Why I love the city that brutalized me

Before Katrina, all I knew about New Orleans was Bourbon Street clichés. Then I got mugged there and fell for a local boy and the glorious city itself.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Crime, Police, Love, New Orleans, Poverty, Romance, Life, Hurricane Katrina, Sarah Hepola

Aug. 29, 2008 | Last Friday, I asked a friend to see the new Katrina documentary, "Trouble the Water," with me.

"Oooh," she said, a sound meant to telegraph temptation but which really meant that I had caught her off-guard. "That sounds really depressing."

I couldn't argue with her. A story about the colossal failures of our government and the needless suffering of others -- what, she had something better to do on a Friday night? Fine, whatever. I went by myself.

It's not as though I didn't understand. I understood all too well. And it's only through a bizarre set of circumstances that I came to be someone who would sit -- alone, tissues in hand -- in that theater in the first place.

Katrina hit New Orleans the week of my 31st birthday, the month I moved to New York City from Texas. When the levees collapsed, I was hung over from a small bash in my honor, and that afternoon, while I watched a "Project Runway" marathon, I occasionally flipped to the surreal parade of anguish that was CNN: a moldy mattress bobbing on the water, an old woman convulsing with grief. It's not that I didn't care. But I quickly began to feel as though I had "Katrina fatigue" before the term had even been coined.

My vague indifference stood in stark contrast to my insatiable hunger for news, any news, in the weeks following 9/11. But while 9/11 was a tragedy that seemed to strike us all -- who will they attack next? where are we safe now? -- Katrina felt like a catastrophe that was specifically someplace else. A place, frankly, I didn't know all that well.

I'd only been to New Orleans twice, quick jaunts through the French Quarter, and what I knew about the city was a bucketful of Cajun clichés. As benefit efforts erupted across the country, as Anderson Cooper grabbed us by the collar and shook us, as celebrities appeared misty-eyed on camera to wax eloquent about the cultural riches of a great American city, I felt a little, I don't know ... left out? Have you ever been at a funeral where you didn't really know the person, but you know you're supposed to grieve? That's what Katrina felt like to me. I'm pretty sure I gave money. There's a T-shirt around here somewhere.

A year after Katrina, I went to New Orleans for a wedding. A friend of mine had grown up there, and her love for the city was more abiding and unshakable than her accent. It turned out to be kind of a funny day. Because that afternoon, I accidentally wandered into a Ray Nagin reelection fundraiser. I met Mayor Nagin and flirted with his press secretary and drank free wine. And later that night, I was hit on the head with a gun and mugged in the French Quarter. And later than that, I fell in love with the detective on the case, and even later than that, I fell in love -- in deep, abiding, unshakable love -- with New Orleans.

So, OK. I was mugged on Royal Street in the French Quarter around 1:30 a.m., walking back to my hotel. New Orleans is a city wracked by violence, but a year after the storm, armed robbery in the French Quarter indicated a chilling audacity. Post-catastrophe New Orleans doesn't want its tourists getting the idea that they can't come to the city, drink themselves into a blackout, and stumble back to their fancy hotel without some thug emerging from the alley, clobbering them over the head and stealing their adorable Dolly Parton tote bag. So maybe that's why my case got so much attention from the people dealing with it. Maybe it didn't get special attention at all. I never really knew.

All I know is that nearly a year later, I was able to identify the kid who mugged me, in a photo lineup after he'd been arrested on similar charges, and I was flown down to New Orleans for a pretrial motion. And it's at the trial that I met Nick, the detective on my case. (Well, technically, I met him the night I was mugged. But, in my defense, I had been pistol-whipped.)

"Come on," he said, escorting me from my miserable and lonely seat outside the courtroom where I waited to testify, "let me buy you a bad cup of coffee."

The story of how we hit it off, became friends and started corresponding -- first by e-mail, then by letters, then with phone calls that sometimes lasted until 3 a.m. or till someone's cellphone ran out of batteries -- is a story for another time. What is important now is that it was through Nick that I began to see a richer, lustier, sadder portrait of New Orleans than the Bourbon Street bacchanalia I had previously known.

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