After the flood

BACK WHEN I LIVED in New Orleans, in the late 1990s, we emerged one Saturday night from a bar-slash-bowling-alley to discover that my boyfriend's car was gone. It had been a fairly easy target for thieves--an old Toyota wagon you could have started with a toothpick--and we figured it might have been swiped by a gang that lived a few blocks away. The next morning we looked and, sure enough, there it was, parked on a side street, unscathed. The thief apparently hadn't woken up yet. On a Sunday in New Orleans, no one could be bothered to do much before noon.

That was the sort of thing that seemed to happen in New Orleans, a place that was languid and lazy with an undercurrent of lawlessness, where every dark encounter became a rambling story with a twisted punchline. For someone who had grown up in the tame comfort of Northeastern suburbs--who arrived for a summer job at the Times-Picayune and stayed for half a decade--the richness and the danger were seductive.

Last week, Americans learned just how physically tenuous life in New Orleans was. But those of us who have lived there know that the city's social fabric has always been just as precarious. Daily life in the city wasn't beads and Bourbon Street--that was mostly for the tourists, who considered it their solemn duty to get drunk. But there were drive-through daiquiri shops and never-closing bars and a last-night-on-Earth quality to fun. Every New Year's Eve in the Mid-City neighborhood, residents would drag their Christmas trees to the Orleans Avenue neutral ground and start a giant bonfire, then throw fireworks into the flames. A fire truck waited down the street, almost as an afterthought.

That sense of recklessness had its costs. One New Year's Eve, a tourist died in the French Quarter just after midnight, struck by a celebratory bullet shot into the air, a third-world custom that New Orleans hadn't shaken. And complacency carried a social toll, spawning a power structure that was often untrustworthy and untrusted. Political corruption is hardly unique to Louisiana, but the state stands apart for its shamelessness. At one point in the '90s, as the Legislature debated whether to approve riverboat casinos, the state Senate president famously crisscrossed the Senate floor, handing out campaign checks from casino companies in full view. One would-be political handler once confided in me that he was joining the fray because, you know, it was his turn to line his pockets.

Of course, many politicians are well-meaning--some pursue do-good agendas with near-religious devotion--and the voters do sometimes fight back. The senator in question lost his next race to the aging president of suburban St. Bernard Parish, a man so fixated on saving taxpayers' money that he took away employees' coffee service. (His reasoning was that they wasted time when they got a cup, then wasted more when they had to pee.)

Still, there has always been a sense that, between the backroom deals and the contracts headed to politicians' friends, not enough money and attention went where people truly needed it. And New Orleans needs help more than most places. The city's economic decline, on some level, is what ensured its survival as a place unlike any other in America, staving off the relative blandness of the New South.

But it also means huge swaths of the city are locked in a level of poverty and true squalor that's hard to fathom in Boston. The newspaper covered schools that were literally crumbling; at one city high school, students were crossing the street to use the bathrooms at a Taco Bell. And the sheer extent of the dilapidation meant that poverty couldn't, as in many other cities, be sealed off or avoided by the well-to-do. But there were also many crimes of opportunity, and everyone I knew had been a victim. There were acts as prosaic as a broken car window, as unsettling as a stranger in the bedroom, gathering up the CD player. One colleague was shot by a mugger while jogging at 7 a.m. He had no money on him. He may have said the wrong thing, or he may have simply been in the wrong spot.

There's no excuse for lawbreaking, or for the looting of jewelry and guns that took place just after the floods this week, or for the warlike acts that followed--the armed gangs roaming the streets, the reports of shooting at rescue helicopters. But while the tone of TV coverage has leaned toward shock at how quickly ''civilization" has fallen away--and has sometimes been loaded with unspoken racial assumptions--it's hard to ignore the way pre-Katrina New Orleans paved the way for post-Katrina conditions.

New Orleans has vibrant black middle and upper classes, but the largest, poorest sections of the city are black, and its history, from the slave trade to Jim Crow, has left a blanket of distrust. Meaningful interactions across racial lines are rare. Many of the poorest residents have no chance to rise above their circumscribed lives, no stake in the rules of society. They grow up disconnected; I once wrote about junior high kids from the West Bank, a suburb just across the Mississippi from downtown New Orleans, who had never even crossed the river.

And it's worth noting that the rich--and the relatively rich, and the middle class--largely evacuated before Katrina struck. The poor, however, lacked the means to leave. Days after the storm, they were hungry and thirsty, hot and powerless, and suspicious about why help was taking so long to come. In recent days, politicians have started to voice that anger, too. ''They're thinking small, man," Mayor C. Ray Nagin said of the federal government, in a tearful radio interview on Friday. ''And this is a major, major, major deal."

This is the New Orleans the nation has been watching, troubled and chaotic in a way that is shocking, but not totally surprising. When I moved to Boston six years ago, I felt palpable relief in the sense of order around me, the fact that I no longer had to look around with caution each time I walked down a city street or got out of a parked car. And yet, I haven't stopped missing the jazz funerals floating past my apartment window, the chance to catch cabbages from the floats during St. Patrick's Day parades. I miss the way, for a few days a year, a string of plastic beads felt more precious than diamonds. I miss the way the people were conditioned to celebrate both life and death, because there wasn't anything more pressing or productive to do.

Globe reporter Joanna Weiss is a former staff writer for the Times-Picayune. E-mail weiss@globe.com.