In New Orleans, the Party Goes On

To prepare for New Year’s Eve, the City of New Orleans sent a tanker truck marked “LEMON FRESH” to wet down the streets of the French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, which was founded in 1718, near where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Men with circular scrubbers and power washers followed, sudsing the sidewalks of Bourbon Street, which runs for twelve blocks, from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue. In “Bourbon Street: A History,” Richard Campanella writes that the corridor evolved from “a minor and rather middling artery” to “one of the most famous streets in the nation . . . a well-honed economic engine that employs thousands, pumps millions of outside dollars into the city’s economy, and single-handedly generates imagery and reputation about an entire metropolis.” Locals think of it as “a delectable mélange of historicity and hedonism”—or as “crass, phony, and offensive.” On New Year’s Day, a fifty-three-year-old Uber driver who introduced herself as Chanel told me, “Nobody who’s from here goes on Bourbon. I’ve been here all my life and I’ve probably been on Bourbon two times.”

Hours earlier, at around three-fifteen in the morning, an American terrorist from Texas, under the banner of ISIS, had plowed down a bunch of pedestrians on Bourbon Street with a Ford F-150 electric pickup truck, crashed, and jumped out shooting. Fifteen people, including the attacker, were dead. The French Quarter was now closed off and glowing with the static blue lights of police vehicles. A perimeter had been established, manned by law-enforcement officers in uniform and in tactical gear. Bellhops for the various hotels on Bourbon had been helping guests navigate their roller luggage past yellow crime-scene tape. Agents from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives were increasing in number; no one was yet sure if the attack was over. The killer had left improvised explosive devices in coolers in at least two locations on Bourbon Street, including one on the sidewalk near a Sheraton hotel; a remote-detonation device was found in his rented truck; and the A.T.F. was investigating a fire at the Airbnb where he was reportedly staying, in another neighborhood. There were concerns about accomplices. The confusion had been magnified when, later that morning, in Las Vegas, an active-duty member of the Green Berets, a special-forces unit of the Army, parked a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks and fuel cannisters at the entrance of a Trump hotel, then detonated the explosives. Before the blast, he shot himself in the head. He had rented his vehicle through the same contactless app, Turo, that the terrorist in New Orleans had used.

The cabbie who had driven me from the airport dropped me off a block away from my hotel, on Royal Street, around the corner from the scene of the carnage, which Google Maps had marked with a red exclamation point and a note: “French Quarter incident.” The Quarter, which measures a little more than half a square mile, is a jumble of boutiques, galleries, restaurants, bars, bookstores, hotels, antique shops, voodoo artisans, beignet cafés, and Daiquiri dispensaries, and despite the police perimeter, business was open. It was New Year’s Day and Sugar Bowl day. I passed scrums of revellers in red-and-black Georgia Bulldogs jerseys who seemed confused about what they should do—the game against Notre Dame had been postponed until the next afternoon. On Chartres Street, a Georgia fan was drunkenly yelling, “We ready to play some defense?” On Royal, a staggering local was singing, to no one in particular, “And fuck you! And fuck you!”

To attempt to comprehend anything, start with a historian. I called Frank Perez, an author and licensed tour guide who teaches at Loyola University. “I’m just shocked, dismayed, confused, worried,” he told me, and agreed to meet immediately as long as he didn’t have to come to the Quarter. The police had asked the public to avoid the district unless absolutely necessary; besides, Perez said, “I’m already half a bottle of wine in.” It was 7 P.M. He told me to come to the Marigny, a neighborhood over. Chanel was the one who picked me up, in a minivan, just outside the perimeter. She’d never liked driving into the Quarter anyway, because it’s a nest of one-way streets, roughly four thousand residents, and many thousands more tourists: “You always get stuck in there.”

The terrorist attack had left Chanel anxious to the point of wishing that she could afford to simply stay home. On her phone, when we were stopped at traffic lights, she showed me the Instagram page of one of the people who had been killed and whose name had not yet been publicly released. Chanel said that she was distantly related to the victim and told me details that later proved true, including the fact that the woman had a young son, and that her mother and her sister, who was eight months pregnant, were taken to the hospital, overcome with shock and grief.

Cross Esplanade, at the north end of Bourbon Street, and you’re in the Marigny, a gentrified neighborhood that was once a sugar plantation. Chanel stopped at the corner of Chartres and Marigny Streets, at the Friendly Bar. Perez, wearing a Georgia hoodie, was sitting outside at one of the café tables, sipping merlot, chain-smoking American Spirits, and stubbing his butts into a black plastic ashtray. Inside, a dozen or so people were quietly enjoying themselves in the festive glow of string lights; in the back, people were shooting pool. I ordered a beer and got Perez another single-pour bottle of Sutter Home, and when I joined him outside he told me that he’d learned of the attack from his partner, Chris Trentacoste, who had shaken him awake at six-thirty that morning to say that something awful had just happened in the Quarter. Perez’s first thought was “Some crazy fucker with a gun.” He told me, “New Orleans has been a soft target since 9/11. We are a destination city. We get eighteen to twenty million visitors a year. Every year, we have the Sugar Bowl. New Year’s Eve is always a big weekend here. Halloween is crazy. We have Southern Decadence. We have the Essence Festival, we have Jazz Fest, we have Mardi Gras. This is low-hanging fruit.”

After Perez got out of bed, he made a pot of coffee and obsessively watched the news. Nobody he knew went to Bourbon Street, especially that late, but a lot of people he knew worked there. “They’re waiters, bartenders, hotel workers that get off in the middle of the night,” he told me. “So l’ve been waiting all day for them to release the list of dead and injured.”

Perez and Trentacoste used to rent an apartment a block away from lower Bourbon Street. “We had a wraparound balcony, on the corner,” Perez told me. They could see Jackson Square and Louis Armstrong Park. “It was brilliant, but the building was in really bad shape, and the city made the owner renovate, which forced everybody to move out.” All that Perez could find in the Quarter were furnished apartments—“illegal Airbnbs”—so he and Trentacoste moved to the Marigny. “New Orleans is historically well documented as inefficient and corrupt,” Perez explained. “It’s a charming, beautiful city—the rich history and cultural contributions are off the scale—but it’s fucked up in many ways, and our politicians are never helping.”

Perez is a Baton Rouge native who has dark eyes and an olive complexion, and likes to explain things by starting with, “You gotta realize.” You gotta realize that the Indigenous people were here first and that their relationship with the French “turned sour because of patriarchy and European Christian arrogance, and all that.” You gotta realize that what fuels New Orleans’s “epic obesity,” “rampant alcoholism,” “love for partying and joie de vivre” is an acute awareness of our mutual “impending mortality.” He told me, “We understand that we need to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. We feel that in our souls. What other city would devote an entire season to Carnival—to fantasy, to creativity, to artistic expression? Yeah, we drink—people down here are born with a blood-alcohol content. But that’s not New Orleans. New Orleans is embracing life.”

Although Perez moved to the Marigny, his Web site is still frenchquarterfrank.com. He writes books and is working on an archival project about Louisiana’s L.G.B.T.Q.+ history. His guided tours are by appointment only, and he likes to keep his numbers small. One group might like to hear about New Orleans’s literary history while another might like to know about the Caribbean, German, and Irish immigrants. In discussing decay and revival, he might reference the 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair, desegregation, white flight. The one type of tour that he refuses to do is a ghost tour: “All that stuff’s bullshit.”

The terrorist, a forty-two-year-old Army veteran whose name was Shamsud-Din Jabbar, had driven to New Orleans from the Houston area to carry out a plan that made use of a diabolically simple tool—an automobile—to kill a lot of people, horrifically, all at once. This has happened, by some counts, at least two hundred times in the past quarter century, but the strategy became widely known on the night of July 14, 2016, when a radicalized Tunisian who had been living in France plowed a nineteen-ton cargo truck through throngs of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, killing eighty-six. At the time, France was planning to lift a national state of emergency that had been in place since November of the previous year, when a series of coördinated ISIS attacks—outside a football game; at cafés and restaurants; at an Eagles of Death Metal concert—killed a hundred and thirty people. The massacre on the Promenade des Anglais, a pedestrian mall, revealed what ISIS called a “new, special operation using a truck.” Terrorists could find success by looking for large, undefended crowds that could be struck at high speeds. Vehicle attacks have since happened in Charlottesville, Virginia; on a bicycle path near the World Trade Center; and, several weeks ago, at a Christmas market in Germany. Counterterrorism experts had warned that it could happen on Bourbon Street.

After the attack in Nice, New Orleans installed steel bollards that could be electronically raised and lowered around Bourbon Street, but the bollards were either in disrepair or were laxly used, according to Interfor International, a New York-based investigative and intelligence services company that prepared a security assessment for the French Quarter in 2019. The city said that the machines were gunked up with Mardi Gras beads, and is reportedly replacing them in preparation for the Super Bowl, which is scheduled to take place in New Orleans in February. On New Year’s Eve, there were no bollards. A police cruiser was parked across the Canal Street entrance to Bourbon Street. Jabbar went around it, using part of the sidewalk, and accelerated.

He made it several blocks up Bourbon Street before crashing. Witnesses who had managed to get out of the way saw him emerge from the truck, firing a gun. Officers with the New Orleans Police Department shot back, killing him. If the I.E.D.s had gone off, the death toll might have been far worse. Perez told me that he kept thinking of “the symbolism of New Year’s Day. New hope, new optimism, new chance, new start.”

On the plane to New Orleans, I watched the first press conference addressing the attack. It featured LaToya Cantrell, the mayor, and the first woman to hold the office; the governor, Jeff Landry, a Republican who is in his first term and previously was the attorney general of Louisiana; U.S. Senator John Kennedy, also a Republican, who seemed eager to impart about how much he distrusted the federal government; Alethea Duncan, the F.B.I. assistant special agent in charge; and Anne Kirkpatrick, the New Orleans police chief, a career officer with a silver Dora the Explorer bob. Perez, who was also watching, told me that he had admired Duncan and Kirkpatrick and found Landry and Kennedy loathsome, in part because they are devoted to Donald Trump, the President-elect. “I was embarrassed,” Perez said. “You got the governor, who’s a fucking moron, and our U.S. senator, who’s a fucking idiot, mansplaining to female reporters why they shouldn’t ask questions at a press conference?” I had already noticed how folksy and tough-talking Kennedy had sounded at the presser, but I hadn’t mentioned this to Perez when he said, “This motherfucker went to Oxford. He is not as stupid as he comes off.”

The mayor was a Democrat, but she, too, had been “a complete disappointment.” Perez explained, “There’s no accountability, and that’s the real problem. I mean, people bitch about New Orleans—the streets can’t be fixed, it takes a year and a half to get a pothole filled, traffic lights are out for months at a time.” No wonder the bollards weren’t working. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, Perez went on, the federal government gave New Orleans a “massive amount of money” for infrastructure improvements; the city was scrambling to spend it ahead of a looming deadline, and to make upgrades in order to fulfill its obligation to host the 2025 Super Bowl. “I mean, it’s like waking up drunk, hungover, dead hooker in the bed, and you gotta be at work in ten minutes,” Perez said.

Jabbar’s Airbnb was north of the Marigny. A doorbell camera caught him unloading his truck in the hours before the attack; other footage would show him in the Quarter, dropping off the coolers, dressed nicely in a calf-length coat, jeans, brown shoes, and black-rimmed glasses. As a young soldier who deployed to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne, he was clean-shaven; now he had a graying beard. The Times reported that Jabbar was raised Christian in Beaumont, Texas, and had converted to Islam, along with his father, whose surname was originally Young, and some of his brothers; Jabbar recently moved to a Muslim neighborhood near Houston, within easy reach of two mosques, although residents and a mosque spokesperson didn’t recall him attending prayers. He was several times divorced and, despite having a six-figure job at Deloitte, the global consulting and auditing firm, was under significant financial strain. Lately, he had been talking about Satan, the manipulative power of music, and “end times.” While driving to New Orleans on New Year’s Eve, he had recorded videos of himself saying that he had initially planned to kill his family but decided to focus on what he called “the war between the believers and the disbelievers.” A flag associated with the Islamic State was attached to the rear of his truck. Jabbar had never mentioned ISIS, according to his brother, who told CNN that he spoke with him almost daily. His father added, “He wasn’t going through something that we knew of.”

Jabbar set fire to the Airbnb, to destroy evidence, which included an explosive compound that reportedly had not yet been seen in I.E.D. configurations in the United States. “It’s something that has appeared in instructional videos created by Hezbollah that have appeared in overseas forums,” John Miller, an ABC News correspondent turned F.B.I. and N.Y.P.D. counterterrorism official turned CNN security analyst, said, on the air, on Friday night. This did not necessarily indicate that someone had sent the materials to Jabbar, or helped him. Instructions were available online and could be made with “kitchen utensils and supplies at home.” With enough patience, a self-radicalized lone actor—counterterrorism officials’ worst fear for decades—could figure it out. By Sunday, the F.B.I. revealed that the layered nature of Jabbar’s plot suggested advanced planning; investigators were unravelling details about recent trips that he’d made to Cairo and Canada, and said that Jabbar had visited New Orleans in October and November. On October 30th, he rode a bike through the Quarter while wearing Meta glasses, which have the capability of recording video.

A bomb squad reportedly detonated the two I.E.D.s that Jabbar had placed on Bourbon Street. At the Friendly Bar, a guy who was sitting near Perez and me heard us talking about the detonations and said that one had happened right outside his apartment: “I woke up to, ‘Fire in the hole!’ ” His name was Clint Johnson, and he was a duelling-pianos player on Bourbon Street. He wore a hoodie, a newsboy cap, and little wire-framed glasses; his beard was part goatee, longish in the front. He was having a beer with his friend Josh, who worked in a kitchen but was also, according to Johnson, “the best beatboxer in the city.” Josh had on Puma everything—sweats, socks, slides—plus an orange W.N.B.A. hoodie and a baseball cap that said “C.U.M.,” which stood for Crazy Uncle Mike’s, a brewery and live-music venue in Boca Raton, Florida. Josh had acquired the cap two nights earlier by trading a Yellowstone National Park hat that his now ex-girlfriend had given him.

Johnson and Perez commiserated about what Johnson called the “political fucking grandstanding” by the governor and the senator, at the presser. “This is just Jeff Landry trying to appease all of the fucking oligarchs that are trying to fucking make the fucking Super Bowl still happen in this fucking city,” Johnson said. He recalled seeing a large number of heavily armed law-enforcement officers in the Quarter on his way to work on New Year’s Eve and wondering whether it was all show. On Friday night, Don Aviv, the C.E.O. of Interfor, the consulting company that had issued the dismal assessment of the Bourbon Street security posture, told Anderson Cooper, on CNN, that the attack was “absolutely avoidable.” It had been known since the massacre in Nice that vehicle ramming had become “the vector of choice for a number of terrorists and just individuals who are clearly mentally unwell.” Aviv said that Interfor had also discovered poor communication and “a fiefdom scenario” among police and security agencies in the French Quarter. Cooper asked him, “Do you know what happened after you issued that report?” Aviv replied, “Once we issued our report, we never heard from them again.”

Johnson feared that the governor would use Bourbon Street as a means to “control the French Quarter”—for the money and for “total control of this fucking blue blip in this fucking red sea.” Perez agreed, explaining, “The tourism money from New Orleans funds most of the state.” A night later, Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, Billy Nungesser, a Republican, told CNN, “The mayor and her team failed miserably.” He said that he’d been trying, for two years, to keep quiet the fact that balusters around Jackson Square, a prime destination in the Quarter, were in need of replacement: “We didn’t want people to know you could drive through that pedestrian mall.” Crime was “taking over” the historic district. It was true that the homicide rate had spiked recently. Nungesser said, “Unfortunately, it took a tragedy like this to bring to light the lack of leadership.”

Perez was trying to focus on matters that he could control, namely his annual Twelfth Night party. Carnival season, the high-spirited weeks leading up to the hedonistic blowout of Mardi Gras, always begins on January 6th, the twelfth night after Christmas. “It’s very common in New Orleans for people to take down their Christmas decorations on January 6th and put up their Carnival decorations,” he told me.

Perez is well known in New Orleans’s L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, and his party is “like, the official start of gay Carnival.” The city’s nine or ten gay krewes all attend. (New Orleans has some seventy Mardi Gras krewes, private clubs that put on parades featuring elaborately glittering, handmade costumes and headpieces, with irreverent themes involving royalty. Perez’s is called the Krewe de la Rue Royale Revelers.) Perez sells tickets for forty dollars, fifty at the door. The tickets are actually customized lapel pins, which Perez distributes to bartenders and friends, who sell them on his behalf. Carnival participants collect and wear these pins like war decorations.

Perez’s party takes place in the atrium of the Mardi Gras Museum of Costumes and Culture, at the edge of the Quarter. “I’ve got d.j.s, I’ve got go-go boys, I’ve got performers, I’ve got singers, I’ve got twenty staff,” he told me. Cancelling was not an option. After Katrina, there were concerns, expressed nationally, about whether it was appropriate to carry on with Carnival after so much suffering and death. “I was, like, You have no idea what this city’s about,” Perez said. “To not have Mardi Gras would have been a surrender.”

The morning after Perez and I hung out at the Friendly Bar, we met for breakfast in the Quarter, at a café called Wakin’ Bakin’. He had on a burgundy zip-up fleece and a New Orleans Saints hat, and would eat only a fruit cup; as a Carnival king, he wanted to feel svelte. We had been talking about the fact that he sometimes envisages a word in marquee lights above a stranger’s head—“PATIENCE”—or gets a dream visitation from his grandfather, who gives him advice, when he looked out the window and recognized a guy who was climbing onto a bicycle, to ride to work. He bolted out the door and chased the guy down. Back at the table, he told me, “He wants to buy two tickets.” Perez said, “Years ago, after the terrorist attack in London, on the tube, I’ll never forget it—somebody did an interview with a woman who was, like, ‘We’re not afraid.’ That’s always stuck with me.” He added, “A hundred years from now, historians will look back at this terrorist attack and consider it one more jab in a three-hundred-year history of problems that New Orleans has faced. We’ve had hurricanes, fires, yellow-fever epidemics, other plagues, an astronomically high murder rate. We had the BP oil spill. We had Katrina. Now we have this.”

After breakfast, Perez ran into Mike Sullivan, a retired paralegal who has lived in the French Quarter for forty-three years. During Katrina, Sullivan evacuated to Ohio, where he’s from, but had returned to New Orleans in a small pickup that his brother gave him, the first vehicle that Sullivan ever owned. He pointed it out to me on the street and said it still ran great. About a decade after the hurricane, Sullivan took up a meditation practice, eventually settling on the Thích Nhất Hạnh style of mindfulness, which involved recognizing his feelings and letting them go. On New Year’s Day, he had noticed that he felt compassion for the visitors who had been caught in an unthinkable act of violence, and for the law-enforcement officers who were standing watch at the end of his block. One state trooper had held his corner for twenty-two hours. “He was so nice and so kind, and answered people’s questions,” Sullivan said. “They’ve all been very graceful about it.” He walked Perez and me to his apartment building and showed us into a sublime courtyard, which had banana trees, a fountain, a gas lantern, and balconies, and said, “You never know what’s behind these courtyard doors.”

Perez wanted to make his rounds, collect some ticket money. We headed to NOLA Poboys, on Bourbon Street near Dumaine. A drunken man wearing Mardi Gras beads greeted him with, “What’s up, family?” Perez didn’t know him. The guy said, “Let me tell you something. This motherfuckin’ scene that we went through? You don’t have to be Black, white, whatever. Love us. Am I correct?”

“You’re absolutely right,” Perez told him.

“I’m American, homie.”

At the counter, a chalkboard read “ALL OUR FRIED FOOD IS SPICY. Other options include: YANKEE (MILD), CURSING MURRAY IN THE MORNING (VERY SPICY).” Perez asked the employee who was working the counter, John Hix, if he was coming to his Twelfth Night party and if he was going to be all right. “Well, I don’t know,” Hix said. “I expected this to happen at a gay bar, honestly.” Perez noticed a bulge on Hix’s torso and asked, “Is that a bulletproof vest?”

“You got it,” Hix said, pounding the bulge.

He’d started wearing the vest that day. On his waist, he wore a mace gun and a stun gun. On his hands, he wore brass-knuckle gloves. He had on a huge cross necklace and a nametag that said “Size Matters.” In July, state lawmakers had decided that eighteen-year-olds were allowed to carry handguns without a permit. Certain cannabis gummies were now illegal, though. “That’s the problem?” Hix said. He then put on a pair of “bear claw” kitchen utensils that are used for shredding roast meat and demonstrated how they could double as a weapon “if you gotta go hand to hand.” Behind the counter, he had a police baton and pepper spray. I asked what he was afraid of. He said, “I work on Bourbon Street—I’m not afraid of anything.”

Next up, Perez stopped at Lafitte’s in Exile, a bar near the northern end of Bourbon Street and the oldest continually operating gay bar in the United States, according to him. The bartender was a maybe for a party ticket: “I need to pay a bill.” Walking on, Perez showed me Lenny Kravitz’s former home and then stopped at another bar to check on more ticket money and a list of the names of those who’d bought them. Perez asks the bartenders to keep handwritten lists. The bartender told him, “Full bar and you want me to stop? I love you to death, but you should have called me, Frank. I’d have had it ready for ya.” At the next stop, the Corner Pocket, which is known for boys who dance on the bar, the bartender, who had glittery burgundy nails, counted out several hundred dollars. Perez tucked the cash into a cross-body bag that he wears on his route, and remarked that this year’s party might be better than ever. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “People in New Orleans have this wonderful we-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. William Faulkner compared New Orleans to an old whore. Not as young as she used to be, not as beautiful as she used to be, dim and tarnished with age, but every day she sits on her chaise lounge fanning herself and smiles at everyone who comes her way.” He went on, “Some fuckin’ piss-ant terrorist is gonna try and ruin us? Fuck you. Best Mardi Gras of my life was after Katrina. Hardly any tourists there. It was all locals.”

Our last stop was the Mardi Gras Museum, where the party would be—cement floors, high ceilings, mannequins in sumptuous costumes. The museum’s owner, Carl Mack, who had on a “Music Man” hat, was leading a singalong with a group of tourists. A staffer was cutting a cinnamon king cake. We slipped past and into the costume-rental area—cloaks, feathers, plastic bins labelled “BOW TIES,” “CUFFS,” “CHEERLEADER,” “DOMINATRIX.” Perez showed me the atrium, where he’d parade in the “grand processional,” beneath a tunnel of tipped flags, and take his position as monarch onstage. He would read the royal proclamation, which would start, as it always did, something like, “Whereas the rest of the country is settling down after New Year’s. . . . ” Perez told me, “You gotta realize, we don’t take ourselves seriously. We’re pretty tanked up.” As if on cue, a person in a mirrored top hat and a mirrored suit walked through the room without saying a word.

Perez and I walked back to Bourbon. By now, the city had reopened the street and mourners were leaving flowers and crosses at the place where so many had died, having come there from Mississippi, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Slidell, Long Island, the suburb of Metairie. Witnesses had been sharing publicly their traumatic memories of seeing the bodies of loved ones and strangers flattened and contorted and torn apart. A second-line band had moved down the street that morning, making way for a new wave of crowds. A woman was walking through with a fat, smoking stick of sage, to clear away the “negative energy.” Perez didn’t want to continue down Bourbon, but we’d again run into Sullivan, who did. He and I strolled all the way to Canal, where the truck had made its final turn. The mirrored man appeared, reflecting sunlight in a million directions. Sullivan told him, “Happy New Year.” ♦