The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (18 page)

On Christmas Eve, we went to Elizabeth’s, just as we had always gone to her parents’ house when we were growing up, and on Christmas Day, everyone came to us. Since the youngest child at the table was hardly a child anymore—Lizzy, who had been barely a year old when I arrived in New Orleans, was now fifteen—I spoiled us with grown-up food. We had roast duck, braised red cabbage with bacon, and butternut squash with white truffles. We also had a gorgeous wheel of Stilton, but sadly we couldn’t linger over it because I had gotten a tad too ambitious and planned a big bash for Christmas night, just as my mother had for at least twenty years before me. There were dozens of photographs of McGee and Elizabeth and M.T. and me, all dressed up year after year, playing with my new toys from my very extravagant grandmother, and drinking sparkling Catawba juice (which came in a bottle thrillingly like Champagne) while our parents in their own Christmas finery (Daddy in his red Christmas vest, Burrell in his maroon velvet jacket) drank the real thing. I even served much the same menu: country ham with rolls and my mother’s homemade hot mustard; dressing balls, and more hot spinach dip, though I replaced her seafood Newburg with a local specialty, crawfish Cardinale.

By the end of the night, John was playing the piano and Roger was playing the guitar, and we all had a wonderful time at our first Christmas on First Street. But it dawned on me that I had been trying to cram twenty years worth of G.E.–style holiday moments into a single season, and I had to laugh at myself.

D
URING CHRISTMAS, THREE
more plumbing disasters had occurred. When my mother tried to take a bath in her luxuriously appointed guest bathroom, the hot water never got hot, which we later discovered was because the plumbers had hooked the hot water pipe to the cold water handle and vice versa. While we waited for Wellington, she gave my bathtub its virgin run, and when she drained the water, part of the kitchen ceiling below fell in—the drain, it turned out, had never been hooked up to any pipe at all. Next came the ceiling in the second-floor guest room—enormous dripping cracks appeared after the fourth or fifth time the third-floor shower was used. Eddie, who had laid the tile in that bathroom himself (“I’ve laid tile more than most tile guys,” were the exact words I remembered him telling me) had not sealed the space between the tile and the tub, so water leaked right through. It had been an interesting trial run.

January brought Dupré’s team back to repaint all the ceilings, while Joe Wallis continued working outside, where I was beginning to think he might stay forever. He had finished most of the work on the house itself, but I was waiting on a carpenter to replace the hideous metal door of the former garage, which, on Ben’s plans at least, was now called a studio (read nice-looking toolshed), with a pair of windows, and he would need to paint that, along with a wooden fence that would one day be erected around the air-conditioning units. Also, my metalworker had decided to move to the comparatively dry mountains of North Carolina after the storm, so once I found someone to fill in all the many wide gaps in the iron fence that surrounded the entire yard, Joe would need to paint it too. I loved having Joe around—not only is he entertaining as hell and full of cosmic questions (“Why is it that every time a human sees a spider they want to step on it, no matter what kind it is?” he asked me after I’d squashed what I was convinced had been a brown recluse), he turned me on to the best of the new Mexican food stands, Chapparal Patio, which had begun life a month or so after Katrina in the bed of a pickup truck. Now it had moved to the cashier’s booth of an abandoned gas station that was a quick roundtrip ride on Joe’s scooter, and we availed ourselves of the
tacos al carbon
and
tacos al pastor
, the slow-roasted pork with rice and beans, or the avocado quesadillas for lunch nearly every day.

The influx of Mexican laborers immediately after the storm had literally saved the city. Joe (and every other contractor in New Orleans, paint or otherwise) would have gone out of business had it not been for the Mexicans he was able to hire, and I would never have been able to get the main roof of our house replaced. One of the more felicitous benefits of their presence was the fact that authentic Mexican cuisine now seemed destined to mix right into the Creole melting pot (Creole cuisine, a mix of African, French, and Spanish elements, with an occasional dash of Italian thrown in, reflects the founding cultures of New Orleans). One of my very best days was spent with Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski sampling the delicious offerings of what Donald referred to as “restaurant row,” the long line of Mexican food stands that remained in the parking lot of Lowe’s building supply for more than a year after the storm. We ate every kind of taco known to man, from tongue to chorizo to fried
camarones
, and sampled at least a dozen different
chalupas
and
tamales
. Every time I turned on the TV and saw either one of those idiot evil twins, Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo, ranting and raving about the perils of immigration, I wanted to make like Elvis and shoot the screen.

January also brought an influx of a different kind—lots of out-of-towners came in for the Rebirth New Orleans fundraiser, and they were suitably impressed by the powerful post-Katrina shows mounted at the Ogden, where we had a cocktail party for them the night before the big event, and they were completely floored by the level of John Besh’s cooking at the brunch the next morning. He knocked himself—and everyone else—out with tables full of crawfish tortellini with fresh peas and country ham, the best grillades and cheese grits I have ever tasted, fried oysters with a creamy caviar sauce, sublime gumbo, and eggs sardou. That night, the Rebirth Brass Band played during cocktails, a handful of wildly beaded and feathered Mardi Gras Indians danced us into dinner, and as people took their seats, the gospel choir from the flooded Dillard University (whose temporary campus was now the Hilton Riverside that was also the venue for our event) sang two numbers that did not leave a dry eye in the house. As soon as the tables were filled and the first course was served, we reminded people why they were there with a powerful video shot in Katrina’s aftermath by Phinizy Percy, the former bad boy of First and Chestnut and now a gifted cameraman.

Though Wynton Marsalis was officially Walter’s and my co-host, Wynton does not fly. He’d performed at concert at Lincoln Center the night before, which meant he was still en route from Manhattan until the evening was almost over, but it turned out not to matter a bit. Irvin Mayfield, a protégé of both Wynton and his father, Ellis Marsalis (the great jazz pianist who, as a teacher at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, had mentored almost every great musician, including Harry Connick Jr. and Terence Blanchard, to come out of the city in the last three decades), agreed to take the stage. Irvin played a down-and-dirty blues tune on his trumpet, Ellis played his signature ballads, and by the time the dancing had begun (and yet another band had taken the stage), everyone in the ballroom had been well reminded of why New Orleans must be saved.

In February, a truly crazy person arrived at the house on First Street in the form of Daniel Brown, a mason whom my new stone supplier had recommended to lay the rest of the stone, including, finally, the steps. Since he was based in Shreveport, more than three hours to the west of us, he was an even-more-expensive-than-usual proposition—he and his laborers had to be housed for days at a time. But workers, masons in particular, were still in frustratingly short supply (Mexicans, apparently, did not have much experience laying limestone), so I was happy to get him, and when I first laid eyes on him I thought he might be yet another benignly entertaining character. He had salt-and-pepper gray hair and chocolate brown skin, wore stacked cowboy boots and tight jeans, and he kept his long ponytail tucked beneath either a battered straw cowboy hat or a coonskin cap. When I stuck out my hand to greet him, the first thing out of his mouth was the news that he was a direct descendant of Davy Crockett, and the second was the declaration that he was the smartest person that he knew. I have no idea how many people Daniel knows, and he may well be smart, but it was difficult to tell since he never, ever, let anyone else talk, and when he talked, which was all the time, it was always at the highest possible decibel level and about a half inch from your face so that it was impossible to actually listen to what he was saying.

He was also yet another person who refused to pay a lot of attention to Ben’s plan, and when he did look at it, he subjected it to his own highly idiosyncratic interpretation of what should be done. Once when I had tried everything to get him to listen to me about a single important point on the very clearly drawn piece of paper that I kept waving in front of him, I finally resorted to: “Daniel, if you don’t stop talking right now and please, please listen to this one tiny thing I have just got to tell you, I am going to pick up that piece of stone down there and hit you over the head with it.” Now, there is no way in the world I could have lifted the stone in question—it would have taken all three of his men. And my “threat” did not seem to faze him in the least bit, since not only did he refuse to shut up and look at the plan, he kept talking even louder. But when he sent me the bill for that week’s work, it included a fat fee for “mental duress.” He said his men, one of whom was named Bump and looked as though his other job may have been bumping people off, hence his name, were deeply religious and that I had offended them by addressing their boss in that way, and that further, I had made them all afraid for their lives.

When that particular missive came over the fax machine, I sat in my office a long time and questioned whether any of it—the house, the city, everything—was worth it. Daniel was abusive to his men, he’d been fairly abusive to me—one morning when I was on a deadline and couldn’t come down the exact instant he demanded, he said later he knew it was because I was drunk. He was a maniac who claimed kinship with a Tennessee folk hero, and yet I was paralyzed at my desk trying to figure out if it were true, if I had really become the monster he described. This was not a good development. I had clutter in my head, there was rubble covering almost every inch of our yard, and in the city itself, great piles of debris were everywhere, along with more than 100,000 flooded-and-abandoned cars and 20,000 boats, including a yellow one in a tree I passed every time I drove to the airport. The mayor had yet to negotiate a contract for their removal, but he had found time to tell us that Katrina was divine providence for going to war in Iraq as well as the black-on-black crime rate that had for so long afflicted the city. There was so much left to do in New Orleans as a whole, and when I read Daniel’s fax I honestly didn’t think I could cope for another minute with even our little corner of the place.

In my childhood, I had spent part of every summer with my grandparents in Nashville, in the manicured enclave of Belle Meade. I knew and loved and was related to a lot of people there; I could maybe even buy back one of our family houses. There was no crime to speak of, it had a really nice airport and a good bookstore; the economy was thriving. I could live anywhere, after all, and surely there were plenty of law firms.

But then I started thinking about the food, and how there really wasn’t much in Nashville that was worth eating—certainly nothing of the caliber that Donald and Ken and Besh and so many others were turning out in New Orleans every day—nor were there any oyster bars or Mexican food stands or drive-through daiquiri shops. Then there was the fact that it was a little too clean in spirit (middle Tennessee has long been known as the “buckle” of the Bible belt), as well as in fact—as much as I had been decrying it lately, I liked a bit of grit around. I even liked a bit of danger. In
The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
, there’s a letter from Walker to Shelby about a predicted hurricane, Carmen, which did not in fact hit. “Carmen missed us,” Walker wrote. “Everybody disappointed. I noticed a certain exhilaration as she approached and a sadness as she went away. That’s the degree of alienation! NOXIOUS particles everywhere! Only 150 MPH winds get rid of them!” In Nashville, I decided, there would be far too little exhilaration and too many noxious particles.

To exorcise myself of any remaining angst stemming from Daniel’s fax, I took a vigorous bike ride through the neighborhood, and about two blocks past Jackson Avenue, there it was, a dazzling white wedding dress, hanging, somehow, from the top of a charred chimney in the midst of what had until several months ago been a house. It was billowing beautifully in the breeze, and though I still have no idea how it got up there or why, it was so fantastical, so out of context and totally unexpected that I knew immediately it had to be a sign. When John got home that night there was no way to fully explain my celebratory mood, or what, exactly, I had managed to work through and come out of on the other side. I insisted that we get Elizabeth and head over to Lilette, where I dined on proper
boudin noir
accompanied by grainy Creole mustard, and a perfectly cooked piece of drum—two things I could not have found anywhere near Nashville, Tennessee.

D
URING CARNIVAL, ELIZABETH
and Katie and I rode together in the Iris Parade. We are not members of the krewe, the oldest and largest all-female carnival organization in the city, but Elizabeth has a friend who is and we are allowed to ride as paying guests. Every year we write our $400 check and buy our beads and trinkets, and then, for three exhausting hours, we are treated like rock stars by the crowds who clap and jump up and down and scream, begging us to throw them something as we make our way down St. Charles. Iris, while old, is not perhaps the most creative of krewes (one of the most entertaining of all the Mardi Gras parades is the hilariously sarcastic spectacle put on by the almost entirely female Krewe of Muses, a fairly new organization whose signature throws include miniature high-heeled shoes), and this year our outfits consisted of baggy green “satin” pants and a shapeless yellow top with a gold-sequined Bertha collar and matching mask. As in years past, we had no idea what we were supposed to be nor had we bothered to inquire as to the typically amorphous theme of our double-decker float. We rode to have fun, and we always did. A year earlier we had made it a mere six blocks before we ran out of refreshments and were forced to call John for emergency supplies. As the parade slowly rounded the corner at Napoleon and St. Charles, our float mates threw out everything from beads to Barbies, while we waited with open arms to catch the only incoming items, three six packs of Bud Lite. John, who had once ridden several miles of his krewe’s parade while hanging upside down from his harness—without realizing it—understood our predicament and was happy to oblige.

I love watching parades almost as much as riding in them. There is no way not to get competitive over the beads and doubloons and plastic “to-go” cups as they fly through the air, and my three painted-and-glittered coconuts, the highly coveted throw of the Krewe of Zulu, the historic African-American krewe whose parade Louis Armstrong once reigned over, occupy a prominent spot in my library. The balls, on the other hand, are devoid of even a shred of exuberance or even much beauty to speak of. They take place in the ballrooms of chain hotels or the Municipal Auditorium (temporarily out of commission since being flooded by Katrina) and resemble an arduous religious rite more than the Cinderella-style balls of one’s childhood dreams. When I attended my first one I had visions of the entertainments favored by the extravagant eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sugar planters on the River Road, who were, for a brief period, the wealthiest people in the nation. They served food on plates of solid gold while tropical birds flew beneath spun silk nets draped atop allees of citrus trees. Even in Greenville, where I was a page at the Delta Debutante Ball, Daddy and I had our portrait made beneath one of the dyed-pink birds in cages that hung from the country club ceiling and completely cracked my father up. (Later, when I declined to make my actual debut, he got surprisingly sentimental on me: “Come on, we could pose beneath those birds again.”)

Instead, I found myself in a velvet evening gown, sitting in an extremely uncomfortable metal folding chair in a surprisingly sparsely decorated room, watching young women, including the “queen,” who is required to attend “scepter class” of all things and who is dragging at least $10,000 worth of beaded finery around the floor, promenading endlessly and curtsying to the masked king. There is usually an incomprehensible tableau put on by men in tights and all manner of other drag, who are also in charge of calling out the names of the predesignated women in the audience who are the only ones then allowed to dance. Throughout most of this ordeal you cannot get a drink, and no food, on gold plates or otherwise, is served until after midnight and then only if you have been invited to the queen’s breakfast. The menu is always comprised of watery powdered eggs and bland grits, accompanied by greasy link sausages and undercooked bacon, all served buffet style from steam trays—a far cry from the breakfast menu in the “holiday feasts” section of the
The Picayune Creole Cookbook
of 1901, which included broiled trout with “Sauce à la Tartare,” potatoes “à la Duchesse, creamed chicken,” “omelette aux confitures,” batter cakes with Louisiana (meaning cane) syrup and “fresh butter,” along with
café au lait
.

I’m sure that if I had grown up in this byzantine tradition, or if I had an intimate connection to any of the “royalty” involved (as I would later with Katie), it might be slightly more fun, but, I suspected, not much. Still, in the interest of being a good, or at least curious, citizen during the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras season, I convinced John that we should attend at least one ball. None of the trappings had changed much since my first outing a dozen years earlier, but a significant sea change in sentiment was revealed as I stood in line at the lone bar with a lawyer I know, a man who has been intricately involved in Carnival and all its attendant hoopla from the time he was a young boy, when he donned the pages’ attire of wig and tights and tunic and helped the various queens with their trains. We kissed hello and he surveyed the scene, and then he looked back at me, whom he does not know at all well, and said, “You know, this is why there is no business in New Orleans.” He may have been overstating the case slightly, which was all the more remarkable given who he was, but I almost fell over. I also thought briefly of one of my neighbors, who had yet to repair the crumbling brick sidewalks rimming his vast property and which I tripped over at least once a week, but who had no problem finding the motivation and the resources to erect a tent and throw an enormous dinner-dance for his daughter, the soon-to-be-crowned queen of one of the most socially prominent krewes, in his overgrown backyard.

The good news was that my lawyer buddy’s priorities were not the only ones that were changing. There were by now as many activist groups as Mardi Gras krewes, including the extremely effective Citizens for a Greater New Orleans, whose leader was the same woman who had earlier expressed surprise that I had not tried to join the garden club. These particular “Citizens” had forced the legislature to consolidate the twenty-four separate entities charged with the maintenance of our levees (now there are two, stocked with engineers rather than know-nothing political cronies who had for years ignored warnings of leaks) and to replace the city’s eleven tax assessors with one. It was the kind of arcane-sounding stuff that barely made the national newspapers, but here its implications were enormous—and not only because we finally got the kind of levee board we needed. That group and others like it were clear evidence that the complacency that had for so long gnawed at what was left of the city’s institutions, as well as the utter disregard for the future, were all but gone. I rarely made it through the Langenstein’s parking lot without a petition being shoved in front of me; early on, self-appointed leaders began driving rebuilding efforts in their decimated neighborhoods, without a modicum of guidance from our mayor and before a single federal dollar materialized.

Nobody I knew paid much attention to Lent. Most people had already lived with enough deprivation. So the night before Easter we were given what amounted to a post-Lenten feast, when Donald and Stephen presided over the grand opening of Cochon. It was almost six months to the day past the scheduled opening date during the previous October, which, in these times of severe labor shortages and skyrocketing construction costs, was still nothing short of amazing. The food was amazing too. My parents were in town, so we took a table for four and started off with crawfish pies and fried
boudin
balls, pork ribs dotted with diced watermelon pickle, and oysters dressed with butter and red pepper and roasted in the wood-fired oven. Next came ham hocks and braised greens, brisket with horseradish potato salad, roasted red fish, and Donald’s grandfather’s rabbit and dumplings that John pronounced “a chicken pot pie gone right.” The prevailing theme was lard, and everyone agreed it was a good one.

On Easter morning, we all attended services at the St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, where we had at last become members and where, this particular year, the talk of resurrection was especially meaningful. While evacuated in Houston, a handful of members dreamed up RHINO (Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans), and as soon as the church reopened its doors, thirty volunteers a week started pouring in from all over the country to help gut and rebuild hundreds of houses. The whole congregation seemed energized and it was impossible not to be affected.

A week or so later, when devastating tornadoes hit Dyersburg, I was hopeful that the skittish Rose would be motivated to return home, but shortly thereafter, FEMA extended the deadline for stopping the free rent, and as long as she and Thomas had the use of the two-bedroom apartment, I could tell she wasn’t budging. Roseanna was back in her house, and Frankie was heading home with her children at the end of the school year. I had talked Joe Wallis, who owns rental property on Delachaise Street, into getting one of the bigger apartments fixed up for her. He had one for Rose too, but when she told us the closets weren’t big enough I knew we had lost her, maybe for good.

Easter also brought progress in the yard, in the form of my own personal savior, Russell Plessy, a second-generation mason and friend of Blair and Billy Dupré, who could not have been more opposite from Daniel Brown. An ardent fisherman who wore a tiny gold trout on a chain around his neck, Russell was so soft-spoken I had to lean into him to hear anything he said. We sat on the front porch and after he looked carefully at the long-neglected plans spread out in front of him, he said he could not only finish the job but he would fix everything both previous masons had done wrong, no problem.

With most of the hardscape finished, I could attend to the more rewarding and less expensive task of picking out trees and plants to fill in what had been, for well over a year now, not much more than a very messy muddy field bounded by the holly hedge we’d planted before the storm and punctuated by the fine new oak in the back corner. Benton and I drove across the lake to a vast nursery in the wild, owned by three generations of plant people. We trudged around for hours, picking out and tagging sweet bay magnolias, Japanese plums, gardenias and Japonica camellias, a hard-to-find loblolly bay, seven sweet olives to line the brick drive, and six sasanqua camellias for the front of the house. In the greenhouse, I then picked out a truckload of giant white swamp lilies and deep-blue agapanthus lilies, and by the time we were done it was almost dark. I knew I was getting way more attentive service than Benton usually provides his clients—or than most of them wanted—but we both needed a respite of sorts. I couldn’t wait for the chance to walk around in a rare unblemished natural setting, and Benton, as usual, was in need of the ad hoc (and ultimately unsuccessful) marriage counseling I had been providing. Guys like Benton and Joe (whose own wife had left him for several weeks during the winter) had been all but killing themselves, working nonstop since the storm, and their personal lives had suffered tremendously.

At the end of May we planted the trees, which was the good news. The bad news was that crime was back with a vengeance. In a city in where less than half the population had returned, the killings were already back up to their grim pre-Katrina rate. I received an email copy of one of the routine “urgent alerts” sent to our neighborhood security patrol, advising them to be on the lookout for a “gang of approximately five African-American teenagers, aged fifteen to sixteen years old,” who were further described as “armed and very dangerous.” I had visions of some out-of-hand kids on bicycles carrying cap guns and pocketknives until a few days later when the paper carried the story of the “massacre” of five African-American teenagers, one of whom was barely sixteen, shot less than a dozen blocks from our house by what was believed to be a rival drug-dealing gang.

While the gangs reestablished old turf (the only real but heartbreaking difference between the old gangs and the new was that a lot of the older members stayed behind in Houston and ceded their corners to increasingly younger men), some of the same professional looters on the scene right after the storm rolled through recovering neighborhoods with big trucks, stealing brand-new appliances and hauling off the heavy equipment of construction workers trying to make a living. Finally, the mayor established a juvenile curfew, and the governor, much less hesitant than in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, called out 300 National Guardsmen and 60 State Troopers, and once again the slow-moving Humvees were crawling through the city, augmenting the beleaguered and seemingly ineffective New Orleans Police Department.

The National Guardsmen weren’t the only folks to return. In June, I interviewed the remarkably sane doctor who heads one of the state-run mental health centers in town for a piece in
Newsweek
, and he told me that a staggering amount of homeless people had returned, despite the fact that only one shelter, the all-male Ozanam Inn that Antoine had favored, was up and running. “There are a number of people who have just wandered in here,” he said. “It’s kind of mysterious. One man who was just in here, it was hard to imagine where he was coming from, how he’d been surviving. These are people who have very few resources and not a lot here waiting for them, but this is home and they miss it, and the neighboring states and towns who’ve been supporting them are tired, so they’re not going to stand in the way of their return.”

When I left him, I thought, of course, of Antoine, and sure enough a week or so later, I got a call from Richard Sexton, a photographer for whom Antoine occasionally worked and whose patience with his habit and his many absences matched my own. Given his surly refusals to be “rescued” by me, Antoine told me later he’d been afraid to contact me directly, so he had shown up on Richard’s doorstep with little explanation other than the fact that he was back. He did tell Richard that Cassandra was still in Texas, which we both regarded as excellent news, but before we were able to enjoy a warm reunion, he was arrested and tossed into jail. The storm destroyed a great many things, but the NOPD’s computer system had not been among them, and Antoine had a long list of outstanding “attachments” to his rap sheet, showing that he had not, for example, paid the fines he had owed for years, or completed any of his probation requirements. After he disappeared, it took five days of calling the black hole that was now Central Lockup to ascertain that he was really there. If Richard or I ever wanted to see him again, it was time to get Antoine a lawyer.