuesday. As Barack Obama won more states and grabbed the momentum of the election, I relaxed and hoped my leg would heal quickly. Come find me, and I’ll show you the wound. And, of course, I’ll tell the rest of the story.
—-Contact Eric Freeman at [email protected]