The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story Read Free Page A

of that was my night-blooming cereus, whose leather-like leaves belied the mysterious, otherworldly beauty of the luscious, bowl-like blooms that lasted for a single night, appearing a few hours after sundown only to close, spent forever, at sunrise. Mine put out as many as a dozen at a time and their musky scent so overpowered the rather more rank odors of Bourbon Street that I could tell it was blooming from a half a block away. In the summers, deep pink Rose of Montana vines appeared out of nowhere to crisscross the entire courtyard; when a rare freeze killed off the blue plumbago covering one wall, rosemary, which had been lurking somewhere in the mortar, emerged in a tumble of branches to take its place. Within a few years, the place was so overgrown that when the normally unflappable François Halard arrived to photograph it for Vogue , I heard a sharp intake of breath before he recovered. “We’ll simply shoot it at night,” he said—the plan being that the interior lights might define the house enough so that you could actually see it.
    But outside the gates was where the real jungle lay. Willie Morris once said about the South that “it’s the juxtapositions that get you,” and nowhere are they greater than in New Orleans. Behind the back courtyard was the Cathedral Academy, which meant that I woke up to a tone-deaf nun singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” over a loudspeaker, and, since I was also in between the two biggest gay bars in the city, I fell asleep lulled by the bass beat of “I Will Survive.” The night Tammy Wynette died, they played the disco version of “Stand By Your Man” in a touching tribute for twelve hours straight. Just one block up, the neon crassness, topless bars, and karaoke hell that is straight Bourbon Street began. (There are plenty of juxtapositions there too—at one tourist restaurant, depending on the day, the all-you-can-eat-fried-shrimp-for-$4.99 sign is held up by either a white male midget or a young black woman, each wearing the same filthy “antebellum” hoop skirt.)
    During Mardi Gras and other such indigenous holidays as Southern Decadence (a gay Labor Day weekend celebration that draws thousands from all over the world), the crowds on my block were so thick it was impossible to get in or out of the gate, which was just as well. One sunny Mardi Gras morning I opened it to find three men—one giving another a blow job on the steps, and the third filming it. In his 1968 essay for Harper’s , “New Orleans Mon Amour,” Walker Percy wrote that “the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.” Had he spent any time in my neighborhood he would have been forced to add “naked men,” but the residents are mostly inured to them. When a guy on my corner dropped his pants at five o’clock one afternoon for the benefit of the patrons of Lafitte’s in Exile on the balcony across the street, not a single person passing on the sidewalk so much as even slowed down to look.
    Still, for all the mayhem outside, the inside of Bourbon remained my own private island. I worked, most days, in my nightgown; when I needed to clear my head, I’d simply wander through the French doors of my office and hack away at the bamboo or pluck the yellow leaves from the gardenia. I ate and entertained almost exclusively on the stone-topped table in the back courtyard and left the whole house open to the outside for seven or eight months out of the year. I wrote a lot, threw great parties, and spent indulgent afternoons with A. playing “tropical nurse” (she restored the patient back to health with homemade Hurricanes featuring mango syrup, a lot of rum, and the juices of the citrus from the courtyard trees).
    The place was less a house than an elaborate stage set—with oriental carpets and slip-covered sofas, collections of coral and shells and birds’ nests, the odd French chair, a four-poster black iron bed—but I found a better way to live there