PROJECTS — [PART 5] Travels with Dad

Dad's Day by RANDY FERTEL

Hearing my stories about my Dad, friends wonder how a man who had enough time on his hands to run for mayor on the platform that the Audubon Zoo needed a gorilla, how he spent his day. Though I am not entirely sure myself, I should probably take a stab, offering a sketch of what I know.

To my knowledge my father, Rodney Fertel, known as the Gorilla Man, never, ever had a job. He owned a riding stable in Baton Rouge for a time in his 20s where he probably met my mom. He owned a bar at Rampart and Gravier for a short time in his 30s run by his friend Joe Pecoraro (known as Joe Peck). He owned thoroughbreds that were trained and cared for by others (my mother, the first woman to be licensed to train horses in Louisiana, among them). He owned real estate overseen for most of his life by Latter & Blum Real Estate. His day was almost entirely his own for the long length of his life. He never, ever punched a clock. He never, ever answered to anyone.

Anyone who has been between jobs knows what a challenge not having a job can be. How to fill the hours? How to feel good about yourself when you are unemployed in a culture where men (at least) define themselves in terms of their employment? How to explain yourself when others ask? How to placate your wife for impinging on the space she is used to experiencing as her own.

My father seemed unbothered by these challenges. Of course he was not between jobs. He played to the camera a bit too much and a bit too skillfully for me to say this unequivocally, but, for the most part, he was blessed with not giving a damn what others thought about him. Or he dressed badly enough in madras shorts and loose-fitting shirts and jackets that people thought they shouldn’t ask. Or if they did, he had a simple answer: real estate. Let them imagine what they would. And of course he had no wife to answer to.

But still he had that day to fill.

How he filled it was largely seasonal and geographic. During the racing season, he rose early either to get the Daily Racing Form or to oversee the tending to the horses on the backside of the track, or both. The Racing Form he delivered at 4:00 am to Paul Stern’s house, his handicapper. Paul lived with his mother, I believe in mid-city. It was in Dad’s interest that Paul have as much time as possible pouring over the horses’ past performances: what kind of track they preferred, fast or slow, dry or muddy; how they fared in their last outings; what their recent morning training times had been. Paul was a wizard and the Daily Racing Form was his wand. Dad shared in the pot of gold he sometimes conjured.

Dad rose early even when the horses weren’t running. He said it was a habit he acquired at the track. A long breakfast followed. He was sure to find the breakfast spot where the characters and wise guys, the men with time on their hands knew how to sit long over a cup of coffee. At the track there was the Track Kitchen, cafeteria style with trays, line and tables filled with hotwalkers, trainers, vets, owners, exercise girls (as they were then called), the usual array of backside hangers-on, people on the make with something to sell, and all of them looking for the inside info that would insure them a winning ticket in a boat race (a race that had been fixed). In downtown New Orleans there was Mumphrey’s sandwich shop, run by my friend Jack Serio and his family for generations on Canal and later in the 100 block of St. Charles Avenue. Simple formica tables were filled with men with newspapers and plates brimming with grits and toast and eggs. These were men with much to say or who were good listeners. My dad was of course one of the sayers. What was wrong with the city, and did Jim Garrison after all have something, and who was likely to win the New Orleans Handicap, and plenty laughter — these filled the air along with the smell of coffee and chicory and biscuits and bacon in huge heaps frying on the grill.

With the right crowd in attendance Dad could make this last till the first race at noon. Or he might walk over to the NOAC at the far edge of the French Quarter for a steam and a swim. Maybe he walked by Latter and Blum on Common to hang out or perhaps there was an issue about that rental property on Palmyra St. that he needed to fuss about. Or, of course, there was Curley’s Neutral Corner, the bar, gym and bookie joint. It was up on St. Charles and Poydras, the heart of Raymond’s Beach. Curley Gagliano’s empire filled the neighborhood. There was Curley’s Corner, Curley’s Neutral Corner, Curley’s Cozy Corner and Curley’s Other Corner.

Once at Curley’s, there was the morning line to consider in whatever sport was in season, and there was the possibility of another audience. Maybe the Black Cat LaCombe, the race track tout, would be there and Dad could enjoy their endless banter. Curley’s Neutral Corner, as I remember relying on a 12 year old’s sight and a 53 year old’s memory, had a bar on one side, a ring on the other and a large chalk board on the center back wall. Guys hit the bag while others poured over the morning line. Who was running and who was playing and what the odds were and what you had to lay to get back so much were all there. It was at least as challenging as the Racing Form but it was Dad’s world. He had learned it at his mother’s chubby knee, even though neither were good with figures.

My father never, ever had a phone, so if I needed him I called around to his haunts. I’d call the NOAC and listen as the attendant at the pool paged him. If that turned up empty, I was transferred back to the front desk where a general page went out. Perhaps my father failed to answer the viva voce page in hopes of hearing his name over the loudspeakers. “Important people have their names in the air,” he used to tell me. Or maybe the answer came back, “Sorry, Rodney’s taking a steam.” You could kill a lot of hours in the steam or lolling about the pool at the NOAC. Dad could do half an hour or so of laps in their salt water, marble-lined pool.

And then of course there was golf. In New Orleans, golf is played late into the year, sometimes all year, so it was possible to get in an early round before the first race during the winter meet. In summer, after the meet, it was important to play early in order to beat the oppressive heat. My father played the links in City Park. He rarely rented a cart: the walking is good for you.

A gifted athlete in high school, Dad swam and played basketball. He played guard on the championship Fortier football team in the late 30s that won the city championship but was not allowed to go on to the state finals. But Dad was not an exceptional golfer. His swing had power but not elegance. It was usually straight which, he rightly contended, was most of the game. Still, I think he played in the mid-80s most of his life. He liked nonetheless to make it interesting by drawing his opponents into various bets: on the front nine and the back, on this hole, on that shot, doubling down, whether the rain would come before the 18th hole. Anything to charge the round and the day. That was the challenge, wasn’t it?

He rarely, if ever, met a friend for a round but relied on pickup foursomes. My friend Garland Robinette tells the story of playing golf with my father many years ago. They fell into play together and quickly fell into bitter arguments about city politics. Garland back then was very visible as a local TV reporter, perhaps by that time news anchor, and so of course well-informed. But Dad didn’t watch TV (except the games) so wasn’t impressed by the name or by his marshalling of the facts. At the end of the round despite an afternoon of endless bickering between shots, he announced much to Garland’s surprise, “I like you. Would you like to play golf again?” Dad liked to argue. And to hold a grudge.

He loved a good fight and loved a legal battle with lawyers and court dates best of all. I believe I come from the most litigious family on the planet. We get a head start in the count by suing one another. It gave him something to do, and as with gambling, it gave him the adrenaline rush that gamblers are hooked on. Anger is a strong spice. And addictive. If only we had had a lawyer in the family — Dad’s plan for me since I was a kid — we could have been a one family Bleak House. Who needs Jarndyce and Jarndyce when you’ve got Fertel and Fertel to fight Fertel vs. Fertel?

With no litigation pending, Dad liked to travel. He also called Hot Springs and Las Vegas home. Perhaps it was just my kid’s eye but he seemed to me to cut a kind of Hemingway figure. He had Hemingway’s jowly jaw. He spent time, months at a stretch, in Havana, Cuba and Acapulco, Mexico and he traveled frequently back and forth. I would get post cards that shared Ernest Hemingway’s commitment to the fewest possible words if not, by any stretch, his talent. Mexican kids and Japanese kids, I learned, were smarter than me: they spoke Mexican and Japanese. He shared with Hemingway a commitment for knowing the right way something was done and the right thing to possess or to consume. Without being acquisitive, he was in his own small and not always very knowing way a connoisseur, if one can be an unknowing connoisseur. For Hemingway it might be Chateau Margaux Margaux 1927. For my Dad it was Mountain Valley Water, NV (non vintage). I don’t know what brand of Cubans Hemingway preferred. My father swore by H. Upmann (for years I missed the period and thought he smoked Hupmanns). Even if he didn’t really know how something was done or what the best thing was of its kind, nonetheless he would be glad to tell you. Always quick to mount the podium, Dad lived to give advice.

The day filled, somehow, then there was the matter of dinner. Like me, Rodney could get on eating jags. He would eat at the same restaurant for days, weeks, months on end until they did something to offend him. Of course he never ate at home. When he first came back into my life it was the House of Lee that had his custom. Later, after he fought with Frank Lee, one of the brothers who ran it under old man Ding Lee, it was The China House further down Veterans Memorial Highway that was not nearly so good, but after the fight the House of Lee just didn’t exist.

He always swore by Chinese food. Whatever he was eating at the time he had lots of health-food-nut rationales for. He liked all those fresh vegetables in Chinese food. Besides, who ever saw a fat Chinaman? Harry Lee, the famous Chinese cowboy sheriff of Jefferson Parish only weighed about 220 those days when every night he seated us. Later, after his law degree and political career, his weight would famously soar and his recurrent diets were front page news in the Times Picayune. But evidence before your eyes was never the issue with my Dad and had little bearing. It was the idea that counted. I got in an argument with Dad once about rice being a starch (which is what we called carbohydrates back then, isn’t it?). “Rice isn’t a starch,” he staunchly averred, “ever see a fat Chinaman?” I don’t know how he argued away all the fat in Chinese food that became a food scandal in the 80s. No doubt if he gave up Chinese food he found another cuisine to tout.

Jan Petersen who grew up on Robert Street and went to Fortier with Dad told me that before he came into money at 21, Dad wanted to be an athletic director. I wonder if his advice giving wasn’t his way of being a coach?

Jay Gulotta, a neighbor in my childhood, recently told me a story about taking cover on the golf course during a lightning storm. There are all these teenagers beneath the shelter and one adult wearing madras shorts and prepared to hold forth for the duration. Jay remembers thinking, how odd, an adult with something to say to a teenager. But what he had to say! The zoo needed a gorilla, and the city should have tollbooths to tax those who lived in the suburbs and worked in the city, and malls would destroy downtown. Jay added: “Of course he was on to something. The zoo was atrocious.”

But that’s another story.

I guess to fully understand Dad’s day, you must envision where it began and ended, in his “home.” I use the scare quotes advisedly. You and I would be scared to call many of his hovels home. Here are some of his hovels I have known. The first, when he came back into our lives, was the only one where he seemed to be making an effort to improve on a bad thing. He had this huge expanse of a room in his seaman’s hotel at the foot of Canal. The ceiling was draped with a colorful parachute, perhaps to hide water damage to the ceiling I speculate now having seen the archival correspondence about the fire marshall closing the top floor because of roof leaks. He was having work done on the bathroom and proudly showed off the showerhead — “the most important thing: always spend what you have to to get a good one.” The next place I saw or remember seeing was 208 South Rampart St. where he moved after his mother’s death. The only furniture I remember was a mattress of the floor. The door had holes from previous doorknobs. I can’t remember any improvements made to Annie’s unpainted, unpapered walls. This address was the subject of a recurring dream that is no doubt one reason it serves as such an icon of the Fertel legacy in this account. I don’t remember it in too much detail. I remember that in the dream 208 is always being built. I remember there is a stairway going nowhere. I remember my father walking down the stairs from nowhere. I remember that the dream was disturbing enough that I almost here called it a nightmare.

Dad’s next “home” was on Cleveland or Palmyra, a block or two off Canal which it paralleled in a black neighborhood in mid-city. Dad’s motus vivendi was in full force by now. He left 208 when it had become uninhabitable and moved on to another address in his portfolio that was only marginally habitable. There he made a token and short-lived gesture of fixing it up. He always managed to hire untrustworthy laborers who he was quick to show the door, happy to find more evidence for the world’s untrustworthyness. He never took any care of the outside, so that the yard grew up in such disarray that the city would pester him to trim it back. Then, as the neighborhood began to make itself felt, and he began to feud with his neighbors who always were certain to rub him wrong, an he they, he began to install high-profile protection: iron bars, huge chains and padlocks across the front door, perhaps barbed wire on the fences. Then it was certain to deteriorate — the roof leaked, you took your life in your hands mounting the stoop, the piles of stuff throughout the house made navigation a challenge, especially when the lights stopped working. I can’t remember a working kitchen. We had to go to Paul the Toadie’s that time to make comfrey tea and cook lamb chops in a toaster oven. I remember many a not-fully-functioning bathroom, one reason the NOAC membership and visits to the Buckstaff Bathhouse was so important to him. All the comforts of “home.” In the 80s when we weren’t talking he contacted me nonetheless to give me a lot on Cleveland that the city was pestering him to mow. He couldn’t be bothered. I declined his generous gift.

At about that time he was living on Derby Place a sweet little street near the track filled with little bungalows from the 20s and 30s. His lot was a jungle and his door was chained and padlocked and large signs warned against trespass. Inside no doubt his stuff gorilla, an echo of Dalí’s stuffed bear, awaited those who dared. I went by to get a shot for the book and the house had been bulldozed.

The saddest of these “homes” in my experience was the house once owned by his mother in Hot Springs. I do not know if it was on this front porch that I had my earliest memory at 3 or 4 or 5, of a woodpecker’s echoing tap-tap-tap, of bright green trees rustling, of cool and fragrant mountain air, of crystalline light. When I returned there in about 1983 or 84 looking for my father the house was ready for the bulldozer. I had been at an NEH Summer Seminar at the incredibly elegant Huntington Library in San Marino, California, an upscale enclave within the only slightly less upscale enclave of Pasadena. I took a room in Pasadena with a delightful, warm-hearted couple. Luther Luedtke was a lit. professor at USC but was temporary dean of the school of journalism. Carol his wife welcomed me and their two tow-headed kids, Nils and Pia, future ivy-leaguers both, made me feel at home. Ironically we realized in the course of the summer that Luther had a couple years before invited me to a conference on the Vietnam War he had run at USC. I hadn’t gotten the funding to attend. This was all the more ironic since I would come to run one of my own 15 years later. In the seminar we studied visionary poets under a professor who was more visionary than rational and I wrote about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as improvisation with as much rationality as I could muster. I fell in with two other professors, one from a state university in Iowa and the other from a fine and tony liberal arts college in Ohio, and we often talked long into the night over beer, not always about the fine points of the visionary tradition. The senior member of our trio told a tale of hunting down his father in the upper reaches of the Canadian woods where they were reconciled before it was too late. I demurred: it’s just not going to happen. But the oracle had sown the seed and, Telemachus-like, when I drove back to Syracuse at the end of the summer I took the southern route so I could pass through Hot Springs. I must have been hell-bent because I made Ft. Smith just south of the Ozarks in one long day (or so it seems — perhaps my memory exaggerates).

And so I get there and find his front door open. No one’s home but he must be in town. The house is by far the worst in my experience. Piles of Daily Racing Forms and boxes of plastic gorillas lie here and there. In the next room a 5 foot hole in the roof has let rain damage everything in sight. I back out as quickly as I can avoiding rotten floorboards.

But I’m convinced he’s in town. After all, the door is open. My adventures take me first to the track, Oaklawn Park, which is not running but there are plenty of people to ask and most of them know Rodney. No, they haven’t see him. Neither at the golf course, a lovely course and the first I ever played that wasn’t as flat as a billiard table. No, haven’t seen him. He’s not at the Smitty’s health food restaurant on Central Avenue nor in the dining room at the Arlington, which has seen better days. The white-gloved waiters have now joined the past from which they had come. Finally I go where I should have started, the Buckstaff. No, they haven’t seen him. But I ask around and find one of the attendants who can readily explain the open door. No, I haven’t seen your dad in a few days, but he left me the key to fix the roof.

Discouraged, I make one last effort. I pass again by his house. An elderly woman, small, frail and European, is outside the house next door. I approach her. No, she hasn’t seen that man. He’s a terrible man. He’s mad at me because my tree fell on his roof. These things happen. I offered to fix it. But he cursed me. He put up this barbed wire. I feel like I’m back in Auschwitz. I told him that and he laughed.

And I was never so glad that I hadn’t mentioned my name or relationship. The cock had not yet crowed thrice. But the dawn has not risen.

I am so upset I decide on the spot to leave my car for a day and fly down to New Orleans to touch base with my mother. I recount my search. As always her explanation is well meaning. She wants to explain it all away and short-circuit my deep yearnings: “well, you know how your dad is.”

As if that explained anything. As if yearnings went away for good reasons.

How my Dad lived explains a lot, as my friend, Sally Knight responded to an early draft of this chapter. How could he love another, she asked, if he couldn’t love himself.