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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | October 3, 2023 | 14 minutes (4,055 words)

In 2014, the National Rail Passenger Corporation, best known as Amtrak, pulled off one of the epic marketing coups of U.S. railroad history—granted, there haven’t been many of late—when they announced the Amtrak Residency for Writers, where they would send 24 writers on cross-country trips, meals and beds gratis, to write the Great American Novel. The announcement of this perfect marriage of two beloved dinosaurs—trains and publishing!—set Twitter aflame, like hearing Panasonic and Oldsmobile had teamed up to launch a new line of gas-powered fax machines. 

Around the same time, evil scientist Elon Musk announced his plan for the Hyperloop, a high-speed transport system where humans would be jammed into cans like Vienna sausages and shipped across the nation via pneumatic mail; meanwhile, Astronerd Jeff Bezos and his Amazonian Savings Monster continued to strip-mine the foundations of the literary ecosystem. So this little PR stunt by Amtrak, the desktop PC of the global travel industry, a national embarrassment to hide from your European friends, smelled of quiet revolution. Together, trains and writers would lay siege to the behemoth of late-stage capitalism. 

Attention was paid. MacDowell, the celebrated New Hampshire residency, receives 4,000 applications a year. Amtrak received 16,000, including mine. Having just landed my first book deal, I was in urgent need of somewhere quiet to finish the manuscript, and when I think “quiet,” I think “trains.”

I knew just which one I wanted to ride. I was born hardly a mile from Central Station in Memphis, Tennessee, midpoint for that fabled locomotive of song, Amtrak’s City of New Orleans. As a boy, this train called me awake at my grandmother’s house in Greenwood, Mississippi, its sonorous horn summoning me to a day of biscuits and books. As a young man, the same train clattered over a derelict coffee house in Jackson, Mississippi, where I loafed on allergenic chesterfields and first dreamed my name onto a title page. As a grad student in Illinois, attempting to finish at least one story that would not induce suicidal ideation, I watched the City of New Orleans roll past the windows of another coffee shop, slow and steady. How perfect to ride this train while actually finishing a manuscript. I applied with gusto.

But alas, Amtrak did not pick me, and I was forced to finish that book at a residency in the Hamptons, like a peasant. Two years later, I applied once again, but the Amtrak Residency for Writers, that hope of insolvent rail barons and writers everywhere, had already disappeared without a trace. Subsequent books I wrote in my driveway in Savannah, Georgia, tortured by the sound of other Amtrak trains—the Silver Star or the Palmetto—while the City of New Orleans was out there somewhere, heaving its way through natal lands.

And so, earlier this year, with the idea for a TV pilot rattling through my brain, I decided it was time, finally, to ride the train that ran through the landscape of my young imagination. As an American author whose books command upwards of $3.09 on eBay, I could fund my own residency.

“Where will you sleep?” my wife asked when I announced this plan. 

“I have no idea.”

“Will you poop on the train?” she asked, troubled at the thought.

“I assume so, in the designated areas.”

“It doesn’t seem safe.” 

I’ve wandered solo across three continents, from Cannes to Kowloon, but maybe she was right. When I travel solo, I can lose my grip a little—neglecting hygiene and ordering Caesar salads nonstop. Generally spiraling. So I texted Mark, my oldest friend.

Mark and I met in ninth grade in Star, Mississippi, and have been best friends now for nearly 35 years, though we’re opposites in almost every way. I come from a tortured nuclear family of farm chores and football, while Mark was a peripatetic child of divorce, shipped from Mississippi to California and back again, an underage drinker lost in books and skipping school. I once discovered in his bedroom a waterlogged library copy of Plutarch’s Lives, three years overdue.

“You should return this,” I said.

“What are they going to do, arrest me?” he said.

His insouciance toward authority shocked my young soul. Senior year, I broke into the guidance counselor’s office and forged his school records, just so he could graduate. 

“Thanks, I guess,” he said. He had the highest IQ in school.

After graduation, I took the academic track across six different states, covering my steamer trunk in diplomas and achievement, while Mark lit out for the horizon on the City of Neverland to guide raft trips, work in secluded mountain resorts, and play his guitar up and down river gorges for women who couldn’t easily run away, due to the gorges. 

I wanted to write stories. Mark wanted to live them. I’ve never stopped seeking achievement and he’s never stopped seeking places to go, the Peter Pan to my Wendy. He even married a flight attendant, mostly for love, but also for the free plane tickets that allow him to join me for book festivals, readings, talks, and conferences across the nation. If I’ve got a king mattress booked, paid for by someone else, Mark’s there. He flies standby and always shows.

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Normally when we travel, I spend much of my free time back in the room, writing, while Mark wanders the city. A few years ago, though, I began to notice that whenever I got stuck on a story, Mark always had the answer, a suggestion that broke the block and carried me through. He had become a kind of muse, a talisman. I write better when he’s around, so much so that we’ve even collaborated on a script or two over the years, with Mark shouting ideas from a jacuzzi while I type. Maybe we could write something together on this train.

“Congratulations,” I texted Mark. “You’ve just been selected for the Amtrak Residency for Writers. Also, you owe me $350.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a train,” he said.

“It’ll be an adventure.”

“What’s the food like?” 

The only thing Mark loves more than a trip is cheap, delicious grub—hamburgers most of all—and his grail is the burger at Port of Call, a tiny Polynesian-themed food chuck wagon on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans. Mark’s a wayfaring evangelist in the Church of Saturated Fat, confronting heterodox servers about the origins of their meat and fearlessly contesting Yelp reviews that reek of heresy (“Best burger in town my ass!”). To paraphrase a meme making the rounds: the energy Taylor Swift fans have for her music, Mark has for Hebrew National chili dogs. 

“We can start with pizza in Chicago and end with a burger in New Orleans,” I said.

“Can we bring our own food?”

“This is Amtrak. We can probably bring our own livestock.”

A month later, in June, we stand in the breezy colonnade of Chicago’s Union Station, a neoclassical block of limestone that makes most train stations look like a garden shed. 

“This place is amazing,” I say, fondling a frigid column for inspiration.

“It’s so cold,” Mark says.

The most interesting part of this particular summer’s day in Chicago is that it’s actually winter. I fully expect to see narwhals nosing bergs in the river below us. We’re warmed only by the two Giordano’s pizzas we now carry, so heavy that they, too, seem fashioned of limestone. We picked them up minutes ago, along with six packs of smokes, two bottles of wine, assorted chip selections, candy, gum, and a case of beer for hydration. 

Mark is almost 50 and I’m not far behind, but that’s the thing about traveling with old friends. You become young idiots again. Soon, we duck inside and behold Union Station’s palatial interior, two middle-aged Pinocchios inside a Gilded Age whale, and make our way to the Metropolitan Lounge, where Mark raids the complimentary snacks, adding Sun Chips and Sprites to our growing pile of foodstuffs. 

“A writer cannot have too many powdered donuts,” he says, handing me a sleeve.

When the call comes, we heave our provisions into a rumbling underground cavern, where the City of New Orleans awaits us. Up close, she’s a mammoth prehistoric beast with a head nearly two stories high. We breathe in the heady fumes. Around the world, 75% of rail transport is sustainably electrified, but here on Amtrak, we burn old dinosaur bones. The fragrance of discovery! Diesel vapors loosen the circuits in my brain, preparing my mind for miles of collaborative writing and toxic hallucination. 

“Remind me, what are we going to write?” Mark asks.

“I have a hundred bad pilot ideas,” I say. “We’ll get settled and hash it out.”

“I believe in you,” he says, though I can see he’s talking to the pizza.

A woman in a fun conductor’s cap studies our tickets and with a jerk of the neck sends us aboard the sleeper, whereupon we discover a hobbit-sized vault called a “roomette,” where we, two full-sized creatures of the race of men, will have to eat, sleep, write, and breathe in fraternal disharmony for a thousand miles. I fall forward into my seat as Mark falls into his, for there is nowhere else to fall. Our kneecaps greet one another with a holy kiss and soon we creep backward into Chicago dusk. The seats may seem small, but on Delta, they’d be business class.

“So, the TV show,” I say, but I’m interrupted by Ricky, our car captain. 

“Dinner time!” says Ricky, handing us two menus.

“We have pizza,” I say.

“I’ll have the braised ribs in a cabernet reduction,” says Mark.

I cave, opting for the Thai red curry with “plant-based meatballs.”

While waiting for dinner to arrive, we have dinner. The pizzas defy Mark’s highest expectations. We crack open beers and make merry. Ricky soon returns with two additional beers and a pair of brown paper tote bags, marked “Beef” and “Vegan.” Mark winces through his salty entrée, while my plant-based meatballs taste like neither meat nor plants, but a secret third flavor profile you simply cannot find on faster, better trains.

“Okay, the script,” Mark says, as we scoot silently through the heartland. I begin to conjure possible scenes when Ricky interrupts again to announce that breakfast is at six.

“Would you like to eat here or take your meal upstairs?”

“The dining car will be fine,” Mark says, like a monocled tycoon. He cracks another cold one and I pour a cup of pinot. I would like to write, but the blood required in my brain is rerouted to my core to deal with my plant-based decisions.

“Let’s explore,” Mark says, and I agree, hoping that movement will aid digestion.

We climb up the narrow stairs to make our way aft. The gangway is steely and bright, very Death Star, with knobs and fat buttons that open the doors with a deep rattling swish. 

In the dining car, we discover an elongated series of Waffle House booths and I make a note for us to return here with my laptop. Moving on to coach, dimmed now, we see a Grizzly Adams type, big as a Kodiak, snoring through his beard, dreaming of pelts. Through the windows, the landscape now gone dark, I see that we’re passing some small prairie village. We stroll through more cars, quiet fathers and sleeping sons in Cubs apparel, a klatch of women in hijabs. The snack bar car features a concession stand serving hot dogs and nachos. Mark wants a wiener, I can tell, though I’m not sure where in his body he plans to put it.

Back in our room, we’re sleepy. Together we attempt to transform the roomette into a pair of bunk beds, but the gallons of beer and wine we’ve poured into our livers have made such large puzzles difficult. Eventually, Mark claims the top bunk and climbs up. 

“We’ve got all day tomorrow to write,” I say. “The morning is better anyway.” 

“Let’s do it.”

Mark is always a let’s-do-it kind of friend, but it’s possible he was not listening, because I can now hear him snoring. Generally, though, I could propose we paddle a tandem kayak to Bora Bora and he’d consider it. His Neverland lifestyle is highly flex. He now sells life insurance over the phone, a remote job he can hate from anywhere.

As he sleeps, I find a notebook and prepare for the thrill of night writing as we juke through the fruited plains. Around two in the morning, my pen lost in the endless crevices of the world’s tiniest escape room, I awaken. We are stopped. 

“What the hell?” Mark moans, above.

“Carbondale,” I say.

We step barefoot out onto the moonlit trackside pavement of this village where I once composed many plays, now mercifully decomposing in nearby landfills. In the dark, Amtrak employees wait patiently for the few stirring passengers to finish inhaling the heavier night air. The South creeps up on you. Home’s getting closer. The idling staff seem somehow both familiar and strange. Large people mostly, tall and rotund, not at all like the fastidious attendants of British Airways. This lot seems capable of throwing human bodies off the train. 

Soon, we are back in our berth and dead to the world. At dawn, the train eases us awake as we hum through hills and trees that crowd closer, set to a yellowy fire by a low Southern sun. My notebook remains empty.

“Man, this is beautiful,” I say.

“What’s beautiful?” says Mark, above.

“The landscape.”

“I see nothing but a wall. I’m trapped.”

Central Station in Memphis, an instrument in delivering our nation’s musical genetic code from the Deep South to the world, has now, more than 100 years after its construction, petered out to a single track. But when you stand on the lonely platform at seven on a clear summer’s morn and look over the city, you can see why some bluesmen said to hell with everywhere else and stayed. I was born here, lived here for many years, and have never seen Memphis so pretty.

“Say, can you boys watch the door for me?” says car captain Ricky.

“What’d he say?” says Mark.

“He deputized us. Guard the door.”

Mark and I ensure no tramps hop aboard (yet another charm of the rails), and soon we are moving again. The next four hours we’ll chug through the Mississippi Delta. To prepare for a solid stretch of writing through this flat-earther’s paradise of swamps and soybeans, I gather a change of clothes and step gingerly to the bathing closet to revive my tired body. In seconds, I am covered in a rich lather and warmish water coughs its way onto my flesh as I’m lovingly thrown from wall to wall with each new curve. Refreshed, I return to find Mark eating the last gelid slice of Giordano’s as curly-headed Hereford cattle rocket sideways past the window, followed by an announcement encouraging passengers to flush.

“That reminds me. We should eat,” says Mark.

“We need to write.”

“Definitely.”

In the dining car, a server in Amtrak uniform—with the slight costume addition of an apron—takes our order, quickly presenting us with an omelet and pancakes that taste of motor oil, along with meat-based meat in both link and patty form. We don’t finish the food but appreciate the speed and friendliness with which it was presented. But the real luxury here is what we see through the windows: Swamp. Farm. Weeds. Cotton. Cow. Meth addict. Miles disappear, and so does our motivation. This view’s too good not to sit and stare, the way campfires make you do. Something about the endless movement invites easy contemplation.

“Greenwood! Greenwood!” comes the announcement an hour later. Porters run through cars like captains of the 82nd Airborne, rousing the paratroopers. 

“Next stop, Greenwood!” 

We disembark briefly to see the town where I first heard the siren call of this old train.

“This is a very historic place?” a blonde giant asks.

“Yes.”

He studies the sad little station, looking around for something to photograph, an old courthouse or one of bluesman Robert Johnson’s dozens of possible graves. We can see nothing from here but a ramshackle depot that looks like it hasn’t seen a train since Bob Dylan sang freedom songs at the voter push in ’63.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Norway,” he says. “Where is your home?”

“Here, sort of,” I say. “My grandmother’s buried past those trees.”

The Norwegian Goliath looks past the trees, disappointed. Not even he can see that far.

Back aboard, we move to the observation car—a long-windowed box optimized for viewing the bountiful emptiness all around us—where a shindig has broken out. We’ve picked up many new travelers, ready to party in their Saints jerseys, cowboy hats, and shiny boots fashioned from the hides of slithering swamp creatures. Not much quietude for writing, but plenty of action for research. I count at least three Bluetooth speakers playing music at a full crackling roar—musica ranchera and Bobby Caldwell and Tina Turner. I see cans of beer, purple sacks of Crown Royal, and a woman with nails long enough to get her cast in the Wolverine franchise watching a cattle auction on her phone while eating Corn Nuts. 

“I didn’t know they still made Corn Nuts,” says Mark. 

“How many stomachs do you have?”

“I’m a complicated man.”

We haul out what’s left of our warm beer and pound a few in good fun. A multiethnic church group in matching T-shirts enters the car to pass out free candy and speak blessings upon us all. 

An hour or so later, just past Yazoo City—where I was married—we climb up Loess Bluff and into deep, dark, dripping woods, where, with a great juddering jolt, the party train stops. Fallen power lines sizzle across the track up ahead, we’re told, as well as a few large trees for good measure. 

“Could be an hour or two,” the engineer explains over the P.A. “Get comfortable.”

The passengers opt instead to mutiny. 

“What the hell?”

“Where we at?”

“A reminder to flush the toilets!” comes a second aggrieved announcement.

“Y’all better be flushing them toilets!” says a passenger to everyone in the car.

The delay affords precious stolen hours to write, and we scoot forward to the hushed Waffle House car—empty—where I pull out my laptop and portable charger. Mark ducks out and returns with a cartoonish hot dog large enough to require its own ticket, setting to work on the massive link with knife and fork. 

“How do you not weigh five hundred pounds?”

“This dog’s no good,” he says, finishing it.

Maddening silence descends. For all the green around us, we could be awaiting bandits in a Panamanian jungle. Minutes go by. Mark eats the last of the powdered donuts wistfully. He is out of food and I am out of inspiration, which has rattled on down the tracks without us. We sit in silence inside this hulking old beast, hardly a murmur from man or machine. I return to my screen, wondering at the emptiness before me. How many hours, how many lifetimes, have I sat across a booth from this strange and beautiful man in faraway places—from the frigid glacial shores of Wyoming’s Colter Bay to the briny paradise of South Beach—and tried to write? I’ll never stop trying to fill my days with words. I will die at a table like this, the cursor waiting for a new thought that will never come. I long for Mark’s ability just to sit with food and moan gratefully. 

“I’ve got nothing,” I say, closing my computer. 

“That’s cool, whatever,” he says.

I pull out the last bottle of red and, after fetching two coffee cups from the galley, pour us a drink. Writers need time, and Amtrak, it would appear, has all the time in the world. But maybe they ended the residency program for the same reasons Mark and I have written nothing on this train: There’s just too much else to do and see. America changing shape before your eyes. 

“I love you, dork,” I say, the wine turning me watery-eyed. I’m spiraling.

“I love you, too,” he says.

We unload feelings on each other, the way near-drunk men will, grateful, meaning every wincing word. I talk of my darker days, which he and others brightened with love and care. He shares much of the same. What a gift, to have someone who knows everything about you and loves you anyway. I have so many people in my life demanding things from me: pages, rewrites, interviews, blurbs, money, mowed lawns, answers, food, water.

Mark is one of the few who requires only my presence—and my occasional thoughts about food. If he’s taught me anything, it’s that doing nothing, asking nothing, expecting nothing, is a precious skill to be mastered in a life well lived. Sometimes you have to do, but sometimes you can stop and just be, like this man. Like the City of New Orleans.

We lurch forward two hours later, the bottle empty, along with Mark’s four stomachs and the Microsoft Word document. We soon roll through Jackson and then plummet through the Piney Woods that stretch from here to the Gulf. The party car is quieter now, everyone dozing away their liquor. It begins to rain. We amble toward coach. I choose my place of rest among the many open seats as we lumber toward the Gulf. It’s been slow going, but that’s the point of Amtrak.

Planes always put me in a bad mood. They herd you like slaughterhouse fodder, compel you to undress among strangers, pat your crotch with gloved hands, gouge you for a club sandwich, shame you for bringing luggage, park you on overheated runways, dare you to hate your fellow man. Humanity is stolen in exchange for speed. Sure, you get there quicker. But who are you when you arrive? 

We could’ve flown from Chicago to New Orleans in a remarkable 144 minutes. Mark and I will have managed the same journey in a little under 24 hours, counting delays, but you know what? Nobody yelled at me for bringing my own water. And while the roomette was indeed small, I was allowed to walk freely about the length of this wondrous machine and escape every so often to breathe in new air from some new town, while discussing my grandmother’s burial place with a Viking. They even let us bring a case of beer and three bottles of wine. Try that on United.

They say we’re on the “cusp of a passenger rail revolution,” thanks to a new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes “an unprecedented $170 billion for improving railroads,” which I can only assume includes meat-based meatballs and improved wieners, in addition to speed and convenience, though maybe we’ve got enough of both already. Maybe we need to slow the hell down.

I awaken from a nap to one of the dreamiest visions I have ever seen out a window: an ocean planet beyond the glass, placid water stretching as far as the eye can see, gray and wet as the sky—the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the longest bridge in the world. New Orleans materializes across the expanse, high-rises pushing up out of the water. Sublime is the word. Alien, though I’ve seen this inland sea a thousand times. 

We slide quietly through estuary marsh and into the heart of downtown under the brutalist concrete arcs of I-10 and come, finally, to the station. The clouds break and the sun shines down hot as we step down off the train into the city that gave her its name. 

A rotund man follows us down, and, tangled in his many bags, tumbles and somersaults onto the platform to great laughter and applause, hopping upright and with a fat smile declaring, “I feel blessed!”

“Port of call,” Mark says. 

“I could eat,” I say.

We didn’t write a word, but I don’t mind. I’ve achieved enough for now. Mark and I have done something far more important on this old train: nothing. It was lovely.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin

I roll my hips like the Mississippi, joints loose and easy, feeling light and free. I cannot remember the last time I felt this way. That makes me sad. I accept this insight and let it go as quickly as it comes. I am here in my body right now, and I am dancing like a bad bitch. The beat drops into a smooth bassline as I sweat the grief out. I dance for my grandmother. I dance for the elders in the synagogue. I dance for Ntozake. I dance for all the Black women I know dying from cancer and strokes and stress and sadness. I dance and dance and dance and laugh and celebrate and feel my aliveness.

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William Torrey| Longreads | October 2021 | 30 minutes (9,100 words)

I: My Protector

Our brotherhood begins with me in a blindfold, one that’s been on for what feels like forever. I’m 18 and pledging a fraternity, and to be a pledge, I’ve learned, means you’re a constant disappointment. You have not properly mopped the bathroom after chapter dinner. You have not properly memorized the Greek alphabet. You have not attracted sufficient pussy to the Gameday tailgate. 

On this night, a hot one in late September, we’ve been summoned to the house for a meeting, one that at first seems promising, in that it involves Natural Light, but soon enough begins to get weird. The Actives line us up and tie rags around our faces, then shove us into rooms with music blaring. “NONE OF Y’ALL BITCHES SAY A MOTHERFUCKING WORD!” someone with beer breath shouts at my face. Then he slams the door so hard I’m sure it’s broken. We sit and wait for God knows what. 

In time — Twenty minutes? An hour? — they lead us out back, where we’re stripped of cigarettes, cell phones, watches, and wallets. A very drunk Active screams that we are, in essence, complete losers, unworthy, a bunch of faggot-ass pieces of shit who ought to be thrown into the Mississippi River. “That’s a great idea!” another Active yells, and before I know it, I’m in a car, still blindfolded, lying in the backseat, “so the cops don’t see,” and we’re zooming to the levee. “Torrey?” someone keeps asking. “Does your bitch ass know how to swim?” My heart pounds so hard I worry I’ll faint. I’ve been in college a month now, and until this moment, I’d fooled myself into believing fraternities weren’t that tough. But now I’m facing danger. I’ll be sodomized with a broomstick or forced to eat shit. I’ll sink to the bottom of the Mighty Mississippi. I picture my mom, asleep in Texas, getting the call in the deep dark night: Pick up your boy at the Baton Rouge morgue. 

The car stops and they line us up again, somewhere that could be anywhere but sure seems like the levee. The whirr of cicada song, the stink of refineries. Wet grass sogging our Sperrys. More yelling. Who’ll go in first? Who’ll sink and who’ll swim? I shift my weight, try not to shake. 

“Repeat after me!” a drunk Active calls. “I love my big brother!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s better than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s gotta bigger dick than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother can fuck my date!” (We repeat.) It goes on like this, this litany, the fear inside me cooling to confusion and finally relief.

Then off comes the blindfold, and he’s there, beaming at me in the shadows by the river, my big brother: Mike from Chalmette. I blink as he hugs me. Pressed tight there against his chest, I am, for the first time in hours, not afraid. I am cared for. I am safe.  

“Come on, baby bro,” he grins, “let’s get fucked up!” 

*** 

Hours later, after we’ve won a game called Beer-a-Minute, Mike somehow drives us back to campus. Sitting in his old green Chevy, watching the first bands of dawn push through the black, he tells me he could’ve had any pledge as his little brother, but the only one he wanted was me. 

“There’s just something about you.” 

“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling special.

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “But I do know we’re gonna be more than just fraternity brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be real brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be great friends.” 

“Okay,” I say, and that’s what happens.

***

In many ways, we are brothers. “Fraternal twins,” we joke, separated by a state line and precisely 13 months. We’re both silly and sensitive dreamers. The kind of guys who can’t help but push the bit, who once they’re going, can’t stop until everyone’s doubled over. The kind of guys who egg each other on until they can’t even breathe. Whenever we run into somebody Mike knows but I don’t — at Reggie’s in Tigerland, smoking Camels in the LSU quad — he never fails to introduce me as his real little brother, and more often than not, never mind that we look nothing alike — he’s short and tubby; I’m tall with a sharp-lined face — people believe him. He’s that charming.    

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And then there’s where we’re from. I grew up in a fancy San Antonio neighborhood called Alamo Heights, where everybody’s dad is in oil and gas and lots of moms live in yoga pants. My grandfather was the president of a bank, and my dad, who divorced my mom when I was 2, is a lawyer. My mom and I weren’t rich, at least not compared to the kids in my grade who got BMWs at 16, but I drive a new Mitsubishi, and college is covered.

Ask Mike where he’s from, and he’ll tell you, New Orleans. But that’s not true; Mike is from Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish — a place just east of the Industrial Canal that real New Orleanians call “Da Parish.” Early on in college, I get that Da Parish isn’t exactly the place you want to be from. These are your blue collars, your Y’ats, people who say axe instead of ask. My fraternity brothers from well-to-do families on the North Shore and Lafayette give Mike constant shit about it, but he takes it in stride. Chalmatians, as they’re called, are used to such jokes.

I like to think I always knew Mike was coming from less than me, but in truth, it wasn’t a subject I gave much thought. Back then we were just two guys eating frat house jambalaya, drinking cheap beer and Ten High. His cash came from waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant off I-10; while mine showed up like magic in a bank account set up by my dad. And anyway Mike never said much about Chalmette. I knew only that he was the first in his family to go to college. His dad’s some kind of mechanic and his mom’s some kind of secretary, and his little sister, who’s my age and not going to college, is expecting a baby. During freshman year winter break, just a few months into our friendship, Mike drove 500 miles to visit me in San Antonio, but it took a whole other year before I saw where he grew up, never mind that it was an hour from campus. In those days, it never occurred to me that maybe Mike didn’t want me to see where he was from, that maybe he was hiding something. But even if he was, and even if he’d told me so, I wouldn’t have understood. Of course, in those days I didn’t understand anything. 

 II: Bourbon Street Knockout

Every Mardi Gras, our fraternity fills a U-Haul with busted couches and kegs and claims a spot beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway. For days we sit in the false dark and watch parades and drink and drink and drink. Sometime on the Monday before Fat Tuesday, both of us blind with hangovers, Mike tells me he’s got to go by his parents’, and if I ride with him, I’ll get a free meal, a shower, and a clean bathroom. I’m caked in street mud and very tired of holding my breath in the St. Charles port-a-potties, so I hop in his truck without thinking. I didn’t know New Orleans well then, but as we whizzed past the Superdome and the city seemed to vanish, I knew we weren’t headed Uptown where our other friends lived.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Chalmette.”

I roll my eyes and think, Da Parish.

“Well, how far’s that?” 

He shrugs again. “Fifteen minutes.”

The little house on Rose Street is just that: little. It seems too small for Mike, let alone for Mike, his mom and dad, his sister, and her new baby. His mom greets us from the cramped front porch. She’s got a tattoo and wears a Rolling Stones shirt that’s been washed a thousand times. All I can think is how young she seems.

In my memory, we don’t stay long. There’s tension, the source of which I don’t get, and everything starts to feel rushed. We don’t eat. I don’t see his dad or sister. Mike gets what he needs, we shower and go. 

“How old are your parents?” I ask.

We’re crossing the bridge back to Orleans Parish. Mike tells me.

“Jesus,” I say, “so your dad was like … 16 when you were born?”

“Yep.” He stares straight ahead. “How old was yours?”

“I don’t know, man, like 38.” A year older than Mike’s dad is now. 

***

That night, sipping a Bourbon Street Knockout in a camp chair under the overpass, my mind won’t stop spinning. How is that where Mike grew up? How was that his mom? How did she have babies in high school? How could our lives be so … different? Da Parish, I think, what had I expected? I brood there until I’m pass-out drunk, waking with a start when my cigarette burns me. 

Days later, I call my mom and tell her about Mike’s. She listens while I ramble on about the tiny house in the neighborhood filled with other tiny houses, about his mom’s tattoo, the old shirt, but after a few minutes, she breaks in. 

“Honey, don’t you get it? 

“Get what?”

“Mike,” she says, “he’s poor.”

“Oh,” I say. 

My eyes go wide. I see it now. She’s just ripped off the blindfold. 

“Well, I don’t know …” I trail off.

I knew it already — I had to — but couldn’t or wouldn’t accept it. Mike was from a place where poor people lived, and yet he wasn’t poor. Not my big brother. Was he leery that day, to show me his house? Was his mom flustered to host me? Will whose dad’s a lawyer? Will in his short shorts and his Brooks Brothers shirt? 

“Now don’t get me wrong,” my mom breaks in, “Mike’s got a heart of gold. It doesn’t matter.” 

“Right.” I snap out of it. “Of course. It makes no difference.”

“Right.” 

Six months later a storm hits, and I see that it does.

III: A State of Emergency

Katrina won’t stop changing her mind. She’s coming right at us, then she’s not, then she’s bouncing back from Florida, en route to kill us all. In my two years in Louisiana, every hurricane that was ever supposed to destroy New Orleans has petered out into a thunderstorm, and I’m sure this one will do the same. But not Mike. Mike is freaking out. 

The morning before landfall, he gets me up early to help him raid the fraternity’s ice machine. I’m annoyed. Fifteen minutes ago, I was in bed with a naked Theta. Now I’m hungover and sweating while we lug a huge cooler. 

“Why are we even doing this? Even if the storm hits New Orleans, won’t we be fine in Baton Rouge?”

Mike says we might lose power, then he tells me his parents have to come to stay with us.

“In our apartment? Can’t they just get a hotel?”

As soon as I ask this, Mike gives me The Look. It’s the one he uses when I brag about backpacking Europe. Or when my dad, out of nowhere, mails me an envelope containing not one, not three, but five hundred dollar bills. Or when I pressure him into giving up his Friday double so he can get smashed with me and be my protector. It’s a look thick with envy and contempt, one that asks the big question without saying a word: Why does your life get to be so easy?    

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I backtrack. “I just meant, like, wouldn’t they be more comfortable?”

“It’s a mandatory evacuation,” Mike tells me. “There won’t be a hotel from Baton Rouge to Houston.” What he doesn’t tell me: Even if there was, his parents couldn’t afford it.

*** 

Late that night, Mike and I drink Bud Selects in the bed of his Chevy. Upstairs, in the apartment, his parents sleep in his bed. The storm’s just hours away. The sky above us: a grey-black swirl. 

“This is gonna be fucked,” Mike says.

“I still think it’ll be okay.” 

This is the lie I’ve told myself all afternoon, one born of a nagging question: If the storm does destroy Mike’s parents’ house, will they move in with us permanently? And, if so, how might this impact my liquor, cigarette, and TV intake? After showing up this morning in a tiny black Civic, Mike’s mom spent the entire day cleaning our shithole apartment. His dad, after arriving in a truck packed to the hilt, immediately went out and bought a generator and has otherwise barely spoken. Mike’s parents are quiet generally, but when I’m around they’re practically silent. I don’t see then what’s so plain to me now: On top of worrying they might lose everything, they don’t want to be in my hair.

“I mean, it could still turn and hit Texas,” I say, lighting a Camel. 

“No,” Mike says. “It’s coming right at us. This whole thing’s just gonna be…”

“…Fucked?” 

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

***

And he’s right. 

The next morning, I wake to find Mike and his parents in front of the TV. The national news is on — Special Report — and they’ve been watching for hours. Apparently, while I snoozed like a beer-drunk baby, one of the worst hurricanes in history made landfall and destroyed the Gulf Coast. The Mr. GO canal has flooded Lake Pontchartrain; the wind has shoved the water onto land. Much of New Orleans is underwater. Canals and levees continue to breach. We are, I learn, in a State of Emergency. 

Not knowing really what any of this means, I ask what they’ve heard about their house. Mike stares empty-eyed and mutters something that sounds like OK.

“It’s OK!?!?” I ask.

“No.” Mike sighs. “It’s underwater.” 

I’m standing in our apartment. The power’s on. Outside it’s barely raining. 

“Underwater?” 

The little house on Rose Street. Chalmette high. His dad’s shop. Da Parish. Thirteen feet.  

“Underwater,” Mike says again, the word already too familiar on his lips. 

***

As the day drags on and the big ugly picture gets bigger and uglier, I start to feel strange. On the one hand, I’m thankful I’ve escaped disaster. A devastating storm has struck within an hour of where I live, but I’m totally fine. On the other hand, I can’t help but notice my being totally fine is all I can think of. I’m surrounded by people who are newly homeless, people who happen to be my best friend’s parents, a man and a woman who cleaned my house and bought me groceries, and a generator we never had to use. I’m staring into the face of human suffering, yet all I can think of is me. 

Not that they’re complaining, these refugees. Life’s hard, but they can take it. That tired old phrase: It is what it is. I don’t like to imagine how I’d react, at 20, to the news I’d lost all my earthly possessions. The tantrum. My God. Even picturing it makes me sick.  

***

LSU shuts down and the Whole Foods where I’ve started to work, just part-time, operates on a come-in-if-you-can basis. I call my boss and say that, while I’d love to get ten bucks an hour to make free-range turkey and aioli wraps, I’ve got my roommate’s parents with me. They’re from Chalmette, so I need to help out. “Just focus on your family,” he tells me. I should correct him but don’t.  

For the next week, instead of helping, instead of telling Mike’s parents they’re welcome to stay, I ghost and pretend Katrina didn’t happen. While poor blacks are herded like cattle into the Superdome, I fart around my fraternity house, playing MarioKart and shooting Jim Beam. While people too sick to move die horrible deaths in a hospital without power, I apathetically text the sorority girls I’m constantly leading on, until one of them tells me to come over for sex. While my big brother has to process that not simply his home but everything he’s ever associated with home — his childhood, his community — has been destroyed, I grow impatient waiting for everything to go back to normal.

After a few days, Mike gives me a call.

“Are you gonna sleep at the fraternity again?” 

“There’s a bunch of people here,” I tell him. “I’ll crash on the couch.”

“Who’s there?”

I say the names, all New Orleans guys, but not from Da Parish, so their houses are fine. We both pause to inhale smokes.

“My parents are gonna go soon,” he says. “In case you’re worried.”

“Worried? Why would I be worried?”  

***

And then they do go, just as fast as they came, only leaving behind a cleaner apartment.

As to where they went, I have no idea. It has to be someplace, but the details didn’t matter. I’d had my fill of tragedy and victims. Once they were gone, they were gone. At last, Mike and I can get back to being drunken goofballs, a couple of flat-footed dreamers. We can resume our fraternal twinhood, keep pretending we’re precisely the same. 

And we can, so long as my blindfold’s on. And for the next few years, it is, tied tight. Because, for me, the storm’s over. But for Mike, it’s only just begun. 

***

Mike and I live together another year-and-a-half, a time during which he declares a theatre major, hardly attends class, declares a general studies major, basically fails out, and then decides to “take a break.” A time during which I declare a creative writing major, get a girlfriend, study in Spain, and finish college on time. A time during which Katrina’s barely mentioned.

My last summer in Baton Rouge is a bacchanal of self-congratulation, one fueled by graduation checks and the insane presumption that I’m on my way to fame. Over the past few semesters, my fiction professors have given my stories way too much praise. Praise I rolled in like a pig in shit. Praise I’ve turned into a smug certainty that I’m destined to be some literary darling. And while I’ve spent hardly any time actually writing, the universe has nonetheless rewarded me with a full-ride fellowship to an MFA program. I’ll have the next three years to read, dream up stories, and surely win the Pulitzer.

Mike is waiting tables. 

But we’re still raging, still cracking everyone up, still staying up late on the porch drinking Franzia and smoking Camels. Still brothers. And yet, in these waning weeks, as I pack my room, things feel out of sync. I’m off to a cool new life. Mike’s staying right where he is. He’s the big brother, but he’s fallen behind.

***

On my last night in town, in August of 2007, after boudin balls and Jack and Cokes at The Chimes, a group of us heads to a friend’s for one last whatever. Once we’ve rid the fridge of Natural Lights, once we’ve told our stories — the time Mike motorboated a friend’s big sister, the Halloween I evaded arrest while dressed as a Twinkie — once we’ve stretched the night as long as we can, my girlfriend yawns and looks at her phone. 

“Time to get moving,” she tells me. 

“Guess so,” I say.

Mike and I light Camels in the courtyard while she gets the car. It’s a moment. We both know it. Not goodbye forever, but goodbye to this. We hug and cry. Mike tells me he loves me, says I’m gonna write some beautiful book. For graduation, he gave me a Royal Deluxe typewriter with a page in the spool. A two-word message: Good luck. I tell Mike I love him, too, and as we sway there beneath a flickering floodlight, I feel a pang of guilt. For the first time, I have the urge to say sorry. Sorry the storm fucked up your house. Sorry the last few years have been so tough. Sorry I never asked if you were hurting. But the moment passes. Our hug ends when my girlfriend honks the horn. 

“You’re my brother,” he says, and I tell him he’s mine. 

“Wow,” my girlfriend says as we drive off. “Mike’s really broken up.”

I tighten my blindfold and say, “He’s fine.” 

IV: Trapped in Fantasyland 

Years pass.

“I feel like I just gotta move to France,” Mike tells me. 

We’re on the phone, on a summer night when I’m home from grad school. I’m smoking on my mom’s front porch, drunk on cheap vodka. 

“And do what, exactly?” 

“I don’t know, man. Work at a cafe. Learn cuisine.”

Mike’s obsessed with cooking. He watches the Food Network religiously, loves Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, wants to work for Thomas Keller. 

I sigh. “You don’t speak French. You don’t have a visa. You don’t have the money to get to France, let alone rent an apartment.” But at this point, I’m barely listening to myself. 

I’m starting to see that Mike might be terminally stuck, starting to worry he’ll burn his entire 20s fantasizing over dream lives. Last we spoke, he was moving to Austin to be an indie rock drummer. Before that, it was Second City in Chicago. Now it’s the CIA. And while everyone’s allowed to dream big, what’s all the more crazy-making is that Mike can actually do the things he dreams of doing. He’s a wonderful actor, has performed Shakespeare with LSU Theatre. He’s a talented chef, has a knack for flavor, can pull loose ends from the fridge and whip them up into something fancy in no time. He’s a good drummer, too, and has been in a Baton Rouge band that makes cool music. And yet, when the chips are down, he never commits to any of these dreams; he commits instead to dreaming up new ones. 

In the years since I’ve left Louisiana, Mike’s kept waiting tables and now has a side gig as our fraternity’s House Dad. He lives in a little apartment in the back, a five-second walk from the restaurant. When he told me his plan to move in, it seemed less than ideal, but House Dads get free room and board, and he’s got debt, so I figured he could pay it down. He’s back in school, too, part-time. So maybe this will end up good. Maybe he’ll snag a girlfriend, graduate, and get back on track. Maybe. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. What does happen is Mike finds himself, at 24 and 25, surrounded by out-of-control college kids, at the restaurant, at the fraternity, all over campus. What does happen is he drinks away his tips at the bar, gains weight, keeps ungodly hours, saves no money, never goes to class, and while the rest of his buddies get advanced degrees, buy houses, and get married, he lives in the bowels of our fraternity house, hiding. 

“Just finish school,” I tell him, incredulous. Me, the little brother who’s never been out of school. Me, whose harrowing experience with Hurricane Katrina is fodder for stories at cocktail parties.

“Easy for you,” he could’ve said but never did. Mike never called me out on a single thing. 

***

Whenever I come to Baton Rouge, I stay with Mike, and by the end of each visit, booze-whipped and bloated, I’m amazed that my deeply indulgent nostalgia trip is to some degree his normal life. But when I show up at his apartment just before the start of my last year of grad school, in August of 2009, I’m no longer amazed; I’m alarmed. 

A plumbing disaster has occurred — and, by the looks of it, not recently — destroying the room where he used to sleep. The place is a wreck. Half the ceiling is gone. Mold and mildew all over. 

“What the fuck happened?” I ask.

“Oh,” he waves it off. “Some shit with the pipes.”

“Well right. But is it getting repaired?”

Mike tells a story that can be boiled down to: He owes a guy money but won’t pay the guy until he fixes the leak, but the guy who’s owed won’t fix the leak until Mike pays.

“So it’s a war of attrition?” 

“Basically.”

“But you have to live here,” I say. “So … you lose.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not livin’ here much longer.”

“What are you gonna do?”

He shrugs. “Cooking school.”

“How? With what money?”

“I don’t know, man.”

The rest of the trip is unpleasant. We hole up in the dank apartment, drink oceans of Early Times and watch Top Chef. We play beer pong with college kids we don’t know and don’t really like, guys who get blackout drunk, take Percocets, and fight. We take Percocets ourselves one night and wake up the next morning on the deck. 

What’s going on, I wonder. The last time I saw Mike, at summer’s start, we had a blast. We went Tiki Tubing down the Amite River, played putt-putt, ate crawfish. We got stoned and drank Abitas with his bandmates and laughed until our sides hurt. Why does this trip feel so different? 

Back then, Mike kept a LiveJournal, one that’s still online. In an entry made after my first visit in May, he writes on his “dilemma.” His bandmates — the friends who replaced our crew when we graduated — have just graduated themselves and will soon move to Austin. Mike wants to go but feels like he can’t. The entry, posted at 4 a.m., is titled “What is and What Should Be.” Here’s how it ends: 

 As I’ve come closer to the day my bandmates leave, I find myself staring at nothing and thinking of everything.   

…[E]very day I spend not … doing the things I know in my heart I need to do, I die a little. I’ve known for some time now the path I need to take and yet, I’m afraid to take that leap. I do nothing to help myself.

I want to go. I need to go. Why can’t I?  

I want to cut my losses and start fresh. I want to be happy.  

The opening line of Twelfth Night reads, “If music be the food of love, play on …” 

I want to play. I want to cook. I want to eat. I want to go.

I want, I want, I want. But he never did. And over the summer, while his bandmates settled into new lives and I finished my thesis, he stared at nothing and thought of everything. He died a little. He began to fall apart. 

***

As I pack to go back to school, it dawns on me that, ever since I’ve left Baton Rouge, it’s become my Fantasyland, a place where I can pretend I’m still the crazy drunk I was in college. A guy who’s yet to dream of becoming a writer, to feel the pressure of expectation. A guy who doesn’t fret constantly about what comes next. Usually, when a visit ends, I’m sad. But this time, I’m thrilled. There’s a danger in idling. You’re not supposed to be in college forever. Mike had a similar realization back in May, but he’s still here, trapped in Fantasyland. Since Katrina, he’s survived on the idea of starting over, the idea of escape. Now he’s come to the end of the line. He’s got to do something, but he doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, so he locks up and disappoints everyone, most of all himself.

Like the leak in the roof, it’s a war of attrition. 

***

Before I leave, I tell him I’m worried. 

“You need to get out of here, Mike. This is no way to live.” 

What I don’t say: This is the home of a depressed person. 

“I know,” he says.

We hug in the grim fluorescence, and I head off to school. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder how Mike felt as he watched me drive away. Was he happy to get back to hiding? Or did he feel more lost than ever? I remember precisely how I felt: equal parts guilty and relieved. And as my Honda hummed east along the Gulf Coast, and the endless green swathes of Alabama became the slow sweeping hills of Georgia, as I got farther and farther away, I relied hard on the bad brother’s mantra: He’s at rock bottom. Things can only go up from here.

V: The Very Worst Thing

Another year. Another call from Mike. Only this time, I don’t answer.

I’m hammering away at a fresh story in my new apartment in New Orleans, where after a summer of living with my mom in Texas, of writing, manual labor, and endless nights of abject drunkenness, certain I’ve fucked up my life — I’ve somehow landed a job as an adjunct at a commuter college on Lake Pontchartrain. My students are mostly poor — black and Vietnamese kids from Gretna and Kenner, white kids from Destrehan and Da Parish. Compared to my fellow MFA grads who work as shopgirls and movers, I’m lucky to have this low-paying gig. I’m starting to see that a so-so writer with delusions of grandeur, and a penchant for blackout drinking, can end up in an unglamorous place. I’m starting to get why people study medicine or law. Starting to see that life takes money, and the more you’ve got, the better it is. Through all of grad school, I’d presumed my degree from an unheard of regional program would automatically yield a slam dunk job at a liberal arts college in the Berkshires: But lo and behold, here I am, desperately thankful to escape my mother’s, to net $20,000 a year “teaching” freshman comp in sad classrooms with overflowing trash cans on a campus so ghostly it seems like Katrina’s surge hit last month, not five years back. This is not where you’re supposed to be, I tell myself while I freak out about barely making rent and grade essays with mistakes so basic I don’t know what to say. You’ve got to live up to your potential. You’ve got to write yourself out of this mess! 

Which is what I try to do — write — unless of course, I’m busy carousing the Marigny or the Quarter, resuming my college persona, undoing the maturing I did in grad school, getting kicked out of Cooter Brown’s and Tipitina’s, and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club … and maybe moving to America’s booziest city wasn’t my best move. And look now: Mike’s calling again, and I’ve put in a solid 20 minutes today, so I may as well power down the old laptop and see what he needs.

“Yello?” I say. 

“Will!” he says like he’s fucking choking.

“Mike? What’s wrong?” 

“My father” — again that choking sound — “My father’s. Killed. Himself.”

I stand and spin in a circle. That’s what I remember: saying “Oh my God!” then standing and spinning in a circle. Like I had to confirm I was still in my room. That I was still Will Torrey, still 25, still a man alive in the world. “Where do you need me?” I ask, and Mike tells me: his parents’, right away. Then I hang up and call my mom. 

“Why does this keep … happening to Mike?” I ask.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says through tears.

But, of course, we both know that’s a lie.

***

The hours and days and weeks that follow are a whirlwind of strangeness. 

I’m in Mike’s parents’ yard, in Lacombe, surrounded by his buddies from Da Parish. We pinch our lips and nod as this or that uncle or cousin goes in to be with Mike and his family, all of us just waiting there, simply existing as we try to grasp that, just after dawn this morning, Mike’s dad — a month shy of 44 — drove out to some bayou and put a bullet in his heart. That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: “He shot himself in the heart.” My mind goes to the morning after Katrina. “He shot himself in the heart” — the delivery, so matter of fact. It may as well be, “Our house is underwater.” 

Days later, I’m up at 3 a.m., on the phone with Mike, whose mom has just shown him the shirt his dad wore when it happened. “The hole,” he says, breathless and sad, “I saw it.” 

Later still, I’m beside Mike at a funeral home in St. Tammany Parish, staring down at the body that used to be his dad’s, a body that now seems small, his coat and tie almost juvenile, like he’s a kid getting dragged to a Sears family portrait. Mike lays a hand on his dad, and I lay a hand on Mike. I try to recall the last time I saw Mike’s dad, I’m sure it was Katrina, the day he and his now widow left our apartment. 

***

What follows is a lost time. Mike is okay but not. Sometimes, cracking jokes over hurricanes at Lafitte’s, he seems like himself. Other times, calling me from Bourbon Street, drunk off his ass with friends from Da Parish, crying and screaming, he does not. He tells me he’s worried his mom’s losing it, that maybe there’s money from a will that may or may not exist, money that he and his sister and her son should get, and could I maybe call my lawyer dad? I tell Mike to go to therapy, and he says he can’t afford it, but even if he could, I know he wouldn’t go. He shaves his head, gains weight, lets his beard puff out until he looks like Zack Galafinakis in The Hangover. 

I write. I publish. I teach. I take pretty girls out to bars in New Orleans.

I drink and drink and drink and wonder why I never feel good about anything.  

That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: ‘He shot himself in the heart.’

At some point, the restaurant where Mike’s waited tables for what feels like an eon opens a new place on the North Shore, and they pick him to run the kitchen. When he tells me the news I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself. This is it! I think. An actual dream come true! Get out of Baton Rouge, make money, grow up! 

Which he does, sort of. Mike scores a great place in Covington, starts his new job. But then he calls and says he can’t afford where he’s living. I ask him his new salary and his new rent and then tell him he absolutely can. “I dunno,” he says and sighs a long sigh.

I visit soon after and the place is half boxed.

“Please tell me you’re not moving out.”

He cuts his eyes to the floor. Standing with him there in this gorgeous apartment, with skylights, new appliances, exposed brick — a place that’s the precise opposite of the ruined House Dad Suite — I lose my patience.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

He throws up his hands. “I can’t afford it!”

“Yes, you can!” My cheeks are hot. I want to grab him and shake him. “And you can’t just walk away from an apartment, Mike! Where the fuck are you gonna live?”

Mike tells me some story about how he never signed a lease, that he’ll eat the deposit, load his shit into his new pickup, the one that belonged to his dad, and drive off into the night. He says he’ll move in with a buddy from Da Parish, a guy who needs a roommate because his crazy wife just left him. What he doesn’t say is that the buddy’s mom will live there too. And what he doesn’t know is that having been shuffled around after Katrina, she’s grown bitter. That she’ll treat Mike like an unwelcome guest. He won’t be allowed to cook and “smell up the kitchen,” won’t be allowed to play drums. What he doesn’t see is, after just a taste of life as a grownup, he’s trading it all to live on the margins of a house that’s not his, to live by the rules of a mom that’s not his. He doesn’t see it — or he pretends not to — but that’s what happens, and in the months that follow, when he vents about it over the phone, I have no sympathy. What did you think was gonna happen. What the fuck did you think?  

I don’t recall what we did that day in Covington, but whatever it was, it was ruined by my annoyance at Mike. Why can’t you just live in an apartment like a normal person? I wonder. You’re making progress. Why sabotage yourself? What I don’t see then: Mike’s terrified of being by himself, alone with his thoughts, his ghosts. What I don’t see, too, is how tight I’m still wearing my blindfold. I’m angry at my friend because he won’t accomplish what I’ve accomplished without the touch of my privilege. I’m angry at my friend because his life’s so hard.

Why can’t you just be like me? I wonder, sitting up at night, getting drunk by myself.

Why can’t you just be like me? Lazy, but bitter that I’m not rich or famous.

VI: Off the Grid

More years. 

I keep teaching, publish stories and essays, and get a better job at LSU, where I go out for beers at the Chimes with the same professors who, years back, told me I had what it took. I live in a funky yellow house in Capitol Heights with the woman who’s now my wife. We take jogs through the neighborhood, walk to Calandro’s to buy wine, go to Radiobar with the editor of The Southern Review, have lively dinner parties with all our lively, literary friends. Life’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop my complaining — about making bullshit money, about never getting an interview for a tenure-track job, about always getting the runaround from agents, about my failure to finish the novel I’ve wallowed in for the last three years. I’m doing most of the stuff I set out to do, but all I can think of is how little I’ve done. I’m making it, I guess, in a failing kind of way.

Mike in the meantime has gone “off the grid.” He’s still running the kitchen at the restaurant, still doing mostly fine, but he’s bought a house way out in the sticks. He builds a chicken coop and talks about farming. I don’t see him much, and when we do talk, he pinballs from one new dream to another: He’ll open a vegetable stand or his own barbeque joint or a food truck or he’ll move to Colorado to grow weed. By now, this stuff washes over me, yet I can’t help but worry that, in getting this house, he’s found a new way to hide: a little compound in the middle of nowhere, a permanent home where the world can’t find him. And why don’t you want to be found? I wonder. Who do you think’s coming to get you? 

Over the summer of 2014, two of our best friends get married, and Mike skips both weddings, each time coming up with a half-cocked excuse. Can’t get off work. Can’t afford gas. 

I’m engaged now myself, and after the second missed wedding I send Mike a text.

If you pull this shit when I get married, I’ll kill you.

You know I won’t, he writes.

We need to hang. Been too long.

How would you feel, he writes, about doing some yard work?

***

I head up the Causeway the next afternoon, Lake Pontchartrain spreading out alongside me like a giant, brackish bathtub. I remember the day Mike’s father died, zooming up this bridge from my old place in New Orleans, trying to understand the pain he’s in, trying to imagine what it’d be like if my dad had done what his just did. My dad calls himself “the absent father” — and I don’t know him well — but he’s always had a knack for being there when I need him. When I finished grad school and couldn’t find a job, when I was sure I was a failure, moving back in with my mom, I called him. “You’re a white man with an education,” he said, almost laughing. “The world was made for you.” Then he mailed me a Treasury bond for $10,000.

The next morning, after a night of grilling pork chops, getting drunk and high, and watching “No Reservations,” Mike and I rise early, eat Adderall, buy mulch and shovels and rakes, and embark on a monumental day of work: mowing, trimming, pruning, weeding, pulling jasmine from his fence. At lunch, we break for Budweisers, and Mike gases up a chainsaw. It growls to life as he yanks the cord. He hoists it overhead, revs it with a laugh.

“What are we doing with that?” I ask.

Mike smiles, teeth bright against his dirt-caked face. 

“We’re gonna cut down a fuckin’ tree.”

***

The most important thing we know about the tree we’re cutting down is that if it falls the wrong way, it’ll destroy Mike’s house. The most important thing we don’t know about trees is how to dictate the direction in which they fall. Either way, we know that when it falls, it’ll fall fast. Either way, we know that this, like everything, is an act of faith.

Mike saws until the tree’s about to tip, and then — employing some silent brotherly language and a panicky series of moves that are at once like dancing and not — Mike pivots one way and I the other, and then, gasping for air, we push, step back, and … womp! Just womp! A sound like I’ve never heard before. A thud, a sucking, the inverse of sound. 

We are alive. The tree is felled. The house stands undestroyed. 

Mike and I blink there in the yard and share a look of wonder. Then we race over to one another and holler as we hug.

***

Late that night, drunk as skunks, sitting in the pale glow of his porchlight, Mike looks up at the moon and says, “almost four years.”

“I know,” I tell him. “Hard to believe.”  

I start to form a thought — how proud I am of him, how sorry I am, for all this shit, for always being so hard on him — only I’m too drunk, so what I say, instead, out of nowhere, is, “I’ll never forget, Mike. That day. The sound of your voice when you called.” And then I double over in a sob. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever cried without warning. 

Mike gets me up and holds me. “Don’t worry, baby bro,” he says. “It’ll all be OK.”

***

Hungover the next morning, I remember Mike’s dad’s viewing. A gang of us went out after and got wasted. At some point, those of us from New Orleans figured we’d better head back, but Mike asked me to stay. “I’ve got all these people crashing at my house,” I told him. He said he got it, but as I left and he lingered with friends from the Da Parish, I could tell he was sad. 

“Wish you coulda hung the other night,” he told me days later on the phone.

“What’d y’all do?” 

“We cut down a tree.”

***

The next summer I get married, and on my wedding day, as I sip scotch in my tux and gaze upon the scores of guests, all gathered to celebrate the love I share with my wife in a beautiful library on King Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, I feel a pang of fear. I’m 30, make no money, have nothing close to a book deal or an agent, and will never get a tenure-track job. I’m a faker, a fuckup, a whiner, a bitch. 

“I’ve got to figure out my life,” I mutter to myself, paranoid, and realize I’m drunk. “I’ve got to figure out my life.”

Two weeks later, thanks to the magic of cronyism, my wife and I are both hired at a prestigious boarding school. Campus like a country club. Huge raises. Free housing. Smartest kids.

When I call Mike to tell him we’re moving, he’s genuinely thrilled.

“Damn, Will,” he says, “You’ve got the best life.” 

VII: Helpless, Happy, Confused, Content

I see Mike next in New Orleans, and he meets my son. In the fancy condo owned by my friend’s parents, where we’ve stayed for free while savoring long strolls through the Lower Garden District and eating ourselves sick at Clancy’s and Cochon and Bacchanal, Mike holds up my boy and kisses his belly until he squeals that perfect laugh that belongs only to infants: helpless, happy, confused, content.  

Chatting after, smoking cigarettes on Coliseum Square, Mike asks what it’s like to be a dad.

“Pretty great,” I say. “Intense, but you get the hang.”

What I don’t say is how terrifying it is, how, when the midwife pulled my son out and I locked eyes with his swollen purple face, I felt not love but pressure. How night after night, as he screws his lips into the shape of a lemon and screams like a pterodactyl, I feel the stinging sense that I’m not cut out for this. How throughout my wife’s pregnancy, I made myself believe that being a dad would cure me of all my bullshit — the drinking, the depression, the anxiety — but none of that’s happened, and now that it’s too late, I get that kids aren’t some panacea; they’re a spotlight for your flaws. They’re needy little puzzles that can fucking break you. How, in my first weeks as a father, as my wife sank into postpartum as she struggled to breastfeed, I hid in the shed behind our house, inhaling Marlboro Reds in the bitter cold, certain I’d squandered my life’s easy years, that the person I was — a writer, an artist — was gone forever, that I may as well fucking vanish.

“You’re gonna be a great dad,” Mike tells me. 

“We’ll see,” I say, and we both light new ones. 

“You think you’ll have kids?” 

Smoke creeps from Mike’s nostrils as he smiles. “No,” he says, “I don’t.”

***

That night, we meet two friends at Patois. We drink martinis and eat steak frites. We remember college, how our fraternity rented whole floors of a Holiday Inn on Dauphine Island, where we’d smoke blunts and finger girls in the hot tub, how I once broke a girl’s nose during sex and then she wet my bed — and I see then that the whole of New Orleans is my new Fantasyland. The place where I can pretend I don’t have to work to be a good teacher at a great school, where I don’t have to fret about never writing enough, where I can get crazy drunk and not have to get up at 5 a.m., hating myself for being angry at my child. Where I can eat dinner with people who don’t read books and feel like the serious intellectual. In a few days, when my family and I fly back to reality, and I’m too fat to fit in my pants with a throat scorched from a hundred cigarettes, I’ll feel ready to run away from the old me, but for now nothing is real.   

After we pay our tab, drunk on gin and nostalgia, we plot our next move. We decide on Avenue Pub, but just as we get moving, Mike gets wishy-washy. He needs to drive home, he says, needs to head back to the North Shore. The rest of us are up in arms. 

“What!?! We never get to see each other! You can crash with us!” 

“I don’t know,” Mike squirms, “I gotta work.”

“When?”

“I gotta be there for noon.”

All of us laugh. “We have babies! We’ll have you out the door by dawn.”

Mike says he’ll think about it while he drives us to the bar, but he’s quiet all the way down Magazine, and I know he won’t stay. This, I see, has been his plan all along: to check in from his hideaway, then hurry back off the grid. When we get to the bar, Mike asks me to stay while the others go in. I stand beside him in his idling truck. It’s a moment. We both know it.

“I gotta go,” he says. There’s fear in his voice, like the world will end if he doesn’t. 

“Why? We’re all here. Why are you so obsessed with leaving?” 

He stares out the windshield and starts to cry. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just everything. Just stuff with my dad.” So rare, this mention of his father. So often I wonder, but I always fail to ask. 

“What is it?”

“I’m just so … angry.”

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t. He looks right at me. 

“Why did all this have to happen, Will?” 

A streetcar rattles by. Cars whisper along the Pontchartrain Expressway.

“It was the storm,” I tell him. “And depression. And …”

He nods.

“All of this happened to you,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault.”

After the suicide, Mike told me he wished he could knock his dead dad to the ground, to pin him there and ask him flatly if he was satisfied with what he’d done. “What do you think he’d say?” I asked. “That killing himself,” Mike said, “was the worst mistake of his life.” 

Whenever I think of Mike’s dad, I don’t see him in that casket, his face all stunned and made-up. I see him alive, stock still on our ugly couch in the Baton Rouge apartment, watching the news, saying nothing, but knowing for certain he’d never be the same. I see the storm surge. I see the waterline and the mold. I see a day years after his death when on a drive through Da Parish, Mike and I turned down his grandparent’s street and happened upon his dad’s dad just sitting there, drinking Budweisers alone in a camp chair, broken. And when you shot yourself in the heart, I wonder, in that final beat before it all went black, did you get one last second to know what you’d done? Did you see the hurt you’d cause? Could you see your son the way he is now, afraid of a world that’s been so cruel? And what if Katrina had missed? What if all this belonged to someone else? 

“I just feel like y’all have all made it,” Mike says. The engine’s running. He’s still in the truck. “You’ve got houses and kids —”

“We haven’t had to deal with anything,” I say, and the truth of this feels good. 

I tell Mike he’s gotta get help, gotta talk to somebody, and then I see that’s what he’s doing right now.

“I’ll get better,” he says. “I promise.”

“I know,” I tell him, thinking so will I.

Mike gets out and hugs me. We don’t worry about food trucks or book deals or fathers or sons. We just sway there, two brothers, connected forever. I think of that night by the levee, that litany: I love my big brother. My big brother is better than me. What did you see in me all those years back? What made me so special? Who would I be if I’d had your life? What would you say if you wrote about me?  

“You’ve still got the best life,” Mike says and gets in his truck. 

I shake my head. “I’m just lucky.” 

“Maybe so, baby bro,” he says. “Maybe so.”

And then he pulls away. 

I stand alone there on Polymnia Street and watch Mike’s tail lights disappear down St. Charles. The night air is hot. The moon a faint ghost. In a few minutes, I’ll go into the bar to get drunk. But in this moment, I feel a whirl of emotions that leaves me unmoored, like I’m hovering over my shoulders. I’m outside of myself, I think, and then I say to no one, “This is it. This is the end of an essay I’ll write.” 

William Torrey’s writing has appeared in Salamander, Boulevard, River Teeth, Colorado Review, and The Florida Review, among many others. 

* * *

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Blake Bailey’s 900-page biography of Philip Roth had been on shelves a matter of days when women began stepping forward to accuse Bailey of sexual assault, harassment, and grooming. Bailey, who has denied the allegations, was quickly dropped by his literary agency. His publisher, Norton, announced this week that it is permanently putting the Roth biography out of print and donating the equivalent of Bailey’s book advance to “organizations that fight against sexual assault or harassment and work to protect survivors.”

In the case of Bailey’s alleged predations, some of the survivors are his former students.

In a deeply reported piece, three authors at Slate — Josh Levin, Susan Matthews, and Molly Olmstead — describe how, as a middle-school English teacher in New Orleans, Bailey encouraged kids to bear their souls to him in class journals, won their trust, and then exploited it:

The teacher’s massive stack of teenage diaries gave him a kind of classroom omniscience, which he didn’t hesitate to deploy. “If you mentioned a crush in your journal,” Sam says, “there was a chance that Bailey would think it was a good match and drop a note to her.” That worked for Sam. Nothing he could possibly say or do, he felt, carried nearly as much weight as an endorsement from Mr. Bailey.

Some students were not as keen to have their private information shared. “The journals were kind of like emotional blackmail,” says Amelia Ward, who was in eighth grade in 1996 and 1997. “He knew a lot about what was going on with the kids, socially.” Jessie Gelini, who took Mr. Bailey’s class in 1998 and 1999, remembers the teacher publicly airing a negative journal comment—something a male friend of Jessie’s had written about her boyfriend. “Here’s this adult, getting involved, and making it a class discussion,” Jessie says. She was humiliated.

While Mr. Bailey told Sam that he was just like him, Jessie remembers hearing the teacher say something very different to eighth grade girls: “I would have been your boyfriend in high school.” At the time, the casualness of that kind of remark felt thrilling, even though she knew it wasn’t quite right. “I was grossed out by him,” Jessie says now. “But at the same time, I was enamored.”

Bailey kept in touch with former students, and more than one has now alleged that, when they became adults, Bailey initiated sexual relationships with them, or raped them. One of them is Eve Crawford Peyton, whose personal essay accompanies the Slate article:

The one line I keep reading in different news accounts is a line that’s haunted me since the night he raped me in June 2003. As he dropped me off that night, while I was still shaking all over, he looked over at me, his eyes sad and sort of pleading, and said: “You really can’t blame me. I’ve wanted you since the day we met.”

At the time, that line almost broke my heart more than anything else. I couldn’t fathom that he could possibly have actually wanted me since the day we met—because I was 12 the day we met. Instead, I thought, he was just using the line on me that he used on all women.

“I’ve wanted you since the day we met,” I could imagine him slurring as a Tulane frat boy, pulling a young coed into his bedroom. I could hear him saying it to a colleague after weeks of courtship and flirtation. I figured it must be a habit, and the fact that he said it to me—someone he met when I was a child and he was in his 30s—made me feel like he didn’t even know who I was, like I was just some nameless, faceless woman.

That was hurtful. The truth was worse.

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You might not know of Earl King, a singer-songwriter guitarist from New Orleans, Louisiana, though you’ve likely heard songs he wrote if you know the music of Fats Domino, Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, Lee Dorsey, Allen Toussaint, or Ray Charles. As Geoffrey Himes reports at The Bitter Southerner, King was a lyricist and showman beyond compare, yet few of his own recordings exist. He was a man with insatiable curiosity, self-motivated to learn about anything that struck his fancy, a songwriter dedicated to his craft. Himes argues that it is about time that King be recognized as poet laureate of New Orleans for his many musical accomplishments, some of which you can listen to in the piece’s accompanying Spotify playlist.

During this period, 1965-1974, King rarely performed in public. Instead, he stayed behind the scenes, writing and producing songs for other people. In this way, he resembled Willie Dixon, the great writer-producer of the Chicago blues scene. Dixon, too, never enjoyed much success with his own recordings, but he wrote and arranged big hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter and is now recognized as the secret genius behind the stars. King is due the same recognition.

In fact, one could argue that King, (Willie) Dixon, Percy Mayfield, and Chuck Berry are the true “Poets of the Blues.” All four made their recording debuts between 1945 and ’55; all four compensated for a lack of higher education by educating themselves to become verse craftsmen; all four satirized American life and romance with an unerring eye.

All of them, even Berry, are better known for the dozens of versions of their songs by other artists than for their own recordings.

“When I got into my own thinking about writing,” King confessed, “my intention was to be the best lyricist in the world. I used to sit around with my buddies, drinking coffee and talking about how something in a song could be said a different way. We used to get a kick out of playing gymnastics with the words. We’d talk about what kind of thought that’s going to create in the person who’s listening. We’d talk about words that might have a twofold meaning to them. Like ‘Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti; forget about the dough and think about me.’”

King was that increasingly rare figure in American life — the non-academic intellectual. He never attended school again after graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in New Orleans, but he never stopped studying and reading. A conversation with King was likely to take unexpected detours into Asian music, marketing theory, modern jazz, and the Rosicrucian Order. He was living proof that an active, well-stocked mind doesn’t always come with scholarly credentials.

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Danielle A. Jackson  | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (4,289 words)

The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s debut memoir, tells the story of the light-green shotgun house in New Orleans East her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961. At 19, Ivory Mae was the first in her immediate family to own a home; her mother had been born on a plantation in St. Charles Parish. Over years of renovations, the house acquired a second floor at its rear and a layer of pale yellow vinyl siding. 

The book is also about a neighborhood, a city, a nation, and how generations of systemic neglect weigh on the human beings who bear it. New Orleans East was a vast, mostly undeveloped marshland in the early ’60s, a fledgling suburb within the city held afloat by investment from retailers and oil developers. Its neighborhoods were, at the time, predominantly white. The public schools were not yet integrated. 

The Brooms built a lively home life there. Sarah, the youngest of 12, was born in 1979. Largely missing from city maps and narratives that highlight the tourist-friendly French Quarter, New Orleans East fell into disrepair by the late ’80s. As investors pulled out, its streets became lined with abandoned apartment buildings and men in cars soliciting sex.

Sarah was just 6 months old when her father, Simon Broom, died suddenly at home. She came of age with the ache of his absence. The house became increasingly difficult to maintain, and shame settled in alongside the family’s grief.

Throughout The Yellow House’s four sections, which Broom calls “movements,” after the parts of a symphony, she pulls from hundreds of hours of interviews to include exceptionally long passages where her family members speak for themselves; the book is, in part, an oral history. She says it is because their stories “compose” hers. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans East and destroyed their home. By then, Broom had a magazine job in New York and had been gone from her hometown for nearly a decade. Her Louisiana family recounts the storm in “Water,” the book’s riveting third movement. In the fourth, the author unravels the questions the full text poses: about grief and identity, American racism and environmental catastrophe, family and womanhood and the multiple meanings of home.

The Yellow House is beautifully wrought on a grand scale and at the level of the sentence. It is intricately researched, narratively complex, and dives into the most fundamental questions of our time: Who am I? How did I become me? How does one survive catastrophe when it is inevitable? How does one rebuild? The Yellow House was longlisted for a National Book Award and became a New York Times best seller in late August. I spoke to Broom two days before its release. A condensed version of our conversation follows. 

*

Longreads: Even before Toni Morrison passed away, I’d noticed certain things about The Yellow House that reminded me of her novels. Beloved begins by mapping the house where Sethe and her family live, the place that is haunted, with an address: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” There’s a scene in the documentary The Pieces I Am showing how Morrison sketched out a floor plan of this house. The architecture and physicality of a house and how a house can live as an object, but also as an imagined thing, a goal, a part of us, is really the foundation of your book. Could you talk about Toni Morrison’s influence on you and your work?

Sarah M. Broom: I remember finding out that Toni Morrison had died. It was rainy and dim where I was in upstate New York, and I kept thinking, This day is so low hanging. That’s how I kept imagining it. Almost like the sky was hovering close, just above my head. I felt grief. It was bottomless and familial. The way that one grieves a family member is like grieving a part of a system, a part of an organism. And I knew this, but I really knew this after she died — she was literally a part of my system. A part of what it meant for me to be a writer. She was so interwoven in these layered ways into the ways in which I think. 

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In The Yellow House, I talk about “water having a perfect memory” [from the essay “The Site of Memory”]. Most people only mention that part of the essay, about how water is forever trying to get back to where it was. But the part that comes after that is equally as important. She says, “Writers are like that, remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” Writing this book for me was driven in some deep way by that quotation, which is really about the ways in which Morrison thought about and dealt with place. It was a given and known thing that she was from Lorain, Ohio. I think that in a way she was always writing deeply about place and about belonging.

There was an interview a few years ago in the Telegraph, where she is talking about a conversation with her sister, Lois, who still lived in their hometown. Her sister told her the street where they grew up is gone. In the interview she says that her sister drew her a map of the street and wrote in the names of the people who used to live in the houses on their street. They figured out that 20 houses were gone. What Morrison said in the interview is that loss, that absence of the houses and all the memories they held, it’s a death. That idea fueled me as I was trying to understand my book and the architecture of it. 

Another thing about Morrison, which matters so much to me: Often, especially with writers of color, people focus a lot on our story and less on our craft. Toni Morrison wrote sentences that were so multi-varied and layered and also were road maps to something. Beyond that, they had an innate musicality to them and they made you feel. I think often when certain writers make you feel, people misunderstand the difficulty of that. Making a person feel something is the greatest thing an artist can do, and it’s all about craft. It’s about rhythm and cadence and tone.

Is it also about what you have to take out to get to that? What isn’t there?

Absolutely. There is a composed-ness. It’s jazz-ical. Great language and great writing is jazz-ical, it’s spontaneous but it’s super controlled. Whenever I was at a point that I felt that I needed to remember the sounds of what writing could do, I always read Toni Morrison. And that’s a gift. I’ll probably be rereading her throughout this entire book tour because I can’t imagine not having her voice every single day. 

Do you read your work out loud while working on it?

Yes, yes I do. There are lots of revisions and one of them is a read-aloud revision. Normally what happens is I start reading it aloud and then I’m disgusted with the work and I give it up. I have to be in a certain mood where I’m feeling generous toward myself. And when I’m not feeling generous, I hate every word and I can’t read it. 

This book has a lot of different registers, so to speak. The beginning of it is more biblical in tone. It’s setting the foundation for a world. It’s the frame. Often when telling our stories, we don’t get to take time to set things up.

The character that is you doesn’t come into the story until 100 pages in. 

Precisely. That was a choice and I was doing a few things with that. One, I was saying we don’t just arrive to the earth and the story begins. The story has already begun. My child and the environmental and racial catastrophe that they inherit won’t just begin at the moment of birth. They’re the carriers of it, and they enter into an entire world of things. In a book which is partly about foundations and the literal ground our house was built on, this is how I’m literally shoring up the house I’m going to build. I’m shoring it up. There’s a moment where I ask, “How do I resurrect a house with words?” What you’re going to understand when I do come into the story at 5 years old is so different because you already know there are 11 other people.  

Also, I wanted to establish the women in this story and create its matriarchal world. The pacing is different than most memoirs, for sure. It’s much more biblical. I’m telling you the lineage: So-and-so begat so-and-so. Then I’m giving you an enormous amount of history that’s not just familial history, but also city history and then American history. They are all moving together.

The book is structured in “movements.” And like you mentioned, they’re very different in tone and feeling. What we’ve been talking about is the first movement, what you call, “The World Before Me.” The rest is more like a traditional memoir, told mostly from your point of view. Because there is no “witness,” so to speak, in that first section, was the writing process much different from the rest?

There are a few moments [in the first movement] where I indicate that I am the one telling the story. You’re right, that section is completely reported. The other movements are equally as reported. In other words, if I remembered something I would, during the course of the interview with my family, say “Do you remember this thing happening?” or, “Is it true that … ?” Or I would tell a story and my mother would say, “Yeah, remember when you would open the presents under the Christmas tree and try to tape them back?” I was still relying in some way on other people’s memory and other people were correcting my memory. There were times when I would remember something incorrectly. I remembered that my childhood friend Alvin was killed on Chef Menteur Highway at the corner of where our house was. But when I went into the archive and inspected the microfiche, I discovered he actually was killed nowhere near our corner. He was killed five blocks away. The tricky nature of memory has me placing it differently. With the accounts of others, I could fact-check my memory. It was interesting to be in a kind of contention with myself over memory.

My training is as a journalist. I could have written an entire book on New Orleans East. Most people know of the Lower Ninth Ward. The Lower Ninth is a single neighborhood. New Orleans East, which is in the Ninth Ward, is an area, a section, composed of many neighborhoods. I’m writing about a sliver of this, which is the area right off of Chef Menteur Highway, where I grew up. I could have spent forever with the research. There was reporting and oral history, there was recollection, and just a lot of me driving to cemeteries and being in Catholic libraries and consulting their records. There was probably a book-size amount of things that I just left out.

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How did you make the decision to not write that book? The book that is a history of New Orleans East, or a history of the streets or the houses, the collection of homes closest to where you grew up? How did you decide to make it a history of those things and those places, but told through the lens of the people in your life?

I have always been obsessed with human beings. I love people and I love their stories. I also love architecture a lot. I could have written a book that was more about geography, and I think I will still write that book, or I hope I will have the opportunity to write that book, and many other books. 

For this book, I drew many maps to work from. An early one was a dot in the center of the page, which was the yellow house. Think of a concentric circle. The next layer was the street that the house was on, and the next layer was the area of the city, which was New Orleans East. And then the next layer or the next rung was New Orleans. And then around all of that was America.

I tried to stay very, very focused on telling this multirung story: How do you tell it small and how do you tell it big? If I’m going to tell you about a house, I have to tell you about the people who live in that house because the people make the house. I stayed very close to that map. I knew that I had to jump away from certain things. I would spend a lot of time on New Orleans East and then I’d go, OK, how does that connect to New Orleans? And how does New Orleans connect to America?

And then you go even broader when you connect the city to the global South. After Katrina, after the family home has been demolished, after the death of her grandmother as a result, in many ways it seems to me, of the storm. The narrator, who has been away from home for college and graduate school and is settled in Harlem, working, goes to work in Burundi, which I did not expect.

You didn’t expect that?

No, I did not, I really did not. 

Did it feel strange to be there?

No, it didn’t feel strange to be there. There is foreshadowing that the narrator has a kind of wanderlust. But it’s a leap in a sense because we’ve been so focused, tightly on a very specific place for about 200 pages. Even though we go to Texas with the narrator, for school, we’ve been so close and focused on New Orleans East and New Orleans and Louisiana. Then it’s like the world of the book explodes suddenly.

I have a very strong belief that in order to understand any place you need to see it from all perspectives. And in many ways the American way is to stay extremely myopic. That’s something about America that I resist. The way that I like to be in the world is to constantly be telescoping out to ask what does a new place teach me about a place I know already? What don’t I understand about this place that I’m not even thinking about, and how does the new place teach me or help me gain insight? When writing that movement, I was reading Dante’s Inferno, which I think now just seems completely infused.  

The narrator feels dislocated and forcibly displaced. Even though she wasn’t in Louisiana during Katrina. I hadn’t yet seen a story about a kind of environmental and human disaster that talked about what happens when you’re not there when it happens. Because if it’s your family, it happened to you. The narrator goes on this journey and she’s flailing. At first she’s obsessed with going home, and then she needs relief. She has pain, and she needs to — I need to — go farther and farther away. I’m becoming more and more displaced. I’m getting farther away from the place that actually can be the answer for what I’m trying to find, but in a way I find the answers in Burundi. And then of course that entire movement ends with me back in New Orleans, working in City Hall.

In the preface, you talk about how it is upsetting the natural order of things to write a family history when you are the youngest. I know you have a lot of experience writing about your family, which means they have a lot of experience being written about. How did you reconcile or manage everyone’s feelings about the book?

That’s tricky. It’s all happening on many layers. First of all, in the reporting, I’m making it clear to each person that this is going to be a book, and at the end of it, in the revision, I’m reminding people of certain things that might be really personal. I tell them, when I know, that this thing or that thing made it in the book. People had various reactions to that.

I tried to be very careful with building out my siblings as people. For me, the way to honor this was not to write a one-dimensional human being, a person who lacked nuance. I tried to be true to them by giving them the complexity that they actually have and allowing them to be real on the page. Because then they’re in context. You’re understanding Carl in context. When you read about him cutting the grass [of the yellow house after it has been demolished], you’ve already seen him do so many things before that moment and seen the way in which he is in the world. So it makes sense. With my brother Daryl, you see him at first as this guy who is struggling to understand his place and his role in the family, but then becomes someone who is quite ordinary in the end with a big house. Then I’m the person who is still hanging on to old stories and old fears. I think I put myself on the line. It would have felt weird to me if I were telling the story of all these people and not putting myself on the line. 

My mother is a very sophisticated reader who is capable of reading about herself and telling me what annoyed her, even though she remembered saying it. At the same time that I’m allowing everyone space, I’m also remembering that this is my story. And my job. My mother said to me, “Do the homework, do the labor, and tell the truth.” When I gave her the book she said, “I think you did both.” That meant a lot to me.

Another thing that is different from a traditional memoir is that there are several moments where you allow your family members’ voices to rest uninterrupted on the page, as they are. Your mother, Ms. Ivory Mae Broom, takes over for several pages in the middle of the text. She’s telling the story as herself. It’s very lovely. Can you talk about that choice?  

Well first of all, just on a very basic level, I love the sound of my mother’s voice, I love her sentence construction. She is really an interesting person to listen to. Number two, I needed her. It was a profound act for me to allow her to speak for herself in the middle of my story. It created a generational feeling, a sense that, even though I am telling you my story, my mother could pipe up at any moment and say, ‘But wait what about this thing? Or why don’t you do this thing?’

Maybe my mother will never write a memoir or autobiography or any other book. You could just read her part of The Yellow House and that would give you a complete story. A lot of people say this is a book about race and injustice, and it is. But this is also a story about a woman who was 19 years old, who bought a house with every dime she had, and raised a family in it. I don’t want the humanity of this, the profundity of this, to be lost. My mother is a woman who had a house and who lost that house and who was tethered to that place. We all were tethered.

When she describes the end of the house, that is one of the hardest sections for me. That section comes from a great big interview, and I edited the interview. In the interview, I asked, “What were the last days of the house like?” My mother gave a very long answer. I revised it, I cut. I didn’t change the words, but I tightened. The work of it is how it’s edited. And it’s profound. What she says is philosophical. She talks about people becoming houses eventually.

She says that you all are the house.

Yeah. And that’s a really philosophical idea, that people can become houses, that houses can live and die. At that moment I realized I am my mother’s daughter. Everything she just said is the philosophical grounding for why I even think I can personify this house and tell a whole big story about it. Like she literally gave me this way of thinking. There are a lot of pauses in that section.

Yeah, those pauses…  I think the preservation of her voice is really beautiful because she is so clearly a different character speaking than the narrator.

This is a book about generations. I have a different experience of the world in certain ways than my mother. But also, this woman gave birth to me, I am her child. I’m not far away from her. We’re essentially the same. So if you dare judge her or the sound of her then how do you contend with how her child, who she gave birth to, who she made, sounds? My own voice is a mix of high and low. I was trying to play with the ways in which language works.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Eight years, because I was writing as I was researching. But I was thinking about the house long before that moment, obviously. I got a book deal in 2011, but I was making notes long before. The sections of the book that have to do with the house and its state of disrepair were taken from the notes I wrote in the late ’90s.

When you were in college?

Yes, from notebooks I had. I was obsessed with the physical house. And then that shifted after 2005 because I was then contending with an absence. I was then trying to figure out what it meant that the house was no longer there, which changed the nature of the story.

I think a lot of times, when people are thinking about cities that do not get a lot of coverage in the national news, they don’t really understand how those cities are important to us all, as a country. They get dismissed as flyover country. Can you talk about why New Orleans is important to America? Also, what is the myth of New Orleans that you are revising with this book?

I think when it’s not hurricane season and there is no looming storm, New Orleans is actually a cipher, it’s whatever you need it to be. Generally what you need it to be is related to a feeling. It’s related to a kind of exoticness, a sense of timelessness. It’s the most different city in America people generally say. I want to point out that I love New Orleans more than any other place on planet Earth. Which is precisely, as James Baldwin said, why I think I critique it. I believe all those sentimental things too. But its 1,000 times more complicated than that. It’s a city with a massive amount of dysfunction. It’s really small. I think people often forget that New Orleans has a population of fewer than 400,000 people. 

That was a surprise to read. I think the number in your book is 300,000 or something like that?

At the time of writing, it was smaller. But this is not a major city. This is a really small place. You can see dysfunction in terms of what the economics are like. It’s hard for people to find good-paying jobs. It’s hard for people to find adequate health care. There is a major homelessness problem. There isn’t enough affordable housing. Every single time there’s a hard rain or a flood or possible storm, the media story becomes about failing New Orleans. But after [Katrina in] 2005, there were so many trips to talk to the Dutch about their water system and the ways in which they live with water. None of those ideas have ever been implemented. I always feel in those moments that we’re not allowing the city to actually be a complicated place that just isn’t dealing with the issues that it’s facing.

I grew up there and I had a substandard education there. And many of my siblings did. And they are the beating pulp and heart of New Orleans. If we fall into pathologizing it, or needing it to be this romantic, exotic place, we really don’t allow space for any kind of critique of the place because we’re sensitive about it. And in the process, maybe inadvertently, we smother the voices of the people who live there.

What do you hope will come as a result of your book being in the world and being the kind of work that upends those notions and tells a more complex story about the city?

I hope the words New Orleans East get said more, that people will have a reference for it. I really hope that this book connects to the people who I wrote it for — my nieces and nephews mostly, and the children who still live on the short end of the street where I grew up. I saw them recently, and I think a lot about the story they would tell about where they’re from. I hope that someday they get to read this book and think, “I wasn’t alone.”

*

Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Editor: Kelly Stout
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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The first Dr. John died in August 1885. He was known by many names, as New Orleans chronicler Lafcadio Hearn noted in his obituary.

“Jean Montanet, or Jean La Ficelle, or Jean Latanié, or Jean Racine, or Jean Grisgris, or Jean Macaque, or Jean Bayou, or ‘Voudoo John,’ or ‘Bayou John,’ or ‘Doctor John’ might well have been termed ‘The Last of the Voudoos,’” Hearn wrote for Harper’s Weekly that November, “not that the strange association with which he was affiliated has ceased to exist with his death, but that he was the last really important figure of a long line of wizards or witches whose African titles were recognized, and who exercised an influence over the colored population.”

The second Dr. John just died on June 6, 2019. In a way he, too, was a wizard — at least in the sense that anything done wonderfully well cannot be told from magic. This latter Dr. John was also associated with New Orleans and exercised his own influence as a singer, songwriter, and musician.

Born as Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., Dr. John was part of the third wave of influence — first jazz, then rock, and then funk — to emerge from the Crescent City, a place more responsible for American popular music than any other. His career took off while he was in exile, trying to preserve the music he grew up with. It ended with the world acknowledging his efforts to broaden our vocabulary, musically and otherwise.

“I been in the right trip,” he once sang — a line written for him by Bob Dylan, “but I must have used the wrong car.”

Born on November 20, 1941, “Mac” Rebennack grew up attending gigs and recording sessions with his music aficionado father, who turned him on to New Orleans jazz greats King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.

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“Well, my father’s records were what they called ‘race records,’ which was blues, rhythm and blues, traditional jazz, and gospel,” Rebennack told Smithsonian Magazine in 2009. “He owned a record shop and had a large black clientele. They would come by and play a record to decide if they liked it. I got the idea as a little kid that I wanted to be a piano player, because I remember hearing [boogie-woogie pianist] Pete Johnson. I thought why not just be Pete Johnson?”

Fats Domino’s guitarists taught the young Rebennack some stuff. Meeting the great New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair inspired him to become a professional musician. Rebennack was present when Little Richard cut “Tutti Frutti” at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Music Shop and Studio on North Rampart street. By the early 1960s, he was playing professionally, doing session work for such local luminaries as Art Neville and Allen Toussaint. Ace Records made him an A&R man at the age of 16.

By this time, Rebennack was also hooked on heroin and subsequently busted for possession. After his release from prison in 1965, he returned to a different world. It was already more difficult to play in mixed groups. “When the civil rights movement heated up, it became more dangerous to travel as part of these package shows,” he remembered. “Before then, we used to travel all over the South with no problem — me, Earl King, Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, people like that — but then suddenly, we started getting hassled.”

Moreover, New Orleans was trying to clean up its seedy image, and many of its music venues, according to Rebennack, were “buckets of blood joints. It was not a wholesome atmosphere where you could bring your family along. There were gang fights. The security and the police would fire guns into the crowd. … Later [New Orleans District Attorney] Jim Garrison padlocked and shut down the whole music scene.” It was time to go.

Rebennack moved to Los Angeles, where he was soon playing sessions with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Frank Zappa. “They recruited about half of New Orleans one time to go out and do The Sonny and Cher Show,” remembered Rebennack’s friend Coco Robicheaux. “They were all out there doin’ that, and Sonny was always after [Rebennack], ‘Man, I got a state-of-the-art studio, it’s there for you any time you want it. Y’all just lay around here, why don’tcha go do somethin’?”

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Rebennack had an idea about a character someone could play, based on Jean Montanet. But he didn’t want to be Dr. John. He wanted his singer friend Ronnie Barron to do it. “I was never fond of front men,” Rebennack told the Smithsonian. “I didn’t want to be one.”

Barron was the reason Rebennack switched from guitar to piano. Years before, at a gig in Jacksonville, Florida, Barron was being pistol-whipped. “Ronnie was just a kid and his mother had told me, ‘You better look out for my son,’” Rebennack remembered. “Oh god, that was all I was thinking about. I tried to stop the guy, I had my hand over the barrel and he shot.”

“It just went right through my finger,” Rebennack said. “And my finger was hanging by a piece of skin. … They put it back on in the hospital and they sewed it back on very poorly and it never did work right.” When asked how he was able to play piano with a crooked finger, Rebennack quipped, “I try to avoid that finger when I play the piano.”

Barron was also responsible for creating a stage persona early on that inspired Rebennack.

“”I met Mac Rebennack when I was 15.” Barron once said.

I’d been aware of him since I was 12, and he had a good working band that played on the west side where I lived, in Algiers. New Orleans was a real fly-by-night town, where there was a big tourist crowd and people wanted to drink. They didn’t care about the music that much, just wanted to be entertained. So I created my “Reverend Ether” character, almost by accident. I made up this mythology about the voodoo and the gumbo. I’d shake the tambourine and say, “I’m gonna drop the truth on you!” I made up all this shit. This was before I worked with Mac, when I was working in a club on Bourbon Street. He’d come in and kind of watch what I was doing. … Mac realized the value in it, and after he hired me he wanted me to be the original Dr. John, because I already had a handle on the thing.

When Barron was hired by Sonny and Cher and moved west, he gave the Reverend Ether character to Rebennack.

Back in Los Angeles, Barron wasn’t interested in adopting Rebennack’s Dr. John persona. “Ronnie was like this good-lookin’ guy, liked to wear suits, he didn’t want to be no swamp thing,” Robicheaux said. “So they talked Mac into doin’ it. ‘You be Dr. John.’ And everybody loved it.”

Rebennack’s conga player told him, “Look, if Bob Dylan and Sonny and Cher can do it, you can do it.” And so Dr. John was returned to earth and put on a mission.

“I did my first record,” Rebennack said, “to keep New Orleans gris-gris alive.”

The first Dr. John was also a gris-gris man. According to Lafcadio Hearn, Jean Montanet claimed to be a prince’s son from Senegal, of the free-born Bambara tribe. As a youth, he was kidnapped by Spanish slavers. Given back his freedom, he traveled the world as a ship’s cook, finally settling in New Orleans. He became wealthy through fortune-telling and the folk magic practices that we now know as rootwork and hoodoo.

“By-and-by his reputation became so great that he was able to demand and obtain immense fees,” Hearn wrote. “People of both races and both sexes thronged to see him — many coming even from far-away creole towns in the parishes, and well-dressed women, closely veiled, often knocked at his door.” Before long, Montanet was worth $50,000 — enormous wealth for the mid-19th century.

The gris-gris originated in West Africa, and Montanet brought the practice with him. It takes the form of a fetish, carried by the user, for protection or benefit. They are often composed of an uneven number of bones, colored objects and stones, graveyard soil, salt, and other exotic ingredients such as bird nests. Gris-gris culture was already a part of Louisiana voodoo, brought to the state by enslaved West Africans, where it syncretized with elements of Catholicism. Hearn, a white man, described Montanet’s religion as “primitive in the extreme.”

If during his years of servitude in a Catholic colony he had imbibed some notions of Romish Christianity, it is certain at least that the Christian ideas were always subordinated to the African — just as the image of the Virgin Mary was used by him merely as an auxiliary fetich in his witchcraft, and was considered as possessing much less power than the “elephant’s toof.” He was in many respects a humbug; but he may have sincerely believed in the efficacy of certain superstitious rites of his own.

Rebennack had his own “notions of Romish Christianity”: He attended New Orleans’s Jesuit High School until kicked out for his musical preoccupations. Other forces connected him to Jean Montanet. “There was a guy the name of Dr. John, a hoodoo guy in New Orleans,” Rebennack once said. “He was competition to Marie Laveau. He was like her opposite. I actually got a clipping from the Times-Picayune newspaper about how my great-great-great-grandpa Wayne was busted with this guy for running a voodoo operation in a whorehouse in 1860. I decided I would produce the record with this as a concept.”

That record was 1968’s atmospheric, ominous, and thoroughly funky Gris-Gris. “One thing I always did was believe,” Rebennack told Mojo magazine. “I used to play for gigs for the Gris-Gris church. I dug the music, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”

“They call me Dr. John, known as the Night Tripper,” he sings on “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” in a raspy voice predictive of Tom Waits. (Rebennack once told a New Orleans paper, “I’m tripping through the shortcuts of existment to feel it and that’s good.”)

Got my satchel of gris gris in my hand

Day trippin’ up, back down the bayou

I’m the last of the best

They call me the gris gris man

“I always thought [voodoo] was a beautiful part of New Orleans culture,” Rebennack once said. “It’s such a blend of stuff; African, Choctaw, Christianity, Spanish.” He told the Smithsonian that he’d approached “some of the reverend mothers” and asked if he could perform the sacred songs. “But I couldn’t do them because it was not for a ceremony,” he said. “So I wrote something similar. One we used went ‘corn boule killy caw caw, walk on gilded splinters.’ It actually translates to ‘cornbread, coffee, and molasses’ in old Creole dialect.”

“It’s supposed to be ‘spendors’ but I turned it into ‘splinters,’” Rebennack remembered. “I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it.”

Coco Robicheaux had a more complex take. “Dr. John, he was very much interested in metaphysics. We had this little place on St. Philip Street. In voodoo they call the gilded splinters the points of a planet. Mystically they appear like little gilded splinters, like little gold, like fire that holds still. They’re different strengths at different times. I guess it ties in with astrology, and influence the energy. That’s what that’s about.”

Gris-Gris didn’t do that well commercially. “What is this record you gave me?” asked Rebennack’s label boss. “Why didn’t you give me a record that we could sell?” Still, the new Dr. John created a cult following by doubling down on the hoodoo visuals. He would appear onstage in a puff of smoke, decked in feathers (or merely body paint), robes, and headdresses. For a while, one of his opening acts was someone named Prince Kiyama, who would bite the heads off live chickens and drink the blood. Sometimes his backup dancers were nude.

It should go without saying that the new Dr. John’s act had as much to do with voodoo as David Seville’s 1958 hit “Witch Doctor” did to African shamanism, which is to say, not at all. When questioned about his Dr. John stage show later in life, Rebennack insisted that “it was very authentic,” and compared the abandonment of his dancers to “things that might happen in voodoo, where they’re taken by a spirit.” It seems more like the act was designed to appeal to his young, libertine audience rather than be an avenue of understanding a different, complex belief system. At any rate, he retired all that by 1976, when Rebennack appeared at The Band’s farewell concert (later immortalized in Martin Scorcese’s documentary The Last Waltz) to sing the charming, if not entirely wholesome, “Such a Night.“

America has always had two prominent cultures: the colonial and the communal. The colonial culture mimics or appropriates the voice of the underclass, manifesting itself in minstrelsy and coon songs, and even affecting civil rights–era folk music.

The communal strain of American cultural expression has been just as strong, but more fruitful. Think of Congo Square, the place in New Orleans where the first Dr. John and Marie Laveaux plied their trades. It was here that slaves were allowed to “gather, roughly by tribe, to play music, sing, and dance” in the 18th and 19th centuries. These rhythms, when combined with blues and European modalities and military marching band instruments, became jazz. Nothing like that had existed before. In the same sense, it’s how Louisiana voodoo was created out of a gumbo of multicultural spiritual and religious expressions to become something unique. Through the centuries, we have all gathered roughly by tribe. Sometimes it’s produced magic.

Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack embodied both of these cultures. His hoodoo schtick had a little of the “bone through your nose” stereotypes typified by artists like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; it didn’t contribute much to cultural understanding beyond a new vocabulary of exotic words and phrases, which he had appropriated largely for effect.

But Rebennack was a musician — and more than that, a New Orleanian — through and through. He learned from black and white people, was shocked when a New Orleans auditorium wouldn’t let his white band back Bo Diddley, and dedicated himself to preserving that rolling, loose-limbed music he believed was dying. Later on, he often recorded with the Meters, the one band that epitomized New Orleans funk. Rebennack also revered his musical ancestors, recording tributes to Professor Longhair, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, New Orleans’s great ambassador of jazz. “I’m trying to give props to Pops,” Rebennack once said about his Armstrong dedication. “I think we’re all supposed to give props to our elders.”  

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Jason Stavers

Fans called football cornerback Jackie Wallace The Headhunter. He played for the Vikings, Colts, and Rams. He played in two Super Bowls. But drug addiction undid the life his talent had built, and he found himself homeless in New Orleans. For The Times-Picayune, photojournalist Ted Jackson traces Wallace’s complicated life of triumph, tragedy, and redemption, and the ways the two men met at different points in their lives.

Their relationship started with a chance meeting under the Interstate 10 overpass, where Wallace told the photographer, “You ought to do a story about me.” That suggestion produced a 1990 newspaper cover story that brought Wallace’s struggle to light, and helped garner the support he needed to break the cycle the disease had trapped him in for so long. The two became friends. When Wallace disappeared after years of sobriety, Jackson went looking for him. Wallace disappeared again last summer. His friends and family are still searching.

During the offseason, a team representative called to say that Jackie’s Super Bowl ring would soon arrive in the mail. He told him there was no need for him to attend the team’s ring party.

Stunned, Jackie realized he’d been cut. His career was over. “Nobody wanted me after that,” he said. “It’s a tough moment when you realize you’re done.”

In the 1970s, an NFL contract didn’t create instant millionaires as it does now. In 1974, Wallace played for $27,500 a year and a $25,000 signing bonus. In his seven years in the league, he estimated, he made between $325,000 and $400,000, including bonuses for playoff appearances and the Super Bowls. That was good money in the ’70s, but like so many players of his era, Wallace never saved or invested a share of his earnings.

With no money to fall back on, Jackie struggled to adjust to regular life. For a while, he worked as a Class B gauger on an oil production platform. He said his yearly pay matched that of a year in football, but without the structure and discipline that a team sport imposes, Wallace’s attraction to alcohol began to take a toll.

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