The other Jewish Elvis in Cajun country

It's been a while since I had a name of the week entry, but this one is so good I think I can safely call it name of the month. Heard at a recent wedding was the name, Shitonya. Make each syllable a separate word for maximum enjoyment. In addition I would like to make a public service announcement to Baton Rouge parents: if the name starts with "Shit," it's probably time to move on to the next page in the name book.

I'm beginning to think that Louisiana actually is the fiery afterlife promised to gays by so many Bible Belt preachers. They just can't catch a break here and now some state senators are even trying to insert homophobic language into property tax laws:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/052904/new_leggay001.shtml

A few days a go I went to check out a protest outside the downtown post office. There were about 20 people, some who had come as families, urging Sen. Mary Landrieu to support the federal marriage amendment. This would not be so weird, except I only found one person from Baton Rouge. Everyone else had come from out of town, some of them had driven two hours.

I wasn't thrilled to sit out in the putrid, soupy summer air to talk to these wackos, but there were some great quotes that came out of it.

I talked to a guy running U.S. congress in a district in New Orleans who thinks gay marriage "brings chaos out of the order that's been going on for 5,000 years." He used this unfortunate for his response to a question about civil unions: "They are a back door attempt to delegitimize marriage."

I really loved this rationale for the detriment of gay marriage on society: "Sweden allows gay marriage and the number of children born out of wedlock has risen." You would think the one thing gays could not be responsible for is out-of-wedlock births, or any other births for that matter.

The most disturbing part of the rally came when I interviewed a couple of teenagers holding a big "Save Marriage" sign. "People say we are hating people, but we're not hating them, we just don't want them redefining our constitution," a 17-year-old girl said. But, wait, I said, aren't you here to support a constitutional amendment?
"Oh yeah, I guess that's right."

Beautiful as that was, I think the underlying sentiment of the rally was summed up by that girl's 15-year-old friend when explaining why she was trying to get gay marriage banned:

"It's not right, ugh, it's just nasty."

It's official, summer sucks. With my car in the shop, I have spent my off-day sweating in my apartment, my natural religious inclinations preventing me from turning on my costly air conditioner. It's been around 90 and very humid for the past several days and the forecast calls for a cooling trend around October, so I guess I need to get used to it. I see why the number one summer activity down here is sitting on the porch with a mint julip and watching the field hands work.

I also understand why people are so fat down here, other than a complete lack of ability to cook with anything other than a deep fryer: for five months out of the year physical exertion sounds about as appealing as, well, Baton Rouge in the summer.

All right, enough of this weak Yankee bitching, time to find me a crawfish boil.

I was at Duvic's Bar with about 20 of my friends and colleagues from the esteemed world of Baton Rouge journalism last night, celebrating my friend Arthur's 34th birthday. As is only fitting, we ushered him into his mid-30s by getting approriately wasted.

Midway through the night, one of my editors who was at the bar with us came up to me and my fellow crime reporter and told us a cop had been shot at the Wal-Mart two blocks away from a bar filled with reporters. The three of us left the bar and went to inspect the scene.

I am ashamed to say that, since college, I have not covered a story drunk, but I was in fine form. When we got to the scene, another co-worker who was on the scene (and has admitted to never being drunk in his life) commented that, "One of y'all smell like you've been having a good time." Given that context I'm not sure he knows what a "good time" smells like, but I digress.

Ignoring this futile criticism, my fellow drunk crime reporter and I went around the scene interviewing witness in what turned out to be a huge story - the first Baton Rouge cop in 11 years to get killed on the job.

A 27-year police veteran was wrestling with a shoplifter when the shoplifter grabbed the cop's gun and shot her in the head.

Despite the multiple g & t's, I think we did a pretty good job of covering the story. Afterward, like any reporter worth their salt, I trudged back to the bar with my co-worker had another beer and prepared for a hungover day of work (which turned out to be a 12 hour day of work chasing this story).

Some of the best quotes in the story came from that boose infused night, which goes to show, well, I don't what it goes to show, but it seems like there should be some lesson not learned in that scenario.

My career reached its nadir recently. I was sent to cover the The Advocate Presents the Life After 50 Expo. It's bad enough to have to cover a company blowjob, but it's even worse when the most exciting attraction is a Tea Party seminar whose presenters suggest with straight faces going to Target and buying the worst kind of kitsch junk imaginable with which to set the table and pass it off as cute (to oohs and ahs, no less).

Between that and the free diabetes tests it was exactly the kind of assignment I've dreamed of.

The best part about the Over 50 Expo? An ambulance next to the entrance, ready to go just in case.

Somebody please tell me that somehow there is a logical transition from that to celebrated foreign correspondent. Anyway, it was one of the less memorable articles I have written but would have been much better if I had stuck with my original lede:

Throngs of people staring death squarely in the face shuffled past a waiting ambulance and inched their walkers into the C.B. Pennington Jr. Center Saturday for the Life After 50 Expo.

I allegedly made some phone calls (www.idiotbastardsons.blogspot.com) during my recent trip to the Gulf Coast. Please cancel any planned interventions.

I have returned and mostly recovered from a quick trip through the finer parts of Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle with Steve The Flight Attendant. Besides a wicked hangover,the journey gave me a new appreciation for fried food, the Stars and Bars and the importance of marrying outside the family.

The trip had its predictable inauspicious start, with Steve calling to tell me he would be several hours late due to drinking related complications (this, consequently, is the second trip to Louisiana out of two that Steve has missed his flight after a big night of drinking).

After work Sunday I sped down to New Orleans to pick up our intrepid peanut peddler. Steve rolled out of the airport looking like his plane crashed. He was clearly unshowered and unshaven, had a pronounced fat lip that looked suspiciously like herpes, and was sporting broken glasses and a glum look.

It seems Steve had said something to a fellow bar patron in Orange County the night before that earned him a sucker punch that knocked off his glasses. His attacker's friend was then kind enough to walk over and stomp on Steve's glasses.

That minor speed bump out of the way, we made haste for Mobile, Alabama. We got in at midnight and after dropping our stuff off at the most rundown-looking motel we could find we looked for a bar going off on a Sunday night. Unfortunately we found Soul Kitchen. As Steve described it, the bar had neither soul nor a kitchen. In fact, despite the name, I spotted but one black person in the crowded bar, and he was making a quick exit.

Everybody else in the bar looked like they were frat boys from a bad 80s teen movie. College baseball caps, button-down shirts with the collars flipped up, khaki shorts and boat shoes with no socks with the girls their saccharine sorority opposites. So what I'm trying to say is we blended.

After drinking enough to make the Blink 182-covering band nearly palatable, we looked for our next watering hole.

In a stroke of brilliance I chose Seaman's Bar for obvious reasons. There were exactly four people in the bar, two of whom were the husband and wife who owned the place. The others were a hammered forty-something acid-casualty who was barely cogent and tried to feed me peanuts and the other was Jim, an entertaining, if bigoted, truck driver.

The ex-Navy bar-keep and his Turkish-Croatian wife were very kind and kept the drinks and free snacks rolling till closing time. We hadn't really eaten dinner yet and Jim offered to drive us to the only place open, Krystal. After Jim loudly announced how buzzed he was Steve and I did the intelligent thing and accepted the ride.

On the way we learned about Jim's Korean wife, aversion to "Wetbacks" and the .32 he kept at the ready under the driver's seat. Following our meal we hoofed it the two miles home and when we got back at 4 a.m., the same guy who claimed he was a Marine and tried to bum a cigarette off me when we left was hanging out with his friend on the balcony. A few minutes after we went to sleep he called our room and asked if we wanted to buy weed.

After that, it was on to Gulf Shores, Alabama, after a two hour stop at Lens Crafters to get Steve a new pair of glasses.

I think Gulf Shores might win for worst nice beaches to shitty town ratio. The sand is sugary, the beaches are wide and Gulf water is warm enough to swim comfortable. The town is on stilts and scummy. Once there I did what any God-fearing Southerner would do, laid out my Confederate Flag towel, opened my beer and headed to the water to do some drinking and body surfing.

A few drinks down I misjudged a rather large wave, got flipped upside down and came up bleeding profusely from my shoulder (which I didn't realize until Steve pointed it out). More importantly, my half empty beer was jarred from my hands, only to wash up as a saltwater filled corpse about an hour later.

After laying a sufficient foundation to enjoy Gulf Shores on a Monday night, we hit the Pink Pony which actually isn't a strip club but does have terrible live music.

Then we got a ride to Florabama, a bar named for it's location on the Alabama/Florida border, which is as class as it sounds. In Florabama, known as the heart of the Redneck Riviera, we made like the locals and continued our steady diet of Coors Light and were having a good time until one of the two girls we were talking to said the following:

"Sorry to ask, but, uh, are y'all together?"

Defeated, Steve and I went back to our hotel and drank on the beach, just the two of us, shattering that myth.

The next morning, thoroughly bombed by our bender, we made our way back to Louisiana.

On the way we stopped in Biloxi to visit the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library, paid for by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. These are people with firm convictions about who was right in the War of Southern Secession.

I learned several things on my tour:

1. Jefferson Davis is a great American and could have done so much if not for that fucker Lincoln.

2. Jefferson Davis major shortcoming was that he was just too darned principled.

3. Slavery shmavery, the War Between the States was about states' rights.

The gift shop was something to behold. There you could buy a T-shirt emblazoned with "Southern Heroes" on the front and below it were several Confederate war heroes, including Nathan Bedford Forrest. The shirt didn't mention that whole first Grand Wizard of the KKK thing, and really why include that minor blip in his biography.

The gift shop also had new editions of the heart warming classic, "Little Black Sambo."

In short, I finally got straight in my head what those fucking liberal Yankees have so muddled during my studies of American History and thank god.

O, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land...

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers (OK, so I suppose I don't need to wish Ben and Joe happy Mother's Day). I will be gone the next couple days on a spur of the moment roadtrip around the beautiful Gulf Coast. The area from southern Mississippi to the panhandle of Florida is known as the Redneck Riviera and is famous for beautiful beaches and scummy nightlife.

Steve "Don't Call Me a Stewardess" Reeder, the fearless flight attendant of TOJECC lore, is flying in tonight and he has already called me to tell me he missed his first flight after a drunken night in Orange County during which he was sucker punched and had his glasses stomped.

A fitting start for a trip that is guaranteed to net me stories and Steve a venereal disease from a fat girl.

I hopped on a plane the other day, struggled through the obstacle course created by the narrow aisle/wide Americans combination and sat down. There was the inevitable pre-takeoff quiet, with many on the plane fidgeting nervously and eyeing each new passenger to walk onto the plane.

I have often joked that when the terrorists hit again they will come through Baton Rouge Metro Airport, as it is run by people from Baton Rouge, which means the images on the x-ray machines are probably just looped as the machine has no doubt been broken for months with no one able to fix it. As I sat there on the Metro Airport tarmac, fidgeting and eyeing my fellow passengers, I saw something out of a sketch comedy routine, except it was on my plane.

A man of Middle Eastern appearance, who seemed to be alone, was walking down the aisle intently scrutinizing and shuffling the five passports he had in his hands. He soon turned to the four family member he had in two, who were several passengers behind him, and started talking to them and I was sufficiently embarrassed for even noticing.

Then it was on to Houston, where I had a layover and went searching for coffee. Not surprisingly the search yielded only Starbucks, so no, I am sorry to report, there is no hidden gem of a coffee shop in George Bush International Airport. Right behind me in line were two officers wearing Department of Homeland Security Uniforms, which I suppose should have made me feel safer. However, there's something about a Homeland Security Officer charged with fighting suicidal terrorists ordering a "venti rasberries and creme" that makes me a little nervous about my next flight. I want the man who's job it is to stop me from being blown up to have to look up from his issues of Guns & Ammo to order a fucking coffee, black, and have to spit out his chewing tobacco to drink it.