by Chris Rose
They tell me the job is pretty easy. The California guy tells me, “We heard this neighborhood used to be pretty bad, but it’s all good now. All the trouble is Uptown these days.”
Bunny Friend, like so many other playgrounds in the city, is paved over with stones. It doesn’t exactly exude neighborhood warmth, no family-friendly vibe from all these pristine trailers crammed together like cell blocks.
Not much of a place to raise kids, but it is what it is. There’s a brand-new playground set in the corner of the lot. That’s a start, I guess.
At the corner of Desire and North Miro, Georgiana Mitchell sits on her stoop finishing off a cheeseburger and a Coke. Her nephew is gutting her house.
“It used to stop right here in front of my house,” she says of the bus named Desire. She rode it for thirty-one years, as the dining room manager of Le Pavillon Hotel and also as a salad maker at Antoine’s restaurant.
She’s retired now. Trying to get back in, get back home. Thieves recently made off with what little survived the flood.
“My crystal, my mama’s china,” she says. “They took it off the porch.” She pauses. “We thought we had lost everything anyway—before we found it—so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
She gives me a look that says: It matters.
Her family, all of whom lived within three blocks of this corner, have spread as far as Hammond, Houston, and Atlanta. They’re not coming back. But she wants to.
“I just love New Orleans,” she says. “It gets into your blood. I’m seventy years old, and I thought at this point in my life I’d just be out here in the yard fooling with my sunflowers and rosebushes and going to the Wal-Mart. That’s what I was going to do.”
And now, this.
“Look at my grass. I can’t believe there’s no Saint Aug at all! Let me tell you: when you come by here someday and see all the pretty grass and all the pretty flowers, you will know I am back.”
• • •
Further up Desire, there’s a boat on the side of the road, right where the flood deposited it. It’s a Scottie Craft, about fifteen feet long. It’s called Zombie.
Perfect.
A shirtless, heavily tattooed guy with a Billy Idol haircut, rocker shades, and pierced nipples is gutting a house. He’s the only white guy on the block—in the whole neighborhood, for that matter.
His name is Eli. He’s a general maintenance man at the tony Bombay Club in the Quarter, and he tells me, “I’m the only one around here who’s not related by blood or marriage. But it’s a good place. Historically, it’s not a bad neighborhood. It’s a poor neighborhood, and crime tends to gather in poor neighborhoods. But it’s pretty quiet now. That’s for sure.”
He cooks on a wood fire in the front yard and had been sleeping in a tent there until the woman across the street got power and now he runs an orange extension cord across the street to power a fan so he can sleep.
“I went from having $200,000 worth of material possessions to what was in two duffel bags,” he tells me. “I had my pity party, but you dust off and say, all right, it’s time to rebuild. The family that lives on this block, they’re all coming back. You can see: it’s the only clean block around here. We’re going to turn this little block into a Garden of Eden in the middle of Hell.”
It does get hellish up the block, toward where the big Desire housing development used to cast a gloom over the whole area until it was torn down. Now it’s all empty fields and empty hair salons and juke joints and grocery stores; that smell.
The rats have become legend around here. Someone tells me the firemen come by and shoot the rats with paint guns, but I don’t know if I believe that.
Here at Desire and Florida, the bus used to head down to Mazant Street and start its loop back downtown.
• • •
At Mazant and North Galvez, a stunning spectacle breaks the pale and dusty horizon. A man has moved himself and what few belongings he has left onto an abandoned corner lot, and, in the process, he has become a bona fide Southern Gothic art installation.
He has positioned broken cars, trucks, and barrels around himself as a perimeter. Yard umbrellas and tarps make his shade, and flags and mirrors and stuffed animals and plastic flowers and just plain stuff, lots of random stuff, are scattered throughout, making for a strange oasis.
It’s a junkyard, but an artful junkyard.
The man says, “I am Willie Gordon, sixty-four years old, 1425 Egania Street.” He says this as though he says it a lot, and from the Superdome to Houston to a series of Texas hospitals to FEMA to the Red Cross and everybody else, he has.
He says to me: “That’s Egania. Do you know how to spell that?”
I tell him I do. He pauses. Says, “You know, I lived there for eighteen years and just learned how to spell it six months ago.”
He’s a truck driver by trade, an eccentric by birth, and, from the look of all the empty bottles on the premises, a drinker.
“I’m the Special Man!” he tells me.
Egania is in the Lower 9th. His house is still there, but he says he’s afraid to go back.
“The water . . . ,” he begins, and he tells an hourlong story about the water rising around his car and his long walk through it and the surgeries for the infections he got from it and the cabdriver in Houston who scammed him of his money, and the story, which began as a mirthful exposition, takes him from playful wisecracker to the depths of human sorrow and he begins to sob.
It’s hot outside. Hot as hell. I don’t know what to say to this guy. “I’m shook up,” he says. “I’m scared. I’m sixty-four years old, and I am alone. What am I going to do?”
He has big gold earrings like a genie would wear. He was wearing boxers when I arrived, but he has put his pants on now.
A guy in a muscle T-shirt rides up on one of those too-small bicycles that gang-banger types favor and he starts to sing: “Dun-dun, DAH-dah! Dun-dun, DAH-dah-dah-dah-dah.”
It’s the theme from Sanford and Son. The guy on the bike asks, “What’s up, Fred?” and Willie Gordon gives a good-natured howl in response. The guy looks at me and asks, “Where y’at, Lamont?” Then he rides away, his laughter echoing in the canyon of broken houses.
A man across the street, on a cell phone, yells into it, “What do you want from me?”
Willie Gordon looks at me and says, “Women.”
• • •
The bus used to roll down Mazant, which matches Desire in its presentation: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The route turns right on Claiborne to head back downtown, and along this stretch, volunteers from Common Ground are gutting houses.
On the street, folks around here tell you they trust white people more than they used to because of all the help from Common Ground and groups like it. It’s kind of weird, but almost all the volunteers you see working in the 9th Ward—upper and lower—are white.
Young and white, from out of town, dressed in space suits, and doused in patchouli, gutting out the ruins of a city they never knew.
The route runs past the recently refurbished Stewart’s Diner, where the mayor, the governor, and the president stopped for lunch one day in March. Bush had red beans and rice with potato salad, smoked sausage, veggie.
On the menu, it’s called the President’s Special now. Served five days a week. $8.50.
I ride my bike, my big red bike, down Claiborne and under the interstate where a million cars are waiting to be carted off. The tires are missing off a lot of them. Those are just about the only salvageable parts on the waterlogged auto farm, and in a town where everyone gets a flat tire once a month, they are no negligible commodity, those tires.
I ride by the newly opened Cajun Fast Food To Go, operated by Asians and patronized by African Americans, and isn’t that a New Orleans story?
• • •
Back at the corner of Elk and Canal, the bus named Desire would have finished its run. But it doesn’t run anymore, so I look at the buses that are here, loading and unloading pass
engers, and I see on the marquee scroll on the front of a bus, in those letters made from green dots of light: SULLEN.
This bus goes to Algiers. To Sullen Place, to be exact. And I am astounded.
The bus named Sullen instead of Desire, and what is there to say?
Taking stock of things, that’s pretty damn funny.
We Raze, and Raise, and Keep Pushing Forward
8/29/06
I drove down Louisville Street in Lakeview the other evening, one of the Avenues of Despair that I have incorporated into my regular rounds of the city as I seek out the progress of our recovery.
I have several friends who lived here. One of them had not mucked out or gutted his house since it soaked in its own sewage last fall and, rather than take offense at the disaster tourism phenomenon that abounds in our region, he welcomed visitors—friends and strangers alike—to enter his home and experience the full sensory shock of what happened here.
To walk into this foul and infected house and gaze upon the domestic carnage was, in many ways, a more effective storytelling device than driving past miles and miles of wretched and abandoned exteriors. The eyes burn, the breath shortens, and the weight of lost history, memory, and family is crushing.
“Imagine if you came home to this,” I used to tell my visitors.
This week, my friend James had that house—where he had lived for fourteen years and raised two sons—torn down. He left work one morning to witness the act with his wife. He bought sodas and ice cream from a passing truck for the work crew, went to Subway for lunch, and then went back to work.
Three blocks down Louisville, I drove past my friend A.J.’s house. His block was nearly pristine, having been recently mucked, weeded, and scrubbed out by one of the legions of young-volunteer groups who have come from elsewhere to aid our city in its distress.
Across the street from his house, a woman and her daughter were sweeping the sidewalk. They have already moved back in. She asked me for A.J.’s phone number and called him right then—he’s in Covington now—to invite him to a neighborhood get-together, a gathering of souls and survivors to commemorate just being alive.
Next to A.J.’s house, I was taken aback by the spectacle of a house in transformation; it had been raised that afternoon on giant piers, looming above the shoulders of a profoundly cheerful woman who stood in her yard, planted her hands on her hips, regarded me, and asked, “Whaddya think?”
What do I think? I think she’s crazy. Bonkers. Stark raving mad. That’s what I think.
But what I wanted to tell her was that I loved her. I wanted to hug her. And what I said was “Looks great!” and I continued on my journey, strangely comforted by what I have come to consider the nearly delusional optimism of our populace. Life gives you lemons? Make icebox pie.
The Corps of Engineers gives you eight feet of water? Raise your house eight feet. Move on. Move up.
Not all stories around here are so cheery, so full of equanimity and can-do. Far from it.
One of my favorite local stores, Utopia, a funky Magazine Street boutique, closed a week ago because of lack of business. In one of the mayor’s ever-increasing public gaffes—his pronouncements on race, progress, and politics have gone from comic to weird to just plain alienating—he recently dismissed the concerns of business owners who say the economic and political climates are driving them away from the city. He said he’d send a postcard to those that leave.
Mr. Mayor, Utopia’s forwarding address is a shopping mall in Houston.
And so it goes.
This isn’t Sudan. It’s not Lebanon. There are greater hardships all across this planet than living in New Orleans. But by American standards, by the standards of those families who lived side by side in the same voting precincts for the past sixty years in Chalmette, Gentilly, and the Lower 9th, by the standards of those who worked their asses off to get a nice house, a nice car, and a picket fence in Old Metairie, well . . . it pretty much sucks here.
But we move on, move up, our faith in government washed out to sea with all that floodwater and our hopes for recovery rooted in our reliance on one another and the triumph of the human spirit. They are our best and only chance.
Folks from other places must think we’re out of our minds when they see pictures of the ruination and hear about all the stress and depression and hear the crazy stuff that comes out of our mayor’s mouth, and maybe they’re right.
It will be decades before we sort through our post-Katrina housing landscape while psychiatric journals write about our post-Katrina emotional landscape.
Most of us have visited other places this past year, where sidewalks are clean and parks and playgrounds are pristine and schools are progressive and city government is efficient, but still, this is where we are.
We stay. We raise our houses and we raze our houses and we get up and go to work—the lucky ones—because this is home and no word has a stronger allegiance in the English language.
I’m not going to try to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is.
It is home.
I have a friend permanently evacuated to Chicago who confirms my belief that, as bad as it is here, it’s better than being somewhere else. To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.
You can’t sleepwalk here; you will fall into a pothole.
My Chicago friend told me over a crawfish boil this spring that the only person he has in the world to talk to about all this—this Thing—is his third-grade daughter.
At night they talk. No one else understands the thousand-yard stare and the apoplectic frustration of not being here to be a part of this. It’s that song: “Do you know what it means . . . ?”
Yes, we do.
As Ernesto wobbled its precarious path over the weekend, my wife and I secured our papers, discussed our options, made our evacuation plans.
“Is this how we’re going to live?” she asked me. I don’t think I answered her directly but instead offered only a shrug—not of disregard or defiance or even determination, but a simple motion of the head to look around the room, our house, our home, and absorb what we’ve got here.
It’s not another day in Paradise, not by any means. And I am tired of the trash and the theft and the blame, just like everybody else.
But there’s something about being here that makes you feel alive. I mean, if offered a chance to be one of those guys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, you’d take it, wouldn’t you?
That’s kind of what this is. A shot at glory.
There are tough hours, tough days, tough weeks at a time, but underneath all our sorrow is the power of community and the common good.
I remember sitting on my front stoop near the end of the first week of September last year when a disheveled and seemingly disoriented guy pulled up in front of me in his pickup truck. He had Michigan plates and was pulling a boat behind him.
“Which way?” he shouted to me. “Who’s in charge here?” he said.
I had to laugh at that part. No one’s in charge, I told him. But if he wanted to put that boat to good use, I said, “Keep going straight and you’ll hit the water.”
He nodded. And then he started crying. “I’m sorry I took so long, man,” he told me. “I got here as fast as I could.” And he drove off.
I saw him two days later on Canal Street, looking fresh and invigorated. He had been rescuing people and pets ever since I’d seen him.
From time to time, I talk to a retired New York City fireman named Jim Kearney on the phone. He has made several trips here and to the Mississippi coast to give free massage therapy to first responders, rescue workers, and volunteer house
gutters.
He says that every time he goes back to New York, he flounders with a sense of loss of purpose and direction. He says his friends who have volunteered to work here feel the same way.
“They go through their own grieving hell when they leave New Orleans,” he said to me. “It’s like leaving the Titanic for a safe distant shore—and leaving all the people behind. There is such a dissonance between what’s going on down there and everywhere else in America. Everyone in New Orleans is going around with a spike stuck in their heads, and they don’t know how to get it out.”
He paused and said, “You all are amazing people to be doing what you’re doing.”
And he’s right. We are.
Tens of thousands of other volunteers like him have discovered this, too. They have come by the bus and plane load to help us help ourselves and the ship is far from righted, but, one year into this, we’re trudging forward.
Moving on, moving up.
It’s impossible to thank all these people who have come from faraway places. It’s impossible even to know who they are anymore, so many have come and gone and they come still and again.
There is only one way to properly express our gratitude to the masses, to show them that what they have done is not wasted time and effort. To show them that we are worth it.
And that is by succeeding.
Echoes of Katrina in the Country
8/8/06
I went to the Mississippi woods for the weekend and did what country folks do on a Saturday afternoon: went to a baby shower that was capped off with riding lawn mower races.
Baby shower/riding lawn mower race. Like shrimp and gravy, bathtubs and Virgin Marys, and the colors purple, green, and gold—there’s just some things that nature meant to go together.
This was up near Picayune, at my in-laws’ neighbors’ house. The only vehicle with which I could enter the event was my father-in-law’s golf cart. It was faster than the lawn mowers, but it didn’t rev like they did and I felt so . . . city.
Like being on a Vespa in a convoy of Harleys. Except for the “faster” part. I was the only male over fourteen who didn’t have a tattoo.