Jack Boulware

This began innocently enough, as a magazine assignment about Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The Joie de Vivre of Alan Greenspan

I’m standing with luggage in front of the Marriott Hotel on Canal Street. I haven’t checked into my room. I’d like to. For the past three hours I’ve been trapped on a street meridian, pinned down by a cacaphony of floats and marching bands. The parade looks easy to cross, but a policewoman says don’t even think of it.

I’ve made some new friends here on the meridian. There’s two drunk guys from Iowa, their equally shitfaced friend from Wisconsin, and an uptight blonde woman from Houston. We guard our pile of suitcases, making bad jokes, and someone comes up and gives all of us Mardi Gras beads.

Historians trace a pre-Lent festival back to the Middle Ages in France, possibly even ancient Rome. The Mardi Gras carnival has been going on in New Orleans since 1837, and the French Quarter architecture is partly to blame: All the second-story residences have balconies for sipping cocktails and watching the drunks. So once you make it to a balcony with a drink, what’s it supposed to be about?

“Izz about beads and boobs.” A Texas blonde named Kimberly leans on a railing. Since her steroid-beast husband is standing right behind us, I lower my voice and ask, “So, have you ever flashed for beads?”

“Ah did it wunce…But it wudn’t a balcony—izz just ohn the street.”

Down below, waves of humans crash together and form a roiling tidepool of inebriated stupidity. It’s relatively easy for one 18-year-old to stumble around the muddy garbage of Bourbon Street, lift up the shirt, and holler like a fool, but if you do this while accompanied by half a million sweaty friends, it’s apparently quite the deal. Music pours out of bars, restaurants, oyster houses, strip clubs, tattoo parlors. A young couple attempts to screw in a doorway. High school kids guzzle from absurdly large bottles of Bud Lite. That’s a lot of really bad beer in one container.

I inch down Bourbon like a cat burglar on a window ledge, and then am jettisoned onto a side street. An old guy leans against a building, watching and sipping a Hurricane from a plastic football. He’s dressed in a Scottish kilt and sensible black wingtips. Something’s strangely familiar about him. The thinning hair and beak nose. The slumpy posture. But it’s ridiculous. What would Alan Greenspan be doing here at Mardi Gras? I stand next to him, trying not to stare. It’s uncanny. Maybe I’ve had a few cocktails, but this guy looks exactly like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Time to find out.

“What’s the interest rate these days?” I ask.

His head snaps around. Jesus, it is him. “That’s one way of putting it,” he mumbles.

“Pardon me for asking, but aren’t you…”

He nods slowly, the smiling king acknowledged by the subject. “I love New Orleans. Come every year.”

We’re interrupted by a young kid in a do-rag, who staggers out from the mob and retches up a torrent of pink bile. He spits and lurches off.

“That’s why you don’t buy a Hurricane on Bourbon Street,” says Greenspan. He wipes off his shoe with a handkerchief. “Rotgut rum. Nicer places make it with two kinds. Gotta use the good stuff.” He takes a meaningful sip, eyeing me to make sure I understand.

I try to remember tidbits from magazine articles. Keep him talking. Something about playing the clarinet. “The music is great in this town,” I say.

“I first came here with Henry Jerome and his Orchestra. It was really swinging, back in the 40s.”

“Ever see Pete Fountain, or Al Hirt?”

“Hirt had some style,” he says. “Fountain is a hack.”

We continue drinking and watching the crowd. The journalist inside me is melting—Alan fucking Greenspan!

“This doesn’t really seem to be your type of place.”

“The world is full of surprises.” He hands me the football, pulls out a phone, and speed-dials a number. “Hello Roger. I’m fine, doing much better, thanks. Must have been a 24-hour bug.” He shoots me a look.

“Roger, I’ve been looking over the numbers, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to lower the rate another half-point. We’ll announce on Monday.” He takes back the football. “It leaks to the press tonight, it’s on the talk shows all weekend. Monday I’ll deny it.” His beady eyes twinkle.

Hyperventilating pundits, news agencies whipping up charts and graphs, all because an old rascal in a kilt makes a phone call at Mardi Gras.

“This your first time to New Orleans?” When I say yes, he crooks a finger. “Follow me, young man. We’re in for some fun.”

After half a block, the person in control of the United States economy stops in front of a strip joint called the Gold Club, and whispers, “Once we’re inside, call me Tony, alright?”

We’re greeted by two thick-necked bouncers. “Welcome to the Gold Club, gentlemen. Tony! Good to see you again!” A waitress passes by: “Hello, Tony!” Another man with a headset waves: “Right this way, Tony.”

We’re led to a corner booth. On the table is a card: “Reserved for Tony.”

I slide in next to “Tony,” and within seconds our table is surrounded by young perfumed bikinis, cooing and stroking his hair. I can’t believe I’m actually in a tittie bar with the Mack Daddy of the Federal Reserve. He finally comes up for air and adjusts his glasses. “Buy you a dance?”

He selects two of the girls, like a sports coach choosing between athletes. The others groan in mock disappointment and vanish. Our designated dancers begin undulating. Over the music, I say, “I remember Ayn Rand from college. Founder of the Objectivist movement. You knew her, right?”

“Ayn was a good friend, yes. I was a strong supporter. I was even married to one of her friends.” He watches the dancer push her breasts into his nose.

“Would she approve of something like this? She was all about individual rights, but wasn’t she opposed to hedonism?”

“One of the tenets of Objectivism is that romance and sex is an integrated response of mind and body,” says Greenspan. “Pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence.”

A high-heeled shoe materializes on his shoulder, and painted fingers run slowly from the toes up to the crotch. “Whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. Even Ayn had an affair outside her marriage.”

“So in other words,” I say, momentarily distracted by a bouncing green thong, “it’s okay to act on hedonistic desires, if you’ve approached it rationally, and made the conscious decision to do so?”

He ignores me, and thumps out a flourish on the girl’s buttocks, playing them like a pair of flesh bongos. She giggles.

Two beefy guys in LSU caps at the next table applaud the effort. “God-DAMN,” one says. “I never seen nuthin’ like THAT before, ah tell you WHAT!”

Greenspan pulls out a wad of 20s and pays the dancers. “The clubs are so much better than when I was young.” I notice his kilt has been pushed aside by an impressive erection, a formidable 70-year-old root which threatens to leap out of his leopard briefs. It makes me a little sick. Greenspan catches my gaze. “Nothing wrong with a little irrational protuberance, is there?”

A squeal suddenly pierces the strip club: “To-neeeeee! Ohmigod, where were you last night—I missed you!” Two girls run up to our table.

“This is Persia,” says Greenspan. “She’s studying erotic geology at Tulane.”

“Tony! This is my friend Cheyenne. She danced for you at that party? Ohmigod, I HAVE to tell you—remember I was telling you about my roommate’s sister’s friend, the one from Baton Rouge whose brother is in that band? You know, I gave you their CD? Well anyway, they got a record deal, and they want to PUT ME IN THEIR VIDEO!”

“That’s wonderful,” smiles Greenspan, with the ease of a man accustomed to receiving such information. He checks his watch and whispers, “I’ve got a car outside. Let’s grab the girls and take it up a notch.”

The night is humid and noisy. Police are handcuffing a drunk on the hood of the stretch limo. We climb inside. The driver eases into traffic and looks in the rear-view. “Where to, Mister Chairman?” Greenspan glares at him. “I mean, Tony, sir.”

“Frenchman Street,” orders Greenspan.

The strippers immediately fold down one of the limo’s execu-desks and dump a small envelope of white powder into a pile.

“Ohmigod, that’s so much—you wanna do it all?”

“Fuck yeah, girl, it’s Mardi Gras! WHOOOOO!”

Greenspan chuckles and waves a fatherly no thanks. I follow his lead. One girl cuts up the drugs into lines. The other cranks up a Moby CD, sticking her tongue out and shaking to the beat. It’s a very rock star moment. We should just crack open a couple of Heinekens and enjoy it, but I can’t stop:

“Ayn Rand also wrote that government should stay out of the way of the people. That a government should only serve to protect man from crime and physical force. Then how come you work for the government? You’re the Fed. Your decisions affect everyone in America.”

Greenspan looks down his beak. “You’re kind of a smart-ass, aren’t you?”

I quickly start asking about his job, and he delivers a dull monologue, definitely on autopilot. Worked under four presidents from both parties, equity markets, forward rate agreements. I nod dumbly.

“It can be stressful,” he says. “I look forward to New Orleans. Recharges the batteries.”

“But what about your wife? Andrea Mitchell, the newscaster. Doesn’t she come here with you?”

He admires the bare bellies of the girls, who are now sticking out the sun roof, screaming at pedestrians.

“She’s usually working. And we have an understanding. Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘Eating isn’t cheating?’”

We stop at Frenchman Street, which is blocked with a drum circle. Someone sells balloons from a communal tank of nitrous oxide. Two fencers engage in a swordfight. A woman juggles a flaming baton. People spill out the doors of bars, dancing to the live music. Nobody looks twice at two coked-up strippers and an old man in a kilt.

We turn a corner and stop in front of a sinister old mansion. Like most of New Orleans, it’s moldering and covered in vines. Greenspan knocks three times, then twice. A dark-skinned bald woman in a vinyl catsuit opens the door: “TONY! Git cho ass IN here! We already STARTED.”

The catsuit woman leads us through a corridor and down a circular staircase into a brick-walled cavern. It’s packed with rowdy drunks, dressed in Mardi Gras costumes and S/M gear. Candles decorate a voodoo shrine built around a framed portrait of Ayn Rand. Up above, a big-screen video plays “The Fountainhead,” Rand’s turgid film adaptation of her own turgid novel. It’s the final courtroom scene, where an architect played by Gary Cooper defends himself against a world of compromise:

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective mind.”

The room bursts into cheers. I elbow my way through and duck into an antechamber. It smells musky, but at least there’s no Ayn Rand. Just a woman with clothespins on her nipples, a couple dressed as ponies, and a man lashed to a wooden wheel. A puddle of urine is on the floor beneath him. He’s getting flogged by two dominatrixes in chef’s hats. His hair is perfect.

I approach a bearded man dressed as a fairy, and ask, “Excuse me, doesn’t that looks like—“

“Emeril Lagasse.” The fairy hitches up his leotard. “Hottest chef in town.”

“Does he do this every Mardi Gras?” I ask.

“Y’all can set your WATCH to it.”

Lagasse suddenly lets out a loud groan. My cue to rush back into the main room. The girls have disappeared, but Greenspan is standing on his toes, looking out over the costumed scene. “Everyone loves a party. I usually see Daschle and Orrin Hatch at these things….”

Of course there would be politicians. “Mostly Democrats?” I ask.

“It’s about 50-50,” he says. “Democrats always want to be put on the guest list.”

The evening was kind of charming about an hour ago. The Fed, the strippers. I could even see Lagasse getting whipped, just on principal. But now it’s beyond entertaining.

Glasses are held up, and the crowd chants in unison: “It’s time for the ceremony! It’s time for the ceremony!” The bearded fairy steps in front of the shrine. I can just make out that he’s carrying an adult chimpanzee.

“Reason is man’s only means of perceiving reality. To face the future we must consume our past.” The fairy raises a bejeweled dagger above the monkey’s head. “Stand in line to receive the brains!”

The group pushes someone to the front, he’s holding out a goblet with both hands. Greenspan! It’s too much. I shove the fairy aside, snatch the ape and head for the stairs, chased by a court jester, a Carmen Miranda and a giant slice of pepperoni pizza. “Where are you going?” yells Greenspan. “Bring back that monkey!” He bolts across the room.

“No!” I shout. “Our government is run by a secret cult of Ayn Rand freaks!” I pound up the stairs, Greenspan’s wingtips close behind.

“Is it a cult, or simply a group of rational humans making reasonable decisions?” He lunges for the chimp and misses. “Who do you think laid the foundation for America? Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, they were the original Objectivists. They despised religion.” I hit the street and keep running. Greenspan’s voice fades into the distance: “The words ‘In God We Trust’ didn’t appear consistently on our currency until 1956!”

A few blocks later, I set down the chimp to catch my breath. It screams and claps its hands. We look at each other. Now what? What are you supposed to do with a monkey at Mardi Gras?

“Welcome to the Gold Club, gentlemen. Roscoe! Good to see you again.” The man with the headset leads us to a table. The card reads: “Reserved for Roscoe.”

(Portions of this were eventually published in Southwest Spirit magazine.)