1 Dead in Attic (26 page)

It boggles. I went to Wisner to do my therapy. Nothing gets me out of my head more than going outside at the hottest point of the afternoon and finding a basketball court on which to run up and down, doing layups all by myself.

I came to Wisner a lot last fall, in the dark days, and I would always pass a dead guy on a bench on the front porch of a house in the middle of the block next to the playground.

He was there for three weeks before anyone came and took him away. His name was Alcede, and it got so I started saying hello to him when I passed by.

If you were here in the days of pain, everywhere you go now, there's some memory staring you in the face. What it used to look like. But that's another story for another time.

At Wisner, I was shooting hoops when two little kids rolled up and asked if they could play with me. Some older kids were playing at the other end of the court and it's a free country so I said yes even though what I really wanted to be was alone and banging the ball hard and working up a sweat and forgetting everything about Alcede and what they did to the playgrounds in this town.

But what are you going to say? Scram, kids?

One of them was slender and quiet, said his name was Shea, or something like that. The other kid, full of vinegar—but with a set shot to match his trash talk—introduced himself to me as Shaquille O'Neal.

Shaq just about never shut his mouth for the hour we played, but he didn't hog the ball or act the fool and so the time passed pleasantly enough. I'd shoot and jump and sweat and then roll the ball off to them for some shots and we rotated around like that, talking and shooting.

Shaq's basketball shorts hung low, down below the cheeks of his rump in the back and down to midthigh in the front and his boxers flared up and it just about drove me crazy and all I could think was: You're ten. You look stupid.

But that's not what you tell a kid. Not what you tell a kid you don't know. In his neighborhood, not yours.

So I just filed the shorts away with the trailers and Alcede and everything else. Not your problem. Nothing you can do about it. Breathe.

“You the
po
-lice?” Shaq asked me at one point, and I'm not sure why, other than I guess not a lot of middle-aged white men play ball in this park and maybe my presence was . . . suspicious?

“No,” I told him. “Not the police.”

My shot was on the mark that afternoon, and this probably helped my street cred with Shaq and Shea, even though these kids are ten and why am I worried about street cred?

We practiced dishing off to one another and high-fived on good plays. When I retrieved my ball in the high grass once, I found a Spider-Man basketball hidden there and Shaq sheepishly admitted it was his. Then Shea volunteered that he has a Scooby-Doo ball at home.

We talked and played and the kids cut up and acted silly and talked endlessly about “booty.”

My kids do that, they talk a lot about “booty.” It cracks them up.

They did not get that from me. I swear, they did not get that from me.

I told Shaq, “You guys are just like my kids.”

“You should bring them here to play,” he told me.

I said they're too young still, too small to shoot at a regulation basket.

“They could swing,” Shaq offered, and we both regarded the sorry-ass situation that appeared before us: the swing set at Wisner is just about the saddest piece of paint-peeled steel you ever laid eyes on and the seats are all tangled and there are two feet of grass growing under it and, twenty-five feet away, there is a mound of black garbage bags that has been sitting there since who knows when.

“I can't bring my kids here,” I said. “Look at that grass.”

“Yeah,” Shaq admitted. “Nobody plays there.”

This kid, he's ten. But he knows. He knows the city is dogging. The city can't deliver. They can't cut the grass for the kids.

How stupid is that?

When we started playing again, Shaq grabbed my hand while he was dribbling the ball. He took hold. He was holding my hand. I instinctively held back while he made a layup but then thought in an instant: Whoa, cowboy! This kid is ten. Not your kid. If you drove by a playground and saw your son holding hands with some guy who looks real out of place on a playground, what would go through your head?

I shook his hand off. I didn't want to. He didn't want to. But I had to.

“Last call, fellas,” I told the kids and said I had to go. Shaq challenged me to take a shot from half-court before I left. So I did. And it went in. Just one of those days, I guess.

The kids just opened their eyes wide and checked me out.

I was thinking: Now's your chance. Now is your only chance, I told myself.

So I said to Shaq, “Pull up your pants.” And he looked at me and bundled up his pants and pulled them around his waist. Just like that.

And I walked off the court.

And I was thinking: I am my dad.

A friend of mine had been telling me, “If you want to experience a nice New Orleans moment, go to the Oak Street Cafe for breakfast. There's a piano player there and he plays for tips while you eat and it's a great scene.”

So I went to the Oak Street Cafe for breakfast. I was thinking I could use a good New Orleans moment and can't we all. I was also thinking I could use a haircut. Only my immediate family knows what my hair really looks like; that in its natural state it assumes an Afro shape that rivals that of former mayor Marc Morial's famous high school yearbook picture, the only difference being that he was a teenager when he had his and it was the '70s.

And oh, yeah—he's black.

At night, I tease my hair up into a fright wig that looks like those old troll dolls we used to play with and I scare the pants off my kids, which seems like a warm-and-fuzzy domestic portrait until the dawning realization: My hair scares my kids.

So before I went to the Oak Street Cafe, I went to the barbershop down the block because another friend had told me that if I wanted to experience a nice New Orleans moment, I should go to the old barbershop on Oak Street because the guy who cuts hair there has been there for something like ninety years and he's a character.

I figured that anyone who went through the Marc Morial high school years and the Beatles era and then Flock of Seagulls and all that would not fear my hair, so I went to visit him before going to the Oak Street Cafe, with the idea that I could just stack up a full morning's worth of nice New Orleans moments there on old Oak Street, so architectural and antiquated, lost in time, where movies set in the '50s come to film street scenes because they hardly have to change a thing.

But the barbershop was closed. It's closed a lot, according to the sign on the door, and I guess I'd be closed a lot if I had been cutting hair since the Teapot Dome Scandal.

I was dressed in my usual post-Katrina daytime attire, which is torn, paint-covered jeans and an array of sweatshirts from the Contemporary Homeless selection at Thrift City and my hair looked as if lightning had just struck the side of my head and that's how I presented myself to the counter at the Oak Street Cafe for my breakfast and my New Orleans moment.

The piano player was there. The energy was just right, soft and languid, diners slowly leafing through newspapers, the tinkling of spoons in coffee cups, sleepy-eyed conversations.

I was behind three women in line. I spied an exotic dish called Eggs Beauregard on the daily chalkboard and was ready to order when the first woman in line turned around, regarded my presence, and said, “You look like shit.”

That's what she said. Just like that. And in a town that refuses to filter itself, I suppose it was in itself a small New Orleans moment, but I'm thinking, well, she's right—but what the hell?

The two women with my fashion critic turned and looked at me and kind of nodded in agreement and then turned back to the counter to gather up their food and utensils.

Then the woman who had addressed me turned her attention to a woman wearing one of those generic white institutional uniforms that everyone from a nurse assistant to a cafeteria worker wears and she inquired into her life and the customer said she worked at a salon just up the street.

As the woman in white was leaving with her meal in a Styrofoam package, I stopped her. “Does your salon do men?” I asked and she said yes. “Ask for Lynette. Lynette Boutte, she's a master barber.”

Now, this woman in white was courteous and professional. But she was also black, and I was wondering if I should make sure we were on the same page by explicitly asking: Do you do white men with poofy, thinning, dried-out dead limbs of hair? A follicle hard case. A desperate man, with hair like Beetlejuice dipped in volcanic ash, asking strangers in a diner if they'll cut his hair?

But I didn't ask. So, after my Eggs Beauregard (exquisite) accompanied by boogie-woogie piano (sublime New Orleans moment) I wandered up Oak Street to where I thought the woman in white had told me her salon was, and as I tried to walk in the door, two thin, beautiful caramel-colored young men blocked my way, rendering unto me a look nothing short of horror.

I'm pretty sure one of them was about to ask me if I was there to fix the broken heater vent.

I had indeed walked into a hair salon, but not the one I had been directed to, and the
über
-hip stylists with their tight shirts and fashionable shoes quickly pointed out the error of my ways, leading me down the banquette to a decidedly busier, noisier, messier salon than theirs and I wanted to sneer at them, “Hey! I was metrosexual once—before the storm!” but I figured it was a lost cause.

And so I walked into the salon where the woman in white works and it was bustling with women of all ages, doing what women do in salons all day, which is talk a whole lot, mostly about men and food, but it kinda got silent in there when I walked in.

It's amazing how you can be wandering the streets around here in your comfort zone and you walk through a door and you're in somebody else's world and I was picturing that scene from
Animal House
where all the white rube frat boys walk into a blues roadhouse and I wanted to call out, “Otis, my man!” but there was no Otis and I was alone.

A woman broke the discomfiting silence by saying to me, “You must be the man my daughter met at the restaurant. I'm Nettie. C'mon in.”

Everyone in the joint laughed when they heard I had tried to get into the salon in the front of the building and Nettie said to me, “Honey, they don't have customers that look like you,” and I'm sure she meant that in the best possible way.

I sat in her chair. “Can you make me beautiful?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, “but I can cut your hair.”

So, amid the chatter of women and the smells of exotic hair products I have never heard of, Nettie Boutte cut my hair.

She is one of the ten Boutte siblings and extended family members (the Vaucresson sausage folks, for instance) whose imprint on New Orleans is immeasurable, all those singers and chefs and artists. She had a salon in the 7th Ward but it got whacked and she spent three days on the overpass after Katrina (“Don't get me started!”). She now drives an hour from the Northshore to get to her temporary business on Oak Street, and she stopped cutting my hair at least fifty times to direct her employees or answer the phone or greet customers, one of whom actually said to her, “How's yo momma?”

Sometimes I forget that people really say that here.

Athelgra Neville walked in while I was there. She is the Neville Brothers' sister and a singer in her own right, and she was asking everybody, “Did you see Aaron on
The Young and the Restless
?”

With my belly full and sitting there in the overpoweringly nurturing warmth of a room filled with women at work, I was indeed having a New Orleans moment and I vowed to start dressing better, but I was just caught up in my reverie and that probably won't happen.

I left Nettie's salon with decidedly less frightful hair. Nettie is an artist, if you ask me . . . taking into consideration, of course, the raw canvas I gave her to work with.

In my car, driving down Oak Street, I turned on the radio. It was WWOZ and there was a song by the Bob French Band and the vocalist was Sista Teedy—aka Tricia Boutte, one of the legion of far-flung kin—and she was singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” and I couldn't have contrived a better transition if I were directing a movie.

It really happened that way. It had been a somewhat awkward journey, but I had gotten my New Orleans moment, and it was staying with me as I drove away, locked into New Orleans in my head and on my radio.

I said to myself: Don't touch that dial.

Living inside the Katrina Bubble and never getting out, one tends to be consumed by the bad stuff; at least that's how it seems when all anyone talks about is crime and trash and politics and insurance companies and No Road Home and progress seems just to slog along in the day-to-day. It's practically insufferable unless you set your iPod on “Motown's Greatest Hits” and just keep telling yourself: Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.

Of course, then you wind up not paying attention and driving into a pothole and busting up your front end and now you're more pissed off than before you started thinking all those happy thoughts—Ice cream! Kittens! New Britney photos!—in the first place, so this method comes with a surgeon general's warning.

I find the best way to get an optimistic sense of recovery around here is to leave town, go observe life somewhere else, and then come back.

When you've been outside the Katrina Zone for even just a short while, you can get a fresh perspective, and when you come back, you tend to notice more changes, improvements; the brown caterpillar slowly—very slowly—morphing into the colorful butterfly.