Will the Good Times Ever Roll Again?
LABASH, MATT
WILL THE GOOD TIMES EVER ROLL AGAIN? A report from post-Katrina new orleans BY MATT LABASH New Orleans I try not to clutter my life with too many hard-and-fast rules. But there is one I observe...
...Never mind that its only growth industries at the moment are house-gutters, mental health workers, liquor store owners, and strippers (to handle all the extra business from the influx of fly-by-night contractors...
...But on this night, as we all take a table at Antoine's (uncharacteristically half-empty), he brings me a CD instead: Shostakovich's "Leningrad" symphony, about the Nazi siege...
...I watched poor children sitting in mud for days by the Causeway overpass, waiting for a chopper or bus to take them some place they didn't know...
...While lecturing on the evils of firearms, he drew a snubnose .38 from under his jacket and waved it around as tablemates ducked, just to demonstrate that he wasn't some kind of Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...When he sees my flowered hula skirt, he says, "I might have a normal one for you, but don't let me save you from yourself...
...Everyone knows, of course, of the misfortune met by the poorest New Orleanians, herded off to football stadiums in other cities...
...Recently, when driving to the apartment, he nearly got in a gunfight...
...But their verdict came back unanimous: If you want the definitive Mardi Gras experience, you have to roll with Zulu...
...A hillbilly walks up with a "Drink beer" shirt...
...A nice crowd, you understand...
...Laissez les bon temps rouler...
...Early Fat Tuesday morning—the middle of the night, actually—I wake up to ride in the Zulu parade...
...I never pass through New Orleans without seeing two of my favorite people: Danny Abel and Shane Gates...
...The next morning, I arrive at the hotel to get my face painted along with fellow krewe members...
...It belonged to his friend, the octogenarian Verita Thompson, who'd turned it into a Humphrey Bogart shrine, since she'd been Bogey's mistress for 17 years...
...But it's the Katrina tour...
...The crowd is thick on the ground...
...She said, 'I'm not leaving' That's people's mentality about home...
...Danny, too, on a separate track, is working on a suit that he says could make a regular class action look like a round of patty-cake to the insurance companies...
...You can go in the toilet, you just can't flush it," he says...
...And while they were packed off on field trips with a little FEMA spending money, Lawrence is disturbed that there doesn't appear to be any effort to bring his fellow New Orleanians back...
...You in New Orleans, baby...
...He also looks slightly older, which he says is going around...
...Still, there's a shadow on them...
...You can be Mrs...
...There's no way, in an average year, that you should be able to fit a car down Bourbon Street during prime time just five days before Fat Tuesday...
...Historically, the meeting of the courts is held in Municipal Auditorium, with the two krewes separated by a curtain...
...prude...
...We get to rebuild the whole city...
...Plus, I cannot f—ing stand to get on an interstate in order to get to something...
...Why...
...That sounds harsh to some people, but they don't know what New Orleans is...
...Kingfish has felt the burn firsthand...
...The city is crumbling into ashes . . . . Its condition is so bad that when I write about it . . . nobody will believe I am telling the truth...
...As Lawrence and I bake on the top deck of a double-decker float, our Jolson paint melting in the sun, we fall into conversation over his city, about which he is mordantly philosophical...
...It included (besides Hitler speeches) Dan Fogelberg's greatest hits and the Sound of Music soundtrack...
...Despite my New Orleans fixation, I'd never been to Mardi Gras, figuring I wasn't missing much—perhaps spring break in Daytona with a shrimp remoulade twist...
...When they played this song, you couldn't help it...
...It doesn't really seem worth the aggravation just to look cool...
...How could we not be better off...
...White girls in tight jeans feel like funkin' it up...
...King-fish," he says...
...One of the last Uptowners with a generator and the bad sense to stay in New Orleans, Kingfish was fighting to keep his house and his businesses and his life from washing away with the rest of the city...
...But he resents those in Uptown—or "the island" as he calls it—arrogantly asserting that places like the entire 9th Ward can be lopped off without being missed...
...That night, I am a world removed from the Zulu parade...
...The landscaping could use some work," BF says...
...The federal government says forget it, the people say forget it, and who knows...
...He starts telling me of the Florida resort where his wife and children spent their Katrina exile...
...Because of it, they have skin problems, and have dropped all kinds of weight...
...It contains nothing but pictures of spray-painted refrigerators left on the curb for pick-up, aerosol epitaphs scrawled by former owners, such as "Free Gumbo Inside" and "Smells Like FEMA...
...There was the evening years ago in a Garden District restaurant...
...Beautiful...
...He showed me his softer side by allowing a peek at his record collection...
...But as we roll through a black section of town, before getting to the common parade route, Lawrence cautions, "Don't ask the sisters to show you their breasts, they'll hurt you...
...He points at him, and says to me, 'I hunt with him every year, great guy—he's a hoot...
...The original drink-tray player, Eddie Gabriel, drowned in his 9th Ward home during Katrina...
...Along Lake Pontchartrain, there's the Southern Yacht Club, the nation's second oldest...
...But on this night, you can walk right in and get a table or three...
...Bernard Parish are still living in a tent city...
...At the last second, Zulu Vice President Naaman Stewart was kind enough to put me on the float of J.C...
...The storm, he laments, has physically erased so many points of reference...
...Faulkner called it "that city foreign and paradoxical, with an atmosphere at once fatal and languorous...
...Then for the next five months, most of the attention shifted from the dire situation on the ground so that critics could hash out who was responsible for dropping the ball—the president, the governor, the mayor (correct answer: all of the above...
...At my hotel afterwards, I order room service...
...It's as integrated as a city gets, he says, "the only place where a $2 million house can be two blocks away from your maid's...
...Kingfish gives him the slip, as Rex members and their families begin to tepidly migrate across the red carpet...
...We drank his Old Fashioneds and took baths in his pool...
...Before I came to New Orleans, I sniffed out some friends in old-line white krewes, asking if they had a slot...
...He lives in New Orleans—where every day is anything-can-happen day...
...While many others were able to come back to something, even if only tarp roofs and trailers, "folks in those neighborhoods were held out of there so long that the rats and cats decided to leave...
...Kingfish had advised, "If you see a girl in a Florida State sweatshirt, that's a good sign, show 'em your beads...
...So Kingfish agrees to pick me up one morning, and spin me over there...
...He was watching over the Le Mieux strip club on Chartres Street for the owner...
...If I don't drink, I don't sleep—period," he admits...
...Gray Line usually runs all varieties of New Orleans tour...
...Favorites include "Show FEMA your tits—they'll mail you your beads in 8-10 weeks...
...C'mon...
...Not good...
...My court reporters tell me I can do over 300 words a minute...
...Spare him all the talk, he says, about how the city's entire identity is compromised...
...What happens...
...Comus is night to Rex's day, the unknown to Rex's known, or to put it in cocktail terms that any New Orleanian could understand, absinthe to Rex's Herbsaint...
...Walker Percy wrote, less grandiosely, that if you fell ill in its streets, it's a place where there's still a chance "that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times...
...Kingfish looks up at the Comus hotel, taking a hit off his go cup...
...But I've come to see the best live party band in the United States of America—the Rebirth Brass Band—second line music at it's funkiest and finest...
...Meanwhile, his engineer tells him that the house is totaled—he's a fool to gut the bottom floor and live on the second story with his wife and newborn (as he's now doing...
...Canal Street at night during Mardi Gras is a pretty dicey affair...
...And he informs us that he's on a weekend pass from his wife...
...In Old Gentilly, Joe has our bus stop in front of a house that's spray-painted "Goodbye N'awlins, We'll Miss You...
...If Long said, "The time has come for all good men to rise above principle," then this Kingfish has no use for good men...
...After Hurricane Katrina held the city's head underwater six months ago, and after several days of witnessing the resulting desolation, I wandered the ghostly French Quarter...
...Like any pillar of the community—which New Orleans needs now more than ever—he once thought about how to expand, how to invest, how to create wealth...
...In all honesty, it was a hit piece...
...Looking back on it," he said, "what an idiot...
...You can't just jump up and replace it, especially since they won't give you the money to do it anyway...
...I wish I could show you something else...
...I've found that all things are possible there, except being bored...
...It's where you created your child or got drunk or urinated off the porch...
...You'd think they'd just Fed-ex it in advance," says Kingfish, "But they always forget...
...He pulled out his gun, I pulled out my gun, we got into a chase," says Shane...
...He dances so hard, and with such conviction, that he distracts the trumpet players, making them forget themselves, as they so skillfully make the rest us do the same...
...Brand new...
...Instead, we take some go cups and head outside, where hotel worker bees take a patchy looking red carpet that looks like it might've come out of the old Convention Center, and lay it across Canal Street to the Marriott...
...New Orleans is a town that resists being fitted with an adjectival straitjacket...
...If outsiders think this will shake out as just another partisan dog pile, with Democrats predictably siding with the plaintiffs' attorneys, and Republicans with the insurance industry, guess again...
...What is this...
...Two scruffy looking white youths are circling each other, and all of a sudden one lunges...
...An attorney friend of his even told him, "I've spent 30 years arguing against post-traumatic stress syndrome, now I have it...
...Ten years from now, Tiger Woods will be hitting a drive over the water hazards of the lower 9th Ward...
...If we take another hurricane next year, it's f—in' over...
...We used to have a good time here, crank the fire-pit up, eat crawfish...
...He tries to think of one particular song they sang, but it won't come to him...
...Lawrence, who he described as "the best defense attorney in New Orleans—if you're in trouble, call J.C...
...He rented an apartment in the Garden District, which became too dangerous a place to stay with his baby, once FEMA turned off the hotel-room subsidization spigot in Orleans Parish for lower-income types...
...This is the city, my friend...
...He balked initially, saying of Huey Long, the original Kingfish, "what a piece of shit he was...
...It's the first look BF has had at his hometown, and Kingfish asks him what he thinks as we drive through the moonscape of the lower 9th Ward, where trees are snapped like Lincoln Logs, and the only inhabitants we see are a lone rooster and men in HAZMAT suits...
...There is so much graffiti in New Orleans that one of the local photography books of the moment is a slim volume called Spoiled...
...Just here to see a friend," says Kingfish...
...Palms...
...It's your home...
...Now it's just gone...
...It is Mardi Gras, after all...
...A group of his friends recently got together—the supposedly unflappable aristocrats who never get interviewed on Oprah...
...Finley makes it plain in the Old-World way: "They're f—ing people, excuse my French...
...At a traditional "Debauch Lunch" at the Redfish Grille, I tuck into a side room with a mishmash of New Orleanian gents who pay dues at the right clubs, like the Boston or Stratford, and belong to aristocratic Mardi Gras krewes (the social organizations that put on balls or parades) like Chaos, Rex, and Proteus...
...I watch them take the stage, their music pulling in throngs of unsuspecting stragglers as though they had magnets attached to their foreheads...
...The occupants were friends of his late parents...
...Rebirth doesn't just kill, they smite, and not just men, but women, children, and livestock...
...He gets them from Vietnam, where they have, "how do you say—cheap labor...
...Dueling piano players tinkle out authentic New Orleans tunes like "Sweet Home Alabama," while the jolly Alvin Babineaux accompanies them on a drink tray that he plays with thimbles on his fingers...
...Princes of the city, they're hail-fellow convivial in the open-bar style...
...It's of an old woman in Bay St...
...And they're not the only ones...
...The building pitched and rolled, which it's designed to do under such conditions...
...Their cheap-labor pool just left town...
...Laissez les bons temps rouler...
...What the shit's that...
...His wife, Christine, tells me that he now barks at her and everyone else over the slightest provocation, or over none at all...
...For a good month after Katrina, everyone was unanimous that the hurricane had been a buzz kill...
...They sing, "Feel like funkin' it up...
...Yet his mortgage company, which is holding the pursestrings, says otherwise, wanting him to patch it up and pay it off...
...His family secure in Florida, he'd turned his beautiful home, which only suffered some dislodged shingles and downed trees, into an armed compound...
...With those repairs, his money is nearly gone before he's touched his house...
...They are large-hearted men, generous and true, and both possess a drinking companion's most desirable trait: They stay until closing time...
...It's strangling him...
...Though which residents would mind isn't entirely clear...
...When he's not thinking about the insurance money that he can't spend, he thinks about the savings that he already has spent (about $60,000 of it, between rentals, unreimbursed repairs, and transportation to and fro, which has seen him put over 30,000 miles on his truck in four months...
...He finally succumbs to peer pressure, though insisting, "I have no peers—how can I be pressured...
...Louis, Mississippi, sitting in a rocking chair with water up to her calves...
...The trick, he says, is for everyone to "chill the f— out, and realize this is a 10-year rebuilding process...
...Alobar Greywalker, who's provided tarot and palm-reading services for some years, sits at a table in a fur hat, eating chopped liver out of a Styrofoam cup...
...He is a middle-aged white man with a straw hat and oversized Mardi Gras beads the size of Christmas ornaments...
...There, I met Jody Bode, a scraggly middle-aged guy in a loud Hawaiian shirt...
...In addition to lawyer-ing, Finley is a fireman, a chief deputy constable, and a rappelling instructor...
...You can hear the dull thud of bone landing on flesh...
...he asks...
...When I hop into his SUV, he looks well-scrubbed and shined up, less tense and less armed...
...There are orange X's on abandoned houses, where search parties have designated how many dead pets/people were found there...
...Danny (now 59) and his legal assistant/distant cousin Shane (now 30) were my minders...
...he says, uttering words I thought were only spoken by out-of-town TV reporters and my Copeland's of New Orleans hostess back in Annapolis...
...In addition to his own small law practice, Danny has owned an exotic cheese farm, is an accomplished chef who used to run a Creole restaurant in the Quarter, and has co-written the Trout Point Lodge Cookbook, based on Creole dishes he and his business partners serve at their lodge in Nova Scotia...
...As the scene attracts more and more attention, the hotel staff gets panicky, and starts pulling empty limos along each side of the red carpet, forming an insular gauntlet...
...Lawrence, is not only the float captain, but the importer of coconuts, Zulu's exclusive throw, which is the most treasured in the Mardi Gras hierarchy...
...Lawrence is a large man with a dry sense of humor...
...In the kitchen, he ate so much turtle soup that they limited him to two bowls...
...he's tired of idiot-brothers-in-law littering corrupt levee boards...
...They're gonna cause a goddamn riot," he says of the move...
...This, in fact, is what it entails...
...After a week of watching inebriated college kids stumbling out of frozen daiquiri bars to bad dance music up on Bourbon, heading down to the Mississippi River to drink cold drafts and eat crawfish pie in the sun is like scouring the grime off your soul...
...Normally, he can't get his cross through the throngs, but now he's practically doing zigzag patterns...
...After what feels like an hour, the Tabasco king finally makes his way across the carpet...
...About the only ones who seem themselves are the cheeky T-shirt vendors who are in high clover due to all the new material...
...We get out and walk past a crew in HAZMAT uniforms...
...How can you f— it all up...
...asks one...
...Then there was the afternoon in the living room of professional Jew-hater David Duke...
...I take a seat in the front of the bus near our tour guide, Joe Gendusa, a retired schoolteacher, and our bus driver Sly, who lost his house in the storm...
...He has two insurance policies (with State Farm and Allstate), about $460,000 worth of supposed wind/flood coverage...
...Rex is gonna get the shit beat out of him with some beads...
...We traverse many of the socioeconomic boundaries of New Orleans...
...They hadn't counted on the Industrial Canal levee being breached, which turned the whole neighborhood into an aquarium...
...A phoenix rising from the ashes...
...So he started ladling it on French bread to make turtle-soup sandwiches instead...
...Kingfish is sick of all the media romanticizing of places like the lower 9th...
...Grass skirts turn out to be a higher-demand item in New Orleans than one would imagine...
...And that kind of person will come back, and the culture will stay...
...To get just a small taste of it, I went out to Slidell two days later, to witness my friend Shane's slow torture...
...At first blush, many would consider Shane fortunate...
...In previous years, he's been spit on, doused with gasoline, and had his cross strung with so many beads that it felt like he was shouldering Jesus and the two thieves...
...His place was once a beautiful plantation-style house on several acres that are now half-swamp...
...One person who has returned, and who rides with us today, is Kingfish's friend since kindergarten, who'd moved away from New Orleans months before the storm, but who still wants to come back...
...But this year seemed as interesting a time as any to go...
...It's difficult, since one of them isn't wearing a shirt...
...Katrina shook the whole thing up—it was going to take 20 years to get it straight...
...Included in the package is one complimentary soft drink...
...They roam the street during the day, until they have to find a place to sleep at night...
...We load our float next to the Superdome, and spend an hour or two placing our throws (or beads) on hooks, as if they are ammo belts in gun trucks headed into battle...
...He has 12 stumps just like it...
...Not a chance, I say, with some envy...
...But they don't bother getting off their horses, since there are no hitching posts on Canal Street...
...In January, Nagin posited that the reconstituted New Orleans should be a "chocolate city...
...New Orleans had problems before the storm, lots of them, says Kingfish...
...I'm going to get in a gunfight because somebody's trying to make an insurance claim.' People are losing their minds around here...
...The worst setback in the city's history could be its final salvation...
...This year, the most heckling he's gotten are half-hearted heathens looking at the rollers under the cross, saying, "Hey bro, Jesus didn't have wheels...
...Just who's coming back, and where, is an open question...
...There are no cocktails on this tour, though as the company's public relations person promises me, "you'll need one by the time it's over...
...So it is important, during these trying times, to remember that New Orleanians are a diaspora people, a people who dress up like Mardi Gras royalty in fruity Shriner-style outfits, a people who "preserve and exaggerate their most essential cultural components: our food, our music, our we-could-care-less-attitude," a people who aren't afraid to drink Christmas trees with their crabes mous amandine...
...With Mardi Gras winding down, King-fish is feeling expansive...
...Horseshit," he grouses...
...Formerly a good-time social drinker, he now drinks during the day, and can only sleep after several glasses of bourbon and a Xanax...
...Gendusa himself rode out the storm with his family in a Central Business District high-rise...
...Kingfish and I stand in white tie and tails and go cups, watching the human carnival...
...A car slammed its brakes on in front of him repeatedly, trying, he suspects, to set him up for an accident...
...But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio...
...You lose the 9th Ward and people say we're losing our soul...
...This is my home...
...Shane and I order Maker's Mark, while Danny claims he's practicing pre-trial abstinence...
...I christened him "Kingfish" when I heard one of his buddies use it on the ride in from Baton Rouge, and after he said he didn't want his name in my story...
...It's been a long six months," says one of his comrades, "everyone's too tired to think about sex...
...One asks if "leg of lamb" is on the menu—code for hired female entertainment...
...A young black woman in shower shoes walked past them, after having lost everything...
...The song comes to him, and he starts tapping it out on his leg, while going into near falsetto: Do whatcha wanna / Hang on the corner...
...But he was lucky compared with his neighbor...
...I can't wait to get back to the office and tell them that one," he bellows...
...This, they all agree, is what is happening to the citizens of New Orleans...
...So we don't have the usual suspects—we get new suspects...
...Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord...
...Let's go nail Comus's old lady...
...He's built homes down here, supposedly above the flood line, though as he points out, somebody missed the call on that one...
...Apparently, the fact that inebriated people will come to the mostly undamaged Quarter to bare their breasts for beads is as good as a clean bill of health...
...Almost none of them were taken by the storm...
...Black men in Kangols feel like funkin' it up...
...Danny says that for the first time in recent memory, plaintiffs' attorneys, who often rank right down there with meter maids, tax auditors, and journalists on the lowest-forms-of-life scale, "could be heroes—people are calling us up crying...
...Every failed institution...
...The strippers had evacuated...
...But his daily existence, his new full-time job, in essence, is fighting the insurance companies for the money to put his life back together...
...The last time I saw the Kingfish, he was stubbled and wild-eyed and heavily armed...
...And there is no better way to spend it than down at the traditional Zulu cookout—Zulu being New Orleans's oldest and most prominent African-American krewe...
...I was having a spirited argument with an anti-gun industry lawyer named Alligator Mick...
...The rest of the house has been gutted for reconstruction, with nothing left but a crab pot in the rafters around the place the water line settled...
...We lost it in the storm...
...He says I'd be much better off waiting for white women on St...
...Church after school after hospital are waiting for the wrecking ball...
...The other night, Shane ended up in the emergency room, his throat swelling so severely that he had to spit in a waste-basket instead of swallowing—perhaps because of the stress, perhaps because of the mold and the toxic mud which comes up through holes in his first floor...
...He picks his own cumbersome pseudonym—"Big Fat Tough Guy"—but graciously settles on "BF" for short...
...America just got a whiff of New Orleans's dirty laundry when even cops were shown shoe-shopping at Wal-Mart without hitting the checkout line...
...Wynton Marsalis wasn't going around shooting people, being unproductive," he says...
...And so the Kingfish and I have our entertainment cut out for us...
...He's considered putting slugs in their brains, just to end their anxiety of being checked in and out of kennels when they're used to living in a spacious barn, and having pastures to run...
...he asks...
...My waiter, an older black gent named Louis Williams, asks how my Lundi Gras is going...
...he asks...
...He throws his arm around Kingfish, and demands to be taken to the Marriott...
...BF has been hitting the Diet Dr...
...Well," he says, chewing thoughtfully, "the ice caps are melting and the barrier islands are underwater...
...Or rather, there was the Southern Yacht Club...
...He estimates it will cost him nearly $100,000 just to raise his house to whatever the new base-flood elevation requirement is, in order to stay insured, or for a new buyer to get insurance to make his house sellable...
...Many of them, Shane says, are now crashing with relatives or living hand-to-mouth...
...With our frizzy Afro wigs and blackface, we look like the lost love children of Al Jolson and Linc from Mod Squad...
...When things were normal, people cruised on the Steamboat Natchez, or visited the tomb of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, or took cocktail tours to learn the history of the Sazerac and Pimm's Cup...
...Anywhere but here," she replied...
...So he goes right in the middle of the bombed out living room...
...There are almost none left...
...I tell him pretty good, since I'd just had my doors blown off by Rebirth...
...I ask Lawrence what happens to the city's personality...
...Kingfish then lets out a fraternal "quack, quack," as if he and Rex are in the blind...
...Hmmm," says Kingfish...
...I insulate myself from all the bad things in New Orleans, and I'm able to enjoy the good things...
...As befits a man so busy, he talks in machine-gun bursts: "I don't talk fast, I talk condensed...
...There was so much debris here, it took Shane an hour and a half to walk up his quarter-mile street when he finally returned home...
...There's a big hitch, of course: next hurricane season, just three months away...
...The details are still in development...
...Am I crazy to live here...
...he asks back...
...But New Orleans offers something more...
...Pepper pretty hard, and has to take a leak...
...Some experts, such as a National Science Foundation-funded panel, agree with my bus mates, saying that the shortcuts that the Corps is taking to complete construction before next hurricane season will leave large sections of the levees weaker than they were pre-Katrina...
...All the while, Shane is supposed to get rental reimbursement for living outside the house while he fixes it...
...Old-looking houses...
...It is way too complicated to describe here in its entirety...
...Now, he's thinking about how to stay liquid...
...It's completely gone, with nothing but a pink dumpster sitting in its place...
...I caught myself and thought 'What the hell am I doing...
...Since Katrina, he's spent over $10,000 to board his beloved five dogs...
...Old white women dancing with young black men (not a sight you see everyday, even in New Orleans) feel like funkin' it up...
...My wife was like, 'it's clean, it's neat, good restaurants.' But there's no soul...
...The city is a sea of blue-tarp roofs and FEMA trailers parked in front yards...
...Mounted police have moved in to break up the fist-fight...
...Rebirth got their start two decades ago, hauling their high school band instruments home through the Quarter, playing for Popeye's and beer money...
...But it boils down to this: His house was worth about a half million dollars, but the most he's shaken out of his insurance companies is around $190,000, administered by his mortgage company in increments, as he reaches certain repair plateaus...
...A black man with braids and gold teeth approaches, spies the red carpet, and utters "muthaf—a...
...19th-century letter from New Orleans, Lafcadio Hearn) realize that things aren't quite right...
...With all construction halted, Kingfish went the demolitions and clean-up route, keeping his head above water...
...Abandoned cars stack up for miles along the I-10 overpass...
...A motley crew in Rocawear jerseys, Saints shirts, and headbands, their music is fierce without being angry, exuberant without being giddy...
...Before mounting the float, I'd gotten lots of pointers on how to entice women into showing their breasts, a cherished Mardi Gras tradition...
...Kingfish spent frantic weeks checking on neighbors' houses, pulling rescue missions at the lawless Convention Center to take family friends to the hospital, and generally saving pets and dotty old ladies who didn't know what had happened...
...A 12-year-old black kid jumps on the stage and feels like funkin' it up for the rest of the show, dancing every dance he knows: the dandruff-brush, the jump-the-turn-stile, the Azusa Street Fire-Baptized Holiness shake...
...Instead, they try to move the ruffians along by their collars...
...He laughs, at first politely, then almost uncontrol-lably—cathartically, even...
...Finley is the local affiliate of an outfit from California called the Storm Lawyers, who regularly sue insurance companies on behalf of policyholders who feel they've gotten shafted...
...I met them nearly a decade ago, when profiling Danny's then law-partner, the late Wendell "The Goat" Gauthier, a legend of the trial bar who sued anything that moved, and probably many things that didn't...
...A couple of friends signed up for guard duty...
...he's tired of episodes such as the one currently playing out in the April mayoral race, in which a fringe candidate (and the state's chief election official) is campaigning from her jail cell...
...My face painted, I skitter out to the buses to ride to the floats, sheepishly pulling on my hula skirt...
...Perhaps the man who is most often portrayed on the silk-screened cotton shirts as Willy Wonka has a loftier aspiration: to become the Nestlé Quik Bunny...
...It's a highly ceremonial gesture that will mean the formal end of Mardi Gras during the much anticipated "meeting of the courts," in which Rex and the oldest of old-line krewes, Comus, come together...
...Look around, there ain't no f—in' porches left...
...The day before Fat Tuesday is known as Lundi Gras...
...But a part of him wants to stay...
...But there is one I observe with religious ardor: Never pass up a chance to go to New Orleans...
...Being a tourist, I decided to take a formal tour...
...At the Florida resort where Kingfish's wife and kids were staying until it was reasonably safe to return to the city, they met another New Orleans couple with one small child...
...He hired Rebirth for his 25th wedding anniversary—they're all locals, many from the 9th Ward...
...Though I'm not sure it's supposed to do that while I'm in it...
...Shane never bothered to get his law degree, though he's Danny's all-purpose investigator, manager, client-closer, and cornerman...
...I don't know," says the other, "but it better be muthaf—n' Bishop Tutu or somethin...
...Then there's every imaginable goof on Mayor Ray Nagin...
...Think about it—you're home...
...The easily pacified citizens of this country's other cookie-cutter cities seem to require only that they have a Starbucks Mocha Macchiato in one hand, and an Olive Garden breadstick in the other...
...A chosen few in the nearly totaled St...
...When I ask him how it looks for New Orleans, he doesn't even break out the cards...
...Of these family friends, he says, "They won't be coming back...
...Slidell, where Lake Pontchartrain drains into the Gulf of Mexico, is where the eye of Katrina passed over, testified to by the forests of downed trees and wreckage and street signs wrapped around telephone polls like bread bag twisties...
...If the levees break again, he says, "Kingfish ain't going to throw the dice twice thinking I'm going to hit seven...
...Like the Kingfish and his ilk, he thinks New Orleans has a chance to remake what is broken...
...Always a weather-watcher, even more so after Katrina, he would like to become a meteorologist, "because you get paid whether you're right or wrong...
...Joe's home could use a new paint job, since everything is marked with graffiti...
...As Kingfish and I stand on the commoners' side of the gauntlet, he gets to thinking about the fashion stylings of the gentlemen around us...
...But there isn't...
...You don't have to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy to "Times are not good here...
...Now, breathless reporters were anxious to tell a comeback story...
...And many of those people consider themselves lucky...
...After striking out at costume shop after costume shop, I settle on a flowered hula skirt...
...The last time I was in town, immediately after Katrina hit, I saw plenty of bad things...
...But he's had a scary look at his own mortality, and that of his city's...
...He wants out of what was once his dream house, since he can't afford to fix it...
...Looking across the room at his pals in their late 30s and early 40s, he says, "People were just grayed-up...
...But Bode had me in for a warm beer, complained about the weather and the looters, then took me around the corner and up a creaky staircase to show off an apartment he was babysitting...
...But Danny revels in Old-Worldliness, pointing out that one of the parade krewes the other day had a sign, saying, "Jacques Chirac, buy us back...
...BF wants to make a last stop—at the wrecked house of a buddy of theirs in swanky Lakeview...
...He'd been shot by a cop and left in the street to rot...
...Never mind that the city that loves to eat, the city from which Louis Armstrong used to sign his letters "red beans and ricely yours," has seen only 1,000 of its 3,000 restaurants reopen...
...he says, now an excited kid...
...Mostly though, he was waiting with his guns and the Perlis mercenaries, sure that "the crickets," as the looters were called, were coming over his fence...
...To dig up a giant pine stump in what used to be his manicured front yard, but which now resembles a mud-wrestling pit, post-Katrina prices will set him back anywhere from $2,0004,000 dollars per...
...My Gray Line tour didn't take me to the 9th Ward— the city council ruled tour buses shouldn't go there, sensitive to the perception that residents of the most famous blighted neighborhood in America might not want to be the object of a safari...
...Many are gutting it out, eking out a fraction of the living they were making, waiting for revenues to rebound in a city that's half ghost town...
...The boy was traumatized, as we both looked on at a dead man lying in a pool of dried blood...
...To ease the tension, Kingfish begins yelling over the limo roofs, "Hey—you were great in Brokeback Mountain...
...From the river over to New Orleans East, to Lakeview and Gentilly, horror stories and destruction abound: cars landing on roofs, boats landing on cars, houses getting turned into boats, floating down the street onto their neighbor's lots...
...I live a pretty good life...
...In order to ride, I had to meet the strict dress code: black turtleneck, afro wig, grass skirt...
...He is well aware of the unfolding pageant and its significance...
...Whatever...
...Real estate deals that he needed to close were going south...
...This development is causing some Louisianans to experience something they've never experienced before: Mississippi-envy...
...he says...
...I'll tell you...
...Shane misses a lot of simple things: lying on a couch, which he no longer has, getting a glass of water in the middle of the night without putting on a coat, thawing his seafood in the kitchen instead of the bathroom sink, walking barefoot in his place without getting an infection...
...Board a bus by the Mississippi River, and for 35 bucks, you get three hours of utter devastation, plus a break for refreshments...
...We had a tape of it...
...Six months later, a good portion of New Orleans still looks like a set from The Road Warrior...
...I can't help it...
...before vamping down it as if he is at the Source Hip-Hop Awards...
...There were a lot of good family people there, but it was also miles of urban decay which added nothing to the city...
...During the costliest natural disaster in American history, they are playing stall-ball, trying not to pay if they aren't absolutely forced to, trying to delay payment if they are, so that they can run up more investment income before writing a check...
...They tried to rescue her, and she went bananas," he says...
...It was noticeable...
...Over near the Marriott, there are raised voices that we can't quite make out...
...I asked one...
...Other tourists board noiselessly in their "Porn Star" T-shirts, with digital camera straps wrapped snugly around pudgy knuckles...
...Founded in 1872, Rex is one of the old-line krewes, and "Rex" himself is the King of Carnival, a civic-minded über-stud who this year happens to be Paul McIlhenny, of the Tabasco McIlhennys...
...One of those good things is the Rex Ball—satiny old dolls and dewy debs and rock-solid gray-haired eminences that you could trust with your wife, your checkbook, or even your wife's checkbook...
...On an elemental level, he's running full-speed on a Darwinian hamster wheel...
...I get full just talking about it...
...With hurricane gales coming off Lake Pontchartrain for hours, his house shook like a belly dancer—so hard that it snapped his underground cable...
...I think I'm gonna cry," he says...
...Their house did a complete 180...
...This year, however, the auditorium was closed due to Katrina damage, hence the red carpet across Canal Street...
...Has there ever been a study done on the low pants thing...
...It has a patch of hair on it, and in the blur of parade revelry, bead-throwing, and coconut-launching, I can't be certain it even belonged to a woman...
...The air quality is causing a discharge from the baby's eyes...
...They were about to return, too, but the wife was killed by a truck when returning her rental car...
...This is great...
...If we don't, we're lost souls...
...Kingfish puts on a happy face: "Six months ago, they were looting out here...
...We become the sliver by the river...
...After the storm, nearly all his income dried up...
...No mess...
...They just don't have the energy, even if they had the money...
...Because," he explained, "When else in your life will you have a chance to stand on a float in blackface and throw coconuts at people...
...Those of us who'd been spending the bulk of our time in the higher-elevations of the Quarter or the Garden District or the well-heeled and mostly undamaged Uptown neighborhood were in for a shock...
...They strolled the grounds with pump-action shotguns and holsters threaded with Brooks Brothers belts, sweating through their Perlis golf shirts with the little crawfish stitching (New Orleans's answer to the Lacoste alligator...
...Even Trent Lott, who's been called an insurance industry-stooge in the past, has sued State Farm for not paying up on his destroyed Gulf Coast home...
...When he comes back with their prices, the insurance company nixes them as too expensive...
...The music just takes their souls—that's when we're doing our job...
...The flood apparently didn't check W-2s before sending 10-foot walls of water crashing through people's living rooms...
...Crime is up, thank God," the defense attorney facetiously says...
...Charles Ave., which he calls "Tittieville...
...When the article came out portraying everybody as the swashbuckling pirates they resembled, we remained friends ever after...
...Danny and Shane have brought along an attorney friend of theirs tonight, Carl Finley...
...Things are sort of getting back to normal...
...Give me a break with the lone kid blowing a trumpet on his porch," he says mockingly...
...We drive past cemeteries that became processions of floating funeral barges, as caskets broke free from their crypts...
...But while you can still do some of those things, the company's bread and butter— the only thing keeping it afloat, actually—is its "America's Worst Catastrophe" tour...
...It was one of the great nights of his life...
...Some have come to see the "Zulu king" that Professor Longhair sang about in "Go to the Mardi Gras...
...Despite his pedigree, Kingfish knows the 9th Ward a bit...
...They are hoping their city becomes a safer place, since many of those who made it unsafe have taken up residence in other cities...
...Sly drives us past many of the failed levees, still under construction, to see what God and/or the Army Corps of Engineers hath wrought...
...It makes me feel better about New Orleans," he explains...
...He did what creative people do in such situations: He improvised...
...Philip Fra-zier, the band's cofounder and tuba player, explains how it works to me after the show: "You get white and black together...
...It was this neoclassical place...
...His face falls and his smile fades...
...Some evacuated thinking they were leaving for a long weekend and never came back...
...Back on Bourbon Street, even the gospeler's placards have taken on a Job-like cast...
...Joe says a lot of his old friends are disappearing these days...
...New Orleans is on the mend...
...In Katrina states, everyone hates the insurance industry now...
...Because I still love the place...
...Before the ball at the Canal Street Sheraton, we meet in the hotel bar...
...Tree removal alone has already cost $8,000 and isn't nearly done...
...They do a short set at the Zulu event, then move across the street in front of Harrah's casino to really air things out...
...Business is also off for cross-carrier Joe Hendrix...
...They took me from Quarter bar to restaurant and back again, explaining the evils of smoking and firearms, even as they lit up and showed me their guns—consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds...
...There are plenty of black and white guest riders, as Zulu is among the most democratic of krewes...
...The athletically built Shane loves food too, even though he's lost 20 pounds from stress since his Slidell house was nearly wiped out by Katrina...
...God Is Unfair," reads one...
...BF shrugs: "It ain't like anyone's coming back...
...Nagin later backtracked, saying that one must mix "dark chocolate" and "white milk" to make a "delicious drink...
...In this most offspeed of Mardi Gras years, I see only one breast...
...Theoretically, there's supposed to be no inebriation during these affairs, but on my ride is Cong Tran, Zulu's only Vietnamese member, who seems to have other ideas...
...Plus, he's supposed to pay himself $10,000 to be his own general contractor in order to find all the contractors who there aren't nearly enough of (since everybody needs one) to actually fix his home...
...At the midway point of our tour, we're driven to a restaurant for a snack break...
...In the upper floors of the Marriott, where Rex is supposed to be headed, men in their evening finery flock to the windows to monitor the situation...
...The men mostly look taken aback, the women smile the forced smiles of someone getting their wisdom teeth X-rayed...
...At this moment, a drunk tourist from Destin, Florida, approaches us...
...I might've felt like funkin' it up, too, if I hadn't been taking notes on all the others funkin' it up, which, mercifully, I was...
...When the bartender slides me a Diet Coke, I double down on Dewars...
...But the company flack was right: Something harder seems called for...
...He orders a Chartreuse, which makes Shane blanch: "It's like drinking a Christmas tree...
...Yeah, right," says one of the tourists...
...My commute is like 12 minutes...
...I go to my club to eat lunch...
...But the important thing to remember, the legal term-of-art that the 300-words-a-minute Finley would like me to focus on, is just one word: BOHICA (Bend over, here it comes again...
...Another tries to pass around a pornographic Blackberry email, but nobody's much interested...
...For weirdness-per-square-inch, New Orleans is like Florida, but with better music and food...
...This makes Kingfish scratch his head...
...Forman runs the Audubon Zoo, making him uniquely qualified, some would say, to run the city of New Orleans...
...What that elevation will be, he says, has yet to be determined, which could make anything he does now futile...
...They'll see soon enough, he suggests...
...Glad to hear it," he nods appreciatively...
...He's tired of Orleans Parish public school officials literally stealing millions of dollars as the system fails...
...Less well known are the tribulations of the insured middle and upper classes, many of whose daily lives now involve fighting federal and state bureaucracies, as well as the insurance companies...
...Over at the Quarter's most famous tourist trap, Pat O'Brien's—home of the Hurricane cocktail and the hammered coed—lines used to wind around the corner on non-Mardi Gras weekends just to stand like sardines at the bar...
...If we enhance 50 percent of it, we're better off...
...Each year, a Comus captain marches over to the Rex Ball, and presents a scroll to Rex and his queen, inviting them to join the Comus ball...
...Whenever I see Danny, a bibliophile who knows the city's used-bookstore proprietors by name, he usually brings me some lagniappe, like Socks on a Rooster, one of the great Earl Long histories...
...Kingfish grimaces...
...As the red carpet is laid, the hoi polloi press in with what's-the-meaning-of-this exasperation...
...This is a complaint I hear from both black and white New Orleanians about the city's largely black poverty centers...
...You see guys you haven't seen for six months, and feel like you've been in a freakin' time warp...
...Back on the bus, my tongue loosened, I ask Joe (who normally handles the Southern Comfort Tour) if there's anything nice left to see...
...There are blustery threats directed at looters, who still make the rounds six months later, having sometimes robbed the same house two and three times...
...But if they haven't moved, he sees them turning up in the Times-Picayune's death notices, which have grown longer lately with all the extra strokes and heart attacks: the post-Katrina toll...
...In the current local economy, it helps to be diversified...
...Good...
...From his apartment balcony, he's been screamed at on a half-dozen occasions by envious less-fortunates who demand that he share his electricity and running water...
...Kingfish's wife has left town, so I can skate into the Rex Ball on her invitation...
...He takes us by one of his houses, which has a pillow strapped to the railing, inscribed with Jeremiah 17:7...
...I interviewed a grown man as he sobbed, describing to me how he had to hit an ailing and abandoned cocker spaniel in the head with a radio, just to put it out of its misery...
...Here, Kingfish loses some optimism...
...A native son with civic pride, he is tired of Louisiana being a national punch line...
...There are men who look like they were just furloughed from prison, and women with pants so tight that it would be easier to amputate than unzip...
...A heavyset Zulu gives me the once over, wearily exhaling cigarette smoke...
...New Orleans is a big jump-ball...
...These guys put on a show," he says...
...My host, J.C...
...Rarely have so many Americans collectively faced such existential uncertainty...
...The federal suit is being brought by none other than Lott's brother-in-law, the super-lawyer/big tobacco-slayer Dickie Scruggs...
...Two black teenagers walk up beside us, irritated that their progress is being impeded...
...I interviewed a stuttering kid on the steps of the Convention Center, since the inside of the building had become a powerless, waterless urinal...
...Hail Rex," Kingfish says dutifully...
...In Jackson Square, the soothsayers aren't all that soothing...
...It would be cheaper to tear the whole thing down and start over, rather than to repair it...
...But we don't stay long...
...Shane, once a happy-go-lucky type, quick to laugh and slow to anger, often feels as though he's losing his mind...
...New Orleans isn't just another American city, he's fond of pointing out...
...One of his several enterprises is a construction company...
...Yet I barreled right down the half-empty boulevard in a rented Cadillac, expecting a Dresden-like payload of beads and bottles, but drawing nothing harder than a stare...
...His favorite Katrina picture is one he saw on the Internet...
...Insurance companies, they say, are getting too cute with the wiggle language of policies they should be paying off...
...He was also my host, his Uptown abode serving as media HQ for me and my MSNBC traveling companions after Katrina closed all the New Orleans hotels...
...People jumped up and down and grabbed onto posts...
...He suffered a fierce backlash from the white business community who originally helped him win, and who now seem to be aligning behind Ron Forman, a former Nagin backer whose wife was Nagin's communications director...
...My subjects were trying to take down the gun manufacturers, much as they did the tobacco industry...
...Kingfish shakes his head in disapproval...
...Never mind that its infrastructure is in shambles, that its public school system is nearly defunct, that all but two of its hospitals are closed, that 80 percent of its residences sustained flood damage, that only 200,000 of its 480,000 citizens have been able to return, that 1,100 of its citizens are dead, and close to 1,500 are still missing...
...As I drove into the 9th Ward, where all manner of atrocity was rumored to be occurring, I saw several men trying to put out a raging house fire with milk cartons full of water...
...While Rex is a parading and public-spirited organization, Comus withdrew from parading years ago when a city councilman tried to make it open its membership, which is supposed to be secret...
...Everybody in one accord...
...He doesn't understand why anybody would rebuild here, since it's proven hurricane bait, and the neighborhood was a crime and murder magnet even before the storm...
...Federal, state, and local entities, as well as insurance companies, are now so tied up in a Gordian knot of interlocking and competing interests that New Orleans these days resembles Purgatory...
...His Cajun grandmother taught him how to cook at the age of 6, knowledge he expanded on when he began working for under-the-table cash at Brennan's at the age of 13...
...I don't think he's home," deadpans one of the crew...
...He takes a sip of bourbon, cocks his head quizzically, and poses a question that seems to have occurred to him for the first time...
...Doing so is an obstacle course of bureaucratic high-hurdles and Catch-22s...
...They're supposed to be done by June," Gendusa says skeptically...
...I asked her where she recommended going...
...Second line," he says, softly dragging out the i in line, as if he's said it all...
...Pass the Courvoisier," he says, pulling a bottle of cognac out of his bag...
...Everybody is waiting for something: waiting for their insurance check, waiting to see if they can rebuild, waiting to make sure that if they rebuild that their neighbor does the same so that they don't live in a blighted neighborhood, waiting to make sure that the city, state, or feds will allow their neighborhood to exist at all...
...Black city council president Oliver Thomas recently caused a stir, saying of public housing evacuees that are now residents of places like Houston, that New Orleans only wants people back who will work, not "soap opera watchers...
...The roof in Shane's attic now has sunlight streaming in, and the downstairs was so covered in mold after receiving about five feet of water that it actually looked like the walls had sprouted rainbow-colored fur...
...But if it were a Chinese-food condiment, it would be sweet 'n' sour...
...I'll have to check the books, but I believe this is the first time there's been a fistfight at the meeting of the courts...
...I can tell you what they're thinking: We sure are glad Rex comes over here...
...Their bass drum and tuba lay a tandem, chest-thumping bottom, while their stable of horn players hold the loose groove, careening around each other through the intersection, then smacking together like bumper cars...
...Others want to see Mayor Nagin toast the city...
...There are cellphone numbers painted on garage doors, so neighbors can find each other if anyone bothers returning...
...We walk in through the open door, around the mold cultures and rotted furniture, the old krewe cups and broken children's toys—the ruins of their friend's life...
...Go to Perlis, and get your white tie and tails...
...He also drinks too much...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 25
