The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (11 page)

Let me just say now that there is absolutely no way to adequately describe on the page the greenish white slime that all those ingredients turn into when they have been unrefrigerated for a full ten days. John had survived a year in Vietnam and Byron a potentially fatal disease along with treatment that he alone had the fortitude to finish, but neither of them could stay inside for stretches of more than thirty seconds once we opened the appliance doors. And I couldn’t manage that much. The sight was so nauseating and the stench so overpowering that Byron’s surgical masks proved so useless as to be laughable (though we were profoundly grateful for his gloves and bleach and disinfectant). Later, my good friend Donald Link, the owner and chef at Herbsaint, told me that even the full-fledged rubber gas mask he had donned had been of little assistance during his own ordeal, which, admittedly, had been way worse than ours, involving as it did an industrial-size walk-in that included a full complement of fish and game and house-cured pork products among the many items on its shelves.

To this day, after a typically delicious meal at his restaurant, Donald will sit down with John and me for a jovial glass, and if the talk turns to the dread refrigerator cleanup, his eyes become slightly glazed and we all, invariably, drink more heavily. I have heard Donald talk about what most people would consider critical blows—a hurricane landing a month before he was due to open his second restaurant, say, or losing his house in the flood. But he always stops himself—nothing, not even those things can compare. For one thing, there’s not a whole lot to be done about them. The refrigerator, on the other hand, required confronting.

For all of us, that confrontation became a badge and a touchstone and proof of membership in a relatively exclusive and still vaguely shell-shocked club. When I made brief mention of its more horrific aspects in the first Katrina story I wrote for
Vogue
, my editor insisted that I cut it from the piece, referring to it, with not just a touch of self-righteousness, as my “Marie-Antoinette moment.” I got—and get—her point. But the problem is that unless you or the people you loved just flat-out drowned, almost everything is a Marie-Antoinette moment. More than 700 people in my adopted city died; many, many more lost everything they owned. Our house had a broken window. By default, and in reality, I am eating cake. So when, late at night, Donald and John and I sit around like soldiers from the front, talking about some seemingly silly and really gross thing like dragging leaky garbage bags full of goo to already reeking curbs, what we are really doing is celebrating our very existence. We are bragging on our luck, boasting of our stamina, commiserating, laughing, drinking, talking. We are still alive, we are saying to one another, and more than that, we are still here, in New Orleans, because we choose to be.

A
FTER WE TENDED
to the rest of the gas meters on our list, I insisted that we check in with Bob Rue, who was still commuting between his shop on St. Charles and the Garden District house of his girlfriend Jean, a French professor at the University of New Orleans who had evacuated to Jackson with her mother. When we pulled up in front of Jean’s gate on Eighth Street, Bob was waiting on the front porch with a two-year-old white German Shepherd by his side and a magnum of red wine in his hand—both, as we were soon to find out, gifts of the storm. I didn’t know Bob well, but I’d always had great affection for him, coupled with an odd faith that dated back to my thirtieth birthday, when I happened to be in Greenville and he was there too. My mother invited him to the impromptu party at our house and within about ten minutes he had marched up to Jessica and told her he could tell she needed what he was about to give her. I held my breath while he did something to her neck and back that looked very dangerous and vaguely acrobatic and afterward she told me she had never felt better in her life. Jessica has always carried more than her share of the world’s woes on her shoulders and I loved that he’d immediately gotten that—and that he had been bold enough to release her from them, at least temporarily.

This afternoon was sort of like that. We’d had a long day, were in need of refreshment in a city that eleven days earlier had been visited by the biggest natural disaster in the history of the country, closely followed by an even more devastating man-made one, and now Bob was seating us in wicker chairs on a lovely side gallery, offering us two different kinds of almonds, and pouring what turned out to be a very nice Bordeaux into Jean’s stemmed crystal glasses. Furthermore, there were other guests, a
New Yorker
writer who’d arrived on a bike, and Ellis Joubert, a brilliant local artisan and restorer of antique metalwork who had evacuated to North Carolina but had come immediately back when his Yankees fanatic brother-in-law had insisted on watching a game rather than footage of the flooding on Ellis’s own street. When they hadn’t let him past the checkpoint, he went back to his mother’s house in the burbs, made a red cross on a white T-shirt with a Magic Marker, and tied it to his antenna. Next go round they waved him right through, because, as Bob put it, “It was the first fucking Red Cross presence they’d seen.”

Bob, as I knew, had not left the city even once since the storm. On the second night, he’d been sleeping naked in a second-floor bedroom with all the windows open when, around three in the morning, he heard a noise. With Jean’s .38 in hand, he rolled from the bed, crawled out onto the porch, and saw that a guy with a flatbed truck and a forklift was about to make off with a vintage Porsche belonging to the neighbor across the street. So Bob says, “Hey partner, which way you want your hair parted? I’m getting ready to blow the back of your head off.” Bob is six-foot-six, bald-headed with what’s left of his hair in a longish ponytail, and not entirely svelte; at this point, he’s also naked and in possession of a pistol. As it happens, the culprit was spared such a singular vision—the city was still pitch black—but the I-mean-business voice out of nowhere had an equally forceful effect, and the thief skedaddled, taking the BMW and the Jeep Wrangler that were already on the truck with him.

The next morning Bob covered the Porsche with old carpet pads and some downed fencing and topped off his handiwork with a hand-painted plywood sign that said “Looters Shot.” On the gate to the car owner’s house, he affixed another, reading “Go in and Die,” and then he called him on the same trusty landline he’d used to call me. (Such was the vital nature of the cheap Princess phone in Bob’s shop, the only one he’d been able to find that did not require electricity in order to function, that he unplugged it from its jack every night and carefully hid it away from possible looters.) The Porsche owner, a doctor with a serious wine collection, was so grateful for the salvation of his car that he told Bob how to get into his cellar and to avail himself of everything he had, which turned out to include quite a few bottles of Château Latour. “I don’t know one from the other,” Bob told us. “It’s all just red wine with a French label to me.” But from the taste of things so far, there were few bad choices.

The dog had turned up the next day, wearing a red bandana and clearly in need of food. Bob gave him some kibble and had him tied up on the sidewalk outside the shop when a woman in a big black van pulled up and demanded that he hand over the dog. Bob had already put himself in charge of the care and feeding of at least a dozen neighborhood strays, including a bitch in her first heat who’d exhausted all the others, so he was offended by the implied accusation. “Hell, I ain’t had him but an hour and a half,” he told her. By this time other identical vans had materialized, along with a soundman and someone toting a tape recorder to immortalize the would-be heroics, and it was finally explained to Bob that he was their first “client,” that they had come all this way to rescue dogs and they were determined to rescue his. Bob explained again that Snowflake, whom he named in that moment, did not need their help, that both dog and master were perfectly fine, so they settled for a shot of him with his arm around his new best friend, and a few weeks later he heard from his cousin in Manhattan that she had seen him on the local PBS station on a show about the doings of the dog savers.

While Bob told us the story, it dawned on me that the only other “unofficial” vehicles I’d seen so far, other than the Wal-Mart trucks, were in fact cars and vans with homemade signs that read Oregon SPCA or Humane Society of Missouri. Now I really love animals. When I was growing up we had everything from bunnies and ducks and a noble gray cat named West Virginia to a horse and at least eight dogs, two of whom had simply wandered up our driveway; when John and I bought the house, part of the whole real-life plan had been to eventually adopt a beagle, the dog I had always wanted and never been allowed to have. But I had to ask myself: if I had been watching the saga of Katrina unfold on TV from somewhere almost 3,000 miles away, like, say, Oregon, would my first thought have been to jump in the car and drive like a bat out of hell to rescue someone’s hungry housecat? In the end, for the most part, the well-meaning dog and cat lovers performed an invaluable service, rescuing close to 8,000 animals that were then housed in temporary shelters all over the state, and I went so far as to send one group a bunch of money. But at that moment, with half the city still under water and dead bodies unclaimed on sidewalks, the zealousness seemed a tad misplaced, an impression hilariously confirmed by officers of the Oklahoma National Guard, whom we visited after we tore ourselves away from Bob’s hospitality.

The Oklahoma Guard, which included 600 men in their battalion, along with a cavalry unit and another small company of military police from Puerto Rico, was assigned an area of town that included the Garden District, and I wanted to be sure and introduce myself and, more importantly, show them where our house was. Their TOC, or tactical operations center, was located in a replica of the top of the Eiffel Tower, an unlikely space toward the bottom of St. Charles Avenue usually reserved for fairly tacky party rentals, and where, when we pulled up, the soldiers were sitting on gold ballroom chairs absently cleaning their semiautomatic weapons. Because the governor had been a tad slow in calling them out (she’d been overheard by a CNN producer as late as Wednesday telling an aide she’d forgotten it was her job to do so), it had taken them six days to get there, until which time, according to Bob, the city more closely resembled Dodge City, an assessment with which the men from Oklahoma agreed. We were told by Captain McGowan, a Tulsa police officer and a veteran of Afghanistan, that by the time he and his men arrived, on the Sunday after the storm, the looters were so well established and so organized that when one band discovered an especially lucrative stash, they notified the others via two-way radio, communications traffic that the Guard, thankfully, began to intercept.

By the time we turned up, they were operating on foot, by air, in Humvees, and boats. Order had been more or less restored, streets had been cleared of power lines and the largest pieces of debris, and the looters were being rooted out with the same antennae, which can detect the presence of body heat, that was currently being used in Iraq. The animal rescuers, though, posed a more complicated problem. McGowan told us about the “culprits” who’d been spotted the day before by a helicopter patrol and quickly located and tackled by the men on the ground. It turned out they were workers from the Georgia Humane Society who’d been given permission online by a frantic pet owner to break into his house. The problem arose after they’d kicked in three or four doors before finding the right place, and all that running in and out had garnered the airmen’s attention. When the tacklers realized the “looters”’ cargo was a pair of housecats in a crate, they let them go, but the destroyed locks and now completely unsecured houses of the petless were left unaddressed. It got so bad that on a return trip I noticed a house on Magazine whose owner had spray-painted a message by the front door: “NO CATS! If you come in I WILL shoot you.”

We left the Guard to make one more stop in the Quarter before it got dark, and on our way down St. Charles, we took a moment to check out more of Bob’s handiwork in front of the Sarouk Shop. The plate-glass windows, which ordinarily display gorgeous Serapis and Bidjars and Herizes, were boarded up with sheets of plywood painted white with two messages in black lettering. The first, done the morning after the storm, read: “Don’t Even Try. I am Sleeping Inside with a Big Dog, an Ugly Woman, Two Shotguns, and a Claw Hammer.” Two days later, he had added an update: “Still Here. Woman Left Friday, Cooking a Pot of Dog Gumbo, Still Got Claw Hammer.” As entertaining as they were, they also seemed to have worked. All the places of business in Bob’s general area, including Emeril Lagasse’s Delmonico, where he had painted a helpful “Looters Shot” by the front door, remained untouched. By contrast, a bit further afield almost nothing had been spared, from the Smoothie King to the Please U Restaurant, where the cash register had been busted open and the tables and chairs and ceiling fans all smashed for the sport of it. At the nearby Walgreens drugstore, someone had simply removed the locked-down steel front door with a forklift.

At Lee Circle, some rather more good-natured looters, a trio of winos whom I recognized from before the storm, were drinking from magnums of Moët & Chandon procured from the Le Cirque Hotel behind them. But heading into the Central Business District, we were back to the more destructive stuff. There was the Athlete’s Foot, whose looting I’d watched live on CNN the week before, and Canal Place, the shopping center near the edge of the river where Saks Fifth Avenue had been set on fire after being ransacked. The only display windows in the entire complex that survived without a scratch belonged to Brooks Brothers, where the Ken-doll mannequins in white flannel pants and blue blazers accompanied by neat stacks of candy-striped shirts and matching stadium blankets apparently held no allure for the criminal minded.

It was almost dusk when we made it to our final destination. On the news, Johnny White’s, a dive on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans, had been repeatedly hailed as the bar that had never closed, and there it was, a beacon of sorts—albeit one dimly lit by a handful of voodoo candles in glass jars. It was as reassuringly disgusting as always, and filled with the same combo of die-hard “Quarter Rats”—heavily pierced latter-day punks; two guys making out on barstools; assorted neighborhood drunks, including one with a freshly busted forehead—except that now there were also a couple of wide-eyed Yankee cameramen and a large bottle of Germ-X on the bar. The beer, Budweiser long necks floating in barrels of melting ice, was delicious; the street empty and astonishingly clean. We were reluctant to leave this unlikely oasis, but Byron was heading all the way back to Yazoo, and we were all suddenly very hungry. We left the city the same way we came and caravanned north until Byron took his turn to Mississippi. An hour later, John and I were in the newly teeming metropolis of Baton Rouge (its population had almost doubled in the week after the storm). When we walked into Linda Jane’s brightly lit kitchen, I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to see my cousin—or the bottle of Scotch she was holding in her hand.

The next morning John and I got up early to head back into New Orleans, but first we had some shopping to do. The day before, when I’d asked Bob if there was anything he needed, he’d answered, “ice and garlic powder.” This was classic Bob, and it turned out that Ellis is an excellent cook specializing in Indian curries and Szechuan stir-fries, but I wanted to stock up on some slightly more substantial items for the National Guard. Their only means of nourishment were military issued “meals ready to eat,” envelopes full of powder that became beef stew or even Cajun rice with beans and sausage when mixed with water, but that were so heavily laced with chemicals that a sergeant told me he wondered if when he died there would be any need to embalm him. It was a funny line, but in New Orleans of all places, the idea of people not eating well, especially people from a place already as culinarily deprived as Oklahoma, seemed deeply wrong to me. Later, I’d find out that my friend Chris Rose, the gifted
Times-Picayune
columnist, had acted on the same thought—and, in the process, confirmed one of my darkest suspicions, that most of what had been served lately at Antoine’s, the once-great Creole institution, was not fresh, but frozen. Leery of the fish and crabmeat, Rose had commandeered the rapidly defrosting lamb chops and beef filets from the restaurant’s walk-in freezers, merrily “looted” some grills from his neighbors’ porches and backyards, and, with the help of his colleagues, staged a cookout amidst the fallen oaks in Audubon Park for the California National Guard, who were looking after most of Uptown.