Old Glory (65 page)

It was the one certificate I had most wanted to earn. I tried to wave my thanks, but the tow was away across the Mississippi.

Z
 adok Cramer described
the proper way of landing at New Orleans:

My own arrival was shifty and unconfiding. I had sneaked into the city at night as if I were going to burgle it; by day, I kept it under surveillance and grew more and more suspicious of everything I saw.

I took a room in a tall and creaky house on Esplanade, at the far edge of the French Quarter. The house was full of shadows, beams and ponderous old furniture. Its balconied courtyard was a deep, steamy grotto of mimosa, vines and bougainvillea. I slept alone in a four-poster bed meant for honeymooning in, and woke feeling widowed. I watched the city through the bright slits of the shutters and was nagged by a sense of its wrongness—or was the wrongness just in me?

If only the bride had been there: one breast exposed by the wrinkled sheet, the sleepy tangle of her hair smudging her face … Then I would have opened the shutters and called, Look! Look out the window! Isn’t it
pretty?
Brideless, though, I studied it coldly, searching for blackheads under the city’s makeup.

For New Orleans did look lovely. But I thought I had seen its loveliness
somewhere before, and I couldn’t remember where. It was so veiled in the black lace of iron trellises, gates, balconies, and shutters that it was hard to see through to its skin; but there were strips and corners of candy pink and bright gamboge lit up by the balmy sunshine. Behind more walls, more ironwork, there were the green tops of secret gardens, with the leaves of palms and camellias signaling that when things happened here they happened in private. I felt I was being teased by the view through the shutters: it was equally full of come-hither looks and keep-out notices. It was also trying for its effects a shade too hard, as if it were using me as a mirror in which to inspect its own fresh paint and powder and ingenious twiddles of mascara. I was supposed to say, Yes, you do look beautiful; no, that’s just exactly right. I wanted instead to say what truthful mirrors do: Watch it, or I’ll crack, you vain old bitch.

For an hour, I went along with the city’s overpracticed charm. There was more obvious promise in New Orleans than in any other town at which I’d stopped. It was impossible not to be won over for a little while by its gentle heat, its intricacy and fuss, its dappled colors. On Chartres Street there were secondhand-book stores. I hadn’t seen such things since I’d left London. I found an old edition of
Orley Farm
by Trol-lope. I listened to the voices on the far side of the shelf.

“She borrowed this book of poems by Rupert Brooke … you know, from the library?”

“Right—”

“And they tried to get it back from her. No way. She’d
kissed
the picture away.”

“Imagine what she’d’ve done if it had been, like, Truman or Tennessee …”

“Right …”

It was New Orleans talking to itself in its peculiar bastard accent. It wasn’t “Southern” at all. There was Irish in it, and the rolled French r, and gay-Esperanto; a soft and lazy blend of sounds, in which words were trailed like the swishing of long skirts across floors.

Still being complaisant with the city, I took
Orley Farm
to the Café Du Monde. I sat in the sun. I ate my three
beignets
. I drank my cup of chicory-flavored coffee. I remembered where I’d seen New Orleans’ prettiness before.

Across from the café, on Jackson Square, horse-drawn buggies with fluttering canopies were picking up the tourists for sight-seeing rides around the Quarter. Their black drivers, elderly men who’d learned the role that brought them in the biggest tips, were going
Yassuh!
and
Sho nuff!;
their white passengers had the benign glaze of people who meant to spend the day being innocently impressed by every single thing they saw. They were being carted about the streets like plastic dummies in their new vacation wear, their heads turning slowly from side to side. Everyone wore the same smile. The men looked oddly naked without their neckties. Bereft of occupation, they pointed cameras at bits of wrought-iron trellis. They photographed their drivers, then photographed other tourists in other buggies, their smiles as fixed and grave as those of early Christian martyrs.

The square was full of artists.
PORTRAITS IN FULL COLOR
$20.
DOUBLE COLOR
$25. A young woman sat with a clutch of shiny pamphlets and guidebooks in her lap. An artist was transforming her into a rigid pink oval with mad eyes and an open wound for a mouth. Over on the far corner of the square, an artist was playing a concertina; nearer by, an artist was scratching a guitar and singing “Old Man River.” There were artists with out-of-tune trumpets; an artist with a pet monkey; a tap-dancing artist; a pavement artist doing something unrecognizable, and possibly obscene, to the sidewalk. All the tourists were encouraging all the artists in a mass demonstration of piety to the living culture of New Orleans. The continuous clopping of the horses’ hooves was art too; more a sound effect than a sound, as if every artist who had failed to obtain a post on Jackson Square had been given a pair of coconut shells to knock together through the day.

New Orleans had had a long and tiresome history of being ceded, occupied and sold. Now it was selling itself. Or rather, it was selling off its own collection of tourist mementos from its holidays in foreign parts. The buggies and the street artists had been brought back from Florence; Jackson Square was a full-color, $20 portrait of the Piazza Della Signoria.

Up on Bourbon Street, the massage parlors and the blue-movie houses with private booths for masturbation went two by two with “Dixieland” jazz bars. The bands were mostly white, and they too were in the business of execrable imitation, casually fooling with the music of Negro funerals and carnivals. I stopped at one of the few bars with a black band. In an interval between the “Saints” and “South Rampart Street Parade” the drummer came over to order himself a beer. His accent sounded strange to me.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Chicago.”

“And the rest of the band?”

“We’re all out of Chicago.”

Toward the end of the morning there was the sudden swell of movement in the streets. Something real was happening. From Bourbon and Royal, Decatur and Canal, a big crowd was homing in on Iberville. I couldn’t see what was going on. In my wallet I had an out-of-date telex credit card. I waved it over my head and shouted, “Press.” It worked. I pushed my way past a line of fire engines, penetrated a police cordon, and reached the patch of street where everyone had a microphone, a notebook or a film camera.

“Who are you with?”

“The
States-Item.
”

“
Times-Picayune.
”

“WGSO.”

“WVUE …”

There was a fire in Harry’s Pirates Den. Firemen were smashing windowpanes with long prongs. They climbed ladders, shoved hoses through windows, sprang out onto the balconies of neighboring buildings like characters in a French farce.

There was a good deal of dense, peat-colored smoke, but that, as far as I could see, was all. Next door to the pirates’ den, across an empty lot, there was a massage parlor with pictures of gymnastic girls.
THIS SHOW YOU MUST SEE
! A man came out onto a second-floor balcony to watch the fire. He was wearing only his underpants and carried a can of Schlitz. I could see his graying chest hair and scrawny knees. Behind him, in deep shadow, a woman moved past in a bathrobe.

The crowd was getting restless. We knew what we had come for. We wanted collapsing walls, dramatic rescues, a holocaust with flames disappearing into the sky. We got what we deserved, what New Orleans seemed all about that morning: a lot of smoke without fire. We melted disappointedly away. As I left, a radio reporter was interviewing a fire chief.

“And nobody was
injured?
”

“There wasn’t anybody in the building, ma’am.”

I picked irritably at a bowl of Creole shrimp gumbo. I had got the message, and hated what it said. New Orleans was being frank: it had some home truths for me, and was wasting no time on polite circumlocutions.

Riding the river, I had seen myself as a sincere traveler, thinking of my voyage not as a holiday but as a scale model of a life. It was different from life in one essential: I would survive it to give an account of its end. The journey would turn into a complete narrative, where
life—my own life—could be only an unfinished story with an inconclusive plot.

Now, just a few days away from the end, I didn’t yet know where the story would finish, but I knew a conclusion was waiting for me somewhere not far off; it had to be. Here, though, New Orleans was telling me plainly that I was laughably deluded: I wasn’t a traveler at all; I was just another rubberneck in a city that made its living out of credulous rubbernecks. Go buy a guidebook! Take a buggy ride! Get your picture painted! Eat
beignets!
Listen to the sounds of Old Dixie! Have yourself a relief massage; then
go home
, shmuck!

Perhaps that was the ending I deserved. It would give the hero his comeuppance and boot him firmly back to where he belonged. He could sit with the other tourists on a flight out of the city, nursing a stripy bag of souvenirs: a T-shirt with
THE CITY THAT CARE FORGOT
printed on its front in fancy wrought-iron letters, a Preservation Hall L.P., a voodoo doll, a Cajun seafood cookbook illustrated with primitive paintings of bayou weddings and, for his bath, a model steamboat and a plastic alligator. I could leave him there, with the plane’s engines drawing in their breath for takeoff, a strapped fool in his seat belt at the end of the road, the beginning of the runway.

Instead, I left the shrimp gumbo. I paid the check. I tore up the message on my way out of the restaurant.

I kept superstitiously away from the French Quarter and took to the moldering streets on the wrong side of Esplanade. Every tourist brochure talked about the “magic” of the city, and there
was
a kind of magic there: a dim and degenerate irrationalism which kept on coming up through the cracks in the talk like a tropical weed.

“Jingle Bell Rock” was playing on the jukebox. At the far end of the bar, two women were sitting with a crippled dwarf. One of the women had a deck of cards and was telling the other’s fortune.

“Turn the fifth card—”

Business was bad. The bartender was lost in a newspaper.

“Count fifteen cards …” The voice was New Orleans-sleepy.
Car-r-ds
. “See? What holds your destiny … what lies beyond?”

“The four of diamonds doesn’t mean anything,” said the dwarf.

“A lot of space … a lot of traveling.”

I tried to read.

It was hard going. The place names stood too evocatively out of the text and got in the way of the story, whose track I had lost long ago.

“Jack of spades. That’s the best. A friend … somebody like that … What I mean is, he’s out to get you, but he’ll smile.”

“Since she chose a bad card, she gets another chance. Life comes back. It always comes back.”

The bartender folded his paper and took time off to thrash me at pool. We were setting up the table when the dwarf slid down from his stool and left the bar, hauling himself across the floor on a single crutch.

“You seen that guy? Know what I reckon? He’s a reincarn.”

“A what?”

“Reincarn. You know about reincarnation? The way I look at it, it accounts for a helluva lot of things you see.” He chalked his cue and shot off first.

“Like I was saying. Look at all the little kids who’ve got these crazy deformities when they’re born. The retards. Grown men with five-year-old brains. Them
mongrels
. Know what I mean? There’s got to be a reason. I ask myself, what’ve guys like that done to deserve it? They must’ve done
something—
”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because there’s an order in this universe, that’s why. Don’t you believe in the Divine Pattern?”

“No.”

“Shit, I do. You see something like that guy, there’s only one explanation for it. It’s retribution. I reckon when he was in a previous life, he did something real bad. I don’t know. Maybe he murdered someone, something like that. Could’ve been anything. Rape. Torture. You know what I mean. And that’s why he’s been sent back. He’s
serving his term in Hell right now, that’s what I think. Don’t that make sense to you?”

I laughed. “Not much, no.”

“Hell, you only got to use your eyes. Look at the people in the streets. There’s us: we’re living out our lives for the first time. Then there’s
them
. Reincarns.”

I couldn’t sleep in the big honeymooners’ bed. As soon as it was light on Sunday morning I started to walk with no particular direction in mind, and found myself on Elysian Fields. It didn’t look like the place of the blessed dead. It was a long dull boulevard which cut through a black suburb of housing projects in khaki brick and gray frame bungalows, half hidden behind palmetto fans and frizzled banana plants. The wet air was still full of Saturday-night smells: a thin, drifting smog of sausage grease, sour liquor, fried fish and sick.