New Orleans, despite its location in the American South, boasts a playful mix of culture that at once feels both Caribbean and European...
Nathan writes me:
Man, I'm in New Orleans, the first time I've ever been here solely on vacation, and it's everything everyone makes it out to be. What a blast. Drinking, bowling, the swamp, bad decisions, excellent decisions, making friends, alienating people, being told I'm a piece of shit, going home with babes, party bus, great music, silly karaoke, Super Sunday, somehow magically not feeling hungover; feeling really horribly hungover, delicious oysters, old friends, ditching the art party for a ghost tour... I've still got a couple of days left. Aubrey's duck got eaten by a raccoon, though not on my watch. [...]
Nate and I both lived in New Orleans for a number of years, he longer than I, but overlapping for many. Now we're both back in our respective home states.
After being laid off from my day job I spent my final year in The Big Easy eking out an existence sustained by unemployment checks, a little writing, a little art, and a number of part time gigs. Fairly typical of a lifestyle in New Orleans given the crap employment opportunities. Of the latter mentioned gigs the most notable of them was the work I picked up at a 24 hour bodega called Quartermaster delivering food and booze on a bike from midnight to eight a.m. Per shift they paid two beers and forty bucks under the table, but the tips- cash, drugs, solicitations for lewd and illicit acts, etc, were all a don't-ask-don't-tell situation. Or maybe more accurately get asked and tell if ya wanna or don't, whatever, but just get the damn job done and who cares if you're fucked up or what, right? I mean you brought the guy on Decatur his fried-shrimp-on-a-bun and white wine shooters, right??!
Quartermaster was owned by a guy named Miseal, a Puerto Rican living in Slidell. He was young-ish, not quite forty probably, with flame tattoos on his arms which were souped up like he worked very hard on them. He'd inherited the place from its original owner who he'd had some kind of cloudy relationship with. I shouldn't insinuate anything as I could just be turning the wheels of my own imagination, but it wouldn't be the first instance I've seen of a dying old white man bequeathing a small fortune onto a young brown companion.* Above the coffee maker inside the shop hung a digitally printed banner with a photograph of Miseal on it. His big brown eyes stared into the camera, into your eyes, piercing you as he casually flexed a bicep. Quartermaster's slogan was emblazoned beside him, "Nothing beats a good ten inches."
It was very dirty. No upscale joint pays a wage like that unless its employees are immigrants. However nestled on the corner of Bourbon and Ursulines at the crown of one of the world's most intoxicated streets it could easily afford dirtiness. There are only so many places to get a cheap and greasy sandwich piled with deep fried meat and mayonnaise at four-forty a.m. in The French Quarter, and none so conveniently stationed as Quartermaster. Bar kitchens close down at some point in the night, and the twenty-four hour diners pause alcohol service to the preposterously drunk so that people might get on the right track- or at least live to spend more the next day. Quartermaster on the other hand would tip a shot into the mouth of a dying man if he had the clams, deep fry those clams and sell him to his next of kin.
The work was lucrative for what it was. A drunk would be so thrilled with his late night gut-buster that the tips would drop in at 150% and upwards. A twenty dollar tip on an eight dollar bill from someone who could barely stand was not uncommon. Similarly, other service industry workers in the area who were just getting a sandwich or a six pack after their shift tended to divvy off piles of ones from their own tip money, in what seemed to me an expression of solidarity. After all, it was likely we'd both had to encounter the same grubby handed maniac vacationing from buck-fuck Iowa at some point in the evening. If we're sharing our pain it's only fair to share our rewards a bit as well, right?
Unsurprisingly the staff of Quartermaster was a disparate calamity of personalities. Minor characteristics, names, are already slipping just two years after the fact. I want to dredge the recesses of these memories before I forget them all.
Nadine from Illinois I worked closest with. A middle aged shipwreck running the front counter and telephone rattling off a near constant stream of redundancies anyone who'd listen, almost all of which were grim reconciliations of a life lived badly- by choice and by circumstance. Abusive husbands, estranged children, addiction, suicide attempts. Trauma torrented from her ad nauseam. I'd listen with a sympathetic ear to the stories repeat themselves night after night, internally begging to be called out for a delivery, or at least back into the kitchen to help empty a grease trap or something. Her tragedy was that she was a human all too common. She covered her depression with crass sexual jokes, boasted emphatic reminders to anyone who'd hear that she'd been beautiful once, pointing to a fading butterfly tattoo at the top of her sagging tit as if it were some kind of evidence. Most nights she ran the front counter for the graveyard shift, receiving the worst of it from the googly eyed patrons stumbling in each night.
Charles ran the kitchen most nights, and often times continued on well into the morning. A few years younger than me, his work ethic was impressive. I never asked the wage that they gave to cooks, but the kid managed to save up for a Goddamn Mercedes working fourteen to eighteen hour shifts in that place. Black and queer and from New Orleans proper, he moved out to Metairie and started commuting to work there shortly after he bought the car, which seemed insane to me. We'd share cigarettes in our downtime, but our conversation typically didn't go much further than friendly verbal sparring, him threatening to eviscerate me with his cock if I didn't let him win. He threatened to eviscerate a lot of things in fact. Skull-fucking came up fairly often as well. He favored a specific, succinct vocabulary. On mornings that he ended up heading out instead of staying to work overtime he was typically met by one or two pre-op trannies, both of them of the most beautiful I'd ever seen. They'd tap up in six inch heels wearing miniskirts that appeared painted on, throw their arms around him lovingly, caress his face and kiss his neck until they drove off together. Despite so many indicators I am all but entirely certain that they were not prostitutes.
Lumbering through his forties Mike managed the kitchen as a whole and cooked on the rare nights when Charles couldn't come in. Generally brusque and authoritative toward customers when he had to deal with them, in general I appreciated his no-nonsense attitude, which was often something in short supply in an area so saturated with drunks. At the same time though he struck me as a person who longed to beat the hell out of someone deep down, just yearning for someone to give him the excuse. For a long time I thought he'd served in Afghanistan or Iraq during the G.W. Bush administration. I'd overhear him retelling insane tales of violent firefights in Middle Eastern cities that would obliterate the psyche of an average man. Unquestioning in my assumption I attributed this to the genesis of his surly attitude. I was shocked to discover that in actuality he was just an avid player of some Tom Clancy shooter on the Playstation three (or whatever the hell game it was). Stout, shaved bald, and a relatively muscular guy, he sometimes walked with a limp due to a number of knee surgeries. He claimed that the worst thing about his injury is that it prevented him from working out as much as he liked, and that he'd lost his six-pack abs some years back. I wanted to find this funny, but when he said it I heard a genuine shame in his voice. It really seemed to bother him.
Jonathan was thin, sinewy and tight skinned, his muscle definition and every crease was painted onto him as if by some 19th century Russian master. He was an ex-junkie. As opposed to Mike, Jonathan actually had served in the military, the US Marine Corp specifically, which is where he'd picked up his heroin troubles in the first place. He never spoke of either however, and in fact all of this is based on what the other employees at the bodega told me. He carried himself with the quiet dignity of someone who had been through an awful lot and had made it out on the other end sane enough, which lent quite a bit to the allegations. I never quite got a pin on his age. Handsome in a heroin chic kind of way, he could have been prematurely gray in his early thirties or a well preserved twenty five years older. As the manager of the delivery cyclists Jonathan often worked double shifts, filling in without complaint when other hires failed to turn up for work. He had been responsible for hiring me, telling me "It's stupid work. It's easy." the day I met him.
I was fortunate enough to work full shifts with Amy only a small handful of times. Typically I'd only see her at the end of my shift just as she began hers. She was a San Francisco hippie back in its heyday who had moved to New Orleans sometime in the eighties before everyone was declaring The City "over." Us both had the pleasure of experiencing SF during economic droughts while the freaks were at high tide. We hit it off immediately. Always draped in a paisley purple mumu and painted in purple eyeliner she'd explode into the store like an elaborate bouquet and tell me how groovy she felt. I'd never heard anyone call anything groovy without sounding forced and I admired it. I was unclear as to whether she was was genuinely smitten with life or permanently riding some legendary high. It wasn't uncommon for her to waylay me for an extra hour once she took over the cash register. I, wearily downing my payment beer. Her, regaling me with charming enthusiasm on the mundane details of her life, whatever had most recently really tripped her out.
I'm not sure I'd intended to document a bodega's cast list, but the catharsis of writing this down is good for me. Reflecting on Amy alone reminds me of the ever increasing emotional distance between myself and San Francisco, a place I once loved deeply and now can hardly recognize. It's still pretty but its current cultural shift is fully intent on walling away all memory of the playground of my late teens and early twenties. I wish I'd taken more pictures back then. Well...
I won't even get into the cast of homeless, drunk, body selling, steet preaching, and otherwise deviant regulars at Quartermaster. The employees are enough. But who else did I work with there?
Lynn, a Godzilla, it's ogreish general manager, feared, who looked like she'd been squeezed out of a tube with rage. I never once heard her say anything that could be considered remotely polite and so I find difficulty in turning up something kind to say of her...
Ahem.
Pat maybe? Was that his name? He looked like a 'Pat.' He was a pale and ancient queer, circular, boasting a serious alcohol problem. After being fired for extreme drunkeness (reflect on how extreme) I'd see him wandering the quarter blearily in his clover green "Mr. Cash Only" t-shirt which was Quartermaster's policy. He'd be leering into bars with no readable expression but for the pure motor instinct that was still driving his old frame. He'd run the counter for about two weeks of my employ. Later I'd heard he'd run the front counter of just about every business in the French Quarter at some point, always with the same outcome. It was practically braggable.
...And Tina, near silent, a frizz haired and frazzled thirty year old who looked fifty and had been working daytime counter shifts there since she was a teenager. My interactions with her were few and one of the only insights into her world was when she revealed her boyfriend, a muscle bound simpleton who favored overdesigned t-shirts depicting nautical stars, skulls with wings and shit like that. He'd been fired from his job as a bouncer for beating up a teenager. Quartermaster hired him shortly before I left. His name escapes me entirely but he was assuredly a douche and I'm pretty sure he fucked men sometimes, which is great and all except for the fact that it seemed unfair to Tina, who began squeezing herself into a slinky numbers and wearing heels each time their shifts crossed. The most vehemently homophobic slander I've ever heard came out of his mouth on more than one occasion, yet I delivered sandwiches to him at Voodoo Lounge in his off hours and each time I'd arrive he'd have to shoo some young lad off of his lap to get up and pay me.
Sia's hit song Chandelier poured from the open bars of Bourbon Street in the months that I held my position at Quartermaster. Bar bands covered Van Halen and The Doobie Brothers and bounce beats blasted from open vehicles. All of it competing to be heard over the sloppy shanty jazz that the city is known for and permeated with. Jonathan had been right. The job was easy. It was also fun. I'd bring my camera along for the ride, usually shooting in the mornings when the delivery orders started slowing down. In fact when Amy found out about my hobby she gifted me a cache of forgotten disposable cameras which sat covered in grime beneath the counter for likely over a decade. Their soft, grainy photographs with broken and leaky frames felt apt for what I was documenting. Inconsistent memories cracked by drugs and delirium. It was sweet of her. Everyone there, at least for the most part, was sweet to me.
