The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (16 page)

That night Upperline opened its doors with Alan behind the bar, Ken in the kitchen, and Jason, now a philosophy professor in St. Louis, backing him up as sous chef. The slightly shortened menu featured the restaurant’s signature fried green tomatoes with shrimp
rémoulade
, the idea for which JoAnn thinks came to her in a dream and which by now has been copied across the country, and Ken’s Cane River Country Shrimp, a delectable combination of shrimp, bacon, and mushrooms over crispy grits cakes which my mother and I helped name. John and I went with McGee and Elizabeth and ordered pretty much everything we’d been missing: the duck
étouffée
on corn cakes with pepper jelly, the crispy oysters with celery root
rémoulade
, the Cane River shrimp, the baby drum
meunière
, the slow-roasted duck with sweet potato fries.

JoAnn’s funky mix of art and her gorgeous cut roses (of course) still enlivened the dining rooms, as did, on this night, the grateful diners. It was another raucous cocktail party, with people hollering and hugging and asking the ubiquitous questions: “How’d you do?” and “Are you back for good?” More than one person who answered yes to the latter told me that in those early, still half-dark days (by now everyone on unflooded ground had electricity but the streetlights wouldn’t be back on for months), that the constant trickle of reopening restaurants—and, therefore, civilization—was what had convinced them to stay. We closed the place, as usual, joined at our table by Alan and Ken and JoAnn, who kept plying us with the wine she wanted to make sure was okay. We happily obliged, but by this time it was frankly hard to tell, and when we finally left, we had to wake up McGee, who’d been napping on the banquette.

If food led the way, culture wasn’t far behind. I was proud that the Ogden became the first museum to reopen—despite the fact that all but one staff member, including the director, had lost their houses. By the second “Ogden After Hours,” a weekly event at which drinks are served and local musicians perform, word had gotten out, and more than a thousand people gathered to hear Walter “Wolfman” Washington play his mix of soul, funk, and blues. The pre-Katrina crowd rarely topped 300 to 400, and now there weren’t even a hundred thousand people in the city, but folks were desperate for normalcy, and more than anywhere else, “normal” in New Orleans means music. To that end, Irvin Mayfield, who by now had found out that his father wasn’t just missing but drowned, had written an epic jazz piece, “For All the Saints,” which he performed with his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra at Christ’s Church Cathedral on St. Charles. The church had originally planned to commission a piece by Mayfield to commemorate the Episcopal bicentennial in Louisiana, but given the circumstances the mission, and the music, changed. Before the concert, the lieutenant governor urged the crowd to “get a sense of where you are in time and place.” Right, I thought, summoning Warren again, “Tell me a story in this century and moment of mania”—and then Irvin did tell it, a story of a life lived beyond his twenty-seven years, a story of grieving and loss and hope and celebration. When he was done, the standing-room only crowd was silent for a full minute before applauding for much, much longer.

By this time, Eddie had sufficiently recovered from his depression to show up with some guy I’d never seen before to reinstall all the bolts and pulls and doorknobs on the two walls of French doors and windows in the sunroom that Abel had installed incorrectly. He also told me that the company that was supposed to have delivered the remaining stone, including the five sets of limestone steps, had gone out of business. (I found out later that for a whole year before the storm they hadn’t paid any of the money they owed to the Pennsylvania quarry that had been their—and our—chief supplier, money which included the hefty check I’d written to them for the stuff we’d received so far.) But since we had no one to install the stuff, it didn’t much matter—Eddie had the heard from the subcontractor whose equipment still littered our yard only once, when he’d called from St. Louis asking for money, a sad fact that meant that our gate would likely be inoperable for some time.

He also assured me that he had repaired the leaks in the flat roof “for good” this time, and since I very stupidly believed him, I got Mr. Dupré’s men, now managed by his son Blair while Billy tried to put his flooded house back together, to come and paint the sunroom ceiling for the third go-round. By the time it had rained—and leaked—again, Eddie had taken off for Oaxaca, one of the very few people at the time who was leaving New Orleans for Mexico rather than the other way around. When I told Joe Wallis, who was back on the job painting the outside of the house, that Eddie had gone down for a long-scheduled trip to get married and to celebrate the Day of the Dead, for which he made an annual visit, I thought he was going to explode. “Day of the Dead? Day of the Dead? Goddamn, hasn’t he had enough of that around here?” Joe is a little guy but he has a deep Irish voice whose primary register is outraged disbelief. When he got through yelling and shaking his wet paintbrush, we both started laughing so hard we were crying. (Later on, when I found out that an early-twentieth-century print of a woman known as “La Catrina” was a symbol of the festivities I couldn’t wait to call him on the phone.)

Freddy, on the other hand, was not laughing. I’d seen him on that day, a couple of weeks after the storm, when he’d come to check on his truck. He’d been thrilled to find it exactly where he’d left it, undamaged and still full of about a thousand dollars of equipment. But when he came back to retrieve it not long afterward, it was gone. A woman down the block, who was involved in a renovation far more extensive than ours, told Joe she had called a service to tow it away. We all agreed that there was something a tad bizarre about this—it had been parked on a public street in front of a house not her own and she could not remember the name of the towing company she had called. When she told Joe she thought it had been “abandoned” it gave him an opportunity to vent some more outrage. “ABANDONED? We had a HURRICANE,” he told her. Later he said to me, “You know what you call that? Two words: GRAND THEFT.”

Other than the truck lady and Allison, a young widow with two children (and owner of the feral cat who had miraculously survived his captivity), we had very few neighbors and most of the ones we did have were men. Only a couple of private schools and no public schools were open, so anybody who wanted to educate their kids had to put them in boarding school like Elizabeth had or stay gone, at least until Christmas. This was disappointing because I had been looking forward to Halloween ever since we’d bought the house—donning a witch’s hat and dispensing goodies to the neighborhood children were a big part of the commitment-to-real-life package of my imagination. In Manhattan I never had a single trick-or-treater and on my block on Bourbon, the only people in costume were grown men dressed in drag. I hadn’t had the need to carve a pumpkin since I was maybe twelve, and now this year, alas, it was going to be no different, but I carved two anyway and bought multiple bags of candy. In the end we had two sets of visitors, a grateful father who’d been desperately driving around the darkened city with a two-year-old “Cinderella,” and Allison’s son and daughter who came dressed as looters, with wads of “loot” stuffed beneath their stretchy T-shirts and Saks Fifth Avenue bags for their candy. Their lone friend wore a T-shirt that said POLICE, which was stuffed with similar wads.

It was heartening to find out in the paper the next day that the Bourbon Street Halloween had been typically lively. I had been thinking a lot about Bourbon because Prince Charles and Camilla, on their first official visit together to America, were coming to New Orleans, and one of the stops on their brief itinerary was the Cathedral School, behind Betty’s, which had been the first school to open in the city. I was reminded of the singing nun on the loudspeaker who had woken me up every morning, but more than that, I remembered watching Diana’s funeral in my big iron bed. It was four o’clock in the morning, and I was on the phone during the whole event with Andre Leon Talley,
Vogue
’s editor-at-large and my very dear friend, who kept up a running—shrieking—commentary that lightened up the proceedings considerably: “What IS THAT on Fergie’s head? Would you LOOK at how many earrings Elton is wearing.” Toward the end, a very frantic Vicki Woods cut in. She was our friend in London who had a coveted seat in St. Paul’s, where her view had been entirely obliterated by one of Sir Christopher Wren’s vast pillars. She had a half hour to write exactly the sort of stuff we’d been saying to each other for a special edition of
The Telegraph
, so we basically dictated the whole story, and I recalled the episode often as an oddly happy morning.

Now unlike, say, my mother, I was happy that Charles had finally been united with his one true love, and I was even more delighted that the two of them had deigned to come to see us, receiving gifts of Mardi Gras beads from the uniformed schoolchildren and generally being more helpful and pleasant than Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska who dropped in the same week and wondered aloud, in front of the devastated homeowners of Lakeview, why on earth anyone would want to rebuild there. In Alaska, he explained, they would simply relocate the whole town.

In Alaska, they also build bridges to nowhere, thanks to the obscene amount of pork Stevens regularly shovels into the place, so when, several months later, it was revealed that he was under investigation for all manner of dubious financial transactions and that the FBI had raided his house, I could not have been more thrilled. I had long since lost patience with irresponsible, inept, and just plain crooked politicians from both without and within Louisiana (our own congressman Bill Jefferson had also been paid a recent visit by the FBI who found, among other things, $90,000 in cash in his freezer). Every day our local elected officials made it maddeningly clearer that people do indeed get the government they deserve. It would take a little time to create a real leadership pool to replace the cesspool every one of us, voters included, had been swimming in way too long. But it was time to do something, anything, to get involved, to help speed our recovery along.

So it was that over dinner at Upperline with my friend Walter Isaacson, the writer and Aspen Institute chief who also served on the governor’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, a small plan was hatched. Walter, who had grown up in New Orleans, had brought along an old buddy who ran the Preservation Resource Center’s “Operation Comeback,” which for years had been buying up the many thousands of blighted houses owned by the city at rock bottom prices, renovating them and making it possible for mostly low-income, first-time homeowners to move in. We all agreed that housing was the biggest single problem facing the city—we had also been imbibing a great deal of whiskey and wine. The next thing I knew Walter and I had agreed to co-host a fundraiser for Operation Comeback, and, since Wynton Marsalis and Walter were both due in New Orleans for a meeting in January, we decided to have it then and to share the proceeds with Wynton’s Higher Ground musician’s fund as well as the Ogden. (I was also already figuring out how to snag one of the houses for Rose and Thomas, who had left Natchez and gone even farther away, to Dyersburg with the others.) Once we’d shaken on it, Walter cautioned, “I’ll help you sell tickets but I won’t do anything else.” I told him I already knew that and immediately started planning the event in my head. In addition to raising some much-needed money, we needed to show people from out of town that we could still throw a good party.

Everybody, including my father, told me I was crazy, that under the circumstances—with few hotels fully staffed, beleaguered locals low on money, and out-of-towners wary of coming to visit so soon—it would be virtually impossible to raise the money and showcase the town. “I’ve done them with huge staffs and it’s still hard as hell,” Daddy said. But I was not afraid, and anyway, I had an assistant coming, Vasser Howorth, the niece of good friends from Oxford, Mississippi, whom I’d met when she was working in one of my favorite New Orleans bookstores. The store had still not reopened, she was back in Oxford, and her boyfriend was in New Orleans, so I implored her to work for me and she agreed. She was arriving just after Thanksgiving and I knew the two of us could pull it off. We would call it Rebirth New Orleans.

T
HOUGH MY LATEST
endeavor was exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to do once I’d committed to John and the house and a life in New Orleans, when I first arrived in the city in 1991, civic activities could not have been farther from my mind. Unfortunately, at the time the same could be said of the state’s leaders, a great many of whom placed embezzling, evading, and general enjoyment of their various offices much higher on the list.

I had arrived that year, two months after Jazz Fest, to see A. again and with Edwin Edwards serving as my larger-than-life excuse. He was making an unexpected comeback after conceding four years earlier to the reform-minded Buddy Roemer, who, while seemingly honest, was also abysmally lacking in leadership skills. Into the void stepped figures far more familiar to Louisiana voters, Edwin and David Duke, the ex-Klansman who had already served two terms in the state legislature. Their ultimate match-up gave rise to the most popular bumper sticker of the campaign, “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important,” which was not only a grim reflection of the state’s leadership pool, it was true on all fronts—though Edwin ultimately went to jail for the criminal activities he engaged in while in office, it had indeed been important that he be elected given the far more devastating alternative.

In the not-so-noble pantheon of Louisiana politicians, Edwin was the last of the great entertainers. Though he was a scoundrel of the first order, he was not a megalomaniacal dictator like Huey Long, and certainly not an obsessive racist like the backwater tyrant Leander Perez, the man A. J. Liebling called the “Pasha of Placquemines Parish”—and who, according to Robert Sherrill, author of the brilliant
Gothic Politics in the Deep South
, was so flat-out “evil” that “one is constantly expecting him to resume the shape of a toad.” (On the contrary, Edwin was thoroughly progressive on matters of race, hiring, for example, the first black state troopers and assiduously courting the black vote, which he always got—though, like Perez, he did turn out to be a thief.) While Edwin was as funny as “Uncle Earl” Long, and certainly as crazy about women, he was not nearly as violent or profane. (Earl once bit a colleague on the cheek and, in front of the entire legislature, he referred to one of its members as a “cocksucker.”) He was also slightly more dedicated to his job than the singer and yodeler Jimmie Davis, who wrote “You Are My Sunshine,” and who compiled the most days spent out of state than any governor before or since (much of them spent trying to sell Hollywood on a movie of his life). The fact that it was unlikely that Edwin would do the citizens of Louisiana a lot of good did not much matter to me—he was great material.

Besides, in the New Orleans I lived in then, I couldn’t think of a single thing that needed improving. From the moment of my arrival, I was firmly ensconced in the city of Tennessee Williams, where, on rainy afternoons (which is pretty much all of them, in the summers at least), “an hour isn’t just an hour but a piece of eternity dropped into your hands.” Faulkner, who wrote
Soldiers’ Pay
while living in New Orleans on Pirate’s Alley, called it “a place created by and for voluptuousness.” I knew what he meant—my existence might have been a tad narrow to some folks, but pleasure almost completely defined my days.

When I wasn’t on the road with Edwin, the great majority of my movements were happily confined to Galatoire’s, Elizabeth’s comfortable kitchen, and a handful of French Quarter bars, including the Napoleon House, a place known for its superior Pimm’s Cups, its operatic soundtrack, and the fact that its original owner offered it as a safe haven for the exiled emperor. (One of the many ironies of Katrina is that until the storm, New Orleans had always been better known for taking in refugees—escapees from boredom, sexual oppression, you name it—rather than shipping them out.) On my first night in town I met A. there at midnight and realized it would be impossible to separate romance from the city’s endless romantic settings.

The exotic nature of Edwin’s campaign was equally seductive. The last race I’d covered was the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, whose fans were not nearly so ardent. At a roadside honky-tonk in Delcambre, for example, I asked the owner about the enormous framed portrait of Edwin above the bar, and she told me, in a Cajun accent so thick I could barely understand it, that after Edwin had kissed her cheek during his first campaign, she refused to wash her face for so long her husband finally left her.

Edwin had served his first two terms as governor from 1972 to 1980, and a third (state law says you can serve only two consecutive terms) from 1984 to 1988. When Roemer came out far ahead of him in the 1987 primary, Edwin, always good at counting, knew he wouldn’t win the run-off so he conceded the race. His first two terms had been buoyed by an oil boom that enabled him to make like Huey Long and build road after road and bridge after bridge, while spending big on education and health care and abolishing state property taxes. He was the reform-minded one that first go-round, forcing a constitutional convention to rewrite the state’s convoluted constitution and make government more transparent. He seemed invincible. He was quoted as saying he didn’t believe Christ had been resurrected (“it goes against natural law”) and after the inevitable outcry, he lampooned himself at a press club lunch with a mock stigmata, comprised of ketchup on his shirt and lipstick on his hands—and the Pentecostals stayed with him anyway. (Their support became clearer to me at a church service in Alexandria, where the pastor lavishly thanked Edwin for his earlier help, which somehow allowed the congregation to skirt the law and avoid installing a $40,000 sprinkler system.)

At the beginning of his first corruption trial, he told a reporter, “It will be long, but I guarantee you one thing, it won’t be boring.” When asked what he thought of the jury, which included a shoplifter, an admitted wife beater, and a man who had pleaded no contest to negligent homicide charges, he replied with a grin that they were “a jury of my peers.” But in the end, it wasn’t the trials that got him, it was the dramatic downturn in oil and gas prices that left the state with a $170 million budget deficit and forced him to raise taxes. The great benefactor had been forced to make the public foot part of the bill, and then Buddy came along and promised “fiscal responsibility” and hammered away at Edwin’s “dishonesty,” so that by the time Edwin stepped aside, his career was pronounced dead as a hammer. Reporters across the country wrote obituaries, not just for “the rogue,” but for the roguish nature of Louisiana politics itself.

But Edwin had no intention of walking off into the sunset. When he announced his comeback bid in 1991, one Louisiana political analyst told me it was all about “redemption,” but I came to realize that it was really about revenge. Buddy was a whiny-voiced Harvard graduate who used words like “neat” and “awesome,” and was famous for saying in an interview with
Esquire
that whenever he had a negative thought, he banished it by popping a rubber band he kept around his wrist (which prompted my father to comment at the time, “Hell, if I never had a negative thought I wouldn’t get anything done”). Buddy’s father, Charlie, who had been commissioner of administration in Edwin’s first term, had gone to jail for bribery in 1981, and it offended Edwin’s sense of loyalty that Buddy had given the reporter who had exposed Charlie’s crimes a job in the statehouse. Edwin wanted a showdown with the man who had cost him what he viewed as his rightful position.

My first meeting with Edwin was in July, just after I arrived, at the Monteleone Hotel in what I came to call the “sleaze suite,” a set of rooms on the hotel’s roof where Edwin typically stayed whenever he was in New Orleans, and where he had celebrated each of his election night victories. (“Twenty years, same three rooms,” one of his closest advisors, Robert D’Hemmecourt proudly told me.) When I’d called to request the interview, I was told to turn up at the same time as the reporter from the
New York Times
. I’m sure they had no idea what to make of me—a writer for
Vogue
who was doing a long piece on the election for
The New York Review of Books
—so they lumped me with another Yankee outfit and figured they’d be done with both of us.

When it became clear that I wasn’t going anywhere, they invited me to travel with them. It wasn’t because Edwin was making the sexual overtures for which he was so famous (his former bodyguard, Clyde Vidrine, had written a book called
Just Taking Orders
in which he described his role as chief procurer of Edwin’s women); to everyone’s astonishment he had become monogamous and was genuinely devoted to Candy Picou, a twenty-six-year-old nursing student from Gonzales whom he married after the election. “At my age,” he said prior to the happy event, “a man should have a nurse and a mistress and with Candy I have both.” I think the guys that comprised “the campaign” put up with me because they liked having some outside company—someone for whom they could put on their act. “You wouldn’t go away,” D’Hemmecourt told me when I saw him in New Orleans a few months after Katrina. “And we liked you.” I liked them too, and every day I’d check my messages to find out where to meet and when.

Usually we traveled via small plane, a six-seater that carried: Edwin; his son David, who served as pilot and chief bodyguard; Andrew Martin, who had been in the shrimp business in LaFourche Parish and Edwin’s confidante since the first race in 1971; and D’Hemmecourt, otherwise known as Bobby or Bobby D., who has deep roots in New Orleans (where there is a D’Hemmecourt Street) and who met Edwin during the gas rationing crisis of 1974 when Bobby was president of the service station operators association.

By definition, David’s job was fairly specific, though he sometimes went so overboard on the bodyguard part that Bobby would just look at me and shrug: “Nothing I can do,” he’d say. “It’s the legacy of Huey Long.” But the exact nature of the others’ roles was unclear. Once, when I asked Bobby if a guy who had joined us on a trip worked for Edwin too, he looked at me like I was crazy—“None of us work for him.”

They did, however, perform many vital services, including the placement of the football bets. I’d listen in amazement as they phoned their various bookies (Bobby called his “my author”), dropping $15,000 here and $35,000 there, before tuning into the Sony Watchman to monitor games from the road. During the Saturday afternoon parade that is the highlight of the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, I watched as Edwin waved to the crowds from the bed of a pickup truck. Andrew clutched his waistband to support him and Bobby crouched out of sight, passing on the scores as he got them—information which prompted intermittent bursts of profanity amid the more jovial “Hey chere” and “How’s your mama?” Once, when someone jokingly referred to Bobby as the “numbers man,” he dryly corrected him: “No, I’m the communications coordinator, I supply information on the numbers.” Meanwhile, Andrew busied himself with the numbers that really mattered, collecting the checks, stuffing them into his inside pocket as we went from event to event and ripping open the envelopes later with his pocketknife so he could give Edwin the tally. On one trip, he told me without a trace of irony that he had been carrying Edwin’s breath mints since 1971, but that, too, turned out to be an important job. Edwin, who had picked cotton as a child, had an obsession with hygiene that bordered on the pathological. At every stop, he excused himself to wash his hands and scrub his face so hard that it shone.

After the second or third trip with them, I finally got up enough nerve to inquire as to what was in the briefcases. They kept them so close, I naively assumed there must be valuable donor lists or super-secret strategy papers lurking within. But when they popped them open in unison the only things inside were more phones, football spreadsheets, the breath mints (along with multiple dispensers of dental floss), and a whole lot of guns, including a semiautomatic and a .350 Magnum.

Edwin went everywhere—bingo halls in Kenner, dance halls in Westwego—but Buddy turned up in so few places that Edwin supporters had milk cartons printed up with Buddy’s likeness. During a rare Saints winning streak, Buddy showed up alone in his box at the Superdome, fell asleep, and left early. He was also a no-show at nearly every debate between the candidates, who included Duke as well as Kathleen Blanco, the public service commissioner who finally became governor two years before Katrina hit, and who persisted in deriding Edwin as a “jokester” and a “character,” stopping just short of calling him a crook. “I can’t stand the corruption and the lies anymore,” she said again and again. “I’m tired of the looks of pity.”

During this performance Edwin invariably did an excellent imitation of a man sleeping. He had no intention of acknowledging the presence of the former high-school teacher, much less of responding to her—preferring instead to marshal his vitriol for Buddy, the “hypocrite” who had switched parties, turning Republican midway into his term after heavy courting by the first Bush administration.

At a gathering of black leaders in a church in Evangeline Parish, Edwin said, “Buddy Roemer betrayed you who helped him get elected. He switched parties and got in with the rich folks.” Referring to Roemer’s plan to privatize one of the state’s Charity Hospitals that Edwin had built, he warned: “They’ll try to make money and not help the poor folks who cannot pay.” Then he returned to one of his favorite subjects, the overgrown weeds along state roads, which apparently had become a big issue among the voters. “You wanna know the difference between a man and a boy? I built the highway between here and Shreveport. Buddy Roemer can’t keep the grass cut.”

Edwin’s disdain was catching. All over Baton Rouge, bumper stickers appeared saying “Harvard Owes Charlie His Money Back.” The Harvard attack was even more effective than the party-switching one. Before a Sunday afternoon rally at a bait shop in Simmesport, a tiny town in Avoyelles Parish where he was born, Edwin greeted the folks inside, picking his way through the cages of crickets and tanks of minnows, the shelves of camouflage jackets and enormous gumbo pots. Outside, he took the mike and said, “I know what a shoupfish is, I know what a catfish is. I know what it is to make a living—I picked cotton…I don’t think Buddy Roemer likes us. He went to Hahvahd and got a Hahvahd education.” He mentioned that Buddy’s commissioner of education had been brought in from Massachusetts, “and I bet he doesn’t know where Simmesport is.” By the time he closed with, “The only people in Louisiana who are better off than they were four years ago are the people who got out of jail,” he had managed to push every button. During the raucous applause, an elderly black woman turned to me and said, “That man could run a hundred times and I’d vote for him every one.”