After the Loving

Sarah K. Inman

“It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.” How many times have you said this when describing New Orleans?  Usually the comment doesn’t bother us, but now, in the angry, dirty aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we think more defensively about our city, about what you really mean when you say you wouldn’t want to live here.  At first we may mistake and think the appropriate verb is “couldn’t,” as in “I couldn’t live here,” and yes, well, that makes some sense, considering the summers, which can be brutally hot and long. It’s a difficult adjustment, even with air conditioner. But that one comment, “It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here,” is loaded with a subtext of moral superiority.

To you who don’t live in New Orleans it’s a city full of good-time people, people who don’t care about tomorrow, people who live low, live below sea level.  You cannot believe we exist as we do.  We eat fried chicken and gumbo and po’boys loaded with dressing. We wash it down with a healthy dose of cold beer.  No sticky sweet Hurricanes for us, thank you.  We slather our biscuits with gravy and sop up bourbon sauce on bread pudding. We stay up until five in the morning dancing to brass bands.  We rest our dead above ground and party when they pass.

And when you come here, you treat New Orleans like a whore. You conventioneers form packs of fun seekers and stray from the meetings.  You find yourselves on Bourbon Street, doing things you normally wouldn’t back home, like drinking beyond your limit, singing karaoke, hitting on strangers, paying to wash the girl of your choice at Big Daddy’s.  And when all that excitement still doesn’t feel like enough, you take off some clothes, dance stupidly.

But you don’t want to think about the daily lives of the people who serve you etouffe and clean your hotel rooms and park your cars.  You’re not here to see the times we mourn the loss of our young men, wiped out by violence that plagues the city. You don’t see the struggle of the everyday people.  You don’t know that some want out of this life. 

            And if you overdo it, the city will get you. You’ll find yourself throwing up outside a bar on Decatur St, your local hosts pulling you to safety, or you’ll start to unbuckle your pants to find relief on what seems a good corner to piss on, and for this you will be arrested.  There’s a sense of decorum, believe it or not, in this brothel.

            You’ll be carried across Canal Street because you’ve had too much to drink and you lost your shoes. You’ll sleep like death, passed out on someone’s futon, wake the next morning and be fed breakfast. 

            This is what you remember about your visits to New Orleans. You remember the good food you ate, the drinks that made you sick, and your colleagues chasing sex, acting like fools and picking fights.  (Remember, it was always someone else’s idea to have one more drink.)  You may remember the dark, tired faces of those who waited on you, You may remember the way people spoke, in accents that were barely intelligible.

            You remember the way you felt at night—well fed, sexy, invincible.  You remember that the dead sleep among us—above ground.

The city’s a beautiful whore. You come from all over to fuck her and fuck her good, and then throw money at her, but you won’t marry her, would never think of it. She’s a beautiful, magical woman, but you cannot commit.  It’s a great place for conventions, bachelor parties, and weekend getaways, but imagine settling down here. Imagine raising your children in this city of sin, trusting their upbringing to pimps and prostitutes.  After the partying, after the loving, you leave, go back to your lives in the nondescript suburbs of America. And when you return to wherever it is you came from, and after you drink a sobering cup of coffee, not an indulgent, creamy café au lait, you wonder who you were for the past three nights.  How you could have allowed yourself to behave so badly? It was the city, you reason. The city allows public drunkenness, encourages it practically, with all those people walking through the French Quarter with drinks in their hands.  It encourages nudity, the exposing of breasts and the desires that arouse from seeing naked flesh.  It’s the city’s faulty because the city’s so permissive.

Outwardly you mourn the destruction of New Orleans, but inwardly you know we deserve it.  We deserve it for living like good time people, for stopping school for a whole week out of the year during Mardi Gras, when we parade around the city, celebrate like pagans.  We deserve it for the way we march around when someone dies, the way we second line and live it up. We deserve it for hosting the Bayou Classic and the Jazz and Heritage Festival. We deserve it because we have all the fun.

After all, you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a whore. You wouldn’t know what it’s like to put in an 18-hour shift bartending, to deal cards to belligerent drunks, to mop up puke in your cab, to shoot rats invading your alleyway, to revel for crowds.   It’s tiring and humiliating, yes, but liberating too.  We whores learn to take our pleasure more slowly, more graciously.  We find beauty in those beer soaked streets, compassion in the muddy river, love in the loud casinos.

All you know is that the city got what was coming to her.  New Orleans is a whore who took a beating but came back, and when the president stood on her grounds after Katrina, speaking to the nation, he apologized like an abusive lover.  He vowed, like a gentleman to his mistress, to take care of his girl, help her get back on her feet.

Outwardly, you mourn New Orleans’ injury, you are generous in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, especially those of you who visited the city, spent a few very special days here.  You need the city to be there for you again.  You need the escape, the comfort, the magic, the power that only a visit to your lady can give you.  When your best girl suffers, you pray for her health and recovery, pray that it’s nothing contagious.

Sarah K. Inman,

504 fugee and bobcat