THE KING OF NEW ORLEANS

WE WERE SITTING IN THE French Quarter one fine morning, my nephew Charlie and me, waiting impatiently for the ham and cheese croissants we had ordered for breakfast at the Authentic Old Creole Cafe.

The Vietnamese waiters were hustling as only they can hustle, but the crowd was big and they were falling behind. There were the usual people — the French Quarter characters in their leather and feathers, plus the respectables who were calmly reading their Times-Picayunes and would ignore the Elephant Man if he happened to lurch in, which, I believe, he occasionally does. And there were tourists of all sorts, jamming the aisles and asking questions through their noses and calling croissants crescents.

Charlie, who is young but stodgy and lives Uptown, looked around him and stated pompously that New Orleans had never been as full of obnoxious strangers as at present.

Listen, Charlie, I said, the strangers of today may well be the fellow citizens of tomorrow. They just got to get settled in. I ever tell you about the time I met our weirdest visitor ever?

No, he said, rolling his eyes up to the faycs tilework in the ceiling, because he knew he was going to get a long story. So I’m into my anecdotage; so what? I admit it. And besides, I was paying for the food.

It was a long generation ago, I began, when I was working for Tiny Sulla, the boss of the 38th Ward. Election time was coming and I was driving the sound truck and doing odd jobs, and let me assure you that many of the political jobs I did for him were extremely odd.

Well, one afternoon about quarter of six I drove back through the slum — the whole ward was, and is, a slum — past the little wooden building that housed the Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ, where a clutter of old cars signaled that a meeting was in progress. I turned into the driveway of Tiny Sulla’s big comfortable house and parked the sound truck — actually an old Studebaker with a big horn on top — behind his mile-long tailfin ‘59 Cad. From the car alone, you had no trouble figuring that Tiny was in politics.

I marched inside and demanded my pay, twenty bucks for a long hard day spent disturbing the peace with amplified bombast. Tiny rose reluctantly from his easy chair and grabbed his stick and limped toward me, free hand on wallet. What a sight he was, even for a politician. A human blimp half crippled by polio, he went around on three legs, the third being that thick, straight stick. His walk featured alternate half orbits of his formidable rump around the stick, first right, then left, kicking his stiff legs forward in turn.

He drew out his fat alligator wallet very slowly, because he hated above all to part with money.

“Miss Trish was heah oilier,” he said, winking. “For a few bucks I could fix you up if you want. You could loin a lot from her, Joey. Even I loint something.”

He talked in the true accent of the ward, like Bugs Bunny on Prozac. The chief businesses of the 38th in those days were prostitution and theft (drugs came later). Tiny was well served by both. On the theft end, he was a fence, buying and storing and eventually reselling everything from kitchen appliances to the complete regalia of Rex, King of Carnival, which a local burglar had acquired in the course of business and which now reposed in Tiny’s walk-in, double-locked closet.

On the prostitution end, he had worked out an arrangement with a hooker called Miss Trish for the cheapest service I ever heard of, even in those simple times: Two bucks for three fucks. (As he said, “exactly 66 2/3 cents per each.”) Tiny Sulla lived in heaven, except for being crippled. He got a cut of everything that went down in Ward 38 and I was willing to bet he paid practically no taxes on it. In spite of that, he was not what you could call generous. In fact he was tight as hell.

I said firmly, “I just want my money, Mr. Sulla.”

He sighed and extracted from a thick wad of bills one ten and two fives. Then he did what he always did: gave me the money, and just as my fingers closed on it, jerked back a five.

“Campaign expenses,” he grinned, put it back in his wallet, and returned the wallet to his hip pocket. The five was a deduct, pronounced dee duck, and he finished the daily ritual of doing me out of a quarter of my pay by saying, “Dee duck is flying.”

At this moment the phone rang. I answered it, saying, “Mr. Sulla’s residence,” and a semi-hysterical voice demanded Tiny, so I carried it over to him.

“So you got problems,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, yeah, I unnerstand what you saying. Me and Remy and Guido. Yeah. The mayor,” he said, hanging up. “Asshole’s got some problem so he calls his only friends got brains and we have to go downtown and solve it for him.”

Tiny was referring to Police Superintendant Remy Dorque and Guido Cantalabria, who was capo of the whole Mafia in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area.

“Sounds like a high-level meeting,” I ventured.

“Say that again,” said Tiny, comfortably aware of his status. “Come on, I’ll drop you off at that dump where you live at.”

We stepped out of the house into a dusk that was redolent of broken drains. Tiny’s big Cad was standing wide open with the keys in the ignition. It stood like that all the time and nobody ever stole it. One reason was a looming shadow leaning against the end of the house, a shadow named Tarpoleon.

Tarp was a black guy, six and a half feet tall, close to three hundred pounds. He had small bloodshot eyes in a face seamed with razor scars. His claim to fame rested on a fight at a local ginmill. Tarpoleon lost the first round, went home, got a hand grenade from a supply he kept in his bedroom, came back, threw the grenade into the saloon and held the heavy door shut while it exploded, perforating two people with fragments, rupturing a bunch of eardrums, and destroying fifty-seven bottles of liquor and a big blue mirror.

Of course Tarp was sent to Angola, but Tiny Sulla, deeply impressed by his feat, bribed the Pardon Review Board to send him back, an officially rehabilitated member of society. Since then Tarpoleon had killed a number of people, or so the local gossip said, but only when Tiny told him to.

Tiny took a long time getting settled in the driver’s seat of the Cad and fiddling with his hand controls. He ground the starter for quite a few minutes until he became convinced that his battery was dead. Finally he leaned through the window into the humid night.

“Hey Tarp,” he shouted, “go over by the choich and get me a battery, okay?”

Tarpoleon sauntered off into the darkness and about ten minutes later returned, carrying a battery, which he put into the Cad.

“Now take the dead battery and put it in whoever’s car you got the good one out of,” said Tiny. “I hate loose ends.”

We roared away into the darkness.

IN THOSE DAYS the Quarter, where I lived, was an incredible mixture of elegance and squalor. My building had been a mansion in 1798, but now it was cut up into forty little apartments, plus an antique shop, a store that sold mammy dolls and stuffed alligators, and an outlet for Cuban pornography.

The gate to the patio was rusty iron lace with iron trees and iron fruit being pecked by iron birds and except for the rust it looked like it led into Buckingham Palace. The patio had run to seed but it was still beautiful, with banana trees heavy with hard green fruit and a huge white oleander that overhung the wall like a nebula. An old French fountain tinkled away, rain or shine.

Nobody seeing only the gate and the patio would think I lived in a kind of cave that maybe had been a storeroom once, or a stable, or a dungeon for disobedient slaves. My bathroom was two flights up and best used in the dark, if you didn’t want to disgust yourself. The cave was my pad. Most of the time I loved it.

When I opened the door, however, a roach as long as my thumb was walking over the dirty dishes in my sink. He gave me the shivers; I have a thing about crawlies. I hit him with a squirt of DDT — it didn’t cause cancer yet in those days — and he immediately ran up to the ceiling and started flying back and forth from wall to wall, wings beating madly. I walked outside and smoked a cigarette — they didn’t cause cancer yet either, in those days — and stirred only when a neighbor yelled that I was wanted on the house phone in the upstairs hall. It was Tiny Sulla.

“Where the hell you been at?” he demanded. “Go outside and wait. Tarp will pick you up in five minutes. He’s bringing me some supplies and Miss Trish.”

“What’s happening, Mr. Sulla?”

“Shit is what’s happening. Remy and Guido is both dead and” (a word followed that sound like digested) “and I need every pair of hands, Joey, even yours.”

Bang went the phone. I returned bemused to my apartment. I didn’t want to go back in because the roach might still be alive, or at least kicking, so I shut my door, a massive oak door with 18th-century ironwork, and locked the padlock that was our century’s contribution to the security of my dwelling. Then I hastened through the iron lace gates into Royal Street and leaned against the wall to wait for Tarp.

I remember the air was sweet-sour with the fragrance of a neighborhood brewery and little lamps twinkled in the windows of the antique shop, and an endless stream of cars crept by winking their brake lights and braying at one another. Then the Studebaker appeared, nosed over to the curb, and I hopped in.

“What’s happening?” I asked Tarp breathlessly but he only growled at me. Miss Trish was in the back, smoking, and I asked her, too. She shrugged.

“Tiny never tells me nothing except get undressed,” she said.

A motorcycle cop picked us up as we crossed Canal Street, turned on his siren and led us at breakneck speed through the evening traffic. We swung into a street uptown near Coliseum Square and squealed to a stop behind an impressive line of cars — Tiny’s Cad and a couple of big black limos. One was a stretch limo so long that it just faded away into the darkness.

Tarp jumped out and opened the trunk. We took out a couple of big cardboard boxes. They were bulky but light to carry and we made our way up onto the shadowy porch of a big, six-columned mansion where all the wooden shutters were tightly closed and other cops were standing guard in the dim light emanating from a door with etched crystal insets.

One of the cops opened the door and we stumbled into an entrance hall that must have been twenty feet high. The light came from a chandelier that was a forest of milky antique globes. I had a distinct feeling that everything I could hope to earn in the next ten years would not buy one of the gorgeously uncomfortable-looking chairs that stood against the walls.

Another door at the end of the hall opened and a rotund, heavily tanned little Frenchman glided out, pushing thin strands of hair over his semibald dome. I knew I was looking at Edouard LeMoyne (Sweet Eddie) Louver, who had been mayor of New Orleans for most of my short life.

“You brung the stuff, I see, yeah, yeah,” he said. Tiny waddled out behind him and the mayor turned to him in something like desperation. Lowering his voice, he said, “Tiny, you gotta get me outa this one. I’m a never forget if you do.”

Tiny was all business, saying only, “You guys have a seat, we’re having us a conference inside.”

He and the mayor disappeared through the door and it shut behind them. We set the boxes down and I sat gingerly on one priceless chair while Tarp flopped in another and hung his leg over the arm. He brought out a pint flask of cheap wine from pockets that seemed to have room for everything, and I asked for a gulp and he gave it to me. It was the chummiest I had ever gotten with a killer, up to that time.

“Come on, Tarp. What the hell is going on?” I asked in a subdued voice, not quite whispering. He shook his head.

“I don’ know who the guy is causin’ all the trouble,” he said. “There was shootin’ earlier, thass all I know. Mr. Sulla, he was all shook up when he call me an’ say, Tarp, bring me bring such and such and so and so and git your ass in gear.”

At this point the door opened and Tiny grunted for Tarp and me to come in and bring the boxes.

I don’t have the slightest recollection of what the room looked like except that it was enormous. All I remember is what was in the middle of it, squatting on, and almost covering, a medium-sized Persian rug.

“This,” said Tiny, “is Mr. Mo.”

“Gawwwwwd,” said Tarp and then fell silent, gaping.

I was looking at Mr. Mo but I was not sure if he was looking at me. His eyes were on the sides of his head and they rotated independently, like the eyes of a chameleon. One seemed to contemplate me for a while but maybe not.

Tiny tried to put everybody in the picture.

“This gentleman was on his way from someplace a long ways off,” he explained, “to some other place also a long ways off, when he happened to drop in to New Orleans. A tourist, you might say. Well, you know how it is. We get these visitors now and then, come for a day, stay for a lifetime. It’s a tribute to the charm of our city. Mr. Mo wants to stay, and he has made it clear that he expects the red carpet treatment and will do incredible things if he don’t get it.”

“He wants to be king,” Mayor Louver explained in a miserable tone of voice, as if he had a bad case of flu.

“King?”

“Yeah,” said Tiny. “King. They have city states where he comes from. He wants to be king of New Orleans.”

Mr. Mo had been sitting somewhat in the posture of a bullfrog, with his front paws or flippers turned in and his back legs folded. He was iridescent all over, like he had been rubbed with oil. His body was bulbous and covered with little twinkling pointed nodules like the heads of fancy upholstery tacks. His head was covered with horny-looking plates and he had an abundance of natural spines and hooks on his legs. His mouth was enormous. He was not pretty to look at, but every eye was on him.

Tarp asked the obvious question: “What’s he gonna do if he don’t get to be king?”

At this moment Mr. Mo proved that he had one other froglike characteristic. Something whipped out of his big lipless mouth — it moved so fast I never saw exactly what it was — and a little antique table across the room was gone. Maybe he swallowed its maybe his spit was antimatter and it disintegrated. Anyway, it was gone.

“That’s the least of what he can do,” said Mayor Louver, running a wet palm over his sweating dome. “I might add that police officers have pumped bullets into him and they just go through without causing any damage to speak of. Those police officers will soon be memorialized with full departmental honors. I intend to give the eulogy myself.”

“WANT BE KING,” growled Mr. Mo, making me jump. He sounded like a concrete mixer churning.

“You will be,” said Tiny hastily. “Whatever you want, sir, you will for sure get it. How about something right now? How about a bowl of gumbo or a woman? Joey, go and get Miss Trish.” “WOO.MUN,” said Mr. Mo.

“Does he, uh, like women?” I asked.

“What, you think he’s not normal?”

I went out and brought in Miss Trish, who was smoking a cigarette.

“Oh shit,” she said.

“Now, now, now,” said Tiny. “I’m sure he won’t want to do anything we didn’t do sometime.”

“I ain’t screwing no animal,” she said. “I ain’t done that for years.”

“WANT BE KING,” grumbled Mr. Mo, reverting to his original idea, and his mouth went flick and an ornate, yard-high Chinese vase vanished.

“Good Christ, that thing cost me $3000,” said Mayor Louver. “He eats a cop, I can get another cop, but some of this furniture is priceless.”

“Ahem,” said Tiny. “His honor has asked me to take charge of this problem. He selected me for the job after losing two of his most valued associates, Chief of Police Remy Dorque and Guido Cantalabria, both of whom went where the furniture disappeared to, wherever that is.”

“They were upstanding citizens,” said the mayor, looking ready to cry. “It’s account of Remy that I’m going to give the eulogy. It’s so sad there ain’t anything to bury. Guido’s memorial service will be conducted by Archbishop Rummage in St. Louis Cathedral.”

“You guys,” Tiny resumed, “open those boxes you brung in.”

As we were obeying, Tiny said conversationally to Mr. Mo, “So how was your trip, sir? Poisonally, I hate to travel.”

The boxes contained the regalia of Rex, King of Carnival. There was a satin cape and a crown full of rhinestones, a scepter with rhinestones, a pair of white gloves, a mask set with more rhinestones, a tunic full of glitter and what looked like fancy silk drawers covered with sequins.

“These, sir,” said Tiny grandly, “are the official vestments of the King of New Orleans and we are going to clothe you in them right heah and now.”

The whole collection glittered and winked and flashed and Mr. Mo fixed first one eye and then the other on the regalia with, I hoped, approval.

“Joey,” said Tiny, “you hand the stuff one article at a time to the mayor. Ed, you present it — don’t just hand it, present it — to Mr. Mo. Tarp, you and Miss Trish help Mr. Mo into his gear. Trish, take that goddamn cigaroony out your mouth. Suppose he don’t like Kents, you want to lose your head?”

So right there in the mayor’s parlor we held Mr. Mo’s coronation. It went slowly. First of all, nothing fit; the fancy drawers wouldn’t go on at all because they were Size 40 and Mr. Mo was more like Size 100, if not more. As for the mask, forget it; the eye-holes were an inch apart, and Mr. Mo’s eyes were roughly a yard apart. The crown wouldn’t stay on his head until Miss Trish borrowed a switchblade knife that Tarp happened to have in one of his deep pockets and cut an elastic strap off some undergarment she was wearing and used it to tie the crown on.

The cape fit perfectly. Mr. Mo had trouble at first holding the scepter, because he didn’t have opposable thumbs, exactly. But when he got his suckers on it they held it firmly. You could see by the way he clutched it that he liked the feel of kingship.

We all bowed deeply except Tiny, who couldn’t. Tiny raised his stick and shouted, “Hail to the King!” at the top of his lungs, and Mr. Mo looked pompous, just like a king or a toad generally does, because he was both, sort of.

“And now, your majesty,” Tiny resumed, “we are going to take you to your palace. No,” he said in answer to a growl from Mr. Mo, “this place heah ain’t grand enough for you. This heah is just soivant’s quarters. Ed Louver is your soivant, and it’s good enough for him. For you we have an ancient mansion all ready, with food and drink and broads and whatever the hell you want, oh incredible one.”

So we all paraded out, Mr. Mo lurching, Tiny rotating, the rest of us scuffling along. The cops waiting on the porch were muttering, “Jesus X. Christ!” as we passed. We stowed Mr. Mo with some difficulty in the stretch limo that had formerly belonged to Guido Cantalabria. Since Guido’s driver had gone to the same place as his employer, the mayor called one of the cops down and ordered him to be Mr. Mo’s driver.

The cop moaned but obeyed. I noticed that he was careful to raise the glass shield between himself and his passenger and I wondered how much protection that would be if Mr. Mo happened to get pissed at something. Or simply hungry.

We didn’t bother with Tiny’s Cad or the Studebaker; all the rest of us piled into a second limo, belonging to the mayor, with me in the driver’s seat because His Honor’s usual driver had run away screaming at some point in the evening’s festivities. Tarp sat up front with me and Miss Trish sat on a jumpseat in back, facing the two political bigwigs.

“Where do we go?” I asked, starting up the biggest, purringest motor I had ever set key to. Regarding my state of mind, I might say that I seemed to be floating, whether from alcohol or fatigue or stress I don’t know. Yet I was beginning to have an inkling of the fact that Tiny Sulla knew what he was doing. He was a man with a plan, and for the first time in our acquaintance I was beginning to develop respect for him.

“Your place,” said Tiny. “That goddamn cave you live in, Joey.”

Long past asking questions, I swung smoothly away from the curb, and the limo with Mr. Mo in it followed us. On the way Tiny told us what we were going to do next.

ROYAL STREET, midnight. The same traffic, so that I had to pull the limo half up on the sidewalk to park. The cop driving the stretch job followed. When we piled out, Mr. Mo stopped at Fabacher’s Antiques to gaze at himself in a Victorian pier glass standing just inside the show window. I guess he liked what he saw, incredible as that seemed to the rest of us, because he didn’t eat anything or anybody. A couple of passersby glanced at him, and one said to another, “Some Quarter character.”

I swung open the squeaking wrought-iron gates and we all paraded into the patio, me leading because I knew the way, and Tarp and Miss Trish bringing up the rear holding Mr. Mo’s cape off the ground like it was a bridal train. I unlocked the big wooden door of my hovel and stepped back, and Mayor Louver stepped back, and Tiny murmured to Mr. Mo, “Enter upon your palace, your majesty.”

Mr. Mo stepped inside, noted I guess that it wasn’t a palace, and began to growl.

Then Tiny lurched up to the plate, swinging his big stick like a baseball bat, and smacked the monster on the back. Mr. Mo stumbled a step or two further into the darkness. Tarp was coming up, pulling a hand grenade from his pocket, and he jerked out the pin with his teeth and tossed the grenade between Mr. Mo’s webbed feet and slammed the door again and held it shut. I hit the ground with a thump; Tiny staggered against the wall beside the door, clawing at the brickwork because whacking Mr. Mo had unbalanced him. As for Miss Trish, she just ran screeching out of the gate.

There was a tremendous impact I felt in my teeth and the big old oak Spanish door jumped against Tarp’s arms and some fragments of steel punched through and went humming across the patio like big roaches in flight. One of them smacked Tarp upside the head and he reeled back. Fortunately, a couple of inches of heart oak had slowed the fragment down but still it must have felt like a nine-pound maul when it smacked him. He stood there bleeding lavishly, then shook his head, dragged out a big dirty handkerchief, and started dabbing at his skull.

For a few seconds nothing much happened. People in the upstairs apartments were screaming, was it an explosion in the brewery, was it an earthquake, etc. Meanwhile the door to my pad was opening slowly by itself, swinging out and releasing a hideous burnt smell like a fire of old truck tires. In the darkness inside little fires glowed and winked out under a deep dark cloud of smoke and dust that slowly surged and billowed out into the courtyard.

It must have been a good five minutes before the smoke dispersed somewhat and our eyes adjusted and we could begin to see the dim outlines of the wreck inside my pad. Tiny and Mayor Louver and I stood looking in, stupefied; I think Tarp was still mostly stunned. Trish had reappeared, curious to see what had happened, and she tied up Tarp’s head with some more of her underwear, his handkerchief being pretty well soaked.

Then, still curious, she took out a cheap cigarette lighter and approached the door.

“He’s dead, right?” she whispered.

“Dead and gone,” I assured her, because in fact Mr. Mo had vanished, evaporated, ceased to be. I couldn’t see anything left of him except a few rhinestones, winking amid the rubble.

Trish crept in and I followed her like a hypnotized man. The air inside was still bad, but after another minute the lighter burned with a steady blue flame. I don’t think I ever saw any place that was more thoroughly destroyed. It was awesome. There wasn’t a Chianti bottle left unshattered or a package of Trojans left unpunctured. The whole of my young life was in ruins.

Miss Trish whispered, “Joey, I don’t think you can live here no more.”

I was starting to agree with her when something fell on my hand and I brushed it off. Then something else fell on my head, and something squirmed under my foot and Miss Trish screamed.

I tell you, Charlie, some things I’ve seen I wouldn’t want to see again. My first thought was that every roach in the Quarter had invaded my pad and was advancing on me. Things were crawling all over, coming down the walls, dropping off the ceiling, migrating across the floor. But it wasn’t roaches. It was pieces of Mr. Mo, reassembling.

The pieces moved with kind of a humping motion. You ever see a migration of woollyworm caterpillars crossing the road? It was liked that, except the pieces were glistening and oily instead of furry. Miss Trish and I tripped over each other twice getting out of there.

Yeah, I ran. I admit it. I have a thing about roaches and other crawlies. When just one was flying around my apartment, I got the hell out. After what I had seen, my nerve broke. If it was any comfort, Mayor Louver and Miss Trish and even Tarpoleon were running too. It was the greatest display of mass cowardice since July 1861, when the U.S. Congress departed the battlefield of Bull Run at a gallop.

Poor old crippled Tiny Sulla was left behind to get away as best he could before Mr. Mo reintegrated and started asking him questions, like: is this how you treat your king? Suffice it to say there wasn’t time. So there was another name for the memorial service, and Mayor Louver had to add a paragraph to his eulogy. It was sad about Tiny; not only was I just starting to respect him, his going meant the end of my political career. Within a week I was working for a living.

So that’s your story, Charlie said, sourly. He was plainly incredulous.

Still, he didn’t get up and storm out. He waved to let John Nguyen, who owns the Authentic Old Creole Cafe,, know he wanted another cup of coffee as well as a croissant, but the crowd was such that he seemed as unlikely to get one as the other.

Then Charlie started to grill me.

Tell me this, he demanded. Why didn’t this Mr. Mo, the toad creature from Dimension X, destroy the city of New Orleans in revenge? Why are we sitting here at this minute in an undisturbed French Quarter full of living, breathing sleaze and eight million turistas?

Mayor Louver, I replied, sent Tarp to apologize to Mr. Mo and tell him the assassination attempt was all Tiny’s doing and offer to make him leader of the 38th Ward. After all, the position was vacant anyway. Tarp wasn’t eaten because Tiny Sulla was such a tremendous din that Mr. Mo had no capacity left. Or maybe he was afraid of being blown up again. Anyway, he listened.

Tarp said later he told Mr. Mo that we don’t have kings and that ward boss was as near to absolute power as he could get under the existing political system. So Mr. Mo took over down there; he was highly intelligent, learned the ropes, and soon began vending hot merchandise and lying and cheating like he was born to it.

He also inherited Miss Trish. I have no idea what those two did when they were alone together, and I don’t even want to think about it, but he paid her a lot better than Tiny had ever done and in time she was able to stop answering the whims of every creature that came along and go into business for herself. Today she has several 900 numbers and a stable of young people with Southern Comfort voices who offer telephone sex at four bucks a minute. She also owns a collection of thousand-dollar genuine-hair blonde wigs and a boy toy with whom she winters in Bermuda.

Mr. Mo, I went on, also needed somebody to guide and assist him while he was learning his new job, so Tarp got his old position back. When Mr. Mo decided to retire and enjoy life on this planet, Tarp took over the ward. It was time the 38th had a black leader anyway, and Tarp was no worse or better than the two monsters who had preceded him. He ran things much the old way until he became involved in the heroin traffic, which since Tiny’s time had developed into a major industry of the 38th. That’s a dangerous business, as you know, and poor old Tarp died in a hail of bullets apparently fired by gunmen sent by Apollo Corso, who succeeded Guido as the local godfather.

Tarp wasn’t buried from St. Louis Cathedral, but the Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ gave him a hell of a sendoff, and Mayor Detour, who had taken over the city by then, delivered the eulogy.

I suppose, said Charlie irrelevantly, that today nobody runs the 38th; the gangs just fight over the crack trade, and nobody’s in charge.

Nobody except the twelve-year-old hitmen, I said. It’s called progress.

And where, asked Charlie, still deeply skeptical, is Mr. Mo today?

Right over there, I said, enjoying my punchline. He’s sitting in the corner trying to catch a waiter like the rest of us. See who I mean? The big guy with the Times-Picayune? He’s sitting behind the two hookers and the guy dressed like a chicken, across from the voodoo queen and just to the left of the transvestites.

Good Christ, said Charlie, staring. He is strange. Even in the Quarter, you’d think somebody would notice him.

He keeps a low profile these days, I said. Eats Creole food instead of Creoles, gets photographed a lot on Mardi Gras, won a prize for his costume four or five years running. I mean, he’s joined the community, he’s accepted our standards. It was seeing him over there that started me telling you this story.

By the way, I added. He calls himself Mr. Meaux today. It’s the French influence. Look, he’s putting down his paper. I bet he’s tired of waiting for breakfast, and he’s about to get a croissant for himself. Watch this!

Wow! said Charlie. Talk about self-service!

At this point John Nguyen rushed up with our breakfasts, apologizing for the long wait.

It’s all these tourists, he said. We don’t mean to, but they get in the way and we shortchange our regulars.

Take it easy, John, I told him. Any luck, some of the tourists will be regulars, too, in time. That’s how a community grows.