In New Orleans, a city that some say suffered God's wrath, sin resurrects itself on Bourbon Street.
By KELLEY BENHAM, Times Staff Writer
Published October 9, 2005
[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
At Utopia, a Bourbon Street nightclub, Amber Capello serves up 2-for-1 “body shots,” an elaborate process that begins with tiny vials of liquor tucked into her tiny clothes. The men “haven’t seen a female in weeks,” she said. Go to photo gallery
NEW ORLEANS - Inside, it smells like mold. Outside, the entire French Quarter smells like a dead cat. But the lights came on this week and so, here and there along the street, men prowled again, booze swirled in plastic cups again, and the strippers, the few who found their way back, climbed up the poles.
In Big Daddy's strip club, where a mannequin swings from the ceiling, manager Saint Jones smokes a Marlboro and tries to hold back what is nearly impossible to hold back: the appetites at the door.
"Guys, come back at 5."
Jones has heard the talk about how God sent Hurricane Katrina to purge sin from this deeply religious and deeply deviant city. He does not believe it. "If God wanted us gone, we'd be gone," he says. He turns toward the door. "Five o'clock, guys. Five."
Across town, rescue workers still haul bodies from the rubble. They will tell you about it later, with tired eyes, beer in hand. A curfew allegedly shuts down the city at dark, but enforcement is especially lax, it seems, here on Bourbon Street.
This is among the most sinful stretches in America, the strip that some hope and others fear will be sanitized in the rebuilding to come.
In the French Quarter, it's still not easy to find a restaurant meal. You can't get a beignet at Cafe Du Monde or hear jazz at Maison Bourbon or ride in a carriage behind a slow mule. You can't buy a voodoo doll at Marie Laveau's, take graveyard dirt from the priestess' tomb or put a hex on your ex, no matter how bad he did you wrong. There are no hustlers or artists or tap-dancing boys. Even a cup of coffee seems like an impossibility.
But if you are so inclined, you can drink yourself stumbling drunk and look at naked women until you go blind.
Sin came back to this city before just about anything else.
"Because there's 10 women in this town and 70,000 men," Jones said. "Police, National Guard, firefighters. I never seen church open yet, have you?"
* * *
At the Bourbon-Strip Tease lingerie and adult gift store Saturday, Kameron and Coco don't have time to chat. They're exotic dancers - not "ho's" - on their first day back to work since the storm. They need new outfits to shimmy out of, and they need them now.
"There's one girl back at work and she's like, "Y'all hurry up,' " says Kameron, who won't give her last name because "my parents put the fear of God in me."
She ducks into the dressing room but won't model her garment because of "weight issues." From behind the door she says Larry Flynt's Hustler Club has about seven girls working out of its prior roster of 150. She says working makes her feel more at home in this city that still isn't itself.
She dashes out and hands the cashier a black thong, tiny skirt and see-through heels. She pays with a crisp $100 and says, "Thanks, FEMA!"
"Ain't nothing going to stop Bourbon Street, okay?" she says. "People be out here in the rain, am I right?"
The guy ringing her up just laughs. "Right."
* * *
A few hours later, the most historic and visible church in the city, St. Louis Cathedral, held its first Mass since the storm, the first Mass in the French Quarter, they said.
As always, a drunk or two lingered just outside at Jackson Square. Inside, Monsignor Crosby Kern acknowledged that bars outnumber churches in the Quarter by a ridiculous . "That's okay," he said. "One church is better than 100 bars."
Most people have been too busy to ask why the storm happened, he said. He hasn't heard confession yet, so he can't say whether sin is up or down. But he said only "silly people" ask whether God sent the hurricane.
God got a lot of press when Alabama state Sen. Hank Erwin called Hurricane Katrina a punishment from God, saying New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast "have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness."
Fundamentalists speculated God was targeting a gay Labor Day parade that week; one group said the storm could be punishment for abortion and that a satellite image of the swirl looked like a 6-week-old fetus.
"We like to blame God for things we do," like messing up the environment or building below sea level, Kern said. "Man likes to think he's in control, but there are things outside of our control."
After Mass the nuns took their dinner down by the Mississippi, where man and nature meet. There, they can look out over the brown water and things feel as normal as anything ever was in New Orleans. Just before the storm, someone gave Sister Mary Esther a flower here and asked her if she would like a tattoo.
They're pretty laid-back nuns and they like to laugh and say, "Only in New Orleans."
They always walk faster if they end up on Bourbon Street, and inevitably someone will say, Sister, what are you doing here? This week Sister Mary Rita accidentally wandered there, unaware the street was in business. "I said "Oh, shoot,' " she remembered. "I got off quick as I could."
Sister Mary Cecilia came to Mardi Gras in high school, before she knew she would become a nun. She laughs and says that if God did send the hurricane, there are a couple of spots on Bourbon Street she wishes he had hit harder.
* * *
When the sun, which felt like God's punishment whether it was or not, finally started to sink that evening, the neon popped out here and there along the street, and you could see that the sin is not yet what it used to be, but is staggering to its feet.
You can still order a Hurricane and walk down the street with it in a plastic cup, and if you need it Category 5 it comes with a shot of 151. You can now order a drink called a Katrina Rita at the Red Fish Grill, which serves praline bread pudding, and that feels like sin. You can buy a body shot from Amber Capello at Utopia and drink it from a tube between her breasts, and she'll lick the tube and roll up her tank top and slither on top of the bar. She would have gotten raunchier before the storm, when there was competition.
Most of the signs remain dark. No crowds hang from balconies and only a few packs of partiers get wild enough to shout. A few guys wear strap-on breasts or stupid hats, but just as many look lost, like they took a wrong turn on their way to find a hamburger. Everyone seems tired. They are firefighters, police officers, military, most still in their uniform shirts, from places like Montclair, Yonkers, Las Cruces. Most any woman on the street, even unshowered, seems to look good to most of the men.
"They haven't seen a woman in a month," said Randy Schwartz, 28, who works behind the bar at the Famous Door. All the bare breasts were long ago evacuated from the city.
James Briggs, an Army National Guardsman from Baltimore, said he hoped desperately to see some soon. "I don't care if they are small or large," he said. "I just like them. I'm happy when I see breasts."
Saturday night, not long after Mass let out, Daisy, Carter, Tori and Tie took turns on stage at Temptations gentlemen's club, smearing a wall mirror and a couple of brass poles with their near-naked bodies. The place was full, but there was no cover and the drinks were half-price, and some guys said they were there just for the cheap beer.
The guys seemed appreciative and tipped okay, said Carter, an Indiana native on her first night back to work. But just because they're from out of town, they can't be counted on to spend like tourists, general manager Ray Palazzolo said. To find enough girls to keep the place operating steadily, he's going to have to track down dancers in other cities. Some of his employees have no home.
It's going to take real tourists to bring Bourbon Street back, and that's going to take hotels and conventions and a long time, he said.
"God is supposed to be a loving God," he said. "He wouldn't s--- on us like this."
* * *
Up the street, Cecedrice Poole wobbled out of the Hustler Club. He leaned on a light pole with a Heineken in his hand and called down the street something like, "Baby, what you doing?"
He was raised Congregational Holiness in Fort Smith, Ark., so he knows something about the wrath of God and the wages of sin. The sign at his back says "Relax . . . it's just sex!" But he insists that in more reflective moments heavier thoughts have weighed on his mind.
"Sin everywhere, baby. They don't just put it on Bourbon Street," said Poole, 44. "The Lord is coming down here to clean up some stuff. I've thought about that quite a bit."
After 18 years in the steel mills, he said he had to drive to New Orleans to help clean up, and to cash in, but mostly to see for himself what the hurricane had done. He saw boats on the highway and people wandering around dazed.
"It let me know time is damn near up. We are living in our last days, you feel me? One of the partyin'-est places is damn near no more."
A man in a National Guard uniform hobbled past him on crutches, through the dark door.
"A lot of people have been wishing for a change," Poole said. "God is coming to clean up his church, and his church is them that wanders these parts. If you're from here, it's got to put something on your heart."
He will admit though, that what is on his heart right now is a desire for Kameron or Coco to straddle his lap.
"The human race is a stubborn race," he said.
He was tired. He had a couple more dollars in his pocket.
