“Skylark,” by William Christy Smith, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 246 pages.
I’m a sucker for novels set in 1980s New Orleans, a time and place that shaped my earliest years but which I was far too young to fully absorb.
Such is the case with William Christy Smith’s debut novel, “Skylark,” a short-story cycle that compassionately captures the 1980s AIDS crisis in New Orleans. Smith’s longtime position as adult programming manager at the Jefferson Parish Public Library has made him a steadfast champion of the local literary scene.
Over 18 stories, featuring a sprawling cast of characters, Smith has crafted a book that is surprisingly lighthearted despite its somber subject matter.
The novel opens on the shared life of Ruby and Bella, recent retirees from Baltimore who move to New Orleans to grow old and comfortable, “like contented cows in a pasture.” To supplement their income, they take jobs cooking and waiting tables at a gay-friendly Marigny mainstay called the Fork in the Road.
The restaurant hosts AIDS support groups, drag shows and the odd bar mitzvah. It’s a prime example of what the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called a “great good place” — convenient, comfortable public spaces where regulars congregate over conversation and other simple pleasures.
It’s also a place destined, after the AIDS-related death of its owner, for the continued guidance of Ruby and Bella, who rechristen the restaurant Skylark, after their preferred weekend activity: excursions to backcountry farmers markets, or what they call skylarking.
British slang for silly or frivolous behavior, skylarking aptly describes the Skylark.
Comic-tinged banter fills the front and back of house. Employees and customers dream up mischievous schemes. It’s the type of laid-back, anything-goes eatery where an impatient diner can jokingly shout, “Who do you have to sodomize to get some food around here?” and the bartender knows to quell his gripes with a well-made Sazerac.
But beneath that frivolity is the novel’s gloomy through line: each of the characters featured in “Skylark,” apart from Ruby and Bella, is a gay, HIV-positive man who is dying of AIDS and/or grieving a loved one who has recently succumbed to the disease.
At the Skylark, these men find comfort in food, community and, in a second connective tissue that links these characters’ lives, telling their stories. On Wednesday nights, the restaurant hosts the Lavender Literary Guild, a memoir writing group where the men, and by authorial extension, Smith, explore their rich interior lives on the page.
“United by AIDS,” they are a diverse group. A pizza delivery guy, a personal fashion consultant at Godchaux’s department store, a Royal Street gallery owner, a florist. One unforgettable character named Hope Chest works as a “drag doctor.” She’s on call “to help repair things,” Smith writes.
“Like when a girl needs a new drag persona, a new costume, a better wig,” He writes. “‘Lose the bangs.’ ‘Get a different shade of lipstick.’”
Helping each other is the key in Smith’s intimate Skylark universe, “an extensive underground network that flourished and was mostly unknown.” A community of individuals who spend their last days offering succor to the sick, honoring the departed, helping each other in ways big and small and, at times, unquestionably illegal — stealing cremains and rewriting wills, for instance — but always morally just.
Smith appropriately bookends the events in “Skylark” between 1983 and 1988, milestone years for AIDS awareness and activism in New Orleans. The Picayune published its first extensive local coverage of the crisis on April 11, 1983, under the headline, “AIDS: Mystery Disorder.” That same year saw the founding of the healthcare organization known as the NO/AIDS Task Force. In May 1988, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed in the former downtown exhibition hall known as Rivergate.
Despite the shared fate of his characters, and the harrowing variety of symptoms that causes them so much suffering, Smith gracefully manages to avoid the clichéd “bury your gays” trope, in which queer lives are buried under the weight of tragedy and trauma.
His stories exude lived-in quality. They are consoling, much like the comfort food the Skylark serves up.
At times, though, I wished the novel felt more in tune with the decade in which it’s set. Sure, there’s a couple references to Tom Selleck’s hairy-chested sex appeal and a prank involving a cache of stolen David Duke bumper stickers, but I wanted a richer portrait of the long-gone gay New Orleans of the 1980s in these pages, a city then filled with ungentrified bars and swinging bathhouses.
But mostly the novel made me long for my own great good place, something I’ve lacked since moving, three years back, out of the same Marigny neighborhood that the fictional Skylark calls home. May we all be so lucky to find a place like that.
Rien Fertel is the author of four books. He recently won his fifth Best Critical Review Award from the New Orleans Press Club.