We’re sitting at the bar in the Acme Oyster House, the landmark French Quarter seafood restaurant, because it seems like a fitting place to plan a genuine New Orleans funeral. First, though, we have to agree on exactly who or what is dyingand maybe even when.
You don’t have to tune in to CNN or the Food Network to know that the oyster, along with the shrimp and the crab and the crawfish and any sea animal that tastes good in a gumbo, is heading toward an oil-slicked grave.
If the Acme is not serving up the last-ever gulf oyster on this night — I get mine chargrilled because it’s a house specialty and because cooked oyster seems a safer bet at this point — it may simply be a matter of time. P&J Oysters, where they’ve been shucking for 130 years, has already closed down, at least temporarily.
How serious is this? In this part of the world, if there weren’t BP’s spill-cammed oil spill, if there weren’t photogenically damaged waterfowl, if there weren’t desperate fishermen and shrimpers leasing their boats to BP/selling their souls to the devil, if there weren’t a threat to a way of life that began with your daddy’s daddy’s daddy’s daddy, if this crazy mix of Cajun, Creole, African-American, Southern, trumpet-playing patois weren’t so damn intoxicating, the loss of the oyster, even for a few years, would still be a major catastrophe.
This is a city that likes to think of itself as attuned to tragedy. You look no further than the jazz funeral, of second-line fame, of grief transcended, of a wake with horns, and you see that they understand here, as well as anywhere, that there’s no comedy — or farce, for that matter — without tragedy.
There’s no blues without the memory of the time when you actually could pay the rent.
The question in New Orleans — where excess is usually welcome — is when does too much become, in fact, more than too much. The spill is the greatest environmental disaster in American history, as we’re constantly reminded, but the spill wouldn’t seem quite so disastrous if Katrina hadn’t come first.
The damage is cumulative, and that’s just the damage to the region’s collective psyche. If you had driven on St. Charles Avenue in the days just after Katrina, you’d have come to the banner that someone had mounted, playing off the old song: “Now You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.” And now the worry is we’ll learn that lesson again.
And so the oyster is not only a tasty morsel but also a convenient metaphor. Just ask Curtis Guichard, who’s working the Acme bar, if these are genuine Louisiana oysters and you’ll understand. This is not a casual question. You might as well ask whether Dr. John is a real doctor (the answer depends on whether you include doctor of musicology). Dr. Curtis, who says he knows two things — beer and seafood — says he’ll be right back.
Meanwhile, I talk to Michael, who is Curtis’ friend and tends bar nearby. He is extolling the virtues of New Orleans’ open-container laws. He has lived around the country, as teacher and bartender, and believes “the right to carry an opened beer from one bar to the next is not just a lifestyle choice, it’s a philosophical statement.”
He has more philosophy, including a remedy for the spill. “You start putting some BP officials in prison and see how fast the spill stops.” This is not an uncommon sentiment here.
When Guichard returns, he slaps down a piece of paper on the bar that shows exactly where Acme gets its oysters. Sure enough, they’re bonafide Louisianans. I feel like a birther getting a peek at the real certificate.
“This is my proof,” he says, smiling. But for Guichard, it’s not really a smiling matter. And so he tells his story. Guichard left New Orleans before Katrina and ended up in Lake Charles, La., where, of course, Hurricane Rita would soon strike. “It took away the front of the house,” he says. “It was like looking into a dollhouse.” He came back to New Orleans, his wife pregnant, his house ruined by Katrina. “I came back not because I had to,” he says, “but because I wanted to.”
Everyone’s Katrina story includes a water measurement. The water was this high. The water came over the roof. The water was higher than the telephone pole. The water line is a stain on the memory. In Guichard’s case, it was high enough that he had to start over. When he got the money to fix his house, the materials the construction team had assembled were . . . stolen.
Yes, stolen. You look at Guichard’s face, and you start to see what the toll was here. You ask about the spill and what it means, and he says he doesn’t know if he can do this again.
To understand the scale of the tragedy of the spill, you have to understand how far New Orleans has come back. There’s a new popular mayor. The Saints, miraculously, won the Super Bowl.
And though the city is about two-thirds the size it used to be, it’s larger than anyone expected at this point. Like Guichard, people came back because they chose to. On the July Fourth weekend, the town was basically sold out for the Essence music festival. My $140 hotel room was selling for $419. If you didn’t have the spill-cam on, you might think the place was back to normal, or as normal as New Orleans would ever hope to be.
I was last here a year after Katrina, and it all seemed hopeless. It wasn’t just a city in ruins; it was a city of romance — OK, romance/debauchery — where a pirate was the civic hero but where the sounds of jazz and Mardi Gras had given way to the memory of grim shots of urban poverty, of dysfunction that no longer seemed romantic at all, of a city drowning in neglect. It may be funny when your congressman is caught storing stolen cash in the freezer. It’s not so funny when thousands of people are stranded on the interstate as a nation watches in horror.
And just as the city is becoming recognizably New Orleans again, along comes the spill.
I’m not surprised when the restaurant manager eventually comes over to say I must go through corporate if I want to talk to anyone else. That’s fear speaking. It’s the fear of bad publicity, which is what happens when things are, well, bad. And if it’s bad now, what happens if a storm hits the gulf with full fury and brings the oil to the city’s door? Katrina was a natural disaster that was enabled by faulty engineering, when the levees failed. The spill is a man-made disaster that could be enabled, in the worst way, by a hurricane.
When people talk of what might happen to the water they drink and bathe in, the fear sounds more like dread.
And how does dread fit into the story line of a city that likes to think of itself as the town that care forgot?
A night later, I find something like an answer. The locals tell you if you want to hear local music, you go to Frenchmen Street, not to Bourbon Street. Frenchmen — where the man who brought craps to America supposedly lived — is just outside the French Quarter. There are no neon lights here. There are no strippers. There’s rarely a cover charge.
It’s where you find the Blue Nile, the Apple Barrel, the Spotted Cat and the music. And on the corner, there’s a band playing for tips. Of course there is.
Across the street, dancing to the band are Rose Bratcher and her friend Bethany Hartfield. When I ask how the spill affects her, Rose says, a hand to her throat, “My oysters.” She looks at me. “My oysters. My oysters.”
Bratcher, 38, is dressed for the evening, but she’s happy to talk to a reporter. This is New Orleans, where storytelling might as well be a residency requirement.
I ask Bratcher for her Katrina story. It turns out, she didn’t leave. She stayed on the other side of the river, in Algiers, where her mother was too sick to make the trip.
“I couldn’t leave my momma, and she couldn’t leave New Orleans,” Bratcher says.
And so when the water came, 8 to 10 feet high, Bratcher got dressed up because, she says, “If I died, I wanted to look cute.”
Eventually they got out, going to stay with relatives until, Bratcher says, she decided to cash in her 401(k), get on a train with her mother and stay until they got off in Albuquerque. Two years later her mother died.
“She died at 62,” Bratcher says. “She was 60 when Katrina hit, and she had a heart attack. She was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina. It just took her two years to figure it out.”
Bratcher came back because, she says, “This is what we do. We understand tragedy. And we’re loyal. You see, this is how Southern gentility works. You don’t say how bad the day is. You get your drink. You dance on the corner.”
She does a little dance. She smiles.
“We haven’t recovered from Katrina, and now we take another hit,” she says. “I was never going to come back, but here I am. How do you think that’s working out for me?”
The story is complicated, as all good stories are. If you leave New Orleans and head south, toward either Venice or Grand Isle, you come to the marshes and the fishermen and the oil rigs. You don’t have to go far. The wells are everywhere, and the ships are everywhere, and the bayous are just like in the song.
The fishermen, who often work for the oil people, at least part of the season, fear that BP has destroyed their livelihood. They also fear the Obama moratorium on offshore drilling would destroy what’s left of the oil economy. If you subtract oil and fishing and tourism from the gulf, you’re left with no economy. Here’s all you need to know: In Morgan City, La., they have the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. Yes, really.
No one misunderstands the irony. It’s an old irony. The oil people came to the gulf a century ago, and the story goes that old-line New Orleanians snubbed the oil barons, who embraced Houston, then a backwater. That’s why, as they say, Louisiana gets employee oil money and Texas gets boss oil money.
If you look for beauty in the marshes, you tend to find oil wells instead. It’s one cost. You go to the seafood market in Westwego, you see another. You see Sue’s Seafood and Ruth’s Seafood and Amy’s Seafood and Who Dat Seafood. The market started — again, if you believe the stories — when one van pulled off the road in Westwego and started selling fish. There are more than a dozen stands now. Fishermen bring their catch, and customers come to buy. Or they did. Now they come to feel, to smell, to check for oil.
Most of the people who work at the market don’t want to talk to the press anymore. Every news story simply makes matters worse. The signs tell the customers that the shrimp are uncontaminated, but not everyone believes. A sign at Sue’s warns, “No Whining,” but it’s not whining when people are talking about closing down their stands.
And as if to put the desolation in context, it’s pouring rain as I talk to fisherman Vincent Taulli, who used to bring his catch to Amy’s. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says, “It’s All Good,” even though it’s not.
“It’s over,” he says. He doesn’t like to say it, but he’s been out of the water for 2 1/2 months. He says he just got his second monthly check from BP. Everyone around here, it seems, is getting a check from BP’s $20 billion cleanup fund, including those, he says, “who haven’t touched a shrimp in years.”
“It’s gonna be nothing but imports soon, and people here don’t like imports, as far as seafood goes. I do hate to say it. It makes you want to break down, but it’s over.”
He’s been trying to do what many fishermen are doing, hiring themselves out to BP to skim oil or transport workers. There’s a flotilla of boats on the gulf that puts you in mind of Dunkirk. If you ask Taulli who’s at fault, he blames BP, but he doesn’t think it’s fair to cast the same net over the other oil companies. Meanwhile, he considers moving inland and raising cattle.
“I don’t know nothing about cattle,” he says. “But I know the oil can’t get there.”
You don’t have to look hard here for stories. I find James Camardelle, who is towing his pontoon boat, Swamp Queen 1, away from the water. He’s done Cajun Critter Swamp Tours for years. He’s 64 now and can’t remember when he started fishing. He remembers first trapping with his grandfather — muskrats and otters. His grandfather trapped with his father. Camardelle says there used to be four swamp tours in the area and now there’s only his. Or there was only his.
If you can’t guess where he’s taking the boat, you haven’t been paying attention. He’s leasing it to BP.
“If the oil comes,” he says, although he pronounces it “erl,” as the locals tend to do, “I’ll be finished. One night I got a call from a friend of mine wanting to know if I’d lease my boat to BP. I asked him how much. When I heard the number, I said, ‘Hell yes.’ It’s time to sit back and collect a little bit for a change.”
I go to Chalmette, where I find Theresa Nguyen, who owns Theresa Seafood. Actually, you can’t miss her. She has about 350 boats landing at her dock. When she immigrated here in the 1980s, she started shucking oysters for restaurants, and now, she says, her business grosses between $7 million and $10 million a year.
“Work every day,” she says. “Never take a vacation. Never take a day off. Work. Work. Work. Work for my kids. What if I die? Who pays?”
She doesn’t look like she’s dying anytime soon. But she worries that her business won’t last the summer.
Any other day, she says, “I not talk to you. Too busy. Customer come and I say (to you), ‘Sorry. Have to work.’ ” She says BP is paying her $5,000 a month. She’s got a lawyer who thinks she should get more.
She takes a phone call, and you hear the tough businesswoman who works the phones in two languages.
But off the phone, she becomes softer. She sounds like the grandmother she is, worried about her kids and her grandkids and about the poor people back in Vietnam to whom she sends money every December.
“I pray every morning. I pray every afternoon,” says Theresa, who has a painting of Mary on the wall behind her. “I pray. But the oil, he keep leaking.”
I didn’t go looking myself. I have help, which in New Orleans means finding someone with just the correct (meaning, sufficiently skewed) world view.
I contacted my friend David Simon, the writer/TV producer who had created the legendary series “The Wire” and has just finished the first season of “Treme,” an HBO series about post-Katrina New Orleans.
Simon had the perfect contact: Davis Rogan, who was the inspiration for the Treme character Davis McAlary, a gadfly who is annoying in an endearing way, or maybe it’s endearing in an annoying way. He’s also a white musician/DJ who lives in the Treme, which is among the oldest African-American neighborhoods in the country.
“I looked at the actor playing me and thought,'”Doesn’t this guy always play doofuses?’ ” Rogan says as we eat breakfast. “Hmmmm.”
In other words, Rogan is the last person I’d expect to present a pragmatic view of the oil/seafood situation.
“This is something you probably wouldn’t expect from your typical leftist atheist New Orleanian,” he says, “but I’m not anti-oil.”
He notes that his father is an engineer who works for an offshore oil company. He notes, too, that BP is the villain here, that if it had built a relief well for a half-million bucks, it would have saved $20 billion and a lot of regional heartache.
“What we need is regulation with teeth, not regulators who think they’re the chamber of commerce,” he says. “If Chile and India can do this right, it seems that we ought to be able to get it right.”
For his part, Rogan is determined not to panic, even if that’s not exactly the default position here.
“I already did it’s the end of the (bleeping) world for Katrina,” he says. “I can’t do it’s the end of the world again.”
He pauses. For effect.
“I’ve got hysteria fatigue.”
We finish breakfast at a place Rogan calls “twee,” which he says is a word he wishes he’d use more often. The next night he meets me at the Candle Light Lounge in the Treme. It doesn’t have candles and there’s little enough space to lounge. But it’s Wednesday, meaning that the Treme Brass Band is there and the place is packed. There used to be clubs up and down the block in this part of the Treme, but they were lost to urban blight.
On this night, the floor is jammed. You’ve got old hippies and young women dancing the Charleston and old musicians taking to the floor dancing some dance from memory — while the band, about 10 pieces that night, was rocking, if not rocking and rolling.
Rogan introduces me to the lead trumpeter, Kenneth Terry, who is only spectacular. The dancers are so close to the band he has move one away with one hand while lifting his horn to play with the other.
In the second row, band leader Benny Jones is counting the tip money while Terry, between solos, leans back to me to ask, “You like that?” He doesn’t need an answer. He knows. And then he takes the floor again.
There’s no confusion. This is New Orleans.
It’s time to see the oil — the erl. It’s the start of the July Fourth weekend when I hit Grand Isle. Every room is full, but not with tourists. The place is filled with beach houses on stilts and people in them who are fighting the spill.
The beach, which I’m told is cleaner that it has been for years, is closed. Cops guard the entrances.
The Coast Guard is here, working on the cleanup. They offer reporters the chance to ride along. We hope to see what one official calls oil porn. We do, but only R-rated. We hitch a ride on “Miss Aimee” to go to the Grand Terre islands, where the Coasties are measuring the damage from a storm. We’re looking for tar balls, of which there are plenty, and tar patties, of which there are too many. We see ruined marsh grass. We don’t see the heavy stuff or any wildlife in the oil.
What you do see back on Grand Isle is anger. Signs are up everywhere blaming BP, which figures. One says: “Can’t fish or swim, BP, how are we supposed to feed our kids?” The government isn’t too popular either. Someone had just bashed the window of a Coastie’s car, although the explanation may just be that it happened to have been payday.
We watch the workers, sweating in their white hazmat suits, as they toss the bagged oil. Believe me, it’s not a job you want. It’s tough work, and no one is sure what contact with the oil will mean. There are 75 to 100 workers on this one island.
It’s hard to get perspective standing in one place, watching one effort. All you can grasp is the obvious: You’re in a small place along a huge coastline.
For perspective we go back to New Orleans to the Mississippi River, where the water had topped the levees during Katrina. You wonder what could happen the next time.
And then we go to the Lower Ninth Ward, where the destruction was the worst. There is progress, but there are still many boarded-up houses. And more empty lots where houses used to be.
There’s also a Fourth of July party at one restored house. People are on the porch; they’re in lawn chairs in the street. Roger Mack is on the grill, cooking burgers and chicken and ribs. Red beans and corn are simmering on the stove. When I ask if I can to talk to Mack, he insists I eat first.
Mack, a carpenter, lives nearby in a house he rebuilt from scratch, taking blueprints from a computer.
He didn’t stay during Katrina. “I can’t swim,” he says, laughing. But he points to the owner of this house, Mike Vaughn. “He stayed. His jaw got broke by a tree. He spent three days on the roof before the helicopters came.”
I ask Vaughn why he rebuilt here. He looks at me as if to ask how I could ask that question.
“My momma raised 10 of us,” he says. “Where else am I gonna go? I got no place else to go.”
He offers a tour of the house and takes me out back. “Look. See those houses. The water come over those trees. Everything was ruined, every house. Now I’m the only one back. Why am I the only one? I get up every morning, and this is what I look at.”
He asks me if I still think New Orleans is coming back.
“I don’t have a dime in the bank. I put all I had in this house. Now I got nothing. You tell me.”
We walk back to the party. The music is up loud. The conversation is up loud too. Mack offers me more food from the grill. Surviving Katrina may mean you can survive anything. Or the spill may mean, as Mack would say, that “people are sitting on the side, waiting to see how bad it gets.”
I remember what Davis Rogan told me. It seemed like a very New Orleans thing to say: “Some people are sitting here saying it’s end of the world. It’s a catastrophe, all right. But I’m not going to pre-cry. And I’m not going to pre-mourn.”
Who can tell? I might believe it if he puts it to music.
