HOME / diary: A weeklong electronic journal.

Rob Walker

diary:
entries

Posted Thursday, Jan. 6, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET

I forgot to mention the stolen car. E drove down here before me with our dog, Rey, and on her first or second night in New Orleans, her rental car was stolen from the street right in front of the house. We actually have a sort of gated driveway, but the landlord hadn't given E the combination to the lock on it yet. We'd both heard quite a bit about New Orleans' storied problems with crime, but this happened so quickly that it kind of stunned us; grand theft auto focuses the mind wonderfully.

RSS

E told this story to a car salesman today. (I test drove four cars, ranging from a new VW Beetle to a Jeep Cherokee; I obviously have no idea what I'm doing.) The car salesman had just told us how, shortly before Christmas, two guys had somehow broken into this dealership in the middle of the night and driven a car off the showroom floor, through a plate-glass window. Just smashed right on through. Ha ha! Everybody here has a crime story. Sometimes the teller just seems intent on scaring the hell out of you. Other times the teller simply wraps it up with a laugh.

In this case the two guys who ripped off the dealership were caught a few hours later; apparently they'd smashed both mirrors of the vehicle, so they were somewhat easily spotted. I guess that's funny.

******

The Times-Picayune editorial page came out strongly against "celebratory gunfire" today. There's been some confusion as to how stiff a penalty can be laid on someone convicted of illegal discharge of a weapon: The mayor had threatened up to seven years in prison, but the DA has since pointed out that the actual maximum is two years. The paper argued that city leaders need to get this stuff straight and work together against the problem. "There's no excuse for negligent gunowners to go out and randomly fire their weapons into the sky."

Sorry to keep coming back to this topic, but the random bullet problem really seems like something out of a Don Delillo novel to me. And maybe it says something about the character of New Orleans; I'm not sure. Is it worth trying to pin down the character of a city in a few sentences? It's a dicey business, especially with a city like New Orleans that's been written about so often. Listen to an attempt to capture the French Quarter: "Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways." Feh! You know who that is? That's William Faulkner, from a novel called Mosquitos. If that's what Faulkner comes up with, maybe I shouldn't try.

******

So, back to idiotic criminal acts: Someone made the case a couple of months ago that a brisk economy siphons off a certain percentage of the criminal class who are smart enough to see that in times like these it's easier to make money legitimately than by, say, driving cars through plate-glass windows. As these people pass into the regular economy, only the dopiest and least competent criminals are left behind, and thus crime falls.

I don't know whether that's true or not. But here's how the story of E's rental car getting stolen turned out. About a day after the car disappeared--after she had called the cops, and the rental-car people, and her credit-card company--she was walking to a nearby convenience store. And she spotted the stolen rental car, being pushed into the convenience store's parking lot by three kids. Apparently they had stolen the car and driven it around the neighborhood, until they ran out of gas.

Obviously, she didn't confront them herself but hailed a cop, and the long and the short of it is that the kids got away but the rental company got its car back, and we have since learned the combination to the lock on our little gated driveway. But the point is that E has told this story a bunch of times, and so have I, and when the car salesman heard it, he laughed, and we laughed right along with him. Ha ha!