by Chris Rose
What a great slogan that is.
Buddy D. The Saints. Garbage pickup. Ah, memories of my old New Orleans.
The Elephant Men
10/25/05
Every night, we gather on my front stoop. We are multiple combinations of jobless, homeless, familyless, and sometimes just plain listless.
We sit and some of us drink and some of us smoke and together we solve the problems of the city—since no one in any official capacity seems able or inclined to do so.
We’re just one more committee howling at the moon. We are a civic life support system.
It began with close friends and neighbors, gathering as we trickled back into town, comparing notes and stories and hugs of comfort and welcome home. But the breadth of visitors has widened.
One night, while I was sitting with a couple of friends, a guy pulled up to the curb in an SUV and regarded us carefully. As the passenger-side window rolled down, I assumed it was an old friend stopping to say hello, so I stepped up to the door.
Turns out, it was a total stranger. He asked, “Displaced dads?” He had a six-pack of Corona on the front seat, and he was just driving around randomly, looking for someone to connect with, someone to talk to, something—God help us—something to do.
We nodded. Yeah, we are men without their women. Women without their men. Parents without their children.
But not without beer.
And he got out of the car and he sat with us for hours and we told our stories to each other and asked about each other’s families, now spread across the planet, and when it was over we had a new friend. A displaced dad. Just looking for a place we used to call home.
We stoop sitters tend to get very wry and blend dark humor with our rants against the machine, but sometimes it gets very sad.
We often deal with First-Timer Syndrome. As my immediate neighbors trickle back into town, one by one—either just to clean up and move on or to move back in for good—they generally end up on my stoop. And they often cry.
It’s the first time they’ve been back to town and they are shaken to their very core at what they’ve seen and smelled and we grizzled veterans of this war try to provide shelter from their storm.
They apologize for losing it, but we tell them that many tears have been shed here on this stoop and they are ours and it’s okay. It happens to all First Timers. Hell, it happens still.
They’re easy to spot, the First Timers. Either they sob or they sit silent and sullen, taking the occasional pull on a bottle of beer, with very little to add to the conversation of the night.
The next night, they usually come back, and they are a little better. One day at a time. Ain’t that the way of life around here?
We sit around night after night because some of us are unable to sit still in a restaurant for ninety minutes or aren’t ready to go back to the bar scene. Many can’t concentrate on reading and television seems like an empty gesture, so we talk. We talk about the same damn thing over and over.
We talk about it. The elephant in the room.
I suspect many folks have sat with us and thought, upon going home: You guys need to get a grip. You need to talk about something else. You need to get a life.
That may be, but I, personally, have been unable to focus on anything but the elephant. I have tried to watch TV or read a magazine, but when I see or hear phrases like “Tom and Katie” or “World Series” or “Judge Miers,” my mind just glazes over and all I hear is the buzz of a fluorescent light. That is the sound of my cerebral cortex now.
I can’t hear what they’re saying on TV. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I think: Why aren’t they talking about the elephant?
Once, in an out-of-town airport, I searched desperately for some thing to read about the elephant, but we have been tossed off the front pages by other events. Finally I found a magazine with a blaring headline—“What Went Wrong?”—and I thought, finally, something about us.
It turns out, though, it was People magazine and “What Went Wrong” was not about FEMA or the levees or the flood, but about Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney.
And the fluorescent light goes zzzzzz.
One newcomer to the stoop one night said something along the lines of “Can you believe that call at the end of the White Sox game the other night?” And you would usually think that such a statement made in a group of drinking men would elicit an argument, at least—if not a bare-knuckle brawl—but the fact is, we all responded with silence.
We’re a porch full of people who don’t know who’s playing in the World Series and don’t know what movies opened this week and don’t know how many died in Iraq today.
We are consumed. We would probably bore you to tears. But it is good therapy and we laugh more than we cry, and that’s a start, that’s a good thing, that’s a sign of winning this war, of getting this damn elephant out of our city—out of our sight.
Mad City
11/6/05
It has been said to me almost a dozen times in exactly the same words: “Everyone here is mentally ill now.”
Some who say this are health care professionals voicing the accumulated wisdom of their careers, and some are laymen venturing a psychological assessment that just happens to be correct.
With all due respect, we’re living in Crazy Town.
The only lines at retail outlets longer than those for lumber and refrigerators are at the pharmacy windows, where fidgety, glassy-eyed neighbors greet one another with the casual inquiries one might expect at a restaurant: “What are you gonna have? The Valium here is good. But I’m going with the Paxil. Last week I had the Xanax and it didn’t agree with me.”
We talk about prescription medications now as if they were the soft-shell crabs at Clancy’s. Suddenly, we’ve all developed a low-grade expertise in pharmacology.
Everybody’s got it, this thing, this affliction, this affinity for forgetfulness, absentmindedness, confusion, laughing in inappropriate circumstances, crying when the wrong song comes on the radio, behaving in odd and contrary ways.
A friend recounts a recent conversation into which Murphy’s Law was injected—the adage that if anything can go wrong, it will.
In perhaps the most succinct characterization of contemporary life in New Orleans I’ve heard yet, one said to the other, “Murphy’s running this town now.”
Ain’t that the truth?
Here’s one for you: Some friends of mine were clearing out their belongings from their home in the Fontainebleau area and were going through the muddle of despair that attends the realization that you were insured out the wazoo for a hurricane but all you got was flood damage and now you’re going to get a check for $250,000 to rebuild your $500,000 house.
As they pondered this dismal circumstance in the street, their roof collapsed. Just like that. It must have suffered some sort of structural or rain-related stress from the storm, and then, two weeks later, it manifested itself in total collapse.
Now, I ask you: What would you do if you watched your home crumble to pieces before your eyes?
What they did was, realizing that their home now qualified for a homeowner’s claim, they jumped up and down and high-fived each other and yelled, “The roof collapsed! The roof collapsed!”
Our home is destroyed. Oh, happy day. I submit that there’s something not right there.
I also submit that if you don’t have this affliction, if this whole thing hasn’t sent you into a vicious spin of acute cognitive dissonance, then you must be crazy and—as I said—we’re all whacked.
How could you not be? Consider the sights, sounds, and smells you encounter on a daily basis as you drive around a town that has a permanent bathtub ring around it. I mean, could somebody please erase that brown line?
Every day I drive past a building on Magazine Street where there’s plywood over the windows with a huge spray-painted message that says: I AM HERE. I HAVE A GUN.
Okay, the storm was more than two months ago. You can take the si
gn down now. You can come out now.
Or maybe the guy’s still inside there, in the dark with his canned food, water, and a gun, thinking that the whole thing is still going on, like those Japanese soldiers you used to hear about in the 1970s and ’80s who just randomly wandered out of hiding in the forests on desolate islands in the South Pacific, thinking that World War II was still going on.
The visuals around here prey on you. Driving in from the east the other day, I saw a huge gray wild boar that had wandered onto the interstate and been shredded by traffic. Several people I know also saw this massive porcine carnage, all torn up and chunky on the side of the road.
It looked like five dead dogs. Directly across the interstate from it was an upside-down alligator.
I mean: What the hell? Since when did we have wild boars around here? And when did they decide to lumber out of the wilderness up to the interstate as if it were some sort of sacred dying ground for wildebeests?
Just farther up the road a bit are car dealerships with rows and rows and rows of new cars that will never be sold, all browned out as if they had been soaking in coffee for a week, which I guess they were.
All those lots need are some balloons on a Saturday afternoon and some guy in a bad suit saying “Let’s make a deal!”
Welcome to the Outer Limits. Your hometown. Need a new car?
Speaking of car dealers, no one epitomizes the temporary insanity around here more than Saints owner Tom Benson, who said he feared for his life in a confrontation with a drunk fan and WWL sportscaster Lee Zurik at Tiger Stadium last Sunday.
Admittedly, the shape of Lee Zurik’s eyebrows have an oddly discomfiting menace about them, but fearing for your life?
Just get a good set of tweezers and defend yourself, Tom. Get ahold of yourself, man.
Maybe I shouldn’t make light of this phenomenon. Maybe I’m exhibiting a form of madness in thinking this is all slightly amusing. Maybe I’m not well, either.
But former city health director Brobson Lutz told me it’s all part of healing. “It’s a part of the human coping mechanism,” he said. “Part of the recovery process. I have said from the beginning that the mental health concerns here are far greater than those we can expect from infectious diseases or household injuries.”
The U.S. Army took Lutz onto the USS Iwo Jima a few weeks ago to talk to the troops about how to deal with people suffering from posttraumatic stress.
They were concerned, primarily, with the dazed-looking folks who wander around the French Quarter all day.
“I told them to leave those guys alone,” Lutz said. “They may be crazy, but they survived this thing. They coped. If they were taken out of that environment, then they could really develop problems. Remember that in the immediate aftermath of all this, the primary psychiatric care in this city was being provided by the bartenders at Johnny White’s and Molly’s.”
Interesting point. I mean, who needs a psychology degree? All anyone around here wants is someone to listen to their stories.
I thanked Lutz for his time and mentioned that our call sounded strange. It was around noon this past Thursday.
“Are you in the bathtub?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “And I’m having trouble coming up with sound bites.”
Like I said, we’re all a little touched by Katrina Fever.
My friend Glenn Collins is living in exile in Alabama, and one Sunday afternoon he went to a shopping mall in Birmingham. He went to the Gap and was greeted by a salesclerk with a name tag that said “Katrina.”
He left immediately. He went next door to the Coach boutique, where he was greeted by a salesclerk with a name tag that said “Katrina.”
He kinda freaked out. He asked the woman something along the lines of: What’s with all the Katrinas? And she blurted out, “Oh, you know Katrina at the Gap? She’s my friend!”
“I wish I was making this up,” he told me. “I mean, what are the odds of this?”
He needed a drink, he said. So he went to a nearby Outback Steakhouse and ordered a beer, but the bartender told him they don’t sell alcohol on Sundays.
“But I’m from New Orleans!” he pleaded. “Don’t you have a special exemption for people from New Orleans? Please?”
They did not. So he drove across three counties to get a drink. He said to me, “The Twilight Zone, it just keeps going on and on and on.”
1 Dead in Attic
11/15/05
I live on The Island, where much has the appearance of Life Goes On. Gas stations, bars, pizza joints, joggers, strollers, dogs, churches, shoppers, neighbors, even garage sales.
Sometimes trash and mail service, sometimes not.
It sets into mind a modicum of complacency that maybe everything is all right.
But I have this terrible habit of getting into my car every two or three days and driving into the Valley Down Below, that vast wasteland below sea level that was my city, and it’s mind-blowing (A) how vast it is and (B) how wasted it is.
My wife questions the wisdom of my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East, and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability, and I suspect she is right.
Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.
That’s advice I wish I could follow, but I can’t. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.
I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn’t inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.
In some cases, there’s no interpretation needed. There’s one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: 1 DEAD IN ATTIC.
That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.
It’s spray-painted there on the front of the house, and it probably will remain spray-painted there for weeks, months, maybe years, a perpetual reminder of the untimely passing of a citizen, a resident, a New Orleanian.
One of us.
You’d think some numerical coding could have conveyed this information on this house, so that I—we all—wouldn’t have to drive by places like this every day and be reminded: “1 Dead in Attic.”
I have seen plenty of houses in worse shape than the one where 1 Dead in Attic used to live, houses in Gentilly and the Lower 9th that yield the most chilling visual displays in town: low-rider shotgun rooftops with holes that were hacked away from the inside with an ax, leaving small, splintered openings through which people sought escape.
Imagine if your life came to that point and remained there, on display, all over town, for us to see, day after day.
Amazingly, those rooftops are the stories with happy endings. I mean, they got out, right?
But where are they now? Do you think they have trouble sleeping at night?
The occasional rooftops still have painted messages: HELP US. I guess they had paint cans in their attic. And an ax, like meterologist Margaret Orr and Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard always told us we should have if we weren’t going to evacuate.
Some people thought Orr and Broussard were crazy. Alarmists. Extremists. Well, maybe they were crazy. But they were right.
Perhaps 1 Dead in Attic should have heeded this advice. But judging from the ages on the state’s official victims list, he or she was probably up in years. Stubborn. Unafraid. And now a statistic.
I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here—I wonder if anyone has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.
And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in At
tic, and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?
Was there anyone with him or her at the end, and what was the last thing they said to each other? How did 1 Dead in Attic spend the last weekend in August of the year 2005?
What were their plans? Maybe dinner at Mandich on St. Claude? Maybe a Labor Day family reunion in City Park—one of those raucous picnics where everybody wears matching T-shirts to mark the occasion and they rent a DJ and a Space Walk and a couple of guys actually get there the night before to secure a good, shady spot?
I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.
1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant, or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?
My wife, she’s right. I’ve got to quit just randomly driving around. This can’t be helping anything.
But I can’t stop. I return to the Valley Down Below over and over, looking for signs of progress in all that muck, some sign that things are getting better, that things are improving, that we don’t all have to live in a state of abeyance forever, but—you know what?
I just don’t see them there.
I mean, in the 8th Ward, tucked down there behind St. Roch Cemetery, life looks pretty much like it did when the floodwater first receded ten weeks ago, with lots of cars pointing this way and that, kids’ yard toys caked in mire, portraits of despair, desolation, and loss. And hatchet holes in rooftops.
But there’s something I’ve discovered about the 8th Ward in this strange exercise of mine: apparently, a lot of Mardi Gras Indians are from there. Or were from there; I’m not sure what the proper terminology is.
On several desolate streets I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven’t bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb—what’s the point, really?—but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.