Almost exactly one year ago, I drove into New Orleans and sprung for a romantically dilapidated hotel room in the French Quarter. I sweated my way up the stairs, dropped my bags, and walked onto the rickety wooden balcony.
âHey, honey!â a voice called.
Three middle-aged women from North Carolina were sharing the room next doorâand my balcony. They invited me in for a rum and coke, explaining that they make an annual pilgrimage to New Orleans to get away from the husbands and kids, skip church, and get wildly drunk. It was early, and they used me to warm up their flirting muscles before hitting Bourbon Street. These wannabe sirens were pretty ugly, a vision of flabby middle-class decadence straight out of an Otto Dix painting, but I was proud of them. They were frank enough to admit to themselves that small-town, right-wing living can drain the imagination and the spiritâthey had come to New Orleans to recharge.
I have no doubt they all got laid. Thatâs what New Orleans is forâitâs our Paris, Rio, and Marrakech rolled into one, a place of sordid history, unexpected dignity, and a pressure valve for pathological American Puritanism. Like âthe Orientâ was to 19th-century Europeans, New Orleans is a repository for our deepest desires: Itâs where we go to dream. (Some say Las Vegas fits the bill, but they havenât got any soul. Vegas is a desiccated, fluorescent machine, while New Orleans is a rich chocolate cake smothered in bourbon. The City that Care Forgot has street hustlers with grace and sinister panache. âSin Cityâ has slot machines. Thereâs no comparison.)
A Catholic city devoted to pleasure in a sea of Southern Protestant austerity, New Orleans is also a cultural crossroads where French, Spanish, African, Latin, and Indian influences were meeting and mingling before the United States was even a concept. Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Chubby Checker, Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, Huey Long, absinthe (Americaâs first high-profile drug culture), gumbo, jambalaya, beignets, lattes, Mardi Gras, Cajuns, Creoles, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williamsâthe list of people and phenomena that emerged from (or were significantly improved by) the city is nearly endless. New Orleans smells like vomit and gardenias. Itâs the most romantic, fucked up, rotten, and beautiful city in America.
Itâs also a poor and violent city, which is part of its chaotic, romantic charm. Its corruption and racial stratification are almost medieval. (Like many tourist and oil economies, New Orleans never fully invested in its locals or infrastructure, which partly explains its current devastation.) The police are wildly corrupt and only seem to serve and protect the tourists (though a little snatch ânâ grab is all part of âthe experience.â) But beyond the tourist enclaves, New Orleans is a very rough town. As my father, who worked federal law enforcement in the city, says, âCrime in New Orleans isnât a news storyâitâs a human-interest story.â
Public schools are awful and overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods are sharply segregated and, according to the 2000 census, 40 percent of residents under 18 live below the poverty line. On the other hand, New Orleans was an early center of racial intermarriage and black slave owners. As a result, the cityâs octoroons (1/8 black) and quadroons (1/4 black) became the cityâs influential nobility before the Civil War.
The very mythology Iâm crowing about is fundamentally misogynist and racistâan Orientalist fantasy of opium dens, black men playing trombones for pennies, Indian magic, loose women, savage African voodoo. This fantasy has ugly roots, but itâs a necessary part of the American psyche, battling cold intellectualism on our left and intolerant moralism on our right. We live in a dualistic country, obsessed with white and black, good and evil. We need a muddy, confusing place like New Orleans, one tiny corner combining European history, Caribbean romance, and African magic. We need a place where middle-aged women from North Carolina can drag a boy half their age into a hotel room and flirt with him over a rum and coke. Not everyone wants to do this, of course, but just knowing that we could is good for our national soul.
