I Wish I Was In New Orleans

Despite the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the environmental threat of the BP off-shore drilling catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the City of New Orleans battles on with a brave face, a cold beer and a sugar-dusted beignet. Chris Marais has been to New Orleans twice in his youth – and can’t get The Big Easy out of his mind…

Photography by Chris Marais

Long Riders

Thirty years ago, I blew into New Orleans with an old school pal called Spike. The drive through Texas had been epic, and we’d slipped into Louisiana via three days of industrial drinking in Shreveport, a southern world littered with porno-rock, stone-eyed bikers and belching smokestacks.

We hopped right off the freeway from Baton Rouge, took St Charles Avenue and revved on into the French Quarter in an old blue truck that had two forward gears and one good tyre to its credit. We stopped off at a place called The Old Absinthe House Bar in a street called Bourbon and I felt inexplicably at home.

“Spike,” I gurgled one hour later, surrounded by Dixie beers, bowls of steaming gumbo and four Big Easy girls out on their lunch hour, “I never want to leave this town. Ever…”

Many months later I said goodbye to my sweetheart city. My black-eyed babe, my vampire lover, my streets cobbled with memories, my shady lanes lined with ghost-oak, my pink mansions, my old granddaddy river and the Cities of the Dead. My New Orleans.

Coming Back

Seventeen years later (1997) and I’m headed back to New Orleans. I am nervous and expectant. I feel like an older man visiting the mistress of his youth. The years have thrown weight on my frame, my temples are grey. What will she think? How will she greet me?

I’m headed into mid-city from the airport. The cabbie has Aaron Neville on the radio and I’m thinking about one night at Tipitina’s where I saw the Neville Brothers and met a young nurse who turned me upside-down for a while.

New Orleans is the true ‘state of mind’ city in the USA. Even when you’re in New Orleans, you end up wishing you were in New Orleans. The city drips with history and nuance, mystery and séance. Everywhere, there’s the hint of an icon, something from a movie you once saw, a line you may have heard or a sax solo in the dead of night with the fleapit hotel neon flashing Red! Zzt! Red! through your window.

Hard-Drinking Drum Solo City

More than 250 years old, this is where the Caribbean with all its colour, voodoo and African throb crept onto the mainland of North America. It’s a hard-drinking, sexy, street-marching drum solo of a city. On the surface is an all-day, all-night street party, where, in February, plump Quarter maids will bear their creamy breasts if you throw them a Mardi Gras charm, where the hookers and the hackers and the Lucky Dog peddlars hang out with the Zydeco players, the jazz nuts and the barmen on Bourbon Street.

And below all that is something deliciously sinister and snakelike and utterly beautiful. You catch it in a Creole eye, the crook of the bassman’s smile, the smell of fresh rain on the thick green banana leaves in a French Quarter inner sanctum, the rumbling of a midnight streetcar as it heads out to the quiet old Uptown mansions of old money.

Down On The Mississippi

The next day, I meet some old mates down at Jackson Square for a two-hour ride up the Mississippi on a riverboat. The captain plays the calliope for the queues outside the boat ramp. Old show tunes blare out through the Quarter and the ears of the carriage horses pick up and flare out towards the riverside.

Sunshine Corrigan

Lunch is back at the Old Absinthe House Bar, and almost nothing has changed. Wads of business cards, yellow and bent, are stuck on every available inch of space on the walls. The central bar is still as lovely as we remember it, and Sunshine Corrigan now rules the roost previously run by The Late Blackie, the barman of our time. We toast dead friends.

I have five precious days in New Orleans, and by Day Two I’m already back in the rhythm of The Quarter.

The day begins at nine, with a breakfast at Johnny’s Po’Boys in St Louis Street. It’s not for sissies: full English breakfast with American trimmings of flapjacks and syrup. Grab a coffee and sit down at the chequered-cloth table. Shiny old-time serviette dispensers, locals poring over the Times-Picayune for the latest scandals and crime stats while the ancient airconditioning system battles on in the heat of Hurricane Season.

By 10am, The Quarter has been washed, dried and is ready for the day’s business. The Lucky Dog carts and their cheerful minders are out on the street corners with the buskers and the dog-walkers Antoine’s has its welcome sign out and the specials at K-Paul’s are posted on the window.

We spend the afternoon bar-hopping down Bourbon, up Toulouse, past St Louis, then Chartres and into a daiquiri den on Decatur.  We regale the rather sleepy barman with African fables until the early evening, when the golden light slides over Old Man River and we wander out into the gloaming.

Blues On The River

On the river walk, two blues players who have strutted their stuff before an empty hat from Seattle to Syracuse are busking through Honky Tonk Woman with gusto, six-string guitar and mouth harp while a gentle crowd of lovers, pig-walkers and sunset junkies gathers in the dusk.

Every night is music night in New Orleans. If you could levitate 10 metres above The Quarter round about midnight, you’d hear at least 50 musical sources playing a mélange of Zydeco, rock, blues, trad jazz, Dixie and new jazz. Perhaps a little folk music filtering in from an alleyway café off Bourbon as well. Everyone’s hopping.

In the early hours of the morning, we sit in the garden of our Audubon Cottages on Dauphine Street, the thick foliage cutting off most of the street music. We smoke cigars and drink Old No. 7 and take our ease and remember younger days.

I remember those long rainy afternoons from another time in New Orleans, when the water dripped off the balcony to the beat of Pete Fountain’s Half-Fast Marching Band playing on vinyl inside, while we haphazardly strung up little Christmas lights all through the little shotgun house. And then went off, in the thunderstorm, to catch The Nevilles at Tipitina’s.

The cigar embers are like moving fireflies in the moonlight. What’s up with tomorrow? The bayou? The French Market? Maybe we’ll just slope off back to The Old Absinthe House Bar and shoot the breeze with Sunshine Corrigan. Who knows? Let’s have another shot of bourbon…