New Orleans, 10.2017: Pelicans and Pralines — A Photographic Essay

Angel on French Qaarter balcony

New Orleans 14.10.1990: French Quarter Ganymedes and Newcomb Pottery

Yesterday Steve and I got up at 5:55 A.M. to go to a garage sale in the French Quarter. The ad in the paper spoke of an old cypress hutch, and we wanted to see if it was anything like the one we have. We arrived at 6:35, the first to do so. The address—741 Dumaine—turned out to be an apartment attached to Clover Grill, an all-night diner across the street from (and sharing clientele with) the world-famous gay bar Café Lafitte in Exile.

In this day and age one is of course hesitant to stand on any street corner in the French Quarter at 6:30 A.M., when dark still reigns. So when we drove up we sat awhile in the car, mumbling back and forth in our sleepy, wimbly state about what to do.

Finally I pointed out that Clover Grill was full and if need be, we could always duck in there in case of trouble. Steve went to park. I got out and leaned on the wall of the house. As I did so, I immediately noticed that a stocky, cigarette-smoking man in shorts across the street was staring at me casually but intently. I realized he was tricking and thought Steve and I had driven up, chatted, and decided I would get out to pick him up! I tried to show not disapproving disinterest, to preserve his feelings.

Gradually it became apparent to me that no corner in the Quarter was so alive as this one at 6:30 A.M. Saturday. Merry singing from Lafitte’s, alternating with loud female rock vocals. For some reason, I could also see a flickering flame through the smoked glass doorway, like a gas lamp but in a spot where one ought not to be.

Tricks came and went. Groups of three and four young men in all types of clothes emerged and sauntered down the street. A thin gray-bearded middle-aged man came out of Clover Grill and parked himself on the other side of the doorway of 741—another garage sale client. A man in tight, dirty jeans and one of those yoked and strap-bearing muscle shirts gay men love came up and said to him, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” The thin man: “From around,” in a high rural-South voice (north Louisiana? Mississippi?). The man then went into Lafitte’s from which he was ejected shortly by a bouncer shouting something about motherf---r, don’t show ass, drugs, etc.

All the time the sky grew lighter and lighter, and cars of tourists cruised slowly and dreamily past. Two policemen on motorcycles came up to the Grill, and the first hustler—by now on the corner, having given me up—shouted to us, “Did you call the police?”

Steve struck up a conversation with Thin Man, who turned out to be a regular, a quasi-antiquer/junker who goes the round of garage sales on weekends. He asked what we liked—Victorian? Anything? He allowed as how he had recently purchased a piece of Newcomb pottery for peanuts.

As we talked, a Ganymede with perhaps not entirely naturally glowing and flowing locks came UP—bemuscled and bemuscle-shirted—opened the door of 741, turned around, and asked the three of us, “Was you wanting a room?” We reminded him there was a garage sale at his apartment at 7 (it was now 6:48 or so). “Oh,” he said, “yes.”

As he spoke, the waiter from Clover Grill came up and said, “You’re having a sale? Whatcha selling?” Blondie: “I’ve cleaned out my attic. My husband keeps bringing home all this shit and I’m selling it.” Waiter Apparently did not quite catch it all, because Thin Man repeated it to Water. He and Blondie and Waiter all appeared to know one another.

Waiter seemed not quite all together, though amusingly distrait. He sported a Café Lafitte t-shirt and lots of name tags, and a baseball cap. Blondie returned to Café Lafitte, whence he had come. Five minutes later, a light and a sound in 741, then the door opens and sale begins. Thin Man knows the seller—“Joe, what ya got on this?” Waiter returns.

Joe to Waiter: “What you want?” Waiter, arm flailing, hand displaying a cigarette coyly perched between fingers: “Dick.” Steve to Joe: “If you rent a room, that comes with it.”

And indeed as we shopped someone did rent a room. At first I believed she was a damsel in distress, over-fatiguée from a night of bar revelry. But as she ascended the stairs in her green satin blouse, I realized she was a he, a he-she. Saturday A.M. in the French Quarter . . . .

New Orleans 28.3.93: Mockingbirds at Sundown, Fragrant Cedars.

A cool evening, after an afternoon of heating showers. I’m sitting on the patio listening to the mockingbirds. Towards sundown they love to sit atop trees and sing. I have been watching one as its throat catches the now horizontal rays of light. I can smell the cedars around the patio . . . .

Yesterday I went to town and shopped. The French Quarter is even tawdrier on a Saturday . . . . I went to town to shop because the thrift stores have only polyester clothes. In this climate, wearing spun plastic seems absurd. Yet in the heart of one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the world, we wear petroleum-based clothes, and cotton is priced out of sight. In the height of Louisiana strawberry season, I could buy only jumbo, tasteless, California berries. Why? Profit, market.

New Orleans 4.7.94: Still Bayous and Dark Coffee

Steve and I up early to walk along the bayou (St. John) and in City Park. I feel some spiritual depth calling to me here, these days. The bayou focuses that call, as it often did for me when we lived in New Orleans, and I wrote poems in my head as we walked on its banks. Followed by coffee at Café du Monde, in that still, cool time around dawn before it’s tourist-crowded.

But times away from home, like this teaching stint in New Orleans, draw out the worst between Steve and me—naked cor ad cor loquitur, and one cannot predict what will happen. The sameness of it all is so boring, so maddening—he says, I say, we say, like some rote chant. That book title, The Dance of Anger, is appropriate—it is a dance, a relentless two-step in which one can never improvise, or fling oneself into the cosmic polka with abandon.

Glad abandon: those old sucker words still get me, with all their self-deception. With Steve, what palls is precisely what drew me to him in the first place—the masculine control. But such sly control, that never really takes control . . . .

Of course, when people argue so hopelessly and for so long about such small things, the argument is really about something else. Control, I guess. If what we hate in others is our own shadow, then it’s I who am conflicted over control. I want to give myself (with glad abandon), but I’m afraid to do so. Afraid I’ll be summarily shaken and my slumber dissipated—as by my mother when I was an infant.

Do the deep traumas inside us ever heal?

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27.6.94

A thought re: my trip to Russia, why it was so painful:

Travelers in foreign lands experience a curious duality: their skin becomes simultaneously transparent and impermeable. To those in whose midst they walk, all their inner mechanisms are exposed, like clocks whose faces are removed. But for the tourist, there is the experience of extreme frustration, as one seeks to connect to foreigners, and finds one’s thoughts cannot pass thick membranes of language and custom, of one’s own skin.

New Orleans 7.7.1987: Beautiful Detritus, Gifts of the Marginal

Steve and I spent Saturday and Sunday almost entirely (and with no intent for this to happen) in the company of gay men. This is extraordinary, in view of the fact that I have previously spent hardly any time with any avowedly gay persons, let alone discussed the topic with anyone openly gay.

On Saturday, we had seen in the paper that a garage sale with tantalizing items was taking place in the Faubourg Marigny. Since we have found serendipitous treasures in the Quarter, Marigny, or Bywater, and since garage sales in those locations don’t seem dominated by bourgeois lust for the top dollar, off we went. The sale turned out to be at the house of a gay couple. The house (which they own, and are selling; they live in an apartment in it) is beautiful—surely antebellum, but much altered (and not for the worse) at a variety of later periods.

What was refreshing (and challenging to me) is the couple’s ability to live cheerfully and gracefully on the margins of society—in short, to make something, something beautiful and meaningful, of the effluvia of a society that discards so much in the name of fashion, progress.

All this is not clear, I know. I suppose what I’m saying is that I admire the ability of many gay people to turn the liability of social marginalization into pleasure, celebration of the small, beautiful, inexpensive, often ugly things and events of non-bourgeois, non-suburban society. (Not that by any means all gays live this way, but many do.)

Here is where I see a gift dimension to gayness. There is giftedness first of all in the ability to see the possibility of retrieving and celebrating what is otherwise overlooked and discarded by mainstream society. And this is not a gift of gay people alone, of course, but of many marginal groups—African Americans have the same abilities, in many cases.

There is also giftedness in being able to transform the discards that one retrieves into the beautiful and the graceful. New Orleans owes a huge debt of gratitude, as a city, to its gay community for having retrieved and restored many of the abandoned historic sections of the city. The French Quarter was a slum headed for demolition at the hands of urban “renewers” before it was discovered and retrieved by courageous artists and writers, many of them gay.

Now the same thing is happening to the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater. Few middle-class young straight couples who have grown up in New Orleans would dream of buying these wonderful houses and raising their families in them. They prefer to move to the “parish” or across the lake. And so a city with some of the most consistently stunning architecture in the country is decaying from within . . . .

The gay community is making a tremendous contribution to local culture by preserving these historic areas of the city, and that contribution should be more widely recognized. This contribution is all the more to be cherished when beauty is restored or created, life celebrated, by people who bear the stigma of social disapproval (and who are sometimes psychically wounded—can I say moi?—by that experience).

New Orleans 27.3.1984: Singing Mockingbirds, Tawdry Quarter

A cool evening, after an afternoon heating shower. I’m sitting on the patio listening to the mockingbirds. Towards sundown they love to sit atop trees and sing. I have been watching one as its throat catches the now horizontal light. I can smell the cedars around the patio. . . .

Yesterday I went to town and shopped. The French Quarter is even tawdrier on Saturday—not the Quarter itself, but the way it presents itself for a summer weekday during holiday time, like a lonely old dame plying her wares, decking herself out as an American commercial seductress. Not much in our culture remains untainted by commercialism: to wit, I went to town to shop because the thrift stores have only polyester clothes. In this climate, wearing spun plastic seems crazy. Yet in the heart of one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the world, we wear petroleum-based clothes, and cotton is priced out of sight. In the height of Louisiana strawberry season, I could buy only jumbo, and tasteless, California berries. Why? All profit, all market.

New Orleans 12.12.03: Green Depths of Patios, Healing Psalms

Our Lady of Guadalupe’s day, and I’m in New Orleans, on St. Philip St. at a b and b with Steve, Kate, and Luke. The latter just finished exams and will fly home Sunday, the 14th. I'm here to help them pack and to assist Luke, in particular, after his serious illness last month. I’m looking out into the green depths of a patio. We’re in the servants’ quarters, and french doors give onto the brick-paved courtyard. A huge yucca spirals up with a hedge of nandina beside it.

So much of my spiritual life has been lived in this city, looking into and sitting in such patios. And my sensual life definitely came alive here, too. There’s always a fitness in returning, in our lives.

Turbulence in my soul, caused by T. Reed—deliberately engineered by her in vicious attacks on me through the new provost. Yesterday as we drove, I read Psalm 107:25-30, and was very glad to think that the Lord calms storms and brings us to safe haven. Have also been reading Micah 2:8-13. This is a time in which it seems as if T. Reed is intent on persecuting—once again. And all that is left is to pray—once again.