America, You Sexy Bitch (20 page)

The politics are hardcore here at this pleasant jazz festival on the levees holding back the mighty Mississippi. The people wear their politics right on their sleeves, and I can see why. Their town knows the direct effects politics can have on people’s lives. They know
every day when they walk down those streets and see the watermarks. Glen’s outrage seems to come from a poisonous gumbo of racial history, political corruption, and centuries of injustice. Right where we’re standing is the site of New Orleans’s first slave market. This is haunted ground. Bad gris-gris.

Soon the sun is gone and we are too. We board the ferry and cross back across the river. Glen leads us to Treme. It’s one of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods, lined with small one-story houses set back from buckled sidewalks and patchy lawns. This was where free blacks came to live early in the city’s history. Now it’s in danger of gentrification.

When we get out of the cab, Glen points up and down the streets, telling us there used to be bars everywhere where you could go and hear live music. Now there’s just a couple left. We’re standing in front of one of them. A few guys mill outside the door, including an ancient-looking gentleman whose head looks like it was shrunken down from a larger size. He is tall and thin as an oboe. Glen introduces us: “This is Benny, the second-oldest active musician in New Orleans. You playing tonight?”

“Yes, I am,” says Benny.

“Benny’s about to beat the shit out of that drum,” says Glen. “You watch.”

We walk inside. The place is tiny, packed with people of every age and hue. It is the first truly and fully integrated place we have been to the entire trip. Shoved into the corner are eight black musicians warming up, the Treme Brass Band. They only play here once a week, on Wednesdays. Benny shuffles over to join them and straps a big bass drum to his chest. Then they start and it’s 1925. People are on their feet with the first trumpet notes: swinging, shaking, their arms flinging droplets of sweat into the thick air. It feels preposterously good, all of this thrilling music mixed with the booze and the pot. Couples fling their bodies around the cramped dance floor, their limbs blurring into the slinky music. In the back, as promised, Benny beats the shit out of his big bass drum.

 

Meghan:
Treme is one of the oldest areas of New Orleans; it is an area known for its rich African American and Creole culture along with its brass and jazz music history.

As we walk through his neighborhood, I jokingly tell Glen he should run for mayor someday, and he sort of half laughs, which in my experience tells me the thought has crossed his mind. In reality, it is people like Glen who should run for higher office: people who know the ins and outs of their city and the people who live in it and maintain a palpable sense of pride for it.

Each house that Glen points out has a story and a person attached to it, and we barely go ten feet without running into someone he knows. I start to feel giddy and grateful to be able to have such an experience, meet such cool people, and absorb such an interesting side of New Orleans that I most likely never would have without this trip or Glen. I grab his arm and yell, “Take me to some Treme music!”

Glenn laughs and says, “Follow me, little lady.”

Within a few minutes we are outside a small building that looks like a reconstructed house that is painted bright yellow, with the words THE CANDLELIGHT LOUNGE printed on the side. We walk inside and it is the way I imagine what walking into a speakeasy from the quiet outside world of Prohibition must have been like. Loud brass music is playing from a group of musicians surrounding a giant drum with the words TREME BRASS BAND stamped on it; people are dancing, sitting, tapping their feet, and drinking. There’s a haze in the air and kinetic energy that is instantly appealing.

The entire place is filled wall to wall with people. Twinkling lights surround the bar and fall from the ceiling. Not one person looks like they aren’t enjoying themselves. I grab Michael by the neck and yell over the music, “Goddamn it, I love this city!”

“I know!” he yells back. We push our way over to the incredibly crowded, sweaty bar where Glen is holding court. After we get our drinks, Michael and Stephie start dancing. A random elderly man dances with me, and we all start getting down. Someone hands Michael a colorful umbrella. Stephie is unleashed.

At some point a woman approaches me and says, “You’re Meghan McCain, right?”

“Yep,” I say. “I’m drunk, so please don’t ask me anything too crazy because I’m painfully honest when I’m sober, let alone drunk.”

“Oh, I just want to know why you’re hanging out with the guy from
Kids in the Hall
,” she yells over the music.

I smile and practically strain my voice, it’s so loud in here. “Actually, he was on
The State,
which is by far a superior comedy show. Fuck
Kids in the Hall
.” I have never seen the show
Kids in the Hall
, but I feel the need to defend Michael and
The State
. I know enough about Michael at this point that asking Michael about his time on
Kids in the Hall
will illicit a similar reaction to asking me how I feel about my father choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate will do.

I realize that yelling “Fuck
Kids in the Hall
!” is probably a signal that I need a little air, so I politely excuse myself. I can outdrink most people, but I can really outdrink Michael and Stephie and I need to pace myself, as I am likely three or four drinks in the lead.

 

Michael:
The band finally takes a break, and I step out with Stephie for some air, although the torpid night offers little relief from the heat. Meghan is already out there, sitting on the low concrete wall lining the sidewalk outside the bar. People are cooking food in big smokers in the open air: red beans, rice, chicken. A woman is standing in the middle of the road in a tight top and tight pants, yelling at somebody: Glen.

“I
am
Treme,” she yells over and over at him. “Motherfucker, I AM TREME!” Glen waves his hand in her direction, unconcerned. Meghan says they’ve been going at it like this for several minutes. I notice that the yelling woman is not wearing shoes. She moves towards Glen, confronting him: “I ain’t addicted to nuthin’. Never have been. And never will be. Not even Treme.”

Meghan, Stephie, and I watch, mouths agape, as the woman unravels there in the middle of the street. Glen keeps his back to her.

“You ain’t gonna fuck with me,” she says.

Glen claps his hands together and keeps repeating, “We got this! We got THIS! Thanks to Trombone Shorty, we got this. All of this. And we gonna be here forever.”

Glen tells us later he’s been involved in a property dispute with this woman and her family. I don’t understand the details but it seems to boil down to an accusation Glen made against them about their taking advantage of people living in the neighborhood with the purpose of using a city program to buy their homes at under-market values and then sell them to more well-heeled investors, white investors, who want to gentrify Treme. Trombone Shorty, who has become a worldwide sensation with his
Billboard
-topping jazz album,
Backatown
, has likewise been buying up properties in the area in an effort to slow down or stop gentrification. It’s a conflict about money and the soul of the neighborhood.

“We got this,” Glen keeps saying. “This” for him means more than a few crumbling houses in Treme. It’s an entire history, a way of being he is fighting to preserve. He says, “The musicians that played in my neighborhood, they brought me out of the womb.” I think he means it literally. This neighborhood, and the people in it, are his blood.

One of those people is Willis, a tall and gangly young guy in whose beat-up Buick we find ourselves a few minutes later. “His grandfather Charles Johnson was one of the greatest clarinetists that ever lived,” Glen tells us by way of introduction.

It turns out Willis just got out of jail. It’s unclear why, although it seems to have something to do with cocaine. His house is one of the ones that the screaming woman on the street “stole.” The details are hazy to me, both because Willis’s voice is quiet, his accent is almost impossible to understand, and because I am getting higher and higher from the cigar we keep passing around, which is, of course, stuffed with marijuana. There’s something about a loan and forged signatures and going to city hall to get them to open up casework, and although I am trying to be sympathetic to Willis’s unintelligible plight, I find the only thing I really want to do is lean
my head against the car window and watch the streetlights zip by as we bump along.

At one point after we’ve been driving for what seems like a long time, Meghan leans over to me and whispers, “Is this a good idea?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “It’s a very good idea.”

We start laughing and cannot stop.

 

Meghan:
More drinking, more dancing, more talking about life with Glen, Willis, Michael, and Stephie. Another joint is lit outside the bar. More flirting . . . more, more, more, more. I am three sheets to the wind. My mind is foggy from the combination of partying, southern humidity, good company, and the intoxicating atmosphere that New Orleans just exudes. I thank Glen for the most amazing night of our trip, thank Michael for meeting me and coming up with the idea for a book, and thank Stephie for always being so sweet, because she is the sweetest girl in the world that ever lived.

“Seriously, Stephie,” I tell her, “you must dream about rainbows, lollipops, and ponies. You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met.” She smiles and laughs, a tinkling sound like fairies make. Right as we are all saying goodbye to Glen and Willis I yell at everyone, “Let’s do this every year! Promise, let’s do this exact same thing again every summer until we die!”

 

Michael:
The rest of the night is more of the same: music and dancing and then I am drinking a sugary glass of absinthe with Willis, who I love even though I cannot understand a word that comes out of his mouth. Stephie runs into a friend from college, and two law students corner Meghan for many minutes to talk about politics; she finally catches us up outside whatever bar we’re at, pissed.

“I thought you had my back.”

“I didn’t know where you were.”

“You didn’t look.”

That may be true but what does she expect? I barely know where
I
am. I give her a hug and she tells me that she loves me, her entire
hard edge melting right off into the ocean of the night. Willis packs another cigar and lights up. We smoke some more and say our goodbyes, Meghan’s farewells topping all of us in their outlandishly sincere bonhomie.

“Quack, quack,” says Willis, which means he sees police. Glen shields the cigar from view with his back and they roll right by us. There are hugs all around, then somehow I am back at the hotel in bed, my mouth feeling as if it’s been stuffed with cotton balls and my ears still ringing from all that wonderful wild music.

 

Meghan:
I wake up in the hotel the next morning and feel extremely hungover. I roll out of bed, turn the shower on, and attempt to pull myself together in any way possible. My head is throbbing with pain, but I feel like laughing.

For all the fun and excess that the night before has given us, the day ahead is going to be a lot more serious and somber. We are going to spend the day taking a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward.

It’s incredible to think that Hurricane Katrina happened so recently. For a lot of people Hurricane Katrina and the handling of the disaster by the Bush administration was the end of trust, or at least support, of the Bush White House. No matter which way you spin the events, it’s difficult to give President Bush any leeway. A lot of people died unnecessarily because of the lack of effort and outreach from Washington. Everything from “Heck of a job, Brownie” to “George Bush does not care about black people” will forever haunt my memory of watching the terrible images of people standing on rooftops, lined up at the Superdome, and the endless red X’s and body bags.

I do not pretend to completely understand where things exactly failed, starting from what could have been done to strengthen the levees so they wouldn’t break, to getting FEMA to New Orleans faster, to everything that made Hurricane Katrina the disaster and tragedy that it was. All I know is what I felt when it was happening, as I prepare to see how far the worst-affected part of the city has come.

At a café we meet up with Jacques Morial, an outreach and research director for Heath Law Advocates of Louisiana, and immediately start discussing what it was like for him during Hurricane Katrina. We talk about everything from President Bush to Mayor Ray Nagin and his infamous “Chocolate City” comments. A few years ago I happened to meet Nagin’s cousin, who asked me what I thought of the mayor, and I said that I thought he did what he could during an almost impossible situation. I didn’t think he was a saint or a criminal, but a politician put in a situation where he was given very little help from the federal government.

Jacques was born and raised in New Orleans, has lived there his entire life, loves it dearly, and never once considered leaving after Katrina, though he does understand why some people just couldn’t bear to come back. I tell him about Willis, and how he’d been in jail during Katrina. He wasn’t released from jail during the floods until the water had reached his chest. Just the mental image of men (and possibly women) thinking they might drown in a locked cell seems like something out of a horror movie, not something that happened in the United States a mere few years ago.

“Yeah, they eventually let all the prisoners out,” Jacques says with a sad shake of his head. “That isn’t even the beginning of the kinds of stories I have heard.”

We drive out to the Lower Ninth Ward, and I realize that my words will never do justice to the physical landscape or the energy of the place, but I hope that I can somehow encourage other people to go on this journey to better feel for themselves its beautiful eeriness.