Knotty and Nice in New Orleans

A typical New Orleans Street.

Knitting is knotty, but no one is naughty in New Orleans, Louisiana.  If anything is racy, it is happening at the Fair Grounds.  If anything is innocent, it is happening on Ursulines Street.  If anyone is happy...well, that could be anywhere between Hollygrove and Holy Cross.

Ode to New Orleans.

A face made for radio, an outfit made for Mardi Gras.

Walk down a New Orleans street and you will see people tending their own business, which is none of yours, part of an inscrutable communal body and spirit.  Faith, hope, and charity keep New Orleans running, along with talent, gumption, tenacity, mendacity, tradition, and lessons learned from the school of heart knocks.  New Orleans runs on its own fuel, ask anyone who has sniffed the fumes.  You can live the high life in New Orleans, but only after you’ve scraped the bottom.  Not every shooting star burns out.  Some of them land in the Sixth Ward, the Seventh Ward, the Fifth Ward, or the Third Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Where there are bitches, there are riches.  Where there are hens, their eggs are like gold.  

Everyone smiles every day in New Orleans, a city where blessings are counted and curses ignored.  Every street in New Orleans is an Esplanade Avenue.

The Real Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, LA

Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

When people say they live on the sunny side of Esplanade Avenue, they mean they live on either side.  The side with even-numbered addresses is as chipper and convivial as the odd-sided one.  Esplanade Avenue, running along the panoramic high ground known, locally, as Esplanade Ridge, is the slenderest slice of New Orleans that is a world unto itself.  No street in America is named more truly than Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Unlike Saint Charles Avenue, the street both closest to, and furthest away from, Esplanade Avenue’s sensibility, Esplanade Avenue is a street that is made for walking.  Its length, between City Park and the Old U.S. Mint, is rarely visited by tourists.  If they chose to, they could absorb a few centuries of New Orleaniana in an hour and three quarters.  Esplanade Avenue’s economy is based on neighborhood interaction.  Its story is self-contained, both part and parcel of the whole city in microcosm.

Saint Charles Avenue is a long, run-on variation on a theme, a tinkling on the ivories.  The only people who live on Saint Charles Avenue are the ones who inhabit it.  Esplanade Avenue is a self-contained story told in four acts, starting with picturesque introduction and concluding when there is nothing left to say.  The people who live on Esplanade Avenue love it.  When musicians march on Esplanade Avenue, they play brass and snare.  A perfect street stokes platonic passions that sizzle, under the skin, from one august day to the next.  

Bisected down its neutral ground, the even-sided half of Esplanade Avenue is the Sixth Ward, and the odd side is the Seventh Ward.  The Sixth Ward’s landfill trash, and the household trash meant for recycling, gets picked up at curbside every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  The Seventh Ward puts its trash barrels on the curb every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.  Esplanade Avenue is very picturesque.  

Between BMC and Check Point Charlie, rhythm and tympanum compliment each other in contrapuntal harmony.  

Fed by the dedicated exit ramp off the Claiborne Avenue Overpass, traffic does not jam on Esplanade Avenue, with its many, patience-inducing traffic lights.  Everyone smiles.  There is plenty of change to spare along a stretch of road that is as old as the city itself, and older, still, in some places.

Between the statue of the Muse of History and the house that Edgar Degas lived in for five months, where Bayou Road, the oldest street in the city, goes from Treme to the Fairgrounds, where the neutral ground narrows at the jag in the lanes after South Galvez Street, bus lines converge and transfer passengers.  Communication and commutation between New Orleans’ distant parts is enhanced and enabled along Esplanade Avenue, where wards converge. 

Different flavors, and different shades, as it traces its patched-pothole track, Esplanade Avenue is consistent in its diversity, and surprising in its tranquility.  If you can imagine peace on Earth, you can imagine a stroll along Esplanade Avenue.  The rat slumbers next to the hen, and eggs are on the breakfast table with red beans and grits, every morning.  Children go to school in waves, and they head home, later.  Adults wander to and fro, morning and night, on their errands.  Conversations unfurl, and connections are made, along Esplanade Avenue.

Between the crumbling high school and the abandoned nursing home, diagonally across from the donut shop, behind the new Rent-a-Center, where a locked, empty church keeps its welcome sign out, business blossoms.

Esplanade Ridge, an unmeasurable, natural wonder of elevated dry land, as majestic as any ineffable, topographic feature, runs somewhat askew of the Crescent City’s curved street grid.  Triangular parks scale Esplanade Avenue’s sides as it runs its straight line to end up near Storyland.  Great things happen on Esplanade Avenue, but they rarely make the news.  

Between two supermarkets that cannot be bothered to compete with each other, and two Spanish restaurants that are as far apart as Minorca and Majorca, a twinkle of whimsy tickles one length of Esplanade Avenue, and one length of Grande Route St. John, and one half of Mystery Street.

Between Saint Louis Cemetery No. 3, and Cabrini High School, devotees of Our Lady of the Rosary pass every day, whether they know it or not.  

Esplanade Avenue rolls over Moss Street and crosses Bayou St. John in a soaring arc atop a utilitarian, cast-concrete bridge.  The view is breathtaking, as is the traffic circle that loops around itself, with stoplights at each cardinal point.  If you ever need to get your bearings, travel the length of Esplanade Avenue from front to back.  What you lose in perspective, you will gain in experience.

When Esplanade Avenue ends, it does so with a command.  A statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, himself, astride a charger, points his saber to the river,.  Any surveyor licensed by the State of Louisiana can plot the course of Esplanade Avenue’s middle by just that saber tip’s angle, alone.  Any symbolic instruction is unintentionally implicit.  You do not have to graduate from Delgado Community College to learn what lies on the other side of the Storyland Railroad’s tracks.

Behind the stalwart, noble figure of General P.G.T. Beauregard, CSA (ret.)(d.1893), is a nexus of rest, relaxation, rejuvenating exercise, picturesque surroundings, family reunions, amateur sporting events, gardens, benches, trails, lagoons, an art museum, and a golf course.  Wars have been fought to preserve civilized life.  Fate runs a weighted lottery.  New Orleans City Park is many things to many people.  Sometimes it all boils down to zoning.  If there are nutria, there is raw, spiritual nourishment available for the inhaling.  Ducks do not live by breadcrumbs alone, and New Orleans needs a grand City Park.  A city that is, itself, a vast testament to vibrant perseverance, should be freckled and speckled with the relics of its permanent past.  

To General Beauregard’s bronzed, right flank, the Canal Street streetcar stops its run with no transfer, but for a a bus.  The only bell that rings on Esplanade Avenue is the church bell summoning parishioners to mass.  Streetcars do not clatter down Esplanade Avenue.  It is a street that finds its identity in unhurried modes.  The loveliest, most thought-provoking, six, sunny-side miles in New Orleans are down one side of Esplanade Avenue and up the other.  A great city’s heart has many arteries to keep its pressure pumping where needed.  Some neighborhoods are scabbed over and scarred, and some have undergone cosmetic surgery.  Some neighborhoods have a fluttering pulse, while others throb with expanding contractions.  Some neighborhoods are husks of empty shotgun shells.  Some neighborhoods are empty, still.  Some neighborhoods make for a pleasant walk at all times of day and night, at all times of the year.

Esplanade Avenue is alive and well.  It is a world both apart from, and, a part of, the rest of New Orleans.  There is no more New Orleanian street on the map, or off the radar.  Esplanade Avenue makes an impression that will inspire a career track for those who can recognize beauty in its polished rough.  A human promenade progresses along Esplanade Avenue.  If New Orleans is beautiful, and it certainly is, its essence is distinctly distilled without a trace of stink, in the perfume that lazily wafts along Esplanade Avenue.  Time does not stand still.  It evolves.  A rough oyster shell holds a pearl.

Esplanade Avenue starts at the Mississippi River, as most everything in New Orleans does.  It ends in art, as most everything in New Orleans does.  There is plenty to see along the way.  Every journey is full of distractions and temptations.  Every journey is worth taking.  If you are lucky enough to walk Esplanade Avenue, you know what it means to have your senses alive.  What is life, but experience?  What is experience if it does not lead to knowledge?  What is knowledge if it does not lead to more questions?  There is always more to learn.  Lessons are dealt every day along the sidewalks of Esplanade Avenue.  Autodidacts, university scholars, and sages wise beyond their credentials find something to savor on Esplanade Avenue.  

Moonlight and sunlight, streetlight, and strobe light, in brightest day and blackest night, Esplanade Avenue is welcoming, peaceful, and secure in its community.  Pelicans, chickens, and pigeons call it home.  So do many, many people who have nowhere else to go between up and down.  The length of Esplanade Avenue runs a pleasant gantlet that invites wandering.  The destination may be unknown, but there will be a welcome respite at journey’s end.

Buses in New Orleans

There are no double decker buses in New Orleans.  If there were, the rides would be much like this..

Every day and every night is an adventure in New Orleans, Louisiana, a world with rules all its own.

Ursuline Concord

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us!

From Hollygrove to Holy Cross, New Orleans glows.  The city radiates a magical aura from the bend in the river to Pontchartrain Park.  The sun rises in the east, a flower blossoming.  The sun sets in the west, locked away in a tomb.  If you can get from the West End to the Lower Ninth Ward in an evening, you will be back again the next day.  Desire is a state of mind that has nothing to do with Florida, but plenty to do with sunshine and retiring from the concerns of the workaday world.  

Sweat it out with Sweetheart.

Our Lady of Prompt Succor.  Sweetheart statue.

As we like to say in New Orleans, "Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us."

If ever there was a city that could help itself, it is New Orleans.  The ties that bind a community together are tight.  Superhuman vision, and a finely attuned ear, make all the difference between a comedy and a tragedy.  Five times out of six, if there is a funeral, there is sure to be a parade.

Out of the bunker.

Cheryl Blossom: Lifeguard.

My life bears no resemblance to two thirds of the plot lines in the typical Archie comic book.  In New Orleans, though surrounded by water, there is no beach.  The few people who swim off the batture... the current carries them away forever.  There are no lifeguards in New Orleans.  There is no drama.

An Amazing Second Line in New Orleans, LA

New Orleans: a drinking town.

The night makes a kind of mask.  All cats are gray in the dark.  Terrence Jefferson is making his way down Frenchmen Street, a skip in his step in time with the music pouring out of the bars.  The women look lovely under the streetlights.  

Winter is the kindest time in New Orleans.  The damp cold is bracing.  People are happy to be outdoors.  They are happy to be spared, for a few months, from oppressive heat.  People stamp down their feet when they dance in the street.  People get more romantic.  The ganders snuggle the geese in City Park as lovers stroll alongside starlit lagoons. 

Happiness loves company, and there is no happiness like the kind of joy a brass band brings.  There is a commotion up the street, where Frenchman intersects with Royal Street.  A brass band is coming, with a parade of impromptu marchers in its wake.  Terrence Jefferson joins in, dancing with a beautiful redhead, before switching to a thin-boned brunette with a bob bound by a spangled headband.  When the band stops in the street, playing the whole time, the bars empty out, including the musicians.  They all add their share to the festivity.  

For twenty minutes, spontaneous bonhomie breaks out in Faubourg Marigny.  People dance on their balconies, and throw flowers into the crowd.  Someone is passing out tambourines.  The musicians play all the old standards, and everyone knows the words to sing out as they dance.  When the brass band finally stops, all of them sweating from pouring out their hearts, everyone offers to buy them a beer.  

The stage musicians get back to their gigs.  The bars fill back up with patrons trying to extend the mood from the street.  A young lady with blue hair bumps into Terrence Jefferson.  “Excuse me,” she says.  “You’re kind of cute.”

They go into the Apple Barrel for a drink.  After that, they go to the Blue Nile.  After that they go to the Balcony Music Club.  Then it is a long walk home-ways, up Esplanade Avenue, hand-in-hand.

Terrence Jefferson lives on Barracks Street, in a pale green shotgun he shares with his girlfriend and her two sisters.  The ladies of the house are out tonight, on Bourbon Street.  They won’t be home until tomorrow.  

Terrence Jefferson and the blue-haired young lady stop into Buffa’s for a nightcap, then they cross the street for a tropical drink at the Port o‘ Call.  As they walk past L’il Dizzy’s, they realize they still have a half-mile to go.    

As they cross Claiborne Avenue, the young lady says, “This is the most romantic night, ever.” 

“It’s getting a bit chilly,” Terrence Jefferson says.  He puts his arm around her waist and pulls her close.  She follows his lead as they take a left on North Prieur Street, then a right on Bayou Road.

Where Barracks Street breaks free of Bayou Road, there is a leafy piazza surrounded by some of the most beautiful homes in New Orleans.  Terrence Jefferson and the blue-haired young lady stand in the middle of the street.  They look at a patch of starry sky haloed by oak branches.  She rests her head against his chest.  “This is like a dream,” the young lady says.

They get to North Galvez Street and Terrence Jefferson says he lives on the next block.  “I live that-away,” the young lady says, extending her thumb.  Terrence Jefferson walks her to her apartment just past Kerlerec Street, and he helps her unlock the door.

Terrence Jefferson walks home, alone, with a spring in his step.  He is whistling.  The air is so cold, it looks like he is smoking.  He stamps his feet on the front steps before he opens his front door.  His girlfriend and her sisters are home early, and he is very happy to see them.  He will not be alone.

One of the sisters notices a blue hair on Terrence Jefferson’s lapel.  All the lights in the house are on.  “I was in the most amazing second line,” Terrence Jefferson says.  That explains it all, and they turn off the lights before going to bed.  

The Best Burley

"You can't go wrong with the best burley raised in lucky Kentucky."  This should be a slogan.  For what, I don't know.  It came to me while I was thinking about Prince Albert in a can, but I don't think the good prince restricts himself to bluegrass burley, or if he contracts with only the best suppliers between Lexington and Paducah.

Kentucky produces about 70% percent of the burley in the U.S. of A.  The next highest producer is its neighbor to the south, the one and only Tennessee.  The Volunteer State is responsible for contributing 20% of the total burley crop.  The remaining, roughly, ten percent is scattered among a handful of other states of more or less importance.

If none of this makes any sense to you:  I am writing pipe smoking stories.  'nuff said.

Balaenius Rex!

Balaenius Rex!

Copyright DC Comics, and probably the estate of Bob Kane.

I've had the opportunity to perform a similar feat twice in my life, before slipping out to the open sea.  I have always lived close to Long Island Sound, Narragansett Bay, or Boston Harbor.  Given the necessity that I may have to startle the populace where I live now, I wonder, should I cruise over Lake Pontchartrain, or circle over the sparsely populated marsh country of Plaquemines Parish?

The whole point of the artful getaway is being left alone until the excitement dies down.   Of course, any panic caused has always been unintentional.  I am just a man going about his business, much of the time.  If I am ever on assignment, it is a covert operation, and I pass unsuspecting pedestrians incognito, as I bivouac between Uptown and Downtown.

Should I have to launch a dirigible in the shape of a whale, I should find a suitable launching and landing pad.  I could inflate the whole apparatus with a couple of hand pumps, helped by the neighborhood schoolchildren, on North Johnson Street, but air patrol requires only one pilot.  He should be able to take flight by himself.  What if civics class is in session?

I've been scouting some sites in New Orleans East, and also a couple of empty lots in Chalmette.  I am negotiating with Tulane University to contract air rights over the university's natural history museum.  The staff is afraid that a flying whale may excite their specimens, and disrupt their experiments.  Since the museum's grounds are not open to the public, I think this abandoned WWII munitions station would be a good place to stow my gear.  The sight of a flying whale excites more than fish.  Evil-doers cower in a whale's shadow.

What I saw today in New Orleans.

Walking back to my office, a bicycle built for two passed.  Then a bicycle built for four.  Then more.  It was a parade of people propelling themselves forward in tandem, all their muscles working together in concert on a frame.  The wheels turned on their spokes.  The pedals circled in humid air.


This is what I saw en route to City Hall.  Most parades pass by Perdido Street.  

The Contessa of Iberville.

 

The Contessa asked me if I had heard she is pregnant.  I hadn’t, and I admitted as much.  “I’m pregnant!” she told me.  I offered my congratulations. 

The proud father works as a bus driver at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner.  Kenner is the fourth-largest city in Louisiana, no small boast.  Louisiana is named after a French King, not Louis Armstrong, though true royalty knows no established bloodline.  The Contessa’s mate drives in circles for eight hours at a time, five days a week, around the airport.  He sleeps eight hours a day, as often as he is able.  Sometimes he takes a long, snoring nap.  Sometimes he plays with his sons and daughters.

“I’m the mother of his seventh child!” the Contessa says.  She seems very happy and very proud.  “When you meet him, you’ll know he is the sweetest, best man there is in the diocese.”  The Archdiocese of New Orleans is made up of the following Louisiana parishes: Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, Saint Charles, Saint John the Baptist, and Washington.  The father of seven children must be the sweetest, best man in so large an area, if not all of Louisiana.  I’ll be able to witness itself, myself, if I get the chance to meet him.

The Contessa and I are sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the outer wall of St. Louis Cemetery Number 2.  The Iberville Housing Projects are across the street.  We are looking at the Contessa’s front door, off to the left behind the crooked oak tree.

“He’s going to take me away from here!” the Contessa said.  

“Away from New Orleans?”  I asked.

“He’s going to take me out of Iberville!”  Contessa said.  “He’s going to take me to Mid-City!”

Mid-City is not to be confused with Central City in New Orleans.  Nor is it to be confused with the Central Business District.  It is neither Uptown nor Downtown.  It is both and more.  It is vast.  It is home to the Criminal Court and the Orleans Parish Jail.  It is where square blocks of homes have been destroyed to replace a perfectly good hospital with a newer, smaller, shinier, less attractive, more superficially expansive model.  New Orleans is full of baubles, some are more noticeable than others.  It is Bayou Saint John. It is Ursulines Street.  It is gelato and Old World Pizza.  It is where the best snowballs can be found.  It is Greater Treme, but not Historic Treme.  It is Banks and Broad and the Fairgrounds.  Jefferson Davis is memorialized in Mid-City.  So are aluminum cans, mayonnaise, and Falstaff Beer.  

The Contessa has a pretty face.  She has skin like a soft, muslin shawl in the dark.  Her eyes are bright and her teeth are white.  She is in love.  We are sitting on a bleached sidewalk, leaning against the whitewashed outer wall of Saint Louis Cemetery Number 2 in the humid, noonday sun of a New Orleans September.  New Englanders would cry from joy if they could feel a hot sun like this in the ninth month of the year.  When the Contessa smiles, the day seems brighter, and cooler, at the same time.  She is in love.

“When I move to Mid-City, everything will be better!” the Contessa tells me.  “I’ll be happy,” she says.

I mention that she has always seemed happy living in Iberville.  She looks at me like I don’t know anything.  She looks at her front door across the street, then she looks at me again.  Then, she looks at her feet.

“I never had a good man until now.  Now I have one.”  The Contessa looks at her feet and she rubs her belly.  I see a ring on the pinky of her left hand.  Burnished tin catches the sunlight, and it sparkles in its scratches.  “His name is Jared, and he has a college degree.  He told me he is going to live with me in Mid-City.  I believe in him, and he believes in me!”

I asked Agent 11 to do a background check.  One hour and twelve dollars later, I had a dossier full of Mr. Jared O’Doul’s vital statistics and details of interest.  He does in fact have a college degree.  It is a BA in Political Science, granted by the University of New Orleans in 2004.  He does drive a bus, or a shuttle van in airport parlance, at the New Orleans Airport in Kenner.  He has been employed by the same company for eight years.

He has, in fact, if birth and baptismal certificates can be believed, fathered eleven children, not counting his begetting with the Contessa.  The mothers are scattered all over the Louisiana parishes of Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, Saint Charles, Saint John the Baptist, and Washington.  Eleven children in eight civic jurisdictions, soon to be twelve children.  It is a virile accomplishment to sire so many progeny within a single archdiocese.  What boasting rights it grants him, I cannot imagine.  There but for the grace of the angels, go thee and me.

His current address is an apartment leased under the name of a Ms. Chardonnay Mercedes.  He has lived there for six months.  

When I saw the Contessa last Tuesday, her belly was a little big bigger than when we sat in the sun outside the cemetery.   She was a picture of health.  She was the most beautiful woman on Canal Street waiting for a bus.  She smiled when she saw me, and I felt relaxed in her company.  I asked how she has been.

“I’m pregnant!” she told me.  I congratulated her.  “It’s not going to work with Jared,” she told me.  “He’s no good.  He’s been living with a dancer the whole time he was with me.  He’s been living with her, two-timing me.  No man of mine two-times me.  I gave him the rush and hit him in the head with a frying pan.”

“I’ve got myself a new man now,” the Contessa told me.  “He’s the kindest, most responsible man in the whole diocese.”  Who could this new paramour be?  I didn’t want to ask.  I complimented the Contessa on how she looked like a perfect mother.

“I don’t have any business on Saint Claude Avenue,” the Contessa confesses.  “I take the 88 bus on Tuesdays because that’s when I can talk to my man.  He’s the driver, and I sit in the front seat.  When the bus is empty at the end of the line, we get to be a little romantic.  He accepts me!

“He doesn’t take me out or anything.  We just meet on the bus.  Tomorrow, I’ll be going to Audubon Park on the Number 11.  I like it out there, and Lester has the sweetest voice when he talks.  Not just when he talks to me, but also when he talks to his passengers who don’t have the correct change, or who don’t know how to put the transfer ticket in the machine.  He is really very kindhearted and patient.”

I have always found New Orleans Regional Transit Authority employees to be professional and courteous.  Unlike mass transit workers in other cities, Boston, for instance, Philadelphia also comes to mind, NORTA drivers and conductors are cheerful ambassadors of goodwill.  They have time for every concern, and they have assistance for every handicap.  They know their routes the way they know their own neighborhoods, intimately and thoroughly.

It isn’t a surprise that a woman can fall in love with a streetcar or a bus driver in New Orleans.  The surprise is that more women don’t.  Though the NORTA mailbox is stuffed with fawning fan letters, they represent only a fraction of the annual ridership.  A lonely lady streetcar driver is as uncommon as a unicorn.  As for the men, let us only say that they have a reputation.

I had an appointment on Gravier Street, so I bid the Contessa farewell.  “Too bad,” she said, “I was hoping you would take the 88 Bus with me.  I know you would fall in love with Lester if you met him.”  I couldn’t predict if that would be the case, but the Contessa certainly looked happy on the corner of South Rampart and Canal Streets.  The day was overcast, but continued to sparkle come what may.  “Momma always told me I was a special baby,” the Contessa whispered to me, “Now I’m gonna have a special baby!”  She smiled so brightly, I could only smile back in return as I wished her godspeed.

To Think It Happened On DeLille Street in New Orleans.

I posit that this may be the first published mention of DeLille Street as actually existing.  I'm just waiting for the city to change the signs.

Who names a baby Anthracite?  I would think no one, but there it was, plain as the day, in the Times-Picayune obituaries.  Francis Lemulet, recently deceased, left behind, as one of his survivors, a son named Anthracite Lemulet.  This called for further investigation.  

I am not the kind of busybody to go and pry into someone’s funeral, so I hired a professional.  Someone who has to make uncomfortable choices, during all hours of the day, for a living, is known as a professional.  Agent 11, with whom I had the pleasure to make contact soon after moving to New Orleans, was willing and able to get me the tale behind and around Anthracite Lemulet’s name.

A few months went by with only sporadic communication with Agent 11.  Most of that consisted of brief notes stating that he was following up leads.  Truth to tell, I was starting to forget about my curiosity until I received another message, and accompanying invoice, from my man in the field.  Agent 11 and I had originally negotiated a reasonable, flat, weekly rate to solve the mystery underlying Anthracite Lemulet’s back story.  When he began to send me receipts for expenses, I flatly told him that I was not paying for nights out at Syndey’s or Sweet Lorraine’s or Buffa’s.  He retorted that these expenses were justified since he was following up leads.  I terminated this mission, and asked for a summary of what he had learned thus far.  

I received the following reply:

Dear Sir,

I regret to inform you that Mr. Anthracite Lemulet is with his father in Heaven.  The younger Mr. Lemulet met his demise while still grieving the loss of his father.  NOPD sources state there was no evidence of violence to the body.  The Coroner’s office agreed with the police department’s assessment that the victim died peaceably.  No arrests have been made while detectives continue to follow up leads.

The senior Mr. Lemulet’s motive for bestowing the name in question upon his son is not yet conclusively determined.  Please follow these instructions .... .... and you will find the location of the latest information I have thus far unearthed.

Please don’t hesitate to call if I can be of any assistance to you in the future.  I found this assignment very stimulating, professionally, and I look forward to working with you again.

With sincere regards, 

Agent 11.  

The ellipses above stand for how many steps I should take in one direction, what quizzical landmark I will see when I get to that point, then how many steps I should take in another direction.  There was a treasure map, drawn on a roll of butcher paper, without any features except for a pattern of dashed lines, each dash representing a footstep.  

I followed the instructions.

When I was finished, I was standing on the corner of Governor Nicholls and DeLille Streets, facing Saint Augustine’s Church.  If I knew what any of this meant, I would be a smarter man than Agent 11.  Was I the victim of a practical joke?  Did Anthracite Lemulet get his name by inspiration from the Holy Spirit?  That is certainly within the limits of the probable, but why the secrecy?  Why the opacity of what I was supposed to achieve by walking a winding path from Gentilly down through Treme?  

I wasn’t sure.

I walked home on Governor Nicholls Street, and I passed the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.  The DeLille Street side of the church is a place of piety.  The Governor Nicholls Street side of the church is a place of memorial.  I think I know the answer to a riddle, but I don’t know it well enough to say it right.  There are bones in the earth.

When I try to explain it to Eric, he says he’s got some crazy ideas, himself.  “Everyone has them,” he says.  “When you live here long enough, you’ll be lousy with them.  It takes some getting used to, but after awhile you won’t mind not being sure what’s going on.  Sometimes the best way to tell something is not to describe it, but to provide an example.”

Ask anyone to speculate what it would be like to go through life as Anthracite Lemulet.  The person who could tell us from firsthand experience is dead without a so much as his own obituary.  I’ve been looking.  He merited only a brief mention in the summary of his father’s life.  As to the son’s life, it remains unspoken.  

Where is his monument on Governor Nicholls Street?  There is a cross forged of rusty, iron chains at the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.  Anthracite Lemulet was born and died a free man.  He was born a few streets away uptown.  He died a few streets away downtown.  There are bones in New Orleans’ graves.

A Secret Under Wraps

A Drinking Town. 2011.

“I know a secret,” the girl under the streetlight on North Rampart Street said.  She asked me if I wanted to learn it.  My curiosity was aroused.

Stopped in my tracks by this spontaneous, feminine apparition, I felt a fertile animal magnetism that made me think twice and then thrice, in quick succession, as to what course of action to take.  The dice rolled snake eyes, so I asked the young lady to show me her secret.  

Her long, bare legs started walking as she swept her head to indicate that I should follow her.  She led me to the Friendly Touch Bar on Touro Street.  She insisted she needed to wet her whistle before we got down to business. Six hours later, we left the Friendly Touch and parted company, exchanging business cards, followed by a handshake.   

A city that is alive is full of stories.  Some of them are told.  Most of them are secrets.  

Unfortunate Nicknames - New Orleans Edition.

Saint Expedite.

I was talking to Dickey the Cock last night.  Don’t get any smirk-inducing ideas.  Richard’s totem animal is a rooster.  He has one tattooed onto each of this chiseled deltoids.  The are inked in a strutting position.  When he wants to impress a certain kind of lady, Dickey makes the roosters dance.  Everyone tangentially connected to the restaurant industry in the French Quarter is familiar with his face.  His friends call him Dickey.  His acquaintances, and people just being introduced who have less prestige than he does, refer to him by his title: Mr. Cock.  

Dickey likes to think of himself as a modern day, New Orleans-based, Eugene Debs.  Through manipulations I cannot begin to fathom, Dickey serves as a kind of informal union boss and hiring office for the city’s unorganized, but professional, dishwashers.  He collects regular dues from the dishwashers in return for keeping an eye on the market and bargaining on their behalf for better working conditions, higher wages, and increased benefits.  He is a vocal, if sometimes inelegant, advocate for dishwashers‘ rights.  “The voiceless need to be heard,” he says.

I bumped into The Cock on the steps of the Supreme Court Building on the Royal Street side.  He offered me a swig from his can of Bud Light, but I had just had a glass of ice water not five minutes before.  After exchanging pleasantries, I asked Dickey about a rumor I had heard, something about a backed up drain in the kitchen of a rather pricey eatery on St. Ann Street.  

“That was on Saint Peter, not Saint Anne,” Dickey the Cock said.  “I cannot say that the dishwasher was involved, mind you, and I don’t believe he was.  All I can tell you about the matter is that a foreign object, one that does not belong in any restaurant kitchen drain, was discovered within the plumbing of the premises about which we are discussing.”  Dickey once considered becoming an attorney.  He even had a slogan prepared for his television, radio, and billboard advertisements: “Put The Cock On ‘Em!”  Instead, he found his true calling.

From what I heard, it was indeed a very foreign object.  I heard that a diamond ring worth $40,000.00 was found wrapped in a napkin and lodged into the U-bend under a sink at one of New Orleans‘ swankiest public dining halls.  According to Dickey, it is improbable to the point of impossible that the dishwasher could have wrapped a napkin around a valuable ring, and disposed of it down the drain.  “Why wouldn’t the fool just put it in his pocket?  He could have hid it in the remoulade, since the remoulade is terrible there and nobody orders it, and then he could have swallowed it during his dinner break.  Heck, he could have put it on his finger if he was stealing it.  He wouldn’t commit to the bowels of the Sewer and Water Board.”

As it turns out, no charges have been filed against the dishwasher, nor is his further employment in question.  According to Dickey, the dishwasher has earned a two percent raise based on his dedication to duty, demonstrated by turning off the water when he noted the drain was clogged.  “It takes a sharp man with a keen sense of responsibility to be a dishwasher,” Dickey says.  “You can’t just pluck a man out of the unemployment line and expect him to be a dishwasher.  It takes years of practice, and familiarity with the traditions of the craft.  Most people don’t realize that.  That’s why I’m here to fight for the dishwashers.”

We chatted a bit more, mostly about the weather and how Lucky Dog’s hot dog carts are not required to have three sinks like every other culinary establishment in New Orleans.  

When it was time for me to go, Dickey had about a tenth of a tall boy of Bud Light left.  Remembering a past conversation about his efforts to complete his state quarter collection, I handed him the four loose quarters that jangled in my pocket when I stood up.  

“Refuse to rest while fellow men go hungry,” were Dickey’s parting words to me as he shook my hand and looked me squarely in the eye.

I told him I am an insomniac, and bid him a good rest of the night.