Big Easy Bonanza

conform she was ridiculed, lectured, even beaten. Yet no amount of correction had any effect, as she could never see the next problem coming. And so she had no way to win her parents’ approval or the approval of her peers. She began to rebel at a very early age.
    At five she was invited to a birthday party to which she didn’t want to go. And so on the way home from kindergarten, she simply threw out the invitation. She hadn’t yet been told the concept of R.S.V.P., yet on finding out about the invitation, her mother spanked her.
    The unfairness of it being intolerable, Skip declined to tolerate it. She pulled one of the living-room lamps off its table just to watch its expensive base crack into shards. For this she was spanked again (this time with a hairbrush) and shut in her room for two days, during which she doggedly refrained from crying. (Years later she noticed that hardly anyone in New Orleans ever bothered with R.S.V.P. and caught on to the real reason for the spanking—the birthday girl was the daughter of people with whom her mother wished to curry favor.)
    She’d been told her kindergarten teacher reported a change in her that year, a sadness that began to replace the high spirits of before. She did not retaliate for the two days of imprisonment—her revenges were sudden angry ones rather than planned attacks—but ever after she was acutely conscious of the unfairness of life on earth.
    Which wasn’t to say that the planet didn’t have its pleasures, even for such a seeming outsider. Eating, for one. And later drinking, smoking, drugs, above all sex. The year she came out, Skip got pregnant. She wanted to keep the baby, but her mother noticed her clothes were getting snug, guessed the truth, and arranged an abortion.
    After that she gave up. She flunked out of Newcomb, most of the time being too stoned or too drunk to go to class. (She was reading up, at the time, on Zelda Fitzgerald.)
    LSU wouldn’t take her after that, but Ole Miss would. They sent her there and she flunked out again. After that, she sold a little dope and used the proceeds to catch a plane to L.A., where, unable to compete with applicants who looked like starlets, she couldn’t even get a job as a waitress. She ended up in San Francisco wearing her hair in spikes and riding a bike for Speedy’s Messenger Service. On that unlikely job, she realized for the first time (and only after many months) that her size—her athletic build—was something in which she could take pleasure.
    She began working out, lost her baby fat, and felt like Sheena of the Jungle. She’d never lost that old sense of unfairness, though now it had evolved into what she thought of as a sense of justice. She saw a lot of crime as she went about her daily rounds and when one day she stopped a mugging as if by reflex, her life changed. She was headed down Fifth Street toward the Examiner when a teenage kid tried to shove an old lady to the pavement and take her purse. Before she knew she was doing it, Skip had her bike on the sidewalk, her body between the kid and the victim. That wasn’t enough for her either—she “detained” the kid, as the cops said, till they got there.
    After that she began to dream of being a cop. Literally to dream, at night, when her defenses were down. And then she daydreamed as well, and soon she was obsessed with it. She knew the place she had to do it was New Orleans. She was still very young and she wouldn’t yet have put it this way (wouldn’t understand it for years), but this was her final revenge against her parents and against the whole stinking crowd they ran with.
    They would hate her for it. And yet how could they hate a responsible daughter on the side of law and order? They couldn’t in good conscience—they’d have to hate themselves as well. It would be a perfect way of thumbing her nose at the whole damn social order. If she hadn’t understood their rules, too bad—she was going to make some rules of her own.
    She was only dimly aware of the revenge factor in her decision. On the surface she saw nothing but constructive value in it. She saw it as a way finally to fit into her hometown, to find out something about it besides the latest gossip in that tiny social group that had so puzzled Steve Steinman by its smallness. She saw it also as an adventure. She would go to neighborhoods she was barely aware of and truly meet the people, the real people, the yats and the ethnics. Best of all she would