Finally, O’Day, or more more likely, Joe Roody, cut some kind of political deal that Luke could barely understand, and wasn’t so sure he wanted to.
“City Hall’s kept you under raps, Martin,” O’Day told him, “but no one can keep Big Joe Roody’s mouth shut, and no one can keep the strike out of the news leads or keep everyone and his cousin from badgering me for interviews with you. So we made a deal. Joe eases up on the pressure, and the superintendent eases up on you. You can do appearances approved by the department as long as you praise Bradford.”
“Praise him for what?” Luke demanded in total befuddlement. “He’s pissed off at me, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but His Dishonor the Mayor wants to run for the Senate two years from now, and he wants a pat on the back from you for resisting the Republican bastards in Baton Rouge who are leaning on him to call in the State Troopers or even the National Guard as strike breakers because the Fat Cats that own their asses are coming down on them to get it done.”
“I guess he deserves it, doesn’t he?”
“Who gives a shit?” O’Day told him. “It’s a good horse trade. Bradford keeps the strike-breakers out of New Orleans and you beatify the cynical bastard who’s going to have to go to the same Fat Cats for campaign funding two years from now and try to convince them that it would have been political suicide to have played their game of ball after he became a hero of the people. Your job in this piece of political theater is to play the devil that made him do it to the Loan Lizards.”
“I don’t get it,” Luke told O’Day, but he was beginning to smell the stink coming off it, something like goose-grease and a fish stand been out in the hot sun way too long.
“Don’t worry about it, Martin, you don’t have to. I’ll give you a script, all you gotta do is stick to it when you go on next Friday.”
“Go on? Go on what?”
Terry O’Day smiled at him with all the warmth of a real yawning alligator. “What I promised you, Martin, remember? I got you on Mama Legba.”
* * *
“I don’t I like this, Harry,” MaryLou had told Mama Legba’s agent.
“What’s not to like, babes?” Harry Klein had told her. “It’s a sweetheart deal, sweetheart.”
“It just doesn’t seem, well, kosher.”
“What’s not kosher about it? O’Day gets his boy some prime regional airtime, and we get some national coverage that I think will give us a chance to take the show national: Discovery, Showtime, HBO, who knows, maybe even a major broadcast network.”
Klein had done good work moving Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe from third-rate local cable channels up to major distribution in New Orleans, most of Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast as far away as Tampa, and even Houston and Galveston, and MaryLou could see where he was coming from and it did make cold show-biz sense.
The Police Department PR people, or this Terry O’Day, had kept Luke Martin off the air ever since his “People’s Police” speech, but he and the so-called New Orleans Police Strike were still lead-story news in the Big Easy and a juicy enough feature nationally so that O’Day’s promise to get Luke his first TV appearance since then some national coverage had credence, and it made sense that Harry had a reasonable chance to use that to market the show nationally.
But there was still something wrong to the whole setup.
Because it was a setup.
“It violates the format, Harry. Everyone in the audience is supposed to have the same chance at being called on.”
“Bullshit, MaryLou! You choose who to point the mike at, and you do it because you think the costumes are gonna make for good TV. Everyone doesn’t have the same chance!”
“We don’t do celebrities.”
“Jesus Christ, girl, Martin isn’t some second-tier talk-show celebrity, he’s front man for a legitimate news story.”
“Whatever. We can’t announce that someone is going to be on the show in advance.”
“For shit’s sake, we can’t not announce it. How the hell else am I supposed to get national coverage? Besides which, O’Day has made it a deal breaker.”
“I’ll have to sleep on it,” MaryLou had told him, meaning discuss it with Erzuli, though of course she couldn’t tell Harry Klein that, who could not and probably should not, be convinced that the show was anything more than a clever format for an actress who was the Second Coming of Rich Little when it came to doing voices.
“Great! You sleep on it, and I’ll spend the night tearing my hair out and chewing my fingernails to the bone.”
I don’t see why not, hon’, had been Erzuli’s take on it. So you give this dude some airtime to say his piece. It’s not like you’re promising that me or anyone one else in the Krewe is gonna come when he calls.
And then there had been a laugh inside her head as silent as Erzuli’s words but somehow a lot louder and more than a little sardonic. And what spoke within her next was clearly a chorus.
But it would make for a good show, now wouldn’t it?
So there they were, backstage in a thousand-seat television studio rented for the occasion to accommodate the additional TV crews, watching the studio audience filing in; MaryLou, Erzuli, and the rest of the Supernatural Krewe lurking behind her in the composite entity that was Mama Legba.
This being the week before the beginning of Mardi Gras, the costumes were more elaborate than usual, more expensive too by the look of the tailoring, the glitter, the peacock feathers, the bling, the elaborate and elaborately bejewelled hairdos, the boobs in fancy bustiers, the abundance of bare and painted skin male and female, more like what you would see throwing beads off a float than the usual hard-luck stories and supplicants.
Making the entrance of Officer Martin Luther Martin in a simple blue police uniform quite dramatic in contrast, and of course all the more so as TV crews not her own pinned him in shoot spotlights as he made his prearranged front-row seat.
“It’s Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe!”
14
Luke had seen this circus act on TV often enough, all too often in fact, since Luella thought it hilarious and Little Bruce thought it was cool, but as far as he was concerned it was about as funny as a loudmouth drunk he had to drag off the streetlight he was hugging and as cool as high noon in a New Orleans August, and he sure never imagined he would find himself part of the show or had ever wanted to.
But here he was, waiting to go on, sitting through preliminary tear-jerking and booty-shaking stories that seemed to be boring the audience and the so-called loas who “Mama Legba” wasn’t bothering to fake as much as they were boring him. Which was probably the point, like a stripper cock-teasing the johns what was supposed to seem like forever before showing her tits and just maybe her pussy.
What that made him, Luke didn’t want to think about.
But now he was about to find out because the spotlight swung his way as Mama Legba finally pointed her microphone at him.
TV show appearance or not, O’Day hadn’t actually given him a script to memorize, he knew better than that, Luke doubted he could even do it if he wanted to, which he didn’t, but if Terry O’Day hadn’t told him how to do it, he had told Luke what he was supposed to get done.
“Don’t worry about this loa crap, Martin, we don’t give a swamp rat’s ass if MaryLou Boudreau decides to favor you with that part of the act or not, that’s her call, not our problem. We just need you to stand up there and praise His Dishonor for keeping the State Trooper strike-breakers out of New Orleans in such a manner as to make it seem like you’re threatening dire retribution if he caves to Baton Rouge and changes his mind. You can handle that, can’t you, Sergeant Alligator Swamp Police?”
* * *
MaryLou did not have a good feeling about this even though Luke Martin was greeted with cheers and waving fists and outright applause by the studio audience. He looked spiffy in his well-tailored and freshly pressed uniform and his well-formed features were suitably heroic, but spiffy and heroic were
not exactly what she was supposed to select for when picking and choosing from the studio audience, let alone a spiffy hero of the People’s Police in a cop costume. And Martin, who had delivered a star performance outside Lafitte’s Landing, looked as if he felt he was about to bomb now.
“I think y’all know why I’m here,” he began, looking around, left, right, at the studio audience, not at her or the camera. “I’m here to speak for my brother officers and the people of New Orleans to thank His Dis … His Honor Mayor Douglas Bradford for his … courage in supporting our refusal to … ah … enforce eviction notices and keeping the … mofos in Baton Rouge from sending in no-good scabbing State Trooper strike-breakers.…”
Shit!
Better give this flannel-mouth dork the quick hook, hon’, Erzuli told her.
As if she had to.
“But what are you asking of Mama Legba and her Supernatural Krewe?” MaryLou broke in.
“What am I asking of Mama Legba and her Supernatural Krewe…?” Martin repeated like a dazed parrot, blinking and frozen like a deer blinded by the klieg lights.
* * *
What am I asking? Luke found himself asking himself. What the fuck am I supposed to say now?
He shrugged to himself, or maybe the camera actually caught it, nothing for it but to stop his brain thinking about it, and let his mouth do the thinking for him.
“What I’m asking from Mama Legba an’ your whatever is what I’m asking of Mayor Bradford and everyone else, natural, supernatural, or otherwise who gives a hoot in hell about what happens to this city! Your police are doin’ their part, your mayor is doin’ his part, and we all are asking you all to do your part, which is whatever you can to save New Orleans and your own asses, natural, supernatural, or otherwise from the Loan Sharks an’ Lizards of Wall Street and their flunkies in Baton Rouge!”
Loud cheers and foot-stomping applause from the live audience, but up on the stage, Mama Legba was sweeping her microphone away from him to point it hastily elsewhere, and then—
—and then she froze.
“What do you offer?”
The voice that emerged from her lips was as male as it gets, deep, powerful, lofty, fit to having Luke’s bones quivering.
“What do I offer…?” he muttered as whatever was doing the talking pointed the microphone back at him like some king with a scepter.
“WHAT … DO … YOU … OFFER?”
Another male voice, this one even louder, harsher, and more than a little scary.
“Hey, honey-buns, relax, doncha get it, we’re willing to deal?” A female voice, soft, seductive, and, well, sexy.
“What do you want?” Luke managed to ask.
Yet another voice, this one male, but with a laughing attitude behind it, like a good-time Charlie. “Music, wine, beer, rum, dancing naked in the streets! Kick out the jams! Slaughter the lambs! Don’t give any damns! Be the great I ams!”
“Say what?” was about all Luke could manage.
“Guede’s talkin’ about Mardi Gras, hon’,” the seductive female voice explained. “He don’t talk so clear ’cause he’s high most of the time. What we want from y’all is Mardi Gras as it’s supposed to be.”
“Which is…?”
“The real deal! No rules! Drink in the streets! Fuck on the balconies! Smoke the herb! Dance with the snakes! Down with the fakes! Come as you like, be what you are, every man a king, every gal a star! We want to party hearty in the flesh, an’ since we ain’t got no bodies, if you don’t, we can’t. So let the good times roll, and get yo uptight tight blue asses outa the way!”
Whatever was going on, whatever or whoevers he was dickering with, Luke was beginning to get it. These loas, or whatever they were, were dickering, and while these were no Swamp Alligator gangbanger honchos, and he sure wasn’t in the catbird seat as the honcho of the Alligator Swamp Police this time around, it seemed to him that he had sung them pretty much the same song.
“Who goes along, gets along, you want the cops not to need you, and expect the same, is that it?”
“Let Mardi Gras be Mardi Gras!” declared the voice called Guede. “Give us happy horses to ride!”
“He means no rules except the famous four golden rules, hon’.”
“Which are?”
“No violence, no robbin’, no rapin’, and y’all don’t bother anyone who ain’t breaking any of the other three, anything else your People’s Police see the People doin’, you just smile and step aside!”
“I think I can go with that,” Luke found himself saying. After all, how different was it from the rules he had laid down to the gangbangers in the Alligator Swamp? “But delivering it is something else again.…”
He laughed to himself even as he said it. “So what do you offer? I’m not the mayor, I’m not the police superintendent, I’m not even a lieutenant. You gotta come up with something they’ll sign off on.”
And there was a voice like mighty waves roaring through the reeds of a marshland, like a whirlwind blowing through the streets, like the soggy battering of a driving rain, like trees falling and electric wires snapping, and walls cracking, and flood waters surging up under the pilings of houses.
“We will hold back the Hurricane Season this year. New Orleans will be spared.”
“You can do that?”
“Well, sort of, hon’. It’s sort of matter which we can’t rule, and it’s sort of power which we can, so we can sort of kick it around a little. What he means is New Orleans will be spared the worst of it, but we’re not perfect, and we’re not talkin’ about Mobile or Galveston and maybe not even Baton Rouge.”
“Do we have a pact?” demanded the voice from the storm.
“Screw Baton Rouge!” Luke found himself saying, and the studio audience, which has been deathly silent during all this, cheered and laughed. “Power to the People from the People’s Police! Let the good times rock and roll!”
15
Mardi Gras had been more or less going slowly south, if y’all pardon the expression, ever since Katrina, some even say ever since they moved the parades off Bourbon Street because the gutters had gotten too jammed by the crowds for the major floats to get through.
But that was before my time as a Bourbon Street saloon keeper, before the advent of the Hurricane Season, which, though it never came close to hitting the Gulf Coast for months after Fat Tuesday, did not exactly give what it left of New Orleans a tourist attraction lift.
What the Bourbon Street Casino Hotel in Vegas did to the Mardi Gras trade, however, was a boot in the butt recent enough to be personal. Everyone living off the Quarter tourist trade could see it coming the moment they announced they were going to build a replica of Bourbon Street inside a mall-world-casino with iron-lace balconies overlooking the nightly parades featuring the current headliners playing in the phony Preservation Hall. Replicas of New Orleans restaurants serving up fast-foody replicas of famous Cajun and Creole dishes. All as family-friendly as a Disney World and no Alligator Swamp surrounding it.
How was the real thing supposed to compete with that? And it got even worse when the Great Deflation beat the Bejesus out of what was left of the American middle class, Mardi Gras was pulling in less and less of the vanishing late winter tourist trade and becoming more and more what it had originally been way back when, a citywide party New Orleans threw for itself.
And while that may have pleased a certain Spanish moss and magnolia self-appointed cultural elite in the Garden District congratulating themselves for not having to make a living off the déclassé tourist trade, it did not sit well with those of us such as yours truly who did, nor the pragmatic economic powers that be, who paid enough dues to the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourist Board to overpower the local Loan Lizards when it came to whose self-interest was going to buy City Hall.
Meaning that while the demands the Loan Sharks were making in Baton Rouge to send in the Troopers or the Guard to break the police strike were enhanced by what the upstate Holy Rollers were cal
ling called the People’s Police’s “Pact With the Devil,” negotiated on television by Luke Martin, in New Orleans it was a Godsend, if you’ll pardon the expression, His Dishonor Mayor Bradford could hardly want to refuse.
Since it was good for the Big Easy’s most important remaining source of dwindling revenue, how could any New Orleans politician not ready for the funny farm in a straitjacket come out against what was the town’s motto, namely “Let the Good Times Roll?”
They couldn’t and it did.
It had been a long, long time, and probably never, since New Orleans had seen a Mardi Gras like this. And as a Bourbon Street saloon keeper with an apartment over the bar with a balcony, I had a front-row seat, though I hardly had the time to sit down in it with a Hurricane or Mint Julep to toss throws of beads and plastic doubloons to the permanent crowds of revelers below.
Still, no way the big floats of the major krewes like Baccus, and Rex, and Endymion, and Zulu, could be dragged down Bourbon Street with the second-rate celebrities tossing throws and doubloons to the frenzied masses, so the main parades were still only along wide avenues like St. Charles, Canal, Decatur, Rampart, and Esplanade.
I never had a moment to see any of them live, but on the replays after Fat Tuesday, I saw that, amazingly enough, they were pretty much what was happening on Bourbon Street writ large and high-budget, and Bourbon Street was for sure something else, something that neither New Orleans or anywhere else had seen ever before, and I was right in the middle of it.
As usual, every saloon, strip joint, porn palace, and restaurant on both sides of the street that had frontage room had a band out there, and as usual the competition from all of them, instead of turning it into an ear-killing noise, somehow managed to turn into the familiar boogying beat of New Orleans Mardi Gras. As usual, there were plenty of street acts in fantasy ball costumes inching and dancing their way through the solid wall of tourists and locals jamming the street. As usual, every bar was permanently filled, every seat had a drunk in it still buying booze, Lafitte’s Landing well included. As usual, people who had rented chairs or standing room on the balconies were tossing throws to the crowds below, which were in the usual frenzy to snag them before someone else did.
The People's Police Page 10
