by Chris Rose
It’s a coat-and-tie place, all boys, an academic and athletic powerhouse on ninety rolling acres; one heck of a place to spend your formative years. Latin was required when I went there; I’m sure it still is.
It was like living inside that novel A Separate Peace, which was also required reading when I was there.
It’s composed mostly of day students, but there are a couple of dormitories there for boarders, and when Katrina blew through New Orleans, the folks at Prep contacted Jesuit High School in New Orleans and offered to take in some kids for the semester. No charge.
That amounts to considerably more than a nice gesture: it costs $25,000 to go there (which is a few more bucks than it was when I was a lad, to be sure).
There actually weren’t any vacancies at Prep, so the academic brain trust there came up with a plan: any undergraduate roommates who agreed to make room for a Jesuit student and make it three to a room would be offered the coveted privileges allowed only to seniors: televisions and refrigerators in their dorm rooms.
Fifteen Jesuit kids wound up at Prep this fall. Maryland is a whole different world for these kids, trying to break into an alien East Coast social scene in midstream. Who are these girls? What are these people talking about? Don’t they have any Abita around here?
After the football game, I met Jude Fitzmorris, one of the Jesuit kids. He’s Tom Fitzmorris’s kid; you know, that “Mr. Food” guy on AM radio.
Jude said he really likes it there. He’s fitting in. He plans to stay the full academic school year. Most of the other guys, he said, are homesick as all get-out and they want to come back here.
In fact, some already have.
There’s just something about New Orleans, I guess, even when it’s beaten down like a wet three-legged dog. With mange and fleas. That’s blind in one eye. And won’t hunt.
That’s us. The three-legged dog. But a confoundingly lovable cur all the same.
At that homecoming game (we beat St. Alban’s by three touchdowns, by the way), I ran into my friend Rory Coakley, who happened to be in New Orleans the weekend Katrina began her ramrod track up our wazoo.
He had been moving his son, an incoming freshman—and recent Prep grad—into the dorm at Loyola University. In fact, this September, I was scheduled to host a dinner for Rory, Jr., and seven other incoming Prep freshmen at Jacques-Imo’s Cafe on Oak Street.
Another local Prep alum and I were going to give the boys a little shrimp and alligator sausage cheesecake just to let them know they’re not in Maryland anymore, then do the old-fart routine of welcoming them to the city and rendering our deep fonts of local wisdom and advice.
Of course, that didn’t happen.
That Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before the storm, Rory called me from his room at the downtown Hilton as things were getting scary around here. I kept telling him to get the heck out of Dodge, but he couldn’t find a flight. Or a car. Or a train. Or a bus.
I offered him one of our cars—told him to take it all the way to the East Coast; I didn’t care. “You really need to get the hell out of here,” I told him.
In my signature fashion, however, my car had zero gas in it and at this point there were no gas stations left open around here. So Rory, his wife, his son, and two other Prep grads were on their own.
“Godspeed to you, brother,” I told him as I split town with my own family. “See you on the other side.”
Rory’s a creative and intelligent guy—and fairly well off, it turns out. As I said, we had a pretty good education, so, in thinking-outside-of-the-box fashion, he walked out of the Hilton lobby and up to a cabdriver and offered him a thousand dollars for a ride to Mobile.
In perhaps another characteristic of a typical Prep alum, Rory was delighted to discover that the cabdriver had a six-pack of Heineken in the car, which he threw into the deal as lagniappe.
Rory decided to drink one beer every hour. The six-pack was finished before they even made the Mississippi state line. The trip took so long that the cabdriver said he was too tired to continue, so Rory finished the driving duties, some sixteen or seventeen hours later.
A few days later, Rory and I were on the phone—he safely back in Maryland, me in Baton Rouge—watching the grim TV images of the Convention Center.
“You know, that would have been you,” I told him. “That’s the best thousand dollars you ever spent.”
Anyway. At the homecoming game, Rory told me he would be back in New Orleans in January. Turns out, Rory Jr. and some of the other Prep guys are reenrolling at Loyola.
I wanted to ask him: Are you out of your mind? I mean, I think they’re plumb crazy to do such a thing when they can comfortably remain in the safe, familiar environs of Georgetown University, where all the other Prep Loyola guys ended up.
But I swear to God, I wanted to kiss Rory when he told me this. It just slays me that there are people Out There who are committing themselves to this city when they have no other need or obligation to, no other reason than that they think it’s the right thing to do.
They believe in us.
And this is so important. If our universities don’t survive this thing, we’re in deep trouble. And I will testify to you that a half-dozen boys from Georgetown Prep are a good place to start.
And yeah, sure, they’ll probably wind up being among those really annoying shirtless yahoos you see sitting on living room furniture on the littered front lawns of the frat houses on Broadway, but they’re also going to be young men who saw what went down here ten weeks ago and understand what went down here and they and their parents are still willing to stick it out with us.
Without them, we’re toast.
And for that I say: Fried green tomatoes and eggplant pirogues at Jacques-Imo’s on me, boys! Just give me a call when you get here in January.
Here to your new home, this crazy little three-legged dog named New Orleans.
Good-bye
12/4/05
Each time I go to Maryland to visit my children in exile, my daughter, Katherine, asks me the same thing: “Daddy, is everything in New Orleans broken?”
My first impulse is to tell her, “Only our hearts, darling. In a million little pieces. But our spirits will endure.”
But Katherine, being six, isn’t much for purple melodrama or lofty sentiment. She just wants to know if her swing set is okay.
So I tell her that a lot of things are, in fact, broken but that most of her stuff—that’s what counts to a child, right?—is fine. Except for the swing set, oddly enough. It’s history. But that’s a small price, I tell her.
I try to teach my kids that they are the lucky ones, the fortunate few, and they saw all that stuff on TV, so I think they get it.
I think.
They see the piles of donated clothes at their schools in Maryland and the table where students were raising money to buy backpacks for Katrina kids and so they know: there are folks out there a lot worse off than us.
On TV, they saw the images of people sitting in baskets dangling from ropes out of helicopters and they thought that looked pretty scary but pretty fun all the same and they wish they had done that.
“No, you don’t,” I tell them and leave it at that.
Katherine and my son Jack recently asked me for status reports about their favorite places. The zoo: good. The aquarium: not so good.
Creole Creamery: good. This is important. After all, who would want to live in a town without ice cream?
I try to paint a somewhat accurate picture of what life looks like here, filtered through their lenses; I want them to understand, in some small way, what they will come home to one day soon.
They need to know what will be different in their upside-down world. The fewer surprises, my thinking goes, the smoother it will all go down.
They seem to grasp the situation best by an accounting of their friends. Where are their friends? they want to know. Who will be here when they come back to New Orleans?
I tell them that Walker and Olivi
a and Margot are like us: they’re all here and safe and settled in their own homes.
I tell them that Casey, Helen, and the twins Sisson and Tappan all lost the first floors of their homes in the flood but that they are going to live upstairs in their houses and they will be in school with us in January.
They think this sounds cool, this living upstairs thing.
“Can we live upstairs?” Jack asks me.
Hmm. “We can pretend,” I tell him. “How about we make believe we live upstairs?”
He thinks this sounds like a good game.
Then I tell them that Lexi and Mila have moved away and they won’t be coming back. Same for Miles and Cecilia. Ditto Charlie. They’re gone.
They don’t like this news, but they process it and they have been aware for a while that lots of families are spread around the country as they are, living in new places and going to new schools. Hurricane Kids, just like them.
They don’t like the idea that they never said good-bye to Lexi and Mila and Miles and Cecilia and Charlie. I tell them we’ll find these kids and we will tell them good-bye. I promise them that we will find these kids. So they can say . . . good-bye.
Continuing on the list of friends, I tell them that Sean is up in the air but that he will probably be coming back.
“Why is Sean up in the air?” Jack asks me. He’s four. I try to picture what he is picturing. Sean. Up in the air.
That sounds even cooler than living upstairs. I guess it sounds as though he’s dangling under a helicopter. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder how we’re able to communicate with our children at all.
Katherine asks me about the specific fates of two other friends, Juliet and Nadia. I tell her that, truth is, I have no idea what happened to Juliet and Nadia. Not a clue. Vanished. They’re just gone, and we don’t know where to or for how long and maybe we’ll see them again and maybe we won’t.
I don’t know.
Kids don’t work so well with uncertainties.
“Will you find Nadia for me?” Katherine asks.
I tell her yes, I will find Nadia. But I don’t know where Nadia is. I can’t even find my barber; how am I going to find some kid who has been cast to the fates?
Where did everybody go?
Man, it’s a hell of a thing that went down here.
Juliet, Nadia, are you out there? Somewhere? Anywhere?
If you are, Katherine says hello.
And good-bye.
Groundhog Day
12/18/05
We have been waking up with Groundhog Day Syndrome for a long time now, dragging ourselves out of bed with a sense of dread that the clock has stopped, the calendar pages don’t turn, and nothing is changing.
We’re Bill Murray. We’re Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. We’re trapped in an Escher print, walking down steps that actually lead up, down straight paths that lead us full circle.
Okay, for the four of you still reading, I’ll stop with the cultural metaphors. You get the point. I get the point. We all get the point.
The point is: it’s fourteen days until January.
Wait until January, people in New Orleans say. You hear it all the time. Things will get better in January.
It’s our mantra of hope, optimism, faith. Or maybe delusion.
Maybe because we’ve been Saints fans for so long that we are willing to buy futures when the market is flat. So eager to accept promises we don’t really believe.
It’s always been “wait until next year,” and we buy our season tickets and jerseys with the name and number of our new star player—the guy who’s going to take us all the way!—and, like Charlie Brown, we keep running to kick the football and Lucy pulls it away.
Again and again. Wait until next year.
But there is merit to the current theory of an impending turn of events for the positive, empirical evidence to shore it up. For New Orleans, that is; the Saints, I’m afraid, are a lost cause, and they don’t make levees big enough to plug that breach.
But January holds the promise of a sound that has been missing from our city for too long: the music of children. Lots of children.
Sure, there has been a refreshing repopulation of the little critters in recent weeks as schools opened and families trickled home, but the playgrounds still look pretty desolate and there’s hardly ever a line for sugar cones at the Creole Creamery.
But there are legions of rug rats coming home this week or next or next, when the school semesters elsewhere end and the holidays are over.
True, my son Jack’s nursery school class will have only twelve of the original twenty kids who were enrolled last September, but I guess that’s a decent rate of return. A start.
And I think it will grow. The kid quotient goes up by at least three today.
My family is coming home.
This is wonderful news from a personal standpoint, but I am also filled with anxiety about this, and immeasurable . . . I guess I can say it: doubt.
Is it safe? Will they pick up on the air of despondency that seems to have engulfed three quarters of the adult population here? Will they be upset that they don’t have a blue roof like everyone else?
These are the questions that nag me.
But I think my friend the barber Aidan Gill summed it up best: “A time will come when someone asks you, ‘What were you doing about it?’ You can’t tell them, ‘I was just watching it. I was just an innocent bystander.’ Let me tell you something: there are no innocent bystanders in this.”
My own call to arms has been that either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem and it’s time we become part of the problem because the solution, whatever it’s been up to now, ain’t workin’.
So I’m Charlie Brown now. New Orleans is Lucy. And I’m gonna kick that ball a country mile.
Come January, everything will get better. If not, we wait for February 2.
That’s Groundhog Day.
Coming Home
12/27/05
On August 27, my family left our home in New Orleans with a duffel bag full of beach clothes, three sleeping bags, three teddy bears, and a basketball.
I always travel with a basketball. It’s my security blanket. I never knew how much I’d need one on this trip.
There was a hurricane coming to town, and, well . . . you know the rest of that story. I returned to New Orleans a week later. My family wound up in Maryland, in the town of Somerset, just on the D.C. border, in the house where I grew up.
There has always been much hand-wringing over what you were supposed to call people like us—refugees, evacuees, etc.—but the terminology I prefer is that my kids were “embedded” at their grandparents’ house. They became minicelebrities in my hometown. Katrina Kids. A name recognized the world over.
When I went to visit, it seemed like everyone knew who we were. Several times, while trick-or-treating on Halloween, other parents stopped me and said, “We’ve heard about you.” People gave us clothes and toys and tuition (thank you, Concord Hill School) and such an outpouring of generosity that it boggles the mind to realize just how kind strangers can be. My sister loaned us her car for four months, and if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
My wife and kids used to spend weekends at my brother’s house in Poolesville, Maryland—forty-five minutes away—and one morning, three bicycles appeared on the front lawn.
No note. No explanation. Just like that.
They’d heard about us.
We made the Somerset town newsletter but not the local daily, as some of our friends did in smaller towns across America. That’s the price you pay when you become Katrina Kids in the Washington Post distribution area; you have to fight with Tom DeLay and Saddam Hussein for front-page space.
On the other hand, the crew at the local Starbucks wouldn’t let my wife pay for coffee when they found out she was from New Orleans, so it was a two-way street, the good and the bad.
My wife and daughter became social mavens
in town; the women of Somerset smothered them with attention and invitations. They thrived. It is a great place, that old town. But the gig is up.
We said good-bye to our extended family and new friends last week, and here’s the thing about that—from the Can’t Catch a Break files: what should have been the happiest day of the year for us—our homecoming—was actually Teardrop City, saying good-bye to my sister, my brother, their families, and, worst of all, my parents, who let us turn their house and their lives upside down and asked in return only that we not break the frail staircase banister or destroy my mother’s favorite old sofa, and, naturally, we did both.
My parents are heroes. Among the tens of thousands of people who allowed their lives to be jolted by those of us who came seeking shelter from the storm. I felt as though we broke their hearts when we left.
But my kids got to know them, and if there’s one thing I can thank Katrina for, it’s that. And also, my kids got to see snow, make a snowman, throw a snowball, catch flakes on their tongues.
That was a nice finishing touch.
But I’m tired of spending all my life surrounded by good-byes. That’s a lyric by Fred LeBlanc, the Cowboy Mouth drummer, but it captures my core right now. Every day, it seems, it’s good-bye to somebody.
But bringing my family home also brought with it the very welcome sound of hello. It was a sound I needed to hear. Hello to all—well, some—of our old New Orleans friends and neighbors.
And it’s funny: it wasn’t until my wife and kids walked into our house that I realized I had been living with a bunker mentality for a long time.
For instance, I had cleaned out our refrigerator months before, but the shelves were still in the backyard. My back deck was still a repository for seven red gas cans, even though I hadn’t run a generator since September.
My closet and drawers were almost exactly as they had been the day we evacuated; I have worn two sets of clothes since everything went down. Jeans, T-shirts. I look at the suits hanging in my closet and wonder what use I’ll ever have for them again.