New Orleans, Mon Amour

by Andrei Codrescu

Genres: Short Stories

Synopsis

For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps.

Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.

New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

Release date: January 31, 2006

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

HOW DID WE FALL IN LOVE? At first sight, violently. I came to visit my friend Philip Herter in New Orleans at Mardi Gras in 1982. He had a houseful of friends in various states of dress and undress who stayed up all night, slipping in and out of his apartment in the Bywater, coming back in different clothes, towing in strangers, stories, news of yet another, more amazing party, somewhere, in a few minutes, in a few seconds. Masked creatures floated by in a swirl of feathers, night parades went by a few blocks away, flambeaux-lit torches preceded brass bands leading huge floats bearing massive gods and goddesses under whose heads masked celebrants threw treasures to frenzied mobs. Time was uncertain, like names and faces, and I found myself in a park at the edge of the French Quarter, sleeping in the grass next to Heather, a red-haired fiery person to whom I dedicated a poem, “Dear Masoch.” The Masoch part had to do with the fact that she turned out to be Philip’s girlfriend and my passion went nowhere, except toward masochism.

I carried that fabulous and carnal image of New Orleans with me like a poetic wound for the next two years. I kept in touch with friends who lived there, artist types who fascinated neophytes with tales of their city. Later, when I started living there, I caught the Mythifying-of-New-Orleans virus, too. The city that Mark Twain called “the upholstered sewer” generated stories like water from a faucet left on everywhere you looked. A friend’s child once exclaimed, on first seeing Lake Ponchartrain, the tenth-largest lake in America, “Mommy, somebody left the faucet on!” From the mouths of babes.

The mythifying of New Orleans started early, from nothing but the facts. The young Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein was sent away from the troubles of revolutionary Germany in the 1840s to New Orleans, where he landed penniless and started writing a serial novel for one of two German-language daily newspapers published in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century. The newspaper he wrote for, the Louisiana Staat-Zeitung, was the bohemian paper, full of romantic, anarchist, and revolutionary matter. The other German-language daily was directed to the bourgeois Germans who wanted nothing to do with the riffraff who hung around the wharfs along with the Irish and the Negroes, looking for work and drinking whatever they could find. Even so, the Baron’s serial novel, The Mysteries of New Orleans, drew protests because he described (vividly and for the first time in American literature!) sex between women, sex between men, child prostitution, and pedophilia. There was also a priest who killed young women in a Creole whorehouse that catered to specialized tastes.



For all that, the Baron was no Émile Zola, by no means a social realist. After scrupulously dispensing with the realistic details that were in all his readers’ purview to check for accuracy (such as well-known scandals, and street names and locations), von Reizenstein took his audience on a breathtaking magical trip that was Gabriel García Marquez times ten. There is a blood-sucking immortal over five hundred years old. An evil horseman who carries the seeds of yellow fever from a mysterious plant that grows at the source of the Red River. The dead are everywhere, up to no good. Readers complained about the graphic details (especially the sex) but couldn’t put it down. During the Civil War the newspaper was shut down for its pro-abolitionist views and the Baron dedicated himself to collecting and classifying butterflies and producing a classic text of lepidoptery. When writers such as Mark Twain and George Washington Cable appeared on the scene, they knew little about the Baron’s writing; they knew him only as the “butterfly man,” a skinny eccentric who frequented seedy bars in the French Quarter. The Mysteries of New Orleans lay unseen and unread until the twenty-first century, when Steven Rowan, a Johns Hopkins professor, pieced it together, translated it from the German into English, annotated it meticulously and deeply, and gave it to us, just in time, it seems, for another apocalypse in New Orleans.

The muddy, the perverse, the magical, and the inexplicable always had an apocalyptic tinge to it. I hadn’t read the Mysteries of New Orleans when I wrote Messiah, my own novel of New Orleans, but the two novels could be twins, separated by a century and a half. The miraculous and profoundly satirical substance that New Orleans has produced for its entire existence rises from both books like thick fog over the Mississippi River. I’ll recall a single incident from the time when I wrote Messiah and I’ll let you be the judge of its veracity. For my part, I swear that I didn’t invent a single thing.

It was a fall day in 1998 and I was having a hard time with Felicity, one of the two principal characters in Messiah. She was refusing to evolve past a certain point, so I opened at random my copy of Nag Hammadi, the Gnostic Gospels, translated by Willis Barnstone, to ask for guidance. I kept the Nag Hammadi close by my desk for oracular readings regarding Felicity, a natural-born gnostic. The Nag opened to a page where the first line read, “Our sister Sophia, she who is a whore.” That didn’t seem to help much, but I typed the line into the file anyway. I shut down my laptop and went around the corner to Molly’s, which was my living room, more or less, in those days. I was always bound to run into somebody I knew at Molly’s. I looked around but didn’t know anybody, so I sat at the window and ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks. I was just sinking into a pleasantly warm whiskey buzz, looking out at the street. It was near sunset and all the freaks were out, extravagantly tattooed youths, skateboarders, confused tourists, drug dealers, hookers, itinerant musicians, pickpockets, waiters and busboys leaving or going to work. I was dreaming away when somebody from behind hugged me with skinny girl arms and whispered in my ear, “Do you want to hear the name of my new band?” The arms belonged to a tiny blond wisp with big round eyes that were all black pupil.

“No,” I said, because there is nothing I dislike more than the names of young people’s bands. I’ve sat in on all-night sessions of baby or band naming, and they were not happy occasions.

“I’ll tell it to you anyway,” the wisp said. “It’s Our Sister Sophia She Who Is a Whore.”

My hair (what was left of it) stood up on my head and on my arms. Two possibilities presented themselves instantly to my mind: (1) the skinny bit, whose name I later found out was Michelle, had looked over my shoulder when I opened the book in my apartment and typed in the line, though I knew that there hadn’t been anybody there; and (2) the page had printed itself and had followed me down the street, where it had been found by this complete stranger who then decided to name her new rock band after it. There were no other possibilities, so I stuttered, “That’s a line from the Gnostic Gospels.”

“I know,” Michelle chirped, “I’ve been reading them since I was fourteen.” I found out, in short order, that she was the lead singer of her new band, that she made a living stripping at Big Daddy’s, and that she was in imminent danger at that very moment of being captured by a strong emergency-room nurse named Susan, who was in love with her. No sooner said than Susan herself, a statuesque and muscled woman wearing a leather miniskirt, appeared in the door of Molly’s, headed straight for Michelle, pried her off my neck, and bit her hard on the arm.

Michelle screamed but didn’t even try to get away, and we all ended up somehow at my tiny apartment around the corner, where I was hoping to read out loud what I’d written to prove to them somehow the incredible coincidence of the identical “Our Sister Sophia She Who Is a Whore’s,” something I never managed to do because Michelle pushed me down on the bed, straddled me, and with her legs around my waist, proceeded to project inspired mystical utterances that could in no way have originated with her. Somebody utterly steeped in mystical substance spoke through her, and that person was, I realized, my character Felicity. I listened for a long time until Susan, who had been briefly lost in the place, pried Michelle off me once again and dragged her into the night.

I threw away everything I had written about Felicity so far, and I replaced her with the persona channeled by Michelle, trying as accurately as I could to reproduce her stream-of-consciousness. Michelle and I became friends, but she never again spoke in that kind of exalted language or mentioned the name of her “new band,” which simply vanished, if it had ever existed. Only one time did Michelle rise to a near sublime occasion of another order: On New Year’s, on the stroke of midnight in the year 2000 she stood naked in the fountain in my courtyard and, holding on to the bronze angel spitting in there, she sang the Chinese national anthem in Chinese. Only, it turned out, she didn’t know any Chinese. On the other hand, neither did I.

This sort of thing was exceptional, but my life in New Orleans had many exceptional and, in the end, epic occurrences. There were many mornings when I wished that I’d had a Boswell by my side to record not only what had been said but what had happened. The richness was profound, and if experience has anything to do with writing, here was a wealth of material that might, just might, give future readers a glimpse of what it was to be alive, a poet, in New Orleans at the end of the twentieth century and the very beginning of the twenty-first.

I had other lives in New Orleans, of course: I lived for a time with my wife, Alice, and my children, Tristan and Lucian, in a respectable neighborhood uptown, in a very beautiful Victorian house. I taught creative writing in the English Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, on a beautiful campus of Italianate tiled-roof buildings. Baton Rouge was as far removed from New Orleans atmospherically and philosophically as the French Quarter was from my Uptown house. I edited “Exquisite Corpse, a Journal of Books & Ideas,” and fell in love with Laura, my coeditor. Laura, now my wife, witnessed all my lives and saw that my writing stayed true to itself in a time that seems now, like New Orleans itself, to be half-submerged in a dream. When I was living in Baltimore in the early 1980s, I received an award from the Maryland Writers’ Council for “leading a poetic life and inspiring us all.” I had no idea, at the time of this slightly goofy award, just how poetic a life I was to lead in the future.

Looking back, I think that New Orleans was predestined. Shortly after moving to Louisiana I had a dream that I was swimming in a vast sunny lake atop a powerful horse. We swam right up to a white sand beach where we were received by beautiful young women. One of them led the horse to the stables to be fed rice and milk, while the others took me to a magnificent hall and sat me before a roaring fire in a stone fireplace. They caressed and stroked me and I was on the verge of being lulled to sleep by their ministrations when I realized, with a sudden shock, that if I stayed here I could never leave again. I stood up and asked rudely for my horse. They brought it to me, I mounted, and we dove back into the lake. I felt good and strong, but the weather had changed. Instead of a sunny day, everything was now gray and cold. I had forgotten our original destination, but still, I was grateful to be moving. I didn’t care where we were going, as long as we were free. A few days after I had this dream, I knew that the vast lake was Lake Ponchartrain.

In New Orleans I had friends and visitors and friends of friends who always seemed to be staying with me. We ate memorable meals at great restaurants. I heard magnificent musicians jam together by happenstance in the middle of the night in smoky joints in the Marigny, Treme, Bywater, the Ninth Ward, Uptown, and in the French Quarter. I wrote poetry by the Mississippi River at Decatur, just past where the golden statue of Joan of Arc stands now. Joan of Arc, the savior of Orleans, France, may have saved the French Quarter of New Orleans, too; it stayed dry after Hurricane Katrina drowned the city. During my two decades in New Orleans, I’ve seen the literary scene, especially poetry, flourish. The Faulkner Festival, the brainchild of Joe DiSalvo and Rosemary James, took off and became nationally renowned. Joe and Rosemary own the Faulkner Bookstore, housed in the building where William Faulkner wrote his first novel. A few years ago a magnificent local poet and bar owner, Dave Brinks, initiated a regular reading series at the Gold Mine Saloon, his French Quarter bar, and we cofounded the New Orleans School for the Imagination (NOSI), which offered, among other classes, Sweat Management for New Orleans summers.

We hung out endlessly at Molly’s under the kind but no-nonsense auspices of Jim Monaghan, whose sharp Irish wit and shrewd business sense added the necessary realism to our flights of fancy. Molly’s was home to the demimonde, to artists, journalists, retired teachers, lawyers, politicians, cops, and people of uncertain description. Laura and I wrote poetry together here, sometimes with other poets. For a time I became addicted to the video poker machines in the bar and lost a lot of money. I once brought Philip Glass, the musician, to Molly’s, and he sat before one of the machines and became instantly fascinated by their Zen randomness and sounds. We had a hard time getting him away from it. We snapped great moments in Molly’s photo booth, when there was one, immortalizing the goofiness and sweetness of ourselves. Jim Monaghan Jr., the son of the great late Monaghan, now runs the bar and refuses to install another photo booth in there, but he is filling his father’s shoes more and more each day.

During the dire days of Katrina and its aftermath, while the whole city, except for a few areas, lay underwater, Jim kept Molly’s open. Huddling there, without electricity or working phones, the surviving tribes of the French Quarter drank liquor without ice and defied orders to abandon the city. Three days after the storm, Jim’s wife, Alana, heard that I was going into the city with an NBC news crew and met me at a shopping mall on I-10, thirty miles from Baton Rouge, to give me ice, food, and gasoline for Jim. I took NBC straight to Molly’s, where the unshaven, unwashed mob was like a post-Revolutionary French rabble in the days of the Paris Commune. Katrina hit on what was supposed to be Decadence Weekend, one of the largest gay festivals in the United States. A handful of hardy survivors put on a Decadence parade. There were as many television cameras as marchers. One grass-skirted reveler pointed to a couple of other decadents and said, “They are straight! Things are so bad we had to recruit straights for Decadence!” And on they marched past Molly’s, a tattered remnant of a glorious past, handing out cans of tuna instead of beads and G-strings. The roar of army helicopters was constant overhead. Outside the French Quarter, fires were burning out of control, and looters were taking what they needed from abandoned shops. The looting was not indiscriminate. Some people took things straight from stores to their trapped neighbors by boat. Food and medicine were distributed by impromptu self-helping citizens’ groups, while in the hellish “shelter” of the Superdome thousands of “evacuees” suffered from hunger, thirst, and violence. In fact, most of the official charities and government agencies failed the citizens of New Orleans in the days of Katrina. The National Guard and the Eighty-second Airborne managed to empty the city of almost all inhabitants, something never before seen i. . .