LEJ's Blog

January 2012, Bonne Année

2012-01-01T11:26:00.029-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

January 2012

* * *

www. LEJ. org

Bonne Année

(Happy New Year)

2012

You can not tell it all! That is the great pain of writers everywhere. Not being able to douse the fire that drives them to set it down.

"There lies writer's block, too," L. A. Norma said.

Forgive me for being late. I seldom miss deadlines, nor experience much writer's block not alcohol-related. But this month I sit indolently watching the morning window-garden shaking off last night's cold snap.

'Tis the season for falling off ladders and setting fire to one's house," L. A. Norma said, blowing Camel Cigarette smoke out the window.

And so January's story sat unwritten inside my computer alight with expectation.

"Write about the Sunset Limited," Norma suggested, navigating the sugar bowl across the table. "The Sunset Limited as 'Le Train Sans Souci' (The Train Without Concerns)."

Alas, no Amtrak train is without concerns. Ask anyone who has ridden one. And soon the dark clouds in Washington will gather to make it worse. You remember the recent solution to the post office budget woes? Make-it-worse will surely bring in the customers, they cried. And make it worse they did. A similar fate awaits poor limping Amtrak.

All that said, there is still something about a train that is cheap, comforting transportation. Less like driving and more like a land-cruise. On the train, like on a ship, you are with time enough to look out the Dining Car window while conversing with strangers. I once lunched with the King of Okeanos, sang with a woman who did studio work in Los Angeles with Elvis Presley, and described the scenery to a blind lady who bought my lunch just to hear me describe passing scenery.

We put Norma on an earlier train so she could be in New Orleans for the Second Line for Coco Robicheaux, who died 25 November 2011, on his day off, at the Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street. He was 64.

Coco Robicheaux was a New Orleans musician we first met at a Voodoo Party with some lady Voodoo Priest from Haiti. As you know, he is now wooing the Hoo-Dooers in the clouds. He was in TREME, the great HBO show about New Orleans and Life therein. The night his segment aired, L. A. Norma and I were at a dinner party from where the host took the guests by taxi to Buffa's bar on Esplanade to watch (there was no TV at the host's house). There we chatted with Coco about post K. things.

The last time I saw him was in the Walgreen's parking lot on Saint Claude and Elysian Fields, Gateway to the Upper Ninth Ward. I wonder how he is dealing with the great FEMA in the Sky?

We missed Coco's Second Line to play Santa Claus at Buck and Johnny's Pizzaria in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. A little girl asked about Twelfth Night. "It is when the Kings came to the Baby Jesus, and the day the Phunny Phorty Phellows ride the Saint Charles Streetcar in New Orleans to open Carnival Season," Santa told the little girl. The Mother beamed. _______________________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

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December 2011 / A New Christmas

2011-12-01T04:55:00.019-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp
by
Leonard Earl Johnson
December 2011

* * *
A New Christmas
by Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

The train to Lafayette
left New Orleans on-time and was sold-out! Lafayette is the first smoke-stop out of New Orleans, and L. A. Norma was ready for it.

We arrived in time for the Downtown Boudin Cook-off in Parc San Souci on Vermilion Street, two blocks from the train station. Norma kept us on the platform smoking with the other outcast smokers waiting beside the idling train.

"They don't let you smoke around food in Louisiana," she told a man-and-wife pair of chimneys from Los Angeles.

"They don't let you smoke around anything in L. A.," the woman said. "You can freely smoke in your car only. For Christ's sake. Your car!"

"That's a pure-air cure," Norma snorted through a smoke ring, "safely smoking while spewing car fumes." The train's whistle blew and the Los Angeles couple scrambled aboard and looked down at us from the observation car. The Conductor waved and we trudged off to Parc San Souci, which is French for "Park Without Concerns."

* * *

"How many times have you heard politicians and other preachers speak of our Judeo / Christian traditions?" Norma asked.
　
Tradition, the thing that passes our values from one generation to the next, and the next, and so on. We Christmas-celebrating Christians follow Gospel teachings about a Jewish Rabbi we have come to call Christ The King. He was born in the little town of Bethlehem two-thousand-eleven years ago this December twenty-fifth, according to tradition.
　
"Tra-di-tion!" The very thing Tevye sang and danced about in Fiddler on the Roof – the English script of which was taken from a story in Yiddish by Russian-American immigrant Sholem Aleichem. It is about events leading towards immigration and change. A story as American as apple strudel, and later told larger than life on Broadway and in the 1971 film by the same name.

Tevye’s lament was for Jewish traditions threatened by something new. Immigration. Change. For Christians, Jewish traditions became just that.
　
The Word. Those New Christian traditions were brought by the Romans to the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. There was added Saint Nicholas, a. k. a., Santa Claus. The Germans had Santa Claus long before they had the Romans or The New Word of Christ. For the full skinny on this hefty subject see A NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION in December's Country Roads Magazine.

In Memoriam: Raise it high for Coco Robicheaux who died in New Orleans, 25 November 2011, on his day off, at the Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street, in Faubourg Marigny. He was 64. You now march for him, too.
_____________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.Your comments are welcome, post them in the Blog.
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November 2011 / New Orleans Film Festival

2011-11-01T07:59:00.015-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swampby
Leonard Earl Johnson

November 2011

* * *

New Orleans Film Festival

by Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

The Sunset Limited from Los Angeles was six hours late arriving in New Orleans on the first day of the 2011 New Orleans Film Festival. Passengers and on-board staff were flummoxed. The Festival films presumably had gone on an earlier train.

“They don’t send film on reels anymore, or by train,” L. A. Norma pointed out. “Everything is on those little plastic disks now.”

The hungry man who boarded at Shriver, Louisiana offered her a bite of his Baby Ruth candy bar and added, “Or sent over the Internet.” He was an elderly man with weak legs, a loudly proclaimed hunger, and a face sunburned from waiting by the tracks since eight that morning. Shriver is a flag-stop an hour or so outside of New Orleans.

“My ride could only drop me off then,” he told the Train Assistant. “There was no shade and nobody could tell me anything.” The T. A. found the man some things to eat from the dining car’s nearly empty pantry. He eagerly joined our car’s chorus of complaints.

The other passengers had all been given little packets of dried fruit, crackers, yogurt, cheese and a small bottle of water. These items were picked up in Lafayette, along with L. A. Norma and yours truly. We got them, too. “For free, to ease your trip,” said the beleaguered Train Assistant. “This train is plumb out’a food.”

“Free” helped, but not much. Most simply wanted the journey to end. No one takes the train for speed, but six hours hurts one's sense of achievement. The man who boarded at Shriver wanted revenge, but no one could think of anything that would not further delay the train.

We were just starting our journey and were still fresh. We fished two beers from our carry-on bag and headed for the Observation Car. We had spirted four Abita Ambers on board to lessen costs and, now, the disappointment that it would be too dark to see the Mississippi River. Anyway, the train’s bar had closed at Shriver. “So the bartender can count the bottles,” L. A. Norma reckoned.

Explanations were proffered as to why we were running six hours late. I bet on the one about a derailed freighter outside San Antonio. Norma chose the belligerence of passing oil tankers and freighters.

Unlike other Earthlings, Americans have but one track for all trains. “The magic of deregulation,” Norma snorted. When Amtrak meets a freighter the freighter has right-of-way, and Am-trickle whimpers off the line and waits for it to pass. Between Los Angeles and New Orleans this can happen a lot.

A derailment, on the other hand, stops everyone. “More democratic,” I said to Norma.

Norma said, “Screw equality.” Smoking is not allowed on Amtrak, and Norma, a chimney, is never in too amiable a mood when on the train. As far as our time was concerned, we would not be traveling any longer than usual, just at night.

“Welcome to The New Third World,” she said to the T. A., who handed her a free bottle of water and wrote “NOL” on the little tickets she placed over our seats.

We pulled into Union Station hours after our ride had given up on us, and taken himself off to the Film Festival’s opening-night Gala at the Columns Hotel on Saint Charles Avenue. There Louisiana red beans and rice were being served to celebrants while we hailed a taxi.

“We have been the week in Acadiana and we’re not in need of any red beans and rice,” Norma told the taxi driver, who did not care. He wore a T-shirt that read: “My Parents went to New Orleans, and all I got was this Lousy I. Q." He told Norma to put her cigarette out and drove us to Squalor Heights.

Next morning we awoke early, for the grand boudin breakfast at Cake Café and Bakery on Spain and Charters. Connie Castille, who, with Allison Bohl, won the 2007 Louisiana Film Maker Award for their masterful 25-minute documentary / drama / comedy / tragedy, I Always Do My Collars First, sat next to us and said hello. Another of Castille's films, King Crawfish, played as part of the 2011 New Orleans Film Festival.

“If you have not seen their film, put down your boudin and bagel and go get it from the library right now, ” Norma told our waitress – who, fortunately for us, did not.

“Forgive his modesty,” Norma said, when I suggested they catch Zachary Godshall and Ross Brupbacher’s feature film, Lord Byron, at Canal Place Cinema. I have a five-second flash on-screen playing a lump in a swampy hobo camp outside of Lafayette. “He is such a good actor Godshall said he didn’t need to wear make up,” Norma informed the ladies.

Not that I had more than those five-seconds to do with it, but Lord Byron was also screened and well received earlier this year at Sundance.

The best film at the Festival that we almost did-not-see was Flood Streets. “Who wants to see another Katrina story,” Norma grumped in the taxi ride up to The Prytania, on Prytania.

“Who, indeed,” we laughed on the way home. What a great work! Flood Streets is less a Katrina story than a well told story about New Orleans esprit showcased against a post-Katrina daze. Just the kind of film to thrill those who worship at New Orleans altar. And further perplex those dryland-ers who do not understand why.

Flood Streets executive producer and script writer was Michelle Benoit. Other producers were Glen Pitre (best known in these swamps for directing Belizaire the Cajun – 1986), and Harry Shearer, whose feature The Big Uneasy (where have we heard that before) is ready for release, but was not at the Festival. He makes a cameo appearance as a teaching dentist in Flood. The original story was written by Helen Krieger, and directed by Joseph Meissner, who also plays the film’s male lead.

A sweet back story: Krieger and Meissner sold their home to finance this great film of their very own post-K. story – the story of any number of us.
Flood Streets clip _____________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.
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October 2011 / German Fest in Roberts Cove

2011-10-01T10:24:00.018-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by
Leonard Earl Johnson

October 2011

* * *

German Fest

in Roberts Cove

by Leonard Earl Johnson
www.LEJ.org

Oktoberfest, in Roberts Cove, Louisiana. You laugh? It might tickle the lederhosen off a real German, but this is the best German Festival in the U. S. of A., that I have ever attended. There was beer, singing, Alpine horns, yodeling, white marble graves of original settlers decorated with bright German flags, and hot spicy (usually mild veal) Bratwurst sausages. Technically it was a Germanfest. Oktoberfest comes in September.

German immigrants were few to French Louisiana, but those who came left their mark. Notably there were the Germans said to have fed the indolent city folk of New Orleans from productive farms along the German Coast at Bayou Des Allemonds (French for "The Germans"). And Roberts Cove, this prosperous rice-growing settlement near Lafayette, where we spent our fine October Germanfest.

When I was a child, my Grandmother spoke German and English. My Mother spoke only English. My Great Grand Mother spoke only German. It was a time when immigrants to America were bent towards assimilation. It is sad that my Mother never talked with her Grandparents. We all lived, in our turn, in a German-American village in Illinois. It was named Ullin, after some early settlers, or the Daughter of the Polish Count Pulaski.

My Father, of Danish/Norwegion descent, did not like the idea of our village being named after Germans. Besides, descendants of the Ullins still lived there and he did not much like them. My Father owned a roadside establishment where he expounded frequently on this and other issues, such as the evils of FDR's New Deal. He must have won the argument because the resident family named Ullin dropped one "l" from the spelling of their name. "Out of fear people would think them Polish," my Grandmother laughed. There were, also, a few former slave families, one Irish, and a merchant family we suspected of being Jews passing as Methodist. The Africans were Baptist. The Germans and Irish were Catholic.

My antecedents had been citizens of Germany's Bavaria and Swabia, lands of mountains, Black Forests, German industry and people who liked to sing and yodel. They immigrated first as one Brother/Uncle, who sailed to New York, took a train to Saint Louis, and a raft one-hundred miles down the Mississippi, to the new German settlement of Ullin, at the southern tip of Illinois. (Incidentally I was born in Cairo, Illinois, the town at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers where Mark Twain's Huck Finn was headed to set free "Nigger Jim.")

My people arrived three years after Mark Twain had captained river boats to New Orleans, fled West to avoid the Civil War, and moved to Hartford, Connecticut to write. Twain came from Hannibal, Missouri, one-hundred miles upriver from Saint Louis. Growing up, my siblings and I read his books and thought ourselves better for it.

The German Brother/Uncle to first seed our New World became my Great Uncle -- though he never knew it. I don't know if he ever read Twain. His name was Wilhelm Stadacher. When he arrived on that first trip he secured land along the Cache River at Ullin, on the opposite bank of a sawmill. The next century, that sawmill’s offices became a roadhouse nightclub, named Porky's, and owned by my Father and Mother. The "hard road," U. S. Highway-51, was laid down in front of it, and the Cache River continued flowing behind -- with growing insignificance. My Great Uncle never knew any of this.

When Wilhelm returned to Germany, he gathered his extended family and led them to The New Promised Land. My Grandmother left behind a life for which she pined, I thought, and did not talk much about it. America's two World Wars with Germany tarnished her memories of "The Old Country." About all my Sister and Brothers and Cousins ever heard her say about Germany was that they had lived in a country village. In an apartment above the ground floor, where a family of cows and two horses lived. And a ghost walked atop the cemetery’s stone wall with a skull under its arm.

Swabia was a good land full of "Jovial people who liked clocks," she told us. It was Texas and Arkansas, it sounded to us. With a dash of Detroit -- in the days before Detroit became the first fallen star of America's fading industrial might. Swabia was, also, in the area of Germany where Hitler first arrived from Austria to save Das Vaterland from the Versailles Treaty. But that is another story, and you know how it turned out.

* * *

"Do you speak German?" asked an old lady a solid three years older than I. Her English was heavily tinged with the Cajun accent. We were inside the Song Fest Tent at Roberts Cove, singing, yodeling and listening to Alpine horns.

"Bisschen Deutsch," I said. She understood the "Deutsch," but not the "Bisschen". "A little," I explained. We raised our "bier" and joined in the Rucksack Song. Her husband wore nice lederhosen and sang with great gusto. I would bet money he had been a boyscout and sang these songs with the same gusto then.

We have all come a long way. Now, the person trying to fish your Social Security check out of your mail box is not some ne'er-do-well Nephew. It is the Con-servative people telling you 60 is the new 40 and you no longer need it. Don't believe it, folks. This is a strong YouTube dark humor rant from beyond the grave by George Carlin on America. Do not watch it if you do not want to hear harsh criticism of running our ship of state aground so others can steal the brass. Mark Twain would be titillated and my Grandmother would have understood the warning. And maybe shed a tear. LEJ

___________

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Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

September 2011 / Maureen Brennan

2011-09-01T06:07:00.019-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by
Leonard Earl Johnson

September 2011

Acadian Impresario,

Maureen Brennan

by Leonard Earl Johnson
www.LEJ.org

Photo credits: Cité des Arts

* * *

It is a Wednesday in Lafayette, the day Pamplona Tapas Bar discounts wine and tapas.

"No wine for me during working hours," Maureen Brennan says, "but you may. Try it with the ciabatta loaf with chili oil and calamari?"

It is a working day for scribes, too, but who begrudges a tipsy writer.

She did not steer us wrong. The bread was Platonic, the calamari lightly dusted and fried to golden perfection. (The ciabatta bread was from the new Poupart’s French Bakery and Bistro, two doors down on Jefferson Street.)

Jerry Young, Pamplona’s congenial owner, waves to us from the bar. There is a comradery in Lafayette belying its boom town reputation. "The Hub City," a nickname derived from being at crossroads of highways, railroads and waterways, has become a major medical and oil center, and is now Louisiana’s third largest city. It grew by 40,000 immediately following the storms of 2005.

The exact population is a matter of local debate, but ranges from two hundred to five hundred thousand, and up. "Depends on how much hinterland is counted," Brennan says with clear civic pride.

She is a booster. A past president of Festival International de Louisiane, the largest festival in festival-crazy Acadiana, where music acts from the French world and beyond are invited to perform on open-air stages scattered around downtown, free to the public. (2012: April 25 - 29)

Childhood
"My very practical parents probably always had concerns because I was such an unrealistic dreamer, interested in too many things, going in too many different directions, hyperactive and stubborn as the day is long.

"Now the latter I inherited from both of them, and it was those traits that gave birth to the dream of Cité des Arts.

"I probably am crazy. But, having been raised in an ‘Irish zoo’ I seem to thrive on chaos.

We met Brennan again recently in New Orleans in the company of New York playwright, Michael Roberts, author of Simply Langston, a play about Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes first produced by Brennan’s production company, Benrose.

It is the day before the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and we are at a Faulkner Society party in the Presbytere remembering The Storm.

John Biguenet read his funny tale about the lady standing the night atop a chair, chin held above water, wishing she had bought nicer things to watch floating past.

Later, nibbling salty little tomatoes before fine tall fanned windows overlooking Jackson Square, Roberts tells us he is not evacuating to our cozy coast to avoid Hurricane Irene’s threat to the Big Apple. "This trip was planned before."

Outside, smoke from the huge marsh fire in New Orleans East is blanketing The City.

" ‘Not again by flood, saith the Lord'," so saith L. A. Norma, as she left us for Jackson Square. We watched out the windows as she lit a Camel cigarette and blew her smoke into the mix.

For the full conversation with Maureen Brennan see Maureen Brennan: Cité des Arts by Leonard Earl Johnson Country Roads Magazine, September 2011. Enjoy and pass a good time! ___________

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Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

August 2011 / Six Years Post Katrina

2011-08-01T06:33:00.008-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Coleen Perilloux Landry

April 2011

* * *

Six Years Post Katrina

Where were you," asked the bartender, "when the levees broke?"

The bar he tended was the art deco Sazerac, at the Hotel Roosevelt. "In historic downtown New Orleans," as we used to hear WWL radio announcers say, in the 1950's, when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education. They spoke as Prophets over the "Fifty-thousand-watt voice of New Orleans," when New Orleans was a dream yet to come true.

"Where was I when the levees broke in New Orleans?

"Hammond. We left late, after the mayor's mandatory evacuation. Most everyone I knew had gone. And I don't drive. I got a ride out that Sunday evening, as the storm was moving in. The winds licked at our wheels as we drove across the bridges down near the Rigolets."

"The Rigolets?" He set a fresh bottle on the bar, then refilled my glass. "Not a good place to be when a hurricane's coming."

"No," L. A. Norma said, walking up to the bar. She was returning from her cigarette break out on Baronne Street, "Swapping lies with the doorman," she smiled at the bartender.

Norma said, "I left at the television's first rumblings of a hurricane. Even then I had the good sense to go west."

"When we left all the roads out were closed," I said, "except those going east. A friendly policeman told us we could turn west later, after we got out of Town. We were among the last to leave -- over bridges that washed out soon after.

"You know, we traveled the very path the storm took. But didn't know it, of course, at the time.

"So, I was in Hammond, Louisiana the next morning when the levees broke. Hammond took a bad hit, too. No flooding, but for days we had no news. No papers, no phones, no electricity. For a week, maybe more.

"It was stunning, the world changing, I mean. But at the time it was hard to see just where it was going.

"Tell you the truth, nothing I felt during those days jibed with what I later learned was happening."

"It's now six years since The Storm," the bartender observed, "and every day I think of something about that time. How the world changed."

"That's post-traumatic-stress," L. A. Norma said, from atop her self-confidence. She noted her credentials. She had been an appointment secretary at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles.

"I worked for a bunch of doctors," she smiled. He polished a glass.

"When things happening are so huge you only realize them later, when it comes to you in bits and pieces, that's post-trauma!" Norma flipped her new cell phone open. The bartender set his shiny glass on the bar.

"Yes, I guess so," I said. "I didn't get scared about being on the Rigolets bridge till a year later.

"The first I knew something ultra-big was happening was when the Pentecostals opened a charity storefront in Hammond. I ate their hot dogs and beans without thinking I was 'needy.'

"A barefooted lady came in while I was there and asked for shoes. They gave her flip-flops. 'Gee,' I thought, 'what am I doing here?'

"When the levees broke," I motioned for two new glasses, "Norma was in L. A., and I was safe at the hearth of a fallen monk who taught English in Hammond.

"He was friends with an English teacher I met the year before at the Tennessee Williams Festival. She had a red truck and two psychotic cats. She was the last person I knew in Town with wheels."

"Buses, trains, airplanes?" a stranger sitting to our left asked.

"They had all stopped days before. The streets were deserted. Remember Amtrak's celebrated story about not being able to reach Mayor Nagin to offer a train out for evacuees? I was at Union Station knocking on their boarded up doors and they couldn't reach me either.

"From Hammond, the fallen monk drove me to Lafayette, where old Illinois colleagues took me in for six months. They saved me from the dreaded FEMA!"

"Think of that three-day-fish story," Norma said, wrinkling her nose.

"Eventually I rented a small apartment in an old railroad hotel renovated earlier by New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff. Elvis Presley once stayed where now I lived.

"Now I divide my time between New Orleans and Acadiana. You might say, I live on Amtrak's Sunset Limited. I still see New Orleans as a religion, but less as 'The Universe' and more as part of the congregation of the Gulf. Do you know half our tourists are Gulf Coast locals?

"Many is the Cajun dreaming tonight of that 'playhouse' in New Orleans, 'On The Banks of The Old Pontchartrain,' as Governor Jimmie Davis once sang the Carl Butler written and Hank Williams made famous song. Davis was ancient and his back up carried the song. It was a sunny afternoon at Jazz Fest. When life was a pre-K. state of mind."

"A great way to think of The City," Norma said, laying her phone on the bar next to the bartender's polished glass, and punching up Vince Vance's music video, I Am New Orleans, on U-Tube.

_____________________________
Copyright, Leonard Earl Johnson, 2011
(This story first appeared in altered form September 2010.)

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator. Magnet size: 2 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches "It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!" ~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope
along with $5 for each magnet. Mail to:
Leonard Earl Johnson
302 Jefferson St., Box 202
Lafayette, LA 70501

July 2011 / Huey P. Long Bridge

2011-07-01T09:32:00.032-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp
By
Leonard Earl Johnson
July 2011
Reprinted from
Les Amis de Marigny / New Orleans in Exile, July 2006

* * *
Photo credit from the top:
1 & 2: U. S. Government Public Domain
3: Coleen Perilloux Landry

The Huey P. Long Bridge by
Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org
* * *

"The Huey," as old timers call it, is the first bridge in Louisiana to span the Mississippi River. It is an old bridge built with two narrow lanes of highway traffic on each side, and railroad tracks down the middle. (photos are before 2011 lane construction)

The Huey opened in 1935, the year its namesake, Huey P. Long, was shot and killed in the lobby of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. As governor, Huey levied taxes on oil production in Louisiana. With that money he built both The Capitol and The Bridge. The Capitol building is the tallest in America. The Bridge is the highest.

Before the bridge opened, all trains crossing The River at New Orleans did so aboard ferry boats that landed on the Westbank at the town of Westwego, a descriptive name given the settlement, in 1870, by the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Incidentally a second bridge, built later and bearing Long's name, crosses the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. Both bridges have superstructures made of high-towered steel that looks, from a distance, like the skyline of a great modern city.

Huey, the man, was only made of flesh. But he was some powerful flesh. Nicknamed "The Kingfish" early in life, his political career gave the nickname special significance as top-feeder in the Louisiana political pond. Huey Long's first elected state office was Railroad Commissioner. He first ran for governor in 1924, and lost.

Four years later, in 1928, he won, and grew in office to became the era's second-most colorful politician. The first was his younger brother, Earl.

Love Thy Brother
Brother Earl occupied the Governor's Mansion, fittingly, after big brother Huey had moved out. And while Huey may have been something of a rounder while there, he was fabulously circumspect compared to Earl.

The married Governor Earl openly dated Blaze Starr, a popular Bourbon Street stripper, and he was widely regarded as fully in possession of a very loose screw.

He used to say of his trysts with Blaze that he wore cowboy boots in bed, "For better traction on them hotel sheets."

Hotel Roosevelt
Something of a forerunner of today's destination hotels, Hotel Roosevelt sat across Canal Street from New Orleans undulating French Quarter, and was mighty popular with both Long brothers. Huey even said he built the Airline Highway from his office in Baton Rouge, "To have a straight hard shot at the Hotel Roosevelt, in downtown New Orleans."

Nice, but not as colorful as cowboy boots on hotel sheets.

* * *

The Longs built their political dynasty at a time when most Americans thought government should solve problems by direct action, not through secondary problem solvers. No trickle-downers, those two.

Private health insurance's big bite out of today's health care dollar would strike them as laughingly overpriced, and inexcusably inefficient for the ones receiving the care -- the people casting votes.

When Huey took office the state of Louisiana was mostly illiterate, had few public schools, school books, hard roads, or hospitals. The Kingfish set out to remedy that.

He was an American seat-of-the-pants socialist who taxed business, including the sacrosanct oil industry, to pay for public schools, roads, hospitals, and more. In return, citizens voted for him in droves each election day.

When he left the Governor's Mansion, in 1932, before his term expired, it was to move up to the United States Senate.

In the Senate he launched his "Share-Our-Wealth Society," complete with its own theme song, "Every Man a King," while maintaining control of the Democratic party back home. (Still smarting over the Republican led "War Between The States," Louisiana had no Republican party in those days.)

Long had set his cap for the presidency occupied by another American seat-of-the-pants socialist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, scion of the family from whom Huey's favorite hotel took its name.

Taxing oil and challenging an incumbent president can make one enemies. Huey had his, then and now. He ended up, after all, assassinated in the lobby of the new skyscraper State House his taxes had built.

Some crotchety opponents are said to have honored vows to never cross any bridge named Huey P. Long. (Such vows, though befitting their times, were more bombastic than practical, I expect. In any case, the bridge was so popular that every few years since it opened Louisiana has built another one.)

Thousands loved The Kingfish, and came -- even walked -- to Baton Rouge, from all over the state, to attend his funeral.

Today, Huey's life-sized statue stands on the state grounds where he is buried, in front of the Capitol building he built. Another of him stands under the dome of the United States Capitol, in Washington, D. C. It is part of program by which "Two-heroes of each state," are honored. The other sent by Louisiana is Edward Douglass White, a Confederate veteran and, later, U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Another Spirit
Brother Earl spent time in the state loony bin during his term in office. Being governor, he cured himself by firing the institution's director and hiring a new one who released him. That tops anything Huey ever did. Even taxing Standard Oil.

Earl once strapped a crate of Texas grapefruits to the grill of his car. He had purchased the fruit while at a loony bin in the Lone Star State. He was there at his wife's behest, and against his will.

Of this incarceration, Fort Worth columnist, Molly Ivins, once told an audience at Tulane University, "Texas authorities took one look at Earl and said, 'Looks like a fine and fit governor to us,' and released him."

With those Texas grapefruits strapped to the front grill of his black Cadillac he drove back to Louisiana stopping along the way to give sweet grapefruits to grateful voters. This parade included his aides, the press, police and his wife, who wanted to lock him up again. I have never learned where Blaze Starr was that day, but I like to think she was in the Cadillac with the governor and the grapefruit.

Back to the Kingfish
Huey's construction projects, like the afore-mentioned bridge and State House, still stand.

The oil taxes, however, from offshore drilling -- negligible in Long's day, but huge today -- now go to finance the good causes of the federal government in Washington.

In other states, oil revenues are more equitably split with the state.

Big Charity
Charity Hospital in New Orleans was founded in 1736 by the Sisters of Charity, and derives its name from them, not the universal medical care initiated by Huey Long. It is -- was -- the second-oldest hospital in the United States.

Huey set out to build Charity into a skyscraper housing a model hospital, and making it the flagship of his statewide health system. The skyscraper opened four years after his death, and there is now a Charity Hospital in most every Louisiana city, but post-Katrina New Orleans.

Huey's twenty floor high-rise hospital still stands, but as a dark hulking ghost towering over The Big Uneasy.

After two hundred and seventy-five years, and countless "con-servative" plots to shut it down, Charity Hospital was felled by hurricane winds, faulty levees, and an unwillingness of the good people from Washington to spend Louisiana's offshore oil revenue to reopen it. But that is another story, maybe.
___________
© 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.
Your comments are welcome. Please post them in the Blog.
Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

June 2011 / Louisiana in Flood and Drought

2011-06-01T06:15:00.009-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

June 2011

Francoise Gilot, In the Heart of Sleep, Day Dream on the Beach, Oil on canvas, 1986

* * *
Louisiana in Flood and Drought

Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

Louisiana, Land of Dreamy Dreams, where we treat the Mississippi River like our grand odalisque.

Constrained by love till feeble on top while stirring below, The River has run off with some giddy television weatherman leaving our crops dusty and the low lands flooded.

Amtrak-ing over the Huey P. Long Bridge at New Orleans, and the numerous Atchafalaya Basin bridges leading to it, it is clear how only the sturdy old Huey is up in the air enough to be untouchable by floods. At Morgan City, the Atchafalaya River lapped over bridge pylons within a few feet of the tracks. Amtrak's Sunset Limited came to a full stop, then proceeded very slowly across. The flood gates, downtown, were closed and water trickled under them, as Amtrickle trickled past.

Upriver, on the Mississippi, the Bonnet Carrie Spillway gushed over a little-developed recreation area on its flood-way to Lake Pontchartrain.

In Acadiana, the Atchafalaya Basin filled with Mississippi River water tumbling out of the Morganza Spillway, above Baton Rouge, threatening homes, settlements, even towns, on its way to Morgan City, its big iron bridges, and The Sea beyond.

The train's conductor said, "You may not be able to come back this way." We bought round-trip tickets anyway.

* * *

Saturday night in New Orleans. At the Vincent Mann Gallery Royal Street reception for Francoise Gilot, New Orleans once again demonstrated its ability to rise from gutter or flood. Outside, levees groaned. Inside, we partied as if God put us here to do just that.

Lafayette, Cajun Spice Jefferson Street Gallery owner, Melissa Dronet, said she was not staying through the weekend. "Going back while the bridges are still up?" L. A. Norma asked. No one expected any bridges to come down. Not the big ones, anyway. Norma and I are banking on the Sunset Limited running, and the Morgan City bridges holding. At least till after we pass. And there is no problem with the Huey P. Long. Huey built it so well -- with Standard Oil's tax money -- that today the Department of Transportation is hanging four new automobile lanes over its sides.

Huey P. Long is reputed to have told oil executives slow to contribute to his campaign, "What you get if you wait too long is good-government." They waited. Long taxed. In an unrelated event, one day while Standard Oil was out of town, someone murdered Huey in the lobby of the new Capitol Building, which he had also built with their tax money.

"Sometimes it pays to wait," L. A. Norma said. "Now they got new roads hanging off the Huey P., and Governor Lapdog Millionaire, too!"

We were sidling along in the crowd shaking hands with Francoise Gilot. She signed Norma's catalog, then declined the next woman, saying her thumb hurt.

"Besides, the paintings are all signed," Norma smiled at the lady-declined.

At the Vincent Mann Gallery the next day, a sweet faced young saleslady told us, "We deal with French Impressionist collectors from throughout the region."

"Picasso would have done her in oil," Norma whispered.

We shake the hand of Gilot's Son (with Pablo Picasso), Claude Picasso, as an oval image behind Gilot's head is removed from the wall. The painting, along with the lady-declined and a gallery representative, disappeared through the crowd.

Claude Picasso manages his Father's estate (and his Mother, as much as she, still ingénue mystérieuse at 90, can be managed). His life began in the ashes of World War Two, a time fading outside art galleries and museums. Francoise was 20 when she and Pablo met. She was having her first exhibition -- in German-occupied Paris! Picasso was already famous, and 60. Claude shares his Father's handsome head. He turns his attention to matters other than us.

Francoise Gilot as A Bridge. From the gallery catalog, ". . . she has been a bridge between the heroic period of the School of Paris and the emergence of New York City as the new world center for contemporary art. While she has lived in New York and La Jolla, California, for many years, I believe that she has found a cultural home in New Orleans . . . I am pleased that the New Orleans Museum of Art possesses several works by Gilot." – E. John Bullard, Director Emeritus, New Orleans Museum of Art.

After the gallery closed, Gilot and Picasso had dinner at Antoine's with gallery founder, Jacob Manguno and a few gallery friends and art collectors. Bob and Marilyn Tarpy of Lafayette were among this lucky number. "I've collected Gilot since 1972," Doctor Tarpy said.

"We are all very proud of our work over the past forty years, bringing fine French paintings to New Orleans," Manguno said, "Francoise Gilot is one of the best."

Francoise Gilot's footnote: The Mann Gallery has sold the master's work in the fancy neighborhood of five million dollars, since 1972.

Claude Picasso's footnote: Manager, impresario magnificent.

Pablo Picasso's footnote: His work commands the art world's largest dollar. Next comes Andy Warhol. (Can George Rodrique be far behind?)

* * *

The Saint Charles Street Car was full of Tulane parents and friends-of-parents. Most of whom come from out of state. We met a few on the train into Town. "Our son is in the second post-Katrina class," one Father told us at lunch in the dining car. He meant the second class to form after Katrina. They formed in 2007 and are now graduating. Outside, thirsty sugar cane fields begged for a drink. Our table wondered about the levees, but talked more about restaurants. We recommended Atchafalaya Seafood, on Louisiana Avenue.

"Louisiana's elite send their children to L. S. U.," L. A. Norma instructed, "to study connections and football. In that order." Everyone laughed. When we reached the Atchafalaya River Bridge, at Morgan City, the train stopped. Then inched across.

________
Copyright, 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Related links

Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

The Vincent Mann Gallery

May 2011 / EXTRA

2011-05-17T08:15:00.010-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

The Great Flood of 2011

Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

Photo Credit in order

1. Matthew Hinton, The Times-Picayune

2. Melisa Dronet

3. Frank Parsley

I'm in New Orleans.

You remember, New Orleans The Land of Dreamy Dreams. Came on the train over the Atchafalaya Basin. The basin soon to spill over with fresh Mississippi River water tumbling over the Morganza Spill Way on its way to Morgan City, its big iron bridges, and the Sea beyond. The Conductor on the train said, "You may not be able to come back this way."

To be continued in June
In the meantime give a listen to
Randy Newman "Louisiana 1927"
"Louisiana, They Tryin' to Wash Us Away"

May 2011 / T'is The Season of The Fests

2011-05-01T05:11:00.046-05:00

Photo credit: Melanie Plesh

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

May 2011

* * *

T'is The Season of The Fests

by Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

We catch the train back and forth across the Atchafalaya Basin just to be in Acadiana for the twelfth annual Washington Catfish Festival (recently Americanized from Festival du Courtableau) one week and back in New Orleans the next, for the twenty-fifth annual Tennessee Williams Festival.

Despite very Yankee names like "Washington" and "Catfish Festival," Washington is one of the older French settlements in Louisiana, 1720. But with strong American inclinations. Located along picturesque Bayou Teche, this area had early access to French Canadian (the Cajuns), and French European (the Creoles) immigrants.

Their music is hot, Cajun (white) and Zydeco (black). Few horns and lots of cultural/racial overlap. This year I saw a license plate that read, "Proudly Mulatto." Gino Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie played. Food stands sold popcorn balls, booze and the best catfish you ever ate.

In New Orleans, the ultra-urban Tennessee Williams flock gathered to honor their god, in the city he called his spiritual home.

TennFest has been the premier literary festival commemorating Williams for the past twenty-five years. And it has never looked better. Also this year, Tennessee turned one-hundred while moldering in his Saint Louis, Missouri grave. Therein lies a story.

Blood is Thicker Than Water!

Blood is thicker than water, as fear all us carpetbaggers. Tennessee made no secret of his dislike of his Saint Louis boyhood. When he passed away his Brother, Dakin, had him planted in the Saint Louis family plot. Grumblings have gone forth since to the effect he would rather not like the location. This year, on a panel of Festival Founders, Errol Laborde told of a recent visit to Saint Louis. When asked, the tour guide said Tennessee was buried in Saint Louis because his family is. Laborde shrugged, "There it is."

TennFest is a large fest. Not large like French Quarter Fest or the god-fest, Jazzfest, but large. "Thousands, many thousands. It's hard to say," said a Festival spokesperson. "We sell tickets to individual events and individuals come to more than one event. And some buy passes good for it all. How do you count that? But we had around ten thousand."

There must have been a thousand at the Stella Hollering Contest on the last Sunday. The Stella Hollering Contest chooses from any who care to participate the voice most something. It is never clear what. But the objective is to yell for Stella from Jackson Square, below an Upper Pontalba balcony in some fashion that honors Tennessee Williams' character Stanley Kowalski yelling for his Stella, in the 1951 New Orleans-set Streetcar Named Desire. Often cited by New Orleanians as Tennessee's best.

We did not holler for Stella, but watched from the corner near Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre. We were helping break the record for sales of signature Festival Mint Juleps, assisted by the amply consuming BY THE LIGHT OF THE JUKEBOX author, Dean Paschal; and Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of William Faulkner. She was in Town promoting her memoirs, EVERY DAY IN THE SUN, at Faulkner House Books, a bibliotech's dream shop in nearby Pirate's Alley. Paschal and I were in Town to drink it dry. The butler at Faulkner House eventually left us our own bottle. Not there just for the wine, we also watched and listened to everywoman-grandedame Dean Faulkner Wells signing and chatting up her fans. At one point, her assistant presented a seeker as the something-relation to someone from some family with kin in California. Faulkner could have written the scene. Tennessee Williams probably did. Those two literary giants were not particularly friends, but Faulkner House sells both. And we loving followers intermingle.

It was theatrical serendipity -- as happens in towns like New Orleans -- that Paschal and I gathered by the trashcan on the uptown corner of the Cabildo, waiting with William Faulkner's niece for her car to be brought round. Four doors down people were yelling for STELLA.

Paschal, a physician by day, suggested some new medicine for Dean Faulkner Well's arthritis. "Take two mint juleps and call him in the morning," some passing college boy offered.

Wells lived in Panama. I told her of my sailor days hanging out in the Crossroads of the World Bar and Whorehouse, after first asertaining that she had not been there as a missionary. She had not, she told us, "I was at the Crossroads with you."

Four doors down, people were ripping their shirts and yelling, "STELLA!"

* * *

click here for LEJ.org icebox magnets
______________

Alberto Navarro Memorial, April 23, 2011

2011-04-20T08:51:00.041-05:00

Alberto Navarro

Memorial

New York City

April 23, 2011
by Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.org

Starting right front:
Victor Campbell, last secretary/companion to Tennessee Williams.
Josh Clark, Publisher.
Leonard Earl Johnson, Bloviator.
Alberto Navarro, Fallen.
Melanie Plesh, Katrina escape-artist.
L. A. Norma, Fictional literary character.
Lee Grue, writer. Karisa Kerry, World traveler.
Margarita Bergen, Impresario

* * *

Alberto, we know you and love you.
You came from Bogota, Columbia to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, to finish high school. We met as S. I. U. freshmen, at the beginning of The Fabled Sixties. From there, for the next fifty years we untethered our youth.

With an enormous number of friends and fellow travelers around the World, you cut swaths across the midlands of America and beyond.

Much happened in The Fabled Sixties. But nothing more elegant than Alberto's launching of a new language.

Is there one among us who does not speak some "ALBERTO-ise?"

Because of Alberto you likely know that "Ester-berry jo-gurt" means, in English, "strawberry yogurt." He taught us this and we still know it and say it. And the universal favorite: "Chess!" In your heart, if not on your lips, you know "chess" is "yes" in Alberto's native tongue.

When Alberto died, I wickedly recalled how often recovering in morning's glare Alberto's hand would flutter over his heart and he would announce yet again that this debauchery of youth would attack his "hair-it." In the end his heart did fail. But not till after a long joyous journey.

One last recollection
Once we sent a telegram, with Alberto and John Harty (whose heart also attacked him early) to a friend imprisoned in the United States for draft resistance. It read: "Ignore instructions from Moscow."

It is a wonder any one survives their youth. Yet here we are far down the path. The next miles will be shallower without you, my Friend.
Join Us in Song
Scroll down to Meet Me in New Orleans, by Sam Rey and the Totem 2 ________________
Copr. Leonard Earl Johnson, 2011

April 2011 / Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are

2011-04-01T06:40:00.033-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

April 2011

* * *

Be a New Orleanian Where Ever You Are!

"Where were you," asked the bartender, "when the levees broke?"

The bar he tended was the art deco Sazerac, at the Hotel Roosevelt. "In historic downtown New Orleans," as we heard WWL radio announcers say when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education, in the 1950's. They spoke as Prophets over the "fifty-thousand-watt voice of New Orleans," when New Orleans was a dream yet to come true.

"Where was I when the levees broke in New Orleans?

"The Rigolets?" He set a fresh bottle on the bar, then refilled my glass. "Not a good place to be when a hurricane's coming."

"No," L. A. Norma said, walking up to the bar. She was returning from her cigarette break out on Baronne Street, "Swapping lies with the doorman," she smiled at the bartender.

Norma said, "I left at the television's first rumblings of a hurricane. Even then I had the good sense to go west."

"You know, we traveled the very path the storm took. But didn't know it, of course, at the time."

"It was stunning, the world changing, I mean. But at the time it was hard to see just where it was going.

"Tell you the truth, nothing I felt during those days jibed with what I later learned was happening."

"It's been five years," the bartender observed, "and every day I think of something about that time. How the world changed."

"That's post-traumatic-stress," L. A. Norma said, from atop her self-confidence. She noted her credentials. She had been an appointment secretary at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles.

"I worked for a bunch of doctors," she smiled. He polished a glass.

"Yes, I guess so," I said. "I didn't get scared about being on the Rigolets bridge till a year later.

"The first I knew something ultra-big was happening was when the Pentecostals opened a charity storefront in Hammond. I ate their hot dogs and beans without thinking I was 'needy.' A barefooted lady came in while I was there and asked for shoes. They gave her flip-flops. 'Gee,' I thought, 'what am I doing here?'

"When the levees broke," I motioned for two new glasses, "Norma was in L. A., and I was safe at the hearth of a fallen monk who taught English in Hammond. He was friends with an English teacher I met the year before at the Tennessee Williams Festival. She had a red truck and two psychotic cats. She was the last person I knew in Town with wheels."

"Buses, trains, airplanes?" a stranger sitting to our left asked.

"From Hammond, old Illinois colleagues living in Lafayette took me in for six months. They saved me from the dreaded FEMA!"

"Think of that three-day-fish story," Norma said.

"Eventually I rented a small apartment in an old railroad hotel renovated earlier by New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff. Elvis Presley once stayed where now I lived.

"Five years later, I divide my time between New Orleans and Acadiana. I still see New Orleans as a religion, but less as 'The Universe' and more as part of the congregation of the Gulf. Do you know half our tourists are Gulf Coast locals? Many is the Cajun dreaming tonight of that 'playhouse' in New Orleans, 'On The Banks of The Old Pontchartrain,' as Governor Jimmie Davis sang it."

"A great way to think of The City," Norma said, laying her phone on the bar next to the glass, and punching up Vince Vance's music video, I Am New Orleans, on U-Tube.

______________________________

(This story first appeared in altered form September 2010.)

* * *

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along with $5 for each magnet.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

302 Jefferson St., Box 202

Lafayette, LA 70501

March 2011 / Death in The Time of Carnival

2011-03-01T09:25:00.004-06:00

www.LEJ.org

Yours Truly in a Swamp

March 2011 / Death in The Time of Carnival

Leonard Earl Johnson

All Photographs are from Margarita Bergen's fabulous mink-and-champagne Round Table lunch, at Hotel Royal Sonesta, in the traditionally drunken French Quarter. Celebrants in no particular order are: Margarita Bergen (impresario). Pat Brady (author), Henri Schindler (historian), Leonard Earl Johnson (arm candy), Mavis Early (keeper of the innkeepers), Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, the man who defined New Orleans Carnival in words and music better than any of us. And Hotel Royal Sonesta manager and Vice President, Al Groos *
--------------
* Ms Bergen wrote of her February 9, 2011 luncheon:
"My Round Table Luncheon was a great success and it featured Dr. Patricia Brady, author and social historian who discussed and signed her book, 'Being So Gentle: The Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson; Henri Schindler, the acknowledged authority on the history of Mardi Gras; Leonard Earl Johnson, well know local writer and world traveler who covered both Hurricane Katrina and the recent British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for the huge national on-line magazine, Consumer Affairs.com; and Mavis Early, Executive Director of the Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association. Entertainment was by Marshall Harris, accompanied by Jim Walpole on the piano. And as a special treat, Entertainer Al 'Carnival Time' Johnson."

What a Time it was?
It was a Wonderful Time!

Lloyd Sensat, 66, died early during Carnival season, on Friday, February 18. An ironic time to die, you might think. But not in New Orleans. We live death here. We embrace it. Celebrate it. Make a market in it. And go on with Life. The next night the Krewe de Vieux rolled through Faubourg Marigny, home of Sun Oak, the restored residence of Sensat and his long time companion, Gene Cizak.

We are Catholic-ish in our New Orleans overview. We know we are mortal. After all, we are post-Katrina people. We all locked our doors that day and never again came back to the Life we lived in those rooms. We know about Life. And passing.

We will miss you Lloyd. You were our hero, a round jolly man ageing more-better than a stalk of yard bananas. Your beard was luxurious and white as Job's robe. Partial to braces and pith helmets, you were a grand flashback to some unspecific time and floating place. You were a precursor of the Internet!

This year, when the Uptown krewes cross Canal Street; and the Downtown krewes cross every other line, the ashes of handsomely bearded old Lloyd Sensat will lie in the family tomb of the New Orleans founding father and Faubourg Marigny namesake, Bernard de Marigny. This by grant of William Hyland, great, great, great, great Grandson of Bernard de Marigny. Hyland lives in Saint Bernard Parish.

Members of this founding family may also be found under the marble at Saint Louis Cathedral.

Monsieur Sensat was born in Crowley, in 1944. He was educated in Lafayette and Baton Rouge. He taught art in Acadia and Saint Charles parishes. The Disney Channel named him Visual Artist of 1986. He was an artist in the best meaning of the word. In that way said of the Bali Islanders: We have no art, we do everything as well as we can.

He was a member of the Faubourg Marigny Improvment Association. A preservationist and historian. Often he portrayed Bernard de Marigny (and Papa Noel). He lived a joyous Life. We celebrate his passing parade. Join us. . .

Join us in song

"Throw my baby out the window / Let the joint burn down..."

It is

CARNIVAL TIME

Al Johnson,

Pops & Music Man

As L. A. Norma likes to say:

"Pass a good time at Carnival,

in the end it ends!"

click here for LEJ.org icebox magnets

______________

February 2011 / Greetings from the Top of The Swamp

2011-02-01T01:53:00.025-06:00

www.LEJ.org
Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

February 2011

* * *

Greetings from the Top of The Swamp

- Dedicated to J. R. Hood -

"You want a big splash of memories all over those mashed potatoes, Son?" L. A. Norma said, mimicking my Mother. "Hell yes," she answered herself, "with a dollop of responsibility on top big as your love."

Recently we traveled to Chicago, Carbondale, Metropolis, and Marion, Illinois. Then, on to Saint Louis, Missouri, Dallas, Texas, New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana. This is more traveling than since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew us to Paducah, Kentucky for Thanksgiving 2005, a somber Thanksgiving if ever there was one.

"Add a sprig of celery," I said, "and some green onions, too, for hope."

* * *

We flew from Marion, Illinois to Saint Louis, Missouri aboard Air Cape, on one of the smallest aircraft aloft. We flew very low over Southern Illinois -- one of those distinct regions within a political state. Southern Illinois is to the rest of Illinois what the South is to the rest of the United States. It is where I was born, grew up, went to school and finally grew big enough to fly away -- as this day I am again doing.

The little plane seated eight counting the pilot and co-pilot. We all chatted in Mid-westerly camaraderie, including the pilot and co-pilot.

Conversations went like this: "Air Cape? Cape Girardeau, Missouri?

"No, Cape Cod, Massachusetts."

"Cape Cod, Massachusetts," I thought, "I'm flying over my homeland on Kennedy-like wings?" Take that, tattered old memories served up with fresh roast turkey with all the guilt.

Cape Cod you likely know. It is home to the Kennedy family. Cape Girardeau you might not. It is on the Mississippi River, an early French settlement on the Missouri side of that iconic American waterway. It is home to Rush Limbaugh, and twelve miles east is the tiny German-American village of Ullin, Illinois, my home town. Cape Girardeau is also home to Southeast Missouri State University. Those Midwestern Germans below our feet believe in education.

"Lush Rumball," my Mother calls him, "is the shame of Cape Girardeau."

Limbaugh's Father, my Mother also says, dined regularly at our Father's Highway-51 supper club, Porky's. "Where your food is Individually Prepared a Little Longer, but a Lot Better," so saith the menu.

My Father wrote that stirring slogan. I wrote the longer menu blurb, a gripping explanation of where the Ohio River had once been. According to me it had once ran through Porky's dance floor. I don't remember why I thought that, other than my Father thought it.

"Rumball's Father was a gas-bag, too," my Mother says, "and so was Porky." She was Mrs. Porky.

* * *

"Here," Norma said, placing the in-flight magazine in my hands. It was open to Air Cape's route-maps showing routes in the Micronesian Islands, Pacific Ocean. "You worked there?"

"Indeed I did, on ships off Guam, Rota, Saipan, and Tinian -- from where the atomic bombs flew away to Japan, in 1945. I worked there four of my distant salad years."

Just then, the fuel intake flap on the left wing popped open.

We turned back, circled above Crab Orchard Lake, where first I lay atop houseboat roofs and marveled at Life's imagined coming-attractions. We landed at Marion. Workers -- a worker -- came out, fiddled with the flap and shot it with WD-40. The pilot left the plane to phone someone. Presumably someone in Cape Cod. Maybe a Kennedy.

I thought, "I am achieving some childhood dream here," albeit one of my vaguer ones. My bank account may send bankers into laughter but, hey, I have just flown to Chicago to meet my Nephew, Eric, who flew in just minutes before from the Republican Governors Convention in San Diego. (My Nephew is a lobbyist!) And I am now talking with kindred souls from the fabled Kennedy lands, about flying around Pacific Ocean islands. All this while flying Air Cape Cod over Crab Orchard Lake!

My Nephew drove us around Chicago visiting my past and his future. He took us on the season's very last Chicago Architecture Foundation's Architecture River Cruise. Wow! "The tour greater than its name," he says.

"One of the greatest things I have ever done, anywhere in the World!" I said to a man sitting approximately in my lap, in the seat in front of me. "And we ate dinner at Rick Bayless Frontera Grill." I toyed with bringing up eating more than once in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but thought better of it. The pilot returned. The single-man ground crew gave a final squirt of WD-40, and we took off again.

The harvest farm lands soon gave way to the silver glisten of the morning sun on the Mississippi River, and the Saint Louis' Gateway Arch welcoming us to the way West.

"When I was in school at Carbondale, a black kid from Chicago said: 'They are building that arch in Missouri so Illinois can build a giant statue of John Brown with a croquet mallet.' " I said this to a frazzled young woman with a baby strapped to her front. She was the only one patted down in Marion.

"John Brown was..." she started to say, but the plane landed so smoothly it changed the subject and all the passengers broke into applause. The pilots grinned. I drifted into remembering Frank Schmitz, the handsome gymnast from Shreveport, Louisiana, who attended Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and died one Summer crashing a crop-duster into his Father's cotton fields.

"We have so much to be thankful for," a Latino airport vendor said, as she took my dollar for a handsomely labeled bottle of purified Saint Louis Municipal Water. I took a seat in the gate area for Dallas-bound travelers. One of our pilots passed by.

"If we'd had duct tape we could have flown you all the way back to Guam," he said, with a wide grin.

_____

Editor: Wed., Feb. 9, in New Orleans, L. E. J. will be reading at Margarita Bergen's Round Table lunch, Bienville Room, Hotel Royal Sonesta, in the traditionally drunken French Quarter. For reservations, contact Noel Scallan at 504-553-2220, nscallan@royalsonestano .com

Copyright, 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson

You want a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare future storm vermin from your refrigerator? "It'll keep them bugs out'a your icebox, next time, sugar!" says L. A. Norma. Click here for information.

January 2011 / Twenty Eleven Already

2011-01-01T08:39:00.028-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

January 2011

* * *

Twenty Eleven Already

"Great gobs of goose fat," L. A. Norma said, peering over the lip of a much abused champagne glass, "can it really be 2011 already?"

"When just a minute ago it was only the eleventh hour," the bartender said, from behind his rampart of empty Dom Perignon bottles. The bottles marched off down the bar like plump spent soldiers on their way to their cash register billet, and our bankruptcy.

"What the Hell," we toasted, "it is a new year!"

Norma: "The bankers are up, and the wages are down!"

Bartender: "And, Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre' has canceled the entire year. So, drink up sinners, tomorrow is here!"

"God bless the New World Order,"

we chimed in with some fellow inebriate wearing a tuxedo and arm candy -- a woman in a red sequined gown.

"Probably a banker and his trophy wife,"

Norma said, in stage whisper.

"Hey, banker man, what ever happened to that k-y World computer-crises, crashing thingy?" she asked, wagging her finger towards their table, ceiling, bartender, and us.

The man smiled. The trophy-wife smiled. Followers before the bar smiled and addressed the bartender: "She means 2-y-k, not the lubricant."

"That was ten-years ago and nothing happened," the bartender declared, from the fat end of yet another champagne bottle. "Nothing but 'nothing-to-fear' falling off our psychic shield, and fear replacing it in a dirty Winter coat and ugly boots!"

Wine's Muddled Clarity

Norma said, "Boots done marched right over me!"

"Nine-eleven attacked our confidence, and our national cheer became a shiver," we added.

Bartender: "We quaked in our boots and sent our children off to wars without reason or adequate equipment. Folks, our ship of state has been run aground by helmsmen stealing its brass."

"It is not smart to scuttle your own ship just to steal the brass," Norma said, sliding in the back seat of a black and white United Cab bound for Squalor Heights, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, and sleep's sweet kiss.

The cabbie / actor (out of work, of course) said, "May your ragged sleeve be mended by dawn."

The cabbie wore a gray T-shirt that read in black lettering: "My Parents Went to New Orleans And All I Got Is This Lousy I. Q."

Happy New Year!

_____

December 2010 / From La Porte Texas to the Promised Land

2010-12-01T05:24:00.023-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

From La Porte Texas to the Promised Land
(This story reprinted, with new polish, by popular demand.)

* * *

Any port in a political storm

1980 was the year of the last Cuban Boat Lift. I was sailing that year aboard the M. V. Sealand Venture, a U. S. flagged container ship running scheduled stops between Houston, Texas and Rotterdam, Holland. I served as the officer's Bedroom Steward (B. R.) -- a kind of seagoing maid. Not a glamorous on-board ranking, perhaps, but a joyful one owing to the amount of shore leave it afforded.

A good B. R. could arrange to be on such terms with his officers so that all but the Captain would lock their doors in port -- to keep out thieves -- effectively ending the good B. R.'s duties after breakfast. I was a good B. R.

During that year, the Sealand Venture quit the wharves along Houston's downtown Ship Channel and began calling at a new container terminal constructed at Morgan's Point, near the little town of La Porte. This was a place so far out-in-the-boonies it was barely in from the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

The Port of Houston's decision to move their container terminal to Morgan's Point was -- and is -- a great thorny urchin in the belly of thirsty sailors from every corner of the Earth. Now, mind you, near this new terminal existed the dirt-floored, tin-roofed watering hole known as The Goat Ranch. It sat promisingly at the turn at Barbours Cut, on a jutting beachhead walking distance from our new berth. Its services were mercifully available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A hand painted sign with white scrawling letters and random splats and dribbles so proclaimed from the mirror behind the bar: "No Close Never." Nice, but hardly the Calcutta-like lure of Houston.

The town of La Porte -- a meager destination if ever there was one -- lay two miles inland. I took a bicycle with me in those days and it was a pleasant two mile ride over new black asphalt roads separating cow pastures dotted with moss-strewn live oaks and long-horned cattle.

The town, alas, offered sailors little. There was the Space Shot Motel & Bar, a Spanish movie house, Rosetta's Fajita Cafe, and the Gulf Coast Hobby Emporium, with its back-lighted plastic sign proclaiming, "Lionel Trains for All The Ages -- Toot! Toot!"

The lights of La Porte and The Goat Ranch were certainly appreciated, but they were dim, indeed, next to the memory of Houston.

* * *

A savior is found

On a memorable Fall day, at the Gulf Coast Hobby Emporium, I made the acquaintance of Cowboy Castro, a fine looking blue-eyed, brown-skinned local, with a not-so-fine looking purple "pick'em up truck." Crowning the truck's left fender, amid a lifetime's collection of dents and scratches, stood a two foot tall hard plastic statue of Jesus holding a bleeding red heart in His one hand and a chromium pigtail radio antenna in the other.

Cowboy Castro was in the Emporium purchasing tiny red lights for his rolling icon. "To light up the world through the eyes of Jesus!" he said with a proud and brilliant smile. I hired him on the spot to drive me and my bicycle back to the ship.

We followed the red-eyed beacon of Jesus down the new black top road. But we did not get all the way to the ship. We stopped for a refreshing beer beverage at The Goat Ranch.

Later that afternoon (still at The Goat Ranch), the ship's Mate, Bos'n, Chief Cook and I secured Cowboy's commitment to meet our returning ship each and every voyage, and drive one or all into Houston. Cowboy was to wait as long as it took, then round us up gurgling in the morning light, and return us dockside and, need be, help us stumble up the accommodation ladder.

* * *

Shore leave and liberty for all

In those days, Houston was a shining alabaster city undulating on a succulent pool of booming oil prices. An anything-goes Babylon of the U. S. Gulf. Cowboy Castro's purple "pick'em up" was our winged angel carrying us to our just reward.

Despite loudly professed religiosity, and being on "extended break" from Texas A. & M., Cowboy performed his duties well. Even, in time, joining our romps in-port out of La Porte.

Our favorite Houston destination was a long gray building along Westheimer Drive named The Green Door. Neon tubing atop its flat roof showed chicken heads kissing among flashing red hearts and green dollar bills.

A row of green doors awaited the weary traveler along a low-slung front porch. Beside each door hung a lantern similar to those used by old-time railroaders. If the lamp was lit green you could enter for a price and talk privately with a scantily clad man or woman behind a plate glass window. By the power vested in money pushed through a slot in the glass, you could persuade your selection to display their many charms. Praise the Lord, it was living porn! Shocking, I guess, but with the possible exception of Cowboy, we were depraved salts and not missionaries.

Truthfully, Cowboy loved The Green Door as much as we did and always arrived screaming Biblical quotes like, "Better to spill your seed in the belly of the whore than upon barren rock!" He would then enter a door labeled "Girl" and, as he put it, "Wax philosophic with the Jezebel inside."

* * *

One sacrament too many

Back at the ship one early December night, Cowboy helped us up the ladder and joined me in my fo'c's'le for a parting drink. After several we passed out.

As the sun rose, we awakened on the deck rocking back and forth against the bulkhead beside my bunk. The ship was gently slipping out to Sea.

"I've been shanghaied," Cowboy hollered. He cursed in Spanish and threw Lone Star Beer cans first at the Gulf of Mexico, on the other side of the porthole, and then at me.

I yelled back, "You Bible thumping Aggie, I don't want a stowaway in my cabin, for Christ's sake!"

The word "stowaway" brought us both up short and sober. He ceased his fretting and we made an agreement to make the best of our situation till reaching Miami, in two days. Miami was our last stop before heading across the North Atlantic to Rotterdam.

Cowboy could walk off the ship in Miami, we figured, and catch a plane back to Houston, with no one the wiser. We settled in and became comfortable traveling companions. He stayed calmly in my cabin drinking beer, watching television, and feasting on food I spirited from the galley.

At night we talked of how lonely Christmas was at Sea, and how Norwegian sailors lashed evergreen trees to their ship's foremast at Christmas time. He told of his family's immigration from Cuba, "Before Fidel," and wondered if he might see the "Crimson Isle."

"Perhaps when we sail through the Straits of Florida?" he asked. I reckoned not.

Passing south of New Orleans, which sits in a hole below Sea level, we picked up Baton Rouge television and saw news films of the huge Mariel Boat Lift washing onto the beaches of south Florida.

Cowboy laughed at how Florida's "gringo governor" greeted Cuban boat people, while literally mopping his brow. Then Cowboy's eyes lit up like the red-eyed Jesus on his purple truck. "Carumba!" he exclaimed. "If I could pass myself off as a boat-person, I could slap-slogan those stupid Florida gringos all the way to easy street."

I was shocked and said so. "How could you, after fleeing Castro?"

"Fleeing Castro?" He peered at me with a prove-it expression and said, "Are you crazy? That Castro was still in the hills when we left Cuba. This Castro," he said, pointing his thumbs at his chest, "was fleeing poverty. And I still am!"

As Cowboy was saying this I felt the ship slow, then go dead in the water. I left him plotting his economic salvation and went topside.

The Mate and Bos'n were walking back from a Jacob's ladder slung over the starboard gunnel. Six sunburned Cubans walked behind them. Off our stern, an unpainted rowboat with an upended oar sluiced in our wake. From the oar flapped a white cloth painted with black letters spelling, "S. O. S."

I followed them, and waited outside the Captain's door till they came out. "Excuse me," I said, "could one of you come with me?" Both shook their head.

"I got'a fight with that drunken Steward over these six extras," the Bos'n said. He turned off towards the crew's quarters. The six Cubans trotted close on his heels.

The Mate shrugged, "Sorry, I've got Federal papers to shuffle."

"You best come," I said rubbing my beard and cherishing the power. "We're in rough waters, Mate. Rough enough to beach us."

The actual power of my mystery was that any ship's irregularity meant Federal paper work for the Mate, and the Mate hated Federal paper work. He came along.

At my fo'c's'le I turned the latch, opened the door and stood back.

"Hi, Mate," Cowboy grinned, lifting his beer can.

"Jesus, Moses and Mohammad!" exclaimed the Mate, slamming the door tight. He looked at me and several words formed on his lips before, "Holy Mother of Christ!" came out.

* * *

Cowboy's second coming

In Miami, officers of the United States Coastguard collected our Cubans. They now numbered seven, with the addition of our handsome, blue-eyed, un-sunburned Cowboy Castro.

On our return voyage we lashed a Norwegian Christmas Tree to the foremast and strung it with yellow light bulbs furnished by the Bos'n. As we hove'round Barber's Cut and slipped up against the wharf all eyes searched the dock. But there was no Cowboy Castro waiting for us.

We found his beat up old purple truck and used his keys to drive ourselves into Houston for Christmas Day. Then, two days after Christmas, as we tumbled down the ladder headed for The Goat Ranch, Cowboy drove up in a brand new blue "pick'em up" truck.

"The new truck's blue," Cowboy explained on the drive into Houston, "because they couldn't find me no purple one." He laughed, slapped his leg and laughed again.

He told us how the Miami V. F. W. had bought him the truck and how, "The gringo governor of Florida got me an appointment to the National Maritime Academy at Kings Point." He grinned and handed the Mate a Lone Star Beer. "I start next Fall, then I'll be sailing with you legal like."

The Mate popped open his beer, rolled down the window and screamed a wild Texas "Wah-hoo!" at three steers nosing a discarded Christmas Tree. "God bless us all," he said, and pulled his head into the cab. "Welcome to The Promised Land!"
_____
Copr. 2010, Leonard Earl Johnson

Want a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face for your memory board, or to scare off future storm vermin from your refrigerator? "It'll keep them bugs out'a your icebox, next time, sugar!" ~ L. A. Norma. If you do, click here for more information: LEJ.org Magnet.

November 2010 / Where Have All The Flowers Gone

2010-11-01T04:44:00.055-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

Reprinted from Consumer Affairs.com

Where Have All the Flowers Gone

In a Breaux Bridge, Louisiana antique store we recently found a dime store memento from the days when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was America's young optimistic president.

It is a small glazed ceramic rocking chair that looked like it might have been half of a pair of salt-and-pepper shakers. But there were no holes in the top, and there was no mate. It is off-white with reddish brown highlights on the arms and rockers. On the bottom it reads: "c. ARROW 1962 NYC Made in Japan," in black letters. On the headrest are the initials, "J. F. K.," in gold.

We took it home and rinsed it off under the kitchen faucet. It now sits on the stainless steel splash board reminding us of that bright time turned very dark, in Dallas, just days before Thanksgiving forty-seven years ago this month.

* * *

Sun Tzu wrote in THE ART OF WAR, the oldest military treatise in the world: "IF THE CAMPAIGN IS PROTRACTED, THE RESOURCES OF THE STATE WILL NOT BE EQUAL TO THE STRAIN."

A small U. S. military excursion had been operating in Vietnam since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. In the years since his assassination, Kennedy has often been quoted telling television newsman Walter Cronkite that Americans should not continue fighting the battles of Vietnamese. In the same interview he also said it would be wrong to abandon Vietnam. (Politicians!)

Robert S. McNamara was one of Kennedy's touted "best and brightest." He was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and, after the murder, Lyndon Johnson.

McNamara was described as brilliant, cold and calculating. Critics at the time called Vietnam, "McNamara's War." He spent the last half of his life trying to shake that moniker.

Historians generally agree that Kennedy and his brother, Robert, who was Attorney General and consigliere (later, also assassinated), planned to tear up and cast to the winds the vast powers that had grown up after World War Two in America's secret police/intelligence/spy system. Chiefly the Central Intelligence Agency which had deceived Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Today we have six, or nine, or who-knows just how many, secret agencies working to maintain peace, freedom and prosperity. And with the addition of each new secret agency we have found less peace, freedom and prosperity. Ironic, isn't it?

Had J. F. K. lived perhaps we would not have had the soul numbing experience of Vietnam, nor the Fabled Sixties counter culture, nor the right wing's persistent drumbeat to save the nation from it with ever more police-force and warfare.

Before his death, McNamara broke silence on the matter (he said he had kept quiet out of respect for subsequent American leaders at war) and said he, too, thought Kennedy would have ended the war. Ironic, indeed, considering it was called McNamara's War.

But Kennedy did not live and we did fight, and fight, and fight. The right, whether Democrat or Republican, said if we lost this war in Vietnam we would lose something great and important. No one ever said what that great important thing was. Not then. Not since.

After more time than we gave to the Second World War we did lose, and by gum, we lost something very great and very important, peace. In a very real way, we have been at war since. Ever in pursuit of that great and important goal no one can name.

Sun Tzu: "THERE IS NO INSTANCE OF A COUNTRY HAVING BENEFITTED FROM PROLONGED WARFARE."

We just held an important off-year election while two of our massively expensive wars raged in Asia. The economy and deficit spending were the issues most talked about. (Issues are no longer actually "talked" about in American elections. They are, however, referred to with iconic symbol-ry.) Yet hardly a word (or iconic symbol) was spoken about the wars.

Many flocked to the polls voting to remove "the ins" from office. Pundits say because "the ins" were too slow removing problems caused by what? Our latest prolonged war? This one begun, of course, by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their band of what? Warlords? All of whom, incidentally, evaded the Vietnam war and did not send their own children to our subsequent wars.

Demagoguery du Jour

Merely simple-minded demagogues or, as some say, the Bush Crime Family on a greed fueled heedless plunder -- what Texas oil men call cowboys.

They clearly left Washington wealthier. (Nothing new in that.) Not a one of them is living homeless or without health care, nor even a smidgen reduced in their share of this world's rewards.

The Big Mess

No one much noted it in the campaign, but the sordid Wall Street/Banker bailout the Cons hung around Obama's neck was a deal cobbled together by Bush's team. Politicians and press pundits said they should not talk about it because it happened two years ago. Why not? It happened. Legally, maybe. Maybe not. But it happened.

As one politician put it, the arsonists blamed the fire department for arriving too late.

The magic bullet that killed Kennedy, November 22, 1963, not only danced miraculously around the presidential limousine, it shot through the heart of America and it just keeps on going.

Sun Tzu: "CONTRIBUTING TO MAINTAIN AN ARMY AT A DISTANCE CAUSES THE PEOPLE TO BE IMPOVERISHED."

This Thanksgiving please pray for us all. Pray next year you can afford a turkey, and your elderly aunt is not living in a hospital-bed in your living room.

Copyright, 2010, Leonard Earl Johnson
Click here To see or 0rder LEJ.org icebox magnets

October 2010 / The House of the Rising Sun

2010-10-01T10:37:00.024-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

(A version of this story first appeared in June of 2005)

Of Scholars, Brothels and Wine

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

The House of the Rising Sun

L. A. Norma crushed her cigarette on the kitchen dormer's ledge and dribbled the last of her coffee over the scar. "Coffee, best damn restoration there is." She pulled the window closed, and led us down the stairs of Squalor Heights, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans. It was the first Spring day of 2005.

Our plans were to heel and toe it into the nearby-faraway French Quarter and eyeball addresses that might have been, "That house in New Or-leens they called The Rising Sun . . . "

We first learned about the Rising Sun, in the fabled Sixties, from a folk song recorded by Eric Burdon (Animals). The song created a musical Mecca during our college daze. A sort of classroom dream-escape that led Illinois college boys to drive to New Orleans for a randy weekend in search of . . .

* * *

After diligent research and a ten-cent martini lunch at Bacco, on Chartres, our leg work netted three addresses with possible connections to the House of the Rising Sun. The staid Historic New Orleans Collection owned one of them, at 535-37 rue Conti. Once, this site housed a hotel named House of the Rising sun. Today it is a fine and proper exhibition hall and storage annex to the Collection's Williams Research Center, also on rue Chartres. This site is the cause for much of the current speculation about "That house in New Orleans."

The Williams Research Center was an experience like college must have been for those who actually attended their classes. Hard-but-comfy straight-backed wooden chairs sat around well lighted tables, inside a room quiet, clean and serene. Save for the occasional loon bobbing about and bumping into the furniture while in pursuit of their own elusive truths. Such are the secondary rewards of library visits every where.

"Must you make such a racket?" L. A. Norma asked. The lanky youth glared back at her and said, "Yes."

The Williams Center's Pamela D. Arceneaux assured us, with the firm voice of a research librarian, "No ironclad evidence existed of any such Rising Sun ever existing."

"Not as she would ever know," Norma whispered, with a slight down turn of her eyes and nose.

Actually she would know. Arceneaux had been quoted on this very subject in many recent books and magazine articles. Because? During the annexe's renovation a multitude of rouge pots and wine bottles were found to have been discarded under the building over the past few hundred years. Naive drylanders writing in distant publications concluded these were indications of a certain joie de la vie in old New Orleans.

Not so, saith Pamela D. Arceneaux :

"I have made a study of the history of prostitution in New Orleans and have often confronted the perennial question, 'Where is the House of the Rising Sun?' without finding a satisfactory answer.

"Although it is generally assumed that the singer is referring to a brothel, there is actually nothing in the lyrics that indicate that the 'house' is a brothel. Many knowledgeable persons have conjectured that a better case can be made for either a gambling hall or a prison; however, to paraphrase Freud: sometimes lyrics are just lyrics."

Not to mention that one would likely find discarded pots and bottles under any building in New Orleans.

The second site we found named Rising Sun was an 1800's coffee house, at #9 Old Levee Street -- now 115 Decatur. From my own personal experience, more than a century and a half later as a Son of the Sea, I am inclined to place a small bet on this upper Decatur neighborhood being the site.

"It would surely have held similarities to Decatur Street, today," Norma said, as she placed her Camel Cigarette back in its package.

The third site was at 826-32 rue Saint Louis. It is listed in BIZARRE NEW ORLEANS, by Frank G. Fox, as having been owned, from 1862 to 1874, by a Marianne LeSoleil Levant -- a name that loosely translates from French to English as, "Rising Sun." Maybe. But my money stays on the coffee shop at 115 Decatur.

What is now the Williams Center's new annex was destroyed by fire in 1822. It had been a hotel by the name, House of the Rising Sun, for the preceding thirteen months. But it is not thought to have been a house of ill repute. It was a parking garage, in 1992, at the time of purchase by the Historic New Orleans Collection.

History can be a fickle pickle and no more confirming evidence than that exists as to where -- or even if -- such a house existed.

We think it did.

"Several of them always exist," Norma said, as we stepped out onto Chartres. She lit a Camel, and added through its smoke plume, "Ask Senator David Vitter, Republican from Louisiana!"
Copyright, Leonard Earl Johnson, 2010

* * *

more Yours Truly in a Swamp at

www.LEJ.org

Note: LEJ in ConsumerAffairs.com
New Orleans: Three Years Later
A Katrina refugee pays a return visit
By Leonard Earl Johnson

September 2010 / Be A New Orleanian Where Ever You Are

2010-09-01T09:36:00.122-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

Reprinted from Consumer Affairs.com

September 2010

* * *

Be a New Orleanian Where Ever You Are!

"Where were you," asked the bartender, "when the levees broke?" The bar he tended was the great art deco bar, Sazerac, at the Hotel Roosevelt.

"In historic downtown New Orleans," as I used to hear the WWL radio announcers say over the 1950's, "fifty-thousand-watt voice of New Orleans," when I was doing time for the Illinois Board of Education. And New Orleans was a dream yet to come true.

"Where was I when the levees broke in New Orleans?

"Hammond!

"I left late, long after the mayor's mandatory evacuation. Most everyone I knew had already gone. And I don't drive. I got a ride out that Sunday evening, as the storm was moving in. The winds licked at our wheels as we drove across the bridges down near the Rigolets."

"The Rigolets?" He sat a fresh bottle on the bar, then refilled my glass. "Not a good place to be when a hurricane's coming."

"No," L. A. Norma said, walking up to the bar. She was returning from her cigarette break out on Baronne Street, "swapping lies with the doorman."

Norma told us she, "Left at the television's first rumblings. Even then I had the good sense to go west."

"When we left all roads out were closed," I said, "but those going east.

"A friendly policeman told us we could turn west later, after we got out of Town. We were among the last to leave -- over bridges that washed out soon after.

"You know, we traveled the very path the storm took. But didn't know it, of course."

"So, I was in Hammond, Louisiana the next day when the levees broke. Hammond took a bad hit, too. No flooding, but for days we had no news. No papers, no phones, no electricity. For a week, maybe more.

"It was fast, the world changing, I mean. But at the time it was hard to see just what was going on.

"Tell you the truth, nothing I felt during those days jibbed with what I later learned was happening."

"It's been five years," the bartender observed, "and everyday I think of something about that. How the world changed."

"That's post-traumatic-stress syndrome," L. A. Norma said, from atop her self-confidence. She noted her credentials for the bar tender: She had been an appointment secretary at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles.

"I worked for a bunch of doctors," she smiled. He polished a glass.

"When things happening are so huge you only realize them later, when it comes to you in bits and pieces, that's post-trauma!" Norma flipped her new cell phone open. The bartender sat his shiny glass on the bar.

"Yes, I guess so," I said. "I didn't get scared about being on the Rigolets bridge with a storm coming in till a year later.

"The first I knew something ultra-big was happening was when the Pentecostals opened a charity storefront in Hammond. I ate their hot dogs and beans without thinking I was 'needy.' A barefooted lady came in while I was there and asked for shoes. They gave her flip-flops. 'Gee,' I thought, 'what am I doing here?'

"When the levees broke," I motioned for two new glasses, "Norma was in L. A., and I was safe at the hearth of a fallen monk who taught English in Hammond. He was friends with an English teacher I met the year before at the Tennessee Williams Festival. She had a red truck and two psychotic cats. She was the last person I knew with wheels."

"Buses, trains, airplanes?" a stranger sitting to my left asked.

"They had all quit days before. The streets were deserted. Remember Amtrak's story about not being able to reach Mayor Nagin to offer a train out for evacuees? I was at Union Station knocking on their boarded up doors and they couldn't reach me either.

"From Hammond, old Illinois colleagues living in Lafayette took me in for six months. They saved me from FEMA!"

"Think of that three-day-fish thing," Norma said.

"Eventually I rented a small apartment in an old railroad hotel renovated earlier by New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff. Elvis Presley once stayed where now I lived.

"Five years later, I divide my time between New Orleans and Acadiana, and I see New Orleans less as 'The Universe' and more as part of a larger Universe of Coastal Louisiana. Or the Gulf. Do you know half our tourists are Gulf Coast locals? Many is the Cajun child dreaming tonight of that 'playhouse' in New Orleans, 'On The Banks of The Old Pontchartrain,' as Governor Jimmie Davis used to sing."

"A great way to think of The City," Norma said, laying her phone on the bar and punching up this Vince Vance music video, I Am New Orleans, on U-Tube.

* * *

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July 2010 / Oil on The Hill, Part One

2010-07-01T09:02:00.088-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Reprinted from Consumer Affairs.com

July 2010

* * *

Oil On The Hill,

Part One

Emotions along the Gulf Coast have ebbed from panic to despair in the three months since oil from British Petroleum's hole in the bottom of the sea began its ascent up the Hill.

In the vernacular of the sea, "the Hill" is the beach. Everything above sea level is on "the Hill." Hurricane Alex lifted the oil higher.

In Plaquemines Parish -- the parish on the last spit of Louisiana below New Orleans -- Parish President Billy Nungesser, a man of great girth, grit and determination speaks with as much fervor as ever, but now he often modifies his pleas for immediate solutions with modest acceptance that President Obama "gets it," even if he is "not doing it."

The "it" man

What the "it" is is not always the same for everyone.

From the first days after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig fifty-miles south of the Mouth of the Mississippi River, Nungesser has advocated building some kind of berm at sea to hold back the oil he knew was coming. Many think this will not work. Some think it will make the problem worse. Some think it is worth trying anyway.

This Fourth of July, like every day since this story took off running on powerful international legs, Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal has told any microphone that will listen to him that whatever it is not-being done is not being done because of President Obama's poor leadership and not his! Governor Jindal is openly being groomed by the Republican National Committee for potentially new fodder in the presidential power wars.

Not that money will lessen this ecological disaster, but President Obama has secured twenty billion dollars in funds from British Petroleum to pay out to those who have lost their income to the oil gusher. Kenneth Feinberg, who handled disbursements -- from U. S. taxpayers -- following the September Eleventh collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, has been appointed by Obama to oversee the disbursements of B. P.'s money.

Meanwhile, the oil comes in further on the wings of Hurricane Alex, which took landfall late last week near the Mexican/Texas border, hundreds of miles south of Louisiana's coastline. Yet the entire sea swelled and waves crashed across the Gulf, through the oil, and onto America's Third Coast.

And also meanwhile, The cacophonous panic heard on local talk radio has subsided a little. Mind you, few other subjects get discussed besides the oil spill, but the tone is sadly growing more despairing than excited.

For others the problem is old and simple. Four elderly oil men stood outside the City Diner in Lafayette's Oil Center, a 1950-ish development of strip mall-like buildings housing much of the region's oil-related offices, and the shops and cafes that serve them. With a spanking new Lafayette General Hospital tower rising above it all.

The four retired oil men tell each other how necessary their work has been to the well-being of America.

For the birds

Tell it to the brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, brought back from DDT-related near-extinction. The birds' two rookeries are covered in oil and their future once again grim. Or the Sea Turtles. Or the oyster-fishers-shuckers shutting down from Abbeville to New Orleans.

And now scientists with the University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University have found droplets of oil in the larvae of blue crabs and fiddler crabs sampled from Louisiana to Florida.

Recent winds pushed the visible oil slick further towards Texas, too. It is said by those measuring the surface of the plume to now be the size of Tennessee. No one has fully measured the thing under the surface. Remember the dispersant Corexit? One thing Corexit has done is make the full impact less photograph-able. Still it is there and more likely the size of Texas than Tennessee.

President Nungesser

Billy Nunguesser has gained some kind of hero status among coastal residents for his criticisms of slow action from Washington, British Petroleum, and Baton Rouge. Nunguesser was first out of the pulpit with the idea of building up sand barrier berms, a kind of levee at sea. The Governor expanded the idea to connecting existing barrier islands with barrier berms.

The image of levees ringing the natural marshlands that once protected us from hurricanes and fed us and much of America's seafood industry is not all that reassuring. In 2005, during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, on-land levees failed us mightily at holding back the sea. Will they work in the sea?

When you fly over the leak site you come upon the Enterprise, the vessel collecting oil from the wobbly pipe leading down one mile to the blowout. She is working away in spite of high seas. But smaller crafts, like the shrimp boats fitted out as oil skimmers, have tied up in safer ports.

The Enterprise has a huge flame blowing out the ship's side burning off gas gathered along with the oil. When this operation started B. P. claimed it was collecting an amount of oil that oddly matched the amount they had first said was leaking. Of course we all know the figures given out by British Petroleum over the past three months were spun from whole cloth.

Alex took landfall as a force-2 storm and is the earliest Gulf hurricane in almost two decades. Meanwhile, life goes on as usual, sort of.

(This article is reprinted with permission from ConsumerAffairs.com. It is the second part of a series on the Gulf Coast oil spill. For more go to ConsumerAffairs.com)

* * *

_______

Leonard Earl Johnson is a former cook, merchant seaman, photographer, and columnist for Les Amis de Marigny, a New Orleans monthly magazine. Post-Katrina, he decamped to Lafayette, La. Columns past, present and future are at www .LEJ. org

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

Magnet size: 2 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

June 2010 / America's Third Coast

2010-06-01T05:39:00.025-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

June 2010

* * *

America's Third Coast

NEW ORLEANS, 2010 -- It's official -- the oil is coming ashore. Not in great black waves. In smaller globs and of course the well-known rainbow sheen seen in mud puddles and now in a patch big as Texas out in the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans, near the Mouth of the Mississippi River.

The question is, will this unprecedented disaster develop into something as big as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005? Those gigantic hurricanes washed away coastal small towns from Alabama to Texas. They flooded 80 per cent of New Orleans, and caused the more-or-less total evacuation of a great American city, something not seen since Sherman burned Atlanta. The economic wreck was huge.

Will that -- or worse -- now happen because of this volcano of oil gushing up from the ocean's floor over one mile below the surface?

No one here knows, of course. But everyone worries.

In iconic restaurants, just back from the grave's edge after '05, waiters mumble and executive chefs avoid the press. In one exception, at the fabulously good Atchafalaya on Louisiana Avenue, owners Anthony Tocco and Rachael Jaffe stood outside the door with a few departing diners sniffing the oil-fumed night air. Tocco said it all: "We are not a steak house."

Herbsaint is a jewel of foodie fun on Saint Charles Avenue, near Lafayette Park and Gallier Hall. The City's new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, was being sworn in at Gallier Hall and free hot dogs, hamburgers and cotton candy were being given away in the park.

Serious eaters passed up the free food in Lafayette Square for haute cuisine by masters at Herbsaint. C. E. O. and Executive Chef Donald Link was in New York receiving a James Beard award. He never got back with us for a comment. But his waiters and the other customers all expressed grave concern for their jobs and the whole New Orleans economy.

"People come here to eat like they don't back home," diner Joni Friedmann told us. That's not the only thing they do in New Orleans that they don't do back home, but that's another story.

A few days later we boarded Amtrak's Sunset Limited bound for Lafayette, the Hub City of Louisiana's famed Cajun Country. It is also the intellectual center of the Gulf oil supply industry. Such names as Halliburton modestly hang on shingles amid others that provide helicopter services, and food services, and those steel container boxes fitted out for housing on the oil rigs.

The air in Acadiana is clean and fresh. The people held out hope that the coffer dam being placed over the volcano of oil this weekend will stanch the flow.

On Mother's Day there was not a table to be found in any restaurant in Lafayette. The economy boomed here before and after Katrina and Rita, because of the very oil operations now turned so destructive off the coast. Before oil there was fishing. In time there may be neither. Though no one thinks that time is today.

On the train, few had seemed concerned about the oil leak, though everyone in the course of our three-and-a-half hour ride mentioned it. We peered out windows for signs of oil in the wide rivers dumping the Bayou State's bayous into the Gulf. We saw none.

But then news filtered down to Mother's Day diners that the four-story tall coffer dam constructed in nearby Golden Meadow had not been successful in cutting off the oil flow. At Don's Downtown, "The Original Cajun Restaurant," according to the banner over the door, one elderly lady told us her mother knew nothing of oil prosperity.

"She lived off rice and sugar. I guess we could do it again," she said, "But not like we live now." Can't argue with that.

---

Leonard Earl Johnson is a former cook, merchant seaman, photographer and columnist for Les Amis de Marigny, a New Orleans monthly magazine. Columns past, present and future are at http://www.LEJ.org/.

This story is the first of a series on the British Petroleum oil leak for Consumer Affairs.com. For more go to ConsumerAffairs.com
Copyright, 2010, Leonard Earl Johnson

Click here To see or 0rder LEJ.org icebox magnets

May 2010 / We Arrived in New Orleans

2010-05-01T06:35:00.027-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

May 2010

* * *

We Arrived in New Orleans

L. A. Norma and I arrived back in New Orleans exactly on time, but on the bus not the train.

The Mexicali Earthquake caused Amtrak's Sunset Limited to delay departure from Los Angeles while experts, "walked the line," looking for damages to the roadbed. None were found. But before the train got even close to Lafayette, Louisiana -- where we awaited its arrival -- it was running eight hours behind schedule. We went around the corner and booked passage on the next of five daily Greyhound buses to the Land of Dreamy Dreams, New Orleans.

"Our magic carpet made of woe leaves in less than an hour," L. A. Norma said, puffing on a fresh Camel and dispatching us up Lee Street to Don's Downtown, The Original Cajun Restaurant, for gumbo to go. "Best gumbo around, but a word to the wise," she added through a blast of cigarette smoke, "tell them not to plop a big scoop of potato salad in your gumbo." Potato salad in gumbo is a culinary oddity found in the Land of Boudin. Usually, New Orleanians do not like it.

Poste des Opelousas, then Church Landing, then . . .

We were returning from the Catfish Festival in Washington, Louisiana. Formerly Festival du Courtableau (first land grant in the area was to Jacques Courtableau), their annual Spring festival is held in a Creole village established in 1720, when Louisiana was a young French colony. At that time the French-Canadian Diaspora had not occurred and George Washington was not yet born. So why the name?

Why it is today named Washington, a name jarringly not French, was not explainable by anyone we talked to, but we suspect it had to do with pro-Union politics. An interesting, often forgotten fact of Louisiana history is that not all supported the Confederacy. The first president of what grew up to be Louisiana State University, for example, returned North and became Abraham Lincoln's ferocious General William Tecumseh Sherman. L. S. U.'s antecedent was established by the state legislature in 1853. It was located above Washington, at the present day site of Pineville and was named Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy. Sherman was its first president. It moved to Baton Rouge in 1925. So what's in a name, Jacques Courtableau got his replaced with a catfish!

The catfish we had were fried, salty, and heart-stoppingly good, but the smoked giant pork chops at another stand could have inspired a religion. It also snowed! Not much. Just a few tiny pellets of soft sleet that could only pass for snow in a state where snowballs get mistaken for snowmen.

"If you don't look up you will miss it," Norma said, undulating across the outdoor dance floor, lost in the embrace of Zydeco. "Music better'n the day God first made Zyd," she added, grinning and smoking.

We saw the soft snow/sleet evaporating as it fell through the air. "A hard Winter's last gasp," we said, heading for the caramel popcorn table.

* * *

We had not been on a Greyhound bus since the first heady days after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when we decamped to Lafayette to await the receding waters in New Orleans. In those days, if Amtrickle trickled in more than two hours late we caught the bus. Then Bush was running America's trains, and you bought your ticket and took your chances. No one could tell you when the train would arrive, even when you stood cell-phone in hand in front of the arriving train. Now, praise good government, the trains are running on time. Except this day!

"Its Global Warming," Norma said.

During our evacuation, the bus between Lafayette and New Orleans buzzed with post Hurricane news, faith, hope, fear. Everyone talked about houses lost. Lives lost. And personal pot holes on the Road Home. One bus driver told us he lost his home in New Orleans East, but thought he could rebuild it. He always began each trip announcing on the public address system: "There will be no smoking on this bus. That means no cigarettes, no cigars, no Maryanna, and no crack cocaine." And there never was, to the best of my knowledge. But a pint of liqueur commonly poked its charming neck up from passing hip pockets.

On one trip, a very black man with very gold teeth and earrings said, "No Road Home for me." He was living, "Back in Opelousas," where he grew up.

He told us, "The Ville Platte Smoke Meat Festival is the best eatin' festival around."

Years later, in front of the University Medical Center (formerly Charity Hospital), we saw him again. He said, "That Road Home money done come through for me after all. I'm back in New Orleans."

"Great news," we said. We also told him about the smoked pork chop at the Washington Catfish Festival. And how "The Ville Platte Smoke Meat Festival, indeed, turned out to be the best eatin' festival we ever ate at." He laughed and said, "How lucky we are."

* * *

Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners celebrate the unveiling of Marigny's Great Places plaque.

Photo (from left): New Orleans Councilmember Arnie Fielkow; Eugene D. Cizek (Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association's First President); F. M. I. A. President Chris Costello; American Planners Association President Bruce Knight, Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners; and A. P. A. Louisiana Chapter President Stephen Villavaso, F. A. I. C. P., celebrate the unveiling of Marigny's Great Places plaque, in Washington Square Park.

* * *

A black-and-white United Cab dropped us at the rue Royal and Frenchmen Street gates to Washington (that name again) Square Park for the ceremonial unveiling of the American Planners Association plaque recognizing Faubourg Marigny as a "Great Place in America." The A. P. A. was holding its convention at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The plaque recognises Faubourg Marigny's "Strong civic engagement, successful preservation efforts, and recent revitalization of Marigny as an arts and entertainment destination."

The A. P. A. also sponsored something titled the Dutch Dialogues, which brought together Dutch and American experts on water management. Their topics of discussion were the drainage canals from the Lakefront to the French Quarter; the area in and around Bayou St. John; and new uses for City Park and the neighborhoods and environments between London Avenue and the Orleans drainage canals. Hope. The jury is still out on much of this.

Jazz Fest is going on out at the racetrack, and the lovely Confederate jasmine is in bloom all over Town. This year its spicy sweet smell is tainted with oil fumes from a growing glob larger than Cuba sloshing about and onto our protective marshlands, and America's seafood estuary. Eat up before . . .

"We smile because we are lucky," the black man with the gold said. Life in Louisiana is a dapple-lighted Monet painting set to a Bobby Charles soundtrack. We smile because we are free. And because June 25-26 will bring another Smoke Meat Festival in Ville Platte, and another reason to ride The Sunset Limited.

"Life is short," Norma says, "If you can't dance on the edge of your grave when can you?"

For more of L. E. J.'s Yours Truly in a Swamp go to

w w w . L E J . o r g

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

Magnet size: 2 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

April 2010 / Easter After Forty Days of Lent

2010-04-01T04:54:00.013-05:00

L. E. J. as the late Ernie K-Doe

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Leonard Earl Johnson

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

April, National Poetry Month, 2010

"Ain't nothing in the world time and money won't cure."

~ Ernie K-Doe, New Orleans Musician and Emperor of The World

* * *

Easter After Forty Days of Lent

On Ash Wednesday, all over Louisiana, Carnival lifted its joyous mantle, leaving Lent's ashen smudge in its place. At New Orleans Saint Louis Cathedral, business suits stood cheek-by-jowl with crimson capes and smeared-lipstick ladies awaiting priests dressed in the vestments of Sorrow and poised to put The Sign of The Cross on their foreheads, with thumbs dipped in the ashes of last year's Palm Sunday palms.

Outside, a soft rain washed The City.
I have many doubts about theological things, but none whatsoever about this ceremony.
To ashes we shall return.

Lent is the strangest holiday in all the Christian calendar. Also the longest. Should you need reason to be suspicious of religion's political powers, consider this fact:

Carnival's pleasurable length shortens. Lent's, by Canon Law, never does.

* * *

Mardi Gras 2011 will fall on March 8,

making Carnival 2011

almost three weeks longer than 2010.

* * *

Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) is the last day of Carnival's ever-changing season of joy. Next day, Ash Wednesday, is the first day of Lent's never-changing season of suffering.

The Catholic Calendar, by which we measure all this, is not too accurate, what with the date of Easter changing with the moon!

Easter is the end of Lent. It is also a ceremony about Spring. Borrowed from religions that came before Christianity nailed down the European world. It may be the oldest human celebration, and it is calculated (or miscalculated), again by Canon Law, with instruments created with faith in suffering and suspicion of pleasure.

Suffering is not to be monkeyed with in theological calculations. Carnival's pleasures, however, are reducible, by God (or His agents with their inaccurate stopwatches).

Lenten fasting repairs Winter's damage and Carnival's excess, and prepares us for Spring's rebirth. Like the jazz man says, "Blow the roof off the sucker ..."

* * *

It has been a good Lent this year, with sunny mornings and a warm place in the kitchen to read Internet newspapers and sip coffee.

The live oaks outside our dormer windows are a soft young green. Live oaks don't dump their leaves till Spring's new buds arrive (as followers of J. F. K. conspiracies know). Then they change from old dark green to young soft green almost overnight. Today soft-green rules Big Swamp City, and we old alligators lie on the banks in whatever sun we can find dreaming of Easter baskets and Spring.
(A version of this story first appeared in 2004)
-----------
Copyright, 2010, Leonard Earl Johnson

For more of L. E. J.'s Yours Truly in a Swamp go to

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* * *

March 2010 / After the Ball

2010-02-07T10:24:00.073-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

After The Ball

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

March 2010

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo Credit Janis Turk

* * *

Mardi Gras 2010 was the best ever! But, hey, we say that about every Mardi Gras. Except maybe the one in 2006.

This year, with hardly a wound showing, we sparkled in the eye of television sets across the nation. The World? We were New Orleans in our great time of joy.

Proud City
We just won the Super Bowel and elected a new mayor. Now, for Mardi Gras 2010, we dressed ourselves in colorful costumes and paraded Up- and Downtown with a spirit not seen in The City since the end of World War Two.

Plastic beads rained through the air of cold sun-washed days. Replicas of the What'a Bouts' (Saints) hard-won trophy passed on floats and atop bicycles. Revelers dressed as The Trophy. Sometimes the real thing passed held high for our cheering.

Mitch Landrieu, mayor elect, rode in parades with some of the football heroes. And throws worth saving passed from hand to hand. My favorite was a cellophane wrapped condom labeled "Mayor Nagin's Last Day, May 3, 2010, Prevent the spread of bad government."

Poor Mayor Ray Nagin, celebrating in shame and relief, toasted Krewe Kings for the last time from the Mayor's seat in front of Gallier Hall. We recalled the Thursday after The Storm when Nagin and newsman Garland Robinette broke into tears on WWL-radio.

* * *

It must have been something like this year's Carnival when the Second World War ended. Old photographs show New Orleans folks spilling out in the streets glowing with knowledge that a century of peace stretched ahead of them.

Pray, unlike the ironic sixty-five years of round robin war that followed World War Two, today's pumped up City will not end up with the new Charity Hospital morphing into a four-bed clinic inside the world's largest football atrium.

Truths and Goodbyes
During the early weeks of Carnival we traveled to Abbeville -- where Mardi Gras, oddly, never took root. We went for something more somber, anyway. The funeral of Louisiana music great, Bobby Charles, author of See You Later Alligator and Walking to New Orleans.

I would not have believed it had someone told me, when I was a school boy, I would in twilight years celebrate the funeral mass of Bobby Charles, author of songs spilling daily from the radio. Songs that defined Life for me and my Brothers when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education.

How many corn-fed boys told corn-feeding girls, with a wink and a grin,"See you later alligator." Never mind we didn't know an alligator from a crocodile. We knew as clearly as Bobby Charles the metaphor of dangerous traps.

* * *

The Sunset Limited from Lafayette to New Orleans was full. Rubens Mesa and Julieta Diaz, owners of Guamas, a popular Jefferson Street night club and restaurant, were on board, with their own bartender and his girl friend. They were bound for Mardi Gras in the Big Easy. The bar car ran out of everything but rum. We soldiered on.

After The Ball

More Amtrak

Bound for Los Angeles, on the first Friday after Ash Wednesday, we took lunch in the diner of the westbound Sunset Limited. At my table was Robert W. Pfister, 2010's King Okeanos, LXI.

Okeanos is the last New Orleans Krewe to throw glass beads. "We get them from India," King Okeanos, LXI said with pride. He gave us a smll bag of beads and a stack of golden King's doubloons. Can Carnival end any better than that?

The train passed over the huge Atchafalya River and an elderly couple at the table across the aisle from us asked if it was the Mississippi again. This is one of those moments I live for, to bloviate as Leonard the knowledgeable. But this time I had to defer to Okeanos, who is, after all, the God of Rivers.

-----------

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New Orleans Mardi Gras / February 2010

2010-02-01T04:05:00.014-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

New Orleans Mardi Gras 2010

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

February 2010

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," wrote Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire). FEMA need not take a bow. New Orleans survived by such kindness long before the great hurricanes of 2005.

Ever since politicians pulled themselves off their Good Books, whisky and whores long enough to build us a workable airport, tourists have flown through the air of Big Swamp City like Carnival beads over Canal Street

* * *

Since the storms of '05 we have had lean tourist years and somber shopkeeper faces. Not this year.

First tourists came yelling, "What'a Bout Them Saints!" Now they join in The City's traditional chorus of, "Throw me something, mister!" They are here in great number for this Carnival and God bless them for it.

Nothing is as good as Carnival. Not even the "What'a Bouts" (formerly the "Who Dats"), good as they are.

The National Football League says they own the words "Who dat" and we must pay a royalty to use them. So, for now, our millionaire Saints will have to be known as the "What'a Bouts." As in, "What'a bout them Saints?"

This is like the old joke about copyrighting a musical note so that every one who then hits high-c will owe me. Give me a break! Louisiana has been saying "dat" and "who" for longer than the N. F. L. or the What'a Bouts have existed. If anything, the N. F. L. owes the Louisiana language and us a royalty.

One more turn round the dance floor, Captain?

The What'a Bout's win makes us feel a whole lot more like "dat who" we were. Carnival cinched the deal. Carnival is the defining ingredient that makes New Orleans New Orleans.

"Dat, and da port," L. A. Norma said, in dialect, while grinning at a young Greek sailor and blowing Camel Cigarette smoke over a pile of glittering Carnival beads piled on the sidewalk outside the old pâtisserie, Croissant d'Or in "da Quarters."

Welcome home pilgrims. Mardi Gras, the celebration of celebrations uncensored and unlicensed is for the people and by the people. So show me ...

"Maybe the taxpayers should build New Orleans Carnival an arena," Norma said. "The way they did in Rio de Janeiro!"

Brazilian Carnival, like ours, is built around good times (mainly sex, drugs and rock'n roll, but also the samba). In 1984 they built something called the Sambadrome for their samba dance/parades.

Tourism is a cultural exchange

There will be many a Yankee trader awakening at home next week with moss-stuffed voodoo dolls sitting bewilderingly atop their desks. They come dancing off their airplanes to our musicians, our chefs, and our artists. Then they dance all the way back home with our tunes and slang ringing in their ears, not the N. F. L.'s!

We show them our "dis and dats," and they fill our hotels with bead-catching, flesh-flashing, credit-card-slinging kind strangers who have come to Town to pay our bills and laugh at our jokes.

"Ever hear the one about the tourist who ate their paper bag at Antoine's?"

* * *

For all Carnival celebrants the following terms are important for understanding the greatest show you may ever see, MARDI GRAS 2010 in New Orleans!

Ball (tableau ball) - This is a masked party featuring, as entertainment, the performance of scenes representing a specific theme.

Boeuf Gras - The fatted bull or ox symbolizes the last meat eaten before the Lenten season of fasting (the live ox presented in the Rex parade was replaced in 1959 by a paper-mâché version). Boeuf Gras is one of the most photographed sights at Mardi Gras.

Captain - The leader of each Mardi Gras organization.

Court - The king, queen, maids and dukes of each Mardi Gras organization. There is a hierarchy here culminating in Rex. However, no court or krewe is more important than the one you are in.

Doubloons - These are coin-like objects bearing some Krewe's insignia on one side and the parade's theme on the reverse. Doubloons were first introduced in 1960 and created by New Orleans artist H. Alvin Sharpe.

Favor - This is a personalized souvenir, given by organization members to friends attending the ball.

Invitation - This is a non-transferable printed request for attendance at a Mardi Gras ball.

King Cake - This is an oval, sugared cake with a plastic baby doll hidden inside. The person who finds the doll is crowned "king" and buys the next colorful cake and gives the next party. The King Cake season opens on Kings Day, January 6.

Krewe - This is the generic term for all carnival organizations and clubs in New Orleans. Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology are the sources for nearly half the krewe names. Some clubs are named after neighborhoods, while others are named after historical figures or places. Clubs are chartered by The City as non-profit entities and are financed by dues, by the sale of krewe-emblemed merchandise to members (who give them as favors) and by fund-raising projects.

(Mardi Gras krewes are often involved in charity work. But not much.)

Lundi Gras - French for Fat Monday (Mardi Gras is "Fat Tuesday"). From 1897 to 1917, the day before Mardi Gras was celebrated by the arrival of Rex (king) aboard a steamboat. The custom was revived in 1987.

Throws - These are inexpensive souvenirs tossed from floats (since around 1871) by costumed and masked krewe members in response to traditional calls of, "Throw me something, mister!" These "throws" include doubloons, plastic cups and beads with and without krewe emblem.

Ash Wednesday - The day after Mardi Gras and the beginning of the Lenten fasting season.

Hangover - You know this one. Most appropriate for Ash Wednesday.

For more of L. E. J.'s Yours Truly in a Swamp go to

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Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a magnetized original Frank Parsley image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator. Magnet size 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"
"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

January 2010 / Remembering KLJ and Eric Hoffer

2010-01-01T12:33:00.033-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Remembering K. L. J., and Eric Hoffer

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

January 2010

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

In April of last year, this space published a remembrance of Eric Hoffer, the West Coast longshoreman, author and confidant of American presidents. My late Brother, Kay Lewis Johnson, told me how much he liked the story. He thought it spoke well of the troubled and fabled Sixties, when he and I were young.

My Brother was a conservative Republican and a retired Air Force colonel. I was nothing of the sort. Yet we were both fans of Eric Hoffer. And of each other.

Kay Lewis Johnson passed away the Sunday before Christmas from brain cancer. He was 68. This one is for you, Brother.

* * *

Brothers

K. L. J.

and

L. E. J.

2005

and

1945

I met Eric Hoffer in San Francisco, a few years after President Kennedy's 1963 murder in Dallas. The Nation was still young then, but ageing fast. The generation before had won the Second World War and now wanted, like Napoleon, to police the World for the greater good of things and reason increasingly unclear to we the young.

By the time I reached California, America was up to its eyeballs in the Vietnam War. Much of America's youth was in open defiance of our elders -- who were, after all, trying to kill us. And San Francisco had become the sex, drugs and rock'n roll magnet of that tune-in, turn-on, drop-out era.

The Sixties!

They were a time of fables. Eric Hoffer was a living one. He was a son of immigrants, and a longshoreman who wrote books. These were the days when philosopher poets walked among us. He was a self-educated, hard-headed realist who wrote, he said, as a way of experiencing Life. More than once I found him sitting on the waterfront at the foot of Market Street, talking about Schopenhauer and America's China trade. His audience would be another longshoreman or some beguiled tourist.

His tenth book was titled, THE TRUE BELIEVER. It was enormously popular and wildly praised by college professors, whom we also suspected of being in the conspiracy to kill us.

TRUE BELIEVER was promoted by no lesser "true believers" than Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike passed out copies of the book to his buddies. When Hoffer heard about this, he said, "It proved to me that this is the kind of book any child can read."

Hoffer was already a minor celebrity in literary circles when L. B. J. heard of him. The gentlemanly Eric Sevareid, one of television's first talking heads, had him on several P. B. S. and C. B. S. specials airing in prime time for an amazing number of hours of intelligent television. They talked of great ideas, without dancing contests or homey makeovers. They talked about work, war and hardhat politics.

During those conversations Hoffer commented that he thought well of Lyndon Johnson and his escalating war in Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson -- smarting inside the White House over draft-age youths dancing not only in San Francisco but right under his own windows, when they should be in Asia making his war -- did not let the TV set cool before he booked Hoffer in for a five minute photo shoot that stretched into an hour-long, jaw-and-gum-flap session.

Reporters leaned in close to hear Hoffer, the New York born German-American Jew, and L. B. J., the Texas-American President, finding out that they shared a ten gallon hat full of good ideas.

Alas, the world came to see those ideas differently.

We saw the early part of those days on college television sets in Carbondale, Illinois. The vertical hold button on ours was tricky. After a debatable eight freshman years the university president booted me out and San Francisco welcomed me in.

* * *

In San Francisco, Hoffer ate his breakfast in a Polk Street cafe where I came to work as a cook, and philosophize with the geezers. Our ages were roughly 70 and 25.

Hoffer mused that his visit with "the man," L. B. J., in "the house," the White House, might have put his soul in exploitation.

Probably it had, I reckoned. It was a time of exploitation.

"Dance lithely," he said, "they all are."

In 1982, Ronald Reagan (also, not a friend of youthful dancing) presented Hoffer with the Presidential Medal of Honor -- no small achievement for two elderly would-be Union men.

Hoffer died the next year, at age 80.

To my knowledge, Hoffer never retracted his support for the war in Vietnam, even after it had clearly failed.

He said at the time of his publicly announced retirement from wharf and his newspaper column, "I knew when to catch the train, but it is harder to know when to get off."

We now approach Hoffer's years of then, and we got off the train at New Orleans. It was what our ticket said to do. Hey, Eric, you self-reliant old cuss, you think we are the one who put us here?

Copyright, 2010, Leonard Earl Johnson

For more of L. E. J.'s Yours Truly in a Swamp go to
w w w . L E J . o r g

Click here To see or 0rder: LEJ.org icebox magnets

December 2009 / The First Christmas After

2009-12-01T05:52:00.012-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp
December 2009

The First Christmas After
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

by
Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

The bar on Saint Charles Avenue had tried all season to coax yuletide spirit from the Storm-weary City. Their effort was great, but their task was greater. It re-opened a few weeks ago and in time it will again be filled with song. But not this night. This night, December 17, 2005, streetcars are silent and military convoys comprise most all the traffic moving on the avenue or any other street in New Orleans.

All over The City, neither stop lights nor street lights work, and homes are splayed open like huge fish with their innards spilling out for the world to see. Occasionally a cascade of generator-powered Christmas lights pour over some brave heart's intact gallery. They cast faint light over a forest of refrigerators sitting along the curb, wrapped in industrial strength tape and the sweet smell of a Mafia funeral.

Inside the bar, sparkling blue snowflakes dangle from the rafters, along with toy, gray helicopters lifting little plastic refugees from little blue-tarped roofs. The bartender sports a red baseball cap with cotton around the rim. A silver bell dangles from its bill. A great effort, indeed, but the bell rings hollow and the bartender looks weary as some Papa Noel dashing up-and-down The River rescuing the hopeless with the promise of gifts not always delivered.

We have come to this bar to meet an old friend, who has just arrived aboard Amtrak's City of New Orleans from Chicago, that broad-shouldered city at the other end of the railroad track. He rode down on this train as a show of support for Arlo Guthrie, who made famous the late Chicago song-writer Steve Goodman's song, "Riding on The City of New Orleans." Guthrie was on board, too, with his "Arlo Guthrie and Friends" benefit tour for Louisiana musicians. The train stopped along the way giving fund-raiser concerts from Kankakee to New Orleans. Tonight we are making our donation and hearing him at Tipitina's.

When we open the French doors, we spot our old friend at the far end of the bar. He is over-dressed and over-served. He wears a camel hair topcoat, wool suit, silk shirt and tie. A fast-paced Chicago uniform in a Storm-slowed New Orleans parade -- a parade none too swift in the best of times. These are not the best of times.

A mural behind the back bar twinkles with tiny blue lights sprinkled over a snowy hillock of white deer nibbling mistletoe berries dotted among the evergreen trees. The mistletoe berries are represented by tiny red lights.

"Mistletoe's poison," our friend is telling the bartender, "and those berries should be white."

A beer representative from Saint Louis, Missouri, is also behind the bar. He is wearing a sport coat that looks to be made from Anheuser-Bush Beer labels. He is passing out free samples of Red Wolf Beer. My friend takes a free one and lifts it towards us. We move down the bar and accept the brew.

"Must be a Santa after all," our friend says loudly to the largely empty room.

From a green felt covered table, an elderly couple we often saw here before The Storm look up and smile. No one is dealing. His cards are laying face up. We tip our beer towards them. They are wearing evening clothes and his gold studs are set with diamonds that flash back at the mural. She is blond, well painted, and wearing a red sequined gown. She unzips the gentleman’s tuxedo.

We nod and say in stage-whisper that she is an expensive date.

He laughs and says, "How better to spend my FEMA money." She laughs and slaps him playfully.

"Where is the vice squad," our friend asks in a real whisper, "protecting patrons from FEMA?"

"Or the Canal Street Brothel," we say.

He laughs. Our friend is in his cups and hanging his observations with dull Chicago bluntness. "Christmas in New Orleans is not like going over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house, is it?"

"It's a good system," we say, "it's the city that works." He snorts at the irony of laying Chicago's motto up against New Orleans work ethic.

"Cops protecting brothel patrons," our friend says, "and people in evening clothes entertaining themselves for free." We both look back at the couple and laugh. He mutters, "Maybe not free, but a lot less than the cops charge."

The beer rep hands us two more Red Wolfs. He wants to finish and leave. Our friend asks, "Shouldn't you call this stuff Red Riding Hood?" None of us are quite sure what he means by this, but we all laugh the laugh required of our station.

The beer distributor gives us two full six packs of Red Wolf and smiles, "Please, I gotta catch a plane back to Saint Louis."

The bartender says, "Let me put that on ice for you gentlemen."

We get up to go to the restroom as our Chicago friend yanks a hanging blue snowflake from its tether. He bellows at the bartender, "What fathead told you to hang blue snowflakes in this swamp-flooded city?"

The bartender is startled and blurts back, "The fatheads in Chicago who own this bar!" Of course he does not know he is talking to fathead number one.

The Saint Louis beer distributor smiles weakly and moves towards the French doors. Through the glass we see a waiting limousine with rental license plates. The man in the tuxedo falls from his chair. The woman in the red gown helps him to his feet and they stumble outside, balancing themselves by holding onto an article of each other's clothing. They lunge into the limo and motion for the Saint Louis beer man to join them. He shrugs and climbs in.

Coming out of the restroom, we drop a quarter in a slot machine. The last of our FEMA money whirls away. We don't care! It is Christmas and our friend is in town to wine and dine us for three fat days. We have known each other since our fabled Sixties college days in Carbondale, Illinois. He likes having, as he puts it, "A writer bum for a friend." We like having a rich one.

In a wastebasket beside the slot machines, we spot seven paper teddy bear tree ornaments. Each bear has the name of someone lost in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We pick up one and read the name, "Senegal Breaux," printed across the bear's stomach. Underneath is, "August 29, 2005." We gather the teddy bears and put them in our shirt pocket.

Back at the bar, we sip our beer in silence. The bartender is smarting from our friend's harsh words and punches up "Blue Bayou" on the jukebox. He pushes a remote-control button and one of the gray helicopters opens its bomb bay and lets red-and-green glitter fall in our beers.

We stand to leave, and tell the bartender to keep the remaining Red Wolfs. Our friend gives him a one-hundred dollar bill and his business card. "Tell those fatheads in Chicago to go jump in Lake Michigan," he says. "New Orleans is in a swamp not a snowy wonderland."

Outside, our friend stares at the empty curb. "Where the hell's my driver!" he yells, throwing his arms in the air.

We say, "Forget it, let's walk."

He slips out of his topcoat and hands it to a bewildered Mexican man in dirty blue jeans and a T-shirt that reads: "FEMA, Find Every Mexican Available."

We walk beside mounds of rubble towards Tip's. Our friend accepts a paper teddy bear and holds it up to some ambient Christmas light. "Ah, Christ, what am I supposed to do about this?" Then he hands it to a passing pair of National Guardsmen.

"Let's distribute them like hand bills," he says.

It seems all those who are back are heading to Tipitina's, too. We start singing, "We three kings of Orient are . . ." When someone says, "Where is your other king?" We hand them the teddy bear named, "Senegal Breaux," and keep on our way.

"Bearing gifts we traveled so far . . ."
-------------------------------------------------------

Photo credits:
LEJ's image, Frank Parsley, Parsley Studios, Houston, Texas

New Orleans images, Coleen Perilloux Landry Coleen Perilloux Laundry's on-line Gallery

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a Frank Parsley original magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.
Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

Nov 2009 / Part 3 of Below the Level of the Sea

2009-11-01T07:27:00.075-06:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp

November 2009

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

- Part Three -

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Even the Prince of Wales

Stopped on His

Way to a Party in San Francisco

One sunny day after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we stood on an empty Burgundy Street with L. A. Norma. We waited with five or six others for a passing wave from England's bonnie Prince Charles and his new lady, Camilla Parker Bowles. Saint Louis Cathedral School had re-opened in the French Quarter, but little else. The City was in horror-book disarray. Military convoys prowled deserted streets, and we awaited a glimpse of the Prince of Wales on his way to pat a poor little school person on the head.

They passed. They waved and smiled as warmly as neighbors. We could see them very well. They were as close as a Land Rover can be to five or six American citizens standing on a deserted French Quarter banquette. "Without running us down," L. A. Norma said while exhaling a cloud of Camel Cigarette smoke.

* * *

Don't we love hearing our story?

Many New Orleanians found their road back home -- and much of what they had left. We struggled. Praise fell daily about how true our grit. And how foolhardy. Authors cobbled books about it. Poets sang it. Song-writers, amazingly, did both.

One who recently plucked the strings of our heart is Les Kerr, a Nashville guitar player with a troubadour's understanding of Bayou Music City, New Orleans.

Kerr was at The Louisiana Music Factory promoting his very good collection of songs about us. The CD is titled: "New Orleans Set," and one song, "Below the Level of the Sea," would bedazzle any scribe on either side of the Faulkner embankment. It goes: "New Orleans . . . it is a writer's town / You live your life / You write it down . . . and it comes out sticky as the hu-mid-ity . . . and we do it all Below the Level of the Sea."

Another of Kerr's songs captures what the years before and after Katrina and Rita meant. Its opening line and title go: "Pray for New Orleans, if you love her too / from sinners like me prayers don't always get through . . ." Enough to make a poet set down their wine and recall again those poems unwritten.

* * *

We watched in a soft rain for the U. S. S. New York, the most politically arresting ship to come down the Mississippi since Farragut arrived with news that we were no longer a part of the Confederacy. With that news came occupation under Major General Franklin Butler. "Spoons Butler," the dreaded Union Governor of Occupied New Orleans said to have palmed the silver from the table. Perhaps. What he brought to the table was an end to the Union blockade of the port.

New Orleans commerce had suffered greatly from the Northern blockade. When New Orleans fell into the craven clutches of Spoons Butler the blockade ended. The City was saved -- by being lost. It might also be remembered that we did not put up a fight.

"Not till the tourists got here a hundred years later," L. A. Norma said, as quite rain drops slashed through her plume of cigarette smoke.

The U. S. S. New York hove into view. America's newest man-of-war was built at the Northrup Grumman Shipyard upriver from the Moonwalk. She was heading out to Sea, to christening in her namesake city. She had been built from the steel gathered after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

"Now, let us see those health-care-yearning Libs find the spot where Cheney put the explosives!" Norma chortled, through a burst of smoke and fire.

* * *

We Saw Michael Moore's CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY, at Canal Place Cinema.
"Greater truth there than the levees girding The City," Norma said walking from the theatre.

We were on our way to a reception for Florida artist, Mark T. Smith, at the Angela King Gallery on rue Royal.
Unveiled were paintings done on canvas used in the Brad Pitt championed tent-project in the now world-famous Ninth Arrondissement of New Orleans. If you bought a tent your money gave a

poor person a new house prayerfully not-destined to flood some day soon. What you got if you bought a painting is the painting, another good deal.

Next day we attended the ceremony in Washington Square Park presenting Faubourg Marigny (Yours Truly in a Swamp's sponsoring neighborhood) with a "U. S. Top-ten Neighborhood" award from the American Planning Association. Few other than politicians were in attendance.

City Councilmembers James Carter and Jackie Clarkson smiled and spoke of the neighborhood's vision twenty years ago. Faubourg Marigny Board Member, Gene Cizek dashed in from a preservation meeting in Nashville. Faubourg Marigny President Chris Costello spoke. The talented Lloyd Senset and others took us on house tours. We are blessed to have these people working with us. Everyone else was at the football game in the Superdome. "Life goes on," Norma shrugged.

That evening we went to Roy Blount, Jr's Faulkner House reading at the Cabildo (one of those very old buildings flanking the Saint Louis Cathedral). We bought his book, FEET ON THE STREET, RAMBLES AROUND NEW ORLEANS, which he cobbled together in the flood of New Orleans books following Katrina and Rita. We had never read it, but we had met and admired Blount for many years. He is something of a performance artist. His smart good-old-boy accent is his main stage prop. Given the chance, you will do yourself well to go hear him.

He signed the book: "For Leonard, whose meat will never go bad again," a reference to the Frank Parsley original refrigerator magnets sold on the false promise of saving your refrigerator from some future Storm.

Blount said he reads this column. We thanked him for that. He had never said it before.

"You never bought his book before," L. A. Norma said.

Les Kerr / New Orleans Set

Faulkner House Books

Angela King Gallery / Mark T. Smith

U. S. S. NEW YORK

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a Frank Parsley original magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"

~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

October 2009 / Part Two, Below The Level of The Sea

2009-10-03T16:38:00.005-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp
October 2009

Photo Credit: Melanie Pleash

One Week Later

and

The Last Ten-cent Martini Lunch Before The Storm

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

Part Two

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Diaspora here is thy sting

Think of closing your front door one day and having all the Life you lived behind it disappear. You are not dead but the Life you lived is. The people where you drank your morning coffee are gone. The waiters are gone. Your job. The bar where you stopped on the way home. All gone.

We spent the day before Hurricane Katrina at Squalor Heights, our Faubourg Marigny garret apartment. We watched television.

New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, spoke somberly in crisis appropriate but metaphorically odd phrases like, "Get out of Dodge."

This is the Deep South, we thought, not the Wild West.

By this time, The City had issued a mandatory evacuation order but offered no help doing so. Just the advice to "Get out of Dodge" if you can, pardner.

If you can not saddle up and ride off, then write your old S. S. number on your arm with one'a them indelible magic markers. Yup! "This is the real deal," the big bossman reckoned.

Jefferson Parish President, Aaron Broussard, said, "This is the 'Big One,' folks."

A few days later, in Saint Bernard Parish -- the parish below Broussard's -- thirty-five Saint Rita Nursing Home residents drowned after days of pleading for help. One of them was Mother to Aaron Broussard's safety director.

The following week, on Meet The Press, Broussard broke down and cried. He bowed his head in front of the nation and wept. Moderator, Tim Russert, had asked a weaving question laced with cool objectivity. The subject was FEMA. The transcript follows:

Mr. Russert: Jefferson Parish President Broussard, let me start with you. You just heard the director of Homeland Security's explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?

MR. AARON BROUSSARD: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.

I am personally asking our bipartisan congressional delegation here in Louisiana to immediately begin congressional hearings to find out just what happened here. Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired? And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go. We have years to go. And whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership.

It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now. It's so obvious.

FEMA needs more congressional funding. It needs more presidential support. It needs to be a Cabinet-level director. It needs to be an independent agency that will be able to fulfill its mission to work in partnership with state and local governments around America.

FEMA needs to be empowered to do the things it was created to do. It needs to come somewhere, like New Orleans, with all of its force immediately, without red tape, without bureaucracy, act immediately with common sense and leadership, and save lives. Forget about the property. We can rebuild the property. It's got to be able to come in and save lives.

We need strong leadership at the top of America right now in order to accomplish this and to -- reconstructing FEMA.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Broussard, let me ask--I want to ask--should...

MR. BROUSSARD: You know, just some quick examples...

MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn't the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn't they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago.

FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel."

Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.

But I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she's done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn't foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: I'm telling you most importantly I want to thank my public employees...

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: ...that have worked 24/7. They're burned out, the doctors, the nurses.

And I want to give you one last story and I'll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. President...

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

This is a clip of that interview

* * *

"We had tons of good times (at Saint Rita's), and we had one bad time. We had everything one day, and the next day it was gone," Saint Rita's owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano told reporters.

The Manganos were charged, indicted and acquitted. At the national level no charges have been brought against anyone for the shoddy response to Katrina and Rita.
-------------
Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson
For more Yours Truly in a Swamp go to www . L E J . org

Below the Level of the Sea, Part One / September 2009

2009-09-01T10:36:00.009-05:00

Yours Truly in a Swamp
September 2009

Photo Credit: Melanie Pleash

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

Part One

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Katrina and Rita are the names of two giant hurricanes that arrived in that order, in 2005. They ate coastal Louisiana. Then they spit it out gutted and changed forever.

"The great New Orleans hurricane of ought-five," L. A. Norma dubbed Katrina even before it crossed Florida and spun out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rita came three weeks later, and blew towns like Cameron and Pecan Island off the map. Rita took her landfall two hundred miles west of New Orleans, near Lake Charles. New Orleans people usually don’t know it, but Rita was the bigger storm. Big enough to lift the entire Gulf of Mexico and blow out New Orleans first feeble efforts at closing Katrina-breached levees.

L. A. Norma evacuated early with friends bound for Shreveport. "At the first gathering of weather forecasters," she now beams.

"After those storms flooded and re-flooded New Orleans, I blinked twice and flew off to Los Angeles. My children live there. You might say, I got a three month evac-u-cation on the wind."

* * *

Elected to stay

What, me worry? Did we not have the government team of Nagin, Blanco and Bush watching over us?

By the time I saw coastal politicians on every television channel warning against staying, it was almost too late to leave. The whole City had shut down. Nearly everyone with private cars had left.

Mayor Nagin said to the approximately ninety-thousand of us still in Town: "Write your social security numbers on your arms with indelible ink."

Sagacious talking-heads came on between the politicians speaking of ten-thousand body bags "rumored" to be stockpiled by The City.

Yikes! Frantic phone calls. Someone at the airport said, "Last plane done gone." Amtrak and Greyhound’s reservation numbers said services in-and-out of New Orleans were suspended till further notice.

Saturday's sun broke over a blue and beautiful day. Winds were calm. We rode Featherbike to Union Station and found it boarded up. We saw no one on the way to the station. On the ride back to Squalor Heights a lone police car passed heading Uptown along Tulane Avenue. At Canal and Basin four young tourists from Chicago asked, "Which way to Storyville?" We asked if they knew about the storm.

"We came down to see it," they chimed, "on the last train from Chicago!"

They were second-year Northwestern University film students. They booked rooms at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, "Right next to the Superdome," where they clearly expected to be safe. "The mayor and his staff are staying there."

We never heard how the students weathered The Storm, but the Hyatt was severely damaged and four years later has yet to reopen.

In the aftermath, Mayor Ray Nagin was re-elected to office. Governor Kathleen Blanco was not. President George W. Bush left the White House and moved into, not "the" big house in Texas, but a huge house in Dallas.

"Where he will doubtless shelter future storm victims," Norma says. She also says, "Governor Blanco was replaced with the G. O. P.'s 'Governor Lapdog Millionaire' helicoptering like a president to religious rallies."

* * *

Back at Squalor Heights, phone calls offered shelter in Meridian and Memphis and San Francisco and Chicago and Washington and more. We told them all, "No, we are staying. Squalor Heights sits on the highest ground around and survived many storms before this one. Besides, if it gets too bad we will go to the Superdome."

Katrina took landfall on Monday, August twenty-nine, fifteen miles east of The City. Landfall is the arrival on land of the storm’s eye wall. A lot of storm comes ashore ahead of the eye.

* * *

Landfall was exactly seven days after my sixty-second birthday, and a last ten-cent martini lunch.

Ten-cent martini lunches are events organized erratically by fifteen or more ne’er-do-well writer bums who gather for high flying lunches-on-a-dime, at Bacco, in the French Quarter. The lunches are normal prices. The dime is for endless martinis, a libation that has filled many a writer’s inkwell. Before The Storm they happened often. Afterwards not so much. There was one recently. More on it later.

The last ten-cent martini lunch before The Storm was great fun. We gathered at the bar, then filled a long table in a domed dining room with Tuscan-mellow lighting (or was it the martinis?). We drank, ate, drank more, and sang songs we knew and didn’t. What a party! There was not a thought given to the coming Storm. We partied as though the Gods would not mind our hubris. Alas, they did.

Lunch disbanded with plans to regroup on Saturday at the Spotted Cat, on rue Frenchmen. Washboard Charley was playing.

Friday we phoned Dave Parker, a tattooed scribe studying at the University of New Orleans. "Is the Spotted Cat still on?"

"We’re in Baton Rouge," he said, "and won’t be in Town."

"What are you doing there?" we asked.

"Escaping the storm. Haven’t you heard, Katrina’s headed to New Orleans as a category five."

We had not heard. We had stopped listening after Katrina crossed southern Florida, went into the Gulf and turned back towards northern Florida.

The television came into focus and the mayor began to speak. "If you are going to stay, take an indelible magic marker. . ."

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a Frank Parsley original magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.
Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501