The Russian poet shook his head in disbelief. He had once been the first, in the now nearly forgotten days of communism, to brand the specter of Russian anti-Semitism in his famous poem “Babii Yar.” Now, here he sat, under the Don-Cesare-pink sky of Florida, in the middle of a cocktail party, alone or nearly alone, with the big bad world. He suffered the news of Rabin’s murder with an intensity that made his blue eyes deeper than the pastels around us.
“I must write about this!” he exclaimed, and I think that he meant everything: the passing of a peacemaker he admired, the indifference or seeming indifference of those around him, the unperturbed inanity of television. He was far from Russia, Yevtushenko, and even farther from the Soviet Union where he had once been as famous a man as the dead prime minister.
San Francisco’s Poet Laureate
San Francisco held a unique and noble event that ought to be emulated by cities around the country: the coronation of a poet laureate. The ceremony took place at the new and controversial San Francisco Library, which is reputed to have more computers than books. Mayor Willie Brown made the presentation with panache and patience. A mentally ill audience member screamed something about prisoners in Eritrea and a conspiracy against her dogs. But best of all, the laureate himself, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, delivered a blistering critique of his beloved city and bit eagerly the hand that anointed him.
San Francisco, Ferlinghetti told the crowd, is losing its soul to cars, a state he called Autogeddon. Gentrification, tacky money, and lack of respect for diversity and tradition are eating the city’s soul. He attacked the navy’s Blue Angels, which regularly shatter the peace. “The poetic life requires Peace, not War,” the poet proclaimed, “The poetic life of the City, our subjective life, the subjective life of the individual is constantly under attack by all the forces of materialist civilization, by all the forces of our military industrial perplex, and we don’t need these warplanes designed to kill and ludicrously misnamed the Blue Angels.”
The poet laureate made a series of concrete proposals to restore the soul of San Francisco, including giving pedestrians and bicyclists priority over automobiles, making the city a low-power alternative for radio and TV, with tax breaks for broadcasters, and uncovering the city’s creeks and rivers again to open riparian corridors to the bay. Then he urged everybody listening to vote YES on a proposition that would remove the Central Freeway from the skyline. He also called for the city to declare North Beach—where Ferlinghetti’s unique bookstore, City Lights, is located—a “historic district like the French Quarter in New Orleans.” I think that the poet was under the impression that the French Quarter was a car-free poetic zone, but I disabused him of that notion later when I told him the truth: The French Quarter has more cars than Formosan termites.
This marvelous display of conviction, poetry, and clarity was fresh water to an audience saturated, here as elsewhere, by the mind-boggling clichés of political scandal and the nauseating praise of business and money that waft from the open sewers of the media and politicians’ mouths. The return of the citizen-poet is a necessity these days, if only to remind everyone that it is possible to speak forcefully and clearly about things that matter to a community. Cities without poets are cities without soul.
Poetic Terrorism
A group calling itself the Assault Poetry Unit dropped off an assortment of suspicious packages at various offices around New Orleans, including that of the Times-Picayune newspaper, which evacuated its employees. The package turned out to be a watermelon with a four-page manifesto in it. The editor of the Times-Picayune was at the time deeply immersed in discussing the upcoming social season with the paper’s gossip columnist. They were forced instead to huddle under a freeway overpass with the manifesto, while the NOPD bomb squad dismantled the watermelon. The manifesto called for painting over the huge Marlboro Man ad at Decatur Street and replacing it with a poem by Ishmael Reed; it called for all Louisiana government speeches to be written and read in iambic pentameter; and it demanded that New Orleans police officers memorize and recite poems at regular intervals. It was perhaps this, more than anything else, that caused the police to treat the incident as a crime. The manifesto declared that “the era of poetic passivity is over,” an egregious statement in a city where passivity, poetic or no, is a sacred institution, especially in the summer. We are so passive here that we never even shoo the flies away from our po’ boys; even the donkeys pulling the tourists quit flicking their tails this time of the year; even more amazingly, no mayoral candidacies are declared at all, leaving the incumbent to take an unencumbered siesta. The energetic manifesto demanded, among yet more things, that the mayor read “The Brown Menace or Poem on the Survival of Roaches” by Audre Lord in its entirety on the seven o’clock news. Now, if someone would dare to wake Hizzoner up, that might solve the problem of what to put on the news, which has been all about how hot it is outside. Still, crime or no crime, you have to hand it to the Assault Poetry Unit. They ambulate, they agitate, they say something. In New Orleans, like in the rest of America now, that’s the height of social action.
Solution: Enivrez-Vous: The Bars of New Orleans
or with Kerri McCaffety in the Realm of Timelessness
On a timeless afternoon in late summer in the courtyard at the Napoleon House, a huge palmetto bug stared up at a famous poet from Colorado, and the man shrieked. As he drew his legs up on the chair, pointing to the small shining being down there, he asked, “What is THAT?”
“It’s a small hearse,” one of the six local bohemians said.
“It takes visible bites out of pears,” nodded another.
“It’s a beauty. We should enter him in the contest,” mused the poorest one among us, who was cadging drinks and always looking for strange ways to make a buck. The contest he was referring to takes place every year: It’s between Louisiana and Texas over the size of local roaches.
The light was suspended between day and night, the air was velvet-thick, there were beads of sweat on everyone’s forehead, and the palmetto kept looking up, antennae quivering like a recording device. And, indeed, I might contend that many of our outsized bugs are recording the secret history of New Orleans to pass on through the generations. Somebody has to record this history because, God knows, the humans who frequent the soulful dives of this licentious city are too busy making up stories to also remember them.
The lack of memory is amply supplanted by the wealth of verbiage that flows like the Mississippi through barrooms, saloons, music joints, cafés, and holes-in-the-wall. Some of this unbound orality is a way for natives of the same generation to recall the past, which in New Orleans never goes away but is continuously reinvented by storytelling. In old restaurants like Galatoire’s or Antoine’s, where the solemn food imparts an aristocratic aura to the drinking, the gentry counts its cousins and polishes its roots like the brass doorknobs on their uptown mansions. The waiters belong to families, and they cajole, correct, and dispense their own additions even as they glide in and out of the kitchen.
One lost patron who had not set foot in Galatoire’s for fifteen years recognized her waiter of yore, who remembered not only her drink and her favorite dish of soft-shell crab, but set also to remonstrate her for her absence. When my friend explained somewhat peremptorily that she had been in exile somewhere in California, the waiter said that he, too, had been absent for five of those fifteen years, five years during which he had raised a family in Florida, beaten back a heroin addiction, and then returned to the only place where he felt needed. These confessions took a good twenty minutes, but no one showed any impatience: The physical details of food and drink were only olives in the cocktail of intimacy that is the true purpose of such an establishment.
If one is concerned with time and efficiency, as they are understood in the harried labor camps of most American cities, one would do well to stay out of New Orleans bars, or New Orleans altogether. The watering holes of this city lay claim to different hours, and their interiors ch
ange with the hour. There are places for the afternoon and early evening, like the Napoleon House, where in the carefully maintained decay, locals can impress out-of-towners with the size of the roaches and the melancholy of a vivid and shadowy past. Napoleon could have lived here, if he hadn’t died, but the implication is that he does live here, upstairs perhaps, and that he might descend the curved staircase at any moment to join the conversation.
A summer afternoon in New Orleans can stretch to infinity over a few beers. One can daydream in the shimmering cool, with or without companions, until it is either late in the day or late in the century. It is a fact of New Orleans history that vast conspiracies have been hatched in the afternoons in bars and cafés. Besides the glorious failed plot to rescue the emperor himself from exile, numerous dreams of conquest and plunder rose in detail from local cups of absinthe, whiskey-laced coffee, and dark beer. Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop was where the famous pirate did business in plundered goods, and hatched depredations. A local adventurer twice conquered Nicaragua and declared himself emperor. The first U.S. war on Cuba was conducted from here by a certain Narcisso Lopez. Lee Harvey Oswald hung out in the French Quarter, broke and without much to do. I have myself sat with men who, for no visible reason, were seized by megalomaniac plans and visions of grandeur. I believe that the distortion of time, the twisted layout of the old buildings, the presence of stairwells, the slave quarters in the back of buildings, the wrought-iron balconies, the shameless flowering of perfumed vines, the stultifying heat, and the indolence of the natives are the causes of such impulses.
The establishments of the night are quite different. Jazz was born in them and they are full of sound. Their purpose is violent exhibitionism, voyeurism, and varieties of sexual congress. Café Brasil, which is the brainchild of a Brazilian named Adé, is like a tropical tree full of chattering birds. Once planted into the sidewalk of Frenchmen Street, this café-bar-dancehall magnetized the whole neighborhood, re-creating a creolism straight out of George Washington Cable, complete with Brazilian accents. On the opposite side of the street is the venerable Snug Harbor, where music is the foreground but Carnival the perpetual background.
One would do well, as I have done many times, to investigate a single place over time, at different times of the day. Molly’s on the Market, for instance, is home in the early afternoon to a lively Window Gang consisting of a varying crew of journalists, men-about-town, women-about-town, writers of fiction and poetry, mysterious characters either larger or brighter than life, led on by Jim Monaghan, proprietaire extraordinaire, Irish wit and provocateur. Monaghan’s extravagant personality imbues the day, but the night belongs to the tribes of the tattooed and pierced young. At night, a sloshed picture gallery displays itself with sensual impertinence. The beauty of Molly’s is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly’s (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided that they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere.
A reporter from The Wall Street Journal sought me out in an effort to explain a grim statistic that maintained New Orleanians live, on the average, ten years less than most Americans. We repaired to one of my favorite watering holes where we discussed this, and many other things besides, at great length. Around 3 A.M. an exquisitely beautiful young woman wrapped in a sarong that allowed for two multicolored reptiles to be seen entwined on her back, climbed on the bar and unwrapped herself, displaying to everyone the rest of the Laocoonian scene, in which the snakes, beginning at her coccyx, circled flowering vines to descend from her shoulders to her perineum. It was a magical moment, like a door opening suddenly to another world. The inkster of The Wall Street Journal was transfixed like a deer in the headlights of the moment, understanding in a flash that the grim statistic he was trying to explain was a figment of time, whereas what unfolded before him belonged to timelessness. This insight, thoroughly forgotten, illuminated yet some of his article, which said, “Yes, it’s true, but …”
Yes, it’s true that, statistically, we live less than people who go to bed at a plain hour in the joyless working hells of virtuous towns, but we live experientially twice as long. Having stayed up in the bars and saloons of New Orleans for a few years now, I can attest to their life-enhancing qualities. Some of them are veritable time machines. I know a three-hundred-year-old man who occupies the stool at the far end of the Saturn Bar. His longevity is the result of having no idea what time it is. He hasn’t seen a newspaper in two hundred years. He is plotting to rescue Napoleon from exile, boredom, and history.
Part Two
In Defense of Innocence
Bad Childhoods
I just read, for the first time, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood . It’s a great book, the revenge of a brilliant writer on those who made her childhood hell. McCarthy was an orphan. She spent the early years of her life in the custody of a horrid pair of relatives and in the chilling shadow of rich grandparents who had everything but human warmth to give.
Some of these people’s rules and regulations about children and life were still popular when I was growing up. In many of my friends’ houses there were rooms where we children were forbidden to enter. Whippings were quite common, and the father with the belt was universally feared. Luckily, I didn’t have one, and my stepfather’s occasional efforts had little effect. I remember also dinners where the paterfamilias got to eat all kinds of delicacies while the children ate some thin borscht. Some kids couldn’t play with their own toys so they wouldn’t “wear them out.”
Happily, these kinds of cruelties have gone out of fashion for the most part. Childhoods are doubtlessly still difficult, but not horrid. My own kids were overindulged in almost everything. My oldest, Lucian, who’s now an engineer, used to create awful scenes if he was interrupted from gluing his billion-piece models by something as trivial as dinner. He would be dragged kicking and screaming from his glue vapors in order to be given chemicalfree nutrition. My other son, Tristan, benefited from such liberty that he needed only to make a phone call to spend the week drumming in the woods. Parents have relaxed considerably since McCarthy’s days, and the coming generations should be grateful. Surely there will always be childhood sorrow because children’s pain is magnified hundredfold by their lack of reference, but it won’t be of the intensity that caused Mary McCarthy to cry her spendid cri de coeur.
In light of this, what is one to make of all the adults who now claim they were raped by their parents who cooked and ate their playmates in satanic ceremonies? Are these just the paranoid delusions of unhappy children or are the monster parents of yore reincarnated even more monstrously because so many parents now are kinder and more indulgent? These are all questions to be raised in a course on unhappy childhood memoirs, which I will teach sometime. I plan to reread Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, too.
Innocence Lost Under Capitalism!
Dilema is a Romanian cultural journal that calls itself a “transition weekly.” It has chronicled the changes from state socialism to nouveau capitalism in all its aspects. One of the most touching discoveries it has made is that capitalism has been stealing the innocence of Romanian children. Professor Dorel Zaica from Bucharest had been asking children questions since the 1970s, things like: “What is fog?” “What is peace?” “What are fingernails for?,” and “Why do cat’s eyes light up at night?” In the 1970s, during the Ceauescu dictatorship, children said things like, “Fog is a lit-up darkness,” and “Grass is a creature that wants to beautify our country,” and “Peace is a silence made by a man with a trumpet.” The professor continued asking his questions after the collapse of the dictatorship and noticed that by 1996, the kids were becoming very well informed and quite reasonable. If the kids of 1970 said that the picture on a stamp was a drawing of the street where the letter was supposed to go, the kids of 1996 said things like:
“A stamp is an identification card for a letter.” The kids of 1970 believed that “old people’s hair got white because their hearts were getting white,” but in 1996, they said that “Hair gets white in old age, instead of blue or purple, so we won’t look ridiculous on the street like some old women.” Mr. Cesar-Paul Badescu, the editor of this children’s column, notes that today children have “lost their spontaneity and childish irrationality.” They are well-informed by television, they are witty, intelligent, have ecological attitudes even—in other words, “they are just like adults.”
I grew up in the information-void of the precapitalist era in Romania, and I remember the magical power of knowing very few facts and using my imagination to make up the world. In fact, I still avoid facts like the plague in the hope that I can stay sufficiently childish to amuse myself and others. Alas, the juggernaut of ponderous truths, minute observations, news, and vérité-floods keep rolling in and evicting whatever stubborn facility for invention we once had.
One can’t feel really sorry for the newly plugged-in Romanian children, but how can one not miss an assertion like, “Time is something you don’t know if it’s coming or passing.”
But it’s passing, passing. That’s the truth.
The Unabomber in School
One of the cruelest assignments I ever gave my students was to read the entire Unabomber Manifesto from The Washington Post. In addition, they were to write an essay on it. It is a testimony to their toughness that they got through the whole text without dropping the class. To tell you the truth, and this confession will get me in big trouble, I couldn’t get past the middle of it; my eyes glazed over, the pencil fell from my hand, and I fell into an agitated sleep wherein I stood before my class, which had grown to millions of people somehow, and they were all shouting at me: You Are Trying To Bore Us to Death! Be that as it may, their observations were right on target: one person could actually hear a Midwestern accent in the perfectly bland sentences. Another wrote a little play in which she had him living in a remote cabin in the mountains. Between us we sleuthed him up pretty good but then the class decided that one of us, a kid who didn’t speak much, was really the Unabomber. And, by God, when he pulled the hood of his jersey over his head, he WAS it. One student, a young writer who works at one of New Orleans’s finest restaurants, told us that she had asked a shy Cuban dishwasher who had a crush on her to download the manifesto from the Internet. It was as if she’d consented to marry him. The shy dishwasher turned out to be a computer freak who lived in a basement full of electronics and had an active fantasy life that my student hoped she wasn’t too big a part of. In any case, he brought her the manifesto plus a foot-high stack of related documents: comments on the manifesto, bomb recipes, poetry. She staggered under the load but one look at his beaming face and she knew it: Xavier, the shy Cuban dishwasher, was the Unabomber! Now that the actual item seems to be in custody, we, seekers after knowledge, are bereft. On the one hand, we are relieved to never have to wade through such tedious prose; on the other, we miss the excitement of suspecting each other of being terrorists. Ah, well.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 7