Sketches of New Orleans


The streetcar track runs along the Mississippi riverfront to the French Quarter from the big hotels up by the convention center. There were a lot of people at the stop and some were having trouble making the dollar bills go into the slot. One woman put a quarter in where the bill was supposed to go. "I'm gonna have to punish you, girl," the operator said, reaching for a pocketknife.

He said it with that soft, sensual accent that characterizes some southern men. It was so devoid of any harshness or threat that the people on the car laughed at the flirtation. I couldn't help wondering how a Berkeley girl from the seventies would have responded. This woman had the quarter out with her fingernail before he got his knife opened, so she escaped whatever punishment he had imagined meting out.

"Come on, let's go," I was thinking. I was ill from eating turtle soup at a ridiculously expensive restaurant in the Quarter. I needed to get back to the hotel to throw up the fifty dollars worth of food quickly poisoning my digestive system. It is unfortunate that in the Quarter one is reminded of the Randy Newman song about Huey Long that begins:

"A hundred thousand Frenchmen in New Orleans. In New Orleans there are Frenchmen everywhere. Your house could burn down, your baby could drown, wouldn't one of those Frenchmen care.

"Everybody, gather round, loosen up your suspenders hunker down on the ground. I'm a cracker, you one too, gonna take good care of you."

After two days of being hustled in the Quarter, as in any place where tourists are bussed in for the fleecing, we went out for a bayou tour this morning. The man who took us out on the bayou was born and raised there, and said he hasn't spent fifteen minutes of his life in the Quarter, though they sell some of his alligator-tooth jewelry, and alligator heads, there.

His Cajun accent was pure music, bubbling along like a kettle of jambalaya all the time, as he demonstrated his ability to call in the alligators to the boat. He delighted in playing jokes, especially exaggerating the danger of the swamp with tales of snakes and spiders shaking out of the trees. "If something gets on you scream and I'll try as best I can to get it off of you," he said. "To tell you the truth I dread going back in these trees." And then he made a loud noise as soon as he went under the trees to make the girls jump and squeal.

He called a six-foot alligator to the boat and tried to catch it and pull in onboard. He got hold of it but lost it. He walked with a pronounced limp. He had been seriously injured at some time or other. He was in his forties, but he had the exuberance of a teenaged boy, as well as a similar humor and a fear of women hidden by the usual ploy of throwing spiders and jokes at them all the time. "I'm two hundred and sixty pound of walking romance," he said.

He was about the same size as the dark, elegantly dressed Frenchman whose menu floating around as an advertisement for "restaurant of the week" was deceptively priced, and whose tables were so close together my chair was bumped by every passing waiter or busboy. But the two men were worlds apart. It reminded me of when I spent time on Crete back in 1980.

My wife and I stayed at a little pension at Matala Bay before securing a longer term rental closer to Pitsidia, on the south side of the island. A man named Manoles ran the pension. He overcharged everybody, didn't supply hot water when he said he would, and generally cut back on hospitality in favor of profit at every turn.

The memory of him that lingers in my mind is my being in the local bar with the other men, with whom I had been picking tomatoes, and who were all like brothers. When we ate, everybody brought something, and everybody shared the food. The idea of each person hunched over his portion, protecting it from the others, was abhorrent. It would leave out those with less. The person who brought tomatoes was as well included as the one who brought meat. And nobody was after what little money we had. In fact, the only way I could pay for the food was to make arrangements beforehand with the owner of the Mermaid Cafe, immortalized by Joni Mitchell: "Let's go down to the Mermaid Cafe and I'll buy you a bottle of wine ..." in the song, "Carey."

While we ate together, none of us better than another, Manoles stood alone and apart, at the bar, dressed in an expensive suit and tie. "He only wants to be richer than everyone else," my friend, Pelapos, explained.

I was thirty that year, and the image of Manoles at the bar in his fancy suit, separating himself from the others, never deserted me. I remember it whenever somebody chooses to cut corners, overprice, and generally cheat customers in order to make themselves a bit richer.

At the Hilton, a USA Today newspaper is against the door in the mornings. It isn't a newspaper I would normally read. But today I took it with me on the trip to the bayou. In one article I read that the Iraqi people don't understand us. Why would George Bush say that the Al Ghraib prison photos were intolerable, and then praise Rumsfeld as the best Secretary of Defense we've ever had?

What they don't really understand is the complicity that develops among people in a money chain. The praise of Rumsfeld had nothing to do with him, personally, or with what he has done. It was said by a man who is bought and paid for, and elected in the only way he could have been elected: "Free drinks for everybody who votes for me, boys."

In a small shop in the Quarter there is a woman from Pakistan. She looks directly at us and smiles as she speaks, and she tells me about India and Pakistan. "The Hindus don't eat cows," she says, "because they think it might be their dead relative. So the Muslims like to throw pieces of dead cow in front of their houses to upset them. The Hindus throw pork at the Muslims to upset them."

I didn't mention that our sacred cows are multi-national corporations, and that our politicians throw pork at them. It's only the people who haven't been outside the country much who can't see it, in the same way a fish can't see water.

A ragtag jazz band led us through the Quarter on Saturday night. There were three drummers, a tuba, a trombone, a trumpet, vibes, clarinet ... we filled the street and stopped traffic, creating a celebration. From every bar there was a different sound, of jazz or rock or cajun or some mixture. And there were drunk people weaving crazily along, cheap beads tossed from balconies, and always the pervasive stench of tobacco smoke and booze and garbage.

There were shops selling t-shirts, such as: "If you can read this, the bitch fell off," for the motorcycle crowd, and "shut up and suck it," for those explaining how to eat crawfish or seek the intervention of Eros in romantic relations with the opposite sex. As the crowd followed the jazz band along the street, I looked at the shadow side of the Southland, the desperate partying in the tiny French enclave, marching along beneath the sea, where the dead can never be buried.

Posted: Wed - May 26, 2004 at 08:14 PM