The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (17 page)

My own headquarters throughout these shenanigans was the apartment on St. Philip Street. A. had dubbed it the gas chamber, due to its lack of windows, Spartan furnishings (the bed was technically a cot), and the bolt on the door that was almost an inch in diameter. The bolt was more comic prop than effective lock since the door was so cheap and hollow almost anyone could have kicked it in, but it made me feel a tad better about the guy across the hall, who heard voices and went from wanting to be my chatty hall buddy one minute to thinking I was saying terrible things to his face, depending on his extremely volatile moods. At night I’d hear him yelling terrible things at his benefactor, a sweet old white-haired street artist, casting aspersions on the ability of his private parts and refusing to give him sex.

On the rainy afternoons Williams described, A. and I would picnic in the gas chamber with a bottle of red wine and a muffaletta sandwich from the Central Grocery. If a bomb had gone off outside, not only would we have missed it, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have cared. “There is just us,” he said one night over and over again. In any relationship, there is never, of course, “just us,” but I was reminded of lines from Robert Penn Warren then too: the passage in
A Place to Come To
in which he describes the “second stage” of a love affair, when time ceases to move laterally and context is all but gone, and, above all, there is total contempt for the rest of the world.

In New Orleans it seems possible to sustain that second stage forever—and it’s not just the people with no windows who lose track of the world outside. Indeed, much of the populace appeared to me to have adopted one or two of Warren’s characteristics permanently. I once interviewed a state legislator from New Orleans who told me: “I don’t know any Yankees, I don’t give a shit about them”; and “There is no reason to ever leave here.” Even before Katrina there were lots of reasons to leave, most of them stemming from that exact attitude. By the time I arrived the school system was in shambles, businesses had fled, and the economy was truly colonial in that it was based almost entirely on tourism, with the owners of the hotels, et al., living elsewhere and supplying only low-paying jobs (taxi drivers, hotel maids, bellmen) for the locals. Edwin’s panacea for the city’s every ill was to push for the passage of a law allowing the largest land-based casino in the world to be built at the foot of Poydras Street, an addition that would only reinforce the economy’s fragile dependency.

But that, in those days, was not my problem. I was a refugee from an earnest and ambitious urban environment, thrilled to be a long, long way from the Manhattan dinner parties I had grown to loathe, punctuated as they were by lengthy and very important monologues from guests who had just returned from somewhere like the Gaza Strip. Once, in the middle of just such a monologue at a dinner party devoid of any fun or even good food, the nurse of the then still with-it Brooke Astor arrived to fetch her at ten o’clock, her established departure hour, and I have never been so jealous of anyone in my life. I longed for the spontaneity and joie de vivre and glamour I felt had worn off New York during the over-the-top eighties, perhaps permanently. I read in a magazine once that true glamour requires at least the possibility of decadence, some hint of “enjoyable sin.” I was enjoying all the sin I could handle without the least thought of its consequences. And when I wasn’t with A., I was with a notably sinful and ultimately felonious politician. I was also having more fun than I had ever had in my life.

At the first organizational meeting of the campaign, Edwin had predicted he would be in a run-off with Roemer, unless the numerous second-tier candidates split the vote and then it would be Duke, whom he would certainly rout. “I’ve been lucky in politics all my life,” he said that day. “But I’ve never been that lucky.” On election night, though, Edwin’s luck did, in fact, hold—Roemer had lost big and he was in a run-off with Duke, whom he crushed a few weeks later in the second biggest landslide in Louisiana history (he had already won the first). At a news conference before the swearing in, Edwin said, “I hope I’m smart enough and mature enough to profit from the mistakes I made in the past,” and everyone was hopeful. “I want my grandchildren to sit on my lap and I can tell them I knew him,” Bobby told me. “I can tell them I helped give him the opportunity to turn this state around, to be the greatest governor who ever lived.”

It was not to be. In addition to the passage of the law allowing the New Orleans casino, his only notable achievement was the lining of his own pockets by extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars (some of which was stuffed into garbage bags and passed into a car waiting under a Baton Rouge overpass) from riverboat casino applicants. (One of those who “bought” a license and later profited handsomely from the sale of his Treasure Chest Casino—profits the Feds let him keep—was Bobby Guidry, a slimebag of a barge company magnate who testified that he routinely kept up to a million in cash on hand in his house for emergency purposes, hidden in either a secret compartment in his hot tub or beneath the wild ducks stored in his freezer, a secret stash location that was turning out to be increasingly popular among the white collar crooks of Louisiana.)

In 2001, Edwin was convicted of racketeering and fraud, along with son Stephen and Andrew Martin, and sentenced to ten years in the pen. Of the old gang, only Bobby had never been remotely implicated in the wrongdoings. “I told Edwin, ‘You know I’ll do anything for you, chief—anything but time.’” For his part, Edwin maintained his innocence to the last, telling reporters, “I have always been a model citizen and I will be a model prisoner.”

Though Edwin may have disappointed his supporters and confirmed the worst suspicions of his enemies, the storm provided a strange sort of redemption for the former governor—even his most devoted critics could be heard wishing aloud that he was still in the mansion, or, at the very least, that he could be released long enough to manage the crisis. He might have been larcenous but he’d also been governor four times and a congressman before that. He knew New Orleans and, above all, he knew what to do, unlike his old critic Kathleen Blanco—who was now the one inspiring “the looks of pity” she’d once derided Edwin for provoking. In the storm’s immediate aftermath, she appeared so disoriented that one press account of her public appearances went so far as to suggest that she seemed “overmedicated.” When
Times-Picayune
columnist James Gill reported that “Me-Maw’s tranked is the word on the street,” I was reminded of Frank’s comment as we stood in front of the TV in the Greenville kitchen: “All that woman does is stand there and pat her hair.”

Bobby, who remains in constant contact with Edwin, reported to me that her two-day indecision over whether or not to allow the Guard troops to be federalized (keeping troops, including my boys from Oklahoma, literally sitting on runways) had floored the old “silver fox.” Edwin also told Bobby that he would have been on the phone urging the president to respond much sooner (and threatening to cut off every refinery and oil and gas pipeline in the state if he didn’t give him everything he asked for), much the way Senator Russell Long had prodded LBJ after Betsy. As for the Guard, “You always hand command of the military over to the president,” Bobby says Edwin told him. “Then it becomes his problem. It’s a no-brainer.”

There were countless no-brainers that no one in any position of power seemed equipped to handle and I was reminded of the final debate back in 1991 between Edwin and Duke on
Meet the Press,
when Tim Russert asked Duke to name the biggest employers in the state and Duke responded that he didn’t know, that he did not carry around an almanac. Edwin hadn’t been able to get over it for the whole rest of the day. “An ALMANAC? An ALMANAC? You look at the almanac if you want to know the stages of the MOON,” he said over and over. Now I wondered if, like me, he was thinking of that day, since Blanco apparently had been without both an almanac and a governor’s manual.

B
LANCO MAY HAVE
been the governor, and the mayor was, alas, still the mayor, but as the holidays approached there were plenty of other things to be thankful for. For one thing, at the start of November, FEMA began disposing of all the refrigerators, which was no small task. After being toted to one of a half dozen appliance mortuaries overseen by the EPA (at the cost of $2 million a day), they were emptied of their contents and power-washed with bleach before being drained of Freon for recycling. What was left was then piled onto a big heap and crushed into metal bales that were bought by scrap metal dealers who hauled them away. Before it was all over, more than 200,000 refrigerators had been picked up and destroyed, and a million pounds of Freon, a fleurocarbon capable of doing some heavy damage to the ozone, had been recovered (which explained the graffiti I’d seen on a French Quarter fridge admonishing that “Chemtrails Are Real”). Trash, it turns out, is a complicated thing—the average TV set left out on the curb, for example, is a lethal little bomb containing four pounds of lead.

I was also tremendously grateful for the delivery of two brand-new appliances, the washing machine and dryer that was a belated birthday present from my very generous mother. She’d already given me many more extravagant things for the house, but this was especially important to her because she knew how important it was to me. I was forty-five years old and had enjoyed the use of a washing machine only one time in my entire adult life, during the year I’d lived in a rented cottage in Orlando, Florida, and worked for the newspaper there. That had been exactly two decades earlier and since then I had done a whole lot of weeping during those General Electric commercials, the ones where irresistible golden retrievers and pretty children bounded around, and happy people pulled warm towels from the dryer and pressed them against their cheeks. Such was the ads’ schmaltz level that I’d heard plenty of people admit they cried too when they saw them, but I think my tears went deeper. I so craved the domestic scene I watched on the screen, but I didn’t, apparently, have the slightest idea of how to go about achieving it—I’m not even sure I was conscious of how badly I wanted it. There had been no room in any of the places where I’d subsequently lived for a washer and dryer, and, I had thought, no room in my life for all the less concrete stuff that usually went with them. In addition to adding a great deal of convenience to my life and being, well, normal, the gift of these two items was extraordinarily symbolic to me. So much so that I did not mind taking a number and waiting in line for almost two hours to pick them out at Sears, which was doing a bang-up business from all the thousands of people who were back and forced to replace their destroyed appliances.

Then there was the happy fact that Rose and Quincy and Roseanna were coming to town for a Thanksgiving visit. Rose and Quincy were driving down from Dyersburg in Quincy’s Suburban; Roseanna, who was waiting for her New Orleans roof to be repaired, was coming in from the country. They were homesick and wanted to make some money. Since I had invited pretty much everyone I’d run into on the street—literally—for Thanksgiving lunch, our needs were in sync.

I knew I’d asked at least twenty-four people, which was how many our table seated with all its leaves, but John warned me that there were likely a few folks I’d forgotten about, since my magnanimity generally expands with each drink and we were still attending the festive reopenings of every bar and restaurant in town. JoAnn and Alan and Ken were coming, and Elizabeth and her girls, of course. My parents were driving down from Greenville and staying at the Windsor Court hotel, where there was no room service or even an operational restaurant yet, and nothing in the minibars, but it was far better outfitted than our house, which still possessed only one bed. My father’s business partner of fifty-two years and his wife were visiting their daughter, M.T., and her husband, so they were on the list. (Like Elizabeth, I’d grown up with M.T. and she was one of my closest friends as well as my neighbor in Manhattan. John and I had fixed her up on a blind date with a friend of his, a judge from across the lake in Covington, and they had married four months after we had.) Our former “landlady,” my cousin Linda Jane, was driving over from Baton Rouge with her husband and their two children. Then there was one of my solo male neighbors whose wife and kids were still away, John’s son Roger, and, as John continued to point out, God knows who else.

No matter who came, we’d have enough to eat. I’d ordered two turkeys from D’Artagnan (not all our grocery stores were close to being open yet and I did not want to take a chance). I was also making oyster dressing (despite the immediate dire warnings that it would be years before we could avail ourselves of the bounty of Louisiana’s oyster beds, the state department of health and hospitals allowed half of them to reopen in late October, after what they assured us had been extensive testing); green beans with caramelized shallots; corn macques choux with crawfish, in a nod to the Indians and my borrowed Louisiana roots; and cranberry relish with the kumquats that were ripening all around us, including on the tree that was just outside the big kitchen window. Elizabeth was bringing the marshmallow-topped mashed sweet potatoes in orange shells that her children (and some of the adults) could not get through the day without, and M.T., one of my all-time favorite cooking partners, was supplying miniature crab cakes for hors d’oeuvres, along with slow-cooked Brussels sprouts with pine nuts and her grandmother’s cornbread dressing.

Quincy turned out to be an ace turkey cooker and hyper-efficient baster who never failed to set the timer at thirty-minute intervals, while Lorel and Lamont, two of Roseanna’s triplet nephews, did an excellent job of keeping everyone well lubricated with Bloody Marys and brandy milk punches and lots of Champagne. Only three people I had forgotten about turned up, but we somehow made room for them, and when we sat down to give thanks, we all realized, for the millionth time, how blessed we were to be here. The only mishap came during the washing of the dishes when the sink backed up and almost a foot of water came flooding into the kitchen. Eddie’s idiot father-and-son plumbing team had returned to fix the same problem—I swear—seven times, and each time they had billed me for it. Fortunately, Lamont had a neighbor who was a plumber, the dashingly named Wellington Grant, and we implored him to come over the next day.

Like our governor, our original plumbers must have been without a manual. Within about three minutes of his arrival, Wellington had removed the pipe that drained the water from the sink to the street, and it was so caked and corroded on the inside that the passageway was now maybe an eighth of an inch wide—a cigarette could not have fit through it, much less a double sink full of water within any reasonable amount of time. I saved it with the thought of beating Eddie over the head with it if I ever saw him again, but that was looking increasingly unlikely since he had not been in touch since his Mexican respite.

Just after Thanksgiving, John enlisted Lamont and Lorel to help him salvage what was left at his brother Andrew’s old apartment. We had been there once before and found that the door was blocked by an enormous bookshelf that had washed in front of it, the sofa was upside down on top of a table, and a treadmill was on top of that. John had climbed in through the window and discovered that Andrew’s books and his treasured pipe collection on the second floor had survived intact. There was his Standard French-English Dictionary, his Modern History and Anatomy textbooks, his John Lennon albums. Andrew had gone to Columbia and was exceedingly bright, so when I looked at his things it was doubly heartbreaking. A lot of people had been forced to undergo the painful process of sorting out the remnants of what was now another life pre-Katrina. But Andrew’s things had already been remnants of his life before his illness kicked in—now there was another remove. Still, he was happy to get his stuff, and he told John they provided a great amount of comfort in his new life so far away.

At the same time John was packing up Andrew’s things, Elizabeth was dealing with a different family issue. Since Katrina, she had not heard from Mike’s mother or any of his siblings and none of the phone numbers that she’d starting dialing as soon as the storm passed had ever worked. Finally, just before Katie’s birthday in November, her mother-in-law, DeeDee, had gotten in touch, and after Thanksgiving Elizabeth took the girls to see her. It turned out that she had an extraordinary story. She’d been in her house in Lakeview with one of her sons when the water began rising. The two of them sat atop ladders until they were no longer high enough, at which point they swam underwater, which was the only way to get out the front door. DeeDee, who does not actually know how to swim very well, grabbed onto a passing Little Tykes truck and managed to stay afloat before being pulled atop a tall nearby shed by her son and a neighbor who had jumped in to help. This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that she is eighty-something years old, and not only vastly overweight but also afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. Once she was on top of the shed, with a back that had been skinned raw, another whole day went by before they were rescued and flown to a hospital in Baton Rouge.

Maybe it was survivor’s guilt in the wake of such stories; maybe it was just the excitement of having a house. Whatever it was that had gotten into me, I launched into such a frenzy of holiday entertaining that Elizabeth gave me a guest towel embroidered with the message “A Fool and Her Money Can Throw a Hell of a Party.” Our neighborhood of temporary bachelors was finally filling up with mothers and children again (and Jean had returned to Bob), so I had all my new neighbors over one night, and then the hundred-plus folks from John’s office, who had worked so hard and pulled together under so much stress, the next. Rose was bored out of her mind in Dyersburg, so I got her a train ticket and almost every day we were in the kitchen together, making roasted pecans and cheese straws for gifts, or preparing sausage balls, watermelon rind pickles wrapped in bacon, and ham biscuits to pass at the parties. Standing in line at the Langenstein’s meat counter to pick up the tenderloin and crabmeat I always served on the dining room table, I was reminded once again of how much patience was required to live in the new New Orleans—and to wait on spoiled rich people. I’d been in the store a long time, but it wasn’t me that I felt sorry for. Buddy, the eighty-two-year-old butcher who had been politely serving the denizens of Uptown New Orleans for many decades, was having what sounded like a particularly harrowing conversation with a Garden District matron from her house in Martha’s Vineyard, where she had been ensconced since the storm. Apparently she wanted reassurance about the availability of holiday shellfish. “Yes, ma’am, we’ll have oysters for Christmas,” he said over and over again. “We have them right now…Yes ma’am, the crabmeat is pretty, yes ma’am.” This went on for so long the line wound up and down the aisles and Buddy was running back and forth behind the counter trying to fill each order with the phone tucked beneath his chin, frantically wrapping and taping and marking each package. I got so worried he was going to have a heart attack I wanted to snatch the phone from him and hang up on the woman myself. (Which is why I have not been a proud member of the service industry since I manned the counter at McDonald’s at fourteen, in a martyrous attempt to pay for the dent I had put in my mother’s car.)

My parents, my cousin Frances, and John’s children were all planning to stay in the house for Christmas itself, which meant that we needed to buy more beds, sheets, towels, and at least one TV for my TV-junkie parents. I had already started sprucing up the place—Blair Dupré had told me he knew of a guy who might finally be able to repair the still-leaking sunroom roof. He was available, which should have been the first red flag, but he ran the hose over everything for a long time when he finished, and when there were no leaks, we were so grateful John cooked him a big breakfast with homemade biscuits and the sausage from Kentucky M.T.’s parents send us every year for Christmas. The rug man had been keeping the custom-made sisal for the sunroom floor in his warehouse—on a high shelf, thank God—since a month or two before the storm and he was more than ready to get rid of it. So we laid it down and hung pictures and installed the matchstick blinds and two days later it rained and the whole thing was covered in irreparable brown spots from at least twice as many leaks as there’d been before the guy had started. Apparently a garden hose is not the equivalent of a New Orleans rainstorm. I was about to have the kind of “house fit” I hadn’t thrown since before Katrina, and then the man who was finally laying the marble tile in my bathroom told me to “get over it, it’s only a rug,” and I realized he was right. I was just very lucky that the furniture had somehow escaped the leaks, and anyway, when Frances arrived she had a new poodle in tow who confused the rug with a giant piece of newspaper, adding more spots of a slightly more sulfurous hue.

Since the benches for the front parlor were being upholstered and we had no other furniture to put in there, I filled the whole room with a Christmas tree so big we had to cut it up with a chainsaw when it was time to take it out; I wired satsumas and enormous Louisiana lemons to the wreaths out front, and filled every big bowl I could get my hands on with more citrus of the season. The “front steps” were still poured concrete risers waiting for the actual limestone, my parents’ bed was delivered about ten minutes after their own arrival, and the “chandeliers” in both parlors and the dining room were bare bulbs hanging by a wire. But my good friend, the extraordinarily talented John Alexander had painted us an amazing oil—I call it a “still-life on acid”—featuring: skittering shrimp, dozens of oysters, a redfish, a catfish, and a crab; a watchful turkey buzzard, one of my beloved crows, and an ibis; along with garlic bulbs, grape clusters, and even a few stalks of cotton in the background. We hung it over the dining room mantel where it reminded me of the Audubon crow and crab that I loved so much. It was also more than enough to divert attention, at least briefly, from the bare bulbs and the spotted rug, and I camouflaged everything else that was wrong or unfinished with lots of magnolia branches from what was left of the tree outside. Benton had told me that it likely wouldn’t last another year, so I accepted its parting gifts with gratitude.