Big Easy Bonanza

routes.
    Skip’s day had started with Zulu and a fight among three men and a woman. The woman’s escort was obviously “from away,” as New Orleanians put it. “Forget doubloons,” Skip heard her tell him. “But if you catch a coconut, guard it with your life.”
    For once, Skip was standing with her back to the parade, watching the crowd, as regulations required. The speaker was a blonde woman wearing a UNO sweatshirt. Her friend had on a denim jacket. Skip’s eye strayed over the crowd and a gold-painted coconut thrown by a Zulu warrior whizzed over her shoulder. The man in the denim jacket, apparently impressed by his date’s assessment of its value, jumped up, caught it, and cradled it in the crook of his arm like a football player catcing a pass. “All r-i-i-ght!” Skip yelled. A few people clapped and hollered.
    “Hey! Hey!” yelled the man with the coconut, and suddenly he was down. The crowd parted. Two well-dressed men were trying to wrestle away the coconut. Skip started toward them. “Okay, okay! Knock it off!”
    The blonde glanced at her briefly, hesitating only a moment, and jumped on the pile, closing her teeth around the polo-shirted bicep of the topmost man. Skip paused, giving the three a chance to work out their differences. She stepped back to give the two ruffians room to run. Caught up in the spirit, she shouted: “A round of applause, ladies and gentlemen!” The crowd cheered, the blonde bowed, and her gentleman friend presented her with the well-earned coconut.
    A satisfying morning. Unlike most of her peers, Skip liked working parade routes. It was a relief from having to make small talk with the likes of Marcelle St. Amant Gaudet, who had ice-blue chiffon behind the eyes.
    It was a relief from a lot of things. She could remember the party at the Pontalba during which the host lowered a bucket from the balcony and shouted, “Alms for the rich.” Unamused, his girlfriend tried to stop him, and he dragged her into the bathroom. There were some thumps and screams, then silence. Finally the host emerged carrying handfuls of frosted, permed, freshly cut hair, which he scattered among the guests.
    The shorn girlfriend, apparently undaunted, spent the afternoon methodically seducing each male member of the host’s family, racking up, by Skip’s count, older brother, younger brother, and two cousins. She later told friends his father had been perfectly willing as well, but too drunk to get it up.
    Even as a prepubescent hellion, Skip had liked the street at Carnival. Not Canal Street particularly, where the crowds were so thick people stood in the streets about an inch from the floats—literally smack up against them, so that if there was trouble the entire U.S. Army, much less the New Orleans Police Department, would be helpless. And where you couldn’t even get your hands above your head to reach out for throws and where, if you were claustrophobic, you’d faint and be trampled to death because no way could you get your head between your knees.
    What she liked was St. Charles Avenue, like Canal closed to traffic for the Rex Parade. But even here, famous as the site of “the family Mardi Gras,” it could get rough. She’d forgotten how rough, how violent it could be, and she was relearning that morning. Yet in past years she’d given the cops as much trouble as certain drunk, foul-mouthed sorority types were giving her today.
    The huddled masses stood several hundred deep on both sides of the avenue, some with ladders for their kids or themselves, some with toddlers on their shoulders, risking the kids’ lives, in her opinion—one bump and baby hit the pavement. As a cop (instead of the dedicated troublemaker of old) she was truly shocked at the way they pushed and shoved and hollered for throws. They really did holler and beg—just like the guidebooks said they did. The aristocrats (the male ones anyway), grandly conveyed on floats, were supposed to demonstrate their largesse by casting trinkets into the crowds. Little strings of beads, mostly, and Carnival doubloons.
    She wondered how the knights and dukes of Rex decided on whom to bestow the coveted gewgaws. Did they search out the prettiest girls? The most flamboyant drag queens? The least aggressive little kids? The recyclers, of course, those who caught throws and re-threw them, bargained for nudity. In the last few years it had become a fad in the Quarter for women to take off their blouses for beads.
    If Skip