Excerpt:
Short excerpts from French Quarter Fiction
Fidel Castro was drawing tourists’ portraits on Jackson Square
in New Orleans that summer of 1971. No one much suspected him of being
a dictator or anything else. New Orleans has always had its share of
strongmen, being the unwitting gateway to the Caribbean and Central
America. Thus Castro languidly cultivated his wavy beard and a penchant
for catching people’s likenesses on cheap manilla paper all through
the infernally hot summer afternoons.
—Mary Elizabeth Gehman, "Trompe
L'Oleil"
But then this New World—all of it—is
a hopeless hodge-podge. From our first stops among the Gulf islands
containing yards of moaning Africans to the long, low benches beneath
shade trees where native aboriginals lounged in front of ponderous
Spanish bureaucrats, the place seemed to be waiting for an element
lost, an ingredient yet discovered, to congeal its mismatched parts.
I am such a part.
—John Verlenden, "Lost Text: Hotel
St. Pierre"
It is delightful to lie in bed on a Saturday
night, safe behind burglar bars, savoring the call of trombones,
trumpets, clarinets, and drums drifting from the open doors of Bourbon
Street’s Dixieland clubs—a
gumbo of tempos and tunes spiced with shattering glass, with shouts
and screams. Sometimes a gunshot, a siren. The sound of the Quarter
on a Saturday night is Spike Jones in spades, an outrageous overture
to a new week.
—Bruce Henricksen, "The Last Bijou"
So you’re picking your way among the tourists and the trash
and yet if it’s home, then anything could happen, and every situation
is a stage set, every bar or lounge. All the ghosts of those you most
have loved are there, and it is overpowering. The whole place peopled
with ghosts, and maybe one or two who accompany you everywhere you
go.
—Nancy Lemann
It is a fact universally acknowledged that the very walls have ears.
What is not so generally known is that we also have eyes.
If you have ever lived in a historic house,
especially in New Orleans, you are well aware that such a building
is an entity unto itself, with a personality and a way of expressing
it. Normally, we do not give up our secrets. But, my darlings—this
one is so delicious!
—Julie Smith, “The House of Mischief”
The change was not, as in literature or even as in film, instantaneous.
Flesh and bone had to be worked into fresh relationships. Each piece
had to be tooled. The latent memory of each ligament and tendon had
to be massaged into oblivion. Then each aching new joint had to be
rotated into each raw new socket. Bones had to be bent, the skull deformed,
the skin hardened. It could take hours.
Once, after he had revealed to me his secret, I walked in on my friend
in the process of changing into a dog. He seemed horribly disfigured
and turned to me with the most pitiful and suppliant gaze I had ever
encountered. I put my arms around his furry nape as he convulsed with
the changes that wracked his body.
—John Biguenet, "Gregory's Fate”
I knew I was handicapped by this dark spiritual landscape and that
without light no healthy growth was possible. I remembered once throwing
myself on the cold tile floor in the chapel where I prayed, alone and
at the close of day. I had watched the sunlight failing to illuminate
the stained glass windows (how each figure faded from the heart outward),
and it seemed to me that I was next in the great withdrawal of light.
Struck by this, I threw myself over the last rays upon the floor, but
no sooner had I touched the spot where they fell than they were gone.
—Valerie Martin
Parshal sat on the porch of his rented bungalow
on Spain Street in the Marigny, chasing the bitter taste of monkey
gland fluid with Rebel Yell. His brain was obsessed by thoughts of
his erstwhile girlfriend, Hypolite Cortez, and the fact that she
had abandoned him in favor of a woman. Hypolite now lived with an
exotic dancer named Irma Soon, a Panamanian-Chinese who simulated
copulation with a rock python six nights a week at Big Nig’s Gauchos ’n’ Gals
Club on Pelican Avenue in Algiers…
“Hey, Parshal! Parshal Lee!”
Parshal broke out of his trance and saw Avenue
Al, a neighbor, standing on the sidewalk. Al was wearing a dyed-purple
mohair suit, which he called his “goat coat,” and was propped up on crutches,
necessitated by his having taken a hard fall and broken both knees
while leaving Teresa’s Tite Spot Lounge in the Bywater two months
before. Avenue Al, a sixty-year-old former professional wrestler whose
claim to fame was that he had bitten off one of Dick the Bruiser’s
earlobes, was suing Teresa for damages. His plan, he told everyone,
was to take the money and retire in Cebu City, the Philippines, where
he had once wrestled an ape. “Fell in love a dozen times in six
days,” he claimed, “and never even got the clap.”
“Come on, Parshal,” Avenue Al shouted, “let’s
go! Trumpet Shorty havin’ a funeral for his pit bull, Louis Armstrong,
jus’ passed. Be the firs’ dog have a second-line since
dat rabid Airedale, Dagoo, hads to be put down in ’71.”
—Barry Gifford, “The Passion of
Hypolite Cortez"
Now he dragged the second body to the edge and pushed it over. After
emptying a sack of lime over the pile, he went back to the cart again
and closed the gate. Then he walked to the edge of the cemetery, drawn
by nothing more than the chaotic flames of a tar barrel. He lit a cigarette,
suffused with the satisfaction of his crimes. A slave by the name of
Robert approached, leg shackles clanking.
“Mr. Tallant, sir!”
“Yes, Robert, what is it?”
“One of those dead bodies you brung. Body ain’t
dead!”
—Jarret Keene, "Conjure Me"
The lights from all the lampposts along the
Riverwalk had shrunken back into their bulbs. The lights from the
GNO Bridge were gone altogether, replaced by two dull, overlapping
steel bridges. A blurred halo arched over the riverbend beyond Algiers
Point. And then there was the noises of the others—the shapeless masses that lined their path, groaning,
growing into form, elbows, arms, bodies—stretching and yawning
and sitting up, wriggling free of their blankets and bags, a sluggish
chorus, their eyes aching into consciousness, the weight of day, blinking
until they became relaxed. And they breathed in the light. And then
the sun. A crimson yolk. Whole new men. Time to get going.
—Maker Clark, "Tide of the Sun"
It was way out there, really beautiful. He’d snapped his legs
together at just the right time and entered the river with hardly a
splash. I was told later that his name was Quinn and he had been a
championship swimmer. Even so, there’s not a swimmer in the world
who can tangle with the Mississippi in late April and live to brag
about it. More than once I’ve seen entire trees rolling out in
the channel, their stripped branches like crowds of skeletal hands
reaching for the sun as the river carries them away, toward the Gulf.
—Jason Wiese, "The Dive"
Summertime in this city the air gets thick and comes alive, wraps
its sickly sweet self around you sticky and strong. We stay indoors
or move from one shady doorway to the next like lizards, blinking.
At night when the hazy sun has burned out, we come out into the dark
heat and move slowly like underwater, which we are more or less, below
the levee and the great unseen black river snaking its way around us
silent and deep. The little girl worked the tourists every day, dawn
to noon or so, then moving from the levee to a shaded step beneath
a balcony off the square. I know. I walked the Quarter learning how
to make myself invisible, fading into the heavy air, molecule by molecule
until I was a seersucker ghost, a white blur wrinkling the air as I
passed by. But she could always see me.
—Christopher Chambers, "Summertime"
We were frog-skinned. The liquid air permeated us. Not toad-skinned,
not bumpy and rough, but smooth and watery, a mix of flesh and beverage,
the moistness of youth, the heavy summer passing through us and not
us through it. Although we were. Passing through.
—Tim Parrish, "Summerteeth"
As far as I know, I am one of only four people
who have ever seen the picture of Lillian—Evans, my father
and herself being the other three.
Why show it to me? I asked, amazed that she
had. Love, she told me, is the most important thing in the world.
Everyone will admit to this, but I want to tell you something they
won’t...
—Josh Russell, "Two Photographs
by Walker Evans"
The past keeps rising up here; the water table is too high. All around
the Quarter groups of tourists float like clumps of sewage. The black
carriage drivers pull their fringed carts full of white people from
nowhere up to the corner outside and tell them how Jean Lafitte and
Andrew Jackson plotted things out, as if the driver knew them personally.
The conventioneers sit under the carriage awning, looking around with
the crazed, vacant stare of babies, shaded by history, then move on.
The sun is getting higher, the shadows are
shortening, the moisture is steaming off the sidewalks. The Schubert,
or Debussy, or whatever it is, has turned into an oboe rhapsody,
with French horns and bassoons quacking and palmetto bugs crawling
across the tile floor, making clicking sounds that I can’t hear because the music is too loud. If she
didn’t love me, why didn’t she just tell me so?
—Tom Piazza, "Brownsville"
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