Feet on the Street (2 page)

In New Orleans, craps, café au lait, and the cocktail were invented, and the following were introduced to America: cocaine, tomato sauce, the free lunch, Marquis of Queensbury boxing, the term
arriviste,
and the Mafia. A New Orleanian's invention made sugar a common household item. The largest slave market in North America was here, and the first synagogue outside the original thirteen colonies. New Orleans was the first American city to build an opera house and the last to install a sewer system. It has been the most nearly European American city and the most nearly African. The northernmost Caribbean city and the westernmost Mediterranean. I know of two places where the
Marseillaise
was sung in defiance of an occupying power: Casablanca, in the movie, and New Orleans, under Union control.

I am not a New Orleans expert. If I'd lived here long enough to be that, I'd be dead, because New Orleans never closes. But then New Orleans has not generally been a place where creatives (see
lagniappe,
below), Fats Domino excepted, put down roots. It has been a place for reorientational interludes. Thomas Wolfe was here just long enough to muster the independence (or to intensify the paranoia) it took to sever his umbilical editorial connection to Maxwell Perkins. William Burroughs long enough, among “lamsters of every description,” to get busted for possession and flee the country. Benito Juarez long enough to plot a revolution in Mexico, and Aaron Burr long enough to conspire to create a new empire with New Orleans as its capital. Edgar Degas long enough to be bowled over, visually, by all the black people around. Gertrude Stein long enough to find “New Orleans hot and delicious.” Charles Bukowski to acknowledge that “being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that.”

I spent one summer here, in 1963, working as a reporter at the
Times-Picayune
and living in a converted slave quarters, on St. Philip Street, around the corner from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. I was twenty-one and shy. I have returned, to the best of my recollection, thirty-eight times, for anywhere from two days to three weeks. I'll bet I have been up in N.O. at every hour in every season. It is not a town, in my experience, where a person takes meticulous notes, over the years, or keeps assiduous track of every note he does take. If this were school, I'd say the dog ate some of my research. But I can bring the dog to class and show you how fat he is and how apologetic he looks. (In 1922 Sherwood Anderson wrote, “When the fact is made secondary to the desire to live, to love, and to understand life, it may be that we will have in more American cities a charm of place such as one finds in the older parts of New Orleans now.”) And I can take you to the river and on various alluvial tangents.

Some Lagniappe with That

L
AGNIAPPE

From the Quechua
yapay
by way of the Spanish and with a French twist added in New Orleans, it means “a little extra.” It's an old local custom. If you bought some red beans and some rice, the grocer might toss in a lagniappe onion. One morning I woke up in a New Orleans hotel room, stretched, went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw to my astonishment that I had a big, thick gout of dried blood in the middle of my forehead. I said to myself, I had better change my way of living. I could remember doing several things the night before, but not, for the life of me, being shot. It was Winston Churchill, I believe, who said that the most exhilarating experience in life is to be shot at and missed. But to be shot at and hit, and have no recollection? Especially if you're a writer. But then I turned on the light and looked closer, and of course I had not been shot. I had just slept on my complimentary mint.

C
REOLE

This term originally meant “born here,” in reference to a fresh start in the New World. As the generations rolled on, people who claimed descent from the early French families used it to mean “from way back.” Then, because New Orleans culture is such a mélange, people began to assume it meant “mixed race,” which caused light-skinned Creoles to deny that there was any such thing as a Creole of color. All along there were descendents of early black, brown, and beige natives of the city who duly considered themselves to be Creoles (says
Times-Picayune
columnist Lolis Elie, “A white guy told me he never heard of any black people called Creoles. I told him I never heard of any white people called Creoles”), and indeed in recent years anti-Eurocentric studies have controlled the discourse to the point that in both scholarly and popular circles Creole is most likely to connote old African-Louisianan blood. Or a culture so blended that there's no separating one ethnic strain from another. Categories melt in New Orleans.

A
LLIGATOR SAUSAGE

“What does alligator taste like?” people would occasionally be heard to ask at the Tally Ho. “Like alligator,” would be the answer, after a beat.

B
EIGNET

A square doughnut with no hole. Which may seem contradictory, but then New Orleans is a laissez-faire city developed for French Catholics by a Scot named John Law whose architecture mostly reflects the Spanish occupation imposed by troops under Don Alexander O'Reilly.

S
MALL COFFEE

Don't order the large, because the cup, tall but not so big around, is hard to dunk into.

C
HUCK BERRY

In his autobiography he writes that New Orleans was “a place I'd longed to visit ever since hearing Muddy Waters's lyrics, ‘Going down to Louisana, way down behind the sun.' ” His first trip there was to perform, in 1955. After the thrill of “seeing my black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through,” he found that his black skin made him inadmissible to strip joints. Whenever he tried to peer into one, in fact, the doorman “would draw the door closed as I strolled past, reopening it beyond my sight.” So, after putting on a show that went over big (“Maybe someday your name will be in lights, saying ‘Johnny B. Goode Tonight' ”), he went back to Rampart Street, where the strip clubs were back then, and “employed a little strategy of my own. With the exception of when the door would close because a black male happened to pass in front . . . I enjoyed a half dozen full shows wearing a cowboy hat and gloves, standing in doorways and using my field glasses from across the street.”

M
ARK
T
WAIN

He came here in February of 1857, at twenty-one, hoping to catch a ship to South America, where he would make his fortune from the importing of coca leaves. Fortunately for modern American literature, which might otherwise have kicked off with
Fear and Llamas at Lake Titicaca,
the coca thing didn't pan out, so young Sam Clemens signed on as a cub pilot on a riverboat instead. Back and forth up and down the Mississippi, in and out of New Orleans. To have some spending money for the nightlife there, he would guard piles of freight on the levee. “It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. . . . I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” When the Civil War broke out, Clemens got off the boat in New Orleans and said good-bye to piloting. After a couple of weeks as a Confederate irregular, he headed out west. In 1881 he returned to the river to expand his recollections for
Life on the Mississippi,
several of whose chapters are about New Orleans.

W.C. H
ANDY

Struggling to make it as a musician, he was penniless in New Orleans. No place to lay his head at night but the levee. It was hard bedding, he recalled years later, and that is why his “St. Louis Blues” begins, “I hate to see that evening sun go down.”

I
NGRID
B
ERGMAN

The movie is
Saratoga Trunk,
from the novel by Edna Ferber. It was filmed on Hollywood sets (as were Elvis in
King Creole,
Mario Lanza in
The Toast of New Orleans,
which Pauline Kael called “sheer excruciation,” and
Naughty Marietta,
in which Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy find in New Orleans, at last, the “ah, sweet mystery of life”), but most of the story takes place in New Orleans during Reconstruction.

Bergman is the fabulous, amoral,
brunette
adventuress Clio Dulaine, who returns from Paris to claim her Creole birthright. With her are her dwarf manservant Cupidon and her ominous maidservant played by Flora Robson—“the least likely mulatto,” as Kael noted, “in the history of cinema,” with kohl-surrounded gimlet eyes. Gary Cooper plays Clint Maroon, a gambler from Texas. (Cooper was drawn to the project by the fully sufficient circumstance that he and Bergman had started an affair on their previous picture,
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
in which she played a palpable but virtually mute blond Spanish revolutionary love-bunny. The noted harmonica player Larry Adler saw
Saratoga Trunk
and told Bergman she was miscast—she was a wholesome Swedish girl. Though this hurt her feelings, she had an affair with him.)

To be precise, it is off a plate atop the hat on Cupidon's head that Clio enjoys jambalaya, she and he both standing, in the French Market. Bergman eats! Later it's fresh peaches submerged in champagne,
in the daytime,
after which she sleeps for two days.

A lawyer sent by her relatives tries to bribe her into leaving town, but he can't concentrate. Halfway through the business proposition in question, he blurts: “You're beautiful!”

“Yes,” she says, “isn't it lucky?”

Clint, impulsively, to Clio: “I love hearing your voice. It goes over me like oil over a blister. Folks back home are fine but they got kinda squeaky voices.”

Clio, manipulatively, to Clint: “I love you like the pig loves the mud.” Clint, or maybe Gary, looks a bit taken aback by this. But not so aback as Clio is taken when she learns that Clint isn't rich. After making the most of her presence in New Orleans she moves on to Saratoga, New York, where just as her engagement to a boring man of wealth is about to be announced, Clint bursts into the party. In the course of a business matter he has been beaten half to death with a shovel, and he is
carrying the dwarf—
who may
be
dead—under his arm. Clint has made his fortune, two-fistedly, and of course he was the man for her anyway, and the dwarf comes to. It is a
great
bad movie, whose richness springs from New Orleans.

C
REATIVES

Once, during some literary conference or another, the writer Molly Ivins, the artist Polly King, and I accompanied the former wife of David Bowie, who had a spicy memoir out, to a French Quarter apartment where “the widder Bowie,” as Molly would call her afterward, was staying with a friend who painted startlingly lurid figure studies. All I remember of the conversation is that the widder Bowie's end of it was conducted at very nearly the top of her lungs, as if she were trying to be heard, or to hear herself, over a David Bowie concert; and that we all happened to agree at one point that we liked spring. I think it was spring. We all turned out to be pretty much on the same page there, causing our hostess to observe, “Well, we're all creatives.” (Other creatives who had flings with New Orleans include Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Lowry, Sinclair Lewis, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Thornton Wilder, Pete Maravich, and Jorge Luis Borges, who subsequently wrote a story about a squeamish famished man who in trying to swallow his first oyster . . . no, I'm just making that up.)

F
ATS
D
OMINO

The man who found a generation's thrill on Blueberry Hill is long retired but still residing in his big pink-and-yellow-trimmed fifties ranch house in the Ninth Ward. He gives no interviews. Some years ago a famous local TV news guy, Phil Johnson, who was famous for his pretentious nightly editorial and the way he intoned “Good evening,” resolved to get Fats for his show. He knocked on Fats's door. Fats opened it. “Hey, it's Phil Johnson!” said Fats. Phil Johnson beamed. Said he was there to interview Fats. “Hey, say ‘Good evening' for me,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn't want to, but Fats said oh, come on. So Phil Johnson said it. “Come next door and say it to my neighbor,” Fats said. Phil Johnson didn't want to, but he did. “Now my other neighbor,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn't want to, but he did. “Now one more neighbor, over here, they'd love it, it would mean so much to them,” Fats said. So Phil Johnson did. Fats had him all up and down the street saying “Good evening” to everybody. Finally, Phil Johnson asked was Fats ready to do the interview now. “I don't do interviews,” Fats said.

In
OffBeat
in 1997, the director of WWOZ (a wonderful roots-music radio station that is always on the verge of folding) spoke of being privileged to eat Fats Domino's cooking: “It was the first and only time I'll ever eat barbecued pickled pig lips. If Fats is cooking in his backyard, you got to eat it. They weren't as tough as you'd think. At least the grill burned off the hairs. Fats has a funny diet.”

J
EFFERSON
D
AVIS

In the Confederate Museum on Camp Street, with portico and tower in the style of Louisiana native H. H. Richardson, the first truly American architect, is displayed a crown of thorns that Pope Pius IX made and sent to Davis when he was in prison after the war. A card next to it says: “Davis was deeply touched and he had a special need of cheer at this time, ‘when,' as he said, ‘the invention of malignants was taxed to the utmost to fabricate defamations to degrade me in the estimation of mankind.' ”