Comic and Tragic Representations of Authentic New Orleans Culture
By June Pulliam
11/01/2005
Exquisite Corpse, Poppy Z. Brite; Fat White Vampire Blues, Andrew Fox; Bride of Fat White Vampire, Andrew Fox
The day Katrina passed through Louisiana, I was sitting in my Baton Rouge home feeling fortunate. After all, we’re 90 miles from the Gulf Coast and on relatively high ground. And unlike many of my fellow Red Stickers, we hadn’t even lost power in my neighborhood. The lights hadn’t even flickered. And our roof was intact. So while others in the city were reacquainting themselves with the joys of lighting a house with candles and oil lamps, and figuring out just how the hell to open those windows anyway, we sat there in comfort with the air conditioning roaring, enjoying yet another south Louisiana snow day. We were thinking about the many New Orleans residents who had fled, yet again, how they would soon return, wondering why they ever left in the first place since getting out and getting in always proved to be such a supreme pain in the ass.
And then we clicked on the television, and saw the pictures.
Ariel footage showed us where the levies had broken. Water was spilling into the city rapidly. Soon Canal Street became what it was originally named for when at one point 10 feet of water rushed through it. So many people didn’t make it out of the city at all, and it was rumored that the state had purchased between 10,000-30,000 body bags in advance of the storm to be prepared for a doomsday scenario that we don’t expect to see in modern times in the first world. Entire families waved from rooftops, desperate to be rescued. Evacuees were left stranded on the top of the interstate for days before they were taken to shelter in another city.
And we all knew that the city we had loved had been transformed, and we mourned.
Part of my personal mourning involves thinking about novels that embody the old city as it once was, and I hope will be again. Three that came to mind are Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse and Andrew Fox’s Fat White Vampire Blues and Bride of Fat White Vampire. Both are set in the French Quarter, as well as in the broader city, and both represent an authentic New Orleans rather than the touristy kitsch that so often is held up as the embodiment of the city.
In Exquisite Corpse, native wealthy New Orleanian and serial killing cannibal Jay Byrne meets his opposite number when Andrew Compton, another serial killer, escapes his U. K. prison cell and ends up in the Big Easy. Their bloody and decadent romp is set amidst parts of the Quarter rarely seen by tourists, ranging from the more upscale shuttered apartments to the seedier dives, to the tiny A & P on Royal that serves residents. Brite does with the contemporary Quarter what so few writers have been able to do, to give readers a picture of this part of the city outside of Bourbon Street.
But Brite’s characters aren’t confined to the French Quarter. Instead, they spread out through the city. Tran, Jay and Andrew’s most delectable victim, gives readers a glimpse into Little Versailles on the East Side of New Orleans, home to Vietnamese immigrants. Tran himself views his name as emblematic of his own life in that it represents the crossing of boundaries (transgression, transgendered, transsexual). He as a character allows us to cross boundaries with him as well, through different cultures and parts of the city where it seems that residents are nearly crossing through time, going from a world where the necessities of life can be purchased in individually wrapped packages in the grocery store, to a place where is it necessary to keep one’s own chickens. And in some ways Tran embodies the city itself, a place where one can quickly pass through boundaries--the touristy part of the Quarter and one of the more romantic aboveground cemeteries located next to the Desire Street Housing Projects, through black and white neighborhoods, and even through time itself where edifices constructed well before the Civil War are side by side with some of the more horrifying examples of 1970s architecture.
Andrew Fox is similarly gifted in presenting the genuine city to readers. Jules Duchon, the fat white vampire of the title, is a cab driver who has had several lifetimes to hone his familiarity with New Orleans. So when Jules takes a fare through the Quarter and down Canal Street, we not only see the real city as it exists today, but as it existed throughout the 20th century. A particularly poignant moment comes when Jules must replace his entire wardrobe because a rival vampire has burned down his house. He goes shopping at Kress on Canal Street, picking up bargains at its going out of business sale. Kress, like the old K & B drugstores with their purple logos that Jules also remembers, was a venerable New Orleans institution, and today, the vacant Kress store still stands near the Saenger Theater. Jules' trips down Canal Street give him and readers familiarity with the area, the opportunity to mourn other past icons of the New Orleans commercial district such as the old Maison Blanche department store, the infamous place where Ignatius Reilly’s mother was shopping with her son on the day she had her expensive traffic accident which prompted her to toss her 30 year old son into the cruel world to get a job and help her pay the bills.
And Fox’s talent for recreating the city goes beyond merely conjuring up specific places. He is also particularly adept at bringing to life famous New Orleans characters, both literary and real. His first novel, Fat White Vampire Blues, is in many ways a parody of another great novel about New Orleans, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Jules himself is similar to Ignatius Reilly in several ways. Not only do the two share the same rotund proportions (Jules weighs in at 450 pounds), but like Ignatius, Jules is a good Catholic boy who loves his mama, and is also not immune to hatching schemes that even Lucy Ricardo would have declared kooky. And while the plots of each novel are radically different, Fox has managed to take Toole’s very genuine New Orleans character types from the 1960s and transplant and update them to the end of the 20th century. His second novel, Bride of Fat White Vampire, builds upon these characters while incorporating other famous residents who have themselves become larger than life. One of his plot threads involves characters whose feud with one another about the best way to renovate a historic neighborhood that has fallen on hard economic times resembles the infamous public war between novelist Anne Rice and Popeye’s Fried Chicken mogul Al Copeland (concerning the location of one of his more upscale restaurants in Rice’s neighborhood, the upscale Garden District).
Finally, both Brite and Fox are extremely adept at bringing to life one of the most important elements of the city: food. Exquisite Corpse renders a description of the cooking of jambalaya with an important difference, Jay Byrne throws in some human flesh among the bits of sausage and chicken (and also uses Crystal Hot Sauce rather than the more famous and internationally known Tabasco). And Brite doesn’t stop at describing the foods that one would traditionally associate with New Orleans, mainly Cajun and Creole cuisine (and they’re not at all the same, by the way). Through the eyes of her Vietnamese-American protagonist Tran, the reader is also able to sample authentic Vietnamese food, something most of the country is still not familiar with, even to a degree necessary to reproduce bad Americanized imitations of it, as is the case with American Chinese food. And while Fox’s Jules Duchon can no longer eat food, he has accumulated his girth by feeding on the city’s inhabitants, themselves ever increasing in size due to a steady diet of foods rich in fats and calories, which Fox describes in loving detail, ranging from the more upscale cuisines found in Antoine’s, to fried catfish.