Two Sundays ago photographer Jayme Kalal and his wife, aerialist Raven Hinojosa, pushed box springs against the windows of their New Orleans hotel room, set a mattress down on the closet floor, plopped down on it, and waited. What would happen when the hotel, packed with a thousand people, had no lights? By evening no elevators worked. They watched TV until the power went out, then they listened to the radio, passing a Walkman back and forth.
Kalal and Hinojosa met in New Orleans 1999. In August 2000 Hinojosa moved to Chicago, and Kalal followed a year later, on 9/11. They lived here till last summer, when, Hinojosa says, “we wanted to settle down and buy a house in New Orleans. I’m a southerner. I can’t handle your winters.”
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They got married in May in a forested part of New Orleans’s City Park. It was one of those magical ceremonies you hear about once in a while: Hinojosa and her bridesmaids, who wore burgundy dresses and twigs in their hair, and her cousin, who played the flute, led the guests down a gravelly path into the woodland. In a clearing Kalal was waiting with his groomsmen. Before they exchanged rings, they passed them around. The guests, gathered in a circle, were supposed to infuse the rings with good wishes.
The street was a little flooded, says Kalal, “but you weren’t seeing heartbreaking shit–just a lot of frightened people.” Some cops pulled up in front of the hotel and told them they weren’t allowed to leave. So they pretended they were heading back in, and as soon as the police were gone they went back to the poor but gentrifying Ninth Ward, where Kalal, Hinojosa, and about 100 of their performer and musician friends lived.
Kalal and Hinojosa and a bunch of their friends went to stay at Poggi’s house, which still had some dry rooms. They waded through crystal clear thigh-high water back to their own house five blocks away, carrying Chocobean in their arms. Kalal estimates that their house, which they were renting, took about a foot of water. When they got there it had receded below the floorboards, leaving a silty residue. Little gray shrimp were swimming on their front steps. They hung clothing, important papers, and Kalal’s paintings to dry, then headed back to Poggi’s house, where they ate tilapia from the grill and drank quarts of melted ice cream with their coffee. It was right after the new moon and the power was out, so it was almost completely dark, Kalal says. “You could see all the stars and it was really beautiful.”
“In a way,” Kalal says, “it was like, yay! We found the motherlode! But we had the understanding that there was no hospital and no police.” They heard that down the street a woman had been caught in a knife fight and was just lying on the sidewalk bleeding to death.
They got good and drunk and went out carousing, mooning helicopters and BS’ing with neighbors. While they were gone the sisters woke up frightened and alone, and when the guys got back Raven put her foot down–they were leaving the next day.
