All Gone to Look for America (42 page)

Places like the Bourbon Street Blues Company – and just about anyone else that has one – rent out balconies in ‘the Quarter' to the rampant
partygoers
that congregate for the annual celebration of excess. There used to be a whole district of town given over to making the elaborate costumes and masks and the shops are still full of extravagant feathered affairs for a giveaway price, for one simple reason: today the vast majority are made in China. Only the elite ‘carnival tribes' – that uniquely New Orleans fusion of Black African and Native American culture with a hint of paganism and a wash of
Franco-Spanish
high Catholicism – still make their own. The best do the rounds of their own neighbourhoods before joining the main parade, with their traditional exotic names, from Yellow Pocahontas, the Northside Skull and Bones Gang or the Krewe of Grotesque and Outlandish Habilments. The cheap Chinese masks are worn by people like me, and Gary here, and just about everybody else in the Bourbon Street Blues Company tonight: out-of-towners, just here for the beer. And the music.

My normal local back in England is a quiet rural pub with neither piped music nor jukebox, where I will stand happily for hours at the bar revelling in good conversation, traditional English ale and quietly savouring the smoking ban. So what the hell am I doing here with a fat cigar in my mouth, drinking lager from a bottle and going ‘yeehah' to a mega-loud rock band fronted by a feisty female singer with a ciggy in one hand and a beer bottle in the other singing a cover version of ‘The Summer of '69' in homage to an era that
vanished
long before she was born.

‘Hey, man,' calls Gary, ‘you really gotta try one of these,' and before I can say ‘Yes', ‘No' or ‘What the hell you goin' on about', there's a black girl in boots jumped on to the table in front of me, her head tilted back so she can hold in her mouth a test tube full of bright red liquid. I'm staring in amazement at this act, wondering what comes next when I find out: she crouches down to my height, pulls my head over towards hers and as Gary yells, ‘Open wide, feller', I do what he says and she leans over, cradling my head in her ample cleavage and empties its contents down my throat. ‘Now you've got to give her three bucks,' says Gary, beaming with red-nosed intoxication, and hands her a 10-dollar bill saying, ‘That's for him, one for me and one for you!'

She virtually straddles his chest to empty the second test tube – bright blue this time (as far as I could ever make out they're all just vodka-based with a dash of colour and maybe flavour) – into Gary, while seconds later he takes a blue one and, rather less expertly, returns the compliment to our waitress, who's now almost supine on the table. Gary has done this before. More than once. So, I soon perceive, have most of the blokes in here, and I'm relieved to say more than a few of them are my age. The ‘test-tube shooters' come out whenever the senior bar staff judge the ‘party mood' to be right. It's a strange form of sexual intercourse, a suggestive interchange of fluids – but not bodily ones – that as a soft-porn experience is probably one step down from lap dancing. Yes, it is a transaction in which sex undoubtedly plays a part, but then so is employing a barmaid with a low-cut top.

Two more shooters, another Abita and I'm not worrying about the political correctness of any of it. I've lost sight of Gary in the mounting crush indoors and wander out, away from Bourbon Street's commercial hedonism down the strangely quiet gaslit backstreets. The moon is scudding behind dark clouds and as the raindrops get heavier my mind is running scenes from
Interview with the Vampire
to Sting's ‘Moon Over Bourbon Street'. Risqué, ridiculous, wildly over the top. Just like the real thing.

Next morning the rain is pelting down as I make a dash for the Café du Monde at the end of Decatur Street. It's 10:30 a.m. but it feels like dusk with rain thumping off the rooftops, guttering overflowing and spilling like waterfalls onto the streets and into fast-filling drains. Even without giant waves washing in from the lake or the mighty Mississippi spilling over the levees, it is easy to imagine New Orleans suddenly being washed away, especially here on the
river's edge. The rain is bouncing off the striped canopy as I dash for cover and coffee.

The Café du Monde is a New Orleans institution, and has been since 1862, opening whenever possible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for
Christmas
Day. In the middle of Katrina it stayed open to midnight until damage to the kitchens forced the staff to close down – it took two months to repair the damage. With the rain forcing people to take cover, I have to wait a while to find a seat at a table, and even longer to get served. American waitresses may live on their tips but those at the Café du Monde either do more than well out of the tourists – or just as probably – do very badly indeed. Whichever it is, the service is about the slowest I've had in America. Then again, maybe that's just New Orleans sleepiness.

But the coffee, when it comes, is as good as its reputation: a rich, strong brew flavoured with chicory and traditionally served here ‘au lait', 50–50 with hot milk. It comes, if you're doing the Café du Monde thing – which I am – with
beignets
, which in New Orleans at least they manage to pronounce properly. In France a beignet is a doughnut which can be sweet or savoury, ring-shaped or just a ball of deep-fried dough. The New Orleans variant – specifically at the Café du Monde, is a small square deliciously light doughnut dusted with icing sugar. Served three at a time. Don't ask me why. If you ask for a beignet, you get three. If you ask for another, you get another three. It's tempting.

The French Market area, which is where the Café du Monde is located, right on the riverfront where the original city docks would have been 200 years ago, at the moment is in a state of transition. The farmers' market is still being repaired after Katrina – and still was when Gustav hit – and although there is a daily flea market, the permanent shops are definitely on the twee side: if you want teddy bears, collectible dolls or handmade sweeties, this is your place. The shop names say it all: Pets Are People, A Tisket A Tasket, Artichoke Gallery, Aunt Sally's Praline Shop. You know a retail outlet in America is
precious
if it calls itself a ‘shop' instead of a ‘store'. The French Market ought to be New Orleans's Pike Place but it looks increasingly more like ‘Old Sacramento'. Which is a shame.

But this is where I'm picking up the city tour. Most cities do bus tours to show off their prettiest attractions. In New Orleans – with the prettiest areas for once remarkably better seen on foot – they do a bus tour of the disaster areas. It's going to take a couple of hours though so I pick up a little something for lunch. That sentence doesn't work so well unless you've seen New Orleans' favourite ‘little something', a sandwich called a
muffuletta
. This competes with
the ‘po-boy' for the claim to be New Orleans' classic takeaway. The po-boy – originally ‘poor boy' – is a long sandwich made from a French-style baguette, and in New Orleans unlike anywhere else in America, or Britain for that matter despite our supposed love affair with the ‘French stick', they have proper baguettes, with hard crusty exteriors and light airy centres. The ‘po-boy' is
literally
stuffed with food which can be anything from cooked oysters to beef. But the
muffuletta
is something else again: simultaneously delicious and a
challenge
to the human digestive system.

It is made with a Sicilian-style circular flatbread, split down the middle and stuffed – and I mean stuffed – with a salad of marinated olives, celery, capers and peppers, topped with layers of Italian salame, then layers of ham, then layers of mortadella, then layers of cheese. Now you can – and people do – argue for ever about the exact nature of each of these ingredients: does it have to be provolone cheese or can you use emmental, is mozzarella an essential too (as well as the provolone), does it have to be Genoa salame or can you use Napoli, should the ham be air-dried or moist? But I can tell you now: the
absolute
defining thing about a
muffuletta
is its size. This is the most
mouth-challenging
monstrosity ever to have been loosely defined as a sandwich, although perhaps in those terms exactly as the inventor intended: an entire meal in a piece of bread. In fact, two whole meals. Possibly even a dinner party.

I'm still staring with wonder at the thing in my hand, contemplating just the physical difficulty of squashing it enough to fit a corner between my teeth, as I board the bus for an experience that is soon leaving a completely
different
taste in my mouth. We start off by driving through the Garden District which was originally virtually a rival city to the Vieux Carré: this is where the English speakers moved in when the United States took over the territory from Napoleon. The ‘Louisiana Purchase' actually cleared the way for the whole US expansion westwards as far as the Rockies and what only warfare finally defined as the Mexican border, but at the time the only real prize anyone cared about was New Orleans itself, the city that guarded access to the vast
Mississippi
waterway system.

The white American gentry were not keen to mingle with the mixed race, multilingual Creole community so they built their own grand villas in a
separate
little grid system a short walk away. It is a district even today of sedate grandeur with magnificent gardens on display in contrast with the French Quarter where the intimate courtyards are hidden away from the street. There is a rich smell of tropical blooms in the air: azaleas, magnolias and other bright flowers I can't even begin to name. The trees have knobbly gnarled trunks like
something from a fairy-tale jungle. The houses have stained-glass windows. And some of them are still missing bits of roof.

Which is a lot better than the Lower Ninth Ward. This was – and is, to the extent that it is populated at all – the poorest part of New Orleans. The houses here are not just missing bits of roof: some of them have no roofs at all. In fact some of them aren't doing too well for doors and windows either. In more than a few places they aren't even houses any more: just tracts of urban
wasteland
, as if in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. It is as if Katrina happened just yesterday, not a few years ago. The guide fills in the missing details: holes cut in roofs were made to get people who were stuck in their attics out when the floodwater rose above window level: in places here it reached 15 feet. Some had to smash holes in their own roofs from the inside to get out and sit on them to wait for the rescue helicopters.

Graffiti on one wall reads, ‘Fix the Ninth Ward, not Iraq.' More than one of my fellow tourists – all Americans – snaps a photograph of it. It is the first overtly negative comment on the war I have seen. The Iraq War is
unpopular
primarily because of the cost in American soldiers' lives and the waste of billions of dollars. It is hard to imagine what the response would be if, as in Britain, the war was not so much seen as a response to terror at home but a direct cause of it

Still there is no doubt in New Orleans how George W. Bush's legacy will be perceived. From down here, in a quarter built well below sea level, you have to look up at the levees. They have been patched with concrete and reinforced by the US Army Corps of Engineers, but I still wouldn't be happy to move in to a property here. Nor would most of the residents. According to the guide, more than 12,000 were evacuated, most of them permanently. We pass the dowdy offices of a law firm with a sign in the window touting for class action business: ‘Hold the corps to account'.

Even in the more affluent suburb of Gentilly it's a depressingly similar story. Many of these homes were little touched by the hurricane, but they look as if they're in a war zone. When the well-do-do fled in their cars, the looters moved in. But it wasn't the immediate few days of chaos that did the damage but the long and badly managed process of getting the city back to normal. Many of the affluent white population haven't come back and in the meantime their houses have been gutted by the poor left behind. Doors have been smashed in with axes, not to rescue people but to ‘liberate' their belongings. It puts a grim reality behind the black humour on one of the T-shirts down Bourbon street: ‘I stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,
a Cadillac and a plasma TV.' Worse still is the damage to the physical
infrastructure
: the rising price of metals on the global commodity market has made it worthwhile for thieves to rip out the copper wiring from the walls. Given that here too most of the property is wooden rather than European-style stone or brick, the result is houses that look as if they've been literally ripped apart.