The Real Deal

Access Is Everything

In the story of working in New Orleans (“The Window in Your Dreams”), I mentioned Billy, a local firefighter who helped me hold fast on Bourbon Street during the drunken, frenetic revelry of New Year’s Eve on one of the most raucous strips of blacktop in America. If you go out there by yourself, you are dependent on the “kindness of strangers.” On that eve, strangers were abundant. Kindness, not so much.

Hurly burly is a mild way of putting it. Drunks, screamers, flashers, gropers, perverts, stoners, and football fans just out of the bars flood the pathway, mixing with fearful, awestruck, wide-eyed tourists not smart enough ...