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NATURALLY N'AWLINS: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Recently, I returned to New Orleans to visit old friends and enjoy the Mardi Gras weekend. It was a far more laid back affair than you would think, not because the city was still recovering from Katrina so much as my friends and I had undergone some changes since the old days. Flying over the lovely Lake Ponchartrain, I recalled how in 1994 I set a land-speed record between Athens, Georgia, and New Orleans on the way to my first hotly anticipated Mardi Gras. I remember being transfixed by the beauty of driving into the city at night over the causeway, the exotic palm trees that greeted new visitors to this Caribbean port of call. Already, New Orleans felt like some rare hothouse flower, a city apart from the prosaic, homogenised environs of America, an atmosphere that still pervades every square inch between Uptown and the Ninth Ward.

My first Mardi Gras was fairly stereotypical. I crashed with friends at Tulane’s dormitories, where we loaded up backpacks full of Goldschläger and bulging wine skins before venturing out and looking for trouble. Half-naked in the tropical heat, I smoked a carton of cigarettes while chasing every single float, screaming myself hoarse for beads and souvenirs when I wasn’t eating a mountain of Popeye’s chicken and relieving myself in every imaginable crevice of the city. Like everyone else, I pushed my way to Bourbon Street through sweaty crowds and bloody brawls in order to participate, along with the ever-present Frat Breauxs, in the ceremonial boobs-for-beads barter system. Satisfied with my haul, I would miraculously make it back home and pass out exhausted. It was a good time, and it continued non-stop for several days.

The seductiveness of Mardi Gras wasn’t all cheap thrills so much as a sense of wonder. As a child of the suburbs, I was amazed by how all the rules and social norms simply dissolved under the watchful eye of the NOPD, as if America’s perversity could be expiated in one weekend of uncensored bacchanalia. I mean, how many times do you see grandparents walking naked in purple and gold body paint down a boulevard full of people and you’re not even in New York? I was smitten. I moved there the following year and stayed for several more, working as a waiter in a French-Creole restaurant in the Quarter. Those were the best years of my life.

Returning to New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year was a different sort of experience. Instead of sharing the floor of a dorm room, I’m put up in the guest room of a lovely home off Magazine Street in the Garden District. And instead of chasing floats, we set up “Family Gras”, which is sort of a tail-gate party in the middle of St Charles Avenue, where the street cars usually run. The appeal of drunk girls has waned, particularly given my new job as guardian over wide-eyed two-year-olds, who are quickly overwhelmed with cascades of stuffed animals from the parade of masked revellers.

The parades are now more intriguing. No longer a uniform buffet of trinkets, they take on the arcane dimensions of baseball teams. Each krewe boasts its own history and idiosyncrasies, which natives expound upon with relish. Rather than sit content on the outside, now my friends have formed their own bawdy marching societies, such as the Camel Toe Lady Steppers, who join in amidst the high school bands, flambeau carriers, shriners and Mardi Gras Indians. Fast food has been replaced by gustatory feats of patience and scholarship, with dishes that have taken days to prepare: crawfish etouffee, smoked pork shoulder and andouille sausage, served with Zapp’s Voodoo Chips and bread & butter sweet pickles, naturally.

Some things, of course, don’t change. I can’t overemphasise the importance of accelerated drinking to New Orleans culture—it’s not a macho thing so much as a way of life. Naturally this is the town that invented the first cocktail. Tourists always swarm Pat O’Brien’s in the French Quarter for a tasteless, overpriced Hurricane, but those in the know stock their liquor cabinets with an array of spirits, archaic mixers and homemade remedies, all of it destined to make you higher than a doughboy.

On the menu for this Family Gras were Corpse Revivers, French 75s and my favourite, the Sazerac, which tastes like licorice and whiskey. When the shakers are used up, it’s time to switch to beer, of which only one label truly dominates: Abita. Brewed in nearby Abita Springs, there's the the Jockamo IPA (a play off the popular Mardi Gras song “Iko Iko”), Andygator and Restoration Pale Ale, to name but a few. And when all of those drinks run their course, the greatest Mardi Gras innovation of all tends to come into play: our own private port-o-potty, the Pot-O-Gold.

Much has been written about the charm of New Orleans, and rightly so. Its poetry hangs in branches off the live oaks that line the streets and swells in the roots that erupt through the sidewalks. Although the romantic allure of the city has been comically exaggerated (think: Zatarain’s commercials, Anne Rice, voodoo tours), the true character of the city tends to be more subtle, like the ashtrays on the bar and the to-go cups by the door; or the three women selling scrambled eggs, grits, bacon and hot sausage in the back of a convenience store; or the chicory in your coffee; or the vats of fresh shrimp in the local supermarkets; or the sign that reads “No Suicides” in a daiquiri shop; or the unmarked house in a sleepy neighbourhood that hosts a fantastic po-boy joint with full bar.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing over whether the city could bounce back from the hurricane, and put on a Mardi Gras party every bit as lavish as those in years past. They needn’t have worried. Strolling back to where I was staying at around midnight last Monday, an apparition emerged from the haze, silhouetted like a bear on a unicycle; when the phantom whooshed past us, it revealed itself to be a shaggy fat-faced drunk with long curly hair on a child’s bike. He declaimed, in his loudest Paul Revere voice: “The night is young….prepare yourselves!” At around six in the morning, we passed the living legend Pete Fountain and his Half Fast Marching Band, getting ready in their boiled white shirts and suspenders to play in the Rex parade. The fundamentals of this weird economy were clearly sound.

On the way to Louis Armstrong airport, driving past the boarded up and spray-painted houses south of Claiborne Avenue, I sat thinking about David Simon’s upcoming HBO show “Treme”. If it casts the same surgical eye for detail on New Orleans that “The Wire” did on Baltimore, it just may inspire the kind of understanding and empathy that was sorely missing in some quarters of the country four years ago. “Why would anybody live there?” Well, put simply, people live here because New Orleans isn’t anywhere else. 

~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: Emily Bobrow