Roy Blount

An excerpt from
“Ramble Two: Wetness”

Perspiration is healthy.  If people didn’t perspire, they’d die in ten minutes.
–Blanche DuBois

Surely one reason New Orleanians take the threat of inundation so lightly is that the city is so moist as a rule.  Most months, people walking outdoors gain a sheen, which in the summer never quite goes away.  You look through an open doorway into a courtyard to see lush plants being watered so lavishly that a stream pours out into the street.  Watch your head—more water sluices down, from the watering of balcony ferns.

It can rain so hard in New Orleans that you expect to see alligators bouncing off the pavement: a sudden event, foreshadowed as suddenly by dark clouds painted onto a perfectly sunny day, and thunderclaps ripping the firmament.  Also dramatic in their way are the soft showers of the early evening, sometimes arriving spookily in full sunshine from no clouds at all, or thick white ones like real whipped cream, and people say, “The devil is beating his wife.”  The Quarter is fine to walk in during a summer rain, with the balconies overhead protecting the stroller except intermittently when he or she, or preferably they, choose to cross a street.  The streets glisten with the wet, there’s a passing cleanliness in the air, which afterward may be hotter than ever, the smell of wet pavement evaporating in wisps of steam.  Tennessee Williams wrote of “the quality light could not be expected to have again after rain, the pigeons and drunkards coming together from under the same stone arches, to move again in the sun’s faint mumble of benediction with faint surprise.”

The mist can add a patina to the replica riverboats that take tourists on excursions up and down the river.  They look about as much like wedding cakes (“without the responsibility,” as Mark Twain put it) as the original ones did, and quite competent musicians play old favorites on them, so if there is enough mist over the river you might hope, as the Natchez or the Creole Queen approaches, to summon up the vision that Jack Teagarden beheld, one evening in 1917 or so, as he rambled the Quarter.

Teagarden would go on to become a great jazz trombonist, but at this point he was still listening for a breakthrough groove.  He heard a trumpet in the distance, over by the river, and took off in that direction.  “I couldn’t see anything but an excursion boat gliding through the mist back to port,” he would recall in later years.  “Then the tune was more distinct.  The boat was still far off.  But in the bow I could see a Negro standing in the wind, holding a trumpet high and sending out the most brilliant notes I had ever heard.  It was jazz; it was what I had been hoping to hear…I don’t even know if it was ‘Tiger Rag’ or ‘Panama.’  But it was Louis Armstrong descending from the sky like a god.”

The waterfront is not what it was before the Civil War, when the Mississippi was the nation’s main avenue of commerce, and hundreds of riverboats and barges would be arriving or standing by there at once.  Now is it in the noir huddle of wharves where Elia Kazan in 1949 shot Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas pursuing unwitting plague carriers Jack Palance and Zero Mostel in Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets.

Nor was there anything divine about the sounds I heard mingling along the river one September afternoon, in 2003: a calliope on the passing riverboat booming the tune to “Can’t You Hear the Whistle Blowing,” and the soft rumble of a train on the track that parallels the river there, and a tooot-tooot from the train, and a streetcar clattering along another track, and a crossing signal going ding-ding-ding, and a flock of uniformed schoolkids chattering, and a guy fwoopily blowing up, squeakily tying, and doggedly hawking balloon animals: “Presto!  Instant giraffe!”  Then the riverboat blew its piercing contralto steam whistle, and the temporarily drowned-out balloon guy swung around toward the riverboat and hollered “WAS THAT NECESSARY?”

No, it wasn’t.  But the whole thing wasn’t Disney World either.  It was a confluence of noises mostly tourist-driven but not virtual.  And a spatter of rain came through the colorful scene like a sloppy brushstroke of mineral spirits.  I proceeded on down the riverside Moonwalk, a wooden promenade, to the Aquarium at the foot of Canal.  Some years ago I made a speech there, at a fund-raising dinner connected with the Aquarium’s opening.  The audience, if that was the word, listened to my leisurely buildup for about five seconds and then fell to talking freely among themselves, reducing me to background noise.  I guess musicians get inured to that, but it’s embarrassing when you’re making a speech, as I persisted in doing for a full half hour to make sure of getting paid.  I learned then that you can’t mosey up on a New Orleans audience, especially one that has been talking and drinking for some time.  They’ve got too many other sources of pleasure working.  If you don’t jump right in and paddle hard, you’re jetsam.

Every time I visit the Aquarium, I learn something.  Once in the penguin enclosure, the keeper was sitting on a rock with penguins gathered all around him, wagging their tails and flapping their wings.  It looked like he was telling them a story, but in fact he was giving a little talk to a small audience of people.  Aquarium penguins can’t be allowed to reproduce much within their narrow circle, he said, because the gene pool will be too shallow (at that, as is on cue, two penguins dove into the water and swooped along together), so plastic eggs are substituted for some of the real ones.  But some chicks are born, and the “moms and dads” take turns tending to them, with help from friends who eat a bit more than their fill and drop by to regurgitate a snack for the little ones.  Penguins, he said, are very soft to pet.  They are covered not in patent leather, as it might appear, but by lots of tiny feathers, eighty to ninety to the square inch, as opposed to eight or nine in flying birds.  One penguin named Patience would nuzzle the keeper like a cat when he scratched her head, and sulk when he stopped.  A couple of the other penguins had found that they could gain the attention of attendants by untying or pooping on their shoes.  The penguins’ diet is fish, but one of them was scared so badly by a big steelhead trout placed in the tank that he stayed out of the water for days.  At another display, I was able to touch a limpet named Patrick.  Once somebody showing me around the Aquarium mentioned that a biologist doing an autopsy on a shark reached inside and was bitten by a fetal shark.

Early developers had in mind a grand canal along Canal Street, but it didn’t pan out.  Still it’s a fine broad thoroughfare, formerly lined by deluxe theaters and emporia, later spooky and semi-abandoned (and the Quarter a slum), now a semi-refurbished mélange.  The old S.H. Kress and Co. dime store and the former D.H. Holmes department store are now the Ritz-Carlton and the Chateau Sonesta.  On the banquette in front of the latter stands a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s famous comic New Orleans novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.  The statue is not a good likeness: not fat enough and too sane.

Also on Canal is the mammoth old four-façaded, sixteen-columned marble U.S. Customs House—not built on bales of cotton, as tour guides will tell you.  It is built on cypress beams.  The bales that were laid down along the beams serve to soak up water, so the beams still haven’t rotted away.  The whole city-block-covering building, however, has sunk three feet.  A friend of mine, Virginia Dabbs, works there.  If you try to bring drugs into this country through the port of New Orleans, she says, you’d better not catch the nose of certain customs agents.  “If a cocker spaniel sits down next to you,” she says, “you are toast.”

You can buy booze on Canal at any time.  There are stores that specialize in liquor and luggage and beads and strange artifacts.  For instance, a stuffed armadillo wearing this outfit: a cowboy hat, a sheriff’s badge, and two six-shooters.  No price tag.

“How much for that?”

“Oh, that’s about $169.”

“But the tag on this one, not dressed up, says $325.”

“Yeah, that one’s got to be $285.  They’re not cheap.  ‘Cause you got to pay the taxidermist.  And he charges an arm and a leg.”

Imagine being drunk enough to be pricing armadillos, to take back home in your new extra suitcase, and trying to do that math?

Down the middle of Canal is a track for the nation’s oldest streetcar line in continuous operation.  We will take that uptown—catching it at the corner of canal and St. Charles, which is the uptown continuation of Royal.

Note, near the streetcar stop, an old, now unfortunately gussied-up, oyster bar called the Pearl.  What I like most about it are the nicely rendered representations of oysters inlaid in the banquette outside.  It can’t have been easy to capture the essence of open-face oyster on a flat, hard surface.  Each oyster is different, as to its white and its gray areas—not stylized, like the oyster-shaped light fixtures (their bulbs are their pearls) overhead inside.

You hop onto the streetcar, which rattles uptown.  Soggy-but-moving air has always come in through the windows, bearing smells of subtropical plants, but now, I am informed as I write this, the cars are being air-conditioned.  That is a bad idea.  Conditioned air could be anywhere.  There is no air like the air of New Orleans.

On the way uptown we’ll go through the Central Business District, a jumble of monolithic contemporary office buildings and art galleries of interest, and the Superdome, where the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League play out their doom year after year.  And we’ll pass Lee Circle.

Mist can have a great effect on what you see in New Orleans.  One night I walked up St. Charles to Lee Circle to have it out with Robert E. Lee, he of noble stoicism, drastically out of place in New Orleans.  I had just finished writing a brief biography of Lee, and was ready to move on from him and the Civil War in general, but first I intended to ask him a New Orleans-related question.  No, not what Steve McQueen asks Tuesday Weld, rhetorically, in The Cincinnati Kid, the movie about high-stakes poker set in New Orleans: “What good is honor if you’re dead?”  Lee would have stared me down on that one, to which even McQueen comes up with an honorable answer.  But by the time honor becomes the issue, we’ve all got our armor buckled on.  And aren’t there a lot of less-than-honorable questions that anyone would rather ask of Tuesday Weld?

Here’s what I wanted to ask Marse Robert: “Oh, why didn’t you ramble?  After all these years in New Orleans, haven’t you learned that everybody owes it to himself, and to those around him, to ramble some?”  I don’t mean screw around, I mean loosen up.  I associate Lee with my father, who was honorable, who was self-sacrificially community-minded, who rarely took a drink, who died when he was sixty, three years younger than I am now.  My mother was already worrying about his heart when he was only forty-nine.  I wish my father had laisser le bontemps rouler more often.  With me, for instance.  But he was a child of hard times.

When I got to Lee Circle, where Lee’s statue was erected in 1884 upon a sixty-foot Doric column, he, like my father, was gone.