K and I drove up to their house, quite a house at that. Mike has always lived big-he's the kind of guy that pretty much gets whatever he sets his sights on. A red head who grew up in both New Orleans, his father's hometown, and Manhattan's Upper East Side, Mike was a buddy from freshman year on, and a roommate my final year here in New Orleans. He's the kind of guy who runs the show. He is generous, gregarious, a guy who is most probably running over his insecurities with a mack truck by being the leader of the pack. He's funny, has lots of truly humorous and interesting stories for every occasion, and who wants to treat you to a show-and-tell event featuring the world that he has constructed around him and his.
Neva and Mike had the home that they live in built to their specifications. It is really large, yard pool in front, wide covered porches one on top of the other along the entire front of the house, lovely plush furniture on the lower one near the grand entrance. Walking in one stands in the living room, a wide open space abutting the wide open kitchen, with a ceiling running both stories, perhaps twenty feet straight up. Later in the evening they shared with us the fact that they don't like to use the chandelier or the recessed lights in the ceiling in that tall, tall room because changing the bulbs is damn near impossible.
Their four kids were hangin' in a game room, jamming on their new Mario game. Good lookin' and polite kids, although Mike assures me that his oldest, Ben, at 14, has begun to not be so polite. Having one of my own I could only sympathize. The house went apparently untouched by water when Katrina struck in'05, although their was considerable damage to the roof due to wind and rain. The Lakefront here is 14 feet above the lower parts of New Orleans; the military apparently blocked off this part of the city to keep those who sought refuge here away, the truly in need and the looters. Funny enough, Neva shared with Karen that the only looting of their house was conducted by the NOPD, but that they were only interested, luckily enough, in the non-sentimental and fairly east to replace electronics.
Mike popped us each a beer and we chatted for a half hour or so, catching up, laughing, agreeing that seafood sounded good for grubs. As we get up to go for a quick tour by car en route to dinner, beers in hand, Karen asks, is there an open container law in New Orleans? Mike, quick to respond, says, yes, you get arrested if you don't have one. So we take our beers, jump in Neva's white Lexus SUV, Mike at the helm, me riding shotgun, and go for a very illuminating and fascinating tour.
Mike shows us the levee around Lake Ponchartrain (I've added an r to the name this time because I'm sort of stuck between wanting to be consistent and wanting to be sure that I've spelled it right at least once) and along the canals. He showed us where the poured through, actually under, the levee, where the water came up to, how high the water got on these houses-up to the bottom of the second floor and higher. As we drove along a neighborhood peppered with houses, I asked, were these empty lots empty before Katrina? No, the reply came, there were no empty lots. Are speculators buying up the empty lots and rebuilding cuz it's so cheap now? No, Mike says, so many of the people who left for the year or two awaiting a place to return to became rooted in the schools, jobs, bars, friends, in the places that they fled to that they won't be coming back-not enough demand, in other words, to cause the need for more supply.
We finished up our tour and our beers and headed to a 'hole in the wall' as Mike assures us, and as my memory serves me, that he prefers to the 'cloth table cloth' establishments. The Galley, it's called, and Mike has called ahead to discover if the place is crowded, and upon a satisfactory no response, to let them know he's coming. As we pull in the place is packed, we walk in and Mike is a bit irate and asks a couple of the staff, their accents heavy with the local accent (funny enough a modified Brooklyn accent), and they tell him that the mob hit just after he called.
Before we really got started a fifty something man, muscular, mainly shaved head, a wonderful, scratchy, cajun style accent booming, shakes hands and jabbers with Mike, looking at me at one point and telling me, grinning, how Mike here had helped him out a few years past when things were not looking too good for him. Set him up with a couple of smart business ventures, I believe it was. Larger than life, Mike pressed hands with all the staff, the owner, much of patrons as well. If you didn't know better, you'd probably have thought he WAS the owner coming by to check on things.
We get a table and the show begins. A large pile of boiled crawfish and shrimp appears with a bowl of the corn, potatoes, and sausage that were in the boil on the side. The corn is sweet, and it has a kick from the shrimp/crab boil spice added to the pot. The shrimp are really big, and so good. The crawfish piquant, deep red in color, with a delicate spicy flavor that causes one to feel truly as though they have just dined on local fare. We drank more beer, talked incessantly, munched out on food, and then the next course came.
Mike had done a good job of finding out what Karen had sampled before and steered the courses towards filling in her, and my, categories of unsampled local treats. Fearing her reaction to raw oysters, we were surrounded suddenly by plates of very hot, sizzling in butter, garlic, and parmesean cheese, grilled oysters on the half shell stacked one on top of the other in pyramids. A small loaf of toasted and mostly sliced through french bread rode astride the piles of oysters. Dip the bread in the butter mix and we did. The oysters were so hot that Karen popped one in her mouth and then held her hand in front of her mouth for about a minute and a half to sheild the rest of us from her open mouth.
Shit they were good, and we sort of looked askance at each other, Karen and I that is, when Mike warned us not to eat too much bread cuz the bigger dishes were yet to come. Holy Toledo, did they ever. Three hot plates were set in the space cleared between us. Breaded soft-shelled crab in a sauce on one plate with an alfredo type angel haired pasta. Crab cakes, to die for crab cakes, with a homemade macaroni and cheese. Blackened red fish with cut and roasted potatoes. A side of corn grits, pieces of corn and cream cooked into it. The food was utterly delectable, rich, rich, rich with flavors, with good and fresh seafoods, textures to die for, subtle flavors intended to not overpower the naturally delicate taste of the sea critters themselves.
We all sampled from the various dishes, our eyes beginning to roll back into our heads, slowing down, eating smaller bites, pacing-my dad's motto that it's a marathon and not a sprint came to mind more than once. As things wrapped up a plate of small, two inch across, crawfish pies appeared and we sampled them. Gorgeous little things, full of flavor, pungeant, meaty, saucy.
And so, stuffed, as it were, to the gills, we waddled out of the place, back into the car, and around the Metarie area for a tour of amazing homes. Metarie Club Gardens is a road next to the country club there that has homes like you've never seen. Stately. Amazingly well lit at night like the gardens of outdoor hotels and restaurants. Well manicured. Live Oaks spanning the forty foot wide avenues, limbs intertwined, Spanish Moss dripping to the lawns.
Down a private lane where John Goodman lives. Lifestyles of the poor and bitter, I'm thinking, from where I sit in the passenger seat. I mean about me. No, I'm actually only impressed and processing all of this novelty. A man once said that we are conscious only of those things that are novel to us. The rest of it all just goes unnoticed through our sensory systems and out the other side. These things I noticed.
After returning to their home we chatted for forty minutes, Mike packing a brown paper bag with the four takeout containers of leftover seafood, a plastic baggie filled with fruit smoothie flavored Tums, five bottled waters. Mike shows us his collection of ivory carvings, mammoth tusk carvings, insects preserved 40 million years past in amber, a 3rd century B.C. roman figurine of a woman sitting, a piece of meteorite.
It's been a hell of a night. Gracious. Entertaining. Connective. Novel. And we part on proper good feelings of how good it has been to get back together after all these years. Of promises to stay connected, to keep in touch.
And I'm happy that I contacted Mike. He's really a hell of a guy and I'm pleased to count him amongst those I've befriended over the years. I feel as though I've finished some circle somehow, closed a loop that had remained all these years open.
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