Patchwork

---

---

I'm buying postcards, wading through racks of pictures featuring the familiar wild drunken revelers packing the streets of the French Quarter, overcrowding the balconies, and thronging the parade floats. You see the jazz bands with brass buttons, the red steaming crawfish on top of mounds of corn and potatoes, the nutty eccentrics in ludicrous costumes, the battered streetlamps. There's music, there's neon, and there's noise...and there's noise; above all, there's noise. Bourbon Street is a wall of color and sound. Those are the memories the postcards try to capture, and they're the same ones I'm trying to extricate from the swirling kaleidoscope that is my memory of last night. The coffee helps. The Handgrenades sure didn't.

Drinking in New Orleans is a serious matter. You gotta be ready to play like a champion. Bravo Company ends up down a side street leaning against a wall by nine o'clock. How serious is it? Try ordering a "fuzzy navel" and see the look you get from the bartender. No apple-tini for you, no grasshopper, no damned Mai Tai. You get a Hurricane, a Handgrenade, or a 911. Your choices are a natural disaster, an explosion, or the number to dial in the event of either.

My personal weakness has always been Tropical Isle's specialty, the Handgrenade. It's made from roughly equal parts Everclear and Evil plus enough sugar to make it go down all too easily. Tropical Isle used to be a closet of a bar on Toulouse next to The Dungeon. You squeezed in there with fifty close friends you hadn't met yet, waited for the band "Late as Usual" to show up (late, as usual) and play from a tiny stage in the corner. The whole bar got shnockered at roughly the same pace while three guys with a guitar, a casio keyboard, and a microphone weaved their musical way through odd bits of zydeco, jazz, and rock. The Isle gave up the old location on Toulouse in favor of bigger digs on Bourbon Street proper and they now have at least two locations. I liked the old location better and the new plastic souvenir handgrenade cups make me think of Cousin Eddy in Vegas Vacation. I still go to the new place anyway.

Another wonderfully bad idea is a specialty of Pat O'Brien's. Yes, there's the famous Hurricane, but there's also a terrible thing called "Skylab Fallout." It's named, not just in keeping with the disasters and explosions theme, but also because two of them will simulate the effect of having a large chunk of metal come screaming out of the sky and smack you in the back of the head.
"Dude, what happened to him?"
"I think he caught a chunk of skylab."
"Ah, maaaan. Is he gonna make it?"

But anyway...back to the postcard thing:

Behind the rotating racks of people acting like fools, there's another rack full of pictures of a different sort. Solemn white Charlestons doze behind wrought iron gates splashed with the filtered amber sunlight of late afternoon. Massive old trees, bent under the weight of their own branches, lean out over silent streets. A Victorian painted lady peaks out from behind a blossoming magnolia. The word for The Quarter is "noise." For The Garden District, the word is "hush." Even the streetcars clattering along St. Charles tone it down a bit when they get near First Street for fear of waking the slumbering old houses. The houses actually look asleep, and you get the impression they've been asleep for a long time. If the shutters aren't shuttered, the blinds are down. The doors are always closed. The porch light is never on. Nobody is ever at home. Or so it appears from what little you can see, which is never much more than a glimpse.

This is a feature of New Orleans: the brief glimpse. Much is hidden, much is only hinted at, there's more to everything than what you are allowed to see. In the Quarter, you may pass St. Ann and hear the clang of a heavy iron gate swinging shut, but the occupant going about his business is a brief shadow disappearing into a dark passage that leads somewhere inside away from the street. You may discern the dim outline of a courtyard screened by banana trees, but you can't make out the details. You can hear the fountain, but you can't see it. The residents of The Quarter put up elaborate barriers to keep their business their own.

As it is in The Quarter, so it is Uptown. The most impressive sights are partial ones. High garden walls are topped by thick railings backed up by dense trees. All of this forms a defense-in-depth against public exposure, an architectural strip-tease that gets interrupted just before the good part. What you can see is often magnificent, but incomplete. The message is clear enough: you may see this much, you're free to admire, but you will not be invited in. Now the shadows are growing long and you don't want to linger here after dark. Enjoy your stay, then be on your way.

This partial view has much the same effect, and possibly the same motive, as a plunging neckline on a woman who's well endowed and knows it. She wants to show off, but she doesn't like being gawked at. That's understandable, isn't it? So is our desire to see more and I think this has something to do with the fact that, once someone has been in New Orleans long enough to penetrate its secrets then nothing, not hurricanes, not poverty, I mean nothing will get them to leave. It seems that, once you've been allowed through the first gate, you're hooked.

---

Photos

Magazine Street 1
Headed towards downtown

St. Charles 1
Here's where I pick up the streetcar.

St. Charles 2
This is the Avenue Pub, where I went for a beer and a crawfish pie. Good place, angry bartender, great crawfish.

St. Charles 3
Walking away from downtown.

St. Charles 4
If you look down the smaller side streets, you see a lot of buildings in this condition.