The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (13 page)

D
URING THE NEXT
several weeks, I made a regular loop from Baton Rouge to Greenville to New Orleans and back, with the odd trip to New York thrown in between. Natchez is on Highway 61, between Baton Rouge and Greenville, so on the morning after my birthday, I stopped to see Rose for the first time. It had been two weeks and two days since we’d had the conversation about evacuating, but since then I’d talked to her on the phone enough to know that she had no privacy in the house with Thomas’s cousin, whom she did not know, and she’d spent whole days standing in line applying for FEMA money.

She couldn’t tell me exactly how to get to the cousin’s house and I don’t know Natchez well, so we agreed to meet in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. I had barely made it out of the car when she ran over and picked me up off the ground. Thomas is a proper, reserved sort, so he stood by the car smiling slightly with his arms folded while we whooped and hollered and carried on. I was brimming with promises and enthusiasm—I’d blithely assumed that as soon as it was possible, she’d want to return to New Orleans just like me. But when I mentioned finding them an apartment in the event that theirs had been damaged, I could tell she was terrified at the thought of coming back. And then I stopped for a minute: Of course she was. All she had seen for the last two weeks was television footage of people—the great majority of whom were members of her race—wading through the floodwaters, waiting on rooftops, perishing in front of the convention centers; members of her own family had come terrifyingly close to being among them. Then there were the warnings of typhoid and cholera, and, after that, of toxic mold spores from the dried sludge (which Brobson had already characterized as more of the same alarmist hooey). In the best of times, as Roseanna reminded us whenever they got into it, “Rose’s nerves are bad.” The first thing she had asked me was if I had seen any snakes.

Unlike me she had a lifelong history in the city, but no financial investment. Even if I’d dreaded the thought of returning, I would need to get pretty chipper pretty quick, on the assumption that there was not much market for a half-finished house in a hurricane-walloped city. But Rose and Thomas rented their apartment; their neighborhood was in far worse shape than mine. Thomas had worked as a mechanic in the same garage for years, but his boss had never given him benefits of any kind, not even health insurance. The only reason for either of them to return would be the tug of roots and family (I knew without asking that Roseanna, who owned her house, would not stay gone for long), but I could tell it might be a long hard pull and I couldn’t blame them. I hugged her again and gave her a month’s salary and promised to see her during the coming weekend.

It was on my way back through that I noticed the billboards advertising Podnuh’s barbecue. All I had brought my Oklahoma boys so far had been cakes and snacks and sandwich stuff—it was time for some hot food. I figured that if Podnuh’s was advertising as far away as Natchez, which was an hour north, it must be good, so I called the Baton Rouge location nearest Linda Jane’s and ordered brisket and ribs and pulled pork for seven hundred, along with baked beans, potato salad, and cole slaw. There was a slight pause on the other end of the phone but then a very determined young voice assured me that he could do it, that I could pick it up the next morning. When we got there, I was amazed. This particular Podnuh’s was a tiny place attached to a gas station just off the interstate; the staff had stayed up all night filling the order. I felt awful for laying such a job on them, but the young manager—yet another person who could have done a better job running FEMA—assured me that I shouldn’t, and flashed me an enormous grin: “We’ve just met our quota for the next two weeks.”

When I looked at the bill, I knew he wasn’t exaggerating—one of the many things about me that has always driven my father, and now my husband, totally crazy is my ability to order up barbecue for a literal battalion without even thinking of asking the price. Still, I was flush for the first time in a year—with the exception of the ones to Benton and Mr. Dupré, neither John nor I had written a check to anyone in almost three weeks. It was exhilarating—like being on temporary parole from debtor’s prison. Besides, when we started hauling great heaping containers of the stuff up the steps of the TOC, the men were ecstatic. Captain McGowan on the other hand was almost embarrassed: “You know, you really don’t have to keep doing this.” I told him I did indeed know that, it was part of the joy of it. These guys had come all the way from Oklahoma, they were spending weeks and maybe months away from their families, sleeping on either the concrete floor of the most ridiculous building in town or in tents in a nearby vacant lot in heat that constantly hovered around 100 degrees. They had cleaned up the place and restored order to “Dodge City,” and so far they had not seen the mayor or the police chief or the governor—somebody had to welcome them, and I realized for the millionth time how easy it is to make people happy by feeding them.

Our next stop was the Sarouk Shop, where we delivered more ice and a couple of chickens to Bob so that Ellis could knock himself out on Jean’s gas stove. By this time, Bob’s signs had appeared on CNN and the front page of
Le Figaro
, and, given the publicity, he figured he’d add a plea of sorts to potential tourists as well as to the locals and their carnival krewes: “You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans. Y’all Come Back for Carnival. I Have my Parade Spot. Come Back Rex, Iris, Zulu, Bacchus, Toth. Proteus, Hermes, Muses, D’Etat, Elks, Babylon. Hey Throw Me Something Mister.” Next door, at Emeril Lagasse’s Delmonico restaurant, there was a white patch where Bob’s “Looters Shot” message had once been emblazoned in big black letters. When I asked him what had happened he told me that the young Emeril’s employee who turned up to check on the property was so aghast by his graffiti that she’d gotten back in her car and made the hundred-mile roundtrip to Houma and back to purchase the nearest can of white paint. His warning, she told him, was not “the kind of message the Emeril’s organization wants to send.” Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure that neither was the message Bob’s neighbor promptly scrawled over the white space: “Emeril Is a Wuss.”

When we finally made it to First Street, I had to laugh: Three Guardsmen from Pennsylvania were parked in front, taking pictures of each other posing in front of Anne Rice’s great violet-gray manse directly across from us. Pre-Katrina, this was a familiar sight—dozens of tourists a day came by on foot, by tour bus, in limousines or in cabs, and now we had a handful in a Humvee. Rice’s career-making
Interview with the Vampire
had been published in 1976; since then, more than a hundred million copies of her books had been sold. For years, she’d arrived at book signings at the nearby Garden District Book Store lying in a coffin, and at the annual Halloween parties for her devoted fan club she did the same. She’d been great for the neighborhood because she was a devout preservationist—at one point she had owned at least four other huge properties, which she’d restored and kept up beautifully. She’d moved into this particular house in 1989, and it had not only been her primary residence but also the setting for
The Witching Hour
, which had come out in 1990.

Some of our neighbors complained about the constant traffic—and the more goth-like elements of many of the sightseers—but I completely understood the allure behind their pilgrimages. I’d read
The Witching Hour
just before I’d arrived in New Orleans that first summer, and had been completely hooked by its descriptions of the “townhouse on the corner” with its “white fluted columns” and “tapering keyhole doorway.” Lying in bed in my apartment in Manhattan, I wanted to will myself into the “engulfing stillness and greenness” of the setting, but I never imagined that almost every description, from the “plaster medallions fixed to the high ceilings” and the floor’s “heart pine boards” to the “long silk draperies” and “carved marble fireplaces,” could someday be used to describe a house I would actually live in, or that it would be across the street from the one I was reading about. I’d been in the Rice house once, years earlier, when I’d interviewed her for
Vogue
, and it hadn’t occurred to me then either, but I had loved the house and liked her, a lot. I’m sure I would have liked being her neighbor too, but she no longer lived there, having sold all her properties and moved to San Diego after her husband, Stan, an artist and poet, died of cancer. The fact that she now lived on the other side of the country had done nothing to diminish interest in the house, and it was heartening to see the first Anne Rice “tourists,” even if they were under orders to be here.

It was still way too hot—and too dark—to think about spending the night on First Street, even though Byron had given me tips: “What you do is sweat and get the bed soaking wet and then you cool down and go back to sleep.” We decided, instead, to head back to Baton Rouge, but first we stopped to meet Brobson at Molly’s at the Market. Molly’s is an Irish bar in the Quarter that had been open almost as regularly as Johnny White’s, though, as Brobson pointed out, it was decidedly more “white collar” than the “blue collar” Johnny’s, where the good doctor had become something of a hero by successfully treating the numerous boils afflicting the clientele to whom the FEMA medics had given the wrong antibiotics.

Brobson had been living well at his house on Dumaine because he had wisely allowed the
Wall Street Journal
to set up camp there and they came complete with two generators and the resources to fill them up with eighteen gallons of gasoline every day. Not only was his place a news bureau, it was also, as the banner draped across the front balcony announced, the “French Quarter Health Department in Exile.” His friends in the police department let him into one of the pharmacies they’d commandeered, so he was able to dispense drugs, and, with the help of some “renegade” paramedics from California, to run a far more helpful sidewalk operation than FEMA, whose emergency clinic was hidden in the bowels of the Royal Orleans Hotel and required getting past two sets of cops at two sets of doors. At one point, his Uptown office even became a morgue of sorts. The owner of the New Orleans Cookery had ridden out the storm in his Conti Street restaurant with a crowd Brobson described as “his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s son, eight or ten dogs, twice that many cats, and a bunch of birds.” When the poor man died of a heart attack a week or so later, the girlfriend had found some policemen who had come and pronounced the obvious, but that was all they knew to do. “Nobody was removing bodies yet,” Brobson said. “But she had him there in that restaurant with all those dogs and cats, and with the heat, he was starting to swell up, so I went on over.”

Brobson and his paramedic buddies wrapped him in “a bunch of plastic bags,” and headed toward a funeral home the coroner had told them might be open. But it turned out to be still under water. Brobson’s office is on the same block of Napoleon Avenue as the flooded former Memorial Hospital just off Claiborne Avenue, but it’s a classic New Orleans raised cottage, high off the ground, and no water had gotten inside. They put the body in a back room, where it stayed until FEMA retrieved it several days later.

Brobson was full of all sorts of slightly less macabre information, including a useful tidbit he had gleaned from a fellow Molly’s regular on “the best possible use for an MRE”: the heating elements from eight of them are enough to heat an entire bathtub full of water. While he talked I checked out the action at Molly’s, where reporters and insurance adjustors and contractors from across the country joined the assortment of Quarterites too stubborn to leave, packing the bar and spilling out onto the sidewalk and into the backs of the pickup trucks parked out front. The bartender, a stunningly beautiful young woman wearing white rubber shrimpers’ boots, a bathing suit top, and a denim miniskirt into whose waistband she had stuck a bottle opener at the small of her back, was taking cash tips from the out-of-town adjustors and contractors that were three and four times the cost of the drinks themselves, while several harried employees kept toting in huge bags of ice from God knows where.

In my early Quarter days I had clocked many an hour at Molly’s, which makes the best Bloody Mary in town and is a favorite of politicians, journalists, and the Romanian writer Andrei Codrescu, who once cited as his reason for moving to New Orleans the fact that its residents had “complete disdain for the whole yuppie, Puritan ethos of exercise and denial.” If people run here, he added, it is usually “from someone.” Like Codrescu, Molly’s founder Jim Monaghan was a transplant who visited the city in the 1970s and decided to stay after catching a glimpse of Ruthie the Duck Lady, wearing her ubiquitous rain hat and pulling one of her pet ducks behind her on a string as she skateboarded through Jackson Square. Ruthie, a sickly child whose only education had been kindergarten, spent more than sixty years in the Quarter, cadging beers and leading her ducks around, just as she’d done in her youth, when, as the Duck Girl, she and her brother sold picture postcards of her likeness at three for a dollar. The
Times-Picayune
theater critic David Cuthbert once wrote that the striking thing about most of the Quarter characters like Ruthie was that they took themselves entirely seriously, that while they may have evolved into tourist attractions, their “act” was not, in fact, a pose.

Either way, as soon as Ruthie had passed by, Monaghan looked at his wife and said, “This is the kind of place I’d like to live.” He went on to own thirty different bars in New Orleans, and though he died four years prior to the storm, he was still very much with us—the new owner, his son Jim Jr., had placed the urn containing his ashes on a shelf above the booze. Now, looking around at the jovial crowd of locals in particular, I realized why I loved living here too—there was the brilliant, ponytailed criminal lawyer who had succeeded in having the wrongful conviction of one of my closest friends overturned; there was the owner of the eponymous art gallery Arthur Roger, holding court from a pickup while his basset hound Ariel sat faithfully beside him. The lights weren’t on yet, but signs announcing an impending neighborhood meeting were already posted on the bar’s walls.