Requiem for Saint Louie

My best friend, like me, grew up all over the place—Cleveland, Maine, Detroit, and Fort Wayne. For the last ten years, however, he’s lived in Chicago. And in that time, he’s pretty much turned himself into Mr. Chicago. He’s not from there, but he identifies, body and soul, with the Windy City. 

I totally get this. We who were moved around a lot as kids lack the sense of security and identity that being rooted in one place brings. We do have a more cosmopolitan outlook, and we’re better able to deal with change, but the flip side is that we never really feel like we belong somewhere. Unless we make the conscious choice to do so.

I have a strange relationship with St. Louis, where I live. By all rights, I should feel rooted here. My mother’s family has lived here they left Russian Poland in 1889. I was born here. I’ve lived here since 1997. But I lack the definitive St. Louis experience: I did not go to high school here.

“Where’d you go to high school?” is the first question native St. Louisans ask. The answer allows the questioner to place you in your ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic strata. Depending on where you went to high school, you are instantly identified as Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish; your family is identified as rich, middle-class, or poor; your politics as Democratic or Republican; your ethnicity as German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Lebanese, or white trash.

Because I didn’t go to high school here, I just don’t feel like a real St. Louisan. But I’ve chosen to identify myself as such. And that’s a little depressing, because I live in a place that used to have a certain indefinable but unique quality about it, and which no longer does.

Back in the day, to be a St. Louisan meant that you had qualities and characteristics that people from other cities didn’t have. We had our own accent. We had our own style. We had our own swagger. We had cachet. Back when we weren’t St. Louis, but Saint Louie--a greasy old French whore sprawled on the swampy banks of the Big Muddy, neither north nor south nor east nor west--the spot where the drifters from all those directions and more ended up to make some fast and easy greenbacks by screwing over Indians, earnest-faced pioneers in coarse homespun on their way west in Conestoga wagons, beat-down Okies on their way north escaping the poverty of the Dust Bowl, and anyone else dumb enough to pass through. 

Being from Saint Louie was, in its own quirky way, special. There was a certain roguishness about being from Saint Louie—a sort of old-timey, savvy, hustlerish, hucksterish, high-rollin’, big city (but unmistakably Midwestern big city) shtick. It was a raffish “don’t’cha even think about fuckin’ with me, buster” attitude explained more eloquently than I ever could by Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “The St. Louis Blues.” Just listen to it—it’ll tell you what we used to have. It was what Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer had in mind when they wrote the musical “St. Louis Woman.” The St. Louis woman they had in mind was known, in the old days, as a tough broad; she liked her diamonds, her liquor, and her menfolks, and she weren’t none too partic’lar about how she got any of ‘em.

It was an attitude exemplified by Joseph Pulitzer’s bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred, “Golly gosh gee whillikers, take a gander at THIS, why don’t’cha!” style of journalism which he developed here (and then took to New York).

It was the kind of place that could spawn a legendary hoodlum like Stagger Lee, whose story has been sung by James Brown, Nick Cave, Taj Mahal, Memphis Slim, Bob Dylan, and about a zillion others. It occupied a unique place in American popular song as the place where bad people go and bad things happen. Tom Waits, that old connoisseur of the grungy and balladeer of the seamy side, mentions it more than any other place. Johnny Cash lost his woman there, as he followed her down the Big River. Tom Petty has been there, too, along with Brooker and Micanopy.  

Culinarily, it took the form of St. Louis-style ribs. Not being much of a meat eater, I had no idea what those actually were until I saw them on the menu of a restaurant in Vegas that described them as the “rich, meaty, center-cut of the rib—the Porterhouse Steak of ribs.” For some reason, I find that hilarious. Ribs are shit meat, but we had the Cadillac of the shittiest meat on the animal.

It was a place that could spawn characters. Characters like Morris Shenker, who was Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer and the front owner of the Dunes in Vegas, and like Jimmy “Jack White” Licavoli, who became the boss of Cleveland’s mob. Characters like Josephine Baker and Tina Turner. It could generate genius cartoonists like Lee Falk (“The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician”) Elzie Segar (“Popeye”) (okay, he was actually from across the river in Illinois, but close enough) and Al Hirschfeld.


But no one bit of pop culture explains that indefinable quality that Saint Louie had better than the Warner Brothers cartoon where Bugs Bunny tells Yosemite Sam, “Hey, Sammy, there’s some lady at the door askin’ for ya. She said to mention Saint Louie.” Sam yells in glee, “Saint Louie? EMMA! YAHOO! HERE’S YOUR SAMMY BOY!” He runs to open the door, which, of course, Bugs has booby-trapped, blows himself up, and, covered in soot, mustaches burnt to a crisp, staggers around mumbling, “Yeah... same ol’ Emma... fulla laughs.”

See, that says it all. Saint Louie was that kind of town. It was known far and wide as a place where you got off the train or the riverboat to get shnockered on cheap hooch or on the beer that the Germans brewed here in quantities vast enough to fill the Mississippi, and blow your cash on three card monte, fancy high-falutin' duds, and fast women who would show you one hell of a time and then blow you to smithereens.

Mind you, Saint Louie wasn’t the only town in what’s now Flyover Land that had cachet. Memphis had it. Nashville didn’t. Toledo had it. Indianapolis didn’t. Detroit had it. Minneapolis didn’t. New Orleans had it, Mobile didn’t. Kansas City had it, but Omaha never had a chance. Cincinnati sort of had it, maybe a little, but Des Moines sure as hell didn’t.   

But now none of them has it. Now these great old towns are just a bunch of rotted-out inner cities surrounded by office park-ringed suburbs where everyone wears Polo, plays golf, and drives an SUV--anodyne, generic places based on how we think the American upper class lives, and completely interchangeable with any other suburb in the country. We’ve created, in the suburbs, a sort of meta-community for America’s transient middle-management class where they’ll feel comfortable no matter what city the corporation they work for sends them, because it'll look, and sound, and feel, just like the last place they lived.

And instead of raffish, roguish, raunchy ol’ Saint Louie, we now have teeth-grindingly banal, soulless, lily-white suburbs with vaguely Englishy sounding names (Marlborough. Town and Country. Manchester. Chesterfield. Blech.) where you can shop at the Gap or Borders and eat at the Cheesecake Factory after you buy a  lawnmower for your ridiculously huge yard at Home Depot. And there’s nothing to suggest that you live in the city that once gave the world Stagger Lee, Morris Shenker, or St. Louis-style ribs.

But there might be a glimmer of hope after all! Once again, in 2010, after losing it in 2007, St. Louis has regained the coveted Most Dangerous City in the United States Award from CQ Press. Suck on THAT, Camden, Detroit, Flint, and Oakland!

I'm only being half-facetious here. Maybe Nelly's on to something. Maybe just a hint of the spirit of Stagger Lee remains in the ghost of Saint Louie after all.