My Disastrous Debut Tour; or How I Was Attacked and Humiliated by a Blowup Doll
My first tour I ever gave was on Halloween night. And in case you were wondering, that’s pretty much the worst day to ever pop your cherry as a ghost tour guide, as the quarter is just a madhouse of costumes, drunks, and agitators. You can probably picture it in your head right now. Even the most seasoned veteran guide has their troubles during Devil’s night, but if you’re a brand spanking new tour guide, it truly becomes a trial by fire.
What made my situation even worse was that in the days, weeks, and months leading up to then I had all the time in the world to do a tour, or ten, if I wanted. You see, I started shadowing in early September and the average guide usually takes two weeks, maybe three, before they start giving tours. But me? I took eight. Why, you ask? Simple, I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.
I guess this is where I should tell you that I only decided to become a tour guide because of a lack of options. I had recently moved into the city and I was having a real hard time finding any kind of job that I might excel that. That’s when my friend, who had been a tour guide for a brief amount of time, suggested I try to be one myself.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do!” I said, feeling confident in the decision at that very moment.
But time has a funny way of making you reconsider your decisions. So when I first started shadowing other tour guides, I began to question what I had gotten myself into. Shadowing, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is when you follow other tour guides around and watch what they do so that you might learn how to handle a tour on your own. That’s the theory at least. For me, however, it was more like I would follow a tour around for two hours while a voice squawked incessantly into my ear: “You can’t do this! Look at how crazy this all is. There is no way you are capable of doing any of this! You think you can handle drunks on your tour? Hecklers on the street? You think you can be confrontational in any way? Who the fuck do you think you are?!”
And so, I stalled. I shadowed every guide I could, and once I did that, I shadowed every guide a second time. I supposed part of me was hoping that if I shadowed enough times, some obvious secret of how to handle a tour would come to me and my worries would be solved. But that never happened. And days of shadowing turned into weeks, and weeks, and weeks. Shadowed so much one of the older, grumpier tour guides (there were A LOT of those back when I started) started derisively calling me “the human shadow”.
“Oh hey, look everyone, it’s the amazing human shadow! He’s come to watch us do our job without ever doing his…”
This certainly bugged me, but not enough for me to, you know, actually take a tour out. And so, I just kept on shadowing. I cannot confirm this, but I suspect I hold the record for the longest tenure as a shadow at eight weeks, a record that most definitely would have been much longer if it hadn’t been for that fucking holiday of Halloween.
I will never forget how irate my boss was when he realized Halloween was tomorrow and I still hadn’t taken out my own tour. “I’ve never heard of this before, what the hell were you waiting for? Do you understand what’s waiting for you tomorrow?! Don’t think you’re gonna get out of this. I need every tour guide I can get, and you’re going out whether ya want to or not.”
I believe my response to this was an audible gulp.
And so the next day, on the evening of October 31st, shaking like a scared little boy, I took twenty eight people out in the darkness of night, all of them dressed as ghouls and demons and Popeye (well, only one dressed as Popeye, but for some reason his image is burned into my mind forever) and led them past the Devil’s Night revelers, around the corner into Pirate’s Alley. I found an open spot next to the Cathedral courtyard gates and for the first time, but certainly not the last, I told my group to gather around me as I made my introduction.
Now here is where the wheels began to come off the tracks. Well, I guess, technically, it was thirty seconds into my intro that the wheels came off. To my credit, before then, for those blissful half minute, I was doing a great job. Ok, I was doing a good job. Maybe, just okay. But the point was, I was finally doing my job.
I told everyone my name, I told them where they were, and I told them what they were about to do: a two hour ghost tour with me. I was hitting all the notes, baby!
But then, just as I was really starting to feel myself, that’s when I felt the oddest sensation on my left cheek. It was this kind of plastic, bubbly feeling pressing into me, like a balloon but different. I tried to ignore this at first, because you know, I was so focused, but after about the fourth time I finally turned my attention to the attacking object, only to find a woman wearing a white bridal satchel (meaning she was a bride on a bachelorette party, which is a whole other red flag I’ll have to write about in a different post) holding a male blow up doll right to my face and bashing my cheek with the penis of said blown up doll. Yes, she was cock bashing me less than a minute into my debut tour. This is my life, people.
Now today if that were to happen I would definitely react much differently than I did back then. Now I might use words like “Stop that.” or “What do you think you are doing?” or “Please stop bashing me in the cheek with that inflated penis”. But I was a gun-shy rookie who just wanted everyone to like him, so instead of saying any of that, I just sort of chuckled and went back to doing my intro… while ignoring her persistent assault to the left side of my face with her phallic weapon.
To this day, I cannot scrub the memory of the other twenty-some odd people looking at me in horror and embarrassment, realizing their tour guide wasn’t going to put a stop to this inflatable penile madness.
To give you a better idea of how bad this was, here is the best transcript of the rest of my intro that I can recall: (Note: in the below transcript, everytime I chuckle, it’s cause a fucking blow up dong is diggin into my cheek)
“Please make sure (chuckles) that uh, you stay on the sidewalk and not the (chuckles) street, and please keep (chuckles) space open behind you, so people can walk past you(chuckles)…”
This went on for a good couple of minutes, which felt like an eternity, until I finally found the courage to turn to the bride-to-be and ask her nicely yet, almost-firmly, “Ma’am, please stop targeting me with your man doll.”
The only other thing I remember about my debut tour was at the very end, when I gave the tip line, and excitedly revealed to my group that they had just been a part of my first ever ghost tour. That’s when a gruff looking man dressed as Popeye (that’s why I remember the costume! I’m just realizing this now!) barked:
“Yeah, we kinda figured that when you let that lady cock slap you for five minutes at the start of the tour.”
And that, people, is the kinda honesty you can only get with a French Quarter Ghost tour…
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