Road trip with my daughter and her college girlfriend, Austin to New Orleans.
Sunday: Houston, with my sister and her husband.
We finish our early dinner at 5:00 p.m., and on the way back to Gwen's house I inquire innocently if she's been to Galveston this season. Fishing. Yes, I am fishing, I admit it. I don't want to be locked up in the house for the evening so early. Gwen hasn't been to Galveston this year. I keep fishing. What time does the sun set these days on the Gulf? Oh, nine-ish. Well, what if I drove us all out to Galveston in the rental car to see the sunset? Gwen loves this idea. The girls are cheering from the back seat. Mike is planning to watch the Hitler mini-series, so he has no objections at all. I suspect he's exhausted from all the girl-chatter, anyway. When we arrive at Gwen's, the girls go to change into their swimsuits. Gwen suggests instead of taking the rental car, we drive her birthday present instead: her brand-new silver Mustang. She actually seems overjoyed at this opportunity.
She kisses Mike good-bye as he watches television, we jump in the Mustang, and off we go for Galveston. It's only 35 miles away, and we speed down the Sunday-evening-empty freeway to get there. I love Galveston; it's one of my favorite cities. As most English majors know from reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening, it's a city much like New Orleans -- a Spanish/French Creole shipping harbor, and the site of many a fabulous Victorian mansion and Italianate villa before the hurricane of 1910 wiped most of it out -- and when part of the island, like Atlantis, took its mansions and villas and inhabitants and went under the ocean forever. I believe it was about 1800 people who perished.
Galveston is, to this day, incredibly Goth and romantic and tragic and haunted. A section just as you drive into the city was spared, so there are still a few rusted, decayed, incredible mansions and villas to be drunk in visually before one hits the ocean wall.
We find a parking place easily, on a Sunday evening, and Cari and Natasha tear towards the beach. The sky is blue and cloudless, the ocean is surprisingly blue and clean -- early in the season! -- and the waves are high. Gulls cry overhead. Gwen and I watch and laugh as the girls shed clothes and shoes and charge into the surf. It's clear my innocent sister doesn't understand the nature of the girls' relationship. It's so romantic to me to see them hold hands and charge off into the ocean. They swim far out, as Gwen and I roll up our pants' legs and test the surf with our bare feet and beach comb for shells and chat. I look out to sea watchfully and spot their two heads, the long-haired Naiads. I see they are holding hands and diving underwater, like two playful young dolphins. I see they are taking turns bearing up each other's head while floating with eyes closed, weightless and totally trusting. It makes me tear up with happiness. They are so much in love and this moment must be terribly romantic for them. It's one of those moments for me when I feel like that dishonored Countess in Willa Cather's The Age of Innocence -- you know, the one Michelle Pfeiffer played in the movie version. I feel terribly worldly and a kind of poignant tenderness for them and for their young, very young love.
I look into my sister's face to see if she understands and is correctly interpreting the relationship of the girls, but I see she doesn't comprehend. Too bad. It's a moment I wish I could share with her in my life as a mother, since it's something so important about her only niece. But I can't say anything; the girls' relationship is a private matter. Their young love, how I feel at this moment, the tide, the sunset -- it's all much too fragile for words.
In time, Natasha emerges from the surf like Venus and trots toward Gwen and me. Natasha's white-fleshed like a peach, voluptuous and splendid, and her love, dark, Sicilian Cari, trails in her wake. I give them the shells I've found for them. By now the sun's starting to go down, and they're tired from fighting the ocean; they swam a long way out, past the end of the jetties. Natasha's spied a cheap tourist trap, housed in what was once a clapboard changing-house on a long narrow pier. As usual, she wants to shop for cheap plastic treasures. Her aunt is entirely amenable to this suggestion, and Cari and I trail behind them. They're in heaven as they examine miniature plastic cameras containing slides views of Galveston, dead baby sharks in bottles of blue water, sea dollars, plastic squeaking fish, purses made of coconuts, rude t-shirts, and the like.
I purchase only four postcards that reproduce the scene of the beach we've just come from after the protective sea wall was erected in an attempt to save Galveston from future hurricane devastation. Ladies in long puffy white dresses and children in black stockings promenade. I love Galveston; it's inherently so sad, and the closest thing to Venice the South has to offer.
We speed back to Houston so the girls can wash the salt out of their hair, and soon it's nearly 10 o'clock and all of us are sleepy. The girls say their good-nights and retreat to the guest room. Mike watches the Hitler mini-series on the television in his office. Gwen takes each of the dogs out its separate entrance to do its doggie business, then says good-night and heads for the master bedroom. I step outside to smoke the last cigarette of the day.
And then, I hunker down in the living room on a couch in front of the huge t.v., and I drift off to sleep to some old black-and-white movie I've seen a hundred times before, with the volume set on "mute."
Monday morning: Houston to New Orleans
As agreed, Gwen whispers, "Rachel," and wakes me at 6:45 a.m. so I can attempt to wake the girls (who are hard sleepers) and we can get on the road to New Orleans early. Mike's sitting at the breakfast table, crunching cereal as he reads the morning paper. I make a visit to the bathroom, and see upon rising from the toilet that the water's bright red. Shit! This is what I hate about menopause. I never know when, or if, anymore, I'll get my period. Unexpected bathroom complication has got to be my least favorite road-trip occurrence. Oh, well.
I tap on the girls' bedroom door, and hear Natasha respond sleepily. I peep inside: they're tangled in each other's arms like eels. I guess they're still so early in the stages of love that they cannot bear to lose touch with one another, even in their sleep. I tell them they have to get up so we can get going. They sit up like tousle-haired zombies. I go to get dressed myself, and check on them again afterward. I hear water running in the guest-room shower. Good.
Mike's soon off on his morning commute, Gwen brings a can of unopened coffee and a bottle of water to me, and I start up the coffee maker. Eventually the girls appear, dressed, and begin to examine the breakfast possibilities Gwen's set out. Cereal or cookies, and juice boxes. They opt for cookies. I sit out on the patio with the Helen Keller dog, who licks at my toes while I smoke cigarettes and drink coffee until I'm sufficiently awake to marshal the girls to load their things into the car. I have my MapQuest directions to guide us into New Orleans. Gwen and I embrace to say our good-byes, and she shoves two crisp $100 bills into my hand, saying, "I'm going to pull a 'Mother' on you. This is for Natasha and you to go to the Brass Lion to get yourselves something." (The Brass Lion is a shop on Royal in New Orleans that specializes in estate and reproduction antique jewelry.) "I always feel guilty that I can acquire a new piece when I go there, but you and Natasha are deprived." Well! Our mother didn't raise me to be a fool, so I gratefully accept. This pleases Gwen very much. She is so very, very sweet.
The trip from Gwen's house to the Interstate highway is smooth, even in the rush-hour traffic. Gwen's warned me about some gigantic bridge we have to cross to head toward Beaumont; she says it's so frightening she has to call Mike or her sister-in-law on the cell phone when she has to drive on it. We hit the bridge eventually, but it's not that scary -- it's euphoric. You drive up and up and up like the ascent of a roller-coaster, like you're on a conveyor belt to heaven. After you crest, it's a fun ride down, and there are tall concrete blinders to make it impossible to see off the side into the ship channel below. What you don't know won't hurt you, I guess, was the builder's philosophy. After the bridge, it's a straight and easy drive to the Louisiana border.
Once we're well into Louisiana, we hit the first of two long causeways we'll take to New Orleans. The girls are fascinated with seeing Spanish-moss draped tree-tops at road-level, and love the fact that it's thirty miles of "No Stopping Permitted" on the causeways. They speculate about the number and the ferocity of the alligators in the swamps below the roadway, and about the depraved Cajun sodomites living on the bayous. From time to time we see cranes and other exotic birds fly up. I give the girls a little history lecture about the days of the Kingfish, Huey P. Long, and the WPA and how you used to have to take the long land route around, or else use cigarette boats pushed with a pole to navigate the swamps to get to New Orleans. We get to Lafayette about noon, and stop at a super-Walmart for me to do my bathroom business. The girls shop for a snack, and eventually emerge with a bag of Zapp's Crawtators -- a local crawfish-flavored potato chips. I wait by the car for them, smoking. I see the people have already changed since Texas. Now the vast majority of the populace of the Walmart parking lot is the color of Sugar Babies candy, and they are already moving with the slow, authoritative Louisiana saunter.
We pass through Baton Rouge next and I ask Natasha if she remembers her French. She doesn't, obviously, since she makes a few wrong essays at translation. "Red stick!" I shout. "I'm gonna beat you like a mouton with a red stick!" I yell, laughing, to refresh her memory on the origin of this town's name. We're over the second causeway now, and I'm starting to get excited. New Orleans is one scant hour from Baton Rouge. The skies have darkened as we've speeded along. We're on the final leg of the journey, past Metaire and about even with the New Orleans airport, when the sky opens up and a torrential rain begins to pour down. We don't know how to operate the rented car's windshield wipers, so they're going one speed, which is so slow it's worthless. I have my nose to the fogged-up windshield, the traffic's suddenly bumper-to-bumper, and we can no longer read the overhead highway signs in the deluge. I keep messing with the wipers until I accidentally do something that makes them beat at a faster tempo, and then I see our exit sign looming overhead and have to screech across two lanes of traffic. The visibility has been so low that Cari has been deprived of her first thrilling sight of St. Louis Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2, with their signature above-ground "oven" graves, on our way in. We make it off the freeway at our exit and find ourselves in a flooded intersection on Elysian Fields. Natasha screams, "I don't want to get stalled out in a car in this neighborhood!" I scream back, "Shut up! I'll drive on the neutral ground if I have to! Do you think I want a flooded car myself?" I keep driving for what seems like miles, but I'm still not seeing my cross-street. I throw a city map at Cari in the back seat, and tell Natasha to start reading cross-street names out to Cari as I continue driving so we won't stall out in the water, so that I can perhaps tell how much farther we have to go, or if I've already missed our street. Natasha's fractured French would be funny, if the situation weren't so dire. She's calling out things like "Deerailers," and I'm saying, "What the fuck? D-e-r-e-i-l-l-e-u-r-s, perhaps?" It's comical, but I am very, very tense, the street is flooded, and, by the looks of the houses, Stella and Stanley's old neighborhood has "gone down" even considerably more than it was back in their day. I have never even heard of these street names. Finally Natasha reads aloud, "Charters." "Chartres!" I shriek triumphantly. We're in the Quarter, and from here on out we are no longer lost. A couple of turns and we're in the loading zone out front of our hot-coral and dusty-blue Faubourg Marigny hotel. Just as suddenly as it all started, the rain stops. I tell the girls to start grabbing stuff out of the trunk, and go inside to check us into the hotel.
The large man working the front desk has deep-set, sleepy Creole eyes. He's non-plussed about the rain and lazily takes my credit card impression and hands me the keys to our room. The hotel has dark rose-painted walls, and is furnished tastefully with antiques; a portrait of Napoleon hangs over the free-breakfast dining table. I go up a narrow staircase and out the second-floor arcade and find our room, overlooking the hotel's swimming pool. Our room has both shuttered and French doors, and it's interior is painted a deep, eggplant purple. It's little, but the beds are fine and what furniture there is, is antique. Back in Creole days, this room at the back of the house would have probably have been reserved for the ladies' maid, or the quadroon children's governess. I meet the girls in the lobby and direct them up, we unload everything into the room, I move the car to the parking lot around back and lock it up. I meet the girls out front of the hotel, then we're off to our first day of New Orleans. The sun's come out, and the humidity is 100% after the rain. Steam rises off the brick streets.
We tear off across Esplanade past where some movie's shooting into the Quarter proper to Central Grocery, which closes at 4:00 p.m.. I have been dreaming of my muffaletta for weeks, and I am not just about to wait another day for it. It's so long past lunch that there's hardly anyone in the neighborhood Italian grocery store, so we get our half mufalettas and our icy bottled root beers and head back to the counter and its stools to consume them. Heaven. Now, with a mouthful of olive salad and salami, I feel I have truly arrived in New Orleans. Cari, being an Italian, loves this grocery store with its high, dusty shelves of attractive tins of Italian tomatoes, bottled olive oil, all varieties of olives in glass jars, leftover pannetone from Christmas past, hard candies, Limonetta and so forth; I point out the foil festooned whole prosciuttos hanging like decorations. On the way out she notices an obscure Italian indigestion patent medicine behind the cash register and buys a box as a present for her father, who complains he cannot find it in Austin.
Then, we're off on a pedestrian tour. It's fun having Cari with us, since Natasha and I get to show all our favorite places to someone who's never seen them before. We walk down Decatur past Cafe Du Monde and enter Jackson Square; I point out the equestrian statue, the strangely Disneyland-castle silhouette of the cathedral, the beautiful iron balconies of the Pontalba apartments. Then, we cross Decatur, past the rows of waiting horse- and mule-drawn Hansom cabs, and climb some stairs to look out on the great, rolling, muddy Mississippi. One of the grand old paddle showboats, the Natchez, is pulled up at the pier debarking passengers. This spot, like the pier off Piazza San Marco in Venice, gives me the willies and makes me jangly-excited. I imagine all the ships that have moored here, and all the incredible exotic goods that have been unloaded at this spot: the parrots, the coffee and spices, the Parisian fashions, the Turkish rugs, the Italian chandeliers. And I cannot help but think, even when I try not to, of the unwilling human cargo also unloaded on this spot -- the Carribean and African slaves who built this new world by their labor on the nearby plantations, the Irish indentured servants who came to dig the canals and soon died in droves of yellow fever. I think this spot must be one of the most karmically loaded places in the South.
I tell the girls we now must make a slow promenade around Jackson Square to the cathedral, as ladies of good breeding would certainly have done two hundred years ago, and go into the church to say a prayer of thanks for our arrival in New Orleans while we light a candle. This we do. The heat of the candles in their wrought iron stands rises up in visible, oppressive waves; I can only imagine how many covered-up and tightly-corseted ladies must have keeled over from the heat during Mass in August a hundred years ago. Cari dips her fingers in holy water and genuflects as we leave. I tell her, "Good. Now you can tell your mother you went to Mass in New Orleans and it will only be lying a little!"
And then, we just start walking. These forty or so square blocks are all magical and each has something unique to offer, so I give Cari the crash-course in doing the French Quarter: "Don't focus on the first floors of the buildings since most of them house only commercial tourist shops. Keep your chin up, and look at each building from the second floor balcony to its roof. As in Paris, these are the floors in which people live. There! See? You've time-traveled two hundred years just by never looking out at eye-level if you can help it." And I begin the tradition that will hold for the rest of our journey: I lead, and the girls follow hand-in-hand behind me.
We comb the streets of the Quarter in a grid pattern and gawk at architecture for about an hour; by then, rush hour has passed, and I suggest we take the St. Charles streetcar out to the Garden District and back. We cross Canal and wait only a moment before the streetcar arrives. It's less than half-full, so both the girls and I get window seats, which we open so that we can hang our elbows and hair out during the ride, as the native commuters do. I love this ride. At first, you skirt the comparatively modern skyscrapers of the business district, but after the car curves around the monument to General Lee, you find yourself bumping along in the lower Garden District, with its once fine store-fronts. We pass Delmonico's. Shit! It's been painted ochre and now sports a gold sign proclaiming "Emeril's Delmonico's." That bastard! Hasn't he made enough off blackening every conceivable grocery item on his t.v. cooking empire? There are hundred-year-old florists and bridal shops in this neighborhood, and a few signs of modern gentrification such as coffee houses and Rite-Aid drug stores. In a few moments you're in the upper Garden District, with its beautiful antebellum columned mansions, built by the Protestant Anglo bankers and merchants who moved to town once the original Latin inhabitants of New Orleans had lain its infrastructure (in other words, after a hundred or so years of hard work had already been done). These homes are mainly ancestral; there are no realtor signs visible, ever, in this neighborhood. Some of the houses have seen better days and need paint and a manicure, but they all stand bravely shoulder-to-shoulder and face the streetcar. There are many Protestant churches on either side of the street, and a synagogue. We pass Loyola and its next-door neighbor, Tulane; both sit directly across from Audubon park. It's early evening now, and it's the best time to be clacking along the tracks as the sun's rays grow gentle and slant down in a golden glow. Many inhabitants of the neighborhood jog with their dogs on leashes alongside the streetcar tracks. A few tired uniformed maids get on at various stops on their way home, and it's obvious the tempo of the day is slowing down now.
After you pass Tulane there are a few blocks with scattered two or three-storey apartment homes built at the turn of the century through the 1920's. I love these little four- and eight-plex compounds with their central patios and balconies and ornately grilled windows and railings. I can imagine living in one of them during the 'Twenties and throwing wild parties, while my Victrola blared jazz out into the night. Tarantula Arms, anyone? One of the reasons I love New Orleans so much is the stories the buildings tell; a run-down, empty apartment building can hold frozen ghosts in its windows that whisper whole novels to me.
At the end of the night the driver tells everyone to debark. Sometimes the driver will then switch all the seats to reverse and face the other end of the car, and he'll walk down to take the controls at the other end. Tonight, there's another inbound streetcar waiting for us, so we simply get off and get on it to head back to Canal Street. A grizzled elderly man who I noticed talking the arm off of a poor, sweet thing on the first leg of the journey plops down next to me. He says, "I notice that you have some stamps." I assume he refers to my tattoos. I don't want to talk, I want to look out the window, so I say, "Yeah." He offers, "I have one I got fifty years ago when I was in the Navy." (Every word he says is letting me hear more of an accent that identifies the speaker as, probably, a resident of Milwaukee, or its environs.) He rolls up his sleeve to show me the ancient, flattened image of a fuzzy anchor. I lie and say, "That's nice," and turn back to my window view. I can sense his disappointment -- it's palpable -- and I feel guilty because he's obviously on vacation all alone, he's old, and he's lonely. Well, he's wrong. I am not a nice Southern lady. May I burn in hell, but I want to drink in my own private streetcar ride with my greedy eyes.
Eventually the streetcar bumps to its terminal stop at Canal and the girls and I quickly debark. I wish the old sailor an over-the-shoulder "Happy vacation!" quickly as we go down the steps, then I hurry the girls across the street so we can escape him. I don't want to have to entertain or be entertained by this poor old fellow even through one drink. The girls are like flushed and sweaty roses from the ride, and they say they're thirsty. I remember I have those two crisp $100 bills in my purse that Gwen has given me to spend on jewelry. I announce, "We're headed for cocktails!" and blaze the way to Bourbon Street. We're momentarily slowed down at the tawdry front end of Bourbon, where the hookers (Oh! Excuse me! I mean "dancers and entertainers"!) stand in doorways and hawk themselves, by a window display at the Unisex Club of photos of people of various genders, races and numbers performing gymnastic live sex acts. A second window display offers the tantalizing prospect of selecting the dirty girl of one's choice and washing her publicly.
Eventually we get to the Bourbon Street entrance of the Court of the Two Sisters; the restaurant has entrances on two different streets, since it takes up most of a block, but the kind maitre d' allows us to cross through the dining area in air conditioning to get to the cocktail bar. Waiters are setting tables in the greenhouse-like dining patio with its live bougainvillea trees and lighting twinkling candles. No one's yet in the bar, so we take a seat at a small round table for three, underneath one of the taxidermied parrots. (The parrots, when living, were residents of the restaurant for a century; in death, they remain as perpetual sentinels.) In a moment a stately, elderly, mustachioed Creole approaches in his long Parisian waiter's apron. "Good evening, ladies. Will you be having cocktails with us tonight?" he asks, bowing.
I say, "A mint julep, please. I've been craving one all afternoon." He bows and turns to Natasha. "A Ramos gin fizz," she orders, not missing a beat. Cari's next, but she's looking around, confused; I can tell she needs guidance about the Cocktails of New Orleans. I say, "Honey, why don't you have a claret lemonade? They're so refreshing, and they're the specialty of the house." She accepts my suggestion, and the waiter departs to have our drinks compounded at the bar. The air conditioning is set at arctic temperature, and the bar is dark and woody. After about five minutes our drinks arrive, complete with elaborate fruit garnish and napkins and swizzle sticks with two Southern Belles represented thereon. The mint in my julep tickles my nose as I draw the divine elixir up the short straw and into my mouth. I'm in paradise. Bourbon is exactly what's needed in the summer in New Orleans. We're close enough to the swinging louvered kitchen doors to observe bits of action inside. Tall, strong black men in full chef's attire and high toques dump boiling water out of caldrons full of shrimp, and clouds of steam rise. Natasha and I speculate on the army of labor needed to make the city's famous cuisine possible. Just think, for instance, of the hundreds of thousands of oysters alone that must be shucked daily to feed a city of such ravenous appetites!
We finish our lovely, lovely tall icy cocktails and the waiter delivers the bill. $25 with tip. Good. Looks like we can drink all night on my jewelry money. We wish the waiter a good evening, and head past the Charm Gate back into the street, which is now dark, and back to prowling the street. Natasha wants to buy a rude t-shirt, and there are plenty of stores that sell them on Bourbon Street. She is particularly taken with one that reads, "Suck me, shuck me, eat me raw." Cari and I beg her not to buy one. She's torn, because she also likes the shirt that proclaims the wearer to be a "Certified Bourbon Street Breast Inspector." While Natasha ogles t-shirts, I'm able to find some nice retro photographic postcards.
We resume our stroll, and hear screaming overhead from a balcony. Cute Goth girls three floors up pelt us with black and silver Mardi Gras beads (in June!), and wave and gesture for us to come up. The street noise is fairly loud, so we can only scream, "Thank you!" while we pick up the beads. I make a Charlie Chaplin shrugging gesture up to them, then pantomime walking on down the street with two fingers. We throw them kisses and proceed.
At the end of Bourbon is my favorite bar, Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar. It has no electric lights, so is dark as a pit once the sun goes down and is lighted only by candles. We get a high table adjacent to the grand piano bar, where an elderly man is setting his microphone levels. A waiter comes to take our order -- White Russians for the girls, a Jack Daniels and Coke ("Jackson Coke") for me. The piano bar singer is wonderful. He has the gin-and-cigarette roughened voice of Louis Armstrong, and his choice of songs is perfect. He starts off with, "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," a song I really love. Natasha and Cari hold hands. When he finishes, he looks over at me and asks, "Where are you lovely ladies from?" I say, "Austin, Texas," as I rise to go over to the piano. I ask if I can make a request, and he says, "You know you can." I say, "I know you must do a wonderful version of 'Summertime.' Would you play it for me?" He says, "I'd love to," and I put $5 in his tip jar and return to my seat. He does a killer version of it, with a long, fabulous piano intro. Lord, it's perfect. Sitting in Lafitte's on a hot summer night, with this melody and these words I love so much wafting out into the brick cobbled streets, as a Hansom cab clops by. It's exactly, exactly what I wanted.
We enjoy the wonderful music and then the girls complain of hunger. Since I had the muffaletta at 4:00 p.m. I'm done with eating for the day, but the girls are like baby birds and squawk to be fed more frequently. We go up a few steps to the Clover Grill diner.
Looks like it's been a hard night at the Clover. None of the tables has been bussed, there's only a cook and one poor waiter working, and the counter is shoulder-to-shoulder diners. I bus a table for us, and we sit and wait. Eventually the "Clever Girl," the very handsome, tattooed and pierced waiter (with gorgeous, huge hands) comes and squats beside the table with his order pad, obviously exhausted. He apologizes for the delay, and we tell him it's fine. The girls order breakfast and I get coffee. Cari needs to pee, and she needs to pee bad. The waiter tells her if she doesn't mind that the sign says "Men," there's a restroom out back. Neither Natasha nor I has ever been to the restroom at the Clover. When Cari comes back, she reports it was a Porta-Potty in a dark alleyway where men from the neighboring leather bar were having sex. Natasha's horrified and says she should have offered to escort Cari. Cari seems fairly non-plussed. The food arrives, and the girls wolf it down. It's now near midnight.
We flirted with the idea, earlier in the evening, of visiting Preservation Hall tonight, since Cari's a jazz aficionado and Monday night should be less crowded than later in the week. We've cruised the exterior earlier in the evening, but the line waiting to get in was long. Now, fortified with food, the girls decide they can venture back to Preservation Hall. There's no wait so late in the evening, and the venerable musicians are winding down with their final three sets. It's standing room only, but, at the next break, I yell "Mosh pit!" to the girls, and they crash through the crowd of standing tourists with me to grab recently-vacated floor spaces at the musicians' feet. The way it works at Preservation Hall is there are three rows of hard wooden benches, and behind that point, everyone stands. There are no lights in the room except where the musicians play, and I hate to stand in the rear, blocked by tall men, in total darkness. There are old couch cushions on the floor in front of the first row of benches, and this is where the truly brave, brazen, or crazy-about-jazz people sit. One's in danger here, of being inadvertently spit on by the musicians, or nailed by the slide of the trombone, but it's my favorite spot. The musicians soon end their short break and file in a take their places. Tonight, we've got a trombone player about my age, an ancient, natty, finger-waved-hairstyle trumpet player, a 50-something Marsalis-family-looking tenor sax player, a white and white-haired showboat banjo player, a European piano player with a name full of consonants (Polish?) in his 30's, a Louis-Armstrong-like, animated, comical stand-up bass player, and an elderly Black or Cuban drummer. The Preservation Hall musicians are all session players: that is, the band comes together anew and in differing combinations each night from a roster of musicians who have made the cut as far as their proficiency as players and their knowledge of jazz and blues go. It's jazz improvisation in spirit, for real, as the musicians simply show up at 8 each night, shake hands, sit down, and begin to jam. There is no set list, and they do take spontaneous requests. Sitting next to me on the floor are two Japanese tourists; they're college-age kids, with Spinal Tap rocker hair-cuts. They are totally grooving on the Preservation Hall experience, but I cannot help but notice they have absolutely no sense of rhythm as they tap and rock along with the music.
Another reason I love sitting on the floor is the music resonates through the building's ancient floor boards. I put my palms down, and the bass and drums travels up into my arms through vibration. I feel how the "thump" would have urged one to dance to this same music in the brothels of Storyville a hundred years ago.
And then, during the last set of the night, without my requesting it, the ancient trumpet player starts the first slow, wailing, melancholy notes of "St. James Infirmary." I'm in heaven! Again, I have gotten exactly what I wanted from New Orleans. The band's in fine form, and the song is sublime. What more could I possibly, possibly want?
Then, finally, as is the tradition, the musicians end the night with "When the Saints Go Marching In." They file out, and Natasha and Cari and I stand up stiffly and stretch. It's been a long, long day from Houston to New Orleans, and now we're tired.
We hoof it back down to Decatur and cross Esplanade to our hotel. The movie people are still hard at work filming. The street's still active with neighborhood people coming and going from the Quarter. The guidebooks say not to chance it, to take a cab into Faubourg Marigny this late at night. The girls feel fine about walking, and I feel safe, too -- like we're in some magical kind of state of Grace. We soon arrive at our hotel, I unlock the lace-curtained French door, the girls fall onto their bed exhausted, and we all decide to shower in the morning. I set the alarm for 7 a.m., crawl into my little twin bed, and we all fall instantly and blissfully to sleep.
Wednesday: New Orleans
The alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and I hear the patter of rain on the roof. Merde! How can it be, when we are working against the clock for our last few glorious hours in New Orleans, and then I face the long, anti-climatic drive back to Houston? I decide to do my bathroom business and dress, not waking the girls, until I can check the television weather forecast and the skies. I step out into the arcade and see the rain's not torrential. The local television radar shows a storm passing overhead, and it's forecast to pass New Orleans within a couple of hours, moving East. Good. I take the opportunity to quietly pack all my stuff, and organize what I can of the girls' before waking them. I tell them to wake up, it's raining, we have to make plans. They sleepily get up and get dressed, find their scattered belongings, and pack up. I suggest for the sake of efficiency they breakfast downstairs this morning, so we go down together to the dining room. Carafes of strong, hot, chicory-laced coffee stand waiting, along with orange juice, and a tray of fresh croissants. This sight pleases them, and their spirits rise a little. After I've had my coffee, I, too, feel more optimistic.
By 8:45 the rain's let up. We head up Conti to St. Louis No. 1, which opens at 9. I don't expect there to be many other visitors so early after opening on a rainy morning, but, wouldn't you know it? The ubiquitous middle-aged blond "occultist" in flowing black clothing is standing smack in front of the "alleged" grave of Marie LeVeau, talking into a documentary camera. I tell the girls to skirt that action, that we'll go deeper into the cemetery and return later to the front. Natasha and Cari are soon clicking away with their cameras. Actually, the overcast rainy morning is ideal for photographing a New Orleans cemetery, so things are turning out for the best momentarily. We're soon all scattered in three directions, following our intuitions and making photographs.
We drift together again toward the Treme tenement-side of the cemetery, where we hear a woman's voice from the projects shrieking, "Put the motherfucker down! I mean it! Put it down now!" and then a blood-curdling scream. I tell the girls, "Great! Now we are going to get hit by stray bullets coming from someone's kitchen." We hustle deeper into the cemetery, away from the wrought-iron open-work gate. I wonder idly if we should call the police on one of the girls' cell phones, but then decide I should probably just butt out, since I have no idea from which of the many apartments the woman's scream has issued. And I haven't heard any gunshots, although knives are, admittedly, silent. We're soon lost again in our photographing. We try Marie LeVeau's "official" grave again, and the occultist and video crew are gone. I expose my tattoos and pose for photos by Natasha. Then, a couple of elderly French women, probably Parisians, judging by the accents I can't help but overhear and their clothes, stumble by. They are trying to figure out what we're doing, and they stare quizzically at all last night's offerings left at the grave (pennies, shells, gum, rum bottles, candle stubs) and at the triple-X markings and scratchings on the crypt itself. I offer helpfully, "C'est le tombeau du voudoo reine Marie LeVeau -- le tombeau officiel." They understand me, and nod their thanks. Still crouching and posing for the photo Natasha's trying to make, I point a few graves over and say, "Le voici, le tombeau actuel de Marie LeVeau." They smile and wander off in the direction I've pointed.
We wander to the rear of the cemetery, where the back wall holds the common "community" crypts -- the ones that are rentals and not maintained "in perpetuity." I know I've mentioned the Napoleonic Code repeatedly now, and this is a startling example of how Louisiana differs in its laws from the other forty-nine states. One's deceased relatives can actually be evicted from rented graves here, just as they can be in Italy. Wonder of wonders, photo op of photo ops! Two side-by-side upper crypts have been emptied and recently cleaned and replastered. Of course, Natasha and Cari want to get inside them to have photos made. I tell them they are going to have to give each other a leg-up to scale the high wall to get in, but if they can manage it, I'll take the picture. I meter the camera, then tell them to start trying. At just the time they've lept up, balanced on their hip bones on the crypt ledges and are attempting to wriggle into the narrow crypts, the two Parisian matrons round the corner. Now they REALLY don't know what to make of us. One smiles weakly and tries an attempt at humor. She says in French, "Better tell them once they get in, there's no getting out again." And I say, "Oui, mais elles vourraient seulement un photo de les derrieres." This cracks both of the ladies up, and they walk away laughing, shaking their heads, and muttering, "Les derrieres!" They will probably return to France and tell their friends that the New World French are all grave-robbing Voodooists.
Just about this time we hear again from the Treme side, "Put the motherfucker down! Better put it down now!" and then the blood-curdling scream. The French ladies high-tail it out of the cemetery. I decide then it's all a plot by some prankster over in the tenement. I think she looks out her third-floor window because she's bored, and when she sees the cemetery's empty except for a couple of white tourists deep within, she does this just to freak them out, for her amusement.
When we've shot up all our film, we head back to the Quarter for last-minute shopping. Natasha cannot leave town without purchasing a black baseball cap with the silhouette of a woman leaning against the Bourbon Street signpost and the caption, "Stolen from a Bourbon Street Whore House." Cari and I consider ourselves lucky, on the relative scale of Natasha's proclivity for rude merchandise. We duck into the Italian grocery and purchase a jar of olive salad for Gwen, and a box of beignet mix. We make a quick razoo through the flea market end of the French Market.
We make it back to the hotel at 11:45 a.m. and we all go upstairs to make one last bathroom stop. My period coming unexpectedly has not actually been such an inconvenience, I decide. I think to myself that I enjoy bleeding in strange cities; by doing so, I leave a part of myself there always, and become a kind of blood sister to the city. First Venice, now New Orleans. We check out, but since we're in a pay-to-park lot, the slow, sleepy-eyed hotel clerk agrees we can just stay parked and continue to do what we want to do, and he'll still reimburse me for my parking fee when we finally leave. Natasha suggests we go have lunch before we depart at Praline Connection, a soul food place we've eaten at on previous vacations, so we strike off. When we arrive, I remember it's graduation time. A couple of families sit at the long ten-top tables in the restaurant's center with teenagers wearing mortar boards and playing with the tassels. Obviously, they're out to a celebratory lunch with the extended families. Our teen-aged waiter, in starched and ironed white shirt, brings menus and sweet iced tea. Natasha orders an oyster poor boy, Cari orders only potato salad, and I order turnip greens and cornbread. When our food comes, Natasha picks the oysters out and consumes them without the sandwich trappings. I ask, "What the heck?" and she replies, "Well, you can't really expect me to leave New Orleans without eating oysters, can you?"
There's really nothing else any of us wants to do, so we face the inevitable and return to the car, pay the parking fee, drive round the block and Natasha runs into the hotel to get reimbursement. And then, once again, it's Good-bye, New Orleans. It always makes me so melancholy to leave. I love this sad, painted, decaying whore of a city, with all its maddening complexity. This town and I dance a tango with each other; she's my soul-sister. She knows all about me, what I want, what I need, what I envy, what I fear. She sees all, knows all, accepts all -- and she always has. The upper-storey windows of her grand buildings hold captive the reflections of the ghosts of a million octoroon balls and stories; more stories, perhaps, than do her famous above-ground cemeteries. And always, always beside her, Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along.
