Fidel Castro was drawing tourists’ portraits on Jackson Square in New Orleans that summer of 1971. No one much suspected him of being a dictator or anything else. New Orleans has always had its share of strongmen, being the unwitting gateway to the Caribbean and Central America. Thus Castro languidly cultivated his wavy beard and a penchant for catching people’s likenesses on cheap manilla paper all through the infernally hot summer afternoons.

—Mary Elizabeth Gehman, "Trompe L'Oleil"

But then this New World—all of it—is a hopeless hodge-podge. From our first stops among the Gulf islands containing yards of moaning Africans to the long, low benches beneath shade trees where native aboriginals lounged in front of ponderous Spanish bureaucrats, the place seemed to be waiting for an element lost, an ingredient yet discovered, to congeal its mismatched parts.

I am such a part.

—John Verlenden, "Lost Text: Hotel St. Pierre"

It is delightful to lie in bed on a Saturday night, safe behind burglar bars, savoring the call of trombones, trumpets, clarinets, and drums drifting from the open doors of Bourbon Street’s Dixieland clubs—a gumbo of tempos and tunes spiced with shattering glass, with shouts and screams. Sometimes a gunshot, a siren. The sound of the Quarter on a Saturday night is Spike Jones in spades, an outrageous overture to a new week.

—Bruce Henricksen, "The Last Bijou"

So you’re picking your way among the tourists and the trash and yet if it’s home, then anything could happen, and every situation is a stage set, every bar or lounge. All the ghosts of those you most have loved are there, and it is overpowering. The whole place peopled with ghosts, and maybe one or two who accompany you everywhere you go.

—Nancy Lemann

It is a fact universally acknowledged that the very walls have ears. What is not so generally known is that we also have eyes.

If you have ever lived in a historic house, especially in New Orleans, you are well aware that such a building is an entity unto itself, with a personality and a way of expressing it. Normally, we do not give up our secrets. But, my darlings—this one is so delicious!

—Julie Smith, “The House of Mischief”

The change was not, as in literature or even as in film, instantaneous. Flesh and bone had to be worked into fresh relationships. Each piece had to be tooled. The latent memory of each ligament and tendon had to be massaged into oblivion. Then each aching new joint had to be rotated into each raw new socket. Bones had to be bent, the skull deformed, the skin hardened. It could take hours.

Once, after he had revealed to me his secret, I walked in on my friend in the process of changing into a dog. He seemed horribly disfigured and turned to me with the most pitiful and suppliant gaze I had ever encountered. I put my arms around his furry nape as he convulsed with the changes that wracked his body.

—John Biguenet, "Gregory's Fate”

I knew I was handicapped by this dark spiritual landscape and that without light no healthy growth was possible. I remembered once throwing myself on the cold tile floor in the chapel where I prayed, alone and at the close of day. I had watched the sunlight failing to illuminate the stained glass windows (how each figure faded from the heart outward), and it seemed to me that I was next in the great withdrawal of light. Struck by this, I threw myself over the last rays upon the floor, but no sooner had I touched the spot where they fell than they were gone.

—Valerie Martin

Parshal sat on the porch of his rented bungalow on Spain Street in the Marigny, chasing the bitter taste of monkey gland fluid with Rebel Yell. His brain was obsessed by thoughts of his erstwhile girlfriend, Hypolite Cortez, and the fact that she had abandoned him in favor of a woman. Hypolite now lived with an exotic dancer named Irma Soon, a Panamanian-Chinese who simulated copulation with a rock python six nights a week at Big Nig’s Gauchos ’n’ Gals Club on Pelican Avenue in Algiers…

“Hey, Parshal! Parshal Lee!”

Parshal broke out of his trance and saw Avenue Al, a neighbor, standing on the sidewalk. Al was wearing a dyed-purple mohair suit, which he called his “goat coat,” and was propped up on crutches, necessitated by his having taken a hard fall and broken both knees while leaving Teresa’s Tite Spot Lounge in the Bywater two months before. Avenue Al, a sixty-year-old former professional wrestler whose claim to fame was that he had bitten off one of Dick the Bruiser’s earlobes, was suing Teresa for damages. His plan, he told everyone, was to take the money and retire in Cebu City, the Philippines, where he had once wrestled an ape. “Fell in love a dozen times in six days,” he claimed, “and never even got the clap.”

“Come on, Parshal,” Avenue Al shouted, “let’s go! Trumpet Shorty havin’ a funeral for his pit bull, Louis Armstrong, jus’ passed. Be the firs’ dog have a second-line since dat rabid Airedale, Dagoo, hads to be put down in ’71.”

—Barry Gifford, “The Passion of Hypolite Cortez"

Now he dragged the second body to the edge and pushed it over. After emptying a sack of lime over the pile, he went back to the cart again and closed the gate. Then he walked to the edge of the cemetery, drawn by nothing more than the chaotic flames of a tar barrel. He lit a cigarette, suffused with the satisfaction of his crimes. A slave by the name of Robert approached, leg shackles clanking.

“Mr. Tallant, sir!”

“Yes, Robert, what is it?”

“One of those dead bodies you brung. Body ain’t dead!”

—Jarret Keene, "Conjure Me"

The lights from all the lampposts along the Riverwalk had shrunken back into their bulbs. The lights from the GNO Bridge were gone altogether, replaced by two dull, overlapping steel bridges. A blurred halo arched over the riverbend beyond Algiers Point. And then there was the noises of the others—the shapeless masses that lined their path, groaning, growing into form, elbows, arms, bodies—stretching and yawning and sitting up, wriggling free of their blankets and bags, a sluggish chorus, their eyes aching into consciousness, the weight of day, blinking until they became relaxed. And they breathed in the light. And then the sun. A crimson yolk. Whole new men. Time to get going.

—Maker Clark, "Tide of the Sun"

It was way out there, really beautiful. He’d snapped his legs together at just the right time and entered the river with hardly a splash. I was told later that his name was Quinn and he had been a championship swimmer. Even so, there’s not a swimmer in the world who can tangle with the Mississippi in late April and live to brag about it. More than once I’ve seen entire trees rolling out in the channel, their stripped branches like crowds of skeletal hands reaching for the sun as the river carries them away, toward the Gulf.

—Jason Wiese, "The Dive"

Summertime in this city the air gets thick and comes alive, wraps its sickly sweet self around you sticky and strong. We stay indoors or move from one shady doorway to the next like lizards, blinking. At night when the hazy sun has burned out, we come out into the dark heat and move slowly like underwater, which we are more or less, below the levee and the great unseen black river snaking its way around us silent and deep. The little girl worked the tourists every day, dawn to noon or so, then moving from the levee to a shaded step beneath a balcony off the square. I know. I walked the Quarter learning how to make myself invisible, fading into the heavy air, molecule by molecule until I was a seersucker ghost, a white blur wrinkling the air as I passed by. But she could always see me.

—Christopher Chambers, "Summertime"

We were frog-skinned. The liquid air permeated us. Not toad-skinned, not bumpy and rough, but smooth and watery, a mix of flesh and beverage, the moistness of youth, the heavy summer passing through us and not us through it. Although we were. Passing through.

—Tim Parrish, "Summerteeth"

As far as I know, I am one of only four people who have ever seen the picture of Lillian—Evans, my father and herself being the other three.

Why show it to me? I asked, amazed that she had. Love, she told me, is the most important thing in the world. Everyone will admit to this, but I want to tell you something they won’t...

—Josh Russell, "Two Photographs by Walker Evans"

The past keeps rising up here; the water table is too high. All around the Quarter groups of tourists float like clumps of sewage. The black carriage drivers pull their fringed carts full of white people from nowhere up to the corner outside and tell them how Jean Lafitte and Andrew Jackson plotted things out, as if the driver knew them personally. The conventioneers sit under the carriage awning, looking around with the crazed, vacant stare of babies, shaded by history, then move on.

The sun is getting higher, the shadows are shortening, the moisture is steaming off the sidewalks. The Schubert, or Debussy, or whatever it is, has turned into an oboe rhapsody, with French horns and bassoons quacking and palmetto bugs crawling across the tile floor, making clicking sounds that I can’t hear because the music is too loud. If she didn’t love me, why didn’t she just tell me so?

—Tom Piazza, "Brownsville"

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