SFist Reads Special Edition: Leonce Gaiter's Bourbon Street

Alex Moreau is the Creole son of a robber baron white father and Creole mistress. Dekeson "Deke" Watley is a petty gambler who's blown into town from West Texas at Alex's invitation for a high stakes poker game. Little does Deke know that the past he ran away from will be waiting there to haunt him, and that the real game of high-stakes has been entirely rigged by Alex.

Set during 1958's Mardi Gras festivities, the book revels in description of the visual details. The character exposition ranges from internal monologue, to taut dialogue to scenes from the past. Alex, the antihero at the center of the story, plays both victim and victimizer, and madly drives the story towards it's very, very dark conclusion. It's paced like a summer read, though the sultry summer nights it would be perfect for are all too rare around here. Make yourself a julep and pretend.

Some of our favorite bits are, of course, the bits of Creoleana (we think we just made that up), like when Deke puts his gun in the chifforobe (we'll never get tired of saying 'chifforobe'). The author and the character indulge in music, jazz of course, and the madness of the bop era finds expression in Alex. One of the main themes of the book also focuses on desire and sexuality, especially as it relates to the social boundaries of New Orleans. Racism, sex and violence are constant company.

We wanted to talk to Leonce about topics the book brought up in our minds, including what it takes to become a novelist in the modern publishing industry, how he feels about the conversation taking place between writers and readers on the Web, how literature and motion pictures have shaped writing in California and beyond, and the broader social issues today that are relevant to those discussed in the book.

What was your experience writing the novel?

I have always loved the noir genre. For the most part, I believe it found its greatest expression in film. The Big Heat, In a Lonely Place, Lady From Shanghai, Out of the Past, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers... and on and on. With the exception of Chinatown, I find modern "noir" to be patently ersatz. The authors of filmmakers seem to lack sincere belief in the harshness of life, the cruelty of fate, and the corruptibility of the human being. In modern, conservative, Oprahfied America, it's unforgivably unPC not to be optimistic and believe that everything can be made right with the right amount of pluck and perkiness. Modern noirists are faking it, and it's obvious. Only Polanski, a war survivor and refugee, got it right. He bears a lot in common with those who perfected the genre way back when.

My background is Southern--bayou Southern on one side -- Creole New Orleans Southern on the other. Those worlds are the diametric opposites of one another. From a black family, we were middle class and lived in white environments during the civil rights era. When I walked outside my house, I was in a white world. When I went back inside, I was in a black one. Displacement? It formed me. White environments in the 60s and 70s taught me about the ugliness people were capable of. I spent a lot of my life at war with my surroundings. I think that's why I loved the noir genre. It truly expressed the paranoia, displacement and sense of menace with which I lived.

I wanted to use the genre I loved to mine a truly multi-racial experience and present a black character unlike any I'd seen. Alex is a pre-civil rights black man who does not turn his hatred in on himself. He does not destroy himself, as the black heroes often do in Chester Himes, Richard Wright, etc. This guy attacks what threatens him--not himself. Alex uses his status as betwixt and between the black and white worlds as a base of power. From it, he makes himself extraordinary--viciously so, grant you, but extraordinary nonetheless.

The main challenge in writing this book was focusing so intently on people so damaged, and making the prose appropriately terse and loaded. I wanted the reader to descend into a particular hell. I had to discover what hell sounded like.

Was it your first, or just your first published?

I had half-finished another novel before I moved to this one. This is the first published piece. I've subsequently finished a second entitled Words of Christ in Red.

How long did it take?

This took about two years. There was a great deal of rewriting involved. I was constantly struggling to maintain the density while maintaining atmosphere. I wanted as much story with as little writing as possible. I wanted the intensity that can bring.

What kind of hustle did it take to score representation and, hopefully, an advance?

That was the worst. Every white individual in the film and book worlds will tell you that "it doesn't matter about race if your story and characters are strong." That is utter, unmitigated, worm-ridden bullshit. People in publishing and other such industries are looking to their own experiences to validate what they read. White Americans think they know all there is to know about black people. Hey, they listen to rap, watched Cosby, read Oprah Magazine and really admired Colin Powell. That is the extent of their knowledge. If you write about experiences that do not map to any of that, they often deem what you've written to be invalid, unbelievable, not well wrought. In fact, they're simply ignorant, and they have been trained to minimize African-Americans to a limited array of gestures. Make those gestures, or you risk exclusion. It's particularly bad with the publishing folks, who sincerely believe they have their fingers on the pulse of everything. They resent the suggestion that there's something out there about which they know little--especially when it's something as simple and "familiar" as Negroes.

Needless to say, I don't make those gestures. My background is distinct and indiosyncratic. So is my work. It took me about a year to find a very experienced agent who understood what I was coming from, and kept plugging away. However, she is from the old school where quality is the most important thing. There aren't too many of those left.

When we first got the press release, we noted that your plug was "Putting the black back in noir." We thought it was a great play of double entendre on the parallel themes of racial hatred and cruel violence. Did you choose the genre as a good vehicle to explore these themes, or for other reasons?

I really can't tell you if the story or the genre came first here. The two are so entwined it's a chicken/egg scenario. As I mentioned, that line "putting the black back in noir" also came from my disappointment with so much modern noir. Noir was easier when we were more innocent. That someone did something horrible for the money, or from jealousy was shocking back in the 40s. That's not shocking anymore. Chinatown worked because when the Nicholson character asks the John Huston character why he's done all this... "what more can you have that you don't have now," Huston answers, "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future." It's the most horrifying thing in the movie. It takes megalomania and makes it as visceral as vomit. The whole movie reeks of it from that point on.

I had characters I knew were desperate, mad, and outlandish enough to provoke that kind of elementalism. The noir genre was their perfect environment.

The narrative, and especially the descriptive exposition, is very dramatic and visual. Do you have any interest in working into a script or optioning it to a studio?

Though I’d been writing since my teens, I majored in film in school (tried the English dept. but, shall we say, didn’t warm to it) and I originally imagined Bourbon Street in very film-like terms. I’d love to see it made into a movie. As a matter of fact, I’ve thought about it. I know the ending would have to change and I have the perfect movie ending for the story. My biggest worry would be those directors, producers, etc. who would claim to "get" the Alex character, but really wouldn’t. I don’t think there’d be too much middle ground with a film from Bourbon Street. It would either be wonderful, or an utter piece of shit.

How do you feel in general about the option of writing for film instead of print publication?

It’s odd. I’ve had work optioned before. I like the idea of working collaboratively with others. However, the reality of the American film industry is that not much work is done that’s not very familiar. My writing is, and will probably always be somewhat eccentric. I wish it weren’t. I’ve tried writing totally commercial pieces and it always winds up going weird on me. I don’t think there’s much of a place for someone like me in American film. I make my living as a marketing consultant. I’m no "artsy" purist. I know commercial, but I also know crap when I see it. I believe in taking calculated risks. That’s not the way it’s done in film these days.

Do you think that the two styles and their cross-pollination in the market have shaped American and, in particular, Californian novelists?

I don’t know if it’s film as much as it is media in general. We live radically differently from the way we lived 30 years ago. The way we process information has changed. The music in rap was initially about using snippets of melody to suggest the whole. Suggesting the melody instead of stating it. We’ve ingested the media language so fully that we’re communicated to in semaphores, but we don’t even realize it’s happening. The way we search the Web is a revolution in visual/written communication. Literature has not caught up with this. Attempts have been limited to often painful, self-conscious "experiments." Frankly, the John Barth of Lost in the Funhouse and the Pynchon of Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow were more on the mark than most of us today are.

In film, they're scratching their heads in wonderment that Cinderella Man hasn’t made a fortune. The name alone is an invitation to stay away. Everything about the movie's trailer and marketing signified a story you’ve seen 50 times before, without one single unique feature. Who's going to pay 10 bucks to see something you've been told you've already seen 50 times before? They didn't even realize what they were communicating in their marketing plan.

Then we have the additional problem of literacy and thinking skills in general. It's an issue of curiosity. We lack it; or at least we seem to in this country. It's as if it's all become so overwhelming we've retreated inward. People want to read about only themselves, about people just like them going through problems just like theirs. They want true-life stories about people like them. Some want the world to be all white all Christian and all Republican just like them. Some want it all black just like them.

So I think we have these twin dilemmas: New ways of processing information, combined with being overwhelmed by that information and the attendant "shut down." The keepers of our cultural gates, as they try to keep their profit margins up in the face of forces they don't understand and can’t control, offer us crap.

You contacted us, we assume, because you found us on the innerweb. One of the issues that we grapple with as online publishers is that there's an audience we would really love to engage who lay across the digital divide. You wrote an excellent essay on the cultural implications of online communication. Do you feel that the digital divide can be bridged?

I believe it can. However, I don't believe the digital divide is the problem. All the other divides simply seed themselves in the new digital realm. I don't think it's any easier to engage a new audience digitally than it is in hard copy. Audiences are simply less interested in things not "them."

This is the real "Me" generation. Forget the '70s.

You're an admitted 'military brat,' and have lived all over the world. Now you call the Northern California home, but you're deeply connected to New Orleans, one of our favorite cities. What kind of similarities and differences come to mind when comparing and contrasting New Orleans and San Francisco?

I can't get beyond New Orleans' past. Slaves were herded off of ships onto that port. And then for hundreds of years -- most of this country's history -- black men and women lived under slavery and apartheid there. New Orleans sounds to my ears like Rwanda or Bosnia -- a place of violence and viciousness that is breathtaking. I get an odd sense looking at it today and seeing the picturesque gaiety. Just beneath the surface, I see blood.

For me, San Francisco does not have that shadowed self. It's a city I can just enjoy, as opposed to one that makes me anxious, angry and sad.

[Ed. Note: The content of this column was researched and completed prior to the publisher purchasing advertising on the site.]