“There is a drainage ditch behind the inexpensive student housing in back of LSU. It’s filled with beer cans. I was watching it in the midmorning heat the way a visitor to a museum watches a big trash sculpture, when the whole mess moved and the green-gray back of a large alligator slowly slid into view. Slowly, it then slid back out if it. Later I was told that the students know him well. They threaten to throw themselves to him if they don’t make their exams.”

—Andrei Codrescu, “Alligators,” from New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City, 2006.