When I first got to Memphis, I walked from the Peabody Hotel to the Memphis College of Art on Poplar Avenue. I walked past the county jail, the juvenile detention hall, ten bail bondsmen, fenced-in vacant lots, the boarded up Tri-State Liqueur, six pawn shops, one psychiatric hospital/ prison, two halfway houses, the Alcohol Drug & Treatment Center, the AIDS-Support Services headquarters, two very unsettling housing projects, and the most lively business, something called Joe Gins, advertising CANADIAN HIGH TEN MILE. Not an Elvis in sight, but surely a place for the blues. I had the vision that Jesus himself did in fact sing his parables. The music was lost. Still, there wasn’t a taxi or an Elvis in sight on Poplar that Sunday—they were all at Graceland or at the Memphis Museum of Art or being interviewed.
Which brings me to El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, whose hip appropriation of Elvis music to the cause of the downtrodden was well analyzed at the conference. I like El Vez because he really rocks and has a good voice, but I can’t say that I’m so crazy about his message-lyrics. There is an authoritarian cast to them. Their radicalism is only subversive in the white world of Elvis fans. If I were one of the subjects of his lyrics, I’d feel condescended to—like, do I really need to get my Chicano Pride 101 from rock ‘n’ roll? I would demand more mystery, more detail, less sloganeering. This is just carping, though, because in the world of infinite white Elvises, El Vez’s activity is quite Christ-like. He is not so much an Elvis devotee as an Elvis competitor, the Antichrist.
The academic Elvis we’ve been setting up here all week, the meta-Elvis, the all-encompassing, revolutionary Elvis, the subsuming Elvis, is also the Antichrist. Many brilliant comments have been made for the purpose of restoring the “real Elvis” from the rumbling belly of consumer culture where he’s been more than half digested, sequins and all. Some of us feel that the postmortem Elvis metastasis has nearly obliterated an American revolutionary. We are attempting to cleanse, purify, and restore a precise Elvis for classroom use. However, I am afraid that this Elvis is just another in a long series of postmortem Elvises.
Several things mattered to me, significantly, that week. Foremost was the music. I always liked Elvis songs, but I was too late to feel orgasmic about any of it. Hearing the songs there, contextualized by all this fever and color, I really, really dug them. Second, I gained a healthy respect for both the historical Elvis and the phenomena he represents. I mean respect in the sense that provocative ideas were generated, worthy of further reflection. I particularly like Professor Vernon Chadwick’s notion of “trans-cultural localism,” because as a trans-cultured Southerner, I feel included. If the conference was about liberating Elvis the liberator from the tabloids, it was quite successful. I was equally interested, however, in the impersonators’ contest, where the pathos of aging in America was brought to me more forcefully than at our academic discussions. I saw the whole vast vistas of face-lifts, the palliatives of Las Vegas, the fidelity to that first orgasm stretch into the future like the mega-retirement communities of Florida and Arizona. Watching the grandmas throw themselves at the sweating gyrating hunks, hoping to break down the Doors of Meat to the past, is enough to make me cry.
In the end, Elvis is a kind of measuring device, an E-meter that registers class, age, and humor in America. One of our chief sources of cultural torment in this country is the fake class distinctions brought about by consumerism. The relentless production of ersatz goods attempts to fool the working poor into thinking that they live just like the rich: The stuff looks the same, even though it’s Naugahyde instead of natural fiber. Until, of course, Naugahyde acquires chic value, and then the poor have to go to the next ersatz level. The E-meter is a palimpsest of images: the original is working-class Southern white trash and the Liberator, then there is Elvis (still living) parodying himself pathetically in a simulacrum of patriotism, the ersatz Elvis of Vegas, and then come all the high and low postmortem Elvises. Incidentally, Patti Carroll introduced me to a Mrs. Hunt who lives in Rome and has discovered, in a well-known Giotto fresco, a pre-Elvis masquerading as St. Francis. So there is that.
I will end this by revealing to you the contents of a note found by a friend of a friend in Elvis’s wastebasket, shortly before he died. He gave me this note because he trusted my academic credentials and knew that I’d be going to the conference. The note says: “Give me a break.” That’s all. “Give me a break.” I think we have done that, literally: broken off another Elvis from the Elvis tree. “Give me a break.” Yeah, right. Elvis, you’re not in charge. You never were.
The Millennium Pies
Here is a typical Midwestern family waiting for Y2K: large mom and dad and five chunky offspring, all holding shotguns and pistols before a mound of Ramen soups, Campbell’s soup cans, cracker boxes, and condensed milk. “We are ready,” they tell the reporter, and you can see that they are. You try to get close to that Ramen, buddy, and your brains will be all over the cornfield.
The people in this magazine pic, like tens of thousands of other determined survivalists, are stocking up on dry and canned goods all over the North American continent, happy that, finally, they can show the world that they are somebody, that come what may, their determined overweight family unit will outlast the millennium glitch.
It’s a new craze, but the urge to be self-sufficient, shoot intruders, and become the stuff of legends is as old as the Puritans and at least as old as Hollywood. The Western drive was all about dry food and rifles and surviving the Indians, who were the main glitch back then. The only difference is that the Indians were real and the food wasn’t radiated for longevity. Back then, you rarely posed for magazines because there was no time.
The new survivalists have barely mastered the basics of the computers they fear will end their world. People in Third World countries, who never even saw computers, have no idea what the fuss is all about. If the electricity fails, as it does every other day, they light candles or go out and look at the moon. If they want to eat, they dig something out of the garden or eat somebody’s family pet. If banks fail, they take cash out of the mattress and pay somebody to fix the well. If airplanes fall out of the sky, they look for nice debris. None of their kin were on board.
At the same time that countless Americans are readying themselves to put up armed resistance against Ramen raiders, other countless Americans are hoping to have a baby on the stroke of midnight 2000. The winner of the timeliest millennium baby gets all kinds of unspecified perks and a lifetime of something to talk about.
Now, here is another picture: the baby is coming, the hospital staff and visitors are cheering, the countdown to the New Year has started and … the Y2K glitch kicks in. All the lights go out, everybody starts screaming, the baby pushes out into the darkness. The hospital generator kicks in and, in the flickering light, the distraught padre bites off the umbilical cord. The baby is held aloft and a battery-operated camera flashes. It’s in the newspapers next day.
Meanwhile, in the Midwest, the family has been firing into the dark because they thought they’d heard something. They had. It was the new millennium, laughing at them. And they keep firing at it.
Human Remedies Against the Devil
Cemeteries are reassuring: they provide continuity. The dearly departed do not need as much room as they used to, but they still have an address. They are available twenty-four hours a day in any weather. There may be fog draping their little house or a downpour trying to drown it, but invariably the occupants are home. This may be small comfort to the widow who never could keep the living husband home, but it’s a promissory note that things will be different in heaven. Catholic tombstones are waiting rooms for the Day of Judgment. In their little perennial houses, the dead rehearse their defense for the Almighty and rest for the day when they will be called to rise and utilize their creaky bodies again. The cities of the dead are busy places, but like cities of the living, their character varies. And the souls, of course, do not stay put. They voyage.
New Orleans cemeteries are like New Orleans
: They swing between destitution and opulence but always with style. Even the humblest marker in potter’s field projects something native: The pathos of scrawled names and the black bordered cross rhymes with the willow and the mossy oak in the cloudy sky. The mightiest marble in the Metairie Cemetery says no more than this, though loudly instead of whispering. The dead in New Orleans are interred above the muddy gumbo of the soil to keep them from slipping away in the water. The dead are drier than the living, and that accounts for their air of superiority. They have shelter, eternity, and are cautiously but faithfully attended by the living. They are also more numerous than the living—the reward of an old city—and love to congregate, haunt, and dance. Only the thinnest film, a razor-edge of twilight, separates them from their descendants. The clouds are no mere romantic props but portents and soul carriers. They drift over the graves, ghostly tour boats from which the dead view their own abodes as well as the living.
On All Saints’ Day in the city of New Orleans, the kin of the departed gather in cemeteries to clean the tombs, wipe the grime of late-twentieth-century air, brush away oak leaves, uproot impertinent banana trees, pick off cigarette butts and used syringes, and scrub clean the graffiti that, like a new force of nature, besets even the noblest. The keepers of the graves are mostly old women these days, who remember their mamère and papère and granmère and grampère. Their own resting places await them in the family crypts. To make room, the oldest bones are lowered into a pit at the bottom so that the recently dead are assured a berth until they too are displaced by another generation. Long before the actual passing, great care is taken in deciding which berth one will lie on. Ending up next to a disliked relative can sour eternity. The grave keepers listen to the bones, remember, plot, pray, and scrub.
The first dead were, of course, the Creoles, French and Spanish nobles, who had the misfortune to settle in the fetid swamp from which the city rose. Later Europeans, notably Irish and German peasants, died of yellow fever and cholera. Some of the nobles perished young, and when their epitaphs contain the word honor, it usually means that they were killed in a duel. The scions of colonial nobility carried the manners of old Europe all the way to their graves, but the occasion for the duels belonged wholly to the New World. At St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, for instance, there is one Louis Philogene Duclos, whose stone proclaims, “Ci gît Louis Duclos, ensigne dans les Troupes des États de l’Amérique, fils lêgitime de Rodolphe Joseph Duclos et de Marie Lucie de Reggi. Né le 18 Août 1791, décédé le 4 Juillet 1811.” Louis died before the War of 1812, so it isn’t quite clear to which United States troop he belonged, but one thing is very clear: the word légitime means that he was the result of a liaison between a French Creole and a quadroon mistress. We will never know if Louis was recognized before he died, but in the end he was brought into the bosom of the family. Creole men had quadroon and octoroon mistresses whose offspring were occasionally admitted to the family tomb, though never to the family table. The neighborhood where these women lived, in pretty cottages smothered in jasmine and draped in weeping willows, still stands. Their graves are less easily found. Louis’s mother lies shrouded in anonymity, though one might easily imagine Louis’s father defending her honor in a duel. The complexities of love, lust, honor, and skin color swirl in a fine mist around the gravestones of New Orleans.
Those mythic beginnings, still visible in the oldest cemeteries, like St. Louis No. 1, translated into yet more extravagant complexities later. At the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, New Orleans became North America’s pleasure dome. Out of its fleshpots rose jazz, America’s music. The institution of the mistress was reaffirmed and some of the later mistresses were not to be trifled with even in death. Josie Arlington was a notorious fille de joie who carefully designed her tomb at the Metairie Cemetery to tower over the more modest resting place of her married lover and his legitimate wife. Josie’s image struck two flambeaux on each side to project a rose light that made it seem as if she haunted the place. It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one’s story, as well as one’s soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.
The graves of New Orleans follow social standing, just like their residents had. I have not looked rigorously into the distribution of angels, but I assume that they were commissioned by the wealthy. Marching past St. Roch Cemetery one time around twilight, with a group of antifascist protesters, I was struck by the proliferation of angels massed in the sky. They were in flight, taking off toward each other, as animated as large winged creatures ever get. Their milky white flesh glowed, their robes came undone, the flowers they held glistened, their hair was on fire. David Duke, the racist against whom we were marching, was defeated the next day. Miracles are very much part of St. Roch: look at the prosthetic limbs left by the faithful in the St. Roch chapel. They were healed and made strong enough to march against racists. Well, maybe. Faith may have no politics, but it does seem to belong disproportionately to the poor. Which makes it all the more fair to employ the angels of the rich to the purposes of justice.
The majority of the tombstones of New Orleans are sans anges: they resemble baking ovens. They are called “burial ovens,” in fact, and one might easily imagine the dead, laid out like loaves of bread, baking quietly in the sun. Perhaps when they are crisp like the baguettes at La Madeleine, they are allowed to leave their graves and frolic with the rest. “We bake in purgatory,” Dante said, “before we are set on the Table of Judgment, / sure to hear our story again.”3
Some tombs are made from the remains of other tombs, whose owners have vanished. In 1866, the famous Theatre d’Orléans, which had amused the Creoles for decades, burned down, and its bricks were bought by the owner of the Louisa Street Cemetery who made them into burial ovens. It might not seem so unusual then to hear someone say, as I did, that New Orleans cemeteries “sing at night.” Of course they do, and this is why people sing even louder: to drown out the dead. Any given night on Rampart Street you can audit the competition: the singers and bands making merry at the Funky Butt are barely rising above the din of dead choruses and howling cats across the street at St. Louis No. 1.
New Orleans cemeteries sing at night, but they are pretty quiet in the morning when I take my coffee there. I started using places of eternal rest for my private coffeehouses way back in my adolescence, when getting away from the horrible noises of adults was a necessity. In my hometown of Sibiu, in Transylvania, Romania, there was a German Catholic cemetery that was as angel-rife and ornate as any in New Orleans. I wrote poetry there among listing urns and reposing burghers, and dreamt of the day when I would take a girl there to show her my favorite inscriptions. That day came soon enough, and I surrendered my virginity to our resident junior-high nymph, Marinella, on the grave of one Herr Titus Bruckenthal who’d been, if memory serves right, a candlemaker. When I first moved to New Orleans, I was overjoyed to be living within walking distance of Lafayette Cemetery, which has a fair number of Germans baking in it. The Lafayette Cemetery also sits kitty-corner from the apartment house where F. Scott Fitzgerald, age 23, is rumored to have begun his first novel, This Side of Paradise. From his window, Scotty, possibly hungover on Prohibition gin, would have had a pretty good view of the tombstones in the Lafayette. “All right,” he might have addressed the entombed, “it ain’t so hot on this side of paradise.”
I once took a Polish artist, Krystof, to the Lafayette for a cup of coffee. We sat on the funeral slab of a certain Tadeusz Millhauser, and he told me that he led a student strike in Warsaw during the late days of communism. He had taken his fellow students to the old Warsaw cemetery, and together they had studied true Polish history from tombstones, a history very unlike the lies told in the propaganda textbooks of their schools. The dead l
istened carefully, taking notes for their nightly meets. I wouldn’t be surprised if Krystof’s story became a song that traveled throughout the world of the dead and was instrumental in bringing down the Berlin Wall a few weeks later. A footnote was that I took Krystoff to Commander’s Palace across the street from the cemetery and they told us that they were booked until I explained that my friend was Václav Havel, the future president of Czechoslovakia. The dead in New Orleans, in addition to singing, pay for stories with restaurant reservations.
A certain dead waiter at Antoine’s, one of the city’s grand restaurants, caused quite a problem when he died without designating a successor. The way a rabbi from New Jersey put it, “I lived in New Orleans for five years and I finally got my own waiter at Antoine’s. Then he died, and I moved. I had no idea how to get another waiter. Mine came to me from a blue-blooded New Orleanian, who bequeathed him to me when he had to move to Paris to take care of his dying sister.” Waiting tables at Antoine’s is in itself a hereditary position, passed on from father to son. A true New Orleans blue blood must have a waiter as well as a tombstone, and a waiter must have a true blue-blooded client as well as a tombstone. For myself, the pleasure of eating in an old restaurant is intimately linked to the comfort of death. “Ah,” I think to myself at Antoine’s, or Commander’s Palace, or any of the grand establishments, “One hundred years ago a man sat where I sit now, had a fine meal, and died.” This makes me inexpressibly happy. I feel that my pleasure is authorized by continuity, that it is not ephemeral the way it is in all those horrid, brand-spanking-new, automobile-riddled, and soullless clusters that pass for cities in America.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 4