I HAVE A MIDWESTERN HEART AND THE COLD EYE OF AN INVEStigative reporter. A lot of the mystery and romance of New Orleans is about alcohol. Let’s say fifty percent is about drinking and the rest is about beautiful restaurants and cocktail parties and white-coated waiters and wonderful, exotic, French food and wines. It is about the huge, beautiful mansions built by slaves or people who were little better than slaves. Irish stonemasons, Italian carpenters, and lately, British painters, Mexican roofers. The roofers swoop in in the early morning. There will be a driver who speaks English and a pickup truck full of sweet-hearted, hardworking men playing wonderful music on cheap radios. Not a green card among them; the owners of the houses being painted know and laugh about it. Cast a blind eye is the mantra when keeping the mansions in shape with Hondurans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, and African Americans who have not agreed to learn to speak the sort of English that will get them a desk job.
The sweet smell of marijuana floats among the toxic fumes of paint and mold-killing Kilz and the chemicals being sprayed on the lice and rodents and roaches that live in those old mansions no matter how much poison you use to make them go next door and propagate. Not to even mention Formosan termites and regular old Louisiana termites.
All will be well. The Mardi Gras costumes are safe in chemically sealed plastic bags. The queens and kings and ladies-in-waiting and pages take off their costumes when the balls are over and they are whisked away to be sealed up for posterity in special cedar closets no roach dare enter.
Things that I took for granted the ten years I tried to live in New Orleans but which now annoy me include waiters who expect huge tips and keep on being haughty even after you turn over the tribute, salaried men at the airport who literally won’t touch your luggage until you hand them five- or ten-dollar bills. I like tipping people but I don’t like to feel as though my luggage will be stolen if I don’t hand over a twenty-dollar bill. You aren’t supposed to have to tip salaried employees of airlines to check in your luggage at the curb. I have flown all over the world and New Orleans is the pirate city of airline employees.
What else annoys me about New Orleans? Taxi drivers from hell, many of whom don’t speak English, won’t turn off the radio or turn on the air conditioning, and expect even bigger tips than their buddies at the airport.
I hate parallel parking on narrow crowded streets with potholes and the fact that parking tickets are one of the major sources of funding for the city. When I was there in the spring semester of 2005, to have a wonderful time and be feted at Tulane University and hold a chair in the humanities and another at the Women’s Center of Newcomb College, it seemed to me that a third of the police force was engaged in parking scams. I was fined fifty dollars for parking in the wrong direction in front of my rented house. No warning. The first night I slept in the house I parked my car in front of it and when I got up at seven the next morning there was a ticket. This after having spent an entire afternoon the day before driving out to City Park to pay seventy-five dollars for a permit and sticker to park in front of my house. Tulane sent one of their office staff with me to make sure I had a personal check. The office where the permits are granted does not accept cash or credit cards. It is manned by three obese women who file their nails and talk on cellular telephones while the roomful of applicants sit politely on hard chairs holding little numbers they are given as they enter. Outside the office a morbidly obese police officer stands guard. This man is so fat it is unbelievable. How they made a policeman’s uniform to fit him is another amazing question. Around the corner two more obese but still basically human-looking policemen sit on a bench earning their paychecks by some mysterious thinking process. I was told by the Tulane employee that all of these people were political appointees, part of the bottomless corruption of the city government. My uncle was the editor of the Times-Picayune, the main newspaper of New Orleans. In his time the city was run by the southern Mafia and the office of mayor was handed down, as it is now, by a family of politically astute pirates.
Before the hurricane and after the hurricane the same hierarchy holds sway. The corruption and lack of real jobs never change. There are jobs on the port, jobs in the tourist industry, jobs selling dope, lawyers and physicians and medical personnel, three universities, yard work, interior decorators and antique dealers and small shops where wealthy people buy expensive clothes for themselves and their dogs and their children, coffee shops and that’s about it, except temporary government jobs teaching the arts to African American students. Plus the Saints games and the struggling symphony orchestra.
The government pours money into New Orleans. It has poured money into New Orleans for a hundred years but nothing much ever changes.
There are wonderful people in the city, rich and poor, white and cocoa colored and black and light brown and dark brown, Caucasian, African American, Vietnamese, and a constantly changing mix of Mexicans and Central and South Americans and French and Belgians and Englishmen and -women who specialize in haughtily looking down their English noses at everyone’s accents.
It’s a constantly changing mix of nations and creeds and costumes and sights. Fifty-year-old white women running in and out of Langenstein’s in their tennis dresses, every man and woman a law unto themselves where fashion and manners is concerned. You can be knocked off the sidewalk by an African bicycle rider and helped into the car by a stranger in the same block.
I hope the federal government keeps on pouring money into this poor but attractive relative of a city. I hope the music never stops and the movie stars keep coming in and buying up all the good houses in the lower garden district.
I wish we could find a way to rebuild the city that did not depend on handouts and people coming there to get drunk and throw trash down on the streets. I really dislike Mardi Gras. It used to be a beautiful, funny, local celebration with grown men being silly enough to pretend they were kings and people seeing through the absurdity and buying into it at the same time.
Now it is a big, overgrown, two-week-long, drunken bacchanal with people coming in from all over the world to get drunk and throw things down on the streets and the next morning big trucks full of poor people coming along behind them to pick up the mess. The trucks burn lots of petrol we buy from the Middle East where the best sons of the poor people go to fight (and sometimes die) because they can’t find a decent job doing anything else.
And so on.
There are times in the early mornings when I go out to run in Audubon Park and the beauty and soft, moisture-laden air and the huge old oak trees are so wonderful I can’t help but love New Orleans.
I hear the bells from Loyola University and see the tall handsome buildings of Tulane University and I think of my physician uncles and great-uncles who were educated there and my doctor grandson and artist granddaughters who recently graduated there. I think of the writing class I once took from a poet at Tulane and the fun of hearing poetry readings in the lovely chapel. I remember the honors they gave me only five years ago and the dinner parties and seventieth birthday party they had for me with three wonderful cakes. I remember when we plastered the campus with signs and gave away buttons saying A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY, both in English and in Latin.
I remember the Thursday afternoon class I taught and how, almost to a man and woman, the students wrote about the dangers and problems getting drunk had caused them or their friends. One story ended in a death, as drunken stories often do.
These were beautiful, upper-middle-class children, some the children of professors and teachers, who had been sent to Tulane to learn to have sound minds in sound bodies, but they had been taught to get drunk at the same time. On the one hand, geology and history and philosophy and literature and biology and geometry and higher math and chemistry and biochemistry and astrophysics and plain physics and architecture and music and art. On the other hand getting drunk at parties and in the French Quarter and at the lake and in automobiles and in bars, bars, bars.
It made me cry to read their stories. I read the same stories at the University of Arkansas but they aren’t this sad and every student doesn’t write them. This was a hand-picked class of the best students at the university. The homecoming queen wrote about her sadness that the beautiful young man she loved was ruining his life with alcohol and she was helpless to save him.
Another student was spending his spare time trying to get his roommate to stop driving when he was drunk and stoned.
I hope the beautiful and good parts of the city can be rebuilt and that industries will come that will give the citizens of New Orleans something to do that adds to the store of goodness in the world.
I want drunkenness and drugs and prostitution and pornography and bad art to be left in the past, drowned beneath the flood. The pitiful artists who sell their ugly paintings to the tourists. The smelly bars with their Tennessee Williams imitators and all of that. You can have it. I quit drinking thirty-five years ago. I don’t like it anymore. I see no reason to tolerate it and let it ruin our lives and the lives of our children.