Feet on the Street

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  And there is a ramshackle-looking place across from the French Market called Fiorella’s where not long ago I got three pieces of chicken with macaroni and cheese and vegetable du jour and a side of olive salad (chopped olives, pimientos, and spices) for $6.95. And my sweetheart, Joan, had the same. At the next table, only the woman was into it. “You’re going to eat turnip greens?” the man said. “Sure am,” she said. “I’m in New Orleans. Can’t eat turnip greens in Davenport, Iowa.” Excellent turnip greens, too. One waitress had tattoos all up and down both arms and was wearing a lacy black low-cut top, a short denim skirt, and a wholesome-sexy-friendly smile. The other one was putting on being grumpy, so some regulars could rag her into smiling.

  “This is that home cooking,” said one of the regulars.

  “Huh,” said the grumpy-looking waitress. “You ain’t never been in no home.”

  In Fiorella’s you could hear a street band playing outside: a beat-up old tuba, a clarinet, a trumpet, a drum with cymbals, and a man singing a song about taking an arm from an old armchair and a cork from an old wine bottle, and from a horse some hair, “put it all together and you get more lovin’ than I ever get from you.” Doesn’t sound like a romantic song, I know, but it was that afternoon. At our table, we were both into it.

  Way up into the Bywater area on Chartres is a homey neighborhood place, Elizabeth’s, whose motto is “Real Food. Done Real Good.” Great breakfasts, and lunches whose sides include the mirliton, a green, pear-shaped vegetable sort of like a bell pepper, which I have never seen on a menu outside of New Orleans. But by now you may be stuffed. Before you get to Elizabeth’s, you might want to linger along a certain block of Chartres. It’s the block between two cross streets whose names enable you to say that you spent some time suspended between Piety and Desire.

  Linger for say about a minute. And then if you’re like me you start thinking of New Orleans as a woman who is sultry and tolerant and always feeds you great. And it’s good-bye, Piety.

  Lagniappe with Food

  THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE

  The Progresso soup company derives from members of the Taormina and Uddo families who came to New Orleans from Sicily in the early 1900s. I once heard Michael Uddo, formerly chef of the lamented G&E Courtyard Grill, tell how immigrants would arrive from Palermo in the nineteenth century carrying lemons and spices in their pockets. “My grandmother was something of a battle-ax,” Uddo said, “so her father gave a dowry of two tickets to America, and spent my grandparents’ wedding night in their cabin so my grandfather wouldn’t jump ship.” When the grandfather arrived in New Orleans, he found that the Italian community couldn’t find decent tomato sauce anywhere in the country, so he made it, packaged it in cans he rescued from the garbage, and delivered it door to door. Then he bought a donkey that knew, from previous employment, the way to all the wholesale groceries in the city.

  RAMBLE SIX: DESIRE

  My woman do somethin’, hon,

  I never seen.

  She must be goin’

  With a man from New Orleans.

  —FROM “CHITTLIN’ SUPPER,” BY PEG LEG HOWELL AND JIM HILL

  BACK WHEN THE U.S. WAS MORE GENERALLY PURItanical, New Orleans was, as Faulkner wrote in Absalom, Absalom!, “that city foreign and paradoxical, with an atmosphere at once fatal and languorous . . . whose denizens had created their All-Powerful and His supporting hierarchy-chorus of beautiful saints and handsome angels in the image of their houses and personal ornaments and voluptuous lives,” where the sophisticated Creole Charles Bon tries to corrupt earnest Henry Sutpen into believing it is honorable to keep an octoroon quasi-wife on the side.

  These days in America as a whole, when the pig-ugly if heroic porn star Ron Jeremy tours Disneyland as a VIP and is mobbed by families wanting to take their picture with him, sex may have been run into the ground. In New Orleans it remains one of various things the air is pungent with. Couples come here for it. In the morning you see them out on the balconies, leaning against the ironwork, looking fond and frowsy. And they head back home having had a lot of it—there go two healthy young folks now, yawning and nudging each other as they pull wheeled suitcases past the strip joint on Bourbon where the sign says “Wash the Girl of Your Choice.” (So the statement by Blanche DuBois, “The cathedral bells. That is the only clean thing in the Quarter,” no longer holds up.)

  Also arguing couples, to be sure. But I’m walking along Royal at nine-thirty of a fine Friday morning in October, and coming the other way on the other side of the street are two head-shaven guys and between them a pretty woman with long black switchy hair, I’d say late twenties, early thirties, I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore, they’re all way younger than me. It’s hard for three people to walk side by side on a New Orleans banquette, in fact that is a distinctive thing about walking in the Quarter: you can’t just stream past people with no notice, you have to step over and squeeze past, and you pass residents on their front steps so close that it’s socially awkward not to nod hello. So these three are sort of jostling, sportively, in the effort to keep all abreast. And here, from clear across the street, is what I hear the woman say:

  “My hole hurts!”

  She’s walking funny, as though she means it, but the three of them chuckle, a little hoarsely.

  “Boo-hoo,” she adds.

  They seem to be friends of some standing. They’re not showing off, it’s nine-thirty in the morning, there’s hardly anybody around and they’re not even implicitly cutting their eyes over at me. You might prefer Jules et Jim angst, and no doubt the relationship won’t always remain so unvexed, but I’d say they’ve been up all night and they’re bushed but jolly. A few more words pass among the three that I can’t hear and then, she:

  “All I know is, my hole hurts!”

  And they go briskly on along. People are still coming to New Orleans to do things they wouldn’t back home.

  As for myself—you’re going to be disappointed to hear this, but I have not done anything in New Orleans that you wouldn’t have done, if you had been there at the time. Anyway I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have. Well there was this one Super Bowl week back in the seventies when Pete Axthelm of Newsweek and I both took an interest in a flower vendor named Molly who was barefoot and dressed in a chenille-bedspread toga, and we bought all her flowers and walked around the Quarter the three of us playing kazoos and then went to my room in the Marriott, which had two big beds in it, and as soon as she had washed her feet and we had shown her some identification, so she could be sure we had been telling her the true stories of our lives, Molly had the run of the place. It was nice. She expressed the hope that this gambol, as she put it, would get her nerve up to tell her boyfriend Leonard of her plans to move to New Zealand and become a shepherdess. In the morning I gave her a Super Bowl ticket, but as best I could make out from friends who sat in the same section, she must have passed it on to a small, edgy man, maybe Leonard, who once, when Fran Tarkenton evaded a headlong Steeler rush (not that it got him anywhere), said, “Never try to horse a soft-mouthed fish.”

  When it comes to vice, I am not your best reporter. Vice to me is like corruption and bad television: it’s appealing if it’s period vice. You might think that New Orleans amounts to a perpetually period town, but no. Even in New Orleans, from what I can gather, contemporary vice is like contemporary so many other things: political rhetoric, for instance. Over-determined. Prophylactic to a fault.

  In 1854 in New Orleans a local man told Frederick Law Olmsted that New England boys who had been “too carefully brought up at home” frequently came to New Orleans and sank into degradation. When I, who had been brought up carefully enough in Georgia that it might almost have been in New England, spent my twenty-first summer in New Orleans, in 1963, I kept a diary. “I am going to have to tell the folks that I like beer,” I confided. “I still hate the idea of cocktail parties and hope I always do, but I now officially drink beer, and I’m not going to sneak around about it. I hope.
” I had a ways to go, to come out of my shell. In a strip joint, I chatted with “one of those B-girls I’d heard so much about,” but when the establishment tried to charge me four-fifty for her beer, I could honestly say that after paying $1.50 for my beer (which struck me as a ripoff) I had three dollars to my name. So she got up and danced, and I noted what seemed to be a bee tattooed on her shoulder, and then she sat back down next to me.

  I asked her how long she’d been in this business and she said fifty years and I said she probably wasn’t even that old and she said no a year and a half. “Was that a bee?” I asked. Couldn’t see it now because she had on a little kimono thing.

  “Mm hm,” she said, and shrugged her shoulder so I could just see it. “But if you don’t have any more money for us, I guess I better go sit over there all by myself in the corner.”

  And she did. But was nice about it. When I left to call E. [Ellen, my college girlfriend, who was off working as a camp counselor, and whom I would marry a year later], she waved affectionately.

  Maybe I read too much into the wave, but it did seem a bit like lagniappe. Here from my diary are two more experiences:

  Experience No. 1, in no particular order: I interviewed Miss Universe. Very impressive young lady, Argentinian, learned English just by talking to people since she became Miss U. last year, very beautiful. She was obviously above the whole silly business of being mistress to the Universe and above the aging charm boys she was surrounded by. I tried to record that in my story, don’t know if I did, sent it to E., E. doesn’t think so.

  Experience No. 2, I ran into Nigel Begg, now known as Tony Begg, as I was sitting in front of a laundromat waiting for my clothes to dry. He is from Scotland, was in high school with me, kicked off the track team for being a Communist, though nobody took him seriously. He supposedly swallowed a nickel once to impress people. Anyway he’s working in a warehouse and going to art school at night. Writing poetry, too. He asked me if I read much, I said yes, so we’ve gotten together several times and discussed things. He knows Nietzsche and has read almost all of Dostoyevsky. Says he figured out evolution before he read Darwin, anyway has an ontology worked out. Now says he’s an anarchist. I went with him to art school one night, mostly to satisfy a lifelong desire to see a nude model, it must be confessed, and I saw one. She kept glaring at me. I concentrated most of my attention on the other artists, but she asked me finally if I painted, and I replied with abominable heartiness no I was just visiting, and she put on her robe and refused to pose until I left. So I did, but pausing at the door to look at something on the wall so as to have a simulacrum of poise. But she was right, I am not an artist.

  I lost touch with Nigel, or Tony, after that. I guess I embarrassed him. But I am more a man of the world today. One night recently, feeling I owed it to you, I ventured into a “gentlemen’s club” on Bourbon called Temptations. Kenneth Holditch, the Tennessee Williams scholar who takes people on literary tours of the Quarter, had told me it was once the mansion of Judah P. Benjamin, known outside the Confederacy as “the brains of the Confederacy.” Benjamin served for most of the war as Confederate secretary of state and, after the war, was sharp enough to escape by way of the West Indies to England. He was not the balls of the Confederacy. When after ten years of marriage his beautiful, notoriously flirtatious Creole wife got pregnant, people said it was by some other man. Then she took off to Paris with the baby and had many open affairs, which she would flaunt when he visited her there, to see the child. Now his parlor has come to this: desultory down-to-thong stripping, and over in one corner a guy getting a lap dance. She’s in a crouch like a baseball catcher, facing him.

  Call me cranky, but I don’t see a lap dance’s allure. Talk about contemporary. A strange strapping woman in a thong hunkered over your loins, pinning you down, grinding away, purpose being I suppose to make you come in your pants? Or would that be out of line? Once I was getting a haircut in Head Quarters on Dauphine. In the lap of the man in the next chair was a big black and white cat. I asked whether there was a cat for me, but my barber said this was not standard lagniappe: “This man has been coming in here for years, and this is the first time Dickie’s jumped up in his lap.” The man was stroking Dickie gingerly. “And I’m not a cat person,” he said. Dickie’s tail was twitching, but he was purring or at least close to purring until the man said, “He’s so happy,” whereupon Dickie bit him, hard, and jumped down. As if to say, “Who are you to tell a cat he’s happy?”

  To me this lap dance looks like an even less nearly mutual experience than that. From the point of view of the old boy having his groin ground, well, not that he came in there to show poise (though I’ll bet he slapped on a little cologne), but still. Dry-humping—though no substitute for wet-humping, particularly in New Orleans—is one thing, but being dry-humped, and apparently not being allowed any use of the hands (except for occasional incidental contact while he’s trying to think what to do with them), he might as well be a fish. This, to me, is not getting your hambone boiled. And it is so not cuddling.

  From the lap dancer’s point of view, well, she is on top. But on top of what? Together they resemble an etching of a succubus at work on some poor soul. Is that the same lap that this guy’s children sit on?

  Another sex worker, I guess is the term, comes up to me, with a little leopard-skin thing wrapped around her, and says, “You look like you’re trouble in a box.”

  Right. There’s a noir title for you. But probably the person in the box would not be the protagonist. I’m trying to frame a noir denial when the lap dancer walks by, pulling a little halter-top thing over her palpably (strike that) fake boobs, and my girl (strike that) says to her, “What goes around comes around, Jack.”

  Inferrably, the lap dancer has stolen this last dance, but I have never heard a woman call another woman “Jack” before, in that tone of voice. I chug my $7.50 beer (in constant dollars, probably about the same price as the one that cost me $1.50 back in 1963), mutter my excuses, and go out into the night.

  Just up the street is Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. One of those electronic crawl signs out front. It says, “Welcome Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology Coatings.” Looks like an excess of Coatings’s, maybe something Freudian there, but let it go.

  Nearby on Bourbon, and right next door to Galatoire’s, the most venerably distinguished restaurant in town, a shop calls itself “Bourbon-Strip Tease, Lingerie and Adult Gifts.” It offers turkey-feather halters, teddies with nipple-holes on either side of the red-letter exclamation HEY BABY, glow-in-the-dark fingerpaints, “Pecker Party Lights,” and at least two inflatable items, a Tartan jockstrap sort of affair and a “party sheep.”

  Period vice had to be better, even at the time. Until World War I, when the federal government shut it down so it wouldn’t corrupt the navy, there was a neighborhood just north of the Quarter called Storyville, which comprised well over a hundred whorehouses. There’s a wonderful book by Al Rose called Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District, in which we learn that in some of these houses, dances were danced that were “so abandoned and reckless,” according to a contemporary account, “that the can-can in comparison seemed maidenly and respectable.” Perhaps one of these was the “ham kick,” in which a ham was hung from the ceiling, several feet off the floor. Any woman who managed to kick it could have the ham, as long as she wasn’t wearing underdrawers. In nicer establishments, patrons could do the fox-trot with naked women. In Emma Johnson’s house, a woman known as Olivia, the Oyster Dancer, performed as follows:

  Completely naked, she began by placing a raw oyster on her forehead and then leaned back and “shimmied” the oyster back and forth over her body without dropping it, finally causing it to run down to her instep, from which a quick kick would flip it high in the air, whereon she would catch it on her forehead where it started. An aged prostitute assured the author . . . that this was now “a lost art.”

 
That is a dance I would pay to see. For one thing, if you’re going to shimmy an oyster all over you, you’re going to have to get pretty moist yourself, otherwise that oyster is going to dry up and drop off, reduced to how a chicken liver gets when it’s floured to be fried, or worse, like a slug when it’s salted. Olivia flourished before air-conditioning. One night in New Orleans recently I attended a performance at the Shim-Sham Club, which is tongue-in-cheek burlesque, which may sound redundant, but in this day and age, that is the way to take burlesque. It’s a show for couples, featuring “the three R’s, wrigglin’, writhin’ and razzmatazz.” The bumps and grinds are retro-spicy, as are the jokes: “She so enjoyed her coming-out party, she hasn’t been home since,” and “She puts the t and a in ‘teacher’s assistant,’ ” and “A gambling man said, ‘I’ll lay you ten to one.’ I said, ‘It’s an odd time, but I’ll be there.’ ”

  The Shim-Sham dancers control the medium without sitting on anybody. But none of them will go down in history, like Olivia. After the show, Kitty West, who danced in the fifties as Evangeline the Oyster Girl, was autographing pictures of herself in her prime. Her specialty’s oyster connection was just that she emerged from a big shell. “And you want to know a secret?” she said to me. “I don’t even like oysters.” I believe that Olivia did like them.

  Emma Johnson herself offered her “sixty-second plan”: any man who could delay his orgasm for as long as a minute inside her, didn’t have to pay. Once in a while, she would let somebody win. Emma staged sex “circuses” in her parlor. Rose interviews a woman, a respectable mother and grandmother, “a plump housewife who speaks in distinctively New Orleans tones,” whose husband knows her past: she was born and reared in Emma’s. When she was “getting a little figure,” she began to perform in the circuses, with her mother. “She’s the one who used to fuck the pony,” she says. “And in the daytime me and Liz [another “trick baby” like herself] rode the ponies around the yard. . . . Ain’t that somethin’?”