Feet on the Street (9 page)

As for Matthew, he took a chip out of my shell. Could I do some small non-carnal thing for the gay community of New Orleans by way of payback? One night last year the occasion arose.

Something gay men have traditionally had in New Orleans, at all hours, is company. People opposed to gay rights used to say they didn't condemn gay people, but rather “the gay lifestyle.” Now we have
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
But that still leaves “the gay agenda.” Sounds nasty, like a frolicking secret body part. (The homophobic hymn: “Heaven protect us / From
Homo erectus.
”) I asked a Republican once what exactly the gay agenda was. He looked alarmed, as if to say, “Why would
I
know?” Now it's in the open. Turns out it's weddings.

But maybe not in New Orleans. On the night of which I speak, I walked by a bar on Bourbon Street called OZ, and saw that it was jam-packed with men. The door was open, but a sign on it said, “Absolutely no video or photography equipment permitted.” Notices to this effect had been posted outside a number of gay bars because, I had been told, anti-gay-agenda enthusiasts had secretly taped goings-on in some of them. (Agenda envy, maybe.) Even at a glance, I could see that there was something intense going on in OZ. Raised voices, earnest concentration. Numbers and letters being called out, as if in some sort of code. I lingered at the doorway. I saw what it was, and I was startled.

Men near the door looked up and saw me outside looking in, and my reaction. They got a good laugh out of it.

Bingo.

Lagniappe with Friends

O
NE OF
S
LICK'S JOKES

Here's another one. A young family moved into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew started building a house there. The young family's six-year-old daughter started chatting with the workers. She hung around and eventually the workers adopted her as a mascot. They shared their lunches with her and gave her little jobs to do to make her feel important. At the end of the first week they even presented her with a pay envelope, containing a dollar. The little girl took it home to her mother, who praised her and suggested they take it to the bank and start a savings account. When they got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed, and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own paycheck at such an early age. She proudly replied, “I've been working with a crew building a house all week.”

“My goodness,” said the teller, “and will you be working on the house again this week?”

“I will if those useless cocksuckers at the lumberyard ever bring us the fuckin' drywall,” she replied.

T
HE GAY AGENDA

A rule of thumb: Beware of anyone who is not content to generalize about categories of people—hey, we all do that—but must tuck the blanket in with the definite article
the.
“The gays,” “the blacks,” “the liberals.” Or, for that matter, “the American people.” People who may have a category in common, but who otherwise vary, are thereby squeezed into capsules—we know who
they
are:
them.
And we know who
we
are:
us.
The hell we do.

T
ENNESSEE
W
ILLIAMS

When he first came to the Quarter, toward the end of the thirties, you could get a dozen oysters for a quarter.

R
AMBLE
E
IGHT
: W
HAT
I
T
C
OMES
D
OWN
T
O

Is New Orleans ever to be redeemed from its imprisonment in the exotic mode?

—L
EWIS
P. S
IMPSON

O
N
M
ONTEGUT
S
TREET NEAR
R
AMPART, THERE'S
a hardy magnolia tree growing up through a rust spot in an awning over a front porch. New Orleans gives rise to unlikely forms of life. I mentioned Ruthie the Duck Lady. She got to where she couldn't look after herself, and her brother Henry Junior died, and I believe so did Pops, who kept company with her (his métier was sticking out his extraordinarily long tongue for tips), so she's in a home somewhere now, but every now and then an old friend takes her out on the town, to old hangouts like the Port o' Call or the Alpine (you'd think a bar called the Alpine in the French Quarter would be inauthentic, but no) or the Chart Room, where they foist nonalcoholic beer on her, pretending it's Bud, because otherwise she is likely to get in the mood to knock a fellow patron right off his barstool with little or no provocation.

I don't think the lucky bead lady is in evidence much anymore either. She wore a lot of aluminum foil, to keep the aliens out, and if you declined to buy beads from her, she would curse you out in an obscure Middle-European-sounding dialect: “I have already wished for your death.”

But Mr. Goodman is still out and about. He is white-bearded and wears a hardhat and an aged khaki jacket, the hat covered with fragments of lyrics of songs he says he wrote and the jacket with end-of-the-world warnings, and every time I've seen him he's been genial. Remarkably so, considering how painfully hunched his posture at a bar is, and how firmly he believes that his songs have been suppressed because he has gotten so many famous singers, whom I will not name here, pregnant.

I asked him if he was resentful, and he said, “Naaww. I was doin' what I wanted to do. You know who's behind it, don't you? Brooks and Dunn.” (Big hit, “Boot-Scootin' Boogie.”) He would also tell you, as early as the fall of 2001, that the government could find Osama bin Laden if it wanted to, perhaps in St. Bernard Parish: “This country has got means beyond means to find people. It keeps finding me!”

One night in the Chart Room, Mr. Goodman sold me a lamp he had made out of a round metal ashtray, a cookie tin, the bowl of a pewter toasting cup, a bronze football, and some Mardi Gras doubloons. As lagniappe came the right to reproduce the lamp commercially in volume: “You can make your million.”

I paid Mr. Goodman his price of twenty-five dollars, and for reciprocal lagniappe bought him a beer. I had a beer myself, and also bought a martini and a Manhattan for a young couple at a nearby table whose drinks I had knocked over in my eagerness to plug in the lamp and make sure it worked, which it did. In the spirit of lagniappe the Chart Room charged me, though I am not known there, only seven dollars for these four drinks. I don't think you'll get that kind of hospitality in a lap-dancing place, even in New Orleans.

Of course, though he may have taken me for someone more in the marketing line, Mr. Goodman and I are both creatives. As is Dr. Bob. There is a great deal of art in New Orleans—lots of Blue Dogs, if you go for that sort of thing, and on lower Royal, where the expensive antique shops look more stuffy than the antiques, we find the Galerie d'Art Français, with this plaque in the show window: “A Masterpiece from a Great Artist's Brush is something to which nothing that exists can be compared. However, the Pride of Possession of such works is reserved only to those who understand the importance of their existence.” Just as we are about to go in and price something incomparable, we are stopped by the notice on the door:
PLEASE: NO OPEN DRINK CONTAINERS.
As it happens, we are carrying a beer in a go-cup, which was a New Orleans institution when Watteau was in knee pants.

Dr. Bob is a New Orleans institution whose work is widely seen there, particularly in barrooms and restaurants, where his small square signs in luminous colors on wood, with bottle-caps tacked to the frames, say “Be Nice or Leave.” While roaming the Bywater, I happened upon Dr. Bob's studio, on Chartres not far from the block between Piety and Desire, across the street from a pile of bricks that used to be a macaroni factory. His is a complex of rickety structures formerly used for miscellaneous industrial storage, in which his works now abound. Signs he has found or created say “INDIAN RED's Hebrew Honky Tonk,” “DR BOB's Outhouse of Blues,” “SINGING CANARY's,” “Hot Roasted Peanuts Parched Daily on Premises,” “Mean People Produce Little Mean People,” and “I'm Somewhere Near Here. Call me 905-6910, Thanks Dr. Bob, I'm Nearby.”

He was there working when I walked in on him, but he didn't mind the interruption. He uses a lot of tin roofing material, and Barq's root beer caps, and zigzag strips he calls “wigglewood.” He cuts snakes and alligators out of the tin: “Look at that! That's a serious alligator! That'll make your dogs bark!” He also showed me a cockroach he constructed out of a pine knot, a garbage-can lid, and a TV antenna. And a monumental painting of his former girlfriend, nude, with big bat wings. “I miss her a lot,” he said, and bat wings aside you could see why, “but she said, ‘You wake up in a new world every day. I need to have a plan.' ” He is not without company, though. “Little hippie girls stopped by, said they were going to squat in a warehouse over here. I said, ‘But you know there's a rape and a murder in there every night?' They said, ‘There is?' I said, ‘Just move in over here.' They add some juice, you know? They said, ‘Can we be your little elves?' I gave 'em a hundred-dollar bill and told 'em to get some food, they worked it out, you know, built that little area there that they live in. And now I can pay 'em.

“I was just fooling around here with all this and people started offering me money for it. Billionaire comes in and I say ‘Don't just come in here and say, “I'll take that and that and that,” you got to live with this shit,' and he says, ‘No I don't.' I had to like that—if you can clean out your apartment whenever you want to. I went to New York and took my portfolio to Ivan Karp—somebody told me, ‘He'll look at anything.' He pushed it away, said, ‘That's the most unprofessional thing I've ever seen. You're supposed to bring slides of your work, not Polaroids of your girlfriend holding it up.' Then I found out he dealt in Warhol, Lichtenstein—people said, ‘That's awesome, Ivan Karp saw your shit! And you got a rise out of him!' You know the man who invented the Nautilus had a snake farm in Slidell. He was our neighbor. 'Course I loved that, what boy wouldn't—here's a place where his lion bit me. Isn't this a great way to live?”

I bought a two-foot-by-three-foot work, a Catahoula hound cut out of ripply tin painted with spots, on a board trimmed in wigglewood and bottlecaps, for two hundred dollars, with a “Be Nice or Leave” sign for lagniappe. Dr. Bob said he would ship the big one to me. “I used to put glitter all over the packages, they said stop it because it was getting all over the delivery men, all over their shoulders and everything. I said sounds like a corporate problem to me.”

A character who has proved more elusive than Dr. Bob is the Prince of Love. Joan and I were walking down upper Bourbon one moist night when a voice came from across the street: “Looking great! Lady always on the inside! You know some shit, baby.” We stopped and looked as a small bearded man with dreadlocks scuttled away. A woman we didn't know stopped and said, “The person who hollered at you was the Prince of Love. Just so you'll know. He's a character in the Quotah.” Then she went about her business.

A few days later I saw him, I thought, over on Royal. “Are you the one they call the Prince of Love?” I asked. He gave me the sourest look! Turns out, according to what people tell me, that he relates only to couples. He gives them blessings rooted in his voodoo beliefs. “Good luck and good sex for a whole year,” he will say. “No outside sex. You can have sex outside but no outside sex. Ya got me?”

The character Joan and I have found most gratifying is not always the same person, but he's always wearing the same costume: Mr. Hand-Grenade Man, who appears around twilight every day outside a bar on Bourbon that serves a drink called the Hand Grenade, advertised as “the most powerful drink in the Quarter.” The drink is an icky concoction of rum and sweet syrups, but Mr. Hand-Grenade Man is lovely. He's a pneumatic hand grenade, dark green, about nine feet tall, with a big shy smile and ingenuous bedroom eyes, and he's springy: When he dances, he jiggles up and down. If you try to pin him down as to his dynamics he will just say something muffled and grab your hand with his nose—his nose is prehensile. The only comparable union of amicability and explosiveness I can think of is the Nobel Peace Prize, founded by the man who invented dynamite. When Joan and I are in town together we try to spend a little time with Mr. Hand-Grenade Man every evening.

Am I the only one who's noticed a recurrence of triangular situations here, Nigel and the model and me and so on? I think that's because everything in New Orleans, in my experience, is a double date. When you're with a woman in New Orleans it's like being with two women, the other one being the city herself. Over the years I seem to have wound up usually with the city. And the city's man ain't me, I know that, her man is the River.

Some day, the Big One, they will be wed—Mr. Miss coming on full-commitment-strength at last into Ms. N.O., and he won't miss and she won't say no. “There will be debris flying around,” an eco-catastrophe expert tells the
Times-Picayune,
“and you're going to be in the water with snakes, rodents, nutria, and fish from the lake. It's not going to be nice.” Not to mention the chemical fertilizer drain-offs from Minnesota on down, and the petro-emissions from the chemical plants along what is called Cancer Alley, immediately above New Orleans. And that albino python that the priestess dances with at the Voodoo Museum. And the penguins from the Aquarium, and “Be Nice or Leave” signs and billions of Mardi Gras beads and doubloons. That flood is going to make the bottom of a gumbo pot look like a finger bowl. Shades of the Battle of New Orleans, in which the lobsterback British invaders got their lobsterbutts whipped by an ad-hoc amalgam of uniformed U.S. soldiers, polyglot pirates, old-family French Creoles, Kaintuck rivermen and free men of color—“and every man was half a horse, and half an alligator.”

We'll be swept rolling and tumbling in no telling what kind of recombinance, and there's Robert E. Lee, the water up to his shoulders—does he look like he has finally found release? Nope, same noble pained expression, oh well, and we're borne out toward the great yawning Gulf, losing well-fed flesh along the way that oysters in their pearly chambers will in due time digest. But didn't we ramble.

Lagniappe with What It Comes Down To

C
HARACTERS

I've never had the consistency to be a character myself, but here's the one I'd like to be. You know the balconies and courtyards of New Orleans, the high ceilings and cross-ventilation, the late hours, are all about catching a breeze. I would stand around the Quarter in a seersucker suit and a straw hat, mopping my face with a handkerchief and singing:

Give me a break here,

The air a little movement pleas
e—

Can I ever get a zephyr?

I got the blues: no breeze.

And then . . . I catch one. People see me and know it: “That's Mr. Appreciate-a-Breeze Man. They say he teaches Breeze Appreciation over by Tulane. Yep, he sho do appreciate a breeze.”

O
YSTERS . . . DIGEST

You can buy a T-shirt in the Quarter that has an oyster on it with eyes, a big smiley face, little hands, and arms spread wide in a welcoming gesture. “Shuck me, suck me, eat me raw,” the oyster is saying. Dancing in his/her shell on a rock. Actually the gesture is more teasing than welcoming, on second thought. An ironic oyster. Maybe that's how oysters are when we're not looking.