Feet on the Street (3 page)

B
OTH
M
ARIE
L
AVEAUS

Mother and daughter, they are remembered as one: the Voodoo Queen, who led rites that may have involved naked dancing (and sometimes, it is said, respectable citizens), and who are said to have exerted political power over a considerable stretch of the nineteenth century. People still chalk X-marks on their tombs in St. Louis Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2. Some fifteen percent of the city's population still practices voodoo, it is said, but the reason you are advised not to visit these graves alone is the percentage of the population that unquestionably practices mugging.

G
ERTRUDE
S
TEIN

She came in 1934 to lecture and to visit Sherwood Anderson. She wrote that she and Alice B. Toklas were shown “the social register of the bawdy houses and a charming little blue book with the simple advertisements of the ladies by themselves and we have eaten oysters a la Rockefeller and innumerable shrimps made in every way and all delicious and we are taken to visit the last of the Creoles in her original house unchanged for 100 years . . . all very lovely and lively.”

R
AMBLE
O
NE
: O
RIENTATION

Mitch: I thought you were straight.
Blanche: What's straight? A road or a line can be straight. But the human heart?

—A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

S
INCE THE
M
ISSISSIPPI FLOWS GENERALLY SOUTH FROM ITS
origin in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, you expect a town on the river to be on the east bank or the west. But at New Orleans the river flows eastwardly, sort of, so New Orleans is on the north bank, sort of. On the other side of the river is an area known, to be sure, as West Bank, but most of it lies either south or east of the river. On a map you can see: if the river were straight, New Orleans would be almost horizontal, right to left, east to west, between the river to the south and Lake Pontchartrain (as big as Rhode Island) to the north. But the river is crooked. The best known parts of New Orleans form a sort of tipped-forward
S
along bends in the river, from Uptown and the Garden District through Downtown, the French Quarter, and on around eastward into Fauxborg Marigny and the Bywater. Within this
S,
Uptown is south (upriver) and Downtown north (downriver), because the river takes a northerly hitch. However, the part of the Quarter that is farthest downtown is referred to as the upper Quarter, though I have heard it called the lower.

So when I tell you that I am pretty damn sure that in 1998, during Hurricane Georges, I saw the river, at least the topmost layer of it, flowing backward (because the wind was blowing so hard southerly along that northerly hitch), you can see why I might not be absolutely sure.

It was late and I was by myself at the time, nobody else was around. And I was feeling let down, because although the wind was blowing hard, and half the population had been evacuated, and thousands who'd stayed had been herded into the Superdome for their safety, and my friend Greg Jaynes and I had taken refuge in the shuttered-up Burgundy Street home of my friend Curtis Wilkie, it was clear that this was not going to be the Big One: the full force of Georges was going to miss us.

We knew this from Nash Roberts. Nash Roberts is a veteran New Orleans TV weatherman who is low-tech, at least by way of presentation, and always right. Nash was broadcasting from his own house, it looked like, tracing the hurricane with a grease pencil on a sheet of Plexiglas or a pad of paper, I forget which, while the other channels' meteorologists were using all manner of laser pointers and rear-projected electronic schematic representations of the area. You couldn't tell what in the world Nash was scribbling with the grease pencil, but as usual he was the first to make the call, this one's going to miss us, and he was on the money.

So I felt I could venture outside and take a look at the river, and when I did, it was going backward. I'm pretty damn sure.

Ordinarily, at any rate, when you face the river from the French Quarter you'll see the river flowing from your right to your left. As recently as the late sixties, early seventies, when Kermit Ruffins was a kid in New Orleans—he's a fixture in the city now as a jazz musician—he'd catch crabs from the river, to eat. “Get some string, tie a chicken leg on it, and when that string get real tight, pull in real slow—scoop 'em up and put 'em in the bucket. End of the day we might have a hundred, hundred-fifty crabs.” You wouldn't want to eat anything out of the river here now; it's filthy with silt and petrochemicals. But it's a robust presence. John Barry, author of
Rising Tide,
a terrific book about the horrific flood of 1927 (which the New Orleans elite managed to divert onto poorer folks' lands) says the river is “perfect,” as opposed to the imperfect people who try to make it behave. It's a little like the horse that the New Orleans “swamp blues” musician Coco Robichaux told me about, which kept walking into a post, over and over. “What are you doing trying to sell a blind horse?” somebody said. “He ain't blind,” said the man who was trying to sell him. “He's just tough. He don't care.”

The river is perfect because it doesn't care. It would just as soon drown New Orleans, or any other place, as not. But people, being imperfect, want to believe that it cares. People call it “Old Man River,” “The Father of Waters.” Big dirty thruster barreling into town.

And New Orleans, née
La Nouvelle Orleans,
is ready to take him on. Not “ready” in the sense that she has pulled herself together for their ultimate date yet (efforts are under way to figure out how to build a wall or something), but she wouldn't be herself if she were all squared away. Stephanie Dupuy, a native New Orleanian, once quoted Billy Wilder on Marilyn Monroe to relevant effect here. Stephanie and I were in Jennifer Flowers's club listening to her sing “Happy Birthday” in a breathy voice, and let it be said that she, who had a long affair with Bill Clinton, did not belabor the allusion by singing it explicitly to “Mr. President.” Stephanie works out of the mayor's office, coordinating with people making movies in the city. She says that when movie people come to New Orleans, they say the same thing Meyer Lansky said when he discovered Batista's Cuba: “At last, a government I can work with.” Stephanie knows Hollywood lore. She says that when people on the set of
Some Like It Hot
were complaining that Marilyn was always late, Wilder, the director, said this: “I have an aunt in Austria who is always on time. You want her to play the part?”

Orientation. You're in the French Quarter looking at the river. Now turn around and repeat this mnemonic:
D
ixie
C
ups,
R
ock 'n'
B
owl,
D
ucks
B
y
R
uthie. The Dixie Cups were a sweet and snappy New Orleans trio, two sisters and a cousin, who knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with “Chapel of Love” and had another big hit with “Iko, Iko,” the old Mardis Gras chant. (New Orleans has a long history of musical families, the Boswells, the Nevilles, the Marsalises, Harry Connick Jr. and Sr.—senior having retired as the city's district attorney to appear as “the singing DA.”) Rock 'n' Bowl is an uptown bowling alley (Mid-City Lanes) that is also where you can dance till all hours to, say, the zydeco stylings of Boozoo Chavis. And Ruthie is perhaps the most famous French Quarter character, who used to rollerskate around the Quarter followed by a string of ducks.
D
is for Decatur,
C
for Chartres,
R
for Royal,
B
for Bourbon,
D
for Dauphine,
B
for Burgundy (pronounced with the accent on
gun
),
R
for Rampart, the long streets of the Quarter in order.

The order of the short streets that cross the long ones may be borne in mind as follows: “
C
'mon,
I
'll
B
e
C
ool,
S
ugar,
T
ake
S
omething
O
ff
—
S
omething
D
ainty,
S
ome
U
nderwear
—
G
o,
B
aby,
E
verything!” Canal, Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Ann, Dumaine, St. Philip, Ursulines, Governor Nichols, Barracks, Esplanade. To keep the sequence of the saint streets straight, remember, Louis, Peter, Ann, Philip: “
L
et's
P
arty
A
nd
P
arty.” These are my own mnemonics, which may not suit everyone, but you are welcome to share them.

We will walk beyond the Quarter, but this is the old city, the Vieux Carré, the central, original, the part of the city that is most . . . how shall I put it? The music critic Will Friedwald praises Connie Boswell's singing as follows: “Unlike [Mildred] Bailey's thin, delicate wisp, which, though charming, represented a coy middle-American attitude toward sex, Boswell's is a more directly sensual, genuinely vaginal instrument, something else [aside from the influence of Louis Armstrong] she picked up in New Orleans.” It is said that the French founders of the city, when they couched its name in the feminine gender, as opposed to
Le Nouveau,
were making a bit of a joke: the Duke of Orleans, for whom it was named, was known to wear women's underwear. But if a city may be regarded as having a sex, surely Chicago for instance is male, New Orleans female. And the Quarter, for all the rectilinearity of its grid, is the most vaginal part of town.

Lagniappe with Orientation

G
ENIFER
F
LOWERS

For a time early in the twenty-first century, she and her husband Finis D. (forgive me if I have the middle initial wrong) Shelnut operated a club in the Quarter where she sang. I had a chat with her between sets, a good-looking woman not at all stuck up. She sang pretty, too. “It Was Just One of Those Things,” which she modified slightly for two patrons who said they were from Buffalo (“a trip to the moon on Buffalo wings”), and “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.” Shelnut himself stood over in a corner listening. J.F. winked at him and said, “My husband went to the doctor, wasn't feeling good. The doctor said, ‘You need to have sex five times a week.' My husband told me, and I said, ‘Put me down for two of those.' ” Finis (pronounced Fine-iss) produced an enigmatic smile. In the audience, dancing to the music, wearing a round red hat snugly attached to a brunette wig, was the lively octogenarian Verita Thompson, who had earlier presided over a club on the same site called Bogie and Me, in reference to her having been Humphrey Bogart's mistress, an association evolving from her service as custodian of his toupee: “She was his hairist,” said Stephanie Dupuy, who introduced us as Verita boogied by. A man standing near us jumped. “I've just been groped by an eighty-year-old woman,” he confided.

R
OCK 'N'
B
OWL

An event that was scheduled for that venue in 2002, according to Bunny Matthews in
OffBeat:

Ernie K-Doe has never let a minor obstacle like death get in the way of his imperial career. His widow, Antoinette K-Doe, is producing an extravaganza on September 20. . . . At approximately 8:30 p.m., the wax statue of K-Doe will be transported via the Mother-in-Law Van from the Mother-in-Law Lounge to Mid-City Lanes. . . . At the bowling alley, the statue will be transferred to the K-Doemobile (a vehicle based on the Popemobile) and escorted into the club, attended by the Paradise Ladies (Antoinette and Uptown snowball stand proprietress T-Eva) and the Cleopatra Ladies (a bevy of dancers . . .). Inside Rock 'n' Bowl, music will be provided by the Blue-Eye Soul Band, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, Oliver “Who Shot the La La?” Morgan, Rico Watts (impersonating Elvis Presley) . . . And, at some point in the evening, Antoinette will don a wedding gown à la Priscilla Presley and the wax rendition of K-Doe will sing “White Boy/Black Boy” and “Children of the World.” Don't ask me how.

H
URRICANES

A hurricane, as it approaches New Orleans or lurks offshore, becomes a character in the local media and in local conversation (for instance Isidore, of 2002, seen as sulking, lumbering, fickle), its arc and potential a matter of debate and speculation, as if the storm were a candidate for public office. Very little dread seems to enter into the discussion—for one thing, as the Louisiana novelist Jim Wilcox observes, hurricanes are a great relief from the heat. However, he says, “There is nothing like the heat the day after a hurricane.”

R
AMBLE
T
WO
: W
ETNESS

Perspiration is healthy. If people didn't perspire, they'd die in ten minutes.

—B
LANCHE
D
U
B
OIS

S
URELY ONE REASON
N
EW
O
RLEANIANS TAKE THE
threat of inundation so lightly is that the city is so moist as a rule. Most months, people walking outdoors gain a sheen, which in the summer never quite goes away. You look through an open doorway into a courtyard to see lush plants being watered so lavishly that a stream pours out into the street. Watch your head—more water sluices down, from the watering of balcony ferns.

It can rain so hard in New Orleans that you expect to see alligators bouncing off the pavement: a sudden event, foreshadowed as suddenly by dark clouds painted onto a perfectly sunny day, and thunderclaps ripping the firmament. Also dramatic in their way are the soft showers of the early evening, sometimes arriving spookily in full sunshine from no clouds at all, or thick white ones like real whipped cream, and people say, “The devil is beating his wife.” The Quarter is fine to walk in during a summer rain, with the balconies overhead protecting the stroller except intermittently when he or she, or preferably they, choose to cross a street. The streets glisten with the wet, there's a passing cleanliness in the air, which afterward may be hotter than ever, the smell of wet pavement evaporating in wisps of steam. Tennessee Williams wrote of “the quality light could not be expected to have again after rain, the pigeons and drunkards coming together from under the same stone arches, to move again in the sun's faint mumble of benediction with faint surprise.”

The mist can add a patina to the replica riverboats that take tourists on excursions up and down the river. They look about as much like wedding cakes (“without the responsibility,” as Mark Twain put it) as the original ones did, and quite competent musicians play old favorites on them, so if there is enough mist over the river you might hope, as the
Natchez
or the
Creole Queen
approaches, to summon up the vision that Jack Teagarden beheld, one evening in 1917 or so, as he rambled the Quarter.

Teagarden would go on to become a great jazz trombonist, but at this point he was still listening for a breakthrough groove. He heard a trumpet in the distance, over by the river, and took off in that direction. “I couldn't see anything but an excursion boat gliding through the mist back to port,” he would recall in later years. “Then the tune was more distinct. The boat was still far off. But in the bow I could see a Negro standing in the wind, holding a trumpet high and sending out the most brilliant notes I had ever heard. It was jazz; it was what I had been hoping to hear. . . . I don't even know if it was ‘Tiger Rag' or ‘Panama.' But it was Louis Armstrong descending from the sky like a god.”

The waterfront is not what it was before the Civil War, when the Mississippi was the nation's main avenue of commerce, and hundreds of riverboats and barges would be arriving or standing by there at once. Nor is it the
noir
huddle of wharves where Elia Kazan in 1949 shot Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas pursuing unwitting plague carriers Jack Palance and Zero Mostel in Elia Kazan's
Panic in the Streets.

Nor was there anything divine about the sounds I heard mingling along the river one September afternoon, in 2003: a calliope on the passing riverboat booming the tune to “Can't You Hear the Whistle Blowing,” and the soft rumble of a train on the track that parallels the river there, and a tooot-tooot from the train, and a streetcar clattering along another track, and a crossing signal going ding-ding-ding, and a flock of uniformed schoolkids chattering, and a guy fwoopily blowing up, squeakily tying, and doggedly hawking balloon animals: “Presto! Instant giraffe!” Then the riverboat blew its piercing contralto steam whistle, and the temporarily drowned-out balloon guy swung around toward the riverboat and hollered “WAS THAT NECESSARY?”

No, it wasn't. But the whole thing wasn't Disney World either. It was a confluence of noises mostly tourist-driven but not virtual. And a spatter of rain came through the colorful scene like a sloppy brushstroke of mineral spirits. I proceeded on down the riverside Moonwalk, a wooden promenade, to the Aquarium at the foot of Canal. Some years ago I made a speech there, at a fund-raising dinner connected with the Aquarium's opening. The audience, if that was the word, listened to my leisurely buildup for about five seconds and then fell to talking freely among themselves, reducing me to background noise. I guess musicians get inured to that, but it's embarrassing when you're making a speech, as I persisted in doing for a full half hour to make sure of getting paid. I learned then that you can't mosey up on a New Orleans audience, especially one that has been talking and drinking for some time. They've got too many other sources of pleasure working. If you don't jump right in and paddle hard, you're jetsam.

Every time I visit the Aquarium, I learn something. Once in the penguin enclosure, the keeper was sitting on a rock with penguins gathered all around him, wagging their tails and flapping their wings. It looked like he was telling them a story, but in fact he was giving a little talk to a small audience of people. Aquarium penguins can't be allowed to reproduce much within their narrow circle, he said, because the gene pool will be too shallow (at that, as if on cue, two penguins dove into the water and swooped along together), so plastic eggs are substituted for some of the real ones. But some chicks are born, and the “moms and dads” take turns tending to them, with help from friends who eat a bit more than their fill and drop by to regurgitate a snack for the little ones. Penguins, he said, are very soft to pet. They are covered not in patent leather, as it might appear, but by lots of tiny feathers, eighty to ninety to the square inch, as opposed to eight or nine in flying birds. One penguin named Patience would nuzzle the keeper like a cat when he scratched her head, and sulk when he stopped. A couple of the other penguins had found that they could gain the attention of attendants by untying or pooping on their shoes. The penguins' diet is fish, but one of them was scared so badly by a big steelhead trout placed in the tank that he stayed out of the water for days. At another display, I was able to touch a limpet named Patrick. Once somebody showing me around the Aquarium mentioned that a biologist doing an autopsy on a shark reached inside and was bitten by a fetal shark.

Early developers had in mind a grand canal along Canal Street, but it didn't pan out. Still it's a fine broad thoroughfare, formerly lined by deluxe theaters and emporia, later spooky and semi-abandoned (and the Quarter a slum), now a semi-refurbished mélange. The old S.H. Kress and Co. dime store and the former D.H. Holmes department store are now the Ritz-Carlton and the Chateau Sonesta. On the banquette in front of the latter stands a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's famous comic New Orleans novel,
A Confederacy of Dunces.
The statue is not a good likeness: not fat enough and too sane.

Also on Canal is the mammoth old four-façaded, sixteen-columned marble U.S. Customs House—
not
built on bales of cotton, as tour guides will tell you. It is built on cypress beams. The bales that were laid down along the beams serve to soak up water, so the beams still haven't rotted away. The whole city-block-covering building, however, has sunk three feet. A friend of mine, Virginia Dabbs, works there. If you try to bring drugs into this country through the port of New Orleans, she says, you'd better not catch the nose of certain customs agents. “If a cocker spaniel sits down next to you,” she says, “you are toast.”

You can buy booze on Canal at any time. There are stores that specialize in liquor and luggage and beads and strange artifacts. For instance, a stuffed armadillo wearing this outfit: a cowboy hat, a sheriff's badge, and two six-shooters. No price tag.

“How much for that?”

“Oh, that's about $169.”

“But the tag on this one, not dressed up, says $325.”

“Yeah, that one's got to be $285. They're not cheap. 'Cause you got to pay the taxidermist. And he charges an arm and a leg.”

Imagine being drunk enough to be pricing armadillos, to take back home in your new extra suitcase, and trying to do that math?

Down the middle of Canal is a track for the nation's oldest streetcar line in continuous operation. We will take that uptown—catching it at the corner of Canal and St. Charles, which is the uptown continuation of Royal.

Note, near the streetcar stop, an old, now unfortunately gussied-up, oyster bar called the Pearl. What I like most about it are the nicely rendered representations of oysters inlaid in the banquette outside. It can't have been easy to capture the essence of open-face oyster on a flat, hard surface. Each oyster is different, as to its white and its gray areas—not stylized, like the oyster-shaped light fixtures (their bulbs are their pearls) overhead inside.

You hop onto the streetcar, which rattles uptown. Soggy-but-moving air has always come in through the windows, bearing smells of subtropical plants, but now, I am informed as I write this, the cars are being air-conditioned. That is a bad idea. Conditioned air could be anywhere. There is no air like the air of New Orleans.

On the way uptown we'll go through the Central Business District, a jumble of monolithic contemporary office buildings and art galleries of interest, and the Superdome, where the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League play out their doom year after year. And we'll pass Lee Circle.

Mist can have a great effect on what you see in New Orleans. One night I walked up St. Charles to Lee Circle to have it out with Robert E. Lee, he of noble stoicism, drastically out of place in New Orleans. I had just finished writing a brief biography of Lee, and was ready to move on from him and the Civil War in general, but first I intended to ask him a New Orleans–related question. No, not what Steve McQueen asks Tuesday Weld, rhetorically, in
The Cincinnati Kid,
the movie about high-stakes poker set in New Orleans: “What good is honor if you're dead?” Lee would have stared me down on that one, to which even McQueen comes up with an honorable answer. But by the time honor becomes the issue, we've all got our armor buckled on. And aren't there a lot of less-than-honorable questions that anyone would rather ask of Tuesday Weld?

Here's what I wanted to ask Marse Robert: “Oh, why didn't you ramble? After all these years in New Orleans, haven't you learned that everybody owes it to himself, and to those around him, to ramble
some
?” I don't mean screw around, I mean loosen up. I associate Lee with my father, who was honorable, who was self-sacrificially community-minded, who rarely took a drink, who died when he was sixty, three years younger than I am now. My mother was already worrying about his heart when he was only forty-nine. I wish my father had
laisser le bontemps rouler
more often. With me, for instance. But he was a child of hard times.

When I got to Lee Circle, where Lee's statue was erected in 1884 upon a sixty-foot Doric column, he, like my father, was gone.

There was the absurdly lofty pedestal. But no General Lee! Well, the living statues who pose on Decatur Street in the Quarter are not sticklers. They'll talk to you, if you keep at them, or they'll take a break for lunch in plain sight. You might see a couple of them, one gold all over and one stone-colored, sitting on the curb eating po-boy sandwiches and indulging in shop talk. Did Lee come down sometimes and hang out at that bar over there, telling war stories with musicians kicking back after their gigs?

“You know, Bob,” says a member of the New Orleans–based band Better Than Ezra (sometimes I think New Orleans is the pun capital of America), “if I can call you Bob, New Orleans surrendered to the United States, with rancor but few shots fired, in 1862, and New Orleans, unlike Richmond, didn't get burned.”

“Indeed. New Orleans is too damp to stay lit.”

General laughter.

But no. The column is white, the statue dark gray. Up close, Lee emerged from the mist, planted facing north against the indifferent ancient foe. Over in the Quarter, in Jackson Square, rough-hewn Andy Jackson sits on a rearing horse, but Lee the capital-C Cavalier is condemned to balance forever on the small end of a marble beam. Back in 1963, when I was a reporter at the
Times-Picayune,
that newspaper's office was in the statue's line of sight, but now the last great Lee of the great American Lees was looking at anonymous new office buildings and a droning Interstate overpass, and to the southwest, over the preeminent self-denier's shoulder, shone a neon peacock, the emblem of NBC affiliate WBSU-TV. I didn't have the heart to pick a bone with him. Instead I went to the bar myself and hung out.

The Circle Bar, formerly Fleur de Lee. Behind the bar was an enigmatic little mural the management had discovered when a layer of paint or wallpaper was removed: two old guys in chairs, one of them Lee presumably but indistinct, his face blotted out except for the beard. William Burroughs used to huddle with junkies on Lee Circle. Now, the Circle Bar's proprietor told me, homeless people use the grass around Lee's pedestal as a bathroom. I flipped through a copy of
OffBeat,
the New Orleans music weekly, in which Art Neville was quoted as saying, “People try to put you in the pigeonhole. They got that statue of Lee Circle, and they want you to be like that: don't you ever change. We wasn't made for no bag.” I went on out into the moist night and left Lee high and dry.

You are well advised to get off the streetcar and walk around in the Garden District—fine old houses, dating back to the days when cotton prosperity enabled the conflation of bounteous income and easy leaving. Bursting monstrously through the banquettes and jammed up against palm trees are the roots of old live oaks, whose limbs overhang the streets. From the limbs along St. Charles hang immemorial glass Mardi Gras beads.