World's Fair Adventure

Someone brought up the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans the other day and it reminded me of a little adventure my best friend and I had. We were seventeen at the time and decided to take the bus to the fair, see if we couldn’t get drunk, and then take the bus home.

Luck was with us as we had gotten ourselves into one of the bars (actually, at that time, you didn’t need much luck to be under age and get into a bar) and got pretty lit up. When the time came to leave, we staggered to our bus stop, which drove us all the way down Elysian Fields and let us off at the campus of UNO where we thought we were getting transferred, but the bus route ended and there were no other buses running. It was midnight.

WHAT?

Those of you from New Orleans will understand this trek, but I will try to explain it fully. There was no way we were calling our folks, not that we had cell phones, so we decided to hike it. We walked from the campus of UNO along Leon C. Simon until we hit the Sea Brook bridge, which was about two miles.

Remember that we were loaded.

We came down off the bridge and got onto the levee that overlooked Hayne (Haynes) Boulevard on the right and Lake Pontchartrain on the left and walked about a mile before having to sit down and there we nodded off in the grass. I remember my friend shaking me to get up so we could keep going. Plus, this was the East, which was predominately black and a fairly high crime area, but we grew up there, so we thought nothing of it. But in the back of our minds, we knew two skinny white kids were easy targets.

The next mile my friend finds a joint that ended up in his pocket some time during the night and we thought it a good idea to light it up and smoke it in order to get rid of the evidence. Whether it helped or not, I have no idea, but we made the four miles down Hayne to my street and the two blocks up to get to my house and passed out in my room at about 3 a.m. I don't know if we woke my parents or not 'cause it was a small house, but they were cool, so it didn't matter.

I have never been so tired in all my life.