A Near Murder on a Ghost Tour!
So this all happens on a pub crawl tour, a haunted pub crawl tour, to be precise. This can be a great tour at times. And at other times, not so much. This is a story of a not-so-great time, where I am in charge of guiding a bachelor party of five to four different bars in two hours. Before the tour even starts I know this might be a challenge. I have no idea how stupid things are gonna get though.
Our first stop is relatively harmless. We enter this restaurant/bar on the corner of Bourbon and St Peter, and go upstairs to the 2nd floor bar to get drinks. So these guys order drinks, crack jokes and slap each other on the back and all that goofy fun. That’s a good sign.
Being the professional tour guide that I am, I 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 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 of 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 jerk, 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 am 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 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 are 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 I 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 the very worst get any sort of residency in your brain, the 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.
– 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 it’s not going well. not feeling the vibe of the group.
I. get. through. It.
Sometimes that’s the greatest weapon a tour guide has.
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 motherf—er!”
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 f–king 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 to only laugh harder 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 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.
F— my life, is all I can think.
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 breathe 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:
“F–king 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 f–k you too.”
Oh dear, 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.
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