Throw me something, dude

Mardi Gras snuck up on me this year, and it’s almost gone.

I’ve been in love with the season ever since my first brush with its madness back in the early 1980s in Thibodaux. I found myself in the throng of the Poor Man’s Parade when a Krewe of Cleophas doubloon landed at my feet, so I bent down to pick it up. But before I could reach the prized plastic, this little Cajun woman smashed her shoulders into the back of my bent knees, nearly sending me into the path of the next float. I spun around in time to see spindly, 70-year-old fingers snatching it off the pavement.

“I saw it firss!” she snapped.

I was in awe. She was willing to use bodily force to wrest a worthless trinket from someone young enough to be her grandson. I’ve loved Mardi Gras ever since.

Even more sublime than watching a parade is riding in one. Hands like fields of cane and pleading eyes urge you to pick them. Amid this commotion you make great little connections with people.

Wearing a full pirate costume and lost in the revelry, I scanned the sea of faces below and spotted some bikers hanging back, all leather and beards and toughness. One in particular—I’ll call him The Dude—was leaning back in beadless indifference, his tattooed forearms crossed on his barrel chest, his legs stretched lazily out in front of him, black boots crossed. And he wore an eye patch.

We stared at each other eye-to-eye—literally. Because I, too, was wearing an eye patch, which suddenly seemed foolish. Naturally, at that very moment, the whole parade rolled to a stop, and I froze.

“Punk,” he must have thought to himself, “I earned my eye patch in a bar fight. Where’d you get yours, at The Party Starts Here?”

I rummaged through my dwindling stash of throws and pulled out an entire, still-bound loop of monster beads, the kind you throw to a pretty girl just to see her smile.

I lifted the jangling mass over my head and re-established eye contact—a tacit, visual contract that said, “Dude, these beads are yours, out of respect.”

Thing is, he was a good 20 yards deep in the crowd, and this huge bead ball was like blood in the water, triggering a minor frenzy below me. But The Dude didn’t budge.

So with all the intensity of Brett Favre in the snow, I cocked back and heaved it.

Futile hands grasped at the spinning, wobbling plastic asterisk as it sailed over their heads and started its descent toward The Dude.

His arms remained folded until the last possible second when, as casual as can be, he pulled the beads from the air. The new bounty still in his fist, he re-folded his arms.

Elated, I threw my arms up as though I’d thrown a winning touchdown pass.

The Dude just nodded at me.

Greatest parade moment ever.