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Show RIVER night was free and by midnight we were dizzy. The streets of the French Quarter were alive with maniacs-I'd never seen a man in drag before, but I saw more than one that night. It seemed that every gay and transvestite in the South were there, painted, gowned, bejeweled, and drunk, along with hordes of students from LSU and Ole Miss, stoned conventioneers, the usual cops, and lots of unusual crazies. The night burned like a carnival. When we had finally wore out we returned to the raft and were serenaded by an inebriated ragtime band playing on an excursion boat docked nearby. Being broke we needed to sell the raft, but the market for used rafts in New Orleans was awful. Beaten and wake tossed in the water next to the ferry was the wreck of a raft built almost exactly like our own. It seemed like our only chance to sell the raft would be to take it through the industrial canal that bisects New Orleans to Lake Ponchatrain and then up the lake shore a few miles to the Southern Yacht Club. So we took the raft through the locks and under the drawbridges of the industrial canal. Early Sunday morning we were ready to try our luck on the lake. Ponchatrain is forty miles wide but only about eight feet deep, so that a wind roaring off the gulf would whip the lake into great choppy waves. Sunday morning was gray with a steady east wind, but it wasn't particularly stormy and it appeared to be about as good a time as any to attempt our last voyage. I knew the lake was going to be considerably rougher than the river, but nothing had prepared me for what we saw when the gate on the last lock swung open. The gray lake waters were pitching like the open sea, long sweeping combers that smashed onto the steel girders reinforcing the beach, breaking against the shore in explosions of spray. As the raft rolled out onto the lake it pitched and bucked -105- |