Your servant, Charles McCain, as a college student in New Orleans, Mardi Gras, 1978.
As a sidebar, allow me to mention that as a college student in New Orleans, myself and some of my frat brothers would go to Galatoire’s now and again for a long, drunken lunch. This was before these old line restaurants became so expensive. Inevitably, there would be two Plaquemines Parish sheriff’s cars parked on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and Leander Perez, junior, having taken his late father’s place as boss of the ass end of Louisiana, would be holding court at one of the tables.
Usually he was drunk as a Lord, smoking cigarettes by the handful, and braying nonsense unfortunately audible to everyone. The lines I remember most:
“Do you know why the North attacked the South,” he asked his toadies. No sir, we don’t hardly know. “Because there were eleven millionaires in the United States at that time and ten of them was in the South.”
We were too far away for junior to see us laughing.
Charles McCain is a lifelong student of World War Two. He grew up in South Carolina and is a graduate of Tulane University. An Honorable German is his first novel. After surviving a bout with cancer 3 years ago, Mr. McCain is at work on several writing projects. He lives in Washington, DC.
