Quarter rat remembers New Orleans, the city care forgot

Once I lived in the French Quarter. I had rooms by Chartres and Ursuline. Throughout the day, like lazy clockwork, the horse drawn carriage drivers came by, each time intoning to the tourists, how "Over thea' is the Ursuline Convent. The first one burnt down, 'cause the nuns were sworn to silence and wouldn't speak when fire first broke out." (photo credit: www.inetours.com/New_Orleans/
images/FQ/history/Ursuline/Chartres_Ursuline.jpg)

I must have heard that ten thousand times that year, sitting in the courtyard in front of my two low-ceilinged rooms, once slave quarters. Now, I must speak about the lesson New Orleans taught me then, and showed me now. I apologize for interjecting myself into the conversation. But, as I am not a nun, I really just can't sit silent while the convent goes up.

I have sat patiently and watched TV and surfed the 'Net in silence while my fellow girlie-men journalists sitting ringside talk about what the guys fighting are doing right and wrong.

Likewise, I have watched my fellow draft-dodgers run the battle in both military and emergency operations, foreign and domestic, with elan, gusto and repeated strategic and tactical failures, now with evacuation efforts for Katrina, and still with Iraq (try a ride to B-dad airport).

I've also watched a typical old, familiar French Quarter carousing type, on the wagon now, still get pushy, proud, and foolish, ("I can drive, dammint") just like I would see him back when I was a Quarter rat, living off tourists.

I see a different image when I see flooded New Orleans, the city that care forgot! One I will try to remember, but that I will most likely forget, again, in time.

I will try to remember seeing that people, and citizens of a democracy, pretty much on their own, mostly got out, no thanks to all the "in-chiefs" and tourists who come to mock our corruption and incompetence. We are all dry now, barely, and there's a bar in the Quarter, which never closed, still open to ride out the latest situation.

This situation of confusion and disaster is not entirely unfamiliar to most Quarter regulars: waiters, writers, drinkers, painters, strippers, tap dancers and general loons, like Ruthy the duck lady, way back then. She trained her brood of pet ducklings, Konrad Lorenz-style, to follow her down the sidewalk in a row.

I also try to remember Ruthy's point, at least to me. That imprinting haunts our species, too, just like we were ducks, though rarely so charmingly. Hence, "Child is father to the man." Most of us ended up in the Quarter because we kept doing things the same, imprinted, way, hoping for a different outcome. This is also a definition of madness.

This point would be easily driven home in any bad Quarter bar by midnight. Then the imprinting takes serious hold mid-bender, leading to frequent fights. And from fights, things might progress quickly to a state of everything going wrong.

Yet there is hope, to conclude with that corny journalism hack. Now, though news of the cost of destruction worsens (surprised at the big bar tab?), reports of each regrettable death, rape and battery seem to show that the total numbers may turn out remarkably low for such a governmental free-fall, considering the hysterical outbursts of those in charge, top to bottom, and the emotion-frenzied coverage of reporters cut off from their google and hip deep in actual shit.

Welcome to New Orleans. We put on a nice Mardi Gras every year, somehow, doin' it our way, don't we? Damn' tourists have such a great plan, let 'em go home and straighten it out back where they come from.

That's what I hope to remember when I look at how it is now in the Big Easy.

It was really Big, and people down there, the regular people, actually made it look pretty Easy. Right, it flooded the whole place. But that's property, and protecting it is the government's damn business, for which we pay our taxes. The people took care of the people, down there, in the end. Not perfect, but not as horrid as possible, either. Down there people are real democrats, which means in the end it's about people, if it gets down to a choice.

And pretty much everyone got through it somehow. Of course, the rich easier than the poor. No kiddin.' What fool livin' in New Oyunz wouldn't have already figured that out?

But also, we all live below sea level in New Orleans, so no matter how much we hate each other, what the class and race differences, we all party together and know we can all drown together, too. Always have. And we all know that in a flood, you mostly help each other out. Families been living next to each other for five generations.

And survived despite the corruption, incompetence and weakness under pressure shown by the big shots all around. Fools forced to see themselves hung-over next morning, reflected in dark, dirty windows of the bars they're just leaving. Their shock of humiliation is enough, almost, to bring a rueful smile to the face of any mid-drunk Quarter rat.

And I hope to remember it all with a bit of pride. In New Orleans, people, no matter what, just helped each other out. Even while calling each other fools, or worse. Any self-respecting looter will still grab a few bottles of water for the old lady nearby, back to her house after a hellish night in the convention center. After all, what person, even a thief around here, wouldn't do that?

I finally hope to remember that most survived by being self-reliant and through the kindness of strangers. A line from a New Orleans writer.

The rest of this country, so proud of what it would do, and will do, I am sure, would still do well to try to remember the vision of citizens struggling to survive together, without any visible government help.

You got a week of drinking water, as they say in New Orleans, 'where y'at?'