New Orleans Is Strong Enough To Stand

This space was slated to hold a post about the HBO MAX series "Industry"– but given the horrific incident of Tuesday night, and in solidarity with my dear friends from my three years-plus in that great city, I'll post the below essay as tribute. It was originally written for the Toronto Globe & Mail.

JEWEL OF THE MISSISSIPPI: THE HAUNTING MAGIC OF NEW ORLEANS 

By Fred Schruers 

8 November 1991 The Globe and Mail

 There is a lot to love about New Orleans, perhaps more to love here than about any other American city. It's not always the manifest pleasures - the profusion of great eating places, the rich soup that mixes music and nightlife, the handsome old buildings. It's a great town for simply driving around in, seldom over-trafficked and always diverting. To cruise quietly under the great trees lining St. Charles headed for one of the Camellia Grill's iconically perfect hamburgers, to swing through downtown on the freeway at dusk as the lights wink on and a giant cloud over the Gulf of Mexico turns rose-coloured, to stand sweating at Tipitina's or the Maple Leaf while Boozoo Chavis or Rockin' Dopsie cranks up the zydeco onstage...these are singular pleasures.  Want to see the steam pour out of a Louisianan's ears? Just mention a movie called The Big Easy. "Aw, cher," Dennis Quaid purrs to Ellen Barkin, lighting his eyes up like a pinball machine and flashing his trademark leer, "Cyummmmmon "  Well, this mush-mouthed concupiscence may work wonders on out-of- towners - especially those who see noble character in Quaid's fibrous, washboard abdomen. But it makes the actual natives of the region, the very people whom Dennis is meant to be artfully replicating, gape at the screen with wrath and nausea. "What - whud - whud the hell is that boy suh-posed to be doin'? What silly-ass planet is he meant to be from?"  It's Quaid's half-baked accent, of course, but even more it's that word. "Cher" is a French word, to be sure, and Cajuns are notably francophone, but no self-respecting coon-ass, as the Cajuns are fondly called (usually out of earshot), says, "cher."  All of this might not be such a bone of contention were the Crescent City not so acutely aware of its image - yes, even vain about it. In this way, the city is like some aging film star - haughty, her ruined face stretched like old lace over a still-elegant bone structure - who is trying to lay simultaneous claim to both sides of her past: the Uptown heiress sitting starched and immobile in the faint hot breeze, and the libertine who forgets to wear underclothing.  As writer A.J. Liebling has noted, New Orleans partakes of things Mediterranean as well as Caribbean. One feels that mix most sensuously in the French Quarter, with its alternating echoes (architectural, demographic and mystical) of Marseilles and the West Indies, but none of this explains the Quarter's disorderly mix of personalities. In John Kennedy Toole's mordantly comic, early-sixties novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, the hero, a colossal eccentric named Ignatius, berates a cop: "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti- Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft..." But there is nobility here, as well. As Stanley Kowalski reminds his wife in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, things are different here: "There is such a thing in this State of Louisiana as the Napoleonic code " Queen storyteller of New Orleans these days is Anne Rice, who has brought a spiritualist's relish for evil to every sex"black magic"decadence cliche about New Orleans there ever was, and combined it with a devoted fascination for the city and its history, to create such blockbuster novels as The Witching Hour and the Vampire Lestat series. In Rice's New Orleans, the exclusive Uptown enclave called the Garden District has an evanescent beauty, gorgeously shaded avenues - and resident witches whose lineage can be traced back to Haiti, and before that to 17th-century Scotland. Rice has pointed out that "as the only Catholic city in America - we have a different vision of good. We don't think that eating and drinking and celebrating are evil, that Dionysian side of ourselves. We have that Catholic tradition that after fasting comes a feast." Rice's characters - especially those she writes about under her pseudonyms Roquelaure or Rampling - also dwell on death, which is often partnered up with sex, its best antidote.  There's a sort of unquenchable fondness for life and one's fellow man in New Orleans that seems to override the sad racism of the deep South. So when the coffee-shop waitress tells you she's run out of such and such, she's likely to preface the news with a heartfelt, "No, baby... " It's that old impossible dream that there is a family of man; impossible, yet it occurs regularly down here. The way New Orleans feels, once you sink into it, has much to do with the Mississippi flowing so massively and soundlessly through it. Rivers, of course, have always stood for time itself. You are not going to change that flow, move that floating branch back upriver. So you lie in bed, in a quiet place in the city that's tucked into that famous crescent shape the river makes, and watch the ceiling fan. And you say the city's name, if you say it properly, with all the vowels softened - N'Awlins, N'Awlins, N'Awlins - like a mantra. You might be practicing, might be praying. But the answer you get back you already know, and it's a promise no place else on the continent can make with such assurance: When you go back out into the city once more, everything will be as it was.