1 Dead in Attic (11 page)

We're Bill Murray. We're Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. We're trapped in an Escher print, walking down steps that actually lead up, down straight paths that lead us full circle.

Okay, for the four of you still reading, I'll stop with the cultural metaphors. You get the point. I get the point. We all get the point.

The point is: it's fourteen days until January.

Wait until January, people in New Orleans say. You hear it all the time. Things will get better in January.

It's our mantra of hope, optimism, faith. Or maybe delusion.

Maybe because we've been Saints fans for so long that we are willing to buy futures when the market is flat. So eager to accept promises we don't really believe.

It's always been “wait until next year,” and we buy our season tickets and jerseys with the name and number of our new star player—the guy who's going to take us all the way!—and, like Charlie Brown, we keep running to kick the football and Lucy pulls it away.

Again and again. Wait until next year.

But there is merit to the current theory of an impending turn of events for the positive, empirical evidence to shore it up. For New Orleans, that is; the Saints, I'm afraid, are a lost cause, and they don't make levees big enough to plug that breach.

But January holds the promise of a sound that has been missing from our city for too long: the music of children. Lots of children.

Sure, there has been a refreshing repopulation of the little critters in recent weeks as schools opened and families trickled home, but the playgrounds still look pretty desolate and there's hardly ever a line for sugar cones at the Creole Creamery.

But there are legions of rug rats coming home this week or next or next, when the school semesters elsewhere end and the holidays are over.

True, my son Jack's nursery school class will have only twelve of the original twenty kids who were enrolled last September, but I guess that's a decent rate of return. A start.

And I think it will grow. The kid quotient goes up by at least three today.

My family is coming home.

This is wonderful news from a personal standpoint, but I am also filled with anxiety about this, and immeasurable . . . I guess I can say it: doubt.

Is it safe? Will they pick up on the air of despondency that seems to have engulfed three quarters of the adult population here? Will they be upset that they don't have a blue roof like everyone else?

These are the questions that nag me.

But I think my friend the barber Aidan Gill summed it up best: “A time will come when someone asks you, ‘What were you doing about it?' You can't tell them, ‘I was just watching it. I was just an innocent bystander.' Let me tell you something: there are no innocent bystanders in this.”

My own call to arms has been that either you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem and it's time we become part of the problem because the solution, whatever it's been up to now, ain't workin'.

So I'm Charlie Brown now. New Orleans is Lucy. And I'm gonna kick that ball a country mile.

Come January, everything will get better. If not, we wait for February 2.

That's Groundhog Day.

On August 27, my family left our home in New Orleans with a duffel bag full of beach clothes, three sleeping bags, three teddy bears, and a basketball.

I always travel with a basketball. It's my security blanket. I never knew how much I'd need one on this trip.

There was a hurricane coming to town, and, well . . . you know the rest of that story. I returned to New Orleans a week later. My family wound up in Maryland, in the town of Somerset, just on the D.C. border, in the house where I grew up.

There has always been much hand-wringing over what you were supposed to call people like us—refugees, evacuees, etc.—but the terminology I prefer is that my kids were “embedded” at their grandparents' house. They became minicelebrities in my hometown. Katrina Kids. A name recognized the world over.

When I went to visit, it seemed like everyone knew who we were. Several times, while trick-or-treating on Halloween, other parents stopped me and said, “We've heard about you.” People gave us clothes and toys and tuition (thank you, Concord Hill School) and such an outpouring of generosity that it boggles the mind to realize just how kind strangers can be. My sister loaned us her car for four months, and if that's not love, I don't know what is.

My wife and kids used to spend weekends at my brother's house in Poolesville, Maryland—forty-five minutes away—and one morning, three bicycles appeared on the front lawn.

No note. No explanation. Just like that.

They'd heard about us.

We made the Somerset town newsletter but not the local daily, as some of our friends did in smaller towns across America. That's the price you pay when you become Katrina Kids in the
Washington Post
distribution area; you have to fight with Tom DeLay and Saddam Hussein for front-page space.

On the other hand, the crew at the local Starbucks wouldn't let my wife pay for coffee when they found out she was from New Orleans, so it was a two-way street, the good and the bad.

My wife and daughter became social mavens in town; the women of Somerset smothered them with attention and invitations. They thrived. It is a great place, that old town. But the gig is up.

We said good-bye to our extended family and new friends last week, and here's the thing about that—from the Can't Catch a Break files: what should have been the happiest day of the year for us—our homecoming—was actually Teardrop City, saying good-bye to my sister, my brother, their families, and, worst of all, my parents, who let us turn their house and their lives upside down and asked in return only that we not break the frail staircase banister or destroy my mother's favorite old sofa, and, naturally, we did both.

My parents are heroes. Among the tens of thousands of people who allowed their lives to be jolted by those of us who came seeking shelter from the storm. I felt as though we broke their hearts when we left.

But my kids got to know them, and if there's one thing I can thank Katrina for, it's that. And also, my kids got to see snow, make a snowman, throw a snowball, catch flakes on their tongues.

That was a nice finishing touch.

But I'm tired of spending all my life surrounded by good-byes. That's a lyric by Fred LeBlanc, the Cowboy Mouth drummer, but it captures my core right now. Every day, it seems, it's good-bye to somebody.

But bringing my family home also brought with it the very welcome sound of hello. It was a sound I needed to hear. Hello to all—well, some—of our old New Orleans friends and neighbors.

And it's funny: it wasn't until my wife and kids walked into our house that I realized I had been living with a bunker mentality for a long time.

For instance, I had cleaned out our refrigerator months before, but the shelves were still in the backyard. My back deck was still a repository for seven red gas cans, even though I hadn't run a generator since September.

My closet and drawers were almost exactly as they had been the day we evacuated; I have worn two sets of clothes since everything went down. Jeans, T-shirts. I look at the suits hanging in my closet and wonder what use I'll ever have for them again.

What did I used to do?

Some folks say it's insane to bring children into this environment, this beaten-down town, and certainly there is merit to that argument.

Is it depressing here? Yes. Is it dangerous? Maybe. The water, the air, the soil . . . I don't know.

And there's little doubt that the kids have picked up the vibe. My six-year-old daughter started writing a book this week—a writer in the family!—and she has a page about the hurricane in it and it says, “A lot of people died. Some of them were kids.”

Mercy. God in Heaven, what lives are we handing to these children of the storm?

Then again, there is much about the aftermath that amuses them greatly. For example, where adults see rows and rows of spoiling refrigerators fouling the side of the road, children see mountains of empty appliance boxes to replace them.

It used to be that when a neighbor on the block bought a major appliance—a once-a-year event—we would commandeer the box and make four or five days of fun out of it. A fort. A playhouse. A cave.

With all these empty boxes around, I thought it would be nearly criminal not to make some lemonade out of all these lemons bestowed upon us, so I borrowed a friend's truck and brought six refrigerator boxes home and built a Christmas village for the kids.

They disappear for hours. In all the muck, you gotta dig for the magic.

When we drove to City Park the other night to look at the holiday lights, we plowed through blighted streets, total darkness, total loss and devastation on the sides of the road.

“Ooh, scary!” was all my son could muster. They thought it was pretty cool, actually, and I'm not going to call them out on that and tell them that in fact it's not. In due time, they will find out.

They will learn what went down in this town.

They see the ubiquitous brown stain that marks where the floodwaters settled for three weeks, and they see not the criminal failure of the Army Corps of Engineers but . . . a bathtub ring around the city.

What other place has that?

They love this town, my kids. They had a blast in Maryland, but they all said they wanted to come home and they've not said otherwise since they got here.

They know that Al Copeland's house is all lit up for the holidays like some crazy Disney castle and they know we'll go check it out this week, and that alone, for them, is a reason to live here.

They'll go back to their schools in January, and we will move on.

It's a big deal, what's happened here and what lies ahead. Rebuilding this city is history in the making, and my family—as we're fond of singing around here—is going to be in that number.

This is not just Anywhere USA we're talking about. This is New Orleans. This is our home. Our future.

It's a hard-luck city right now, and you can look at it as a half-empty, half-full conundrum, although, in New Orleans, the truth is that the glass is shattered.

But we're going to help pick up the pieces. Starting today.

Refrigerators are poignant symbols of our city's destruction and our government's inertia; many are now painted with political slogans.

The refrigerators of New Orleans are also the weapons of choice in the rapid deterioration of civility Uptown. Weapons of our Mass Destruction—literally.

It's all a part of NIMBY syndrome—Not In My Backyard—the bane of political processes nationwide (think Wal-Mart, landfills, and halfway houses), but these are particularly wicked and stinky cases.

A small instance would be the case of the jerk who loaded his dead and smelly fridge into his pickup truck one night and drove around Uptown looking for a place to get rid of it, rather than putting it on his curbside like the rest of us and taking his chances on the latest gambling craze sweeping our town: FEMA Garbage Pickup Lotto.

And did he dump it in the river or on some abandoned lot on Tchoupitoulas? No, this pillar of society chose Audubon Park—at the corner of Laurel Street and West Drive—to dump his offensive icebox. Smooth move. What a prince.

There's one oasis for miles in this community that has been cleaned and groomed for repopulation (Thank you, Oklahoma National Guard)—a place to bring kids and pets and grandmothers and see what little remains of nature in this godforsaken wasteland—and somebody dumps a fridge on the corner and drives off into the night.

This kind of crap makes me hubcap-stealing angry. But this was just a skirmish in what has become the Uptown Refrigerator Wars.

Refrigerator clusters have started appearing all over the area, as one guy dumps his fridge on a corner away from his house and then—like iron shavings drawn to a magnet—suddenly there are five appliances on the corner, then ten, then fifteen.

But it gets worse. It gets personal. The above crimes are random and anonymous. The two I shall now describe involve direct confrontations followed by covert actions and now, no doubt, smoldering resentments among neighbors.

Full disclosure: I was involved in one of these episodes. I'm sure this comes as a great shock to, say, my wife and close friends, to hear that I interjected myself into a petty and juvenile refrigerator dispute but, hey: like everyone else, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

To wit: On Friday night, the garbage crews rolled onto my street—huge dump trucks and backhoes and cranes and Bobcats. It was the closest to a parade that we've seen in a while, and we all poured out of our houses to cheer them on. Finally, our six-foot wall of debris, stretching from one end of the block to the other, was going to be hauled off, and we could begin to try to forget what has happened here.

But while the hard-hatted cleanup crews were doing their massive sweep-up, a guy from around the corner drove up in his pickup truck and dumped a fridge on the corner.

My neighbor Franke jumped off his stoop and ran over to explain that the refrigerators and other hazardous waste had already been cleaned from this block; that these guys on Friday night were just picking up trees, branches, household debris, and regular old garbage.

The guy insisted that the trucks would take his fridge, too, and then he drove off, even as we told him: Don't leave this here.

Well, it took an hour, but the federal contractors got my block clear. We could see our curbs and sidewalks for the first time since the hurricane. The place was swept spotless. It was a time for celebration.

Except for that damn smelly fridge they left on the corner, just like we said they would.