The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed

put on for years, and they’d become big buddies. Every trip, he declined the hotel room the club offered to provide for him, choosing instead to sleep on the floor in the convention center, much as the evacuees were doing now, on top of his rolled-up rugs. It turned out to be good training—in the days following Katrina, he alternately camped out in his shop on St. Charles and on the porch of his girlfriend’s house in the Garden District—all the while acting, as I would later discover, as a one-man neighborhood posse.
    Our house might have been okay, but there was no shortage of bad news. Conditions at the still crowded Superdome and convention center were beyond hellish, and so many people had been stranded on one particular stretch of the I-10 overpass for so long that a clearly sleep-deprived Shep Smith resorted to repeating the name and number of the closest intersection over and over again, in case anybody in any position to help was watching. Charmaine Neville, the singer and daughter of Neville Brother Charles Neville, told of being raped at knifepoint before driving a commandeered bus filled with other terrified citizens upriver to Baton Rouge. Charmaine’s estranged husband, a musician who sometimes painted with McGee, had put up the third version of blue in our dining room, and I started obsessing about the sorry condition of his truck, which I knew could never have made it out of town.
    I started obsessing about a lot of things—Antoine, of course—but also why in the hell the levees had broken when the storm had turned out to be a weak Category 3. (My father, who had been a surveyor for the Corps of Engineers when he was a kid, and, later, the owner of a barge and towboat company on the river, stood in front of the screen as helicopters dropped countless—and fruitless—sandbags into the breach at the 17th Street canal, shaking his head and bitching about the politicization of the Corps. “They should not have broken,” he said more than once, confirming with some authority what I already thought.) Then there was the question of what on earth had made the majority of Louisiana’s electorate vote for Kathleen Blanco, who had not yet managed to call out the National Guard, and who appeared on the screen far too often, patting her hair and asking everyone to pray. At one point, the governor angrily told a reporter she had no idea what day it was, so I did pray—that she would cease to go near a television camera for the duration of the crisis. The mayor had already lost it on the radio, and when Bush finally turned up after his initial flyover, he told “Brownie” he was doing a “heckuva job.” In the face of all that, plenty of people besides us were forced to resort to wine—and whiskey too, as it turned out. On Wednesday, when John and I went to our favorite local liquor store, the Cask and Flask, to restock our dwindling bar, there wasn’t a bottle of Scotch left in the place.
    Meanwhile, those of us more firmly rooted in reality than our elected officials had already gotten back to work. I had assignments from Newsweek , Vogue , and The Spectator in London—there is nothing like being a resident of a disaster zone to make one popular with one’s editors. And then there were the standing assignments I somehow had to find the focus to finish, like a profile of Reese Witherspoon, who had been thoughtful enough to email Vogue to ask if I were okay. John, who is managing partner of his law firm, was charged with temporarily relocating the entire practice to Baton Rouge. So I started typing while he stayed on the phone, tracking down the lawyers and secretaries and paralegals, finding office space and lining up furniture. Both tasks were made easier by the efforts of my father, who, as soon as it became evident that our evacuation wasn’t temporary, arranged for two new cell phones on a network that was working, as well as wireless Internet, a printer, and a second landline in my youngest