Beaucoup Sad

First published September 9, 2005

It was a muggy afternoon and I was twenty-five years old, sitting in a bar on Bourbon Street, next to a screenless window that opened to the sidewalk outside. Somewhere in one of the neighboring bars, a trumpet, a clarinet and a tuba carried on a musical dogfight around the melody of some gospel song.

My friend and I had a pile of iced crabs on the table between us, and I was banging on the shell of one with the blunt end of a butter knife. My friend was holding another one up to the light, apparently looking for some sort of pull-tab on the little critter.

A tiny immaculate grey-haired man dressed in a clean but very well-worn black cutaway suit, with a grey vest and a carnation in his lapel, stopped on the sidewalk next to us. “Pardon me sir,” he drawled, “but there is a particular technique to that. Would you permit me to demonstrate?”

Then, still standing out on the sidewalk and leaning through the window, he showed us how to elegantly disassemble and eat a fresh Louisiana blue crab, along with a gentle lecture on proper application of lemon and cayenne pepper sauce. When we invited him to come inside and join us for a drink and more crabs, he smiled, bowed slightly, and said, “Alas, I am required elsewhere. But do enjoy your visit to our city.”

I wonder where that wonderful little man is now.

New Orleans is not like any other place I’ve ever been. In a single ordinary weekday afternoon and evening there I saw my first Dixieland jazz band, hooker, Creole funeral, street-gutter drunk, antebellum mansion, transvestite – and iced Louisiana blue crab.

In New Orleans I first heard someone speaking Cajun, that verbal gumbo of French, English, Spanish, African, Choctaw, and maybe a little Martian. I listened to barkers on the street delivering impassioned sales pitches for jazz joints, and strip joints, and a few jazz-strip joints.

I walked down streets that had been used by general Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite the pirate. I stood in a square where slaves had been bought and sold. I sat in a tavern where Laffite and Jackson may have shared a pint and I heard Al Hirt do things with a trumpet that were not humanly possible. I wandered through a city founded on a sort of unashamed decadence that would probably take several lifetimes to understand.

I wonder where that wonderful little city is now.

Last week I watched a group of overfed white men on television, standing in a hanger in Mississippi with their shirtsleeves symbolically rolled up, as they staged a “situational briefing” for the cameras. They told each other things that anyone who could read a newspaper had known for days, and congratulated each other on the wonderful job they were doing.

At that moment in New Orleans more than 50,000 trapped and helpless people had been waiting for days to be rescued. Some of these people are probably descendants of the slaves that were traded in the streets of the French Quarter 170 years ago. Virtually all of them are among the poorest people living anywhere in the richest nation the world has ever known.

Cut off by the floods and not having worked their way up in the priorities of the leaders of our nation – who needed a couple of days to wrap up their vacations and plan their photo-ops before sending help – these people lived through the nightmare of an almost total collapse of civilization. They watched helplessly as the oldest and the youngest and the sickest among them died. They watched a few morally bankrupt young men, armed with looted guns and liquor, carry out a reign of terror unchecked by the handful of police officers in the city.

I guess New Orleans will be drained and rebuilt some day. Eventually the French Quarter will sputter back to life, and the musicians, and the blue crabs, and the strippers will all resurface to take their places on Bourbon Street.

But I wonder if New Orleans will ever regain that sense of innocent debauchery that would allow an old man with a carnation in his lapel to lean through a window to give a young man a lesson in Bayou dining.

God, I hope so.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball