The Redstar Perspective

Most of you who follow my life as closely as any narcissistic blogger would hope know that I share a house in NOLA with another PhD student who is also a former friend and lover.  (For details, roam around on the blog - see Irish List, Friends Game, etc.) Fewer of you know, but might be able to assume, based on the upbeat nature of the blog these days, that the antipathy that characterized this relationship over the last 6 months has largely dissippated.  We’re certainly not friends, but there’s an easier rapport b/w us as roommates and colleagues, which facilitates working together on NOLA projects. 

But sometimes, the irony of the situation just kills me…

Our friendship and romance exploded simultaneously in early Nov 2005, and after having to work together on getting a (subsequently rejected) HUD proposal out the door for the remainder of November, I like to refer to Nov. as “the month of my life I’ll never get back.”  Doesn’t fit as easily on the calendar, but much more appropriate.  Less than 2 months later, he and I were signing a lease together on a house in NOLA.  It was the last week in January, and his first in the city after I’d been there a month and found this place for us to live.  The M.A.S. and others can attest that our civility was strongly tempered by a desire to scratch each other’s eyes out.  Yet there we stood on a weekday afternoon, passing a pen b/w us and scribbling our signatures side-by-side on a one-year lease for a 3BR/3BA in Uptown New Orleans.  And I smirked, and got the giggles, and wished we could pause our loathing for 1 minute just to laugh at the irony of the situation.  But alas, we didn’t and I went home later that week with a terrible cold from drinking so heavily in response to his arrival.

So it was with much relief this past Sunday night that we could joke about driving out of National Rental Car at the airport in a mini-van for our funder’s site visit the next day.   As we threw our stuff in the back of the van, he quipped, “after we drop off ”MG” tomorrow, don’t forget to pick up the kids from soccer practice.”  Of course, and then bring them home to our spacious family home on Willow Street.  Where you walk from the hall bathroom to your room in boxer shorts after a shower.  While my friends joke that it’s my Brighton condo with the pool out back that is Melrose Place, I’m prone to think Willow Street is the more appropriate setting of the made-for-tv-movie aspects of my life.

This evening I stood barefoot in drenched yoga clothes in the parking lot of Baptiste yoga in Brookline, trying to cool down after 90 minutes of power yoga in 95 deg heat.  I wished I could strip then and there, vs. having to go back into the studio to (try to) dry off and change my clothes.  I thought of Harry Potter and his Invisibility Cloak, and wished I had one myself.  And then I thought, but is it hot underneath that cloak?

 Transvestite gang pesters Magazine Street
http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com/uptotheminute.cfm?recid=4912&userID=0&referer=dailyUpdate

Thanks to one of my favorite NOLA loyalists Michael for sending this along!

 

A few of you have been getting in touch re: the recent press on rising crime in New Orleans.  Thanks to my friend Kristen for sending me a CNN link that disturbingly confirmed my fear that this weekend’s shooting of 5 teens in Central City was not just in the vicinity of a neighborhood I frequently, wander through in my car, but actually on the street I drive regularly.  Following here is a mix of my response to her email with an email exchange b/w the M.A.S. about this. 

Which part concerns you, the crime itself, or the need for the National Guard?  It’s a weird conundrum w/the police there.  Most of them are back, I think, and the city’s population is half what it used to be, so in theory, there should be enough of them for patrols.  However, this is the force that was notoriously corrupt, barely earned a living wage, and thus most relied on private duty to make ends meet. So it’s not like they’re now more free to get back to exemplar operations given the shrunken population. 

Further, the city has NO $$$$$, so offering them overtime to step up - as one of the city council persons says in this article - seems like an unlikely option.  So I can see why they’d consider bringing in the national guard if the state has the resources for it. That said, I think it’s odd the reference they made to the heavily flooded areas as the spot to send the troops.  I wasn’t aware there was much policing going on in those ‘hoods - what’s to protect?  There’s not so many people in those areas…my MBA brain wonders if the police force might take a look at their operations (which from first hand experience I know seems pretty inept and wasteful) and re-assess whether they might have pre-existing manpower to reallocate to these “hot spots” before they call in the troops. 

Either way, there’s no doubt crime is on the rise.  I read it - like you - and hear/see it anecdotally.  The creepy thing about this shooting - it’s on the crosstown street I drive most regularly.  Sure, it’s a street through a predominantly black, comparatively run down neighborhood, so it’s not typical that you’d find many of our peers on it.  And maybe it’s time I get off it.  The storm damage is more modest compared to other neighborhoods, but the infrastructure still seems pretty spotty or absent (e.g., stores, lights, etc.) despite the returning population.  I’ve seen it get increasingly crowded with street traffic in the last 5 months that I’ve been tooling around NOLA.  And folks are just sitting, hanging out - I reference feeling nervous on it for the first time in a blog posting several weeks ago.   It’s hot and edgy in NOLA, I can’t emphasize this enough, and people are bored and unemployed and pissed off that the city can’t or won’t save itself and that outsiders are crawling around and appear to be the only ticket to redevelopment and that family and friends are still displaced and that there are no services and it smells as weekly-picked-up trash rots on the sidewalk, etc. etc.  It’s a pressure cooker down there.  There’s no youth services (e.g., summer pools, summer camps, etc.), and the only work is at places like McDonalds, etc., while a huge, newly arrived Hispanic population (many undocumented) appears to do the bulk of the construction work available.  It’s an angry situation.    

The M.A.S. interjects: “[And] I guess, as we speculated before, here we have evidence of un- organized crime- turf battles over who’s going to control what in a drug market completely transformed.” 

According to the press - the drug trade is returning - wouldn’t you, given you were on dangerous, foreign turf in Houston and Baton Rouge, and NOLA is a place with a weak, corrupt police force to begin with?  

M.A.S.: “On a policy-politics note, how the hell is the national guard going to police the drug trade? they will have guns, yes. but more than likely no skills, no savvy, and no sense of what the hell to do except make their presence and their guns known. and, likely, more bullets will fly. damn.  not that I would know the most effective strategy, but, you know, maybe you want some cops FBI/ATF-types, anti-gang, with some hard core street battle experience in there, not the Guard?”

Nagin is no leader, that’s for sure.  And even if he was, the city’s got no resources to set its own course.   

Finally, Central City, esp. those parts I drive through, where the shooting occurred, is a really odd mix of post-Kat NOLA.  It’s pretty intact while still having relatively noticeable damage, and it has this sense of not officially functioning despite how bustling it clearly is.  Somewhat like Tremé (a pre-dom black, low-income, famous and historic community adjacent to the French Quarter and Central Biz Dist.), except without a sense of being contested or having its future up for grabs (unless I’m missing these conversations), so more just blatant evidence of the unequal nature of recovery and rebuilding down there.  Feels like it’s ignored despite the fact that it’s populated, versus all the empty places that are all the rage.   Sigh.  

Culture is a catch-all phrase in sociology to describe differences b/w people that aren’t structural (aka: “tangible”) - like differences in income, residential location, etc.  I use it here to describe some of the differences I’ve found b/w living in New Orleans and….Boston/the Northeast/rest of the world???

1) There’s no ginger ale in New Orleans.  This study is not exhaustive, but while sick last week I went to three different stores - a convenient store, Walgreens, and the gas station - and couldn’t find ginger ale at any of them.  The next day at the airport, the three beverage displays I saw didn’t carry it either.  I always knew ginger ale was sort of the redheaded stepchild of soft drinks, but to not carry it at all?  Don’t get a stomach bug in NOLA, is all I can recommend.

2) This one is courtesy of Robin from Seedco, long-time New Yorker and recent transplant to NOLA.  To effectively capture what it’s like living down there to a group at a Brooklyn bbq a few weekends ago, she described to them that her dry cleaning in NOLA would not be ready for 10 days.  10 days?!?!, they spluttered.  Wow, she really is living in a developing country, they quietly concluded.

3) Again, thanks Robin.  The way she is getting a parking permit in the French Quarter is by befriending her meter maid who will now hook her up with one.  Seems there’s no other formal process for doing this, or if there is one, she doesn’t meet the criteria and this is the neighborhood level of graft that will enable her to be able to park as a new resident of the Quarter.

4) There are still plenty of non-functioning street lights that have been replaced with stop signs throughout the city.  This includes on multiple-laned roads, where drivers are required to roll through these signs in unison.  It’s a really odd collective action moment.  In addition, I live in a grid of suburban-esque mostly one-way streets by Tulane in the Uptown section of the city.  Plenty of street signs here, and the streets are narrow and crowded w/on street parking and I’m still getting used to figuring out in which direction to look at the different intersections, not to mention just learning to actually stop at all these stop signs.  As I cruise around in big American rental cars, trying to slow my Masshole driving pace to a more Southern/grandfather/Sunday drive cruising speed, and try to reach an equilibrium of rolling through/stopping/looking both ways at all these neighborhood stop signs, I’m feeling too often like the father in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off languidly driving home after work, complete with the occasional stopping short and giving vague, inoffensive hand signs to the different drivers who impede my progress. 

5) The packaging - particularly in coffee shops - is mostly styrofoam.  Hot coffee, iced coffee, it all goes into styrofoam cups.  I’m not sure what year it is in New Orleans, or why it’s kosher in one of the most environmentally vulnerable places in America to keep at it with the styrofoam.  Though, maybe this is more of the norm in the U.S. than I know. 

I’ll add to the list as I think of more.

You know, I always thought I had a tortured love life.  I said to my shrink, “I don’t want anymore relationships that seem like prime time tv plotlines.”  For example, see Grey’s Anatomy.  First, there’s getting broken up with for an ex-fiancee the same weekend Meredith Grey’s own McDreamy’s wife bursts back onto the scene.  Then there’s the dismissal speech to my (ma)lingering ex who calls me a spinster the same weekend she makes her brilliant “you don’t get to call me a whore” speech to similarly lurking, judging McDreamy.  Then there’s the season finale prom scene shortly preceeding my own prom (see Bouncy Castle and other mentions on this site….though the M.A.S. would prefer I stop prefacing his description as my prom date with his age.  Fair enough.).  On and on.  Grey’s Anatomy concludes, and I write to Leah that I think show producer/creator Shonda Rhimes is living in my closet, secretly recording my life.  (My lovely 610 sq ft condo comes w/three oversized closets; my friend Adam surmised that he could easily live in at least 2 of them should the situation ever arise.)

Fine.  With the recent establishment of the M.A.S., I am effortfully trying to depart from prime time-esque cliff hangers of having to choose b/w the lovable prom date and the irrestible prom-wrecker.  So far, so good.

But then, I read this lovely new book by Curtis Sittenfeld (famed for Prep, c. 2005), “The Man of My Dreams.”  I devoured it yesterday on my flight(s) home from New Orleans.  It is a quick, light read, unless, again, you feel like the narrator has been living in your closet, taking notes on your life.  I can’t quite bring myself to share the synopsis just yet, but her eloquent, vivid depiction of this woman struggling through relationships with men through her 20s, based largely on how she learned to act growing up, and starting to find some peace/working towards getting it right, made me think this book was somehow as cathartic for the author as is sorting through and repairing my own romantic wreckage for me right now.  She’s probably around 30 too, and she’s giving her boyfriend a serious shout-out in her acknowledgements (no matter how controlled the language),  and maybe I’m just projecting, but it seems to me this is the famous writer’s equivalent to me posting M.A.S. references on my ever-so-slightly-more-obscure blog.

Keep in mind, both her website-maintaining, “dreamy” boyfriend and the M.A.S. are not the cause but merely initial evidence of any catharsis, healing, a moving on from a tortured past and resignation that these are always the types of relationships you’ll want and have.   But, even as I fold the corners down of pages in which her writing particularly resonates with me, I am left thinking, just maybe, while I might be tortured, is it possible my romantic history is also a little cliched?  And if I am really the stuff of sweeps weeks and beach reads, doesn’t that make clinging to a tortured if, fine, funny past even more…pathetic? 

I suspect somehow all this relates to my “money-making taste” (I know what sells because I’m living the drama?), or to my ultimate success as the first woman president, when I skillfully argue for sensible economic development and immigration policies while also uniting and empowering women through the universal language of “he’s a dick and doesn’t deserve you.”  Votes, book tours, and of course, the made for tv movie to follow.

But for now, I’ll just keep leaving the closet door ajar.

 

If I translated this into Swahili correctly, this means “I live on Willow Street.”  In Swahili the verb “-kaa” means to live, to dwell, to stay.  When speaking with Tanzanians, I learned the customary way of asking this question in English was, “where do you stay?”  I always found this odd, “stay” sounding like a relatively impermanent arrangement when talking about where people lived.  Arguably not for interlopers like myself, but certainly when I was posing the question rather than answering it. 

Yet, I’ve found this phrasing to be depressingly appropriate in post-Katrina NOLA.  “Where do you stay?” reflects the impermanence of so many dislocated residents, living usually with or near relatives, still after all this time.  And like in Dar, where I live in NOLA  - still as an interloper - sounds like a much comfier and swankier arrangement than those described to me. 

Two nights ago I had dinner w/a former colleague - a terrific single woman who I never really got to know before as she was always several degrees above me in our rigid office hierarchy.  Over dinner, I promised her I wouldn’t evacuate the city w/o her should it come to that; she feared having to get out of the city on her own, sitting in traffic for hours w/no one to talk to and scheme with.  Interestingly, despite often feeling so alone here or in the world in general, I never worried about having to get out of NOLA on my own.  I always assumed I’d evacuate with my roommate in the direction of his relatives in Texas (assuming a flight north wasn’t an option).  In exchange for promising Robin I’d take her with us, she agreed to bail me out of Orleans Parish Prison should my unpaid moving violation from February ever catch up with me.

It’s weird feeling reliant on or expectant of my roommate in this way.  We have an awkward intimacy - not quite friends but more than colleagues - stemming from a past friendship turned affair that ended predictably explosively and painfully.  While I take a perverse pleasure in being the antagonistic roommate that eats his food and blocks his car in the driveway, i also find myself eating ice cream with him at midnight, and playing co-host to a dinner party we’ve disjointedly thrown together.  Because when you are on your own in foreign environments - be it Dar es Salaam or, sadly, post-Katrina NOLA ‘06 - companionship takes on a different form.

This guy Ronald once summed it up for K in Dar.  He was this shady mechanic who drove her absolutely batty by charging her too much for shoddy work that took too long, while at the same time making sure she had spare cars and doing other favors for her to make her life easier in Dar.   Once, as she thanked him, he said simply, “you don’t get by on your own here.”  And it was true.  People stayed with you when you got sick, picked you up when your car broke down, gave you a place to stay when you needed one, lent you their clothes, invited you on trips at a moment’s notice, and generally made sure you were never alone unless you deliberately went out of your way to be.  When I came home from dinner with Robin I said to my roommate, “do you have an evacuation plan?” He replied he’d head to TX to his family, and added, after a moment, “you’d be welcome to join me.”  “Of course!”  I thought to myself.  Doesn’t he know how the ex-pat system works??

 

In Tanzania, Kristina and I learned that the popular Moonwalk that little American kids bounce around in at fairs, etc., is known by our Brit-African friends as a “Bouncy Castle.”  A more literal and perhaps more appropriate interpretation. 

On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, the two founders and sole members of the Mutual Admiration Society (M.A.S.) wandered to Toscanini’s in Somerville for the first coffee I’d had in two days.  On Friday night of that weekend we had attended our department’s end of the year function, known to all as the “DUSP Prom” given it’s in a banquet room at the Royal Sonesta from 7-11, with dj, catered dinner and faculty attendees.  The main differences from my high school prom: the self-styled hair, cash bar and 35 yr old prom date.  Similar to the week I spent down the Cape with friends following the Braintree High Prom in 1993, he and I extended our prom night into a 3 day weekend spent mostly in his apartment in Somerville, with occasional breaks for cocktails with friends.  Though it might have been just the caffeine spike as I sat across from him on the sunny back porch at Toscaninni’s, I described being with him as feeling like the physical and emotional equivalent of a kid in a Bouncy Castle. 

So as the Sports Guy has his Sports Gal, so Grahamad has her Mutual Admiration Society.  His fear of showing up on the blogosphere has just been realized.  Good thing as self-appointed King and Queen of the Prom, we are somewhat used to fame and adulation. 

I am sitting in one of my favorite sundresses, a $5 purchase in Dar that fit me and the steamy weather perfectly.  Two years later in New Orleans, the dress is equally suitable.  I have spent the morning in my pj’s going thru my TZ photos, to get them ready for a much belated album.  Probably not a coincidence to finally go thru this process as I get reaquainted with NOLA and its people and all of the thoughts it stirs up each time. 

Last night some MIT and Harvard-KSG folks sat around in my living room drinking Abita and eating pork ribs and red fish.  Good times.  Talking to one of them for awhile, we compared notes on his stint in Uganda and mine in Dar (Uganda, with Kenya and TZ, is one of the main countries comprising E. Africa).  His work in Uganda was disaster-related, so we shared that in common as well.  We talked about how much our experiences here reminds us of our experience overseas.  One of his more astute comments was how while the contents of the trash heaps differed in E. Africa from here, there were nonetheless trash heaps in both places unlike we’ve seen elsewhere.  I laughed and described to him how Kristina and I used to say, “turn left at the trash heap” to guide visitors to our apartment in the Upanga section of Dar.   

One friday afternoon in Dar Kristina and I gave our co-worker Limbe a ride to a “bar,” where he joined other men for “happy hour.”  It was essentially a wall-less thatched hut on the side of the road with a bartender and some stools to which men pulled up and drank beer.  Yesterday afternoon - Friday around 5pm - I rode my bike through Central City and passed a group of black men seated around a plastic table with cups and bottles of beer in front of them.  Though the house structure behind them was sturdier than Dar’s roadside bar, it nonetheless served as some sort of commercial establishment where these men probably gathered regularly.  There are many many informal small businesses here that operate out of people’s homes - living rooms converted to restaurants such that you almost don’t notice it’s also a residence until you pass through a non-commercial kitchen to use the bathroom in a back hall stacked with buckets, brooms, shoes, etc.  Like Dar, and low-income, often minority communities in the U.S., informal entrepreneurship abounds as people disconnected from or lagging in the mainstream economy figure out ways to support themselves and their families.  Touching this is one of my favorite aspects of my work.

There are other means of connecting and bridging the many worlds I’ve moved through down here.  Ironically, it was a 2 hour conversation with a white, male community leader last night that brought me back around to my a) Lower Manhattan mostly immigrant SB owner stint and b) low-income, minority business development work around the Southeastern U.S.  Last night I heard from the co-chair of the Broadmoor Improvement Association about the community’s plan to rebuild.  Though I have worked with other CDCs here, I rarely experience the vitality and intimacy of working closely with community representatives who work to change what they live through on a daily basis - be it a sudden disaster like 9/11 or Katrina, or the chronic trauma of disinvested inner-city neighborhoods - like I used to in these other communities and as I did last night.  Either because they are recent transplants to NOLA, disconnected executives from national intermediaries, or New Orleanians who lack leadership and energy, most of the folks I’ve interacted with in other neighborhoods have lacked this all-consuming, personal fighting spirit that is so inspiring. 

On Friday, the other member of the M.A.S arrives for his third visit to one of our favorite stops on our emerging world tour (NYC and Boston being the 2 other destinations so far).  With this white man on Monday night I sat in a parked car in Mattapan (one of Boston’s black and reputedly roughest neighborhoods, along with Roxbury and parts of Dorchester), while we consulted a map to figure out how to get to a new restaurant in Dorchester.  Through my open window I looked around while he figured out where we were, and since I’ve been thinking about his practiced ease at moving through not only black communities but new and unfamiliar environments.  Like me, he appears to put down roots in each city that becomes his host for however long a period of time.  This, along with his ability to consume large quantities of alcohol, his appreciation for my Masshole roots, and his need to analyze everything, is one of the many shared aspects that led to our establishment of the Mutual Admiration Society over lunch at NOLA’s Marigny Brasserie back in January. (The M.A.S. currently is headquartered in Boston, MA.)

Now friends from this winter and spring in NOLA are leaving as the summer sets in, and a new group is arriving.  Just as in Dar, with the constant welcome and good bye parties, there is a never ending stream of people to get to know and drink with here.  And with each visit, New Orleans becomes a new node in a network of friends - old and new - and memories that stretches from Boston/NY/DC to the Gulf Coast and abroad. 

Well, it’s arrived.  Hurricane Season.  Kicks off today.  June 1, 2006.  (Also the anniversary of me moving into my condo, but that’s a celebration for another time. Wahoo!  Homeowner.) 

It’s been 3 weeks since I’ve been in NOLA, and awhile since I’ve posted anything here.  Had to finish the semester: papers to write, proms to attend, 35 yr old prom dates to admire, it’s been a busy - and fun - couple of weeks at home.

And now I’m back, for my longest stint down here since January.  Just under 3 weeks.  The few friends/colleagues I have here have left, it is just me and my messy, scattered roommate and the locals with whom I need to get reacquainted.  Finally post-disaster federal $$ is available, for housing repair/restoration or buy-outs**, and we have a mayor, and local neighborhood groups have been working over the last couple months to pull plans together for the redevelopment of their ‘hoods.  So in theory the ingredients are coming together to actually start to rebuild - beginning with clean-up in some places - this city. 

But for the folks who’ve returned to damaged neighborhoods with limited services available, few institutions open for places to go, and limited job opportunities other than your usual service sector dead end work - most being outside these ‘hoods and requiring cars to get to - there’s not a lot to do but hang out.  I live Uptown by Tulane - white, dry, populated - and work mostly downtown -  low-income black communities surrounding the FQ and at risk for gentrification - and most nights drive through parts of Central City to get home.  The ‘hoods I go through are moderately damaged and predominantly black.  I’ve been taking this route since February, and the population has visibly risen while the physical damage is mostly unchanged. Especially since I’ve been working in NOLA, I had started priding myself on my comfort at literally moving through black communities.  But last night, sitting in my car behind one stopped in front of me at dusk on Danneel St, and noticing how many men and some women were hanging out on stoops and corners, I felt the old insecurities of being a white woman alone in these urban neighborhoods.  I disappointedly realized that the demographics of the last few months have had a lot to do with my ease of roaming through these neighborhoods.

I’ve experienced directly the rage and frustration of residents here.  But the prospect of harm (to anyone) from the collective anger, exhaustion and trauma in a city with too few resources and too much time on its hands is far more unnerving than these isolated moments I’ve witnessed or felt.  My friend Rachel who is headed to Seattle after working here since December believes the city is backsliding.  More streetlights out, more broken water mains, more trash moldering on the streets.  The city smells as the trash bakes.  And anecdotally, and from prelim. stats, it seems crime is on the rise.  It is going to be a long, hot, tense, summer, as New Orleanians brace for storms of all kinds.  At least my fruitcake roommate is 6 foot 2. Even if I have to drag him out by his ankles from underneath his bed to protect me. 

 

** Given so many homeowners are displaced and were un- or under-insured, many will not have the ability to actually come back and resurrect their homes - the $$ will not bridge the gap, and they can’t or won’t come back at this point.  Like Hoover’s promises of “a chicken in every pot” during the Depression, I have heard this payout to folks who can’t make real use of it referred to as “an Escalade in every driveway.”