1 Dead in Attic

by Chris Rose

  This spectacle told my guests so much more than my words ever could, so I turned on WWOZ and headed for the Fair Grounds and we set about the business of celebrating the life and survival—albeit somewhat tenuous—of this profoundly soulful city and its culture.

  And then this week, in a moment of downtime, I rifled through some old papers stacked in my living room and found a death notice from last week announcing that a “Celebration of Life” would be held for Derrick Arthur Brown at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church on St. Roch Avenue last Saturday morning. And that’s what we witnessed: a celebration of life.

  I read more of the death notice and found out that Derrick Arthur Brown had graduated from McDonogh 35 and played football at Jackson State and used to mask with the Cherokee Hunters Mardi Gras Indian tribe and was once employed by a place called B-Neat Cleaners.

  He was forty-seven, with two daughters and three grandkids, when he died.

  And it said this: “Derrick Arthur Brown passed away on or about Aug. 29, 2005.”

  Eight months later, to the date, he was sent to his final home, and the measure of this information leaves me stupefied.

  What to say? We’re still burying them. Still burying us.

  I don’t have the words to comment on this, to lend any clarity or perspective. It just sits in your head with everything else.

  Where was he all this time?

  It fails to shock or stun because the bar on shock value around here has been raised so high. It just is what it is. And if nothing else, we find in a back-of-town street on a cloudy Saturday morning a small act of celebration, defiance, and closure for one more death in our family.

  Thanks, We Needed That

  8/15/06

  A severely injured Kirk Gibson is sent out of the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout to pinch-hit in the ninth inning of the opening game of the 1988 World Series, a truly desperate moment; watching him walk to the plate, you doubt he could even run to first base if he hit the ball, which he probably won’t do because he’s facing arguably the greatest relief pitcher in history.

  Then, amazingly, improbably—impossibly!—he homers and limps his way around the bases, fist pumping in triumph.

  It’s 1998, and Michael Jordan cans a jumper as time runs out, clinching his final championship with the Chicago Bulls. His victory leap becomes an iconic image of success. Nike’s stock price rises 23 percent.

  The 2000 World Golf Championships, eighteenth hole. It’s not that daylight is fading; it’s actually nighttime. Tiger Woods takes a literal shot in the dark with an eight-iron, 158 yards, and the ball somehow finds its way to within inches of the cup. Tiger taps it in for a win as flashbulbs explode to capture the moment.

  It’s 2006. Reggie Bush takes a handoff left and sees what Saints running backs have been seeing all their careers: the broad backs of their teammates’ jerseys being pushed back at them.

  So he cuts a hard right and, while twenty-one players on the field are moving in one direction, he is moving in the other and he gets 44 yards before anyone can catch him. The Reggie Bush era begins.

  Okay, three of these are considered among the greatest moments in contemporary sports history. But only one was truly important.

  I think you know where I’m going with this.

  Truth is, no one outside New Orleans will ever remember what happened the other night. First of all, it was not only a preseason game, but it was the preseason opener, not just football’s—but the entire world of sports’—least meaningful event.

  If anything memorable happened at the game Saturday night—something that just might make the history books, in fact—it was that our backup quarterback was run over and injured by a golf cart driven by the Tennessee Titans’ mascot.

  How the hell does something like that happen? Aren’t these people supposed to be protected from nonsense like that? I mean, when the Saints play the Falcons, can we send Whistle Monster or Holy Moses down to give Michael Vick a pregame wedgie or something?

  Anyway.

  Reggie’s run was no Miracle on Ice or Hail Mary Pass or Immaculate Reception. (Please note the overtly religious overtones of great moments in sports history, for it is well documented that Jesus was mad for all sports, with the exception of bowling.)

  But I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that those 44 yards—the first glimpse of the potential of this guy Reggie—were fraught with implication, both real and imagined.

  The first point is: it gave us something to talk about that was completely unrelated to The Thing—if anything that happens around here can be said to occur outside the all-consuming context of The Thing, which I doubt it can, but let’s go with it anyway.

  I watched part of the game in a loud and crowded Bourbon Street bar Saturday night and was amazed at how I witnessed a single run from scrimmage play a small part in making some people whole again. Right before my very eyes.

  I heard at least two conversations in which the term “play-offs” was bandied about, and I thought: Wow, I miss that playful delusion that everyone around here used to have. That completely illogical yet congenital attachment to schemes that don’t work and if there was ever—historically speaking—a scheme that doesn’t work, it’s the Saints.

  Now, truth is, I’m not a Saints fan in the conventional sense. I watch every game and listen to the postgame shows and all that, but I have always been fascinated by the Saints more as a sociological phenomenon than as a mere sports team.

  We could dig deep into the well of New Orleans clichés about how we don’t do anything the way they do it in other places and our relationship with our football team is certainly up there on that list. Their performance seems to have such a profound influence on the mood of this community and never more so than this year and I know that sounds superficial and, in fact, it is superficial.

  Only a game, right?

  Not anymore. Not here. Not now.

  We need a real juggernaut to lift us up, and it turns out that a big fireworks display and masquerade ball, as our mayor suggested, to commemorate the drowning of New Orleans wasn’t quite the answer.

  But a winning football team? Ah, that would be something.

  In fact, I’m worried that if the team doesn’t deliver, it could deal a devastating blow to the psyche of the city. More than anything else Saturday night, I was hoping and praying not that Reggie would play well but that he simply wouldn’t get injured—by an opposing team’s linebacker or a middle-aged man wearing a big furry costume.

  If Reggie goes down, I told a friend on the phone Saturday afternoon, it could be the proverbial straw that breaks this camel’s back.

  Levee failures, looting, death, destruction, murder, corruption, depression, suicide, bankruptcy—those we can handle.

  But another losing season? Oh, the horror.

  So mark it in your memory lockbox—that 44-yard run—just like remembering where you were and what you were doing when you heard that Kennedy was shot or O. J. Simpson was on the run or a man had walked on the moon.

  That was one small step for Reggie Bush, one giant leap for New Orleans.

  Say What’s So, Joe

  9/24/06

  Dear Joe,

  Welcome back to New Orleans. As you have probably noticed, a lot of the city looks like it did when you were last here, whenever that may have been, in our pre-Katrina state.

  Admittedly, all those windows blown out of the Hyatt downtown have an ominous look about them, a jarring reminder of what went down here a year ago. And since they loom over the Superdome, they’ll make for good TV images, and that’s why I am writing to you.

  I am offering you some unsolicited and perhaps unwelcome comments on how you should do your job Monday night.

  Joe, I hate when strangers give me unsolicited advice on how to do my job. But you and me, Joe, we’ve got history together.

  I grew up in Washington, D.C., and was a young man when you came to the Redskins and gave us a new attitude and our first Super Bowl win. That was a ni
ght to remember.

  It was 1982, before the era when “fans” of NFL and NBA teams began that wonderful tradition of looting their downtown stores and burning cars to celebrate winning the championship.

  Ah, the old days.

  And by the time L.T. busted your leg on Monday Night Football all those years later, I was living here in New Orleans and watched the game with some friends in a bar in Kenner and I want you to know, Joe: I was there with you.

  It hurt me as much as it hurt you.

  Well, maybe not.

  But I’m straying from the point. The point is, I don’t know much about all the other sports guys who are in town this weekend telling America our story. But it worries me that they won’t get it right, so I wanted to write to you to ask you to get it right.

  There’s that guy on Fox Sports named Chris Rose—he does that Best Damn Sports Show thing—and I suppose maybe he’s the guy I should be talking to but I don’t know Chris Rose and the whole idea of talking to a guy named Chris Rose is a little weird to me.

  But I know you, Joe. When you’re in New Orleans, you hang out at my neighborhood bar, Monkey Hill. Hell, Joe—we’re practically family.

  So here’s the deal: I know you like to talk a lot, a whole lot—and that’s okay because it’s your job—but I’m like a lot of people around here, very sensitive about what people say about us these days.

  Maybe too sensitive, I don’t know.

  I’m afraid our circumstances will end up being cast in sports metaphors, and somehow I get the feeling that we’ll be portrayed as the ’76 Buccaneers or the 2003 Detroit Tigers—teams without hope or redemption—when the way we really see ourselves is as the ’69 Miracle Mets.

  Sad-sack underdogs. The odds stacked against us. Backs against the wall, all that cliché stuff. And then—the great story line—pulling together and overcoming the odds and winning the big game!

  Of course, I’m talking about the city of New Orleans and our neighboring communities, Joe. Not the Saints.

  We’ve got bigger issues than the Falcons to deal with. We’ve got life. And a lot of our life depends on what all you sports guys tell the world about us and my guess is that you’ll all go to our really great restaurants on your expense accounts and rave about the survival of New Orleans cuisine, so that one takes care of itself.

  But there are other pressing matters at hand that might come up during your conversation with ten to fifteen million Americans tomorrow night, so I’d like to offer you some talking points.

  The first is this: I’m assuming you had the professional curiosity and courtesy to drive around town and take a look at it for yourself. If you did, you now understand what we mean when we say you have to see it to believe it and you’ll understand why we kind of freak out when the message that goes out is that a tiny and interesting place called the Lower 9th Ward got wiped out but everything else is okay.

  And if you haven’t seen the Lower 9th—or Gentilly or Lake-view or Chalmette or any area of the devastation, which is roughly the size of Great Britain—then please, don’t even talk about it because you won’t know what you’re talking about.

  Here’s the message you need to give America, Joe, and this part gets a little confusing: Tell everyone that the city is rocking, it’s alive and kicking with music and food and all that good-timing crazy stuff that Americans have come to expect when they visit here.

  The fact is, you can spend a week downtown and in the Quarter and the Marigny and Garden District and Uptown—the small, old part of the city to which tourists usually confine themselves—and hardly see any manifestations of the storm, the flood, and its damages.

  Tell people that, Joe. Tell them that New Orleans is still the best city in America. Tell them to come see for themselves, that we’re happy, hopeful, joyful, and celebratory still.

  Then tell them this: New Orleans is a broken, suffering mess, weakened and scared. We’re not ashamed to say it, Joe: We’re afraid.

  Because what tourists never see is the other 80 percent of the city and that’s the part where businesses, homes, and churches were wiped off the map and that’s where despair and sorrow have set in like incurable viruses. Depression, divorce, and suicide are the trifecta in this town now.

  Tell them that, Joe. Tell them that New Orleans is also the worst place in America, dysfunctional and angry, victimized by looters, predators, insurance companies, utilities, and even government.

  Got that? It’s simple: Everything is fine here. But it’s not fine.

  I’m not sure why people get so confused when we tell them that.

  Anyway, Joe, tell them we don’t want a handout. Tell them we just want a fair shake.

  The Feds built crappy levees, Joe, weaker than the Packers’ secondary, more porous than the Browns’ offensive line, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes and possessions and all physical manifestations of their youth in the flood.

  Imagine if you had no photos of your grandparents anymore, Joe, or of your Little League football team or your best friend from high school or the letters your dad wrote to you from Vietnam or the diaries you kept all your life or your wedding album or your collection of jazz 78s, baseball cards, or some other stupid thing that was really, really important to you.

  Imagine if you had lost one of your parents to a slow and unbelievably agonizing death in a dank attic last year.

  All right, I’ll stop there with the gloom.

  I’m just trying to say, Joe, that we’re a proud people around here and we’re held tighter together through age, race, and social class than the outside world has been led to believe and we are resilient and determined to save our city and our culture and I guess sometimes we hear out-of-towners say stupid things and we get all in a tizzy about it because we think no one understands us.

  Then again, we don’t understand ourselves. That’s why we all find one another so interesting.

  So have a good time while you’re here, Joe, live the good life and loosen your tie and say hello to strangers and talk a good game tonight and remember that even if we can’t stop Michael Vick, in the end, we’re going to kick Katrina’s ass.

  It’s third and long—real long—but there’s still a lot of time on the clock and although our front office is a joke and the game plan is shaky at best, we’ve got the guts, the courage, and the tenacity to persevere and nobody works as hard as we do day after day because nobody else has to.

  Remember that feeling, Joe? It’s almost rapturous: when everyone thought you’d be a pushover? That you’d just lie down and quit in the face of insurmountable odds? And then you showed them what you were made of ?

  That’s us, Joe. We’re The Bad News Bears, man. We’re Angels in the Outfield, Brian’s Song, The Longest Yard, Remember the Titans. We’re Rocky, dammit. And we’re gonna rise up. Tell the world.

  A Night to Remember

  9/27/06

  How do you dress your kids for school on the day the Saints play Monday Night Football if you don’t have any Reggie Bush jerseys in their size?

  It was a dilemma that none of my self-help parenting books addressed Monday morning as the ritualistic battle over what my kids would wear took on a different tenor than usual.

  To send them to school in anything but black and gold—as the administration had urged parents to do in a show of school spirit and city unity—would have been akin to sending my children out trick-or-treating on Halloween without a costume.

  Basic black we’ve got plenty of in my house, but here’s the rub: who, besides Paris Hilton and Elton John, actually owns gold clothes?

  There was much give-and-take, and I finally convinced my kids by heavily referencing Mardi Gras that yellow actually is gold, at least in New Orleans.

  “Yellow,” I told my daughter, “is the color of kings and Saints.” This seemed to satisfy her.

  At the parent/teacher/student assembly at my kids’ school Monday morning, the only “educational” item on the agenda was whether face painting wo
uld be allowed that day.

  This had actually been discussed in administrative meetings that morning.

  Alas, it would not be allowed. There were groans. Principals can be so exasperating at times. The many children who had arrived with fleurs-de-lis already in place on cheeks and noses would have to turn themselves in for a scrubbing before reporting to class.

  Then the music teacher stepped forward and began pounding out a melody on his chest with his hand, and he asked the parents to follow his lead and chant, over and over, “Saints go marching in, Saints go marching in . . .,” which we did, maybe two hundred of us, in group baritone.

  Then he led the children into a high-pitched, squealy version of the song over our jungle beat and it was beautiful, poetic, and touching.

  And very strange, really, when you think about it. I looked around and thought: What the hell is going on around here?

  Funny: as the meeting broke up and the kids went off to classes, many parents and teachers and kids all hugged one another before parting as if it were the last day of school, as if there would be some sort of transformation and personal growth before we all saw one another again—the next morning. You knew then that, well . . . Monday would be a day like no other.

  And you keep telling yourself: It’s only a game.

  Who dat?

  I had instructed my children that they were to respond to any questions asked by their teachers Monday with one answer: “The Deuce is loose!” and I was kind of kidding but kind of not and when my son Jack greeted his kindergarten teacher with this as he entered the classroom, she looked at me as if I were crazy and maybe I am but it’s nothing a little tweaking of my medication can’t cure.

  What happened after that, I don’t know, but I do admit—now that I’ve had time to consider the implications of the matter—to a little apprehension about all this.