What I miss most about New Orleans is leaving New Orleans.
Bear with me.
I have left New Orleans several times now. Curiously, all of the many times I have departed have been at one end or another of the long summer, the days already or still sweating in sullen protest of the city’s proximity to sea level, the equator and too many bodies of water. I have become exceedingly efficient at discriminating between essential and nonessential possessions and can now pack out of an apartment and into my Explorer in less than six hours. I have also left a swath of appreciative former roommates in possession of abandoned third-hand furniture.
In my travels to and from and through New Orleans, I have driven Interstate 10 to Santa Monica, Calif., and back again to Jacksonville, Fla., and bombed up Interstate 55 until I ran out of land. Perhaps it is only because those two highways are rather boring — especially the nearly 900 miles of I-10 that run through Texas — but to me, nothing has since compared to the first time I crested the Industrial Canal high rise and saw the Big Easy.
I’m a born Yankee. I came South as a young man with every ridiculous misconception one might expect a Yankee to bring, both about the South in general and New Orleans in particular. And some of them were correct — unfortunately, some generalizations are generally true. People (including my people, Yankees on vacation) flash and get drunk in New Orleans. But after the maybe five minutes during which I was preoccupied with trying to find naked ladies, I decided maybe there were some other things to look for, and I was overwhelmed by what I found.
I immediately realized that everyone around me was completely different from me. I spent my first year in New Orleans sarcastic or taciturn, too modest about my own adolescence to say much about it, preferring to crack wise with the people I met. When I hit my stride, it was working nights in a pizzeria, earning meager tips and drunken adulation (“You make the best pizza!”) and usually getting falling-down drunk with my coworkers after leaving work around sunup. I loved that second year so much that I stayed through the summer, not daring to waste the sodden husk of a season for fear that there might be some fun left to be had.
The third year was even better. I had either grown confident or cocky because women that I had no business dating suddenly took interest in me. I had a comfortable income and a stable living situation; I built friendships in some places and alliances in others. It was an existence I could never have conceived — not because of its magnificence, just my own lack of imagination as a youth.
But then it came time to leave again, this time for a job back north. In preparation for this departure I didn’t sleep for three days, instead bowling and tubing and drinking on balconies and paying one last visit to a surreal goddess of a woman who had the bad habit of entertaining my affections.
I spent the entire season of my contract in anticipation of getting back to New Orleans, getting back to abnormal — but mere days after I settled back into Louisiana I was back on the road, headed to Dallas to avoid a wretched tart named Katrina.
The night before the announcement of evacuation I was out to dinner with friends, some of whom were in relationships that would not survive that ghastly weekend, although all of us were fortunate enough to keep our lives. We ate ravioli and lasagna and drank wine and bourbon and laughed ourselves weepy; we were all delirious and goofy to be reunited from our various comings and goings.
I think that might be the beating, breaking heart of New Orleans — we eat, drink and are merry because tomorrow, a Category 5 hurricane may flood our homes, kill our neighbors and dispatch pieces of our city to far-flung corners of the country, many never to return.
The next night, when we knew we would have to leave, we drank again, bitter and subdued, into the morning hours when we ate one last Camellia Grill omelet, dropped some friends off at the airport and joined the westward-crawling melee.
We packed lightly. There was still room for hope.
That was what I had found in New Orleans. I had brought none with me when I arrived as a younger man –– no hope and no direction. Even in the gruesome crawl of standstill traffic, we hoped that this exodus was pointless. As we watched the news for the next week, we hoped that friends and loved ones survived and were high and dry. We knew that we were the lucky ones, and those of us who had faith — or rather, those of us who had any faith left — prayed for those less fortunate. And in the months to come, some of us dared to hope that we could somehow resurrect the city.
Of course, I know I don’t have to remind any of you of all that.
I was able to pay a visit to New Orleans in October while I was working with the American Red Cross in Slidell. I went to my house, mostly intact. I visited my old job — it was temporarily closed, but the bar next door was open. The bartender gave me and my companions shots and sat on the bar and drank with us, pistol in hand.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” I told him.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he replied.
Unlike me, he had never feared for the city’s future. He knew better. He wasn’t an outsider, a Yankee like I was.
And so people slowly returned. More businesses opened and began staying open later. Now we hope that New Orleans will again be a 24-hour city. We hope that the empty neighborhoods will again ring with human voices and vehicles instead of gunshots and silence. That our government will have better ideas than crime cameras. That the good people of our city will outnumber and outlive the bad — because there is still plenty of despair, plenty of evil.
The tan Humvees of the National Guard withdrew, and the grasses of Audubon Park, which had covered my knees that October as I stood deafened with silence, were again cut short and trampled beneath feet and paws.
I left again that summer, hoping to make more money up north while the summer slowed New Orleans back down. I left again the next summer, hoping that I could hold together a fragile, already-breaking relationship by following the woman west. Every time I left, the friends who came and left would demand one last audience, and we would tell each other the things that should have been said months previously. We would make a point of doing the things that we should have been doing all along — lounging by the river, eating beignets and mini tacos and more often than not getting a little tipsy, all the things that would make us laugh until it hurt or until someone realized how late it was.
And that’s what I miss about New Orleans. That’s why I love leaving. In that last week, when I’ve quit whatever job I’m working but haven’t started packing yet, I get to drive and walk and lounge around, count balconies and horse-head anchors and water meters. I can catch up on missed bike rides, leaving the city for a few dozen miles, zipping out to the 310 bridge and returning sunburned and covered in flies. When it’s actually time to leave — well, that’s the hard part.
The last time I left, I was hoping to start over, hoping that I could find the destination of the direction I’d chosen. I didn’t like leaving this time around because I didn’t know when I would come back. Now I hope that my wheels turn back south someday soon and that the crazy music that narrated my dreams when I lived in that horrifically beautiful city does not fall silent before I make it back.
Alex Gecan is a Tulane graduate and a former intern of Renaissance Publishing. He currently lives in New Jersey, where he is working at the Trentonian.
