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... Wherein Rochilieu Tells You About Some Rather Strange Phenomena ...
All of a sudden while walking around in the Quarter I began to notice some really Weird Shit.
And believe me, that shit would have to be EGREGIOUS. I should know. I live here.
After all those Missile Strikes, you'd think pretty much nothing'd be left of this place, wouldn't you? Like it'd be if a badass Category 5 like Hurricane Camille sent a thirty-foot Wall of Water into this place, coming at ya right down the Mississippi. At least that's what I'D have thought, and I guess I'd just had so much shit on my Mind in the last few days I really hadn't stopped to consider it! But I was Considering it Now. Jesus.
New Orleans, and especially the French Quarter, is a place Built on a multi-layered Strata of Sleaze. From WAY back, man. And none of it ever goes away, actually, it just Builds on Itself.
And every time a missile hit, see, the smoke would cover it up and nameless people would die and shit, but when in a day or two the smoke LIFTED, it was the SAME PLACE exactly as it had been a few generations or so ago, with the same buildings, just in Earlier States, and the same people, except they were REALLY the same people who'd been there Back Then, but since they were doing the Same Sleazy Shit, nobody seemed to notice! And they didn't notice, either. WILD, man! The Tremé, just north of the Quarter, was slowly turning back into Storyville, at least the parts of it that had suffered the worst Casulties. Those 1917 brothels were springing up again here and there and all these 1914 white dudes were coming over from the Garden District to have at it. That Frenchman Bellocq was there photographing it all. And in the Quarter, some of it was like Nola circa 1960 and lots of it was 1880s and 1890s action and some of it, in parts near the river that had been hit repeatedly, was full of all these French and Spanish people walking around getting drunk on Port and shit. They were hanging out with a Pirate dude named Jean Lafitte. Like the ones in the Quarter were hanging out with this dead old Voodoo Priestess. Suddenly, I realized what the Broadmeyer/Fleetwhite Summit was going to be about. They'd seen all this, too!
But nobody else really seemed to notice. I started asking around about where the Absinthe Houses and the Opium Dens were at.
You had a bunch of Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden fuckers playing Dixieland at Preservation Hall, which incidentally looked the same then as it does now, and NOW, it REALLY did, dig? Degas lived on Esplanade Avenue and everybody had Yellow Fever and thought it was Biological Warfare or something. Tennessee Williams was living at 721 Toulouse Street and Faulkner was passed out in Pirate's Alley and they were both so young they didn't even know they were Assholes yet. The town was MORPHING into ITSELF! That fucking Superdome wasn't here no more. Neither was that Central Business District building, the Tallish one. John James Audubon lived next door to Frankie Minot.
It was observed that there were fewer people in the city's famous Above-Ground Cemeteries than there'd used to be. A fellow named Hennessey was Mayor on at least three streets in the Faubourg Marigny. Carlos Marcello hadn't yet been born to call the hits on Kennedy and King (who were, nonetheless, still dead in the Rest of America), but like someone might have said, nobody outside of New Orleans knew about the Algiers Missile Crisis Terror.
It wasn't like these people were GHOSTS, they were REAL! Hey, it happens.
And the whole time this Cocksman Putz named Don Becker was still running Vampire Tours out of his place on Burgundy, oblivious! OBLIVIOUS! Now, hey. There actually ARE vampires in New Orleans. They just don't look like Don Becker dressed up in some Super K Halloween costume. Nor do they resemble the vampires that old Author chick wrote about in that Book she wrote, the one about the Vampire in New Orleans. Or the other one. Or the other one. Or the one before that. Or the one that just came out. But hey, to give her some credit, one could probably just as easily rag on that Other New Orleans novelist where in every book all the characters are addicted to Liquor and Sex.
And vampires do NOT look like Depressed Heavy Metal singers. They DO tend to look a little like, say, Baudelaire. Or the Thin White Duke, or Allan Swafford. Me, I can spot a goddamn vampire eight miles away. Which is not to say that Don Becker isn't a Bloodsucker, like most of the rest of these fuckers in this Town Full of Hoors. But REAL vampires, the ones who live in America, at least, mostly gravitate to New Orleans and the two other cities with which it has most in common, San Francisco on the City side and Savannah on the Town side, all because of the seedy history which ensures they can lay low for LIFETIMES and no one'll fuck with 'em. Vampires keep a Low Profile.
Hoors don't. And the NEW Hoors showing up in town in the PRESENT are usually very pretty and quite stupid, just like their predecessors, who of course were arriving on the Scene here for the First Time as WELL, just wearing different clothes. They look like Jane Fonda circa 1962 like she looked in that movie that was shot here and the next year, they look like goddamn Barbara Stanwyck after a Nembutal overdose. The next year, they look like something out of that film Tod Browning did, which is SPIRITUALLY set here in New Orleans. Didn't know I knew about that film, did ya? Motherfucker. Well, neither did Kermit Broadmeyer. And then he knew. 'Cause I'd just told him. And he also told me to shut the fuck up, lest anyone else get wind of what exactly was Going Down in the Crescent City before he and Fleetwhite had time to ACT.
The only way to deflect the Present is to Beat its ass with its Past. At least it makes a damn good thing to argue about when you're smoking Opium with dead people.
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