NEW ORLEANS, Where They Let You in Free, Then Hit You With A $15 Drink Minimum — The cabbie was saying be careful.

We were angling our way into the French Quarter at 10:30 Monday night, the last all-out blitz before the end of Mardi Gras. A few blocks ahead was Canal Street and the Krewe of Orpheus parade. At 171 feet from curb to curb, Canal is one of the widest thoroughfares in the world. From what I could see, they needed every square inch of it at the moment.

But Mardi Gras is a series of paradoxes. People will wait for hours to catch beads they wouldn’t pay a dime for in June. What you were doing yesterday would get you arrested when Carnival is over. And while masses of people may consume a few city blocks, it can be dark and deserted and very dangerous less than 50 feet away.

“So when I want to get a cab home, I walk straight up the other end of the Quarter to Canal?” I asked.

The world was safely turning on its ear a few blocks away, but we were on Death Row, only without the iron bars. Just figures in doorways, no street lights.

“Yes,” he said. “Do not come back here.”

“Or I will get killed,” I said.

He actually turned and looked at me. I hate it when cabbies do that.

“Yes,” he said. “Or you will get killed.”

And there you have it.

I tip big for advice like that. I found out later that better advice would have been for him to suggest I go back to the hotel right then.

I landed close to Jackson Square. It was unlit and a little spooky. Only a couple hundred tourists were walking there. A guy was beating his bongo drums for change. I could hear faint sax sounds of “Misty.” A carriage passed, pulled by a horse wearing a plastic bra. (“So this drunk dyslexic horse walks into a bra…”)

I walked up into the Quarter, up Royal, down Chartres, and was surprised at how few people, relatively speaking, were there.

But then the parade ended, and at least six million strong steamed down every street, coming steadily from all directions, like blood through veins and into the heart of the French Quarter.

I was not long for the festivities after that, but I think I did stay long enough to capture the color and pageantry of The Night Before Fat Tuesday.

Basically, people would ask in loud voices to see body parts of other people and would offer Mardi Gras beads in exchange. This was the main thing that happened. The ONLY thing that happened, as far as I could tell.

People sure do love these beads. Beads were flying off balconies, toward balconies, from balcony to balcony, or sometimes just handed over, like you’d hand someone change for an Icee. It was a strange sort of bartering system.

At one point a siren sounded and it looked like an ambulance was coming right down Bourbon Street. It wasn’t. It was a truck spraying water, cleaning the streets, pushing the trash to the curbs. The crowd quieted, opened, and the truck passed. You could hear only the music and the spraying sound. Just as quickly, the crowd poured back into the middle of the street, and the truck was swallowed into the next block. It was surreal, like the whole experience.

And it wasn’t even midnight. For all I know, things hadn’t gotten weird yet.

I hit only the side streets the cabbie suggested, passing sleepy-eyed policemen on every dirty curb, and caught a carriage back to the hotel. I felt safe. Who would hurt a horse wearing a bra?

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