You would despise Old Man Couillon.
You don’t know him, but seriously. That guy.
He’s the idiot who speeds his flag-festooned pickup truck down flooded streets after the latest display of the Sewerage & Water Board’s staggeringly reliable ineptitude.
He’s the guy who sticks nasty, marginally literate notes under the windshield wiper of anyone who has the temerity to park on the public street in front of his house.
He leaves his crawfish boil detritus — the sucked heads, shucked tails and half-eaten corn cobs — uncovered at the curb for the whole neighborhood to appreciate.
He mows his lawn at ungodly hours.
In all objectivity, he is a jerk, a Chad, a raging jackwagon to his pustulent core.
Trust me. I should know.
Old Man Couillon is my next-door neighbor.
With all due respect to Mr. Rogers, he was wrong.
Certainly not with regard to everything, mind you. His cardigan game was rock solid, for starters, and his blue, low-rise sneakers remain to this day the chef’s kiss of nerdcore footwear.
That said, his unconditional affection for his neighbors was, in my estimation, a skosh overly generous.
That’s not intended as a slight to Mr. McFeeley, François Clemons, Chef Brockett or any of the other denizens of his decidedly utopian hood. All seemed to be splendid fellows.
But Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood – that toy, streetcar-like trolley notwithstanding – was clearly not a New Orleans neighborhood.
Had he hung his shingle in the Bywater, Mid-City or the Irish Channel instead of the Land of Make-Believe, his would have been a very different show.
Imagine a “Mr. Robért’s Neighborhood” in which, rather than visits from the aforementioned coterie, he received regular drop-ins from the likes of Valerie Sassyfrass, Big Freedia, Ignatius J. Reilly, Richard Simmons and the Special Man.
The result would have been less PBS and more “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” – which isn’t an altogether bad thing.
But.
New Orleans is a unique town filled with unique neighborhoods that seem to attract – or, who knows, maybe create – unique characters. As such, being a good neighbor in New Orleans isn’t like being a good neighbor elsewhere.
It takes a special patience and generosity of spirit. It takes faith in your fellow man. It takes a flask-half-full mentality.
Old Man Couillon clearly never got that message.
You’ve heard that saying about good fences making good neighbors?
It’s cute in its own subtly cynical way. It’s also absolute balderdash.
A fence, and a tall one, was my first hint that Couillon wasn’t a good neighbor upon his moving in next door.
Living here, one often hears poetic musings about the city’s front-stoop culture. It is a nice, romantic sentiment, and it is not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the front porch gets too much credit.
The backyard is where the action is – the crawfish boils, the beer fridge, the makeshift slip-and-slides – and where lasting friendships can be fostered over only slightly illegal mischief.
If you are lucky, you have a friendly neighbor – or two or three – with whom to share it.
Back when Old Man Couillon moved in, the fence separating our respective backyards was a short picket fence, which just might be the closest thing possible to fence perfection.
It was quaint. It was cute. It established a boundary but not at the cost of community.
It wasn’t good enough for Couillon.
When we first introduced ourselves to one another, we shook hands over that little fence. We exchanged all the usual pleasantries – where we went to school, opinions on the most generous Carnival krewes, our personal rankings of the players with the best names in New Orleans Saints history.
You know. The usual get-to-know-you drill here in Atlantis.
Honestly, aside from his coffee breath, I was hopeful. I thought I made a friend.
Instead, that unwashed homunculus gave me COVID.
Two weeks later, he built his fence.
This wasn’t just any fence, either. It was a border wall.
“It’s 8 feet,” he bragged, blissfully ignorant, as the last handful of planks were banged into place.
Then, he sealed the border, and with it my raging enmity.
I realize it could be worse.
I could, for example, have the misfortune of sharing a duplex with somebody like Old Man Couillon – which, speaking from experience, can be its own sort of residential hell.
When you have a single, paper-thin wall separating you and your neighbor, you can tell what they’re watching on TV, you can tell what they are cooking, you can tell what they are smoking.
It is almost as bad as being the first-floor tenant in one of those upstairs-downstairs duplexes. I’m not sure exactly what it’s like to live downstairs from the 610 Stompers, but, as a former downstairs resident, I have an inkling.
Worst of all would be living next door to someone who turns their home into a short-term rental. Nothing says “I have no soul” than inflicting overzealous tourists on one’s neighbors.
That said, Old Man Couillon and his fence became an obsession to me.
It brought out something primal. Something tribal. Old Man Couillon was my mortal enemy.
I fantasized about torching that damn fence. I considered disassembling the whole thing overnight and giving the lumber the ol’ Almonaster Avenue treatment. In my darkest hour, I actually Googled “termite pheromones.”
Rather than resorting to vandalism and illegal dumping, I decided to order a remote control compatible with Couillon’s widescreen TV, which I could see from my laundry room window. During key moments of Saints games – zap! – I would take aim and switch to Univision. He would switch it back. A few minutes later – zap! – back to “El Gordo y la Flaca.”
We would dance thusly every Sunday afternoon throughout football season.
I’m not proud of any of that. I’m honestly not sure who I had become.
But that fence! That fence! That feeeeeennnnnccceee!
You can tell a lot about a community by the way it reacts to crisis.
Here, in South Louisiana, disasters have a funny way of uniting us, of reminding us that we’re all in this – all of this – together.
The Cajun Navy was born out of Hurricane Katrina, for example. A post-storm burst of civic pride, born of the realization of what we had all almost lost, made the fleur-de-lis the local tattoo of choice. That same pride also democratized Carnival by sparking the formation of countless DIY marching clubs.
Recriminations and finger-pointing have their time and place, but if you’ve lived here long enough, you know the immediate response to tropical storms is to build bridges.
And, in the case of 2021’s Hurricane Ida, to knock down fences.
As it turns out, those seemingly endless winds from Ida caught ahold of Couillon’s stupid fence as if it were a sail, toppling it. The next morning, standing amid my limb-strewn backyard, I could hardly believe my good fortune.
Then, as I stood there basking in my entirely accidental triumph, I heard it: the gnashing scream of a chainsaw from the front yard.
Investigating, I found Couillon on my front lawn, cutting up a tree that had fallen across my driveway.
He looked up and silenced his saw.
“How’d you make out?” he asked.
I nodded. “You?”
“Same,” he said, then added: “Get some pants on. We’ve got work to do.”
We spent the day driving the neighborhood and removing fallen trees from streets, yards, driveways. His ridiculously oversized truck proved vital to the task, it turns out.
Naturally, we got to talking along the way.
Funny how that will teach you about somebody – talking with them.
I learned that Couillon almost lost his sister to a heart attack during a previous storm. That’s why I saw him speeding down a flooded street that time. He was flying to her and he was panicked, he said.
As for the notes on cars and the crawfish at the curb, he sheepishly owned up to curmudgeonly tendencies, apologized and promised to be a better neighbor.
We spent six and a half hours together that day. When we got home, he ran two extension cords from his generator to my house, so my family could power up the fridge and a fan.
“Let me know if you need anything else,” he said.
We shook hands. This time, it took.
It was, indeed, a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
That’s when a previously inconceivable thought occurred to me: Was my past fury and pouting warranted? Had I been the ungenerous, uncharitable, intolerant one? Was I the real reason behind our feud?
Was I the bad neighbor?
Old Man Couillon never rebuilt his fence. We talk a lot more now.
He still has his moments of eye-rolling imbecility. He’s still brash. He still has that stupid truck. I loathe his politics with every fiber of my being.
So we just don’t discuss politics. Beneath it all, he’s all right.
In fact, I think our cycles have synched. We cut our grass at the same time now.
I’m not sure I would consider Couillon a close friend. But he is a decent neighbor.
That said, I still know where to get termite pheromones, just in case.
