For a year after Katrina he sat in Houston, going through the motions of a new life, his thoughts never far from the kids in the projects he used to coach. They got so close, the boys latching on to any male influence they could find, and now that he was displaced, he found that he needed them too. He came back to New Orleans in August 2006, shortly before the Superdome reopened, coaching in Mid-City, working on setting up at a place closer to the Iberville.
Three years later, on July 18, 2009, he opened a football program in Lemann Playground, the only public green space between the Iberville and the Lafitte projects, both occupying the gray blocks northwest of the French Quarter. On the day the league officially began, a drill team of neighborhood kids he’d trained led a procession through the gates into Lemann. The adults released balloons. Across four age groups, 125 boys played football, Brown says. That was six years ago. Now the Lafitte projects have been torn down, replaced by mixed-income housing. The Iberville is almost gone, the last of the city’s projects. He remembers the hope of opening Lemann Playground. On that sunny day in 2009, with a newspaper reporter taking notes and pictures, he didn’t suspect that his football league would be killed by the very spirit of rebirth that rose from Katrina’s receding waters.
* * *
—
The next morning, Shack drives back toward New Orleans. His comedy gig went well.
Halfway home, he passes the exit to Gillsburg, Mississippi, right on the state line, where the plane chartered by Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed in 1977. I start to tell the story, but after getting a blank look, I ask Shack if he’s ever heard of the band.
“No,” he says.
He asks about their famous songs, and I tell him “Freebird” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” Nope, he says, those don’t sound familiar. We laugh, because there are only four miles between the mostly wealthy, mostly white Uptown neighborhood where I rented a house, where everyone has heard of Skynyrd, and the mostly poor, mostly black neighborhood where he grew up.
Those four miles might as well be an ocean.
He’s flipping through the radio stations. A fellow comedian named Blowfish is crashed out in the back, wheezing and snoring. The highway is a drone, and 103 miles from the city, Shack gets quiet.
“My life can’t go nowhere but up,” he says at last, “living in the Superdome . . . ,” trailing off, pulled back in time.
Shack rode out the hurricane with 17 family members in the Iberville. The old projects stood strong. The storm didn’t knock out the water or the gas, so his mom cooked Monday night as Katrina hit Louisiana. She made turkey necks and gravy, rice and peas. That’s what they ate through Tuesday, watching the water rise, first above the parked cars, then above the street signs.
On Wednesday, the project’s running water went off and Shack’s mom told everyone it was time to leave. The streets were flooded, and all 17 of them linked arms and tried to walk to high ground. The sun hammered down, more than 100 degrees, dead bodies floating in the muck. Shack found the mules of Mid-City Carriages still tied to a fence. That’s how they tried to get people through the water at first, riding on top of the stolen mules. The mules hated the water, and mules don’t do anything they don’t want to do, so Shack tied them back up. His family walked to the Orleans Avenue exit, rising steeply up to I-10.
They walked a mile and a half the wrong way down the interstate, his grandmother stopping often to catch her breath. The inside of the Superdome smelled like feces, and he held his 4-year-old daughter in his arms so she could go to the bathroom. The free water and blankets got stolen by local gangsters, who then sold them. Tweaking drug addicts wandered the stadium. Brown kept his family in a small corner on the plaza level. They took turns sleeping, someone always standing watch.
Two days later, he loaded his family onto a bus, getting the women on first, then making sure the boys made it, then working to help the police keep loading those still inside the Dome. Because people respect coaches so much in New Orleans, most everyone in the projects had at least heard of Shack Brown. As the sun set, a cop came to him.
“I held the bus with your family,” the officer told Shack. “It’s time to go.”
That’s how Shack Brown left New Orleans, riding down the empty interstate, passing small groups of people still walking to safety, like something from The Grapes of Wrath. He doesn’t think about it much, at least not on purpose. His memories aren’t a cancer, slowly eating away, but a bomb that goes off from time to time without warning. Sometimes he’ll be driving alone in his car and look into the mirror and see himself silently weeping.
He doesn’t tell anyone about it.
* * *
—
All New Orleanians can describe three moments from the past 10 years in cinematic detail: their escape from the storm, where they were when Gleason blocked that punt, and where they were when the Saints won the Super Bowl. These are the tentpoles of biography since Katrina, and in telling them, people reveal their most unguarded selves. Like a love of the Saints, this is one of the few things in the city to bridge all the deep race and class divides: Everyone suffered through the storm; everyone cried when Gleason blocked the punt; and everyone still struggles to express the emotions they felt when the Saints won in Miami.
Shack Brown went to the Monday night game against the Falcons and saw Steve Gleason block the punt in person, and he doesn’t talk much about that either, except to say that during the game he found the spot in the plaza where he’d huddled with his family.
Three years later, in February 2010, he sat with his grandmother in her nursing home as the Saints took the field in Miami. He’d promised her they’d watch the Super Bowl together if the Saints ever made it, the team’s historic awfulness becoming a running joke about her mortality. On that Sunday, they sat side by side in front of the television. The game ended, and the Saints won, and his grandmother exhaled: a deep, resonant sigh.
“Now I can get some rest,” she said.
He made a joke about sleeping, and she just looked at him, and then he understood.
“I saw it all,” she said.
Her health started failing not long after, and she never really got well again. Near the end, Shack had a fourth son, Lorenzo, and he took his boy to meet his grandmom. The baby rested in her arms, and she rested in white sheets, her head on a white pillow. Two days later, she died. That night, Brown slept with Lorenzo on his chest, and around 3 a.m., the baby woke up gasping for air. The next morning Shack got the news about his grandmother, who’d passed away between 3 and 4 in the morning.
“That was them exchanging breaths,” he says now, as he looks out the windshield at the long, blurred yellow line of the highway. He’s gone from rocking Boosie to silence, the truck somewhere between Jackson and New Orleans, nothing but trees and swamp on either side of the road. His friend is asleep in the back, or at least pretending to sleep out of respect. A plastic butterfly pin hangs on a lanyard looped around his rearview mirror; they wore these pins at his grandmother’s funeral. The wings are made from small pink-and-black feathers, and when he’s stressed, he’ll pluck a feather and say a prayer: “Grandmama, I need you to use your wings over me.”
He plucked one a day or two ago.
His oldest son is now repeating the life Shack worked so hard to leave behind, the young man who carries his name, Leander Brown Jr., facing two aggravated assault charges in Georgia, to go with a long and violent rap sheet, the résumé of a habitual offender. Shack doesn’t have any money or connections to find a decent lawyer.
“I don’t want my child sitting in jail for the rest of his life,” he says softly.
He’s spent the past two decades trying to save kids, and he can’t do a thing for his own. A few years ago, it all got to be too much, fighting the battle for his park, still dealing with the trauma of the storm. He told his wife he wanted to die, let this pain wash away.
“I h
ave my moments,” he says, “when I feel like I can’t hold it no more.”
* * *
—
The night Steve Gleason blocked the punt, Chris Rose was in the stands at the Superdome. It was his job to take the madness around him and somehow put it into words for The Times-Picayune. Nobody did it better. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its Katrina coverage, and he was nominated individually for a second, the poet laureate of New Orleans. Two days later, Rose’s column about the game appeared, which was subsequently included in his best-seller 1 Dead in Attic, a collection of his work in the aftermath of Katrina. Two years ago, when the Super Bowl came to New Orleans for the first time since the storm, a local organization got Gleason to read that column on video. The link is still on the Internet. In it, Gleason’s voice is slurred, the camera tight, the weight in his body already stealing his ability to talk. . . . It is superficial and meaningless and a sign of total loss of perspective, but I stand before you and I declare: It is good to feel like a winner . . .
Gleason’s eyes are red and watery, as if he just finished crying or is about to start. A three-day stubble covers his face. This is not the future he’d imagined when he retired in 2008 from football and started pursuing an MBA from Tulane, hoping to read books and debate their ideas, working in his free time to rebuild neighborhoods destroyed by Katrina. Those dreams died with his ALS diagnosis. With whatever time he had left, whether years or decades, he decided he’d fight to not let his disease define him and to help others who didn’t have the resources afforded to someone who once blocked a punt in prime time. He started a foundation, which did the usual things like raise money but also something uniquely Steve Gleason. It encouraged people to get out and live. A group of people, including his former Saints teammate Scott Fujita, carried Steve and another ALS patient to the top of Machu Picchu.
On the video, he continues to read Rose’s column. . . . And out my window today as I write this—my open window, oh, glorious day—I hear the same sounds I hear every day—chain saws and hammers and drills—and it would be foolish to suggest that the workers have more pep in their step today and that everything is going to be easier now because, well . . . because it’s not . . .
Gleason’s T-shirt reads “No White Flags.” When he swallows, the microphone picks up the noise. His voice is loose and childlike, sharp vowel sounds the first to go, his tongue heavy in his mouth. The book is held firm in his hands, the spine bent over. The man who lives forever in bronze at the Superdome—the statue is named Rebirth—remains inside him. Gleason’s voice grows in strength for Rose’s last line.
Only a game, you say? Like hell it was.
Steve Gleason stares into the camera until the shot fades to black.
* * *
—
“Shit, between him and the archbishop,” Chris Rose is saying, standing outside an Uptown corner bar, waiting for it to open. “‘What’s the archbishop say and what’s Gleason say?’ I mean, those are the two guys who people look to when we’re confused about something. I mean, he’s the—literally he’s the moral epicenter of this city.”
Rose loves how Gleason weighs in on the important issues of the day, from the cuts at The Times-Picayune (against) to gay marriage (for), and how people look to him as the best of what the human animal does under duress—almost the exact opposite of how people see Rose.
“The people of this city didn’t turn on me,” Rose says, sounding deeply grateful. “I feel the love every day when I walk around.”
His voice sounds like tires crunching through an oyster-shell parking lot, and he moves with a herky-jerky walk, all arms and legs, like Keith Richards playing himself in a Tim Burton movie. His hair is curly, gray, and wild, and his T-shirt has a quote from one of his old stories. It’s a few minutes before 4. We check the door to St. Joe’s Bar on the corner of Magazine and Joseph, but it’s still dead-bolted. We can see people moving inside. The Roman candy man, a dollar a stick, click-clacks in his donkey-drawn cart. Wooden wheels on uneven streets. There’s music coming from somewhere. One of those summer New Orleans storms hit a few minutes ago. Wide rivers of water rush through the gutters, the streets already starting to flood. Rose huddles beneath a vestibule awning, trying to stay dry.
At a little past 4, they let us inside.
“What everybody lost,” he says, “was the stuff in the back of their closets, and shoe boxes full of photographs. You know, your letters from your uncle who served in Vietnam, or the awards you won when you were a child. There are people in this town who don’t have photographs of their grandparents. It wasn’t about couches and TVs and automobiles and Sheetrock. It was about your history being taken away from you. You don’t have photographs, the images, the words, the awards, report cards, letters, mostly letters. Diaries. Imagine how much unpublished music was destroyed in that storm.”
He lights a cigarette.
When people see him, they instinctively remember Katrina. Many feel compelled to share their own personal horrors. Afterward, they feel better and he feels worse. He doesn’t go out much.
“I make a lot of people cry,” he says.
The hours slip away, sitting among the red Chinese lanterns on the bar’s covered outdoor patio. Most of his troubles made the paper: depression, then drug addiction, $800 of Oxy a day. He took three trips to rehab and the third one stuck, but not before he lost everything. He lost his wife, then got arrested after stalking his new girlfriend. He lost his house; his ex-wife lives there with a new man. He lost his career. He left The Times-Picayune, taking a buyout from the place where he’d done his best work, then wrote for the alt weekly until that fell apart. He did television essays for Fox 8, until it sent him packing. He wrote the seminal work on Katrina, a New York Times best-seller, then spent all that money on opiates. He’s broke.
“Destitute,” he says.
That’s why he started waiting tables a year and a half ago at a French Quarter fish restaurant. “I strapped that fucking apron on,” he says. “There was no time to be proud.”
New Orleans was being reborn, rebuilt, and the voice of the city’s destruction had been left in the past. Many diners recognized him.
“Are you doing a story?” people would ask.
He shook his head.
“What are you writing these days?”
“I’m writing your order, that’s what I’m writing.”
The rain picks up now outside the patio, pouring hard and loud. He’s quit his job at the restaurant and is looking for writing work again, hoping to find himself in the shadow of the anniversary. His biggest client is a magazine run by a local grocery store. He’s still trying to get a local media company to take a chance.
He’s making changes. Three days before Christmas, tired of living in the French Quarter, he rented a house in Bayou St. John, a quiet neighborhood north of his old one. The next day, he got a nice check from the grocery store. The day after that, Christmas Eve, he went and bought four bicycles, one for each of his three kids, ages 16, 14, and 12, along with one for himself. He put them under the tree, a father’s promise that the future would be better. “The kids are why I’m alive,” he says. “God knows what lessons I’m teaching them. I don’t know, but I know I’m giving them hard shells.”
The heavy raindrops look like a broken rainbow, falling through the prism of the late-afternoon sun. It is sunny and pouring at the same time.
Rose laughs. His laugh is a treble machine gun.
“It’s sunshine!” he says.
He’s quiet, just listening, watching, sun and water and noise and light.
“That great Tennessee Williams line,” he says finally. “‘Every raindrop is a piece of time in your hands.’ He got it dead-on. It’s the only place I know that rains big drops like that when the sun is shining.”
He’s leaning against the bar, a curl of hair on his forehead. Because he use
d to be a newspaper reporter, a very, very good one, he’s totally aware of what’s happening, what I’m writing down about him and why. The beam of yellow light shining through the lattice to his left hits him on the arms, moving up to his chest, glittering off the gold letters on the T-shirt, bright on his face. Ten years come and gone.
“Almost everything’s better,” he says. “It feels like it happened a million years ago. On the other hand it feels like it happened yesterday. Its manifestations in the city are very few. Its manifestations in my life are complete and total.”
* * *
—
During the summer of the anniversary, Rose works on his latest writing assignment: a follow-up of perhaps his most famous piece, an odd experience given the way his life has changed in between. Ten years ago, just eight days after the storm hit, he wrote an open letter introducing the fleeing citizens of New Orleans to the communities around the nation taking them in. The same local nonprofit that got Gleason to write and record his letter reached out to Rose for a new version of his column. The group is called Evacuteer, and it created a website to collect the love letters and offer readers a way to donate. Rose plans to read his piece at an event near the end of May.
On the appointed night, an hour or so before his reading, a crowd starts to gather at a community center on O. C. Haley Boulevard, once a Central City no-go zone between the Magnolia projects, birthplace of the Cash Money record label, and the Calliope projects, where No Limit rapper and founder Master P grew up. The city tore down both, and now the neighborhood is a few months, maybe a year, from being acceptable to suburban white people. There is still violence. This summer, a hit man walked up to the St. John the Baptist Church and shot someone once in the chest; meanwhile, half a mile away, chef Adolfo Garcia, a culinary star in a city that treats a chef’s coat like a low-slung guitar, just opened his latest place. It’s across the street from Rose’s reading, which folks are talking about at the bar. Chris is one of Katrina’s many ghosts.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 22