Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around. Cheryl Wagner
that also happens to be true. When a cliché is true, I’m never sure if that makes it not a cliché anymore or if that just makes the cliché all the more sad.
The way people love New Orleans and what they love about it is individual. For poor, rural Louisianans from immigrant families like my mother, New Orleans was an international city that appeared over the horizon once you cleared the familiar, murky hurdle of the swamps and lake. It was the big city Louisiana had to offer. New Orleans had a bustling river port and an airport. People hailed from everywhere. There was a small Chinatown. In the fifties, though an old, old city, New Orleans was also for the deep South a strikingly modern place.
During her childhood, Mom lived on a farm with an outhouse and an outdoor clay oven. As a small girl, she attended the all-night wake of her great-grandmother who was laid out in her own living room. But in New Orleans her Hungarian relatives had long enjoyed modern plumbing and funeral homes.
Mom leapfrogged past where the farms and woods and swamps and outhouses ended and into the city where Fats Domino recorded the country’s first rock ’n’ roll record. By the mid-sixties, she was married and my father worked briefly for Delta. The two grabbed hands and climbed aboard shiny silver airplanes and flew the country for free. This was around the time on TV that Star Trek unveiled its famous transporter used to dismantle people one particle at a time and reconstitute them later. I imagine to a farm girl, New Orleans gave my mom a taste of that. When she stepped onto a jumbo jet on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and stepped out in New York and San Francisco, it must have been like walking on the moon.
Because she had lived in New Orleans as a young woman, Mom transmitted some open New Orleans attitudes to her five children when she later took a nursing job halfway between New Orleans and the settlement. When I went to play at a professor’s kid’s house and came home shocked that I had seen a naked clay lady hugging her knees on the edge of the mom’s private bathtub, Mom explained, “Oh, that’s nothing. That’s art.”
When I was a child it was clear that life, real life, happened in New Orleans. At Mardi Gras the men drank at the Friendly House and played cards at the VFW hall on Magazine Street. You could peek in and spy your grandpa and uncles in the curling smoke inside until someone shooed you back to eat stuffed peppers with the other children and ladies. On the street were walking krewes of old men dancing by with gin breath, paying perfect strangers crushed paper flowers for whiskery smooches. Old men with cigars in their mouths juked in broad daylight in the street.
When my father died, my aunt Mary showed Mom how to keep moving. Aunt Mary had lost a child, so she knew. People die for no reason and you keep going. I like to think of these two in the late seventies and early eighties dancing down their front steps for the Krewe of Shut-Ins parade with us kids cheering them on. Old woman in a worn housecoat shaking her rump, showing the young mother how you wriggle free of life’s palls.
When I moved to New Orleans in the late eighties, before the Internet, people had to actually leave their bedrooms and even their towns and move somewhere to meet anyone who was remotely like themselves. Some of my first New Orleans friends were small-town Southern gay guys, ex–Southern Baptists who longed to don a cape on Decatur Street, a black punk girl sick of Virginia, and a pothead hard-core drummer whose mother had run the Tallahassee Informed Parents for Drug-Free Youth. New Orleans was the place these Southerners chose when they got old enough to finally be spit out of their mean towns. It was the place you came to start your real life, stop hiding your real self, say your true opinions, wear the jacket you always liked and not have a beer bottle hurled at the back of your head from a pickup truck over it, and still be close enough to drive back home to see if your parents loved you yet. When you got to New Orleans, people said, “Come on over.” For many it was a place of comfort in exile. It was not just fun. It was home. And so it was important to us.
By the summer of 2005, how a good honor-roll Catholic daughter winds up happily living in sin and blatantly child-free in her thirties was a question my mother no longer asked herself. New Orleans was the place you sent such daughters in hopes of keeping them close to home. They would be living among relatives and people from home but also strangers and freaks. So it has been and so it will always be. These are the daughters you drive into the city on weekends to do something fun with. You don’t know exactly what all they’re up to, but you packed them with some common sense and you sent them there so they don’t starve or move to New York where you’ll never see them again.
Jake was aggravated that we were evacuating. Earlier that summer, a storm that wound up coming nowhere near New Orleans had us jamming the two dog beds into the car and scurrying off to Houston. Our friend Stan had laughed and said, “Y’all evacuated for that?” and detailed all the hurricane party exploits we had missed. At such times I think Jake wished he lived with a non-evacuator instead of the early evacuator I had become.
And who could blame him? Evacuating mostly sucked. When evacuations became more frequent in the late nineties, I and many other New Orleanians trying to put a rosy spin on things declared them sudden mini-vacations. But they weren’t. Evacuations had taken on a disturbing pattern for us. For every unexpected good thing that happened, there was a counterbalancing bad.
During the evacuation to Houston, we had discovered a secret African and Arab immigrant world nestled in the South that we had never known existed, complete with men in traditional African dress pushing goats on dollies. But it cost me $500 later when I blew out my car air-conditioning running it for the dogs until I could sneak them into our motel. Other people we knew came back either merely brainfogged from too much motel cable or claiming they had eaten some unforgettable something at a cousin’s house in Lafayette. Maybe we weren’t doing evacuations right.
I wanted to leave early in hopes of getting ahead of the Winn Dixie water and batteries freak-out, the mandatory evacuation grumblings and subsequent “I’m not getting locked in that nasty Dome again!” panic that had been raging since people evacuated there for Hurricane Georges. I wanted to leave before my mother started calling every half hour to nag me about her visions of me drowned in the bottom of the New Orleans bowl. Above all, I wanted to be miles and miles ahead of the one-way traffic projectile vomit that was Contraflow.
In the middle of the night next to me in bed, Jake had put the pillow over his head and grumbled, “You just decide.”
I’d made reservations at a cheap, pet-proof motel in Memphis so we could check out the historic Peabody Hotel and their Duckmaster parade. Every morning since the 1940s, a Duckmaster had marched his ducks to John Philip Sousa down an elevator onto a red carpet through the Grand Lobby to an indoor marble fountain. I pictured these ducks with a peacocking drum major like St. Augustine or some other raucous New Orleans high school marching band. I liked amazing animals and our basset hounds were rarely that amazing. One day at the mall when I was a kid, I peered into a fluorescent-lit glass box and played electric tic-tac-toe against a shitting chicken. I made good grades at Holy Ghost School, but I lost every quarter I had to this bird. It had made a lasting impression.
Chapter 2
expedition pants and hobnail milk glasses
Somewhere before Mississippi we gave up on Memphis. Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee was blustering on the radio that he had canceled his big birthday blowout. A hefty Chinese-American-Louisianan in an even heftier cowboy hat, Lee was a big Willie Nelson fan and a robust singer. He often took the stage at his annual “Chinese Cajun Cowboy Fais Do Do” fundraiser to belt out crowd favorites like “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” or “Wind Beneath My Wings.” His gigantic plaster bust of himself was probably already down at Hilton Riverside, waiting to be showered with fortune cookies.
The way the storm was sucking the fun out of everybody scared me. If the storm missed us and hit Mississippi, the remnants would probably just blow all the way up to Tennessee and rain on our duck parade.
“Let’s just go to Gainesville,” Jake said.
Jake’s mother was a former cheerleader from Georgia who had recently retired from teaching middle school art in Florida. After decades of grimy clay hands and tempura paint, Brenda was a devotee of both swabbing and order.