Chapter 1: Record

Tape One

The first thing on the tape is my father's thumb.

It's huge. It fills the whole screen, pink and blurry, with the whorls of the fingerprint going in and out of focus, and behind it you can hear him breathing hard through his nose and saying, "How do you — Colleen, where's the — is it on? The red light's on. Is that on?"

And my mother, from somewhere off to the side, says, "Sal, your thumb."

"What about my thumb?"

"It's on the lens."

The thumb goes away. The picture swings around, wildly, the kitchen ceiling, the window, the refrigerator with the Saints schedule held on by a magnet shaped like a crawfish, the floor, a dog that isn't ours, and then it settles, shaking, on a little boy in a paper crown sitting at the end of a table in front of a cake with five candles on it.

That's me. June 21, 1990. My fifth birthday. In the back room of my father's po-boy shop on Bienville Street in Mid-City, New Orleans, with my grandmother and my mother and my baby sister and about fifteen cousins, and my father, behind the camera for the first time in his life, shouting.

"Gabe! Gabriel! Look at Daddy! Look at the camera! No — at the camera — the camera, baby, the big black thing on my shoulder!"

I look at the camera. I've never seen one before. It's enormous. It's a full-size VHS camcorder, the kind you held on your shoulder like a news cameraman, with a real tape inside it, a regular VHS tape, the same kind you put in the VCR, and a little red light on the front that meant it was recording, and my father had bought it that morning, from a store on Veterans, for nine hundred dollars, without telling my mother.

"Nine hundred dollars," my mother says, on the tape, from off to the side. You can't see her. You can hear her. "Salvatore Scaglione. For a camera."

"It's an investment."

"In what?"

"In memories," says my father, on the tape. "Gabe! Blow out the candles!"

I blow out the candles. On the tape, I'm looking straight at the camera the whole time. Not at the cake. At the lens. At the little red light.

I've watched that tape probably two hundred times. I've transferred it to DVD and then to a hard drive and then to the cloud. In every version, the little boy in the paper crown is looking at the red light. Like he's found something. Like he already knows.

Scaglione's

My great-grandfather opened the shop in 1949, when he came back from the war. It was on the corner of Bienville and a little cross street in Mid-City, a neighborhood of shotgun houses and corner bars and old Italian and Black and Irish families, two miles from the French Quarter, close enough to smell the river on a hot day. The building was a two-story wooden thing, painted green, with a gallery on the second floor where my grandmother lived, and a hand-painted sign on the front, SCAGLIONE'S — PO-BOYS — GROCERIES — SINCE 1949, that my father repainted himself every spring, standing on a ladder, cursing.

Inside, there was a counter, and a meat case, and a wall of bread from the bakery on Dryades, French bread, the long kind with the crackly crust that shatters all over your shirt, and a grill, and a fryer that never stopped, and six tables with red-checked oilcloth, and a TV up in the corner that only ever had the Saints on it, or the news.

My father made roast beef po-boys with the gravy running down your arm. Fried shrimp. Fried oysters. Hot sausage. Muffulettas on Fridays, because my grandmother made the olive salad, and she only made it on Thursday nights, and she wouldn't make it on any other night, for reasons she never explained.

I grew up in that shop. Literally. My mother worked nights at Charity Hospital, and my father worked days at the shop, and so from the time I was a baby, during the day, I was in the shop, in a playpen behind the counter, then on a stool, then under the tables, then running errands to the bakery, then working the register by the time I was nine.

And from the day of the cake, I was filming it.

The camera

My father couldn't work it. That was the thing. He'd bought a nine-hundred-dollar camera and he couldn't figure it out. He'd point it at things and forget to push the button. Or push the button and forget to take the lens cap off. Or film for twenty minutes with his thumb on the lens. He filmed one whole Saints game off the TV in the shop, three hours, on the six-hour setting, and when we played it back it was the ceiling fan.

So I took it.

I was five, then six. It was too heavy for me. I couldn't put it on my shoulder. I had to set it on the counter, or on a stack of bread boxes, or on my father's head while he held still. But I could work it. I figured it out the first week. The power button. The red button. The zoom, a little rocker switch on the top that made things go big and small, which I thought was the most magical thing in the world. The little black-and-white viewfinder you looked into with one eye, where the whole world was a small gray square.

I filmed everything. The shop. The customers. My father at the grill with his cigarette and his apron, flipping shrimp. Mr. Lionel, who came in every day at eleven for a hot sausage po-boy and sat at the same table and read the Times-Picayune and called me little Fellini, which I didn't understand. The bread man. The beer man. The ladies from the church. My baby sister Maria, two years old, eating a crawfish head.

"What are you going to do with all that?" my mother said. She'd come home from Charity at eight in the morning in her white uniform and her white shoes and she'd find me in the kitchen, at six years old, rewinding a tape.

"Watch it," I said.

"You already saw it. You were there."

"But it's different," I said. "When you watch it, it's different."

My mother looked at me. She was tired. She was always tired in the mornings. She'd been on her feet for twelve hours at the biggest hospital in the city, the one everybody went to when they didn't have anywhere else to go, the one with the gunshot wounds and the car wrecks and the babies, and she had dark circles under her eyes and her hair coming out of her bun.

"Different how?" she said.

I didn't know how to say it. I was six. I pressed play. The tape came on, on the little TV on the kitchen counter. It was her. From the morning before. Coming in the back door in her white uniform, at eight in the morning, tired. And then bending down and kissing me on the top of the head, which she did every morning, and which I'd filmed by setting the camera on the counter and pointing it at the door.

My mother watched herself kiss me. On the little TV.

"Oh," she said.

St. Joseph

In March, my grandmother built an altar.

That's what the Sicilian families in New Orleans did. On St. Joseph's Day, March 19, you built an altar to St. Joseph in your house, three tiers high, covered with white cloth, and on it you put food. Bread baked in shapes, crosses and hearts and staffs and sandals and fish. Fig cookies. Cuccidati. Pignolatti, the little fried pastries in the shape of pinecones. Whole fish. Lemons. Fava beans, the lucky beans, that you carried in your wallet all year so you'd never be broke. Candles. Flowers. A statue of St. Joseph holding the baby Jesus. And then you opened your door and anybody could come in and look at it, and pray, and take a lucky bean, and eat.

A St. Joseph's Day altar in a home on Magazine Street, New Orleans, March 19, 1942.

My grandmother, Nonna Rosaria, built hers in the shop. On the six tables, pushed together. She started three weeks ahead. Baking every night, upstairs, in her tiny kitchen, the whole building smelling like anise and fig. She was sixty-three. She'd come from Sicily in 1938, at ten years old, on a ship, with her mother, to meet her father, who'd been in New Orleans for six years cutting sugarcane and then selling fruit off a cart in the French Market. She spoke English with an accent so thick that only the family could understand her, and she called me Gabrieluzzu, and she gave me a fig cookie every single time I walked into her kitchen, even when my mother had told her not to.

I filmed the altar in 1991. I was five, almost six. My father held me up on his shoulders so I could get the top tier. I filmed it from bottom to top, slowly, the bread and the fish and the candles and the saint, and then I filmed my grandmother, standing next to it in her black dress, with her hands folded, looking at it.

On the tape, you can hear me say, "Nonna. Say something."

And on the tape, my grandmother turns and looks at the camera. Right at it. She's never been filmed in her life. She looks at it for a long moment, very serious, like it's a priest. Then she says, in Sicilian, something I didn't understand until I was twenty, when I played it for my father, the week before she died.

Chistu è pi quannu nun ci sugnu cchiù.

"This is for when I'm not here anymore," my father translated. And then he had to leave the room.

Mardi Gras

On Mardi Gras day in 1992, my father carried me on his shoulders on St. Charles Avenue with the camcorder on my head.

I mean that exactly. I was six. I sat on his shoulders, and I held the camera on top of my own head, with both hands, pointed forward, and looked through the viewfinder, which was right at my eye if I tilted my head back. My father held my ankles. My mother walked next to us with Maria in a stroller and a cooler and a bag for beads.

St. Charles on Mardi Gras day is the loudest place in the world. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Families on ladders, the ladders with little wooden seats built on top for the kids, lined up along the neutral ground, the wide grassy strip down the middle of the avenue where the streetcar runs. People in costumes. People in nothing. Brass bands. High school marching bands, the big ones, from the Black high schools, St. Aug and Clark and Kennedy, with the drums so loud you felt them in your teeth and the dancers in sequins and the tubas swinging side to side. And the floats. Huge, glittering, lit up, two stories tall, with the masked riders on top throwing beads and cups and doubloons into the crowd, and everybody screaming throw me something, mister.

I filmed all of it. Two hours of tape. Most of it is useless. It's the sky, and beads flying at the lens, and the back of a man's head. My father kept jumping for beads with me on his shoulders. But there's one minute, about an hour in, that I've used in everything I've ever made since.

It's the St. Augustine Marching 100. Coming down St. Charles. The whole band, a hundred boys in purple and gold, the drum major in front with his tall hat and his baton, high-stepping, bending backward so far his head almost touched the street. The drums. The horns. The sound hitting the camera so hard the microphone distorts and the picture shakes.

And for one minute, my father stopped jumping. He stood absolutely still, on the neutral ground, holding my ankles, so the camera would be steady. Because he knew. He couldn't work the camera. But he knew what it was for.

When the band passed, he looked up at me, upside down.

"You got it?" he said.

"I got it."

"Good," said my father. "That's the best band in the world, Gabe. Don't let anybody tell you different."

Nights

My mother was never on any of the tapes. Hardly ever. She was always the one saying Sal, your thumb from off to the side. Or she was asleep, because she'd worked all night. Or she was at Charity.

Charity Hospital was a giant. That's what it looked like to me. A huge stone building downtown, twenty stories, from the 1930s, like something from a movie, with the name carved in stone over the door. Big Charity, everybody called it. If you got shot in New Orleans, you went to Charity. If you didn't have insurance, you went to Charity. If you were having a baby and you didn't have anywhere else, you went to Charity. I was born there. In 1985. My mother had been working there for three years when she had me, and she worked there for twenty more.

Charity Hospital on Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, 2014, closed since Hurricane Katrina.

She worked in the emergency room. Nights. Seven at night to seven in the morning. She came home smelling like soap and something else, something sharp, that I found out later was blood and the stuff they used to clean it.

When I was seven, I asked her if I could film her at work.

"Absolutely not," she said.

"Why?"

"Because it's not a place for a camera," said my mother. "It's a place for people."

I didn't understand that either. I thought a camera was for people. I thought that was the whole point.

That night, she was getting ready to leave for her shift. In the kitchen, in her uniform, putting her lunch in a paper bag. I had the camera on the counter. I turned it on. I didn't tell her. The little red light came on, and I put a dishtowel over it so she wouldn't see.

She packed her lunch. She filled her thermos. She put on her watch. Then she stopped in the middle of the kitchen and stood there, for a second, with her eyes closed, her hand on the counter. Like she was gathering something up. Like she was getting ready to carry something heavy.

Then she opened her eyes and picked up her bag and kissed me on the head and went out the back door to the car.

I watched it later. Alone. I watched that ten seconds, her standing there with her eyes closed, about fifty times. I never showed it to her. I never showed it to anybody. Not for thirty years.

It was the first time I understood what my mother meant. That there were things you could film, and things you shouldn't. And that sometimes the things you shouldn't film were the only true things on the tape.

Chapter 2: Tracking

Quinn's house

We didn't have cable. Quinn did. That was how it started.

Quinton Batiste lived four blocks from the shop, on a street of shotgun houses near Orleans Avenue, with his grandmother, his mother, his two older brothers, an uncle who came and went, and a television that was never, ever off. His grandmother kept it on the gospel channel during the day and the news at night. But from three-thirty to five-thirty, when Quinn's grandmother was at her job cleaning offices in the CBD, the TV belonged to us. And on cable, there was MTV.

We were nine. It was 1994. We'd met in the third grade at the Catholic school on Canal Street, where Quinn was the only boy in our class who could whistle with two fingers and I was the only boy in our class who brought a camcorder to show-and-tell. He'd come into the shop for a po-boy after school one day, with two dollars in quarters, and my father had given him a whole shrimp po-boy, the big one, for the two dollars, and told him to come back anytime, and he did. Every day. For six years.

On the afternoons at his house, we sat on the floor in front of the TV and watched music videos.

I'd never seen anything like them. Nobody had, really. A song, but with pictures. Little movies, three minutes long, that went with the music. Some of them told stories. Some of them didn't make any sense at all. People dancing in the rain in slow motion. People walking down an empty street while the camera flew around them. A man in a dark room with a guitar and a light on his face. A woman in a white dress in a field of fire.

"How do they do that?" I said. "The slow motion. And the camera going around."

"Money," said Quinn.

"No, but how? How do they make it go slow?"

Quinn shrugged. Quinn didn't care how. Quinn cared about the horns. Whenever a video came on with horns in it, any horns, he'd sit up and lean toward the TV and his fingers would start moving on his knees, pressing down on invisible valves.

I cared about how. I'd sit there with my face a foot from the screen trying to figure it out. Where the camera was. How it was moving. Why it cut from one thing to the next thing right on the beat. I'd go home and try to do it with my father's camcorder. Point it at Maria, who was six, and tell her to walk down the sidewalk in slow motion, and then run alongside her, filming, trying to make the camera fly.

It didn't fly. It bounced. Maria fell down. The tape looked like an earthquake.

"You need a crane," said Quinn, watching it on the TV in the shop. "They got cranes. And tracks. Like a train. For the camera to ride on."

"How do you know?"

"Saw it on a show," said Quinn. "Behind the scenes. They had a man on a crane like a cherry picker, up in the air."

I thought about that for a week. Then I put the camcorder in a shopping cart from the Schwegmann's and had Quinn push me down the sidewalk on Bienville while I filmed Maria walking. It was the first tracking shot I ever made. It was terrible. It was the best thing I'd ever seen.

April

In April, Quinn's cousin Tanya cried on the floor of the living room because a man in Seattle had died.

She was seventeen. We didn't know who he was. A singer. From a band that was on MTV all the time, a loud one, with a song that everybody's older brother played too loud in the car. MTV stopped playing videos and played news instead, all afternoon. Men talking. A house in Seattle. Flowers. Kids crying in a park.

Tanya sat on the floor with her knees up and watched it and cried and wouldn't let us change the channel.

"Who is he?" I asked Quinn, very quietly.

"I don't know," Quinn whispered. "Some white boy with a guitar."

Tanya heard him. She turned around. Her face was wet.

"He was somebody," she said. "He was somebody to somebody. That's all you need to know."

Quinn didn't say anything. I didn't either. We sat next to her on the floor and watched the news about a man we'd never heard of until it was dark outside and Quinn's grandmother came home and turned it to the gospel channel and Tanya went to her room.

Quinn's horn

That summer, Quinn got a trumpet.

His uncle brought it. The one who came and went. He came on a Sunday, in July, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had a black case in his hand, old, beat up, with the latches rusted, and he set it down on the kitchen table in front of Quinn.

"Your granddaddy's," he said. "Played in the Eureka. In the fifties. Then the Olympia. You know what that means?"

Quinn didn't. I didn't either. Later I found out. They were brass bands. The old ones. The ones that played funerals and parades and church picnics, the bands that marched behind the coffin playing a hymn very slow, and then, after the burial, on the way back, played it fast, and everybody danced.

Quinn opened the case. The trumpet was inside, on faded red velvet, dull and dented, with green on the valves.

"It needs work," said his uncle. "Valves stick. You got to oil them. You got to take care of it." He looked at Quinn. "You want it?"

Quinn reached for it. He took it out of the case. He held it, the way you'd hold a baby, like he was afraid it would break. Then he put it to his mouth and blew.

Nothing came out. A spitting sound. Air.

His uncle laughed. Not mean. "Buzz your lips," he said. "Like this." He showed him. A sound like a bee. "Then blow."

Quinn buzzed his lips. Then he blew. And a note came out of the trumpet. One note. Loud, and wobbly, and terrible, and enormous, in the kitchen of the shotgun house on that little street off Orleans Avenue, so loud the dishes rattled and his grandmother yelled from the other room.

Quinn took the trumpet away from his mouth and looked at it. I'd never seen his face like that. Like he'd found something.

I knew that face. I'd seen it on my own tape. Looking at the red light.

The second line

In the fall, Quinn's uncle took us to a second line.

A second line is a parade. Every Sunday, from late summer to spring, somewhere in New Orleans, one of the social aid and pleasure clubs, the old neighborhood clubs, mostly Black, that started a hundred years ago to help people pay for funerals and doctors, puts on a parade. The club members in front, in matching suits, every color, with sashes and hats and fans and umbrellas covered in feathers. A brass band behind them. And behind the band, the second line. Everybody else. Anybody. Thousands of people. Dancing down the street behind the band for four hours, through the neighborhoods, stopping at bars, going under the overpass on Claiborne where the sound bounces off the concrete and it's so loud you can't think.

My father wouldn't let me go at first. My mother said absolutely not, and then she said, "Who's going?" and I said Quinn's uncle, and she said, "The one who comes and goes?" and I said yes, and she said absolutely not again. Then my father said, "Colleen. Let him go. I went when I was his age." And my mother looked at my father like he'd grown a second head. "You did not," she said. "I did," said my father. "Nonna doesn't know."

So I went. With the camcorder. Which I'd been told to hold on to with both hands and not let anybody touch.

I've never been so scared and so happy at the same time in my life. I was nine. I was one of the only white kids there. I was small, with a giant camera on my shoulder that weighed half what I did. And the crowd was enormous, and loud, and everybody was dancing, old men and young girls and grandmothers with umbrellas and little kids on their fathers' shoulders, and the band was in the middle of it, the tuba and the trombones and the trumpets and the big bass drum, moving down the street like a storm.

Quinn's uncle walked behind me with his hand on my shoulder. The whole time. Four hours.

"Get in front," he said, at one point. "Get in front of the band. Walk backward. They'll go around you."

So I did. I walked backward down the middle of the street in front of a brass band, with the camera on my shoulder, filming them coming at me. The trumpet player, an older man with a gray beard, saw me. He saw the camera. And he leaned down, right into the lens, and played a run of notes straight into it, so close I could see the spit fly, and then laughed, and went on.

That's on the tape. You can see his face, enormous in the lens, the trumpet bell, the notes coming out. And behind it, you can hear Quinn. Somewhere in the crowd. Screaming.

Lakeview

In 1995, we moved to Lakeview.

My father had saved up. The shop was doing well. Better than ever. And he and my mother wanted a house of their own, with a yard, away from the shop, so that he could go home at night and not hear the fryer. They bought a little brick house in Lakeview, by the lake, near the 17th Street Canal, in a neighborhood of brick houses with lawns and live oaks and families who'd been there since the 1950s.

I didn't want to go. Quinn was four blocks from the shop. Now he'd be four miles.

"You'll still see him," said my father. "Every day at the shop."

"It's not the same."

"Nothing's the same," said my father. "That's what moving means."

The new house was one story, brick, with a carport and a backyard with a fig tree and a fence. It had an attic with a pull-down ladder in the hallway, which I loved immediately, and used as a movie studio. It was a mile from the lake and three blocks from the canal, which was a long, straight channel of water behind a wall, with a grassy levee on top, where you could walk your dog.

"What's the wall for?" I asked my father, the first week, standing on top of the levee with him, looking down at the water on one side and the houses on the other. The houses were lower than the water. You could see it. The water in the canal was higher than the roofs on our street.

"Keeps the water out," said my father.

"What if it breaks?"

My father laughed. "It's not going to break, Gabe. The Army built it."

The Saints

My father had been a Saints fan since 1967, the first season, when he was twelve. That was the worst thing about him. He said so himself.

The Saints were bad. Not sometimes bad. Always bad. For almost thirty years, they'd never won a playoff game. In 1980 they'd lost fourteen games in a row, and the fans had worn paper bags over their heads to the games, with eyeholes cut out, and called them the Aints. My father had worn a bag. He had it in a drawer in the shop. He showed it to me once, like a relic.

Every Sunday in the fall, the shop TV had the Saints on. And every Sunday, my father stood behind the counter with his arms crossed, watching, and suffering, and the customers suffered with him. Mr. Lionel, who was eighty now, at his table. The bread man. The ladies from church. Quinn, eating his po-boy.

In October of 1996, the Saints' coach quit. In the middle of the season. After a terrible loss, he stood up at the press conference and said something about his team that I can't put in this book, and the next day he was gone. My father watched the press conference on the shop TV, and when it was over, he turned off the TV and stood there.

"Thirty years," he said.

"Daddy—"

"Thirty years, Gabe. I been watching them since I was twelve." He took off his apron. He folded it. He put it on the counter. "You know why?"

"Why?"

My father looked at the dark TV. "Because they're ours," he said. "That's it. That's the only reason. They're terrible, and they're ours. You don't stop loving something because it's terrible. That's not how it works. Not here."

He picked up the apron. He put it back on. He went back to the grill.

I didn't understand that either. Not for nine more years. Not until the water.