LAST CALL: To Miss New Orleans, Forever
Babbin, Jed
LAST CALL JED BABBIN To Miss New Orleans, Forever IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT. If the mayor of New Orleans had been named Rudy Giulianeaux, maybe the levees would have been reinforced, the...
...If you can't close your eyes and, by smell and sound, tell if you're in New York or Chicago, St...
...On those morning runs, I'd either do laps around the Superdome (three to a mile) or jog through the narrow streets of the French Quarter...
...When first there in 1969, on a college ROTC trip, we ended up at Pat O'Brien's, drinking the joint's signature drink...
...Louis or San Francisco, you don't know your country well enough...
...At 6:30 A.M., the drunks from the previous night's debauch were still on the streets, searching their pockets for long-lost hotel keys tagged with the name of the hotel to which they would stagger...
...ONE NIGHT, AT GALATOIRE'S, I had the greatest meal of my life...
...But it may be that nothing could have saved New Orleans and its people from that old whore, Katrina...
...Maybe forever...
...When we got up to leave my roommate hadn't finished his, so he gulped it down and—with the instinctive grace of the fighter pilot he would soon become—toppled over on his nose...
...Redfish in court bullion, a fine white wine at a small table against the far wall...
...I miss New Orleans, and will for a long time...
...New Orleans was more than that, its people much more...
...After dinner, I lit a good cigar and walked around the Quarter, absorbing the sights and sounds of the night...
...It was, for this working tourist, a lovely, decadent, fragrant pile...
...The taste of New Orleans wasn't just the food in all those fabulous restaurants...
...It's a ten-inch tall glass of rum with unidentifiable sweeteners and named, of course, the "hurricane...
...It wasn't just the jazz heard in every small, smoky club where you could sit for an hour or two, nursing a six-ounce beer that cost a sawbuck...
...He bounced up unhurt, and we hurried off to the next bar, laughing at ourselves and at all around us...
...That grace shaped Lindy's politics, and often made her harshest opponents submit to her gentle arm-twisting...
...I dined alone, watching the people come and go...
...If Governor Blanco had mobilized the National Guard at the storm's approach, and not waited for others to make the decision, if Mayor Nagin had ordered school buses be used to evacuate those who couldn't leave on their own, more lives might have been saved...
...AND IN THAT FRAGRANCE was an element that intoxicated everyone with humor and the idea that in New Orleans all the usual rules were suspended...
...The air smelled 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 of garbage, brewing chicory coffee, and, when the wind was right, the fumes of tugboat diesels, chugging their business around the port...
...EVERY BIG AMERICAN CITY has a personality, a feel, a taste that makes it different from all the others...
...As I learned about a dozen years later from its then-Congresswoman Lindy Boggs, New Orleans was one of the last bastions of the grace and hospitality of the Old South...
...If the mayor of New Orleans had been named Rudy Giulianeaux, maybe the levees would have been reinforced, the downtown hospitals evacuated, and the thousands sent to the Superdome not sent there and then abandoned...
...It was the sights and sounds of the early morning that greeted me when I went out for my morning runs in the early 1980s...
...My law firm had a huge case that sent me there for about half my time over two years...
...1/4...
Vol. 38 • October 2005 • No. 8
