Before the Flood
Weird prophecies of the 'mother of all storms' and how New Orleans was gutted way before any home-wr
By Cole Coonce
On a muggy Thursday night in August, I waited for Meisner at a hotel bar in New Orleans, absently watching a teevee screen mounted above the bar. Some squall known as Katrina was still a swirling micron of abstraction there, not yet powerful, a burbling blobular protoplasm on The Weather Channel. I finished my drink, we walked up Poydras to St. Charles Avenue and jumped on a trolley headed uptown, to a restaurant called Jacques Imo's. The sticky heat wafted into the cable car and attached itself to our clothes. The air tasted of molasses.
Out in Carollton, a weird little slice of Americana where St. Charles ends, we got to Jacques Imo's around 8-ish, went into the bar, and asked how long the wait for dinner would be. "About three hours." What time do you close? "10 o'clock." Meisner ran the numbers, scrunched his brow and shook his head. "It's New Orleans math, dude. Just go with it." I ordered mint juleps.
By the time we were done with dinner, a passing thunderstorm had dampened the streets and the air was dense as a bag of feathers, and the trolleys had stopped running. A middle-aged white dude picked us up in a beater Ford taxi, we got in and he gunned it. The driver was a laconic man in flannel, asking only our destination. He drove with one hand, which moved with precise economy, like moving the steering wheel any more than necessary would cut into his already-slim profit margin. Most of the motion in the vehicle came from our driver habitually working a toothpick between his lips. In the dank hush of being and nothingness, the smear of headlights passed us sporadically and weather reports droned on the radio.
We passed through a blurry panorama of squalor and crime. It was all fairly depressing, actually. To mitigate the malaise I started up a conversation with the Toothpick. We passed a sign that read: "Garden District."
"Isn't this the Garden District?"
"No, this isn't the 'Garden District,'" the Toothpick said, forming air quotes with his free hand. "The Chamber wants you to believe it's the 'Garden District' because you are tourists."
So where is the real Garden District?" I refrained from using air quotes.
"Closer to Magazine Street. But I won't even drive my cab down there, because of all the ... criminal elements."
We talked about those criminal elements. The place had grown noticeably less fun over the years, with crime going up and bona fide, laissez-les-bontemps-rouler bacchanalia on the decline. I had been trying to explain this to Meisner.
"Is it the politicians?" I tried. "I mean, New Orleans and Baton Rouge have a real history of political corruption ... ."
"All our best politicians all went to jail," the Toothpick interrupted.
"What? You mean like Huey Long?"
"Well, like you said: It's a tradition. Huey Long, Earl Long, Edwin Edwards, and the rest of 'em. Sure, they skimmed the till. But roads got built, bridges were spanned, and heads got busted. When they were on the job, people went to work and there was a lot less crime."
I turned around and saw Meisner shudder and grin. The toothpick picked up on the uneasiness of his passengers.
"The best thing that could ever happen to this place is if it had a clean start," the Toothpick wagged. "For a storm to just level the entire place, wiping out the sex, the sleaze, the crime. All of it. Uptown, the Quarter, the 9th ward, the 'Garden District,' whatever." Again, he looked at me and did air quotes with his free hand when he said "Garden District."
The conversation stopped. Meisner kept grinning.
It could be argued that Mother Nature had been beaten to the punch. New Orleans had been destroyed years before Katrina. The French Quarter had become a joke. The Garden District was a ghetto that tested every iota of one's street smarts, if one didn't want to get rolled. We had been looking for the heart of the old city and couldn't find it. It had been replaced by Disney.
In Anaheim in 1965, Walt Disney unveiled New Orleans Square, a period-perfect simulacrum of the French Quarter. The mayor of New Orleans was made honorary mayor of his city's Disneyland doppelganger. And that is when New Orleans's problems metastasized and became manifold ... . CUT TO: Forty years later and New Orleans had basically gone down on its own cultural identity, feeding on its own DNA as New Orleans attempted to become Disney's vision of New Orleans. White flight blew across Lake Pontchartrain, creating a vacuum that left the Big Easy black underclass with nothing but an economy based on drugs, food service jobs, and a culture that had degenerated into a shuck-'n'-jive tourist trap.
Over crawfish cakes and Dixie beer at Mandina's on Canal Street, I thought back to the days when this town was most definitely not a theme park. To give Meisner the flavor of the Crescent City of old, I told him a story over chow about the French Quarter. As I was telling it, I realized the anecdote was 25 years old.
It went like this: At age 17, me and Bo Fingers drove to New Orleans to see the Rolling Stones at the Superdome, who were in town to play songs from their then-new album, Some Girls. The night before the show, we were drinking in something called The Society Page, a juke joint in the nether regions of the French Quarter. Bathed in a phosphorous blue light, The Society Page was where the Dionysian meets the Victorian, as decorated by Hieronymus Bosch. I attempted to pick up on a long and tall older woman for practice in the art of licentious liberties. It was three in the morning on a Monday/Tuesday, and some dude at the bar had a briefcase full of cocaine. At that time, I remember thinking New Orleans was pretty much the Valhalla of debasement. As I chatted up this fetching picture of pulchritude, she began singing along with the jukebox and leaned into me. "Black girls just want to get fucked all night," she baritoned in my ear, in a guttural whisper that registered two octaves below Mick Jagger's bleating. "And I just don't have that much jam." His/her breath and perfume reeked of something like paint thinner.
"What's that fragrance you're wearing?" I asked, trying to change the subject from the licentious to the prosaic, once I realized my date had an outie and not an innie.
"RUSH."
"Rush?"
"Amyl nitrate, silly."
Ohh for the days of New Orleans before sin became mainstream and commoditized, before Mardi Gras became an exchange of beads for bare breasts and besotted bi-curious sorority sisters kissing each other while cameras roll on Bourbon Street and it all became a Girls Gone Wild commercial on Comedy Central. Ohh for the days when New Orleans was out-and-out depraved and didn't need television to flaunt its disturbing peccadilloes, before it swallowed its own seed in the name of tourism. Gone was New Orleans of yore: A hoodoo-voodoo burbling cauldron of human gumbo, a polyglot of French, Haitian Creole, Irish, Italians, Germans, sodomites, actual lesbians, greasers, hepcats, Klansmen, all letting the good times roll.
One New Orleans landmark had escaped Disneyfication. It was too politically hot, perhaps, to be included in Walt's perfect world. I pointed this out to Meisner while on the way back from Mandina's to our hotel on Poydras near the Quarter: the statue of Jefferson Davis standing erect and tall in the middle of a slum. Yes, good ol' Jeff Davis - Mississippi boy, slave owner, states rights advocate, and sole president of the Confederate States of America, a man who barely survived his internment for treason and died in New Orleans in 1889 - has his likeness molded in marble and mounted right smack dab in the middle of one of the Big Easy's worst neighborhoods.
"Look at that statue. It's covered in bird shit," said Meisner. He got a closer look. "And paint."
I was thinking back to all of that while in the cab on St. Charles. The Toothpick continued his less-than-politically-correct and more-than-a-little-proto-fascist polemic on that mildew-y cab ride back to Poydras Street. He was talking about needing the "mother of all storms" to wipe New Orleans clean again.
"Ummm, won't this mother of all storms wipe you out too?" I asked.
"Maybe. But me, I got a place picked out in the desert, where I am going to retire. But if the hurricane comes before I can make it out of here, that will be fair enough also. I just hope I can live to see the day when the storm wipes this entire city and everybody in it off of the planet."
"Don't you think that is a little ... " I struggled for the word. "Draconian?"
"I dunno. I just know that for a place founded by Catholics, there is no redemption for this hell-hole."
Eighty-four hours later, when Katrina hit, Meisner and I were in Houston, Texas, having been evacuated out of the city. I watched the natural disaster on CNN. When the levees broke, the only thing visible from Mandina's was the roof. But the Jefferson Davis statue on Canal Street finally got its bath and washed away the paint and the bird shit. Weeks later, when the waters receded, the locals bathed it in paint the color of bile.Published: 03/23/2006
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
