by Peter Millar
The station has the feel of a railway in wartime: busy with people jostling one another, faces lined and drawn, tired. Out front I climb into a taxi – I have no enthusiasm for tramping these streets – and all of a sudden I know why this city is still called the Big Easy: it’s behind the wheel, half the size of a butter mountain squeezed into a lime green tropical shirt and shorts, grinning broadly, sipping constantly from a quart-sized container of fizzy pop as he slides his ancient Dodge along the wide streets, before we crawl into the rectilinear warren of the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, and with a hand wiped across his lips, a loud belch and a laid-back demand for 10 dollars – the meter in this cab was no more in the habit of running than its driver – deposits me on a corner outside St Peter House. Welcome to the edge of America.
You only have to look at Google Maps and see New Orleans from space to realise how insanely fragile this city’s existence is. South Louisiana isn’t really terra firma at all: it’s a transition zone where the land bleeds into the sea in 10 thousand spidery veins. Most of the modern city is built on reclaimed muck – there is no bedrock for more than 50 feet down. This is the bayou: a unique word for a unique landscape where the vegetation – mangroves and cypresses growing out of the slimy algae-covered water – surreally extends the false impression that this is territory naturally inhabitable by life forms other than egrets and alligators. Even on the way north, inland, solid ground is the exception rather than the rule: the railway hugs the swampy coast of the great expanse of Lake Pontchartrain which when the weather turns, joins forces with the Mississippi to the south to roll over the levees or burst through them. It is uncannily, eerily wild and beautiful, the tarmac causeway across the lake a thin, straight concrete line in a world of weird contorted organic forms, pelicans with full beaks and trees with slime-covered branches that reach out like zombie arms. It is easy to see why there have been so many horror stories set in the bayou swamps.
The French built their little city in the early years of the eighteenth century on one of the very few bits of raised land – they sensibly referred to it as an island – in a rigid grid pattern with a wooden church and military parade ground – Place d’Armes – on the river frontage. A map made in 1770 by Captain Pittman of the British Army shows it with its fortifications: wedge-shaped wooden ramparts and ‘a trifling ditch’. Incredibly, the rectangle within his map’s walls is preserved almost perfectly today between Rampart Street and the Mississippi and Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue. This is the Vieux Carré – the old square – universally known as the French Quarter, even if many of its buildings date from the subsequent, brief, late eighteenth-century period of Spanish rule. And this is where I find myself standing on the balcony outside my room in St Peter House, a modest but beautiful little B&B in its heart, wondering what continent I’m on and in which century.
There are banana plants growing in the courtyard, and a smell of cigar smoke in the air, as I saunter – there’s no other way to walk in New Orleans – up triple-named St Peter Street/Calle San Pedro/Rue St Pierre in the early evening savouring the tropical warmth in the air, admiring the intricate curlicues of the ironwork on the balconies. Hurricane? What hurricane? Up ahead is Bourbon Street, and I’m slightly apprehensive that the famed 24-hour party zone will either be Disney or down-and-out. To my surprise, it’s neither, at least not exactly. It’s loud, tacky, sleazy, relaxed and perversely exhilarating all at once, utterly self-conscious with its jazz bars and street-drinking culture, its strip joints and souvenir shops with a local turn on the tacky T-shirt motto: ‘I drove my Chevy to the levee and the levee was gone.’ Here a ‘Hurricane’ is a sticky sweet cocktail of light rum, dark rum, grenadine and passion fruit juices. A man with a sandwich board on the street is advertising Huge Ass Beers To Go. A man with a huge ass is drinking one next to him. There’s a smell of garlic and gumbo in the air.
I pick a restaurant at random amid the clutter on and off Bourbon and sit down to a plate of Creole cholesterol with Karin Carpenter in my head singing about crawfish pie, jambalay, and filee gumbo. Until now I’d never known what ‘filee gumbo’ was – specifically the filee bit – it turns out to be a thickening agent made from plant leaves used as an alternative to okra. My plate of ‘shrimp gumbo’ – I have just about got used to the strange American habit of reversing our definition of prawns and shrimp size-wise – oozes rich tomatoey goo and I follow it up with a jambalaya of chicken and spicy sausage with tomatoes and celery and rice, and feel fit to burst. Time for a beer. Maybe even two.
Not a ‘Huge Ass’, though. Across the street is a bar with a jazz band playing Dixie and a beer called Abita on tap which I’ve never heard of. The guy next to me at the bar has, though. His name is Gary and he’s in computers, lives in Houston but comes to New Orleans regularly on business. Not as regularly as he used to – ‘before Katrina’ – but enough to know that Abita is made by a microbrewery in Abita Springs 30 miles away. Their ‘Amber’ is the colour it says, rich and malty and full of flavour. And to round it off, Gary offers me a cigar, only he pronounces it ‘see-gar’, ‘coz we’re in Louisiana, man’. And we light up and lighten up and listen to the music. And have another beer.
And then we hit the cigar shop for a couple more. I’ve never really been a smoker – at least not of cigarettes – but a good cigar is an occasional pleasure, not least since I visited Havana a couple of years back. It is of course illegal for Americans to buy Cuban cigars – even if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger – but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy a cigar hand-rolled by Cubans, especially in New Orleans. At the Cigar Factory on Decatur Street they sit there in a line, speaking Spanish to one another, separating out the leaves – medium-leaf binders and long-leaf fillers – like I watched them do at the La Corona factory in Havana. The salesmen are locals, African-Americans with cigars firmly between their lips setting the right example to their customers, offering tips to choose between the robust Vieux Carré or the full-bodied Tres Hermanos. The tobacco can’t come from Cuba either, so instead they use Nicaraguan, Honduran and Dominican. I’m sure a connoisseur could tell the difference, but I’m just a dilettante who’s had a couple of beers and enjoys the taste, although perhaps not so much the Purito, which boasts a ‘sweet dip’, as if the end had been dipped in honey.
Puffing proudly Gary and I head for the Music Legends Park back on Bourbon, where a couple more Abita await us at the open-air bar along with bronze life-size statues of New Orleans jazz heroes. Did you know that ‘Fats’ Domino’s real name was Antoine Dominique Domino? I didn’t. He stands there in bronze effigy with a keyboard fixed to his fingers, alongside trumpeter Al (Alois) Hirt and clarinettist Pete Fountain, born Pierre Dewey LaFontaine. I had somehow never quite realised the French input into the jazz gene pool.
There’s a real-life jazz trumpeter too and a fine skat singer, and it’s easy to sit back and soak in the music in the warm air, the heady mood dulled only slightly by a few drops of rain from a heavy night sky. As the rain made its presence more tangible we migrate to one of the premises of the anomalously named Bourbon Street Blues Company, where there’s a rock band playing. It would be easy to say New Orleans ought to be about jazz and blues, but that would be like saying that Liverpool ought to be about nothing but the Beatles. Even nearly half a century later. What New Orleans – and certainly Bourbon Street – is about is hedonism: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow… And let’s face it, there are not many cities where that is a more appropriate motto. That’s what they celebrate with those famous jazz funerals that have origins in Dahomey and Benin. That’s what Mardi Gras is all about, ‘Fat Toosday’ as the locals say.
Places like the Bourbon Street Blues Company – and just about anyone else that has one – rent out balconies in ‘the Quarter’ to the rampant partygoers that congregate for the annual celebration of excess. There used to be a whole district of town given over to making the elaborate costumes and masks and the shops are still full of extravagant feathered affairs for a
giveaway price, for one simple reason: today the vast majority are made in China. Only the elite ‘carnival tribes’ – that uniquely New Orleans fusion of Black African and Native American culture with a hint of paganism and a wash of Franco-Spanish high Catholicism – still make their own. The best do the rounds of their own neighbourhoods before joining the main parade, with their traditional exotic names, from Yellow Pocahontas, the Northside Skull and Bones Gang or the Krewe of Grotesque and Outlandish Habilments. The cheap Chinese masks are worn by people like me, and Gary here, and just about everybody else in the Bourbon Street Blues Company tonight: out-of-towners, just here for the beer. And the music.
My normal local back in England is a quiet rural pub with neither piped music nor jukebox, where I will stand happily for hours at the bar revelling in good conversation, traditional English ale and quietly savouring the smoking ban. So what the hell am I doing here with a fat cigar in my mouth, drinking lager from a bottle and going ‘yeehah’ to a mega-loud rock band fronted by a feisty female singer with a ciggy in one hand and a beer bottle in the other singing a cover version of ‘The Summer of ’69’ in homage to an era that vanished long before she was born.
‘Hey, man,’ calls Gary, ‘you really gotta try one of these,’ and before I can say ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘What the hell you goin’ on about’, there’s a black girl in boots jumped on to the table in front of me, her head tilted back so she can hold in her mouth a test tube full of bright red liquid. I’m staring in amazement at this act, wondering what comes next when I find out: she crouches down to my height, pulls my head over towards hers and as Gary yells, ‘Open wide, feller’, I do what he says and she leans over, cradling my head in her ample cleavage and empties its contents down my throat. ‘Now you’ve got to give her three bucks,’ says Gary, beaming with red-nosed intoxication, and hands her a 10-dollar bill saying, ‘That’s for him, one for me and one for you!’
She virtually straddles his chest to empty the second test tube – bright blue this time (as far as I could ever make out they’re all just vodka-based with a dash of colour and maybe flavour) – into Gary, while seconds later he takes a blue one and, rather less expertly, returns the compliment to our waitress, who’s now almost supine on the table. Gary has done this before. More than once. So, I soon perceive, have most of the blokes in here, and I’m relieved to say more than a few of them are my age. The ‘test-tube shooters’ come out whenever the senior bar staff judge the ‘party mood’ to be right. It’s a strange form of sexual intercourse, a suggestive interchange of fluids – but not bodily ones – that as a soft-porn experience is probably one step down from lap dancing. Yes, it is a transaction in which sex undoubtedly plays a part, but then so is employing a barmaid with a low-cut top.
Two more shooters, another Abita and I’m not worrying about the political correctness of any of it. I’ve lost sight of Gary in the mounting crush indoors and wander out, away from Bourbon Street’s commercial hedonism down the strangely quiet gaslit backstreets. The moon is scudding behind dark clouds and as the raindrops get heavier my mind is running scenes from Interview with the Vampire to Sting’s ‘Moon Over Bourbon Street’. Risqué, ridiculous, wildly over the top. Just like the real thing.
Next morning the rain is pelting down as I make a dash for the Café du Monde at the end of Decatur Street. It’s 10:30 a.m. but it feels like dusk with rain thumping off the rooftops, guttering overflowing and spilling like waterfalls onto the streets and into fast-filling drains. Even without giant waves washing in from the lake or the mighty Mississippi spilling over the levees, it is easy to imagine New Orleans suddenly being washed away, especially here on the river’s edge. The rain is bouncing off the striped canopy as I dash for cover and coffee.
The Café du Monde is a New Orleans institution, and has been since 1862, opening whenever possible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for Christmas Day. In the middle of Katrina it stayed open to midnight until damage to the kitchens forced the staff to close down – it took two months to repair the damage. With the rain forcing people to take cover, I have to wait a while to find a seat at a table, and even longer to get served. American waitresses may live on their tips but those at the Café du Monde either do more than well out of the tourists – or just as probably – do very badly indeed. Whichever it is, the service is about the slowest I’ve had in America. Then again, maybe that’s just New Orleans sleepiness.
But the coffee, when it comes, is as good as its reputation: a rich, strong brew flavoured with chicory and traditionally served here ‘au lait’, 50–50 with hot milk. It comes, if you’re doing the Café du Monde thing – which I am – with beignets, which in New Orleans at least they manage to pronounce properly. In France a beignet is a doughnut which can be sweet or savoury, ring-shaped or just a ball of deep-fried dough. The New Orleans variant – specifically at the Café du Monde, is a small square deliciously light doughnut dusted with icing sugar. Served three at a time. Don’t ask me why. If you ask for a beignet, you get three. If you ask for another, you get another three. It’s tempting.
The French Market area, which is where the Café du Monde is located, right on the riverfront where the original city docks would have been 200 years ago, at the moment is in a state of transition. The farmers’ market is still being repaired after Katrina – and still was when Gustav hit – and although there is a daily flea market, the permanent shops are definitely on the twee side: if you want teddy bears, collectible dolls or handmade sweeties, this is your place. The shop names say it all: Pets Are People, A Tisket A Tasket, Artichoke Gallery, Aunt Sally’s Praline Shop. You know a retail outlet in America is precious if it calls itself a ‘shop’ instead of a ‘store’. The French Market ought to be New Orleans’s Pike Place but it looks increasingly more like ‘Old Sacramento’. Which is a shame.
But this is where I’m picking up the city tour. Most cities do bus tours to show off their prettiest attractions. In New Orleans – with the prettiest areas for once remarkably better seen on foot – they do a bus tour of the disaster areas. It’s going to take a couple of hours though so I pick up a little something for lunch. That sentence doesn’t work so well unless you’ve seen New Orleans’ favourite ‘little something’, a sandwich called a muffuletta. This competes with the ‘po-boy’ for the claim to be New Orleans’ classic takeaway. The po-boy – originally ‘poor boy’ – is a long sandwich made from a French-style baguette, and in New Orleans unlike anywhere else in America, or Britain for that matter despite our supposed love affair with the ‘French stick’, they have proper baguettes, with hard crusty exteriors and light airy centres. The ‘po-boy’ is literally stuffed with food which can be anything from cooked oysters to beef. But the muffuletta is something else again: simultaneously delicious and a challenge to the human digestive system.
It is made with a Sicilian-style circular flatbread, split down the middle and stuffed – and I mean stuffed – with a salad of marinated olives, celery, capers and peppers, topped with layers of Italian salame, then layers of ham, then layers of mortadella, then layers of cheese. Now you can – and people do – argue for ever about the exact nature of each of these ingredients: does it have to be provolone cheese or can you use emmental, is mozzarella an essential too (as well as the provolone), does it have to be Genoa salame or can you use Napoli, should the ham be air-dried or moist? But I can tell you now: the absolute defining thing about a muffuletta is its size. This is the most mouth-challenging monstrosity ever to have been loosely defined as a sandwich, although perhaps in those terms exactly as the inventor intended: an entire meal in a piece of bread. In fact, two whole meals. Possibly even a dinner party.
I’m still staring with wonder at the thing in my hand, contemplating just the physical difficulty of squashing it enough to fit a corner between my teeth, as I board the bus for an experience that is soon leaving a completely different taste in my mouth. We start off by driving through the Garden District which was originally virtually a rival city
to the Vieux Carré: this is where the English speakers moved in when the United States took over the territory from Napoleon. The ‘Louisiana Purchase’ actually cleared the way for the whole US expansion westwards as far as the Rockies and what only warfare finally defined as the Mexican border, but at the time the only real prize anyone cared about was New Orleans itself, the city that guarded access to the vast Mississippi waterway system.
The white American gentry were not keen to mingle with the mixed race, multilingual Creole community so they built their own grand villas in a separate little grid system a short walk away. It is a district even today of sedate grandeur with magnificent gardens on display in contrast with the French Quarter where the intimate courtyards are hidden away from the street. There is a rich smell of tropical blooms in the air: azaleas, magnolias and other bright flowers I can’t even begin to name. The trees have knobbly gnarled trunks like something from a fairy-tale jungle. The houses have stained-glass windows. And some of them are still missing bits of roof.
Which is a lot better than the Lower Ninth Ward. This was – and is, to the extent that it is populated at all – the poorest part of New Orleans. The houses here are not just missing bits of roof: some of them have no roofs at all. In fact some of them aren’t doing too well for doors and windows either. In more than a few places they aren’t even houses any more: just tracts of urban wasteland, as if in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. It is as if Katrina happened just yesterday, not a few years ago. The guide fills in the missing details: holes cut in roofs were made to get people who were stuck in their attics out when the floodwater rose above window level: in places here it reached 15 feet. Some had to smash holes in their own roofs from the inside to get out and sit on them to wait for the rescue helicopters.