It’s Hard to Leave New Orleans
I have been putting off this post for nearly a month, partly because I’ve been working through stages of grief and denial and partly because I didn’t want this writing to be overly sentimental. I have by now come to some degree of acceptance but this piece is quite self-indulgent anyway.
I’m being transferred to Houston. I’ve seen this coming for a long time. I am surprised and grateful it took so long. During the past two years, every month, every new season, every Mardi Gras in New Orleans has felt like a gift and I have consciously savored the sweetness of it.
This move is strictly business. Our company’s headquarters is in Houston and it no longer makes financial sense to have a New Orleans office. This small naval architecture and marine engineering firm (I’m not an engineer – I’m in communications) was founded on St. Charles Avenue near Lee Circle when this city still supported a robust segment of the offshore energy industry. Lately, we were one of the last businesses of our type remaining here. Nearly everyone else, the big corporations and the small independents, loaded their wagons long ago and moved west.
My wife, Lisa, and I won’t be strangers in Texas. Lisa was born in Southeast Texas about 20 miles from the Louisiana state line. I met her when I moved there to work on a newspaper. We married and started our own business together. Texas has been good to me. Then, I got an offer to work in New Orleans – a mythical place I had fallen in love with on my first visit.
I could try to make myself feel better about this move by dwelling on the crime in New Orleans and the every-present anxiety of inevitable natural disaster and resultant risk of regional and personal economic doom, but the fact is, I’m pretty much ruined for loving anyplace else this much. I’m not alone in this; it’s a peril of living here. Though our house is on the North Shore, Lisa and I worked in New Orleans daily and that is a joy and privilege many people in this world envy. Lisa still works in the city. My office is now empty and the building has already been sold. My key no longer fits the door. I’ve been out of there since June 10, working from home and prepping the house for putting it on the market. I will report to Houston sometime this summer.
AMERICA’S ONLY FOREIGN CITY
For writers, New Orleans can be a trap; once they arrive, they tend to write about nothing else, and why would they? In most cities, you drive everywhere and walk from car to store. Here, where many streets are narrow and the city hands out parking tickets like float riders toss beads at Mardi Gras, driving can be a pain, but we have sidewalks and people use them. It’s nearly impossible to get from one place to another without becoming immersed in the often frustrating, occasionally euphoric game of living here. The look, feel, and pace of life in this city, which pretty much no locals call The Big Easy, is Spanish, French, African, Caribbean, Italian, Irish, German, Asian and American all at once. The mix can change from one moment to the next. One gets caught up in the fray and forgets the rest of the country isn’t like this.
I think there is more to New Orleans than any one person can ever know. Even William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams may have left a few things unwritten, at least I hope so, because I’ll never be over the urge to try to figure her out through my writing. Yet, life beyond South Louisiana does go on, or so they say. There must be something out there in the great Somewhere Else to write about. Maybe not. Not like here.
LIFE ON THE UPTOWN PARADE ROUTE
I will miss my office, feet from the Uptown parade route. In the dim light of that century-old building, I would pause in my work to absorb the clatter and scrape of passing St. Charles Avenue streetcars. It never felt it a waste of time, or at least I didn’t care if it was, to lean back and gaze up past two ship masts milled ages ago of virgin, long-leaf pine and installed to bear the weight of massive wooden ceiling beams 20 feet in the air. Over my head, dust drifted in sunbeams and shadows of clouds swept across high, dingy windows. St. Charles Avenue was a few steps from my desk and I could walk out anytime I felt the urge to soak in the view or investigate some shenanigans on the sidewalk. Life was good. Exceptionally good.
A week before Mardi Gras each year, I would drag three lengths of commercial sign-quality plywood from a deep, dark, long-out-of-service elevator shaft. In February 2006, just before the first, unlikely post-Katrina Mardi Gras, I had rolled purple, green and gold paint across them and a draftsman had painted, by hand and with great skill, a large fleur-de-lis on each one. We designed them to cover the mahogany-trimmed front windows of the building. They are screwed into place each February to protect the woodwork from the parade chairs of bosomy grandmothers in floral print dresses, who, side by side, lean against the building for hours at a time during parades. These matrons of Mardi Gras rarely needed to stand up, as everything they wanted was brought to them by their families, who crowded the curb in front of them, blocking their view. Sometimes, I enlisted help installing these window covers. Usually, I did it myself with a ladder and a drill. I guarded that job. Everyone at work knew it was mine. I don’t think they wanted it.
I made that little stretch of St. Charles Avenue in front of our building my responsibility. In early December, every year, I would borrow the company credit card, take my pickup truck to a nearby Home Depot and pick out a Fraser fir or, if I could find one, a Noble. I would bring back a good one and place it by the front, downstairs windows and decorate it with lights from my home collection to supplement the few old strands we kept in a plastic bin at the office. Passersby on the sidewalk at dusk would peer through our windows under copper Bevolo lamps and smile at the lighted tree, its cheap ornaments shining in incandescent splendor.
WATCHING OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Over the course of 13 years, I became the self-appointed mayor of the Lower Garden District, making rounds almost daily. I came to know some of the merchants on my stretch of St. Charles, like the old guy who runs the rug shop famous for his defiant window sign during Hurricane Katrina (he was the one inside with “a shotgun, a mean dog and an ugly woman.”), who sits inside alone each day sketching colorful, bizarre, modern art with titles like “Karen Carpenter’s Colon” and leaves them by the front window so the curious can crane their heads at works in progress. He feeds pigeons on the sidewalk and picks up trash on his block. One day I watched him limp across the street on his way to a diner for lunch. He bent his stiff body to lift a string of faded beads from the neutral ground and, with a nonchalant sweep of his arm, toss it into a tree as he passed, not pausing to see where it landed.
I will remember the stately lady a few doors down from the office who owns the consignment shop with the best-decorated windows in the city, Prima Donna’s Closet. Each day, with perfect handbag in one hand and a ring of keys in the other, she unlocks her business in perfect posture, makeup, hat, dress, jewelry and shoes. From listening to her, I learned the elegant way to pronounce the street name Melpomene. Her pronunciation, Mel-POM-eh-nee, has four syllables, the accent is on the second one, and is rendered, almost sung, in the languid rhythm of a Southern woman of a certain age, confidence and attitude.
In that neighborhood, for a dozen blocks west toward Uptown and south toward the river (the wealthy, lavishly green part), I know the gates, porches, stoops and columns of a hundred Creole cottages and Victorian mansions, having studied and coveted them for years, befriending their dogs through iron gates. I know how to roam those historic avenues and narrow byways without being mugged. (Be wary and lucky.)
THE FOOD
Wait staff in cafes and diners in the Lower Garden District knew my face and would pause to chat. They served unforgettable plates of New Orleans fare created by seasoned cooks in old, tiny kitchens. If we needed something to talk about, we always had the Saints. I am a Saints fan for life.
Of course, the food here is so famous it hardly needs to be mentioned. No restaurant can survive for long in New Orleans serving mediocre grub. You can find fantastic eats in gas stations. I can be found more often in humble diners than in fine bistros – the food is so good at cheap places I can’t justify paying more anywhere else. Show up at Please-U Restaurant for lunch on a day when they are serving braised beef short ribs and mashed potatoes – get there early before they run out. St. Charles Tavern serves a plate of fried catfish with red beans and rice that I consider the best plate in the city. That, of course, is an absurd statement, but I can recall thinking I don’t know what they are cooking up over at Commander’s today but I’ll bet it’s not better than this. Maybe I’m simple.
Not to knock the finer establishments; we have some of the best in the world here in the French Quarter, the CBD, the Garden District, Uptown, Magazine Street and other, far-flung neighborhoods, where old houses converted to restaurants hang small shingles on residential street corners and you have to drive around looking for a place to park and try not to block someone’s driveway.
Locals like to say they never go to the French Quarter. I don’t believe them and I never listened to their advice about this. Aside from Bourbon Street, which really is just for tourists, the Quarter still thrills suitors with her worn, lush, sultry charms if you overlook the tacky t-shirt shops and skip the tourist traps selling subpar gumbo . I love nothing more than making time for window-shopping antique stores and art galleries on Royal, loitering for hours in used book shops, having breakfast wherever someplace is open, picking up a half muffaletta, root beer and a bag of Zapps Crawtators at Central Grocery and carrying them to the levee, and ordering dinner with Lisa at places like Muriels and Mr. B’s. When my out-of-town friends visit, I know where I can find them – at the bar or front window of Boondock Saint on St. Peter– I don’t even have to ask.
THE MUSIC
And everywhere in the city, but especially on Frenchmen Street – the music. I am stupefied at the talent level of the vocalists and musicians here. At any affair in New Orleans with live, local music, no matter how small the gig, you may be treated to a spectacular performance by band members working for peanuts; not always, but often. I like being able to turn on the radio and hear WWOZ promote Jazz Fest and broadcast every form of local music. When I leave town, OZ’s signal will fade before Baton Rouge. At least I will still be able to pick them up on the Internet.
The Lower Garden District has been changing lately. The Whitney Bank I would visit every two weeks closed two months ago. On the next block, the Irish House restaurant closed. General Lee was plucked, defiant to the end, from atop his monument on Lee Circle; all reminders, perhaps, that life changes and would continue to do so, or maybe that I had grown too fat and happy on my privileged corner and that I should go somewhere and do something else. I don’t know.
THE RIVER
I will miss the river; the easy access to it, knowing I could climb up the levee and down the batture any time I wished, to look and wonder and do nothing, to imagine sailing ships, flatboats, barges, and steamboats moored cheek to jowl, and to pity the slaves who worked them, to offer thanks to the mother of all American waterways for giving birth to river towns, and to squint at her eternal, sun-lit waves. I was born on the Ohio River and grew up on the Mississippi. I have never liked being away from them.
This move means no more workday lunches at Domilise’s, the discovery of new books by Louisiana authors in independent bookstores, picking up friends at the airport, buying king cakes on the way into town and so much more that I don’t have the heart, or stomach, to dwell on. All I know about Mardi Gras next year is that Lisa plans to ride in Muses, as she has done for the past seven years. We haven’t had time to plan beyond that.
THE PEOPLE
Most of all, I will miss people I have met in New Orleans, many of whom do not even live here but visit often, especially for Mardi Gras. Because of them, I have true friends. Without them, Lisa and I would not have become so integrated into the traditions of this city. This move means we will not see them often and that is going to be difficult.
I need to end this ramble; my to-do lists are exhausting to read. My affection for our life here and typical apprehension of the unknown confuse my efforts to decide whether this leap of faith is a good or bad thing – probably it’s both. Most things are.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.