Cover Story: Smoke and Mirrors

I like to go down to the Quarter early on weekend mornings and live vicariously through the graveyard bartenders. I’m an alumni. I graduated to Uptown Landlady and now I sleep at night and miss everything. I like to go visit Jack at the Deja Vu around 9 a.m. By then he’s having a beer and considering the night with his handful of hardcore bar flies. Jack’s a very funny alcoholic English major. All my favorites are. Jack has been in the box for over six months now, which is about his limit. Twice a year or so, Jack goes on a bender. For three or four days, he’s a drunken drugged-out menace. His signature stunt is a boycott of all doors. He will only enter or exit anywhere through a window. Even taxi cabs. He wears wigs and barks and will eventually crawl through a window at work and get fired. But Jack has been highly amused at the Deja Vu. It is strategically located for comedy and has floor-to-ceiling windows that you’re supposed to walk through, so maybe Jack will be happy there.

Directly across the street from the Deja Vu is a medium-priced hotel, one block from Bourbon Street. The hotel is full of normal people from somewhere else who wouldn’t know that they’re in the trashier quarter of the Quarter. The Bourbon Street barker for the strip club on that corner emphasizes that the dancers are real women and hollers, “Chicks without dicks! Sluts without nuts!” all night long. A half-block away is the Round-Up, one of the seediest gay bars in town. The Round-Up sells three-for-one cocktails 24/7 and attracts a certain downtrodden, effeminate redneck type. Good ol’ gay boys. Gay bars smell different than straight bars first thing in the morning; they smell like cologne and liquor rather than beer and piss. The Deja Vu smells like bacon because it has a 24-hour diner in there. Half of the bar is fluorescent light and eggs and the other half is flickering beer signs and a few Christmas lights sunken in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. Jack stays on the dark side unless someone wants to eat.

Jack says it’s a good gig. “First I get drunk waiters. They get off at midnight, and by 2 they’re plowed. They swill vodka, chain-smoke lights and drop money everywhere. They do get mugged a lot.” Jack bums cigarettes from his customers and classifies them by what brand they smoke. “Around 3, my second shift rock star bartenders come in. Those girls have an entourage of their own best bar customers, lots of money, a gun in their purse and a coke dealer trotting behind them. I love them. Marlboros and Camels. The strippers get here around 5.” He wrinkles his nose. “They smoke ultra-light 100s and they are glued to their reflection in the mirror behind the bar. They talk to each other through the mirror. They order their drinks through the mirror. What is that about? Around 8 I get Newports; the whores, the pimps and the drug dealers. And that’s when the hotel people are looking for breakfast. It’s a beautiful thing.”

I smoke Newports. Jack’s rock star bartender’s coke dealer had me all figured out. “Coming, you look like a nice white girl. Going, you look like a sister. You got a black girl name and you smoke Newports, so you must be married to a black man, right?” Curious math. I said I got my name and my ass from my mama. Then he says, “Why’d your mama give you a black girl name?” He laughed and laughed when I said that my mother thinks my name is French.

I would never eat at the Deja Vu, but people do. When Jack has to cross over to the other side, he puts on fat Elvis sunglasses. The hotel people typically miss the mischief in Jack’s recitation of the specials and order anyway and get stuck there. Sometimes after a cup of coffee, they start really looking around. They peer into the dark side, their eyes adjust, and the scenery registers. There’s a waiter curled up in a ball under a table with his head on his apron. The girl with the extra long cigarette is discussing and manipulating her extra large breasts in the mirror. She catches their glance through the glass and yells, “I can play with them if I want, I bought ‘em!” A little purse spills off a bar stool and a handgun skitters across the floor. The two guys in John Deere hats are in a lip lock when the food arrives. Jack surveys the situation and nods approvingly, “Chaos and disorder. My work is done here.”

I try to get by the Hideout for shift change. Dean is getting off and Camillia is coming on. The Hideout is on the other end of the Quarter. Down river, deep in local freak country. There are no doors on the Hideout. Being open 24/7, it doesn’t really need a door. It does have drunk flaps. These are easily parted clear plastic strips that keep the heat or air inside. They quickly turn the color of nicotine, and drunks get tangled up in them so they’re sticky. You can peek between the flaps, but you can’t really see what’s going on in the Hideout until you go in there.

Dean has posted a sign in the window that says, “Dwarfs and midgets drink free from 2-10 a.m.” Dean loves the little people. The story goes that Dean’s best friend from birth was a beautiful midget girl, Dee. Dee and Dean were elementary school sweethearts and were the same size for a long time. But eventually, Dean started growing and growing and grew into a 6-foot, 8-inch Greek John Belushi and Dee dumped him. Dean has never found a midget girl to buy a drink for. But there has been a recent sighting. Word on the street is that there is a newly arrived midget dancer named Roxanne who was seen dancing on top of the bar at Snake and Jakes, which only a midget could do, given the low ceilings. I try to flirt with Dean, but I’m 5 feet tall. When he takes my money, he says, “Baby, if you were just a little shorter.”

The Hideout has a sawed-off parking meter on a wooden base that they put next to people who fall asleep at the bar. It’s $5 an hour. Dean and the drunks decorate the sleepers with swizzle sticks stuck in their hair, lipstick in their ears, fingernail polish, a Sharpie tattoo and then hazard-tape them to their stool. Camillia and her dog always arrive early with her Polaroid camera. There is a photographic “Hall of Shame” on the way to the bathroom where snoozing drunks and others live in infamy. Camillia’s dog, Gidget, is a 15-year-old diabetic blind toy poodle (aka Pet Cemetery Puppy) who Camillia loves like a child and carries around like a handbag to work and everywhere else. One night, a bowl of soft ice cream fell out of the freezer onto Gidget, covering her up entirely. Camillia swooped her up and rinsed her off before she consumed a dangerous amount of sugar. But after that, poor Gidget held vigil in front of the freezer in the hallway for days. She ate, drank and slept there. For all the bungling comings and goings of the drunks, no one stepped on her. The Hideout believes in letting sleeping dogs lie.

Camillia has some kind of alien metabolism that came to her after surviving cancer, a cardiac arrest and bypass surgery, and a head injury in a bad car accident. She vibrates at a higher frequency than the rest of us, in reverse. Stimulants put her to sleep and she can run a marathon on Vicodin. She does pass out from time to time, but just for a minute or two. Camillia also works the door part time at Big Daddy’s Gentlemen’s Club. Big Daddy’s legs are a Bourbon Street icon. A pair of sexy legs and heels swing out of a window just above the front door. The famous legs belong to an ancient armless mannequin with droopy stockings and a dry-rotting wig. Camillia named her Lucy Goosey. Having to stand beneath and between Lucy’s legs for eight hours twice a week, Camillia has been on a mission to clean Lucy up.

“She sheds. Nasty bits of bar moss drift down from her all night.” Bar moss is something between cobwebs, dryer lint and Spanish moss. It’s gray, smells bad and clings to the ceilings of the bars in the Quarter. My theory is that it’s cigarette smoke turned to matter.

Camillia says, “You can plainly see Lucy has no arms. You can see the dust matted in her hair and the cobwebs in her crotch. And every night at least one guy wants her phone number, wants a table dance, wants to take her home. Maybe the butt box confuses them?”

Big Daddy’s is the only strip club where you can get a free glimpse of real naked lady ass. They have a long box with a mirror above it where the dancers take turns lying on their tummies and reading magazines and you can see their butts from the street.

“My first inclination was to point out their stupidity and say, ‘That is a mannequin, you moron. Look at it! Look!’ But then I started pretending she’s real. ‘Oh, Lucy won’t come down off her swing much, she’s very shy, says her hair’s a mess. She’d love to dance for you, but she has no arms and can’t swing around the poles. Yes, it is a good job for her, she was a terrible waitress. Can you tip her? Of course you can!’ Some guy gave me 50 bucks for poor Lucy. I bought her new stockings, heels and a wig, and the rat bastards won’t let me take her down and clean her up! I got the good Marilyn Monroe wig and they won’t let me do it.”

I started to ask why, but I know why. The folks who run businesses on Bourbon Street are mean and crazy and cannot be reasoned with. They are widely hated in the service industry due to having the disposition of slave holders.

“So, me and Dean and Jack are going to kidnap Lucy and give her a goddamned makeover. Leila is going to cover the bar for me and said we can bring Lucy back here. I have it all worked out. I borrowed a wheelchair. We’re just waiting for Jack. Do you want to go?”

“Yes! I want to go.”

Then I thought of all the reasons I should not go. The snide grown-up voice of Lady Liability weighing in: “Just how pissed is Big Daddy going to be that somebody stole his legs, new wig or not? Those people are mean and crazy and have no sense of humor. Is this a press opportunity or an arrest opportunity? Aren’t they mob related? Dean and Jack have been drinking since 9, will they have motor functions by noon? Do they have outstanding warrants? Or drugs in their pockets? Won’t all of them be armed? Don’t you have a vacant apartment to paint?”

I hate her.

Camillia went on. “Here’s the plan: Jack wears the Marilyn wig and sits in the wheelchair. We’ll make sure the bouncer sees Jack on the street. I will go into the middle of the club and pass out, which I sometimes do. The bartender knows all I need is fresh air and will get the bouncer to take me out the back, leaving the front door unattended. Dean can just step up on the bouncer’s stool, unhook Lucy and put her in the wheelchair. Jack sticks the blond wig on Lucy and they roll off into the crowd, looking more or less the same.”

“Can I just go in with you?” I asked.

“Oh, no. You can get fired for bringing friends in. Why don’t you apply for a job? Then you can be sitting at the bar filling out an application and watch the whole thing. You can be a fly on the wall.”

I liked that. Flies never get arrested. The wig, the wheelchair and big Nurse Dean sent Jack right out of the box. He found his fat Elvis glasses and he was ready for his close-up. He started channeling blond movie stars: “It’s our ability to accessorize that separates us from the animals! Fasten your seat belts, kids, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” And on and on. True manic episodes are so damn funny. Camillia tucked Gidget under her arm and we tottered off into the daylight.

Walking toward the black hole doorway of Big Daddy’s, I could not believe I was applying for a job at a strip club on Bourbon Street under any pretense. It made me want to giggle and gag at the same time. The high noon sun was most unkind to Lucy with her bar moss-covered arm stubs. The occupant of the butt box was asleep. I was pleased to meet the bouncer, a skinny 60-year-old black man hunched over a cup of coffee. He ushered me into the darkness. I groped toward the bar, “Hi, I’d like to apply for a bar or cocktail position.”

The barmaid raised her drawn-on eyebrows and slid me an application. There were a couple of stages with dance poles and yellowish footlights and mirrors everywhere. The dancers could almost touch the ceiling, so they were immersed from the waist up in a swirl of cigarette smoke. The crowd was small and uninspired, and the girls mostly kept their eyes on themselves through the blur of smoke and mirrors.

I tried to see Dean and Jack wheeling around outside, but the outside world was reduced to retina-searing white light streaming past the silhouette of the bouncer. Suddenly, applause and singing broke out. Middle-aged white men singing, “Roxanne! You don’t have to put on the red light!” And there she was, Dean’s little dream girl, in the flesh and not much else. I had certainly never seen a naked midget before. I didn’t know if it was rude to look or not to look. She had the naughty Catholic schoolgirl thing going on: plaid short skirt, knee highs, saddle shoes, braids. A popular look with the dancers, but they look like horny high school girls. Roxanne looked like an obscene third grader. It was so repulsive and yet so riveting.

I didn’t even see Camillia come in and pass out. I heard the barmaid yell, “Buster, Camillia’s down again.” Buster left his post at the door and the bar was flooded with cruel sunlight. Bar moss crept over the ceiling, nicotine tinged the mirrors and lights, nails were chipped, stockings ran and we all aged 10 years. Buster shuffled across the club to where the cocktail waitresses and guests were squinting at Camillia on the floor. Somebody held Gidget, the dancers didn’t miss a beat, and Buster scooped up Camillia and took her around the corner. They had done this before. Then the great hulking figure of Dean appeared in the doorway. When he stepped up on the rung of the barstool and stretched his arms in the air to unhook Lucy, he filled the entire doorway and threw the club back into blackness. And then he saw Roxanne. Dean froze and dropped Lucy, who landed squarely on top of Jack and knocked him to the ground. Dean floated off the stool and drifted up to Roxanne’s stage. I saw the shadow of a high-heeled leg slide around the corner.

Jack and Lucy were a half-block away at a daiquiri shop. No one seemed to have noticed our heist of Big Daddy’s legs at all. No one was paying any attention to our dusty, handicapped blonde. Buster was back at the door with his coffee, oblivious to Lucy’s escape. Camillia caught up with us and we wheeled Lucy down the street and back to the Hideout laughing and laughing. I love that about the Quarter; you have to really work at it to stand out as a weirdo.

After a bath, Lucy was a new woman. We hot glued on her hair, stockings, eyelashes, panties and pasties and paraded her around the Decatur Street bars. Here it gets a little fuzzy for me. I know we went to Molly’s and the Abbey and Check Point Charlie’s and confessed our crime to entirely too many people, and I know we saw it on the news.

“Big Daddy’s infamous legs were stolen today in broad daylight. We go to the French Quarter for an eyewitness report.” They cut to a reporter in front of the Fool’s Paradise, an open-air bar right across the street from Big Daddy’s, where someone could’ve seen the whole thing. Or worse yet, filmed it. The reporter looked confused for a minute, then there was the flurry of a drunk caught in the drunk flaps and a guy stumbles out.

“Good evening, sir, I understand you saw the whole thing?”

“I sure did. I was watching the girls for a while, the one swinging in the swing and the other one lying down, and all of a sudden the girl in the swing does like a ninja back flip and jumps on top of this blond lady and just flattens her on the ground. They wrestle around for a minute then she throws the blonde into this wheelchair and takes off down the street with her.”

The reporter laughs. “Now, you do know the girl in the swing was a mannequin, right?”

“Who, Lucy? I just bought her a drink.” n

Chantelle Rytter graduated from Pennsylvania State University and moved to New Orleans, where she lived for 10 years. She is captain of the krewe of the Grateful Gluttons, who parade in Little Five Points for Halloween.