The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  “As you may have noticed, I’m not winning this election,” he said. “The polls say I’m running fifteen to twenty points behind Brown, and even in an ordinary election for governor, whatever that may mean in this state, any Democratic candidate starts in a hole even though no Republican could be elected nutria catcher down here if he were Jesus H. Christ on a Harley because upstate outvotes New Orleans and downstate and redneck land is solidly Republican, ordinarily sixty-five to thirty-five or something like that. You following me, Sergeant Martin? Luke, if I may?”

  Luke nodded, rather than saying “Gotcha, Elvis,” though he required a certain amount of applied self-discipline himself as his initial awe in the presence of such a political celebrity began to fade. This guy, after all, had opened by admitting that he was asking him for help and now had admitted that he was in deep shit.

  “So right now my chances for being elected governor are slim and none,” Montrose admitted to Luke’s astonishment. “Thanks in significant part to you, Sergeant Martin.”

  Uh-oh! “What did I do?”

  “Oh nothing much, Sergeant Martin,” Superintendent Mulligan broke in without even a sour look from Montrose. “All you did was make a deal with the Devil to protect New Orleans from the Hurricane Season in return for turning Mardi Gras into Sodom and Gomorrah on behalf of the New Orleans Police Department on your own without any authority. If the Department were the Army, you’d be in the stockade, Officer Martin.”

  “Come off it, Dick, you can’t demote him,” said Big Joe Roody.

  “Oh, can’t I?”

  “Well, I suppose you can, Dick, if you don’t mind having a little total strike on your hands until you reinstate him and promote him to lieutenant.”

  Mulligan shot a poisonous look at Mayor Bradford.

  “For once, I’m with Joe.”

  Montrose took over smoothly. “The point is, Luke, that my chances were slim before, and now, thanks to you, they are none.”

  Luke was beginning to get the idea, or perhaps the certainty, that his whole thing was some kind of put-up job. “Then why did you run in the first place?” he ventured to ask.

  “Would you believe because I believe that this whole Great Deflation is a scam by the vultures of Wall Street and the hedge funds and the investment banks and the rest of the virtual economy that owns this great nation of ours in the form of trillions of dollars in uncollectable debt to convert it into owning the real wealth of our state and our country, farmland, mines, commercial real estate, housing, and factories?”

  “Well, seeing as I believe it too, and seeing as everyone in Louisiana has heard you say it a thousand times, I guess I can believe that you believe it, but…”

  “But you find it hard to believe that any politician in Louisiana would run for office in an election he figured to lose without any ulterior motive just because of something he believed in?”

  “You said it, not me, Mr. Montrose.”

  Montrose broke in a twisted kind of grin, the first expression that Luke had seen on his face that seemed entirely sincere.

  “Well, you’re right, Luke,” he said. “I’ve dipped my wick into my fair share of the honey-pots—who hasn’t?—but I’m not independently wealthy, I’m a professional politician; holding office is my job and I can’t afford to join the army of the unemployed, I need the salary and the perks, and my ambition is to climb up the ladder. If I managed to get elected governor of Louisiana, I win. But if I don’t, I’ve got a good plan B.”

  “Plan B?”

  “I’m not going to run for reelection, there’s going to be an open United States Senate seat two years from now, and I’m going to run for it,” Mayor Bradford said. “So if Elvis loses this election, he’ll run for mayor of New Orleans and be a lock to win.”

  “So you see Luke, I really am free to run for governor on principle, I can try to do what I believe is right just because I believe it’s right because my ass is well covered. And you believe what I believe, now don’t you? And you and everyone else in this state knows that if Harlan Brown is elected governor, he’ll send in the National Guard to foreclose on everything legally forcloseable, including your own house, because he’s sworn on a mile high stack of Bibles to do it. And no one in this room wants that to happen, now do we?”

  “So what do you want from me, to endorse you?” Luke asked. “I guess I can do that if you want.” This guy was beginning to look a little better to him, certainly at the very least more than good enough to at least vote for, considering the alternative.

  “No way,” said Terry O’Day. “He’s already got a lock on the vote down here because a vote for Brown is a vote for sending in the Guard, and if you say anything good about him at all, it’ll make things even worse than they already are. You don’t even mention the name of Elvis Gleason Montrose.”

  “I don’t get it.…”

  “You attack Harlan Brown and the Republicans on the narrow issue that you own—”

  “Making a deal with the Devil to save New Orleans from the Hurricane Season?”

  “Shit no!” said O’Day. “You own that issue in New Orleans, but upstate it owns you.”

  “Upstate, the Republicans are running to send the National Guard down here to take control of Sin City away from your People’s Police in the name of Jesus, law and order, and motherhood,” Montrose told Luke. “It’s a smoke screen to keep from reminding those folk that voting for Brown would be voting to use the Guard or the State Police to foreclose on them too when push comes to shove. I keep saying that, but it’s not getting through.”

  “And I can? But they hate my guts up there, don’t they?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Luke, because your real upstate audience is going to be the small-town cops and sheriffs and whatever,” Big Joe told him. “There’s already a growing movement up there by various jurisdictions of our unorganized brothers not to foreclose on brother cops or even anyone else. Turn them into little bitty People’s Police forces too. You just keep hitting that over the head with a mallet. Divide and conquer.”

  “And you use it to organize police statewide,” Superintendent Mulligan said sourly.

  Big Joe Roody laughed. “Why, that’s a great idea, why didn’t I think of it myself?” he said sarcastically. “Thanks a whole bundle, Dick.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Luke said sharply. Now that he knew what they wanted for him, it was time to dicker. After all, could cutting a deal with Louisiana politicians be more presumptuous than cutting one with Mama Legba’s Supernatural Krewe?

  “Whatever happens, you’re guaranteed your promotion to lieutenant, isn’t that right, Doug?”

  The mayor nodded his approval. The police superintendent pursed his lips as if he were biting into a turd.

  “If he welshes, there’ll be a strike that will cost him the Democratic nomination for senator, I can promise you that,” said Big Joe Roody.

  “And if by some chance I should win, it’ll be captain immediately,” promised Montrose. “If I lose, it’ll take two years longer until I’m mayor. Have we got a deal?”

  Luke knew damn well that it was golden. Luella would fry his ass with eggs for breakfast if he didn’t take it. He was going to take it. But there was a certain power in that, or anyway enough for a decent bluff from which he could back down if he had to. He was beginning to get the hang of this politics game. And he too had a right and maybe a responsibility to push back a little for what he believed in.

  “I want two more things,” he said. “I want the Mardi Gras police rules to be made permanent in New Orleans. If you’re not killing, robbing, raping, or stealing, if nobody else is hurt by what you’re doing personally, you don’t get arrested.”

  “No way!” shouted the police superintendent.

  “Shut up, Dick!” the mayor and Big Joe said simultaneously.

  “I have no problem with that,” said Elvis Gleason Montrose.

  “And I want to be able to encourage all those upstate cops to do likewise.” />
  “Icing on the cake,” said Elvis Gleason Montrose.

  “Hey, Lafitte!” Big Joe Roody roared. “Time to come down and bring out that champagne we ordered!”

  18

  Well, there was good news and bad news at the September meeting of the French Quarter Pissing and Moaning Society, but then there always was, given that the society was a bunch of owners of saloons, strip joints, restaurants, sex shows, porn parlors and the like, a dozen or so of us usually, whose meetings were held in the establishment of one of us, generally Sunday brunch when it could be closed for a few hours, and generally consisting of the aforementioned well-lubricated pissing and moaning.

  This month it was my turn to hold it in Lafitte’s Landing and pony up the champagne, Mimosas, Sazeracs, Mint Juleps, and straight shots, but since I got to drink my share of freebies when it wasn’t, I was feeling no pain.

  Well, sort of. The good news was that the Hurricane Season was coming to an end and we all had been spared any real damage. The bad news was that business was deep in the usual early post–Hurricane Season slump.

  The good news was that Elvis Montrose was rising in the polls against Harlan Brown. They were only 5 or so percent apart, within what is laughingly called the margin for error in a state where error is normal and margin for it is a joke, and Montrose had what the sportscasters call the “Big M,” so the chances of Brown not being elected and sending in the National Guard to kick half of us out into the street were getting to be a little better.

  This was being achieved by the deal that had Luke Martin fomenting local copycat refusals by upstate police forces to evict anyone from anything, and hammering Brown for the promise he had rope-a-doped himself into to send the Guard into New Orleans to do the foreclosure dirty work, and pointing out that if Brown got elected, no way he would not use the Guard upstate in the same deeply unpopular manner too, while ol’ Elvis swore quite convincingly that he would never ever do such a dastardly deed in the service of the bastards bankrolling Brown.

  So Montrose had succeeded in using Martin to shift the main issue with the upstate voters away from New Orleans making a deal with Satan to save Sin City from the Hurricane Season, where Brown was the champion of Jesus, Virtue, and Law and Order with a Broomstick Up Its Ass and he was the protector of Evil Big Easy Sleaze to whether or not the Guard would be used to enforce foreclosures upstate too, on which he was their champion and Brown the villain.

  But as his end of the deal, Martin got to champion the weird suggestion to Holy Roller Land cops that they also emulate the so-called People’s Police and turn their jurisdictions into what the double-dome citizens’ rights shysters called “victimless crime free zones” and we all just called letting the good times roll, and this went over north of Baton Rouge like a fuck film festival in Oral Roberts University.

  Anyone who had spent any time upstate at all had to know this would happen, let alone a professional politician like Elvis Gleason Montrose, who had cynically used Martin to gain just these results. Good news for him maybe, but at the expense of bad news for the tourist trade, and therefore for the unofficial members of the unofficial French Quarter Pissing and Moaning Society.

  The tourist trade had been given a mighty boost by Mama Legba’s Mad Mardi Gras, getting New Orleans enticing national publicity as America’s most sinful city fit to turn Vegas green with envy, and which everyone here dependent on the tourist economy hoped would carry over through the Hurricane Season and into a profitable fall and winter between then and the next Mardi Gras.

  It was bad news for us, meaning bad news for the economy of the whole city, because that wasn’t happening. Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe was sliding in the national ratings because the Voodoo Queen of the Mad Mardi Gras versus the Bible Belt Holy Rollers was no longer the hot topic out of Louisiana, the so-called police strikes and the election that would decide whether or not the National Guard would be used to break them was, as Montrose had intended.

  Street-smart New Orleans homeboy, good old Elvis, knew just what you needed to be to survive, let alone succeed, as governor of the great state of Louisiana, those lacking the required cynicism better not apply.

  You seriously ask how I know the details of this deal? You are really so naïve as to believe that there is a whorehouse in the Garden District not thoroughly wired for video and sound? Let us not insult each other, okay? I will not insult your intelligence, and you do not think of such a thing as “gathering blackmail material.”

  This time around the biggest pisser and moaner was Charlie Devereau, which was unusual since Charlie was the biggest success story among us and therefore usually had the least to piss and moan about.

  Charlie had started out with a single saloon in the Quarter, added a strip joint, another saloon, a restaurant, a third bar, a jazz disco, and so forth, working his way up to where he was today, part owner of several Central Business District hotels, full owner of a casino, and who knew what else. So successful that he was the only one of us who was actually a dues-paying member of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce and even admitted to having voted Republican upon occasion.

  But we didn’t hold that against him, because good ol’ Charlie didn’t attend these brunches for the free drinks or to lord it over us, but because he had a nostalgic fondness and even respect for his French Quarter roots and had never sold any of his various properties down here.

  After a number of us had complained about how the tourist trade was just not rebounding with the end of the Hurricane Season here in the Quarter, it was Charlie’s turn to piss and moan.

  “It looks like the fall season is going to be even worse than it’s looking to y’all now, thanks to the damn election. Hotel bookings are way down instead of rising as they should after the Hurricane Season. The family tourist trade is afraid to come down because the so-called police strike is being hyped by the Republicans and the out-of-state media as turning New Orleans into Satan’s playpen with the cops supposedly not even keeping the Swamp Alligators out of the Quarter, and Brown screaming that if Montrose wins it’s gonna stay that way. But the good-time, uh, Charlies aren’t booking ahead because if Brown wins, the Big Easy ain’t gonna be so easy ’cause it’ll be occupied by the National Guard and maybe even under martial law.”

  Charlie paused to finish his Mimosa and fill his empty glass directly from the bourbon bottle, and I switched over to hard liquor myself upon hearing this really bad news from our only big-time Central Business District connection, and I sure wasn’t the only one.

  “You should hear what’s going on in the Chamber of Commerce!” Charlie went on after chug-a-lugging a big slug. “Everybody’s hurting right now, and those of us looking at advance bookings would short New Orleans tourist trade futures on Wall Street if there was a way to do it, or bet against it in Vegas if we knew how.”

  “So what do your Fat Cats plan to do about it?” someone demanded, speaking for all of us.

  “Are you kidding? All they see to do about it is what they’re doing right now, namely when in trouble, when in doubt, scream and shout, wave your arms, and run about like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  “They all askin’ you to to pick our brains?”

  “They’d listen to Earl Long in his straitjacket in the bug house if he wasn’t dead like Huey if they thought he’d come up with something, and some of the very Fat Cats he wanted to squeeze and spread the results out thin are probably even praying to the Kingfish’s ghost to tell them what to do.”

  Charlie downed the rest of his bourbon.

  “So anyone here got a bright idea?”

  The only sound was that of glasses being drained, refilled, drained again, the glasses being the only thing not coming up empty.

  Charlie poured himself more bourbon, only half a glass this time, and he only took a sip. “Well, I do have wild and crazy idea, and since no one else has any idea at all, I think I am now drunk enough to say it. Let’s get Mama Legba to run for governor.”

&n
bsp; “WHAT?”

  “She can’t win, but who cares? She won’t even get enough votes to affect the election.”

  More dead silence. But I thought that maybe I was beginning to get Charlie’s drift.

  “It’s about publicity, guys,” Charlie said. “New Orleans was good big news all over the country because of the Mad Mardi Gras, but now the big news out of the Big Easy and the Great State of Louisiana is the election, and the only reasons it’s a big ongoing national story is the police strike and the threat of martial law, which are not exactly talking points for the tourist board. So how do we fight that?”

  “With a better story!” someone shouted.

  “Which is?”

  Bingo! I got it. Or I thought I did. After all, you’d need to do more than take off your shoes so you could use your fingers and toes to count how many local TV personalities in the US of A had used their shows to run for office, so why couldn’t one use running for office to pump nitrous oxide into her deflating national ratings? Especially when she and everyone else knew and admitted that that was exactly what she was doing.

  “An election with the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans running for governor! A Voodoo Queen with a national TV audience! Now there’s a story that the blabbarazzi will pick up and run with like hogs after swill!”

  “You got it, J. B.,” said Charlie. “She’ll draw free national and international press coverage like horseshit draws flies, fun coverage, with Brown and Montrose both getting whatever attention they can manage as spear-carriers, and have the tourists forgetting about police strikes and threats of martial law and all that political crap and have ’em flockin’ back to the Voodoo Capital of the World like ants to a puddle of blackstrap molasses.”

  “Can we really do that?”

  “Can we not?”

  “Is it legal?”

  “Would the show get kicked off the air if she ran?”

  “Plenty of comedians have run for office like this!”

  “You mean the real ones who didn’t mean it seriously or the ones got elected?”