All I Wanted Was an Authentic Po Boy

a strange, hungry travel diary with toppings of history and musical analysis and a dash of bitters

On not quite a whim, I flew to New Orleans for Christmas. My friend was sorry he couldn’t pick me up, but he was playing his last Nutcracker.

On the plane I read a book I never wanted to read, a presidential biography, the life of James Monroe, eight hundred pages, the sort of hefty tome that I imagined prosperous men would skim in a recliner, in khakis and leather loafers, and then place on on a coffee table, as manifest evidence that they understood how America became the glorious bastion of representative democracy that it is today.

The story has fire in it, for sure. But it was also an endless roundabout. Arguments with George Washington, ill-managed farms, tariffs, epidemics, slavery “compromises”, diplomatic evasions. We landed. My Lyft driver tried to wish me happy holidays but I was lost in a haze of history. Quickly, I hit my hotel room—key swiped, hands washed, bags dropped. And I was back out the door in search of present experience.

—

I hurried through the hotel lobby, a Multiplex Christmas Orgy. Multiplex because of its six or so seating areas—different theatres of holiday cheer—orgy because all the parts seemed interchangeable. Each area had a tableaux: tree, statue, fake presents, cozy symmetrical armchairs. The statues were reindeer, Santas, birds, in a gold styrofoamy material, probably cancer-causing. I didn’t touch them. Each tree’s ornaments were all of the same color—mauve or red or green.

I was oddly fearful of these pre-fabricated corporate Christmas nooks. I kept veering away from one tableaux, and then nearly crashing into another. As it happens, this is exactly how I behave at a real orgy.

“Have a good time,” the guy at the check in counter called out, assuming I was drunk already.

Glass doors slid open onto the southern night. I turned towards the French Quarter for my tourist’s desire, a Po Boy sandwich. A friend and mentor recently challenged me to write down the things I really wanted out of life, and I was absolutely overwhelmed by it. For now—a sandwich, some chaos, some distraction.

The first encounter was in front of a hat store with a panoramic display window. A man was asking the crowd for area codes. Someone yelled out “215!” He began to rap:

you gotcha philly cheese steaks

and your hard breaks

life’s full of big stakes

It was loud. Someone jostled me, touched me on the shoulder, did I want ... ? No, no, I didn’t want whatever that was, because I was gazing in wonder at the hundreds of hats in the window, from an old-school Mad Men number, which might make you as cancel-proof and sexy as Don Draper, to the dorkiest flannel earmuff extravaganza, for New Orleans’ well-known Arctic weather.

Life was about wearing every hat, loving every hat, I thought, sincerely!, and then immediately Jeremy what the hell is wrong with you, you need a drink or a hug or a long talk.

All these takes

are deep fakes

On to Canal Street. There was an unlit section in the middle for the streetcars, with no lines or lanes, a dark river Styx. You had to hope and cross. On the other side, what appeared to be a hardware store promised POBOYS in red neon. A voodoo sex shop. BURRITOS AND DAIQUIRIS in all caps loomed to my left, the fluorescent light unlivable except for late drunken pit stops. Thin sidewalks waged a battle against swaying walks. I dodged a few characters who looked ready for trouble, and a pack of not especially svelte people in elf costumes.

Was this fun or terrible? I texted my friend but no answer—possibly immersed in a sugar plum fairy.

After a left turn, the situation got wilder. Cars squealed away or screech-stopped to let packs of revelers out of back seats. The roads were mostly torn up—sewer construction—and the sidewalk (already a mockery of level) just became an idea, an abstraction. You walked where you needed to walk. Noise, and music, from every direction. A woman staggered, a couple super-built dudes crashed into me as I was going to be gallant. The thing about chaos is that you can’t really adjust it for your comfort level.

Google said I was at my recommended destination. The doors of the corner bars were all thrown open, creating a Venn diagram of beats and styles, pounding, louder than I could ever have imagined. Peering in the window: a take-out counter with no customers, and two waitstaff leaning in the pose of fuck you for making me work tonight.

—

My search for a Po Boy went on. No more algorithm. From now on, my soul would be my guide. But my soul couldn’t help looking down at my phone again for another suggestion. No, soul!, I thought, just walk, just feel. I turned left, right, right, as if trying to lose myself in a maze, away from noise and revelry, and then out of nowhere, on a corner, a door stood open.

Inside wasn’t full or empty. The right chill vibe?

“Sit anywhere?” I asked, slipping past the door woman, but she was coolly placing a cigarette in her mouth.

I sidled up to a long bar. A well-dressed gay with excellent salt and pepper hair was eating at a high top. Physical proof that I wasn’t the only loner in this world. A drunk straight couple gazed at a fearsome brown platter of fried unknowables. In the back, a few large tables chattered away.

But moments after I hung my nerdy backpack on a hidden hook, I began to sense a mistake. It seemed quiet, too quiet, maybe, now that it was too late, now that I’d chosen. For 8-12 minutes the bartender—white, shaved head, in his fifties or hard-living forties—stood a few feet away from me and stared just to the right of my face, taking glasses out of a dishwasher and rubbing them with a dirty rag. It appeared he was contemplating a philosophical problem, but despite or because of this, he did not seem willing to acknowledge that I existed.

“Hello,” I said at last in a middling voice. Nothing happened, except that a saxophone threw some queasy stylings on Silent Night.

I summoned my courage. A few minutes later, loudly, at the border of rude, I said “Hey? Do you have some water?”

He turned away, did something invisible, swiveled back.

“No,” he said, placing a large full glass in front of me, “we don’t have any water.”

—

I began to enjoy the bartender’s dislike for me.

He allowed me to order, at last, my Poor Boy. Some indecision between shrimp and oyster. The emotion on Bartender’s face as I chose was boredom and again abstraction, like he had to keep some part of his brain busy elsewhere not to die a little inside—exactly how I feel when I see a symphony program with Beethoven’s 5th on the second half.

I pulled my presidential biography out of my backpack, and delved back into the Missouri Compromise, which as you may recall didn’t quite take, and didn’t notice that the tables in the back were clearing out, that the lone gay had left, how the straight couple were fondling their last amorphous fried object. The only thing that grabbed my attention was the smell of bleach. They were mopping the floors around me. Open til midnight, the sign said. Also, the door was still propped, bringing a chilly breeze down the bar.

If they were trying to drive me away, I was ready to escalate.

“How about a beer?” I asked. I tried to look like someone who would nurse a drink for hours and then leave a meager tip. He replied “Yes,” and waited to see who would break the stalemate.

A plate appeared. A giant, split loaf of French bread with an ocean’s worth of fried shrimp on top. If you tried to pick it up, shrimp would rain to the floor. I popped one in my mouth and it had that classic old, frozen ammoniac taste, the flavor you’d expect from a Red Lobster in Peoria. Ah, the true meaning of Christmas, a bait and switch, a classic tale of warmth, frozen through reuse or apathy. This metaphor also felt too easy, a trap. If I wanted anything out of life, it was to avoid these obvious metaphors.

Beneath the shrimp, I started digging for magic sauce—I still hoped, in these circumstances, to know the secret of a Po Boy—and found only a parsimonious smear of mayo. A few lettuce leaves melted into the shrimp, victims of sudden and catastrophic climate change. I imagined how happy the lettuce had been, hours earlier, in the coolness of the fridge. Just two pickle slivers, one towards the far end, another dangling off the near edge, as if trying to escape. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed possible this was the world’s most passive-aggressive Po Boy.

I looked up and caught the bartender looking at me, at last, with curiosity. Is it what you wanted?

I took a nearby sticky bottle of Crystal hot sauce and covered the shrimp with it. The ammonia taste vanished. What was left burned in a satisfying way. The sauce soaked the bread, creating a handy glue or paste, so now you could pick the whole mess up. After ten determined minutes, the sandwich was gone. A giant pile of fries, too, covered in hot sauce, and then ketchup, and lastly (in a nod to European sophistication) mayo.

My friend texted.

As I asked for the check, I noticed a red glop on my gray hoodie, like a wound.

In a flash, the bartender became a good Samaritan. “You need soda water”, he said, firmly. No more philosophical distance. He grabbed a rag, soaked it in soda, and handed it to me over the tall bar with apparent kindness. Our fingers touched, his rough, mine pianist-soft. Was it Jesus soaking the rags?, I wondered, no, now I remembered, the Roman soldiers soaked the rags, or maybe a sponge, was it with wine or water or vinegar?, it was all a jumble, was it at last meant to make Jesus feel better or to mock him?

Anyway, the sign of my empty gluttony vanished. My hoodie was reborn.

—

At the next bar, my friend laughed—“Oh God you went there?!?!?” My soul, untethered from my iPhone, led me to the saddest and most worn out of New Orleans’ many dilapidated leftovers, which figures.

Here, life was newer. Tourists and miscellaneous hangers-on had been replaced by deliberate hipsters. I ordered a “Seasonal Ennui.” There was Korean fried chicken, and edamame, and ‘nana pudding. The down-home abbreviation made me wince.

My friend, swimming deep into a martini, was as charming as always, telling me a redacted version of his life, which neither of us were totally pushing to declassify. Then a metal version of “I Wish You A Merry Christmas” came over the sound system. This launched a kind and sweet person into bitter tales of nominally paid Christmas gigs with choirs that were both preachy and out of tune. Performing the miracle of redemption for possible homophobes on demand. Christian goodness in the era of Trump? A sick joke. But someone that night had gotten lost in one of the famous Nutcracker bits with a crash of dissonance, he said, and this funny memory brought him out of the funk.

—

The next day was all golden sunshine and blue sky. We set out for breakfast. The hangover was a form of wisdom. Breakfast was a way of softening the edges of that wisdom, coming to terms with it.

As we passed along the same streets, my friend said how much he loved this area when it was less itself, trying less hard, how cute and charming it was. Yes. So many beautiful structures had survived the remorseless American desire for newness. It was hard to reconcile the sense of diverse life and gorgeous proportion with the cheap drunk touristy shambles and the third element, which you probably had to say was menace. Menace’s many forms, if one could say that, the hard reality, floods, colonial wars, racism, etc., but at the same time sexy menace, like in the movies when the demons and devils are extra-sexy, that was all part of it.

There were Asian foot massage parlors everywhere, with rows of empty beds, and door attendants, aggressively selling relaxation. Also soap stores with hot Slavic door people, trying to get under your skin, to read your life as if they were psychics (“you flew all the way here for him, honey, I bet”). The plan seemed to be that these personal revelations would guilt you into buying products to clean yourself.

We went into a hushed gallery which turned into a monstrous epic three-floor opulence. French cabinets, chandeliers, rich people portraits, sculptures, boudoirs, gilded samurai suits. At the top floor you found this:

An astounding canvas, far more overwhelming and disturbing in person, in the gallery’s lurid light, a work you could never bring into your home, so New Orleans, the seedy gaze and the referential beauty, the French grand style and the elegance and awareness of history built, if not on, at least adjacent to a moral swamp.

More wandering, more sun, more talking about life and not exactly knowing what to do about it. It was good to think of no deadlines, to be beyond ignoring deadlines. There were no deadlines in this city. Everything had already happened, or would just keep happening. But there was, in fact, a hidden clock ticking. My friend started to look a bit worse for wear, a bit stretched, and my head throbbed—the joy of the walk was about to turn sour. My phone, knowing me, suggested an annoyingly trendy coffeeshop.

It was packed.

At the front of the line was an elderly man with a large walking stick. On the top of the stick sat a green skull with black eyes. And on top of his head, a black Willy Wonka hat with a diorama built in, a scene from Alice in Wonderland. His face, when he turned, was one of the most beautiful older faces I have ever seen, almost as beautiful as Georgia O’Keeffe’s, just the right amount of wrinkle and cheekbone, just the right reminder of youth and all the whittling and thinning and erosion of age had only managed to create something more glamorous. And yet—the skull.

He was attended by two companions, older men but not so old, with none of his glamor, and in the process of consulting with them what to order he clogged up the line in an amazing way.

People began to feed into the place, brunch rush hour, a thousand hangovers awakening, and the line began to snake out the door. Two adorable gays were in line behind me, in fashionable baseball caps, not grungy and sweat-stained like mine, Warby Parker frames, small fashion brand tote bags, the whole nine yards. I felt sure they were doing one of those NYT “36 hours in New Orleans” type things, or whatever. I was bitter. How did they look so good? They also weren’t one of those matchy-matchy gay couples, suggesting a future world of clones having preordained sex with each other. They were distinct, almost too ideally dissimilar. I texted my friend (in an equally clogged line for the bathroom, apparently) that “some gays had arrived” as if this was a newsflash. When he finally returned he seemed nonplussed, as if he only now realized that half of the things I say or think are obvious or profoundly not worth saying.

In the meantime, I’d chatted up these guys. They actually seemed nice, mellow. No archness, as if they were avoiding archness, trying to be inclusive characters in some thoughtful novel. I asked them what to order and they said (mellowly) “we always get the same thing, a flan stick.” Well, well, well! I had no idea how a flan could become a stick, but in the modern world of culinary fusion, I was willing to accept and eat anything. Actually, come to think of it, I was desperate now for the experience of a flan stick, the melting custard somehow encased in some fried or baked Southern charm which would…

Hmm, I was getting horny, that was weird, definitely something to look into with my therapist, if I had one.

As at last the green skull wizard man finished ordering and I approached the pastry case, there was—alas—no flan stick. What there was, and what they had said to me, was “muffuletta stick.”A huge psychic blow. A muffuletta breadstick was too obvious, too easy to imagine. The darker, more disturbing question was how I heard “flan.” Was this some New Orleans distortion field, a blur of phonemes, a drawl of the mind? The LA gays (of course, that is where they were from) were confused by my explanation of this.

I ordered a jalapeño corn cookie, chocolate babka, and the now infamous muffuletta. We didn’t eat any of it. Friend and I pounded six or so delicious glasses of free water and headed out to a table to rest and gaze upon all the awakening people. The man with the green skull was talking with his companions, or minders, or benefactors. The LA gays maybe wanted us to talk to them or maybe not, but everyone stayed at their tables and waited for the day to mature.

Later in the afternoon, when the friend had gone to do some work and I was reading about the Louisiana Purchase, I set all three pastries on the desk. After a couple hours, I looked around for a bite of something, some entertaining nibble, energy to “help me work.” But all the pastries were gone. A day’s calories at least. I had eaten them all, but had no memory of it. Bits of buttery crust lay everywhere. It was not a virgin birth; it was a virgin consumption.

Much of the James Monroe book was more or less the same. Colonial consumption, devouring lands—the insatiable, inalienable hunger of a free people in pursuit of happiness. Consuming, taking, and all the while, act by act, day by day, in a million ways composing a glorious history to help forget.

—-

The next morning, calorie-laden, I was late for a Lyft. As I ran through the lobby, a woman posed for an Instagram selfie in one of the tableaux, fluttering her eyelashes and moving her phone back and forth.

A sensible hatchback waited in the roundabout. I slipped in, to find a driver in a Santa suit. His seat had reindeer antlers, hung with red and green beads. Tinsel everywhere, mini-tree on the dash, Bing Crosby on the sound system, Frosty the Snowman. It took me a minute to notice a smiling skeleton, locked in embrace with the passenger seat in front of me, maybe three feet in length. “Say hi to Eugene!” a note suggested. Is there any city in America that embraces death so openly?

Mixed messages, though, at Christmastime.

An iPad offered me control over the soundtrack. I informed the driver that we were going to do a deep dive into my favorite Christmas tune: Lo! How a Rose, E’er Blooming. He was silent. We started with Sting’s version: a little bloodless, a little fancy. A solo version of the tune, Sting singing nicely enough, though you couldn’t help noticing that the dissonances felt smoothed, and the turn into the minor didn’t quite have melancholy (the absolute essence of this tune is its hovering there, the constant reference of the parallel minor against—a simple trick—but in this case, in its placement in the central joint of a phrase, in its subtle commentary, it becomes the loneliness of Christmas, the wintry barren trees, whatever you want it to be.)

Sufjan Stevens, next, an artist I deeply admire. He added one extra beat which was nice the first verse, less charming the twentieth. The plinking of the banjo, the folking of the tune, extracting it from pretense, from its Renaissance origins, or finding a truer Renaissance origin? His approach renounces sustain. He wants you to hear hypnotic decays of notes, all similar. It creates a sense of waiting, I guess, and you might find this eloquent, but not me, not today, as I explained to the driver—and Eugene of course.

Lastly, as a gag: the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I was prepared to make fun. The hum of hundreds of voices filled the cluttered hatchback. The sun shone; the minor chord spoke. They didn’t do much. They didn’t have to. Pure breath, pure sustain, the philosophical opposite of Sufjan, pure classical music uncool, and when the harmonies got more dissonant, more articulation, a tiny bit more grab and pull. The driver didn’t seem too excited about my explanation of this. But I was fighting tears. The feeling hidden in the almost hackneyed chord progressions flowed over me like water, or wind. How was it possible that this lonely minor chord was understood by every one of those singers at the same time, in the same way?

—

At Elizabeth’s, a New Orleans favorite, we sat under a chalkboard of possibilities. I was kindly lectured by my waiter on the proper pronunciation of Boudin.

Characters entered, stage left. A good ol boy family, two fratty sons in preppy buttondowns, father and mother not really talking. A graying black professor (I guessed, from the glasses and book) with a bunch of antsy, happy kids. A couple out of liberal gentrification central casting, his legs in their high-end denim crossed, rolled up hem, New Balance sneaks, her pregnant in bohemian wear. They checked their phones a lot and stared out into the room instead of at each other.

An un-ignorable family came and sat next to us. One big gay son, flowing hair dyed platinum blonde, looking like a Targaryen from Game of Thrones, if a Targaryen could have fabulous earrings, a Madonna T-shirt, and a bearish Latino boyfriend. His brother, apparently trying to win the most rednecky beard of all time award, held down the head of the table in a tank top and American flag hat. The dad, kind-looking, white-bearded, white-haired but youthful, not quite fat, bespectacled, with a Winnie-the-Pooh shirt that said “Let’s go fuck shit up.” Mother—sensible clothes, no sayings, joyful but worn face, who knows what she’d been through, trying to keep all these men from whatever their tendencies might be? But there they all were, in the spirit of Christmas, with pretty massive political differences one would imagine, sitting down to break bread. I of course couldn’t resist the aww shucks America’s melting pot impulse, how sweet, and all that jazz, or resist the cynical voice, that the melting pot was now a seething stew of rage and resentment. I really wanted to nestle up to the Dad, to let him tell stories and pour drinks and live a nice contented life fucking shit up on top of our American contradictions, shrugging them off just enough to stop worrying, thinking, panicking.

Breakfast arrived.

I have often felt that Southern food is a scam, an excuse for drowning foodstuffs in cream, butter, sausage, ham, etc. A culinary equivalent to overpedaling at the piano.

But on my plate was a trinity as perfect as any Bach fugue or invention. At the bottom these BOO-dan, I’m not sure you could call them the bassline, but they sat down there, earthy, a bit dirty, the mixed textures of rice and sausage with the crisp surface of the fry. Two poached eggs sat on those, yolk running just enough to free itself, both substance and something to fill the gaps. Finally—the miracle I’d not expected—a crawfish etouffée, little toothsome chunks of mild seductive lobstery flesh running through an inexpressibly complex seafoody broth/sauce. To call it a sauce was insufficient; it was a soul, insofar as food has soul. A tremor of chili brought life to the other spices. The breath of the Mormons connected the old tune; this connected the dish.

“Do you need to be alone with that?” my friend asked.

—

My days in NOLA came to a quiet end. Friend had stomach troubles. I found myself at the hipster bar again. Why didn’t I go hear some amazing jazz or whatever? Too much truth, maybe, a reminder, maybe. I ordered a “Sad Boy Club.” which made the bartender give me a look, c’mon man.

When I came out, some guy was doing an amazing Motown thing on the corner; I wandered over, entranced; a truck pulled up, pounding hiphop through its open windows. New Orleans streets offered a constant Ivesian clash of bands, with only brief moments where one music could be heard.

Next morning, Christmas morning, a tree branch grabbed at me as I rushed through the lobby, an ornament fell to the floor. I didn’t stop. Then came a dark reckoning. A blonde young woman at the desk asked me a question. “Oh,” I said, “A couple waters.”

“A Pringles?” she asked.

Yes, I conceded, sure.

“A second Pringles, barbecue flavor?” she asked. Her smile was hard to read, an official smile with some unofficial pleasure.

Ah yes, I said. If they dusted my hotel room, I’m sure the forensics team would find sufficient BBQ crumbs to indict.

“Peanut M&Ms?”

It did come back to me now, maybe, after the third mezcal, that I might have had those too, and who knows what else.

“Just whatever you’ve got is right” I said, desperately, while thinking no no no, Christmas spirit, love, generosity, breathing in and out.

But she kept on. “Two large Fiji waters?” “A bag of pretzels?” “Chex mix?” When I looked hopeless she said “I just want to be sure this is all correct.”

This morning’s Lyft was an unassuming white guy in his 60s, driving on a holy day for what reasons I didn’t ask. The city was religiously empty, an almost serene space, the roads like too big clothes, suddenly too full of room. We sailed through downtown and some industrial spaces, onto a highway.

From that vantage the great old city seemed to go off, flat, like some early pre-anti-Semitic Ezra Pound translation I can’t quite remember, in every direction, the four directions, stretching out, with water at the ends of many of these vectors, waiting, biding its time. Signs for innumerable companies, plumbing, construction, massage, digital services, on and on, and then, lulled by these endless short structures, I was shocked by a monument in the near ground. A massive pole rose up next to the highway, stained somehow, either scraped or rusted or mildewed. What color was it? You had to say it was gray but you knew it was meant to be white.

On top of the pole, two prongs, like a cross maybe, or a fork for some immense crustacean. One prong said La Quinta, the other Wendy’s, way up in the air, floating there.

I was taken by this capitalist cross, by the sheer effort required to erect it, the forging of the metal, the pouring of the concrete, the massive dig in swampy ground, just to say we are here, we want your money. And as I was trying to process that, the visual field gave way to a cemetery—not just any cemetery!—this too was much bigger than you imagined it could be, like if a movie director created a CGI, infinite, inconceivable, overstuffed repository for all the lost souls of all time. We rushed to the airport at 65 miles an hour, with only a few fellow heathens on the road, and gray graves kept coming, ornate mausoleums, gorgeous structures with French arches and crosses and fleur-de-lis, all just sitting there in proximity to the highway like all the signs for all to see and go by and ignore, like an advertisement.

Oh yes, I remembered, I was supposed to be writing down what I wanted out of life.