by Rich Cohen
Part Two
In the fall of 1986, I arrived in New Orleans. I had left a gray, sober, Germanic city and all at once found myself in a drunken, weedy greenhouse of a town. New Orleans looks like a capital in the French Antilles, a port backed by swamps. Tulane is in the English quarter of the city, and the houses are ramshackle and Victorian. The leaves cast spiky shadows, and the vines running up the carports glisten in the drenching tropical rain. Each afternoon, I would climb up to the roof of my dorm, where I could look out over the neat greens of campus to the twisting coil of the river, tugboats heading toward the Gulf of Mexico. In the evening, the sun dropped through bands of dust and the sky passed through the colors of a mood ring—placid, agitated, angry.
I fell in with a group of boys from the dorms, prep schoolers from the South with names like Whit and Ricky and Trey, who wore white bucks and backwards baseball caps, who loved Hank Williams Jr. even more than Hank Williams Sr., and who greeted you from a distance, shouting, “All right, son, let’s go drink a couple!” After class, we would wander past the rundown mansions of the Garden District, with open doors offering a quick glimpse of marble and velvet. We talked about music or sports or high school, and I told stories about Jamie, which, late at night, grew into legends. On Saturdays, we walked down flat streets to the levee, the Mississippi River catching and reflecting the midday sun, so muddy the water looked like chocolate, and on the other side the smokestacks and industry of Algiers. We sat on the grass and imagined each other’s hometowns, but I knew these friendships were just a temporary alliance. Whenever I found the chance, I slipped away.
Jamie was still very much at the center of my thoughts. I knew he had gone to Kansas, or so he had said, but I could not really imagine his life there. He did not write in those first weeks, and his mother, when I called, had also not heard from him. Once, in a bar, I met a girl who was visiting from the University of Kansas and, when I asked if she had heard of Jamie Drew, she said, “Drew-licious?” So somehow the nickname had tagged along. Well, that was good news, anyway. He was staking out his legend. Also, I knew some other kids that went to KU and from them there were rumors that Jamie had moved on to serious drugs, or was drunk all the time, or was seen with the worst kind of people in the worst kind of dives. And then there was still that other life that he lived in my mind. I thought of him whenever things went badly for me, when a girl shut me down, say, because in such moments Jamie gave me that special loser’s solace: “Oh, baby, you’ve made a terrible mistake. You should meet my friend Jamie; he and I are superstars back on the shore.” Just the memory of Jamie could make me feel that way. And of course I thought of him on those great nights that just went clicking along. At times, I felt like a fisherman, netting colorful experiences that I would enjoy not now so much as later, back at home, in some dark bar, where I would share them with my best friend.
A few nights a week, I would ride down to the French Quarter. The streetcar ran past brick walls painted over with advertisements, my favorite being the sign for HER-MAN AND SON PAINTERS, benevolent old white-haired Her-man over the words TWENTY YEARS’ EXPERIENCE, next to his son, dark-eyed and mischievous, over the words FULLY INSURED. I would ride to the end of the line and then walk into the narrow, twisting streets of the French Quarter. The French came here first, settling at the end of the seventeenth century, building a haven for Jesuits and businessmen fifty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then came the Spanish, then the French again, then the Americans. The city has always been the great drain of the continent. It stinks with the sadness of the last century. From open doors you hear foot-stomping and horn-blowing. Is there anything better than standing in the street and listening to horns? Or going around the corner to Felix’s Oyster Bar for turtle soup, or having a drink at the Napoleon House with its open shutters and its ceiling fans? Like Venice, New Orleans is a monument that has been allowed to dilapidate, an aristocrat pulled from her horse and gawked at by men with money belts.
Of course, some people feel that if a pleasure or a place such as Royal Street has been discovered by yokels, by happy idiots, by guys on convention, then it is ruined and must be abandoned. Or, worse yet, it is ruined and so can be enjoyed only through a heavy filter of irony, a cheesecloth thrown up between yourself and the world. To me, this response is cowardly, an excuse to abandon the field to the yokels. It is running in the face of fire. So while other kids at Tulane avoided the Quarter, I spent many nights there, drawn to the same world that Jamie and I once looked for in the blues. From each trip I brought back some image or impression—a parrot-colored house glistening in the rain, a sloop plowing through the coffee-colored river—that I could turn over in my mind.
But most of the time I was just another kid on campus, far from home, lonely. There was a sense of abandon at Tulane that struck me as slightly insane. It seemed that many of these kids had come here on a spree, hoping at last to test the lessons of their parents or simply to flush them away. Of the twenty or so people on my freshman floor, only about five were around to graduate. The rest transferred or dropped out or burned away like debris on reentry. In Spanish class, I sat next to a kid who, on his desk, in addition to his notebook and pencils, set down a fruity cocktail—bright blue in a curvy souvenir glass, with straws, umbrellas, and a slice of pineapple. The teacher, a bug-eyed Honduran, spotted the drink and said in Spanish—everything in Spanish—“And what is that?”
“A Blue Hawaii.”
The teacher ordered the kid to throw out the drink. The kid said that, since he was eighteen, his drink was legal, and since it was a Blue Hawaii it was refreshing, adding, “And, of course, it is delicious.”
The teacher told the kid he would have to make a choice, so the kid gathered his notebooks and pencils and left with the cocktail.
Another day, I came to the same class after sharing a joint in the dorms. I was late and the chairs had been arranged in a circle, and this was confusing. As I sat down, the teacher said something to me in Spanish. It sounded like gibberish. I said, “Come again?”
He said “Tengo” or “Tenga” or “Tony,” and there was something about “la luz.” I somehow got the idea that I was being asked to turn off the lights. I reached over and flipped the switch. The room was in the basement, so all at once we were plunged into darkness. I could hear the other kids laughing. The teacher said something in angry gibberish.
I said, “¿Cualo?”
He said, “Richard, turn on the damn lights.”
By November, I had at last found my way into a group of friends, most of whom lived in a house a few blocks from campus. The house had crooked shutters and a sagging porch and was set before a curtain of swaying pine. If you stopped by the house, you might find rooms alive with conversation, or a party about to spill over, or just kids sleeping it off. The boys in the house were pitied and envied by the other kids on campus, because they were idle and lawless and wild. They dressed in torn jeans or dirty shorts, in shirts with no buttons and torn cuffs. In the winter, some wore chewed-up black overcoats that dragged along the ground. They went to class only if moved to do so and slept where they fell, on couches or in yards; now and then, when they tired of the city, they headed north to the forests of Mississippi, emerging a few days later with stories and game, and shared both in big cookouts behind the house.
I would stand in the backyard, talking to each of the boys, trying to find a way into the world they had built. There was Joseph Rivers, a gloomy, dark-eyed Texan, who wandered far from the familiar haunts, seeking out desolate places. When Joseph fell into a black mood, he would walk to a fraternity bar and pick a fight with a guy twice his size, and the beating he took always made him feel much better. There was Kip Clawdell, whom everyone called Crawdad, a creature of the great indoors, of skunky rooms, gossip, late-night talks. There was Tim Tree, so tall and sallow he looked like he had stepped from a painting by Velázquez. Tree spoke of binges and bar fights. Fog seemed to roll from the pauses between his sentences.
There was Magna Para, short and stocky, with a glass eye. Now and then, Magna Para dropped his eye into a beer, chugged the beer, and caught the eye between his teeth. He called himself Cyclops. There was “Handsome” Hansen Jackson, the only son of a local judge, who, each February, so they could play at his Mardi Gras party, furloughed a combo of jazz musicians. Hansen was clever enough never to say anything anyone could understand. He spoke of the inanity of college professors, the portentousness of Hegel, the insipidness of rock lyrics. I did not like him at all. There was Maximilian Franco, a sophomore who failed out the semester before. In the middle of the year, Franco’s father hired two goons to kidnap Franco and return him to his home in Paraguay. In addition to a blue blanket and a student ID, Franco left behind a Nintendo, which, over the next three years, traveled from room to room, driving down grades and ruining friendships. It was called the curse of Maximilian Franco. One afternoon, Joseph Rivers, a liberator whose name should be remembered with that of Simón Bolívar, hurled the game off the second-floor balcony, smashing it to pieces and freeing the house.
For the most part, these kids had met in the dorms, or at parties, or out at the bars, and they had been drawn together by a shared sense of style. This was not necessarily something they themselves possessed or even understood; it was instead something they badly wanted to be. Some of them called it keek, as in “He has keek,” or “Very keek,” or “Feel the keekness.” If you asked them to explain keek, they would say, “Explain jazz.” I suppose keek was a way of carrying yourself, of looking at life: of never being wrong-footed or buried by a situation or suckered by fake writing, or fake music, or fake anything. It was being in the right place at the right time, or creating the right place simply by being there; it was enjoying whatever moment you were living without judging it for its value. Did they drink, did they take drugs? Yes, yes of course, but not with that tired old hippie idea of enlightenment. They took drugs because there were drugs to be taken and because drugs were fun to take. In keek, I recognized a quality I had first seen in Jamie, whom I came to think of as the complete possessor of keek, a natural aristocrat who, whether he knows it or not, is down here slumming with the rabble.
The creators of keek, those who brought the ideal of it to Tulane, anyway, were three guys from Missouri: Waxey James, Eli Tenafly, and Matt Congress, called Congolese, or Congo. Congress would often say, “If you can talk you can sing, if you can walk you can dance—a saying from the Congo.” These friends had known each other as kids, and they had with each other a total ease. Each of them had been a successful high school athlete, and there was something gone to seed in even their smallest gestures. Eli Tenafly had dropped out of school years before and was simply hanging around, drawling in an accent of no known territory. He was crafty and could read weakness. Once, when my friend Billy had, for the first time, taken a tab of acid and was wavering between here and there, he met Eli Tenafly, who said, “Billy, I want you to know something: you are never coming down.” Waxey James wore leather pants and snakeskin boots with steel tips. Though he was not yet twenty-two, his hair had gone completely white. Once, driving by late at night, I saw him skulking around the Desire Projects. And Congo? Well, Congo was going crazy; anyone could see that.
It was Congo who brought me to the house in the first place. We met in a bar, drinking side by side, talking about the beauties of back home. From the start, he spotted me as another kid lonely for the Middle West. He had the face of old America—sharp cheekbones, wide eyes. We would meet at the house, then go out to the clubs. At one point, he told me he was drinking too much and so had decided to cut back to three cocktails per night, which sounded like a good idea until he told me the cocktails—a pitcher of beer, a sixty-four-ounce daiquiri, a double bourbon. After a fight with Eli Tenafly, he moved into his own apartment. He often lost his keys. Rather than hire a locksmith, he would sleep for weeks on the couches of friends. Someone bought him a key chain with a beeper: clap three times and it beeps. Once, after I had not seen Congo for several weeks, he came into my dorm room, clapped three times (beep-beep-beep), collected his keys, and went home. He wore one set of clothes until they wore out. He used to stand in the back of bars, face to the wall, drinking alone, saying, “Why, yes; yes of course.”
In the early evenings, we went to Miss Mae’s Place, a dive by the river where the drinks were cheap. From there we went on to Frankie & Johnny’s for oyster or shrimp po-boys and pitchers of beer. And then to one of the music clubs uptown—Tyler’s or the Maple Leaf or Tipitina’s. Up front at Tipitina’s there was a cast-iron bust of Professor Longhair, and we used to joke that, miraculously, the ’fro on the Longhair sculpture seemed to be growing. We often went to Jimmy’s, a converted warehouse in a sketchy part of town. Dozens of local bands played at Jimmy’s, the Uptown All Stars and Charmaine Neville, and good out-of-town bands, too, like Drivin’ N Cryin’ and the Pogues, but my favorite band was Dash Rip Rock, three young guys from Baton Rouge whose shows were always furious and wild. Their music was a combination of country and punk, what the band called cowpunk, with an occasional ballad for the girls. You always felt, at a Dash Rip Rock show, that you had stumbled onto the real thing. Now and then, the band played a parody of an old hit, including “(What the Fuck Is?) La Bamba,” and a lightning-fast version of Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” Their own songs were always about something I had actually experienced (“All Liquored Up”) or hoped to experience (“Shake That Girl”). I once saw the lead singer, Bill Davis, perform an entire set in nothing but an Indian headdress; this was during Mardi Gras.
Between sets, we wandered outside into streets lined with shanties, creaky iron dwellings blue with the light of flashing televisions. Underground bars were run out of some of these shanties, a slab of wood polished to a high shine, serving Thunderbird and King Cobra, a knockout malt liquor. Inside were black dudes in pimp-colored clothes. I never got up the courage to go in for a drink. Instead we went around the corner to Carrollton Station, a cavernous hall that twice a week staged a chicken drop.
You crowd into the bar with the country boys and the rednecks and the college professors and the sociology students and the girls from Loyola as the juke box blasts Merle Haggard (“Two Lane Highway”), or David Allan Coe (“You Don’t Have to Call Me Darlin’, Darlin’ ”), or George Jones (“White Lightning”), or Willie Nelson (“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”), or Johnny Cash (“A Boy Named Sue”), or Hank Williams Jr. (“A Country Boy Can Survive”), and wait.
The floor of the bar has been divided with tape into one hundred squares, each numbered. For a dollar, you buy a square; you can buy as many as you want. When every square has been sold, the crowd starts to chant. The cigarette smoke is so thick the faces in the crowd dull into a smear of color. At last, a chicken is set down in the middle of the floor; you watch as, to cheers and boos, the chicken bops its way across this arena of drunken faces. The chicken hesitates, scampers, clucks, pecks, feints, scratches. And at last the chicken defecates. If the chicken defecates on your square, the square you hold deed to, you walk away with the pot—one hundred bucks, a fortune. You always feel a little bad for the chicken, of course, and you never do win, except when you win, and at such times you feel only admiration for the chicken as you set off on a night of pleasure, every man your friend, every woman too. But usually you are back at Jimmy’s for the second set.
Much later we would go to Bennie’s, an after-hours club in one of those clapboard shacks built for poor families before the Second World War. From a distance, the bar looked like a music box, alone on its dark street, bursting with noise. In a comic strip, it would be surrounded by jagged lines. On the outside, it was no different from the other houses near Magazine Street, but it had been gutted and there was a stage in what had been the kitchen. The crowd squeezed in, no more than twenty or thirty people at a time. There was no cover charge and the music did not get going before 3 a.m., but on that makeshift stage you might see the greatest musicians in the world. They c
ame from gigs at the big arenas; their shows had ended and still they wanted to play. During the Jazz Fest, when musicians came to New Orleans from all across the country, you might see a local guitar hero playing with Michael Stipe, or Marcia Ball backed by Stevie Ray Vaughn, or who knows. Between songs, an empty water bottle was passed around. Patrons stuffed in dollar bills, quarters, watches, rings. When we left Bennie’s, we were always surprised to discover that the sun had risen and people were on their way to work.
At some point each night, we would stop by the house where the boys lived and try to scare up some action. If there was a bit of foolishness I did not want to engage in, Congo would say, “Son, these are just adventures. Now, wouldn’t you agree that a young man needs his adventures?”
We often sat around talking to Eli Tenafly, who lived in a room in the corner of the house, in which everything, even the stains, were stained with some other kind of liquor, backwash, or fluid. Tenafly would sit there, rubbing his forehead, smiling. He was keek as hell, of course, and full of great stories, and not wrecked by ambition. He was just getting stoned until his money ran out. And, as I said, he was low-down and cunning and absolutely able to read fear. The ceiling of his room was strung with a web of Mardi Gras beads. This was the playing court for a game he had invented called Jake the Snake. Sitting on one of the room’s low couches, you would throw a rubber snake up onto the net of beads; if the snake landed safely on top of the net, you got to give out a drink, or a hit, or a line of cocaine, or whatever you were playing for. There were dozens of rules, which you could learn only by breaking; each broken rule incurred a penalty drink or whatever. Some of the rules included Roughing the Jake (knocking loose a strand of beads), Banking the Jake (rebounding the snake off the wall), premature eJakeulation (throwing the snake before someone has finished their drink, line, hit, whatever). The Jake Court was strung with Christmas lights, and when it was dark the lights were shut off for a game of Night Jake. Some questioned the purity of Night Jake, which, they argued, lacked tradition.
