Laissez Les Morts Temps Rouler: Goth Parenting in New Orleans

We’ve been in the Guillermo del Toro exhibit for five minutes when I realize it may not be the best place for a two-year-old.

My wife, Darcy, and I, along with our son, Sebastian, have driven several hours to see the exhibit, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters, which explores lapidary horror auteur del Toro’s “creative process through his collection of paintings, drawings, maquettes, and concept film art.”

We’re both die-hard del Toro fans. Last October in New Orleans, where we currently live, we hired our first babysitter in months to catch a matinee of del Toro’s Crimson Peak, shotgunning beers in a mall parking lot to get buzzed before going inside. Today, the plan is to linger in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art galleries for as long as Sebastian will permit before driving back to San Diego, where we both grew up and where we’re visiting family. But now, as I chase my son among life-sized tableaus of Frankenstein’s monster and Edgar Allan Poe and maquettes of the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth and the Angel of Death from Hellboy, I’m concerned that his car nap will have monsters in it: men with eyes in the palms of their hands; corpses with black wings and mantles of bone.

Sebastian, however, is cheery as ever, sprinting between the displays and vitrines while calling out, “Mon-stuh!” He stumbles; I catch him. He freezes in front of the statue of Poe staring out from the depths of a library chair. “Poe!” Sebastian says, recognizing the face that’s tattooed on my right inner bicep. In fact, Sebastian and I both have multiple T-shirts depicting his haggard and iconic visage. (“What’s with you guys and Poe?” the director of my son’s nursery school recently asked me; “He’s our mascot,” I answered.)

Darcy walks up and points out the black arabesque wallpaper adorning Poe’s library. “This is cool, right?” she says. “I’m thinking it might be great for some of kind of gothic parlor room in the house. Maybe Sebbie’s,” she smiles, “when he outgrows the space.”

Sebastian sprints off, ducking, chirping.

A middle-aged white dude in a Hawaiian shirt, whose path has intersected with ours several times, sidles up with a grin and says, “Brave little guy. “

*

With our family, del Toro exhibits and Poe T-shirts are only the tip of the coffin. The city in which we’ve made our home steeps itself—is steeped—in horror.

With its old-world architecture in resplendent decay, its narrow, crooked streets lit by gaslight, its murky swampland erupting with cypress knees and otherworldly birdcall and its weather-streaked aboveground cemeteries, New Orleans has got to be the most gothic city in America.

Beyond jazz, cocktails, and Lil Wayne, the macabre is the city’s primary export. Fake real estate signs in the French Quarter read: haunted. Ghost tours roam the streets. There’s a Voodoo Museum. The music scene pulses with Goth and black metal. Anne Rice is from here, though she lives here no longer; her house, on First Street in the Lower Garden District, is an ancestral mansion right out of Lestat. Come Halloween, there’s a ball in her honor.

For me, a writer of dark fiction and recovering Goth, who wore black raincoats and corpse makeup in high school, blasting Swans and Sisters of Mercy while drawing all the shades in my SoCal bedroom to block out the heinous abundance of sunlight, and for my wife, a minister and social justice advocate who, when we met in New York City in our late twenties, had a Netflix queue consisting only of the films Peeping Tom and Audition, and who loves anything and everything by Flannery O’Connor, New Orleans is the perfect home.

Sebastian has little say in the manner yet. He was born here in August of 2014.

When he was just two months old, we trucked him all over the city in pursuit of Krewe of Boo, New Orleans’s annual Halloween parade, which features a float of the killer doll Chucky, stopping once in Armstrong Park to take a spooky family selfie: Sebastian, cherubic, asleep in our arms, while Darcy plants a zombie’s kiss and I pretend to eat his head. On the long, aimless days when he doesn’t have school and I curate a playlist for us, he head-bangs and growls to Norwegian black metal and sways to Bauhaus’s cascading guitar. We have children’s versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Dracula. The latter book, Dracula: A Counting Primer, progresses all the way to 10: 1 castle, 3 wolves, 5 heroes, 9 boxes (see: coffins), 10 garlic flowers.

Our decision to embrace the ghoulishness of Sebastian’s birth city has gone well—for the most part. If anyone gets the occasional side-eye, it’s been me: rolling up to the playground in Bathory T-shirts, dropping Sebastian off at daycare in glow-in-the-dark purple skeleton PJs. But most of the time in this city, folks get it, because it’s all they’ve ever known.

Killing time in a CVS one day, I took him through the decorations. He loved the dancing skeletons, the croaking ravens even more. But when we arrived at the unholy clown with the button that made it maniacally cackle, Sebastian’s face began to crumple.

A woman came up to reassure me. “My nephew don’t like the clowns either,” she said.

Blessed interventionist. I wanted to tell her so many things:

Really, don’t worry—he lives for this stuff.

Your nephew’s never been to our place.

No, you don’t understand. See, I want him to like it, because it’s who his mother and I are and what if he grows up and studies finance? What if we can’t control what he loves—and what he fears?

I think the thing I said was: “Thanks.”

My wife and I assure each other that even if Sebastian’s an irrepressible jock, we’ll go to his games, and we’ll enjoy them. There’s more to life than being a couple of morbid eccentrics. New Orleans already has plenty of those.

And this city has scarier things in it than monsters. New Orleans is the most incarcerated city in America, disproportionately when it comes to black men. Katrina has gone, but her wages remain: blighted buildings, displaced people, a charter school system improved in theory, but plagued still by systemic inequality and institutional rot. Economic disparities hug racial lines. Louisiana’s losing wetlands at the rate of a football field an hour, they say, much of it a crucial stronghold between New Orleans and the Gulf.

As the white father of a white son with a middle-class support structure living in a majority black city that so often seems on the brink of collapse, it’s not lost on me that I’m whimsically exposing my child to imagined horrors instead of the grim realities many people face every day. Indeed it’s occurred to me that my obsession with darkness and horror, more persistent every minute, might be somewhat of an unconscious displacement. It’s similar to the reason my wife, whose job involves advocating for women’s reproductive rights in the Gulf South, has seen almost every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Horror is containable there, follows narrative twists and resolutions. If I keep showing my son that maniacal clowns with dirty teeth and pale men who see with the palms of their hands are the worst he has to fear in life, then I can forestall his having to fear the terrible, beautiful world that surrounds him.

But I don’t want to shield him forever. I can’t. Ours is a city with jazz funerals, year-round skeleton costumes, wakes where dead people are posed in pink boas, sporting cigarette holders or tallboys of Busch.

It’s a place that delights in its own mortal terror, in the fact that, one day, it will no longer be.

*

As you might’ve already guessed, my wife and I really do up Halloween.

We watch the seasonal specials with Sebastian (usually Spongebob or Curious George). We brainstorm costumes in advance. We carve pumpkins. We hit the parades and the “Hallow-Oui Fall Fete.” We stroll through the French Quarter, Bayou St. John, and the grand streets of Uptown to scout porch displays. Our own display is growing yearly.

We have one beloved decoration that hangs from a hook outside the front door, a skeleton woman in a Victorian gown who outstretches a hand when she blows with the wind, proffering a rose to passersby. My wife and I named her the Dowager. That’s a mouthful for Sebbie, who calls her the Ghost.

When I carry him past her en route to the car, he sometimes makes this wary moaning noise. Once, he called out: “No. I don’t want the Ghost. No, the Ghost, no.”

That afternoon, Darcy and I talk seriously about possibly taking her down. But we don’t.

Several days later when I hustle him out, he pauses beneath the Dowager, gazing up at her skeleton hands, her frayed gown.

I say to him: “Don’t be afraid of the ghost. The ghost can’t hurt you. She’s not real.”

Buckled into his car seat, he turns back again. He narrows his eyes at the Ghost on the porch to get a fix on her.

“Bye-bye, the Ghost.” He waves. “Bye-bye.”

I keep quiet. This is one of those moments it pays not to speak.

I am like some creature who loves him so much that I want to devour him, but I can’t, I won’t, eat his head. I’ll leave him to discover the truth of the world on his own terms.

Until then, I’ll be watching my son from the shadows, eager to offer a fleshless, gaunt hand.

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