Hurricane Winds

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Hurricane season is a time of oft changing skies filled with enough war-cloud metaphor to inspire poets, Republicans and Southern Decadence screamers alike. We hunkered together behind our little floodwalls and waited for Tropical Storm Isidore. For lunch the day before landfall, I fried crab cakes, and served halved tomatoes filled with garlic, basil, Parmesan and a few drops of “Olive's Oil.”

Olive’s Oil was the nickname of a screamer I knew aboard the good ship Sugar Islander. I caught her at the Domino sugar docks, and rode her to Israel with a bottom full of grain. Topping off our holds in Beaumont, Texas, Olive’s Oil came screaming back to the ship with the news that Elvis Presley had died up in Memphis. “The World will never be the same again,” Olive’s Oil said.

L. A. Norma looked up from her crab cakes and asked, “She now a journalist?”

Before Norma arrived I boiled two pounds of shrimp bought late the day before for use in a sweet pea, basil, pepper, and garlic bisque (I never use salt, you likely would). The roux was dark and made with “Olive's Oil” and patience. It would have been good with New Orleans French bread and sweet butter, but we only had bagels and cream cheese.

After lunch, Norma took us to “Coffee, Friends and . . .” – the new coffee shop with the odd name at 2401 rue Burgundy. On our way home we stopped at Robért Fresh Market for supplies. This former Schwegmann’s Giant Supermarket, on Saint Claude and Elysian Fields, served Faubourg Marigny since the 1930’s, with prices fast fading into memory.

“Camel cigarettes, chocolate ice-cream, coffee and brioche,” Norma counted aloud placing her items on the counter. “That should do it. No, wait, batteries, too.” Earlier we had laid in a case of medicinal red in case the storm lasted longer than expected.

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The Sugar Islander crossed the Atlantic and sailed the length of the Mediterranean to the port of Haifa. We cleared Israeli customs on a clear blue afternoon. After dinner, Olive’s Oil and I took a walk along a stonewall on some forgotten Haifa street. On the wall was a poster for a Tel Aviv appearance by Elvis. A slender banner pasted over it read, “CANCELED.” A young couple from Boston heard our American accents, and advised against going on the other side of the wall. On the other side was the Palestinian section. We thanked them. They walked off, and we walked through the gate. It looked poor and quiet.

“It looks worse today,” an Israeli I met recently in the New Orleans Shopping Centre told me. He was agitated about Louisiana’s tax-refund for overseas tourists. The Israeli said he was staying at Faubourg Marigny’s Royal Street Courtyard and had taken the Vieux Carre bus to Lord & Taylor’s in search of a rumored discount center. He found it on the third floor where a sales clerk gave him a tax-refund certificate for even more savings. “I am delighted,” he said, “but not able to find where to cash it.”

I explained Louisiana operates a kiosk at Louis Armstrong Airport that does nothing but refund Louisiana taxes to foreign visitors. (This used to irritate me; giving back taxes the rest of us poor Louisianians would have to make up. But now, what the hell, we may as well give it back to the tourists since what we do collect we just give to the Saints, anyway.)

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From the front dormer at Squalor Heights, I can see and hear fire trucks and ambulances skittering along the streets below. In preparation for approaching storms, and at the first sign of cool weather citizens fall from ladders and set fire to their houses. It is a pathetic ritual. (After Hurricane Andrew skirted past, in 1992, I climbed three-riser library stairs to cut a fallen limb. When I stepped back to admire my work, I stepped off in air and broke my left foot.) We are a gathering in need of more help than simply medicinal red.

On television a few days before Isidore, Walter Maestri, Jefferson Parish Director of Emergency Management, told Channel Twelve/PBS’s NOW with Bill Moyers, “come a bad hurricane,” and we either leave town or die.

After the storm, in the bright light of my kitchen dormer, I started SOUL RESIN, a readable surrealistic novel by Faubourg Marigny resident and Xavier University assistant professor of English C. W. Cannon. “The smell of blood ...,” Cannon wrote on the first page. A smell that again passed us by.

But wait, here comes Lili up the same watery path!