London Letter: The hardships of toiling in the French Quarter

So there I was, wide awake.

I glanced at my watch… 3.30am and at that moment, four gunshots went off. Then a fifth … possibly a coup de grace.

Where was I? Iraq? Syria? Soweto?

No – I was in a swanky business hotel in downtown Chicago in a bedroom almost the size of my house in England. It was surreal.

Anyway, thanks to jet lag, I was soon asleep again.

Later I told my host Joanne about the gunshots and asked if I had been dreaming. She said probably not. Chicago is one of the most prosperous cities in the States, but also one of the more violent.

Hollywood producer Spike Lee was currently shooting a film of the city calling it Chi-raq-o … as he says it was as bad as Iraq. But it’s only the south Chicago gangs, I was assured. At that moment I hoped I was in the north.

But Joanne wouldn’t have cared anyway. She’s only interested in flowers – she’s a successful landscaper – and saving animals.

That’s why I was here; I’m doing a book on her and her best friend Penny who 10 years ago waded into the teeth of Hurricane Katrina to save the thousands of pets abandoned when their owners fled New Orleans.

Why two aging women left homes and families to risk their lives saving pets, ranging from tarantulas to pitbulls, is something I will explore in the book, but in any event, they are unusual people.

I mentioned in a previous column that Joanne is a former Playboy bunny, while Penny’s a bodybuilder who once came third in the Mrs Michigan contest. She went to a gym to retain her husband, but decided he wasn’t worth it, so kept pumping iron and married someone else.

Anyway, Joanne is well-connected in the city and so got me a room in one of the most exclusive hotel/clubs around, fortunately warning me in advance that dress code excluded jeans.

We did the initial interviews there, which was great, but didn’t quite give me the feel of a tropical hurricane, so reconvened in New Orleans a couple of days later.

Rum stun

This was more like it. Our hotel was on the fringes of the French Quarter where jazz and blues is played 24 hours and cocktails such as the Hurricane pack enough rum to stun an alligator.

They drove me down to the low-lying areas where they had done rescue work, and here I got to see the real deal.

New Orleans, I’m told, is one of the more socialist-leaning cities in America, and that’s one ideology that is guaranteed to fail. They are ditching it even in Scandinavia.

The result is that New Orleans is poor by American standards, despite massive revenues from shipping and tourism.

At the top end of the scale you have a small core of bullet-proof old money living in plantation-style houses, followed by the middle ground energetically chasing the American dream, and then the majority: bottom-feeders in the ‘housing projects’ who blame everyone else for their woes.

Simplistic, I know, but you get the picture.

Joanne and Penny spent a day pointing out houses where they rescued beagles, or cats with no fur from severe chemical burns.

They showed where they had crawled under buildings fearful of swamp snakes, or broken into homes where there were still bodies.

At night we went to the French Quarter. The romance is sometimes tarnished with the smell of vomit and bodies clutching lampposts on Bourbon Street, but it still has to be one of the most vibrant square miles I’ve visited.

And when strolling down the streets you hear New Orleans classics such as House of the Rising Sun, Arlo Guthrie’s City of New Orleans or Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee (the blues version) being sung better than the originals, it’s … well, awesome.

I wouldn’t want to live in New Orleans. In some places its borderline third world with beggars and addicts and others who have surrendered.

But hey, if someone wants me to write a book for them and takes me to the French Quarter, that’s absolutely fine by me.