Feet on the Street (6 page)

“That's right. I was in Thailand coming upriver to where we were building a refinery, and all of a sudden, what'd we hit? We ran into this village's whole fishing industry. It's a trotline all across the river, hand-woven out of bark, must've taken years, beautiful thing. I said, ‘I'm not going to cut that,' but of course, had to. We wound up destroying that village. Houses, trees . . .”

“It was a different world back then.”

R
AMBLE
F
IVE
: F
OOD

Oyster Inspiration of the Day: The chef's creation, from the classics to the unique.

—
THE MENU OF THE
201 R
ESTAURANT ON
D
ECATUR

T
HE THING
I
HAVE WRITTEN THAT PEOPLE SEEM TO
remember most is a song to oysters:

I like to eat an uncooked oyster.

Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.

Nothing's easier on your gorge,

Or when the time comes, to dischorge.

But not to let it too long rest

Within your mouth is always best.

For if your mind dwells on an oyster,

Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.

I
prefer
my oyster fried.

Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

In those last two lines, I lied. An oyster no more
needs
cooking than a sonnet by Shakespeare needs recitation. But when H. L. Mencken wrote that “No civilized man, save perhaps in mere bravado, would voluntarily eat a fried oyster,” he revealed that he had never had a fried-oyster sandwich on homemade bread in Casamento's, the venerable shiny-tiled seafood house in Uptown New Orleans. It is a crime without question to fry an oyster so callously that the animal's integrity is lost, but an oyster that is still juicy and plump within a light layer of deftly seasoned crunch—in fact,
more
juicy and plump for the frying—is a sonnet set respectfully to a tune anyone can sing.

New Orleans is the best town for eating in America, if not in the world. There is high cuisine aplenty. I sing now of the spinach gnocchi and sauteed drum at Gautreau's, uptown. Of the tomato and ginger soup at Herbsaint, in the Central Business District. Of the chicken Rosmarino at Irene's, in the Quarter: chicken cooked in garlic and rosemary, which is such a signature dish that it is what Irene's smells like for the length of the block. Of the pistachio-crusted tenderloin of rabbit or the grilled salmon “De Salvo” or the bouillabaisse at the Bistro at Hotel Maison de Ville, on Toulouse. Of the crabmeat maison at Galatoire's. Of the pan-fried sheepshead at Peristyle. Of the salmon in tarragon beurre blanc with virtually ephemeral fried oysters and bits of leek preceded by fried green tomatoes with remoulade sauce, or, indeed, the grits and grillades, at Upperline. Of the truffled eggs at Bacco. Of the simple but savory beef brisket at Tujague's (pronounced Two-Jacks) on Decatur. Of the smoked trout dumplings or the seared foie gras with duck confit at Emeril's. Of the cane-smoked salmon at Commander's Palace, in the Garden District. Of the lavishly saucy barbecue shrimp at Mr. B's Bistro. Of a great grilled veal chop with caramelized shallot butter at Sbiza's, which on Sunday offers a fine jazz brunch. Of the triggerfish with truffle and cauliflower vinaigrette puree and asparagus and prosciutto chips at Bayona, on Dauphine, topped off by some kind of little coconut cookie that gives you hope, when you least expect it, that even in New Orleans there is always something more to learn about what taste buds are for. In New Orleans, people know chefs like Susan Spicer (Bayona, Herbsaint) or Ann Kearney (Peristyle) or Greg Piccolo (Bistro at Hotel Maison de Ville) or of course Emeril Lagasse (Emeril's) and restaurateurs, like JoAnn Clevenger of Upperline or the Brennans of Mr. B's and many other places, the way people know Jack Nicholson in Hollywood. And when was the last time Jack Nicholson made you think, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. That is
good
”?

But you can't live like that. After a week in New Orleans trying to squeeze in all the cuisine you can, you wake up thinking, “With roux my heart is laden. If only a serpent would come along and tempt me with an apple.”

No such luck. Satan is saying, “You know, Uglesich's is open. And they say the old man is getting tired and the son doesn't want to take over. How would you feel if Uglesich's were to close before you got back in town?” So at 11:30 a.m. I'm at this dump of a place on Baronne at Erato, a no-man's-land uptown of the Central Business District, girding my loins for what may be the best food in town.

Pronounced “Yoogle-sitches.” A Yugoslav-American family. The place is so popular with local people, including other restaurants' chefs, that if you don't get there early for lunch you might have to wait three times: outside in line till you get through the door and reach the counter to order, then inside for a table, and then for your food. But nothing's expensive, and oh is it rich. Shrimp creole—“cooked,” according to the menu, “with every tomato product you can imagine.” Pan-fried trout topped with “muddy water” sauce: chicken broth, garlic, anchovies, and gutted jalapeños, and sprinkled with parmesan cheese. Fried green tomatoes with remoulade sauce. In Uglesich's I have felt, at times, that I was mopping up the most delicious grease I have ever put in and around my mouth, and that is saying something.

You don't have to pay much money to eat well in New Orleans. Turn most any corner in the Quarter and you will see a sign that says
FOOD STORE,
and inside will be crawfish egg rolls. That were made this morning. That are good. Peoples Grocery at Conti and Bourbon, the Royal Street Grocery at St. Ann, the Verti Mart at Royal and Gov. Nicholls. You can get convenience-store fare, odds-and-ends items, newspapers, but you can also get California and French wines, liquor, black-eyed peas, gumbo, fried fish, crab cakes, jambalaya, red beans and rice, full breakfasts and all kinds of po-boys and regular sandwiches to order.

On Decatur between Dumaine and St. Philip, you can home in on the Italian influence. At Central Grocery, the muffaletta was invented: on a big round sesame-seed bun, slices of several different aromatic meats and cheeses and oily-garlicky olive salad. Half a muffaletta is enough, and then you can browse among imported pastas, spices, salamis, and canned goods including baby conch, quail eggs, octopus in oil, abalone mushrooms, Creole chow-chow, and Cajun trinity (onion, bell pepper, and celery).

I recommend the croissants at the Croissant d'Or, on Ursulines between Royal and Chartres. Or you can go to Johnny's Po-Boy on St. Louis, where the mule-carriage drivers and the living statues eat, and have red beans and rice or a bowl of gumbo or a Po-Boy sandwich, which you might call a hero or a sub, but in New Orleans it will contain things into which you can sink heroically. At Mother's, another unpricey place just uptown from Canal, you can have a roast beef sandwich with
debris,
which is the gravy and breakage you get when you roast beef slowly with, it goes without saying, seasoning.

“They don't have any seasoning up there,” a cabdriver told me, in reference to everywhere north of New Orleans. “Nowhere knows about seasoning but here.”

Then there is the whole area of fried chicken. “My mama didn't cook any cacciatore, or any pad Thai,” says my friend Lolis Elie, the
Picayune
columnist. “But my mama fried chicken, so I know.” Lolis will send you to the famous Dooky Chase, on Orleans, or to Willie Mae's, on St. Ann (both in the Treme district, across Rampart from the Quarter). The fried chicken at those places does make it clear that he was brought up right. But Jacques-Imo's on Oak Street, uptown, will serve you some fried chicken, which for juicy and yet not heavy is phenomenal, and you should also try the alligator cheesecake there—I know it sounds strange, but it is I think (and it's not sweet, now, don't let the word “cheesecake” put you off) the best way in the world to get some alligator in your system. Jacques-Imo's is also a friendly, talk-inducing place for a few drinks. Lay down a foundation of that alligator cheesecake (yes, it is rich, I didn't say it wasn't rich, but it's not show-off rich) and you are not going to get prematurely tipsy, I'll tell you that.

But my mama's fried chicken on the spectrum of juicy was more toward the chewy side than the succulent, and she didn't season it at all heavily, just brought the brown and the flesh into a balance that echoes down through my years. I have had chicken that reminded me of that chicken in a place on Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny called The Praline Connection. From nearby tables you can overhear the unmistakable tones of reality-facing progressive biracial political palaver, and unless prices have gone up you can have crowder peas and okra and rice for five dollars, or with meat for $6.95. The meat might be chicken or it might be pork chops or something. And the fried okra—hot and lightly cornmealed, so that the okra, still holding its own in there, is a first-rate fusion of brown and green, to which you might want to add just a touch of red: hot sauce.

And there is a ramshackle-looking place across from the French Market called Fiorella's where not long ago I got three pieces of chicken with macaroni and cheese and vegetable du jour and a side of olive salad (chopped olives, pimientos, and spices) for $6.95. And my sweetheart, Joan, had the same. At the next table, only the woman was into it. “You're going to eat
turnip greens
?” the man said. “Sure am,” she said. “I'm in New Orleans. Can't eat turnip greens in Davenport, Iowa.” Excellent turnip greens, too. One waitress had tattoos all up and down both arms and was wearing a lacy black low-cut top, a short denim skirt, and a wholesome-sexy-friendly smile. The other one was putting on being grumpy, so some regulars could rag her into smiling.

“This is that
home
cooking,” said one of the regulars.

“Huh,” said the grumpy-looking waitress. “You ain't never been in no home.”

In Fiorella's you could hear a street band playing outside: a beat-up old tuba, a clarinet, a trumpet, a drum with cymbals, and a man singing a song about taking an arm from an old armchair and a cork from an old wine bottle, and from a horse some hair, “put it all together and you get more lovin' than I ever get from you.” Doesn't sound like a romantic song, I know, but it was that afternoon. At our table, we were both into it.

Way up into the Bywater area on Chartres is a homey neighborhood place, Elizabeth's, whose motto is “Real Food. Done Real Good.” Great breakfasts, and lunches whose sides include the mirliton, a green, pear-shaped vegetable sort of like a bell pepper, which I have never seen on a menu outside of New Orleans. But by now you may be stuffed. Before you get to Elizabeth's, you might want to linger along a certain block of Chartres. It's the block between two cross streets whose names enable you to say that you spent some time suspended between Piety and Desire.

Linger for say about a minute. And then if you're like me you start thinking of New Orleans as a woman who is sultry and tolerant and always feeds you great. And it's good-bye, Piety.

Lagniappe with Food

T
HE
I
TALIAN INFLUENCE

The Progresso soup company derives from members of the Taormina and Uddo families who came to New Orleans from Sicily in the early 1900s. I once heard Michael Uddo, formerly chef of the lamented G&E Courtyard Grill, tell how immigrants would arrive from Palermo in the nineteenth century carrying lemons and spices in their pockets. “My grandmother was something of a battle-ax,” Uddo said, “so her father gave a dowry of two tickets to America, and spent my grandparents' wedding night in their cabin so my grandfather wouldn't jump ship.” When the grandfather arrived in New Orleans, he found that the Italian community couldn't find decent tomato sauce anywhere in the country, so he made it, packaged it in cans he rescued from the garbage, and delivered it door to door. Then he bought a donkey that knew, from previous employment, the way to all the wholesale groceries in the city.

R
AMBLE
S
IX
: D
ESIRE

My woman do somethin', hon,
I never seen.
She must be goin'
With a man from New Orleans.

—FROM “
C
HITTLIN'
S
UPPER,” BY
P
EG
L
EG
H
OWELL AND
J
IM
H
ILL

B
ACK WHEN THE
U.S.
WAS MORE GENERALLY PURI
tanical, New Orleans was, as Faulkner wrote in
Absalom, Absalom!,
“that city foreign and paradoxical, with an atmosphere at once fatal and languorous . . . whose denizens had created their All-Powerful and His supporting hierarchy-chorus of beautiful saints and handsome angels in the image of their houses and personal ornaments and voluptuous lives,” where the sophisticated Creole Charles Bon tries to corrupt earnest Henry Sutpen into believing it is honorable to keep an octoroon quasi-wife on the side.

These days in America as a whole, when the pig-ugly if heroic porn star Ron Jeremy tours Disneyland as a VIP and is mobbed by families wanting to take their picture with him, sex may have been run into the ground. In New Orleans it remains one of various things the air is pungent with. Couples come here for it. In the morning you see them out on the balconies, leaning against the ironwork, looking fond and frowsy. And they head back home having had a lot of it—there go two healthy young folks now, yawning and nudging each other as they pull wheeled suitcases past the strip joint on Bourbon where the sign says “Wash the Girl of Your Choice.” (So the statement by Blanche DuBois, “The cathedral bells. That is the only clean thing in the Quarter,” no longer holds up.)

Also arguing couples, to be sure. But I'm walking along Royal at nine-thirty of a fine Friday morning in October, and coming the other way on the other side of the street are two head-shaven guys and between them a pretty woman with long black switchy hair, I'd say late twenties, early thirties, I don't know, I can't tell anymore, they're all way younger than me. It's hard for three people to walk side by side on a New Orleans banquette, in fact that is a distinctive thing about walking in the Quarter: you can't just stream past people with no notice, you have to step over and squeeze past, and you pass residents on their front steps so close that it's socially awkward not to nod hello. So these three are sort of jostling, sportively, in the effort to keep all abreast. And here, from clear across the street, is what I hear the woman say:

“My hole hurts!”

She's walking funny, as though she means it, but the three of them chuckle, a little hoarsely.

“Boo-hoo,” she adds.

They seem to be friends of some standing. They're not showing off, it's nine-thirty in the morning, there's hardly anybody around and they're not even implicitly cutting their eyes over at me. You might prefer
Jules et Jim
angst, and no doubt the relationship won't always remain so unvexed, but I'd say they've been up all night and they're bushed but jolly. A few more words pass among the three that I can't hear and then, she:

“All I know is, my hole hurts!”

And they go briskly on along. People are still coming to New Orleans to do things they wouldn't back home.

As for myself—you're going to be disappointed to hear this, but I have not done anything in New Orleans that you wouldn't have done, if you had been there at the time. Anyway I can't imagine why you wouldn't have. Well there was this one Super Bowl week back in the seventies when Pete Axthelm of
Newsweek
and I both took an interest in a flower vendor named Molly who was barefoot and dressed in a chenille-bedspread toga, and we bought all her flowers and walked around the Quarter the three of us playing kazoos and then went to my room in the Marriott, which had two big beds in it, and as soon as she had washed her feet and we had shown her some identification, so she could be sure we had been telling her the true stories of our lives, Molly had the run of the place. It was nice. She expressed the hope that this gambol, as she put it, would get her nerve up to tell her boyfriend Leonard of her plans to move to New Zealand and become a shepherdess. In the morning I gave her a Super Bowl ticket, but as best I could make out from friends who sat in the same section, she must have passed it on to a small, edgy man, maybe Leonard, who once, when Fran Tarkenton evaded a headlong Steeler rush (not that it got him anywhere), said, “Never try to horse a soft-mouthed fish.”

When it comes to vice, I am not your best reporter. Vice to me is like corruption and bad television: it's appealing if it's
period
vice. You might think that New Orleans amounts to a perpetually period town, but no. Even in New Orleans, from what I can gather, contemporary vice is like contemporary so many other things: political rhetoric, for instance. Over-determined. Prophylactic to a fault.

In 1854 in New Orleans a local man told Frederick Law Olmsted that New England boys who had been “too carefully brought up at home” frequently came to New Orleans and sank into degradation. When I, who had been brought up carefully enough in Georgia that it might almost have been in New England, spent my twenty-first summer in New Orleans, in 1963, I kept a diary. “I am going to have to tell the folks that I like beer,” I confided. “I still hate the idea of cocktail parties and hope I always do, but I now officially drink beer, and I'm not going to sneak around about it. I hope.” I had a ways to go, to come out of my shell. In a strip joint, I chatted with “one of those B-girls I'd heard so much about,” but when the establishment tried to charge me four-fifty for her beer, I could honestly say that after paying $1.50 for my beer (which struck me as a ripoff) I had three dollars to my name. So she got up and danced, and I noted what seemed to be a bee tattooed on her shoulder, and then she sat back down next to me.

I asked her how long she'd been in this business and she said fifty years and I said she probably wasn't even that old and she said no a year and a half. “Was that a bee?” I asked. Couldn't see it now because she had on a little kimono thing.

“Mm hm,” she said, and shrugged her shoulder so I could just see it. “But if you don't have any more money for us, I guess I better go sit over there all by myself in the corner.”

And she did. But was nice about it. When I left to call E. [Ellen, my college girlfriend, who was off working as a camp counselor, and whom I would marry a year later], she waved affectionately.

Maybe I read too much into the wave, but it did seem a bit like lagniappe. Here from my diary are two more experiences:

Experience No. 1, in no particular order: I interviewed Miss Universe. Very impressive young lady, Argentinian, learned English just by talking to people since she became Miss U. last year, very beautiful. She was obviously above the whole silly business of being mistress to the Universe and above the aging charm boys she was surrounded by. I tried to record that in my story, don't know if I did, sent it to E., E. doesn't think so.

Experience No. 2, I ran into Nigel Begg, now known
as Tony Begg, as I was sitting in front of a laundromat waiting for my clothes to dry. He is from Scotland, was in high school with me, kicked off the track team for being a Communist, though nobody took him seriously. He supposedly swallowed a nickel once to impress people. Anyway he's working in a warehouse and going to art school at night. Writing poetry, too. He asked me if I read much, I said yes, so we've gotten together several times and discussed things. He knows Nietzsche and has read almost all of Dostoyevsky. Says he figured out evolution before he read Darwin, anyway has an ontology worked out. Now says he's an anarchist. I went with him to art school one night, mostly to satisfy a lifelong desire to see a nude model, it must be confessed, and I saw one. She kept glaring at me. I concentrated most of my attention on the other artists, but she asked me finally if I painted, and I replied with abominable heartiness no I was just visiting, and she put on her robe and refused to pose until I left. So I did, but pausing at the door to look at something on the wall so as to have a simulacrum of poise. But she was right, I am not an artist.

I lost touch with Nigel, or Tony, after that. I guess I embarrassed him. But I am more a man of the world today. One night recently, feeling I owed it to you, I ventured into a “gentlemen's club” on Bourbon called Temptations. Kenneth Holditch, the Tennessee Williams scholar who takes people on literary tours of the Quarter, had told me it was once the mansion of Judah P. Benjamin, known outside the Confederacy as “the brains of the Confederacy.” Benjamin served for most of the war as Confederate secretary of state and, after the war, was sharp enough to escape by way of the West Indies to England. He was not the balls of the Confederacy. When after ten years of marriage his beautiful, notoriously flirtatious Creole wife got pregnant, people said it was by some other man. Then she took off to Paris with the baby and had many open affairs, which she would flaunt when he visited her there, to see the child. Now his parlor has come to this: desultory down-to-thong stripping, and over in one corner a guy getting a lap dance. She's in a crouch like a baseball catcher, facing him.

Call me cranky, but I don't see a lap dance's allure. Talk about contemporary. A strange strapping woman in a thong hunkered over your loins, pinning you down, grinding away, purpose being I suppose to make you come in your pants? Or would that be out of line? Once I was getting a haircut in Head Quarters on Dauphine. In the lap of the man in the next chair was a big black and white cat. I asked whether there was a cat for me, but my barber said this was not standard lagniappe: “This man has been coming in here for years, and this is the first time Dickie's jumped up in his lap.” The man was stroking Dickie gingerly. “And I'm not a cat person,” he said. Dickie's tail was twitching, but he was purring or at least close to purring until the man said, “He's so happy,” whereupon Dickie bit him, hard, and jumped down. As if to say, “Who are you to tell a cat he's happy?”

To me this lap dance looks like an even less nearly mutual experience than that. From the point of view of the old boy having his groin ground, well, not that he came in there to show poise (though I'll bet he slapped on a little cologne), but still. Dry-humping—though no substitute for wet-humping, particularly in New Orleans—is one thing, but
being dry-humped,
and apparently not being allowed any use of the hands (except for occasional incidental contact while he's trying to think what to do with them), he might as well be a fish. This, to me, is not getting your hambone boiled. And it is so not cuddling.

From the lap dancer's point of view, well, she is on top. But on top of what? Together they resemble an etching of a succubus at work on some poor soul. Is that the same lap that this guy's children sit on?

Another sex worker, I guess is the term, comes up to me, with a little leopard-skin thing wrapped around her, and says, “You look like you're trouble in a box.”

Right. There's a
noir
title for you. But probably the person in the box would not be the protagonist. I'm trying to frame a
noir
denial when the lap dancer walks by, pulling a little halter-top thing over her palpably (strike that) fake boobs, and my girl (strike that) says to her, “What goes around comes around,
Jack.
”

Inferrably, the lap dancer has stolen this last dance, but I have never heard a woman call another woman “Jack” before, in that tone of voice. I chug my $7.50 beer (in constant dollars, probably about the same price as the one that cost me $1.50 back in 1963), mutter my excuses, and go out into the night.

Just up the street is Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. One of those electronic crawl signs out front. It says, “Welcome Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology Coatings.” Looks like an excess of
Coatings
's, maybe something Freudian there, but let it go.

Nearby on Bourbon, and right next door to Galatoire's, the most venerably distinguished restaurant in town, a shop calls itself “Bourbon-Strip Tease, Lingerie and Adult Gifts.” It offers turkey-feather halters, teddies with nipple-holes on either side of the red-letter exclamation
HEY BABY,
glow-in-the-dark fingerpaints, “Pecker Party Lights,” and at least two inflatable items, a Tartan jockstrap sort of affair and a “party sheep.”

Period vice had to be better, even at the time. Until World War I, when the federal government shut it down so it wouldn't corrupt the navy, there was a neighborhood just north of the Quarter called Storyville, which comprised well over a hundred whorehouses. There's a wonderful book by Al Rose called
Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District,
in which we learn that in some of these houses, dances were danced that were “so abandoned and reckless,” according to a contemporary account, “that the can-can in comparison seemed maidenly and respectable.” Perhaps one of these was the “ham kick,” in which a ham was hung from the ceiling, several feet off the floor. Any woman who managed to kick it could have the ham, as long as she wasn't wearing underdrawers. In nicer establishments, patrons could do the fox-trot with naked women. In Emma Johnson's house, a woman known as Olivia, the Oyster Dancer, performed as follows:

Completely naked, she began by placing a raw oyster on her forehead and then leaned back and “shimmied” the oyster back and forth over her body without dropping it, finally causing it to run down to her instep, from which a quick kick would flip it high in the air, whereon she would catch it on her forehead where it started. An aged prostitute assured the author . . . that this was now “a lost art.”