The miserable steamy evening began in a glaring brightly lit restaurant on Saint Charles Avenue, near Canal Street. A friend and I dined on oysters on the half shell. We washed the oysters down with whiskey and we washed the whiskey down with beer. After dinner Oliver revealed a small but elaborate tin of chocolate covered grasshoppers. Because I had never seen chocolate covered bugs before, I thought they were only a joke, something bought out of a trinket shop on Bourbon Street. However, after the tin's lid had been popped off, we insipidly ate the little black carcasses as though they were a new form of nihilistic dessert reserved only for this posh occasion. The crunchy bodies tasted delightful after the fifth shot of Jack Daniels. Our conversation was as inconsistent as our diet---lethargic oysters; loud, harmonious babble mixed with grasshoppers and beer, full of suds and dirty jokes. While still sober enough to appreciate the air-conditioning we left Pearl's Restaurant and headed for the French Quarter in search of life, liberty and the pursuit of more alcohol.
As we approached the Quarter, blue notes from a saxophone fell upon my head like the acid rains in Canada, caused by the industrial smoke stacks in Gary, Indiana. Like rats following the Pied Piper, the mystical, burning, baritone, floating musical notes led us to a doorway in the one hundred block of Bourbon Street. In the doorway stood a short balding jazzman with a gold saxophone case lined with blue felt and discarded coins. The jazzman's fingers danced up and own the tommy gun sounding sax, like John Dillinger dancing with Ginger Rogers in the alley behind the Biograph Theatre. The jazzman blew hard on his screaming saxophone, but he never opened his eyes. I danced to his music, but I never tapped my feet. Oliver uttered obscene remarks for no reason, but he never opened his fly.
We entered the French Quarter with visions of grandeur, like two brave adventurers in search of gold for their king. That illusion only lasted for three fourths of one city block, for a new reality hopped forth in the form of a multi-colored jacket. On the corner of Iberville and Bourbon stood three black prostitutes; transvestites, none of them shorter than six foot four and all wearing matted rabbit fur jackets and brightly colored afro style wigs---the type that sell at Woolworth's for $19.99. The lack of electrolysis treatment was obvious as sweat and whiskers protruded from large pores on their upper lips and chins. The 100 degree heat and the many layers of clothing caused their lips to expand and turn suffocation blue.
The scantily populated streets were spotted with fast city people dancing to slow drags (and also a few whited sepulchers--a Southern form of hypocrite generally found in the New Orleans area and the surrounding suburbs). Almost everyone on the street looked like a hustler of some sort and those that didn't seemed in no position to be hustled. The pimps, prostitutes, pick-pockets, street musicians, strip-tease dancers, cab drivers, panhandlers, and bar and shop owners on Bourbon Street all heavily depend on the tourist trade. However, on this summer night tourists were far and few between and all businesses were empty. The Bourbon Pub was closed. At the Paddock Lounge, James Davis was blowing his horn full blast into a microphone, but the only things moved by the music were the many photographs of race horses as they vibrated against the walls. Rick Hardeman and his band at the Famous Door may as well have been playing at a funeral--then more people would have shown up. The Blue Angel, the Hotsy Totsy, and the 500 Club all looked like part of the same ghost town. Three tourists stood giggling in front of Big Daddy's as the tuxedo-clad doorman, with matching slicked-back hair, swung one of the swinging doors open and closed and routinely barked, "Boys and girls naked together, no cover charge, always a continuous show." Big Daddy's plastic mannequin, whose internal swinging legs have delighted tourists for years, as they popped out a curtained window, was not working this night. The swing was broken and the fake girl's legs were paralyzed between the dirty, tattered red curtains.
This night, the city did not resemble a romantic French Impressionist painting, as depicted on most postcards, but rather it was twisted and suspended as part of a dream sequence like Salvador Dali' s version of "The Anthropomorphic Cabinet. The architecture had lost its majestic aura as the haunted buildings leaned, smeared, cracked and crumbled apart. The lonely tourist traps, and jazz bars, were silently filled with empty chairs like a Baptist mission in a rich Jewish suburb. The rawboned musicians resembled characters that had risen from the grave, as portrayed in the film classic, "Night of the Living Dead." They stared at the floor and played, "When the Saints go Marching In", while coughing and reminiscing about the great days on 42nd Street.
Like tourists with "go" cups in hand, we stood in front of Crazy Shirleys' and watched the band play inconsonant jazz with the absence of intellect. With no motivation for music, the piano players' hand crept toward a drink sitting at the far right edge of the piano. His left hand shook at the ivory keys, not really creating any sound, just going through the motions. Without emotion, the bass players' fingers fell off his hand and rolled off the stage. The clarinetist was blind and the trumpet player had lost his lip. The trombonist had no nose and no spit valve on his trombone. The drummer had no skin. He had shed it years ago like a rattlesnake in spring and now he sat on stage like exposed meat at a Mexican open market. I lost interest in the music and focused my attention on the beautiful blond waitress; she drank chocolate flavored coffee in between serving Hurricanes, while wearing her autographed Shirley Temple dancing shoes which were too small.
The street stank of booze, urine and Parish paid bug spray. The insecticide didn't kill the vicious tiger mosquitos with their orange and black bodies, it only caused their wings to turn blue. The mosquitos mixed well and added color and flavor to any Pat O'Briens' Hurricane when they fell into the souvenir go cups. It's easy to get confused in a city like New Orleans with its blinking lights, cheap neons, old street lamps, loud music, brassy strip shows and ancient architecture. It's surrounded by dangerous housing projects and modern suburbs, and filled with cheap, readily available alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. It all adds up to an adult Disneyland, and like children, it can give adults an animated false sense of reality with its historical and sexual parallels to an amusement park. At Disneyland all is make-believe, but in the French Quarter people never know what is fantasy and what is reality. At Disneyland, a walking tree, a witch, or a zombie from the grave are only people dressed up in costume, but in New Orleans they could be and probably are for real. It's a city with mystique. Often it's a commercial mystique where Bourbon Street is the epitome of commercialism. None the less, the mystique of wild bacchanals, sex orgies, and voodoo rituals are frequent and real. That blending of myth, commercial illusions, and historical romanticism have caused New Orleans to become a natural Disneyland.
Out of the bowels of the back of the French Quarter came just such a fantasy creature--"The Bead Lady." She is known by that name because she sells lucky beads. Tourists think that she is the river witch placed in the Quarter by the Chamber of Commerce to amuse them and to protect the city from another invasion of Spanish pirates. Children cringe with fear, while adults, convinced she is only a harmless side show, paid for by the Better Business Bureau of Greater New Orleans, squeal with delight when they see her dressed in her full length red silk dress, dirty green sweater and snaggly wig.
Peeking out from under her sleazy dress were two ragged, electric blue jogging shoes that curled upward at the tips, while dirty-caked toes broke out of various holes. Around her neck hung a large, blue crystal ball, about the size of a baseball. Her jaded, pale, decomposed looking face is always caked with cheap make-up and on her head sits a matted rat-nest wig that slightly resembles the old bee-hive hair-do of the late fifties. Her beads are supposed to be lucky, but most locals have only had bad luck after purchasing one of them. Her chant,"You want Lucky Bead? You need Lucky Bead!" is heard late at night above the sound of ten thousand air- conditioners in the back streets of the Quarter, where the most prevalent sight is the bored male prostitute leaning against a prehistoric light pole, waiting for his twenty dollar trick.
Before she was in sight I heard her muffled chant above the drudgery of proletarian jazz and the vibrant sound of automobiles. She was trying to sell her lucky beads as she slowly sauntered into sight. Nobody seemed interested in her beads so she started talking to a wall. After a few moments of conversation with the wall, the Bead Lady spun around delivering her incoherent babble to nobody in particular. She then picked up the receiver of a pay phone and started ranting in her unknown foreign tongues. The fragmented words ricocheted off the wall and struck pedestrians as they passed by in awe. Her sales technique was not great, but her mysterious vocabulary was outstanding, enough that she could capture the most elusive of audiences.
That was about the time I decided I wanted that old witch's rat-nest wig for a souvenir, so I dared the inebriated good old boy Oliver to make a wager. I proposed that if he would bet me five dollars, I would steal the Bead Lady's wig.
He drunkenly accepted the offer, gave me the cash in advance, and without further thought, I walked right up to the Bead Lady and snatched that old infested wig from her head. It came off easily, her real hair was too short to attach it with bobby pins. I intended to run and listen to her sick cackle chase me down the street, but to my amazement, I was stopped in my tracks by a strong vibration of some kind. It wasn't a physical vibration, but rather, an irregularity of thought. Osiris and other demonic images wavered past my face in an oscillating manner. Perhaps I was hypnotized, but for a few moments the Bead Ladys' green gray eyes turned bright red and burst into flames like the fire that burned down the old Duvic Hardware store that once stood at Algiers Point.
It seemed like an eternity while standing in the middle of deserted Bourbon Street with the wig in my hand, however, I physically couldn't flee until the flames burnt out and her eyes turned from red to green. I ran toward my friend, but he was gone, I didn't know what happened to him or to me. I scurried down the street, like a cockroach when the lights have been turned on, looking for Oliver. I didn't want to run for I already felt like an obvious criminal with the old woman's wig in my hand. I didn't expect an arm to grab me from behind, but suddenly, I was spun around and pushed up against the wall by a grody looking hippie. The hippie pulled out a badge and a pair of hand-cuffs. I handed him the wig. He looked at it with disgust, then he looked at me with even more disgust.
