"Matt, goddammit I told you not to f**k around with that nine-millimeter in the house!" Shelnutt yelled at a friend who had engaged in some sloppy gun-handling in the kitchen. "Sorry," he added. "Got a buddy just came home drunk. He's supposed to be real tight with FEMA. But if he keeps loadin' that gun, I'll put his ass out on the street in the middle of the storm if he doesn't watch it. Son of a bitch."

The weapon itself was not the problem. Shelnutt had his own Glock .45 and 150 rounds of ammunition at the ready. Given the epic chaos of 2005, sidearms are now standard hurricane kit, as South Louisiana gun store owners discovered last week when they were inundated with customers before Gustav.   

And potable water? That had been a huge problem during Katrina. 

"Washed out the crawfish pots this morning," Shelnutt said proudly, "I got about three hundred gallons put up. Not," he added, "that I'll need it to bathe. You could just strip, walk outside, and soap up and the rain around here would hose you down."      

From 720 St. Louis's four-storey roof on Sunday night--one of the taller buildings in the Quarter--Shelnutt watched Gustav's eastern bands gyre in over the city until 2 a.m. last Monday, then slept for a few hours. The north half of the Quarter, including 720 St. Louis, lost power about 6 a.m.; the southern streets maintained electricity. By midafternoon Monday, as Gustav's eye bowed west and rolled down on Houma and Lafayette, Shelnutt hopped on his bicycle and headed for the Mississippi to see what the storm had wrought, toting a few well-iced beers in his prized Trojan condom backpack, bought during one of the Quarter's frequent condom promotions in a very optimistic Mardi Gras deal that included a couple of hundred Trojans. Shelnutt's social life extends through the city to Cajun country and beyond, including communities of the Texas state line--all hurricane-threatened areas--so the stockpiling had a kind of local-evacuation-route-driven logic.               

"I broke into Antoine's and got a bag of ice," Shelnutt said, when asked about how he managed to chill the beer during Gustav. As a trusted neighbor and as the generally acknowledged mayor of St. Louis Street, Shelnutt has had a key to the famous restaurant for years. "Then I called Rick [Blount, chief executive officer of Antoine's and a descendant of Antoine's founder, Antoine Guste], and told him everything looked good. He was happy. The river was rockin' on Monday afternoon, by the way." 

Standing diagonally across St. Louis from Shelnutt, Antoine's lost part of a side wall and sustained heavy heat damage to its nationally renowned 17,000-bottle wine collection during Katrina. It took four long, hot, late-summer weeks before power was restored. Shelnutt invaded Antoine's walk-ins and gave the steaks to the California National Guard soldiers patrolling that section of the city. But it wasn't just about putting the meat to charitable use. Had the food decayed, the doors to the refrigerators would have been in danger of blowing off their hinges from the built-up gasses, a difficulty several New Orleans restaurateurs faced post-Katrina.   

As this week's threat--Hurricane Ike--rakes central Cuba with 100-mile-per-hour winds and gathers for its predicted northwesterly waltz towards Louisiana and Texas later this week, Shelnutt takes the long view of life on St. Louis Street, a life necessarily punctuated by cataclysmic storms.

"I just have one complaint about Rick this time," he said. "He took all the steaks with him before Gustav hit! And since this is just the first storm of the season for us, allow me to remind everybody that I will not be taking a hike for Hurricane Ike."

Further reading:
* Extreme Hospitality: New Orleans post-Katrina