The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu Read Free Book Online Page A

they are crisp like the baguettes at La Madeleine, they are allowed to leave their graves and frolic with the rest. “We bake in purgatory,” Dante said, “before we are set on the Table of Judgment, / sure to hear our story again.” 3
    Some tombs are made from the remains of other tombs, whose owners have vanished. In 1866, the famous Theatre d’Orléans, which had amused the Creoles for decades, burned down, and its bricks were bought by the owner of the Louisa Street Cemetery who made them into burial ovens. It might not seem so unusual then to hear someone say, as I did, that New Orleans cemeteries “sing at night.” Of course they do, and this is why people sing even louder: to drown out the dead. Any given night on Rampart Street you can audit the competition: the singers and bands making merry at the Funky Butt are barely rising above the din of dead choruses and howling cats across the street at St. Louis No. 1.
    New Orleans cemeteries sing at night, but they are pretty quiet in the morning when I take my coffee there. I started using places of eternal rest for my private coffeehouses way back in my adolescence, when getting away from the horrible noises of adults was a necessity. In my hometown of Sibiu, in Transylvania, Romania, there was a German Catholic cemetery that was as angel-rife and ornate as any in New Orleans. I wrote poetry there among listing urns and reposing burghers, and dreamt of the day when I would take a girl there to show her my favorite inscriptions. That day came soon enough, and I surrendered my virginity to our resident junior-high nymph, Marinella, on the grave of one Herr Titus Bruckenthal who’d been, if memory serves right, a candlemaker. When I first moved to New Orleans, I was overjoyed to be living within walking distance of Lafayette Cemetery, which has a fair number of Germans baking in it. The Lafayette Cemetery also sits kitty-corner from the apartment house where F. Scott Fitzgerald, age 23, is rumored to have begun his first novel, This Side of Paradise . From his window, Scotty, possibly hungover on Prohibition gin, would have had a pretty good view of the tombstones in the Lafayette. “All right,” he might have addressed the entombed, “it ain’t so hot on this side of paradise.”
    I once took a Polish artist, Krystof, to the Lafayette for a cup of coffee. We
sat on the funeral slab of a certain Tadeusz Millhauser, and he told me that he led a student strike in Warsaw during the late days of communism. He had taken his fellow students to the old Warsaw cemetery, and together they had studied true Polish history from tombstones, a history very unlike the lies told in the propaganda textbooks of their schools. The dead listened carefully, taking notes for their nightly meets. I wouldn’t be surprised if Krystof’s story became a song that traveled throughout the world of the dead and was instrumental in bringing down the Berlin Wall a few weeks later. A footnote was that I took Krystoff to Commander’s Palace across the street from the cemetery and they told us that they were booked until I explained that my friend was Václav Havel, the future president of Czechoslovakia. The dead in New Orleans, in addition to singing, pay for stories with restaurant reservations.
    A certain dead waiter at Antoine’s, one of the city’s grand restaurants, caused quite a problem when he died without designating a successor. The way a rabbi from New Jersey put it, “I lived in New Orleans for five years and I finally got my own waiter at Antoine’s. Then he died, and I moved. I had no idea how to get another waiter. Mine came to me from a blue-blooded New Orleanian, who bequeathed him to me when he had to move to Paris to take care of his dying sister.” Waiting tables at Antoine’s is in itself a hereditary position, passed on from father to son. A true New Orleans blue blood must have a waiter as well