Leaving New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina

I am an ex-patriot. I left my city because I cannot stand the thought that it is broken - because if it is, then so am I. The news of Katrina, or "the storm," as we say, got to me while I was visiting my parents, up north. August 25, 2005. I immediately got in my car and drove into it because that's how it was between us, me and my city. That's loyalty. I drove until the water was too high and then I walked. I walked until the water was too high and then I swam. I swam until a wrinkled, old man, thin as a reed, picked me up in his two person shrimping boat. We got lost because water covered the tops of houses, street signs, and landmarks we took for granted - before. Nothing looked familiar. Nothing looked like nothing. The brown, craggy man, who wore a baseball cap that said in red letters, "Old Fart," turned to me with tears and resignation in his eyes and sighed, "Our New Orleans is gone. It's gone." I turned my face away from his, into the eerily silent, damp velvet air, knowing he was right.

That's the thing with us: we know each other. Who belongs here and who doesn't. I came by choice when I was twenty. I stayed because I found that anywhere but here felt like I was in prison, just counting down days to being free again. It's the soul of it; and I'm not talking about music. The decadent grace and regal ornamentation of antebellum homes dripping with cypress and ivy. The languid perfume of magnolias and night blooming jasmine wafting through the labyrinth of cobblestone. A collectively high tolerance for eccentricity and low one for malarkey. The oddities that only make sense here: jazz funeral parades and drive through bourbon stands. And time - it doesn't really exist. There are no seasons: there's hot and damn hot. Bars don't ever close; we take our drinks into the street from four to five in the morning, so they can tidy up. And then there was that young Creole kid I saw on every street corner, making me doubt if it was today or yesterday, or maybe even tomorrow. He played his battered trumpet and the rest of the world just fell away. He only played Otis Redding's, "I've Got Dreams to Remember," but I would always wonder what he would play next, no matter if it was yesterday or tomorrow. That kid had soul.

It was easy to tell who was an outsider because they don't know our language. A rue is a street and a sidewalk is a banquette. My gallery is their balcony and my balcony is their porch. My court is their yard and my home is their vacation. Tourists thought my city was a carnival caricature, a distraction of debauchery: Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, and nubile girls lifting up their shirts. Our secret is: we never told them they're wrong. We didn't want them to stay. I would sit at Envie coffee shop and watch, ringside on Rue Decatur. Their skin humming with cheap liquor sweat, clogging the streets, perusing for postcards and pralines. It wasn't their damp hairlines, unaccustomed to subtropics that gave them away - it was their clean shoes. A city built at sea level provides more dank puddles than a shoe could take. There is also a difference in how we walk the cobblestone. Tourists, unaccustomed to the unevenness, stumble like the first time a baby drag queen tries on his mother's church pumps. I do it with a go-cup of bourbon in my left hand, a smoke in my right, and five-inch platforms on my feet. And I don't walk; I saunter. As the Cajun old timers say, "What's the hurry there, baby? If you're going, you might as well look good as you get there." They had soul too.

There is a math term, outliers, and it applied to us: the ones who claimed this city, or perhaps this city claimed us. An outlier is extreme and unusual data that is discarded. That is who we were. We were the dreamers, the writers, and the artists. We were the anarchists, the saints, and the lovers. We did not blend well and we did not care to. We all know the location of Stanley and Blanche's house over on Elysian Fields because Tennessee Williams' told someone who told someone's cousin and then we all knew - but we're not telling. We went to Tip's to hear Alligator Charlie play the blues and he only has one hand so he knows what he's talking about; we went to The French Market for homemade Creole hot sauce, so fiery that it made us repent for sins that weren't even ours; and we went to Preservation Hall to be reminded that 3-4 rhythm jazz is the same as a heartbeat and that surely they were born of each other.

When I visit now, I see what isn't. The holes in the sky poked out by the absence of hundred-year-old oak trees. The wooden benches around Jackson Square are a few feet off from where they were - before. I used to sit on the one, closest to Pirates Alley, sit real tall, and watch the steamboat smoke playing tag with the Mississippi. The Shim Sham Club closed, but I always forget, and I walk through the Quarter to visit with friends who are also no longer. Nine of us danced burlesque at the Shim Sham and anywhere else in the world, that makes us whores. There, it made us legends. I even fell in love once, at the intersection of Independence and Desire. I blame the fat moon that was so full it was tipping over. Those streets are still there, but that boy's body is just one of hundreds that has never been found. I can only clearly see what was because what is - isn't what was. The soul is gone. I am an ex-patriot.