Feet on the Street (4 page)

I have seen this figure: that every year at Mardi Gras, from floats, to people begging for them,
fifty-eight billion
beads are thrown. A good place to watch Mardi Gras parades is St. Charles Avenue—not during the frenetic last weekend that is most people's idea of Mardi Gras: “They say if you like drinking and fighting and running naked, then that's your crowd,” as a cabdriver told me. No, the week before the saturnalia is when you should catch parades along St. Charles, in crowds comprising a wide range of New Orleanians from the rich and poor neighborhoods that jumble together nearby.

There is a house on St. Charles that is built to look like a wedding cake. And there's a mansion called Columns, now a restaurant and hotel, where Louis Malle shot
Pretty Baby,
with Brooke Shields playing a girl born in a whorehouse and Susan Sarandon her mother. For $160 you can spend the night in the “Pretty Baby Suite,” where as I recall Brooke's character lost her auctioned-off virginity.

And as you walk along St. Charles you may come upon the apparent shambles of an old horsedrawn sort-of-medicine-show cart, listing to the side, from which a man will sell you twelve pieces of “Roman Candy”—saltwater taffy—for five dollars.

I suggest you get off the streetcar at Audubon Park, where you can walk along a lagoon and over to a fine view of the river, and you can visit the zoo, whose orangutans are an inspiration for anyone with tight shoulders. Watch an orangutan
woop, woop, woop
its way along ropes to the top of a pole as high as Lee's column and sit there with those long arms folded, watching you. Maybe he'd rather be in a real rain forest, I don't know, but he looks more at home than Marse Robert.

The streetcar stops at Claiborne Avenue. A great deal of water is expelled, something to do with compressors, and the conductor comes along,
flack, flack, flack,
slapping the seats over so they face the other way for the trip back downtown. This time we could get off at Napoleon Avenue and walk toward the river, crossing Magazine Street, where the trendy shops are, to Tchoupitoulas (first syllable pronounced
Chop
), where we find Tipitina's, the storied music venue dedicated to the memory of Professor Longhair and his song “Tipitina” and still putting on good shows of everything from funk to Cajun till all hours. Also on Tchoupitoulas is the F&M Patio Bar, a cheerful neighborhood watering hole where some years ago the Queen of Comus stopped in after the ball, took off her shoes to dance, found the floor too dirty, and so became the first person to dance on the pool table. So many people have fallen off the pool table since then that a grating has been installed above it for dancers to grab on to.

Little early in the day for pool-table dancing, though. So let's go on back to the Quarter, where . . .

Where maybe we need a little break from the picturesque? And something to relieve our head, because last night those Sazerac cocktails at that great swanky art deco bar in the Fairmont Hotel, formerly the Roosevelt, went down so tasty and fast and, therefore, numerous? (They used to contain absinthe; now, something called herbsaint.) Let's pop into the Walgreen's drugstore just down Royal from Canal. Behind us in line at the cash register is a jumpsuited, hardhatted man completely covered with dust. He sees that we've purchased a generic headache medicine, Wal-something, and he nods approval. “That Wal- line is the way to go,” he says. “I don't use that Slimfast, I use that Walfast—only thing is, it doesn't take me up in the
middle,
know what I'm saying. I'm running up and down thirty floors with the concrete all day—my arms and legs lose weight, but the middle stay thick. Go to make love to my wife and looking like Big Bird.”

In New Orleans you can't get away from New Orleans, because people in New Orleans will talk to you. If a woman you've never seen before addresses you as “baby,” or “darlin',” it doesn't mean she's a hooker. She's just being cordial. Her pronunciation of
darlin'
will very nearly rhyme with the predominant local pronunciation of
Orleans.
It's sort of a cross between dahlin, dawlin, doilin, d'ohlin, d'ahwlin . . . can't be spelled, it's an oral construct. Similarly with
Quarter:
it comes closer to rhyming with “porter” than with “garter,” but it's more “Quo'tah,” with an
o
sound that's semi-extended, as if you're saying “oar,” or “o'er” more like it, but not finishing off the
r
sound. The essence is in that apostrophe somewhere. Something like that is going on in the word
oyster.

Speaking of which, that concrete man looked awfully dry. Let's stop in at Felix's oyster bar, at Bourbon and Iberville, for a beer—sometimes even more effective than Wal-something—and lunch.

Lagniappe with Wetness

A
UDUBON
A
QUARIUM

In 2002 at the Aquarium, a single bracket supporting a catwalk over an exhibit gave way, and ten people were dumped into a twenty-foot-deep tank filled with sharks. The people were in there swimming around terrified, some for as long as fifteen minutes, while the sharks circulated below their feet. No one was seriously injured.

T
HE
C
INCINNATI
K
ID

Edward R. Robinson slurps oysters, with relish. New Orleans movies tend to have some good eating in them.

R
OBERT
E. L
EE

On a plaque outside the Old Absinthe House bar on Bourbon, you may see Lee's name, along with those of the Marquis de Lafayette, Jean Lafitte, Alexis Grand Duke of all the Russias, Oscar Wilde, Buffalo Bill Cody, Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt, John L. Sullivan (but not Jim Corbett, who in 1892 at the Olympic Club on Royal Street took the heavyweight title from Sullivan in the first world championship bout fought with gloves), Babe Ruth, P. T. Barnum, and many other historical figures listed as having had a drink there. Not all together, but it's a nice thought. Lee did pass through New Orleans on his way to the Mexican War, but we may be sure that he eschewed anything like absinthe. Once I watched as Kappa Alpha fraternity brothers of Tulane University, in Confederate uniforms, and their dates in low-cut crinoline ball gowns, joked and posed for photographs at the base of his statue. He did love a cotillion.

W
ITH
r
ANCOR

Clara Solomon, age sixteen, in her diary, 1862: “Endeavored to kill as few mosquitoes as possible. For two reasons, the first being that we should be polluted by being touched by ‘Yankee blood,' and secondly each one increases the number and aids in biting and tormenting them. I wonder how they like them!”

M
ARDI
G
RAS

My favorite Mardi Gras participation has been walking with Curtis Wilkie's dog Binx—a dog with, as they say, a lot of “attaboy” in him—in Barkus, the parade of hundreds of dogs and dog people through the Quarter to Louis Armstrong Park, with a brass band right behind us.

R
AMBLE
T
HREE
: O
YSTERS

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion. . . . They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

—C
LOVIS, CHARACTER IN A STORY BY
S
AKI

I
T WAS AT
F
ELIX'S THAT
I
FIRST ATE AN OYSTER RAW,
that is to say live. A rite of passage. Felix's was a good place for it, because I don't like to be talked through things, and the shuckers in Felix's are not solicitous. As a rule New Orleanians in service occupations are by no means boundary-conscious. You'll hear a couple arguing at a restaurant table, the wife saying, “I need validation!” and a passing waitress will say to the husband, “Yeah,
cher,
she needs validation.” Rosemary James recalls entering a stylish restaurant and seeing one waiter slapping the other with a napkin as if challenging him to a duel, and the other pulling off a tablecloth to play him like a bull. “I realized,” she said, “that everybody in the place was drunk.” But the men who lay oysters bare at Felix's have perhaps been involved in so much opening up that they keep their own counsel. I loaded my first raw oyster with catsup, horseradish, hot sauce, and lemon juice, said a little prayer, and slurped it down.

It hit the spot. Now I eschew all seasoning but a spritz of lemon, and chew a few times for the savor before letting each little mollusk ease on down. Raw oysters give you a coolish inner lining collateral to the sheen that New Orleans humidity gives your skin. And I have seen too many people swallow oysters in Felix's in July without dying, to worry about the
r
's in the month.

Across from Felix's Iberville entrance is another venerable oyster bar, the Acme. You are either an Acme person or a Felix's person. I am the latter. For one thing, in New Orleans oysters are pretty much oysters, because they come from farms in the brackish waters where the river meets the gulf. When the river has been low they have more flavor, because their habitat has been saltier, but they're seldom as flavorsome as Atlantic or Pacific ones. If you want splendid briny oysters, go to Apalachicola, Florida, where you can also get a local brand of hot sauce that proclaims itself “An Oyster's Best Friend.” But there's no such thing as a bad oyster, unless they have
gone
bad. And there's often a line outside the Acme, whereas you can almost always walk into Felix's and lean against the place where the shuckers are shucking and call for a dozen and an Abita, the beer
du pays.

At one point I resolved to capture the essence of New Orleans by tracing it through everything associated with the city, from the simplest form of life, the oyster, up the chain to the most complex: the prose style of William Faulkner. While writing his first novel, Faulkner lived for a time in a ground-floor room that is now part of Faulkner House Books, on Pirate's Alley, around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral. My friends Joe DeSalvo, who operates that excellent bookstore, and Rosemary James, founder of an annual literary festival celebrating New Orleans culture, now live above the store. At the end of the book, I figured, I could tie things up by quoting Faulkner on oysters. Maybe he had taken the point of view of an oyster,
whose life was all digestion suspended by ice now open to light not knowing it light yet knowing it the better for the flood of it once, just once, not knowing love nor lust nor even affection but just this fond violation of privacy by light, and knife, and now again dark, and digestion.

If Faulkner ever wrote anything about oysters, I couldn't find it. Neither New Orleans nor my resolutions ever work out orderly. But in these times of culture-clash entanglements, when subjectivity vis-à-vis objectivity has become so vexed an issue, we might well dwell for a moment on the oyster. Why is Lewis Carroll's “Walrus and the Carpenter” such a lasting monument to cold-bloodedness?

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

“I deeply sympathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size.

Because who can honestly put himself in an oyster's place? A fish has a face, a snail a pace. An oyster, without its shell, is all morsel.

“Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the Fool asks King Lear as he is being rendered homeless by his folly and his daughters. “No,” says Lear. Can a grape coat itself in bark, a baby generate armor out of itself? An old man survive on his own?

Eating a raw oyster is like exchanging a soul kiss with the sea. But not much like it. We may think of Dickens's sanctimonious Mr. Pecksniff, and certain attempts to jog his memory:

“The name of those fabulous animals (pagan, I regret to say) who used to sing in the water, has quite escaped me.”

Mr. George Chuzzlewit suggested “Swans.”

“No,” said Mr. Pecksniff. “Not swans. Very like swans, too. Thank you.”

The nephew . . . : “Oysters.”

“No,” said Mr. Pecksniff, . . . “nor oysters. But by no means unlike oysters; a very excellent idea; thank you, my dear sir, very much. Wait. Sirens! Dear me! Sirens, of course.”

My memory is jogged by oysters. New Orleans madeleines. In Felix's, especially, they make me think of my friend Slick Lawson, photographer, who lived in Nashville but hailed from Louisiana and loved New Orleans—maybe even more than I do, because he could stay up longer. I'd stagger off to bed and he'd go find the bar where the waiters went after work.

Over the years Slick and I went out into the Alabama woods, to observe the Ku Klux Klan; and into the hills of Hazard, Kentucky, to interview an opponent of strip mining (Slick was delighted when the man said, “You know who owns this property here? Doris Day”); and to Paris and the palace of Versailles to chronicle one of the many political escapades of Edwin Edwards, then the roguish governor of Louisiana, now in prison. In 1981, Slick and I went to New Orleans for the orphans.

Parade
magazine, for whom we had covered the Klan, wanted us to do a heartwarming Christmas story on orphans. Sounded like a refreshing change from hanging around with Klanfolk, who had made us feel like taking a Lysol bath. My mother was an orphan. She had recently died. Slick and I were both fathers of children of broken homes.

And we wanted, as always, to go to New Orleans. We figured we'd go to New Orleans and eat, drink, and—New Orleans had everything else, why not orphans?

We ate, we drank, and we discovered that orphans, strictly speaking, were an outmoded concept. The line of would-be adoptive parents was so long that almost any small American child left legally parentless would be snapped up. There were, however, plenty of troubled children who had been taken into custody by the state because their parents had abandoned, neglected, or abused them. These children weren't candidates for adoption because their wretched parents hadn't given up their rights to them. Nor had the kids given up their longing for the parents.

Some of these children could be placed temporarily with foster parents, but many of them had to become less troublesome first. They had to be weaned to some extent from their sense of what love was like. “These kids have never found handshakes and nods and smiles rewarding,” said an administrator. “The only interaction that's gotten them attention has been negative and obnoxious.”

So these kids were kept in group homes or other residences, where they could earn points for making eye contact, shaking hands firmly, and eschewing temper tantrums or at least cutting their tantrums back from hour-long to half-hour. If they accumulated enough points, they were told, they might be able to go back home.

“Adult attention is so important that kids will
take
violence,” said a man who, with his wife, ran a group home. “They'll
make
you mad at them.” Because that's what it had taken to catch their parents' eyes. The man told of a boy who'd been “beaten by his mother. Badly. His body all . . . broken.” When the boy cried, and the man's wife tried to comfort him, he'd say, “Nobody holds me when I hurt like my mama does.”

“I'm a criminal,” said one blond thirteen-year-old, with what seemed to be a mixture of bemusement and pride.

“No, you're not,” said his teaching parent, a man whom the kids called “Zap” and whom we liked a lot. “You made some mistakes, but you're not a criminal.”

“I stole a lawnmower,” he said.

“A lawnmower?” I asked. “What did you want with a lawnmower?”

“His parents threw him out of the house,” explained Zap. “He took the family lawnmower with him so he could support himself.”

“I ain't staying here for no year,” one boy told us. “I'm going
home.
” He had recently complained, when served black-eyed peas and turnip greens, “We always get white people's food. I want some black people's food.”

What did he call black people's food?

“Weenies,” he said.

Another boy, “Ethan,” practiced his “guest skills” by showing us around his group home. He showed everything, including the cabinet where they kept the salt. And the salt in the cabinet. Every time I turned to talk to another kid, Ethan showed me something else. And shook my hand. He had scars on his neck that looked like claw marks. He was earning points toward going back home.

“They come in here,” an administrator told us, “with, oh, the mark of a barbecue grill on their back. Or . . . there is so much sexual abuse today.” Some kids would go home and get beaten some more and have to come back. “And they still defend their parents to the death. If the other kids say, ‘Your mama is mean,' they get mad. They say their parents are the best thing in the world.”

Slick and I should have known that New Orleans was not the place to go for unalloyed heartwarming. We did find poignant loyalty. I didn't hear anybody say, “He ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother,” but we met one nine-year-old who had been going from foster home to “residential treatment agency” to foster home since he was three, when authorities discovered that he was being left at home all day with a loaded revolver to guard his infant brother. And we met a ten-year-old whose twelve-year-old sister was in a different residence. Christmas was coming up. The administrator who introduced us told him he could list his first, second, and third choices from the Sears catalog.

“A tape recorder,” he said, “and if I can't get that, a typewriter.”

The administrator looked surprised. “You want a typewriter?” he said.

“No.”

“But you said . . .”

“For my sister.”

“What's your third choice?”

“A typewriter for my sister.”

“That was your second choice. What's your third?”

“
A typewriter for my sister!
” he said.

Our problem, from a professional standpoint, was this: we couldn't report these children's real names, or tell their full stories, or take their pictures, because their parents might sue for invasion of privacy. The damn Klanspeople had welcomed publicity, but these kids might as well have been in a witness protection program.

Everywhere we went, the kids wanted to pose. Well, there was one girl who, with two kittens in her arms, declared, “You aren't going to take a picture of
me.
Like that man did in the paper once.”

“Well,” said Slick, “but if I
did,
where would you like to be photographed?”

“Standing over there on top of the monkey bars,” she said.

She would have been perfect for the cover shot
Parade
wanted, but we couldn't shoot her. A boy came running up holding a flaxen-haired three-year-old, whom we will call “Greg.” “I think Greg likes you,” he said. “He keeps doing things and looking at you and saying, ‘Daddy, watch!' ”

Greg ran over toward the swings. An administrator said Greg had been found, in a dirty diaper, with his sister, wrapped in a man's coat, and with his mother, who was eager to get rid of them because their father had ditched them all. Greg sat in the swing and said, “Daddy, watch,” and did a somersault out of it. I said, “That's good, Greg,” and his eyes lit up.

But no pictures. Then we heard of a small fundamentalist Christian institution on the outskirts of New Orleans that might be persuaded to let us get some touching shots.

We went there. Our mouths watered at all the cute kids we saw running around. We found the spiritual head of this institution reposing in a trailer home on the grounds. We were prepared to plead with him for pictures.

He was old, pale, and shapeless, a blob floating in the carapace of a Barcalounger. He breathed with a faint wheeze. He had had several bypass operations, he said, and was living only for his charges. Nestling nervously in the middle of him was an aged Chihuahua. We explained our mission, at length, as founder and dog eyed us narrowly.

Then we waited.

“On one condition,” said the founder at last. A shudder went through the Chihuahua.

We waited.

He asked for a pen. I gave him one. He asked for paper. I tore him a scrap from my notebook. He wrote out a few words, slowly, deliberately, and handed the paper over. I believe he kept the pen.

His handwriting was spidery. His condition was “That it glorify Christ.”

I looked at the message, Slick looked at it, and the man looked at us.

The Chihuahua sneezed, as if in disgust. A Chihuahua can tell who's from Satan.

In fact we behaved as Christians in that crucial moment. There was no one else around. We could with impunity have taken that dog and smothered the founder with it, and his consequent heart failure would not have surprised or stricken a living soul.