STARS & HYPE
First Time Notes On The American Deep South
THE DEBUT BOOK FROM AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST SAMUEL J. FELL RELEASED TODAY
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***
5
New Orleans, Part One
Newspapers read thus
far: The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (West Coast Edition),
The Austin American-Statesman, the Goliad Advance-Guard, The Times-Picayune.
Someone said to me at some point prior to
this trip that the Faubourg Marigny district is a burgeoning bohemian area. A
little way east of the French Quarter in New Orleans, it’s home to artists,
hipsters and the like, small pop-up bars and artisan shops. Still gritty and
real, but only in its early stages of gentrification and so not tainted.
It doesn’t seem too gentrified at first glance though. People
of dubious character (not a hipster to be seen) ramble along the steaming reach
of St. Claude Avenue, others sprawled outside Hank’s where we go to buy beer,
leaning against the brick walls in the shade – some with flea-bitten old dogs –
drinking 40s out of brown paper bags eyeing everyone else from under
low-brimmed hats and ratty hair.
A little earlier, the cab from the airport had dropped us
off outside our temporary digs on Mandeville Street, just off St. Claude, a
long thin stretch of concrete with tiny houses packed along its sides, an auto
shop on the corner. We were met by Orly, a friend of the house’s owner, who led
us down the narrow path next to the house, let us in the back door and gave us
some tips on where to go, what to do. I asked him if the area is safe. He
thought for a bit. Essentially said just be careful.
He left us to it and we lay on the bed under the fan and
thought about what to do next, whether three in the afternoon was too early to
do anything. We decided to go and buy food and so found an organic supermarket
up the road down the back of a yoga studio, new age medical clinics off to the
side, a hip haven amongst what seems to be a wasteland.
We go from there to Hank’s then back to the house.
I sit in the tiny back garden and sip on a can of Bud and
smoke a cigarette, humid, rub my feet in the grass and wonder how this’ll all
pan out. The yard is long and narrow, patchy grass and overgrown bushes on the
side half hiding the rusty chainlink fence. There are a few small flower pots
near the back door, flowers struggling in the heat, an old strand of fairy
lights looping the rail by the steps like a translucent snake, too hot to move.
The yards on either side are concrete, the one on the right with a ramshackle
old shed, falling down, missing its door, most of its windows.
Despite the area’s seeming desolation however, we’re only a
five minute walk from the top of Frenchmen Street, which runs parallel to
Mandeville, south to the edge of the Quarter and is lined with myriad tiny
bars, music of all strains booming out onto the sidewalks, people wandering
about with plastic cups of beer smoking and laughing. Just a regular city
street in a regular city late on a Friday afternoon except the street is
exceptional and the city is N’Awlins, The Crescent City, The Big Easy, so it’s
all different and ribald and loose, a permanent party except you’re always
watching your back, no matter how far into the situation you push yourself.
Once we’ve eaten at the house, we find our way down there,
navigating along St. Claude, missing the top of Frenchmen thinking it’d be a
pulsating strip like Bourbon Street and so doubling back and stepping out of a
seeming war zone – cracked grey pavement, roadworks, jackhammers blowing
concrete dust into the thick air – onto
a leafy, tree-lined street with small, neat houses that eventually give way to
one of the most famous music strips in the world. We feel at home immediately
and see The Spotted Cat and go in and sit at the bar drinking bottles of Bud
listening to Andy Forest play harmonica and a bit of guitar.
As I listen I look about and try and feel it, this famous
venue I’ve known of for so long, the dancing cat mural on the back wall, the
myriad bills tacked up behind the bar – I see an Australian five, a ten – the
green walls and dark wood bar with the lip, so’s you have to reach across and
down a little to pick up your beer. Two girls walk out and one stops to take a
photo of Forest playing guitar on stage, but he snaps that they don’t even know
his name so don’t take no photo, just throw a dollar in the bucket.
They slink off, a self-conscious laugh. We move off after a
drink not long after, throw a dollar into the bucket, out the door into the
fading sunshine, left and across the road, where to next? Wherever sounds good.
The night carries on in this fashion. Chance Bushmen’s
Rhythm Stompers at Bamboulas, dusty rag-time, tap-dancin’ jazz ‘n’ jive; Higher
Heights at Café Negril, all funk and groove, good for dancin’, good for
swingin’.
We head down to the bottom of Frenchmen at one point and
onto the start of Decatur which leads into the Quarter proper and find a tiny,
dark hole in the wall where we grab two seats at the end of the bar, order
beers and shots of Jack Daniels. The bartenders are switching shifts, the place
is open 24 hours, the clutch of people down the front are regulars. The
bartender getting off is shitfaced drunk. The one coming on is a jovial gay guy
who ain’t takin’ the last guy’s shit, but you can tell they’re friends. They
both joke with us and it’s a comfortable little place despite the dinge and
dark, the noise and the smell. Feels comfortable. I sit out the front for a
smoke, on a small wooden bench, and watch a few kids doing tricks on a
skateboard outside the shop next door.
We walk back to Bamboulas and sit out the front at one of
their two tables and smoke more cigarettes and drink cheap beer watching the
tide of people wander past, listening to snatches of conversation wondering
where people are from and where they’re going.
We head home reasonably early, via the night market, back up
Frenchmen and along St. Claude, slightly oblivious to the danger – is there any
danger? – past the Hi Ho Lounge which has people spilling out onto the street,
past another small bar blasting out some decent heavy metal.
After dark, the bohemian element is obvious. It’s almost
like during the day the area belongs to the downtrodden and broke, the hungry
and desperate. Once the sun goes down however, the music starts and the
temperature cools and people come out to play, a bit of money in their pocket,
op-shop boots and long, slim cigarettes.
We keep walking, around the corner onto Mandeville and to
the relative quiet of the back garden for another beer or two, more talk, where
to next, tomorrow.
***
We sleep late. Eventually we rouse
ourselves and I have a shower and then sit out the back in the shade for bit.
It’s so quiet, still. The sun beats down, not a cloud in the sky and everything
is trying to soak it in, let it accentuate its colour, but it’s almost like it
can’t quite get there.
There’s a sense of gloom over this place. A sense of danger
just under the surface. A sense of desperation. Perhaps a hangover from
Katrina, a decade ago, perhaps just the normal daily feel of a poor
neighbourhood that doesn’t deign to be anything other than it is. And so it
feels gloomy, scary, somewhere we shouldn’t be. The feeling sits in the pit of
my stomach, a dull object in my gut like I need to shit but can’t. That feeling
of being out of one’s comfort zone, a long way out. I smoke more than I usually
do.
We leave the house a bit before lunchtime and head back down
Frenchmen, onto Decatur towards the French Quarter. Our surroundings gentrify
and the feeling lifts a little. Soon we’re thrust into the Quarter itself, its
own little city, twelve-odd square blocks of sin. A man drives slowly down
Toulouse Street, leaning out his window shouting verses from the bible. We see
him later down by the river, standing on a busy corner, shouting his bible
verses. Not to anyone, just to everyone. One man trying to make a difference.
Claire asks if I think he thinks he is
making a difference. I shrug, maybe. We don’t see him again all weekend.
We wander around the Quarter for a few hours, just looking
and watching. There’s a college football game on this evening, Florida State,
The Gators, in town to play LSU and there are fans everywhere decked out in
jerseys and t-shirts. Flags are flying, it’s a fierce rivalry but the feeling
seems good. So the place is full, it heaves despite the early hour, expectation
is in the air. We catch bits and pieces of the game later that night. Louisiana
State win by a touchdown.
By then, we’re back on Frenchmen Street, but we spend the
day exploring the Quarter. Even at one in the afternoon, Bourbon is teeming,
college kids wandering about in packs with fishbowls and hand grenades, huge
fluoro coloured drinks of god knows what clutched in tanned hands, male and
female, some already stumbling and crooked, others well on their way. Bourbon
smells like vomit and young exuberance gone stale and wan. Piss and the
desperate remnants of last night. Stains the back of your throat.
No one gives two shits though and the bars encourage it and
the drink flows and a normal Saturday afternoon on Bourbon Street carries on.
The sound from countless horn sections booms from open doorways and floats up
on the vague breeze enveloping the fern-laden balconies above. The music is
high-octane, designed to move your feet and fill your glass.
We sit for a while in Congo Square, somewhere a bit quieter,
over in Louis Armstrong Park. The grass is green and thick and I kick off my
boots and look through the info pack I’ve been left at the information centre
by the media people at the tourism bureau – maps, brochures, badges, a few
passes to things. We throw most of it out, but keep the bits that interest us. We
watch a few homeless guys wander past. We watch a tattooed and shirtless guy
trying to land various flips on his skateboard as his girlfriend sits in the
sun, bored. She claps when he lands something though.
We decide to head back into the Quarter and so duck back
across Nth Rampart and onto Toulouse, down towards the river. We line up
outside Café du Monde, famous for its beignets, but don’t actually get in. We
stand and listen to a small trad jazz combo – sax, clarinet, drum, fiddle and
guitar, with a self-conscious fiddler who sings but is embarrassed.
We wander the streets and generally get a feel for the
place, its old-time influence, its party prevalence, countless voices from then
and now bouncing back off old stone walls, a cacophony, buildings seemingly
growing out of each other, a mass of architecture climbing up from the narrow
streets. French doors open onto sagging balconies above our heads. Halloween
decorations festoon across front porches and around ground floor windows.
Because of the football, we find a small bar serving fifty
cent oysters which we have with Cajun calamari and some local beer for a few
bucks before heading back to the house, have a shower and sleep for a while,
smoke a cigarette in the long, overgrown yard prior to heading back out to
wherever the fancy takes us. Who knows? Not us, by no means.
We end up, after dark, in the lounge at the Hotel Monteleone
which has a revolving carousel bar. It’s fancy and we order cocktails. I try
not to get distracted by the football being shown on a dozen screens around the
room. Claire’s heard about this place, and so we come here to seek out a bit of
the opulence prevalent in parts of the Quarter and I order a sazerac because
it’d be remiss of me not to given where we are.
From there we wander back to Frenchmen’s where we bar hop a
little before ending up at our table outside Bamboulas, drinking and watching,
listening to the BackBone Blues Band and then the Johnny Mastro Band, just
soaking it all up, finally finding our feet in a city known for knocking one
down.
I go inside for a beer at one point and come out in a bit
and Claire has been befriended by a newly married couple from somewhere in
Wisconsin who have been drinking for a few hours and so the four of us spend a
couple more hours talking and watching and swapping stories and the like and
it’s harmless enough for sure.
I switch to gin at some point before deciding bourbon is
more appropriate and perhaps I’m talking to myself at this point, but everyone
else seems to be in the same mindset and so we carry on, swapping stories,
listening and watching the constant ebb and flow of human flotsam up and down
the narrow sidewalks, cigarette butts in the puddle off the curb, the smell
from the bins across the street mixing with weed, tobacco, stale beer and sweat
in a city that doesn’t sleep, even when hungover, which one gets the impression
is most every day.
They tell us stories of life in Wisconsin, and we ask questions
and drinks are spilt on the rickety table. I can’t remember their names.
The foot traffic swells, a band finishes at DBAs so the
pavement is full. A new one starts at a joint down the street a bit so traffic
wanes. On the road itself, cab after cab passes by slowly, dodging pedestrians
who should be dodging cars but are just rambling into the street to the place
across the road, flicking cigarette butts and yelling to friends over the way,
or up on one of the balconies above their own heads.
It’s a good time vibe, there’s no malice anywhere, just a
general feeling of drunken bonhomie and friendship. People bump into you and
say sorry quickly, a smile and off they go, into the night looking for God
knows what. A Norwegian (so he says) man stops and starts talking and the
Wisconsin woman rolls her eyes and lights another of her menthol cigarettes,
and this guy tries to sell us small bottles of a homemade hangover cure he says
can’t fail. We take a bottle so’s he’ll leave, throw it in Claire’s handbag.
I find it, weeks later, when we’re home and I don’t even
read the label before throwing it in the bin.
Eventually, I call it and we wander home again and sit
outside once more and then pack our bags as we’re moving into the Quarter
tomorrow. We fall asleep a little more easily, the dull feeling in my gut not
as urgent as before.
Australian / New Zealand Customers Only
$AU 20.00 (+$AU 5.00 Postage)
American / European Customers Only
The title is available from Amazon in your home territory
ALSO AVAILABLE ON E-READER
(Kindle, iPad, etc)
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