Travels with Barley (37 page)

I noticed a cluster of guys off to my right that I figured to be engineering types—one wore chinos and another even had a pocket protector tucked into a white shirt. They were laughing and carrying on, the first animated people we'd seen all night. So I ambled over to see if I could post my Perfect Beer Joint question and was brusquely told by one of them—a paunchy guy with a fleshy red face who talked with a Texas accent—to get lost. The River of Beer had, so far, been a remarkably hospitable place and, for all I knew, these guys (whom I'd clearly mistaken for cordial drunks) might actually have been engaged in some deep moral problem-solving. I retreated to find more congenial company.

That's when I spotted, with a nudge of Jack's elbow, a sight that was certainly more pleasant than the grouches I'd just left. There were two women working the crowd in their underwear, holding large rolls of red tickets of a kind that get you on the Ferris wheel at the county fair.

Well, actually, it wasn't
their
underwear, after all.

A friendly guy standing next to us by the name of Mike Russo, who later told us he was an Oil Patch consultant, explained that this was The Den's weekly lingerie show and that it probably accounted for a goodly part of the crowd here tonight. He was going to explain how a lingerie show worked when the women actually appeared before us and introduced themselves.

“Hi, guys!” said one of them. She then told us her name was Denise and, in case we hadn't noticed, “I'm wearing a body stocking.”

“This is Sandy,” she said of her friend.

Sandy smiled and said “Hi, guys!” too, but she didn't say what she was wearing. We could tell it wasn't much.

“Have you ever been to a lingerie show?” Denise asked me.

I said I had not, which was not exactly true. As I'd waited for Jack at the West Bank Holiday Inn that I'd checked into, I'd peered into the bar there to check out the beer scene and saw a woman walking around in her underwear there. But I hadn't thought that much of it. Rules governing a wide spectrum of social behavior are relaxed in South Louisiana. For example, it's the only place that I know of that has a chain of successful drive-through convenience stores called Daiquiris-to-Go where you can, without leaving you car, load up on a quart of the rum-laced frozen concoctions. (The law technically prohibits drivers from drinking the daiquiris bought there—and was only changed in 2004 to prevent passengers from imbibing.)

Anyway, I didn't want to deprive Denise of the pleasure of explaining how a lingerie show at The Den worked.

“We sell raffle tickets—$5, $10, $20,” she said. “At the end of the night, they draw the numbers and you can either win nothing, a drink, or lingerie.”

“Ah,” I said. “It sounds like fun but I don't wear lingerie.”

Denise smiled at me and said, “Silly, you're not supposed to wear it. You're supposed to let it fall to the floor and kick it aside.”

To which Sandy said, “Like this!”

Whereupon, in a remarkable move, Sandy shrugged about one-third of the way out of the almost-nothing garment she was wearing, and then deftly feigned how, having stepped out of it, she would kick it aside.

This rendered us temporarily speechless and eventually had the hugely desirous effect (for Sandy and Denise) of having Jack, Mike, and me pony up exorbitant sums for raffle tickets, since the money went to a really good cause (Sandy and Denise).

Unlike the grouches, Sandy and Denise seemed intrigued by my quest to find the Perfect Beer Joint and were on the verge of giving me all of their particulars, hoping they might be included in the book, when they realized there was something they needed to tell me.

“One of us is a Bud Girl,” one of them said—meaning she went around, wearing quite a bit more clothes than she had on now, promoting Budweiser at various events. “And as Bud Girls, we're not supposed to do lingerie shows. They don't like it. We're supposed to be, you know, good, wholesome, all-American types.”

I took a quick poll of Jack and Mike and we all agreed that Denise and Sandy seemed like good, wholesome, all-American types to us; that this seemed merely another perfectly valid interpretation of the Beer Goddess model; and that we had not been harmed by our encounter, except perhaps for mild and fleeting arrhythmias brought on by Sandy's feint.

Denise and Sandy then moved on and I noticed that they were greeted quite a bit more warmly by the grouches than they'd greeted me. I noticed, in fact, that the grouches spent lavishly on raffle tickets as well.

Jack and I hung around till they pulled the raffle tickets and, alas, we won neither drink nor lingerie.

And happily, neither did the grouches.

Around nine the next morning, I strolled through the French Quarter looking for morning beer life, aware that a goodly number of bars in and around the Quarter stay open round-the-clock. When I said earlier that New Orleans was only an average beer town, I meant, of course, in beer choice, not volume. I've never seen a reliable estimate, but I'd hazard to say that more beer is consumed in New Orleans during that annual quasi-religious beer bash known as Mardi Gras than Detroit drinks all summer. Think of two million people in the streets and spilling out of bars, pretty much of all them clutching giant plastic cups of lager, and you get the idea.

As a brewing city, though, New Orleans is a C-minus. The city was once home to a large Falstaff plant, and a midsized regional lager maker named Jax, but both died in the Lager Wars in the 1970s. It supports one remaining regional lager maker, a quirky brand named Dixie that has been in business since 1907 and revivified itself a few years back by introducing a few new beers, notably one called Blackened Voodoo, a rare dark lager, that has turned into a popular local seller. North, across Lake Pontchartrain, a microbrewer called Abita Brewing Co. sprang up in the piney woodlands in 1986 and has since outgrown the microbrew label to produce more than 35,000 barrels of beer annually out of a stunning, state-of-the-art automated brewery that I would amble over to tour. Abita makes some wonderfully interesting beers—one called Turbodog, a dark brown ale, and another called Purple Haze, which is an American wheat beer made with a pinch of raspberry puree. Both Abita and Dixie do very well in the South Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast market. But except for them, a handful of brewpubs and craft beer tap bars, the beer scene here—indeed, in all of Louisiana—is pretty much just another extension of the Bud Belt. On the other hand, face it: the long, hot, sultry summers here make it prime American Standard lager territory.

In fact, this day was starting out as a good lager day. It was clear and hot, the sun slanting through a light mist and casting sharp shadows across the Quarter's narrow streets and alleys as it climbed high up over the river. Yet I'd found surprisingly little beer action: of two twenty-four-hour sports bars I'd peeked into, one was open but empty save a bartender drying beer glasses, and in the second, three men clustered at the bar and two of them had their heads down on the counter. Just outside that bar, a Budweiser truck was groaning through a tight turn; a sticker on its rear bumper read, “Drink Responsibly.”

After about a half-hour stroll, I realized the coffee shops were a lot busier than the beer joints. New Orleans, so far, wasn't living down to its reputation.

I had slightly better luck when I wandered into a friendly, open-to-the-street pub named Good Friends at St. Ann and Dauphine streets. There I settled in at an L-shaped counter and found a barman named Tyler, agreeable but exhausted near the end of his graveyard shift that had begun at midnight. I ordered a virgin Bloody Mary and asked Tyler what he could tell me about New Orleans beer culture. He said he wasn't much of a beer drinker and Good Friends wasn't primarily a beer bar and, besides, it had been incorrigibly slow as of late. “Do you know how much I made last night? Twelve lousy bucks,” Tyler said. “I'm burnt out. I think I need to get another job.”

I'd noticed a couple of men bellied up to the other leg of the bar when I came in. As I was explaining my beer quest to Tyler, I realized one of them, an older man with chin stubble and a smoker's pallor, and wearing a jaunty straw hat, was trying to ask me a question. I had to get him to repeat it twice before I finally understood.

“Ah, okay,” I said, as I found myself repeating the question back to him. “You want to know if I'm one of the drag queens in town this week?”

Good Friends was never going to be a candidate for the Perfect Beer Joint. But this was the most surprising question I'd been asked so far on the River of Beer.

Now, it is true I'd gone into training for Beer Year, as I called my book assignment, and that even past fifty, I sometimes flatter myself by thinking that I still have a swimmer's build. But I would've thought my mustache made me a poor candidate for a drag queen. Still, I had the good manners to understand that the question perhaps contained a kernel of flattery. So I laughed and said I wasn't. And I knew then, of course, that Good Friends was a gay bar. Alas, it was mostly empty and, as Tyler had explained, didn't sell that much beer.

About that time, another of the customers, drinking some exotic concoction about the color of the Mississippi, came over and introduced himself as Gary. Gary
was
a beer drinker and gave me a pretty thorough rundown on what he considered to be New Orleans' best places for beer—the Abby nearby on Decatur Street; Cooter Brown's in the city's Garden District; D.B.A. over near the city's Warehouse District. (D.B.A., as you may recall, has a sister bar in Manhattan.)

I asked him if he happened to know which bar ranked as the oldest in New Orleans, thinking perhaps it would also might be a fun morning beer stop.

“I think it's Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop,” he said.

I thanked Gary for all of his suggestions, left poor Tyler a sizable tip, and struck out for Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, which Gary said was nearby.

I found it at the corner of Bourbon and St. Phillip streets in a lovely faded stucco building that literature inside told me had been built sometime before 1772 and was one of the few remaining examples of original French Period architecture left in New Orleans (most such buildings had been devastated by fires in 1778 and 1794). Lore had it that Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre had once owned the building and used it as a front for their privateer enterprises. Lafitte escaped prison by helping Andrew Jackson rout the British in the Battle of New Orleans and, after receiving a presidential pardon, drifted off into the deep Louisiana mists, a figure of enduring mystery and legend here. People are still looking for his buried treasure.

I loved the feel of the bar. But it was inhabited by a sole tourist from Nebraska who had come in mostly to beat the gathering heat while sipping a soft drink. A friendly waitress confirmed that, of all New Orleans bars, it was the one inhabiting the oldest building. But it mostly did a brisk nighttime business, selling a lot of that popular indigenous concoction called the Hurricane to tourists.

There was a bit of the morning left and I walked out into the bright light of Bourbon Street and made a left, heading in the direction of Canal Street, New Orleans' major north-south commercial artery, off of which I'd parked my rental car. Bars in the French Quarter are as ubiquitous as mosquitoes outside the Rock & Sake and I knew most would have opened by 11:00
A.M.
I still might find a gathering of beer-enamored poets willing to share the meaning of life and beer with me and thus give me something to write about.

That's when I ran into Darryl and Sheila.

I noticed Darryl first—he was the one with khaki shorts, a faded New Orleans Saints T-shirt, flip-flops, and a large white plastic beer cup balanced on his head.

He was walking slowly as though the cup were full (which it turned out to be).

Sheila, in matching khaki shorts and what looked to be a baseball jersey, was walking alongside. They were a handsome couple, in their late twenties, I'd guess, all the more striking because Darryl was at least a foot taller than she was. They were in the middle of the street until a garbage truck came around a corner and herded them to the sidewalk. Darryl took his time so as to not jostle his beer.

I caught up with them and introduced myself, telling them in short form what I was up to. They gave me their names and from their accents I guessed they were probably locals. Sheila said they'd recently gotten engaged and hadn't quite yet stopped celebrating.

Darryl stopped walking and looked at me out of the corner of his eye and said, “Damn, man, that's some job you got. You need an assistant?”

I laughed and told him I'd had lots of offers for assistants along the River of Beer.

I asked Darryl what was with the beer on his head.

“Oh, that. Well, it's a bet I got with Sheila here. See, I gotta make it all the way to Canal without spillin' the beer. If I do, well, I get a present. If I don't, I don't get anything.”

I looked ahead and saw the street wasn't all that crowded yet.

“You probably have a good chance,” I said, “if you take it easy. What's the present?”

At this, Darryl started laughing. Upon laughing, he put his hands to his stomach so that his laughter would not upset his rigidly upright body attitude and thus his beer.