a quick glimpse of: in pursuit of pat o’brien

Preface
I AM NO ORDINARY WOMAN. I AM A WOMAN OF NEEDS.

Even if I had no excuse to go down to New Orleans, I would have found one anyway. I have been a practicing imbiber there for years and the Crescent City’s Police Department is well aware of it. Someone’s got to keep the reputation of New Orleans up I say. It’s my civic duty to help our fine city stay afloat.

Besides, it’s the one place I feel at home.

The irony of this gets me every time, because the moniker, The City that Care Forgot, has been misunderstood.
I tell you this not for an immediate digression, although I do have the tendency, but so you understand that the many who have sojourned here to New Orleans find the pursuit of moral abandonment most appealing: surrendering to the city’s whimsical free-spirited essence; being carried away to another time and place; and relishing in every occasion as if it is an essential rite all to one’s own.

The French have a name for this style of living in the moment—joie de vivre—and it’s precisely where my subject and I crossed each other’s paths.

Who could ask for a better excuse to hit the Quarter? My journalistic nature reveled at first. But as the research and interviewing process kicked off, and an awkward reception ensued, I began doubting myself, cobblestoning the bits and pieces together of all the stories people were telling me.

Why did I really want to learn about this man’s life? Where were the impulses compelling me to report this story coming from?

I gripped onto my subject tighter, believing that no matter how this bar fits into the French Quarter’s landscape, now, that this man, the Pat O’Brien I knew, is a Louisiana icon.

And you know it, too, and that’s why we’re here.

Talk about the luck of the Irish—if it had not been for the vision of Pat O’Brien to name a French Quarter bar after himself and invent the Bourbon Street-renowned Hurricane cocktail, it is highly unlikely a single book about this man would ever be written.

Countless droves from around the globe rendezvous at Pat O’s bar, but the bar itself has changed owners since his death in 1983 and no one seems to want to surrender his trademark.

However, I find it interesting that the bar touts itself as being the place that serves the most alcohol of any drinking establishment of its size in the world, and the Hurricane, also by now an icon, accounts for sixty percent of this revenue.

Mr. Pat’s input must amount to something.

Simply said though, few seemed to want to linger and remember the legendary man behind the bar’s name. I volunteered enthusiastically anyhow, uncovering a plethora of reasons and met some individuals who preferred his anonymity.

The journey was an exhausting and rigorous one. I ended up at one of the most unimaginable places, arguably the nation’s most archaic penitentiary, Angola Prison. It was nothing nice.

Nonetheless, I am a better person for having ridden this thing out.

Now to the story you’ve been waiting for!

Mr. Pat began his colorful life, simply, on a small Alabama prairie. He was a country boy without much of a formal education to mention.

After his service in World War I, he wandered around the southern part of Texas, landed a couple of wives and a couple of ugly divorces, too.

Roving and skipping from one odd job to another, that’s what he did, until he drifted over to New Orleans, and immersed himself in a thriving bootlegging operation in the French Quarter.

It was during this time his business dealings resulted in a lot of easy cash and introduced him to organized crime. Mr. Pat was not a straight-up gangster, okay, but he possessed borderline tendencies and friends of the kind.

That’s all I will say here.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Mr. Pat reinvented himself briefly as a package liquor salesman, which flopped, because his customers complained about not being able to sit and drink, so he parlayed himself into a legitimate bar owner which worked.

Seduced by alcohol, this is not to say by any means Mr. Pat was a functioning alcoholic, though he enjoyed his sauce.

He was a business professional who serviced the kind of people who took pleasure in wetting their whistles—and there’s nothing wrong about that.

But there must be more to Mr. Pat than selling people a good time? The question kept resurfacing in my mind.

The chronicle of anyone’s life has to be incomplete without a consideration of that person’s private life.

And, oh, how he had one, too!

I would argue now though, that no one could possibly come to terms with Mr. Pat’s fundamental decency or the darker aspects that drove his personality, nor the unfinished business of his struggle to devise a moral compass, without being familiar with the devastating afflictions that have characterized the O’Brien family for three generations, the unusual nature of their lives.

I must tell you now that what started off as a straightforward biography about Pat O’Brien miserably failed.

Strike that—gloriously failed!

If you are seeking that in this text though, you need not read any further. Although his story and life and fame and fumbles do get told within the following pages, the strange occurrences that happened to me during the devolution of his book took over where the straight facts left me stranded.

Which ended up being a good thing because my pursuits took me to places I never would have gone and brought me to information I never would have known. Characters from his life you would have never experienced.

Now, this story is gonzo journalism. First, it was supposed to be an academic biography.

You see—Mr. Pat’s family who claimed they knew the truth, the same people who invited me into their home and who I have been friends with for 25-years, suddenly stopped returning my phone calls without telling me why.

Well they kind of told me why.

I had to refocus. So, I kept taking my notes and recording my interviews and that’s when my screwed up biographical endeavor became a journalistic exercise in style and voice, and most importantly, maintaining my own sanity.

What resulted was this 21st century uninhibited, and often inebriated, quaky concoction of his adventures, and mine telling them.

Now—if you carry a judgmental nature, you may not want to quest further in this experience. In fact, before I digress or divulge any further, I highly recommend you read no more.

Some of the truth here is scandalous.

Some of the truth here is ruthless.

Some of the truth here makes absolutely no sense at all.

Maybe you can make some sense of it yourself.

It’s just, it’s so hard, nearly impossible, to say exactly what the truth about someone is when they’re gone from this world and their story is told through the minds and eyes of others, others who have their own addictions and hidden agendas.

Life is tricky; people are trickier, and the darker and lighter shades of someone once they blend together make them who they are, still aren’t who they really are.

Or, who they are not.

But my straightforward biographical failure became so clear, no doubt clear enough to me that I could not proceed—but—that I could make it into a debauched exercise in communications, which is one of the degrees I carry on my back.

So, even if I am a participant in this piece and a master of English, it is I, the experimenter who is headed for a tricky race.

However, I feel confident enough in my disappointment, and perhaps now this experiment, to dabble in it publicly and risk it all, like Mr. Pat did.

This project was definitely worthwhile, worth several incredible buzzes at least, buzzes in fact I probably shall never see again in this lifetime.

Now back to the story. Growing up visiting there, I have enjoyed myself on several occasions at the O’Brien’s residence picking wild flowers and appreciating nature; nurturing my first love and seducing the opposite sex; feeding a festival of animals and respecting the breadth of life; fishing in ponds and living free off the land.

But I knew some day I’d be called to task to report his life story. I remember discussing this exact purpose with Cara O’Brien and my mother in Mr. Pat’s kitchen as a newt.

Which is precisely why I had my doubts going in. Because I knew very well who I’d be interviewing and all their unpleasant eccentricities.

I’m talking grave doubts. Grave doubts. But—high hopes.

I jumped in wholeheartedly, perhaps naively.

I never expected once everything was all over Mr. Pat would become known to me as a lunatic, a debauched, hurricaneous phenomena himself, who urged me on during the creative process to do strange almost unrepeatable things. (Urged or egged, you tell me after you read all of this.)

But he is.

What I learned about Pat O’Brien is remarkable though it would be about anyone for that matter. It’s a complicated tale, a twisted journey, shocking, and lies in the pages ahead.

In the 70s, the time I spent with Mr. Pat I remember vividly because they all occurred outside in the fortressed brick courtyard of his private residence. His final days were spent there cuddled in the lush countryside of Covington’s womb.

To me, back then, Mr. Pat always went with the flow of things, a liquid rainbow kicked back in his chair. It was the quintessential Irishman, first generation born in this country to make it.

Nothing seemed to bother him then.

But what was Mr. Pat like before he settled down to country life I started to wonder. I knew he wasn’t always like this.

What was he like when he first arrived in New Orleans with nothing and provided so many with a safe harbor during Prohibition? How did he come to opening up the bar when he was more like liquid fire, not a liquid rainbow?

Why is it people universally boast about their experiences at Pat O’Brien’s bar? Was he really one of those bigger than life characters with charisma everyone wanted to be around?

I was hoping someone could help me gain some insight into the questions swirling in my head. I was looking forward to it, to hearing these stories about him.

This was when my gonzo adventure began.

I interviewed Mr. Pat’s children from several of his marriages, a few of his grandchildren, his friends, their friends, horseracing buddies, long-time bar employees and patrons.

The information provided by his immediate family at the time of his death is both limited and ambiguous. Much of their information ranged from superciliously indulgent to self-exalting, to outright lies.

Secondary sources presented additional problems polluting his ethereal spirit. The memories of Mr. Pat’s other relatives, friends and former employees are a cacophony of quarrels and unrequited love. A peculiar mix of peremptoriness and ingratiation seemed to characterize these relationships.

I searched through the Orleans Parish Public Library’s newspaper archives. Pat O’Brien’s bar itself has a brazen history for being the central magnate for rioting in the French Quarter as well as the single-most visited place in New Orleans for hot international studs, yanks and locals.

I also reviewed Supreme Court of Louisiana microfiche. Behind all the courtrooms and high-society hand-painted murals of federal judges, I discovered an underground world that stored the family secret.

I drove across the Causeway and visited the new towering St. Tammany Parish Civil Courthouse on more than a few occasions and read through hundreds of pages of court pleadings. The legal battles Mr. Pat fought led right to his back door.

I inquired at the Orleans Parish Mortgage and Conveyance offices. Their helpful staff gave me the dates and times Mr. Pat put his business plan to practice here in the Crescent City. I also wrote to the Louisiana Secretary of State, Fox McKeithen, who confirmed the incorporation of Pat O’Brien’s bar and his partnership with Charlie Cantrell. I was determined to know it all.

Mr. Pat had enemies and I had always been curious why the iron bars were put up in his home on every single door and entryway and window. At night, we all got locked in. We locked ourselves in.

Of course, I researched the Internet, too. The State of Alabama Department of Archives and History mailed me genealogical information on his family and Mr. Pat’s Statement of Service Card for World War I, but the information conflicted with what Mr. Pat’s heirs had told me about his service.

At times, I even felt like Mr. Pat and some of his other deceased family members were channeling me to chip in their ante. I did everything possible to get the complete story.

Once I laid all the pieces out though, it occurred to me they all had to be pieced back together, weaved in an attractive fashion.

There were so many pieces to his puzzle missing.

Still, I would have liked to have known more about his childhood. A barrage of other questions flooded my thoughts when it was all over.

Did his mother really die giving birth to his brother? Had this been the main reason Mr. Pat left home at the age of sixteen—or—was it because his father remarried and her family all piled into the house pushing him out the door, like the census showed? Or, his fleeing just a demonstration of masculinity for the times?

Was that really his Uncle Pat O’Brien who owned the saloon in Birmingham, Alabama in the late 1800s? If so, maybe his uncle was the bar’s inspiration. Why did Mr. Pat’s first wife, Hazel, and her family ridicule him? How did he fall into the hands of the second wife, if only for less than a year of their marriage? A shotgun? What was it about horses that attracted him most—the money or the animal? They’re quite endearing creatures.

Why had Mr. Pat’s shares in the business dwindled to minority ownership and then into no ownership at all? What really did provoke Mrs. O’Brien to sell the bar less than a year after Mr. Pat’s death and was she aware of what she was doing when she did it? There’s serious speculation to the contrare.

Did his women come cashing in later in life? Was it simply the inheritance tax issue at the time for Charlie’s divvying up the rest of his shares?

Does it all boil down to perception versus reality? I am not here to bash anyone, but I wish I knew the truth.

However, I always have a tendency to question whoever alleges they behold the truth.

Straightforward paranoia, the nature of my beast.

I can only tell you what I know, what I heard and what they told me.

Who is Eileen, the mysterious third wife, with whom he never had children? I couldn’t find her anywhere.

How was she able to receive alimony until the day he died? They didn’t seem to have had a good sound relationship.

If Mr. Pat was making so much money on the bar in the 1950s and 60s, then why were there so many past due notices on the bills his granddaughter gave me? Had his passion for horses ignited a gaming frenzy that ran out all his cash reserves?

Was he really a member of the Rainbow Unit entrenched in France in World War I or was that another cock-and-bull story fabricated in paternal-glorification?

Or even better, was everyone trying to confuse me? I don’t know.

I was an unprofessional journalist, no doubt, trying to get to the root of things and pissed because I couldn’t.

Pissed off and pissed drunk.

I sipped on my unanswered questions staring into the flaming fountain from the back table in the courtyard at Pat O’Brien’s bar in New Orleans, the sun filtering through its fizzling flow causing a rainbow to appear.

Should I have another 24-ounces of the potent rum punch? My questions got fuzzier after my next drink.
What would the color of a rainbow be, if all the shades blended together, and one solid kaleidoscope color emerged?

Would it be like the pupil of an eye? Would it resemble a roux, the brown base of all gumbos? Would it feel like the gushy mud at the bottom of a river? Would it possess the same powers as a real rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of every one?

After one or two more drinks, it registers.

Mr. Pat is the flaming fountain out in the courtyard!

Mr. Pat is the kaleidoscope color of a rainbow!

His place is the theme of the heart of the French Quarter!

As I developed this book, countless other faces popped up and contributed their advice and comments to this story—a popular bar owner concealed an even more private man—and made their voices invaluable, and honestly, thoroughly entertaining.

They should know who they are.

I thank them and offer this as a token of appreciation for all the happiness and gallant patronage Mr. Pat gave, and continues to give, to this fun loving but freaky world.

Everyone, keep humping!

And now that Katrina has hit and ruined my city, so much, I guess, for The Pursuit—and for the last chances of running amok in New Orleans and then living to tell the tale.

But maybe the rest of the country won’t miss her. Perhaps not rebuilding her is really the best way to go, after all.
Maybe so, and if this is the way it goes down, at least I shall know I was there, in the center of the frivol madness, before the final card went down, and I got so wild that I felt like a crocodile rolling around in a swampy bayou with a nutria locked inside its grip.

It was a nice way to go, and I recommend it to anyone who can handle the ride.

Some, obviously cannot. For them, I have nothing.

Now, if you’ll pardon me. I would like to break free from this computer and meditate in my Garden District courtyard in the buff.

A breeze is blowing and a full moon is coming out.