Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Outside, the crowd resembled an endless copulation of confused ants. Inside, a woman attached herself to the Doggfather and squirmed in the light of temporary stardom.
Feb 19, 2002 | There was no surprise when Snoop Dogg and the pimps wound up with the girls. There was frustration among the rest of us. But no surprise. That was just the nature of things. And at a Girls Gone Wild party, nature has a way of simplifying the complexities of life.
Girls Gone Wild, the guerrilla video series that advertises on late-night TV, features endless loops of drunk, usually Southern young women flashing their breasts at Spring Break and other similarly public settings. In five years of operation, Girls Gone Wild has managed to dominate a category of its own creation; as such, Mardi Gras is the closest thing it has to a trade show.
It was the final Saturday of Mardi Gras, and all around us girls were going wild. There was Sarah-Brooke from Mississippi. Crystal from Clearwater. And Crystal from Orange County. Bulbous bits popped out of nowhere, from everywhere. The pimp in the sequined pastel Technicolor suit with matching cowboy hat smiled an alligator smile. He knew all about the long and terrible journey that had taken these tummy shirts from broken homes to the crumbling balcony that overlooked Bourbon St.
Mardi Gras started on the plane. A man stopped the boarding flow to stand in the aisle and spray clouds of cologne onto his neck. The airline handed out bead necklaces. A passenger showed his scrotum to a flight attendant. When the plane landed, a female voice came over the intercom: "Welcome to New Orleans." A deep-throated yell came from the bulkhead. "Show us your tits!"
The party had been swinging for something approaching two weeks, and this year had been gracious enough to include the Super Bowl. Fat Tuesday, the official final bell, was three nights away, though our cabbie figured that would be an anticlimax. "This is the night lots of tits come out," he said, rolling a toothpick across his lips. "After tonight, Mardi Gras is over, as far as I'm concerned."
The streets were clogged with all kinds of accumulated debris. Steaming piles of swishy garbage. A battered Domino's Pizza cart. Tweaked white kids with dreadlocks and ugly stains on their store-bought khakis. All of it locked in the narrow streets, the buildings closing in on either side, their trellised balconies dripping with middle-aged drunks in paper party hats. People grabbed complete strangers and gave them bear hugs, equally prepared for brotherhood or violence, any kind of physical exchange in the soul-robbing milange. Screams and hoots rang out in all directions.
In the middle of it all, a malnourished man in a long beard bore a tall white cross. He shouted into a bullhorn. "You will never see heaven." Behind him, two guys with Greek letters on their shirts loaded a pink beer bong for a friend in shiny new sneakers. "But the good news is, if you accept Jesus Christ, you won't have to see hell." The friend puked on his Pumas.
Everywhere, there were whispers of Snoop Dogg, bringer of The Chronic. If it was to be believed, Snoop was coming to Mardi Gras, and he was partying at each and every person's very own get-together. "Snoop Dogg's coming to the party tonight," went the whispers along Canal St. "Dude, they paid him like one-point-five million." "I saw his limo like an hour ago."
We were all glad to be upstairs on the Girls Gone Wild balcony. And not just for the prospect of sex and free booze. From up above, the street resembled an endless copulation of confused ants, robbed of the gene that coded purpose. People crushed against each other, back to front, cheek to shoulder blade, like destitutes heading for a U.N. grain depot. Was this fun?
A large man lost his balance on the curb. He stumbled into a few guys standing in front of him. They in turn bashed into the backs of the people in their immediate radius. Within a second, one person's stumble rippled through the entire crowd, making its mark not only in abstract energy, but in the wave splash of a man's head against the wall of a stucco building on the opposite side of the street.
No, this wasn't fun; it was to be endured. Most everybody understood the predicament. There would come along now and again a guy who took the bumps personally. On the far side of the street, a nudge became a shove, and so a punch was born. The blows came in ranging, swinging turns -- clocking throats, noses, and sides of heads. At any one time, there were seven people involved in the escalating melee. One side would throw, and then the other in turn. This provoked something more than a ripple through the horde; more of a tidal wave, sending bodies, yelps, and debris rushing in every direction from the central point of conflict. The combatants jumped up and down. They smiled at each other, then swung and connected. They relished the release.
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