St. Phillip Street by Louella Bryant

National Writing Project of Vermont
louellabry@gmavt.net

Richard Louth’s apartment in the French Quarter is his refuge from university business, his getaway for rendezvous with the muse. One enters the building on St. Phillip Street through an iron grate door into a hallway checkered with terra cotta tiles and old grout. On the walls, semitropical Bermuda pink makes its way back from an eon ago, rising from dingy peeling plaster like a sea. The plaster forms a gray island here, a peninsula there, straits, capes and bays, until the walls are floor-to-ceiling maps, the pink dark where the sea is deep, lighter in the shallows.

The narrow corridor ends at teal doors that open to a brick courtyard ancient as Morocco. The bricks are rose colored, mortar green with algae. It’s almost a hundred in the sun, but here in the moist shade of a shedding eucaliptus, it’s not so hot. From wall cracks, slender vines grow like long centipedes. A ficus reaches an open palm toward the sky. Someone has picked up fallen branches and placed them on the cement bench, perhaps the same person who fixed silvery wire angels—or are they dragonflies—to a dead sapling.

Richard’s place is off this courtyard, one room the size of a utility closet. A lopsided couch and a futon face each other on opposing walls, a desk at one end of the room, bath and kitchenette at the other. The desk holds a computer for his writing, and a wall shelf supports a television that gets bad reception and a stereo for atmosphere. Five of us participating in the July writing marathon sponsored by SELU and the Southeast Louisiana Writing Project crowd into the tight space to write a few paragraphs before moving to another venue in the Quarter.

Richard turns on the air conditioner, which not only cools the place but chases away the strong smell of mold, and soon the air is comfortable. He slips a CD into the stereo, a recording of Jacob Fisher, a street crooner who mends his guitar with duct tape. “Too many people sleeping in the park, too many people need a change of heart,” the singer moans.

Richard is a dead ringer for Eric Clapton, his four-day growth graying like Clapton’s and a skinny look of been-on-tour and late-night-whiskey. But he doesn’t play, just strums the pen across the page and puts his heart out with the rhythms of rambling sentences.

We settle to write, Richard perched on a stool in a corner, giving his guests the more comfortable sofas. There is silence for twenty minutes, and then we read what we’ve written, following our own creative maps and inspired by the thick atmosphere of the apartment, the courtyard, the Quarter. Richard writes about characters like Jacob, about MD the vagrant poet, about Bucket Man, who sings with his head inside a bucket, pounding percussion on the side, and the cop on Bourbon Street who billy clubs the lawyer he catches pissing on a building.

When we’re finished, we’ll stroll downtown for an afternoon ale at Molly’s bar, and Richard will sit at the open window and watch the city, taking notes. Or maybe he’ll get a go-cup and wander back to the apartment to finish the thoughts he began there.
I have no doubt that, even after a hurricane that devastated the city, Richard’s muse is still in place, waiting for him at 619 St. Phillip Street with a satchel full of images, colors and smells. And I have no doubt that, in spite of disaster, Richard will go back, clean up, and keep writing, stories peeling themselves from the walls and falling like bits of old plaster onto the page, the muse lingering at his elbow long into the New Orleans night.