COVER STORY : Road Trip! : Andrei Codrescu is your basic droll Transylvanian poet and social commentator who was given a ’68 Caddy and a mission: Find America and its soul

NEW ORLEANS —  “Near where I live,” Andrei Codrescu writes in an essay for the anthology “New Orleans Stories,” “there is the Lafayette Cemetery on Prytania Street. Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat lives in one of the tombs.”

It is an irony that Codrescu views with something less than unadulterated glee. As a native of Transylvania, he is inordinately proud of his fictional countryman Count Dracula, the only king of the undead he will ever acknowledge. Lestat? Codrescu considers Rice’s best-selling, soon-to-be-Tom-Cruised creation to be a mere pretender to the throne.

“It used to be that when Americans thought of vampires, they thought of this cultured Eastern European aristocrat,” Codrescu recently complained while entertaining a visitor in his Garden District home.

“But now, they think of this . . . this . . . “

The visitor was startled. Not by the angry outburst, which seemed more comically affected than genuinely wrathful, but by a far more unusual spectacle. Here was Andrei Codrescu--poet, novelist, university professor, National Public Radio commentator, part-time TV pundit and documentary-movie star--suddenly at a loss for words.

For the thousands who have consumed his 25 volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, and for the millions who listen faithfully to his droll commentaries on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Codrescu is a wordsmith par excellence, a raconteur nonpareil. Hearing this transmedia Transylvanian struggle helplessly for an appropriately harsh put-down is a bit like seeing Dracula scurrying away from daylight: oddly disheartening.

Not to worry, though: Codrescu quickly came up with an aptly sarcastic (and, unfortunately, quite unprintable) description of Lestat. With that out of the way, he was eager to talk about other notable aspects of his neighborhood.

Next door to the Lafayette Cemetery, Codrescu said, is the apartment house where a 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his first novel, “This Side of Paradise.” But there’s no marker to indicate the historical importance of this site. And that, Codrescu said, is probably as it should be.

“If New Orleans went into the memorial plaque business for all the writers who ever lived here,” Codrescu said, “they would have to brass-plate the whole town.”

Actually, New Orleans is very much Codrescu’s kind of town. He and his wife live a short stroll from their favorite Magazine Street restaurant-cum-art gallery and only a few minutes from the Greyhound Bus terminal, from which Codrescu commutes to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he teaches literature and writing.

(That he is a tenured professor in the university’s English department is an endless source of amusement for Codrescu: ‘In America, we get our shoes from Italy, we get our cars from Japan--and our English teachers from Romania.”)

“This is a town that really appreciates talent,” he said. “I just wrote a piece about this amazing obituary that appeared in the newspaper a few days ago. It was an obituary for a chef at the Louis XVI Restaurant. And the newspaper praised this chef’s dishes--like the veal chop with sauces of sherry, ginger and pepper. And it went on to talk about his sweetbread stuffed with mushrooms. It talked about his famous poached salmon Lafayette, which it gave the complete recipe for.

“And I thought, ‘Man, what other town would actually list all of your creations, so they could cook from your obituary?’ So what I wrote was: ‘In New Orleans, the dead don’t get to eat, but they still can cook.’ ”

It was just that kind of pith and playfulness that appealed to documentary filmmaker Roger Weisberg, who telephoned Codrescu three years ago with what he thought was an irresistible offer.

Here’s the deal: With a frayed shoestring budget from public television, Weisberg would follow the transplanted Romanian on a drive down highways and byways in Florida, “documenting the Americana and the roadside attractions” as Codrescu waxed eloquent and, even better, ironic.

So how about it?

Codrescu, a mischievous-looking fellow with the smile of a warily skeptical cherub, still shakes his head in bemusement at the memory of Weisberg’s first phone call.

“I told him we have two problems,” Codrescu said. “I don’t want to go to Florida. And I don’t drive.”

And that, Codrescu thought, was the end of it. Several months later, however, Weisberg called again, with an amended proposal. The producer would finance a cross-country auto journey, allowing Codrescu to set the itinerary. Before the trip began, he would pay for Codrescu’s driving lessons--provided, Weisberg stipulated, “you will allow us to film the ordeal.”

And, perhaps most important, Weisberg “offered me a ridiculously small amount of money,” Codrescu said, “that was, however, more than my poetry had earned me in a lifetime of practicing its dangerous pin turns.”

Thus began the saga of “Road Scholar,” the pungently idiosyncratic documentary that evolved from a TV series episode into a 82-minute feature as its horizons and ambitions expanded. The movie, one of the most popular offerings at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival, plops Codrescu behind the wheel of an immense, cherry-red ’68 Cadillac convertible and accompanies this modern-day De Tocqueville along assorted memory lanes, back roads, fast tracks and seldom-beaten paths. It opens Friday at the Nuart in West Los Angeles and Aug. 20 at the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar and the Rialto in South Pasadena.

“I was looking for people outside of the mainstream, for Americans who manage to live--some of them successfully--by not doing the conventional things of Mom, Pop and 2 1/2 kids in front of the TV,” Codrescu said. “So these people that I talked to were either too new to be integrated, or they were too outside to really be typical.”

Much of “Road Scholar” has an autobiographical flavor, as Codrescu--who arrived in America in 1966, at age 19--retraces his immigrant roots by visiting old friends and former haunts in New York, Detroit and San Francisco. (Near the start of his journey, Codrescu seeks the “blessing” of his spiritual mentor, poet Allen Ginsberg.)

But a lot more of the movie is Codrescu’s journey into terra incognita, as he casts an inquisitive eye and a sharp tongue at such phenomena as a Denver “beauty pageant” for artificially inseminated cows (bred, Codrescu notes, “to increase the McDonaldability”); a golden-ager punk-rock band, One Foot in the Grave, in a Sun City, Ariz., retirement community; the dubious Biosphere II (“a Disneyland for the millennially distressed”) in Oracle, Ariz., and the ineffably formidable Bo, a Las Vegas shooting instructor who has posed for Playboy and Penthouse and claims that “to be an American, in America, owning machine guns is the best thing in the world.”

A good deal of time--but not as much, Weisberg and Codrescu agree, as they could have used--is spent among the New Age channelers, rebirthers and other spiritual seekers in Santa Fe, N.M. Codrescu addresses all of this mysticism with ironic commentary and unbridled curiosity, coming across as wry and whimsical without seeming snide or smart-alecky. (Well, OK, without seeming unduly smart-alecky.) It’s a delicate balance, one that indicates that, deep down, Codrescu may be too much of skeptic to completely trust his own skepticism when dealing with things other commentators might dismiss with cheap put-downs.

Which is not to say, however, that Codrescu blunted the edge of his serrated (and sometimes surreal) humor to make a nice impression on moviegoers. Indeed, said Weisberg, Codrescu didn’t even try to spare himself from the occasional indignity of looking foolish on camera.

“Actually,” Weisberg said, “filming his driving test was hysterical, because Andrei made many, many mistakes.

“But the driving examiner was so self-conscious about being filmed that she didn’t pay any attention to the mistakes Andrei was making. And, as if she were an actress delivering her lines, when Andrei finished the test--he’d changed lanes without signaling and done a million other things--she proudly announced that he’d passed his test.

“Which we know wouldn’t have been possible without the camera crew breathing down her back.”

Codrescu said he endured the ordeal in large part “because I thought it would be interesting to go back and see places where I used to live without a car, and see them from my car.

“But more than that,” he added as his eyes twinkled behind his studious-looking spectacles, “I wanted to see my old friends and kind of show my car. You know, that kind of thing. You go back to the old country and say, ‘I done good.’

“Like my mother, when she bought her first car--I don’t remember if it was a big one. But for months, she would send back pictures of herself with her car. Mother with her hand on top of the car. Mother at the wheel. Mother looking at her car. All these stiff-looking photographs.”

Another car--to be specific, a large black Packard--looms large in Codrescu’s memories of his childhood in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. “In those days, at the height of Stalinist terror,” Codrescu said, “the man in the car was the one who came to take you away. He took you away in his car and you never came back again.”

Codrescu’s father, who divorced Codrescu’s mother when Andrei was just 6 months old, drove a Packard.

“My father was a mysterious guy,” Codrescu said in a tone that sounded only half-facetious. “I didn’t know much about him. I know he wore a leather jacket in the ‘50s, and he had a black car, and people ran inside when he drove by. But I don’t really know what he did.”

Pregnant pause.

“Maybe,” Codrescu suggests with a perfectly straight face, “he was a horticulturist?”

And then again, maybe not.

Either way, young Andrei grew up painfully aware of terrifying repression and terrified self-censorship. People of his parents’ generation, he recalled, “felt if they didn’t lower their voice when they talked about certain things, they would go to prison. Or something worse would happen to them. If you’re going to listen to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, you put that volume way down. You could take a walk through my hometown and see the little radio dial lights all over the place, but you’d never hear anything, because everybody was huddled real close, listening to forbidden radio stations.”

Along with his mother--a photographer and printer--Codrescu managed to leave Romania in 1966, thanks to the unlikely beneficence of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

“Ceausescu’s main business in the first years of his regime was selling Germans to West Germany and Jews to Israel. We cost $10,000 a head--my mother and I were worth $20,000. With interest, that’s quite a lot now. I still owe the state of Israel ten thousand bucks, because we never went there. We went to America instead.

“See, my mother ended up marrying my high school math teacher. Back home, I was always embarrassed, because he was a real nerd. I was at the age, you know, when nobody is cool. But this guy was particularly uncool. Of course, I never learned any math, because I was blackmailing the guy. I said, ‘If you don’t pass me, you can’t go out with my mother anymore.’

“But he came here before us, and he sponsored us, because he really wanted her to come. He still had a thing for her.”

The Codrescus settled in Detroit, where Andrei--a budding poet who struck U.S. immigration authorities as possibly subversive--gravitated to the Cass Corridor, the city’s mecca for bohemia. He lost his heart as soon as he met Alice Henderson, an artist from Birmingham, Mich. (“An American girl! With a typewriter!”) They married, then moved to New York, where Codrescu divined the best place for a poet to be: the Lower East Side.

“I worked at the 8th Street Bookstore,” he said. “Some of the best writers in the city would have charge accounts there. Edward Albee would come in and get a few books. So all of us young poets who were working there would take home the books that Albee was reading. We were so hip, we were on top of things. We knew what all the writers were reading. You couldn’t get any better than that. We definitely thought we were the chosen ones, the cat’s pajamas.”

While in New York, Codrescu gratefully absorbed the influence of poet Ted Berrigan, whom he calls “the teacher who taught me how to be an American.”

“He had a way of looking at things that was very direct and concrete,” Codrescu said. “He would see things that I would pay no attention to, that were right in front of me, like the Pepsi or the refrigerator. . . .

“I always thought, in my European literary tradition, that you use the objects of this world to arrive at some idea, some generalization, some abstract thing. Ted said, ‘That’s not the American way. What you do here is you pay attention to things because they’re mysteries in themselves. They don’t stand for anything. They’re not symbolic of anything.’ And that was very liberating.”

Codrescu started writing, and continued moving. He and Alice lived in San Francisco, where the non-driving Andrei enjoyed the availability of public transportation, and Monte Rio, in Northern California, where he worked hard at being a model passenger to mooch rides from friends. Then there was a brief interlude in France, when the Codrescus (and the first of their two sons) thought they would experience life as Europeans. “We lasted three months,” Codrescu said.

Returning to the United States, he and family settled in Baltimore, where he landed a visiting-writer gig at Johns Hopkins University and began writing Op-Ed pieces for the Baltimore Sun, “a very gentlemanly paper, where the writers are given some respect.” Codrescu felt so respected, in fact, that he continued to write twice a month for the Sun after leaving Baltimore in 1983 to take his teaching job at Louisiana State.

National Public Radio producer Art Silverman enjoyed one of the Sun editorials that year enough to request that Codrescu read it on the air during an “All Things Considered” newscast. Much to Codrescu’s amazement, this led to his attaining national attention, cult-celebrity status and a welcome new wherewithal to pay his bills on time.

“For 20 years,” Codrescu said, “I did nothing but write poetry, and did nothing but starve, because one doesn’t make it as a poet. What you do as a poet is to make friends and have a community of like-minded souls and minds who support you while you’re rifling through the garbage bins at the A&P.;

“And then, in 1983, I started doing this radio business. And it did indeed end up providing me with a living. Not because of (the commentaries), which they still pay very little for. But because people heard about me and asked me to speak. And it was easier getting a job teaching. So it did have a tremendous effect on my dietary habits, and on putting a roof over my kids’ heads.”

And what effect does Codrescu have on radio listeners? To Melissa Block, senior producer of “All Things Considered,” Codrescu “does touch nerves.”

“And he doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” she said. “He’s quite pointed in a lot of what he writes. He did a commentary called ‘Ukes With Nukes’ that aired around the time that the Soviet Union was breaking up. As a Romanian, he expressed some views that were quite critical of the Ukrainians.” Brief, Codrescuesque pause. “That drew a lot of mail.”

Another piece, describing a lawsuit filed by Vanna White, generated lots of laughs, particularly from Block: “His first line was ‘My favorite Dadaist artist, Vanna White . . . ‘ And I just cracked up.

“Actually, I think Andrei has a thing for Vanna White.”

(Maybe so. It is perhaps revealing that Codrescu has written a play titled “The Marriage of Joseph Stalin and Vanna White,” which juxtaposes excerpts from Stalin’s writings and quotes from the biography “Vanna Speaks.”)

Codrescu, Block said, “has a real sort of Dada-realist view of the world. He sees connections between things that other people just don’t see. He draws parallels between life and art and the media and experience. He finds ways of linking things together in really interesting ways.”

Just as important, said “Road Scholar” producer Weisberg, “I think he can get away with a certain optimism about this country that is tolerable in an immigrant, that we might not accept from one of our own.

“It borders on the patriotic. And I didn’t realize that until Sundance, and someone in the audience actually got up and said, ‘This is the first movie that I could call patriotic that I could get behind, that I could approve of.’ I never thought of it that way, but there is that dimension to it. And because Andrei has this irony and irreverence going for him, it’s not sappy. It’s authentic.”

So authentic that Ted Koppel--who “just adores Andrei’s writing,” according to “Nightline” executive producer Tom Bettag--invited Codrescu as his only guest for the program’s annual Independence Day celebration. Most of the July 2 telecast was devoted to clips from “Road Scholar,” bracketed by Koppel’s conversation with Codrescu in front of the Jefferson Memorial.

“It was one of our better-received programs,” Bettag said, adding that he wants “Nightline” to have an informal “special relationship” with Codrescu.

“I don’t know what that means, ‘special relationship,’ outside of, you know, sex,” Codrescu said. “But I think he meant that they might call occasionally for future things.”

Which means that Codrescu now has yet another medium to sustain his unique status as Romanian-born, American-adopted multimedia pundit. “And I made that all up, it wasn’t something that was there before. It’s a very American idea--invent a need, and then fill it.”

None of which, however, may be enough to impress some of Codrescu’s critics--the most virulent of whom, apparently, live in and around New Orleans and have easy access to mailboxes.

Earlier this year, Codrescu offered scathing commentary on the case of Yoshihiro Hattori, the 16-year-old Japanese exchange student who was mistaken for a home invader and fatally shot by a Baton Rouge resident (who was later cleared of homicide charges). That, Codrescu said, generated the latest round of hate mail:

“One gentleman from Metairie--this white enclave here near New Orleans--he wrote to me and said that he hoped that I was planning to move soon from the state, given the kinds of things I say about it, which truly makes me unfit to live among the good citizens.

“Another time, there was a big gun store down here where they used to have an exhibited rifle in a glass case with the legend ‘The Rifle That Killed Kennedy.’ And so I did a suitably descriptive piece. And one of the responses I got was from a guy who asked me to go ‘on a float’ with him, to ‘discuss the differences between your government and mine.’

“I wasn’t sure what that meant, until somebody told me that a float in southern Louisiana is this thing where if you have a disagreement with another man--usually, it’s over a woman--you go in your rowboat or your pirogue (a canoe common to Louisianians) with a gun and a bottle of whiskey, and you go float into the swamps, and you don’t come out until you’ve resolved it. Sometimes, just one guy comes out.

“So I wrote back to the guy: ‘I’m an American. What’s your government?’ He doubtless thought I was some kind of Russian spy or something.

“Actually, that used to happen a lot more when there was a Soviet Union. They could say, ‘Go back where you came from. Love it or leave it.’ But now they don’t know exactly where you should go to.”

Not that Codrescu would want to go anywhere else. Even if he had harbored any doubts about what he is and where he belongs, they were erased by his brief stint in France, and his even briefer visit to post-Ceausescu Romania.

“I speak American with a Romanian accent, but I don’t feel Romanian anymore,” he said. “I feel American. I’ve lived here more than half my life, so I’m American. When I went back to Romania, everybody laughed at me, because I speak Romanian with an American accent.”

Usually Codrescu laughs off even the most malicious letters--even those that challenge him to “floats”--as harmless stuff. Two years ago, however, he took another type of threat very seriously. That is why now there is a sign in his front yard warning anyone who dares to venture beyond the iron gate that the whole place has been wired for surveillance by a New Orleans security firm.

In May, 1991, Ioan Culianu, a fellow Romanian emigre who taught courses in the history of religion and culture at the University of Chicago, was found shot to death under mysterious circumstances on campus. Many, including Codrescu, believe Culianu was silenced because of his outspoken criticism of what Codrescu calls “the so-called revolution in Romania” and the post-Ceausescu “neo-Communist government.”

“The same day it happened,” said Alice, Codrescu’s wife of 26 years, “Andrei was in Brazil. And I got all these phone calls from people wanting to know if Andrei had committed suicide. And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And they said, ‘Well, there is this rumor that a Romanian man had called NPR and (Louisiana State University) and Andrei’s agent and everybody that had anything to do with Andrei, saying that he had committed suicide.”

“Which was a part,” Codrescu said, “of the disinformation campaign--the kind that they used to do--so that, in case they actually made the hit, it would seem like the word was out that I had killed myself first.

“There is a Romanian proverb that says, ‘You hit the saddle to make the horse pay attention.’ The killing of Professor Culianu was a message sent from the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, to all of us.”

So Codrescu--who roasted the new Romanian regime in his 1991 book “A Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution”--thought it prudent to take certain preventive measures.

“At that point,” he said, “I thought it would be great to have a fence, a home-security system and a dog.

“And,” he added with a smile, “the laser gun I got helps too.

“I’m not paranoid. But, hey, you have to be careful. It’s a big town, you know?”

Life in the Big Easy is more than fulfilling enough for Codrescu to shrug off such petty annoyances as the proximity of an upstart bloodsucker and the possibility of a Securitate ambush.

After completing “Road Scholar” and returning the Cadillac “to the guys from New Jersey who leased it to us,” Codrescu is back to relying on walking shoes, public transportation and the kindness of new friends to make his way around. (He gratefully accepted an offer from his visitor for a ride downtown, to the main thoroughfare Canal Street.) Still, he doesn’t miss being behind the wheel, because New Orleans, in addition to its other considerable qualities, is a “pedestrian city” where “walking humans still feel at home.”

Even as “Road Scholar” edges into wider release, and Codrescu’s face becomes increasingly familiar through periodic “Nightline” exposure, the transplanted Transylvanian feels secure in his ability to walk through his neighborhood--and to ride buses and streetcars when it’s too far to walk--without being stalked by ill-wishers or mobbed by new fans.

“There actually are neighborhoods here where you can hang out pretty safely,” Codrescu said, “because either nobody has a TV or they only get two channels, and neither of them very well.

“Actually, there are people here who are really famous. Coppola, Julia Roberts, all these people have houses here. But they really are left alone, either because people just don’t care--or because they’re too addled to recognize them. When it’s so hot, and you’ve had a few drinks, everybody looks like Julia Roberts.”