New Orleans, match to my flame, flame of my soul. My sin, my passion, my confession. New Or-lins: the tongue trampolining up to the roof of the mouth then down before bouncing back up again. New. Or. Lins.
She is just New Orleans in the mornings when the mist rises like ghosts from the river. She is the Big Easy to musicians, N’Awlins to tourists trying to go native, home to the locals. She was Nouvelle Orleans to the French, Nueva Orleans to the Spanish, Nuovi Orlini to the Italian immigrants, Nua Orleans to the Irish.
For many years film and television producers called her Hollywood South.
But in my heart, she is always simply New Orleans, my home. A magical place like no other, nestled in curves created by the wanderings of the father of waters. She is surrounded by water, connected to the mainland by bridges and a ferry across the river. A mystical island of sorts where what rules there are differ vastly from those elsewhere and are rarely enforced; where the words last call are never called out, where anything worth doing is also worth doing to excess, where Piety and Desire have been a block apart for hundreds of years.
She resists yet welcomes change, encourages people to be themselves, and never judges; celebrates and embraces eccentricity.
To know her is to love her, despite the daily frustrations of blinking traffic lights and deep potholes that can swallow cars whole, the herds of stray cats and the swarms of Formosan termites in the spring, where school board money disappears without a trace and frequent street flooding and snarled traffic from unexpected parades and second lines are all just a part of the fabric of life. Once you’ve lived in New Orleans, everywhere else seems tame, bland, colorless, the same as everywhere else.
New Orleans decays and crumbles and collapses, yet always rises to meet the latest challenge and will never surrender, will never bow because, as the song says, “we don’t know how.”
New Orleans shouldn’t exist, yet somehow does, her head high and arms wide open to welcome visitors and tourists and explorers, bachelor parties and fraternity trips and conferences.
And newcomers, seduced by her charms and wiles.
After the Flood Caused By the Failure of the Federally Built and Maintained Levee System, written off for dead, she rose from the ashes, for if New Orleans didn’t exist, someone would have to create her.
We need New Orleans, and always have.
The flood of newcomers after the flood waters receded was welcomed but watched with a raised eyebrow. The newcomers brought change in their wake, and New Orleans has always been slow to accommodate change. Working-class neighborhoods were rebuilt, only to become short-term rentals rather than homes. New construction went up everywhere—luxury condos here, a new University Medical Center complex there, grocery stores and restaurants and gas stations. There were concerns that the charm was being lost, but can one really complain about the Costco? The revitalization of the Carrollton corridor? The rebirth of the Central Business District, and the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods?
But rents and property values rose.
Nothing says gentrification more than bathhouses being turned into luxury condos.
I do miss those bathhouses.
But the city was changing before that fateful flood. K&B had already been replaced by CVS, Maison Blanche bought out by Dillard’s, and Starbucks had opened a couple of stores. But we were all so busy putting our lives and homes back together it seemed like one morning we woke up and the city wasn’t quite the same place we remembered. The new Rampart streetcar line, new hotels on Canal and in the CBD, Sewell Cadillac became a Rouse’s Grocery, Mary’s Tru Value left Bourbon Street for the newly repaved Rampart.
So much has changed it’s hard to remember what changed before the flood, and what changed after.
And…I’m not getting any younger, and my memory isn’t what it used to be.
Although I’ve yet to find a gray pubic hair. The Goddess has thus far spared me that horror.
I am that rarest of rarities in the newest and latest iteration of our beloved city: an actual native. There was a time, not all that long ago, when someone who’d lived here for twenty years would be sniffed at, airily dismissed, waved away, as a parvenu. In those antediluvian times you could live here most of your life, but someone would surely say at your funeral, if you weren’t born here, “I’ll miss him, he was a great guy…for a parvenu.”
My name is Milton Bradley, but everyone calls me Scotty. I suppose most people would say I lead a strange existence, which would be true if I were anything other than a born-and-bred New Orleanian. I lead a charmed life—money on both sides of the family, grew up in the French Quarter, and have been involved in a long-term relationship with not one but two incredibly great guys who are also incredibly hot and sexy. (For the record—and you know you were wondering—the sex is amazing.)
Although there are times when I question the charmed thing. I have a bad habit of stumbling over dead bodies and running afoul of criminal conspiracies, with a tendency to get kidnapped by bad guys now and then.
It’s a long story, but I have a tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot more regularly than most.
I don’t think I was ever destined to have a normal life, to be honest. My mother’s a Diderot, which means she was from Rex royalty and expected to be a nice Uptown lady who married into another old society family and lunched and did charity work. My father is a Bradley—not quite as blue-blooded as the Diderots, which Papa Diderot never lets Papa Bradley forget—which meant he was supposed to go to Vanderbilt and come home to either law or medical school at Loyola. Instead they fell in love as teenagers and turned their backs on everything their respective families have always stood for—and went to the University of New Orleans, becoming what I guess is now called sneeringly social justice warriors or hippies or pinko commie bastards. I never gave it much thought; they were always just Mom and Dad to me. They are very liberal—very much anti nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, very much in favor of equality for everyone—and are unrepentant stoners. They’ve been arrested numerous times at protests, and some of my earliest memories are of my parents chained to fences at nuclear power plants and marching in protests carrying signs.
I think my first words were “I want to speak to a lawyer.”
Another way they rebelled against their parents was naming me Milton Bradley.
My grandmothers’ maiden names were Milton and Scott; that’s how Mom and Dad claim they came up with the name. The family legend is that both sets of grandparents insisted Mom and Dad give me a normal, family name—they named my older brother Storm and my sister Rain (she started going by Rhonda in junior high)—and that’s what they came up with; a family name but also a middle finger to their parents.
The legend also holds they were going to name me either Ridge or River. Either would have been better than being named after a board game company. Other kids made my life miserable at school until Storm started calling me Scotty.
Having Milton Bradley as your legal name causes no small amount of hilarity when dealing with things like the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the passport office, or whenever you need to show legal ID, like at airports.
Trust me, I’ve heard every possible joke that can be made about my name, thank you very much.
Don’t get me wrong, my parents are the best. No young kid grappling with his sexuality could have had better parents. Mom and Dad were thrilled when I came out in high school—they’ve marched in every gay pride parade in New Orleans since, hang rainbow flags on the house every Pride, Decadence, and Mardi Gras, and have worn out numerous I’m proud of my gay son T-shirts. They own and operate a tobacco shop on the corner of Royal and Dumaine in the Quarter, and I grew up in the spacious apartment directly above. I went to Jesuit High School, and like a good little Bradley went off to Vanderbilt after graduation. But I hated the school, missed New Orleans, and finally flunked out at twenty, returning to New Orleans an abject failure. Dismayed at the dark stain on the family honor my flunking out had created, both grandfathers tied up my trust funds until I proved myself worthy of access to all that money and accruing interest.
Or turned thirty, whichever came first.
It probably goes without saying that the trust funds were released on my thirtieth birthday, doesn’t it?
Then there’s the psychic thing. I have what is known as a “gift,” which means that I can sometimes see the past or the future, and sometimes I can commune with the Goddess in one of her incarnations. That usually happens when something big is going to go down, but she also speaks in maddening riddles that I often can’t figure out until it’s too late. Sometimes I can focus the gift using tarot cards, and sometimes the cards will answer my questions. It doesn’t always work, and for some years after the Flood Caused By the Failure of the Federally Built and Maintained Levee System, it went away completely.
I don’t really understand how it works, to be honest.
If I did, I suppose I could have made money doing it. But without a degree or work experience other than working in my parents’ shop, I was kind of at loose ends.
So, I became a stripper. I was also a personal trainer, but no one ever mentions that. It’s always “Back when you were a stripper…”
I was a personal trainer by day and a sometime go-go boy at night in gay bars. I originally worked with Southern Knights, a booking agency that sent me all over the country to dance. Sometimes I made great money, sometimes I didn’t. But it required me to stay in shape. I was already in pretty good shape from being a wrestler in high school—Storm got me to go out for wrestling when I was in junior high, when kids were picking on me—and I was pretty good at it. I rented an apartment from a lesbian couple, old family friends that I call my aunts, on the last block of Decatur Street, across from the old Mint. Millie and Velma were awesome, and never minded if I was late sometimes with the rent.
The summer I turned twenty-nine, a porn star who was supposed to dance at the Pub for Southern Decadence weekend overdosed and went into rehab, and the manager asked me to fill in. I needed some quick and easy money, so I said yes. I wound up helping the FBI stop a crazed right-wing politician from destroying the French Quarter (it’s a long story) and wound up with not one but two boyfriends. Frank Sobieski was the FBI agent I worked with, and Colin Cioni…well, he told me that weekend he was a cat burglar (it’s a long story) but it turned out he’s actually an international espionage agent, working for the Blackledge Agency.
His boss, Angela Blackledge, is who governments call when they need something handled but also need plausible deniability. Colin is gone for long stretches of time, on jobs we can’t know anything about. Frank retired and moved to New Orleans, and eventually chased his dream of being a professional wrestler, signing with Gulf Coast Championship Wrestling and becoming one of their biggest stars and draws. He keeps saying he’s going to retire but hasn’t yet.
I joke that his farewell tour has lasted longer than Cher’s.
I think both of them being gone so much helps keep our three-way relationship fresh and alive—we’re never around each other long enough to get annoyed or bored.
The sex is also fantastic. Have I mentioned that?
Once the top floor of our building became vacant we rented it, too—so we have the third and fourth floors of our building.
But Millie retired from her law practice—Velma had retired years ago. Tired of living in the city, they wanted to live at their beach house in Florida. I bought the building from them—but haven’t figured out what I want to do with it yet. There are four floors: The ground floor has always been leased to a business of some sort, but it’s been vacant since the coffee shop closed a few years ago. Millie and Velma’s apartment on the second floor has been vacant since they moved. Colin has always had his own bedroom up on the fourth floor, while Frank and I both have our own on the third—but we mostly all sleep together in my room. Frank’s nephew, Taylor, also lives with us now. His parents disowned him and threw him out when he came out, and he’s now attending Tulane University. He also has a bedroom on the fourth floor, and since Colin is often away, he pretty much has his own place.
Both Frank and Colin think I spoil Taylor.
Maybe I do. I have a soft spot for gay kids who grew up with homophobic parents, sue me. I was lucky, as I said, with my own parents, so I feel a bit of a karmic debt that needs repaying.
I keep thinking I should renovate the building and turn it into a four-story home for my little family, but I tend to procrastinate—and Frank and Colin aren’t much help. My accountant, Bonnie, tells me I should actively look for a business tenant for the first floor, and I could make a fortune renting out Millie and Velma’s apartment, too…but I don’t know. Millie and Velma were family, and after the Duchesnays closed their little grocery store after Katrina, having other businesses in that space seemed weird to me. I never got used to the coffee shop being there—and it didn’t last long anyway.
I’m also a private eye, licensed by the state of Louisiana. After that first experience with a criminal conspiracy and catching a killer, Frank convinced me to become a private eye. He retired from the FBI and we opened an agency together…but I don’t use the license much, honestly; we might get an actual paying client once in a while. Most of the time, my detective work is limited to doing research for my brother Storm’s law firm. But sometimes, a body will drop out of the sky, bullets start flying, and I’m right in the middle of the whole mess.
The New Orleans Police Department—particularly detectives Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague—used to find me annoying. Over the years, they’ve come to a kind of grudging respect for my skills, such as they are.
At least I like to think they do, anyway.
I also have a deep dark secret: I love reality television.
Not all of it, of course. But when it first got started, I was obsessed with The Real World, and later, with Project Runway. I liked the competition shows, where people were required to have some sort of talent in order to participate, but I didn’t care for the singing ones. I don’t watch the ones about finding your true love or about families with more money than they need who are just terrible people or any of those. I stopped watching Real World when they stopped casting actual real people and instead starting casting wannabe models and actors with rage and/or drinking problems.
And then one of the cable networks launched a show called Grande Dames of Marin County. I didn’t watch, but one Sunday when I was the only one home I turned on the television while cleaning, and it was on. I didn’t change the channel right away because I’d turned it on just for background noise, and having seen preview commercials I immediately knew what it was…and so I paused, with my finger on the channel button, ready to flip to something else if it was as awful as I figured it would be.
But I couldn’t stop staring at the television. Two women, their faces frozen rigid and expressionless with Botox and fillers, were screaming at each other about something. Curious, I kept watching as they screamed at each other, finally agreeing to disagree but now that They Had Had a Conversation and Made Their Feelings Known, they were happy they could Move Forward and start fresh with their friendship.
Everything about these shows annoyed me. They began, basically, as a rip-off of a hugely successful prime time soap starring actresses too old to play love interests for men two or three times their age and too young to play grandmothers yet. I hated that they catered to the lowest common denominator. I hated that all the women on the show were certifiably insane, encouraged to behave badly and make all women look bad, like a bunch of shrewish self-absorbed monsters—the absolute worst stereotypes of women: shallow, vain, petty, and unsupportive of other women, only concerned about their looks and money and things.
I suppose it goes without saying that I couldn’t stop watching, nor could I stop hating myself for watching. Frank and Colin roundly mocked me for being so addicted, but I watched them all: The Grande Dames of Marin County, Manhattan, Malibu, Palm Beach, Baltimore, Boston, and Houston. The franchises spread across the country like bubonic plague in fourteenth-century Europe. The formula was the same, no matter which city served as the setting: women with money who had never progressed emotionally and intellectually beyond junior high school with too much time on their hands and way too much access to a plastic surgeon.
Narcissism and borderline personality disorders were also apparently a plus in getting cast.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before New Orleans got a franchise.
A previous attempt to launch a franchise in New Orleans had failed spectacularly when the producers couldn’t find enough women interested in being on the show. The network had been getting complaints about racism and the lily-whiteness of its casts; even the Houston show was all white women, with nary a Latina in sight. The producers’ plan had been to make the New Orleans show the “black” one, but they couldn’t find enough women of color with the requisite narcissism and mental problems to air their dirty laundry for the cameras. The New Orleans show plans were scrapped, and they’d moved on to Baltimore, where they’d had great success finding women of color to film—and the Baltimore show was wildly popular.
But one summer the news broke that the producers were, once again, trying to launch a New Orleans franchise. Naturally, it was a lot of fun trying to figure out who would say yes to being on such a show—casting it became a very popular parlor game around town. I couldn’t imagine anyone who was actually old-line New Orleans society—Comus and Rex and the Boston Club—agreeing to go on television and look bad to the entire country.
When the cast was finalized and made public with a blazing fanfare and burst of publicity, no one was surprised they hadn’t landed anyone from the upper echelons of New Orleans society—the kind of woman they wanted here would never do a television show. The women in the New Orleans cast were all successful in varying degrees, but no one who’d ever been any sort of Mardi Gras royalty. Chloe Valence was probably the closest out of them, but she wasn’t from New Orleans and had married into an old Garden District family. Rebecca Barron was the widow of a nouveau riche restaurateur. Fidelis Vandiver had been a weather forecaster for one of the local news stations but had gotten her own local workout show, which led her to owning a string of health clubs scattered around the metropolitan area. Megan Dreher was married to a man who’d been a slumlord before Katrina and was now making a fortune in the building boom of the last decade—and becoming one of the most loathed men in the city. Margery Lautenschlaeger was the oldest member of the cast, with a family fortune from liquor. Her family name and money went back to the nineteenth century…but they were also Jewish, which meant no Boston Club or membership in Rex or Comus.
The final member of the cast was the one I knew the best, Serena Castlemaine, an oil heiress from Dallas who’d relocated to New Orleans several years earlier. I loved Serena, with her platinum blond hair and enormous breasts and her earthy sense of humor. Serena was a Grande Dames natural. But she has a great sense of humor, and her reason for doing the show was neither fame nor fortune, but simply because she thought it would be fun.
“And, darling,” she said, rolling her enormous eyes at me with a wicked grin, “when it stops being fun, I’m done.”
New Orleans being the small town it was, I had met all the women cast on the show in passing or knew who they were. New Orleans being New Orleans, I’d also heard plenty of gossip about all of them. And once filming began, their presence became hard to miss: restaurants and bars put up the filming tonight coming inside indicates permission to be filmed signs on their doors.
“I was going to go to that fundraiser/party/event, but those dreadful reality show people were going to be filming there” became a common refrain throughout that late summer and fall, always mentioned with sighs and eye rolls. I suspected that most people couldn’t wait for the show to air but would never admit it—and would certainly never admit watching.
I managed to avoid filming, even though Serena kept asking me to film with her. I always declined—when one of your partners is an undercover operative working around the globe, the less attention you bring to yourself, the better. Besides, I didn’t want to know how the cookies got made. I preferred to just continue being a fan, pretending that it was all unscripted and none of the women were putting on a show for the cameras, trying to be liked, trying to claw their way up the ladder and become a brand.
But…you hear things. New Orleans has always been about a block long and everyone is on a party line, as they used to say when people still remembered what a party line was.
And the weekend the show premiered, I got sucked into the drama against my will.
Like I said, I have a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, this is the story of how I sort of became a Grande Dame of New Orleans.
They didn’t even have the decency to give me a fleur-de-lis to hold in the opening credits.
Bitches.