napoleon complex 2.0

Napoleon complex 2.0
Originally uploaded by Zuzu*Petals.

That’s right, I promised a report on my recent visit to New Orleans. I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure out what exactly I want to communicate about the trip - some grand, symphonic epiphany that I could hand to all five of you who read this thing to savor and digest, not unlike the absolutely amazing meal I had at Galatoire’s. With my brain as caught up with other things as it has been, though, all I’ve been able to come up with until this morning was the recollection of a T-shirt I saw for sale hanging on a shingle outside of a shop on Decatur Street, reading across the chest FEMA Evacuation Plan: Run, Motherfucker, Run. On further thought, the T-shirt makes for a nice jumping-off place - it takes me right back to a spot of Louisiana pavement where I was standing all of two weeks ago.

New Orleans. The last time I saw her, it was October in 2000 and I was with a band of 10 starving actors in a 15-passenger van, living out of suitcases and zigzagging across the country doing children’s theatre for three months (a tale in and of itself, but I digress). When you’re traveling with people whose budgets barely allow for them to heat their cans of soup on a portable stove, it’s hard to enjoy all the fine dining options New Orleans has to offer. Nevertheless, I managed to find affordable po-boys, muffulettas, homemade biscuits with sausage gravy, beignets and took simple pleasure in walking the Vieux Carré grid for hours while replaying scenes in my head from Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named Desire.

Today, there's no streetcar named Desire. It's a bus. A bus named Desire. It's been that way for years, though, so I can't fault a hurricane, just poor city planning. It strikes me as hilarious, though, and reminds me that NOLA is scrappy and as full of humor and voodoo gris-gris as ever, even after we helplessly watched her drowning from our living room armchairs, thinking she was down for the count. To write off New Orleans, though, is to forget her history. An ancient city by American standards, shabby, chic and triumphant, she long-ago established herself as a survivor. A French, then Spanish, then French again territory before the Louisiana Purchase, the city survived a hurricane in 1722 and practically burned to the ground twice (1788 and 1792). Where was FEMA then? Exactly where it is now – pretty much nowhere. The locals – still a ragtag bunch of charmers, intellectuals, ruffians and eccentrics if ever I met any – pulled themselves up by the bootstraps because nobody else was going to do it for them. That’s how it’s done in New Orleans and they do it with grace. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

That’s not to say the city is fully-recovered. A few of us (myself included) pulled money from places we had no money to pull from in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and sent it to organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Musician’s Village. I’m telling you now: keep sending donations; go volunteer to rebuild; plan your vacations there - they need the money and they need the support. While the French Quarter was largely untouched by the flooding aside from some storm damage and the Garden District has recovered quite nicely, it should be noted that these are the neighborhoods with the most money and are also major tourist destinations. Tourism is NOLA's number one money-maker. The neighborhoods frequented by tourists had to be back on-line immediately for the mere sake of trying to stabilize their local economy. It’s the struggling and largely abandoned blue-collar nabes that the tourists never see like the Lower 9th Ward and Carrollton that, 2.5 years after the fact, almost have the air of being one of New Orleans’ famed above-ground cemeteries - they're just less stately with many homes still boarded-up and marked with No Trespassing signs.

While the storm had no prejudices about which neighborhoods it chose to destroy, the socio-economic lines between the haves and have-nots in New Orleans have always been clearly drawn; those lines are especially clear between neighborhoods in the wake of such a disaster. We didn’t see the rich standing on the roofs of their mansions trying to flag down helicopters on CNN; it was the poor and elderly and infirmed and, in some cases, the stubborn. Those that lived wound up in a sports stadium or stayed with friends for months; many wound up making lives elsewhere. The stubborn, though...the stubborn are back. The stubborn are the ones that will not, cannot leave. They eat and breathe the Bayou. They will live and die in New Orleans, a town as unconventional and full of personality as they are.

Make no mistake, the people are what make New Orleans truly great. We lucked into meeting the old-blood-of-New-Orleans owners of Commander’s Palace at a booksigning at the New Orleans airport after I had just bought their cocktail cookbook on a whim. There was the homeless man who pulled Mardi Gras beads out of his bag when he saw my buddy Jen and I weren’t wearing any, made sure we were properly festooned and then sweetly explained he was down on his luck and asked us for five bucks. We made local friends of all walks of life everywhere we went as they know no strangers – waiters; pretty boy models wearing eyeliner; bouncy Tulane co-eds talking about parties involving too much Jaeggermeister; an earth goddess of a psychic with a full-belly laugh and an accent that spoke more of Wales than the old south; the bartender at our hotel who served me one of my favorite movie quotes of all time from Stripes as I was walking out: Wait! You can't leave! All the plants will die! And then...depression set in; redneck good-old-boys in a laundromat/bar openly complimenting me on my hat and my classic rock jukebox choices. There was the man standing on the sidelines on the Krewe of the Ancient Druids parade route screaming New York is in the house! for us so we could catch more beads. Even people who initially intimidated us – yes, us, the New Yorkers – won us over with their generosity. Here, take these, a rough-looking young man tells me, handing me a handful of just-caught and really choice Mardi Gras beads, expecting nothing in return. We live here; we get enough of ‘em.

If there is anything I think the people of New Orleans would want me to tell you, it is that New Orleans is open for business. Some hours in certain restaurants –Napoleon House included – are abbreviated due to a continued shortage in staff, so call before you go anywhere first to make certain places are open (a cue I should have taken myself a couple of times on this trip). Go to Café Du Monde and drink too much coffee and go home wearing about half a pound of powdered sugar from all those beignets. Take a long, languid sip of humid Mississippi River air from onboard a paddle wheel steamboat. Get used to people calling you baby, as in How you doin', baby?, because you will get it from men, women and children. Stop in for a few minutes of peace and relative quiet in St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. Get your cards read at Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo (if you're going to do it, do it right). Wander around until you hear live blues or jazz or funk playing somewhere, and then park yourself and listen. When they ask what you’re drinking, ask what’s good. Ride the St. Charles streetcar just as far as you can and then ride it back. Get the chicken-fried steak and eggs with grits at Clover Grill. Your heart might stop afterwards, but life is short anyway. Find Fahy’s Irish Pub on Toulouse Street. It’s a local dive bar with a yellow labrador retriever who works the door and there’s hardly a tourist in the place.

Sit on a raised curb when you’re tired and watch the world go by; the locals sit in the gutter all the damned time in the French Quarter, and why wouldn't they when the streets and sidewalks are washed clean every morning? Most of all, look around at the buildings, the streets, the history and faces and the gaslight (yes, gaslight) illuminating them all. Look in wonder, because this is what it is to be surrounded by the spirit of determination and survival; it is what New Orleans was built on and is what it will be rebuilt upon until Gabriel blows that cool jazz horn of his. You can dress it up in powdered sugar or chase it with a Sazerac, but however you take it, it is the stuff of myth and legend.

(If you're interested, you can find my photos from the trip here. Feel free to enjoy them, but please do not use them without my permission. Thanks.)