New Orleans – My Southern Comfort

August, 1997 – Sixteen years ago, I blew into New Orleans with my old buddy Spike Hansen.

The drive through Texas had been epic, and we’d slipped into Louisiana by way of three days of industrial drinking in Shreveport, a southern world littered with porno-rock, stone-eyed bikers and belching smokestacks.

We hopped right off the freeway from Baton Rouge, took St Charles and revved on into the French Quarter in an old blue truck that had two gears and one good tyre to its credit. We stopped off at a place called The Old Absinthe House Bar on Bourbon.

Many months later, after the Mardi Gras mask of 1982 had slipped and revealed a little too much detail to me, I said goodbye to my sweetheart town.

My black-eyed babe, my vampire lover, my streets cobbled with memories, my shady lanes lined with ghost-oak, my pink mansions, my old granddaddy river, my Cities of the Dead, and my Voodoo joints. My New Orleans.

 

Return to the Big Easy

Many summers later, I’m going back. There’s a tension in the pit of my gut. I feel like an older man visiting his sweet bird of youth. Thank you, Tennessee Williams.

The years have thrown some weight on my frame, my temples are grey. There has been a tragedy in my life, and this is a gathering of old friends in a city we all love. This is my Southern Comfort.

How will New Orleans be, this time around? What will she think of me?

Two seats away on the flight in from Miami is my old photographer-friend Herman Potgieter. Seated between us is a brand-new, accidental acquaintance: one Frank Wyman, an old Louisiana man from Jefferson Parish.

Hurricane Season

Frank once met Lee Harvey Oswald, had a bit part in JFK and another in Kingfish, based on the life of the notorious Huey Long, backhanding governor of the Great State of Louisiana.

As local as they come, Frank tells us all about the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico and then settles in on his favourite New Orleans topic: food. What they like to call Gumbo Ya-Ya down there. One tip: it’s all about the roux, the sauce at the root of it all.

“We’re all a little over the scale in Nawlins,” he smiles, patting his ample girth. “The skinny folk you see are the tourists.”

Aaron Neville on the Radio

We’re chugging into mid-city from the airport. The cabbie has Aaron Neville singing on the radio and we flash past a billboard that reads:

Mayor Morial Welcomes You To New Orleans!

What? Is Dutch Morial still the mayor? The man was in charge the last time I spun around here. The cabbie puts me straight.

“It’s his son, Marc. Dutch died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve in 1989.”

There is no place like this in the world. Even when you’re in New Orleans, you wish you were in New Orleans.

The city drips with history and nuance, mystery and séance. Everywhere, there’s the hint of an icon, something familiar from a movie you once saw, a line you may have heard, or a sax solo in the dead of night in a fleapit hotel where the neon sign flashes Red! Zzt! Red! outside your window.

Voodoo Town

More than 250 years old, this is where the colour, Voodoo and African throb of the Caribbean once crept onto the mainland of North America.

It’s a hard-drinking, sexy, Second Line street-marching, drum solo of a city. On the surface is an all-day, all-night street party where plump Quarter maids will bare their creamy breasts if you throw them a Mardi Gras charm, where the hookers and the hackers and the Lucky Dog pedlars hang out with the Zydeco Cajuns, the jazz nuts and the barmen of Bourbon Street.

And below all that there lurks something decadent and utterly beautiful. You catch it in a Creole eye, the crook of the bassman’s smile, the smell of fresh rain on banana tree leaves in a courtyard off Dauphine, the rumbling of a midnight streetcar heading up St Charles to the slumbering mansions of Old Money.

 

The Quarter

My old girlfriend, my old city. She’s as gypsy-eyed stunning as ever. A tad brassier, maybe, with all the curio shops and postcard alleys and tourist traps in the French Quarter. There are some laughter lines around that red, plump mouth. The burnish of her thick copper Southern tresses probably comes from a bottle these days, but it still catches the fiery evening light just so.

New Orleans is a survivor, and I am here to draw from that well of wild strength in the face of the saddest thing that could ever happen to a soul: the loss of children.

Here comes my friend Llewellyn Kriel. He has just competed in the World Champs of Toastmasters here in New Orleans and, although he bows out in the regionals he has made his country proud.

Band of Brothers

The next morning the band of brothers is complete, with the arrival, from the West Coast, of Spike Hansen and Noel Watson.

Spike married his American sweetheart and has set up a construction management business in Los Angeles. Noel is still farming in the wilds of Northern California.

The first thing we do, after hugs and shots of Jack Daniels, is head down to Jackson Square for a two-hour Mississippi riverboat ride. As a travel writer, I don’t often get to play Classic Tourist. Here is my chance.

The steamboat captain plays the calliope for the queues outside the boat ramp. Old show tunes blare out through The Quarter, and the ears of carriage horses on Toulouse Street pick up and flare out towards the riverside.

Mississippi Boat Ride

The boat ride is a daiquiri dream, as we sip from enormous cups of frozen alcohol and fruit, calling out to the people on the riverbanks. Like five middle-aged children, boys mucking about on the water, we cannot mask the exuberance of the moment. A moment over-arched by grief.

We are indeed a rowdy lot, so the other tourists nearby give us that look and move off to another deck. Fuck ‘em. There have been deaths in the family and this is the way we roll. We don’t do black and sombre.

After the Mississippi jaunt, it’s off to the Old Absinthe House Bar. We walk in, and for Spike and me nothing has changed since we first arrived in 1981.

Sunshine Corrigan

Wads of business cards, yellow and bent, are stuck on every available inch of space on the walls. The place is packed with locals and here’s Sunshine Corrigan, behind the bar. She is lovely and serves us cold beer. But, pray tell, where is Blackie, the barman of our time?

“Sorry darlin’, Blackie died two years ago.”

Thus follows more beer and an hour of our Blackie stories, as told to Herman, Llewellyn, Watson and anyone else in the bar who can decipher a South African accent.

By Day Two we’re already in the rhythm of the French Quarter.

The 9am breakfast is at Johnny’s Po’ Boys in St Louis Street.

“Even our failures are edible” is the catch-phrase at this, the oldest po’ boy restaurant in the world. And me, I’m hooked on their monster chipped-beef sandwich.

Up Bourbon

As we walk out after breakfast, the hot breath of August slams into us. It’s humid, which means the rains will soon follow. And the hurricanes.

All the way up Bourbon Street, people are busy washing down the sidewalks and picking up all the trash from last night’s carousing. The Go-Cup Crowds are heavy traffic for the French Quarter of New Orleans – also big business, so no one bitches that much about cleaning up after a tourist.

By 11am The Quarter is spanking clean and ready for another round. Big Daddy’s Topless-Bottomless Bar is rousing itself, Antoine’s has put up its welcome sign and today’s specials at K-Paul’s are posted in the window.

The hookers are still a little drowsy, so they socialise before the crowds arrive. It’s already too damn hot to do anything but drink and share a few trade secrets.

Daiquiri Avenue

We spend the afternoon bar-hopping down Bourbon, up Toulouse, past St Louis, through Chartres and into a daiquiri den along Decatur. This is where we regale the barman with African fables until the early evening, when we wander down to the river to see the golden light slide over the waters of the Mississippi.

Two hobo blues players who have worked the public crowds for more than 20 years, from Seattle to Syracuse, attack Honky Tonk Woman with gusto, six-string acoustic guitar and mouth harp. A couple of guys and a pink pig on a rhinestone leash wander by.

Far away downriver, the ornate paddle-wheelers pass each other and blast their whistles in greeting. Creole Queen says howdy to Natchez. We stroll back to The Quarter, which is beginning to hum.

At The Dungeon across the road from the Maison de Ville on Toulouse, a girl in a leather bikini flexes her bullwhip and waits for her kind of business.

Bars Bars Bars

But the early-evening crowds follow the music: Zydeco, Dixie Jazz, Blues and good old Southern Rock. There’s a bar for everyone, including a little corner joint where acoustic folk is the main menu item.

At one in the morning, we take a break from the madness outside and slip into our quarters at the Audubon Cottages on Dauphine Street.

A little key lets you into a secret garden, where the thick foliage cuts off most of the Quarter sound outside. We all sit by the pool, Cuban smoking cigars in the night, sipping liqueurs and beers, chatting as old friends do.

Lucky Dogs Galore

Minutes before, we were young bucks in the streets, ogling the pretty girls and their flashing legs, popping into the blues bars, chugging carafes of Dixie beer, trading bullshit with the others punters on the sidewalks, sharing a joke with a hundred bartenders and pulling the piss out of the Lucky Dog vendor on Royal Street.

Here, poolside at the Audubon Cottages, is where a writer with something to say should come for a year. Great things are bound to follow.

It worked for William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And when it pours down, like right now, one remembers the words of Blanche du Bois, from A Streetcar Named Desire:

Don’t you just love those long, rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour – but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands – and who knows what to do with it?

Marching Bands

I remember those long, rainy afternoons from another time in New Orleans, when the water would pour off the balcony to the beat of Pete Fountain’s Half-Fast Marching Band playing on vinyl inside, while we haphazardly strung Christmas decorations all through the little shotgun house that belonged to the kind woman who gave us shelter and friendship.

And then we would go off, in the middle of a thunderstorm, to listen to The Neville Brothers at Tipitina’s. Or to the poets at The Maple Leaf Bar.

The cigar embers are like restless fireflies in the moonlight. That comfortable, laid-back feeling of New Orleans, the real thing, has settled on us all. There is no tension left in us, as The Big Easy begins to work its mysterious magic.

Tomorrow? Perhaps we’ll walk down to the French Market, maybe we’ll drive out to the bayou for some country-style fried catfish.

Or maybe we’ll just sit in The Old Absinthe House Bar and shoot the breeze with Sunshine Corrigan. Who knows? All is well. Care is forgotten – for now…

Chris Marais writes about his Mardi Gras in The Journey Man – A South African Reporter’s Stories, available in Print HERE and in Ebook format HERE.