NEW ORLEANS: A TRAVEL JOURNAL
part one
by Tina L. Jens
Note: This is the first in a 7-part series excerpted from the travel journals of Tina Jens, from her most recent visit to New Orleans. Tina is the author of more than 20 published short stories in the fantasy, horror and thriller genres. Her most recent work can be found in: MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY and PHANTOMS OF THE NIGHT, both from DAW Books.
Sunday, April 14, New Orleans --
Barry and I arrived about 2 pm in the French quarter, checked our bags into storage at the St. Marie Hotel (Toulouse&Bourbon), and headed straight for the Cafe Du Monde for cafe au lait and beignets; 3 each in mounds of powdered sugar. At the table next to us were two Frenchmen who were having trouble with the menu, but their waiter helped them through it.
This being our fourth visit to the Big Easy, the day went much as I had predicted it would, except we skipped the mufalettas at Central Grocery, since we had eaten lunch on the plane. From Cafe Du Monde, we walked to the French Market. I bought a long, crinkly skirt in one of the enclosed shops. Although they have French Market addresses, I always feel like it’s cheating to shop in those stores. Market shops shouldn’t have permanent addresses and glass windows, they should be open air stalls.
The weather is gorgeous- 70’s and 80’s. Far better than the 40 degrees we had when we left Chicago. But I digress...
Despite the open market setup, with collapsable tables that are emptied each night, you find most of the same vendors at the same location year after year. We entered the market as we always do -- through the vegetable and fruit, and food vendors -- strands of purple garlic and strings of red chili peppers suspended over our heads. A man was roasting peanuts and pistachios and they smelled delicious.
Rather than rushing through the area as we usually do, we stopped and bought some food stuff: boxes of red beans and rice, and a white beans, vegetables and rice mix.
Then we walked past the gazebo stall that has all the African art and masks, and into what I think of as the Market, itself. The unofficial entrance is marked by a T-shirt booth on the center aisle and the huge stand of feather Mardi Gras masks on the right.
The mask stall was the first place we stopped on our very first trip to New Orleans and the French Market, 6 years ago. I bought at least 6 masks, then. I still have 2 or 3 of them. I gave the others away as gifts.
Our first stop this time was a silver jewelry table. (No surprise to my husband. Most of the jewelry I wear on a daily basis has been bought in the French Market.) I found a pair of silver and garnet earrings to go with the garnet rings and necklace I have. And I found a pair of dragonfly earrings for a friend who collects all things dragonfly. Our final Market purchase of the day was a Voodoo doll, with a clay painted and speckled face and a body made out of Spanish moss.
By this time Barry was growing impatient with standing around while I searched for treasure in the silver bins, so we left the Market and crossed the street to the shops there. The doorway of one snared us through. It was set up like a maze and lined with.... GARGOYLES! Of course we had to go in and look. Some wonderful designs. Some were reproductions of Notre Dame gargoyles, others obviously the artist’s own creation, along with the standard winged puppies and angels. There was an alien mother and father set that I dearly wanted to buy for Von (an SF and Horror author). And there was a vampire satyr that I wanted to get for Nancy Kilpatrick, (Canadian Scream Queen and dear friend). If only I were rich!
I finally narrowed my choices to 2 -- a Dedo Notre Dame reproduction and one the artist called Petie, with great taloned claws and a bumpy spine.
The clerk told us to pick a little angel out as a lanyap. And after we established that a “lanyap” is a little bonus gift, Barry chose a little rose-colored angel, that we thought would make a nice gift for one of the moms.
The gargoyles are great heavy monsters made of cement. The clerk wrapped them well for the airplane trip and double bagged them, so we could carry them home, then we set off for the hotel, with hopes that we could now check in.
The rooms at the St. Marie are spacious and well furnished, but more impersonal and “motellish” than the bed and breakfasts we’ve stayed at before. On the other hand, there are not the quirks -- such as no hand towels or kleenex -- that we’ve encountered at the smaller inns.
After resting, showering and dressing, we decided to dine at Johnny White’s on Bourbon. It was not a decision easily reached. There was much consulting of George Alec Effinger’s restaurant guide. We settled on Johnny White’s because we didn’t feel up to one of the fancy restaurants on our first night. And, as there were still a lot of kids out celebrating the last few hours Spring Break, we thought the view from JW’s balcony of Bourbon St. ought to be quite entertaining.
I had come to N’awlins determined to do a few of the traditional things that we’d missed in our previous visits. We struck one of those items off the list with our first course at dinner.
Boiled Crawfish. These critters hadn’t been in season during our previous visits, and if they had been, I’m not sure we’d have been brave enough to try them. The waiter came with a brown plastic tray filled with them. Big, orangish-red with beady black eyes and cool, miniature pinchers. The look a lot like little lobsters.
I said to the waiter, “Terrific! Now show us how to eat them.”
It caught him by surprise, but it couldn’t have been the first time he’d had such a request. The consumption of these things is =not= self-evident. He showed us how to snap off the heads, and told us to suck the head out, but he made a face that clearly indicated that he thought that particular tradition was truly gross, and he didn’t practice it.
Then he said, “peel once, peel twice, and gently pull on the tail.”
He made it look easy, which it wasn’t, at least at first. As Barry pointed out, it’s a lot of work for a little bit of food. A crawfish (or mudbug as some of the locals call them) the size of your hand gives you a piece of meat the size, but not quite the length of my little finger. Of course, Barry thinks shelling boiled shrimp is a lot of work, and you don’t have to pop the heads off those.
Our neighbors on either side of us gave us funny stares (“Oh how disgusting! I can’t believe they ordered that!” kind of looks) and we fumbled through the first few, crawfish juice squirting everywhere. But we soon had it mastered and I think Barry even liked them. I know I did. The seasoning was superb.
I only tried sucking the head once, and I didn’t get much out, just a salty, spicy bit of what I hope was water. Of course, if I had sucked a little harder, I might have gotten something more. But I wasn’t willing to do that much work to get something I wasn’t too sure I wanted in the first place!
Entrees came soon after. Barry had the red beans and rice with a breaded tenderloin. They were bland enough that he added hot sauce. I had the alligator saus pecan., over rice. It needed no doctoring! As Barry observed, you know it’s hot when I eat the salad. The gator was the consistency of roast pork, and very tender. I really don’t know how to describe the taste. I’ve had it four or five times now, and it’s entirely dependant on how it’s spiced. For dessert, we split a chocolate cheesecake and sipped the coffee, and watched a couple of tipsy kids try to figure out the bar’s breathalyzer machine.
During dinner we had been entertained by a keyboardist and drummer who seemed to be playing more for the people on the street than for the handful of folks in the little bar. There were a lot of teenagers around. I suspect this is a popular part of the street for the kids who are too young to go in the bars. It’s at the far end of the busy strip of Bourbon. Now that we were well and truely fed, it was time to hit the clubs.
NEXT: Bourbon Street Music =============
Bourbon Street Music
All of the clubs open up on to the street, with half a dozen large windows or French doors, so you can hear the music as well on the sidewalk as you can in the club. It’s a delightful and effective marketing tool. And you can stroll the five or six blocks along Bourbon street and enjoy a dozen different entertainers without stopping.
They close Bourbon street to traffic in the evening so it becomes a big festival fairground, with the music and parties spilling out into the street. It’s not at all unusual to see a crowd dancing outside on the sidewalk, if a club is too packed to have a dance floor.
Our first stop of the night was my favorite club from the three previous visits: Krazy Korner. I love this place because they always feature a traditional R&B band with a female vocalist. They also usually feature a good brass section. On this night they had two trumpets and a trombone player. We stayed for a set, but it was still early yet, not much of a crowd and the band was sort of coasting, marking time until things heated up, so we moved on.
I did start getting flashes of ideas for a story called “Beware the Zebra Crossing at the Krazy Korner” which was sparked, in part by the zebra striped tennis shoes one guy had on, on the dance floor, and the Indiana Jones hat the trumpet player was wearing.
>From there we crossed the street to hear a couple of tunes by the Dixieland band at the Maison Bourbon, then strolled on until we were lured in by the sounds coming out of a new club called the R&B. The first time we visited N’awlins, this place was a seedy dive with a sleazy, too pushy waiter. We still stayed for a whole set -- to hear an incredible Jimi Hendrix imitator.
The new management has really cleaned the place up and the staff was a lot friendlier, unfortunately, the music wasn’t nearly as good, at least on this night. It was a mediocre guitarist who was a weaker singer whose one gimmick -- being able to hit a fairly high note -- was repeated too often to be effective. But he had a good crowd rapport, and was doing a lot of “Big Chill” kind of songs, so the crowd was a decent size, and happy. I will say one thing for him, he’s the only Blues musician I’ve ever seen who uses props. He kept holding up a blue suitcase every time he sang the lyric, “I’m gonna pack my bags, I’m going down to the station, Gonna catch that Greyhound and =ride=.”
By this time ideas were tumbling out for the story and I wanted to write them down before I forgot them. Unfortunately, neither of us had a pen. We didn’t want to walk back to the hotel, so thus ensued The Great Pen Hunt. I had to hit three souvenir shops on bourbon before I could find a pen. One clerk wanted to send me to a store two blocks away in the wrong direction.
A giant box fan was sacrificed during the hunt. Though it was really killed by the customer in front of me who staggered backwards into it, knocking it off the bar stool it was sitting on, and eliciting a scream from me. (Hey, I was distracted, thinking about the story. Give me a break.) Anyway, I found a pen, a fat, gaudy, metallic pink thing that said “New Orleans” and has a trumpet on it. 99 cents.
Now all I needed was something to write on. I’d smuggled my bar napkin out of the R&B, but it was damp. It was 9 pm, the music starting time at the Funky Pirate, Barry’s favorite club on Bourbon St. So we went there, ordered two Miller Lights and four bar napkins. The waitress brought me a stack and I wrote through the first half of the set.
The music was rock-n-roll, and decent, and we recognized at least one of the guys from the house band there last year. More entertaining were the three guys and three girls at the bar, who were taking turns pairing off in different groups and dancing obscenely. At one point, when all the girls had gone to the bathroom, two of the guys danced in a more intimate, erotic way than you normally see from two guys of any persuasion. I’d have sworn one couple actually copulated while the girl sat on the barstool, except, she had on really tight denim shorts, so there was no way they could have completed the act.
The band closed the set with “Stormy Monday,” “an Allman Brothers’ song,” or so the band said. And Barry and I danced too, though not in quite the same manner as the others. Actually, that wasn’t the end of the set. We snuck out early to miss the Tip Jar Number. We’d gotten caught by that three times already in the past hour, twice when we’d wandered into a club just in time to hear the last song of the set, which doesn’t excuse you from contributing to the Tip Jar, unfortunately.
I was so excited about the story that I made Barry sit down on a doorstep while I read my notes to him. I’m sure it made no sense to him at all, since they were more a collection of random images I wanted to use, rather than a coherent narrative. But, he indulged me.
Then we walked back by the Krazy Korner and kibitzed with the doorman, dancing in the street to a Springsteen song, then asked where Marva Wright was singing. The Krazy Korner had her poster up, but she wasn’t performing there. He sent us down to the Old Absinth House.
On the way, we stopped at the hotel to relax and clean up a bit, and debated going back out. But it was only 11 o’clock and we still hadn’t seen any =really great= music. That was about to change.
We’d seen Marva Wright at the Krazy Korner on one of our previous visits, so we knew we were in for a good show. It winds up she’d been touring a lot in Europe and only recently returned to Bourbon St. She plays at two clubs a night on weekends, so she lets her band do a lot of the work. But that’s alright. They’re really good. She’s got a particularly hot saxophone, and (that night) an absolutely inspired keyboardist named Joe, who was the backbone of the band. He and the lead guitar player were white, a novelty of sorts, among the Blues and Jazz musicians on Bourbon St. The rock and roll bands and acoustic guitar players tend to be white, or have a mixed group. The guitarist had that clueless “I don’t know what I’m doin’ here -- I just play my music” kind of look. His backup work was kind of sloppy, but his solos soared. The group was rounded out by a trumpet player and an electric bass.
Marva has the physique of all the great female R&B singers -- she’s short and =round=. She looks like you could tip her over and roll her down the hall. But man, she can belt out a tune! She told us she used to be a public school secretary, but she’s been singing up and down Bourbon St. for eight years. Her signature song appears to be “I Ain’t got No Drawers On,” the lyrics of which make the same claim about each of her band members, giving them a chance to do a solo and be introduced, then proceeds into an audience participation bit, and ends up accusing the entire audience of being underwear-less.
The song falls into the grand tradition of rude Blues ditties, my favorite of which is Johnny Johnson’s “Ya Done Stepped In It” which has the added virtue of being musically interesting, as well as having a rude catch phrase the audience can yell out.
Marva’s musical stylings border on the edge of scat, without the polysyllabic creations of Ella Fitzgerald. My favorite moments were when the extended note she was singing was so hot she had to fan herself with her hand. And, when she cried out, “Somebody Play Me Some Blues One Time!”
The band did a final set without her, which was well worth hearing. And we bought her CD, “Marvalous.”
The evening ended with the waitress telling us all, “The good news is, You had a great time. The bad news is, I can’t go home until you do.” The packed club cleared out in about three minutes time.
