1 Dead in Attic

by Chris Rose

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Who We Are

  Early Days

  Facing the Unknown

  The First Time Back

  Survivors

  Life in the Surreal City

  Hope

  Rita Takes Aim

  The Empty City

  God and Strippers

  The More Things Change

  Enough to Feed an Army

  Tough Times in the Blue Tarp Town

  Blue Roof Blues

  The Smell

  The Elephant Men

  Mad City

  1 Dead in Attic

  Despair

  The Ties That Bind

  My Introduction to New Orleans

  The Funky Butt

  The Hurricane Kids

  Traveling Man

  Have Barbie, Will Travel

  Prep Boys and Jesuits

  Good-bye

  Groundhog Day

  Coming Home

  Life in the Refrigerator City

  Civil Unrest

  Refrigerator Town

  Lurching Toward Babylon

  The Cat Lady

  Caving In

  The Magnet Man

  The Last Ride

  Lights in the City

  Let the Good Times Roll

  Our Katrina Christmas

  Tears, Fears, and a New Year

  Misadventures in the Chocolate City

  Chocolate City

  Tutti-Frutti

  He Had a Dream

  He’s Picking the Pairs for Nola’s Ark

  Rider on the Storm

  Car 54, Where Are You?

  Not in My Pothole

  Survive This

  Love Among the Ruins

  September Never Ends

  The Muddy Middle Ground

  Misery in the Melting Pot

  The End of the World

  A Huck Finn Kind of Life

  Our Very Scary Summer

  Songs in the Key of Strife

  The End of the Line

  We Raze, and Raise, and Keep Pushing Forward

  Echoes of Katrina in the Country

  The Purple Upside-Down Car

  Second Line, Same Verse

  Don’t Mess with Mrs. Rose

  Shooting the Rock

  The City That Hair Forgot

  A Rapturous Day in the Real World

  Big Daddy No Fun

  Peace Among the Ruins

  Artful Practicality

  “She Rescued My Heart”

  Miss Ellen Deserved Better

  Things Worth Fighting For

  Rebirth at the Maple Leaf

  Melancholy Reveler

  They Don’t Get Mardi Gras, and They Never Will

  Reality Fest

  Love Fest

  O Brothers, Where Be Y’all?

  Funeral for a Friend

  Thanks, We Needed That

  Say What’s So, Joe

  A Night to Remember

  Eternal Dome Nation

  Falling Down

  On the Inside Looking Out

  A City on Hold

  A Tough Nut to Crack

  Hell and Back

  Letters from the Edge

  Where We Go From Here

  Children of the Storm, It’s Time to Represent

  Thank You, Whoever You Are

  A New Dawn

  Acknowledgments

  About Chris Rose

  This book is dedicated to Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman, who died in his attic at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans’ 8th Ward on or about August 29, 2005. He had a can of juice and a bedspread at his side when the waters rose.

  There were more than a thousand like him.

  TEN YEARS LATER

  A Foreword by Chris Rose

  Hard to believe it’s been ten years.

  Sometimes it seems like a million years ago, sometimes like it was yesterday. But it never seems like it didn’t happen.

  Even ten years after—with so much rebuilt, restored, resettled, reconfigured, and entirely reimagined—the specter of Katrina still colors life here, in some small way, even if just a muted gray.

  In casual conversations or social settings, it comes up. Might take a while, but it will come up eventually.

  That’s not to suggest that the stranger sitting next to you is ready to collapse into a fit of despair, rail against the injustice, and then itemize everything he lost.

  It’s not like that anymore, thank God.

  It was for a really long time, though.

  And that time sucked.

  • • •

  Looking back, the hardest thing to wrap your head around is remembering how many people said: Let it go. Let New Orleans wash into the sea.

  This was not just the discontented grumblings from America’s online lunatic fringe, but from established members of the media, the clergy, and Congress, most of whom made such vulgar pronouncements far away from the stink, the misery, and the wreckage.

  The prevailing sentiment among such folks was that New Orleans—bless her charming, offbeat little powdered-sugar heart—was not worth fixing.

  Because not just the levees needed fixing. The roads needed fixing, the parks needed fixing, the schools needed fixing.

  The jails, which needed fixing, were being jammed by the judiciary, which needed fixing. They were stressed to the breaking point handling the massive caseloads delivered by the NOPD, which needed a lot of fixing, and who were not fit or equipped to handle this city’s crime situation—which needed the most fixing of all.

  You wonder: How could anyone have thought New Orleans was broken beyond repair?

  (That was sarcasm.)

  I acknowledge, looking back now from this side of the rubble and the flood—looking back from this side of history—that even a conservative estimate of the projected cost of rebuilding this city, coupled with the dubious integrity and doubtful competence of City Hall at the time . . . it was not a sure bet.

  But still: Let New Orleans die?

  When destiny calls you home, when it’s time to exit the stage, when your number is called (insert any other number of overused clichés for dying): There’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Money and politics can’t fix dead.

  But we weren’t dead. Or if we were, we didn’t know it.

  Here, in arguably the most death-obsessed city in the world, the natives are by turns unaware, unconcerned, and often unconvinced of our own mortality.

  And whereas our geographical positioning might have seemed like a great idea at the time—say, 1718—it’s now a challenge, perhaps even a risk.

  And it’s true, we are neither the most logical nor efficient municipality in this great land.

  But still.

  We’re also not the most educated folks you’ll ever meet, but one thing we did know: We were not going gently into that good night. We were not giving up on New Orleans.

  And with the help of 500,000 of our closest friends around the country—or hell, maybe a million—we put on some boots, pulled on some gloves, and got busy.

  • • •

  If what the magazines and websites have been saying—if what the analysts and futurists are predicting—is true, then New Orleans is the destination for America’s next generation of young artists, entrepreneurs, and designers. Millennials, dreamers, and vision
aries are here creating the next new business model, designing the next great app, fusing the next landmark technology, mixing the next banging cocktail.

  We’re the new Austin. The new Portland. The new Brooklyn. Hollywood South. Hipster City, USA. The New New Orleans, the bright new shining city on the hill. Except, well, without the hill.

  We don’t have any hills.

  But you get the point.

  And maybe that’s all a load of piffle, I don’t know. I reckon time will tell.

  But I do know this: The more New Orleans changes, the more she remains the same. That is the nature of a place where irony is a birthright and contradiction is the dominant hand of fate.

  It’s hard to envision the day when the Thinking Class outnumbers the Drinking Class in this city, but we are approaching a necessary equilibrium between the old and new, the practical and the frivolous, the digital and the sensual.

  We are innovation and tradition, high-tech and antique, fiber optics and gas lamps, new urbanism and the Vieux Carré, Uber cabs and streetcar lines, Airbnb and the Hotel Monteleone.

  We’re Dixieland jazz and sissy bounce.

  New Orleans is today, as it was before, a place suspended between the physical world and the realm of imagination. The experience of everyday life here is magnified by emotional intensity and creative reverie, yet also reduced by the heat, humidity, and altitude to its most basic and primal elements: Food, shelter, and the Saints.

  You can regulate our smoking and regulate our music and—hard to believe this day has come—you can even regulate our go-cups.

  But you cannot regulate soul. You cannot legislate funk. And you cannot pass an ordinance that makes us ordinary.

  The best things about us will never change.

  • • •

  And one final word: Thank you, America. Thank you, from me and my city—you 500,000 (or hell, maybe a million) of our closest friends—who came down here over the past ten years and helped us rebuild this crazy, shambling, loveable hot mess of a city.

  Because without New Orleans, where would all the Wild Things go in the night?

  There’s a bunch of old nicknames for this city and a whole bunch more now, but taking stock of this past decade of transformation—from our despair to our triumph, from our shame to our redemption—I know where I live now.

  Welcome to Lucky Town.

  —June 2015

  “If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.”

  —JUDY DECK

  Introduction

  Writing an introduction for a book like this is tricky business.

  Intros I have read over the years are generally composed of personal anecdotes and references to the body of work that follows. But, in this case, what follows is the personal work, the veil pulled away, the soul of a city—and a writer—laid bare.

  Newspaper reporters are used to covering death and disaster—it’s our bread and butter—but nothing prepares you to do it in your own town. Usually, we parachute into trouble, fill our notebooks, and then hightail it back to the comfort of our homes and offices.

  Katrina changed all that.

  Our comfort zones disappeared, turned into rubble, wastelands, and ghost towns. I went from being a detached entertainment columnist to a soldier on the front line of a battle to save a city, a culture, a newspaper, my job, my home.

  Whether we won or lost the war remains to be seen. New Orleans is still a work in progress. The observations, lamentations, and ruminations that follow are the story so far, as it unfolded to me in the first sixteen months after the flood.

  It’s probably too emotional for conventional newspaper work. Too sentimental. Too angry. And way too self-absorbed, particularly for someone who weathered the storm remarkably well—in a material sense, at least (I suffered a broken screen door and a loose gutter)—and whose career not only survived the storm, but actually thrived in the aftermath.

  I got a book deal, a movie deal, a Pulitzer Prize, dinner with Ted Koppel, and a mention in the social column of The Washington Times. If that ain’t Making The Grade, then I don’t know what is.

  Natural disasters are a good career move for a man in my line of work.

  But you didn’t have to lose your house, your car, your dog, your job, your marriage, or your grandparents in an attic to suffer the impact of this storm. Unfortunately, most folks around south Louisiana and Mississippi did lose some or all of this.

  Others lost less tangible assets: their peace of mind, security, serenity, ability to concentrate, notions of romance, sobriety, sanity, and hope.

  The toll it took on me is in the book; I’ll not belabor it here other than to say Katrina beat the shit out of me. It beat the shit out of everyone I know. This is our story.

  • • •

  In the winter of 2006, I self-published a collection of my post-Katrina columns from The Times-Picayune, a slim volume of love letters to New Orleans, howls of protest, cries for help, and general musings on the surrealistic absurdities of life in a post-Apocalyptic landscape.

  I called it 1 Dead in Attic, a phrase I saw painted on the front of a house in the city’s 8th Ward; words that haunted me then, and haunt me still.

  Within six months, I ran through five printings of the book, collected great reviews from publications large and small, and sold 65,000 copies. I’m a neophyte in the world of independent publishing, but I’m told that’s a real good number for a self-published volume. In fact, it’s a good number for any volume.

  And that’s how the book came to attention of Simon & Schuster. I was preparing a follow-up to 1 Dead in Attic, another collection of stories that I was going to call The Purple Upside-Down Car, a declarative observation my four-year-old son made from our car during a tour of the Lower 9th Ward that I clung to as the perfect metaphor for the whole of New Orleans and not just some wasted, toppled vehicle lying in a field of debris down on—get this—Flood Street.

  The irony in this place could kill you.

  Simon & Schuster bought the rights to 1 Dead in Attic and the as-yet-unpublished Purple Upside-Down Car and we put them together and that’s what you’re holding in your hands. Faced with two titles but only one book, we went with the former because it already has brand recognition and because, well . . . the other one kind of sounds precariously like a Dr. Suess book.

  This book takes the reader up to New Year’s Day, 2007. A lot has happened since then, to the city, to me. On the eve of publication, I split with my wife of eleven years and went to rehab for an addiction to prescription painkillers, which I turned to in my ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression.

  It would be easy to lay this blood on the hands of Katrina, though there is more, much more, to the story.

  There always is.

  But I guess that’s the next chapter, the next story. The next book.

  —Chris Rose

  New Orleans, June, 2007

  Who We Are

  9/6/05

  Dear America,

  I suppose we should introduce ourselves: we’re South Louisiana.

  We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we were never much for waiting around for invitations. We’re not much on formalities like that.

  And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn’t ask for this and neither did we, so we’re just going to have to make the best of it.

  First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses, and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals, and everyone else who has come to our rescue.

  We’re a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don’t cotton much to outside interference, but we’re not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.

  Just don’t get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing ag
ain, don’t try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters.

  We’re not going to listen. We’re stubborn that way.

  You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.

  We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large, and, frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t.

  But we’ll try not to judge you while we’re in your town.

  Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love south Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on the pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.

  Often we don’t make sense. You may wonder why, for instance, if we could carry only one small bag of belongings with us on our journey to your state—why in God’s name did we bring a pair of shrimp boots?

  We can’t really explain that. It is what it is.

  You’ve probably heard that many of us stayed behind. As bad as it is, many of us cannot fathom a life outside our border, out in that place we call Elsewhere.

  The only way you could understand that is if you have been there, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and bars and parades and music and architecture and all that hooey, really, the best thing about where we come from is us.

  We are what made this place a national treasure. We’re good people. And don’t be afraid to ask us how to pronounce our names. It happens all the time.

  When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

  But don’t pity us. We’re gonna make it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints for thirty-five years. That’s got to count for something.

  Okay, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.

  But what the hell.

  And one more thing: In our part of the country, we’re used to having visitors. It’s our way of life.

  So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer us in this season of our despair.