1 Dead in Attic

by Chris Rose

  Of course, these cars represent people leaving town—arrivals are downstairs—but presumably the great majority of them came from somewhere else to visit or are from here and will return. It looked almost like the airport of old.

  Down in the Central Business District and the Quarter, there were pedestrians all over the place, some of them showing off the visiting 49ers colors, and outside Anne Rice’s old house in the Garden District (it’s been years since she lived there) the crowds still gather to gawk, take pictures, and search for ghosts.

  The weather Saturday was, as you know, profoundly clear and crisp, and Sunpie Barnes was singing about Creole tomatoes on WWOZ when I got stuck in traffic because there was a caravan of Mardi Gras floats bouncing up Rampart Street behind tractors, headed for who-knows-where and who-knows-what, but obviously somebody was having a big party somewhere with all these strange and beautiful indigenous means of transportation.

  Saturday evening, a friend of mine went to Brennan’s to eat, but they told him it would be an hour’s wait so they went to Galatoire’s instead. At the Galactic gig at the Maple Leaf, David Letterman showed up in the crowd and Paul Shaffer sat in with the band. Over at Rock n’ Bowl, Jimmy Buffett showed up at the Sonny Landreth gig and joined in for a few numbers, and, funny: it’s December, when, even before Katrina, there wasn’t usually that much going on around here.

  There seemed to be people everywhere, a city—what’s left of it, at least—jumping and alive.

  At Tipitina’s that night, Lusher, my kids’ elementary school, held its annual winter fund-raiser. The music for this event is generally supplied by the school’s jazz orchestra, which is positively phenomenal. They are young members of the true cultural elite—the very future of this city’s musical heritage.

  Music is also supplied by the parents of students who happen to be professional musicians, of which there are plenty. There are Iguanas and Imagination Movers and members of $1,000 Car and various jazz singers and more and it was crazy to see the mothers of my kids’ classmates, women who generally look pretty frazzled and hurried just like me when I drop off my kids at school in the morning, suddenly wearing cocktail dresses and singing torch songs and transformed and what is it about this town that everyone is an artist of one kind or another? Everybody’s got something happening on the side.

  Last year, the fund-raiser seemed to be a somewhat forced affair, held a few weeks after the school reopened in January and muddied by the still-humid aura of shock and uncertainty.

  But Saturday night, it was a rocking affair, and I realized it felt that way because now, fifteen months into this thing, everyone who showed up to support the school—although we are mixed incomes and religions and ethnic backgrounds and philosophies—all had one thing in common: We’re here. And we’re likely staying. And by our very presence, we’re obviously committed to making this a better community for ourselves and our children.

  Some of the folks I knew and some I didn’t, but I looked around the room at people laughing and dancing and living here in the center of the universe because, in case you haven’t heard, that’s still what New Orleans is.

  Like my travel theory above, this opinion is based purely on anecdotal evidence. But wheeling all over town Saturday with the windows down and WWOZ rolling out one New Orleans chestnut after another, I couldn’t imagine anywhere else in the world I’d rather be. When we’ve got our game face on (insert appropriate Saints metaphor here), there is no place like it in the world.

  Now, I realize that at that very minute I was having a golden moment, other people all over this town, this region, were staring at hollowed-out houses with glassed-over eyes and their hands on their hips, wondering how they’ll ever find their way back to peace of mind.

  I know there is plenty of bad stuff out there. Good and plenty, to be sure. But I didn’t see any of it Saturday, and maybe it’s good not to see it every now and then, to get away, whether by airplane or simply by cranking up the radio.

  It’s the ever-present and always alluring possibility of this type of near-rapturous experience that I had Saturday that makes people want to be here, I guess.

  I swear, if some loathsome creature had accosted me and axed me where I got my shoes, I could have transported myself to a dream state where you could almost believe that the things that have happened here were all just a bad dream and in fact, life is groovy.

  But despite the insistence of some to the contrary, we live in a reality-based world and what happened happened and that’s that, but it is mighty damn refreshing once in a while to feel as if we’re crawling out of the hole.

  Even with a flattened landscape and so many challenges ahead of us, I don’t remember a single person on Saturday asking me how I made out in the flood, and if that’s not a change for the better, then I don’t know what is.

  Big Daddy No Fun

  6/18/06

  My family went to Ye Olde College Inn for dinner Thursday night.

  This local institution has a new look and a new menu since The Thing—heck, it’s even in a new building—but it still verily throbs with local charm.

  You look around at the patrons at the bar and in the dining area, and whether you recognize them or not, they just exude that strange and familiar essence of this place. I don’t really know the proper words to describe it—the exact metaphor escapes me (in fact, it has escaped every writer who tried to find it)—but you know what I mean if you’ve ever walked in the door of College Inn or Uglesich’s or Domilise’s or Dunbar’s or any other of a million places where the talk is too loud and the calories too high and the energy is that just-right, impossible stew of languor, insouciance, comfort, and anticipation.

  Ah, this place.

  We were told it would be twenty minutes until we could get a table, and we understood in the New Orleans lexicon that meant it would be forty-five minutes until we could get a table so we decided to take a walk rather than try to rein in our kids amid the hungry and waiting masses.

  They were drawn immediately to the scene down the street, a wasteland of rubble that covers an entire city block, that stretch of Carrollton between Claiborne and Earhart where those huge brick mansions all burned to the ground—or should I say to the waterline—back in September.

  All that stands today are steps and chimneys, and otherwise it’s a blackened potpourri of ash and bricks, glass and appliances. You can make out the charred skeletons of bicycles and hot-water heaters and bedsprings and a few other things.

  To you and me, this scene generally evokes horror and anger and sorrow, but then again we see it every day so it also strikes a chord of the familiar—as familiar as walking into your favorite old restaurant, I suppose.

  It is part of our life. A New Orleans thing.

  To the kids, it’s something completely different. “Where are the bathtubs?” my two oldest shouted from the sidewalk that borders this mess, and this was a strange question since my kids don’t spend much of their time or energy in their own home seeking out the tubs.

  Quite the opposite, in fact.

  But it’s what popped into their little minds and they actually wanted to go prospecting in the rubble for bathtubs but Big Daddy No Fun put the clamp down on that idea.

  We did walk the perimeter of the block, hunting bathtubs, and even walked up a few front stoops to get an “aerial” view.

  We found two tubs.

  For my kids, this was a game and for me some sort of cautionary lesson/observation period: Let the kids absorb this. Let them keep absorbing this.

  But then you think: This was someone’s house. Someone’s life. Someone’s stuff. Hopes, dreams, memories, and probably lots of not-so-pleasant things also, the grist of life, reality and struggle—even before it all burned down and washed away.

  I guess I’ve kicked around so many busted houses that it’s easy to lose sight of that—lose the proper sense of respect and perspective. I hope I haven’t crossed the line, but if the reason you do this—to gawk at all
the ruin around here—is to learn and to never forget, then is it okay?

  Is it okay that my kids played here on the site of someone’s extreme loss? Even if the larger aim—in my mind—was a lofty ideal of understanding?

  I don’t know the answer to that. I suppose whoever owns these properties can tell me some day.

  Across the street, directly behind the restaurant, someone had obviously just gutted their house; that ubiquitous mountain of wasted domesticity was piled up six feet high on the curb.

  Such a familiar sight. A New Orleans thing.

  It’s amazing how free and unburdened little kids can be in this stark environment. There was a huge stuffed Snoopy in the maw in front of this house and my kids asked if they could keep it and I don’t have to tell you how Big Daddy No Fun responded.

  My kids have seen the depths of the devastation here. One Sunday afternoon, we drove them down to the Lower 9th for reasons that elude me now other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  They spoke very little and I didn’t even try to narrate our driving tour but let the landscape speak for itself, a vista unlike anything they’ve ever seen in movies or on TV.

  My son Jack—four years old at the time—looked out his window and said, “Purple upside-down car.”

  That’s all he said, and in those four words of simple declarative observation (there was indeed a purple upside-down car), I realized that maybe Jack will be the next writer in the family, for so perfectly did he capture the metaphor that has eluded me for all these months.

  New Orleans is the Purple Upside-Down Car. A bright color with no sense of direction. A stalled engine. A thing of once-beauty waiting to be righted and repaired. Something piled up on the side of the road.

  I am a father and my kids are riding shotgun in this purple upside-down car. We drive the streets of the familiar and the horrible. We use the seat belt. We live our life. We move on. We do the things that make us feel comfortable in these discomfiting times.

  At the College Inn, I went with the foot-long fried oyster, melted Havarti, and bacon po-boy, drenched in mayo and Crystal Hot Sauce. A wondrous spectacle to behold. A truly ludicrous thing to eat.

  Such a New Orleans thing.

  Peace Among the Ruins

  2/3/06

  Those first hours and minutes, they stay with you forever. The very first time you rolled back into town after The Thing.

  I was dropped off at my house by another reporter. I had a car parked there, but it was out of gas.

  So I retrieved an old rusted bike that I had inherited from a neighbor and I was going to hit the streets, see what was here, what wasn’t here, absorb the meaning of it all.

  It had a flat tire. I didn’t care. I took it and started walking it down the middle of the deserted street, having become—after just ten minutes in town—one of those zoned-out, postapocalyptic zombies doing things that make no sense.

  I had joined the tribe.

  The first two guys I met—you remember the first living people you saw—were good Samaritans sent my way. They pulled up alongside me in a pickup, and I had met them before—a friend-of-a-friend thing—and we went through these strange reintroductions and the thing is: I can’t remember today who they were.

  But I remember what they had: a bicycle pump.

  In what would become a season of strange and inexplicable occurrences, this was the first. Here I am, feeling like the only living soul on the planet—with a flat tire—and the first guys I meet say, “Do you need some air in that thing?”

  Even at its lowest hour, New Orleans has the capability to surprise you with her penchant for serendipity and delight. The human element.

  We parted ways. I was, for the moment, a little less frightened by The Thing, having been rescued from my first physical plight so quickly, easily.

  Then I ran into Terrence Sanders, and he was the first to smooth out the mental rumples in my head, to make me feel—even on that first day back, a time when New Orleans still smelled of death and rot and panic—that one has many choices to make in life and one of those choices is simply to carry on.

  A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons—make daiquiris.

  That’s not what Sanders was making, though. He was making art.

  He was sitting crouched in front of a massive canvas in the Magazine Street gallery that bears his name—and where he lives—and he was putting the finishing touches on a bold, colorful painting and listening to the radio.

  At this point, my mental images of New Orleanians—not so mental really; they were from TV—were people dangling from choppers and dying of thirst in front of the Convention Center, and here’s this dude, painting.

  I was thinking more about foraging for fuel and food, maybe fending off the roving gangs I had heard about—and here’s a guy making art.

  I need to talk to this cat, I thought.

  So we talked. We talked about the city and we talked about art and this guy was so rock steady—or maybe he was flat-out nuts—that he settled me.

  Like many of the more eccentric characters in this city, he’s not from New Orleans (born in Pineville, actually) but settled here about a year ago after a young life traveling the globe because it feels like home. He’s been here a year, just kind of muddling along; an unknown in local art circles, just trying to make a name.

  And here’s the thing about the painting he was working on: It was the final panel of a series he had been working on for four years, a commemoration—of all things—of the September 11 disaster. It was a list of the names of the dead.

  Well, if you’re a fan of irony. . . .

  I glibly remarked that he shouldn’t have any trouble finding subject matter for his next project.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Disaster can be like that. It makes death, despair . . . and art.”

  He told me this week, all these months later, “I felt like an obscure guy in a lost place. There was all this hell going on. I was just trying to find some inner peace.”

  At age thirty-eight, Sanders is throwing his own New Orleans coming-out party tomorrow night, announcing his arrival on the local art scene with a show about September 11 and Hurricane Katrina and some things in between.

  The work that emanated from his quest for inner peace is colorful, passionate, political, and New Yorky. He used to run in Basquiat’s crowd in Gotham City; maybe that’s an influence.

  There’s lots of text, for those who like to read their paintings. There are stark photos he took of passengers when he was a cabdriver in Baton Rouge. He’s showing a movie he made, projecting it onto the front of his building.

  Every time I drive by that building now, I remember what amounts to the strangest day of my life so far, and I will always remember stopping there to talk to a stranger and feeling better.

  I will always remember that building and the moment of humanity I found in its doorway and how I pedaled away thinking: We can do this.

  Artful Practicality

  3/31/06

  One thing the Aftermath has proven is that if you are not an adaptable creature, New Orleans is no place for you.

  Staying in New Orleans necessitates redefining oneself. Marco St. John would be a good example.

  St. John is a “decorative painter,” which means he does commercial murals, trompe l’oeil paintings, and fine-art restoration.

  But in the post-Katrina world, there’s not much demand for $8,000 billboard-sized reproductions of Michelangelo’s Creation, fine art being one of the final frontiers of discretionary spending, and “discretionary spending” being one of the final frontiers of the current New Orleans vocabulary.

  There is, however, a huge demand for housepainters.

  “It’s almost funny,” St. John muses in the bright yellow living room of a freshly restored home on Palmer Street Uptown. “I was finally getting the kind of clients I wanted and I was booked for a whole year. And then.”

  And then.

  “I quickly realized I had to be
as utilitarian as possible. And this idea kept resonating with me: people can’t buy paintings if they don’t have walls to hang them on. So I decided I would help them get walls. And then it suddenly clicked with me that I could band a lot of my artist friends together to do this.”

  Thus, St. John is now managing three full crews of interior housepainters who were visual artists left unemployed by The Thing.

  And with such a gesture—hiring photographers, mask makers, graphic designers, and landscape painters to restore a home—comes inadvertent slices of comedy and unintended character studies of the methodology of the artistic temperament.

  “They’re all wonderful artists,” St. John says. “But they bring a level of craftsmanship to the job that, quite frankly, doesn’t belong here. I am learning how to run a business, and I have learned: Time is money.”

  The foibles of a team of meticulous aesthetes attacking the job of refurbishing a flood-ravaged community almost plays out like some weird reality TV show on Bravo.

  To wit: “The photographers seem to understand how to do this because they’re used to the immediacy of the artistic process,” St. John says. “The mask makers, they’re used to such meticulous work. When it comes to filling in little nail holes, they excel at it, but faced with the huge expanse of a living room wall, they pick up little brushes and just start dabbing.

  “And the realist landscape painters! They can get fixated on a piece of rotten baseboard and you can’t get them off of it. They could spend hours caulking and recaulking the same spot if I let them, and I can’t afford that if they’re on the clock.

  “There’s no question that we’re very good at what we do,” St. John says. “Fast is what we’ve got to get.”

  Korey Kelso, a former illustrator at the Lionel Milton Gallery on Magazine Street, is one of the artists St. John was able to bring back to New Orleans.

  He was waiting it out in Massachusetts when St. John called. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do,” Kelso said. “I wanted to come back and be a part of all this, but I didn’t have the means to do it. This allows me to be functional on my own again. It gives me a chance to make a living while I put a portfolio back together again.”