1 Dead in Attic (24 page)

The Corps of Engineers gives you eight feet of water? Raise your house eight feet. Move on. Move up.

Not all stories around here are so cheery, so full of equanimity and can-do. Far from it.

One of my favorite local stores, Utopia, a funky Magazine Street boutique, closed a week ago because of lack of business. In one of the mayor's ever-increasing public gaffes—his pronouncements on race, progress, and politics have gone from comic to weird to just plain alienating—he recently dismissed the concerns of business owners who say the economic and political climates are driving them away from the city. He said he'd send a postcard to those that leave.

Mr. Mayor, Utopia's forwarding address is a shopping mall in Houston.

And so it goes.

This isn't Sudan. It's not Lebanon. There are greater hardships all across this planet than living in New Orleans. But by American standards, by the standards of those families who lived side by side in the same voting precincts for the past sixty years in Chalmette, Gentilly, and the Lower 9th, by the standards of those who worked their asses off to get a nice house, a nice car, and a picket fence in Old Metairie, well . . . it pretty much sucks here.

But we move on, move up, our faith in government washed out to sea with all that floodwater and our hopes for recovery rooted in our reliance on one another and the triumph of the human spirit. They are our best and only chance.

Folks from other places must think we're out of our minds when they see pictures of the ruination and hear about all the stress and depression and hear the crazy stuff that comes out of our mayor's mouth, and maybe they're right.

It will be decades before we sort through our post-Katrina housing landscape while psychiatric journals write about our post-Katrina emotional landscape.

Most of us have visited other places this past year, where sidewalks are clean and parks and playgrounds are pristine and schools are progressive and city government is efficient, but still, this is where we are.

We stay. We raise our houses and we raze our houses and we get up and go to work—the lucky ones—because this is home and no word has a stronger allegiance in the English language.

I'm not going to try to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is.

It is home.

I have a friend permanently evacuated to Chicago who confirms my belief that, as bad as it is here, it's better than being somewhere else. To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.

You can't sleepwalk here; you will fall into a pothole.

My Chicago friend told me over a crawfish boil this spring that the only person he has in the world to talk to about all this—this Thing—is his third-grade daughter.

At night they talk. No one else understands the thousand-yard stare and the apoplectic frustration of not being here to be a part of this. It's that song: “Do you know what it means . . . ?”

Yes, we do.

As Ernesto wobbled its precarious path over the weekend, my wife and I secured our papers, discussed our options, made our evacuation plans.

“Is this how we're going to live?” she asked me. I don't think I answered her directly but instead offered only a shrug—not of disregard or defiance or even determination, but a simple motion of the head to look around the room, our house, our home, and absorb what we've got here.

It's not another day in Paradise, not by any means. And I am tired of the trash and the theft and the blame, just like everybody else.

But there's something about being here that makes you feel alive. I mean, if offered a chance to be one of those guys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, you'd take it, wouldn't you?

That's kind of what this is. A shot at glory.

There are tough hours, tough days, tough weeks at a time, but underneath all our sorrow is the power of community and the common good.

I remember sitting on my front stoop near the end of the first week of September last year when a disheveled and seemingly disoriented guy pulled up in front of me in his pickup truck. He had Michigan plates and was pulling a boat behind him.

“Which way?” he shouted to me. “Who's in charge here?” he said.

I had to laugh at that part. No one's in charge, I told him. But if he wanted to put that boat to good use, I said, “Keep going straight and you'll hit the water.”

He nodded. And then he started crying. “I'm sorry I took so long, man,” he told me. “I got here as fast as I could.” And he drove off.

I saw him two days later on Canal Street, looking fresh and invigorated. He had been rescuing people and pets ever since I'd seen him.

From time to time, I talk to a retired New York City fireman named Jim Kearney on the phone. He has made several trips here and to the Mississippi coast to give free massage therapy to first responders, rescue workers, and volunteer house gutters.

He says that every time he goes back to New York, he flounders with a sense of loss of purpose and direction. He says his friends who have volunteered to work here feel the same way.

“They go through their own grieving hell when they leave New Orleans,” he said to me. “It's like leaving the
Titanic
for a safe distant shore—and leaving all the people behind. There is such a dissonance between what's going on down there and everywhere else in America. Everyone in New Orleans is going around with a spike stuck in their heads, and they don't know how to get it out.”

He paused and said, “You all are amazing people to be doing what you're doing.”

And he's right. We are.

Tens of thousands of other volunteers like him have discovered this, too. They have come by the bus and plane load to help us help ourselves and the ship is far from righted, but, one year into this, we're trudging forward.

Moving on, moving up.

It's impossible to thank all these people who have come from faraway places. It's impossible even to know who they are anymore, so many have come and gone and they come still and again.

There is only one way to properly express our gratitude to the masses, to show them that what they have done is not wasted time and effort. To show them that we are worth it.

And that is by succeeding.

I went to the Mississippi woods for the weekend and did what country folks do on a Saturday afternoon: went to a baby shower that was capped off with riding lawn mower races.

Baby shower/riding lawn mower race. Like shrimp and gravy, bathtubs and Virgin Marys, and the colors purple, green, and gold—there's just some things that nature meant to go together.

This was up near Picayune, at my in-laws' neighbors' house. The only vehicle with which I could enter the event was my father-in-law's golf cart. It was faster than the lawn mowers, but it didn't rev like they did and I felt so . . . city.

Like being on a Vespa in a convoy of Harleys. Except for the “faster” part. I was the only male over fourteen who didn't have a tattoo.

At one point I looked up and saw my seven-year-old daughter driving an off-road four-wheeler and I don't even know how to drive a four-wheeler myself and you turn your head for one minute in the country and somebody teaches your kid something.

It's like that.

After the completion of three lawn mower races, one of the riders opined, “You know you're a redneck when . . .,” and he didn't finish the phrase because we all knew it and it truly was a moment, families gathered together, dogs barking, fish frying, barefoot kids running all over the place, the sun setting on Saturday-afternoon America.

But it's not so country as it used to be in and around Picayune these days, in and around the entire north shore and Louisiana/Mississippi border region, actually, and on that long stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

As the southern Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines disappear—literally—residents' fear rises proportionally and only a thrill seeker would want to live near the coast now.

People, people, everywhere inland now. And you can see them all so easily because it seems that half the trees in Dixie were swept away in the wind and twisters of a year ago.

I was with my kids and my nephew tooling around the country roads in Picayune and we stopped at a cul-de-sac by a pond where we used to hang out and do nothing and all the boys—three kids and me—got out to whiz at the end of the road, a place we have whizzed many times before in privacy.

I guess I hadn't noticed that a house had been built right there by the pond—it happens that fast—and the view out of that home's living room window at that moment was the backsides of a bunch of boys relieving themselves on the side of the road and I guess you've got to be mindful when new people start moving in, when a place starts to get crowded and everything changes and the comforts of privacy—this land is my land—begin to disappear.

When I started going to Picayune twelve years ago, my in-laws lived in near isolation in the woods. They began selling off pastureland to build houses about two years ago.

They got in on the pre-Katrina building boom of Hancock and Pearl River counties, favored destinations for folks from St. Bernard and St. Tammany parishes who found their neighborhoods too crowded, too city, for their tastes anymore.

Since Katrina, the market has soared, and now there are homes going up all over what used to be woods and meadows. Land is being cleared at an astonishing pace as the area becomes home for folks who were pushed out of or gave up on the New Orleans area but who want to stay close to the mother ship nonetheless—it's only an hour away—on land that won't flood.

With the influx of New Orleanians comes change, of course. The top story on page one of this past Sunday's
Picayune Item
newspaper (“Serving Pearl River County Since 1904”) began thus: “Petitions have been circulating in Pearl River County to allow the sale of liquor in Pearl River County, and to allow the sale of beer and light wine county wide, but religious organizations are rallying in an effort to defeat the petitions.”

Troubled times, they have come. To your hometown.

It's an economic issue, a county revenue issue, a restaurant issue, and, of course, a lifestyle issue. The newspaper speculates that the possible vote on the November ballot could swing on how many “additional people in the county” register to vote in time.

“Additional people.” That's us. The new kids on the block, all across America. It's a better term than “evacuees,” which sounds so temporary and fraught with emergency.

And I guess the additional people could accurately be figured to constitute the swing vote because, of all the people I know who have moved away in recent years—and I know many, both before and since Katrina—they have cited many reasons for leaving New Orleans (crime, education, politics, opportunity), but not one of them ever told me it was to get away from all that beer and wine.

It's funny, but out there in the Great Elsewhere that is America, New Orleans seems to get most or all of the focus of the national media. As if this whole thing happened only in a place called the Lower 9th Ward. As the memory and images and impact of Katrina fade in the national consciousness, so, too, it seems, does the geographical and emotional scope of its damages, not to mention Rita's. From the Texas border to Mobile Bay, a huge swath of America took a grenade. And everything changed everywhere.

And we muddle through the changes, geographical, cultural, political.

In Mississippi, I suppose it's only a matter of time before someone squawks about that infamous sign at the entrance to the town on Memorial Boulevard right off the interstate, the one that proclaims, “Jesus is Lord over Picayune.”

It looks like one of those green, government-issue signs, not a private billboard bought by a church, and that's going to bug someone, eventually.

The times, they are a-changin'. Or maybe not. Will there be rush hour in Picayune one day? A Daiquiri's drive-through?

Jesus drank wine, we all know that part. Maybe everything comes full circle, becomes part of the whole. Everyone's in this together, right?

So saddle up the lawn mowers and grab a bottle of easy peace—purchased in Louisiana, of course, for now—and forget about your cares. Gather near your loved ones and let the party start. Let the good times roll. Let the music play. Let the wild things run.

It's Saturday afternoon in America.

It has always been the greatest allure of this city that you could travel a very short distance and completely disappear into somebody else's life and culture and, generally, that somebody else would welcome you or—at the very least—tolerate your presence.

Back in the late '80s and mid '90s, I was all over the map. My Saturday nights would be spread from the rough-and-tumble biker joints of Fourth Street in Marrero to the Vietnamese billiards halls in the East to the Latin dance clubs in Kenner to evangelical tent revivals in Bridge City to the Cajun roadhouse scene down in Crown Point.

I've always had a fascination with hanging out in places with large crowds of people who are nothing like me. A culture vulture? Yeah, I suppose.

I remember an amazing and nearly mystical dance hall in the shape of a green pagoda off Canal Street in what amounted to the city's teacup version of Chinatown—now long gone—where Asian Madonna wannabes imported from L.A. used to seduce massive, sweaty crowds.