by Chris Rose
That is our promise. That is our faith.
Early Days
Facing the Unknown
9/1/05
I got out.
I’m mystified by the notion that so many people didn’t even try; but that’s another story for another time.
We left Saturday, my wife, kids, and me. We went first to Picayune, Mississippi, thinking that a Category 3 storm would flood New Orleans and knock out power, but that we’d be dry and relatively comfortable in the piney woods while the city dried out.
Sunday morning, of course, Katrina was a massive red blob on our TV screens—now a Cat 5—so we packed up and left again.
We left my in-laws behind in Picayune. They wouldn’t come with us. Self-sufficient country folk; sometimes you can’t tell ’em nothing.
We don’t know what happened to them. My wife’s dad and her brother and their families: No word. Only hope.
Like so many people around the country wondering what happened to those still unaccounted for, we just don’t know. That’s the hardest part.
If you take the images you’ve seen on TV and picked up off the radio and Internet, and you try to apply what you know to the people and places you don’t know about, well, the mind starts racing, assumptions are made, and, well . . . it consumes you.
The kids ask you questions. You don’t have answers. Sometimes they look at me, and though they don’t say it, I can see they’re wondering: Daddy, where are you?
My six-year-old daughter, she’s onto this thing. What is she thinking?
We spent Sunday night in a no-tell motel in a forgotten part of downtown Vicksburg; a neighborhood teetering between a familiar antiquated charm and hopeless decay. Truth is, it called to mind my beloved New Orleans.
Most of the folks in the hotel seemed to live there permanently, and it had a hard-luck feel to it. It was the kind of place where your legs start itching in the bed and you think the worst and you don’t want your kids to touch the carpet or the tub and we huddled together and I read them to sleep.
Monday morning, my wife’s aunt told us they had a generator in Baton Rouge. As Katrina marched north and east, we bailed on our sullen little hotel and drove down along the western ridge of the storm, mostly alone on the road.
Gas was no problem. We had catfish and pulled pork in a barbecue joint in Natchez, and the folks there—everyone we have met along our three-day journey—said the same thing: Good luck, folks. We love your city. Take care of it for us.
Oh, my city. We have spent hours and hours listening to the radio. Image upon image piling up in your head.
What about school? What about everyone’s jobs? Did all our friends get out? Are there still trees on the streetcar line? What will our economy be like with no visitors? How many are dead? Do I have a roof? Have the looters found me yet? When can we go home?
As I said, it consumes you as you sit helplessly miles from home, unable to help anyone, unable to do anything.
If I could, what I’d do first is hurt the looters. I’d hurt them bad.
But you have to forget all that. You have to focus on what is at hand, what you can reach, and when you have three little kids lost at sea, they are what’s at hand and what you can reach.
I took them to a playground in Baton Rouge Tuesday afternoon. They’d been bottled up for days.
Finally unleashed, they ran, they climbed, they fell down, they fought, they cried, they made me laugh, they drove me crazy; they did the things that make them kids.
It grounds you. You take a breath. You count to ten. Maybe—under the circumstances—you go to twenty or thirty this time.
And tonight, we’ll just read them to sleep again.
We have several books with us because—and this is rich—we brought on our evacuation all the clothes and things we planned to bring on a long-weekend trip that we were going to take over Labor Day weekend.
To the beach. To Fort Morgan, right at the mouth of Mobile Bay.
Man.
Instead of that, I put on my suntan lotion and went out in the yard of the house where we’re staying in Baton Rouge and I raked a massive pile of leaves and limbs from the yard and swept the driveway.
Doing yard work and hitting the jungle gym on the Day After. Pretending life goes on. Just trying to stay busy. Just trying not to think. Just trying not to fail, really.
Gotta keep moving.
The First Time Back
9/7/05
The first time you see it . . . I don’t know. Where are the words?
I got to town Monday afternoon. I braced myself, not knowing how it would make me feel, not knowing how much it would make me hurt.
I found out that I am one of the lucky ones. High ground. With that come gratitude and wonder and guilt. The Higher Powers have handed me my house and all my stuff, and now what? What is there?
I live Uptown, where all the fancy-pants houses are, and they’re all still here. Amid the devastation, they never looked so beautiful. They never looked more like hope. This swath of land is where this city will begin its recovery.
There are still homes and schools, playgrounds, stores, bars, and restaurants. Not so many trees, I’m afraid. We’ll have to do something about that.
The Circle K near my house was looted, but there are still ample supplies of cigarettes and booze. They just took what they needed. The hardware store and Perlis—the preppy clothing store—same thing.
Someone kicked in the window at Shoefty, a high-end shoe boutique, and what good a pair of Manolo Blahnik stilettos is going to do you right now, I don’t know.
Idiots.
I myself was escorted out of the local Winn-Dixie by narcotics officers from Rusk County, Texas.
I told them I thought it was okay to take what we need. “And what do you need?” the supervisor asked me. I reached into my bag and held up a bottle of mouthwash.
I told him I will come back to this Winn-Dixie one day and pay for this bottle, and I will. I swear it.
Right by the entrance to the store, there is a huge pile of unsold newspapers stacked up from the last day they were delivered, Sunday, August 28.
The Times-Picayune headline screams: KATRINA TAKES AIM.
Ain’t that the truth? Funny, though: The people you see here—and there are many who stayed behind—they never speak her name. She is the woman who done us wrong.
I had the strangest dream last night, and this is true: I dreamt I was reading an ad in the paper for a hurricane-relief benefit concert at Zephyr Field and the headliner act was Katrina and the Waves.
They had that peppy monster hit back in the ’80s, “Walking on Sunshine,” the one they play on Claritin ads on TV and that almost seems funny in light of what happened.
Almost.
Riding my bike, I searched out my favorite places, my comfort zones. I found that Tipitina’s is still there, and that counts for something. Miss Mae’s and Dick & Jenny’s, ditto.
Domilise’s po-boy shop is intact, although the sign fell and shattered, but the truth is, that sign needed to be replaced a long time ago.
I saw a dead guy on the front porch of a shotgun double on a working-class street, and the only sound was wind chimes.
Everybody here has a dead-guy story now. Everybody here will always be different.
I passed by the Valence Street Baptist Church and the facade was ripped away and I walked in and stared at the altar amid broken stained glass and strewn Bibles and I got down on my knees and said Thank you but why? why? why? and I’m not even anything close to Baptist.
It just seemed like a place to take shelter from the storm in my head.
The rockers on my neighbors’ front porch are undisturbed, as if nothing ever happened. At my other neighbors’ house—the ones who never take out their trash—a million kitchen bags are still piled in the mound that’s always there and I never thought I’d be happy to see garbage, but I am.
Because it reminds me of my home.
I haven’t been down in
the kill zone yet. I haven’t seen the waters. I haven’t been where all hope, life, and property are lost.
I have only seen what I have seen, and we took the hit and it is still here. This is where we’ll make our start. This is where we’ll make our stand.
And when everything gets back to normal—whenever that may be—I’m going to do what I’ve been putting off for a very long time. I’m going to walk next door and tell my neighbors that they really do need to start taking out their trash.
Survivors
9/8/05
They’re telling the people they have to go. They’re going door to door with rifles now.
They came to our little hovel on Laurel Street Uptown—a dozen heavily armed members of the California National Guard—they pounded on our door and wanted to know who we were.
We told them we were the newspaper, the Big City Daily. I admit, it doesn’t look like the newsrooms you see on TV. I suppose if we wore shirts, we’d look more professional.
The Guard moved on, next door, next block. They’re telling people they have to go.
It won’t be easy. The people who stayed here have weathered ten days of unfathomable stench and fear, and if they haven’t left yet, it seems unlikely that they’re going to be willing now.
In a strange way, life just goes on for the remaining. In the dark and fetid Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas, an old woman I passed in the pet food aisle was wearing a house frock and puffy slippers and she just looked at me as she pushed her cart by and said, “How you doin’, baby?”
As if it were just another afternoon buying groceries. I love the way strangers call you “baby” in this town.
Outside the store, there’s an old guy who parks his old groaning car by the front door from sunup to sundown. There are extension cords running from his trunk into the store, which still has power—don’t ask me how; I have no idea—and he watches TV in his front seat and drinks juice.
That is what he does, all day, every day.
At this point, I just can’t see this guy leaving. I don’t imagine he has any place else in the world but this.
And life goes on. Down on St. Claude Avenue, a tribe of survivors has blossomed at Kajun’s Pub, where, incredibly, they have cold beer and cigarettes and a stereo playing Elvis and you’d think everything was in standard operating procedure but it is not: the Saturday-night karaoke has been suspended indefinitely.
The people here have a touch of Mad Max syndrome; they’re using an old blue Cadillac for errands, and when parts fall off of it—and many parts have fallen off—they just throw them in the trunk.
Melvin, a bar owner from down the block, had the thing up for sale for $895, but he’ll probably take the best offer now.
Melvin’s Bar and Kajun’s Pub have pooled their inventories to stay in business.
“We’ve blended our fortunes together,” said Renee dePonthieux, a bartender at Melvin’s. “We carried everything we could down here, and we’ll make the accounting later. What else are you gonna do? In case you haven’t heard, Budweiser ain’t delivering.”
A guy with a long goatee and multiple tattoos was covering a couple of aluminum foil pans of lasagna and carrying them up to the roof to cook them in the sun on the hot slate shingles.
Joann Guidos, the proprietor at Kajun’s, called out for a game of bourré and they all dumped their money on a table and sat down and let the cards and liquor flow.
A National Guard truck pulled up and asked if they were ready to leave yet. Two guys standing out on the sidewalk in the company of pit bulls said, “Hell no.”
DePonthieux said, “We’re the last fort on the edge of the wilderness. My family’s been in exile for three hundred years; this ain’t shit.”
I just don’t see these people leaving.
Uptown, on what was once a shady street, a tribe is living in a beautiful home owned by a guy named Peanut. There are a seaplane in his driveway, a bass boat in the front yard, and generators running the power.
Let’s just say they were prepared.
All the men wear pistols in visible holsters. They have the only manicured lawn in the city. What else is there to do all afternoon, really?
Christine Paternostro is a member of this tribe, an out-of-work hairstylist from Supercuts in a city where no one shaves or bathes. Not many prospects for her at this point.
“Everyone will need a haircut when this is over,” I offered.
While members of this tribe stood talking on their street, a woman came running out of the house, yelling, “Y’all, come quick. We on WWL! We on WWL!”
Everyone ran in the house and watched a segment about how people are surviving in the city. And these guys are doing just that. (Although I think the airplane in the driveway is a little over the top.)
As I was leaving, the WWL woman asked me, “Are you staying for dinner?”
I was not, but I asked what they were having. “Tuna steaks,” she said. “Grilled.”
If and when they rebuild this city and we all get to come home, I want to live near people like this. I just can’t imagine them ever leaving.
They make me wonder if I ever could.
Life in the Surreal City
9/10/05
You hear the word “surreal” in every report from this city now. There is no better word for it.
If Salvador Dalí showed up here, he wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. Nobody could paint this.
He did that famous painting of the melting clock, and our clocks melted at 6:45 the morning of August 29. That’s what the clocks in the French Quarter still say. That’s when time stood still.
The Quarter survived all this; you’ve probably heard that much. Most of what remains unscathed—and I’m using a very relative term here—is a swath of dry land from the Riverbend through Audubon Park, down St. Charles and Tchoupitoulas to the Quarter and into the Bywater.
It’s like a landmass the size of Bermuda, maybe, but with not so many golf courses.
There are other dry outposts in the great beyond—little Key Wests across the city—but I haven’t seen them.
The weather is beautiful, I don’t mind telling you. But if I wrote you a postcard, it wouldn’t say, “Wish you were here.”
There are still hearty rosebushes blooming on front porches, and there are still birds singing in the park. But the park is a huge National Guard encampment.
There are men and women from other towns living there in tents who have left their families to come help us, and they are in the park clearing out the fallen timber. My fellow Americans.
Every damn one of them tells you they’re happy to be here (despite what you’ve heard, it still beats the hell out of Fallujah), and every time I try to thank them, on behalf of all of us, I just lose it. I absolutely melt down.
There is nothing quite as ignominious as weeping in front of a soldier.
This is no environment for a wuss like me. We reporters go to other places to cover wars and disasters and pestilence and famine. There’s no manual to tell you how to do this when it’s your own city.
And I’m telling you: it’s hard.
It’s hard not to get crispy around the edges. It’s hard not to cry. It’s hard not to be very, very afraid.
My colleagues who are down here are warriors. There are a half dozen of us living in a small house on a side street Uptown. Everyone else has been cleared out.
We have a generator and water and military food rations and Doritos and smokes and booze. After deadline, the call goes out: “Anyone for some warm brown liquor?” And we sit on the porch in the very, very still of the night and we try to laugh.
Some of these guys lost their houses—everything in them. But they’re here, telling our city’s story.
And they stink. We all stink. We stink together.
We have a bunch of guns, but it’s not clear to me if anyone in this “news bureau” knows how to use them.
The California National Guard came by and wanted an accoun
ting of every weapon in the building and they wrote the serial numbers down and apparently our guns are pretty rad because they were all cooing over the .38s.
I guess that’s good to know.
The Guard wanted to know exactly what we had so they would be able to identify, apparently by sound, what guns were in whose hands if anything “went down” after dark here at this house.
That’s not so good to know.
They took all our information and bid us a good day and then sauntered off to retrieve a dead guy from a front porch down the street.
Then the California Highway Patrol—the CHiPs!—came and demanded that we turn over our weapons.
What are you going to do? We were certainly outnumbered, so we turned over the guns. Then, an hour later, they brought them back. With no explanation.
Whatev. So here we are. Just another day at the office.
Maybe you’ve seen that Times-Picayune advertising slogan before: “News, Sports and More.”
More indeed. You’re getting your money’s worth today.
Hope
9/11/05
Amid the devastation, you have to look for hope. Forward progress of any kind.
Even the smallest incidents of routine and normalcy become reassuring. For instance, I was driving down Prytania, and at the corner of Felicity, the light turned red.
Out of nowhere, in total desolation, there was a working stoplight. I would have been less surprised to find a Blockbuster Video on Mars.
And the funny thing is, I stopped. I waited for it to turn green, and then I drove slowly on my way, even though there were no other cars anywhere and the likelihood of getting a ticket for running the only traffic signal in town seems very unlikely right now.
Considering.
Also on Prytania, there was a gardener watering the plants on the porch of Nicolas Cage’s mansion, and I guess that’s a good sign. Life goes on. In very small ways.
The toilets flush now, and I never thought that would be a sound of reassurance. Even better was finding out that WWOZ is broadcasting on the Web—radio in exile—laying out its great New Orleans music.