1 Dead in Attic

by Chris Rose

  From Jesse Jackson he has learned: Blame it on somebody else.

  And from George Bush he has learned: Pretend it isn’t happening.

  Of course, Car 54 swears his mission is to drum up business for New Orleans and I heard he did talk the coat check girl at the Usher show into coming down to Mardi Gras with some of her friends and the bell captain at his hotel is apparently genuinely interested in checking out a time-share in the Quarter so maybe it’s not all wasted time.

  I had a crazy dream: I was driving around downtown wondering what the hell is happening to my city and wondering who would save it, and I looked up and I saw a bright light.

  The source of the light was the third floor of City Hall and I realized that city leaders were working there until midnight every night to hammer out the excruciating details of our recovery.

  Then I drove into a pothole and woke up and realized it was all a dream. Because, in truth, there’s not a lot going on in New Orleans, particularly when measured in conventional units of activity and time.

  One hundred days, two hundred days, three hundred days, it’s all the same. Time is a mere medieval contrivance—an anachronism, really—that leads to nothing more than unreasonable expectations.

  The warranty on Car 54 says it’s supposed to last four more years. But the first four years seem to have taken a toll on the old beater. Sure, it runs as smooth as ever—a sleek and shiny ride, to be sure—but there seem to be performance issues.

  This baby is leaking gas all over the place. And I hear a lot of folks are ready for a trade-in.

  Not in My Pothole

  9/15/06

  After I wrote about a ferocious pothole in my neighborhood the other day, a reader contacted me to see if I had ever peered directly into the chasm, which is so big and so old that it has developed into a nature preserve for several species of local flora.

  I admitted that I had not approached the beast on foot, that I had admired the gaping street gash only from the comfort and safety of my automobile as I drove by.

  “Check it out,” she said. “Look inside. You won’t believe it.”

  So I did some old-fashioned gumshoe reporting this week and got out of my car and walked to the edge of the abyss—a roughly ten-by-six-foot section of Calhoun Street that has caved in on itself at the corner of Tchoupitoulas—from stress, age, water, design flaw, or just because it was tired, I don’t know—right in front of Children’s Hospital, at an intersection favored by ambulance drivers.

  And what I beheld in the depths of this rupture shook me to my very core. It reawakened in me all the horrors of the city’s devastated landscape last fall.

  Inside the pothole—there, in the dark and rugged underbelly of our city—was an abandoned kitchen appliance.

  A friggin’ dishwasher. Or maybe a washing machine, I don’t know; it’s upside down and overgrown.

  The metaphorical implications of this spectacle are boggling, to say the least. But I will bypass all of them to get to the seminal question that comes to mind and it is this: Just who the hell was driving around Uptown trying to get rid of their waterlogged dishwasher and came upon a pothole in the middle of a residential neighborhood and said, Hey, this looks like a good place?

  After absorbing the initial shock of this scene, I felt anger well up inside me. But upon further reflection—upon my repeated meditations on a pothole—maybe I’m misreading this.

  Perhaps this is some kind of tactical urban guerrilla artistic statement, some organic art installation that ties together themes of isolation, loss, and the commonality of experience.

  Or maybe there is a richer and more urgent message in this complex, weed-strewn tableau: technology versus nature, the rediscovery of the id, man’s inhumanity toward man and the titanic struggles of good and evil.

  Or maybe it was just the careless act of a common punk and now it’s somebody else’s problem, not his.

  My first impulse, was, of course, to blame the mayor for this. But no, I don’t see this rather generic and budget-conscious machine—a sturdy but all too standard mustard yellow—being either his brand or style.

  For him, I see stainless steel. I see Bosch, not General Electric.

  So it must have been FEMA, then. Or the president. Or the terrorists. Or somebody not from here, right?

  It had to have been some bogeyman not of our world, because I ask you: Do we really live in a community with people who pull crap like this? Look out your window at the guy walking down your sidewalk and ask yourself: Was it him?

  I mean, what the hell?

  Then again, maybe we should thank this guy. Maybe he’s just trying to help. After all, now, if you drive your car into this canyon, the dishwasher could save you three feet of vertical drop. Thereby necessitating just a new front end and not a new chassis.

  Yeah, there are bigger problems in town and we’ve all got bigger worries than a pothole with a dishwasher in it but . . . wait. No. In fact, we don’t.

  What it has come down to in this town is a struggle between the people who live here, who are busting their butts every day to make this a better place to live, and the people who simply don’t give a damn, and I would suggest that dumping an appliance into a pothole on somebody else’s street would be a quintessential—if somewhat unorthodox—manifestation of not giving a damn.

  What we have here is, in fact, a battle between the kind of folks who clean up after their dogs on the sidewalk and bag their leaves—and the kind of folks who have picnics in the park and leave crawfish shells on the ground when they leave or folks who hire lawn maintenance men to blow their leaves and dirt into the street and leave it there.

  It’s somebody else’s problem, not mine. And we have here nothing less than the titanic battle between good and evil. The battle for our city.

  Survive This

  9/20/06

  Television is without a doubt the most influential medium, and its effect on New Orleans’ recovery is no small potatoes. There have been great moments of enlightenment (Spike Lee’s documentary comes to mind) and giant steps backward ( just about every time the mayor speaks into a microphone).

  Each image projected from here frames our story, gives the nation the information it needs to decide our fate.

  And although the upcoming Monday Night Football extravaganza will provide a huge spike in presumably positive publicity, I can’t help but feel we missed a golden opportunity by not luring CBS to bring its Survivor franchise here this season.

  Survivor: Cook Island, the thirteenth edition of the landmark reality series, drew more viewers for its premiere last Thursday night than Dancing with the Stars, and if that doesn’t speak to the profound dominance of its intellectual content, I don’t know what does.

  Its ratings were no doubt boosted by the risky gimmick to segregate the four “tribes” on the show into ethnic classifications: Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian.

  The producers have gone to great lengths to tell us how difficult it was to draw these tribes from an application pool that was almost entirely Caucasian—white folks historically having a stronger congenital predisposition toward exposing their character flaws on television (see: Jerry Springer, The Gong Show, et al.).

  But the producers would have had it easy if they’d come to New Orleans. They’d have found exactly what they were looking for without incurring the expense of dragging production crews halfway around the globe: a physical and emotional environment teeming with danger, adventure, and challenge, and a community already divided into four ethnic components, all eyeing one another warily, suspiciously, each trying to maneuver its interests to the fore.

  Throw in the elements of questionable drinking water, a rodent population larger than its human counterpart, lots of mosquitoes, and the imminent possibility of getting capped by three teens in a stolen Range Rover and it’s almost sublime: Survivor: New Orleans.

  We’re already the most interesting reality show on TV—except we’re confined to the second half of the ni
ghtly news twice a week. Why didn’t anyone think to get a major advertising sponsor and put us on prime time?

  What are they thinking in New York and L.A?

  What an opportunity lost.

  Imagine how the traditional thematic elements of Survivor—shelter, safety, nourishment, water, comfort, teamwork, mental rigor, physical toughness, and political acumen—would have played out here.

  Survivor’s appeal is to show how contestants—everyday people like you and me, except maybe a little stupider and better-looking—are able to withstand life without power, water, food, bathing, transportation, communication, government, and all other creature comforts for thirty-nine days.

  You call that tough? I call it “home.”

  If you put the four Cook Island tribes in the middle of City Park, I bet it would take them a week to find their way out. They could boil lagoon water to quench their thirst and hunt raccoons for food. Imagine a moment of desperation—one of Survivor’s trademark emotional bloodlettings—when an inconsolable contestant finds out she’s been living on the sixth fairway of a golf course and what she thought was a nest of edible egret eggs under an oak canopy were actually Titleists and Callaways badly shanked by investment bankers skipping work back in the summer of 2005.

  They could have one tribe live in a pothole, one in a tent under the interstate, one in a FEMA trailer (it goes without saying that it has no utilities), and one in what remains of Fats Domino’s house down in the Lower 9th and let them try to survive the tangle of living options and deprivations that we have come to know as routine.

  Better yet, one of the tribes could be embedded with Uncle Sal and Aunt Judy in their two-bedroom rambler in River Ridge, along with Sal’s two grown sons and Judy’s ex, C.J., and his fourth wife, Tina, and their two kids and four dogs, Sal’s nephew Gerald and his family of six and Gerald’s son Tony’s parrain, Sid, and his boyfriend, Jeff, and their two cats—and then they will know what “surviving” means in the post-Katrina landscape.

  Admittedly, much of life in the suburbs has played out less like a reality adventure series and more like a prime-time sitcom pilot—Look Who’s Living Together Now!—as extended families and their nagging ancillary units bunk together under the oppressive climate of contractor delays in Gentilly.

  But I digress.

  To test the mental endurance of the contestants, they could be forced to acquire building permits, driver’s licenses, and the working phone number of a psychiatrist. Anyone who comes home without them is voted off the island. Back to civilization.

  The tribes could comb the wild swamplands of eastern New Orleans in search of buried treasure—perhaps the lettuce crisper from William Jefferson’s refrigerator—and whoever finds the wad of cash gets two nights’ immunity to blow it all on Bourbon Street.

  I see great potential for a supporting role for our mayor, who could appear as some crazed tribal voodoo warrior who makes crazy gestures and says crazy things and then presents a challenge: Haul away the trash! Secure an equitable insurance settlement! Build a casino!

  The winning tribe gets immunity. And a bar of chocolate.

  The tribes could commandeer some boats from people’s driveways and sail out into Lake Pontchartrain to catch fish. Then, when they return, they could fight lawsuits against the boats’ owners.

  When real looters break through the CBS security barricade and overrun the set, the tribes could all take cover in local bookstores—the only retail outlets looters never visit.

  Then, in a surprise ending season finale that trumps anything the writers at 24 or The Wire could ever come up with, the four tribes—Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian—could discover a fifth tribe in their midst, a morally impoverished group suffering from an identity crisis greater than the sum of the other four.

  There, living in rough brush in the shadow of Tad Gormley Stadium, an undisciplined and wild-eyed tribe lives off the cadavers of New Orleans, sucking the blood from any living being in its midst, a primitive and unruly tribe bereft of a code of conduct, decency, or civility for the past three decades.

  In the season’s climactic moment, the New Orleans contestants could come face-to-face with the motley and desperate indigenous cannibal tribe that destroys its enemies without regard to race, color, or creed: the Entergy board of directors.

  And because of their electric bills, all four Survivor tribes are forced to relocate to Houston to finish the game.

  Love Among the Ruins

  September Never Ends

  2/7/06

  I’m standing on Iris Avenue, and it feels like last fall.

  I look up and down the street at the fresh wreckage wrought by tornadoes that have no name, and all I can think of is that Green Day song “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”

  When does September end around here?

  Buildings are shredded and power lines dangle like Mardi Gras beads off the oaks on St. Charles Avenue after the Bacchus parade, and stuff and things are just everywhere. It’s a sheet metal jamboree.

  There’s a building at the corner on River Road that looks as though Jerome Bettis ran right through it, and I love this part: the front door is spray-painted NO LOOT ZONE.

  Well, the good news is you weren’t looted. The bad news is, five months after The Thing, a tornado came and knocked you flat on your ass.

  Now, both the president of Jefferson Parish and our mayor have said a lot of crazy things over the past few months, but I don’t remember anyone taunting the fates and borrowing a line from our president: “Bring it on.”

  But somebody done brought it on.

  Some folks say it’s God’s work, some say the Hand of Fate, but I have to think it’s because of all the trailers we’ve got around here now. It’s a bad joke, but when you create the world’s largest trailer park, you’re going to have tornadoes.

  That’s true science. It’s in the chapter right after fossils.

  It was such a tough wind came down this neighborhood that it knocked over DeWitt’s, the little vegetable stand that’s been there on River Road forever, taking with it the big, faded HARRY LEE sign that somebody put there the first time he ran for sheriff in, what—1950?

  I never thought that sign would go away. I thought it would outlast Harry Lee, in fact.

  But nothing will outlast Harry Lee. At the End of Days: cockroaches, Harry Lee, and Johnny White’s Bar.

  I suppose there is a certain poignancy or entendre—double, triple, quadruple; I don’t know—that one of the buildings that got clipped on Iris Avenue last week was the storage warehouse for Mardi Gras City.

  There, in the middle of the street, was half a building, and left behind, standing in plain view from the street: boxes and boxes and boxes of beads. Neatly stacked. Ready for loading.

  Is somebody trying to tell us something? Throw me something, God. Perhaps a colorful strand of baubles rather than a roof this time, if you please.

  I have a co-worker, Renée Peck, who was among the first in her neighborhood in East Lakeshore to rebuild a house that was whacked by The Thing last fall.

  Maybe you saw her story in Saturday’s paper: her family was among the first to empty the contents of their house onto the sidewalk and the first to gut the insides and the first to get teams of roofers and carpenters and everybody else, and this week, the painters were due and they were going to move back into that house this month and plant one of the first flags in the Vanilla Wasteland, lay claim to a spot of land, and say: Here we are. This can be done.

  I’m guessing you know where this story is going.

  Wednesday night, when the torpedoes—er, tornadoes—came roiling through the area, one of them took out half their house. It imploded. Dust to dust. Bricks and rubble. A front-porch portico was found two streets away.

  Wake me up when it’s over.

  You could hardly blame someone for waking up last Thursday morning and telling himself: I can’t do this anymore. I won’t do this anymore.

  But we will.

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nbsp; I am listening to the car radio and it’s WTUL and they’re broadcasting out of the Rue de la Course coffee shop Uptown because they lost their studio, and when the deejays come on, you can hear the baristas pounding their empty espresso grinds on the counter and you can hear plates clatter in the background, but they’re getting by. The coffee shop and the radio station, doing what they have to do to bring us the essentials of post-Katrina life: caffeine and music.

  At the corner of Napoleon and Claiborne, Chill the Barber is set up between two gas pumps of the shuttered Shell station and he cuts hair there because the building marked CHILL’S FIRST CLASS CUTS around the corner is a literal shell.

  Chill is just getting by, barbering with power supplied by his car battery. Come hell or high water, people will still need haircuts. Men will still need a place to talk politics and sports. Even if it’s a gas station island.

  I was with my family on the levee in Algiers Sunday afternoon, looking across the river at the city, and my daughter said, “That’s where my new best friend lives.” And I asked, “Where are you talking about?” And she pointed to a cruise ship docked at the Convention Center.

  Her deskmate at school, a first-grader named Brooke, lives there on a big boat in the Mississippi River until, well . . . until when?

  The ship is called Ecstasy, and I swear, if we gave it a chance, the irony around here could just kill us.

  Because it’s beginning to look like nothing else can.

  Punxsutawney Phil stuck his head out of his groundhog hole in Pennsylvania last week and made the official forecast: six more weeks of September.

  We can take it. Bring it on.

  The Muddy Middle Ground

  3/12/06

  I went to Mid-City, looking for a friend.

  There are still so many folks I used to run with whose fates and misfortunes I do not know since The Thing came down.

  Every couple of days, I try to track one down, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. Sometimes I find him, sometimes I don’t.