Memories of New Orleans

[lederhosen]

I've mentioned some of this stuff before, but now seems like as good a time as any to repeat myself. Before I do, I'll just pimp Shortie's Katrina resource site, which may be useful to those looking for information or ways to help.

Back in 1994, when I was 19, I went a-travelling on my own for the first time. I had a month to visit the USA - I hadn't been there since my family took me at age 8 or so - and aside from meeting a few online friends I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The friendly guy at STA Travel told me "You have to see New Orleans". I was curious, I didn't know all that much about it other than that people kept mentioning it, so I let him book me in for three nights at the St. Charles Guest House, in the Garden District and close to the streetcar.



So I got into New Orleans (I think it was mid-December), talked a little bit with the guest house people about things like swamp tours and plantation houses, and then went a-wandering into the French Quarter on my own with a camera round my neck and a map which marked allegedly safe areas. I was pretty naive, even by the standards of kids who grew up in a quiet safe town like Canberra - I blush to say that in my first few minutes in the Quarter, I was parted from twenty bucks by one of the locals who could tell me where I got my shoes - and for all that I seem to be one of the fools Fortune favours, it's probably a good thing that I wandered into a mask shop - the Little Shop of Fantasy - on Rue Dumaine.

They made and sold carnival masks, and I don't mean the mass-produced crap that sells alongside the "One tequila two tequila three tequila floor" T-shirts in all the shops along Bourbon Street. (I'm not really a Bourbon Street kind of guy.) Ironically enough, although the shop itself is probably underwater, they have a website up... and I have to say, the masks in the gallery on that site are nothing on the ones they had when I visited. They had small, unremarkable but well-made feather masks; they had ornate leather ones; they had a latex one that looked like a little skeletal creature coiled around the face, twin to one they'd sold Anne Rice; they had a gigantic paper-mache demon mask that was five feet high. The walls were covered with them, all shapes and sizes, up to the high ceiling. If I note that the most expensive mask on that website is $125, and the *average* in the shop when I went there eleven years ago was more like $300, that might at least hint at how much more they had than what you can see there. I ended up buying one of the masks as a souvenir; it was bloody expensive, but I've never regretted it, and I still have that mask safe at home.

But this isn't about the masks. While I was in there, gawking at all the pretty stuff and trying to convince myself I could afford just a little one (the one I ended up with isn't all that little ;-) I got into chatting with the store owner (well, one of them, but he was the original) while he worked on a feather mask. His name was Mike Stark, and it was the first time I really encountered true Southern hospitality. Somebody else described him as "the rotund, soft-spoken, muumuu-wearing hippie preacher with the flowing red hair and beard", and another as "a gentle red-bearded bear of a man", and that's certainly how I remember him. Here's a picture, although I think he was a little greyer by the time I met him:



He gave me some good advice about being a tourist in New Orleans and not getting mugged. I'd mentioned that I was curious about the graveyards, and he told me not on any account to go there by myself... but he offered to shut up shop for the afternoon and show me around. And of course I accepted.

There are people who'll brag that they know everybody in town. Mike was one of those people who really *did*. He was head of the New Orleans Maskmakers Guild; he'd started a health clinic and a home for runaways; when he had a stroke in 1989 or thereabouts, he was visited in hospital by the Mayor and many of the city's jazz legends. These facts I discovered afterwards, and have cribbed from this obituary; what I saw when we wandered through New Orleans was that it wasn't just the big names. Because of his stroke, he'd sometimes falter on words - he told me stories, and now and then I'd have to fill in the word he couldn't find before he'd go on - but every street we walked down, he'd greet somebody by name and tell me something about them.

Some of the stories he told me were comical, or smutty (some of the Mardi Gras ones in particular...) and some of them were sad. I remember he waved at one street-corner carol-singer with an angel's voice, and greeted her as a friend, but would not give her money, and from the look on her face she knew not to ask; he told me afterwards where the money would've gone.

We visited one of the old cemeteries, up near the projects, and he showed me the part that had been filmed in Easy Rider, although I had to supply the name of the film (which I still haven't seen myself - must do that some time). Somewhere along the way he made a remark about me being 'cute', and I completely failed to pick up (for several years, in fact) that Mike was, in fact, flamingly gay, because he'd already mentioned that he was a Baptist preacher and I was under the impression that the Southern Baptists didn't permit that sort of thing. (New Orleans is an exception to many things, or was.)

I'm not really sure now whether he *was* making a very polite pass at me, or whether this was the sort of friendliness with which he greeted the world in general, and I'm not fussed one way or the other; he certainly seemed to be happy enough just showing me his city and its people. Afterwards, he got us into a jazz concert at Preservation Hall - there were long lines at the door, but everybody just waved at him and said "you go on in, Mike".

When I came back, in 1997, I dropped by again and said hello. On our honeymoon in 2002 I took reynardo to New Orleans; Mike, sadly, had died a year or two after my last visit, but they'd kept his ashes in an urn in the shop, and I paid my respects.

What else? There were dozens of antique shops in Royal Street, full of gorgeous things hopelessly out of my price range (and some rather ugly things that were just as expensive). There were as many art shops; in one of them I admired Rene Gruau's Rouge et Noir; at three thousand dollars, the original was far out of my price range, but I bought a print that, like the mask, will be hung on our wall when we get the hooks up. There were walking tours and swamp tours and grand plantation houses and Christmas light displays in one of the parks. There was the Idea Factory - I think turnberryknkn discovered this one too - that sold wonderful wooden toys and puzzle boxes, and I still have two of those.

And there was the shoe-shine man Rey talked to at the airport on our last visit, an ageing black man who had been shining shoes for thirty-five years and did not so much as own the stand he worked.

There are so many songs about New Orleans, and for good reason. But the only song I have stuck in my head at the moment wasn't written with New Orleans in mind.

Men walkin' 'long the railroad tracks
Goin' someplace there's no goin' back
Highway patrol choppers comin' up over the ridge
Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretchin' round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin' in their cars in the southwest
No home no job no peace no rest

The highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad

He pulls prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and takes a drag
Waitin' for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box 'neath the underpass
Got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and gun in your hand
Sleeping on a pillow of solid rock
Bathin' in the city aqueduct

The highway is alive tonight
But where it's headed everybody knows
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Waitin' on the ghost of Tom Joad

Comments

[hacked2death.livejournal.com]

New Orleans is an exception to many things, or was.

IS. This to me feels like a place that somehow will go on..