Feet on the Street (5 page)

We did not do that. We let him live. He waved us away. No pictures. And no pictures, no story.

Slick and I went to Felix's. We kept up with the shucker through a couple of dozen, but after a while Slick wasn't eating so much as staring at the little pink bodies lying there exposed to the light. He started telling me about something that had happened when, as a teenager in Monroe, Louisiana, he was working as a lifeguard at an overcrowded pool. On his watch, a kid drowned. Nobody saw him go under. By the time anybody called for help, he was dead. Slick was full of remorse, especially when he heard that the child's parents wanted to have a talk with him. When they arrived, they just sat there looking at him. He expressed his deep regret, explained the situation as best he could, and got no response.

“I was about to cry, I felt so bad,” he said.

Hard to imagine Slick in tears. He went on.

“The parents just stared. They looked nervous. I said, ‘Is there anything you want to ask me?' Finally, the mother spoke up. She said, ‘Can we have his frog feet?' ”

Not a story
Parade
's readers would want for Christmas. We had already run up quite an expense account. “What are we going to tell
Parade
?” I wondered aloud.

Slick stared at the oysters lying in their shells. It was early evening, magic time in terms of light, which was coming in through the big window there, lending a rosy glow. Slick picked up the battered Leica that stuck with him through thick and thin.

“How about: ‘
Orphans?
We thought you said
oysters.
”

M
ANY YEARS LATER,
I'm in New Orleans alone, at Felix's, having a dozen and working the
New York Times
crossword. And the shucker is condescending to talk to me. He can evidently shuck and jive at the same time. He is telling me that the other night a man ate forty-eight dozen oysters at a sitting. Not here, but at a seafood place out by the lake. “I don't know if he even leaves the shells,” he says. “Lives in Hammond, Loozanna. I wish I owned a grocery in Hammond.”

“Fat?” I inquire.

“Yes. But not
extree-ordinarily
fat. About my heighth, with your stomach.”

And in comes Becca. And her husband. I know who they are because he says, “Aw, Becca,” and she looks at me, jerks her thumb over at him, and says, “My husband Kyle.”

It's late fall, crispy for New Orleans, and she's wearing a sweater. Striped, horizontally, which on a flat surface would be straight across but on her the effect is topographical. And there's a twinkle in her eye—well, more of a glint, probably, but you can see seeing it as a twinkle in just the right light. “Shuck us a dozen,” she tells the shucker, and with a look over at hubby, “Let's hope one of 'em works.”

If I had not seen
Double Indemnity
enough times to be all too familiar with how these things turn out . . . Because she is over close to me now saying, “I work that puzzle every damn day of this world.”

One look at Becca and I'm into a noir-narration frame of mind, thinking to myself, You know, a man has always got to be promoting getting some; and a woman always got to be promoting getting something out of giving some up; but a woman who is giving you some to get back at her husband can just enjoy it and let you just enjoy it because her ulterior motive is covered. Problem would be when she gets her message through to the husband, gets tired of that, and starts figuring out how you, too, are letting her down. I'd say Becca's daddy had money till she got halfway through high school and he lost it all: A daddy's girl whose daddy folded.

And now this husband, Kyle. A weedy sort. He nods distantly, looking like he hopes it won't come across as miserably. “And two Ketels on the rocks,” she says, and he says, “Aw, Becca,” again. They're both fairly sloshed, but he's fading and she is on the rise.

“ ‘A little hard to find'? How many letters?” she says. She's up against my shoulder looking at the puzzle. Kyle's leaning against the counter, putting horseradish on the first oyster the shucker has presented them with. Without moving away from me or looking away from the puzzle, she reaches over, takes the oyster from in front of Kyle, puts it to her lips, gives me a little half-look, and slurps it down.

I say, “Eight.”

She says, “A good man.”

“But where's the ‘little' in that?”

A woman just in it for the giggles would have made a coy face and said “I'm not touching that one.” Becca gives me another half-look and grabs my pen and starts writing “A GOOD MAN” in.

That doesn't appeal to me at all, on one level. On another, it brings her up against me even closer.

She smells like her corsage—they're in town for the weekend, she says, for a football game—and her lipstick, maybe, which is certainly red enough to be aromatic, especially now that it's set off by a fleck of horseradish.

“No,” I say, “ ‘A GOOD MAN' can't be right—see, fourteen down, ‘Greek love,' would be AGAPE, and—”

She looks at me with both eyes, and rolls them. “Ooh, I don't think so, hon,” she says. “Let's just jam it in there. We'll make it fit.” She writes AGAPE in so that the
E
is on top of the
N.

That fleck of horseradish is still there on her lip. I could flick it off for her. Or I could point to the same spot on my own lip so she could get it off herself. I refrain from doing either.

Now she has one of my oysters. “Slurps” is too blatant. She takes it in juicily. Now she's filling things in one after another, free association and spontaneity being the key more than strict interpretation or even in some cases the right number of letters. I am more tolerant of this than I would be in other circumstances.

“You know we could do this all evening,” she says, and in spite of my reserve I'm beginning to have the same thought. At this time I am unattached, and I am not thinking with as much edge as I was back there in that noir-narration frame of mind. But there's Kyle. She turns to him and says, “Me and this man could keep on doing this till another puzzle comes out.” She takes the last of their dozen. “Kyle doesn't do the puzzle,” she says. “Kyle could eat ever' got-damn oyster in New Orleans and he still couldn't do the puzzle. Let's go, Kyle, put some money down.” He does, and my weight sags just a bit farther than I'd prefer in the direction of her abruptly withdrawn shoulder.

Becca and Kyle turn to go, her arm in his; but she looks back long enough to lick the fleck of horseradish off, finally, and to say, by way of farewell: “They like it when you dog 'em out.”

I look at my puzzle, which is a mess.

“Say, ‘They'?” says the shucker.

S
LICK PULLED THE
orphan story out of the fire. He had a wide circle of friends in, for instance, the ballooning and motocross and country-music communities, and one of them put him onto some photographable orphans. The cover picture, under the billing, “When Love Is the Best Gift of All—MERRY CHRISTMAS, AMERICA,” was of a little blond girl who had been an orphan before adoption. But when Slick told the story of the orphan story he tended to leave people believing that we had shifted topics on
Parade
and pulled it off:
Oysters.
He pronounced it
oischers,
to rhyme with
moistures,
as do many people who savor those mollusks' juices. They say a mayor of New Orleans named DeMaestri hosted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at dinner once and didn't say a word until the end of the evening, when he said, “How'd you like them ersters?” This is one of several indigenous pronunciations.

Some twenty years later Slick died, directly from drink. He was the second New Orleans rambling companion of mine who knew that drinking would kill him, who narrowly escaped dying once already from it, but went back to it anyway. One of the things Slick often said was, “I wouldn't want to live like that,” in a not entirely facetious though mock-pious tone, pronouncing “live” sort of like “leeyuv.” Say we passed a man in the street who was carrying a cat in a cage labeled “Tom Doodle” in fancy script, and the cat was emitting a cranky-sounding moan and the man was talking back to it in a whiny, put-upon voice. Slick would say, “I wouldn't want to leeyuv like that.” When liquor began to get the better of him, he was in and out of rehab programs. “I'm drinking myself to death,” he told me once, in tears. Slick, in tears! I told him drinking wasn't as much fun as it used to be, which was true. He agreed. A pleasure-principle grounds for abstention. But in the long run he couldn't live like that.

Lagniappe with Oysters

S
LICK'S LOVE OF
N
EW
O
RLEANS

One of his friends in town was the scion of an old family who fell in love with a stripper. The family was appalled, but the scion assured them that she was quite bright and cultured. Meet her and you'll see, he said.

So some of them came to the club where she worked, and sat talking to her, and sure enough she was quite the lady and well educated. They liked her. You couldn't not like her. Then she stood up and said, “Excuse me for a minute, y'all, I've got to go show 'em my monkey.”

C
HIHUAHUAS

On Decatur Street, across from the French Market, there's a wee nook called Chi-wa-wa Ga-ga, “A small store for dinky dogs.” In the window in Christmas shopping season are many gift ideas, including a red-and-green sweater that says “I Don't Fa la la for Nobody,” a pullover suit that would make a miniature dog look bulging with muscles, and nightlights for dogs.

Outside, a very large woman is holding in one arm a dog so diminutive and quivery that you can hardly make him out. She is saying to a heavy, beat-down-looking man, “Look, Rob, little crowns! It's a little dog store!” Halfway through the door, she sees Rob trying to continue down Decatur. She reaches back and grabs him.

I follow them inside, where many people are squeezing and milling about. At least seven of them have brought their tiny dogs, not all of whom are Chihuahuas. “Some kind of shelty and shih tzu, we don't know. Do we, Precious?” says one owner. One little dog, shivering on the glass counter, is modeling a tiara.

“She don't preshate it,” says the man of the couple.

“Yes she does, she preshates it, don't you Weejee?” says the woman.

“She's already got one tiara. You going to get her another tiara she's not going to wear?”

Another little dog is brought to the counter, to try on a sweater. “It's too big for him, look, he's trying to get out of it. You have a changing room? He don't like to get naked.”

Among the small dog toys for sale is a chewy-looking monkey labeled “Shake Me!” A shopper tells me, “Ohhh, my dogs back home have one of those, they love it so much.” She shakes the monkey and nothing happens. “I can't get it to do,” she says. “My dogs get it to do all the time. You try.” I shake it for her, it emits a vaguely simian squeal, and she says, “There. That's what I hear all day long.”

The
resident
Chihuahua sits next to the counter in a tiny stuffed armchair, yapping at everybody who tries to pet him.

“That your chair?” asks a woman trying to win him over.

“You're mighty god damn right it's my chair,” says the Chihuahua.

B
ALLOONING

So far as I know, the full history of ballooning in New Orleans has never been told, but in 1858 two local enthusiasts, named Morat and Smith, raced from Congo Square to the corner of Camp and Felicity riding not in the standard gondolas, but on the backs of two live, eleven-foot alligators. And in a local paper in 1905 a man named Buddy Bottley (or Bartley), “the colored aeronaut,” advertised “astonishing, perplexing, fascinating” balloon ascents. If Buddy brought along his brother Dude on these rides, to provide cultural commentary, they must have been fascinating indeed, judging by “old Mr. Dude Bottley's” recollections of early musical days in New Orleans, which appear in
Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville,
by Danny Barker. Bottley recalls hearing Bolden, in venues where the funk was like “burnt onions and train smoke,” perform “such nice love songs,” like “Your Mammy Don't Wear No Drawers, She Wears Six-Bit Overalls,” “Don't Send Me No Roses 'Cause Shoes Is What I Need,” and “Stick It Where You Stuck It Last Night.” Bottley also speaks of a Lorenzo Staulz, who would sing Civil War songs “about how General Grant made Jeff Davis kiss and kiss his behind and how General Sherman burnt up Georgia riding on Robert E. Lee's back.” Staulz “had a cleaning and pressing business. If you took your clothes to his place to have them cleaned, if he looked nice in your suit and it fitted him, he wore it. So, people naturally thought he had a hundred suits.”

R
AMBLE
F
OUR
: C
OLOR

The various grades of the coloured people are designated by the French as follows . . . : Sacatra, [a cross between] griffe and negress; Griffe, negro and mulatto; Marabon, mulatto and griffe; Mulatto, white and negro; Quarteron, white and mulatto; Metif, white and quarteron; Meamelouc, white and metif; Quarteron, white and meamelouc; Sang-mele, white and quarteron. And all these, with the sub-varieties of them, French, Spanish, English, and Indian, and the sub-sub-varieties, such as Anglo-Indian-mulatto, I believe experts pretend to be able to distinguish. Whether distinguishable or not, it is certain they all exist in New Orleans.

—F
REDERICK
L
AW
O
LMSTED
, 1861

O
N ESPECIALLY MISTY DAYS IN
N
EW
O
RLEANS,
background colors emerge as if bleeding into the atmosphere: you catch sight of a beige-faced woman in a blue slicker carrying a manila envelope past a mint-green housefront, and it's as though you're seeing the color manila for the first time. In the Quarter and the Marigny and the Bywater, you see houses painted blue and green and white, orange and white and green, pink and beige, lavender and white and purple, ocher and powder blue, pink with red-and-white trim, aqua with cream trim and deep purple shutters.

New Orleans has historically been unconventional and recombinant also in regard to color of skin. The city from its founding in 1718 was a melange of voluntary European colonists, African and Indian slaves, and European deportees and indentured servants; there was much commonly accepted mixing of blood. Slaves escaped into the surrounding swamps and established “maroon” communities that traded with citizens of the town. And within a few decades there was a growing number of “free persons of color.” Many of these were immigrants or refugees from Haiti (then Saint-Domingue), others former slaves who bought their freedom, or had it bought for them by relatives, in the late eighteenth century.

However, for most black Americans before Emancipation—for instance, for Jim in
Huckleberry Finn—
New Orleans was a threat: if they didn't toe the line, they could be sold “down the river” to the New Orleans market, which meant back-breaking labor and separation from loved ones in the deep South.

On a wall on the corner of Chartres and St. Louis, there's a plaque with a bas-relief of three gents (one taller and more rawboned) looking at some papers around a table. The plaque commemorates “Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange, est. 1788. Within this historic structure slaves were sold and Andrew Jackson met with the Lafitte Brothers and planned the defense for the historic and epic battle in which the British surrendered to American troops commanded by General Jackson. American independence was finalized and General Jackson went on to become the seventh President of the United States of America.” The plaque doesn't linger even long enough for a comma after “slaves were sold.” What the plaque might say is “slaves were sold to the highest bidder after being made to run, dance, leap, tumble, and twist to show they had no stiff joints, and after being fattened up over by the river in holding pens and washed in greasy water to make their skin shine.” Until long after the finalization of American independence.

Slaves were sold at several locations in New Orleans. At the corner of Royal and St. Louis is the splendid, expensive Omni Royal Orleans hotel, on whose site once stood the even more opulent St. Louis Hotel, in whose rotunda slaves were auctioned off. An 1842 engraving of one such sale shows white men in big hats and white women in big dresses milling around as an auctioneer waves his gavel and points to a black woman naked above the waist. Also in the picture are two small black children not wearing anything and a black man with a wrap around his loins. In the foreground are casks and bales also up for auction. Louisiana law prohibited the sale of small children separate from the mother, but if they came from other states there were no restrictions. When the novelist John Galsworthy visited New Orleans in 1912, the St. Louis Hotel was in ruins. As he poked through them, he was startled nearly out of his skin by the sudden appearance of an abandoned, injured horse stumbling through the marble rubble.

As a young man, in 1828 and 1831, Abraham Lincoln twice worked his way on flatboats down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. These exposures to what was then the nation's most cosmopolitan metropolis are assumed by biographers to have given Lincoln his first sense of the great world, and also his first sense of the magnitude and inhumanity of slavery. He'd seen some slaves in Illinois, but never anything like those auctions. According to a friend who accompanied Lincoln on his second trip, the sight of a girl being sold made him vow to do something about slavery when he got a chance.

New Orleans seceded along with the rest of Louisiana at the onset of the Civil War, but by April of 1862, Union troops had reclaimed the city. The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, abolished slavery only in those parts of the nation that were “in rebellion.” According to
Soul by Soul,
Walter Johnson's authoritative history of the New Orleans slave market, “All signboards advertising slaves for sale in Union-held New Orleans were taken down on January 1, 1864.” So the slave trade continued for over a year in New Orleans after it came under the control of the Great Emancipator.

In 1873, when P. B. S. Pinchback, an African-American, was the Reconstruction governor of Louisiana, Edgar Degas had a long visit with relatives in New Orleans. He wrote back to Paris ecstatically of “the pretty pure-blooded women and the pretty quadroons and the strapping black women! . . . There are some real treasures as regards drawing and color in these forests of ebony. I shall be very surprised to live among white people only in Paris. And then I love silhouettes so much and these silhouettes walk.” But the New Orleans light was too bright for his supersensitive eyes. He painted indoor scenes in which only a few glimpses of black folk appear. His mother's first cousin, a free New Orleanian of color named Norbert Rillieux, transformed the sugar industry and the sugar market by inventing a process for the efficient evaporation of murky cane juice into fine white grains. Sugar suddenly became so cheap to produce that just about any table could afford it, at least any white table, as long as there was plenty of cheap black labor. Reconstruction lasted longer in New Orleans than anywhere else, but local whites reassumed supremacist control after bloody riots instigated by a white citizens' militia, the White League.

Before things tightened up in the years leading to the Civil War, however, slaves had more freedom in New Orleans than elsewhere. They were allowed, notably, to assemble on Saturday nights to play drums, chant, and dance. The basic beat was known as Bamboula. The music that grew out of those get-togethers, absorbing Arabic, Italian, Catholic, and pop-American influences as it evolved, was jazz. Hip Northeasterners may sniff at “Dixieland” jazz, but bebop and Brubeck are inconceivable without the foundation laid by the tortuous, exuberant fusion that imploded in early New Orleans and expanded from there.

The gathering place for Bamboula was known as Congo Square, part of what is now known as Louis Armstrong Park. The New Orleans airport also is named for Armstrong now. Armstrong grew up in the streets of the city, marching with brass bands and soaking up street vendors' calls and ferociously rhythmic emanations from the clubs where musicians competed to establish themselves as the best in town. “They didn't have all the noise that you have today, like automobiles and trucks,” remembered Danny Barker, who went back to the early days of New Orleans music, “and you could hear that beautiful calliope on the river,” and other eruptions of music all around. “It was like the Aurora Borealis. The sounds of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn't be sure where they were coming from. So we'd start running—‘It's this way!' ‘It's this way!'—And, sometimes, after running for a while, you'd find that you were nowhere near that music. But the music could come on you any time like that. The city was full of the sounds of music.”

Armstrong got serious about his playing after he was arrested for juvenile disorder in the streets (firing off a pistol for fun) and sent to a Catholic orphanage, where he studied cornet and played in the school's band. Later he was nurtured, to his lasting gratitude, by a Jewish family in town. As soon as he could, he headed upriver to Chicago and New York. But he kept on signing his letters “red beans and ricely yours.” Traditionally, New Orleans music has been about “playing for the people,” not just for the improviser and a coterie. The prime of Louis Armstrong was a time when the most serious music in America was also its sweatiest, downest, most joyous and engaging.

Today authorities recurrently try to clear the “betcha I can tellya whereya got them shoes” boys off the streets. My friend Lolis Elie, whose father was an eminent civil rights activist, argues that this is for the kids' own good: “They're not trying to be better, like Armstrong did. It's not about learning anything, trying to outdance each other. It's being out of school picking up change.” But I hated seeing a fat white man running out of the Tropical Isle bar on Bourbon to shoo away five kids—two drums, a trumpet, a tuba, and a trombone—who were raising money to go on the George Washington Carver High School band trip, because tourists were listening to them instead of coming into his cheesy club. And there can be no excusing the city's efforts (futile as they seem to be) to discourage the cheerful a cappella doo-wop men who will serenade you and your sweetheart on the street for a dollar or so.

There are plenty of clubs in town where you can hear good music for not much money, for instance Donna's and the Funky Butt on Rampart, Snug Harbor in the Marigny, and Vaughn's in the Bywater, where Kermit Ruffins holds forth on Thursday nights. Young musicians in New Orleans keep coming up with new variations on old traditions, for instance the Bounce, merging the Bamboula beat and brass-band blare and boop with rap: oompah-hop. In the window of a club called Mama's Blues on Rampart, I saw this clipping pasted: “Praline Soul. As one of today's most progressive young artists, ‘MYSELF' comes from the heart and speaks to your soul. While (X)ploring hip hop and (re)defining poetry in motion, he pushes the new-soul movement to limitless boundaries . . . , embraces the conscious sounds of yesterday at the same time moving forward at the lightspeed of rhyme. . . . Hypnotic riddims with a rootsy vibe. . . . ‘MYSELF' is formerly known as Goldielox.”

You can further your education in New Orleans roots music by listening to WWOZ and shopping at great record stores like Louisiana Music Factory on Decatur or the Magic Bus on Conti. Or you can walk down Bourbon past various touristy clubs and take in an overlapping, well-rendered continuum of “St. Louis Blues,” “Dock of the Bay,” “Highway to Hell,” “Don't Mess With My Toot-Toot,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” “Has Anybody Seen My Gal,” “Shake Your Booty,” and a guy with a great bass voice hollering “Jell-O Shots.” You can hear all that for free, but it's only fair to stop into these venues long enough to drop a few dollars. And don't forget to tip the band. There is such a surfeit of musicians in town that they may well be getting paid only ten or twelve dollars apiece for the night.

The current mayor of New Orleans is black, as was his predecessor, but the city is hardly a model of racial harmony. You're not advised to venture too far afoot at night, because there is no shortage of poverty, drugs, and deadly weapons in town, and tourists are easy prey. I've always counted on being too large, irritable-looking, and ill-dressed to be a high-percentage target, but one afternoon just before twilight I was walking along Esplanade past gracious housefronts when two sizable African-American youths nodded as they passed me coming the other way. I nodded back. Then from behind I heard one of them cry, “Hey, buddy! Hey, buddy!” A young, professional-looking black man jogging ahead of me took one look back and sped up away from there. I looked back. “Remember me?” said the youth who'd called out. “You know, over by Rita's place?” He came toward me, holding out his hand to shake. There was nobody else around. I didn't know any Rita, so I said, “You don't know me,” and picked up my pace in a hurry.

When you're going anywhere in New Orleans that you've never been before, it's a good idea to phone for a United cab. It's not a touristy thing to do. Old ladies living alone in the Garden District call United to bring them vodka and cigarettes in the middle of the night. There are other taxi companies, but everybody I know in town says, “Don't get excited, call United.” A cab will be there in a jiffy, to take you anywhere you want to go, though one driver told me he hated to venture into the area of Tulane University because he had been stiffed too many times by college students. The drivers tend to be locals. One told me he'd moved to Atlanta, “but I had to move back. Atlanta made me feel like a little child. I don't even drink, but I don't want anybody telling me I have to stop, and go home, at a certain time.”

Lagniappe with Color

R
OYAL
S
TREET

Once on Royal Street I came upon a crowd that was cheering and groaning strangely. A man was lying in the middle of the street, agonizingly working his way out of a straitjacket. He dislocated one shoulder, then the other. In the end he was beet-red and scraped up, but free to pass a can around for change.

T
HE
R
OYAL
O
RLEANS

Its Rib Room provides excellent expensive food—New Orleans cooks can do steak as inventively as oysters—and also an opportunity to eavesdrop on high-rolling businessmen, like the two I overheard indulging in petrochemical nostalgia: “Before EPA, hell, we'd dump shit, when it came out, the hairs on your arms would sizzle—but you could do that back then.”