Down and Out in New Orleans

Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy

Peter J. Marina

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780231545198
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

In the years since Hurricane Katrina, the modern-day bohemians of New Orleans have found themselves forced to the edges of poverty by the new tourist economy. Modeling his work after George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the sociologist and ethnographer Peter J. Marina explores this unfamiliar side of the gentrifying "new" New Orleans. In 1920s Paris, Orwell witnessed an influx of locals and outsiders seeking authenticity while struggling to live with bourgeois society. Marina finds a similar ambivalence in New Orleans: a tourism-dependent city whose commerce caters largely to well-heeled natives and upper-class travelers, where many creative locals and wanderers have remained outsiders, willingly or otherwise.

Marina does not merely interview these spirited urban misfits—he lives among them. Down and Out in New Orleans follows their journeys, depicting the lives of those on the social fringes of a resilient city. Marina finds work as a bartender, street mime, and poet. Along the way, he visits homeless shelters, squats in abandoned buildings, attends rituals in cemeteries, and befriends writers, musicians, occultists, and artists as they look for creative solutions to the contradictory demands of late capitalism. Marina does for New Orleans what Orwell did for Paris a century earlier, providing a rigorous, unrelenting, and original glimpse into the subcultures of a city in rapid change.

CHAPTER 1

NEW ORLEANS

Romancing the City of Sin and Resistance

The Rue du Coq’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept a little hotel opposite mine, had come out to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

—George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Rue Toulouse, New Orleans, five in the morning. Sounds of late-night debauchery permeate the early-morning slumber on piss-stained streets. Shane, who rents a run-down—and barely legal—shotgun hostel in the city’s Seventh Ward,1 emerges from the room with a cigarette in his mouth and a guitar strapped to his shoulders to talk with a short-term renter from Anywhere Else, USA. Shane’s sweat sticks to his face while he peers at his tenant, still staggering from a bellyful of the local Abita beer.

“You play music?” Shane asks, already knowing the answer.2 Almost everybody first moving to this mosquito-infested swamp city bojangles some type of tune. The tenant replies, “I get on,” knowing damn well Shane might be a connection to a connection within and among the urban tribes of New Orleans. Urban subcultures of musicians, artists, anarchists, druggies, and intellectuals from a wide variety of creative endeavors conglomerate in the Crescent City, gravitating to one another in a shared pursuit of drugs, sex, music, art, and enlightenment. Shane says, “Well you know what to do, Monday night, back of Molly’s, eight o’clock. A group of us do our thing.” Just like that, we get another member of the underground urban scene.

Stories captured in this book—from that of “New Orleans Saved Me” Shane to those of a romantic Frenchmen Street poet, a cemetery-jumping occultist, a freak-show sword swallower, and dozens of others—capture the worlds of similarly willful fringe dwellers. These are souls who exist—with varying degrees of success—within the many subcultures of this new bohemia. New Orleans, and its central heart—the Vieux Carré, better known to many as the French Quarter—has been attracting bohemian types for over a century.3 And while they come in all different shapes, sizes, and flavors, they share a unified desire: to carve out creative lives that transcend the ordinary. This book is an homage both to Orwell and to the resilient “accidental” city of New Orleans,4 viewing the city from the prism of downtrodden 1920s Paris to showcase the fascinating and uneven journeys of late-modern New Orleans urban dwellers and tribes living on the periphery of city life. It reveals the complexities of social life within the cultural mecca that produced jazz and brass-band funk. What follows is a journey into the beating heart of an unapologetically contradictory city, one that can at once be stagnant and vibrant, exhibitionistic and mysterious, celebratory and treacherous, rich and poor—and eternally fascinating because of it all. The Crescent City we will visit down near the mouth of the Mississippi River isn’t the postcard-ready New Orleans highlighted in the Lonely Planets and Zagats of the word. It is the Moulin Rouge by way of Baton Rouge.

More than eighty years have passed since George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London, which intimately described the experiences of poverty in the great modern metropolises of his time. The literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin may have captured 1920s Parisian social life as a flâneur strolling through the city as a connoisseur of the street,5 but Orwell lived and worked in the urban underbelly beneath the iron-and-glass-covered arcades.6 The interwar Paris of Benjamin’s and Orwell’s writing attracted a creative community of bohemian artists and intellectuals who frequented coffee shops and participated in lively nightlife. In bourgeois Paris, creative artists and intellectuals—the heart of Stein’s “lost generation”—attempted to find meaning in a world that had proved worthy of distrust and cynicism. The Paris of the 1920s became the breeding ground of Hemingway’s battered but not lost resilience and Fitzgerald’s disillusionment with extravagance and the failed promises of Western society.7 It attracted migrating expatriate urban dwellers searching for meaning in an irrevocably damaged world. And beneath the surface of Benjamin’s bourgeois Paris, Orwell depicted life on the fringes of the city’s Latin Quarter as he stood in breadlines, worked lowly restaurant jobs as a plongeur,8 experienced near-destitution, and traversed the unseen and often hidden spaces of the city. During this same period, many artists and intellectuals were also arriving in New Orleans, making that city—the cradle of jazz—a Paris on the Mississippi.

While the uptown neighborhoods attracted the bourgeoisie, who lived along St. Charles Avenue, the grit of the Vieux Carré just downriver attracted, à la Montmartre, artists and intellectuals. “Dixie” Bohemia9—where the beer was cheap and rents were low, women entertained for agreeable prices, and tolerant attitudes for the madness of creativity prevailed—became fertile ground for alternative and resistant lifestyles.10 New Orleans in the 1920s, the Vieux Carré in particular, became a literary hotspot, beginning with the journal The Double Dealer, which published the works of, among others, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—all literary giants who either lived in New Orleans or who had spent considerable time there during this period.11 It was where William Faulkner and William Spratling wrote the pamphlet “Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles,” and it was a place composed mainly of migrant bohemians, writers, preservationists, intellectuals, and artists, all participating in the social and cultural life of what was then “surely the most civilized spot in America.”12 It’s the place where Tennessee Williams has Stanley shout “Stella” into the humid, uneasy air,13 where Louis Armstrong Muskrat Rambles the Basin Street Blues of Storyville, where F. Scott Fitzgerald drinks sazeracs at the Red Room in the Roosevelt Hotel,14 and where Sherwood Anderson writes about sexual freedom in Dark Laughter, based on his experiences in New Orleans while living in the historic Pontalba Apartments of Jackson Square.15

Fast-forward a century, to post-Katrina New Orleans. It still attracts a flow of modern bohemian transplants, all migrating to the city to become part of its distinct culture and in search of cultural authenticity, artistic expression, self-actualization, identity transformation, and alternative lifestyles. Just as in 1920s Paris, beneath this bohemian surface lives a huge urban and mostly unacknowledged class of willful outsiders, people who exist on the edges of the postindustrial tourist economy. In this book, borrowing a page from Orwell, I pull back the veil to reveal the less-seen spaces of New Orleans, intimately depicting the social life of the new creative urban dweller living in or near poverty. As I describe in chapter 3, I lived on limited funds, like Orwell did when he first became down and out in Paris; I worked odd jobs in the city for ten weeks in New Orleans, as Orwell did in Paris, to try to re-create Orwell’s work as closely as possible in the modern day.

I do not merely study the city’s fringes; I live on them. I don’t merely interview the city’s new bohemians; I live among them, live as one of them. I don’t settle for examining the city’s modern underbelly. I creep and crawl through it, working menial jobs, scrounging for enough to eat, living among the urban tribes—becoming part of them—and hoping to survive.

I walk on glass as “Cuban Pete the Clown,” participating in sideshow freak shows. I pantomime on the streets outside the Superdome before Saints games, busk poetry on Frenchmen Street, bartend on Bourbon Street, clean Airbnb apartments in Faubourg Marigny, trip with occultists in Barataria swamps, break into cemeteries for underground Satanic rituals, attend informal burlesque shows, sleep in homeless shelters, and squat in abandoned buildings.

Using Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London as a rough blueprint, this book reproduces, as closely as possible, the conditions Orwell faced while down—but not completely out—in late 1920s Paris. The goal: to tell the story of postmillennium New Orleans and its culture of creative degenerates, vagabonds, artists, hustlers, lowlifes, transients, grifters, intellectuals, musicians, informal educators, druggies, skells, writers, gutter punks, goths, nihilists, and existentialists who exist beneath the radar. This book is a transgressive sociology about the world of Lucky Dog vendors, seekers of the occult, brass-band musicians, clowns with facial tattoos, burlesque dancers, buskers, hustlers, freak-show performers, beggars, hipsters, and white middle-class bohemians rejecting humdrum conventional life. We enter into the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and moods of real events among romantic nihilists living on the edge in a city that—because of its geography and vanishing marshlands—is also living a precarious existence.

Welcome to New Orleans. Welcome to the city of unapologetic sin, orgasmic “rattle-your-bones” romance, and stubborn resistance. Take a peek into the heart of New Orleans’s nouveau bohemia. This is Frenchmen Street.

THE BLUE NILE ON FRENCHMEN STREET: STOOGES BRASS BAND

“Marigny strolling” in the deep, dense, and heavily moonlit night along Frenchmen Street, just behind the Vieux Carré. Stumbling and bumbling and rumbling, it’s New Orleans city-bouncing from d.b.a. to the Blue Nile music venues. It’s all smoke and beer and whiskey and sex and sax and funk and trombone. The band starts its third piece of the first set. It’s Saturday night; everything clicking just right. Big-man sousaphonist blows left and right, up and down, pumping knees marching style while blowing the hell out the brass. The crowd, hot and high and frenzied, swings forward, backward, left, right, it does not matter. Trombonist with cheeks puffing out like a blowfish about to explode. Drummer desperately tries to maintain pace, wildly beating on Kerouac’s “rolling crash of butt-scarred drums.”16 Trombone man puts down his brass to shout, “You got to wind it up” and something about Michael Buck; the crowd cares less about the actual words because it’s only the beat that means a damn thing.

The drummer plays a series of hits, a steady quarter-note conduit to a living breathing culture, like the Ogou giving passage to the spirit world of gods and their lambs. Mobs of revelers balancing beers and cocktails spilling all over the place; a smoke hangs from the right side of my lips, while a pretty one twirls like a well-balanced top from my left hand.

And it’s not about being cool or dancing or the repetitive lyrics or the presentation of self or feeling as one collective connected to that proverbial something larger. There’s also a sense of the sadness of the culture, but you have to work hard to become aware of it. You battle with the culture while it rejects you and your arrogant sense of self-importance. Arrogance is lost in the screaming trombones and beating drums; so is all sense of some essence of self or claim to authenticity or thoughts that you matter or illusions that you are part of something more. No one here tries to rescue individual subjectivity from cannibalizing objective culture. It’s about realizing the simultaneous destruction of the self to save the self, the creation of culture through resisting it, saving the world by realizing it needs to be obliterated. It’s about endless destruction to satisfy the human need for self-realization. The drummer beats and the trombonist trombones to funk and splash and shrieks, and no one knows yet that there is something here to get. It’s as if with the music makers teasing out that moment of it, the first wave will know, and the knowing will know they know, and they will move in a knowing way until it spreads and begins to respond. A cultural dance to commence between the makers and receivers, this dialectical creation of music is a passageway to all that is frightening and history and myth and reality. Here in down-and-dirty NOLA we reclaim reified culture and give it our own human identity.

The mood suddenly changes when a sweat-drenched man with a long white T-shirt and baggy, saggy jeans demands that the frenzy stop, if only for a moment. He’s got a story to tell. It’s about his friend, a guy named Shotgun Joe Williams.17

The police killed Shotgun Joe Williams. They shot him dead.

The people don’t know what to do but listen and try to feel what the man at the microphone says as he evokes his sadness and love for his friend now dead. And no one really knows except knowing that this has something to do with the culture and the music that is the voice of that culture. It gives new meaning to culture not as some unchanging noun handing off knowledge from one generation to another but as a verb that won’t accept dying quietly in the unfriendly night. Culture here in New Orleans slaps you right in the face, like the hot sauce that squirts in your eye from the sausage in your jambalaya. But if you look for it, even in the music, if you purposely look for it, it’s as gone as the lover when the front door opens and the back door slams. It’s a subtle reckoning, sometimes a feeble whimper, other times a collective sigh, still other times the collective roar of humans who say, “Yeah, you right.” It is collective in its pure drive of individual human will. They ain’t willing together, mind you. They willing independently. But they willing all the same. And that is the culture. You get into the culture once you finally reject the city, and only then will the culture truly allow you into its labyrinth. The roaring and dancing and kissing and fighting, it’s all isolated...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. New Orleans: Romancing the City of Sin and Resistance
• Chapter 2. The Hard and Soft City: A Portrait of New Orleans Neighborhoods and Their Characters
• Chapter 3. Living Down and Out in New Orleans
• Chapter 4. Buskers, Hustlers, and Street Performers
• Chapter 5. The Informal Nocturnal Economy of Frenchmen Street
• Chapter 6. City Squatting and Urban Camping
• Chapter 7. Occultists and Satanists
• Chapter 8. Gentrification and Violent Cultural Resistance
• Chapter 9. Hipster Wonderland
• Chapter 10. Brass Bands and Second Lines
• Conclusion: The Fogs of New Orleans and the Future of the Crescent City
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations