The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (15 page)

When we got home, the first thing we noticed was the utter stillness and quiet. From the time we had owned it, the house on First Street had been full of noise. For more than a year, all day long, people had been hammering and sawing and drilling, yelling at each other, knocking down walls. Once we’d moved in, we heard the same nighttime sounds of gunshots and sirens as everybody else across the city, but on this night there was nothing. The city had only been “open” for a day or two—all of our neighbors and well over 80 percent of the population were still gone; the guys in trucks were concentrated in a few downtown hotels. I’d never been in such a large urban space so sparsely populated; I had also never seen such an astonishing sky. When I left the Delta I rarely bothered to look up at night—the lights in all the cities I’d lived in, including New Orleans, made the stars barely visible. But now, not only had Katrina knocked out the electricity in New Orleans, there were no lights to speak of all the way to Mobile. I felt as though I were looking through a telescope.

Bob had told me that on the first night after the storm, the night before he’d been disturbed by the car thief, he’d been awakened by the far more pleasant sound of hundreds of owls who had blown in off the lakefront and taken refuge in the great oaks on St. Charles. When he’d walked over to get a closer listen, he’d looked up and seen the Milky Way. “There it was,” he said. “Clear as I’ve ever seen it from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Telling it, he had still been a little awestruck, and now I knew something of how he’d felt: completely alone, a little brave (even though by the time I looked up there was nothing much to be afraid of except the city’s unknown future and I had a bizarre blind faith in that), and suddenly proprietary. We were pioneers of a sort and even the sky was ours, however briefly.

When I looked up that night, I didn’t see the Milky Way, but I did think of Robert Penn Warren’s lovely lines from “Audubon”: “Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.” In the emptiness where I was standing, the poem, subtitled “A Vision,” seemed startlingly appropriate, topical even; also, part of Audubon’s own story had played out under the same intensely starry sky. It was here, mostly in a studio on Dauphine Street, that he had painted his brown pelican and great white heron, his snowy egret and sandhill crane, my favorite fish crow dining on a crab. (Broke, he’d also painted the nude mistress of his friend Bernard de Marigny, Celeste’s brother who introduced the game of craps to Louisiana and who kept his many mistresses on a street in his new “subdivision” called rue Amour, which, like his original Craps Street now known as Burgundy, sadly goes by a different name.)

When Audubon came to New Orleans in 1821, he was impoverished but determined to follow his passion, and he set for himself the task, which he came impressively close to meeting, of painting a bird a day in order to finish his mammoth
Birds of America
. I envied him his extraordinary ambition and discipline but also his freedom and his intimacy with the natural world—watching the passage of “millions of Golden Plovers” in the woods outside the city, jumping in his rowboat whenever he needed to procure a new species for his drawings. I even envied Bob his owls. New Orleans had always been lush and green and even a little wild, but since my early childhood, when the “country” just outside of Greenville where we lived began to get increasingly populated, I had missed the rawer aspects of nature. And then, as if on cue, the crows appeared. On our first morning home, I was visited by a whole flock of them: they landed two and three at a time on the railing of the second-story balcony just outside my office windows, and spread out into what was left of the ancient magnolia and the enormous live oak that flanked the house.

Unlike the Creoles, who, according to Audubon’s letters, made gumbos out of the “barred” owls they bought for 25 cents at the French Market, John is firmly an owl man. As a wedding present, I’d given him a tiny owl stickpin made of diamonds with emerald eyes, but I have always been partial to the majestic raven, even though in this instance I certainly knew what they were doing in town. Crows and ravens are scavengers after all—not only do they have an uncanny ability to detect the dead, they have a literally “ravenous” appetite. They are also generalists in their eating habits and I pictured them munching on the piles of newly beached crabs like the one Audubon had painted in the mouth of his fish crow. They’re lordly, yet lithe and elegant in their flying patterns and I had always wanted to go dressed as one to a costume party, with great wings and a headdress made of their glossy black feathers.

For years, one of my favorite restaurants in London was an elegant, now-defunct place called Odin’s. Until I found out otherwise, I thought it had been cleverly named for the Norse god who gave up one of his eyes in exchange for dipping his cup in the well of wisdom. Thereafter, he relied on the ravens Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory) who flew through the nine worlds and returned to him at night, perching on his throne and whispering news of all that had transpired. The fact that Odin had made the correct choice of bird for such a mission was confirmed not long after my own visitation on one of my many drives through Louisiana and Mississippi when I heard Constance Savage, a writer who has chronicled the doings of crows for years, on NPR. According to Savage, “For their size, crows are among the brainiest organisms on earth, outclassing not only other birds, with the possible exception of parrots, but also most mammals.” Further, she said, their ability to make and use tools is a distinctive characteristic of humans, and when they sing together, they actually harmonize as “a mark of friendship or social affiliation.” Though my crows filled the air with random-sounding caws and “quorks” rather than harmony or whispered news, they seemed somehow to possess plenty of the latter. I found myself wanting so badly to talk to them, and I looked forward to their morning visits.

T
HE FIRST WEEKEND
in October, the Viking Range Corporation, which makes stoves and refrigerators and all sorts of other appliances, and which happens to be headquartered in Greenwood, Mississippi, six blocks from Lusco’s, held a retreat for the displaced chefs of New Orleans and I was enlisted as a cheerleader.

The purpose was to hold informal discussions to find out what everyone needed most, but also to provide some much needed R&R in the form of rooms and meals at the surprisingly luxurious and really cool company-owned hotel, The Alluvian, and treatments at the well-appointed spa across the street. Among the guests were John Besh, a Gulf War vet and the aforementioned supremely talented chef/owner of Restaurant August and Besh’s Steakhouse, who, in the days immediately after the storm, had fired up his butane boiler, put it on a flat boat, and served hundreds of pounds of red beans and rice to folks stranded by the flood. Susan Spicer was there from Bayona, along with Greg and Mary Sonnier from Gabrielle, whose restaurant near City Park had suffered extensive damage, and Leah Chase, who, at eighty-two, was the undisputed
grande dame
of Creole cooking and whose restaurant Dooky Chase had taken on several feet of water.

I was happiest to see my friend JoAnn Clevenger, owner of Upperline. I had interviewed JoAnn for one of the pieces I’d written just after the storm, and by the time we’d hung up, she’d given me an assignment: convince Ken Smith, the restaurant’s chef, to return to the stove. I was happy to oblige—Ken is a gifted cook, a dear friend, and he shares JoAnn’s and my passion for collecting old cookbooks—owner and chef had been brought together through a rare bookseller. Ken and JoAnn are both from north Louisiana, Natchitoches and Alexandria respectively, but Ken is a lot more fond of it up there, and I knew uprooting him from his evacuation roost in what he calls “God’s Country,” was not going to be easy. Much of my driving time during the last month had been spent on the phone with either Ken or JoAnn, but it had paid off. Ken was returning to New Orleans (mainly, I think, because his beloved books were here) and to the restaurant; JoAnn had come to the retreat for encouragement and advice on how to get it up and running.

Those with families brought them, and it was all very gay, but some folks were clearly better off than others. Besh, for example, was simply recharging before returning in the next week or so to reopen August and to nail down a contract to feed FEMA workers—he had bought the three-story brick building that houses August literally days before the storm and the contract would enable him to pay the mortgage. No matter what their situation, everyone was worried about staffing; JoAnn was worried about whether or not any of her wine, which was worth many uninsured thousands, had survived the heat; and Greg and Mary were worried about where—and if—they would reopen.

One person missing was my good buddy Donald Link, and when we got back to town, we found out why—Herbsaint had reopened that weekend, becoming the first “white tablecloth restaurant,” using real china and silver and offering both lunch and dinner, to have done so. Pre-Katrina, the restaurant had forty employees; the first night we dined there, six people were doing it all. The manager was also a busboy, the sous chef was also the dishwasher, and everybody was dashing around madly, dressed in the Herbsaint T-shirts usually reserved for games in the restaurant soft-ball league. The customers, on the other hand, were not harried at all, but profoundly grateful. In the midst of a city that was still, essentially, a wasteland, Donald had pulled it together and given us a glimpse of Life As We Had Known It. The crowds that waited on the sidewalk outside—drinking, talking, laughing, greeting—reminded me of the glory days of the Galatoire’s line; in the ladies’ room I heard a woman exult that it was “just so great to see other people.” Not all of his vendors were even close to up and running but Donald improvised brilliantly, offering up comfort foods like his usual fine gumbo, chicken and dumplings, meatloaf enhanced with tiny bits of andouille sausage, and an excellent iceberg lettuce salad with fennel and applewood-smoked bacon that was so good everyone demanded that it stay on the menu long after the usual arugula and
frisée
and romaine were easily procured.

The night Herbsaint reopened happened to fall on the same date as the planned grand opening of Cochon, a restaurant with a sophisticated Cajun emphasis that Donald and his sous chef Stephen Stryjewski had been working on for more than a year. Donald and his wife had lost their house in Lakeview in the storm and were staying at his brother-in-law’s place in Metairie with their six-year-old daughter. At the end of the night he was so wired he went through at least one bottle of tequila before he could even think about tucking into his mattress on the floor—a practice he discontinued when the dairy delivery guy found him throwing up in the kitchen’s garbage can early one morning. He is German on one side and Cajun on the other, with a subtle sense of humor and extraordinary focus. He is also a truly great chef and it hadn’t surprised me a bit that he had been the first to open and that he was pressing on with plans for Cochon.

“What else are you going to do?” he asked me that night. “We didn’t bring this on ourselves, it was just something that happened.” In the middle of his second week, during a particularly brutal lunch service, he noticed two Mexicans having a drink at the bar. They told him their FEMA gig had just run out, they’d lost their lodgings, they were headed back to Texas that afternoon. Donald didn’t miss a beat—he ripped off his apron, grabbed the newspaper, and came back an hour later with keys to one of the last habitable apartments in the city. In little more than an instant, the Mexicans had become Herbsaint dishwashers on a fast track to becoming kitchen assistants.

Donald also told me that as tough as it had been to get it open, the restaurant had immediately become a sanity-saving “sanctuary” for him and his staff. “When we leave, there are reminders everywhere that it’s not the same,” he said. “In here, it’s just the normal day to day.” I knew exactly what he meant—it was the chefs who saved us. Every week there were more and more places to go for sustenance, a few hours of normalcy and camaraderie, and, most important, hope. People like Donald were just doing it: cleaning things up and repairing what was broken, taking out loans and cheering on their employees, all of whom were doing the work of at least five people. Nobody had seen the mayor, no one had heard a plan, but if these guys could do it, so could the rest of us. When Besh reopened August, I ate the same lunch special, a Moroccan-inspired chicken stew with pistachios instead of the pine nuts he couldn’t get, three days in a row—not because nothing else was on offer (the menu was in fact surprisingly extensive), but because it was so totally delicious. They were all winging it, and cooking better than ever.

A few days after our first dinner at Herbsaint, I walked the twenty-something blocks up Magazine to Upperline Street to visit JoAnn. It was the second week of October and still hot as hell. For weeks now it had been too late to salvage a refrigerator by cleaning it out, so when people got back to their houses, they simply duct-taped them closed and set them on the sidewalks. Their stench was overpowering but they made such great venues for graffiti that a small book of refrigerator photos was printed up in time for Christmas. The most popular messages were “Here lies the heart of Tom Benson” (Benson is the owner of the New Orleans Saints who had threatened to move the team to San Antonio), and “Please forward to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” (the address of the White House). There were those that could only have been found in New Orleans—“Voodoo Today Here Now 5 PM” along with the slightly grosser “Free Gumbo Inside” and “Got Gravy”—and at least one that lampooned the cat saviors, “No Pets Inside.” Some were just weird—“My Lover Is You!”—while another performed a public service: “Slow the Fuck Down.”

During my trek, there was little traffic, fast or otherwise, which was a good thing because enormous piles of tree limbs and trash made the sidewalks all but unnavigable. By the time I got to Upperline Street and the restaurant, which was five more blocks off Magazine on the corner of Prytania, I was about to pass out, but when I got there I quickly rallied. All I’d done was walk, and here was JoAnn down on her hands and knees scraping up carpet glue. Since the restaurant is on high ground and hadn’t flooded, I assumed her roof had leaked but that did not turn out to be the problem. The stench from her own refrigerators had gotten into the wall-to-wall carpet of the front room and there was nothing to do but pull it up.

JoAnn is a trouper—in every sense of the word. Her first home in New Orleans had been an otherwise empty infectious disease ward in the back of Charity Hospital that she shared with the nuns who terrified her (“I had grown up Baptist”), and her mother, who was slowly dying from a rare fungal disease called coccidio mycosis she’d contracted through a small cut over her eye. Her father was, as JoAnn put it, a smart man with little education and a “Zane Grey sense of adventure” who moved the family constantly, so it was left to JoAnn, at seventeen, to come to the city with her mother while also taking the bus from the hospital to high school every day. Though she’d transferred to town in her senior year she was bright enough to become a National Merit Finalist, which earned her a picture on the front page of the
Times-Picayune
, a key to the city, and a scholarship to Tulane. When her mother died during her first year there, she “fell apart,” she said. “I thought, you know, since I was with the one who was with her, I should have been able to save her.”

Her grades failed and she lost her scholarship, so, completely on her own, she took an apartment in the Quarter. For the next several years JoAnn would work as a waitress and meet pretty much everybody, including Tennessee Williams and Dizzy Gillespie, for whom she mixed a drink when the white bartender refused to do it (they became fast friends). She bought her own bar, the Abbey, for $1,500, built a back bar out of two old mantels, and became the only tavern owner in the entire Southeast to offer Guinness on tap. She also served up such exotica as free cheese and pumpernickel on Sunday mornings as well as the Sunday
New York Times
, which she had to go all the way to the airport to pick up. (“We had this lazy, eclectic group of people coming in to get their paper and bread and cheese.”) A few years earlier she’d started a business selling bouquets from a cart, which she now expanded into the Abbey, and which led to a successful lobbying effort to change the state law keeping everyone but licensed florists from selling cut flowers. Part of her strategy was placing a flower on the desk of each legislator, along with a greeting card in the shape of a cart. “I think that brought more happiness to more people than anything I’ve ever done,” she told me. “Because think about it—now, all over Louisiana, little grocery stores can sell flowers.”

Along the way, she married, had a son and a daughter (her husband worked in the day; she worked at night), and met her second husband, a British engineer who approached her in a bar called the Seven Seas and told her she looked like Ruthie the Duck Lady—a line so “unpredictable” she forgave him, she says, and “anyway, he was the cutest dancer you can possibly imagine and I can’t dance.” After she got a divorce and married Alan, she opened a secondhand clothing and costume shop that led to a job as costumer for the musical
One Mo’ Time
, which ended up playing in Manhattan for three years. In 1982, just back from a
One Mo
’
Time
tour through Australia and New Zealand, she found the building that would become Upperline and opened in January 1983 with “forty chairs, no money for the first week’s paychecks,” and her son Jason, who had been chef at Café Sbisa’s in the Quarter, at the stove. Now, almost twenty-four years later, she was on all fours with a razor blade scraping up the glue she had poured herself just before that first opening.

Two days later, riding my bike on Magazine, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. In the short time since my walk, the merchants had banded together and staged a massive cleanup aided by the remaining National Guard troops, who were by now getting bored, and the firemen from the Magazine Street station. At one point even the mayor, shamed into turning up, briefly managed to lift a shovel. Now, with the debris gone I could see things, important things like the banner hanging across the Belladonna day spa exhorting me to “Be a NEW New Orleanian,” and the open takeout window at the pie and praline stand of Tee Eva, a former dancer for Ernie K-Doe, the late New Orleans soul singer whose biggest hit had been “Mother-in-Law” (hence his widow’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, which boasts a painted life-sized statue of Ernie dressed in one of his embroidered suits). Aidan Gill, John’s Irish barber was back up and running, which meant he was also dispensing shots of my favorite Red Breast Irish whiskey, and, at Casamento’s, the narrow, tile-walled oyster bar that opened in 1919, a hand-lettered sign announced a reopening date of November 15. Joseph Casamento, the son of the founder, had been born in the second-floor apartment above the restaurant where he lived his entire life until, at eighty, he evacuated for Katrina and died of a heart attack on the same day she hit. A bachelor, he had never worked anywhere but Casamento’s or lived in another spot—his nephew’s wife told Brett Anderson she thought the upheaval had been too much.

On October 19 at six in the morning, Café Du Monde began dispensing its famous chicory coffee again, along with its addictive beignets. A month earlier, the mayor had predicted that “once the beignets are in the oven, [New Orleanians] will come back.” Despite that fact that beignets are fried in a deep fryer and not baked in an oven, people did flock to the reopening, though at least half of them appeared to be FEMA workers and the media, including the folks from CNN who featured it on the morning show, complete with an anchor biting into a golden brown, powdered-sugar-dusted, fried beignet.