“Only New Orleans is real.. [2]
Round 1 of showings. You know, I think maybe everyone should try to rent real estate here. Almost like one of the airboat tours. You book the experience for the afternoon. Maybe also offer that in New York City. I haven’t ever looked at real estate there but I hear it’s a thing, too. I have so much more understanding and respect for New Yorkers after living here.
I know now what it’s like to love a city that lives. Most cities, even ones like Miami and Los Angeles that move and shake, aren’t alive. They have life, but they don’t have their own life. New Orleans does. I walk out onto the street in the mornings and I check to see what mood she’s in, the way she’s wearing her hair, what she’s hungry or hurting for. She’s never the same. You don’t know until you leave the door. And I’ll be darned if she doesn’t change over several more times during the day.
To stay in a city that lives is a gift. I guess that’s why I’m writing this. So people know that such a thing exists. Or did exist. That’s another thing. There’s a bit of a stranglehold on American life right now. Government, covid, corporate’ing. God I hope New Orleans flips all that sh!t onto its back and teaches it a thing or two about humans. Real humans. Of which there are plenty here.
Some friends visited and I asked what they thought about nola. I also asked some linemen that were here after the hurricane. Everyone said “Shithole” at least once. And I can’t blame ’em. It really is dirty. Filthy, even. I have to shower every time, or rather I choose to, almost every time I come home because, yikes. Spilled beer, human excrement, building debris, powdered sugar, magnolia buds, chicken wings, street cleaning soap get ground and mixed together on sidewalks into a dank gray paste. You’ll recognize it when you see it. It sorta coats the ground. Anyhow, I do my best to keep it away from that couch and those pillows I was telling you about. I bet if you put it in a petri dish you could grow your very own dark mysterious corner of New Orleans. I’ll have to try.
Where was I? Hmm. Oh, real estate. To see the first place, which was actually owned by the family of my agent who is a.. I can’t remember exactly so I’ll go broad, 4th, 5th, or 6th generation New Orleans family, you walked in through a narrow shop that sold masks and swamp tours. That’s the building Truman Capote wrote his first book in. Supposedly.
A lot of the buildings in the quarter are like donuts. From the street, it looks like a regular solid, square building. But there is usually a mossy, fountain-speckled, somewhat-busted, yet entirely romantic hole in the center. This was one of those. His space was on the other side of the donut from the unit I saw. Another fantastic writer. God bless him.