by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

This column, the first of the New Year (of the Tiger, and I hope all of you bag your limit this twelve month) is in the tortuous form of a rebuke and a response. Never mind that y.t. turned one year shy--coquettishly, flirtatiously shy--of a half-century just days ago, and never mind that while reeling from the effects of a year's worth of smothered cabbage and blackeyes turning to concrete in my intestines and also reeling from half a shiny ice-blue bottle of Bombay heading for the same destination on a collision course, and trying to keep my balance on a Bourbon Street balcony (not the French Quarter's Most Festive Seasonal Balcony, far from it, about six blocks from it), and who should pass my bleary eyes on the pavements beneath but the eternally youthful and luscious Bob Batson (or maybe it was the Bead Lady, it was that kind of New Year's Day) and when I gargled out a greeting of sorts and told him of my impending chronological crisis, he cried up to those charmed magic casements opening on faery seas perilous and forlorn that I was leaning against, "Oh goodness, fifty isn't old!" before making the bend of Bourbon Street. Well, he ought to know, but it still doesn't make my old bones feel any better in the wet and humidity and the fact that I danced my fool head, and much else, off on Twelfth Night (no gold bean this year, alas!) and am still feeling it, may make for a crabby cast to this column. When I told an oppressively hip young man with whom I toil that I was going to be dancing on Twelfth Night, he said with astonished mien, "Really? You? Dancing? On what bar?" and I thought to tell him that the pasties with tassels and the leopard-print g-string had been retired long ago--hell they may be in the Smithsonian by now, along with the Spirit of St. Louis and Al Jolson's tubs of burnt cork with which they are roughly contemporaneous.

But I'm sure you'd rather I got on with this, and got out of everyone's hair. So the matter or marrow of the thing is this: I received a letter, a sweet, precious, darling, adorable letter from one of the more charming Ambush employees (as if there were such of a thing as a less charming one! how you talk!) chiding me for my malicious, uncaring, totally malevolent and repellent animadversion against the late George DeVille in my last column. Hmm, I thought, what a dear, kind letter! When I had finished tearing it to infinitesimal shreds and stomping on them, I opened the windows, took a deep breath and thought I really should reply to this.

So I low-rated that saintly creature George DeVille, had I? When people had called me from as far away as Abita Springs to tell me, yes, I had brought it all back and they--or rather their psychiatric care-givers--were thinking of bringing legal action for dredging up long buried and repressed past traumas. To get Old Lady DeVille out of the way and back where he belongs, I'll say that perhaps I did de-emphasize and play down certain good qualities of George's. Character assassination wasn't my express purpose, much as I am unfairly rumored to have a weakness if not a talent for it. I might have gone on about those wonderful evenings above Minty's on Dauphine St. with the portieres wide open, The Threepenny Opera screeching on the Victrola and the endless flow of scotch and fat lips and witty badinage. I might have mentioned George's wonderful Mardi Gras Day open houses when he never failed to don the skimpiest of guest towels as a cache-sexe and perform a cooch-dance to dazzle or at least render speechless the assembled multitude, I could have gone on and on--and you know I can, ragazzi--about his endless kindnesses and charities, many of which however were private and not conducted within the purlieus of 622 Canal St., which was what I was writing-or trying-to write about: that peculiar decompression chamber away from the jeers and sneers and snubs of the straight world. (Of course, it helped that Wanda's, the Midship, Gene's Hideaway, Pennyland, the Safari, and even Gilmore's Newsstand were right in the vicinity...I well remember the Old Rossetter telling me, an unlettered and hopelessly provincial and naive soubrette just up from the country, i.e., Metairie, that "if you really want a low thrill, go around to Gilmore's and get a copy of this thing called Song of the Loon right now!" Only those who loved before the era of the VCR can realize what potential nitroglycerine such things were in the hands of, well, anybody that could read. Not to mention as well that the Walgreen's on the corner of Royal and Iberville had at that time a lunch counter where one of the older, more maternal waitresses acted as a sort of mother-confessor and unpaid therapist in listening to endless tales of woe and broken hearts and betrayal from all the smart nine-to-five sissies who drifted over from Rubenstein's and points west.)

I think it does a disservice to George DeVille and to all the dear departed, and God knows we all of us have houses filled with ghosts these days, not to remember him in the round, as 'twere. DeVille could embarrass and appall people who often simply didn't deserve it, he would paw and poke people to not-always-happy distraction, he would refer to you loudly as Gussie or Bessie until your ears were ready to bleed, and he could be catty and petty and larcenous and promiscuous and all the rest of it and often was. At the same time, he could get hauled off to jail by the cops for selling James Baldwin's Another Country, that most tedious and least erotic of 'dirty books'--well at least the NOPD thought it was, dirty, that is--back in those unenlightened days, which certainly qualifies him for beatification if not canonization. Usually on Good Friday, George's companion for some time, Julian Mutter, has some people in and they sit around and eat and hoist a few and tell DeVille stories, and the atmosphere when I've been in attendance is not exactly sacerdotal. I've told some of the same stories I put in here, and have heard many worse ones, along with the usual homilies and teary-eyed stuff. No one's ever been offended, because people don't exist in a vacuum. If there are forty people at Julian's on a Good Friday, odds are that each one of the forty knew a different DeVille. Gosh, this is starting to sound like the drag road-show of It's A Wonderful Life.

All of us of a certain age, who have done more mourning than the Trojan Women, really owe it to those who have traipsed on before us to remember them as they were. Everyone has lost lovers or bosses or coworkers, family or friends or deadly enemies, and it is a credit to them not to smear vaseline all over the lens so that they look pretty and fresh-faced and twenty-years-younger all the time. Very few people are wholly good and even fewer are completely wicked; most of us are a smart two-tone gray. One of the reasons I try to skip memorial services, after my first couple hundred, is because generally those who speak about the dear departed almost never seem to be talking about the person I knew. As Becky Allen might put it, we like diamonds, dawlin', all 'em facets!

On a completely, utterly different note....since next month is Mardi Gras, I want to tell all of you to get yourself to a bookstore and have a look at Henri Schindler's Mardi Gras book (Flammarion, $50): OK, you might not want to pop half a C-note for it, though it is a treasure and I don't say that just because I am on the Acknowledgements page, but there are several pictures worth the perusal of anyone with even the remotest curiosity about Mardi Gras As It Was, and incidentally How We All Got This Way. Among them are a spectacular Charles Franck picture from the late Thirties, I would think, of two queens got up as Mae West and her maid-right there on Canal Street, and three (count 'em) photos of the late and luscious Elmo Avet, subject of one of these very columns some time before all of you were born.