After a seafood dinner as fresh, well-cooked, and modestly proportioned as anything I've had in Paris, we hit Bourbon Street and its shouting throng of bars and clubs.
Bars were selling drinks to take away. None of this no-alcohol-in-public nonsense. Studenty types were sloshing beer and cocktails over their chins from giant plastic beakers as they staggered along the street, checking out the blast of music exploding from every doorway. The jocks were also ogling and hassling the granite-eyed curies standing outside the lapdance places, who turned on professional smiles and tried to usher the drunks inside.
I couldn't decide if it was the beginning or the end of the world—primitive life forms learning to stand on two legs, or the last fizz of decadence before civilization fell over and became extinct.
Whatever. It was fun.
We paddled upstream through the crowd blocking the entrance to a pub, stared at the vibrating tonsils of a girl shrieking Janis Joplin songs, and then went next door, where three old jazzmen were doing their best to compete with Janis, popping their eyeballs to push their trumpet, tuba, and drums to the limit. It was a blast, but the band played one blue note too many for me, and I suddenly got hit by a wrenching sadness that Alexa wasn't here. She thought it was better to spend some time apart rather than come to New Orleans? What the hell could she be doing that was more of a thrill than this? I hardly dared think.
I left the two Js to it and headed back toward the hotel through the empty side streets.
On the corner of Royal Street and St. Ann, I found an old man propped up against his suitcase, with a small cluster of people gazing down at him from a respectful distance.
He had a boxer's nose and a scraggly white beard. He was wearing a thick brown overcoat, with white sneakers on bare feet, and seemed to be holding court beneath the iron balcony of a closed art shop. As I got closer, I saw that the seat he was perched on was a small amplifier, and that he was holding a battered red electric guitar clutched to his chest.
He launched into a blues number, and he was astonishingly good. His voice was throaty but clear, his playing chunky and rhythmic. I recognized the song. He was, he sang, standing at the crossroads, trying to find his way home. A classic blues, with hypnotically repetitive words.
For the second verse, he branched off from the original. Now he was "sitting at the fucken crossroads." And in the last verse, he was "sitting at this fucken crossroads, cos I ain't got no fucken home," which got a cheer from his audience. "Yeah," he concluded, "I got the hurricane homeless blues." He played a short, searing guitar solo, and stopped.
The small crowd was silent for a moment and then clapped and cheered. The old guy ignored them, and got out a cigarette packet.
I went over, gave him a five-dollar note and told him, "That was real blues." But he didn't hear me. He was too busy trying to extract a cigarette from his squashed packet.
Another spectator dropped a note into the open guitar case and said something that made the old guy grunt a bitter laugh. He gave up tugging at his cigarette packet, threw it to the ground, and growled, "Shit life."
He seemed to like the sound of this, and chanted "Shit life" four or five times to himself. This went on for a few seconds as we all waited for him to turn his chanting into a song, but he seemed to forget the crowd, his guitar and his money, and began yelling "Shit life, shit life!" at the sky.
Standing beside me on the sidewalk was a chic guy, dressed in a sports-branded anorak, crisp jeans, and expensive sneakers. He turned to his equally chic girlfriend and said, in a strong American accent, "He's probably got Tourette's or something."
"No," I butted in. "I think he's probably got a shit life. It is possible, you know, even in America."
8
"Where are you?" Alexa wanted to know. It's probably the most commonly uttered question between girlfriend and boyfriend on the phone, constantly checking up on each other.
Actually it was a good question, because I didn't know the answer.
"In Louisiana somewhere. We've lost the Mississippi." It might seem difficult to misplace one of the world's mightiest rivers, but we'd managed it. Actually, driving out in the bayou it's pretty easy to do. "It's great to hear from you," I said. "How are things going?" It sounded like a neutral question, but of course it meant a million things. Like, have we spent enough time apart yet? And where exactly did Boston Mike sleep last night?
"Yes, fine, thanks. I'm filming in Miami, but j’ai un truc à te demander" Something to ask me, and in French, too. It had to be serious. She was certainly sounding very stern. "Mes photos."
"Which photos?"
"My photos of you. The ones that were in my exhibition in Paris and London."
"Oh." It was unpleasant to be reminded of something so pleasant. Alexa had spent the first months after we'd met taking photos of me unawares. They were mostly shots of me waiting for her to turn up to a date—happy times when I'd been impatient to see her rather than resigned not to.
"Was it you who gave permission to put them on the English tourism website? And how did tbey get them, anyway?"
"Your photos are on the Visitor Resources website? I had no idea."
"They're all high-resolution scans. Someone gave them the files. It wasn't you?"
"No, of course not. This whole business with Internet photo sites is way out of my control."
"Well, I've been advised to get a lawyer and sue tbem. Maybe shut down the website."
"Sue them?" She was turning even more American by the minute. "But that'd totally screw up my campaign."
"Then tell them to take my photos off."
"But isn't it good publicity for you?"
"It's unpaid use of my photos."
"Is that the only reason you called?"
"What? I can't hear you? Are you in a tunnel?"
"There are no tunnels in Louisiana. They'd only fill up with water." • "What?"
"I said, is that the only reason you called?"
"Oh damn, not another one." Juliana punched the steering wheel. We'd come to a dead end, blocked by the entrance to a petrochemical site. Every time you turned off the main road, you ended up meeting a large sign announcing that some multinational had bought the rest of the bayou.
"Who's that in the car with you?" Alexa asked.
"Juliana. She's driving."
"Juliana?" Alexa sounded shocked, and I remembered too late that I hadn't wanted to mention that Jake wasn't my only hitchhiker.
"Yes, she and Jake are—you know—dating," I said.
"Jake? He never dates. It's you; you invited her. I said you had a thing for receptionists."
"For a start, she's not a receptionist, and she's Jake's girlfriend, for God's sake, not mine. I've already got a girlfriend, Alexa—you." At least I hoped I did.
"You'd better take my photos off that website," she said, and hung up.
I began to redial, but stopped. There wasn't much point continuing the conversation, I realized. It had to be one of the side effects of my mini-fame. I was already having relationships like the Hollywood stars. Box-fresh love one minute, legal action the next.
9
It was an American who told me that the toothbrush was invented in the Deep South. Anywhere else and it would have been called a teethbrush.
I saw what he meant. Teeth are what divide Americans. They are the ultimate status symbol. If you've got money, you've got teeth. No cash, no gnash. That, I suppose, is why rappers get their mouths walled with gold. They go from extreme poverty in childhood—and hence extremely bad teeth—to absurd wealth, and hence absurdly expensive teeth. It's why Hollywood actors can't play convincing poor people. As soon as they open their mouths, you can see that they're rich.
I remembered the teethbrush joke as we continued our tour of the bayous.
We were looking for Utopia. Who isn't? you might say, but this one really existed. It was the name of a plantation, and I'd been given directions by its owner, Woodrow. We had to get on the 61 out of the city, c
ross the Mississippi at Gramercy, then turn west and follow the river until we got to a place called Bienvenue. From there, there would be signposts to Utopia.
It all sounded simple, except that driving around the Louisiana bayous with a road atlas of America was like searching for your contact lens from a helicopter.
Juliana was getting pissed off. Jake, though, was happy enough in the back, reading all the French road signs. We'd seen towns called La Place, La Branche, and Longue Vue. Jake was writing them all down and, I feared, thinking up words to rhyme.
"Let's ask someone," I suggested, remembering my conversations with Alexa about macho men being doomed to stay lost for eternity.
But there was no one to ask except the trees, the reeds, and—I guessed—the alligators. The houses we'd seen didn't exactly make me want to stop in a tiny urban car and request help in a foreign accent. Most of them were ancient cabins knocked askew by floods, or maybe simply uprooted and dumped miles away from where they'd originally stood. Sometimes a wrecked house had a fancy car standing in the yard. This had to be the only place in the Western world where people's cars were more valuable than their homes.
We eventually found a sign pointing us back to the highway and followed the road as far as a small town with a brick-built diner. Its parking lot was inhabited by big-wheeled pickups and rusty sedans. All I could see through the front bay window was a field of baseball caps. Oh no, I thought, if any of these guys recognizes me as the Englishman who wears skirts, I am dead.
The interior could have been bought up by a French art foundation and shipped out to the Centre Pompidou, floor stains included. They'd even have bought a few of the customers. The place was spacious, with at least twenty booths, and had been built in the 1960s by someone who loved red Formica and yellow metal tubing. The ceiling lights were solar systems; the fixed booths were mounted on curved rocket fins. It was like a cafeteria for astronauts.
The place had been used and abused by a few generations of landlubbers since. Our table had cigarette-burn craters in its Mars-like surface. On the wall was a poster ad for a lawyer, a well-fed white guy in shirt sleeves and braces who called himself "number one for industrial accidents" and promised to get you ten thousand dollars per crushed limb. Behind the counter was a man-size fridge with a bumper sticker on the door saying, "If the answer is Clinton, it's a pretty dumb question." And above the serving hatch was a large handwritten notice, in clumsy capitals, saying, GORDON IS BANNED FROM THIS PLACE.
There were about a dozen customers, with, all told, maybe a hundred teeth between them. I knew this because, to my surprise, when we walked in, everyone looked up and smiled.
A small waitress in a black skirt and black leggings was moving from table to table, setting out fresh salt shakers and bowls of ketchup packets.
"How y'all doin' today?" she asked. She was only about thirty, but she had no top teeth at all. Maybe Gordon had punched them out.
We ordered coffee, and when the waitress came back with three steaming mugs, we asked about Utopia. She shook her head guiltily.
"I ain't from heyuh. Ah'm from Gramercy," she said. It was about five miles down the road. She called for help from the general population. "Any you guys know Utopia?"
Immediately, everyone in the diner broke off their conversations and had a debate about how to get to the plantation. They discussed various back-road routes, discarded the more complicated ones, and then came to a consensus about how three strangers could drive to Utopia without getting lost.
A tall man in an oil company baseball cap came over to the table to convey their decision. He seemed slightly better dressed than the others, and had almost all his teeth, too. The local dentist, perhaps.
"You want to visit the plantation?" he asked.
"No," Jake said. "There will be a piece of Shakespeare there."
"A Shakespeare play," I translated. "Tomorrow night. We're helping to organize it."
"Shakespeare?" the man said. I saw raised eyebrows around the room, and had a sudden attack of doubt that people down here would be interested in a bunch of men in tights talking in poetry. Still, I reasoned, selling tickets to the masses wasn't really my problem. I was only interested in the local dignitaries who had a vote in my World Tourism competition.
"You actors?" the waitress asked, a look of wonderment on her face as if we'd beamed in from Hollywood.
"No," I said. "We're just—"
"Yes," Jake said. "Paul, he is Scottish; he will play Macbeth in a kilt."
"A kilt?" the spokesman repeated, and I looked around for something to stuff in Jake's mouth and shut him up. A bar stool, perhaps.
"Yeah, I'm from Scotland," I said, in my gruffest whiskey voice.
"Hey, you Cajun?" the waitress asked Jake. "You gotta weird aksint."
"No, but I speak French. Do you?" he asked.
The waitress didn't hear his question because she was shouting over to another table.
"Hey, Mee-shell, git over here! This guy tokes Frinch."
A gray-haired man in a black ski anorak and a faded pink baseball cap that had probably been on his head every day and night for forty years hobbled over to our table, and introduced himself in an accent that was uncannily like Jake's.
He was Michel, he said, and lived in "Gary-veel." He was a retired "feesherman," and was "heppy" to meet someone who "tok Frensh." He didn't really speak it himself, he said, but his parents used to, so he "got the geest." He was much easier to understand than Jake, because he didn't use French words.
"You here to teash Frensh?" he asked Jake.
"No, not really. But I hope to teach the Americans about European cool-toor. You know Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire?"
"Rambo, sure, but the others . . ."
"Justement." Jake shooed Juliana over to my side of the booth, invited Michel to slide in, and started lecturing him in mangled Anglo-French. Michel nodded, understood, and even laughed. Jake looked as though he'd landed in heaven. A place where people listened to what he said without taking ten minutes to translate each sentence into a comprehensible language. He was home.
10
"Woodrow?" I failed to keep a note of disbelief out of my voice. No, more than a note, a whole symphony. I'd Googled his picture, and he'd looked as old as the plantation house itself—older even, because the house had fewer cracks and dents in its facade.
The guy standing in front of me was—what? Fifteen? Twenty? Twenty-five, tops. The trouble in America is that lots of men have boyish faces, and you can only tell their age when you get up close and check out the wrinkles. This guy was very close, clasping my hand and smiling into my eyes, and he barely had laugh lines. His hair was the same chocolate brown as the Mississippi and hung over a shirt collar that was way too loose for him. His wide, florid tie seemed to be preventing the shirt from sliding down off his shoulders. He was a kid dressed in his dad's clothing.
What's more, we were standing in a tiny shack—an ocher-stained shed with a pointed wood-tiled roof. And this was meant to be the plantation-owner's office? It was a garden playshed.
Woodrow explained my mistake. I'd seen a photo of Woodrow Woodrow the Twelfth, his grandfather, and he was Woodrow Woodrow the Fourteenth. He had taken over the management of the plantation on his grandfather's death. Woodrow the Thirteenth had dropped out of line for reasons he didn't go into.
He spoke at about one word per minute, all the time smiling benignly as if he'd just eaten some magic mushrooms and was watching dinky green elephants fly around my head. There were no traces of Deep South in his accent. The family didn't believe in sending their kids to the local schools, it seemed.
"Did you grow up on the plantation?" I asked.
"Yeah, but I went to school in the Northeast." I guessed he meant Harvard or Yale. Or possibly both. "Hey, before I forget, I got something for you."
He picked up a yard-long FedEx tube from his cluttered desk. It was addressed to me, care of him. He loaned me a pair of scissors to open it, and patientl
y held one end of the tube while I probed about trying to extract the contents. It was as if he had absolutely nothing else to do for the next twenty years.
"Oh my God," I moaned when I'd unrolled the three items inside. The first was a small printed note telling me that I'd attracted new sponsors to my campaign and was to attach the enclosed stickers to each of my car doors. The two basketball-size stickers were what caused me to moan. One was the logo of a 100 percent German make of car. The other depicted an ejaculating bottle of well-known French fizzy water.
So Britain had outsourced the rest of its campaign. Transport was being handled by the Germans, and the catering contract had gone to the French.
"Problem?" Woodrow asked with the same carefree smile on his face.
"No, no problem." No more than usual, anyway.
We drove the twenty yards to the main house on Woodrow's little golf cart.
The place was smaller than I'd envisaged. It wasn't a kind of White House with thick classical columns and a Greek temple portico. It was a brick-and-wood building painted tiie same ocher as Woodrow's hut. It had a white balustraded porch and tall French windows with spinach-green shutters. With its high, orange-tiled roof, it was a bizarre mix of American mansion and Provencal villa.
"We can get a tour of the house tomorrow," Woodrow said, "if you really want to see portraits of all my ancestors." He drove us around the back of the house, toward the Mississippi, which was lurking half a mile away. The front of the house had been all formal lawns and picket-fenced driveway, but now we were chugging through a mossy, prehistoric forest of trees with green spaghetti hanging from meir branches. The air was only slightly less damp than the dark waters of the swamp. Instinctively, I tucked my feet and hands tight inside the cart in case of ambush by an alligator or a chainsaw-wielding wacko.
"This is the kind of landscape my ancestors cleared when diey created the first plantation," Woodrow said. He stopped at the edge of a wide gooey river channel to let us appreciate the dank, fetid charm of the place.