Southern Legitimacy Statement: Fifty years within fifty miles of Cafe du Monde is surely south of somewhere. Yet in all the places I have lived I have heard people say: “Down here,” prefacing all that may follow as if nothing could be farther south than that spot. I have also been told that above us is the realm of a form of mystical divinity that is both loving, and wrathful, a duality that they always try to explain to us in thirds. It could be said that, in relation to that Divinity, we are all “down here.”
Bucktown Mona Lisa
First, they put a piece of toasted white bread on the plate before lifting that basket out of the deep fryer by its long wire handle, give it a few shakes or bangs and hang it by the drip hooks, but they never leave it there long enough. One reason is getting that plate out to the customer as fast and hot as possible and the other is that those order tickets keep lining up under the slide bar and more fish or whatever got to get dropped right back down into that hot fat because there are only so many fryers and a lot of those people only have so much time to eat their lunch.
Anyway, that’s what that white toast is for, to soak up the fat that’s still dripping down out of them oysters or shrimps or whatever it is that you order. I’m told a dishwasher came up with the idea originally so he, or maybe it was she, yeah probably she. So that she could just push that bread that had soaked up most of that fat right into the trash. And you know, if your restaurant was over the water like so many were, trash like that went straight into the bayou or lake or whatever. It all came down to there wasn’t a puddle of fat left on the plate, making them easier to wash.
Thing is, most of those plates came back with no bread on them at all because the people down here just love that frying fat like Jack Sprats wife and probably think those pieces of fat-sopped toast are like dessert. Now, that brings me around to what I wanted to tell you about Byron’s daddy.
Byron’s daddy was big, what they call a healthy man like most down there in the CBD. He was a lawyer and even did a stint in the state legislature. He had money and prestige. Mrs. O’Leary did charity work around town and wanted for nothing except maybe a little loyalty if you catch my drift but hell, that was life back then. It may still be like that, but I don’t pay much attention to that stuff anymore. Anyway, his father sent Byron to Jesuit and his sister, Bethany, she went over to Ursuline so that tells you something about them, their money, their connections and all.
Hey, did you know back then Byron was planning to go into the priesthood? Yeah, those brothers at Jesuit had him all snowed on the glory of that telling him that with the family money and pull, he would be an archbishop or a cardinal or something one day. That is, until Bethany started bringing some of her girlfriends’ home from the Academy and they all thought he was cute, and it became a challenge among those girls to see which one of them could throw our future pope off the track. That’s what those Ursuline girls called him “Pope.” But none of them could sway him until the night his folks threw a fund-raising party for the mayor out at their place across from Audubon Park, and Byron; he ends up rolling around in the sasanquas with the mayor’s daughter. I’ll tell you one thing for sure, after the mayor’s daughter, Byron never thought about the priesthood again, nosiree.
Oh yeah, Byron’s father. Keep me on track if I get lost.
Well Mr. O’Leary, he liked the highlife. He belonged to two carnival krewes, Rex and Endymion. You name me one more person could make that claim. And he took those long lunches and golf or fishing trips with clients who, all the while, thought he was paying for them. well, you know how that works. And he would come home late because he always had to “work so hard” you know. Well, after a while that kind of living can wear a body down, so one Saturday during Lent, and after making one hell of a drive off the seventh tee over at Louis Prima’s Golf Course, he just up and keeled over.
You ever play that course over on the Northshore? No, it used to be where that Wal Mart is now, on 190. It wasn’t that great; I think they must’ve paid Prima to put his name on it.
Well, the ambulance drove right across three fairways and when they found out who he was, they just hightailed it across the causeway to Ochsner with four cop cars clearing the path like he was the president or something. When they opened him up to look at his ticker, it wasn’t good. The docs gave him a quadruple bypass right there. Well, that slowed him down a bit and he was a good boy for a while. Then, when his six-month check-up rolled around and his surgeon told him he could live a good long life if he stayed away from the booze, stopped with the cigars and ate right, meaning like salads and stuff with maybe a little fish or baked chicken. You know the drill.
To O’Leary, this was like a reprieve. He had his man drive him home and he told his wife they were going to go out that night to celebrate. A man like O’Leary, you might think that’ve meant Antoine’s or Galatoire’s or even Commander’s, any of them places would find him a prime table even if he just showed up on a real busy night. Nope, he took her where they had their very first date forty-two years earlier. He took her to Deanie’s Seafood in Bucktown, just the two of them, no cronies.
Of course, he had told his wife that the doctor said vegetables and seafood were all right, so they ordered the artichoke dip as a starter, she got the shrimp cocktail with a white wine just like she did on their first date and, he ordered a Miller Lite instead of Jack with the seafood platter. You know what I’m talking about here now, don’t you? If you never been to Deanie’s, you need to check it out.
That seafood platter, Christ, I don’t know how they do it; someone in the kitchen must have an engineering degree or something because they bring this thing out and it’s a foot high if it’s an inch. It is truly a thing of beauty. All that fried fish and shrimp and oysters with the French fries too, mmmm-mm. Well, O’Leary tucks his napkin into his collar and goes for it which is also something to behold. Boy, that man could put it away and he must have been feeling a little underweight after six months on a strict diet because that night, I swear, he was a man possessed.
Huh? Oh yeah, I was two tables over with my brother and our wives. we do something like that once a month. But let me finish telling you the story here. I swear it’s true.
So, O’Leary’s putting those fries and oysters away double-time and only slowed down to chug half a glass beer before he started on the shrimps and catfish when, suddenly, this god-awful sound came out of him. I can’t even begin to describe it, but everyone heard it and the whole damned place went dead quiet, and we all were staring at him. His face as red as a creole tomato and he was holding his last bite of catfish in the fingers of his left hand raised halfway to his open mouth for what seemed like forever in that silence.
Then, he lost hold of that last bite and it dropped in his lap. I swear, all of us were holding our breath and a beat or two later, BAM, he lands face first, right into that piece of fat-soaked white toast.
Huh? Yeah you right, and like everybody’s still holding their breath, their eyes shift from him to her wondering what’s gonna happen next. No shit.
Well, poor Mrs. O’Leary, she looked down at her blouse, and thinking back on it now, I believe she was checking for splatter; then she lifted her napkin from her lap, dabbed at her lips a bit and when Sammy, the waiter, finally got over to her she asked him to send the bill to her husband’s office and would he be so kind as to call her a taxi. She was gone before the cops or the ambulance or anybody showed up and if you ask me, that woman sure did look something like that Mona Lisa gal when she walked out of there.
