The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  To

  THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF THE BIG EASY

  Past, Present, and Future

  Never let your song sing surrender

  Acknowledgments

  Who dat’?

  The marching band of our Secondary Parade

  Ben Abrass on camera

  Simon Thoral on mike

  Wilton Hymes on the road

  And the ever-popular Dona Sadock on tambourine and rhythm

  1

  Some folks are still bitching that the Eternal Mardi Gras is a Disney version, what with the traditional Krewes’ parading limited to the traditional lead-up to Fat Tuesday while the big budget corporate floats from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Pornywood parade all year, all long, all over New Orleans, which is sort of true, given that it was Disney I brought in first.

  But whining that the Mouse has gone and done to the French Quarter what it did to Times Square, and oozed out into the rest of New Orleans like the annual dose of mud during the Hurricane Season, and calling yours truly, Jean-Baptiste Lafitte, a swamp rat traitor to the true soul of the city is going a tad too far, seeing as how the Quarter had fallen far off its fabled glory days even before Katrina.

  You expect me to apologize for saving the city from drowning to death?

  Oh yes, I did!

  Everyone knows New Orleans had been on its economic ass for decades, barely able to pay the cops to keep the Swamp Alligators down in their lowlands swamps and out of the New Orleans Proper high grounds.

  And the Hurricane Season wasn’t going away, now was it, and what the Dutch were demanding in order to save what was left of the Big Easy from finally going under would’ve been about the total budget of the city government for the next decade or two. No high-priced, high-tech Hans Brinker seawalls and solar windmill pumping stations back then, need I remind you?

  I guess I do.

  Amazing what short memories ingrates have.

  New Orleans featured itself as the Big Easy since before Mickey Mouse was even a gleam in Uncle Walt’s evil eye, but just because the truth wouldn’t look so good in the tourist guides doesn’t mean we don’t all know that it’s always really been the Big Sleazy, now does it?

  This city was making its living as a haven for pirates and slavers and the riverboat gamblers, saloon keepers and whorehouse impresarios like yours more or less truly, rollers high, low, and medium, who serviced their trade since before the Louisiana Purchase.

  The Big Easy was born as the Big Sleazy. Easy?

  Yeah, sure.

  Born between a bend in the mighty and mighty ornery Mississip and a briny marsh presumed to call itself Lake Pontchartrain serving as an overflowing catch-basin for tidal surges when the major hurricanes hit and a giant mud puddle in-between.

  Easy?

  First built precariously on the natural levees of the Mississippi, expanding greedily and stupidly into the back swamps. Tossed around like a beachball between the French and the Spanish. Finally sold to the Americans by Napoleon on the cheap because he knows he’s gonna lose it to the British anyway if he doesn’t. Flooded every few decades even before Katrina, before there even was an annual Hurricane Season, squeezing what remained onto what high ground was left to it after the sea level rose. The population cut almost in half, forced to live off the tourist and entertainment trade alone when the Gulf oil dried up, just about surrounded by the Alligator Swamp and what crawled up out of it if its back was turned.

  You call that Easy?

  Those who adapt survive, like the Cajuns from icy Quebec said when they found themselves in the steamin’ bayous of the Delta, like the Alligator Swamp nutria hunters turning a plague into protein. Those who don’t ain’t been heard from lately. So making legal what the Big Easy always was to pull our terminal condition from the mud is not “selling out the soul of the city” or “whoring ourselves to the mavens of show business.”

  Because the Big Easy has always been a whore, a charming, sleazy, free-wheeling, good-natured hooker with a heart of gold and an eye for the main chance, which is what makes her easy, and bein’ easy is the name of the game in this business, which has always been the main game in town. And let an old bordello impresario tell you, who would ever hire a hooker who wasn’t all of the above, and good-lookin’ too?

  In case you’re forgetting, the Big Easy wasn’t exactly looking as appetizing as a platter of Oysters Bienville back in the day before Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe. She’s all spiffed up and lit up and giving herself the star treatment now, to the point where ingrates and ignoramuses and Creole romantics looking back over their shoulders can afford to complain about how New Orleans is peddling her previously jazzy derrière to less than the genteel bohemian trade of their absinthe fantasies.

  Whoever wrote that song about there being no business like show business sure got it wrong. As things stand now, there’s no business but show business and we all are in it. Not that we haven’t always been. The only difference now is that it’s making the good times roll again after all those years in the deep dark shit, and that’s good enough for me, and if it’s not good enough for you, this ain’t your town, you’d best leave and go somewhere more to your tight-assholed liking.

  But y’all come back on vacation from the salt mines, y’hear! Whatever your pleasure, we got it, and if we don’t, don’t worry, no matter how pervo it may seem to your sweaty vestigial morality, we’ll get it for you. Here in the Eternal Mardi Gras of the Big Easy, we make no such judgments, we’re impossible to scandalize, de gustibus non est disputandum.

  What pays here, stays here, and never fear, we do still want your money.

  2

  Patrolman Luke Martin had “enforced” more final eviction warrants than he could count or cared to, and while it didn’t exactly make you feel like a hero kickin’ folks out of their houses and into the street, it was far from the worst duty, sure better than dealing with pickpockets and muggers from the Alligator Swamp trying to work the Quarter or gangbanger patrol duty guarding the swamp itself.

  There had been a few minor firefights when this dirty work got dumped on the New Orleans Police Department, but these days you did it with a partner, and the two of you were issued military body armor and M35s hung with enough scopes and grenade launchers and fancy doodads to scare the shit out of the civilians in question to the point where no cop he had ever heard of had ever needed to fire one of the things even when the former homeowner was armed with a sawed-off shotgun or a rusty M16. Sweet duty in a way, ’long as you didn’t think too hard about it.

  But—

  “Is this some kind of fuckin’ joke?” were the first words out of his mouth when
he read the address and the name on the latest final eviction warrant handed to him.

  “You find something fuckin’ funny about one more poor sucker’s eviction notice?” snarled Sergeant Larrabee, aka Sergeant Slaughter, aka the Mouth That Roars. “You’re not some kind of sicko Bourbon Street comedian, Martin, you’re a cop, remember, or anyway you’re dressed like one and this ain’t Mardi Gras, so keep your black sense of humor to yourself, just take Moreau with you, hold your nose, and go enforce it.”

  There it was, the full legal form of his name on the final eviction notice, the exact same form on the mortgage contract he had so proudly and hopefully and stupidly signed less than two years before the onset of the Great Deflation, aka the Steroid Dollar, aka the Superbuck, aka Up Shit Creek.

  “Don’t you read these fuckin’ things before you hand them out?”

  “Read them? You out of what passes for your mind, Martin? Don’t you know how many of them come down across my desk every fuckin’ day? Of course you do, Martin, you must’ve enforced at least a hundred of ’em by now yourself.”

  “This is my house,” said Martin Luther Martin.

  “Say what?” grunted Sergeant Larrabee, snatching the poison paper out of Luke’s hands. “Jesus H. Christ on an airboat!” he sort of moaned when he took a good look, in a tone of voice that made him sound almost human. “Martin Luther Martin!”

  Almost. For a moment.

  “Martin … Luther … Martin? Now where did an ol’ gator like you get such a highfalutin handle? Yo daddy had himself a reefer dream?”

  What Daddy had as far as Luke could remember was a bad smart-ass attitude. Martin Luther Martin had always loathed the official name inflicted on him at birth, and hearing it out of Larrabee’s flannel mouth, let alone seeing it on this piece-of-shit paper sure didn’t make him like it any better.

  He was calling himself Luther about the time he learned to talk, transmuting it into Luke as his gangbanger tag in the Vu Du Daddies, cool hand that he styled himself after seeing the Paul Newman movie on an ancient TV they had snatched, no Mohammed This or Barack That bullshit for him, no Rat Man or Baron Saturday or other such Vu Du mumbo jumbo either.

  So Luke Martin was a self-made man from the git-go, who had a choice, Papa doin’ long hard time in Angola for general bad-ass thuggery by the time he hit the first grade in what passed for school, Mama makin’ her junkie ends meet by selling the shit and her pootie at street level, that is, to the extent that you could call anything a street in the Alligator Swamp.

  Mudville, Stilt City, the Alligator Swamp, whatever.

  Mudville because the so-called streets were unpaved pathways of mucky mud when they weren’t underwater. Stilt City because anything that wasn’t built up on a platform tall enough to keep it above the incoming surges during the Hurricane Season wasn’t going to be there for very long.

  The Swamp because it was what had been called the “back swamp” way back in the day before the young city called New Orleans started slithering down off the natural levees of the Mississippi and the Esplanade and Gentilly Ridge and suchlike into the sea-level lowlands and worse. And the poorest of the poor had been living there even then, squeezed between the levees and ridges and the real bayou swampland between the spreading city and the Gulf of Mexico, more or less, and sometimes much less, absorbing the tidal surges and keeping it from being flooded with salt water.

  These days, what with the rising sea level, and the various canals stupidly dug down through the decades to connect the old natural harbor to Lake Ponchartrain and to the Gulf, the far back-swamp bayou land was now under salt water, and the more or less habitable front of the back swamp that wasn’t, except during the Hurricane Season when it too was more or less under water, had moved inland all around what high ground remained.

  So no one tried to build anything that wasn’t stilted and platformed above the record high-water mark or if they were stupid enough to try it, got drowned out within a year, and during the Season, New Orleans Proper—as the proper folks living there had taken to calling it—was more or less surrounded by a cross between a Third World version of a country-mouse Venice and the long-gone true bayou country of zydeco-mourned forlorn Cajun lore.

  Mostly wooden stilt-huts on mostly wooden platforms mostly clustered together in mostly self-contained villages like something carved out of clearings in the Amazon rain forest or on the low-lying shores of the Mekong Delta. One-room grade-school buildings in the bigger ones that the law still more or less required the city to provide. Outdoor markets selling swamp-grown vegetables, swamp-hunted nutria meat, swamp-caught fish, crab, shellfish, and crawdads. Liquor stores, clothing huts, and general stores selling most everything else, mostly tools, fishing gear, guns, ammunition, and more of them than not serving as fences for stolen goods.

  During the relatively dry seasons, it was foot traffic on the muddy village streets, and not much better from village to village, and during the wetter days, which were about half the year, it was patched-up rubber zodiacs, homemade lightweight and shallow draft canoes and kayaks, and half-assed rafts pretending to be gondolas.

  As America thought of itself, as New Orleans Proper thought of it, the Alligator Swamp might be a shameful rural slum that belonged somewhere in the deep Third World Boonies, but as a Third World Boonie, it was better than most.

  Enough growing months when it wasn’t Hurricane Season and enough rich-soiled farmland to grow just about any vegetable, if nothing that grew on a tree or grew like a grain. Back away into the new bayou back swamps, there was abundant saltwater seafood fishing and trapping. The uncounted hundreds of thousands or even millions of nutria—amphibious rodents the size of beavers that banged like bunnies and reproduced like rats—that had once been a despised plague destroying the freshwater swamp vegetation had been driven closer in by the salting of their previous turf, right under the village huts during the Hurricane Season, and were now an abundant supply of easily hunted meat. Easy small-plot farming. Easy fishing and lazy-man’s hunting.

  A subsistence-level lifestyle, maybe, but a good one, almost a paradise if you were into it.

  The Alligator Swamp not because the real reptilian deal had indeed managed to make its way up from the bayous but because it was a shithole if you weren’t a teenage human alligator hungrily clacking your teeth at what you knew all too well was up there that you couldn’t have in New Orleans Proper, as the mofos there called it.

  The French Quarter, with its saloons, and bars, and music halls, and high life, the Business District and Magazine with their supposedly easy pickin’s, and the burglar’s dream Garden District hovering there on the high ground like the literal City on the Hill, had much more appeal to the boys in the hood than a lifetime of dirt-farming in the mud or hunting swamp rats or fishing for your food.

  But knowing full well that their chances of honest gainful employ in New Orleans Proper were slim and none, the boys trying to become men, and the men who didn’t know how to stop being boys and really didn’t want to, became the top predators of this ecological niche, sharp-toothed and lizard-hearted young Alligators who would bring down their own fathers if they could find them and devour their own mothers if the bitches ever accumulated anything worth stealing.

  For a teenage Alligator, the down-and-dirty economic base of the Swamp was low-level drug dealing and pocket-picking and drunk-rolling and such in the Quarter or the Magazine District one step ahead of the police if you had the brass balls to try it, but mainly joining one of the gangs preying on the softer targets in your own hood.

  So young Luke took the path of least resistance, not that the resistance was insignificant, not that there was any other path to take, and managed to gain admission to a scruffy and scurvy low-level gang called itself the Vu Du Daddies, though what they knew or cared about voodoo would fill about five of their remaining brain cells, and as far as they were concerned what they might father by gangbanging some skank was none of their business.

  What was the
ir business was what more powerful Alligator gangs allowed to be their business, which wasn’t very much. Muggings. Burglaries, but not of the more lucrative liquor stores, which were reserved for the dominant gangs—more like bottom-of-the-food-chain dealing.

  Of course, you could always get a job and leave. That’s what they told you in school if and when you bothered to show up.

  Hah, hah, hah.

  There weren’t really enough “proper” jobs in “proper” New Orleans to keep much more than half of its “proper” populace above the official poverty line and their heads, uh, above water, so no one up there with a job on offer was about to lay it on something that slithered up out of the Swamp.

  But one not so fine day not that long after the Hurricane Season, Luke emerged from the family hut toward sundown to join the Vu Du Daddies for a night of nothing in particular and had a vision that changed his life.

  The streets were in the slow oozy process of emerging from the floodwaters, the worst time of the year for getting around, with the so-called village streets no longer flooded but up over your ankles in mud, and what was left of the waterways so shallow that proceeding by canoe or raft was like mud puppies flipflopping their way from puddle to puddle.

  Nevertheless, or maybe because their meth-sotted brains saw this as some kind of advantage, a half dozen members of the Fuck Yo Mothers had boosted some out-of-date TVs and computers from somewhere and were fleeing with the loot in two wormy old bayou pirogues fitted with rusty electric outboards, here and there having to dismount, hold tight to the gunwales, and, cursing and bitching, push their overladen boats off a not-yet emergent mud bank.

  The Fuck Yo Mothers were as high up the food chain as it got in the Swamp, which only made this sorry spectacle even more pathetic, and Luke might even have laughed at these addled buffoons were it not worth your life to be caught doing so.