1 Dead in Attic

by Chris Rose

  The colors of these displays are startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.

  So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after an atomic explosion. I don’t know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.

  They haunt me, almost as much as the spray paint on the front of a house that says 1 DEAD IN ATTIC. They look like ghosts hanging there. They are reminders of something. Something very New Orleans.

  Do these memorials mean these guys—the Indians—are coming back? I mean, they have to, don’t they? Where else could they do what they do?

  And—maybe this is a strange time to ask—who are these guys, anyway? Why do they do what they do with all those feathers and beads that take so much time and money to make? What’s with all the Big Chief and Spy Boy role-playing?

  As many times as I have reveled in their rhythmic, poetic, and sometimes borderline absurd revelry in the streets of our city, I now realize that if you asked me to explain the origins and meaning of the Mardi Gras Indians—I couldn’t do it.

  I have no clue. And that makes me wish I’d been paying more attention for the past twenty years. I could have learned something.

  I could have learned something about a people whose history is now but a sepia mist over back-of-town streets and neighborhoods that nobody’s ever heard of and where nobody lives and nothing ever happens anymore; a freeze-frame still life in the air, a story of what we once were.

  Despair

  12/6/05

  She had a nice house in Old Metairie, a nice car, a great job, a good man who loved her, and a wedding date in October.

  A good life.

  He was from Atlanta and had moved here to be with her because she is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else and even if they do, they always come back.

  That’s just the way it is.

  For the hurricane, they fled to Atlanta. His city. His people.

  Meantime, her house was destroyed, her car was destroyed, and within days she was laid off from her job. And, of course, the wedding here in New Orleans was canceled.

  When all settled down, he wanted to stay in Atlanta. But she is a New Orleans girl, and you know the rest. Equanimity courses through our blood as much as platelets and nitrogen—it is part of our DNA—so she was determined to return, rebuild, recover.

  So they moved back here.

  A few weeks ago, they moved into my neighborhood. She arrived first. That afternoon, she came over and joined the group that sits on my stoop every night solving the world’s problems.

  I introduced her to the local gang and welcomed her back to the neighborhood; she had been a neighbor many years ago.

  Like many post-Katrina First Timers, she was a wreck on that first night. Didn’t say much. Just sat there. Not the girl I used to know. But then, who is?

  To add to her troubles that first night, her fiancé, who was following her to New Orleans that morning in a rented truck, had gotten a flat tire outside Mobile and was stranded on the side of the road.

  She drove on because she had the pets in her car. He called the rental company for help; it wasn’t the kind of vehicle with a tire that just any John Doe can change.

  He called the trucking company all day. They kept telling him that they would be there within an hour and that’s what he told her so she waited. We all waited.

  By 8 P.M., he got fed up with the trucking company and called them and told them he had started the engine and was going to drive to New Orleans on the exposed tire rim. And that’s what he did, calling the trucking company every few minutes to give a new location.

  When she related this news to us, we all knew right then that we would like this guy.

  Naturally, the trucking company showed up within minutes and changed the tire. He arrived late that night. He met all the neighbors and they all knew the story of his driving on the rim and they all thought it was hilarious.

  And so their new life on my block began. They were one of us now, the survivors, the determined, the hopeful, the building blocks of the New City. Members of the tribe.

  They settled in. I used to see them walking in the park and reading the paper on their front porch and occasionally they sat on my stoop, and life went on.

  But I guess things were not going so well. She was always pretty grim—not the girl I used to know—but he seemed jolly enough and we would talk in the “Hey, how ya doin’?” kind of way.

  Turns out, he couldn’t stand it here. And truthfully, if you weren’t from here, didn’t have a history here, didn’t have roux in your blood and a stake in it all: Would you want to be here?

  I wouldn’t.

  But she is a New Orleans girl. To hell with no house, no car, no job, no prospects. This is where she belongs. And her mama lives here. End of discussion.

  He moved back to Atlanta. She stayed. He came back. Try again. Work it out. Whatever it takes.

  A few nights ago, they drank wine and, in some sort of stupid Romeo and Juliet moment, decided that they would kill themselves because all hope was lost and living here amid the garbage and the rot and the politics and the profound sense of failure was sucking the marrow out of their bones.

  Not even love could overcome. Here, in the smoking ruins of Pompeii, sometimes it’s hard to see the light.

  She told friends later that she didn’t really think they would do it. Said they got caught in the moment and let the bad stuff crawl all over their minds. The darkness can be so damn dark, and they weren’t thinking straight. But she didn’t think they were really going to do it.

  But he did. Right then, right there.

  So he’s dead, and a family in Atlanta has lost a son, a brother, a friend. Another notch in Katrina’s belt.

  My stoop is empty these nights. None of us really knows what to say anymore.

  This is the next cycle. Suicide. All the doctors, psychologists, and mental health experts tell us the same thing: this is what happens next in a phenomenon like this. But has there ever been a phenomenon like this?

  Where are we now in our descent through Dante’s nine circles of hell?

  God help us.

  The most open, joyous, freewheeling, celebratory city in the country is broken, hurting, down on its knees. Failing. Begging for help.

  Somebody turn this movie off; I don’t want to watch it anymore. I want a slow news day. I want a no news day.

  A friend of mine who used to live here said on the phone from Philadelphia the other day, “I don’t know how you guys can even get out of bed in the morning.”

  Well, obviously, some of us don’t.

  But we have to try. We have to fight this thing until there is no fight left. This cannot be the way we go out, by our own hands.

  My neighbor is in a hospital in another part of the state now, learning how to deal. She talked to friends over the weekend and said she is not going to run away from this. She is a New Orleans girl, and this is where she is going to stay and try again. And again. And again.

  She told her friends this weekend that she still has hope.

  I don’t know what flavor of hope she’s got or how she got it, but if she’s got a taste of it in her mouth, the rest of us can take a little spoonful and try to make it through another day, another week, another lifetime.

  It’s the least we can do.

  The Ties That Bind

  My Introduction to New Orleans

  11/8/05

  I was sitting in Donna’s on Rampart Street last Saturday night, shaking my legs to a righteous swing session with the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, when a stunning realization hit me in the face: it was a hurricane, or something very close to it, that had brought me to this city in the first place.

  It was November 1980. I was in school in Wisconsin, floundering both personally and academically. I had a friend in the sam
e situation. We decided to blow off our classes and head out of town the week of  Thanksgiving, pointing south with a tent and two sleeping bags in an attempt to decide whether we wanted to stay in college or find another direction in life.

  I had told my parents in Maryland that I had a load of schoolwork and would not be home for the holiday. And off we went, destination South Padre Island in Texas, where I had gone for spring break the year before and had a gas.

  But South Padre was miserable. It was deserted. Oil from a runaway well in Mexico was fouling the beach. And worst of all, the wind was relentless and borderline scary. It blew our tent all over the beach, and when we’d party a little and try to play Frisbee, the disc would get caught in the wind and take off three hundred yards down the beach.

  A state trooper told us there was a mighty storm brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico; that the situation was certainly not going to improve and, in fact, might get a lot worse.

  He suggested we leave.

  So we packed up and decided to head for the Florida panhandle. Nice beaches, we’d heard. And so we hit the road again, passing through south Louisiana in the middle of the night.

  Somewhere out in Acadiana, we stopped at an all-night gas station, and the girl at the cash register was wearing a baseball cap that said, “I’m a real Coonass, me.”

  Okay, I’m thinking. I’ll take the bait. “What’s a Coonass?” I asked her.

  “Me,” she replied.

  I turned to my friend, also named Chris, and said, “Let’s get the hell out of this state.” Two hours later we were passing the interstate exits to New Orleans.

  What did I know about New Orleans at the age of twenty? At this point in my life, I was already a Meters, Wild Tchoupitoulas, and Neville Brothers fanatic, having been turned onto them by my older brother, who had incorporated annual trips to Mardi Gras into his life’s journey.

  My sum total knowledge of the place was that it was probably a great place for a couple of lost college boys to do some serious partying.

  We considered this option, but between us, Chris and I had less than $100 and we hoped to road-trip for at least a week or so, and then we’d need gas money back home—1,000 miles to Madison.

  So we bypassed New Orleans, figuring to sleep on the beach in Florida and eat campfire beans, which is what we did. For one night. Then whatever storm had been brewing in the gulf descended upon us. The same lashing wind sent sand stinging into our legs.

  Someone told us the storm had kicked east. It was going to get nasty. For two down-and-out, borderline depressed guys, this trip was simply not working out. We’ve got to get out of here, we said. New Orleans, we agreed, money or not.

  The first New Orleans bar I ever walked into—a rite of passage as meaningful as your first car or your first kiss—was Tujague’s on Decatur Street. I’ll never forget the impression that the tiles and the sexy lighting and the lazy ceiling fans and slow-moving clientele had on me: What year is it? I thought. This place is gone, man, long ago gone.

  We ate dinner at what I believe was Café Sbisa, but I’m not positive, all these years later. All I know is, we could afford only a couple of appetizers and we were surrounded by a busy and talkative staff of tall, thin gay men and this was all very exotic to us.

  Next, naturally, we were on Bourbon Street. We put $40 in the glove compartment of our car for gas back to Wisconsin (forty bucks to Wisconsin, imagine that), and we decided we would hang out until we ran out of money.

  That took about six hours.

  Bourbon Street was jumping. The street was packed. The night before, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran had sparred in the Superdome in one of boxing’s truly legendary fights. It was the night Duran exclaimed, “No mas!”

  We didn’t know or care much about that. We just knew that we had never seen anything like this place before.

  At the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter, there was a slow jazz band playing and a young black man singing “The Christmas Song.” You know: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”

  The man was beautiful. I had never seen skin quite his color, and I don’t think I had ever seen a black man with green eyes before.

  And his voice. Wow. It wasn’t Aaron Neville or Johnny Adams or even in their league, obviously, but to me it was angelic and new and soul-settling. I just stood there with my mouth open, filling my open mouth with much beer, but also just in plain awe.

  He didn’t use a microphone, and everybody in the place was quiet, just hanging on to the moment. I doubt that Bourbon Street has many musical “moments” anymore, having descended over the past few decades into a cacophonous sprawl, but to my young and nearly virgin ears, I had found something.

  Something beautiful. Something that would stay with me, it turns out.

  We listened to a few more songs and then left. I wanted to stay, but we agreed that this was no place to meet girls—too mellow and refined—and we wanted to meet girls, and so we wandered.

  The story, at this point, becomes dramatically less poignant and sentimental, so I’ll run through the details quickly: we were thrown out of three bars on Bourbon Street and were entering a fourth when a police officer took hold of my collar and said to beat it.

  We were the exact same two guys I now witness from time to time lousing up our streets downtown. I see their immature, careless behavior and think: Idiots. They don’t get this town and they never will.

  But now I know there is hope for fools like me.

  We ended up in Luther Kent’s old bar over on Toulouse Street and the band was big and brassy and loud and we met these beautiful Scandinavian girls and the night was so far beyond perfect that I thought I was in Heaven.

  I drove from New Orleans all the way to Wisconsin on Thanksgiving Day, pausing twice to stop at gas stations and once to eat Thanksgiving dinner at a Denny’s in Illinois.

  The following Monday, I returned to classes. Chris did not. I started listening to the Neville Brothers more and more. The Neville Brothers, their 1978 debut record, became my “date” music. I’d play “Washable Ink” and “Vieux Carré Rouge” and “Audience for My Pain” and I thought I was one very cool brother.

  For my male friends, I’d play a cassette of the Wild Tchoupitoulas record with “Brother John,” “Hey Pocky A-Way” and “Meet de Boys on the Battlefront” and I’d watch them try to figure out what the hell that was all about.

  Not that I knew myself. I just knew I dug it. In between all the Springsteen and John Prine and Little Feat that consumed my musical interests back then, there was this deeper appreciation for sublime funk.

  I graduated from college with a journalism degree, moved back to Maryland, and was working there when a friend who had wound up at The Times-Picayune called me in the spring of 1984 to say there was a job opening here.

  “You’d love this city,” she told me.

  I thought about that music. That six hours of immortality I had once lived there. I thought about that guy singing “The Christmas Song” and thought how sexy it all was in New Orleans. “Yes, I’d love that city,” I agreed.

  And Jesus, what a ride it has been.

  I had not thought about that road trip to New Orleans in years, and when I was sitting at Donna’s the other night, they were singing these great swing tunes without microphones and it was smoky and intimate and it felt like 1952 and it also felt like that moment I had in 1980. And then it hit me: I first came to this city because I was fleeing a storm.

  I have spent hours online since I left Donna’s the other night, Googling weather sites and other sources of meteorological data, trying to find out what was in the Gulf of Mexico that last week of November 1980.

  I found that a moderate hurricane—Jeanne—was in the gulf about ten days earlier and Karl was off the southeastern United States that week. Neither amounted to much. But I can’t find any reference to a severe storm rolling from Texas across the gulf to the Florida panhandle in those exact days.

  Maybe it was just a tropic
al depression of some kind, or just the turbulence between Jeanne and Karl, but it was wild and windy when I evacuated into—not out of—New Orleans for shelter and safety and that’s how I discovered the pulse of this magical place.

  It’s far past irony to reconsider this event. It’s almost absurd, now, to realize how I got here. And it’s also the best thing that ever happened to me, to have seen, known, loved, and lived this place called New Orleans.

  The Funky Butt

  12/9/05

  When I moved to New Orleans twenty-one years ago, I was—to use a contemporary phrase—all in. I loved it from the minute I smelled the burning sugar cane from the Celotex factory across the river, a sweet stink I have always found oddly sexy.

  But there was always a caveat to my love affair with New Orleans. I stood firm, fast, and unbending on one point: I was not going to raise my children here. No how, no way.

  My reasons were obvious: school system, crime, litter, racism, politics.

  I thought this place was great for getting my ya-yas out in my twenties and thirties, but I was off to Wisconsin when baby-making time came around. And I was going to make sure I found a wife who believed the same.

  And I did. Sort of. We were vague about our discussions but talked often about where we might go—Wisconsin included—when the time was right. We both agreed: This is no place for kids.

  But Sonny Landreth changed all that. Yes, that nebbish-looking, Ubangi-stomping guitar god from the southwest Louisiana musical stew made me rethink it all.

  True story: It was JazzFest, 1999. My first child, Katherine, was five weeks old. Against the advice of our friends who had children, we took her to the Fair Grounds for an afternoon.

  This was less for her, of course, than for us. She was too young for us to leave her with a babysitter—that new-parent protective coating being tough as tungsten—so if Kelly and I wanted to go, then Kate was coming, too.