by Rebecca Dana
Feel like funkin’ it up!
Aahhhhhh, feel like funkin’ it up!
Ahhhhh…
And then after, or before, there are fried oysters and fried catfish and maybe also some fried chicken at Jacques-Imo’s, the unironically kitschy restaurant down the street, with the red-and-white-polyester tablecloths and the waiters who will offer you a free dessert just for the pleasure of watching you keep eating. And then, depending on how long these activities take, either before or after all that—depending on whether evening stretches into morning or the night bends to the will of the afternoon—you go to the Columns Hotel on St. Charles to drink Bloody Marys with the old New Orleans blue bloods and watch the trolley car pass and smell their cigar smoke and just sit for a spell. Time in New Orleans gives this way, forward and backward, pliant to everyone’s whims. Everything gets done—the drinking here and eating there and more drinking and music and food and booze—with the day slowing up at some point and life just sinking down, settling in.
My second assignment was in Orleans Parish, at the newspaper’s headquarters near the city’s Central Business District. I covered the night cops beat Tuesday through Saturday, coming in around lunchtime and listening to a police scanner for news. Usually very little happened, and the highlight of my shift was the nightly lecture from the hair-netted cafeteria lady when I ordered my regular turkey on wheat about why didn’t I have the gumbo or whatever they were serving under a congealed layer of grease. “Turkey gives you gas,” she said.
But every once in a while I’d get lucky, and something horrible would happen. This was my chance to shine. This was when I first learned the essentially parasitic nature of journalism: that we thrive on other people’s misery. The last day of elementary school in Metairie—all those adorable, inarticulate seven-year-olds who can’t speak a quotable sentence to save their lives—were hell compared to the amphetamine boost of a murder-suicide. It was during my time in Orleans Parish—somewhere between the time in July when a man accidentally burned down a nice white house with three young children inside it and the time in August when a school group fell into a shark tank at the aquarium—that I fell in love. You never get inured to the tragedy, nor should you, but there is a special privilege in the telling of it. We have to bear witness to history, even ugly and tragic history like the pointless death of three little girls, and so writing these stories felt important to me, sad as they were.
The city is full of terrible poverty, racism, crime and injustice, which I saw when I was not submitting to the pulls of the French Quarter, when I was earning my $600 a week on the metro desk. Sometimes I went on “ride-alongs” with police officers, sitting behind the wire mesh in their cop cars, where the criminals usually sat, and going with them on their rounds. One night, I was reporting a story about the city’s curfew law, which required all minors to be indoors after ten p.m. As far as I could tell, the city used this law to round up poor black children and force their parents, many of whom were single mothers working multiple jobs, to retrieve them. On my ride-along, we strayed from one of New Orleans’s seven major housing projects only when we were en route to another. We never, for example, drove through my neighborhood, where white kids sometimes stayed out playing in the street until dawn.
On very rare occasions, my hazy life that summer came into sharp focus, as on the morning I met the mother of two of the three children who died in a fire in her white shotgun house. The fire was sparked by a faulty air conditioner left running while she and her boyfriend ducked out for a bit. All three children were under three years old. One left a pink tricycle toppled over in the front yard, and it was such a stark, obvious symbol of loss that when I saw it, the first thing I thought was, “Nah, not believable.” The mother, herself only twenty, spoke to me through tears when I found her at a friend’s house around the block. The house had been decorated for one of the girls’ birthdays. It was now “veiled for a funeral,” I wrote for the next day’s front page, taking note of the tricycle and other details that earned praise from my editors over beers in the Quarter that night. This is the New Orleans the rest of America saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: the fortunate ones on higher ground and the unfortunate ones in the low-lying slums, decadence and depravity side by side.
If you go into journalism with some vague idea of helping people or in some way serving the greater good—and no matter how preoccupied you may be with fashion and entertainment or blood and guts; the prettier, cleaner things in life or the darker, dirtier ones, you always to some extent want to do good—then New Orleans is a better destination than most. There is a lot of good that needs doing there, and unlike in New York, where you can go an entire lifetime leaping from one luxury high-rise to another, in New Orleans the need is manifest. Every place in America has its beauty and its tragedy, its heartbreaking stories to tell. In New Orleans, the stories are just easier to see.
I’ve had a good half-dozen journalism jobs since then, and all have taught me something about the craft and something about life: At the Washington Post—which gave America Deep Throat, Watergate and the end of the Nixon administration—I learned how to write a proper lede and also how to give a proper blow job, the latter from a secret seventeen-page document written by a gay senior reporter and posted under an innocuous title on the newspaper’s internal server. At the New York Observer, I learned that all journalism is really about hubris and that “New York is Paris, kid” and that if you walk into enough parties pretending like you belong, someday maybe you will. From the New York Times, where I accepted a job that I quit before starting, I learned that great newspapers are made by many smart, kind, hardworking people and, invariably, a few chimpanzees. At the Wall Street Journal, I learned humility and what EBIDTA stands for. At the Daily Beast I learned a little about genius and a lot about madness and that as far as free chocolate pudding is concerned, I prefer Swiss Miss to Jell-O.
My brief stint at the Times-Picayune taught me some of the least useful things I know: what brain matter looks like on the cement floor of someone’s government-subsidized living room; how to recognize the smell of burned baby hair; what to do if you’re cut and bleeding in a small tank teeming with sharks; the best place to hear zydeco on a Monday night that’ll also give you a paper plate of red beans, sausage and rice at the door; where to go for boudin and crawfish étouffée; how to sit for five hours in a hot coffee shop and enjoy it; how to spot nutria rats in the swampland on the Mississippi border; how to dance to jazz. I learned these things and learned also that they were worth knowing, and then, before the implications of that second lesson began to take hold, I left. I made my way to New York, and that was the end of that.
WHEN I CAME BACK, five years later, on assignment from the Beast, the city at first appeared unchanged. Louis Armstrong International Airport was still barren, still over-air-conditioned and still smelled violently of mildew. Bourbon Street was still brimming with the worst of humanity, drunk and obese, one of whom grabbed my ass and said, “Where’s the party?” when I went out for a walk the night I arrived. I was booked at the Hotel Monteleone, two blocks off Bourbon, in the heart of the Quarter. I was staying, oddly, in a two-room suite on the eleventh floor, with a bedroom, sitting room, and two bathrooms, one of which had a Jacuzzi tub. The room cost ninety-nine dollars a night and came with two Andes mints and a handwritten note from the maid each afternoon. My task while in town was twofold: to tell a more human side of the oil-spill story, where other media outlets had tended to dwell on the technical and the easily defined—gallons lost, species annihilated, flaws in different proposed solutions—and also, if possible, to catch someone important “in the act.”
BP being a British company, the spill provided an opportunity to dust off treasured story lines about Old England and its uneasy relationship with the West. BP’s uppermost managers were British, its upper-uppermost being the pale, thin-lipped and uniquely unsympathetic Tony Hayward, who days after an explosion that took eleven lives and untold thousa
nds of livelihoods, complained to an interviewer about the burdens of his company’s crisis-management strategy, saying, “I just want to get back to my life.” The day I arrived in New Orleans, Tony Hayward left, flying straight back to England after enduring hours of withering congressional hearings and entire days sweltering in Louisiana. He left for a “much-needed rest,” and where he went was the Isle of Wight, where he watched his yacht, Bob, compete in a race sponsored by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. It would not have been any worse if the yacht were named Blue Collar Bill or Ha Ha, I Named My Boat After Some Generic Dirty Prole. Wouldn’t it have been great to catch him at a strip club, say, or tearing through a steak at Galatoire’s? This was the assignment. New Orleans is Sin Central, and the British are colonists at heart, and wouldn’t it be interesting journalistically if Tony Hayward or any of his tweedy deputies, all no doubt eager to get back to their lives, were quietly sampling any of the local culture?
The next level of BP managers under Hayward were swarthy Texans, led by Robert “Bob” Dudley, the chief operating officer and, who knows, perhaps the namesake for the yacht. Dudley and his charges were drawling, jeans-wearing, brush-clearing, get-down-to-business types in the mold of George W. Bush, and the emerging media narrative held that these were the people who understood the situation, who were kinsmen to the people affected and therefore should be in charge. President Obama, flaccid and as seemingly peeved by the oil-spill distraction as Tony Hayward, eventually mustered a show of pique, asking his staff to find him an “ass to kick.” But by then a special American brand of nostalgia had already set in, and we were already back to wanting cowboys in charge. Hayward was eventually reassigned, first removed from a position of oversight of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and then relocated to Siberia—overseeing BP’s emerging business with Russia. The president’s due would come in the midterm elections, people said. This was “Obama’s Katrina.”
My flight from New York was nearly empty. My closest neighbor was an engineer who spent the entire trip working on a complex-looking blueprint. When we arrived, I asked if he was working on a project to cap the oil spill, and he shook his head sadly. “I design coffee filters.” We walked together out to the taxi stand, where two hundred cabs were lined up in neat rows, waiting for passengers. My driver, Mohammed, said he had been waiting four hours for my thirty-dollar fare to downtown New Orleans. He was Pakistani and had moved twenty years ago to Hawaii, then to Louisiana because, although the weather was beautiful in Honolulu, it was a tough place to make a living. He lived in New Orleans with his brother, his wife and his two daughters and their families. I told him I was from New York and he perked up. “I hear you can earn money there year-round,” he said. Tourist season, such as it had been, was long over in New Orleans. I asked how the oil spill compared to Hurricane Katrina, and Mohammed said, “Much worse.”
He gave me a version of the same explanation I heard from many people while I was there—the beignet chef on her cigarette break outside Café du Monde; the people behind the counter at a butcher shop in the Faubourg Marigny; my friend Eric, a New Orleans blue blood, whom I met for brunch one morning—which is that with Katrina you could see the devastation. After the floodwaters receded, at least you could drive around or flip on the TV or, God forbid, go buy a newspaper and actually look at what had happened, connect with the suffering and understand, physically, what needed to be done. Entire neighborhoods needed to be rebuilt; the entire infrastructure of the city needed to be knocked on, tested and probably stripped to the bone—but it was visible and because it was visible, with enough grit and enough of an outpouring of support from the rest of the country, it was also doable. What was the Deepwater Horizon explosion? It was some dark sludge glugging out into the Gulf of Mexico forty miles south. There weren’t any puppies stranded on roofs. Anderson Cooper and Shepard Smith weren’t weeping on the Interstate. The oil spill was slowly decimating the topography of the state’s southern coast. It was wiping out the seafood industry that made up so much of the local diet and culture. It was gathering on the outskirts of town, ready to be lifted by high winds and dropped like a big wet stinking veil on New Orleans proper as soon as hurricane season came. But other than one slide show of gunky birds that made the rounds shortly after the spill, you couldn’t see anything.
I rented a silver Kia and drove around. In Houma, where many of the cleanup workers were stationed, I met Big Al of Big Al’s Seafood Restaurant (as distinguished from Big Al of Big Al’s Malibu Beach Bar), who offered me a drink, told me about how his business was suffering and repeatedly apologized for the skin cancer removal scars on his nose. In Grand Isle, a blue-collar vacation community on the southeastern tip of the state and what was being called the Ground Zero of the spill, I met Ruth of Ruth’s Diner, a small, sweet woman with sad eyes who had lived in the same place for the last fifty-five years. She had met her husband in Grand Isle, and they had been married fifty-four years ago, and he had died last year. Her diner was empty and would probably stay that way. Her health was fading and her children were encouraging her to move. “Where am I gonna go?” she asked. “My husband is buried here, and I’m not leaving him.” I drove all along the coast, stuck my toes in the water, talked to cleanup workers and aid workers and fisherman and oilmen and mothers and daughters whose lives were upended by the spill. But in a week’s time, I didn’t see anything that looked like the end of the world, even though for thousands of people, it surely was.
While I was waiting for my silver Kia to be ready for pickup at the Budget Rental Center down the street, I popped into a consignment store in the Quarter and tried on a few hats and one sequined floral jacket, like Rue McClanahan would have worn on the Golden Girls. The shop smelled like the attic of the grandmother I never had, and it was all on sale for pretty much whatever you wanted it to be. I went to pay for the jacket and that’s where I met Justin, who ran the shop with his boyfriend. We got to talking, and it turned out Justin was a fashion hound. I came back that night to return an umbrella he’d lent me, and we got to talking again.
We drank a bottle of rosé and smoked cigarettes on the back patio of his shop and discussed the last three seasons of Marc Jacobs’s collections, and the expansion of the Band of Outsiders label, and the potential python shortage in Florida. It was a Tuesday night, I flew out the next morning. I had been working so much, all I’d had was fast food and room service that week, and I convinced him to accompany me for one proper night on the town. We went for fried chicken at Jacques-Imo’s, and then passed by the Maple Leaf, where Rebirth was going onstage. Time sank down like a feather bed. I could have gone in to listen. I could have missed my flight the next day. It was all there, laid out before me, and it was so far from mouse-infested Brooklyn. I could have crashed there for a while, or stayed, even—found work, dug in and succumbed again. Instead I drove Justin home, arguing about Alexander Wang the entire time, and the next morning, I arrived at the airport with an hour to spare.
I wrote my stories and I came home to discover that some of them had been well received, and maybe even helped humanize the suffering on the Gulf Coast, judging by a few supportive comments left on the Beast’s website. And then there was the one I did about BP employees flirting with waitresses at the Houma Hooters—and all the other awkward enjambments that occur when British geologists commingle with sweet-faced Southerners—which had so incensed the people of Houma that someone created a Facebook group just to tear apart the story. A local newspaper columnist wrote an entire piece about how I had misunderstood the situation, overemphasizing the friendly attitudes some residents felt toward BP and underreporting the enmity between the two sides. It was about the same ratio of positive comments to vitriol that I was used to, and I felt the usual mix of pride and shame at the pieces of writing I had churned out, magnified slightly in both directions. It had been good to run away to New Orleans for a week, and I was happy I’d done it, and I wanted to do it again someday. But was I transformed? No.
“Runn
ing away is never the answer,” Madeleine says. “Because wherever you go, it’ll still be you there.”
And being me, I still found the person who could talk about the python shortage.
We’re in Japan. We’re everywhere.
I could run away to Crown Heights or Los Angeles or New Orleans or anywhere, and maybe I could even do something more meaningful when I got there, but wherever I went, I was really just me: a two-time Space Camp graduate with an unnatural interest in dyeing her hair and an unhealthy preoccupation with expensive shoes. I am no more an altruist than I am a perfect collage of all the women I admired as a kid. I’m just a person who sometimes, in between all the bouts of narcissism and loneliness, tries to do something good, and who usually ends up finding someone to talk to about the hottest designers or what Marc Jacobs is showing for spring. It’s not the woman I always dreamed I’d be, but actually, it’s not too far off.
Things of Wisdom
There are many things I learned during my time in Crown Heights, but none of them was how to live with mice. We all have our limitations. I always thought it would be the people who drove me out, but in the end, it was the people I stayed for, as long as I possibly could. Then summer came. And I had no air conditioner. And the idea of sitting around sweltering in this mouse-infested room was more than I could bear. Strangely, Cosmo never saw a mouse in his room. They haunted only me.
I was ready to move back to Manhattan. I had made peace with my life. I worried about Cosmo. What would happen to him now that he was a bacon-scarfing jujitsu blue belt and one step closer to becoming an American? Would his story carry him to the place where my story began, where the limitless possibilities of life in Manhattan in the twenty-first century collapsed like a tower on his head? I hoped not. I wanted to protect him, but who can really protect anyone? We would stay friends at least, I hoped.