On Leaving New Orleans (written August 2008)

Note in 2025: This was the last essay I wrote before leaving New Orleans for NYC in 2008, and I never tried to get it published. We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, leading to no small amount of reflection, so I dug this up and thought about revising it. But then, on the advice of my brother in law, I’m just posting it as-is, letting the scene fade to black as I drive north….

Dissolving

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

August, 2008

So I’m leaving New Orleans this month after living here for 13 years. Apparently, I’m not alone. On the one hand, I’m “pursuing better opportunities elsewhere.” On the other, I’m joining the gradual trickle of defeated souls slinking their way out of the scarred and shattered city they love. I’m not sure I know why…

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

Last week, around 9:30pm, on my way home from my second job, I noticed I had yet another almost flat tire. I drove around uptown, futilely looked for a working air pump, ruining my shocks on Carrolton’s axle-cracking potholes, passing abandoned gas stations and dead stoplights—still not repaired three years after the hurricane that broke them. I pulled to the back of an open Shell station and up to the third air compressor that night. After dropping in my last quarters and pressing the greasy button to no avail, I heard voices. One was from a loud speaker, yelling something completely incomprehensible. Eventually, I made out the words “…ain’ workin…” Also, from across the lot, I heard “My man! My Man!”

I turned to see the silhouette of a tall guy lurching towards me like something out of Day of the Dead. He was holding a huge can of something in a paper bag. “My Man. Let me talk to you for a second. Can I talk to you for a second? My Man!”

I knew what he wanted to talk about. And all of my change was lodged in three broken air pumps. I mumbled “Sorry. I have to go,” slammed the door and peeled off, thumping my undercarriage hard as I bumped onto the road. As I drove away, fighting the wheel against the bent tire rim, I heard the guy yell “Why you gotta be like that?”

There are many reasons to leave New Orleans, not so much caused by Katrina but certainly exacerbated by it: high rents, rampant crime, urban blight, corrupt politicians, racism, poverty, and drunkenness—collective laziness passed off as a “laissez faire.” It’s hard to tell which buildings were destroyed by the hurricane and which ones were already rotting and neglected.

These things make it easier to leave, but they’re not the real reason.

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house…

Almost exactly one year before Katrina, I settled down, or maybe I just settled. My boyfriend of four years and I bought a small white house in Gentilly, close to my job at the University of New Orleans. After a short while, I got used to the idea of a semi-suburban existence, and so I charged my Home Depot credit card to its limit, investing in a gas barbecue, a chrome stove/fridge set, gallons of paint and spackle, and a garage full of power tools. I assumed I’d be teaching at the University of New Orleans for a long time, and I think I was okay with that, despite the low salary and burgeoning class sizes. We joined the neighborhood watch and barbecued for our friends and neighbors. I still ducked into the French Quarter for big holidays, but I also spent more and more time drinking beer in front of the TV, or playing games on the computer with a bottle of wine next to the keyboard.

Like many people in bad relationships, I thought buying a house and moving in together would cure our problems. But by the following summer, Eric had quit his fourth job that year, stopped taking his anti-depressants, upped his already-heavy drinking, and started disappearing late in the night. I had already lived through four years of his binges, temper tantrums, and moods swings, but things were getting worse. He worked on the house obsessively, repainting the kitchen three times while chattering non-stop about his get-rich-quick plans. One day, I left a jar of mayonnaise on the counter and he lost his temper, hurling the contents of the jar all over the walls. Sometimes, he could still be as sweet and gentle and fun as he always was, but he was starting to scare me.

And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here?

In 1989, I was an 18 year-old college freshman gothy gayboy who liked to wear black nail polish and eyeliner. And then I read Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. You can imagine the results. So I came to New Orleans for a spring break, lurked the streets of the Quarter, ate my first raw oysters, bought silver jewelry and scented oils at a voodoo shop, and danced all night at an underground techno club. As I stood on the Moonwalk watching the sun rise over the Mississippi, I vowed to make New Orleans my home.

It took another six years to get here, and by then my bangs were much shorter and I no longer wanted to be a creature of the night, but yes, that’s the real reason I moved to New Orleans: an Anne Rice novel.

I fantasized I would live in the French Quarter, write novels in courtyard cafés, and support myself as a French Market vendor, street performer, face painter, fine-dining waiter, DJ, honky-tonk bartender, tarot card reader, renegade journalist, or black and white photographer—until I was a famous novelist. Even after moving here in 1994, I still fantasized about becoming a cemetery tour guide.

Thirteen years later, and I’ve done almost…none of those things. I shopped and drank in the Quarter and spent many nights there with handsome tourists, but I lived Uptown for all but that one fateful year. Instead of being an artiste in any way, I’ve been a temp secretary, a grad student, a private tutor, and a college instructor. Sure, I wrote a few things and got some of them published, but I never really became a “writer,” and wrote less and less every year after graduating. Mostly, I’ve been a teacher, grading freshman composition essays at UNO for what, eight years? Wow.

And while my internal critic wants to imagine that all I’ve done here in New Orleans is drink beer, eat, and watch TV, that’s not the case. I finished a master’s degree, read a small library’s worth, completed many Sunday Times crossword puzzles, quit smoking, won a few hundred bucks playing Hold-Em poker, took up running, gained and lost forty pounds (a few times), made a ton of friends, had a few boyfriends, learned to sew, honed my carpentry skills, and picked up all sorts of odd skills and hobbies. I even took up fire spinning and finally did some street performing this last year, although lately I’ve been too tired from work.

I’ve also had a hell of a lot of N’awlins fun, some of it with Eric, and even more Post-K.  I participate whole hog in every High Holiday: full costumes and all-day binges for Mardi Gras, Decadence, and Halloween. This past Easter, I found myself tipsy on mimosas at noon, wearing a white suit coat and bunny ears, watching a parade of drag queens in home-made Easter bonnets throw marshmallow peeps from mule-drawn carriages.

Jazz Fest, punk and drag shows, crawfish boils, cocktail parties in Garden District mansions, dozens of costume parties, endless conversations in restaurants and cafes and bars with beer or martinis or coffee on balconies in overgrown courtyards. So I never met Anne Rice or Trent Reznor. Big deal. I stood in the middle of Bourbon Street wearing a top hat and feather boa, making out with a square-jawed attaché from Belarus.

And you may tell yourself: This is not my beautiful house!

Exactly one week before the Big K, I came back from a vacation (I had gone by myself because Eric canceled on me at the last minute, apparently to stay in town and indulge his new crystal methamphetamine habit, which explained his tantrums and disappearances earlier in the summer). As I was unpacking, we fought. He said some things that were so hurtful that I knew I had to get out. I love him but I have to leave. The only problem was we owned a house together, and there was no way he could afford the mortgage payment by himself or buy me out. I had no idea how to extricate myself.

That, by the way, was the real moment I decided to leave New Orleans. Seven days before Katrina, curled up on the bed, crying for the first time in years, listening to him slam pots and pans around in the kitchen.

Water dissolving...and water removing

So when Katrina hit, and we sat in my uncle’s living room in Houston watching CNN as our neighborhood flooded with eleven feet of water, somewhere in the numb shock I felt a glimmer of relief, especially as I watched Eric completely disintegrate into addiction and psychosis over the next month. I did my best to help him, but I couldn’t. To be honest, I was probably only a few beers behind him.

So when he returned to New Orleans, I stayed in Houston. I told him it was to save money, but it really was to save myself. Somehow I convinced him he wanted to break up with me. We split the insurance money, and that was that.

I came back to New Orleans a few times that fall to work on the house. There’s nothing like having to throw away sodden, smelly, slimy, moldy versions of the stuff you used to own to make you re-assess your attachment to material possessions. And having to do so next to the trembling shell of the man you used to love makes you think hard about what you’ve done with your life and where you’re going.

I wondered: What if I’d left earlier and gone to a more energetic city like San Francisco or New York. What if I’d moved in 1999, right after grad school, instead of sticking around to see where this new relationship was going? How different would I be? Would I be a published novelist? Semi-famous or on my way? How much has this city’s big easy attitude and booze-soaked culture affected me? Would I have less debt and more money? Would I drink as much as I do? Would I have a smaller waistline? Is it too late to change?

And you may ask yourself: My god! What have I done?

When I came back to New Orleans in January ‘06, I took a $900-a-month apartment next to a crack house, borrowed a bunch of furniture, joined a gym, and gave it my best try. I came back for the teaching job, for my love of the city, and for the “experience” of being here. (It’s like being in Berlin after the wall came down. You’ve got to be there to see.) I tried to write more, eat better, drink less, and appreciate all the city had to offer. At the same time, I already had one foot out the door.

I think about staying, but the problem is this: Every day I have to drive to UNO through that Gentilly neighborhood where Eric and I tried to make a life, past the flood lines and dead plants and FEMA trailers, past the street where he and I tried to cover up our tensions with semi-gloss paint and laminate flooring.

Most of the time I’m okay, but sometimes on the way to work, an unexpected sob bubbles out of me, and I have to pull over and rest my head on the steering wheel, pulling myself together to face my 8:00am class, finding comfort in the geese and ducks who have re-made their home in Bayou St. John.

And I’m drinking more, and writing less, and I’m quick to lose my temper over little things, like broken air compressors and drunken panhandlers.

And you may ask yourself: Where does that Highway go?

And while I love this city, I have to leave. There’s a job in New York that might work out, an affordable room in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, and a more ambitious and less recently traumatized population where I might find someone sane.

Will I be happier there? Healthier? More Productive? I don’t know. I know I’ll still be the same person, with the same strengths and problems, same genetics and set of experiences. I’ll just be somewhere else. On the other hand, I have a good idea of what my life will be like if I stay here: Same as it ever was…

So I have to give it a try.