Albert Cowdrey: Hot Nights -- And a Chilly One

HOT NIGHTS — AND A CHILLY ONE

by Albert Cowdrey

We all remember those stifling summer nights in the days before airconditioning. I’m not sure how we survived them, but on the evidence, we did. From childhood I remember the feel of summertime skin, alternately slippery and sticky; the tiny Salt Lake that filled my bellybutton as I lay sweating in the dark; the hypnotic roar of the attic fan; the currents of lukewarm air blowing through windows that were always left open three inches to concentrate the breeze.

The mattress heated up where I lay on it, so I’d roll onto an unheated part, which felt delicious until it heated up too, and I had to roll back. A Cajun neighbor’s dog barked until dawn, when his fighting cocks awoke, flapped their wings, and with brazen throats began crowing to greet the sun.

When exactly did I sleep, anyway? In class, I guess, at Gentilly Terrace School, while Miss Davis was explaining the basics of algebra. Or anyplace else when a sudden cloudburst dropped the temperature by twenty degrees, populating the house with shadows, turning the far side of the street into a dim old sepia photograph, and bringing the kids out in their bathing suits to send toy boats coursing down the foaming rapids that filled every gutter.

I was 28 when I acquired my first air-conditioner. A lady friend I’ll call Lili – a sophisticated older woman, maybe 30 at the time – had found a rewarding gig in PR and moved from the Marigny to a posher apartment on Royal Street. I inherited her old one, which came equipped with an A/C unlike any I’ve seen since. It was about the size of a subcompact car, lacked a thermostat, and had two speeds, Off and Hang Meat. Lili hadn’t made much use of it, because she got chilblains if the temperature dropped below eighty, but I used it every night and some days. I didn’t yet own a bed, so she left me a box spring and mattress, plus a couple of blankets that I needed when the monster got going – otherwise, I’d have become the first recorded case of a New Orleanian suffering frostbite.

Along with the coolness came the joy of privacy. The 1830’s-era camelback on Dauphine Street had been divided into small apartments, and all except mine were occupied by garbage men, their women, and swarming children of varied hue and parentage. Perfectly honest, hard-working folks – but loud, very loud. And frank, very frank. Chatting with them made me realize that in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams hadn’t been inventing, he’d merely been transcribing. One evening when I was seated on my doorstep, smoking an after-dinner cigar, a garbage lady emerged from the adjacent alleyway and summoned her kiddies home by bellowing, “You git in dis house, or I’m a make ya BLEED!”

Great line, that – I’ve never forgotten it. But also great that I could go inside, shut the door, fire up the A/C, and get back to reading for my PhD exams (though the language of the textbooks was a lot less vibrant and original than hers).

Then I began a new living arrangement. I kept the small, cheap, chilly apartment where I worked and stored all my books and stuff, but started to spend the dark hours in Lili’s dwelling on Royal Street. True, it wasn’t air-conditioned, because of her aversion to chill, so in a sense I was back in the nights of my childhood. Only now I enjoyed them a lot more. The Quarter had been built for hot summers, and for a while our lives there were total New Orleans, from the bubbles all the way down to the dregs.

We spent long hours on her gallery in the company of a 6-foot papier-mâché rabbit from a performance of Harvey at La Petite that she’d played in. Man, woman, and rabbit lounged in the dark, surrounded by the murmur of voices from neighboring balconies. An occasional laugh would break from the shadows, maybe a jazzy riff, a tinkle on somebody’s piano, or the deep thrumming of Segovia’s guitar on a hi-fi. I did the bartending, always providing a cinnamon stick to swizzle Lili’s Old Fashion – she insisted on that. If the night was especially steamy, we’d move to the roofless gallery of an empty apartment next door, put down a bedspread, and sprawl. It was a great place to snuggle, despite the metallic grating of four rusty bolts that seemed to be the only things holding the balcony to the building. Down below, a bus might roar past (buses still ran on Royal Street), or a clot of crapulous tourists debate loudly how to find their way back to Bourbon.

We didn’t do much cooking – too hot – but we enjoyed Cantonese shrimp at Dan’s International, followed by beer and Beethoven in the Napoleon House. Louder and raunchier was the thundering rock at La Casa de los Marinos, where one night we watched an uptown lady throw a remarkable number of her garments on the floor and dance on them. Post-midnight hours brought the illusion of

coolness; foghorns brayed on the river and showers as heavy as torrents of buckshot fell on the streets, churning the reflection of the lights. Maybe what James Lee Burke meant by his haunting title The Neon Rain.

Then harsh realty intruded. I’d finished most of my work as a grad student at Tulane, and if I was to avoid the Baptist Rescue Mission, had to find a job. I prepared to leave town, drawn by the glamor of Frisco and the report of an attractive teaching position there. The heat had broken, and a cool wind was blowing when I headed back to the Marigny to bag up my few belongings. I remember a million bits of waste paper parading down Dauphine Street like midget second-liners waving tiny flags.

For me, for a while at least, the hot nights had come to an end. And so had my time with Lili. A lot of different kinds of warmth went out of my world that night, some to return later, others not. Maybe my memory’s playing tricks, but I seem to remember that while I worked on my possessions – take this, ditch that – a Beatle (Lennon? McCartney?) was on the radio, singing, “Oh, I believe in yesterday.”

Portrait by George Schmidt