On I-55 near Hammond, at Louisiana’s instep, everything around us began to change. The low pine forests of western Mississippi fell away, replaced by starving tree stalks. They were drowning in a swampscape made even more dismal by a gray, wet sky, which met the swamp at the horizon. Out of this comingling of saturated atmospheres, New Orleans appeared like a ghost ship.
We stayed with my brother James, who lived in a low-lying enclave uptown named the Irish Channel after the immigrants who settled it, although it has been mostly black and Hispanic for the last half century. In lieu of giving a street address, James had described his house to us as “the one mostly obscured by banana trees with a lot of weird shit on the lawn,” and we spotted it with relative ease among the sea of modest shotgun houses. The decoration scheme evoked the chaos of the Hopson music barn, only here there was twice as much junk crammed into a quarter of the space. James shared the house with his girlfriend Allison, his daughter Attica, and a small and a seemingly fluid cohort of bohemians, who homesteaded there with the blessing of its elderly owner. The place had been a porous shell when they had moved in two years earlier, but over time James had installed windows and screens, doors, electrical wiring, and wooden lofts. Gradually, other items, practical and otherwise, were scavenged and baptized into the dim hovel’s uncanny aesthetic, making it livable while insulating it from convention.
James is taller than I am by maybe an inch or two, and narrower. My face is roundish, crowned by short brown hair, and framed by an incongruously auburn beard. This partially obscures the skin beneath my chin and on either side of my nose, which creases into soft pouches when I smile. James’s face, on the other hand, is tall and thin, following the pattern established by his body, and seems to slope down flat cheeks toward his mouth. His lips tent on each side when he smiles, revealing a narrow palette of yellowed teeth that slope in from the canines to the molars, having reverted to their pre-orthodontic shape after years of neglect. While like me he is often unshaven, his stubble is confined to the sides of his face and the circle around his mouth. It also retains the dark color of his hair, whose natural waviness is dampened by grease, and twisted here and there into braids.
And yet most of his friends were able to tell immediately that we were brothers. James and I mutually refuse to see any similarity, except maybe for our low, deliberate way of speaking, where we pause at long intervals to finish and edit sentences in our heads before speaking them—a trait that my friends find intolerable. James is handy, and has developed a knack for diagnosing and repairing all sorts of hard-to-fix (read: expensive-to-fix) machines, which is a major factor in why he is able to live so frugally. Me, I would never dream of learning anything so practical. I am the type of person who, if one of the various machines that I depend on malfunctions, will poke absently at its gears while figuring in my head how much it will cost to replace. James still knows how to troubleshoot a computer better than I do, even though I don’t think he has owned one for half a decade. All this is largely due to the fact that he refused to be spoiled when we were growing up. Rather than press our parents to buy him a car upon turning 16, James went out and bought a bright orange, 1968 Volkswagen Bus for $1,000. Its engine coughed and struggled like an outboard motor, and I could see rushing pavement through the holes in the floor where the pedals where. But determined to defy the high repair and upkeep costs that are supposed to make folly of the frugal car buyer, my brother turned into a grease monkey, keeping the colorful heap running for a year before reselling it for 200 percent of what he bought it for. It remains the only example I have seen of a car appreciating in value.
When James came across a problem he couldn’t fix, he would exercise option number two, which was to simply walk away from it. This is what happened with his second car, a two-ton Crown Victoria that he bought for $500 at a police auction. It crapped out on the side of a highway, so he scratched off the serial number and hitched a ride home. This is also what happened shortly after he turned 19 when the line connecting James with the bourgeois lifestyle of our mutual upbringing ruptured after years of stress, and he left Boston. He drifted around the country for about a year before settling in New Orleans—a place which, like his old orange bus, was sufficiently eccentric and full of projects to keep him interested.
And eccentric it was. After dinner at an African restaurant, we bought beer at a corner market and James and Allison took us walking around the French Quarter. New Orleans is the only place I have ever been where this is legal—they even give you a bottle-sized brown bag to carry it around in. Being drunk in public, however, is not legal. I’d have thought police might see this contradiction and enforce the second leniently, but James assured us that this was not the case. Cops in the French Quarter, he said, are notorious for jailing tourists as unhesitatingly as they did locals, on grounds ranging from urinating in alleys to “public intimidation,” which I imagine could mean anything they needed it to mean.
We walked past bars and peepshows, antique shops and galleries. Past a colorful club where an expatriated member of the Brazilian aristocracy gave out free drinks to people he liked (“You are the future! You are living life!”) and filmed homemade porn upstairs. Past a bar called The Spotted Cat, where a washboard jazz band was playing some of the best live music I had ever heard. We paused in front of one art gallery called All Amzie All the Time, which featured self-portraits of Amzie Adams, a local artist recognizable by his large white beard. Amzie, I learned from an article posted on the wall of a different store, had been born in New Jersey, and had served in Vietnam, but his superiors had designated him “camp artist” after deciding that he was more useful painting in the barracks than crawling through the mud. Afterward, he had moved down to New Orleans. We saw Amzie later that night in front of a bar, looking spectral in his round sunglasses.
Allison said hi to him, like she did with most people. I had noticed that she was on a hugging basis with every other person we saw on the street—the guy sweeping up outside the restaurant, the harmonica player in the washboard band, and many others. My brother, who had been allergic to most forms of physical affection growing up, also exchanged grinning embraces with these friends and acquaintances. One such acquaintance was an intense young artist named Jack, a fellow Boston emigrant. Jack, who spoke with the agitated enthusiasm I have seen in a number of artists I know, was trying to enlist my brother in a project to locate and refurbish a new house.
“I’ve been looking around,” he said, “and there are all these totally abandoned, fucked up, beautiful houses.”
“Yeah,” James said, “you’ve got to get the hell out of Tremé.”
“You know, man, there are just so many things about that neighborhood that piss me off these days, you know?” Jack said. “You’ve got gentrification, all these rich folks moving in, squaring off with the drug dealers—and that’s the other thing, man, the crack dealers are fuckin’ everywhere. The only reason I don’t get offered crack on my way home anymore is because at this point I’ve become known as the guy who yells at people when they try to sell it to me. But man, it’s tough, because at the same time—OK, so I was it my house the other day washing dishes, naked as the day I was born, and I hear this music outside, so I throw on a pair of trousers and go outside, and there’s a fuckin’ horse-drawn hearse and Olympia Jazz right there on the street in front of my house.”
“Whoa, who died?”
“Some lady in the Ninth Ward. So I follow this thing for like five blocks, you know, listening to some fuckin’ amazing jazz, and nobody rubber-necked or said anything to me or anything.”
The funeral processions Jack was describing were called second lines. They were the type of things I had seen on postcards and films set in New Orleans. James told me there was tension between the generally poorer, black practitioners of this custom and the city government, which had been steadily raising the price of second line permits for years to the point that they were nearly unaffordable. Still, the bereaved would collaborate and managed to pay the fees. This spirit became a recurring theme of our New Orleans visit—the stubborn resolve of people who believe they are fighting for ownership of their city, and of themselves. I saw it in James and Allison’s community of iconoclasts; in an unhandsome building in Tremé where an aching old man named Sylvester curated a museum celebrating the Black Indian festivals that still thrived in black neighborhoods; in a tent in a parking lot where a slam poet professed, “I’ve got the Nine in my spine, and I don’t mind dyin’,” to affirming yelps from her audience. “New Orleans is a religion,” I had scrawled in my notebook.
“Katrina drove out about half the population of the city, families who had been here forever,” Allison said as we walked past glowing storefronts of Jackson Square. “They say it’s been repopulated, but people don’t realize that it’s not the people who moved out coming back, it’s upper-middle-class people from Texas.”
At first, I didn’t understand. Wouldn’t the transplants bring in money, and wouldn’t money bring back the city?
James paused to roll a cigarette with his dirt-framed fingernails. “Not to mythologize too much, but New Orleans has traditionally been a town of pirates and outlaws.” He took a drag. “It’s not like that anymore, exactly, but—you know what I mean?”
I thought about the endless sprawl of the exurbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, and everywhere else. I thought of harbors of pristine black asphalt lapping against flat boxes of concrete; of supercenters and golden arches; of convenience and progress; of Albemarle; of Ben muttering about how all of America looks the same while I scanned the Atlas for escape routes that might allow us to feel like we were actually exploring the country; of my brother’s house; of Amzie Adams; of ornate houses with vine-choked columns, Spanish balconies, and dark windows—abandoned, fucked up, and beautiful. And I decided I knew what he meant.
Posted from Motel 6, Del Rio, Texas.
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