LOOKING FOR MARTY GRAW: The author shows the proper way to consume a “mudbug.”

By GREGG KIRK
April 1995

My girlfriend and I stood in the middle of Bourbon Street in New Orleans on February 28, 1995 — 32 oz. Everclear daiquiris in our hands — watching people in the balconies throw beaded necklaces to others in the street who obliged them with brief displays of nudity. A guy pushed through the throng and accidentally bumped into us. I glanced down at a button he was wearing that said, “Who is Marty Graw?” In our lubricated state, we double over in laughter. Somewhere at that point was our defining moment of Mardi Gras 1995 — the world’s greatest party.

We had weathered a 20-hour drive to bring our big mouths to the Big Easy. Sure, we had been there before and found plenty of things for our mouths to do. We’d eaten mudbugs (crawfish to you Yankees), although I could never bring myself to suck the heads. It’s sort of like chomping in the middle of the scary part of the crab. We’d eaten beignets and drunk cafe au lait at Cafe Du Monde while nursing serious hangovers acquired by drinking too many Hurricanes at Pat O’Brian’s.

Yeah, been there; done that. But we’d never been there during Mardi Gras when the whole town goes berserk for almost a week and unbridled drunkenness and animal-like behavior are commonplace. Sure, we expected the chaos, and we were even prepared for violence. But we were happy to see that even though the town had recently beaten out D.C. as the murder capital of the country, we saw no signs of it. And we only heard about the shooting near actor John Larouquette‘s float on the radio.

One thing really amazed me about the town, however. The fact that a city as large as New Orleans can let down its hair as ugly as you please and then clean itself up and get back to work by the next working morning was a revelation. What do I mean? On the day of Fat Tuesday we drove down St. Charles Street (one of the main parade routes) after a full-on parade assault had hit earlier that morning. There were so many beads in the street it affected the way the car drove. If I hit a speed higher than 35 m.p.h., the tires flung beads in the air so furiously that they hit passersby and thrashed the side of the car. The street itself looked as if it had been hit by a tropical depression. Beer cans and bottles were everywhere, entire couches that had been dragged to the street’s edge for a better vantage point had been abandoned, and there were hundreds of beads in the nearby tree branches.

But by the time we drove home later that night, there was absolutely no sign of the festivities. We were stunned.

We also had the great honor of watching something I had never heard of — the official end of Mardi Gras. At the stroke of midnight on Tuesday night, mounted policemen lined the intersection of Canal and Bourbon Streets. They were at the vanguard of a different sort of parade. Behind them stood a line of street cleaning vehicles, garbage trucks, and garbagemen on foot. They waited patiently for the signal — a lone police whistle — before they clanged noisily down the street while tardy partiers dodged out of their way. In an East Coast town, I thought, the drunks would be right back out in the street, puking and throwing bottles around. But in New Orleans, that is not the case. At midnight, the party ends, and everyone respects it.

In fact, the next day we wondered if it would be a faux pas to wear our beads. The only people who seemed to be adorned with them were obvious tourists.

We never did meet this Marty Graw fellow in person, but he knows how to throw a mean party. I think I’m gonna invite him to my town.