What is New Orleans, on a Mardi Gras day ...

The po' boy sandwich. A true time-tested New Orleans institution. Take your french bread, spread some mayo on, drop some lettuce and tomato on top, coat liberally with fried shrimp and oysters, or "barbecue" shrimp, or roast beef and gravy, or whatnot and so forth. Blam. That's good eating. I remember one heartbreaking day I was off out of New Orleans, after a few months' stay, and headed west. Before I went I got the aforementioned 12-inch half shrimp, half oyster po boy from the St. Roch Fish Market (defunct after Katrina) and ate it in the car on I-10 straight out of my lap. A little taste of ambrosia on a humid Sunday morning ...

The Atchafalaya Basin Bridge on I-10 in Louisiana

The best po' boy "restaurants" aren't famous names like Parkway Tavern or Domilise's. They're off the map, out of the way, down in the backwater-type shacks and fast-food-looking joints and sketchy corner grocery stores with bullet-proof glass and steel-grate doors in neighborhoods you don't wander in at night. (I found it quirky that, while some were black owned and operated, others were run by Asians, Vietnamese among others. I imagined that owner A sold the place to owner B on condition of handing down the secret recipe to the ancient family's original cooking.)

My faves were always at the Marigny's edge or in the Bywater neighborhood, in the (Upper) Ninth Ward. Some like Captain Sal's are on relative thoroughfares like St. Claude Avenue. Others are peppered along residential streets, a seductive scent wafting in the jasmine-tinged air, made with that magic recipe containing something invisibly delicious you just don't get at the clearinghouse tourist places -- or even the workaday spots where regulars flow in and out for lunch.

Vaughan's Lounge at a corner of Dauphine and Lesseps streets in Bywater

I'll fight you on this. I'll take my french bread loaf and bop you on the head.

I'll take my late-night two-bit emergency ration po' boy from the store next door to the all-night daquiri shop with the police siren flashing blue light spinning around and around, the under $5 joint where maybe I'm the only white customer after midnight and the dingy walls are streaked with grease and the general mood feels heavy with hard-knock weariness in a decaying, decadent city on the river at the edge of the continent in a world all its own. And I'll take a bite. And I'll take another bite. A scrumptious special bite. And I'll give you a look that says, don't you mess with this. This is my little pleasure. This is my kind of comfort.

This is a moment in a lost, low-down world where I feel almost home.