by Chris Rose
That’s Christmas in New Orleans this year. Shape-shifting. Adapting. Getting along and getting by. Pondering the heretofore unknown dilemma: what to get for that special someone on your list who has . . . nothing.
Today it will be my family and my in-laws from Baton Rouge and Mississippi coming to join us in our winter homecoming, to celebrate over a warm meal and probably a few tears and a lot of laughter.
Kind of a simple formula, really. A chance to eat, breathe, forget, and remember. One more day to just be alive and be thankful for that and to carry on and up.
And José Feliciano on the radio. Singing that dang song.
Tears, Fears, and a New Year
1/1/06
When I look back on the year 2005, nothing comes to mind more than the opening line of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Except for that “best of times” part, it describes New Orleans perfectly.
How did we get here? What happened to my tough-lovin’, hard-luck, good-timin’ town?
Mercy.
I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. The fear of injury, the fear of disease, the fear of death, the fear of abandonment, isolation, and insanity.
I have had seared into my olfactory lockbox the smell of gasoline and dead people. And your leftovers.
I have feared the phantom notions of sharks swimming in our streets and bands of armed men coming for me in the night to steal my generator and water and then maybe rape me or cut my throat just for the hell of it.
I have wept for hours on end, days on end.
The crying jags. I guess they’re therapeutic, but give me a break.
The first time I went to the Winn-Dixie after it reopened, I had all my purchases on the conveyor belt, plus a bottle of mouthwash. During the Days of Horror following the decimation of this city, I had gone into the foul and darkened store and lifted a bottle.
I was operating under the “take only what you need” clause that the strays who remained behind in this godforsaken place invoked in the early days.
My thinking was that it was in everyone’s best interest if I had a bottle of mouthwash.
When the cashier rang up my groceries all those weeks later, I tried, as subtly as possible, to hand her the bottle and ask her if she could see that it was put back on the shelf. She was confused by my action and offered to void the purchase if I didn’t want the bottle.
I told her it’s not that I didn’t want it but that I wished to pay for it and could she please see that it was put back on the shelf. More confusion ensued and the line behind me got longer and it felt very hot and crowded all of a sudden and I tried to tell her: “Look, when the store was closed . . . you know . . . after the thing . . . I took . . .”
The words wouldn’t come. Only the tears.
The people in line behind me stood stoic and patient, public meltdowns being as common as discarded kitchen appliances in this town.
What’s that over there? Oh, it’s just some dude crying his ass off. Nothing new here. Show’s over, people, move along.
The cashier, an older woman, finally grasped my pathetic gesture, my lowly attempt to make amends, my fulfillment of a promise I made to myself to repay anyone I had stolen from.
“I get it, baby,” she said, and she gently took the bottle from my hands and I gathered my groceries and walked sobbing from the store.
She was kind to me. I will probably never see her again, but I will never forget her. That bottle. That store. All the fury that prevailed. The fear.
A friend of mine, a photojournalist, recently went to a funeral to take pictures. There had been an elderly couple trapped in a house. He had a heart attack and slipped into the water. She held on to a gutter for two days before being rescued.
It was seven weeks before the man’s body was found in the house, then another six weeks before the remains were released from the St. Gabriel morgue for burial.
“Tell me a story I haven’t heard,” I told my friend. Go ahead. Shock me.
When my father and I were trading dark humor one night and he was offering advice on how to begin my year in review, he cracked himself up, proposing, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
That’s close, but not quite it. “It was a dark and stormy morning” would be closer to the truth.
What a morning it was.
I was in Vicksburg. I had just left the miserable hotel crack house to which my family had evacuated—it must have been the last vacant room in the South—and was looking for breakfast for my kids.
But the streets and businesses were abandoned and a slight but stinging rain was falling, the wind surging and warm, and while my kids played on a little riverfront playground, I got through on my cell phone to the Times-Picayune newsroom, where scores of TP families had taken refuge, and I remember saying to the clerk who answered the phone, “Man, that was a close one, huh? Looks like we dodged another bullet.”
I suppose around a million people were saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. What I would have given to be right. Just that one time.
I was trying to get through to my editor to ask, “What’s the plan?”
By late afternoon, that’s what everyone in the gulf region was asking.
Of course, it turns out there wasn’t a plan. Anywhere. Who could have known?
The newspaper was just like everyone else at that point: as a legion of employees and their families piled into delivery trucks and fled the newspaper building as the waters rose around them, we shifted into the same operational mode as everyone else:
Survive. Wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something. And call your mother and tell her you’re all right.
Unless, of course, your mother was in Lakeview or the Lower 9th or Chalmette or . . . well, I’ve had enough of those horror stories for now. I don’t even want to visit that place today.
This was the year that defined our city, our lives, our destiny. Nothing comparable has ever happened in modern times in America, and there is no blueprint for how to do this.
We just wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something.
You’d have to be crazy to want to live here. You’d have to be plumb out of reasonable options elsewhere.
Then again, I have discovered that the only thing worse than being in New Orleans these days is not being in New Orleans.
It’s a siren calling us home. It cannot be explained.
“They don’t get us” is the common refrain you hear from frustrated residents who think the government and the nation have turned a blind eye to us in our time of need. Then again, if they did get us, if we were easily boxed and labeled, I suppose we’d be just Anyplace, USA.
And that won’t do.
We have a job to do here, and that is to entertain the masses, and I don’t mean the tourists. They’re part of it, of course, but what we do best down here—have done for decades—is create a lifestyle that others out there in the Great Elsewhere envy and emulate.
Our music, our food, yada yada yada. It’s a tale so often told that it borders on platitude, but it is also the searing truth: We are the music. We are the food. We are the dance. We are the tolerance. We are the spirit.
And one day, they’ll get it.
As a woman named Judy Deck e-mailed me in a moment of inspiration: “If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.”
Yeah, you write.
That, people, is the final word on 2005.
Misadventures in the Chocolate City
Chocolate City
1/18/06
I wake up in the Chocolate City mad as hell.
It’s like this: I’m supposed to be on vacation this week, cooling my heels, and then our mayor, Willy Wonka, loses his grip in public again and that’s hardly headline news in and of itself, but this time he really lets one go.
I mean, he really gasses the place up, if you know what I me
an. Now, how am I supposed to sit this one out?
First thing I do, I follow the mayor’s lead and call Martin Luther King, Jr. Of course, it takes a while to get through because he died in 1968 so he still has one of those avocado green rotary dial phones on his kitchen counter and no call-waiting.
As you might imagine, his line was pretty tied up Tuesday morning.
“King!” I holler when I finally reach him. “What in blazes are you thinking? You’re writing speeches for Wonka, and the best you can come up with is ‘Chocolate City’? Meet me at CC’s Coffee House, bruh. Pronto. We gotta talk.”
“I’m tired,” he complains. “I had a big day yesterday.”
“We all had a big day yesterday, King,” I tell him. “Eleven o’clock. Be there.”
Then I call God.
Of course, my call is answered on the first ring, but it’s some lackey working out of a phone bank in Singapore. We tangle a bit; she’s giving me the runaround about him being busy and can she help me, and I’m wondering: What’s with authority figures these days?
“Just who does he think he is, he can’t take my call?” I say. “What, he’s Dan Packer now? Put him on!”
I finally get him, and I calm down a bit because he’s got that comforting voice, kind of like Barry White, but I’m still all dandered up and I tell him, “Eleven o’clock, CC’s. We gotta talk.”
He starts to make excuses, tells me he’s got lunch at Ruth’s Chris with Pat Robertson, but I’m all over him like white on rice.
Unless it’s brown rice, of course.
I suppose it could be brown.
Anyway, I wear him down and he finally admits that he thinks Robertson is a lunatic blowhard who’s always asking God to take out some foreign leader or burn down a place like Oklahoma because there are sodomites reportedly living there, so he says to me, “All right. Chill, amigo. I’ll be there.”
So me, King, and God all meet up and I’m ready to tear into these guys about the advice they’re giving Mayor Wonka, who’s gone all Shirley MacLaine on us and has had almost five months to compose himself since his multiple meltdown and the best thing he could come up with was this?
We’re standing in line to order, and I let loose: “All right, you knuckleheads, which one of you wrote the ‘Chocolate City’ thing?”
They are aghast at my strong language, “knucklehead” being the harshest term our mayor can come up with to describe the dirtbag, scumbag, dope fiend gang-bangers who have run roughshod over this town for the past decade, making us the Killing Fields of America.
Knuckleheads. Yeah, that’s great, like they’re the Three Stooges now. “Hey, I’m gonna cap yo ass with my nine. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”
Anyway, King waves me off. “Can we order before we get into this?” he asks.
The barista, one of those bright and perky Uptown people—and I think you know what kind I mean—says, “Hey, guys, what can I getcha?” and sure, she acts all Ladies’ Auxiliary toward us, but we all know—me, King, and God—that all this white girl really wants is to grab up as much property as possible in the Lower 9th and build a couples resort and day spa.
Me, King, and God—we’re not stupid.
King orders first. “Coffee,” he says. “Black.”
Well, do I need to tell you: the whole shop is paralyzed into the most uncomfortable silence you ever heard.
“Jesus!” I mutter under my breath, and God pokes me in the eye. “Watch it, knucklehead,” he says.
The barista, she goes, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” and I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed; I should have just stuck to my original plan to meet Kafka for racquetball at noon.
Coffee. Black. This King guy, he just doesn’t get it. Then it turns out he’s just joshing around. Suddenly he breaks the uncomfortable silence and screams, “I’ll have a cream!”
And he starts wagging his finger all around like he’s back at the Lincoln Memorial, and he starts yelling, “And my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their coffee, but by the content of their character.”
God, he cracks up at this. He starts nudging his elbow into my side, and he’s practically got tears in his eyes.
“What are you, Chris Rock?” he says. “That’s hilarious, King. You are one loco dude!”
They do that knuckle-knock thing, and God orders. Café au lait—who would have guessed?
So we sit and I ask them, “Guys, what’s the deal? Wonka says he consulted with both of you before that blasted speech yesterday. Tell me you’re not behind this Chocolate City thing. It’s tearing us apart!”
King falls silent; he’s eyeballing all the Uptowners like they’re going to steal his hubcaps.
God pipes up, “Listen, hombre. Me and King, we had nothing to do with that speech. We told Wonka to go with a unity theme, black and white together as one. We did have this thing about Oreos in it, but we scratched that long before the final draft.
“Your boy Wonka, that was all off the cuff, man. Extemporizing, you dig? He was off the script on that one. Completely off the reservation.”
This gets King’s attention. There’s another uncomfortable pause as the whole place goes mute again.
“Sorry, cats,” God says. “Poor choice of words. My bad. But listen: You people have got your race thing so screwed up down here that even I’m having trouble concentrating. You’ve got to get your house in order, folks. Your boy Wonka is walking around tossing matches on kindling. If you don’t watch out, the whole place is gonna blow.
“And that will put us all out of work,” he says, and he pushes his chair back and stands up.
“Gotta vamoose, bruh!” he says. “Been real, but there’s mucho work to be done in the Chocolate City. Hasta la vista.”
Silence again.
“All right, I’ll take the bait,” I tell him. “What’s with all the gringo lingo?”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. He reaches into his wallet, grabs a card, and hands me one before he rolls out the door.
The card, it says, “God & Sons Roofing. Reasonable Rates. Fully Insured. Habla Español.”
I look at King. I stutter, “Did you know . . . ?” But he’s just shaking his head at me.
“Go figure,” he says. “But it makes sense, when you think about it. His son’s name is Jesus. The stepfather was a carpenter. All of them living in a Kenner hotel without electricity and running water like it’s no big deal. It just goes to show, you never can tell. I guess you really need to be careful about what kind of assumptions you make about people.”
We both take a sip and pause for a moment, and he adds, “And God, for that matter.”
I nod at him over my tall glass of milk. “Now you’re talking, King,” I tell him. “Now you’re talking.”
Tutti-Frutti
1/22/06
When the mayor broke onto the political scene with a Starburst four years ago, he was our Mr. Goodbar, the Sugar Daddy we needed to lead us out of our intractable cycle of political Trix and Twizzlers.
Well, some folks suggest his Lucky Charms wore off this week with that Milk Dud of a speech, in which he handled Dr. King’s legacy with Butterfingers and sent a fudge ripple over America’s airwaves and Snickers through the halls of Congress.
He looked a little Zagnuts on TV, telling all those Whoppers and getting himself in Mounds of Dubble Bubble trouble. Sociable Crackers around here got Good & Plenty mad about that, wondering how we let this Cadbury the collective goodwill of the citizenry.
Oh, Henry!
Forthwith, his detractors would have you believe his Very Berry ill-timed comments threaten the city’s Rocky Road to recovery and may even leave him wondering where the next Payday might come from after the elections.
To be Frankenberry with you, I disagree. With his admitted lack of political Skittles and his Neapolitan savvy, the chocolate chip on his shoulder, and that Jujube in his swagger—to say nothing of his knack for the perfectly timed Quis
p—I find him a breath of fresh air.
A real Altoid of a guy. Therefore, I don’t think we should pecan him anymore.
After all, rather then curry favor with political Jawbreakers, corporate Cocoa Puffs, and sycophantic Goobers like our former city leaders, our mayor made City Hall a haven for Smarties and Nerds, bringing the city’s standards and technology up to the twenty-first century.
Okay, maybe his advisory team is not so Cracker Jack, a little top-heavy with dilettantes and Raisinets. And you have to wonder: What got into the guy? Was he dipping in the Laffy Taffy again? What made him Krackle up like that and go all Chips Ahoy on us?
It seems like he might have hit the Frosted Flakes a little too hard on his recent vacation in Jamoca; you’d swear he was eating Sno-Caps, all in a Häagen-Dazs like that old dude from the Grateful Dead.
Whatchamacallit?
Cherry Garcia. Yeah, that’s the guy.
And now what a Chunky Monkey this city has on its back. We need our Big Shot mayor, Count Chocula his bad self, to lead us out of the Sierra Mist to Fruitopia, where levees are fifty feet tall and not made of Mallomar—and where we all worship at the same Oreo altar. Otherwise, you can just Kiss all our MoonPies good-bye.
So just say your Breyer’s and hope everything turns out for the best, and let’s have a little faith in our mayor, our leader.
Our Nutty Buddy.
He Had a Dream
5/26/06
Did you know there was a plan? A secret plan?
There was talk, of course, in the months before the mayoral election that white folks were intent on taking over this place and remaking it in our own image and we pooh-poohed that notion, of course, because it was politically expedient to do so, but it was, in fact, true.
There was a grand design for the New Vanilla City.
The first thing we were going to do was default on our contract with the Hornets and bring in NASCAR. Nothing gets white folks excited like really fast cars making a left turn for three hundred miles.