The grill is gone

Vance Vaucresson lost his home and his business in the flood and, well -- that might be news if it hadn't also happened to everybody else around here.

Irony of ironies, he had just moved back into his Gentilly house three weeks before Katrina, having been forced out of it for several months because of a fire.

After Katrina, he relocated his family to New Iberia, where his wife -- and business partner at the Vaucresson Sausage Company -- had complications from childbirth, resulting in five operations and bed rest for most of the past year.

On top of that, his office manager at the sausage company -- cut off from her livelihood, her routines and her friends -- grew depressed and isolated and killed herself and her children in Algiers last year.

How much can a man take? In this community, as we have witnessed time and again, a person can take a lot.

So Vaucresson sucked it up, took it on the chin, and then, the strangest thing: It was the common theft of an outdoor grill that nearly sent him over the edge.

But this was no ordinary grill.

It was custom-made, one thousand pounds of iron, aluminum and stainless steel, a dual grill and smoker able to handle 250 pounds of meat at a time. He used it rarely, but it was his festival season workhorse, and on the eve of the French Quarter Festival and Jazzfest, it disappeared from the empty lot where he kept it parked on a trailer -- unmolested -- on St. Bernard Avenue, in the heart of the 7th Ward, for the past 15 years.

Standing in the lot this week, across the street from the famed Aristocrat Club, Vaucresson stared blankly at the empty space where the grill had been -- hauled away on its trailer, a victim, he believes, of the burgeoning post-Katrina scrap metal trade.

"How could somebody do this?" he lamented. "Going into the festival season, that grill was going to pull me out of the hole.

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