The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

For John

 

“Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”

LAFCADIO HEARN, WRITING ABOUT NEW ORLEANS TO A FRIEND IN CINCINNATI
, 1877

 

“I came down here about a month ago and am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I’ve found in America.”

OHIO NATIVE SHERWOOD ANDERSON WRITING TO GERTRUDE STEIN, 1922

W
HEN I WAS
a child, maybe eight or nine, every few months the phone would ring and I would answer, and on the other end a man named Noel Parmentel Jr. would be playing a bugle into the receiver. He would be drunk, of course, and my father would take the phone and laugh a lot, and my mother would roll her eyes. She was not a big fan of Noel, who always stayed too long when he came to visit. Later he turned out to be at least partial inspiration for the rather dissolute character of Warren in Joan Didion’s
The Book of Common Prayer
, and reading that book in the cold light of adulthood, I can certainly see my mother’s point. At the time, though, I thought Noel was just about the coolest human being on the planet, and, at the time, Noel lived in New Orleans, a place I imagined was full of a lot of heavy-drinking, horn-playing bad actors just like him. I could not wait to go. But even in my childhood fantasies, I had no intention of staying—it was clearly a place to visit.

In those days, pretty much everybody I knew visited—a lot. They’d go down and eat well and drink too much and generally live it up. They might go for the architecture or the music, and they almost always brought stuff back home: old cypress mantels, jumbo lump crabmeat, evening sandals from Maison Blanche. They might step back in time, or out of it altogether, but nobody ever stayed for good. It would be too dangerous, too indulgent. Even Noel didn’t stick around long. The only person I knew who did was Walker Percy, our neighbor’s brother, but he was a writer after all, and, more to the point, one on a search.

I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, in Greenville, a once-thriving port city 442 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans. We were linked by commerce—from the mid-1800s until just after World War II, steamboats brought everything from fine chandeliers to sacks of oysters upriver and toted countless bales of cotton back down—as well as tragedy (both cities were devastated by the 1927 flood). There was also a certain worldliness, marked in part by an easy consumption of whiskey, along with a shared isolation from the rest of the Deep South with all its morals and mores. In
King Cotton
, a history of the Delta’s heyday, Robert Brandfon writes that by the end of the nineteenth century, the expanded railroads made the trip from the Delta to New Orleans faster and far more convenient, a development that nurtured the Deltans’ already healthy “sense of cosmopolitanism,” as well as our feeling of separateness from (or, more accurately, superiority over) the rest of the state.

The Delta’s legendary economy and lifestyle were attributable to the fact that the land was the richest alluvial flood plain in the world. Well into my adolescence, there was a distinct—if sometimes laughable—Gatsby-esque quality to some of the social doings there. One of my more entertaining childhood duties was the morning-after collecting of evening bags lost so often, and so far from where they should have been, they required “If found, please call” notes safety-pinned onto the satin linings. But whatever we got up to—and we got up to a lot—New Orleans was always our far more storied older sister to the south, a genuinely cosmopolitan city, and one where everything, from world-class restaurants to transvestite hookers, was available. By the time I was born, steamboats and railcars had mostly given way to small planes and automobiles, but the traffic was just as dense and the field reports endlessly interesting. My father went to a towboat convention with his friend Johnny Kirk and returned with one of my favorite artifacts, an eight-by-ten of the two of them taken with, not by, the pretty girl photographer on the patio of Pat O’Brien’s. One of the running “jokes” of my youth involved the fact that every year my best friend’s grandfather flew Mississippi Senator “Big Jim” Eastland to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, and every year—diverted, apparently, by the more interesting goings-on in the Royal Sonesta bar—they missed the game.

Things happened in New Orleans that didn’t happen anywhere else. Walker Percy wrote, not entirely in jest, that he moved across Lake Pontchartrain to Covington, for fear of falling victim to “a variety of French flus,” the symptoms of which included “turning fey and pottering about a patio,” but there were far greater dangers. The beautiful Maury McGee got married in the Delta and during the course of the reception, a great many of the guests decided to accompany the bride and groom on their honeymoon. When they woke up, hung over, in New Orleans the next morning, they found themselves barricaded in their hotel rooms. A sniper on the roof of the nearby Howard Johnson’s had already killed eight people and the whole area was in lockdown. A Greenville lawyer trying a case in New Orleans celebrated a particularly triumphant day in court with a prostitute who shot him in his room at the St. Louis Hotel just before taking all his money. He told his wife he’d been an innocent victim of foul play, but our local paper—and everybody else who knew anything about it—dropped plenty of hints as to what actually happened, a story confirmed years later by one of my husband’s law partners who had been with him at the defense table.

To me this kind of stuff only added to the city’s allure, but no more so than descriptions of slightly tamer stuff—a jacket set on fire by a tipsy waiter serving flaming
café brûlot
at Arnaud’s, say, or exotic breakfasts of powdered-sugar-covered beignets and chicory coffee at Café Du Monde. The suppliers of all these details—my parents, their friends, just about everybody I grew up around—were not visitors to New Orleans so much as regular out-of-towners. Just like the locals, they ate their oysters at either Felix’s or the Acme but would never patronize both; they had their own waiters at Antoine’s, where I longed to try souffléed potatoes and baked Alaska, and at Galatoire’s, where I was determined to learn, firsthand, the difference between trout
meunière
and trout Marguery. They knew that everybody still called the Fairmont Hotel the Roosevelt even though the name changed in 1965, and they were well known in the hotel’s Blue Room, where you went for music (Benny Goodman, Peggy Lee), and its Sazerac Bar, where the cocktails included, naturally, Sazeracs, which were said to have been invented there, along with an excellent Ramos gin fizz made with real egg whites.

For a year during World War II, my grandfather was stationed in New Orleans, and in the fifties, he and my grandmother returned to board the
Stella Polaris
for a holiday in Havana. Even though the photograph of them boarding the ship is in black and white, it is clear that they are a tad greener than usual—they had celebrated their departure the night before with my newlywed parents in a private room at Antoine’s. When my grandfather came alone on business he always stayed on Royal Street at the Monteleone Hotel, which his insurance company held part of the note on, and sent me treasured pull-out postcards of Bourbon Street. When my own father first came to New Orleans in the summer of 1947, between his freshman and sophomore years in college, he and a buddy hitched a ride into town on a truck driven by a banana broker and had big dreams of getting work on a ship bound for South America. Rebuffed at first for being too young and inexperienced (they had naively thought their summers working on dredge boats on the Mississippi qualified them as pros), they won spots on a freighter bound for Dublin after a bad batch of moonshine had killed four members of the original crew and everyone became convinced the ship was cursed. To this day, my father does not come to town without making a mini-pilgrimage to the old maritime union hall, at the corner of Decatur and Conti, where he slept outside on the deep windowsills hoping for his chance. Years later, he took my brother and me to the Famous Door on Bourbon Street, where we heard an albino clarinetist named Hollis Carmouche lead his orchestra in a searing version of “St. James Infirmary” and watched Pork Chop, a local fixture who had to be well into his nineties by then, tap dance on the bar.

When I was finally old enough—sort of—to make the trip on my own, my good friend and most stellar running buddy McGee and I would pile into my black Toyota Celica, roll back the sunroof, and blast out of the Delta at ninety-five miles an hour, stupid and stoned and dying to get to the city, where we stayed, on the floor, with her sister Elizabeth, who’d had the good sense to go to college at Tulane and very little interest in serving as our chaperone. No one in their right mind would have wanted to—we hit every bar on Bourbon Street, including the Gunga Den, a grungy place where we realized after the second or third Hurricane (sickly sweet, fuchsia-tinted concoctions served in souvenir glasses we dutifully toted around in our large purses) that we had been watching boys who had taken just enough hormones to pass as girls. Though we came to town essentially to drink, we knew, even then, that eating was a big part of the point. On Sundays, Elizabeth dressed us up and took us to “Breakfast at Brennan’s,” the thing to do in those days, and for us, barely seventeen, the height of sophistication. I thrilled to the quail served in a nest of shredded fried potatoes, followed by flaming bananas Foster. We took the streetcar to the all-night Camellia Grill for chocolate freezes and chili omelets and ate oysters by the bushel at the late lamented Tyler’s Beer Garden.

By the time I was in my twenties, I too had become a “regular out-of-towner.” Firmly in the Felix’s camp, I’d start the day there with a Dixie and a dozen raw before getting a Bloody Mary to take around the corner to stand in line for a lunch table at Galatoire’s. (It is perfectly legal to drink on the street in New Orleans, so that the Galatoire’s line—a thing of the past since they added an upstairs bar and waiting area—was always festive.) I loved late nights at Cosimo’s in the lower Quarter (I once left a red satin Gianfranco Ferre evening coat there, and two years later when I went back to reclaim it, the male bartender disappeared for a minute and came back out wearing it). I knew to grab a Lucky Dog to soak up the booze on my way home to my lovely room at the antiques-filled Soniat House; I bought my first fine Champagne flutes at Lucullus on Chartres Street and struck up what became a close friendship with its proprietor Patrick Dunne. The trips were no less excessive, just marked by slightly higher caliber establishments—the Gunga Den, alas, was no longer.

It was on one of those trips that I started down the long and very winding road that ultimately led me to the house on First Street. I’d been living in New York, where I wrote for
Vogue
. It was the first weekend of Jazz Fest and I’d come down to go to what I knew would be some wild parties, and to catch up with Elizabeth, who was married by then to a man we all loved, with two young daughters, Katie and Lizzy. I ate at Upperline for the first time, heard Miles Davis play for the last. The music was great, the weather was warm—it was not much different from any other really fun, fairly debauched weekend I’d spent in New Orleans, except that by the time it was over I’d fallen, hard, for a man I knew I shouldn’t have. At one of the wild parties, I heard myself saying I was coming back in the summer to cover what promised to be a historic governor’s race. It was three o’clock in the morning, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew that they were true.

I’ll never know for sure what it was that made me come back—the man, the city, or the opportunity to watch Edwin Edwards, the notorious three-term former governor, stage his final comeback. It was probably a bit of all three, and certainly Edwards was a draw—he had survived two corruption trials (he’d been accused by the Feds of selling state hospital contracts, but the first trial was declared a mistrial and the second ended in acquittal). He was running for an unprecedented fourth term in a wide field that included the incumbent Buddy Roemer, his nemesis, and David Duke, the ex-Klansman. Until he dropped out of a clearly unwinnable run-off with Roemer in the previous election, Edwards was famous for saying that to fall out of favor with the voters of Louisiana he’d have to be found in bed with “a dead girl or a live boy.” He retired his 1983 campaign debt with a fundraising trip to France, which included a dinner for 600 at Versailles and party favors in the form of gold lapel pins with the moniker “the Sun King” engraved below Edwards’s profile. He would likely be the last of a long line of flamboyant populist Louisiana politicians who included Huey and “Uncle Earl” Long. Covering the race was the chance of a lifetime for anybody remotely interested in Southern politics or in having fun.

I was interested in both, so I bought a one-way ticket, shipped a few boxes of books ahead of me, and arrived in town just before noon on July 13, a Saturday. Elizabeth’s husband, Mike, picked me up at the airport and dropped me off in the Quarter, at a windowless “temporary” apartment on St. Philip Street, across from the red McDonough schoolhouse, where Elvis shot part of
King Creole
and just around the corner from Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a bar housed in the early eighteenth-century building said to have been the headquarters of Jean Lafitte, the pirate who helped Andrew Jackson win the War of 1812 in return for a pardon. It was 97 degrees outside and steamy as hell; when I opened the apartment door it felt like a blast furnace. There were two small rooms, very little furniture, and a whole lot of dust, but there was a noisy air-conditioning unit, a narrow bed, and a table that could double as a desk. I could stand it until the election was over—a few months at the most. I kept it for more than a year.

I couldn’t possibly leave. I spent my days having long romantic lunches at Galatoire’s, where I soaked up vodka martinis and a culture in which returning to one’s office was not of paramount importance, or blowing through the state with Edwards and his cronies, for whom I had become something of a girl mascot. We mingled with the adoring masses at bingo halls and bait shops, while in between, the boys made prodigious football bets and spoke in Cajun French when they didn’t want me to know what was going on. I was having the time of my life.