I walked into New Orleans in '73 with backpack and a little money. I found a large place (by poor standards) over on Rampart Street that had one large room and a little kitchen and a bath down the hall. I luckily found a job the first day at the first place I walked into - a high end printing shop on Carondelet- I thought I wanted to be a printer. The bad part was the little place on Rampart smelled of urine and cigars and you could see the courtyard below through the little kitchen floor and the landlady didn't allow guests up to the rooms (I was on the second floor) I scrubbed the walls and the floors, but the smell just wouldn't go away. Also I was a horny 21 year old. So I moved to Decatur St. to a one little room deal. It looked a little like this. I lived on the bottom floor next to the main building. (Behind that white street door there) The room was lousy, but the landlord gave me rent credit for fixing it up, it had two windows and you had to go outside and into the main building to take a shower in the morning. The landlord liked me and bought me curtains and liked to get get up so he could hear me sing in the shower in the morning and he always made sure that I had my own roll of toilet paper (just in case there wasn't any in the bathroom). - I've always depended on the kindness of strangers- An older gay guy had the bigger apartment next to me and we were friendly. Upstairs was an middle-aged alcoholic printer and next to him a divorced drunk cop down from Ohio. The two guys upstairs adopted me and we drank together some times. The printer would start with whiskey & milk about 5 PM every day. I got tired of it after a while and wanted some green, so I moved out of the Quarter to way up on Dante Street in the river bend area up past Tulane. The ceiling of the room collapsed shortly after I moved out as I described earlier.
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