It was instantly recognizable as the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe standing, if memory serves, over an open ventilation grate somewhere in New York City. I have to confess to not being a fan. Was the image a press stunt or a scene from a film? Who else was present? Was it an actor or a husband? And if it was the husband, was it Arthur Miller or Joe DiMaggio? Was she still young, or was she older?
I couldn’t say for sure. I saw her escape cartoon gangsters with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and only once again, in the twilight of her short career, alongside the creaking shells of the once fine actor Montgomery Clift and the usually hamlike Clark Gable.
Mel stood on the crate in her heels and bubbled vapidly and breathed in and out suggestively, and a fresh crop of boys hollered and catcalled. She made a little more money in the second act.
I left the show at the end of the second part. Mel saw me leave. I waved once and she tossed a kiss back with all the requisite Hollywood Va Va Voom! she could muster, which, in her Norma Jean guise, was not inconsiderable.
The Square was hot and hectic. A high school marching band played “Smoke on the Water” outside the bleached stucco façade of the cathedral, and tourists stood under the palm trees and waited in line for the horse-drawn carriages to fill and depart. A black man in matching yellow sweatpants and T-shirt played achingly slow hymns on a trumpet under a green café awning. As he ended each rendition, he pointed to the sky and mouthed the words “thank you” as he beamed beatifically upward. I placed my five dollars in his baseball cap. He nodded his head and informed me that I had displayed impeccable taste. I thanked him for the compliment.
“I know where you got them shoes.” A voice called out to me two blocks southwest.
I didn’t bother to turn around as I answered. “Decatur and St. Louis.”
This was getting to be much too easy.
* * *
The ferry to Algiers Point in the later part of the afternoon was almost empty. I paid the exact amount and sat down outside. The loading and unloading took longer than the voyage itself, even allowing for the gentle progress the boat made across the width of the Mississippi River.
This was only my second time in Algiers. The ferry terminal was much more elaborate than I remembered. There was a huge billboard with a map for tourists and a helpful numbering system to get them and their money from ferry to shops to bars to shops and back onto the ferry and back across to the city.
I followed the road to the left of the terminal, then climbed up the grass on the side of the levee to the footpath running along the highest point, where I could gaze out across the water.
I remembered that Algiers had sustained wind damage to roofs and broken trees but little actual flooding during Katrina. It had however suffered a blow or two to its reputation. After the storm, a number of its minority white population had armed themselves and cordoned off small sections of the neighborhood, threatening the majority black residents at gunpoint, firing their weapons into the night. There were witnesses who spoke of black bullet-ridden bodies in the terrifying aftermath of no electrical power and little police presence. The charred remains of a black man were discovered in the trunk of a car abandoned on the west bank of the levee.
Algiers was neither alone nor remarkable in the days that followed. Two black men were shot to death by police on a bridge in eastern New Orleans six days after the flood. One of the men was mentally disabled, and he was stomped and kicked as he lay on the ground dying.
It was and still is almost impossible to separate fact from myth during the immediate aftershock of the storm, and tales of destruction and death have gradually given way to stories of resilience and rebuilding. The desire for healing can clearly overcome a great deal, but the long line of criminal indictments stands as a grim and well-documented record of hatred and brutality.
Inside a roadside bar, a few late-afternoon customers nursed happy-hour drinks and squinted some, as the unforgiving sunlight filtered through the dirty windows and a seven-piece band went through the last part of a sound check.
The upright bass player was black and tall and dreadlocked and friendly and we talked at the bar when they were finally satisfied with the mix. I bought him a porter from Michigan. It turned out he made his own. We talked of many things but mostly we talked of beer. He’d drunk some of ours in Chicago and he approved. We talked more beer and we talked Chicago and then we talked Colorado. He named a few places in the state where they had played. They’d been to New England and Northern Michigan recently. We talked beer and we talked music.
All seven members of the band lived in New Orleans, which he claimed they loved, but where they seldom performed.
“It’s a wild place to hear music but it sucks to try to make a living playing clubs and bars. No place charges a cover. Tourists know they can get it for free. Even a five-dollar charge makes folks go someplace else. Club owners know how much good music is around so they can be cheap and they can be choosy. We get gigs during the festivals and Mardi Gras for the exposure, but that’s all.”
“Why do you stay here?”
He looked at me as if I were thick.
“It’s my home, and it fucking lives and breathes music. When we tour out in Colorado we make money. We’re on the road for most of the summer. If we charged a five-dollar cover on tour people would figure we were shitty and not show up. So we charge them forty and sell them a CD for fifteen and everyone is happy. I teach keyboarding to second through fifth graders at two charters four mornings a week during term time. My girlfriend teaches pre-K all day at one of the schools. I blow trombone at every second line I can get myself to in the afternoons and weekends. Drunk tourists always want their second line weddings. It’s an hour of my time and a hundred bucks a pop. A good weekend’s second lining will cover our rent. We play the same songs and get some exercise. My girlfriend teaches dance to at-risk kids during the week in the evenings and I stay home and practice and watch our three-year-old. We have to pay a sitter during the day but she’s great and lives close. She’s teaching my daughter Vietnamese so she can be an interpreter if we ever have to go fight there again.” He smiled and shook his head. “It’s all a mess of work.”
“Maybe you’ll get a break.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Are there breaks?”
“Sure. All the Marsalis family are doing just fine for themselves. Shorty, too. The Nevilles pretty much own this town. Rebirth are a fine band doing real well. None of them are working as hard as I am. All that New Orleans bounce has probably already been and gone and I missed me that chance, but I’ll survive that nasty shit till the next big thing comes down. You need to check yourself out some Big Easy street music.”
“What should I listen to?”
“Get some compilation discs. Can’t go too far wrong with the local labels. There’s good music stores on Frenchmen and Chartres for you to go and check out.”
“Do they carry your stuff?”
He smiled me a big smile. “They sure do. But I got some in the case right here. Ten bucks even. Giving you the preshow discount. Cash only. No tax on that.”
“Will you sign it for me?”
“Be my honor. Sign you up for the mailing list too. Next time we’re in Boulder you can stop on by and see us. You still making that Art Nitro?”
“We are indeed.”
“Got yourselves a choice brew there.”
“Thank you.” I changed the subject. “When do you guys play?”
“Not till late.” As he spoke he ripped the thin plastic off the CD and signed the front of the cover with a blue sharpie and a flourish. I handed him my money and we shook hands on the deal.
I walked back to the terminal. The ferry was just arriving. It would be a while before it turned around, but I was in no hurry.
A block down the road, a British police box blocked the entrance to a bar. Even though Da
leks had scared the living shit out of me when I was little, it was a temptation.
* * *
Mel was gone when I got back to the Square. Her bike was chained against the fence. This time her crate was pushed under the front tire. Inside lay a few strands of beads on top of what I would now refer to as her Blanche outfit. Wherever she had gone, she had gone there in her Marilyn persona.
For some reason this made me more nervous.
I asked one of the robots where she was. He chose not to break character. Our conversation was short and one-sided. The square was growing quieter. The trumpet player had moved on as the line for tables outside the coffee stand had shrunk. Jugglers were assembling outside the church, but they were still in the talking up part of their act, working the crowd, and they showed no sign of getting started anytime soon.
The assembled crowd was sparse and listless at the tail end of a hot day.
I headed northwest on Decatur. There were several bars in the first block. One was a loud franchise for distracted families, named for a singer of modest skills and formidable business acumen. It struck me as altogether too bright and slickly wholesome for Mel. There was a grocery store and a T-shirt shop and a voodoo emporium, but in truth every type of store would happily sell you a T-shirt. I looked in each window, but she wasn’t visible.
Where had she gone? My guess was not too far. She’d left her bike and her costume behind. Her bike lock was cheap and flimsy and her stuff in the crate was unprotected and accessible to anyone.
I decided to keep on walking for another block.
She was inside the last bar on the left-hand side of the street. Their table was near the back of the room, half-hidden behind a pair of wood-framed glass doors. They opened to a courtyard where the waitstaff and the cooks smoked together and gave the busboys all manner of shit. The barroom was exposed beams of dark dried-out wood and powdering plaster walls water damaged decades before Katrina had taken the Quarter and shaken it some, before it moved on, splattering the lower-lying sections of town all the harder.
I will never understand the topography of this city, where it was possible to be a few feet from the banks of the Mississippi and still stay dry when the storm hit.
Mel’s face was silly and florid behind a sea of empty glasses. Her eyes were half closed. The three boys at the table looked barely past their teen years. Two were clearly drunk but could still move, yet kept drinking hard. Their arm movements were synchronized, each word or two requiring the clinking of glasses. The third was almost passed out beside Mel. His mouth was open in a vacant half-smile, and his head was partially thrown back. One of his arms lay loose across her shoulder.
I walked closer to their table. When I was near enough to see that his other hand was up inside her skirt, and that one of her hands was inside his trousers and furiously moving, I stopped.
I had several thoughts:
It was none of my business and I should leave.
I could hit one of them before I left.
They were all consenting adults, although three of them were close to children.
It was none of my business and I should definitely leave.
Maybe he was her boyfriend.
Discount that last thought. Don’t be so fucking stupid.
It really doesn’t concern you, so why don’t you just walk the fuck away?
And why do you care so much anyway?
As I reached the door of the bar, a waiter smirked at me and asked if I wanted a table in the back. I told him to fuck off and I felt very slightly better for a split second.
* * *
In the record store on Frenchmen, the gentle goateed soul behind the glass counter looked anxious to answer any possible question I might have on the indigenous music of the region, but I didn’t have the energy to let him loose. I stood in the Local Tunes section in the front of the store and stared vacantly at a handful of record covers. It was hopeless. I picked up OffBeat at the door and told the gentleman I would return another time.
Across the road stood the restaurant Nye had told me about.
It would have to wait. I still wasn’t hungry enough.
Two thoughts occurred:
Leaving this shitty town suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Beyond any rational sense of proportion, seeing Mel in that bar had bothered me.
* * *
For want of anything better to do, I started walking, back to the corner of Burgundy and Dumaine, where Logan Kind and I had both done our streetside serenading. The market was closing up for the day. Inside the store no one recognized this one-time local troubadour. I bought my shrimp po’ boy and Zapp’s and stood outside under the canvas to eat. The bread was still warm. The chips were unbelievable. Then I thought about Mel and her boys again and lost most of my appetite.
I threw half the sandwich in the garbage and walked back through the Quarter eating the rest of my chips and wondering where the nearest bike shop was located.
There was a hardware store on Rampart only a few blocks away. I bought the cheapest cutters they had. It was all I would need.
Mel’s bike took a half second to cut loose. Once again the robot said nothing, but I could sense he was trying not to get caught watching.
“You can relax. I’m giving it back to her.” I got up in his face and spoke the words slowly and clearly. He might have thought about a smile. Her crate of crap was still there and attached to the front of the bike with two pink bungees.
Her bike rode pretty much as expected. I’m used to riding a police special Cannondale back in Boulder.
At the bike store on Frenchmen they sold good locks. The guy in the store wore a red and black bike shirt with a winged demon drinking a beer. He was far from impressed with my ride as he walked me to the door.
“The lock’s worth more,” he observed.
“It’s a loaner,” I told him defensively.
“It’s a piece of shit,” he calmly stated.
* * *
The knock on my front door came close to the morning.
She looked pretty much how I imagined she would. She also smelled less than fresh.
“You took my bike away Mister Tourist.”
“I was worried someone would steal it and take all your stuff. How did you know it was me?”
“This is my way home remember?”
“How do you feel now?”
There was silence. She was thinking her way through it. That I knew how she felt probably meant that I knew more than she probably wanted to talk about.
“Thank you for bringing it here. You cut my lock.”
“It wasn’t very hard.”
“No. I suppose not.” She wasn’t that interested.
“The new lock is a much better one. It uses a four-number combination. I’ll change it for you. It’s still set on the default.” I was starting to sound like an idiot.
Her bike was chained to the rails at the front of the house. I pulled the lock free and held it up.
“What’s your lucky number?” I asked her.
She looked at me for a long time. “Do I fucking look like I have a lucky number?”
I said nothing and went inside to get her crate. I handed it to her. She took it and still said nothing.
“Do you want to get changed?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The other dress might be cleaner. I can lend you some other things.”
She shook her head. “I really need to go now.”
We said goodbye. On the sidewalk she got slowly onto her bike.
“Which one are you?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Which one? Marilyn or Blanche? Which one are you?”
Her laugh was hollow. “Maybe I’m both of them. They were both fucked up.”
I told he
r, “I like Blanche better.”
“Is that so?”
I nodded.
“And why is that Mister Tourist?”
“I just do.”
And then she managed a tiny smile. “So maybe you can tell me something they both had in common?”
I was ready for that. “Laurence Olivier.”
“Very good Mister Tourist.”
“It’s Tom.”
“I know it is. Good night, Tom.”
“It’s morning.”
“No it isn’t.”
And she left.
I watched her as she rode her bike along the length of Elysian Fields as the sun rose in the sky.
Eleven
There wasn’t much point in going back to bed.
The café where I could replenish the dangerously low levels of boudin in my body was still closed, but the outside tables and chairs were spread across the narrow sidewalk and were available for sitting and waiting.
I sat down with my copy of OffBeat and tried to read as I waited. There was an ad near the front, for the record store I’d been to on Frenchmen. There was also one for another shop on Chartres. I assumed these were the ones the bass player in Algiers had been talking about. It was time to find myself some New Orleans street music. Help would be welcome, although OffBeat might as well have been written in Braille for all the comprehension it offered to the old, the vacationing, and the non-hipsterish.
Speaking of hipsters, the magazine cover showed one aging white specimen in an impossibly loud suit and a bowler hat. The story said he was traveling through South Louisiana and Southeast Texas on a mission to soak up the culture and trace the origins of classic swamp rock from the fifties onward. His pilgrimage would begin with the seminal recordings: the early cuts from Cookie and the Cupcakes and Bobby Charles. He was an Englishman, naturally, in his early sixties and hailing from the town of Crawley, which was just south of London. Back home he owned a mail-order record company and two small independent labels: Bayou Teche Tunes featured the finest in vintage swamp rock, and Los Hoyos Records put out modern day carnival music from east Cuba, principally from the town of Santiago. Both of these niche genres were apparently alive and flourishing in the United Kingdom and Germany.
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