Chapter Excerpts
Chapter 3
Heartbreak Motel
No matter how bad it was back in New Orleans, I told myself, I would at least blend in with all the other basket cases.
The longer I stayed in Baton Rouge the heavier the question of home and its fate weighed on me. It was a source of gut-wrenching anxiety, something so big and so important to my identity and to my vision for my life in the future that no line of thought could avoid running into it. Most of my friends felt something like the same way. We were all waiting for answers, for some word about if and when and how we could go back to our all but quarantined city, but there was nothing coming. What official guidance we could find seemed more theoretical and political than anything that could answer the question of home that loomed over us. It was like a suspended anvil, something that had to drop eventually, and the only question was if it would fall just behind our heels as a near miss or if it would land on our heads as a crushing blow.
The only thing that helped was actually going back home on those weekend trips, seeing the old house and being on the familiar streets, however distorted they were now. What little work I could do on my early visits with the bleach mop and the claw hammer was as much catharsis for my sense of displacement and helplessness as it was therapy for the damaged house. I felt real pain each time I left, driving back to Baton Rouge at the sunset curfew, inching west in the intense daily exodus of flatbeds and work vans and emergency vehicles, watching the city recede in my mirror as the radio talk shows featured one tear-choked caller after the next.
I decided I wouldn’t wait for any official green light to return home. I knew it was possible to repair my house and that most of my neighbors could repair theirs too. I couldn’t wait for insurance money or backlogged contractors when I knew I could sleep in my old bed on the second floor of my own house in the heart of my own city. I learned that my office would reopen downtown by the end of October as the company’s first symbolic return to its city, and that one practical consideration sealed the deal for me.
I had no illusions that simply returning would restore some kind of normalcy, some sense of that longed-for life that existed before Katrina made landfall. Even someone blind to all the wreckage and deaf to the sounds of demolition tractors and the sobs of disconsolate neighbors inspecting their homes still could never miss the smell and even the taste of the place, that low level, omnipresent murk. It painted a foul, salty background over everything, like a glaze of residue and rot punctuated occasionally by the outright exclamations of organic reek from toppled refrigerators and unremediated grocery stores. But still, the road to normal had to start somewhere, and it surely never would if I stayed in Baton Rouge watching the seasons change.
There was also an argument for civic duty. Someone, after all, had to be the first one back in each deserted neighborhood, on each empty block. I didn’t know my neighbors’ plans, but I knew that with no kids to worry over, with my job intact and now local again and with a relatively unscathed second floor of my house to live in, I could come back before a lot of others. When my neighbors came to visit their houses, I wanted them to see that the recovery was already starting to happen, that people were back, or at least a person was back. With no official guidance forthcoming for Mid-City, it would be up to individuals to return and weigh the benefits of reinvesting their lives or walking away. So instead of my neighbors coming home to utter desolation and deciding to cash-out in sorrow, I polished a positive fantasy that they would arrive to find me walking my dog along our street, fixing my house, offering them a cold one from the cooler.
Then there was the specter of looters. With so few people in the city, there were still some who were ransacking even flooded homes for whatever they might find on upper floors. There was really very little of any value left in my place but the thought of looters breaking into my house or my neighbors’ houses, the thought of that continued violation, was just too repugnant. So by returning early I could also add to my proud little list of recovery roles the title of “sentinel,” a watchman for the wreckage.
More than anything, though, I was compelled by my own personal desire to make it real, to live the experience of my city in a way that watching it on TV, writing about it in countless e-mail correspondences or even seeing it first hand on my weekend visits never could. I needed to immerse myself in home and be part of it, even in its pain and degradation.
I wasn’t interested in living anywhere else. It would feel like a betrayal. It would feel like turning my back on someone I loved because she had been attacked and raped, like walking out on her at her most desperate and vulnerable moment. That’s when you need to love the most, I told myself, that’s when you need to affirm the value of life and the wonder of beautiful things. New Orleans was my beautiful thing.
~
I wrote out all these rationales one night in Baton Rouge, sitting in a huge, high-backed booth at a chain restaurant in a strip mall. It was getting toward closing time when I arrived at the restaurant, but the hostess sat me anyway in the back of the mostly empty dining room. I was all but cloistered by the padded heights of the booth, and I must have succumbed to the quasi-private setting because immediately the barometer of my heart fell to emotional lows. I ordered dinner from the young, clean-cut, somewhat worried-looking waitress, and then brought out a notebook. I started writing down the reasons to return home, essentially making the case to myself to live again in the city I loved, and I soon started crying.
The waitress arrived with my glass of wine and found me deep in teary introspection, gazing across the table at the empty side of the booth with my face flushed and wet. I tried to get myself together. I drank half of the wine in a gulp and went to the restroom to wash my face. I returned to the table and my notebook and tried to focus on something practical. I made a list of supplies I would need to buy before returning home - candles, lantern oil, water, a spare can opener, more bleach, batteries, first aid stuff - and promptly resumed crying.
The waitress seemed increasingly wary each time she returned to bring a salad or more wine. She approached the table with the cautious, grossed-out delicacy of a first-year zookeeper assigned to feed one of the more dangerous animals. I might even have been snorting at one point or another, probably around the time I came up with the analogy of New Orleans as a raped lover I mustn’t abandon. Eventually the waitress came around with the bill, hovering just beyond the line she might have assumed was the reach of my claws or tentacles. I looked past her and noticed that parts of the restaurant were already being cleaned up for the night in a clatter of forks and water glasses and a rumble of stacked barstools.
“Do you want anything else?” she asked.
I really must have looked like a wreck, puffy-eyed from crying and hunched over my little notebook with my abysmal dinner sitting cold and only half eaten off to the side. The waitress looked down at me wide-eyed. I wondered how many other New Orleans people were stuck at that moment in rooms around Baton Rouge or in Atlanta or in Houston, stranded with no prospect of home, crying in front of people who might sympathize but who would never get it at all.
And then, in an instant, I had a whole new reason for getting back home in a hurry. No matter how bad it was back in New Orleans, I told myself, I would at least blend in with all the other basket cases.
