Feet on the Street (7 page)

That is a dance I would pay to see. For one thing, if you're going to shimmy an oyster all over you, you're going to have to get pretty moist yourself, otherwise that oyster is going to dry up and drop off, reduced to how a chicken liver gets when it's floured to be fried, or worse, like a slug when it's salted. Olivia flourished before air-conditioning. One night in New Orleans recently I attended a performance at the Shim-Sham Club, which is tongue-in-cheek burlesque, which may sound redundant, but in this day and age, that is the way to take burlesque. It's a show for couples, featuring “the three R's, wrigglin', writhin' and razzmatazz.” The bumps and grinds are retro-spicy, as are the jokes: “She so enjoyed her coming-out party, she hasn't been home since,” and “She puts the
t
and
a
in ‘teacher's assistant,' ” and “A gambling man said, ‘I'll lay you ten to one.' I said, ‘It's an odd time, but I'll be there.' ”

The Shim-Sham dancers control the medium without sitting on anybody. But none of them will go down in history, like Olivia. After the show, Kitty West, who danced in the fifties as Evangeline the Oyster Girl, was autographing pictures of herself in her prime. Her specialty's oyster connection was just that she emerged from a big shell. “And you want to know a secret?” she said to me. “I don't even like oysters.” I believe that Olivia did like them.

Emma Johnson herself offered her “sixty-second plan”: any man who could delay his orgasm for as long as a minute inside her, didn't have to pay. Once in a while, she would let somebody win. Emma staged sex “circuses” in her parlor. Rose interviews a woman, a respectable mother and grandmother, “a plump housewife who speaks in distinctively New Orleans tones,” whose husband knows her past: she was born and reared in Emma's. When she was “getting a little figure,” she began to perform in the circuses, with her mother. “She's the one who used to fuck the pony,” she says. “And in the daytime me and Liz [another “trick baby” like herself]
rode
the ponies around the yard. . . . Ain't
that
somethin'?”

The words right out of my mouth. One of Rose's sources was a genteel woman who came to New Orleans in 1896 after she was marginally, even virginally, touched by scandal and her father told her never to darken his door again. She found employment, solely administrative, in one of the nicer houses. She told Rose that King Carol of Rumania attended one of Emma's circuses, though she was not sure he was king yet at the time.

I doubt you'd bump into a prince at a New Orleans vice den today. In 2002 there was a big story by Michael Perlstein in the
Times-Picayune
about the federal busting of an “infamous Canal Street brothel” that I had not heard of. The madam, Jeanette Maier, disclosed that she had been a victim of so much child abuse that she “began to feel detached from her own body.” Her mother helped her run the place, and her daughter was charged with turning tricks there. The daughter said, “The women in our family are strong and beautiful, but they're cursed.” The story was accompanied by a color photo of the three of them posing rather jauntily. They'd all been abused from an early age, by uncles, by at least one nun. . . . Their brothel had “rugs and mirrors from Pottery Barn.”

More tasteful than the pony thing. But the old houses, the high-end ones at least, were all marble, mahogany, mirrors, brocade, and Tiffany chandeliers. And women with so-here-they-are bodies and faraway eyes, judging from the famous photographs by Ernest J. Bellocq. Orphans, probably, in one sense or another.

One evening on Bourbon Street, a vision caught my eye. I was walking past an open-to-the-street bar where a band was playing “Proud Mary” and patrons were dancing. A golden-blond woman, evidently naturally buxom and lily-fair and untanned all over, in a bright white string bikini, was rolling, rolling, rolling on the river with whatever fellow proffered the right size bill, I guess, because she had money tucked into her outfit's virtually nonexistent white-spiderweb top. Ample though she was, and “ample” is an insufficient term, she looked so much lighter than the prevailing humidity that she bordered on being afloat. She appeared to be enjoying herself thoroughly. A mounted policeman in the street crooked his finger to get her out of there. She ignored him, kept on dancing, lots of wobble syncopated with the flow. The cop sighed, got down from his horse, and—he couldn't see what happened, I couldn't see what happened, the horse, too, looked surprised—she was gone. As if in a dream. Maybe she was inflated, somebody pulled a stopper and she went
pfflluuh.
If not, she probably came from an abusive background, too. Bring somebody you want
with
you to New Orleans, is my recommendation.

Lagniappe with Desire

H
ENRY
S
UTPEN

Faulkner himself in New Orleans, when he was twenty-seven, swathed his small-town Mississippi self in lies about war wounds. Said he had a steel plate in his head. Made a point of dressing bohemian, for instance in an enormous overcoat with inner pockets that held several half-gallon jars of corn liquor. Sherwood Anderson, who gave him formative guidance and encouragement, told someone that Faulkner in that coat reminded him of Lincoln's remark about Alexander Stephens, the diminutive vice-president of the Confederacy: “Did you ever see so much shuck for so little nubbin?” Perhaps that remark got back to Faulkner, who went on not only to outwrite Anderson a hundredfold but also to lampoon him in a book called
Sherwood Anderson and Other Creoles.

S
TORYVILLE

Sidney Story, an anti-vice alderman of New Orleans, put through the legislation that confined the city's prostitution to that area. To his dismay, the press began referring to the district as Storyville, and the name caught on in the street. The designator signified by the designated.

In
Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville,
Danny Barker tells of the famously soft-spoken pimp Clerk Wade, who escorted all his sporting women—except for one, Angelina, who had not fulfilled her weekly quota—to a ball at the Roof Garden, to hear King Oliver's band and get some fresh air. Angelina went alone to the Big Twenty-Five club, where she sobbed and drank absinthe until daylight, when Clerk and the rest of his stable rolled in. Clerk went to her booth to console her in his dulcet-toned way and have a pork-chop sandwich. Angelina took a pistol from her purse and shot him five times in the chest. He fell to the floor, his shirtfront on fire from the muzzle blast. His last words were a whisper: “Li'l girl, I'm sorry I did not take you to the ball.” After she told the police her side of it, she was released.

According to Al Rose's book, some women in the Storyville district “stood on sidewalks in kimonos, which they would flash open now and then to display their bodies.” Compare the recollection of Stephanie Dupuy, who in the sixties attended a private girls' school on Prytania Street: “We'd be sitting out front wearing little miniskirts, and cars would go by, and the old biddies would come out and say, ‘Backs to Prytania, girls!' ”

N
AKED DANCING

Jelly Roll Morton, who wrote a tune called “The Naked Dance,” told Alan Lomax that naked dancing in New Orleans was “a real art,” particularly in the house run by Gypsy Schaeffer, “one of the most notoriety women I have ever seen in a high-class way. She was the notoriety kind that everybody liked.” A great piano player (“professors” they were called in the houses) named Tony Jackson held forth there. He wrote the song “Pretty Baby.” Although the movie
Pretty Baby
was inspired by Al Rose's Storyville book and tells the story of a whorehouse child, such nakedness as crops up in it is demure. If you ask my sweetheart and me, the most romantic movie scene involving the song “Pretty Baby” is in the 1935 classic
Ruggles of Red Gap.
“Nell's place,” in the western mining town of Red Gap, is not a house of ill repute, it is just a place where folks who aren't snooty can go to drink a bit and have a good time. When a visiting earl (Roland Young) stops in there and meets Nell (Leila Hyams), there is no nudity, certainly, but there is a definite spark. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asks him with a worldly twinkle in her eye. “No,” he says in an unassumingly suave, upper-crust mumble, “that's why I thought I'd stay awhile.” As Nell sings “Pretty Baby” at the piano, she teaches the earl to provide accompaniment, “ditta-boom,” on a drum set. In the end he takes her back to England to be his wife. Couldn't there be a place like Nell's place with naked dancing?

Do not confuse that engaging earl with the stuffy Creole gent, also played by Roland Young, who woos Marlene Dietrich in
Flame of New Orleans
(1941). Adventuress though she means to be, she dumps this rich fellow for knockabout boat captain Bruce Cabot. No spark there. Nor in
New Orleans,
which was originally conceived by Orson Welles as Louis Armstrong playing himself in his life story and the story of jazz. Such a movie could have gone some way toward connecting jazz with the word's original use as a verb meaning to have carnal knowledge, since Pops enjoyed a hearty and sometimes hair-raising love life in New Orleans—“right
amongst
all this vice,” as he jauntily recalled—and points north. However, the project fell into other hands and devolved into a tepidly romantic semi-musical in which Armstrong and Billie Holiday—playing a maid, in her only feature-film appearance—are relegated to asexual margins by white persons of drastically lesser erotic charge. The sexiest New Orleans movie scene, to my knowledge, is Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid going at it heatedly and convincingly, with their clothes mostly on, in
The Big Easy,
which gave the city a new nickname. Otherwise, unless you go for the bloodless Tom Cruise in
Interview with a Vampire,
New Orleans movies have been less libidinous than the sign outside a dry-cleaning establishment in the Quarter:
DROP YOUR PANTS AT ARABI CLEANERS.

Well, the relationship chat, woman to husband, between Barbara Bel Geddes and Richard Widmark at the end of
Panic in the Streets
is pretty hot in a marital way. Especially if you can't help thinking of her just a little bit as Miss Ellie and him as Tommy Udo, who pushed the old lady down the stairs. Oh, is she slick in the way she slips it to him that he's a lucky guy because they're going to have another baby, when they can hardly afford the child they have. Slick in a way that's good for all of them.

R
AMBLE
S
EVEN
: F
RIENDS

If
ifs
was skiffs, we'd all be boating.

—N
EW
O
RLEANS EXPRESSION

A
N OYSTER IS HERMAPHRODITIC.
O
NCE IT SURVIVES
the floating, shell-less larval stage, and until we wrench it out of the only home it's ever known, an oyster doesn't have to go anywhere, even to reproduce. So it doesn't. Unlike the questing and burrowing clam, an oyster has virtually no foot, which is why it goes down so easy.

What Tennessee Williams called “a certain flexible quality in my sexual nature” would appear to go down easily in the Quarter. Storefront signs proclaim enterprises called Mary Hardware, the Nelly Deli, Queen Fashion (“Masks! They're not just for the bedroom anymore. Halloween is around the corner”), Flora Savage (a florist apparently specializing in wildflowers), and the Crow Bar, which is what it takes to separate the men from the boys.

At the Clover Grill on Bourbon, which never closes, you can get a good eggs-bacon-and-grits breakfast or a hamburger “cooked under an American-made hubcap,” to quote the menu, which is saucy: “Clover Weenie, a quarter pound of pure beef pleasure (select staff members available for private parties).” There always seem to be at least three men behind the counter, engaging in gay badinage:

“Someone in the group—”

“Did I hear my name?”

“Is your name ‘Someone in the group'?”

“Just checking. I don't want no drama.”

“Oh, I do. What else is there?”

“Miss Ma'am, there are ladies here—do something for them.”

“Get away! I'm singing ‘Sea of Love.' ”

Which is playing on the jukebox voted the best in the Quarter. Everything romantic from Lauren Hill to the B-52s.

“ ‘Come with me . . .' That's my favorite part.”

“You queen.”

“I still have a living mother. Address me as ‘Princess.' ”

Then “Keep Your Head to the Sky,” by Earth, Wind & Fire, comes on, and everybody behind the counter is singing along and dancing, and then “Oh Happy Day, When Jesus Washed My Sins Away,” and everybody in the place joins in.

Except for my high-school English teacher, Ann Lewis, I never had a literary friend, even through four years of college, until the summer I spent in New Orleans when I was twenty-one. I met Matthew Snow in the Quarter, in the Jazz Museum, which isn't there anymore. He was originally from Gainesville, Georgia. When he heard I was from the same state, he said he'd show me around and introduce me to people. He was thirty-one. He limped and spoke haltingly as a result of a car crash, after which, he said, he heard a doctor pronounce him dead. He had taught philosophy at NYU, he said. He said he had met James Thurber and Jonathan Winters and knew Plaquemines Parish boss Leander Perez and the late Earl Long's widow, Miz Blanche. He said he had studied under Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
with
Norman Mailer under André Gide's son, or brother, or maybe it was Gide himself. He said he had filed sheet music for Toscanini. He said he knew five languages (I heard him speak fluently in German and French) and people at
The New Yorker.
He had a great apartment on Bourbon. I wrote in my diary:

He's self-conscious and shy, and strange, so we have trouble, given my undemonstrativeness and willingness to drift, getting along very naturally, but I hope we can have an interesting friendship. I feel a little bit apprehensive about taking up with such a mysterious person, but it's about time I started meeting people on a purely human basis, not as classified fellow workers or students.

We walked the streets of New Orleans—he gimpily but gamely—talking about the arts for hours on end. He got me into the last club I ever belonged to: the Thompson's Club. It gathered in Thompson's Cafeteria on St. Charles late every night to drink coffee and talk. There was Babe, a former prizefighter and former cabdriver who was said to be “living off a chicken farm,” and told stories that I had a hard time following except for one about a little girl actress in Hollywood who got paid three hundred dollars a week, “and she didn't have to do anything but smile, and she wouldn't smile, so her mother had to beat her to get her to smile.”

Mrs. Leslie, the fiftyish widow of a policeman, plump and not averse to marrying again, as she made plain by saying “My husband, God rest his soul,” frequently. Matthew loved to listen to her stories, which consisted almost entirely of explaining who everybody in them was: “He was the middle one, who jumped off the levee. The old one is the one who used to live next door to me and would put on a wig and a bonnet and a pipe and entertain me through the window. You know, he was quite good. He was a busboy for a while and then he was a boxer and his family did everything they could to get him to go to church, and when he did he just sat there.”

Armand and Toots Hug, he the accomplished but not very ambitious pianist in one of the clubs, quiet and suave-looking in a nice sort of way, in his fifties, and she disintegrating from dipsomania, not quite all there in a charming, almost, way, patting her husband's hand until, without making any sign of irritation, he would withdraw it.

Dutch, a typesetter at the
Times-Picayune,
who described the place, with little rancor, as a salt mine, and would stop eating every now and then to remark, “I think I could eat if my throat was cut.”

Pink Earmuffs, as he was called because he came in wearing some one night and looked at himself in the mirror, carefully. He let drop that he wanted to buy a continent—New Zealand, maybe. He operated an ice-cream cart, the kind you pedal like a huge tricycle, and always wore a checked shirt, a suit, and a bow tie.

Full of characters, New Orleans! During working hours at the
Times-Picayune
I was shown a photograph (from the front) of former governor Earl Long, during his crazy period, taking a dump out a window of the Roosevelt Hotel, and I met a wizened woman of the Quarter who made and sold fruitcakes and also played the horses. A socially prominent lady ordered several hundred dollars' worth of fruitcakes for a lavish tea party she was giving, and made the mistake of paying in advance. On the day of the party, the hostess put in a frantic call to the fruitcake lady: “My guests are all here, and the liquor is here—where are the fruitcakes?”

“Drink up, Doilin',” said the fruitcake lady. “The fruitcakes come in third.”

Not vice but
characters,
that's what I wanted. Bumpy Doucet, the assistant city editor, told me of the legendary crack reporter Walter Goodstein, who went with a photographer to interview the French bombshell Corrine Calvet “at 9:00 a.m. in her hotel room,” according to my diary, “and came back drunk with the photographer at 4:30 p.m. after having raised all manner of hell with her, getting her picture in the shower and being convivial in various ways he never would tell anybody about.” Nope. Not a word.

I wanted to be a crack reporter.

However, I was sort of semi-engaged to be married, and not very outgoing. I went with Matthew to visit an artist named Lorraine. It startled me to hear her say she was in love with a man who was involved with another man, and she didn't like it when the three of them went out together. I was even more startled to hear that this was just the second time she had met Matthew. People opened up to Matthew quickly, but I didn't know how to take him, as I told my diary:

Why can't I have simple associations with people? Matthew isn't sure I want him around, and I'm not sure he's what he seems to be, or exactly what it is that he seems to be. He showed me a piece he wrote on Kafka that seemed pretty good though loaded down with Freudian terms. He says he's decided he's not a writer, that he'd be a teacher if he could talk better—he doesn't stutter exactly, it's more an intermittent struggle to get his thought out—but as it is he doesn't know what to do.

Matthew shared my enthusiasm, which has since cooled, for the characters of J. D. Salinger, who were humorous, brilliant, appalled by phoniness, and always verging on spiritual crisis. He reminded me of Zooey, I told my diary:

He's always prodding me along nicely by asking embarrassing questions about what I've read or said and by leaving me notes in German. I'm not used to friendship so intense, sudden and straightforward. I feel like the farmer who, when the man from the Department of Agriculture told him he could farm better using modern methods, said he wasn't farming half as good as he could, right now.

Matthew had recuperated from his accident at a monastery in Conyers, Georgia. One of the monks there had been a good companion for him, he said, because he had accepted Matthew as Christopher Robin. He left me a poignant little note, a conversation between Winnie the Pooh and C.R., with W. getting bored and losing interest after the two of them plan to do something together, or suspecting that there is a catch to it somewhere. (“W: It's free? C: Yes, it's free. W: I don't know.”)

What can I tell you?
Winnie the Pooh
was one of the primary texts via which my mother taught me to read. Okay? And I still had a soft spot for it. I guess so did Matthew. (But he also turned me on to Bessie Smith.) And I “maintained,” as I told my diary, “that Pooh and C.R. were more casual than that. It doesn't seem right to me to be that dedicated and sympathetic and close to anybody, especially a man, that I have known so briefly and have been through so little with. Several hours later he said he decided he didn't know how to be a friend. He turned away and said he'd be friends on my terms.”

A few days later, he proved that the Thompson's Club wasn't his only connection:

We went to visit Walker Percy yesterday, at his house in Covington. They have a mutual friend at the monastery. Percy was very hospitable, mild-looking but direct and relaxed and with impressive eyes. We sat around with him and his wife and two daughters, Mary Pratt, fifteen or sixteen, very sophisticated and conversant for her age, obviously used to participating in adult discussions, and Ann, seven or eight, who is deaf and whose talk is accordingly very hard to understand—she shot rubber-tipped arrows at the walls for a while as we talked. Their house is comfortable but not pretentious, with a small river in the backyard (they invited us to come water-skiing). He was disappointed when we didn't want a drink, though he'd heard that Matthew was a teetotaler. (Percy would be an alcoholic, he said, but for the fact he has a weak gut—he throws up after five drinks.) We had two or three cups of coffee, served by Mary P., who also lit her father's cigarettes and was said to be very obedient about dating and all. They were going to move her to a Catholic school in N.O. until they heard that the one in Covington was to be integrated, they want to support that so left her in.

They talked about Catholic matters, with occasional jocular reference to my heathenism. Matthew said the monks at Conyers can only speak with permission, so they express their dissatisfaction at something being read or performed at meals by crunching their celery loudly. Some of them enliven masses by posing as various Peanuts characters secretly and letting the others who are in on it guess who they are. They give hints surreptitiously by sign language. One of them plays the stock market, has built up an imaginary fortune, which makes him very independent.

We found to our pleasant surprise (M. had refused to read any more of
Moviegoer
after Binx Bolling said he didn't like the Quarter because of patio intellectuals and homosexuals; you can't just dismiss those people, M. says) that Percy likes the Quarter, has always wanted to live there, but Mrs. P. is afraid for her daughters on the streets. I asked him how closely he identified with Binx and he said not at all. His “confessional” novels, he said, were fortunately too bad to be published. He said the only way you could ever start writing was to prove to yourself that you were unfit to do anything else, which made me feel a little better about my possible literary future. He sent
Moviegoer
to an agent, who took it straight to Knopf, who said they would publish it, but they didn't like the last half, which was intensely religious, full of abstruse conversations with priests, so he spent two years rewriting it, that half, and said he never did get it right.

When Alfred Knopf read it he howled, didn't like it, had thought it was like Percy's uncle's book,
Lanterns on the Levee,
but it was already out. Percy tried to give Mrs. Knopf some autographed copies of it, seemed to be the thing to do, but she said she didn't want any. All his Catholic New Orleans friends congratulated him on the book until they read it, then he didn't hear from them until a priest reviewed it favorably, when they congratulated him again. He didn't care much for
Catch-22,
although he thought it original, because Heller had a good idea but kept going on and on with it and didn't know what to do with it.

Mrs. P. was smart-looking and intelligent, homey enough, too, blond and plumping up. Her father was there, almost totally disabled, mute, from a stroke. They have a terrier-Chihuahua that slept on everybody and barked at everybody. Percy said he writes for three hours every morning, then quits.

I was impressed by how respectfully Percy listened to Matthew and sought his opinions. The Percys appreciated as much as I did Matthew's story about a family whose Chihuahua died. They put it in the deep freeze until they could get it stuffed, then found out how much it cost to stuff it, then just left it there because they couldn't bear to thaw it out. But Matthew still confused me, I wrote a few days later:

If he were a character in a novel, I would accept him as my alter ego and inspiration, but I just can't quite accept him as all that in the flesh. I can't take all this striving to relate and to give. It ain't natural. But he has awakened my interest in art, music ranging from opera to jazz, he has given me sermons on working and not letting things interfere and associating with the true and beautiful and avoiding the sleazy and superficia
l—
he has stirred me to dedication. At least I think he has, but he's been with me so much I haven't had a chance to try my dedication out.