Part III: The 801 (the Irish Channel)

I hesitate to call the 801 a bar. It’s more barn – a barn with a refrigerator. The 801 is also where things began to get fuzzy for me.

I was hitting my stride after a few PBRs at Pal’s Lounge, a couple of half-pitchers of Budweiser at the Mayfair and a delicious catfish po’ boy and a Dixie at the Parkway Tavern (which doesn’t qualify as a dive). Before arriving at the 801, I thumbed through my notes – all written on bar napkins – and everything seemed, for the most part, coherent and in order.

The brutal day after, when, in a hungover haze, I pulled the wads of napkins from my pocket, the only thing I had written down about the 801 was:

“Remember Jerry. And you’ll remember everything.”

I could never forget Jerry.

Jerry is a leathery carpenter with black hair so wiry it could just as easily belong to a Labrador retriever; he has no more than six teeth, fingers like knotty bratwursts and forearms that would make Popeye green-eyed. He stands only about five feet tall, has a hole in his hand from a knife fight and somewhere in his diminutive ruddy framework lives a few chunks of relatively fresh lead from when he was shot by some street toughs and left for dead. His speech is unintelligible, and his voice sounds like he exists solely on a steady diet of whiskey, sawdust and battery acid.

As soon as we walked into the 801 –without Mat and Molly I never would have found this ramshackle bar, much less thought it serves as a watering hole – Jerry slipped off of his barstool and immediately walked over to greet Mat and me with a bone-crunching handshake and Molly with – no kidding – a gentlemanly Southern bow followed by a wheezy, garbled introduction. He showed her to a nearby barstool and cozied up next to her.

The tall, barrel-chested and grey-haired bartender – obviously of Irish heritage – seemed mildly perturbed at Jerry’s behavior, but guffawed to Mat and me that “he’s harmless.”

“And Molly’s tough,” we retorted, and each ordered a can of High Life for $1.25. As the bartender reached into the antiquated refrigerator for our beers, the peach-colored rotary phone resting on a plywood stand jangled a tired ring. He answered.

“Jerry, it’s for you,” he bellowed. Jerry looked up somberly while his buddies, on the other side of the bar, loudly laughed out. Apparently, Jerry hadn’t finished up an odd job in the neighborhood, and the client knew just where to find him to let him know his work wasn’t done. His friends were ribbing him.

That gave Molly a chance to fill us in on her up-close-and-personal with Jerry.

“He was telling me about a game they used to play here,” she said, wide-eyed.

Somehow, she gathered that the game involves a chicken and a large numbered board. Before the game starts, each player would bet money on corresponding numbers, much like any office sports pool. But this game is quite different: The chicken was then turned loose on the board, and when it relieved itself, the owner of the number that the chicken shit on wins the pot.

“He said that sometimes the chicken won’t shit, so he sticks his thumb in its ass to get it to go,” she whispered.

With that, I figured we needed shots immediately. The big Irish bartender served us three hefty Jim Beams in rocks glasses. Our buddy Marc, who was instrumental in assembling the dive bar list, joined us at the 801 shortly after we choked down our shots.

I asked Marc, who has a vast knowledge of the city’s dives and their history, about something that had caught my attention as soon as I walked in: Cut into the wall about three feet from the ground was a window about 2 ft. x 2 ft. It had a small wooden door that latched it closed. It was wide open at the moment.

He explained that, throughout its lifetime, the 801 likely has always been a bar or speakeasy. When the city was still Jim Crow, African-Americans would come to the window to buy their hooch. He said that many of the homes and businesses in the Irish Channel still have them, and some businesses, including the 801, still vend their wares out of them.

However, he had no answer to my question that followed about the picture hanging on the opposite wall – The Roach Beef. At first glance, it looks like a photo of a typical lunch plate in New Orleans – a cold Dixie beer glistening with condensation next to a bottle of Hunt’s ketchup, a big roast beef po’ boy with ample debris and a side of fries, all sitting on a red and white checkered table cloth. But no, this is not your average roast beef po’ boy. Rather, on the hard French bread where the roast beef should be, a writhing mass of cockroaches sits. At the top of the poster it reads, “801 Special, N’awlins Roach Beef Po’ Boy.” At the bottom, “Bon Appetit.”

Jerry, probably wisely, opted to join back up with us to drink instead of finishing his neighborhood carpentry job. He ordered another round of Jim Beams that we all promptly knocked back. Nature began to call and I wondered out loud if I should just go out back behind the building, because, honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if this place didn’t have a toilet. Jerry took Mat and I into the back – a barely-standing wood-paneled room where, I assume, the chicken shit game took place.

Amazingly, there were two working restrooms back there. The men’s room was free of graffiti and the door even locked. Jerry motioned to the wall and grumbled – Mat translated that Jerry, at one time, had a financial stake in this place, but didn’t anymore for reasons he explained to us but we couldn’t understand. He pointed out a stained 2×4 about two feet long and scalloped at the bottom – like something an 8th grader would make in wood shop – with the words “801 Roach Palace” routed into it.

“This place is a one of a kind, Jer,” Mat said.

Jerry laughed, coughed violently and smacked Mat on the back with his club of a hand as we walked back to the bar for another round.

The 801 Roach Palace is, indeed, one of a kind.

Click here for Part I: Pal’s Lounge, here for Part II: the Mayfair and here for Part IV, Pete’s Place.