THE BIG Easy. The Crescent City. The city that care forgot. Easy Rider, Blaze, Angel Heart, Interview With The Vampire. Louis Armstrong. Daniel Lanois. Aaron Neville. Tennessee Williams. William Faulkner. Sherwood Anderson. O, Chhre, dis place so good, it make yo wanna slap yo mamma! New Orleans, or, once you go native, N awlins , is one crazy place. And the only thing better than visiting it, is living in it. Or so the locals claim . . .
Whether you consider it the nethermost island of the Caribbean or the westernmost of the Arab States, New Orleans never fails to disorientate. Although bearing the latitude and longitude of a Southern state, culturally and geographically the city is an island.
Creole French wafts along the banks of the Mississippi, but the swampland gators speak with a southern drawl that s pure Louisiana. Downtown, New Orleanians Moore Street is The French Market, where locals are most likely to quaff cafi au lait and beignets (a Southern-fried doughnut awash with icing sugar) than wallow in the quintessential American breakfast of pancakes and syrup. And if you re up to a lope uptown (for lope you must, this being the somnolent South), the French Quarter beckons, with its jazz bars conjuring images of spicy couplings to match its pyromaniacal cuisine, and the wrought-iron balconies of the fabled Bourbon St. recalling its regal past with aplomb.
If you haven t been schooled in the New Orleans mythology, chances are you re either a Trappist monk or Helen Keller. Artists have been drawn to it for centuries, some for its 24-hour bars, others for its barely-suppressed appetite for all things sensual and sexual, and a few die-hards, for the chance to spin their hellfire and damnation yarns to anyone who s either too knackered or too ossified to dodge the onslaught.
Blanche DuBois captured the decadence of the city when she ranted of its timelessness: Don t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn t just an hour but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands and who knows what to do with it? (A Streetcar Named Desire).
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs all passed through The Big Easy, and chronicled their escapades to the delight of the beat generation; Charles Bukowski got his first shot at writing from a French Quarter publisher with an eye for grit and grime, and Neil Jordan would ve been short of a job but for the fiery imagination of Ann Rice who conjured up Lestat and his cronies in Interview With A Vampire while sipping iced tea in her plantation home in the Garden district.
But it s also achieved its notoriety by many more colourful means. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda tripped through a rake of carnal delights in the heady surroundings of St. Louis cemetery where, due to the city being some six feet below sea level, the dead are buried overground in tombs of Gothic grandeur. Brooke Shields chose to trade more than her looks for Louis Malle in Pretty Baby, amid the genteel surroundings of Columns Hotel on Charles Avenue, and voodoo gurus trawl through the city s numerous temples in search of their elusive ancestral spirits.
But all of this glorious technicolour is of the pattern, and not the cloth. The Big Easy is as rich or as poor in culture and pzazz as you want it to be. Take the urban myth trade for starters. If you swallow stories that make the headlines, you end up tiptoeing through the city clinging to your liver in permanent dread of the organ donor brigade. If you read the crime statistics that champion New Orleans as the second murder capital of the US (after Washington, DC), you confine your sightseeing to your hotel veranda. But if you re more of a party animal, you simply plunge headlong onto Bourbon St. and let your ancestors good karma look after the rest.
Arriving in this city of madness on the Saturday before Mardi Gras, you re left with no choice but to go for the last option anyway. The carnival s in full swing, the floats (of truly Schwarzenegger proportions) are hogging Canal St. and the crowds are knee-deep in booze, blues and bewilderment.
For a town with such a reputation for free spiritedness, they get unmerciful kicks out of the sight of an inch of bare flesh. Mardi Gras, at least New Orleans-style, focuses most of its energy on a remarkable activity: motley bunches of (very drunk) people toss plastic carnival beads (selling in K-Mart for the princely sum of 5/$3) to kindred spirits who, on catching the trinkets are obliged to flash or moon at their suitors .
Not quite what you d call hard core, and in a city that boasts strip clubs and full-frontal shows the entire length of Bourbon St., a mite puzzling. Or maybe not, if what they say about forbidden fruit bears any relation to the truth. But watching countless men and women getting off at even a fleeting glimpse of a piece of ass makes you wonder about this city of sex and sin. Like a bunch of escapees from an enclosed order, they re quite satisfied to look but not touch. Mind you, with so many pitchers of beer swilling around in their bellies they d probably be hard pressed to locate their own goolies, never mind touch anyone else s.
But yes, during Mardi Gras, the debauchery is the thing. Nothing else really matters, cept keeping time to the music. Tout ensemble! (everything together), the jazzmen trumpet and the Cajun chefs holler. Hurtle it all into the pot and see what you get. If your appetite s for something spicy, you may end up with a down-home blues band tugging at your jump leads, or a jazz combo that promises nothing more than a chance to make yo liver quiver . If, on the other hand, you re after something that s plain hot, you ll probably be landed with a jambalaya on your plate and instructed to swally gracious plenty, else yo ll sully the chef! . And that s the best thing about this city. You never quite know what you re going to get, or who s going to give it to you . . .
Whatever you think of her morals, (and let s face it, she doesn t have many), New Orleans wisdom surely outstrips any other city with a pretension towards greatness. When the rest of the Western world clenches its teeth in preparation for the post-Christmas blues, The Big Easy dons its party frock. Twelfth Night (January 6th), traditionally the last day of Christmas, marks the first official day of carnival. And from there it s but a merry hop, skip and a jump through the dreariest of winter months with no let-up until the stroke of midnight Fat Tuesday, when Lent begins, and thereafter fast and abstinence.
Of course, the beauty of this Louisianan version of events is that everybody gets to enjoy the debauch without having to endure the discomfort of the Lenten cleanse. Because denial is simply not part of these sassy Southerners vocabulary. To ask a native New Orleanian to deny himself his daily pleasures is akin to expecting Shane MacGowan to quaff mineral water. Not only are both unlikely, but they invite nothing more than scorn from all right-minded people.
And so the revelry begins. It renders a stroll on Bourbon St. an impossibility; you re simply whooshed along, suspended in mid-air by the force of wall to wall carousers. Plans to stop at a bar for a drink are jettisoned along with the Mardi Gras baubles. You go where the collective aerodynamics deposits you, with solid ground only an occasional encounter, while frequent entreaties to let the good times roll make more and more sense as you negotiate the funkiest strip in the Western hemisphere.
A quick gander at the menu du jour hints at the piquant flavours of the gumbo on offer tonight. Harry Connick Snr. is lounging at Maxwell s; Zeitgeist Theatre Experiments is staging The First Annual Demented Alien Blues/Lounge Mardi Gras Music Marathon; the Funky Butt s got the Algiers Brass Band; Andy Boudreaux s promises The Finest Male Strip Show in New Orleans! ; Cowboy Mouth are whooping it up at The Howlin Wolf; The Iguanas are creeping out of the woodwork in Tipitina s and Monaco Bob s Touchdown Lounge is proudly presenting Brown Sox with Damp. Hmm. So many cellars. So little time.
And so the party goes. On and on until dawn. Or until the liver cries out for a reprieve. Then it s time to navigate a path back to the sanctuary of the hotel room where gentle sleep and the mollycoddling of room service will work its magic on this partied-out HP hack.
The dark underbelly of New Orleans is often alluded to, but rarely defined by visitors to bayou country. Aaron Neville might be so bold as to croon about voodoo, but passers-by are loathe to probe the reality too closely for fear of what they might find. But everywhere there are allusions to the occult.
Marie Laveau, New Orleans most famous voodoo queen, has her very own shrine (and paying emporium) where admirers can congregate, venerate, or self-flagellate as the mood dictates. Her House Of Voodoo invites the curious as well as the converts, and the look on the face of the keeper of her house hints at an appetite for more than just spiritual stimulation. Love potions and pincushion dolls aside, the bookshelf groans with all manner of useful resource: The Crone s Book Of Words , Money, Spells And Charms , Death And The Invisible Powers , and one instantly snapped up by Hot Press, How To Dream Your Lucky Lotto Numbers .
Stories of hexes put on errant husbands depriving them of their natural prowess, and blood sacrifices to obscure gods, abound. While none of the tales claim kinship to those of Angel Heart, some of them trade on the fear of retribution planted in the hearts of practitioners. A simple illustration: Marie Laveau, a free woman of colour who did, indeed, live in New Orleans in the late 1800s, is buried in St. Louis Cemetery, a site of daily pilgrimage for her many disciples. Chalked on her tomb are a series of X s to signal protection for the scribe. The fact that such traditions are merely ruses dreamt up by tour guides with voracious appetites for tall tales, has done nothing to deter Laveau s apostles from continuing the practise, groundless and all as it is.
Voodoo thrives here, as most things do, because of the generosity of spirit of the native New Orleanian. An amalgam of African tribal beliefs and sanitised Christian rituals, voodoo represents the confluence of two traditions, one African, one Creole. Voodoo is the Yoruba word for god , which infiltrated the local argot when the first slaves were imported from Africa, and whose belief system was finally assimilated into the local (white) church. Cemetery and voodoo tours abound in New Orleans, and cryptic tales from these Cities Of The Dead are related with barely-concealed glee by scores of tour guides laughing all the way to the local cambio.
Whether spiritual hocus-pocus or kosher belief system, all this voodoo ritualising can get a bit tiresome at times, particularly when the sun is beating down, and thoughts of spine-tingling ancestors hovering nearby seem a tad implausible. But resistance can be short-lived, particularly if one wishes to avail of the niceties of the local drug stores. Remarkably, ecstasy is legal here in Louisiana. Yes. Ecstasy is L-E-G-A-L. Signs proclaiming Ecstasy for sale here abound. Which shouldn t come as much of a surprise to anyone grown accustomed to N Awlins ever-ready licence to licentiousness.
Lieutenant Marlon de Fillo, Public Information Officer with the New Orleans Police Department attempts to explain this phenomenon: At this time of year we demand a tremendous amount from our police officers in terms of durability, he begins, with no insignificant talent for understatement, because they ve got to have a high tolerance level for the types of activities they encounter. But we plan for Mardi Gras all year long, and we feel we re the best in the world in terms of crowd control.
The most common drug we encounter on the streets of New Orleans is crack cocaine, he continues, and we re constantly working with our social services to reduce the demand, though, of course, we work on reducing the supply as well. Ecstasy is not considered a controlled dangerous substance. We do monitor those outlets which sell ecstasy to make sure that whatever they re selling is within the law, but because ecstasy is not a scheduled narcotic, it s not illegal to sell it. We just keep an eye on it, is all.
I ve heard tell that serious crime takes a nose-dive during Mardi Gras. Is this true, or just a tourist boards marketing ploy to pull the punters in?
No, that s right, serious crime does take a nose-dive, De Fillo confirms. The biggest problems we encounter are alcohol-related.
Of course, when you start quoting statistics, damn statistics and lies, you ve got to be careful not to lose sight of what Lieutenant means by a drop in serious crime.
Well, first of all murders are down in New Orleans, he explains. Last year we saw a 5% reduction in murders, and the previous year 10%. This year alone we re looking at a 30% reduction in murders. Violent crime is down 7% overall, and crime is constantly on the decline in this city.
Heck, we re still in the mire of statistics. 5% of nothing is nothing, but 5% of a lot can be quite something. Just how many people get surprise visits from the Grim Reaper in the city every year?
Last year we recorded 350 murders, 364 the previous year, and in 1994 we had 441, De Fillo proffers blithely, and with perfect timing, nips our conversation in the bud before any more colourful tales of love and danger seep out of the swamps and into the pages of foreign newspapers . . . n

CAJUN:
The Gospel According To Lafayette

WORD HAS it that the bona fide Cajun sounds aren t to be heard in the confines of the French Quarter. If it s the real thing you re after, then a trip out West is the only solution.
Baton Rouge sounds promising. Any town that cooks up sex, lies and videotape on a slow afternoon must surely be worth a visit, but the folks down in Flaherty s Irish Channel on Toulouse Street aren t convinced. If it s kosher Cajun you want, they say, you ve got to head to Lafayette, home of the fais do-do, the courir and the mama of all jambalayas.
Enough said. I secrete my best dancing shoes in my bag, banish all memories of Deliverance from my head and hop on a Greyhound that s going all the way to Laredo . . .
Jerry, our female driver, regales us with tales of Interstate 10 as soon as we hit the road. She s been doing this route for the last 10 years, passing through everywhere from Texarkana to Mobile, Brownesville to San Antonio.
Cajun country stretches all the way along Highway 90 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Lafayette and beyond, to Crowley and Jennings, she explains. No buses travel that route any more, but it s real Cajun territory. But to tell you the truth, child, once you cross Lake Ponchartrain on the causeway, you in Cajun country straightaway. It s right here honey!
The Greyhound trundles along, making what should be no more than a three-hour trip into a four and a half hour odyssey, just so s her passengers can stop awhile in Baton Rouge to take in the sights. Lafayette beckons with its promise of 7/8 time signatures, washboards, fiddles and banjos, and a plateful of crawfish, if we manage to get there before the kitchens close.
Randol s is the happening place, if my sources are to be believed. And believe them I do. Beth Waggoner, singer/songwriter and bouzouki-player par excellence, is a Lafayette native who s plying her trade these days in The Big Easy. She points me in the direction of two of Lafayette s finest Cajun aficionados: May and Roger Waggoner, her parents. We rendezvous over a beer, bibbed and tucked in anticipation of the long-promised crawfish.
May Waggoner is a veritable well of dazzling scials, of Cajun history and culture, music and dance. Her eyes light up as she recounts a few, stopping every once in a while to greet friends and acquaintances with a nonchalant Ah, chhre, ga va? . We re in the right place, right enough.
Beads and trinkets, the mainstays of the New Orleans festivities, are almost afterthoughts in this beating heart of Cajun country. And the spirit of community here dictates a far more personal plan of campaign for Mardi Gras.
Mardi Gras is so totally different round here, y know, she begins, irked that HP crash lands in town on Fat Tuesday evening, just as the festivities are coming to a close. Here the people who observe the Mardi Gras belong to what we call krewes (teams) and are mostly men. Recently women have started to take part too, but back in the old days it was always men. The women stayed at home and had the babies and prepared the food.
Anyway, these men get up early, early and start drinking, and in the old days they would get on their horses or flatbed trucks these days and go from farm to farm. This stretches right the way back to the medieval begging tradition, and they re all masked, except for the captain. The masks are decorated with sometimes highly suggestive images, always colourful.
The captain of the krewe, wearing a long red cape and carrying a white flag, asks permission of the mistress of the house to receive the Mardi Gras by saying: voulez vous recoir le Mardi Gras? . Then, if the woman nods, the krewe comes in and they beg for pennies, they act crazy, dance with the women, and accept anything she offers for the gumbo (Cajun stew). Then later that night they cook up a real big gumbo in the town square and everybody dances, plays music, and uses up all their nervous energy and their livers before Lent starts!
Mardi Gras-ers are prone to regaling anyone who ll listen with stories of their Fat Tuesday shenanigans, generously sprinkled with local dialectal terms that send the hapless listener reeling in the direction of the nearest dictionary. Scials of the Fais do-do are the most colourful, though anything remotely connected with Mardi Gras seems to demand the full technicolour treatment anyway. Louisianians simply don t deal in monochrome.
The Fais do-do goes back to the old tradition when the Louisianian Acadians would get together. That s where the word Cajun came from. The Acadians, who were French Canadian, came down from what is now Nova Scotia in the 1800s, and every Mardi Gras they would have their bal de maison , or party. Of course there was no babysitting, so everyone brought the children, put them in another room and told them to fais do-do which means go to sleep . And so the expression fais do-do came to mean a party .
The Louisianian penchant for opting for the ` la carte (instead of the table d htte) is a weakness that May Waggoner readily acknowledges:
It s contemporary culture, I guess, she smiles. You want to take all the good stuff and leave the penance behind!
Good stuff is prone to rotting too though, as Waggoner suggests, casting a cold eye over the jewel in the Mississippi crown.
New Orleans is a little over-ripe, I believe, she avers. It s like the ageing dowager who wears too much make-up, and who s so wrapped up in her faded flowers and her memories, that she doesn t realise that she s wearing too much perfume, and she s a little out of date. Lafayette s version of Mardi Gras is much more part of the community, a living, breathing thing, and not just a garish hangover from times past.