The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

by Julia Reed

  This afternoon was sort of like that. We’d had a long day, were in need of refreshment in a city that eleven days earlier had been visited by the biggest natural disaster in the history of the country, closely followed by an even more devastating man-made one, and now Bob was seating us in wicker chairs on a lovely side gallery, offering us two different kinds of almonds, and pouring what turned out to be a very nice Bordeaux into Jean’s stemmed crystal glasses. Furthermore, there were other guests, a New Yorker writer who’d arrived on a bike, and Ellis Joubert, a brilliant local artisan and restorer of antique metalwork who had evacuated to North Carolina but had come immediately back when his Yankees fanatic brother-in-law had insisted on watching a game rather than footage of the flooding on Ellis’s own street. When they hadn’t let him past the checkpoint, he went back to his mother’s house in the burbs, made a red cross on a white T-shirt with a Magic Marker, and tied it to his antenna. Next go round they waved him right through, because, as Bob put it, “It was the first fucking Red Cross presence they’d seen.”

  Bob, as I knew, had not left the city even once since the storm. On the second night, he’d been sleeping naked in a second-floor bedroom with all the windows open when, around three in the morning, he heard a noise. With Jean’s .38 in hand, he rolled from the bed, crawled out onto the porch, and saw that a guy with a flatbed truck and a forklift was about to make off with a vintage Porsche belonging to the neighbor across the street. So Bob says, “Hey partner, which way you want your hair parted? I’m getting ready to blow the back of your head off.” Bob is six-foot-six, bald-headed with what’s left of his hair in a longish ponytail, and not entirely svelte; at this point, he’s also naked and in possession of a pistol. As it happens, the culprit was spared such a singular vision—the city was still pitch black—but the I-mean-business voice out of nowhere had an equally forceful effect, and the thief skedaddled, taking the BMW and the Jeep Wrangler that were already on the truck with him.

  The next morning Bob covered the Porsche with old carpet pads and some downed fencing and topped off his handiwork with a hand-painted plywood sign that said “Looters Shot.” On the gate to the car owner’s house, he affixed another, reading “Go in and Die,” and then he called him on the same trusty landline he’d used to call me. (Such was the vital nature of the cheap Princess phone in Bob’s shop, the only one he’d been able to find that did not require electricity in order to function, that he unplugged it from its jack every night and carefully hid it away from possible looters.) The Porsche owner, a doctor with a serious wine collection, was so grateful for the salvation of his car that he told Bob how to get into his cellar and to avail himself of everything he had, which turned out to include quite a few bottles of Château Latour. “I don’t know one from the other,” Bob told us. “It’s all just red wine with a French label to me.” But from the taste of things so far, there were few bad choices.

  The dog had turned up the next day, wearing a red bandana and clearly in need of food. Bob gave him some kibble and had him tied up on the sidewalk outside the shop when a woman in a big black van pulled up and demanded that he hand over the dog. Bob had already put himself in charge of the care and feeding of at least a dozen neighborhood strays, including a bitch in her first heat who’d exhausted all the others, so he was offended by the implied accusation. “Hell, I ain’t had him but an hour and a half,” he told her. By this time other identical vans had materialized, along with a soundman and someone toting a tape recorder to immortalize the would-be heroics, and it was finally explained to Bob that he was their first “client,” that they had come all this way to rescue dogs and they were determined to rescue his. Bob explained again that Snowflake, whom he named in that moment, did not need their help, that both dog and master were perfectly fine, so they settled for a shot of him with his arm around his new best friend, and a few weeks later he heard from his cousin in Manhattan that she had seen him on the local PBS station on a show about the doings of the dog savers.

  While Bob told us the story, it dawned on me that the only other “unofficial” vehicles I’d seen so far, other than the Wal-Mart trucks, were in fact cars and vans with homemade signs that read Oregon SPCA or Humane Society of Missouri. Now I really love animals. When I was growing up we had everything from bunnies and ducks and a noble gray cat named West Virginia to a horse and at least eight dogs, two of whom had simply wandered up our driveway; when John and I bought the house, part of the whole real-life plan had been to eventually adopt a beagle, the dog I had always wanted and never been allowed to have. But I had to ask myself: if I had been watching the saga of Katrina unfold on TV from somewhere almost 3,000 miles away, like, say, Oregon, would my first thought have been to jump in the car and drive like a bat out of hell to rescue someone’s hungry housecat? In the end, for the most part, the well-meaning dog and cat lovers performed an invaluable service, rescuing close to 8,000 animals that were then housed in temporary shelters all over the state, and I went so far as to send one group a bunch of money. But at that moment, with half the city still under water and dead bodies unclaimed on sidewalks, the zealousness seemed a tad misplaced, an impression hilariously confirmed by officers of the Oklahoma National Guard, whom we visited after we tore ourselves away from Bob’s hospitality.

  The Oklahoma Guard, which included 600 men in their battalion, along with a cavalry unit and another small company of military police from Puerto Rico, was assigned an area of town that included the Garden District, and I wanted to be sure and introduce myself and, more importantly, show them where our house was. Their TOC, or tactical operations center, was located in a replica of the top of the Eiffel Tower, an unlikely space toward the bottom of St. Charles Avenue usually reserved for fairly tacky party rentals, and where, when we pulled up, the soldiers were sitting on gold ballroom chairs absently cleaning their semiautomatic weapons. Because the governor had been a tad slow in calling them out (she’d been overheard by a CNN producer as late as Wednesday telling an aide she’d forgotten it was her job to do so), it had taken them six days to get there, until which time, according to Bob, the city more closely resembled Dodge City, an assessment with which the men from Oklahoma agreed. We were told by Captain McGowan, a Tulsa police officer and a veteran of Afghanistan, that by the time he and his men arrived, on the Sunday after the storm, the looters were so well established and so organized that when one band discovered an especially lucrative stash, they notified the others via two-way radio, communications traffic that the Guard, thankfully, began to intercept.

  By the time we turned up, they were operating on foot, by air, in Humvees, and boats. Order had been more or less restored, streets had been cleared of power lines and the largest pieces of debris, and the looters were being rooted out with the same antennae, which can detect the presence of body heat, that was currently being used in Iraq. The animal rescuers, though, posed a more complicated problem. McGowan told us about the “culprits” who’d been spotted the day before by a helicopter patrol and quickly located and tackled by the men on the ground. It turned out they were workers from the Georgia Humane Society who’d been given permission online by a frantic pet owner to break into his house. The problem arose after they’d kicked in three or four doors before finding the right place, and all that running in and out had garnered the airmen’s attention. When the tacklers realized the “looters”’ cargo was a pair of housecats in a crate, they let them go, but the destroyed locks and now completely unsecured houses of the petless were left unaddressed. It got so bad that on a return trip I noticed a house on Magazine whose owner had spray-painted a message by the front door: “NO CATS! If you come in I WILL shoot you.”

  We left the Guard to make one more stop in the Quarter before it got dark, and on our way down St. Charles, we took a moment to check out more of Bob’s handiwork in front of the Sarouk Shop. The plate-glass windows, which ordinarily display gorgeous Serapis and Bidjars and Herizes, were boarded up with sheets of plywood painted white with two m
essages in black lettering. The first, done the morning after the storm, read: “Don’t Even Try. I am Sleeping Inside with a Big Dog, an Ugly Woman, Two Shotguns, and a Claw Hammer.” Two days later, he had added an update: “Still Here. Woman Left Friday, Cooking a Pot of Dog Gumbo, Still Got Claw Hammer.” As entertaining as they were, they also seemed to have worked. All the places of business in Bob’s general area, including Emeril Lagasse’s Delmonico, where he had painted a helpful “Looters Shot” by the front door, remained untouched. By contrast, a bit further afield almost nothing had been spared, from the Smoothie King to the Please U Restaurant, where the cash register had been busted open and the tables and chairs and ceiling fans all smashed for the sport of it. At the nearby Walgreens drugstore, someone had simply removed the locked-down steel front door with a forklift.

  At Lee Circle, some rather more good-natured looters, a trio of winos whom I recognized from before the storm, were drinking from magnums of Moët & Chandon procured from the Le Cirque Hotel behind them. But heading into the Central Business District, we were back to the more destructive stuff. There was the Athlete’s Foot, whose looting I’d watched live on CNN the week before, and Canal Place, the shopping center near the edge of the river where Saks Fifth Avenue had been set on fire after being ransacked. The only display windows in the entire complex that survived without a scratch belonged to Brooks Brothers, where the Ken-doll mannequins in white flannel pants and blue blazers accompanied by neat stacks of candy-striped shirts and matching stadium blankets apparently held no allure for the criminal minded.

  It was almost dusk when we made it to our final destination. On the news, Johnny White’s, a dive on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans, had been repeatedly hailed as the bar that had never closed, and there it was, a beacon of sorts—albeit one dimly lit by a handful of voodoo candles in glass jars. It was as reassuringly disgusting as always, and filled with the same combo of die-hard “Quarter Rats”—heavily pierced latter-day punks; two guys making out on barstools; assorted neighborhood drunks, including one with a freshly busted forehead—except that now there were also a couple of wide-eyed Yankee cameramen and a large bottle of Germ-X on the bar. The beer, Budweiser long necks floating in barrels of melting ice, was delicious; the street empty and astonishingly clean. We were reluctant to leave this unlikely oasis, but Byron was heading all the way back to Yazoo, and we were all suddenly very hungry. We left the city the same way we came and caravanned north until Byron took his turn to Mississippi. An hour later, John and I were in the newly teeming metropolis of Baton Rouge (its population had almost doubled in the week after the storm). When we walked into Linda Jane’s brightly lit kitchen, I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to see my cousin—or the bottle of Scotch she was holding in her hand.

  The next morning John and I got up early to head back into New Orleans, but first we had some shopping to do. The day before, when I’d asked Bob if there was anything he needed, he’d answered, “ice and garlic powder.” This was classic Bob, and it turned out that Ellis is an excellent cook specializing in Indian curries and Szechuan stir-fries, but I wanted to stock up on some slightly more substantial items for the National Guard. Their only means of nourishment were military issued “meals ready to eat,” envelopes full of powder that became beef stew or even Cajun rice with beans and sausage when mixed with water, but that were so heavily laced with chemicals that a sergeant told me he wondered if when he died there would be any need to embalm him. It was a funny line, but in New Orleans of all places, the idea of people not eating well, especially people from a place already as culinarily deprived as Oklahoma, seemed deeply wrong to me. Later, I’d find out that my friend Chris Rose, the gifted Times-Picayune columnist, had acted on the same thought—and, in the process, confirmed one of my darkest suspicions, that most of what had been served lately at Antoine’s, the once-great Creole institution, was not fresh, but frozen. Leery of the fish and crabmeat, Rose had commandeered the rapidly defrosting lamb chops and beef filets from the restaurant’s walk-in freezers, merrily “looted” some grills from his neighbors’ porches and backyards, and, with the help of his colleagues, staged a cookout amidst the fallen oaks in Audubon Park for the California National Guard, who were looking after most of Uptown.

  Likewise, John and I filled the car with hams and turkeys, pound cakes and cookies, fruit and chips, and ice chests full of drinks. As we drove toward New Orleans, it dawned on me that it was the first time in my life I had brought food into the city; people were forever asking me to bring things, things you couldn’t get anywhere else, out: Zatarain’s Fish Fri, olive salad from the Central Grocery, Turduckens and boneless chickens stuffed with dirty rice from the Gourmet Butcher Block. That had been the tradition from those very first forays with McGee, when we were invariably charged with bringing fresh shrimp back to my mother, and it must be said that the imports did not match up to the exports. Still, the guys in the Guard, who had likely never heard of a Turducken (a partially deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken, and layered with cornbread stuffing or sausage dressing or both) were glad to see us. When they found out I was a journalist, they immediately offered to take John and me and the photographer who’d been roaming around shooting for Vogue on their mission the next day, and we gladly accepted. It was the only way we could get into the still-flooded parts of town without our own Humvee or boat.

  For the rest of the day, we took a more extensive tour of the parts of town where we could easily move around, and since food was on our minds, our first stops were all our favorite restaurants. At Herbsaint, Donald had written “Back ASAP” on his boarded-up doors; at Lilette, the unboarded and miraculously unbroken windows revealed wineglasses appropriately turned upside down on top of crisp white butcher paper, and napkins neatly folded at each place. It was hard to believe we couldn’t just push open the door and take a seat in our usual booth. Further uptown, the brightly painted façade of my friend JoAnn Clevenger’s Upperline, where I dined for the first time during that fateful Jazz Fest, was as cheerful as ever. But on St. Charles, at the entrance to Audubon Place, a gated street full of lavishly appointed, mostly 1920s mansions (including one once owned by Bob Dylan), there was a slightly more sinister sight. At the first reports of looting, some of the residents there, most of whom were safely ensconced in their Aspen summer houses, pooled their considerable resources and flew in a team of Israeli commandos. Now, I had shared the same panicky fear as these particular house owners, and the person most responsible for bringing in the security team happened to be one of my favorite people in the city. But these guys, in their head-to-toe black outfits and wraparound sunglasses and Ninja headscarves, wielding their Uzis in what was now, for all practical purposes, a ghost town, looked utterly ridiculous. It was easy for me to say it, since our house had survived the looters and the fires and the storm itself, but I was glad our own security team had instead consisted of Bob and his dogs and his armload of painted signs.

  Bob was in front of his shop when we dropped off his provisions, and he was happy to get them, but happier still over his first commission. As soon as the Guard had cleared the roads, he’d started parking his paneled truck at various highly visible intersections throughout the Garden District and Uptown, in hopes that any homeowners who had managed to slip in to check on their property—and who might also have some waterlogged rugs—would see his sign: “Bring All Wet Oriental Rugs to Sarouk.” In a scene that would grow familiar over the next several months, he had an enormous Serapi spread out on the sidewalk, drying it before he got to work on the stains. Unless they’d stayed in salt water too long—“It eats up the foundations”—he could salvage them, he told me, and in the end, he cleaned more than 600 carpets at $2 per square foot.

  The next morning we arrived early to meet the Guard, this time bearing more ice, coffee cake, and Krispy Kremes, which prompted the same heroes’ welcome we’d received the day before. I had never met our photographer, but he’d taken the
famous National Geographic cover shot of the blue-eyed Afghani girl that had so penetrated the public’s consciousness during the Soviet invasion in 1985, and then he’d found her again, at a refugee camp on the Pakistani border, after our post–9/11 invasion. He was with his girlfriend, also a photographer, and the two of them had already spent one night with Linda Jane, who’d been nice enough to put him up because he’d made no other arrangements. He might have been a war photographer but he was not exactly clued in as to the conditions on this particular ground. After introductions were made, the four of us piled into a couple of the Humvees in the Guard caravan. The order of the day was “urban recon,” covering the dry parts first, block by block, following the crumpled Xeroxed grid of the city that each driver had stuck in his pocket.

  We drove past the Robért Grocery, with its bittersweet banner “You Are too Late; Already Looted” strung across the front and stopped to chat with a young Haitian family that were by now trading inside jokes with the soldiers. Although the mayor had issued an order for everyone who had stayed through the storm to vacate the city, McGowan had already told me, “We’re here to serve and protect, not to drag people out of their houses.” (The mayor, on the other hand, seemed to be obeying his own order.) We stopped to check out radio reports of some activity at a long-abandoned building where plentiful caches of loot had already been discovered—mostly electronics and cases of alcohol and cigarettes—but the perpetrators turned out to be a couple of cats who had so far managed to elude the vigilant rescuers. The day before, a call had yielded less amusing results. Our “guide,” Staff Sergeant Chris Havens, told me they’d chased a suspected looter into an apartment where they’d also discovered “an unfortunate woman.” I had visions of the toothless, coked-up Cassandra—“What do you mean, ‘unfortunate’?” I asked. “She was dead.”