The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (6 page)

In fact, it was the painters we should have consulted—they had better insight into Eddie and the increasingly sloppy way he and his subcontractors did business than anyone. They were the folks I called in to repair the messes; they heard the daily conversations and witnessed the daily screw-ups. I was the novice—they were far more familiar than I with how a professional job is done. Their boss, Billy Dupré, was a light-skinned Creole who was such a gentleman that months passed, and many, many dollars changed hands, before I could bring myself to call him anything but Mr. Dupré. His guys—Byron, PeeWee, Sean, and James—were really good at what they did and they respected each other, but I could tell they did not have much use at all for Eddie. Unfortunately, they were also polite and minded their own business. None of them, Mr. Dupré included, told me what they really thought until it was way too late.

So we stayed the course, and in early July, ten months after the process began, the third floor was ready enough for us to occupy. We bought a box spring and a mattress, said good-bye to Elizabeth, Lizzy, and Honey, the loyal yellow lab to whom I’d become hopelessly attached, and toted our suitcases “home.” Two weeks later, a dead body was found a block and a half up the street, shot in the head, and dumped on the curb. In August, four weeks after that, came the biggest natural disaster in the country’s history. So much for a settled life.

L
IKE MANY PEOPLE
in New Orleans, I had not paid a whole lot of attention to the increasing likelihood that Katrina was heading our way. I was, as usual, far more focused on the house: There was the refreshing fact that my new team of outside painters, the hilarious Joe Wallis and his right-hand man, Freddy, was doing an excellent job, and the enduring fact that Eddie’s team was not. (On the Friday before Katrina’s arrival, his outdoor guys had laid the stones for the front walk—but at the wrong elevation, a fitting, for them, swan song, which meant it was no longer possible to open the front gate.) Also, we had already been through one hurricane (Cindy, who arrived in early July was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane after the fact), and evacuated for another—but only as far as the downtown Marriott. Even before we checked in, it was clear that Dennis would bypass New Orleans and bear down on Pensacola instead, but we had paid in advance (the rule during hurricane season) and I was eager to try out the hotel’s heavily promoted new down bedding. It did not disappoint—our weekend on Canal Street was the closest thing to a holiday we’d had since the renovation began.

As pleasant as that particular “evacuation” turned out to be, I remember thinking: There is no way this city can keep beating these odds. Just one season earlier, the Florida Panhandle and the Alabama coast had been pounded with no less than four catastrophic storms—Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne—and now Dennis was dealing another blow. In the years since I’d first arrived in New Orleans, we had dodged the bulk of Andrew’s heavy artillery, and Opal and Georges had missed us altogether. Since then, the warmer waters in the Gulf had made hurricanes not just more plentiful but a lot more powerful. My father, a successful but prudent gambler, had warned me long ago that the house always wins. In this case the house was nature and there was no way our luck could hold.

As moments of clarity go, it was a brief one. It had taken me more than twenty years to decide to commit to a city—the daily imagining of its destruction (not to mention the destruction of a house into which we’d just sunk pretty much everything we’d ever had) was hardly a recipe for sanity. For years the nightmare scenario of “the big one,” a Category 4 or 5 storm barreling straight up the Mississippi from the Gulf, had been played out in series after series in the newspaper and on television, with lurid graphics showing the “bowl” that is New Orleans completely awash in floodwater and petrochemicals—“a massive tomb,” they’d always say, containing dead by the tens of thousands. Most of us watched with a half-wary eye and went on about our business, having already made the necessary bargain that living in New Orleans requires: the decision that the city’s ample charms outweighed the peril. And anyway, what could we do about it?

Certainly no one at any level of government was doing much. Over the years, millions had been squandered on disaster models and, most recently, on a simulated Category 5 hurricane named Pam, but at the start of every season, the only truly serious discussion involved the evacuation traffic flow plan that, invariably, had been botched the year before. Politicians could get impassioned about the traffic because voters got extremely impassioned about being stuck in it. It’s a whole lot harder to summon outrage about something that hasn’t happened yet, so basic stuff, like coming up with the means to evacuate those unable to leave on their own (almost 80,000 households in pre-Katrina New Orleans were without a car) was never addressed. Nor did anyone bother to check the only structures that lay between us and certain inundation—the levees and floodwalls—even though residents whose homes backed up to the 17th Street Canal (and which, therefore, are no longer in existence) had been reporting standing water in their backyards for more than a year. On a national level, three months prior to Katrina, the United States House and Senate, including every single one of Louisiana’s representatives, had signed off on an obscene highway bill whose 6,000-plus pork projects cost $24 billion—more than enough to pay for both the wetlands restoration and Category 5 levees needed to protect New Orleans and its port, the country’s leading gateway for coffee, rubber, and imported steel.

The port, and much of the rest of the commerce vital to the area—and to the nation—is, of course, directly dependent on the same water that puts us at risk. (Louisiana’s wetlands produce 25 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, and a billion pounds of seafood annually, hence the seemingly contradictory, and slightly scary, moniker of the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival that takes place in Morgan City every year.) The Mississippi pushes 300,000 cubic feet of water past the city every second, Lake Pontchartrain is so wide it is crossed by the longest overwater bridge in the world, and the Gulf of Mexico lies just 100 miles below us. We’re surrounded, which is the reason Bienville’s engineer was so adamant that he move New Orleans, as well as the reason that Bienville refused to budge.

But the Gulf, the river, and the lake are hardly our only source of hydration. Roy Blount says he thinks the reason New Orleanians traditionally have taken “the threat of inundation so lightly” is not merely denial, it is that the city is “so moist as a rule.” He has a point—the humidity is so dense it is often hard to differentiate between the air and the water; it rains so much and the drainage is so bad that there are mini-flash floods all the time (during one of them, the car I was driving floated into a canal and I was forced to save myself by swimming out the window).

Not only are we more or less constantly saturated, we have always had a more intimate relationship with death than the residents of any other place in the country, a fact which engenders a certain amount of fatalism. In 1853, six years after our house was built, 8,000 people died in one of the yellow fever epidemics that were a constant throughout the century; as late as 1914 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague. Graves lie above ground in gleaming white “cities of the dead” because the water table is so high that bodies buried below ground would simply pop back up.

The coroner, Frank Minyard, who is also a jazz trumpeter, attributes our abysmal life expectancy rates to our “killer lifestyle,” and it’s true that we are home to the fattest people in the country, we’ve had highest cancer rates since the 1930s, and we drink—a lot. Legendary restaurateur Ella Brennan says we drink so much because we start so early: “Drinking a Ramos Fizz or a Sazerac with breakfast is considered normal behavior.” Not only is liquor available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in barrooms (pre-Katrina there were 1,500), restaurants, grocery stores, and pharmacies, it is also conveniently obtained from drive-through daiquiri shop windows, thanks to an exemption in the state open container law that makes it okay to drink and drive as long as the alcoholic beverage is frozen. I take Minyard’s point—there’s no question that sucking down a 32-ounce White Russian daiquiri while barreling down I-10 can be construed as a killer lifestyle choice—but we are also cursed with killers of a more straightforward kind, the ones who carry guns. And, unlike other cities, where violent crime and gang activity goes on out of sight of much of the populace, New Orleans is fluid in more ways than one—“nice” neighborhoods abut “bad” ones throughout the city, so that even the occupants of the grandest of houses are not immune to the sounds of gunshots in the night, or indeed, to the sight of a dead body dumped on the curb.

All this has contributed to something of a survivor’s mentality. When the city fathers printed up a batch of bumper stickers bearing the message “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home,” another batch appeared within days: “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Hell.” There is a sort of perverse pride the natives take in living in a place that “the big one” may well hit one day, as well as an ingrained rebel defiance. (When the occupying Union troops of General Benjamin “Beast” Butler arrived in New Orleans in 1862, the ladies of the city responded by spitting on them and dousing passing soldiers with buckets of sewage from their balconies.) Seven years before Katrina, when the likelihood of Georges led the mayor to open up the Superdome as a shelter for the first time, the paper carried photographs of patrons in Magazine Street bars wearing hardhats, and the first commodity to run out at my neighborhood grocery store was not water or even batteries, but vermouth. McGee, who had holed up in her French Quarter apartment with a stranded Australian sailor and a case of bourbon, kept calling me in New York to tell me I was missing all the fun. By the time Katrina reared her monstrous head, John was fifty-six years old and had lived in New Orleans for most of his life, but he had never once evacuated for a storm. During Betsy, a powerful Category 3 hurricane that killed 58 New Orleanians in 1965, his uncle held him by his feet out a third-story window so he could unclog the gutters that were pouring water into their house.

So it was that on the Saturday before Katrina I was busy making a grocery list, not for hurricane supplies or evacuation needs, but for our first dinner party on First Street. Our friends Byron and Cameron Seward, who live in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and have a house in the Faubourg Marigny, just below the French Quarter, were in town with their daughter Egan, a former summer assistant of mine who works as a decorator in New York. Byron farms cotton and soybeans and corn for a living, but he is also a serious wine nut, and all summer long he had been assembling a collection of rosés in hopes that we might actually be able to sample them—in our house—before the summer was over. I love cooking for Byron because he gets so into it and I’d planned several courses, including a lobster spaghetti John and I had eaten in Sicily that I was determined to replicate.

The first sign that something wasn’t quite right was the fact that I immediately found a parking space in the always nightmarishly congested Whole Foods parking lot. Then, on my way home, I noticed people waiting in long lines at gas stations—the ones that were still open, that is—while the roads themselves were mostly clear. When I walked back in the house, the phone was ringing. My mother, a steadfast watcher of television (there is one in almost every room of my parents’ house, which would prove to come in handy later) and a world-class worrier, was calling to tell me that we needed to start driving to Greenville immediately. “I am not kidding, Sister,” she said, using the only name she ever calls me (and which is pronounced “Suhstuh”) unless she is really, really angry. “This hurricane is coming straight at you.” Elizabeth, with whom I’d endured a tortuous evacuation during the Ivan false alarm (maximum speed of five miles an hour for the first four hours, coupled with a vomiting Honey), was next. There was no way, she said, she was she was going to get stuck in that traffic again (no one had any faith whatsoever that the new traffic plan would be any better than the last one). “We’re leaving now,” she announced, adding that McGee would not be far behind them.

Despite all signs to the contrary—chief among them the fact that John himself announced that we were evacuating Sunday no matter what—I was somehow convinced there was still time for the thing to change course before we actually had to leave. Not only did I not want to consider the long-term implications, I did not, in the short term, want to abandon the live lobsters I had just stuck in the refrigerator or cope with tying down the thousands of potential projectiles that littered the construction site that was our yard. I was much relieved when, astonishingly, Eddie called to say he would take care of everything outside, and Byron and Cameron called to say that if the dinner was still on, they were coming. Egan’s plane did not leave until the next morning and all the earlier flights out were suddenly booked.

So when Rose called I did not have to pretend to be calm. Rosemary Russ, who had worked for me for years keeping house, and who, along with her whole family, had come to Greenville to cook and serve all the food at our wedding (as they do at almost all my parties), is a phenomenally skittish woman. During the thunderstorms that are daily occurrences during New Orleans summers, she steadfastly refuses to answer the phone, convinced she’ll be electrocuted through the receiver if lightning strikes the power lines. I told her that if things stayed like they were, we were leaving the next day. “You better call me if you go a minute earlier,” she said, and I promised that I would.

The night turned out to be lovely—prehurricane weather is always clear and breezy, and the impending doom we still did not take entirely seriously had us all feeling a tiny bit braver and more alive. Byron had gotten us an extravagant housewarming gift, a case of Billecart-Salmon, at about the same time we’d moved into Elizabeth’s, and he was as relieved to finally unload it as we were to finally be in the house. We hung out in the kitchen, toasted the new growth on the live oak tree Benton’s guys had recently planted, and munched Spanish almonds and tuna
tapenade
on toasted slices of baguette. By the time we sat down to the spaghetti, Byron, whose life’s blood is the weather, and John, who had talked to a geologist friend monitoring offshore rigs in the Gulf, both predicted the storm would jog to the east at the last minute; we would be prudent and leave, but we would not worry. Instead, we drank more wine and lingered merrily at the table, and then John and I hiked up to the third floor, where we slept like babies in a new down-covered bed of our very own.

The next morning was not so jolly. Eddie failed to materialize and sent Abel instead, who stayed just long enough to nail some plywood over the big sunroom windows before jumping into his truck and roaring away. I closed and lashed all the shutters, dragged ladders in from the balconies, and cleared the flat roof of the many jagged pieces of marble that surely would have punctured the roofs of half our neighbors, while John got started in the yard. By the time we were done, we had tied down at least a dozen more ladders and filled the shed with random pieces of lumber, wheelbarrows and shovels, piles of brick and pieces of stone. There was not a whole lot we could do about the Bobcat or the cement mixer. We just hoped they wouldn’t end up in somebody else’s living room.