It’s been three years since I last updated this blog. A lot has happened between then and now. Mainly, I’ve been working day and night on my fiction writing, sending it out to any and all publishers online and otherwise, and have pretty much mastered the art of getting rejected. But that’s okay, good things are just around the corner, I can feel it.
Anyway, I figured now wouldn’t be a bad time for a blog revival, so I could share with the people (my millions of loving fans) some of the silly little true stories that happen to me in everyday life that have no place in the world of fiction. And so with that in mind, please allow me to share that one time on my tour where I was pretty sure someone in my group was going to get killed right in front of me.
But first, a little backstory.
Now for those who don’t know, I am a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, and I can say with complete confidence that it is the most bizarre, enjoyable, and insanity-inducing jobs I’ve ever had in my life. Easily. So yeah… not really your average occupation. However, I have to admit it’s pretty much the best job someone like me can have, because I work a ridiculous short amount of hours a day (five hours of work in one day would be a long day for me) so I get tons of time to work on my writing (and do other stupid stuff that someone my age probably shouldn't do, but that's neither here nor there), it’s rarely boring, and I get to meet all kinds of different, interesting people everyday. It’s also a great job for me because, well, I get to tell stories for a living! I mean sure, it’s a far cry from being James Joyce or J.K. Rowling, but I mean, as far as a job for a struggling writer goes, it’s pretty amazing. Just imagine if those poor bastards in LA who were trying to make it as actors, instead of waiting tables to pay rent, were able to make their way by acting out the plots to their favorite movies in front of tourists while honing in on their craft. It’s really just amazing when you think about it.
So yes, I am quite grateful for my job.
But don’t it get it twisted. That doesn’t mean that this job isn't also ripping apart my sanity. Because it very much is. There are too many stories to share on this one blogpost, but hopefully we’ll get to them all eventually. Right now, as promised above, I will just tell the story about when I thought somebody on my tour was honestly going to get murdered in front of me.
Now this was a pub crawl tour, a haunted pub crawl tour, to be exact, which is different from your standard ghost tour. I’m not sure how interesting the precise differences between the two would be to you guys, but let’s just say that the standard ghost tour is a two hour walking tour where you make a big loop around the quarter, stopping outside of different places of (paranormal) interest and telling the story of that place before moving on. Aside from the one bar stop in the middle, drinking is not a huge part of your basic ghost tour (not to imply that people aren’t drunk on the ghost tour, because good god are they ever).
And then there is the pub crawl tour. The haunted pub crawl tour. Which is where you go inside four different (haunted) pubs, order drinks, and then tell the story elsewhere. I enjoy both kinds of tours for different reasons, and I’m infuriated by both tours for different reasons. I don’t think my reasons for being infuriated with the haunted pub crawl tour will shock anyone. It turns out when you take a group of people, who are in vacation mode, and go drink at four different bars in two hours, you’re gonna run into some problems. Especially when you expect them to stand there patiently as you tell them detailed stories for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, asking them not to heckle, side-talk, fight… or cry (yes it’s happened, more than once...much more). I mean, that’s just asking a lot. Especially when you are doing this in an environment like the French Quarter, which is essentially an amusement park for drunks, a permanent carnival of sin with ten million distractions in every direction at any given time (good god, what is my life?).
So yeah, basically on any given night when I’m scheduled for a pub crawl I have no idea what to expect. It’s a mystery box filled with booze and the human condition. Never a good combination. Anyway, on this particular night I remember starting out thinking it would be a breeze. Only five people showed up for the 8:15 pub- in case you don’t follow tour guide lingo, that’s short for the 8:15 pub crawl tour (keep up people)- which is a small group, even for the pub crawl. For reference, the max amount of people you can have on the basic ghost tour is twenty eight, while the max on the pub is only twenty one. Why the difference? Let me tell you, if you’ve never had the experience of trying to get twenty eight drunk people in and out of french quarter bars on a Friday night in a timely manner consider yourself lucky. So even by Pub standards, five people ain’t much. Which isn’t great for tips, obviously, but quite nice for my sanity- which, if you remember is dwindling daily thanks to this job.
Now this was well over a year ago, but I still remember exactly how I learned that this tour might give me some trouble. It was just before I went over to the group to do my introduction. I had just finished my prerequisite bathroom trip that I do before the start of every tour, and I was walking past my admin- that’s tour lingo for administrator, who is essentially the manager, coach, and sometimes therapist for the tour guides- and I made some passing remark to him like:
“I’ll alright, I’m off. Five people, right?”
“Yep!” he replies back, before adding, “Five guys. They are altogether. It’s a bachelor party. Have fun.”
I distinctly remember looking back at my admin to see if he’s messing with me, but the shit-eating grin on his face tells me he’s not.
Huh.
A bachelor party.
Huh...that’s weird.
So, let me explain why what he told me is so weird. We never, ever, get bachelor parties on our tours. OK, that’s not one hundred percent true, but it’s very rare. By comparison, we get tons, and I mean tons, of bachelorette parties. That’s a nightly occurrence times twelve. Bachelorette parties love us.
But bachelor parties? Well, I'm pretty sure that as a whole they are only barely even aware that we exist.
I mean, I don’t think any of us find that particularly shocking, right? Your average bachelor party is probably a lot less planned out than the party of the opposite gender, and their itinerary, if they have one, probably took about ten minutes to fill out and is most likely composed of various locations that specialize in the four b’s: booze, boobs, blow and bull rides (of the mechanical nature). And all that you can find up and down Bourbon Street, so why ever leave that infamous street to hear some stupid guide talk about ghosts?
So again, yeah, I get it. I see why a group of bachelors are not dying to do a ghost tour.
But still, as I’m walking to my group of five, it’s dawning on me how unusual this is, and I start trying to think of the last time I had a bachelor group on my tour. And I realize there is only one time that I can think of, in all my years of doing this, when I actually had one before this. It was during a ghost tour, and the only reason I remember it is because what happened was really kind of incredible. It was a basic ghost tour, and I found out at the start that I had a bachelor party of seven in my group. Almost immediately after learning this, I also found out I had a bachelorette party of seven as well- and that these parties were not connected in anyway. I remember it was during my first story that these two unconnected love parties of matching numbers started talking to each other. And it was in the middle of my second story, I kid you not, when they decided as a whole that they were much more into each other than into me and whatever I had to say. So all fourteen of them just left my tour, mid-story, hand-in-hand, and headed to Bourbon Street for a night of, I assume, shots and sex (have I mentioned that I have a weird job?)
Anyway, that was the only time I could recall having a bachelor party on my tour before, so I really didn’t know what to expect from this. But what the hell, I thought, it’s only five of them, how much trouble could they be?
As I am doing my introduction on the sidewalk of St. Peter Street, I come to the conclusion that they would be no trouble at all. This group of five all seem to be in their early thirties, and they all have generic names like Bill, Matt, Eric, Gary and so forth, they all live in the same small city in the midwest, they all have known each other since childhood, and they all have jobs like: banker, data analyst, lawyer, accountant…
I get this kind of group all the time. Usually not in bachelor party form, but yeah, this is your classic generic man group. Affable guys with boring jobs, whose personalities are completely lacking in originality. I’m not trying to sound snarky when I say that, but another remarkable thing about my job is that you soon learn that almost everyone falls into some kind of “type” that you see over and over and over again. (and I’m sure I’m not removed from that. I bet that if you take tours in NYC, LA or wherever you’ll see charming, amazing guides just like me).
So we are at our first stop, at this restaurant/bar on the corner of Bourbon and St Peter, and their ordering drinks and cracking jokes and slapping each other on the back and being altogether tolerable. Good sign. And me, being the professional tour guide that I am, join in on the fun, grabbing a beer from the bartender and laughing along with the group acting like I’m just another member of their party. So far nothing bad.
After we get our first round of drinks, I lead my men upstairs to a secret room to tell the story. And that goes well too. They laugh at all the right parts, they listen well, gasp at the horror, and even curse at the worst of it. When I finish telling the story of the poor family who were burnt to a crisp in the fire of 1794, they give me a nice round of applause and I lead them downstairs to the exit and I’m thinking to myself:
Oh, this tour will be just fine.
But then, when we are back downstairs, heading outside again to continue to the next stop, I feel a tap on my shoulder and receive the first indicator that this group might be problematic.
“Hey bro,” one of the guys says to me, “would it be cool for us to get another round a shots here before we head to the other place.”
Now this is the sort of question I can't really say no to without coming across like a dick, but I really want to say no to this. The next bar is only four blocks away, and I know when groups start going heavy on the drinking early in the tour... it'll only complicate things later. But what I'm I gonna do? I work for tips.
So they take their shots and we exit the restaurant/bar and start walking to the next one.
It's here, on the this walk, where these guys start to annoy me. One of them, let’s assume Gary, spots a discarded, half full beer can lying on the curb, and proceeds to run up and kick it as hard as he can, sending it crashing down the street. This is followed by a cry of:
“And the kick is gooooooooooood!”
I calmly, but firmly, tell him to please go pick up the can and throw it away, and not to do things like that again, because we’re on a tour and I could get in trouble for something like that, plus it’s not polite to the neighbors. That’s when one of his buddies puts his arm around Gary’s neck and answers for him.
“Aw, we’re sorry. Gary just gets like that sometimes. He’s a wild one. In fact, we all a little wild, right guys?”
To which a small cacophony of hoots and hollers follow.
Ah yes, so wild, I think, kicking a can down the street, you bunch of James Deans you…
“Oh man, this guy is gonna hate us by the end of the tour!” one of the others says to his friends, like I’m not even there, “ He’s gonna remember us forever and he’s gonna hate us!”
Hearing this makes me cringe.
If there is one statement that I can’t stand that get constantly from my different groups it is this. I’m convinced the only people who utter this phrase to a tour guide are those that have never worked in the service industry at all. Because those who have know one obvious fact about a job like this, you forget 99.9 percent of the people you serve. As soon as they leave your little world, you forget about them almost immediately. Maybe while you served them they annoyed you, maybe they were fine, maybe they made your day a little better. Maybe they made it a whole lot worse. It doesn’t matter. As soon as they are gone they disappear from your mind. Only the very great and they very worst get any sort of residency in your brain, they rest vanish immediately. And at this point, I’m positive these jokers aren’t qualifying for either position. But I don’t bother explaining that. Instead I just give my standard answer:
“Ah no, you guys are fine. I've had way worse. I actually like you guys.”
(Did I mention I work for tips?)
Anyway, this renegade crew proceeds to rebel in the following ways:
-Slapping on the top of the occasional trash can as we walk down the sidewalk.
-making loud, lewd comments about the women in their lives back home (note: they were silent about those that passed them by IRL though).
- shoving each other into gallery posts.
-asking one of the bartenders for her number (while the rest snicker loudly).
-making bad jokes while I tell stories.
- telling each other how much I hate them and will always remember them.
So all in all, this gang of five has devolved into your typical annoying-but-unmemorable pub crawl group, and that’s fine. I’m not in a great mood, so it’s irritating me more than it should, but it’s fine.
On our third stop, we make it to May Bailey’s, the one high class bar on the tour that has a delightful brothel story. And would you believe this? While I’m describing the brothel, and the women who work there, my group says things to each other like:
“Matt would go there everyday!”
“Eric would never leave!”
“Gary would get a job there!”
“(laughing) Would you guys stop? This tour guide is going to hate us forever!”
So yeah, still just your average pub crawl tour that, if I would have been in a more giving mood, might have even been a little fun. But as I said before, I am just not feeling it tonight, so I do what I always do when I’m working a tour and not feeling the vibe of the group.
I get through it.
I raise my voice when they make their jokes and little comments and fight my way to the end of the story.
More than halfway through, I tell myself, only thirty minutes to go.
Finally, I finish the third story, and we are on our way down Dauphine Street to our last stop. Now I have a tendency to hold my breath at this section of the tour, because it’s the most sketchy area that we travel down. Up until that point, nothing bad has ever happened here during one of my tour, but you have a lot of drug dealers and other criminal elements that frequent the area. I have always felt that I had an unspoken agreement with this sketchy element of the quarter though, which is essentially:
You leave my group alone, I leave you alone.
That might have been wishful thinking, but in all my years doing this nothing bad had happened yet.
And then, as we are about to come up to Toulouse Street, I notice something strange. There’s a man on a bike riding alongside me in the street. And he’s got a big, stupid grin on his face, like the cat who ate the canary or whatever. And the stupid face with the stupid grin looks awfully familiar. But how would I know this guy? A friend from the neighborhood? A fellow service industry worker?
He rides past me as I’m trying to figure it out. And then, a lot of things happen at once:
- I hear my group behind me start laughing uproariously.
- I see a man who I recognize as being part of the sketchy element that I mentioned earlier running down the street toward us screaming profanely and furiously.
- I recall ten seconds earlier, as we were walking down the sidewalk, that I passed by a bicycle resting against a building wall, while two men discussed something in secret not five feet from the bike.
-Finally, I remember why that man with the stupid grin on his face riding the bike looked so familiar, it’s one of the fucking five guys on my tour (let’s say Gary).
Oh Jesus Christ, this is bad, I think to myself.
And as I’m processing all this, the running man passes us on the street, screaming again at the idiot who stole his bike, and I hear him clearly shout:
“I’m gonna kill you motherfucker!”
And by God, I believe him. With my whole heart I believe that he means those words. In this area, in the French Quarter, at night, I can safely say that people have been killed for less. And what really gets to me at this moment is the rest of the group behind me is dying of laughter. All four of them slapping their knees and holding on to each other for support as the chuckles vomit out of their drink holes.
“Oh fucking Gary man!”
“Gary’s an animal!”
“Look at Gary go!”
In a panic, I turn to them and try to impress upon them how bad this situation is, telling them that they need to go grab their boy before something really bad happens. But their response is only more laughter and further praise of Gary’s wild heart.
I turn my head back to the nightmare scenario unfolding in front of me, and find that it’s only grown worse. What I haven’t realized til now is that Gary is riding the stolen bike the wrong way down a one way street, and there’s a car not too far away at all heading right for him whose driver seemed to have no idea Gary’s pedaling toward him, or just doesn’t care.
My mind tries to process this. Violent angry, death-threatening sprinting man on one side, oblivious speeding car on the other, “Wild Gary” in the middle. Simply put, it’s the French Quarter sandwich from hell.
Of course, in situations such as these, your life goes into slow motion, and with each turn of the pedal I try to weigh my options here. Do I go after Gary myself and try to save him? Do I save time and just call the ambulance now? Do I just run away from this whole mess and claim the group ditched me after the third stop? None of these options are appealing, so I start thinking of how I’m going to explain this to my boss, when he learns that someone on my tour hijacked a vehicle and immediately got into one of the oddest traffic accidents/murders of all time.
And while I’m thinking on all this, the group of jackals behind me are still giggling like children, and Gary is still joy riding, and both the angry man and the car are gaining steam, bearing down on him.
Fuck my life.
Now, I don’t know how much of this has been exaggerated over time in my head, but as I remember it, Gary’s not ten feet away from the front bumper of the incoming car before the bike owner reaches him and throws a right handed haymaker at the left side of his head, causing him to slump over to the left, causing the bike to veer hard to the left so that both the bike and Gary miss the car completely (the car also may have slammed on the brakes at the last minute, but that’s honestly not how I remember it. But if it didn’t, why didn’t the irate bike owner get run over by the car seconds later? These are the questions I have no answer to.)
I breath a small sigh of relief, as at least Gary wasn’t killed by a vehicle. However, my relief is very momentary, because the bike owner is hovering above him as he lays on the ground, with two balled up fists, echoing familiar threats of the recent past. This would have been bad enough, but the fact that Gary’s on the ground laughing hysterically while looking up at the bike owner...well, I feel like this is an added insult to injury that does not help the situation. And of course, behind me, I hear the familiar calls of:
“Fucking Gary man!”
“He’s a legend!”
Even now, his friends make no effort to help their friend, or take the situation serious. This infuriates me so much, I almost want something bad to happen. Just so they will finally understand that you don’t pull this dumb shit in the quarter, and if you do, you don’t laugh it off like it’s nothing, because it’s not.
The next thing I know, I see the bike owner back on his bike, pedaling past us. Behind him, Gary is still on the ground, still laughing like a maniac. As the biker passes us, I see him turn to me with angry fucking eyes and say:
“And fuck you too.”
Oh shit, I think. Whatever deal we had before is over now…
Gary’s friends finally run over to their fallen friend and help him up. All of them are laughing. Especially Gary.
“Gary, you’re out of your mind, buddy!”
I quickly get them back on the sidewalk and march them a few blocks away before laying into them. I explain to them how dangerous that was. I explain how stupid that was. I explain that if they pull anything like that again, this fucking tour is over (some tour guides here will admonish me, saying if it was them, that would have been the end of the tour right then and there. I can’t argue this, all I can say is I am a whore for tips, and in the back of my mind I’m hoping that this guilt trip will help with some major cash love at the end [spoiler alert- it didn’t]).
I tell them all this, in my angry AND disappointed tour guide voice. When I’m done, one of the guys turns to his friends and says as if I’m not standing there:
“Oh man, this tour guide is gonna hate us forever by the end of the tour! He’ll never forget how awful we were!”
Amidst their cackling, I can’t help but finally agree with this sentiment.
