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Acquisition Fever: A
Mardi Gras Essay
By L.D. Sledge
For those who have never experienced parades and Mardi Gras, you wouldn't believe what happens to you when they start throwing beads, trinkets, and doubloons. If you are on the street, you watch the jam-packed, crazed people around you with their arms in the air screaming, "Throw me something, mister," and the masked man on the float throws a long string of pearls and every hand grabs for it. Suddenly you are seized by a desire to catch something and there you are doing the same. By the end of the day you have several pounds of beads hanging round your neck and you have learned to only keep the good ones, and the rejected cheapies are crunching under your feet along with the beer cans, paper cups, and other debris. I had written a novel called Dawn's Revenge, a thriller set in the French Quarter. I wanted to write a sequel involving Mardi Gras (which I haven't gotten around to yet) and decided to join one of the big Krewes and ride on a float in order to integrate that experience into the new book. I joined Endymion, the biggest Krewe in New Orleans, in 1996. I think there may have been as many as sixty or seventy floats, some almost a block long, three stories high. They were immense. You buy your own throws, and this is a major industry in Louisiana for there are many outlying towns and cities all around New Orleans with their own parades. So we were able to go a day early to put our boxes of beads on the float. These beads range in price and quality from stupid little plastic beads strung on a short string to long, gorgeous forty-eight inch pearls or ornate balls and baubles that if they hit you, they would raise a knot on your head. They are damn expensive too, so you save them for special people on the route. We reported to a hotel near the Superdome, where our float was located. We were given our costumes and instructions. The mask was a plain expressionless man's face with holes for the eyes and mouth and holes for your nostrils to breathe, with a kind of headpiece attached that draped around the ears and back of the neck. Also there was a gown of sorts. They already had your size and your name on your costume, so when they called your name, you picked it up. They were well organized. I think there were around fifty people on my float, and we were given designated spots to stand. I was given the second story on the very rear of the float. There was to be NO DRINKING, and if you took off your mask, you were to be thrown off the float (excommunicated as it were from the sacred Krewe) for we were Masquers, and it was the mysterious Krewe of Endymion, the identity of whose members was part of the mystery. It was cold that night, but with all my clothes I was very hot. We were driven by busses to the starting point and then got on board our floats and into our places. I busted open some of my bead boxes and broke the paper seals that held two or three dozen strands together, and hung them up on the upturned hooks situated at chest high level, so they could be easily pulled free to throw. I was positioned by this guy from Chalmette (a suburb of New Orleans) who had to be six feet eight, weighing in at three hundred, a giant of a man who was a sheet metal worker. He was a serious Mardi Gras fan. He said, in his New Orleans-cum-Bronx brogue, "I don't go to no freakin’ Hawaii, I don't catch no airplanes nowheah, I do two parades a yeah, and dats plenty for me." He was a professional krewe member. He had ten monster size satin pillowslips stuffed with the most expensive thirty-six and forty-eight inch pearl beads. These are the kind of beads revelers would die or kill for, and he knew it. He was a real sadist, having been thrown off several Krewes for the things he did. I don't think he smiled the whole time, not that I could tell with the mask he was wearing. He bragged about gluing doubloons together and throwing them hard at people, hitting and hurting them. After the parade began, I watched him offload what appeared to be five grand in pearls. At the same time, I was very busy trying to throw my own investment of a couple of thousand wasted bucks into the crowd. I kicked myself later for it. But it was an experience and I can write about it now. There were crowds at the beginning of our route, and as we drew closer to downtown, the crowds got thicker and thicker. There were elaborate stepladders joined together to make high seats, with some having long nets on poles to catch beads. Many had their kids sitting on these little seats on the top of ladders, and on other ladders, there were women in t-shirts who willingly exposed their chests in exchange for our special beads. As we got closer to downtown, the crowds were twenty and thirty deep on Canal Street, reaching from the asphalt to the buildings, all screaming for beads. My sadistic partner on the back would dangle a string of beads over the back, while little boys would follow, jumping up and down trying to reach them, and finally, when they reached a peak of frenzy he would drop the beads and a fight would ensue with individual beads, broken from the strand, flying everywhere. I would hear him give a satisfied giggle. This guy was a piece of work! Imagine bands playing all around, echoing against the walls, music blaring from your own float, hundreds of thousands of people screaming for beads, a sea of reaching hands and upturned faces with wild eyes and open mouths yelling, “Hey, hey, here, throw me something..." Finally we got in view of the Superdome, and several blocks away we found we had lots of beads left. Some of the guys just bailed off, leaving dozens of boxes of expensive beads unopened. So we began throwing plastic packets of a dozen each until we reached the dome and still there were many beads left onboard when we finally stopped inside. The floats were parked around the football field where one big party was going on. Jerry Lee Lewis was playing on one side, and K C and the Sunshine band was playing on the other. I had a group of around thirty friends with me and the party went on until the early hours. I had enough beads left over to do my own mini-Mardi Gras a few years later while at the Sand Castle Restaurant in Clearwater, Florida, surprising everyone with wild music as my buddy Murray and I, in masks, pranced around the restaurant throwing beads. Those Europeans and Asians had no idea what was going on but soon they got into the swing of it and started grabbing beads and reaching for more. It is a crazy thing to watch people get the acquisition fever. As I write this, it's Mardi Gras right now, and at this moment in New Orleans, it is at its height if it isn't raining. |
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