Above Canal
For Rent: one bedroom, one bath on Magazine Street. $525 – pets ok. Water paid. High and fucking dry.
Five hundred fucking dollars and a lousy fucking quarter. Uptown. The 3600 block of Magazine. Step out front door, walk to sidewalk, turn left: handbags, men’s wear, ever-so-fine fucking fine dining. Further down: hardware, chi-chi veterinarian, dentist. Or, leave house, walk to sidewalk, turn right and cross the street: jewelry, boutique, boutique, lamps, antiques, jewelry. Don’t even need to mention: step out front door, cross street to gallery, gallery, mother-fucking gallery.
My history: walked into this tan, century-old, Magazine Street double in May of 1995 just after the Great May Flood. It was the ONLY fucking place any land-owning mother-fucker would let me look at when I came down to find housing for grad school. When I told whoever the fuck was on the other end of the phone that I had two dogs, they would laugh and hang up on me. Still, I got here, and coming from downtown Denver, the rent was a wet dream: $525 – pets ok. Water paid.
Now it’s ten and a half fucking years since I moved into the back of this double. The longest I’ve lived in any house my entire thirty-five years of life. Been about six years since I bought this place, which sold off the market when the owner was killed in a freak car accident – hers the only death in a 100-car pile up one foggy New Orleans morning. Since then I’ve followed suit and rented out the Magazine Street half for $525 – pets ok. Water paid. Rent could easily be six, seven, eight hundred clams a month. Even more. Could rent it to a business and be rolling in the black instead of paying to the feds on this mother-fucker every single year. Never have broke even. Not even once. It costs me to live here, to play landlord.
Year after year. Third set of renters. $525 rolling in sure as shit, sometimes three, four days or even two weeks late. No worries. I’ve replaced the central air and hot water heaters in both halves. $10K don’t come easy either. I’m no Tulane Trustafarian. No Uptown mommy in my Tahoe, dropping my babies off at St. George’s or Lusher. Most of the time, I live check to mouth. Lots of dogs and cats and cars and a girlfriend to feed. And still, that rent hasn’t gone up in ten and a half years.
Mother-fucker Katrina and kid sister Rita roll through. I leave town with my last four hundred bucks and four dogs, a girlfriend and two gas guzzling cars. At 6:25am in a shithole greasy spoon outside of Houston, we watch as that bitch Katrina goes Category 5 on us, and I sure as shit kiss my hundred-year-old double goodbye. I watch the shit play out on CNN and MSNBC. Days go by and I figure that if the water don’t take it, the looters will. I wonder if my doors are flapping open, if my roof is gone, if the oaks stayed in their places, if someone or something is fucking in my bed.
More days go by, and I hear nothing from my tenants. I hear rumors about where they are: Houston, Toronto. Call them. No cellphones work – the 504 is out of biz-naz. I email them. Nothing. Forget about September’s rent – fuck my house payment. My only four hundred bucks gone straight to gas and feed.
Lo and behold, six weeks later the house is still there. Walls and roof. Oaks mostly placated and in place. A now-missing gigantic crepe myrtle took down the cable, phone, and electricity; fence torn open, carriage bolts bent like wire. Roof over rental half still intact, complete and as secure as secure could be. Tree branches missed windows; iron bars protected from looters. Rental half better than ever. Still, no tenants as far as the eye can see. As far as the ear can hear. No pitter-patter of booted feet echoing across wooden floors.
My half, a different story. Same iron bars kept looters out, but living room ceiling is a soggy, moldy mess. Cat piss everywhere; flies ruling the roost. Insurance man says $30K ought to fix it right up. Replace that asbestos roof; replace that ceiling. Pick someone else’s shingles out of my yard. Find the flashing from the roof. An awning. But who will pay for my time? For my chainsawing and cleaning up? My bleaching and bagging? For my refrigerator, rugs, and dog beds? For my mind, my sanity. Who pays because I’ve had to look at this fucking city for almost two months now, while making my home habitable for them?
It’s nearly December, and the rent has trickled in, as will my tenants at some point down the road. They will, they say, come back to “assess the city as a whole.” My friends have asked to sublease in the Mean Time, have asked, “what if they don’t come back?” Have asked the all important, “will you raise the rent?” Have told me what I already know: “You could make a fortune on that place.”
All around me when I walk my dogs are the lives of others scattered on the sidewalks and in the streets – yes, even here in Uptown where mostly wind and rain did the damage. My cars are unscathed; my walls mostly unmoldy. My house sits four feet above the street, and I don’t have to decide between rebuild or remove. As don’t lots and lots of us fortunate folks who live nestled safely against the river, far from the levee breaches and tidal surges. This time. And yet these Uptown, and even Mid-City, and Jefferson and all ovah left literally “high and dry” fucks are jacking their rents up two, three, four hundred dollars or even doubling the shit. A place no better than mine just up the street is $1200 bucks now – no water paid, no pets. When places are advertised as “fully furnished,” I wonder what unfortunate fuck evacuated and is now helping his landlord to pull in double the rent with his fucking couch and bed still in place. The place where maybe his babies were made; where maybe a picture of his dead momma still hangs.
There’s no shame to it – this literal scattering of lives. Like looting, it’s a crime of opportunity. The rich get richer; the poor stay poor or get poorer. Sure, I played with it, the idea, the fantasy of booting my renters to the curb when the rent didn’t roll in right away in October, and I was back here battling the city out. I imagined putting their leather couch and paintings on the curb or, at the very least, upping their rent to cover my monthly note. Their shit’s better than mine – their bankrolls fatter than mine. But I would never do it. Never. Wouldn’t have done it before; won’t do it now. Not can’t. Won’t. Fuck.
People all over the city who made it out and had nothing in the first place are coming back to find their shit on the street and some other fuck in their house, their space, between their walls and under their roofs. They come back relieved, knowing that their space was spared only to find it’s now for rent to them or someone else for twice as much. Their baby’s toys in a heap on the sidewalk. Their doghouse upside-down or flattened. Their clothes a nasty tangle in the gutter. Them holding a white flag of an eviction notice in their hands as a shiny new car or truck rolls to what was once their curb. Or they come back to nothing at all. A slab of mud. A salty car. A black hole in the middle of town. Fucking landed-gentry landlord laughing to the bank.
So I tell you what: when those renters of mine come back to “assess” the city, I’ll take those fuckers back with open, scabby, fucking arms. But if they decide to move on to more marvelous and clichely greener pastures, I promise you that the rent here on Magazine Street will still be $525. And I will pay for your mother-fucking water, and I will pet your cat, dog or miniature horse on its fucking head when you carry your couch up the front steps. Hell, I might even help you with that plasma screen TV if you catch me on the right day. We’ll sit beneath the naked oaks on that big Magazine Street front porch and watch Ashley Judd blow her wad on stationary; we’ll fire a shot over Sean Penn’s head. Fuck, if we’re both still here when the Big One does come, I’ll hold your place for you till you get back. $525 – pets ok. Water paid.
Jen Kuchta writes and owns property in the 12th ward
