N.O.: Day Five

We took in a leisurely breakfast at The Trolley Stop, a diner on St. Charles. It was near a spraypainted sign we'd seen every day on the way to work but that I missed taking a photo of; let me see if I remember what it said: "8/30: inside with 2 dogs, an ugly woman, and a shotgun. 9/4: still here, cooking a pot of dog gumbo". A NY Times or WA Post reporter quoted this sign in an article about Katrina; I'm glad to have seen it, the better to marvel over the writer's resilience and humor, but it's been five months since the storm, and the lack of rebuilding makes the sign sadder than it should be.

After breakfast, we picked up Betsy from the Marriot downtown, and went to the lower 9th ward Disaster Recovery Center. It's in a house that was gutted and somewhat patched up. A number of people came by, and we did the intake for them before Betsy counseled them and told them what the office could do for them. One man I did the intake for had just moved into his house in the lower 9th in May. Now it's completely gone. Another woman, a school teacher, was shuttling between N.O. and Houston, trying to start rebuilding a house. Betsy introduced us as law students who had come to help. The invariable answer was, "Well, we sure need it."




At 3:30 or so, we headed out to more hopeful pastures, namely the French Quarter and Cafe du Monde, the original home of beignets and chicory coffee. Despite the numerous empty tables, there was music on the sidewalk, and a wedding party on the stairs above us, and a sense of liveliness.




Beignets: fried dough covered with powdered sugar. I've had them before, the others hadn't. Betsy bought us 5 of them, and there was one left after we ate our share. Feeling that I couldn't leave the gift on the table, I finished off the last one. Oof.

Betsy left us to get ready for a ball (yes indeed), and we headed back home. On the way, Matt said that his roommate and the Common Ground folks were at a wine shop eating and drinking, so he'd like to go there rather than go home. Wanting to avoid Host, I went with him, and enjoyed a few bottles of Chimay with them. Fun!

But then, the evening started to go sour. You see, there was a social divide, as there often is. I was off making a phone call when the others, for some reason, decided to go eat at the Flying Burrito, even though, as it turned out, most of them weren't hungry. And because they weren't hungry, a splinter group formed that wanted to go directly to the French Quarter. While another group was standing in line for a table.

It ended up that the splinter group stood at the bar and drank, and the other group sat down and ate, and the splinter group headed out to Bourbon Street early. Matt, feeling in the middle, I think, explicitly said to me, "You'll come out, won't you? I'll be sad if you don't." Don't worry, I replied, it's the last night, we'll be out there.

In fact, Evan and Rinna decided not to go to Bourbon, and I ended up going with two of the splinter group down to the French Quarter, in the pouring rain. We found the guys easily enough; they had moved from a place famous for its Hurricanes (the drink, not the storm) to a local law school bar review. Free cheap beer, drunk law students, the works.

I immediately knew I needed to leave soon.

And I did. Soon after some of the splinter group began hollering at passersby and throwing down beads, I remembered, "hey! I don't have to stay here!" So I told one girl I'd been talking with, the DD for the group, and split. The patented hk duck-and-run.

Remembering that Host had walked to the previous night's gathering in about 45 minutes, I decided to try and walk back home. I passed the open doors of the bars and the groups of Saturday night partyers and slipped out of the French Quarter, glad to leave it behind. But then the streets got really desolate. And I got really lost. At which point I called Evan to pick me up.

"Where are you?"

"Uh, I'm not sure. I think I'm on Carondolet and ... shoot, why are there no signs here?"

I figured it out eventually, and Evan said he'd be there in a few minutes. In the meantime, I'd wandered into an extremely desolated area. There was no one walking except me, and nothing was open. Catching sight of the Marriot a few blocks away, I decided to walk over to that street, hoping it would be more populated.

Unfortunately, the way there was even more deserted, and I thought to myself, "Well, I can't go back the way I came, because then I'll look really lost. Best to pretend that I know where I'm going. In case there's someone unsavory out there. Which there probably isn't, seeing as only 1/3 of the city's population is back, and it's pouring rain. Even the robbers aren't out tonight, I'm sure. And if they are, they're probably back on Bourbon Street, preying on the drunk fools there. And besides, didn't the police chief say that daily arrests were down from 450, pre-Katrina, to 70 now?"

And I walked along, completely lost, completely alone, in my little yellow rain jacket, thinking of these things, and social divides, and desolation, and the ways of people and the world.

Evan and Rinna were slightly horrified when they did pick me up, soaked up to my thighs in rain and really, really glad to see them. They'd been watching a DVD of Forty-Year-Old Virgin at home, and I was glad to join them. Steve Carell's a funny guy.