5 minute read
MARDI GRAS: A DISTURBING INSIGHT INTO THE BEST BAD THING I EVER DID, BUT WILL DO AGAIN
WRITTEN, IN SPIRIT, BY CHARLIE KITCAT A DISTURBING INSIGHT INTO THE BEST BAD THING I EVER DID, BUT WILL DO AGAIN
KAUPANGER, USA
Welcome to America’s mecca for the joyously nefarious. Welcome to Louisiana’s remarkable city of shameless excess. Welcome to the madhouse that clumsily fuses old Europe and the modern South. Welcome to Mardi fucking Gras.
For nearly a week in New Orleans, I was one of 1.2 million festival-goers swelling the city to three-and-a-half times its regular size. Like tiny pebbles we float with the tide, back and forth, before being spat out with the rest of NOLA’s expendable trash in the ocean of green, purple and gold. Join your fellow screaming imbeciles staggering down Bourbon Street. Join the swathes of colorful floats cruising down St. Charles Avenue. Join their idolatrous groupies, intent on exposedtorso-for-plastic-bead exchanges, however ethically questionable.
But the real deep end must wait. First, beignets and chicory coffee must invigorate the mind, plump oysters must arouse the palate, and buckets of steaming jambalaya swimming with seafood and andouille sausage must revive New Orleans’ most essential element—the soul.
And then, in a staggering splash, the deep end is awash as the whole city cannonballs straight in together. The festival of rampant revelry has begun. Neon green Hand Grenades — NOLA’s strongest drink of simply gin, rum, vodka and melon liqueur — are devoured. Secret absinthe bars loathingly acquiesce to the drunken demands of dribbling nitwits. Frenchman Street’s jazz clubs spark with a cymbal then a CRASH: the stumble of their first overzealous victim.
“What on earth is going on?” I ask my companion. It is his fourth festival, but he seems as astounded as I. “It’s Mardi Gras dude, do whatever the hell you want.”
That’s when the inescapable Louisiana fever dream ensconces me. I see meandering lines to drive-thru bars like laundromats, only with washing machines swirling daiquiris instead of dirty clothes. I see Walter White atop a float, catapulting beads at delirious freshmen. I see a sumo wrestler of a man backflip on a balcony. I see a yeti with fraternity letters shaved into his chest. I see trees drenched in rainbows of beads like weeping willows smothered in LSD. I see a man spew a misjudged gallon of sangria on the parade ground. I see a man lose $100 in three minutes at blackjack. I see a man lose his phone, snap his sunglasses and pose on a police car within 90 minutes. I see hundreds gathered outside Tulane’s The Boot, awake at 8 a.m., sipping Red Bull Vodkas for Fat Tuesday’s Tequila Sunrise. I see thousands of other degenerate pawns intent on having the most shameless and brainless version of fun possible. I always thought the worst thing about capitalist America was the soulless strip mall, then I see branded cushions, neon hula hoops, and light-up sunglasses tossed repeatedly into nameless crowd upon crowd. St. Charles Avenue is encrusted with palatial plantation houses, and Tulane’s Broadway Street with kooky condos and imposing fraternities. Yet just a few blocks from the complimentary consumerist insanity dwell hundreds of people divided economically, socially and racially. My Uber driver on arrival, Leneir, talks me through the sprawl of neighborhoods on the way to the frat house I’d be staying in. He tells me of the refurbished housing developments ravaged by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and how he and thousands of others pursued temporary escape from submerged New Orleans as their only option. He laments how even now, just blocks from Tulane’s esteemed campus, drive-by shootings occur at family-centric bus stops. I wonder, wouldn’t the money invested in needless beads and clutter drape around the necks of others a little more fairly?
Yet still, on Bourbon Street, industrious prostitutes pluck away the late night clingers-on. Mobs of virulent racists belch insults at anyone who looks or sounds unlike them; “go back to your country,” they squeal, before attacking with fist and foot. For a city inundated with religion, at a festival celebrating the onset of Jesus’ 40 days and nights in the desert, the omnipresence of moral recklessness is startling.
What better represents this than the image of a homeless man, unconscious outside St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, as tourists nonchalantly bypass his ragdoll body — as if he was just another worthless pile of beads?
But the citywide lunacy prevails. Choruses of “Wake the fuck up — it’s 2 p.m.!” echo across Tulane’s Greek-heavy campus. Three hours of sleep and it
begins all over again. Trundle over to the grounds in the back of a U-Haul. Inside the truck’s metal walls awaits the epitome of seediness: a soggy second-hand couch, mounds upon mounds of cheap beer, and enough cigarette smoke to asphyxiate a coal mine’s canary. Ten minutes later you emerge, gobbled up by a similar picture. You find mountains of piss-warm alcoholic seltzer, odious clouds of billowing green and heinous freshman tonsil orgies amongst the oh-somany beads.
And again, twelve hours later, you’re back on Bourbon Street lurching from the last bar toward breakfast. There, you guzzle shrimp and grits like the garbage trucks that simultaneously swallow the day’s mountains of plastic beads and general detritus. And with that final clean-up, my six days of manic but glorious hysteria had ended.
I returned home — now 48 hours without any sleep, any attempt at hygiene, any form of currency, any form of voice, and any form of dignity — and I struggled through the door. Back to my own haven of depravity: broken glass exploded across the floor, rotten fries festering beneath the couch, and a sprawl of beer cans strewn throughout the living room like well-struck bowling pins. I slovenly tiptoed across the disaster zone toward the shower — my fresh towel no longer reeking of fraternity-induced stale tobacco and beer — to see my roommate slack-jawed at the sight of this repugnant monster who’d stumbled into his house unwelcome, like a decaying home invader.
“Jesus Christ, you look, and smell, like shit!” he exclaimed, more outwardly outraged than I’d ever seen him.
I faintly acknowledged his offenses before shamefully dragging myself to the mirror. And there it was. I see a man, an anemic gargoyle of a human: eyes sunken, hair bedraggled, teeth yellow and skin jaundiced. Mardi Gras had shown me what may be the glorious pinnacle of America, and I had returned bankrupt, hollow, repulsive; perhaps the worst of everything it stood for.
