A New Yawkah in N'Awlins

"Breach my levee, baby," a hammered Ashton Kutcher look-alike wearing a non-ironic (read: unimpressive) T-shirt hollered across Royal Street, New Orleans' answer to Gansevoort, but today hijacked by bead-mongers and herds of drunk old music-men. He underhanded a string of plastic beads, which a woman next to me snatched on the necklace's rebound off my forehead. I'd been hit in the face by throws twice already at this point, a bright-hot Mardi Gras morning.

The first time, I was engrossed in the photos I was attempting to take of Jenna Bush-or someone who looked like Jenna Bush (Proteus Krewe announced her as a special guest, and, well, she does like to party)- when something hard and flat hit my eye. It felt like a packaged cake, and it felt aimed.

The next time was early in the Zulu parade, 14 hours later. Just beads. I'm a bad catch, especially when my energies are elsewhere. I was talking to a tiny 20-year-old Texas A&M student, Keshia Mitchell, who was engrossed in her jambalaya and chanting the passing dance squad's jam ("I do that raunchy dance/I do that raunchy dance/I raunchy/she raunchy?"). "They cleaned up a lot around here, but I don't know 'bout the rest," she said. "My friend, her house is knocked down and she ain't got no FEMA money. The people next door, they got beaucoup FEMA money and they didn't have any damage."

Did she see the worst of it? St. Bernard Parish or the Ninth Ward?

"Naw. I don't know 'bout that. I like Fat Tuesday, though," Mitchell said. "They're a nice culture here. A different culture. New Orleans was made from a black man, you know that? I gotta go find my friend."

She was gone. It was almost noon, the time I had promised a trio of gay men that I'd meet them at a drag show at a bar at the corner of St. Ann's and Bourbon.

Driving west along Highway I-10 through marshy Southern Mississippi is an exercise in visual endurance. A few down branches and permanently wind-bent trees turned into an irregular layer of downed trees marked with a shrub-height dark water line from flooding. Miles and miles more of the same flank the highway as it curves toward New Orleans.

I aimed my camera at fat steel poles topped with skeletons of former billboards. A sea of blue tarps announced the approach of New Orleans.

We ended up in Esplanade Ridge, a nice neighborhood where we were staying a dozen blocks from the French Quarter. The area became popular with the Creole families that didn't want to associate with the too-brash arrivistes on Bourbon Street in the 1850s. It's full of both Greek revival and Italianate-style homes, and simple shotguns, all of which have sustained some wind and water damage. Post-Katrina water level in the area was between two and five feet. Rolling past a defunct streetlight, my sister remarked, "I didn't know it was this bad."

Plastic bags were piled everywhere on top of wood planks on top of stained couches on top of boats, all riding on the small curbs of Johnson Street. By the end of the long Mardi Gras weekend, beads, kazoos, wigs, plenty more household trash and another layer of rain would change the dimensions of these piles.

Partying amidst the rubble I woke up groggy on Lundi Gras, the parade-saturated day before Mardi Gras. I had been out late the night before, following men dragging seven-foot-tall wooden crucifixes and trying to entreat women to sign pledges not to flash bead throwers by giving them beads. Religion is the heart and roots of Mardi Gras, the church groups reminded passers-by. We feast before we fast. They held signs and spouted slogans. Reuben Israel, 44, of a Louisiana Christian group called the Bible Believers, rattled off, "Once you come onto Bourbon street, you've become bead-witched."

Sure enough, the feast was swinging, but the street was not packed. Women were not showing off breasts very often. It was a slightly reserved 150th carnival, attended mostly by those within driving distance. Celebration was abundant, but it was celebration shot with a dose of tranquilizer. Everyone seemed to be rubbing their eyes, looking around and asking, "Are we waking up?"

Brittany, our hostess, invited us to come along while she walked her docile Rottweilers. "Happy Mardi Gras, Mr. Lewis," Brittany hollered across Johnson Street. Lewis, a wiry, very dark-skinned man, sat planted in a lawn chair in the shady part of his driveway for most of the day, every day. "I knew the neighborhood was coming back together when Mr. Lewis was back in his chair" sometime in October, two months after the National Guard and the NOPD forced Esplanade Ridge to evacuate after the hurricane lightly flooded the area, Brittany told us.

"But, uh, his partner in crime, Mr. Sam, didn't come back," she said. "Maybe he's in Houston or something ? Mr. Lewis seems to be getting on OK, though, without him."

Brittany left her home on the Sunday before Katrina hit, taking with her three dogs, her family jewelry and a book. She left chickens, cats and everything else. Most of her home was intact when she returned from a hiatus in Texas and California-all but her Chanel perfume and her John Frieda shampoo. The TV? Fine. Computers? Still there. But the John Frieda?

Someone pocketed that on a pass-through. "Probably someone from the neighborhood, too, which is the eerie part," Brittany said. The "pet Nazis" removed one of her cats and left a spray-painted note, she said, and she hasn't been able to track down little Stormy yet. They left the chickens, though, along with dozens of eggs. Brittany returned in October to 40 chicks running around her backyard. Rosa, one of the Rottweillers, had a litter of hurricane puppies. It was suddenly a full house.

The haunted old-folks home Two doors down, St. Martin Manor, formerly a retirement home owned by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, was empty. The manor's wrought-iron front gate was battered and jammed open, which allowed us into a paper-, wood- and debris-littered front courtyard, only a lonely saint statue keeping guard. Around back stood a red electric wheelchair. Brittany told me that a handful of vigilant old men stuck through Katrina there and, after the storm, fortified the compound against the National Guardsmen who tried to force them out.

Larry Denny, a grey-haired man who lives a few blocks away on Esplanade Avenue, later told me at the lineup before the Corps de Napoleon parade in a mall parking-lot on the outskirts of the city that he did the same thing, defending his home and generator with a German Shepherd, an AK15 and a 45. He's damn proud of his home, even of the state it's in now: "It's the only one on Esplanade with a fountain and a FEMA trailer."

Inside St. Martin Manor were myriad signs of semi-recent life: sprouting onions left in bowls on counters; piles of dirty laundry; rocking chairs remaining in hallways and apartments, all of which were littered with wind-blown-in garbage. Another neighbor of the retirement home, Edgar Sierra, showed me photos of the Esplanade Ridge neighborhood when it was flooded. His house is in pretty bad shape, but on Mardi Gras, he was mainly riled about lagging garbage pickup. "This city has money to hold parades and clean up Bourbon, but not to pick up our trash? What the hell?"

Sierra had many theories about why the city wasn't picking up the trash during Mardi Gras, and most involved the media. I don't remember them all anymore. I was in a little bit of a daze when I talked to Sierra. I had downed half of my sister's Pina Colada an hour earlier and had just met up with friend who lived with me in New York, Lars, and our friend Henry from Jackson Hole, Wyo. Earlier, they had snuck into a deserted elementary school where they saw "8/29" written on the chalkboards.

My last night in town, the night of Mardi Gras and my final hit on the head, Lars, my sister and I found ourselves circling New Orleans searching for an open restaurant. Lars described a homeless pre-Mardi Gras night he spent with a conspiracy theorist who said he was a retired bounty hunter from Florida. Lars told us of the boat still sitting in front of City Hall. He told us of getting high with some Tulane students living in mold-splattered homes.

"I get it now why New Orleans needs to be rebuilt," my sister said that night. She'd listened to Lars as well as hung out in Frenchman Street's jazz bars and felt the city. She'd heard Brittany's evacuation tale. She'd met a long-lost aunt of ours who has an unflinching passion for the city.

New Orleans, however, won't survive on good intentions. The city continues to sink farther below sea level every year. Hurricanes like Katrina only speed the process. People still sleep with blue tarps over their heads, but these are the people who will defend their city with 45s. They will keep their dogs by their sides and smoke weed and drink hurricanes until, during and after the next hurricane hits. This city is alive, if not entirely well. Laissez les bontemps roulez!