The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (10 page)

At eighteen, he’d made his first trip to New Orleans just in time to meet Betsy. He and two high-school classmates had saved their summer wages and bought tickets on the
Hummingbird
, the old Nashville and Louisville Railroad train that picked them up in Decatur, Alabama, and deposited them in New Orleans, where they asked the cab driver to take them to the finest hotel in town. Instead, he dropped them off at a fleabag, the Lafayette (“which is what I’m sure we looked like we deserved”), where they took a corner suite and slowly became aware that a hurricane was on her way. On the night Betsy hit, Brobson distracted the clientele and hustled free cocktails in the hotel bar by drinking whiskey sours standing on his head. After the storm had passed, he and his buddies got to stay another week because the train tracks had blown away, and it was then that he knew he would one day return to stay. He’d grown up in a dry county, and in New Orleans he was not only able to get a drink legally, even at eighteen, but “there was an aisle of liquor that seemed to be a mile long” in the grocery store. “I thought the devil himself had something to do with creating New Orleans when I saw that.”

During medical school at Tulane, he’d had a place on Dumaine just three blocks from his current abode. The Quarter was his beloved home and longtime stomping ground, and he was furious that the city was denying him (and every other resident) the right of return, based, at least partially, on more flimsy medical grounds. The current city medical director had cited the danger of E. coli in the floodwaters, adding that when the waters receded people would get septic E. coli and pneumonia from breathing the dust. “That is malarkey because when E. coli dries, it dies,” Brobson said. “It doesn’t even form spores. He’s got his bacteria mixed up.” He told me he’d spent every waking hour going slightly crazy wondering what was really going on; also, he was a doctor with a house that was perfectly intact. “If there’s anything I can do, I want to be doing it.” I realized he was right. More than a week had passed and we needed to see things for ourselves. I honestly did not think I could stand in front of the TV for another second. I told Brobson I thought his expired medical badge could get him past the National Guard checkpoints, and failing that, he could caravan behind me with my press pass. Either way, it was time to go back to New Orleans.

A
S SOON AS
I hung up with Brobson, I called Jon Meacham, my editor at
Newsweek
, who promised to FedEx me something on the magazine’s letterhead to produce at the National Guard checkpoints. The only story I had left to do was for
Vogue
, but I had the sexist idea that
Newsweek
would carry more clout with uniformed gatekeepers I knew would be entirely male. Either way, relief workers, journalists, and contractors were the only people allowed into the city, and now the mayor was ordering everybody who had stayed through the storm to get out. John’s name was included in the letter too, but amorphously, as a sort of driver/photographer/general escort, along with that of Byron Seward, who was past desperate to get in and check on his house—unlike us, he’d received no reports from the field. The plan was that Byron and I would drive down together from the Delta and meet John in Hammond, forty miles past the Mississippi/Louisiana line. From there, we’d take a circuitous route into the city, crossing the river above New Orleans and entering from the west bank via the Greater New Orleans Bridge. The direct route required taking Interstate 10 East all the way in, but Ken Wells had already warned me that parts of it were still under water.

Before dawn on Friday, September 9, eleven days after Katrina had made landfall, I got up and armed myself rather feebly with empty tote bags, flashlights, pens, and a notebook. Frank drove me the hour and a half or so that it takes to get from Greenville to Yazoo City, and on the way he told me about his close friends and serious partying buddies from Gulfport, one of the hardest hit towns on the Mississippi Coast. They had—crazily—ridden out the storm (Gulfport is smack on the water), and Frank had been worried to death about them all week. When he finally made contact, he discovered that not only were they fine, they were also having a fine old time, keeping cool with fans powered by their lawnmower engine, and dining, in a makeshift pavilion lit by automobile headlights strung overhead, on the grilled contents of the ice chests they’d thought to fill up ahead of time. They told him they had plenty of whiskey and water and no intention of going anywhere.

When we pulled up at Byron and Cameron’s we were still marveling over the often festive ingenuity of our fellow man, but when we saw Byron’s truck we were forced to marvel instead at his own personal preparedness level. Once again, I was reminded that the wrong person had been in charge of FEMA. The truck bed was filled with enormous wrenches and crowbars and all sorts of other serious-looking tools I’d never seen before, along with three or four big cans of gasoline and several gallons of water. There were surgical masks, heavy work gloves, plastic gloves, flashlights of a far higher caliber than my own, heavy-duty garbage bags, and insect repellant of a grade strong enough to ward off predators of the sort that inhabit Mississippi Delta cotton fields at the height of summer. Inside, there were a couple of hunting rifles, Handi Wipes, industrial-strength bleach, and bottles of disinfectant. In a small ice chest, the same one Cameron packed for him to take to the farm every day, there were carefully wrapped sliced apples with peanut butter and other healthy nibbles that were the only reminder of Byron’s illness.

Almost two years earlier Byron had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, a particularly cruel fate for someone with as refined and enthusiastic a palate as he possessed. But, alone among his group, he had come through a rigorous clinical trial at M. D. Anderson, the renowned cancer hospital in Houston, with flying colors. (One man had simply gotten up and left, saying he’d rather dice with death than endure another minute of whatever it was they were putting them all through.) Byron is not a big guy—he looks a bit like Paul Newman and has much the same physique. (At twelve, I was shocked to find out, after buying a life-sized poster, which I promptly lay down on top of, that Newman is only about five foot five.) Byron makes constant teasing jokes and can drive you half-crazy—the first time I met him he was terrorizing the diners in Galatoire’s with a pocket full of plastic roaches. But he is also intuitive and really smart and generous to a fault. More important for this particular outing, at least, he is extremely handy, and I could tell he couldn’t wait to get going and find a use for those tools. Before he and Cameron had bought their own house in the Marigny, they too had been Betty’s tenants, at her place on Esplanade, and he spent the majority of his years there serving as plumber-in-residence and chief excavator of out-of-control banana trees.

While Byron drove, I checked my various lists—when folks heard we were heading back in, our services (or, I should say, Byron’s) were much in demand. The TV footage of the fires had panicked everyone, so we had lots of gas lines to turn off, and then there were the less pleasant tasks. My friend, the journalist Curtis Wilkie, had overnighted his keys from Oxford, Mississippi, where he also lived, along with a page from a Galatoire’s notepad. “May we live to dine here again,” he’d scribbled, along with a plea to clean out his festering refrigerator.

In Hammond, we filled up at the last working gas station we would see for a while, bought some Nabs for me (who had not thought to pack snacks, healthy or otherwise), and John pulled up behind us in my car. It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny, but the closer we got, the usually lush hardwood trees growing out of the swamps on either side of us were increasingly flattened, and the hunting and fishing camps that once dotted the route were now just so many piles of kindling. As we neared the bridge, which crosses the Mississippi in downtown New Orleans, there was a short line at a checkpoint, where a disinterested guardsman took a look at our letter, glanced at John behind us, and then waved both vehicles through. Midway across, I looked up to see that the walls of a high-rise hotel looming alongside us had blown off, revealing room after room of seemingly tiny tableaus—beds, nightstands, bureaus—all still in place but completely exposed, just like a developer’s model on a lobby table.

We got off at the Tchoupitoulas exit and made our way toward Magazine Street, a main artery that runs parallel to St. Charles Avenue and forms the riverside boundary of the Garden District. Dozens of cars parked along the way had been relieved of their tires and their gas tanks had been forced open, some with the siphoning hoses still hanging out; a police cruiser’s smashed passenger window had been taped over with a garbage bag. Ornate iron fences surrounded the charred remains of once-lovely Lower Garden District houses; here and there a brick chimney or a metal fire stair rose up from the ashes. On the corner of Magazine and Jackson Avenue, where a wall of a nineteenth-century brick building that housed the flower-and-antiques shop of a friend had caved in, there was a handwritten sign saying “Please Do Not Demolish,” while on the opposite corner, some of the bricks had already been put to sad use. An elderly lady from the neighborhood, who died, as we would find out later, when she ventured out from her apartment just after the storm, was respectfully covered with a white sheet held down by bricks in a neat oval. Flowers and a salvaged white cross had been left on the sidewalk amid the rubble, and across the sheet, in red, a message had been painted: “HERE LIES VERA…GOD HELP US.”

At the end of our block, the scene was not nearly as tragic but no less dramatic. A couple of years ahead of us, our neighbors had completed a renovation of their own James Gallier–designed corner house; the crowning touch, not long before Katrina, had been a handsome new copper roof. Now it was sitting in the middle of the intersection of First and Camp Streets, in a single enormous piece, as though a giant hand had peeled the lid off an even more gigantic sardine can. John’s car was still on the street, in its carefully chosen spot, as was the black pickup truck belonging to our outdoor painter Freddy—both miraculously unscathed by the nearby roof or any number of ancient tree limbs, or even the gas siphoners and tire thieves. It was almost 100 degrees outside and completely still. I stood atop the sideways trunk of our snapped-off magnolia and looked around. The gallery in front of the house was sagging a bit where it had gotten waterlogged, and the wind had blown a third floor shutter open and broken a lone pane. There was some visible roof damage and a big gash in the siding, and I had to laugh because our yard, which for a year had been the messiest in the neighborhood, now looked roughly the same as everyone else’s. We were very much alive, our house was more or less okay, our cars hadn’t even been damaged. Meanwhile, less than four blocks away, there lay Vera. I looked at John and knew he was feeling the same thing: utter unworthiness coupled with intense, joyous relief.

IT MAY HAVE
been damn hot outside, but inside, I was convinced that the upper floors were hotter than hell itself. I raced through them and filled up my totes with extra power cords, the jewelry I’d idiotically left behind, more clothes, a box of checkbooks, the pile of bills and mail and tax stuff I’d left on my desk in the office I had yet to unpack. I taped a piece of cardboard over the window on the third floor, grabbed my small kitchen laptop as a backup, and, on Byron’s advice, took the rest of our housewarming Champagne and a few more good bottles before the heat destroyed them all. Who knew how long it would be before the power returned? The pantry was by far the coolest space in the house—even the lobster shells weren’t completely unbearable. We re-bagged them in one of Byron’s triple-ply bags and put it outside next to a pile of limbs, and then we headed downtown.

The Faubourg Marigny, whose plan dates back to 1806, was the original Creole city’s first suburb, the subdivided estate of Pierre Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, father of Celeste de Marigny, the woman who had married the unlucky Livaudais, divorced him, and ended up with the land that became the Garden District. Byron and Cameron had bought their house there, on a street just a block below the Quarter, three years before the hurricane. It remains one of my favorite New Orleans houses—an airy two-story Caribbean-style shotgun with a rare side gallery and a long front parlor—and, unless it was a particularly busy time during planting or picking season, they were there almost every weekend. The commute was more than three hours, but other than a pretty good barbecue joint and a KFC, there is not an actual restaurant in Yazoo. The Marigny, on the other hand, is blessed with an abundance of them, including a Thai place, a sushi place, and an excellent French bakery, as well as a bar on Byron and Cameron’s corner that stocks more than a dozen hard-to-find foreign beers, hosts crawfish boils, and gives free haircuts on Thursday nights.

Usually there is lots of foot traffic, too, but on this day there was no one—until Brett Anderson, the relatively recent and currently wild-eyed food critic for the
Times-Picayune
, came flying out the front door of his house across the street. Brett was slightly breathless and extremely sunburned, with a T-shirt tied loosely around his head in a futile attempt to provide shade. He’d been in town since the day after the storm, he told us, one of the noble and sleep-deprived foot soldiers who rallied each day to get the paper out, and whose beats had expanded to include pretty much everything they saw. He’d been staying with a group of colleagues in a crowded Uptown abode they’d dubbed the “frat house,” but which nonetheless had a generator, and he’d made the trip back home to get more clothes and clean out his refrigerator. From the looks of him we did not have a pleasant task before us.

We wished him well and while Byron went inside to check things out, I noticed, for the first time, the light. The Marigny is closer to the river and lacks the canopy of trees that defines the Garden District and Uptown, so that the sky seems somehow closer. It also, at that moment, seemed hard and pale yellow and generally strange, an impression intensified by the menacing drone of the low-flying helicopters overhead. There was definitely an apocalyptic feel to things, like in the movies after a nuclear holocaust has taken place or a deadly volcano has erupted. I’d just never seen one where the event in question had been a devastating hurricane followed by a flood. I’d also never been in occupied territory before. We were in it now—we’d already spotted guard units from Oregon, Oklahoma, and California—though I also realized that of all the big trucks I’d seen stocked with supplies and water, none of them said FEMA or even Red Cross. Rather, they were emblazoned with the logos of either Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club, and, as I would learn later, they’d arrived first and in fuller force.

The tall wooden fence that separated Byron’s property from his neighbor had blown over, supported only by the listing sweet olive trees now beneath it, but everything else was intact, so after he procured his big wrench from the truck and turned off his gas, we headed across Esplanade to the Quarter and Curtis’s Creole cottage. Curtis had recently become a tenured journalism professor at Ole Miss so he often rented out his place in New Orleans (he would make a killing off the
Washington Post
in the months to come), and the last tenants had failed to clean out the refrigerator before they fled. They also hadn’t stayed long enough to amass the kinds of New Orleans freezer fodder that would have made our jobs as disgusting as Brett’s clearly had been, so when we left for Elizabeth’s we were stupidly emboldened.

Elizabeth lives in what is loosely referred to as Uptown, on Carondelet Street, parallel to St. Charles and one block over and several blocks beyond the Garden District. She and Mike had bought their late-nineteenth-century house just after Katie was born and it is beautifully proportioned, with high ceilings, a pretty walled garden, and the two-room guesthouse where we had squatted for almost six months. The kitchen had been recently renovated and boasted roomy new side-by-side freezer and refrigerator units, both of which had been packed to capacity with the kinds of things Curtis’s tenants probably didn’t even know existed: vacuum-sealed bags of crawfish tail meat, links of andouille sausage and
boudin
, pints of lump crab, pounds of pork tenderloin. I knew there had been containers of seafood gumbo and red beans and rice from the beloved Uptown grocery store Langenstein’s in the freezer because there always were, along with the justly renowned “Le Popeye” spinach dip and an addictive cheese-and-walnut spread called “Betta Chedda” from the same place.