City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Yet there were also all these little signs of hope—a restaurant opening, a friend seen for the first time…Slowly, some parts of the city were making witty and defiant gestures toward normalcy. Bacco, a high-end French Quarter restaurant, had opened at the end of September, when there was still no safe running water in the city, serving meals on paper plates with plastic utensils and a Xeroxed daily menu consisting only of cheeseburgers. People huddled together in the one steamy coffee shop that might be open within a mile’s radius.

  But to get to these outposts, one walked or drove through streets where the dust blew down the sidewalk and the houses sat in comas, waiting for life to return. After nightfall, the areas of the city that had flooded were submerged in darkness. Nighttime drivers passing through on Interstate 10 looked down upon two cities, on either side of the elevated roadway; toward the river, the French Quarter was brightly lit, although the streets were empty. To the other side, looking toward Lake Pontchartrain, Mid-City was utterly dark, dark as the inside of a fish tank filled with black ink—no streetlights, no lights in any house. It was like driving along the very edge of the world at night and looking off into deepest space. The occasional adventurer or curious resident driving through those streets followed his headlights, like a diver searching a sunken wreck, down tunnels and corridors of lurid desolation, the furniture of wrecked lives caught in the glare of momentary revelation, like one of Weegee’s famous crime scene photos—ruined houses, piles of debris, duct-taped refrigerators, waterlogged cars streaked with muck, their windows broken out and trunks popped open, random garbage everywhere, dead houses with doors open to the empty street—which sank back into a starless blackness again as the headlights moved on.

  Alice had asked Craig to at least speak to a realtor about the real estate market and the possibility of selling their house. There was, apparently, a strong demand for houses in areas of the city that hadn’t flooded. Predictably, they had a huge argument about it. One added element was a call from Borofsky, announcing that Gumbo was indeed going to relaunch, probably in January, from temporary offices in Metairie, and he wanted Craig to come back as the editor. Boucher School, too, claimed that they would reopen in January. What the actual texture of life would be in the city, with its strained or nonexistent resources, bankrupt energy company, one partially working hospital, half the people they knew gone, along with three quarters of the people they didn’t know, the wreckage of so much infrastructure, nobody could tell.

  “Craig, how hard could it be to ask? Just go to Latter & Blum on Maple Street and get a feel for it. Please? Just ask them for some sense of what the market is like?”

  It had been a step he could not bring himself to make. Yet part of him was besieged by a debilitating anxiety that the city could never come back, that getting out was the only smart thing. The emotions involved were hard for Craig to explain, even to himself. Getting them, in all their contradictions, into the fifteen-hundred-word columns he was writing was proving to be more than he could manage. So Craig ended up writing what he told himself was necessary—columns about all the signs of hope, and bravery, and occasional pathos. He kept his own dark doubts to himself.

  Like the column he had just sent off. He had been in the Quarter two nights earlier, looking for signs of life, and three blocks from Rosie’s along Decatur Street he had found a ragtag pickup band playing in a little corner joint. The night was wet and chilly, but they had the front door open and the sound of that little band—trumpet, guitar, and a guy playing with brushes on a single snare drum, in the middle of the empty blocks, like an outpost at the South Pole—drew him in and he sat down and got some chips and a can of Coke, and sat along with the dozen or so others who had found their way there.

  He tried to let his mind relax to the sound of the group, and he pulled out his notebook and began making a few notes on the others who were there, the guitarist playing with the hood of his sweatshirt over his head for warmth, shaping it for his column. But even as he did this he felt the undertow of all the places that were no longer and that might not be again—Palm Court, Preservation Hall, Mandina’s, Crescent City Steaks, Liuzza’s, Domilise’s, Bruning’s, Sid-Mar’s. The sheer fullness of life as they had known it. It was one thing to be grateful for the human spirit poking up like a little shoot of foliage in a bombed-out landscape. But New Orleans had been the most lush garden in the world, to him, and now here they were huddled around these few remaining stalks, trying to warm themselves…It was like living in an optical illusion; from one angle the city was a ruined shell of itself, where people hung onto the wreckage for dear life; from another angle it was already coming back, insisting on not dying, full of examples of the human spirit defiantly asserting itself in the face of the worst that life could dish out. If Craig’s own conflicts hadn’t been so overwhelming for him, he might have been able to write his column about how the city was both, at the same time. But as it was he chose door number two. He called that column “The Outpost.”

  Now as he drove across Claiborne, headed toward Bobby and Jen’s, the little signs along the neutral ground stopped abruptly and the evidence of flooding began. The by now familiar high-water lines crept higher as he made his way up Carrollton, past the huge piles of broken furniture and soaked couches and garbage and refrigerators and moldy Sheetrock at curbside up and down every block. All this was, in fact, evidence of the cleaning-out that needed to take place before rebuilding. It was simultaneously inspiring and depressing.

  As he approached Canal and Carrollton, Craig decided to swing by the first place he had lived in New Orleans, the house he had shared with Bobby on South Cortez Street. It was right around the corner. Driving carefully to avoid the ubiquitous lengths of wood and roofing and weatherboard with nails sticking out of them, and all the other nails everywhere—flat tires were epidemic—he turned slowly from Canal onto South Cortez and crawled along the block.

  The old house showed a waterline about seven feet off the ground and one refrigerator out front but not much else. Beyond the house, he saw what, for a moment, he thought was a hallucination—his neighbors from ten years before, two lesbian partners, Chris and Babe, wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks, hauling out trash in front of the next house down, and a battery-operated boom box on the porch blaring the Meters’ “Hey Pocky Way” into the deserted street. Next to the boom box sat a bright red cooler. Craig slowed to a stop in the middle of the street. He waved, and Chris walked over to the car and hollered, “Hey Babe—look who’s here.” She leaned down, sweaty, to look in his window. “You allright dawlin’? How’s your little girl?”

  Babe came up to the car, sunburned skin, short-cropped blond hair, tough. Craig shut the car off, stepped out.

  “You don’t want to hug us, dawlin’. We too dirty.”

  It had been a wild place when Craig had lived next door, especially on Mardi Gras, when it seemed as if every lesbian in the city converged on their house. They had a rugby team, and Craig and Bobby used to watch from their balcony as the whole gang of rowdy dykes, some of whom they found drop-dead beautiful, would do a group striptease at midnight on Lundi Gras, hollering encouragement to one another. Craig and Bobby would watch, laughing, asking themselves how they could ever live elsewhere.

  Babe brought Craig a beer from the cooler and they stood in the street and talked. The two of them had been staying out in Laplace and coming in every day to gut the house. They talked about the neighborhood, and who was back, and do you remember Mr. Arceneaux, he died at the airport, we heard from his wife. She moved to Phoenix by their son. And Lorraine is talking about moving back. FEMA trailers? What fucking FEMA trailers? They gonna finally deliver the trailer next year after we back in the house. Are we moving back? Where the hell else are we gonna go? They gonna have to drag us out by our ankles. We gonna have Mardi Gras this year. Bet on dat.

  “With the rugby team?”

  “Yeah—bring your camera, Craig. We used to see you sick bastards up there on your balcony.�
�� The two of them laughed and laughed, and Craig said the hell with the dirt and hugged them both. Eventually he drove off and they waved at him as he disappeared around the corner onto Cleveland Street, waving at them out the window.

  Bobby and Jen’s was not far away, across Carrollton and a block off of Canal. He made the eerie drive down the block with its canopy of oak trees and its giant piles of rubbish on each side. Craig pulled up as Jen was dragging out a gray plastic garbage can, wearing a surgical mask, pulling it, bumping, bumping, down the three steps from their porch to the ground and out to the sidewalk. It was filled to the top with strips of wood and chunks of plaster and drywall.

  “Bobby’s letting you do all the heavy work?” Craig said, getting out of the car.

  Jen pulled down the surgical mask. “Just like when we fuck,” she said. “The difference is I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to.”

  Before he had a chance to approach, Jen put up her hands and said not to touch her; she was filthy. Bobby emerged onto the porch, pulling down his mask, wearing shorts and rubber boots. “Hiyo Silver,” he said, in greeting. “Get your hands off my wife.”

  “Place is looking good,” Craig said, breezily, stepping up and giving Bobby a soul handshake.

  “Sorry for the rubber glove,” Bobby said. “Reserve judgment on the visuals until you see inside.”

  They walked through the familiar doorway together, with Jen following a moment later. The living room and, beyond it, the dining room, were empty of furniture, the bare, dirty floors littered with plaster pieces and papers and one folding chair. The floor was covered with a fine, damp, gray dust in which shoes and dragged furniture had etched lines and smears. The walls had been knocked out from the floor up to about waist height, exposing the studs and the back of the exterior weatherboards. Lengths of molding leaned in a corner of the room. Their house had taken on only about three feet of water, but that, as Bobby said, had been enough to ruin the plaster, most of the furniture, and the electrical wiring. Only small signs, here and there, of the green and black mold that had grown riotously in so many homes; on one wall a large chunk of plaster torn out, floor to ceiling.

  “What happened there?” Craig said.

  “That happens to be an interesting thing,” Bobby said. “The one place where the previous owners had patched the plaster and replaced it with Sheetrock, it was like a mold farm. We thought about putting a frame around it, but we decided to toss it instead.”

  “What, the mold doesn’t like plaster?”

  “Apparently not. I mean, you can see—it likes it a little bit…” He pointed to a few spots.

  “So you’re going to replace the plastering?”

  “Probably not; it’s too expensive and there’s like two guys left in the city who know how to do it and they’re busy until 2015.”

  “We’re getting this expensive treated Sheetrock,” Jen said. “I told him if the place floods again we’re out of here anyway, so who cares if the Sheetrock is mold resistant? But he’s like, ‘I’m a big-time reporter…I write for the ‘LifeStyle’ section and I make sixty-five thousand dollars a year…I’m rich…’ I’ll probably end up having to give blow jobs outside Café Brasil just to pay for the fucking Sheetrock.”

  Bobby gave Craig his “Not bad, huh?” smile, and Craig smiled back at him. There they were, Craig thought. Still alive, still there. They had made it through.

  They walked through the dining room into the kitchen, which was bare, too; they had had to throw out all the appliances—stove, refrigerator, sink, dishwasher. So many parties there, Tuesday night movies, nacho chips and salsa, the kids of their large extended family as years went on, running between adults’ legs, Doug singing a cappella Coasters songs…

  “I’m going to take this bag out,” Jen said. “You want to put anything else in it?”

  “No, I’m happy,” Bobby said. Jen tied off the bag and dragged it out through the dining room, toward the front door. A piece of wood that had poked through the bottom of the bag scored a wavering scar behind her on the grimy wood floor. As he watched her, Bobby said, “We’re gonna have to refinish the floors anyway. You want to see upstairs? It’s the same as it was, except we got a hibachi on the balcony.”

  Craig stood quietly, looking around.

  After a moment, Bobby said, “Yo…Craig…Are you visiting the Giraffe People again? What’s up?”

  “I just don’t fucking know why we’re in fucking Chicago; we should be back here.”

  Bobby frowned, laughed. “Hey, one step at a time. You’ll be back.”

  “Alice wants to stay in Chicago. She wants to sell the house.”

  “That’s an old story, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Craig said. “It’s crazy. I should be here helping you out, doing rebuilding…”

  “You’re writing the articles, honcho. You’re spreading the word.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not the same as being here.”

  “Hey man,” Bobby said, “you know what? If you feel like you should be here, then be here. If you have to leave, you have to leave. It just doesn’t seem like it should really be all that complicated.” Jen walked back into the room. “It’s like you’re asking me to tell you it’s okay that you’re not here helping me out.”

  Craig was a little taken aback by his friend’s tone, through which he easily read, and amplified, the mild annoyance that was there.

  “He’s not thinking about moving out of town is he?” Jen said.

  “Alice wants to stay in Chicago,” Craig began.

  “So let her stay in Chicago,” Jen said. “Let her go chew on a cheese steak.”

  “That’s Philadelphia,” Bobby offered.

  “Who gives a fuck?” Jen said.

  “Well,” Craig began, feeling defensive and annoyed now, himself, “she has some legitimate concerns about the schools…”

  “You said Boucher is opening again.”

  “…and about health care and about the state of the whole city in general. She wants to raise Annie and Malcolm someplace a little more secure, and I can see where she’s coming from, even if I don’t agree.” Craig felt sick with himself, defending a point of view that he had spent the past couple of years arguing against, but it couldn’t be dismissed out of hand, after all. If it could, then they would have to stay in New Orleans. Or he would. And his marriage would be over.

  “So I guess you haven’t told him?” Jen said. She was speaking to Bobby. Craig looked from one to the other.

  “We’re going to be contributing to the repopulation of the city by at least one new citizen sometime next June it looks like,” Bobby said.

  “He forced me into it,” Jen said. “I told him it might be yours. But now it turns out you have no balls, so…”

  “Hey…” Craig said, frowning and laughing, a little hurt.

  “Oh come on, you big fucking baby,” Jen said. “You aren’t moving.”

  “I am so happy for you guys,” Craig said. “That is incredible news.”

  “So anyway,” Jen said, “little Gertrude is going to need a babysitter, and Annie will be the right age.”

  “Gertrude?” Craig said.

  “If it’s a boy we’re calling it Hercules.”

  Bobby gave Craig his “What am I supposed to do about it?” shrug, and they shared their standard chuckle.

  Eventually, Craig headed out with his mind in a tangle of confusion.

  The next morning, he drove through the uptown streets, to the coffee shop on the corner of Nashville and Magazine, his temporary outpost until PJ’s on Maple Street, much closer to his house, reopened. This new place was always filled with the most disparate types of people who made their way there through the empty streets, mismatched, thrown together sitting at the small tables or waiting on line for the rare and precious coffee: emergency workers, contractors, FEMA officials, real estate speculators from out of town, police officers.

  On this afternoon, Craig found himself on line behind a short,
youngish man wearing khaki shorts, a white Izod shirt, sunglasses hung from around his neck with Croakies, Top-Siders…Not New Orleans; probably a claims adjuster, he thought absently, or maybe a FEMA man.

  Craig stared into the display case, trying to decide between sesame and poppy seed bagels, sensing that this fellow was watching him. He was not in the mood to talk to anyone, and he tried to convey this through his body language. Then he heard, “Hey there—Chuck Bridges.”

  Craig looked up from the display case and saw the face, the vacant alertness, vaguely familiar.

  “You live in the house on Cypress Street?” the man said. “A block from Boucher. I came to your party right before the storm.” The short, athletic-looking man was putting out his hand for Craig to shake. This was the guy he and Bobby had made fun of. To his surprise, Craig found himself mildly but reflexively happy to see the man. Craig had noticed this before; there was a happiness at seeing just about anybody you had known before the hurricane. If they had made it through, you were comrades, of a sort. For a little while anyway.

  “Are you still in your house?” the man said. “That block didn’t flood.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Craig said. “We’re still there.” No need to tell him that they were in Chicago, or thinking about selling. Now it came back to Craig—the unpleasant feeling he had had from the guy asking him so quickly if he was thinking of selling. “How did you do?” Craig asked, to be polite.

  “Did fine. We’re out in Metairie. A little roof damage but we got that cleaned up pretty quick. Want to sit down?”

  Craig could not easily find a credible excuse, and so, reluctantly, he followed the man to one of the small tables in the back.

  “Thinking about selling?” the man said.

  Craig was struck again by the man’s directness and apparent guilelessness. Small talk didn’t seem to occur to him. “A lot of people in your neighborhood are selling and making beaucoup profit.”