Shotgun

We are staying in an early 19th century shotgun house which, for New Orleans, is not an old building – last night we walked past a bar that has been open since 1770 or so – and it seems the shotgun was ahead of its time. There has always been an urban need to store vast quantities of poor people in a small and convenient space, and lacking the resources, the engineering, the geology to pile them into the cinder block prisons of the 20th century housing projects, early New Orleans developers came up with a kind of neatly stacked matchbox dwelling. A shotgun.

A shotgun is a kind of long, narrow row-house that served in this city’s industrial areas as low income housing for immigrants and destitute laborers. Small rooms are partitioned by sliding doors, and narrow floor plans preclude any kind of hallway. Each room is accessed by way of another. This leads the lines between personal and communal space to blur almost immediately, particularly in the high traffic areas adjacent to the front door, the kitchen, the restroom, et cetera.

Our lodging is about twelve feet wide and extends perhaps sixty feet back from the street. Downstairs are three living spaces and a kitchen, where a narrow staircase climbs steeply to two more bedrooms and a small bath. 

Tim, Gonzo, and I share a room which is perhaps twelve feet wide and sixteen deep. It has tall, ten or twelve foot ceilings, and is furnished sparsely with a decrepit futon and a wardrobe large enough for three or four jackets. The remains of a fireplace have been mortared over, and gaps between the door and the jamb permit gusts and rain to blow across the hardwood. Tim sleeps on the futon, I on the floor.

This space is separated vaguely from the next room, where mismatched chairs and a battered couch surround a cluttered coffee table. The couch is home to Liza, for whom it is at once a bed and a perch for crafting earrings and Christmas ornaments from stamped steel and brass and plastic beads. As far as I can tell she does not leave her perch for any reason except to use the restroom and, occasionally, to stew beets in the kitchen.

A person accustomed to northern winters may scoff at the notion of being cold in New Orleans, and of course Louisiana is mild during the Christmas season. Temperatures there rarely dip into the 40s and rain showers are calming, maritime affairs. It is a place completely unprepared for winter weather of any kind; if the specter of snow casts a shadow across the weather forecast the city more or less loses its mind. A chance of snow flurries on our third day in the city cancelled schools and drew warnings not to drive except for emergencies.

Even the rich houses are uninsulated, and in our humble shotgun holes in every door and window treatment welcome the outside climate in. This home is not so much as poorly insulated as it is only a meager shelter from the elements at all. A leaking roof has left a jagged scar of cracked and peeling plaster above Liza’s perch, and only a very recent drywall patch keeps the neighborhood pigeons from coming and going from the kitchen as they please.

This is all to say that the cold, rainy weather that joined us in New Orleans chilled me to my core, and that I did not always mind that the gas heater in this middle room runs at full throttle at all hours of the day. The central room is interminably, cloyingly warm. It reeks of incense and designer tobacco. The healthy cigarettes, I am told. Next to our spartan finishings the room feels at once cozy and cramped.

The room serves, aside from Liza’s abode, as what social common space the home can offer. The roommates are the wandering artist type. From Wisconsin or New Jersey or someplace, and work in kitchens or delivering pizzas by bicycle when not chasing gigs. Tim and I keep more or less banker’s hours – staggering bleary-eyed to work some time around 8, making our way home in the evening to recuperate and have a cigarette and mull over where to find dinner for the night. An hour or so before we returned from work, two of the roommates left to deliver pizzas and did not make it home until two or three in the morning.

Another roommate worked, nominally, in a vegan kitchen across town but could never be seen in any kind of cook’s outfit and generally seemed to be occupied beneath the hood of a rusted Jeep for any waking hour. The last girl was only seen once, as she fell during an aerial silks performance and broke her pelvis, and was rushed away someplace else to recover. And so the house never felt overcrowded, and someone always seemed happy to sit and smoke with Liza.

Beyond Liza’s domain, a cloth is draped across a narrow doorway to the kitchen. I cannot report on the kitchen. Since our arrival each horizontal surface there has been adorned by a precariously balanced tower of crusted dishes and scraps of food. The stairway climbs past a slapdash plaster patch intended to finally stunt the pigeons’ foray into the common space. On the second day in the house a rat (or other vermin) chewed a hole in the shower plumbing and the kitchen filled with dripping graywater.

Through the back of the kitchen is a doorway to another bedroom which, I presume, fits the mold of stacked 12’ cubes. I am still unsure of who exactly sleeps in which room, and to whom the other dogs purport to answer. The stairway climbs to a narrow hallway that runs the length of the building and allows the roommates to access the sole restroom without passing through either of the bedrooms upstairs.

I understand that this is not an unusual living situation for the starving artist set in urban Louisiana. It is communal living, forced by architectural circumstance. To reach the restroom, one must slide multiple sets of heavy oak doors and traverse the private lives of his roommates. More than once, Tim tells me, he’s tiptoed past a drunken tryst because he simply couldn’t hold his bladder any longer. It is a lifestyle that is not, perhaps, suitable to everyone.

Our month long tenure in the place has been welcomed with varying levels of enthusiasm. Guy, the patriarch here, welcomed us with open arms; as has Liza, from her perch, and Cory, who I have come to believe occupies the final first floor bedroom. The others seem somewhat less amused, and I suppose I can’t hold them at fault for it. Seven humans and three dogs is quite a lot for a small place.

The place is not without perks, of course. We live six blocks from the Christmas tree lot, four blocks from the restaurants and bars of Magazine Street, and a brief 100 yard shuffle from Parasol’s. It is a dog friendly neighborhood in a dog friendly city, and Gonzo is growing accustomed to joining us at work, at dinner, at the bar. We could use the kitchen if we pleased, and together we pay $350 a month, which for two men and a dog on short notice does not seem unfair.

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Lay of the Land

Southern Louisiana, and specifically the portions of New Orleans in the lowlying, poor neighborhoods, has an undeniably apocalyptic feel. This occurs through a conspiracy of influences, which pull together to create a city which feels as though it may be the last on earth (and never without charm).

It is an old city. Its narrow, cobbled streets have caressed the levees and the river for three hundred years. Cardinal directions are useless here. No street extends in a straight line for more than a quarter of a mile before it skews again to match the oxbow of the Mississippi, and Tim explains that “no one knows where the fuck north is. You go toward the river or away from it; up or down.” It is an unsettling sensation, coming from a neatly numbered grid of streets, to get tangled in a web of crooked avenues.

The landscape is absolutely flat, and without some familiarity with where the river lies, directional advice like “uptown” or “down from there” is wholly useless. The only ubiquitously visible landmarks in the city seem to be the super dome, where the Saints play, and a handful of abandoned skyscrapers in the business district. Even so, the streets wrap around them in a way that their arrangement against each other is essential to where you are, and navigating by landmark in New Orleans feels a bit like sailing by the stars.

This feels fitting, with the rich, maritime history of the place, and there are businesses here (bars, mostly) that are older than the United States. The narrows and corners of the city feel authentically aged, a departure from the amusement park styling of the historic boroughs of New England. The honest old age is compounded by the fact that this is not a particularly clean place. Litter piles in clogged street drains and the back corners of Parasol’s do not appear to have been cleaned in decades. Walking a dog through the French Quarter reveal that everything there is coated with a thin veneer of urine.

The bars here do not close at any mandated time, and music leaks from beneath the doors until the bartender stops making money and throws everyone out. Four a.m.? Five? Daybreak? Styrofoam to-go cups and takeaway food wrappers and shopping bags and cheap rain coats and all manners of plastic detritus fill the streets each night and in the very early mornings an army of sanitation staff emerges to primp and preen the tourist haunts as best they can to prepare Bourbon Street for another day of shopping and rum.

The squalor of New Orleans cannot be unique. When four hundred thousand people live stacked on top of each other a degree of mess cannot be avoided. But here the blowing debris and the sheer age of the buildings are compounded by the moisture. This is the third wettest city in the US. 65 inches of rain fall each year. Most of it comes during the late-summer hurricane season, but all year the air approaches saturation and the marshlands and swamps seem to be forever lapping at its fringes to reclaim the Crescent City.

Fog drifts across the streets on cool nights and every surface feels damp at all times. A moss or mold so deeply green that it is black creeps across park benches and law firms, sidewalks and police cars. Roofs leak and plaster swells and cracks. Porches sag on soft foundations and as a chilling kind of true ghost story, high water marks from Katrina still scar the poorer houses a decade later.

Katrina marks, undeniably, a transformative moment for the city. Like Lexington and Concord, or Pearl Harbor, or September 11, it was an irrecoverable moment in history that fundamentally shifted what the word normal can pretend to mean. Chris Rose dedicated his collection of essays to

“Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman, who died in his attic at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans’ 8th Ward on or about August 29, 2005. He had a can of juice and a bedspread at his side when the waters rose. There were more than a thousand like him.”

Unlike an act of War, Katrina left a wake of devastation without an enemy to strike back against. You cannot bomb a culture of indifference. There are no surgical strikes against a warming climate or rising tides. No clandestine commando raid can undo 300 years of hubris. We can only lament the loss and cast blame wherever it can land – on the ones who died. The poor who could not or did not leave or had nowhere to go or had no idea how bad things could really be. Or the looters, left to fend for themselves as the inadequacy of our shared disaster relief played out on the evening news and the police started shooting.

When we talk about a post apocalyptic feel in the city, it is because these people have experience an apocalypse. And as pockets of the city grow back swaths are locked in decay. Poverty is inseparable from any honest discussion of life in New Orleans in the same way that it is inseparable from any honest discussion of life in America.

Take more than a few steps from the bustling muffaleta shops and coffee joints by the World War II museum and you will find rows of buildings with rough squares of OSB screwed across the windows. Mold grows along the bottoms where floodwaters carried lives away. Many have burned and sit as charred frames aside schoolyards and basketball practice.

I ask Tim what happened with the fires, whether it’s for the copper in the walls, or what. He shrugs. Maybe it’s the pipes and the wire. Maybe it’s insurance – almost no one was covered for flooding when the storm came and so fire is, for many, the only way to rebuild. And then maybe it’s just the same scourge of poverty that drives crime in the first place: boredom and hopelessness.

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The Art of the Deal

The rooster in question is four feet tall. He’s one of those rare, proud birds that struts less with hubris or panache as much as dignity, really. Don Martin gets a little emotional when he talks about the bird’s scarlet cape and glowing iridescent epaulets. He’s not a kind bird, sure, but then a bird doesn’t win enough fights to buy his trainer a house on the edge of town by making friends. So no, the rooster is not for sale, and no, you may not kill him.

To hear Don Martin tell it this bird is a hero. Even when the Riera brothers could not be beaten and killed half the birds in Huehuetenango, his charge flapped and bit and clawed its way to stand above their bleeding foul. To hear Don Martin tell it without that rooster there in the woods they never would have learned that the Riera brothers soaked their gaffs in snake venom. Without that bird the Riera brothers might still be around, fixing fights and cheating and stealing.

Of course our story’s coward’s spanish is not so good and so he does not hear Don Martin tell it at all. It talks so much so early, our coward says, I cannot sleep at night. You know that popular wisdom gives that roosters crow at dawn, but it turns out they’re actually at it pretty much all the goddamn time.

The sun is up before six in the morning and by nine the shadows offer short, stunted refuge from an already scorching day. Our coward squints against the glare and stands dumbly, quietly, as both men have presented their positions to deaf ears and stand awkwardly while they wait for the other to relent.

Don Martin is not a tall man, but still holds his hand to his shoulder to show the height of the bird. Muy peligroso, he says, and waves behind him to the jungle before going back to his chores. No vaya al bosque.

You’ll learn not to hear it, she says, through the twisted iron fence that divides their balcony in two. Her legs drape through the railing and she blows smoke through her nose. Might take a few weeks, but you’ll learn not to hear it. Anyway, you’re going to be late.

She mashes the butt against her concrete perch and lurches to her feet to walk inside. I think that bird is actually pretty dangerous, though, and disappears through the curtain across the door.

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El Cuarto de Tula

The jukebox is broken and only plays that Lenny Kravitz version of American Woman, so more often than not it sits unplugged in the corner as a darkened sarcophagus of commercial pop from the 90s. The bar plays songs from the phone of whoever opened that day through tinny, up-too-loud computer speakers that haunt the corners of the room. They don’t do any favors for the harmon mutes and spanish vocals that are making it hard to carry on a conversation.

Not that it matters to the Peace Corps kid chatting to some Australian girl two stools down. He’s definitely a Peace Corps kid. You know the type. Always droning on about Aldo Leopold or or What’s Really The Matter Here, like he’s really going to fix something. Like a few classes at Brown or wherever has somehow uniquely suited him to fix what the American Death Machine has spent four decades ruining.

Everyone hates the Peace Corps kids.

“This song, you know, it’s really pretty sad. With the trumpets and the drums and the dance beat and everything, it sounds happy, but when you listen to the lyrics, it’s about a girl dying.” The voice comes from the boy in cargo shorts and Chacos, a fresh bag of rolling tobacco on the bar in front of him. Classic corps.

“See?” he asks. “Listen to it. Allí fueron los bomberos con sus campanas, sus sirenas. Here come the firefighters.”

The girl isn’t much younger, a gap year kid. Maybe a year or two of Uni. Her eyes flit around the room for someone, anyone, to cut in, buy her a drink, get this guy away from her, talk about literally anything else on earth. Javi is working the door.

Rumor is he was a Kaibil in the war and saw things, did things, a man doesn’t come back from. Most nights he sits on a stool by the scarred wooden doors as though someone might be told they can’t come in and pans across the room with steely blue faraway eyes. When the doors close at 11 and the ashtrays come out he peeps to the street and yells to shut the fuck up when a military patrol rumbles down the cobblestones.

Al cuarto de Tula, le cogió candela, Se quedó dormida y no apagó la vela. She went to sleep and didn’t blow out the candle. Vela, that’s another word for candle.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?” Javi yells through the barroom murmur. The Peace Corps kid sits upright on the stool with the posture of just being caught in something. “That song’s not about any fire. That song is about fucking, man! You know?” He gesticulates with his hips across the bar.

Rumor is one year during Semana Santa he saw from his perch a girl getting raped between a couple of cars. Story goes he just went over and killed the guy there in the street, didn’t even help the girl up or anything, just killed the guy with his hands and went back to work. No one really knows if that’s true or not, but people don’t really fuck with Javi.

“You know? Fucking? Like this?”

You can’t help but feel for the kid while he squirms on the stool. The entire bar looks at him, looks at Javi, looks back at him. Only Ibrahim Ferrer cuts the silence. And then quietly, almost imperceptibly, at first, the Australian girl begins to laugh. It’s only a giggle, really, and she tries to hold it back. Her lips are taught and she bites her cheeks bloody out of some deeply ingrained tenderness toward this awful boy.

Without the rum she might have made it. Instead a short, staccato, hacking kind of laugh bubbles over and escapes before she regains control. But then another, and then from behind the bar Sofia begins to laugh as well. And then before long the whole bar is in tears. The room is consumed by a wild, frantic, hysterical kind of laughter that feeds on itself until it is a beast of its own and whatever small funny thing brought it about is not only forgotten, it is moot.

Grown men roll on the floor and point at the Peace Corps volunteer, now flushed and staring stonefaced into his rum. He stammers for a moment, and gets up, and trips, and he runs for the door but Javi, the only person in the room not laughing or crying, yells after him that he owes for the last two drinks.

He shuffles back through a straight of crying, laughing, pointing people and lays too much money on the bar and turns and runs out through the heavy double doors and into the street, and before the door is even latched behind him a different young man takes his seat and begins talking to the girl, tears still streaming down his face.