Devil Sent the Rain

by Tom Piazza

  Possession, demonic or otherwise, implies that one part of an organism has taken control of the whole, putting things out of balance and destroying as much of the organism as possible before someone either exorcises the demon or destroys the host organism from without.

  America has always been extremely vulnerable to fears of possession, and it has gone through famous periods of panic over it. The Salem witch trials, populist rhetoric about special interest groups, anticommunist fever, Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industrial complex . . . sometimes the concerns are justified. But the most opportunistic elements in the society usually look for a way to exploit the concern in order to gain greater power. Which in turn fuels greater concern . . . This tendency toward entropy seems built into the logic of our society, and it is a paradox from which we may not recover.

  In the 1970s Dylan could conceive of going out on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue and reclaiming the spirit of America—freedom, possibility, creativity, inclusiveness—from the clutches of the folks who brought us the Vietnam involvement and Watergate. Today we have bigger problems. The spirit itself, the sense of entitlement, is questionable. In the aftermath of 9/11, the oil companies scrambling to enrich themselves, the media full of sentimentality, the rush to jettison constitutionally guaranteed liberties, shopping as a patriotic duty . . . Is that really what it was all about all the time? Does it really all amount to a big Coke commercial? Who says the greediest and most rapacious bastards in a society get to define what it means? Can a culture get so defiled that its own citizens don’t recognize it?

  Everybody pieces together their own America in the brain, whether they want to or not. Dylan’s career still suggests a way of operating within such painful confusion. In making a harmony of such apparent discord, it reminds us that freedom is a curse and a blessing at exactly the same moment. But that’s how you know it’s alive.

  From Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader,

  Benjamin Hedin, editor (2004)

  Part Two

  Before I moved to New Orleans, in 1994, I spent three years in Iowa City, two of them at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In my final term there I studied with Margot Livesey, the wonderful fiction writer and teacher. In our first workshop, Margot said to us, in her deceptively hesitant-sounding cadence, “For this term, I would like to suggest that if you are used to writing quickly, write slowly. And if you are accustomed to writing slowly, write quickly.”

  I was a slow writer. I had written my first good short story five years earlier, and had subsequently produced six more. One of them had taken me two years to get right. It wasn’t an encouraging pace. Nonfiction was different—reviews and journalism could arrive on a deadline. But fiction seemed to demand endless revision. The ghost of Flaubert, padding around Croisset in his dressing gown and his Egyptian slippers, laboring for the mot juste, loomed large for me, as it probably does for most writers. Ditto Proust in the cork-lined room, James Joyce going blind rewriting, and so on and on. And, of course, long labor could produce masterpieces. Sometimes it produced Madame Bovary. But then sometimes it produced Bouvard et Pécuchet.

  When Hurricane Katrina hit, in August 2005, a lot of new and unfamiliar information—logistical, emotional, and spiritual—was abruptly forced on me, as it was on everyone else, and I needed, badly, to make some kind of provisional sense of it all in the only way I had, which was by writing. What did I know? What was necessary? What was not necessary? What role had community played in my life? What would be lost if it disappeared? Where do you go when you are put out of your house? How do you feel when friends lose everything they own? What about when they kill themselves? Why is your hand shaking? What is the meaning of this?

  I wrote one book, Why New Orleans Matters, very quickly, in the five weeks immediately following the storm, mostly in a spare office in a Missouri cotton gin. Since it was the first book to come out of New Orleans after Katrina, it got a lot of attention, and I did a lot of traveling and speaking, gave a lot of interviews, all of that. The book was a response to the idea, which was being advanced in some quarters, that New Orleans should not be rebuilt. I developed what amounted to a stump speech on behalf of the city. I’d go out on the road for a week or two, talk to community groups or college students, then come back to New Orleans, to some fresh vista of grief and loss.

  At dinner one evening, maybe four months after the disaster, when I still had trouble getting through a conversation without breaking into sobs, I was seated at a nice New York City restaurant next to a well-intentioned person who asked me what it was like to live in New Orleans post-Katrina. The city was still in ruins; bodies were still being found in soaked, moldy houses; people I knew had gone through unspeakable things; I was living out of a suitcase. Although I recognized the gesture toward empathy, in true post-traumatic stress fashion I was irrationally furious with this person for not realizing how stupid the question was. I mean, how are you supposed to answer a question like that?

  I turned to him and said, quietly, “You want to know what it’s like?”

  He nodded.

  “AAAAAGGGHHHHHHH!” I yelled, right in his ear, slamming the table with the flat of my hand and jangling the silverware and plates.

  The entire restaurant went quiet. My companion looked at me agape, truly frightened.

  “The way you’re feeling right now?” I said. “That’s what it’s like.”

  Most of the pieces in the second half of this book come out of that feeling. They were written quickly, for the most part, during a time when I was also writing my novel City of Refuge. Most were written in response to invitations after the publication of Why New Orleans Matters. Writing that book had been like diving out of a plane or walking across hot coals: You had to do it before you realized that you couldn’t do it. The same goes for most of the following work.

  New Orleans, 2006. You had lived through Katrina, you had stayed in town and were rebuilding. You had gone through the shock, the sadness and grief, the fear, and then, to a degree, the unreasonable bubble of elation at having survived, at each encounter with a friend who had also survived and was still there. You huddled together for warmth, you made the necessary plans, you filled out the forms, you helped the people whom you could help, if you could help, and others helped you. Gradually the smoke began to clear, and you began to be able to imagine some kind of provisional way forward.

  That got you through the spring.

  Then summer hit, and that little mirage of optimism evaporated and the grim truth settled in, of just how big the challenges were, and how deep and wide the damage was—not just physical but spiritual—and the mood in the city turned darker again. Across the nation, the sugar rush of interest and empathy was starting to ebb, replaced by the predictable crash of boredom with New Orleans and even, at times, a kind of nasty backlash. Anyone who has been through the death of a loved one knows the drill—effusions of support, people bringing food to the house, tender and sincere expressions of comradeship and love. But two months later nobody wants to hear about your grief. Who can blame them?

  That summer of 2006 was the hard one to get through. In the middle of it, I wrote this piece for Eric Banks, at Bookforum.

  Charlie Chan in New Orleans!

  1.

  Summer is never one of the buoyant seasons in New Orleans. The heat is oceanic. It’s not just a fact among other facts—it becomes the one glaring, inescapable Ground Of All Facts. This summer the heat seems worse than usual, but maybe that’s because it brought its pals along with it: depression, dread, loneliness, breakdown of services. The fact that the rest of the world may soon have to get used to this kind of heat is no consolation.

  Air-conditioning helps, of course. Except that last November, three months after the roof blew off the house during Hurricane Katrina, my landlord hired the Moe, Larry, and Curly Repair Company (“Look out with that ladder, you nitwit!”) to fix the collapsed ceilings, and they sheetrocked over the main air vent in my apartment.

/>   I wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t a Representative Anecdote. Even ordinarily competent people here are increasingly unable to function. They drive erratically, forget obvious words and familiar names, have eye problems and skin rashes. They don’t recognize old friends, or they act as if they know you when they don’t. Everybody here, and from here, is crazy. The evacuees who are stuck in Houston, or Atlanta, or Salt Lake City or Baltimore or Phoenix, living with cousins, are crazy, and so are the people who returned to houses full of obscenely proliferating mold of various colors, like camouflage all over their walls and furniture and treasured photographs and books.

  Some people came back to houses that were no more than a pile of sticks and rags under a collapsed roof, and some came back to houses that were more or less intact, and they are crazy too. The streets are full of potholes with no one to fix them, and there is one working hospital, which has a three-year wait for the emergency room. You can’t get insurance if you are trying to buy a house, the traffic lights don’t work at most major intersections, and the city had to bring in the National Guard to patrol the streets of ruined neighborhoods whose houses have been cleaned out of their meager contents by looters both amateur and professional. It’s like the Vienna of The Third Man.

  The weird thing is that you can still have a great time visiting. Many of the best restaurants are up and running and doing overload business—Bayona and Brigtsen’s and Upperline and Lilette and Mosca’s and Clancy’s and more. Liuzza’s in Mid-City, which sat in six feet of water for weeks after the storm, finally opened in May, serving beer in frosted mugs and stuffed artichokes. That was the menu at first, but it was enough, for a while at least. The French Quarter is more or less okay, as is the picturesque heart of the Garden District, and the university area uptown. You can eat and drink and walk around and have fun. Come on down.

  But living here is a different story. And now that it is summer and the Tulane and Loyola and Xavier students have left town, and many of the residents who stuck it out through the spring to let their kids finish the school year have put their houses on the market and left town, and you run into your friends here and there and talk about how nobody from outside will ever understand what this was like and then you find out that some of those friends are leaving too, and you start asking yourself, What am I doing here? How can I stay in this?

  But how can I leave?

  And so on. Something on the order of $12 billion in aid is about to be pumped into the city to jump-start businesses and services, rebuild hospitals, clear land, build new housing. What is left of the city may be in for the biggest boom since the Marshall Plan. Or it may be about to collapse completely. Living with pairs of incompatible yet equally plausible scenarios is another part of why everyone is crazy.

  We are entering a new Phase of Grief, I think, calculus compared to Kübler-Ross’s algebra, one that affects everyone differently at different times, like Red Kryptonite. I have made a provisional decision to shore up what is left of my own sanity with a mountain of books and CDs and DVDs; somewhere in there I will find the key, the right attitude, or the right stance, an exoskeleton, a persona, someone who will show me How to Be, because frankly I have run out of ideas.

  2.

  That is why when I heard about the “Buy Two DVDs and Get One Free” sale at the Barnes and Noble in Metairie, the big suburban white-flight enclave just across the Jefferson Parish line, I almost wept with gratitude. Happiness, escape, paradise. I could spend hours browsing with a purpose, comparing prices, putting together possible groupings of DVDs to get the Best Value, mixing and matching. I had a few boxed sets in mind that I wanted to steer for—the new John Wayne/John Ford box set with the special edition of The Searchers along with They Were Expendable and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the brand-new four-disc Super Collector’s Edition of Taylor Hackford’s great 1987 documentary on Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll. Maybe I would use my freebie to pick up the two-year-old box set of late Marx Brothers films, including A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, worth having despite the inclusion of dogs like Room Service and The Big Store.

  I went, I grazed, I was happy, like the Eloi in The Time Machine. The simple, beautiful, idiotic Eloi were fascinated by shiny, spinning discs that contained important information from the past, just like me. But to them the information was meaningless, inscrutable. Up and down the blessedly air-conditioned aisles I browsed. I found the Ford/Wayne, Berry, and Marx Brothers sets and put them in my shopping basket.

  In an ordinary season that might have been enough—mission accomplished—but it wasn’t now. I had, after all, known and thought about these in advance. I wanted more adventure, more Thrill Of Discovery. I could easily work my way through these three sets in a week. By then the sale would be over, and what would I do? Around the three sets a certain amount of dread began to seep; the protection they provided felt slightly unsound, as if it could give way. I needed high levees, deep pilings, more to watch than I could possibly get through any time soon.

  So I kept going. I passed on Universal’s new W. C. Fields collection even though it contained his masterpiece It’s A Gift; it repeated The Bank Dick, which I owned in the Criterion Collection version (now out of print). I examined the new Legacy Collection editions of The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon—padded out with dog sequels like The Mummy’s Ghost and Revenge of the Creature . . . I would have bought single-disc versions of all the classic monster movies but I knew I would never watch The Mummy’s Ghost. I had all the stuff in the new Bogart box except the new two-disc collectors’ edition of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and who needed all these “making of” documentaries and audio commentaries by the assistant director? I was aware of my own desperation; I was raking through the ashes. And then I came to the Action and Adventure section and I found what I was looking for, even though I hadn’t realized I was looking for it.

  The Indiana Jones movies have always been a guilty pleasure for me. I’m not proud of it, but it is a fact. Pure action, fantasy, spectacle. Escape into the desert or the mountains, hard-charging horse races, sweltering archaeological excavations staffed by Nazi sadists, that wild ride through the cave tunnels in the Temple of Doom . . . Indiana Jones was ready for anything. I’d go ride on his coattails for a while. The set contained all three movies in widescreen editions, along with a “making of” disc that, for once, could answer some interesting questions, like how they did that tunnel chase. This was exactly the kind of thing that the Buy Two, Get One Free Sale was designed for. The set had been out for a while, but I had passed on it because the pleasure was sufficiently guilty. Now I could get it for free, as a dividend. But I needed to find two more box sets that I wanted, so that I could get Indy for free. Obviously the reasoning was feverish, but at least it was a substitute for all the chaos outside B&N’s air-conditioned perimeter.

  I found what I needed on the next aisle, under Mystery and Suspense, a solution amazing in its simplicity. Ying to Indy’s yang. The missing jewel in the crown, two boxes, ten DVDs’ worth.

  3.

  A darkened office, a man’s head and shoulders seen from behind, silhouetted against the light from a lamp shining in his face. Across from him sits a man wearing a white suit with a vest and a white fedora on his head and almost plausibly Asian features, peering into the face of the man he is interrogating, really putting the screws to him.

  Shadows always surround Charlie Chan. If they are not immediately present in a given scene, he will be heading for them shortly. He always carries a flashlight. He also carries a gun, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him fire it. He can crawl through any underground passageway, including sewers, without getting dirty. If an old house has a sliding panel leading to a secret hallway, he’ll find it. Everybody important knows who he is, and if they are okay they light up when he appears and they defer to him. If they are not okay they fear him. Troublemakers and creeps make an issue of his “foreignness,” and then he wields his politeness like a
sword.

  An example, from Charlie Chan in Paris. Chan, played by Warner Oland, has just arrived at a young friend’s apartment on his first night in the city, when the doorbell rings and some revelers in evening clothes enter, including one effete drunken boor who raises his eyebrows, bows to Charlie, and says, “Oh! Me velly happy know you. Maybe you likey havey little dlinky?”

  Charlie Chan smiles faintly and says, in his most courtly manner, “Very happy to make acquaintance of charming gentleman.”

  The boor squirms and Charlie lets him twist in the wind in front of his friends for just a moment and then, to show that there are no hard feelings, does his own parody of pidgin Chinese. As everyone laughs gaily at the discharge of tension, Charlie watches the boor closely—with reason, as it turns out. Chan is a virtuoso of the mask.

  Most people would probably tell you that Warner Oland was a better Charlie Chan than Sidney Toler. Whether he was or not, these two boxes give you plenty basis on which to decide. The 2004 Chanthology has six of the Tolers, from 1944 and 1945; the just-issued Warner Oland Is Charlie Chan, Volume 1 contains four of the Olands, filmed a decade earlier—Charlie Chan in London, Paris, Egypt, and Shanghai, along with Eran Trece, a Spanish-language version of the early, and lost, Charlie Chan Carries On.

  Simone Weil remarked that we must prefer real hell to an imaginary heaven, but I’m not sure I agree. Right now imaginary anything sounds good to me, for a few hours at least. These black-and-white tableaux vivants are my idea of a good idea, the perfect escape. The Indiana Jones movies, while almost a definition of escapism, have felt jarring to me this time around. The ancient landscapes full of ruins and insects, the fiefdoms of violence in burnt-out purlieus, the occasional outposts of decadent urbanity, the treasures of the past mercilessly exploited by thugs from halfway around the world, everyone sweating constantly under scorching sun and torrential rain—it all reminds me a little too much of New Orleans, post-Katrina.