by Julia Reed
The next morning, the electricity—which meant the television—was back on, and well before seven, Mama was banging on our door. “Get up. The whole city is under water.” Now I really, really love my mother, but she is prone to serious exaggeration, and the only reason I did not go back to sleep was because the chance to tease her about what was surely an overreaction, a primary pastime of my father and my two brothers and me, was too good to miss. Except that this time there was no making fun. The “whole city” may not have been under water, but we could see enough already to figure out that plenty of it damn sure was. I grabbed a cup of coffee and took my position in the huddle while we watched the biggest man-made disaster in the history of the country unfold. At eleven o’clock, wine replaced coffee as the beverage of choice. When Mama asked if we thought it was too early to open a bottle of wine, no one bothered to answer—by the time I pulled the glasses down from the cabinet, she had already retrieved the wine from the fridge. The tortuous slow boil had begun.
By Wednesday, the water was no longer rising (stopping, finally, just nine blocks across St. Charles from our corner), while scenes of rampant looting gave us something different to worry about. Reports of attacks on rescue helicopters sounded like scenes from Black Hawk Down, and fires raged out of control less than three blocks away from our house. Almost every hour brought a new fear, but our worst ones were assuaged when my friend Bob Rue, an Oriental rug dealer who had stayed in the city, left a message at my father’s office via his ancient BellSouth landline: “House looks okay. Tell them I’ll be watching it.” I’d met Bob long before I even moved to New Orleans—he’d sold his rugs at the garden club antiques show my mother had helped put on for years, and they’d become big buddies. Every trip, he declined the hotel room the club offered to provide for him, choosing instead to sleep on the floor in the convention center, much as the evacuees were doing now, on top of his rolled-up rugs. It turned out to be good training—in the days following Katrina, he alternately camped out in his shop on St. Charles and on the porch of his girlfriend’s house in the Garden District—all the while acting, as I would later discover, as a one-man neighborhood posse.
Our house might have been okay, but there was no shortage of bad news. Conditions at the still crowded Superdome and convention center were beyond hellish, and so many people had been stranded on one particular stretch of the I-10 overpass for so long that a clearly sleep-deprived Shep Smith resorted to repeating the name and number of the closest intersection over and over again, in case anybody in any position to help was watching. Charmaine Neville, the singer and daughter of Neville Brother Charles Neville, told of being raped at knifepoint before driving a commandeered bus filled with other terrified citizens upriver to Baton Rouge. Charmaine’s estranged husband, a musician who sometimes painted with McGee, had put up the third version of blue in our dining room, and I started obsessing about the sorry condition of his truck, which I knew could never have made it out of town.
I started obsessing about a lot of things—Antoine, of course—but also why in the hell the levees had broken when the storm had turned out to be a weak Category 3. (My father, who had been a surveyor for the Corps of Engineers when he was a kid, and, later, the owner of a barge and towboat company on the river, stood in front of the screen as helicopters dropped countless—and fruitless—sandbags into the breach at the 17th Street canal, shaking his head and bitching about the politicization of the Corps. “They should not have broken,” he said more than once, confirming with some authority what I already thought.) Then there was the question of what on earth had made the majority of Louisiana’s electorate vote for Kathleen Blanco, who had not yet managed to call out the National Guard, and who appeared on the screen far too often, patting her hair and asking everyone to pray. At one point, the governor angrily told a reporter she had no idea what day it was, so I did pray—that she would cease to go near a television camera for the duration of the crisis. The mayor had already lost it on the radio, and when Bush finally turned up after his initial flyover, he told “Brownie” he was doing a “heckuva job.” In the face of all that, plenty of people besides us were forced to resort to wine—and whiskey too, as it turned out. On Wednesday, when John and I went to our favorite local liquor store, the Cask and Flask, to restock our dwindling bar, there wasn’t a bottle of Scotch left in the place.
Meanwhile, those of us more firmly rooted in reality than our elected officials had already gotten back to work. I had assignments from Newsweek, Vogue, and The Spectator in London—there is nothing like being a resident of a disaster zone to make one popular with one’s editors. And then there were the standing assignments I somehow had to find the focus to finish, like a profile of Reese Witherspoon, who had been thoughtful enough to email Vogue to ask if I were okay. John, who is managing partner of his law firm, was charged with temporarily relocating the entire practice to Baton Rouge. So I started typing while he stayed on the phone, tracking down the lawyers and secretaries and paralegals, finding office space and lining up furniture. Both tasks were made easier by the efforts of my father, who, as soon as it became evident that our evacuation wasn’t temporary, arranged for two new cell phones on a network that was working, as well as wireless Internet, a printer, and a second landline in my youngest brother’s room, which became my office.
If Mama is Mother Teresa, Daddy should have been FEMA director. He thrives in a crisis and his political instincts are infallible. (In the aftermath of Camille, Richard Nixon became the first sitting president since Teddy Roosevelt to set foot in the state of Mississippi thanks to his advice, which Bush would have done well to heed. “If you’re not going to stop, don’t bother to fly over,” my father told White House aide Bryce Harlow. So Nixon stopped—and in the next election he carried Mississippi with the widest margin of any other state.) Every day at noon he’d call from his office and ask, “What you need, kid?” before arriving home with the day’s Wall Street Journal and a helpful new surprise: a stack of legal pads, a stapler and some Post-its, and, best of all, a checkbook from the local bank with my name on it. “There’s five thousand dollars in there,” he said as he slapped it down on my brother’s old bed. I almost fell over. He may be efficient, but he is notoriously unextravagant. It was the strongest evidence yet that these were desperate times and a fine alternative to the real FEMA. McGee, who had already decamped for Tennessee, reported that she had actually stood for hours in a FEMA line before being told that since she had insurance she was ineligible for any immediate relief.
Not that she needed any. McGee was ensconced in the empty Nashville house generously offered by her friends the rocker Steve Winwood and his wife, Genia (she and McGee had gone to boarding school together), and she’d found work with a local decorator. But she was not the only one with places to go. By Thursday, John and his office manager had miraculously gotten the firm’s move squared away, and after a quick shopping trip that enabled him to look like a lawyer (all he’d brought with him were jeans, Nikes, and a couple of shirts), he drove to Baton Rouge, where he moved in with my cousin Linda Jane and her husband, Scott. Also, since no one had any idea when the New Orleans schools would reopen, Lizzy had enrolled in boarding school—Elizabeth had allowed her to go online and choose one on her own, and she found one she liked, St. Margaret’s in Virginia.
So on Friday, five days into it, things were pretty quiet when the phone rang in our house. It was early evening, Mama and Daddy were both out (he at a meeting, and she, naturally, at the convention center feeding giant casseroles of eggplant Parmesan to the folks still there), and I was about to pour a drink (by that time we had procured more Scotch) to celebrate having finished two of my assignments. When I picked up the receiver, a vaguely familiar male voice on the other end asked if he had reached the Reed residence. I said yes, so he identified himself as Leon Pearce and explained that he was looking for John and me. It took a second to register, as Leon is the rarely used formal name of John’s older half-brother Skeet, a retir
ed San Diego motorcycle cop who lives part of the year in a tent in a state park in Southern California, part of the year in a cabin fifty miles below the Canadian border in St. Marie, Montana, and the rest of the time on the road or in San Diego with his saintly girlfriend Cindy, who accepts all his mail and takes his phone messages, since he is adamant about not owning a cell phone or a computer. I had met him only twice, once in New Orleans and once at our wedding. “Skeet,” I said, after finally making the connection. “It’s me, Julia. Where are you?” I had in mind either California or Montana, but his answer was a tad more dramatic: “the Greenville Inn and Suites.”
Since Monday, he told me, he’d been trying unsuccessfully to reach John on his cell, and the overloaded long-distance lines had kept him from reaching our house as well. Skeet’s a driver, so he looked at his atlas and discovered that Highway 82 runs from Greenville to Fort Rucker, where his son, just back from a tour in Afghanistan, was stationed. He figured that even if we weren’t in town, my parents would know how we’d fared, and once he found out, he’d continue on to Alabama and make a trip of it. When he called, he’d just driven 1,800 miles in two days; I hated having to give him the news that he’d missed John by less than twenty-four hours. “That doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I just needed to know that he was all right.”
As signals go, the fact that Skeet had just driven halfway across the country to check on his little brother brought home the import of the events of the week in a way that even the gift of the well-endowed bank account could not. And the quiet urgency that had propelled Skeet all the way to Greenville made me weak in the knees. Skeet and John and John’s two sisters had the same mother, a nurse who was also an alcoholic and a drug addict from whom they’d been removed by their paternal grandparents when John was almost five. A year or so earlier, John’s father, a doctor who had gone to medical school and completed his residency in New Orleans, had moved the family back to West Texas, his birthplace, where he planned to open a clinic in San Angelo. But almost as soon as he’d arrived, he was essentially lobotomized in an accident—he ran into the back of a pipe truck that had stalled in an underpass, and when the pipes crashed through his windshield, one landed square in the middle of his forehead. It was an awful, complicated story—when John and I first started seeing each other, it took him five hours and at least as many milk punches at the Rib Room to get it all out. The one constant in the narrative was Skeet, who had early on acted as a sort of ur–big brother, protecting him as best he could from their mother and her abusive boyfriend. When the situation became unbearable, it was Skeet who led his half-sisters and John, whom he carried most of the way on his back, on a trek of several miles from their house to the bus station, where he convinced the manager to put them on a Greyhound, C.O.D., to Ballinger, the town where their grandparents, along with their newly impaired father, lived.
In the aftermath, it was decided that John should go to Manhattan to live with his Uncle Charles, who was finishing up his own residency at New York Hospital, and his wife, Dorothy, a chemist who worked with Dr. George Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear. They eventually had two sons and a daughter of their own, and when John was in his early teens the family moved to New Orleans, where Charles taught at Tulane and started his practice as a heart surgeon. Despite the physical separation, John and Skeet stayed close, and the first time I met him I was pretty sure I had never encountered anyone so gentle or calm or at peace with himself. John has a lot of the same stillness and self-containment, but Skeet’s is seriously profound, and I was not sure how well my decidedly unquiet mind of the moment would handle the dinner at Doe’s I’d immediately invited him to. I enlisted Elizabeth to accompany me, but it had been ridiculous to worry—we had a big steak and a really lovely time and Skeet painstakingly recorded our latest two phone numbers in his notebook before pushing off to Alabama the next morning. “Don’t you want me to at least try to get John on the phone?” I kept asking him. “No, he’s busy. I don’t need to bother him.” Like everybody else in America, I had spent five days watching gruesome images of death and destruction and desperation, and each new morning brought glaring new evidence of just how inept, callous, irresponsible, and just plain base a too-big segment of humankind can be. Skeet was a timely reminder of our better angels.
That next afternoon, my father, determined to remain in his jaunty crisis mode, suggested that he drive my mother and me to Lusco’s for supper. Lusco’s, a restaurant in Greenwood, about forty-five minutes east of Greenville on the edge of the Delta, began life in the 1920s much like Doe’s, as a grocery store run by Italian immigrants. (The Delta is heavily populated with citizens of Italian descent since, during one of the many unpleasant chapters in our history, landowners suffering through the acute labor shortages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lured thousands across the Atlantic with the promise of parcels of land, whereupon they became nothing more than indentured servants or worse.) In the Delta’s heyday, no one thought anything of driving forty or fifty miles just to eat and have fun—hell, we went all the way to Memphis for the justifiably famous lump crabmeat in hollandaise at Justine’s. It was equally worth it for the broiled pompano at Lusco’s and the festive curtained booths, originally designed to facilitate a discreet and relaxed enjoyment of wine and whiskey—unbelievably, Mississippi was legally dry until 1967.
Still, on this particular day, I don’t think any of us had bothered to make the trip in more than ten years, but it was a sweet suggestion and we did it. Food, after all, is a much-vaunted comfort, and by day six, I was well on my way toward gaining what became universally referred to among New Orleanians as the Katrina Fifteen. And no wonder. On that first bad night, after we realized that the levees had broken, my mother overcompensated with two-inch-thick pork chops, squash casserole, fried okra, sliced tomatoes (some of those “pretty” Arkansas Travelers, which were, it must be said, delicious), both corn on the cob and cornbread, and homemade blackberry cobbler. Every day for lunch, Frank Lijer, who has worked for my mother in all manner of capacities for almost twenty-five years, brought in bags of chili cheeseburgers and fried catfish sandwiches from the excellent Abide’s drive-in; in six days I’d been to Doe’s three times. Then there is the typical largesse of the Southerner when the chips are down—before we even arrived my eighty-nine-year-old next-door neighbor had brought over a basket of muffins and a container of her signature homemade mayonnaise; someone else dropped off a caramel cake.
On Sunday, John came back for an overnight visit and we went to Lillo’s, the third of the Delta’s venerable Italian restaurants and the site of one of my father’s better lines. In the early 1960s, a friend of his and my mother’s had recently divorced and he was dating a younger woman, a former beauty queen who did not have a lot to say when they met at my parents’ house for cocktails before going out to Lillo’s (in those days known as Lillo’s Dine and Dance) for dinner. When they pulled up, the music from the jukebox was spilling out into the parking lot, and as soon as the beauty queen got out of the car she started gyrating and carrying on like crazy. The transformation was, apparently, remarkable, and prompted my father to look at my mother and say, “She ain’t much in a parlor but she’s hell in a tonk.”
Lillo’s is no longer much of a “tonk,” but the jukebox is still there and a live combo plays on Thursday nights. On one wall there are numerous pictures of Marie Lillo, a stage actress who left the Delta to make her fame and fortune in New York, where, judging from the photographs, she also formed a tight connection with Milton Berle. I went to school with Jimmy Lillo, who runs the place these days, and he still serves the best Italian salad I’ve ever tasted (the secret is the mashed green olives in the otherwise classic dressing), excellent thin-crusted pizzas, and a delicious Delta hybrid, catfish Parmesan. Located in the next-door town of Leland, just about eight miles east on Highway 82, Lillo’s is a lot closer than Lusco’s, and maybe even better, so we met Elizabeth and some of her cousins there for an anniversa
ry of sorts—it had been exactly a week since we’d first arrived. Despite the rather grim marker, there was cause at least for slight celebration: my old buddy Ken Wells was in New Orleans running Katrina coverage for the Wall Street Journal and he had been thoughtful enough to go by our house and snap a picture, which he’d emailed that afternoon. While there were a handful of big oak limbs and what looked like the whole top half of the ancient magnolia down in front, the house itself seemed to be in remarkably pristine condition. When I saw it there, glistening in the bright New Orleans sunlight, I literally jumped up and down.
I was happy to see John, we were both ecstatic to see the house, and we were, as had become the recent norm, completely stuffed with food and wine when we arrived back at my parents’ house. At the door, though, contentment gave way to hilarity. Since I was a teenager my mother has been a big proponent of the late night note, filled with all manner of instruction or, depending on my behavior, warnings. They invariably contained way too much information, and my brothers and I often kept them for our mutual enjoyment, but this one was in a class by itself, veering as it did from the usual mundane stuff about setting the alarm and turning off the outside lights, to the more pressing matter of the new family pet. Our beloved yellow Labrador, Bo, had died almost fifteen years earlier, and in his absence—and unbeknownst to me until that moment—both my parents had become unnaturally (in my opinion) attached to a tiny green tree frog, though he had not yet been given a name, which I chose to take as a good sign. For the last three years, the note informed us, the frog had come back after his warm weather sojourn at the end of every summer to take up residence in his fall-and-winter habitat, the pottery planter attached to the wall by the back door. My mother had made the discovery of his return on that very day, and urged us to be especially careful opening the door, since he was fond of taking evening outings across it and she was afraid we might alarm him, or worse, knock him off (no matter that, as I learned in my subsequent research, tree frogs have adhesive toe pads, and, though they are reluctant jumpers, they are capable of taking great leaps).