Feet on the Street by Roy Blount Jr. Read Free Book Online

one increases the number and aids in biting and tormenting them. I wonder how they like them!”
    M ARDI G RAS
    My favorite Mardi Gras participation has been walking with Curtis Wilkie’s dog Binx—a dog with, as they say, a lot of “attaboy” in him—in Barkus, the parade of hundreds of dogs and dog people through the Quarter to Louis Armstrong Park, with a brass band right behind us.

R AMBLE T HREE : O YSTERS
    I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion. . . . They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There’s nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
    â€”C LOVIS, CHARACTER IN A STORY BY S AKI
    I T WAS AT F ELIX’S THAT I FIRST ATE AN OYSTER RAW, that is to say live. A rite of passage. Felix’s was a good place for it, because I don’t like to be talked through things, and the shuckers in Felix’s are not solicitous. As a rule New Orleanians in service occupations are by no means boundary-conscious. You’ll hear a couple arguing at a restaurant table, the wife saying, “I need validation!” and a passing waitress will say to the husband, “Yeah,
cher,
she needs validation.” Rosemary James recalls entering a stylish restaurant and seeing one waiter slapping the other with a napkin as if challenging him to a duel, and the other pulling off a tablecloth to play him like a bull. “I realized,” she said, “that everybody in the place was drunk.” But the men who lay oysters bare at Felix’s have perhaps been involved in so much opening up that they keep their own counsel. I loaded my first raw oyster with catsup, horseradish, hot sauce, and lemon juice, said a little prayer, and slurped it down.
    It hit the spot. Now I eschew all seasoning but a spritz of lemon, and chew a few times for the savor before letting each little mollusk ease on down. Raw oysters give you a coolish inner lining collateral to the sheen that New Orleans humidity gives your skin. And I have seen too many people swallow oysters in Felix’s in July without dying, to worry about the
r
’s in the month.
    Across from Felix’s Iberville entrance is another venerable oyster bar, the Acme. You are either an Acme person or a Felix’s person. I am the latter. For one thing, in New Orleans oysters are pretty much oysters, because they come from farms in the brackish waters where the river meets the gulf. When the river has been low they have more flavor, because their habitat has been saltier, but they’re seldom as flavorsome as Atlantic or Pacific ones. If you want splendid briny oysters, go to Apalachicola, Florida, where you can also get a local brand of hot sauce that proclaims itself “An Oyster’s Best Friend.” But there’s no such thing as a bad oyster, unless they have
gone
bad. And there’s often a line outside the Acme, whereas you can almost always walk into Felix’s and lean against the place where the shuckers are shucking and call for a dozen and an Abita, the beer
du pays.
    At one point I resolved to capture the essence of New Orleans by tracing it through everything associated with the city, from the simplest form of life, the oyster, up the chain to the most complex: the prose style of William Faulkner. While writing his first novel, Faulkner lived for a time in a ground-floor room that is now part of Faulkner House Books, on Pirate’s Alley, around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral. My friends Joe DeSalvo, who operates that excellent bookstore, and Rosemary James, founder of an annual literary festival celebrating New Orleans culture, now live above the store. At the end of the book, I figured, I could tie things up by quoting Faulkner on oysters. Maybe he had taken the point