Selling Flowers in New Orleans

New Orleans Flower Vendor

            I moved down to New Orleans in January, 1975, with a group of friends, based entirely on my friend Eric’s recommendation that it was cheap and happening.  And it was incredibly cheap.  A place to crash on the floor of the Head Inn cost a dollar, and for a mere 15 bucks a week, you could rent a room there. You could get an excellent bowl of red beans and rice for 40 cents at Buster Holmes’ legendary restaurant, and a hamburger with everything cost less than a dollar at the Port o’Call, which had a great juke box.

            Although I had travelled many miles at that point, I hadn’t worked at anything but childcare, so I needed to find a job that required no skills or experience. I managed to land a gig as a street vendor, selling flowers on Royal St. from a colorful cart.  Every afternoon, we vendors would set out over the cobblestones with our buckets of roses and carnations to locations determined by our boss.  My spot was on Royal St. and I was glad it wasn’t Bourbon St- Royal was wild enough.  On Bourbon, folks couldn’t get though the crowds to make a purchase.

            It wasn’t enough to just stand by the cart and look cute; you needed to have a shtick or a gimmick. Being from NY, I harassed people with my catchy rhymes, like “Don’t be sour, buy a flower!” and “Flowers are beautiful, Flowers are fine, Buy some of my flowers, so I can buy wine”. The only vendor who consistently outsold me was Agnes, who was Belgian and had long blond hair and a sexy accent and wore a long, flowing skirt.

            Having a cart to stand by was the best way to watch the pre-Mardi Gras madness of the French Quarter. It gave me an anchor, an excuse to be on the street all evening, and it gave my friends a good rendezvous point. I met all sorts of people by my flower cart, including a Dutch guy who ended up moving in with me. One night as I was standing there, I spotted my childhood best friend from NJ stumbling down the street hanging onto some guy I could tell she’d just met.           

            Our shifts ended at midnight and we’d wheel our carts back from our various locations and collect our pay and often head over to the Café du Monde for some (cheap) chicory coffee and hot, sweet, greasy beignets.   

            The down side of standing by a cart in the French Quarter in the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras was the amount of police brutality I witnessed. On the Saturday night before Mardi Gras, I watched the cops beat a fellow up for no apparent reason, and when he hit the ground next to my cart, I decided that I really didn’t want to be out there any longer.  Despite my boss telling me I was a fool to quit just before the biggest event of the year, my flower-selling career ended that very night.  It was the right choice, because after that the streets became all but impassable with Mardi Gras madness, and I was free to go play in it.

Jake's

Jake’s

            Jake’s was the first job I found when I moved to Austin in 1975.  I’d answered an ad for a Barmaid and was assured that no actual drink-mixing was involved- Jake’s was strictly a beer joint. From the outside, it was an odd shade of green, tucked into an obscure corner of downtown, among the used car lots. From the inside, Jake’s was dark, long and narrow, with a shuffleboard table running the length of the barroom and the sticky vinyl booths arranged along it.  Above the shuffleboard table was a design in pink neon on the ceiling  that brightened the room up a bit. The other distinctive decoration that I remember was a sign that said “Jake’s” made entirely out of interesting pens.  It was a Texas temple to neon, beer and grease.

            The man who ran Jake’s was called Pee Wee, and he lived above the bar with his wife Marie . I felt very lucky that Pee Wee wanted to impress me with  

what an excellent  cook he was.  He fed me my first fried oyster. It was steaming and crisp, contrasting perfectly with his tangy homemade tartar sauce. His fried chicken was so good that my hippie friends would risk bodily harm to obtain some- Jake’s wasn’t the kind of place you saw a lot of long hair in. He tried to get me to try his chicken-fried steak, but that was where I drew the culinary line, back then.

            The waitress who tended the tables while I tended the bar with was a tattooed biker chick- and this was before a lot of women had tattoos. She told me wild stories about her family- her daddy was a preacher and mama was a barrel-rider. Working at Jake’s was my like my personal Texas immersion program.  I liked being a bartender- having the bar between me and the action on the floor made me feel somewhat safe and protected.

            There were mainly two groups that hung out at Jake’s. The afternoon crowd was the quieter set- Government workers and guys from the car lots who’d have a couple of beers and a game or two of shuffleboard before heading off to wherever it was that grown-ups lived.  Later in the evening came the frat boys from UT, including some whose fathers owned those car lots we were surrounded by. Getting drunk at Jake’s was a rite of passage for them and they worked hard to get it right.  The jukebox played “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain”, “In Heaven there is no beer” and “Are you  sure Hank done it this way?”

            One afternoon a grizzled patron sat at the bar and issued an order that I could not understand.

“Puh!” he said, “I want a Puh!” I wracked my brains and looked at my selection and decided that he was trying to say “Bud”. I opened a Budwieser and placed it before him.  He looked at it, and me, with utter contempt.

“That’s a Budwieser!”  he sniffed.

“ Well, what did you want?”

“PUH! PUH!”

Finally, the light went on. Oh, Pearl. I’d forgotten about Pearl.  I think probably everyone has forgotten about Pearl.  They tore down Jake’s and really, truly put up a parking lot.