---I remember clearly the day I found my house in New Orleans. I was in the city, on the street, when I ran into a woman I knew from Mississippi who owns three spectacular houses in the French Quarter. A former slave quarter was available behind one of them – would I like to see it? It was a pretty day; she was walking her dog; I didn’t have anything else to do. We walked to a just-OK, mostly residential block on Bourbon Street, and then she opened a gate. Behind a seemingly simple Creole cottage was a tropical eden: an enormous courtyard, shaded almost entirely by even more enormous banana trees; a two-story slave quarter with a breeze-way and balcony; and a back courtyard walled by bamboo. Before I had even set foot inside I told my friend – now my good friend and landlady—that I’d take it. Within the week, after years of on-again, off-again New Orleans living, I became permanently bi-coastal: East Coast/Gulf Coast.
--- I’m Southern. Eventually we do go home again. I already had a place to live in New York—I’d bought my apartment there in much the same way, after gazing at its tall French windows from the street and looking at a scribbled floor plan. To me, New York is like town. You have to be there to have meetings, to get paid, to go to the doctor or Elaine’s, to get your hair cut. But sooner or later you have to have someplace else to go, and New Orleans by plane is the same commute as the Hamptons (which might as well be New York) by car. .I went down at first, temporarily, to cover an election—a

great one between the notorious then former three-term Governor Edwin Edwards and the former Klansman David Duke. I stayed, a long time, for love, and returned, finally for real estate. It seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, real estate is important.The Romans said your house is your character. I think some houses come with a

imagine to be dozens of Nicks and Noras, possessed of not much more than some satin sofas, a martini shaker, and a dog. Made for entertaining, the space allows me to imagine I have a slightly more posh—and sometimes more madcap —existence than I do.Though the place is bigger than Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s walk-up, it was once the site of a party so crowded people were forced to stand on the rungs of the fourteen foot library ladder (from the Putnam Rolling Ladder Company, so cool) and literally swung off the balcony that juts out over the living room at the top of the stairs.
--- I have no idea who actually did live in my apartment but Sherwood Anderson is said to have resided for a while in my house in New Orleans. The author of Winesburg, Ohio was enthralled with the city (of course he was; he was from Ohio), going so far as to publish an open invitation urging writers to come to the “the most civilized place I’ve found in America.” He should see it now. I live between the biggest gay bars in the city, and during such indigenous holidays as Southern Decadence Weekend and Mardi Gras, the block is so thick with drag queens and wannabes I have trouble getting out of my gate. Not long ago, at 5:30 in the afternoon, a guy on my corner dropped his pants for the benefit of the bar patrons on the balcony above, while no one on the sidewalk so much as slowed down. It’s a weird mix. Around the corner is a cathedral school, a few blocks away is the Ursuline Convent, and just one block up begins the neon crassness, topless bars, and ceaseless din of straight Bourbon Street.