by Chris Rose
I love Mid-City. I’ve always loved tooling around there. It has its own vibe and languorous pace and never seemed to be in sync with society’s inexorable march to revolutions in retail, food service, upholstery, auto repair, and flooring.
You could still buy remnants in Mid-City. You could still get your car fixed by a mechanic named Sal.
Mid-City has its own alluring architecture—some Creolized version of the antiquated American cottage—and I’ve always felt that if I were transported blindfolded to the neighborhood and then was asked to divine where I was, I would look around and maybe smell the air and think: We’re near Liuzza’s.
You can just tell.
Mid-City seems like one of the (many) forgotten neighborhoods in the Aftermath. Not as rich as Lakeview and not as poor as the Lower 9th and not quite as whacked as either but very much whacked, indeed—soaked, sodden, gutted, and blanched in the sun like a dead fish.
Not black, not white. Not so easily categorized and labeled and affixed in the political order we are being force-fed, the notion of Us and Them.
That’s probably one reason I like it.
The brown line, the watermark, the stain of our national disgrace—sometimes it’s over your head here.
Sometimes I’m in my car and I look at the line and realize I would be completely submerged where I am driving if it were six months ago, and this is so hard to fathom, to process, to make peace with.
I try to picture the corner of Banks and Carrollton as some sort of lake, but I don’t see it. I look at a building now and think: It looks fine. Where is everybody?
Over a few blocks, Mandina’s is a shell, not to open for many, many months, but at least it will reopen and that’s important because when you break things down to their very basic fundamentals, you’d have to question whether living in a New Orleans without Mandina’s would be worth living at all.
Mid-City was always so full of classic neighborhood joints with lively and eccentric crowds day and night. Venezia, with its beehived waitresses and “sit anywhere ya like, dawlin’,” and, down the block, the gray men whose elbows were permanently affixed to the sticky bar top at the Red Door, smoke from their unfiltered Camels streaming from tin ashtrays straight into their listless eyes.
I spent much of the night of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 at the Red Door, grabbing buck-ten-cent Carlings and going out on the neutral ground on Carrollton with friends and grabbing tree branches and letting the wind lift us up.
Young, wild, free, and stupid. My friends and I greeted Andrew with a game of bourré, a bottle of Pinch, and mud slides on the neutral ground until one in the group got covered with red ants and, later, got out of sorts and hit another in the group with a baseball bat.
Paul Sanchez, from the band Cowboy Mouth, wrote a song about it, “Hurricane Party.” I’m guessing they’re a thing of the past now—hurricane parties, those homages to the bravado and insouciance with which we used to greet the news of impending hellfire and destruction.
Now it’s not so funny.
The Red Door is whacked and Venezia is whacked and Liuzza’s is whacked and the barest few Mid-City businesses have been able to limp themselves back into order, now six months later, seven months later, time marches on.
The New Orleans writer Jonathan Hunter recently lamented his favorite neighborhood’s state of disrepair with a hopeful paean: “I look forward to the return of the Liuzza’s waitresses yelling ‘Draw one!’ over the buzz of the crowd drinking frozen schooners of beer on a Friday afternoon. A plate of fried pickles was only a dollar. They were weird but good. And I certainly hope that my barber continues to interrupt my haircut to take bets on the phone: ‘Gotcha covered, babe.’ ”
We will be part of what we were and a part of something new. Maybe Sal will fix your car. Or maybe you’ll have to go to Jiffy Lube on Vets.
I was in Mid-City looking for my friend Tracy Jarmon, a waiter at Mandina’s and a painter of lively abstracts that I started collecting about two years ago. A man of interminable—even borderline annoying—good cheer, he was one I had wondered about.
I called recently, but couldn’t find him. So I went to his rented raised double, where I had been twice before to buy paintings right out of his garage where he worked and struggled to make an artist out of a waiter; no easy task, that, particularly when the canvases are given away at a hundred bucks a shot.
His house on Bernadotte Street was empty. Cleaned out. No trace of life. No paintings. No interminable cheer.
I’m assuming that all his work was destroyed and his Mandina’s gig is gone and whatever. Thing about Tracy is, he’s probably laughing it off somewhere. He’s got that New Orleans thing crawling all over him, the good stuff, that We Are the Champions, to hell with the rest and I’ll just start over kind of attitude.
There was a neighbor on a cell phone on the sidewalk on Bernadotte, and I asked if he knew what happened to the painter down the block and he said, “Oh, that guy? Yeah. I don’t know what happened to him.”
This guy and I on the sidewalk, we did the obligatory small talk that has become so surreal attendant to what happened here. I did what I hate doing, what I swear I won’t do anymore, but that I continue to do: I asked a stranger how he is doing. How his block is doing.
The guy paused a long time. Then he said, “We’re doin’ all right.”
Isn’t that the way? You can either tell the truth or you can say “We’re doin’ all right” and keep the stiff upper lip.
That’s what I have taken to doing. When someone asks me how I’m doing these days, I ask them back, “What are the choices?” It’s sort of my personal joke that no one gets. But either you beat this thing or it beats you.
Pandora’s snowball stand has reopened on Carrollton and shirtless boys from the Jesuit cross-country team run through the rubble of the neighborhood every afternoon and there’s your metaphor: not a sprint, but a marathon.
Snowballs today, fried pickles tomorrow, Mandina’s ever after. Gotcha covered, babe.
Misery in the Melting Pot
3/22/06
It has been seven months.
I am walking down Toledano Street, the wide pitch from Broad to Claiborne, ten blocks of classic urban American landscape: sad grocery stores, chicken, pig’s feet and dirty rice to go, brick revival churches, funeral homes, auto parts stores, and ramshackle row houses.
There was a time when optimistic paint jobs—orange sherbet, burnt sienna, and sea foam green trims, posts, and porches—did their best to cover the age and decay, but it’s all laid bare and painful now. The optimistic veneer here—everywhere—was stripped by the water.
Seven months ago.
The corner of Broad and Toledano once marked a turf war for customers between Cajun Chicken and Cajun Seafood, two catty-corner carryouts owned by Asians in a black neighborhood.
Welcome to the melting pot.
But the war is over; both stores have been shuttered. For seven months.
Just down from the corner at Broad, there’s a sign that says, NO DUMPING: $500 FINE.
That’s almost funny. Eight feet above the ground, the crooked sign has the brown watermark across it. And there are, about every hundred paces, big piles of debris, like a dump—carpet, plaster, furniture, and televisions, lots of televisions.
You have to figure the local Nielsen ratings took a beating in this hurricane. The revolution was televised, but all the TVs are broken.
This is one of those puzzling neighborhoods where you look at some of the houses and you tremble at their altered states of decline but you sometimes realize: this one or that one was falling down even before The Thing.
The Rhodes Funeral Home anchors this unwieldy boulevard, all stately, grand, and white, looking like nothing more than a mausoleum itself. It is gutted now, and masked workers are removing the floor with shovels.
You don’t want to think about what happened in the funeral homes. The only consolation is that at least the people inside were alrea
dy dead.
But still.
In the middle of the afternoon, there’s a wan ghost town feel to Toledano, with weeds gone wild and power lines dangling and swaying in the breeze like electric spiderwebs and Styrofoam cups and potato chip bags drifting this way and that as motorists speed by on their way to or from Uptown or the interstate, destination always someplace else—anyplace else but here.
It’s easy to fall into a listless state after a while out here on Toledano. You get an irritation in your throat, or maybe that’s just your imagination—that Katrina cough that people talk about, but is it real?
The work crews around here are spotty and slow-moving; there seems to be no urgency.
Many houses have been gutted, but that’s as far as the work goes in most cases while the residents wait to learn the future of Broadmoor, this neighborhood, designated “green” by many specialists who suggest that low-lying areas such as this should be returned to their natural state and their natural state didn’t include crawfish egg rolls or jazz funerals.
Or Bible study or happy hour, so both the Pleasant Zion Baptist Church and Tapp’s II are gutted and waiting. Capt. Sal’s Seafood is cleaned out and cleaned up with shiny stainless-steel counters in place and a fresh paint job, but there’s no one on the premises, hardly ever is, all boarded up and waiting.
Inside the storefront window, on a tabletop: work gloves, industrial wipes, small electrical fixtures, and a book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.
Indeed. Talk about self-help. Best of luck to you, my friend.
There’s an unmarked green tin building down the block, the parking lot still full of drowned cars, but life and commerce stir around them.
This is Dooley’s Auto & Wrecker Service, but you’d know that only because that’s what’s printed on the brand-new shirt that the man named Dooley wears in the office.
There’s no actual wrecker visible on the premises, but gospel music blares from the back auto bay, where Dooley’s grandson-in-law—the only current employee—busies himself with auto repair.
Dooley sits at his desk eating lunch out of a Rally’s bag with Guiding Light blaring on a TV against the wall. After losing every tool and every machine seven months ago—to say nothing of the eight cars he was working on at the time and all the old mechanics’ uniforms with names stitched on the pockets—he’s been back in business for three weeks.
New uniforms. Some new tools. Still need new machines, but can’t wait forever.
“Need to get back to work,” Dooley says. He’s cobbling this thing back to life with no help from FEMA or the Small Business Administration or anything else that’s government-related or spelled by acronym.
“I don’t fool with that,” Dooley says. “Just doin’ it myself.”
Doin’ it with no sign and no phone; there is still no land-line service in this part of town. Seven months later.
A customer walks into Dooley’s shop. Broken headlight. Dooley loses interest in his conversation with a stranger and attends to the customer and the gospel music in the back bay blares and the sound of tools—new tools—clatters in the shade.
Moving down the block, more piles of debris. Big and small. A pile of riding lawn mowers stacked up on the sidewalk speaks of the loss of a small business. One small story. Many small stories make the big story.
Other places, little things, cosmetics, bedding, toys, small appliances. It’s just stuff. Possessions. But it was somebody’s stuff, and it took a long time and some scrap to get this stuff, and in a lifetime, this stuff amounted to somebody’s comfort zone. Their home.
We are Humpty Dumpty, laughing on a wall one minute, then cracked and flat on our back the next.
A work crew is gutting a home, its debris spilled out onto the traffic lane and marked off with police tape. A man in a mask delicately lifts and tucks strands of Christmas lights that hang from the aluminum awning on the front porch to keep them from getting tangled in the floorboards the workers are ferrying out. It’s as futile and loving a task as you could witness.
Let there be light. Let there be life.
Most houses here on this stretch of Toledano are one-story and empty, but some folks here are living in the rare upstairs and there are some trailers dotting the landscape, though not much sign of activity in them.
Clara Hunter watches this world from her front porch. In a housecoat and plastic hairnet, she is the only resident in view this afternoon, one of the first back.
“I was in Metairie, but I didn’t like it,” she says. “Didn’t like paying rent. So I came back home. There is nothing like home.”
Her front lawn, all twelve square feet of it, holds two new azalea bushes and one gardenia, the only living plant life other than the menacing, spiky weeds you see up and down this street.
She regards the boulevard before her, silent but for speeding, anonymous drivers seemingly oblivious to the stirrings out their windows. They’ve got their own problems.
A retiree, Hunter has lived here for thirty-five years. She says most of her neighbors own their homes. From what she has heard, the neighborhood will rise again, but she doesn’t hear much these days because there is no phone service and she can’t afford a cell and there’s no one on the stoop next door or next door to that or next door to that.
“I can’t talk to my friends,” she says. “But the lady up the street says some folks say they’re coming back here soon. And some folks say they’re not coming back at all.
“You got to be patient, I guess. You’re not patient, you get a stroke or a heart attack.”
Words to live by. Seven months in.
The End of the World
4/4/06
There used to be a sign at the end of the road in Delacroix, at the termination of Highway 300, that said END OF THE WORLD.
The official state Department of Transportation and Development map identifies the endless expanse beyond this point as simply “hunting and trapping.”
Of course, that sign and that map predate August 29, 2005.
On that date, the sign disappeared, washed away like just about every man-made structure in lower St. Bernard Parish. The End of the World went from being a commentary on geography to a statement on what happened here on August 29. The sign itself washed out to sea. Obliterated.
Some other time, some other place.
And the landmass that reaches forever southeast to Black Bay and Breton Sound—next stop, Cuba—is currently of indeterminate quality as the famous pristine Louisiana sporting grounds it once was.
Standing at what was once the End of the World, a commercial fisherman named Cap’n Rocky Morales, a brick house of a man, gestures toward the horizon—the hunting and trapping—and says, “It was marshland before. Now it’s just water.”
Indeed, as far as the eye can see, mostly water, with lumps of land trying to rise up, trying to break through, trying to dry out. Trying to exist. Kind of like St. Bernard itself.
The tidal surge that Katrina’s brutal storm bands pushed into this land took everything, including the sure footing, geographically speaking (and perhaps psychologically as well).
There are boats where they shouldn’t be and no houses where there should. And in the trees, everything, crazy stuff, it makes no sense: furniture, appliances, tires, clothes, ice chests, a toilet—all of it hanging like some nightmare vision of Christmas in the Oaks.
Katrina in the Oaks.
And there are blue trawler nets everywhere—everywhere—fanned out in branches like spiderwebs across the expanse for miles, and it’s impossible not to think of Bob Dylan’s song about Delacroix: “Tangled Up in Blue.”
The whole damn place is tangled up in blue nets and just trash. An unholy mess. Coyote ugly, and there’s not enough beer in the world to make it look pretty.
“It’s not so good,” Cap’n Rocky says. “I was leery about coming back here at first. But I was born here.”
That explains a lot, particularly why he woul
d try to carve a life here out of the matchsticks that remain. The inexorable lure of a sense of place. Home sweet home. A man’s trailer is his castle.
Cap’n Rocky was born half a mile up Bayou Terre Aux Boeufs, and in his forty-two years he has moved only this far—third house from the End of the World.
Funny, sort of, but he doesn’t even know how to spell the name of the bayou he has lived on all his life. Apparently no one has ever asked him to spell it before.
It has been a life uncomplicated and on his own terms, and this is where he will stay, despite the fact that his house vanished and everything in it is a memory now.
“When most people came back here, the only way they found their houses was by the steps,” says Cap’n Rocky. “That’s the only way we knew.”
And it’s true. All that seems unmolested by the fury are the steps to the doors of the houses that aren’t there, stairways to nowhere.
Lined up and down the highway, they call to mind that macabre joke about the little black boxes on airplanes that always seem to survive a crash: Why didn’t they make the houses out of the same material they used for the steps?
Delacroix, it’s just wreckage and steps and ghosts. No ice, no fuel. Hardly a way for a man who makes his living on water to carry on, but carry on he will. His life is the water. Give Cap’n Rocky a boat and some bait, and he will make it.
And not necessarily alone. “Let’s see,” he muses over the question of who else has come back to live at the End of the World. “My uncle is up the road; he’s back. There’s my other uncle. And there’s that old man up there; I guess there’s four or five families.”
But more will come back, in that prideful and insolent Louisiana fashion that The Thing has carved into our hearts.
You can see already at the End of the World at least two dozen stacks of new crab traps set out on empty lots where people used to live. Local fishers have delivered them down here and will get busy with them when they can clear the channel and if they can get new boats and if they can find a place to live and if it doesn’t all happen again this summer then, well . . . then everything will be just peachy in Delacroix.