The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (12 page)

Likewise, John and I filled the car with hams and turkeys, pound cakes and cookies, fruit and chips, and ice chests full of drinks. As we drove toward New Orleans, it dawned on me that it was the first time in my life I had brought food into the city; people were forever asking me to bring things, things you couldn’t get anywhere else, out: Zatarain’s Fish Fri, olive salad from the Central Grocery, Turduckens and boneless chickens stuffed with dirty rice from the Gourmet Butcher Block. That had been the tradition from those very first forays with McGee, when we were invariably charged with bringing fresh shrimp back to my mother, and it must be said that the imports did not match up to the exports. Still, the guys in the Guard, who had likely never heard of a Turducken (a partially deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken, and layered with cornbread stuffing or sausage dressing or both) were glad to see us. When they found out I was a journalist, they immediately offered to take John and me and the photographer who’d been roaming around shooting for
Vogue
on their mission the next day, and we gladly accepted. It was the only way we could get into the still-flooded parts of town without our own Humvee or boat.

For the rest of the day, we took a more extensive tour of the parts of town where we could easily move around, and since food was on our minds, our first stops were all our favorite restaurants. At Herbsaint, Donald had written “Back ASAP” on his boarded-up doors; at Lilette, the unboarded and miraculously unbroken windows revealed wineglasses appropriately turned upside down on top of crisp white butcher paper, and napkins neatly folded at each place. It was hard to believe we couldn’t just push open the door and take a seat in our usual booth. Further uptown, the brightly painted façade of my friend JoAnn Clevenger’s Upperline, where I dined for the first time during that fateful Jazz Fest, was as cheerful as ever. But on St. Charles, at the entrance to Audubon Place, a gated street full of lavishly appointed, mostly 1920s mansions (including one once owned by Bob Dylan), there was a slightly more sinister sight. At the first reports of looting, some of the residents there, most of whom were safely ensconced in their Aspen summer houses, pooled their considerable resources and flew in a team of Israeli commandos. Now, I had shared the same panicky fear as these particular house owners, and the person most responsible for bringing in the security team happened to be one of my favorite people in the city. But these guys, in their head-to-toe black outfits and wraparound sunglasses and Ninja headscarves, wielding their Uzis in what was now, for all practical purposes, a ghost town, looked utterly ridiculous. It was easy for me to say it, since our house had survived the looters and the fires and the storm itself, but I was glad our own security team had instead consisted of Bob and his dogs and his armload of painted signs.

Bob was in front of his shop when we dropped off his provisions, and he was happy to get them, but happier still over his first commission. As soon as the Guard had cleared the roads, he’d started parking his paneled truck at various highly visible intersections throughout the Garden District and Uptown, in hopes that any homeowners who had managed to slip in to check on their property—and who might also have some waterlogged rugs—would see his sign: “Bring All Wet Oriental Rugs to Sarouk.” In a scene that would grow familiar over the next several months, he had an enormous Serapi spread out on the sidewalk, drying it before he got to work on the stains. Unless they’d stayed in salt water too long—“It eats up the foundations”—he could salvage them, he told me, and in the end, he cleaned more than 600 carpets at $2 per square foot.

The next morning we arrived early to meet the Guard, this time bearing more ice, coffee cake, and Krispy Kremes, which prompted the same heroes’ welcome we’d received the day before. I had never met our photographer, but he’d taken the famous
National Geographic
cover shot of the blue-eyed Afghani girl that had so penetrated the public’s consciousness during the Soviet invasion in 1985, and then he’d found her again, at a refugee camp on the Pakistani border, after our post–9/11 invasion. He was with his girlfriend, also a photographer, and the two of them had already spent one night with Linda Jane, who’d been nice enough to put him up because he’d made no other arrangements. He might have been a war photographer but he was not exactly clued in as to the conditions on this particular ground. After introductions were made, the four of us piled into a couple of the Humvees in the Guard caravan. The order of the day was “urban recon,” covering the dry parts first, block by block, following the crumpled Xeroxed grid of the city that each driver had stuck in his pocket.

We drove past the Robért Grocery, with its bittersweet banner “You Are too Late; Already Looted” strung across the front and stopped to chat with a young Haitian family that were by now trading inside jokes with the soldiers. Although the mayor had issued an order for everyone who had stayed through the storm to vacate the city, McGowan had already told me, “We’re here to serve and protect, not to drag people out of their houses.” (The mayor, on the other hand, seemed to be obeying his own order.) We stopped to check out radio reports of some activity at a long-abandoned building where plentiful caches of loot had already been discovered—mostly electronics and cases of alcohol and cigarettes—but the perpetrators turned out to be a couple of cats who had so far managed to elude the vigilant rescuers. The day before, a call had yielded less amusing results. Our “guide,” Staff Sergeant Chris Havens, told me they’d chased a suspected looter into an apartment where they’d also discovered “an unfortunate woman.” I had visions of the toothless, coked-up Cassandra—“What do you mean, ‘unfortunate’?” I asked. “She was dead.”

At first, Havens told me, the body was so large and so decomposed that they couldn’t figure out the source of the overwhelming stench—they thought she was part of the bedding. Also, it had been difficult to tell, he said, whether she’d been a victim of foul play or had just suffered a heart attack in the heat, but they’d been forced to leave her there because there was not yet anywhere to take bodies, and even if there had been, there was no proper means of transporting them—hence Vera’s sidewalk “burial.” When the photographer’s girlfriend heard that the body was where they left it, she all but demanded to be taken there so she could get a picture. While I get the need to illustrate the more gruesome aspects of a tragedy, I thought asking those guys to revisit such a scene was a bit much, not to mention the fact that there were plenty of gruesome sights that did not involve disrupting a mission or disturbing what was left of the dignity of an “unfortunate” woman lying dead in her own home. Havens, who had been all but ordered to do whatever we asked, was about to radio that he was turning around, but his discomfort—and that of the rest of the men—was palpable. I told him to forget it and we were best of chums for the rest of the day.

As we drove up Jackson Avenue and crossed St. Charles, I began watching for Danneel Street, home to Rose and Roseanna, Frankie and Joe. The water line there was not much past the porches it had risen to when the gang had made their getaway, but just one or two blocks farther on, the lines were considerably higher. In front of a side yard, a chain-link fence bore a sign saying “Beware of Dogs,” while the animals in question sat vigilantly atop the flooded cars parked on the other side. “You can start to smell it now,” Havens said, and he was right. You could also see the evidence of the mayhem that had ensued as the water began rising. Brown’s Dairy trucks, packed with flooded loot, now stood at all angles with the doors wide open on the higher neutral grounds (known in less parade-going parts of America as grassy medians), along with dozens of white stretch limos and black hearses (the Brown’s parking lot, as well as that of a limousine service and a funeral home, was in the neighborhood). By this time we were driving through a housing project that had been in terrible physical shape pre-Katrina, and so notorious that even the out-of-state troops referred to it as “bad man’s land,” but it had not dawned on our savvy war photographer that the abandoned vehicles might have been stolen. “Man,” he said, “this doesn’t look like a very good neighborhood, but these people sure had a lot of limos.” At this point the two of us were atop the Humvee accompanied by Sergeant Morales and another young man who pulled a Tom Clancy novel out of his jacket every time there was a long wait. When I looked at both of them their shoulders were shaking so hard in silent laughter I thought they were going to fall off.

As we moved—slowly, since the water was now churning beneath us and coming in through the doors—I talked to the men, many of whom had joined the Guard long before it meant an almost certain stint in Afghanistan or Iraq. Havens, a litigation specialist who had signed up in 1987, told me he had talked with his wife early on. “I said, ‘If anything ever happens to me and you cry on TV, I’ll come back and haunt you. Because we’re doing what we want to do, what we’re proud to do, and you shouldn’t ever be sad.’” We both knew it was unlikely that something so drastic would befall him in New Orleans, but the mission was not entirely devoid of danger—or pathos. Toward the end of the crawl through the project, we came across a dead man, alone and facedown in the grass, his hands, the back of his head, and much of his torso chewed off above the twin waistbands of his white Jockeys and dark jeans, his ribs sticking out but his feet still protected by black leather sneakers. Earlier I had commented on the general good health of many of the dogs we’d come across, and now Havens looked at me: “That’s why the dogs aren’t hungry.”

We stopped but, except for the photographers who were immediately on the ground snapping pictures, there was not a whole lot for anyone to do. Just ahead us, there was an agitated pit bull on the roof of one of the units, and from the radio a voice in front said, “If he’s not a threat, leave him alone.” Who could tell? I thought, but a subsequent communication was clearer: “Rules of engagement on the shooting of animals, over: If you see any eating human remains, shoot them.” They rogered that, at which point another voice was heard: “The water’s coming in here, Gonzo, I mean really coming in”—and we were forced to turn around. Part of the reason for the exercise had been to measure how much the water had receded in the previous twenty-four hours and I was told that it had gone down a full six inches. Only the day before, Morales said, he’d seen a catfish swimming down Claiborne Avenue, another of the city’s major thoroughfares that runs parallel to Magazine and St. Charles. Now Claiborne was more or less dry, but the ground was covered in a disgusting sludgy slime that would later dry into a thick dusty hull marked by a web of deep cracks.

On the way back to the TOC, our convoy passed a fire station packed with hundreds of volunteers from all over the country, including the New York Fire Department, who were all veterans of 9/11 and who wore airbrushed T-shirts reading NEVER FORGET. As it happened, it was 9/11/2005, and there was no way, shaking the hands of those men and women, not to cry. They told us they’d all signed on for two-week stints and as we thanked them and began to pull away, they rushed inside and came back out with armloads of extra boxed lunches and cold Cokes and big bags of M&Ms for the Guard, who were so elated by yet another chance to eat real food they let out war whoops.

September 11 is also my birthday, so after another run by Elizabeth’s to grab some school clothes to send to Lizzy and a black suit for Elizabeth (“in case anybody dies”), we headed back to Baton Rouge to do what little celebrating we could. I had been in Manhattan on 9/11 and watched the second tower fall; the following year, on September 13, as I was dashing out for a belated birthday lunch, McGee had called to say come quick, Mike was dead. With the arrival of Katrina three years later, Patrick Dunne had emailed to say enough was enough, that perhaps I should make like the Queen and arbitrarily pick another date on which to celebrate my birth, preferably one not so loaded with bad karma.

Despite recent dramatic events, I had to say that karma-wise at least, this particular birthday was actually not so bad. I was forty-five years old, not exactly the age I thought I’d be when I moved into my first real house—and certainly a lot older than I’d pictured myself being back in the day’s when I was rearranging Barbie’s furniture—but I’d moved in nonetheless. And yes, a catastrophic hurricane had hit the city I’d finally chosen to live in almost immediately afterward, but it had all but spared our little patch on First Street—Eddie and crew, as we would continually find out, caused us a lot more damage than Katrina. Then there was our drive-through with the Guard, which had reinforced the notion that figuratively speaking, we were definitely eating cake. So it was in that spirit that we headed off to eat the real thing with my cousins, whom I dearly loved and never saw enough of and who really believed (Linda Jane is a devout Catholic) that our being together was an unexpected blessing of the storm.

I believed it too and when we arrived at Linda Jane’s, she and her mother and her daughter were waiting with the wedding presents they had never gotten around to sending, a lovely crystal and silver bud vase that had belonged to Linda Jane’s grandmother, my great aunt Trudy, along with an art nouveau tea strainer (I am a tea fanatic) that had been hers as well. After we uncorked a bottle of the rescued Billecart-Salmon, John presented me with his present, a glass oil lamp and a big bottle of oil, which was really funny but also typically sweet and potentially useful—it is sitting on the bookshelf behind me as I type just in case. Afterward the two of us went to an oddly romantic and surprisingly delicious restaurant where a really good pianist played at just the right remove and journalists and volunteers and evacuees filled the tables around us, along with a few locals intrepid enough to venture out among the newly arrived populace. It was another one of those out-of-time experiences in the post-Katrina vortex. We didn’t know a soul in the place, our phones still didn’t really work very well. Just a few hours earlier we’d been in no-man’s-land and now we were in some pleasant anonymous place sharing a decent bottle of wine. I would have been happy to stay there forever.