The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (14 page)

After a few exquisitely cold beers, Brobson escorted us the four blocks to the Royal Street Grocery, which he had taken to calling “the new Galatoire’s”—no matter that other than the occasional Red Cross truck, it was also pretty much the only hot food in town. The store, around the corner from my old place on Bourbon, has been in the same family since 1938 when 20,000 people lived in the Quarter and more than a dozen places just like it served the neighborhood with po-boys and groceries and chicory coffee and conversation. Skyrocketing rents and a much smaller population (the Quarter is now home to less than 2,000 full-time residents) had driven out most of its former competitors, but the original owner’s grandson, a lawyer who still practices in order to pay the bills, took the place over primarily to keep the family tradition alive but also because he likes it. Even before the gas was turned back on, he was out on the sidewalk, flipping steaks and simmering pots of gumbo on a propane-fired grill, while his three-year-old daughter, Ava, served as hostess to the handful of tables inside.

Brobson told us that during the last week he had dined there daily, enjoying red beans and rice and burgers on French, as well as such delicious occasional specials as sausage po-boys and crawfish
étouffée
. The state health inspectors had been put off by the initial lack of running water, and, after that, by Ava’s cat, but since, as Brobson pointed out, “Those folks don’t work after three o’clock,” the cat was not forced to stay in hiding all day and was snoozing peacefully beneath the counter when we arrived. A day or two after our “dinner” there, a pink paper, the permit posted on the door saying restaurants were legal to serve, was finally granted, which came as a great relief to the neighbors, especially Brobson, who told me, “I think hunger is a far greater health hazard than eating around a cat.”

We agreed, and happily dug into a couple of chili dogs, which were all that were left at the end of the busy day. After saying our goodbyes and vowing to return to sample more from the Royal’s extensive list of delicacies, we headed back up I-10 to Linda Jane’s.

The following week I was in New York when I realized the deadline to fetch Antoine in Denton was looming. It had been three weeks since the hurricane, and the electricity in our neighborhood was due to come back on any time. I decided the best thing to do was just bring him back to town and see what happened—at the very least I could pick up an air mattress on the way (so far, John and I owned only the lone mattress and box spring) and move him in with us.

I was actually looking forward to the journey. Denton was a day’s drive from New Orleans, and Dallas was on the way. John’s first cousin Andrew, with whom he’d been raised, and whom he always referred to as his brother, had for many years suffered from schizoaffective disorder. Not long before we had started seeing each other, John had been forced to commit him to “a group home,” a collection of townhouse apartments in New Orleans East, populated by people with needs much like Andrew’s. In the days before Katrina hit, John had made sure that Andrew was evacuated with his roommate to a similar facility in Dallas, so I figured I would take Andrew whatever he might need and spend the night there before going on to Denton, collecting Antoine, and enjoying a festive trek back.

And then I called Camp Copas. The same officious woman I had talked to the first time gave me the “wonderful news” that Antoine had been tracked down via Red Cross computer by his “wife,” a woman named Cassandra, and that he had been put on a bus to Houston so that the two of them could be reunited in wedded bliss in a FEMA-funded room at a Motel 6 on the Katy Freeway. For a long moment, I honestly thought I might have a stroke and I started to tell this woman what she had done, but then she told me she had a phone number so I took it wordlessly and hung up. The motel operator connected me to his room and when somebody who was not Cassandra answered, I asked for Antoine. I could hear people and television and all manner of commotion in the background, and when a groggy Antoine finally came on, I announced brightly that I was on my way to pick him up. This time, there was no laughter, no joyous relief, and definitely no breathless “Boss Lady” greeting. The only words out of his mouth were, “I’m sleep.” It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I didn’t know who I wanted to kill more: the wily Cassandra, the idiot Baptists, or Antoine himself.

During the course of four or five more calls over the next two days, I managed to piece together that they were ensconced in a block of motel rooms with some folks Antoine referred to as his “brothers,” as in the siblings to whom he had never been close (I had met only one of them, years earlier, when he’d come to pay a call on Antoine and stole a bottle of bourbon from my bar) and Cassandra’s “children,” who had never, until this moment, lived with their mother. Whoever they really were, they were all pretty well set, since in those early weeks, FEMA was still paying out $2,000 per person in emergency assistance in the form of checks or debit cards, in addition to picking up the tab for lodging. Later I would find out that Cassandra had managed to supply “proof” of two hurricane damaged houses at two addresses, one each for her and Antoine, and she had received additional payments for each of the children she claimed, along with hefty—and seemingly indefinite—disaster vouchers not just for their rooms at the motel but for the apartment complex they subsequently moved into. Antoine, who was high as a kite every time I got him on the phone, no longer had the remotest desire to be “rescued.”

Most people, of course, desperately needed the help, but at a congressional hearing several months later, it was revealed that FEMA had paid out $1.4 billion in fraudulent aid during those first few weeks alone, and that the money had gone to such varied pursuits as a week’s vacation at a resort in the Dominican Republic, season tickets to the New Orleans Saints games, and the services of a divorce lawyer in Houston. Since drug dealers don’t ordinarily hand out receipts, there was no mention of crack cocaine, but, in an effort to figure out how long it would be before I had any hope of hearing from Antoine again, I had already tried to calculate how much of the stuff I thought he and Cassandra could now afford to buy, and how long it might take them to smoke it. The results did not bode well. A single emergency debit card could pay for up to 200 rocks or 50 grams, which, at roughly three inhalations per rock, translated to 600 hits. Given that a mere two or three rocks led to behavior that inevitably landed him in jail, I would likely never see Antoine again. As Rose said when I gave her the news, “They don’t play in Texas.” So much for our triumphant return to the city.

Instead, I arrived solo, on Friday, September 30, a month and a day after Katrina made landfall, in order to lead CNN on a tour. A second hurricane, Rita, had devastated the areas to the west of us and forced the mayor to delay the reopening of parts of the city. Now folks were finally being allowed in, and the producers wanted to show them a slightly quirky and less grim version of what they might find. My first stop, naturally, was Bob’s shop, where they filmed me dropping off yet another cooler full of chicken and ice, and where at least ten more damaged rugs had been spread out in front, along with a new sign: “Welcome Back Y’all. Grin and Bear It.” I showed them the goofy Eiffel Tower TOC, and a house on St. Charles where a 200-year-old oak had landed, hatchet-like, in the center of an otherwise undamaged Greek Revival house. We walked down Canal Street, past the still pristine Brooks Brothers window, and into the Quarter, where the Big Daddy’s Big Ass Beers banner, accompanied by an enormous helium frosted mug, dominated Bourbon Street. On nearby St. Louis, in front of Alex Patout’s restaurant, the open-shirted owner, Finis Shelnutt, sat at a bistro table sipping Champagne from a flute and stirring a huge propane-fired pot of spaghetti. Shelnutt, the ex-husband of Gennifer Flowers (who, until just a few months earlier, had performed most nights at the piano bar on the ground floor), had stayed through the storm and turned out to be the source of the never corroborated rumors that looters had shot a policeman in the head. Sitting there in his diamond-encrusted Rolex and gold-rimmed glasses, he was clearly enjoying his celebrity, so we skipped him, heading instead to Molly’s, where I met Brobson and Byron and John, who were happy to join me in a cold beer for the benefit of the camera.

We spent that night in the Royal Sonesta, the Bourbon Street hotel that had become the CNN bunkhouse, and Byron slept in his usual sweat-soaked bed, but we were all in equally excited moods the next day when we met for lunch at Stanley, whose recent opening on Decatur Street had been major news. Stanley is the casual off-shoot of the critically acclaimed Stella, whose chef had been planning Stanley’s opening long before Katrina hit, so when she did, he postponed the planned menu of sophisticated sandwiches and po-boys (think fried catfish with
rémoulade
sauce and house-made cole slaw), fired up his grill, and started selling hamburgers with hand-formed patties and ripe Creole tomato slices for five bucks apiece. The line stretched for blocks, and while we were standing in it, a girl on a bike came by with fliers touting the immediate reopening of ZydeQue, an upper Quarter restaurant co-owned by my buddy Tenney Flynn, who is also the co-owner and chef at G.W. Finn’s, an excellent upscale fish restaurant around the corner. It had never occurred to me to seek out barbecue in New Orleans, even if it was Tenney’s, but now that it was on offer, we could not wait to go, and began planning dinner before we even sat down to lunch. This was the New Orleans we all knew and loved—the place where you talk about food in the rare moments when you don’t happen to be eating any.

There was a limit of one burger per customer, so we ate slowly and exchanged the latest animal rescue stories. Byron had seen a van advertising itself as an Avian Rescue Unit in his neighborhood that morning, and once again, we had to laugh at the innocence of the do-gooder newcomers. While I’m sure plenty of abandoned parakeets and parrots might well have needed care, rescuing them in New Orleans is not exactly a clear-cut proposition, since thousands of wild Argentine “monk parakeets,” also known as “Quaker parrots,” have for decades happily—and noisily—dwelled in our trees. Twelve inches long and lime green with lovely pale gray faces and chests, the birds do not migrate, which means at least two of them either escaped from captivity or were intentionally released sometime around 1972, when the first pair was spotted in the suburb of Metairie. They make communal nests out of sticks, complete with compartments, and can be found all over town in anything (including telephone poles) remotely resembling a palm tree. I told Byron they’d likely be as miserable over being captured as our neighbor Allison’s feral cat who had been “rescued” two days earlier.

When John and I checked on the house that morning—and discovered to our great amazement that we had electricity—we also found a note from the LASPCA stuck in our mail slot, informing us that they had removed “our” silver tabby to a shelter in Gonzales. At first I couldn’t believe that after four weeks the rescuers were still so hard at it, but then I realized it had probably taken even the most zealous volunteer the full month just to catch that one cat—he was incredibly beautiful with exotic markings, but so relentlessly wild I was honestly afraid that being put in a crate might have already killed him.

Byron went back to mend his fence and we went back to revel in the fact that we had power. Though the same doomsayers who predicted the typhoid epidemic were also warning us not to bathe or drink the water, I continued to take my cues from the unflappable Dr. Lutz, who was doing both. Since returning to the city, Brobson had been emailing his friends occasional “reports from the bowl,” in which the results of his long, therapeutic soaks in the bathtub and his “in vivo” testing of the water supply were always the same: He was still alive and well. My own bathtub was still unfinished but John’s lavish shower was done, so we availed ourselves of all its many nozzles for the first time in more than a month, and celebrated a tiny milestone in the city’s recovery along with the rehabitation of our house.

That night, as we made our way downtown, I realized that the National Guard’s Humvees were now outnumbered by the even more bulbous vehicles of the contractors and electricians and engineers we’d seen at Molly’s. Apparently even insurance adjustors don’t drive cars anymore because there wasn’t one in sight—the entire unflooded part of the city looked like the parking lot of the world’s largest monster truck rally. Hundreds upon hundreds of them were parked on the neutral grounds, on the sidewalks, on both sides of every street, which meant that the narrow thoroughfares of the French Quarter were especially harrowing to navigate. Undeterred, we met Byron and set off for our first post-Katrina meal in the city that would not be a hamburger or a hot dog, tasty though they’d been. Chef Tenney, who ordinarily would have been in the kitchen of his “proper” restaurant, serving up impossibly light lobster dumplings, sizzling smoked oysters, and by far the finest pompano in New Orleans (if not the country), was in the corner at the wood-fired oven, happily tending half chickens and slabs of ribs—he had even figured out a way to make individual pecan and apple tarts on the grill. Recently divorced, he’d been living in a house trailer across the lake in Folsom, which was still deprived of power and more than fifty miles from the restaurant where he was putting in fifteen-hour days. When I asked him how he was holding up, he just grinned—a cook likes to cook and he was, pardon the metaphor, on fire.

We had a stellar gumbo, of stock that had been made from the remnants of all those chickens and which was served Cajun style, with a scoop of creamy potato salad in the center rather than rice, followed by the chickens themselves, plump and tender and succulent with just the right hint of smoke. We could hardly speak we were so happy, a condition prolonged by the two bottles of Oregon Pinot Noir I’d brought along: a knockout 2002 Beaux Frères that had been a wedding gift, and a Domaine Serene that had long been a favorite of McGee and me. I figured that if there was ever a good time, in her words, “to drink some serenity,” it was now, but really, we’d already achieved it. The various truck owners were piled in at the bar munching on ribs and watching college football on TV, Tenney was making magic at a rare working oven, and I was sitting across a table from my dear friend and my husband, with whom I was about to go home—to our house—for the first full night since the storm. Brett Anderson, his sunburn faded and his wild-eyed look mostly gone, came over to share a glass and we each raised one, not for the last time, to friendship and endurance and our amazing good fortune.