Tales—Told, Shaken, and Spelled Both Ways

December 29

This morning we got out in time to visit St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. According to signs, it’s much smaller than it used to be. Part of it used to be where Rampart Street is now. The remains were moved to other cemeteries.

New Orleans cemeteries are fascinating. They consist not of graves but of above-ground mausoleums. It’s partly for reasons of space, but also because conventionally buried bones can float up to the surface. It puts me in mind of the cat fight scene in “Tom Jones.”

Anyhow, the reason to go to St. Louis No. 1, besides it crumbling visual appeal, is the tomb of Marie Laveau. According to a plaque on the wall she was a “notorious voodoo queen.”

Of course, we couldn’t find it by ourselves. There was one tomb that had been vandalized, so there were no names on it. It was covered in triple x’s, with a variety of offerings (or litter) in front of it. 

A tour came through and the guide said “This is not the tomb of Marie Laveau,” but the marks are some kind of mystical symbol.

When he started to lead the group a little farther along, I stopped him and asked where Marie Laveau was. He said, the big white tomb near the front. 

That narrowed it down quite a bit. There are a lot of white tombs, but only one had six or eight people with cameras standing around it.

Turns out, nobody’s sure if she’s there. Who knows? Maybe nobody’s sure that she ever existed. But why should quibbles interfere with a good time?

Joanna wouldn’t get into the picture of the day, although I asked her. She felt a little leery of being photographed next to the voodoo queen.

The man who does appear in the photo may be a devotee. I’m not sure. We did have a conversation of sorts.

He came up to the tomb and set that blue bottle down, the one on the lower left, and then started talking to the tomb. Then he seemed to be talking to the air. I couldn’t make out anything he said, but could see his lips move. Then he was talking directly to me.

I moved closer, but couldn’t get most of it. He pantomimed something, wobbling his knees like somebody doing the Charleston. He also said something about dogs and somebody flying. Who was flying? I’m not sure the question registered.

Then he told me about finding a million dollar bill folded up on (I believe) a streetcar. “I never knew there was such a thing as a million dollar bill.” He said it had pictures of all the presidents on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other.

I gave him a couple of dollar coins and said next time he makes an offering to ask Marie to remember me. He looked at what I gave him: “U.S. gold dollar bills.”

The tomb where Marie Laveau may or may not be is next to the former tomb of Ernest Morial, the first black mayor of New Orleans. His name is on a few improvement projects in the French Quarter and on the city’s convention center. According to an inscription, he has been reburied at St. Louis No. 2.

The Laveau tomb is also within a few feet of the tomb of Paul Morphy, the 19th century chess genius. 

We strolled for a while and stopped for a snack at a place called La Bayou on Bourbon Street. I couldn’t decide between gumbo and a dozen raw oysters. One of the beer choices was a brand called LA 31 (as in Louisiana Highway 31). 

I decided to sip the beer before I ordered. It was an IPA, or very like, and that meant oysters.

At some point in the afternoon we crossed paths again with the man from the cemetery. He was carrying the blue bottle, so I guess it must have been a loan instead of a straight-out offering. 

Dinner was at Brennan’s, a restaurant that I’d heard about a long time ago.

I started with a sazerac. I had seen the word on menus but had no idea what it was. I was about to find out. It mixes rye whiskey with absinthe and bitters. 

The bitters kill some of the annoying sweetness of the rye. Absinthe adds a touch of licorice. It may be the strongest mixed drink I have every taken. That’s not saying much, I admit, because I generally don’t order mixed drinks unless they are Campari and soda or a mimosa, which are relatively low in alcohol content.

The sazerac went to my head and stayed there.

Brennan’s menu is maybe a little longer, but is more varied than Antoine’s. Most of Antoine’s meat dishes were beef, for instance.

I started with lamb sweetbreads over black truffle grits. It was beautiful. I never had grits so good.

Then came palm sugar seared duck with a rutabaga cake and Vietnamese mustard greens. Because of the shape and texture, I expected the rutabaga cake to taste like hash browns, but of course it didn’t. It was maybe a little sweeter and chewier. 

The mustard greens were very tasty, although I’m not sure what made them Vietnamese. I haven’t had enough Vietnamese food to guess.

The duck was served off the bone but under the skin, and painted with the glaze. Terrific.

Joanna had exceptionally good gumbo as an appetizer. (I sampled a spoonful)

Her entree was French chicken with broccoli rape, creamed potatoes made with chestnuts, and cipollini onions. This fell into the comfort food range, and was also excellent.

Wine was a Burgundy for Joanna and Cotes du Rhone for me. Possibly because of the sazerac, on which I intend to blame everything for the rest of my life, the wines tasted a little bit acidic, almost sour, until the food came, and then they were perfect.

One feature of the meal is that, every now and then flames shoot up near a table, because open flame is one of the draws of Bananas Foster, a dessert invented by the restaurant.

We didn’t have room for dessert.

We left Brennan’s a little before nine and were strolling on Royal Street behind a family with two small boys. They turned left toward Bourbon, and one of the kids said, “Are we going back to the naughty street?”

Sounded like a good idea, after all, so that’s where we went.

Bourbon Street is the tourist Mecca of New Orleans. The spirit of the place lies halfway between a New Jersey boardwalk and the Red Light District in Amsterdam. You never can guess what you’ll see, so you keep going back to see it. 

You can look into a door past a drag queen and see another guy in a fright wig dancing for a crowd.

A stripper in the doorway of another club was wearing a tiny triangle for a bikini and an industrial-strength halter.

The missionaries were out again. This is a group I’ve seen before. Mostly kids, they hold up a wooden cross in the middle of the street and read from the Bible.  

This group is nowhere near as fanatical as some I’ve seen in New York. They don’t shout in anybody’s face, for instance, that you have to believe what they’re saying or you’ll burn forever. They don’t even use amplification. So it’s only when you walk past that you can hear them. I give them credit for that.

As we walked by, a girl in the group said hello and asked if I wanted to pray with them or talk to them about anything.

It seems that sazerac plays hell with your filters. Instead of just saying, “No, thank you,” I had to be a wise-ass and try to be clever—or, dare I admit it, philosophical. “I pray all the time by living.” 

I didn’t even have the presence of mind to be embarrassed by saying something so fucking smug. Not, that is, until this morning. Sorry, lady. I was out of line. 

Outside one strip club you see the silhouette of a naked woman dancing. I’m pretty sure it’s an animation, and not a recording of a real dancer. I had seen it before.

A block down on the other side of Bourbon, though, was something new. It was the same kind of thing, but on a bigger scale with more-realistic movements. The silhouettes were on a window shade with a bright light behind them. 

What the hell is this? These were actual dancers, trying to upstage the other club. I was pretty plastered, and this just stopped me in my footsteps. I must have gawked like a rube, because the doorman came over and offered to lead me inside. Joanna’s a great sport, but I figured that might be just a little too much.

There’s a lady who travels through the French Quarter on a tricycle decked out with a canopy painted with paraphrased Bible verses and wisecracks. “God so love dah world he gave his only b’gotten son.” “Just do it.” This wasn’t quite the same as the kids in the middle of Bourbon Street.

She dressed in white. Hat, bustier, everything was white except for the blue thong that stretched up out of her shorts. 

Tonight, just about when we were calling it a night, she was off the trike dancing with another lady in front of our hotel. She crouched, which pulled her shorts down to show more of the thong, and a lady exclaiming “oh,my” ran out of the crowd ran up with a cell phone to take a close-up.

“We take tips,” she said after she got up.

Then she saw a guy all in black and wanted to dance with him.

One look at me and she should know I can’t dance. But somehow she got one leg over my knee and we rocked together for a few seconds. 

Joanna, laughing out loud, wanted me to hand her my camera so she could take a picture. No, no photographic evidence. I have no idea what I’m doing right now. It’s better left to the imagination. Forever.

From Marie Laveau to dirty dancing in the street. A million dollar bill thrown in. What a day.

Best to all.

Harry

Dec. 29

I’m enjoying your New Orleans adventures.

When Bob and I were there we dined at Antoine’s every night and I was always so stuffed I never had dessert. Each day I promised myself that I’d limit my intake so I’d have room for what I’d imagined were glorious desserts. But each day on the street I’d have fudge and pralines and that did it.

My voice teacher, Renato Cellini, was head of the New Orleans Opera Co. He’d been a conductor at the Met but a heart attack forced him to limit his conducting. I was in New Orleans to have a couple of lessons and it was kind of like graduation.

I have such happy memories of the Crescent City. An editor of Bob’s, a native of the place, was vacationing there while we were and showed us around.

Continue to enjoy.

Best to Joanna.

Beatrice