Return to Prytania

“Sorry, already taken,” the site genie simpers again. I have already submitted every stupid user name I can invent, old addresses, siblings’ nicknames, all those aliases we need as our cyber-umbilicals.

With a cleansing breath I empty my frustrated mind. In floats a lovely word: “Prytania.” I enter it, and the site cheers, “It Rocks!”

But now I am paying no attention. I’m remembering Prytania Street. Frenchman, Annunciation and Tchoupitoulas Streets. Desire, Rampart, and Gentilly. Where the peeling, multicolored shotgun houses sit by the great sliding brown river.

New Orleans.

I’ll tell you about my first time there. As I lay beside my mother in a narrow bed, my father leaned over to kiss us. Everything about him was in perfect order. His Army Air Corps captain’s uniform had not a wrinkle, the shirt carefully pinched into a single pleat at each side where he had tucked it into his trousers. His black hair was sleekly combed back. I am sure that he smelled good, slightly astringent and clean, like pressed laundry. My mother wore a nightgown with white lace forming a V along the top. The hospital sheet, folded back smooth and tight, came across her body just below the breasts. My parents had joined their right hands with odd formality, like two dignitaries, but their expressions were full of tenderness.

I have no idea who took the little photograph I hold, now curling its crenulated white margins inward. It surely could not have been a grandparent; the trip from Alabama would have been unthinkably extravagant that wartime year. My tiny dark eyes seem to study the photographer. My parents are seeing only each other.

Is it possible that I could remember sucking milk from my mother’s pink nipples? If not, why do I have this magnified vision of them, big as rosy saucers, with thumb-sized papillae? A redhead, mama had fair skin and roseate nipples. I inherited my father’s black hair but got her complexion.

Although I was born there, my parents always said they absolutely did not conceive me in New Orleans. More likely in Carlisle Barracks or Keesler Field. I have had to take their word for it, zygotically speaking. But how I conceive myself is another matter, and New Orleans is my soul’s rootstock.

As a girl in Alabama I loved having been born in Charity Hospital, not some boring hospital named for the stupid town a person lives in. I loved it that for “County of Birth” on my school papers my mother would neatly print “Orleans Parish.” I knew it made me very special. Nobody around here even knew what a Parish was!

It is said that at age four, propped by my daddy on a tall stool at Felix’s Oyster Bar, I consumed some legendary quantity of half-shell oysters, I am tempted to say several dozen. I remember that. At least my body remembers it: the cold salty tang, the squirting lemon, the sweet slippery rush of the mollusk down my throat. Sucking the last of the oyster juice out of each empty shell. And my delighted parents, laughing and laughing.

Nowadays I repeat this story to the shuckers who prise open their heaps of scabby bivalves behind the bar at Felix’s. Prompted, they always say, sure, they remember me. And pour me another Sazerac.

After the storm, dreading what I might see, it was more than two years before I could make myself return to New Orleans. Needing a businesslike excuse I signed up to attend a large conference in a giant hotel and went by myself.

Like everybody else, I’d seen the pictures. I knew Charity Hospital was no more. And I’d heard a lot about the city being “Back in Business.” But what for God’s sake might that mean? As sad as a dispirited, beaten down New Orleans would be, a plasticized theme park of a place would be unbearably worse.

I walked my feet to blisters. I rode a bus all over the 9th ward and took pictures of gutted houses with spray-painted numbers showing how many dead humans and animals had been found there. I rambled (Didn’t I ramble?) through the Quarter. People were still practicing saxophones on doorsteps, instrument cases lying open and seeded with some little currency.

And I rode down Prytania. At one end, a restored old mansion was for sale for five million dollars. Ten blocks away, the hind end of a FEMA trailer jutted from the wall of a mostly collapsed gray frame house. A woman sitting beside it in her white plastic chair waved her cigarette at me.

The trailer’s top and sides were draped with Mardi Gras beads. A huge flag -- purple, green and gold-- flapped from a pole.

Completely covering the end of the trailer that faced on Prytania, someone had spray-painted a tremendous crimson heart.