American Backyard:

the American landscape, revisited

I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing about.
--> Jack Kerouac

In any city glutted with con-men, one must know the rules of the deal going in, even if the deal is a losing one.

If the stakes are raised high enough, defeat assumes a grandeur and pathos which victory rarely achieves. Failure should, at any rate, be on a grand scale; as Heat-Moon observes, it is "a matter of dignity."

But first, some nickel-and-dime pointers.

One may eat like a king in New Orleans on four dollars. The side-street gumbo shop offers a feast for the penny-pinching traveler. Do not let the Jackson Square tourguides lure you to any of the plush restaurants that line North Peters Street. These establishments are only of use when you need to patronize a restroom, which one rarely finds in the gumbo shacks. Walk with confidence past the maître d’ while reciting verses of Baudelaire that you have memorized for just such an occasion. Once your business is done, leave quickly in a state of high dudgeon, complaining of dirty fourchettes and flies in your vichyssoise.

If you intend to visit a strip club, be sure first to schmooze with Brett Smith, the proprietor, and with Eric Bay, the general manager, at La Louisiane, a stylish bar and bistro on Rue Iberville. If you charm these gentlemen with exotic tales of roadside exploits, and if you are polite and winsome with the bar-owner’s daughter, Alli Smith, you are likely to receive VIP passes to the Gold Club, the cabaret next door. Here again, your Baudelaire will come in handy. At the Gold Club, treat the women with respect, and if a stripper stands astride you, pelvis swinging with the force of a baseball bat, duck.

The larger the container, the cheaper the price per ounce of Southern Comfort.

You are likely to find tiny old seductive voodoo shops with signs saying "BACK IN 10." You are likely to wait outside these shops, becoming more curious with each second; you are likely to stay there taking photographs and muttering incantations for twenty minutes before you realize your mistake: these are not New York minutes but New Orleans minutes, and you with your foreign mindset have taken the sign literally.

Once inside the shop, be sure to haggle. Be vigilant: the shaman-proprietor will snatch your soul, if you give him an opening.

Under no circumstances should you shell out well-earned coin of the realm in exchange for beads—no matter what color, no matter how resplendent, no matter how many breasts they are "guaranteed" to coax from the cozy casing of a tank top. Rather, prowl through the Garden District until you chance upon Mike the Bead Man, who gives tours of the neighborhood’s above-ground cemeteries, and from whom, if you ingratiate yourself, you will receive more beads than you could use in a dozen Mardi Gras.

Pay no more than $14.99 for a light tan Panama hat with cool blue trim. It will last for years, or until one of your traveling companions pours a magnum of red wine into it, precipitating the second-most vicious fight of your entire friendship.

As for the rest: the traveler to New Orleans must be prepared for revelation and prostration. Most folks come here looking for something they can’t put their finger on, something peculiar to New Orleans, an empty promise or something they’ve been told to expect to find. Bear in mind that a reasonable approach to the city is utterly out of the question, that one must match madness with madness.

New Orleans makes one promise: the acceptance and defiant celebration of the precariousness of life, a frenzy that comes only from teetering on the edge. In the Big Easy, everyone is a sailor on his last landbound night, a soldier about to ship off, an astronaut about to be shot up into space. Its revelry is the urgent and apocalyptic revelry of the buccaneer, the gypsy.

Folks flock here for any number of reasons, from A.J. Garibaldi, the hip-hop promoter with his makeshift schemes to help the homeless, to Rufus, the pastor-professor-counselor-columnist from Sandusky, Ohio, who comes here to take a "sabbatical from everything," to the UMASS women with whom we enjoyed the following pithy exchange:

"What brings you girls to New Orleans?"

"We’re here to get FUCKED!"

This, we like to think, is the New Orleans Bargain, the euphoric fine print in the Louisiana Purchase. The visitor must surrender himself in a very real sense, and in exchange, New Orleans will offer him anonymity, moral reprieve, food for all five senses, and total access.

In this much, at least, the promise is far from empty.

When the dust has cleared, he may drive off bearing scars, but this too is part of the bargain. In New Orleans especially, it is foolish to expect to beat the house, and it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

Catfish was one man who especially enjoyed losing to the house, if only because it provided fuel for invective. We discovered him bouncing down North Peters Street, tossing magnetic noisemakers that clicked together in the air and fell back into his open palm, tipping his hat to any women he passed, dressed dark, grinning behind his sunglasses, saying, look at me. He sensed an opening with us, knew we would listen, and stopped when he reached us, snapping his silver noisemakers jazzily, conversationally, smiling as if he knew something we didn’t. He got the drift of American Backyard immediately, dug it, said it was groovy. Talk to us? He’d love to.

Profession?

"Jazz pianist."

Why New Orleans?

"I’m on vacation, playing for tips."

"You’re on vacation?" Brian asked.

"Well it’s a two week vacation turned into three months," he explained. "Can you imagine doing a job that you enjoy for—you’re doing that right now, so I don’t have to talk to you about it. So it’s like what you’re doing."

"What are we doing?"

"You’re on vacation and you’re working, right?"

"Pretty much, exactly," Brian said.

"Same here, same thing," he said. "A friend of mine told me I should go here and scare them with my piano talent, and I’ve done so."

"How’d you break into the scene?"

Catfish took a breath and then let fly.

"I physically walked the Quarter during a tornado watch while it was raining while everybody’s pansy asses were sitting underneath shelter when I went out and got a gig in five hours at Ralph and Cacoo's which I got fired from by a corporate weasel 'cause I played too well." He paused, not for breath but for dramatic effect, and looked directly into the camera with a wide smile: "Welcome to New Orleans!"

"Who’s the corporate weasel?"

"The one that never had the balls to talk to me that wrote a report that said I played too interesting for the culinary experience," he said smoothly. "But see I was overqualified to play a dining room." Another dramatic pause. "Would Elvis do a dining room?" We chuckled. "And my street name is Catfish," he added.

"Catfish?" Brian repeated. Everything he said had a hint of untruth. It seemed as though he’d just plucked a name out of thin air.

"Catfish!" he affirmed. "'Cause I’m a scavenger—nibbling on the toes of millionaires."

"What kind of people do you meet at these gigs?"

"The whole spectrum," he said. "It's a gumbo—you know, it's New Orleans—I mean high, low, rich, illiterate, extremely literate, homeless—you know, the whole spectrum, all mixed, you know." A moment. "Retards like you too, you know what I mean." Catfish gave the camera a tense smirk and finally took a drag from the cigarette with which he'd been teasing his lips for the past ten minutes. Mostly he'd been using it as a magician does a wand, as an object of misdirection, distracting the audience from whatever slick business was going on. A trolley car rolled by.

Catfish said that McCoy Tyner had taught him piano "by ear." We were confused.

"Well, I learned from his records," he admitted slyly. "I was ten and I started bangin' on—" he pounded his fingers on an imaginary keyboard and did a nasal rendition of the William Tell overture—"da da lun, da da lun, da da lun lun lun…. Like 10,000 times and I haven’t stopped."

"What's your favorite place you've played?"

"Wherever there’s a piano that's in tune. I've played all over the place, yeah. I don't have a favorite. In the streets, probably my favorite, but it doesn’t pay. But it's a lot of fun, see the drunks come cartwheelin' down Royal Street you know guys get out of jail ecstatic, 'I'm outta jail!' knock my piano over—" he threw his arms in the air to demonstrate the ecstasy and knocked over his imaginary piano. A twenty-something guy passed us and screamed "I love Jesus!" into the microphone. "It’s a little dangerous," Catfish continued, not missing a beat. "You never know what’s gonna roll up on ya, so it’s fun."

Catfish cut Brian off. "It’s all a vehicle to help the homeless. I'm making my fortunes I've made and lost and keep on investing in helping homeless people I'd like to get with some powerful people which I'm in the process of doing—I'm doing some TV shows and public relations and we wanna educate these folks and teach 'em how to play piano so I can step off—and they’ll all be my bitches!" He was talking without punctuation, but always with eye contact, a nod, and a wink, the demeanor of a benevolent scoundrel. "I'll work 'em, and I'll get 10 percent off the piano players I’ll put twenty piano players in town and that would be considered, like, cool in this down, if I did that."

"You think you'd like that better than playing yourself?"

"Well I’m not worried about me anymore, you know." His tone jumped from greedy to selfless, and we glanced at each other, unable to believe in full anything that he said. "I’m out to help some people that, uh, their heads are cracked for some stupid reason, and if you talk to them for 10 minutes they won’t be homeless anymore because you just gave 'em one little, you know, therapy. So I'm working with some people in the city for that, that’s my real fun—" he smirked again, "is trying to change this lock-'em-up-in-cages treatment of homeless people."

Brian wondered why, of all causes, Catfish's was homelessness.

"My van burned and I experienced the state myself. I said, 'This sucks,' and well I got out of it quick and I started to think what about these guys that don’t get out of it real quick they're kinda, you know, uh, you know." He cocked his head. "So it’s about that, finding that point where someone gives up hope—and you bring them up to a point of maybe there is a reason to be. Exist. 'Cause they’re just in nonexistence, you know, and around here it’s too easy just to sit in a corner people’ll give you ya' 5 dollars 'cause you look so awful."

He never stopped grinning, and at this point he laughed. "I couldn’t get a tip. They say 'he looks like a professional'—they don’t tip me—'he looks like a con artist,' you know? Roll in some dirt and you start gettin’ money, so you get rewarded for being down. So the next time you see a guy like that just tell him to snap out of it."

Catfish made a snapping noise by clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He snickered and threw the strange silver noisemaking bullets in the air again. "And we'll punctuate that with a sound effect," he said.

He told us that he had a gig in an hour at a restaurant around the block, and we promised to come see him, even though we knew there was every likelihood he would not be there when we showed. We certainly hoped he would be. We wanted to see how scary his piano talent really was.

"What kind of reaction do you get?" Brian asked him before we split for the liquor store.

Catfish thought seriously for a second. "Oh, something like how people reacted to Jesus," he said. "Or Bob Dylan."

We spent the next hour at the mouth of the Mississippi, working through a liter of Southern Comfort chased with Full Throttle energy drink, an old stand-by of Chris'. At 7 pm we arrived at La Louisiane, and sure enough, Catfish was there, along with a bartender, the restaurant owner, and the owner's three daughters. Otherwise, the place was empty. Catfish saw us walk in and ended his song abruptly. "I've been waiting for you guys," he said. "My motivation to play." This seemed to be the truth. We were the only actual customers in the restaurant and would be for the two hours we spent there. Catfish eagerly took our requests, which ranged from Herbie Hancock to Gershwin to Bill Evans to Brubeck.

Brian, Chris, and Dan sat at the bar with the family and ordered drink after drink. The proud owner kept them enthralled with tales from La Louisiane's history, especially its most infamous owner, "Diamond Jim" Moran, a notorious fifties gangster. Brian and Chris chatted with the girls, aged eight, ten, and thirteen, who lived above the restaurant with their dad and were waiting, at this moment, for their mother to pick them up. They were off to sleep-away camp in Tennessee the next morning, and we could sense the butterflies in their stomach. It was the youngest girl's first time going to camp. She was cutting out business cards to give to her new friends.

"What’s that?" she asked Brian, pointing to his old Nikon 35 mm.

"A camera," he said.

"Can I play with it?" she asked, fidgeting in her barstool. "I love old, beat up things."

Brian showed her how to use the camera, with external light meter and all. "Do you like living in New Orleans?" he asked her as she took pictures of his face.

"No, I hate it," she said. "It smells like butt."

Her mom arrived shortly thereafter, and before the girl was whisked away she made sure to give Brian and Chris a business card.

Meanwhile, Catfish was shoring up his fan-base, which consisted of Ted. He had taken a break from playing and they sat at the far end of the bar together. Catfish was drinking a beer and eating a plate of stuffed rabbit estoufade with tuna marchand de vin, his payment. He spoke wildly, bits of food going in and out of his mouth, occasionally jumping to the piano when he was reminded of a song. He held forth, riffing on about eighty different topics, usually without the benefit of a discernible transition (modulation), and Ted scrawled pieces of their conversation in his notebook. Two hours later, Ted had amassed a trove of Catfish epigrams:

On politics: "A lie is the lowest form of creativity."

On art: "Ego and creativity—they’re just enemies!"

On rhythm: "Fractals!  All styles, all cultures of music come down to it, even physics.  I mean, certain styles of music make you feel the same as any style of music. Rhythm equals life equals emotion equals time equals change."

On the pendulum swing: "If we’re all winning all the time, we’d lose our freakin’ minds! People are made to create or attract problems."

On appearance and reality: "They ask me what happens when a tree falls in a forest.  I say, 'What forest?'"

On the broadening of horizons: "You gotta learn. Extend your range, you’re seeing larger spheres...all life seeks to expand."

On marital relations:  "My wife was in the navy.  Had to salute before sex. 'Permission to come aboard, sir?' Permission granted every time."

On patriotism: "I don’t consider myself an American, just happened to be born here."

On the environment: "If the planet is a body, it’s a sick one."

On fashion: "I hate to see people with their pants down their asses and they wanna look hip, but really they're conservative."

On rap: "Assaulting people on the airwaves, that's their idea of gangstahood. You wanna be hip? Help someone."

On religion: "People experience miracles and ascribe them to the entity of their choice and misread their own roles."

And then there were Catfish's words from before: "…their heads are cracked for some stupid reason, and if you talk to them for 10 minutes they won’t be homeless anymore because you just gave ‘em one little, you know, therapy."

What was Catfish's pop psychology like in action? Perhaps this was it; perhaps he counseled all those streetside head cases with the same disjointed one-liners now unleashed on Ted in an impromptu performance. His was a show with no end, with nobody allowed backstage—probably because there was no backstage after all.

Several songs and drinks later, Catfish began to tell Ted about a trumpeter he once knew, a man who fell victim to the lifestyle.

"His name was Bebop, you see, a heroin burnout who wanted to be Charlie Parker…." He trailed off to sip his beer.

Catfish and Bebop. Neither could shake off the pose. Neither had a real name. Both were on permanent vacation, playing for imaginary tips. What would the pianist's epitaph be? "His name was Catfish, you see, a road burnout who wanted to be McCoy Tyner…."

He had compared himself to Elvis, Jesus, and Dylan, trashed Oscar Peterson's ivory-ticklings for "a whole lot of talk and not much to say," claimed his epigrammatic wisdom was enough to straighten out the entire freak population of New Orleans. He was a good-hearted quack, a small-timer paid in French food and the chance to talk big; and he was unable to admit the point where it stopped being a vacation and became merely life.

Partially taken in but somewhat dazzled, we felt guilty when it came time to move on; we were his motivation to play, after all. Catfish craved an audience more than anything, and he had found a captive one in us. The owner handed us four VIP passes to the Gold Club cabaret next door, which we accepted as the logical next step in our evening. We left Catfish at a grand piano in a deserted bar, playing a Memphis Slim song for the listless bartender and nobody in particular.

Three hours later found us struggling to address the problem of Brian. He had led us through a frenzy of barhopping, which was really a zigzagging chase sequence scored by blues, zydeco, and sweaty rock and roll. In a city full of folks expelled from towns all over the world, it takes a lot to get kicked out of a bar. Brian managed to do so several times.

Bourbon Street had worked its way under his skin. His indecorous behavior seemed traceable to a manic acceleration of the sex drive triggered by heat, liquor, and the ambient culture of flesh. Strip clubs were the grail, though any bar with a band of sufficient volume would do. He was AFTER A WOMAN, somewhat in the mode of the caveman, and no matter how many times he got turned away from the same door, eventually he would make his way back after having exhausted the competing options. It was a stubborn and primal mission that kept the rest of us stumbling to catch up, knowing that if we lost him in the crowd of partiers we might tomorrow find him on his hands and knees, combing the gutters for his wallet and his dignity. We wished we had brought a leash, and pressed on, always two steps behind him.

And now he lay half on the sidewalk, half in the street, while we debated possible courses of action.

"We could call his mother," someone suggested.

"Or a priest."

"Or the pound."

We tried to lift him again, but in a sudden and unlikely turn of events, Brian arose and fled, stopping only when one of his rubber flip-flops flew off his foot.

"Brian, you are completely out of control," Ted yelled after him, exasperated as though with a badly behaved child—only this child had a fake ID, an overactive imagination, and a blind tenacity that made him tougher to subdue than a rhinoceros.

Dan saw the need for swift action. "Godammit, we've got to get him back to the hostel. You two hail a cab; I'll get him."

He tore off through the crowd with the igloo slung across his back and caught up with Brian, whose bid for freedom might have been successful if not for the flip-flops: they tripped him up, and Dan tackled him to the ground. Brian howled in pain and swore incoherently as Dan hoisted him up and led him, limping, to the cross street where Ted and Chris had found a taxi. The four of us piled in, with Brian slumped between Chris and Ted in the back seat. Brian mumbled a steady stream of half-intelligible profanity consisting mainly of derivatives of the word “anus,” obscene constructions he had devised himself. We propped him up and apologized to the very good-natured cab driver, who had seen it all before and laughed for the duration of the ride.

The cabbie dropped us off on Carondolet, but because of blurry-mindedness and the distraction in the back seat we found ourselves on an unfamiliar part of the street. Brian, unable to exit the cab gracefully, wound up face-down on the pavement. "Fuck you guys," was all he would say. We got him standing and Ted babysat while Chris and Dan searched for the hostel. Brian was trying to piece together his sunglasses, which had broken in two when Dan tackled him. This was the cause of his blind and inexpressible anger—his busted pair of shades, which ended up, along with Brian, in an anonymous yard on Carondolet.

"Get up, man," Ted kept saying, his patience wearing thin. "Get up. Get your ass up."

Brian just grunted and dug his face into the grass.

"I'm serious, Bri, get your ass up."

More grunts. A new strategy.

"Brian, the police are coming, and you are in serious trouble. I suggest you get up." Grumbling, Brian stood up and walked unsteadily after Chris and Dan. His glasses remained behind in the grass.

Ted's Journal, 2:32 AM, 6/15/2005.

Inventory of Brian's pockets after a night of heavy drinking:

·        Three condoms, unused

·        Crazy Horse Cabaret info ticket

·        Leather pouch for 35 mm light meter

·        Fujifilm label

·        Crumpled $1 bill

·        Sam Hafer's Missouri ID

·        Matches from Leavitt & Pierce

·        Scraps of paper bearing illegible phone numbers

·        One (1) free admission to The Gold Club as hotel "guest"

·        Black Bic^TM lighter

·        Keys

·        Business card from "La Louisiane" bar & bistro: "ALLI SMITH—Proprietor in Training (A.K.A. The Owner)—"

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