1 Dead in Attic (4 page)

The kind of rain that falls even though the sun is shining. Does that happen in other places?

New Orleans rain has always been like drops of clarity in an otherwise murky habitat, sometimes too much, sometimes too little, but always a marvel to behold. There's always something that needs to be washed down here.

In
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Blanche DuBois said it best: “Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped into our hands—and who knows what to do with it?”

Indeed, what to do?

That was the rain that fell Thursday. And we needed it. Because the oyster stink is at noxious levels and the city is stacked with an apocalyptic vision of dry kindling that requires only one dummy with a discarded cigarette to torch an entire block.

Which raises one of the things that most catches the eye here: the trees. Or the lack thereof. I don't know that anyone will ever be able to count how many trees fell or just plain withered and died under Katrina's fierce hot breath, but I'm sure some expert will tell us in due time. Whatever the raw number, it won't match the impact on the senses.

I can't remember where I read it, but someone interviewed a New Orleans artist who had returned home last week, and this guy—whose very living hinges upon his interpretations of shadow, nuance, and color—said the problem with New Orleans now is that there is too much sunlight on the ground.

That changes everything. Because if there were ever a town that couldn't afford to surrender shade, it is this one, where a walk on a summer afternoon can be like sauntering through a blast furnace.

Maybe only the bad golfers will be happy about this development, for their way from tee to green is now so much more accessible.

It had been three weeks since it rained—since you know when—and that's as unfathomable a notion here as a September without fresh oysters.

Of course, by the time you read this, Friday, rain might not be such a charming enterprise here. And Blanche DuBois's notion of eternity may not be so romantic.

Rita swirls out in the Gulf of Mexico, capriciously choosing its path of destruction, and even the slightest brush of wind could take out so many more trees and the slightest rain—the kind that tourists with their Big Ass Beers in hand used to stand under French Quarter balconies and watch with a sense of comic wonder—could wind the clock back three weeks to that piece of eternity we don't ever want to live again.

Under one of those French Quarter balconies, those famous mannequin legs at Big Daddy's strip club improbably swing in and out of a window, an alluring, optimistic, or delusional signal that the libertine times will once again return to the Old City. That
les bons temps
will
rouler
again someday.

There is no power on that block of Bourbon Street where the legs swing; the owner just thought that the best use of portable power would be to swing those legs.

Swinging in the rain. Drinking a hurricane instead of dodging one.

Living in a place where the past and present and future have never collided so chaotically and without rational analysis.

There is no one who can tell us what tomorrow will bring. But, personally, I consider it a very bad sign that the killer hurricane that is dancing on our television screens and toying with our collective psyche is named after a meter maid.

That can't be good.

It's hard to imagine that it could have felt any lonelier in New Orleans than it has for the past three weeks. But Friday, everything just disappeared.

What little life there was seemed to dissipate into the not-so-thin air of a colossal barometer drop. The Furies, it seems, are aroused.

The wind buffeted cars and put the heavy hand on already weakened trees. Magazine Street boutique signs—most hanging askew by only one chain after Katrina—spun in place like pinwheels. Loose power lines whipped and flapped across Uptown and Lakeview streets like fly-fishing rods.

The rain came, misting one minute, blinding the next. Outside the CBD emergency operations center, anywhere you drove, you saw . . . nobody.

The folks who had been trickling into town for the past week or so, checking on homes and businesses, simply disappeared. Police on the outskirts of town blocked all entry. The big National Guard camps in Audubon Park disappeared overnight without a sign that they had ever been there.

So much for the repopulation plan. A TV station reported that there were only five hundred civilians left in the city as Hurricane Rita set aim on the Cajun Riviera, all those miles away to the west, and you were hard-pressed to find any of them.

A passing truck stopped me, and the guys inside asked for directions to the Nashville Wharf, and it was good just to talk to someone.

The isolation can be maddening. The car radio just tells you bad things. You just want to find someone, anyone, and ask, “How 'bout dem Saints?”

You know those classic New Orleans characters—the cab drivers, bartenders, and bitter poets—who buttonhole you and natter on and on forever about tedious and mundane topics that date back to Mayor Schiro's term and when the Pelicans played out on Tulane Avenue? Usually when you're in a hurry somewhere?

I'd give anything to run into one of those guys right now. Go ahead and tell me about the fishing in Crown Point; I'll listen to just about anything you have to say.

I went to Walgreens on Tchoupitoulas, which had been open most of the week, figuring there would be life there, but it had shuttered at noon. There was a sign on the door that said “Now Hiring,” and that's funny.

I guess.

The day before, the store's public address system was stuck in a time warp, a perky female voice reminding shoppers (both of them): “Don't let Halloween sneak up on you; stock up on candy early. You'll find great savings now . . . at Walgreens!”

Truth is, there sure was a hell of a lot of candy there. Trick or treat.

As I drove around, the gray sheets of rain pushed around all the stuff in the street, and, trust me, there's a lot of stuff in the street. For as far as you looked up and down every avenue, the same blank vistas.

Across town, the water was rising. Again. I suppose there were people there, trying to save our city again, though the cynical might ask: What's to save?

On dry land, the only place I found people gathered was at the fire station on Magazine Street in the Garden District. I went by to drop off some copies of the newspaper for the local guys and found about sixty firefighters from all over the country hanging out in a rec room watching TV and frying burgers.

That was perhaps the strangest sight of all, these guys just sitting around. Stranger in some ways than the desolation.

Because for once, with all this rain soaking the downed trees and rooftops and nobody around to do something stupid like start a fire, they had nothing to do.

Just sit and watch TV in a haunted city.

Even at the End of Days, there will be lap dancing.

Over the weekend, while a desolate, desperate city plunged into darkness and the waters rose again in the Rita Aftermath, and while a population spread across the nation watched new horrors on TV with churning guts, a strip club opened on Bourbon Street.

The symbolism of this event can hardly be overstated.

The Saints are gone. The Hornets are gone. Zephyr Field is a staging area for choppers to go find dead people.

No college hoops. No movie theaters, no Swamp Fest, no Voodoo Fest. No horses running at the Fairgrounds. No line for Friday lunch at Galatoire's.

But there are topless women hanging upside down from brass poles at a place called Déjà Vu. Gaudiness, flesh, neon, and bad recorded music have returned to one small outpost on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and if that's not one small step towards normalcy—at least as that term is defined in the Big Uneasy—then I don't know what is.

There were about a hundred guys in there Saturday night, all of them with very, very short hair, which is basically what everyone around here who's not a journalist has these days.

Exactly how a posse of exotic dancers were smuggled into town during the most severe lockdown in this city since the hurricane crises began, well, I don't know.

Inexplicable things seem to be the norm around here these days.

When I walk down the street one day and some rumpled grifter tells me he knows where I got my shoes, I guess I'll know we're fully on our way home. (Of course, I could be cynical and tasteless and tell the guy I got them at Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas like everyone else, but that would be cynical and tasteless.)

And speaking of tasteless: this is not a topic I want to delve too deeply into, but someone has to call out the demagogic ministers who have used Katrina's destruction to preach the message that God was tired of this city's libertine ways and decided to clean house.

Let me roll at you some snippets of wisdom that have been widely distributed on the Internet from Reverend Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship in Metairie: “New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion—it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there—and now we're going to start over again.”

Well, almost. It's an interesting interpretation, to be sure, and Shanks is not the only man of the cloth to make such claims. No doubt it's a good message for the evangelical business.

Of course, try telling some poor sap down in St. Bernard Parish who has never heard of Southern Decadence and who goes to Bible study every Wednesday night that he lost his house and his job and his grandmother died in a flooded nursing home because God was angry at a bunch of bearded guys in dresses over on Dumaine Street.

Collateral damage, I guess. The question that arises, of course, is that if Shanks's prophecy is true, how come Plaquemines, St. Bernard, the East, and Lakeview are gone but the French Quarter is still standing?

I'd suggest that there are those who have confused meteorology with mythology, global warming with just plain hot air, but that might be cynical and tasteless. Might be crass and gaudy.

And I'll try to leave that stuff where it belongs—in the French Quarter, where the craziest patchwork of people ever gathered on this planet are cobbling back together a strange and mind-boggling Twilight Zone of what it once was.

File that one under: Only in New Orleans.

You hang around New Orleans long enough these days, and you begin to absorb what is new and what is different.

For instance, I was sitting on my front stoop and an RTA bus marked
MAGAZINE
zoomed by. I thought: Well, how about that! That's a good sign.

Never mind that the bus was empty; at least it was running, and that's a sign of normalcy. And it was going way too fast, and therein was another harbinger of the same-ol', same-ol'.

Then, about ninety seconds later, another RTA bus marked
MAGAZINE
whizzed by, shaking my house to its foundation. It, too, was empty, but it was the realization that there were probably only two buses running the entire Magazine Street route and here they were, one right after the other and I thought: We're back!

What could be a better indication of a return to the old ways than the colossal inefficiency of our public transportation system? I don't know about you, but I will sleep better tonight; at least, that is, until an RTA bus blows by the house at midnight at Category 5 speed and does more damage to my plaster ceilings than Katrina did.

Of course, a common joke around here—dire times make for dire humor—is that when the mayor announced that he was laying off three thousand workers this week, who would notice? I believe he, or some other public official, called them “nonessential employees,” and I'll let you fill in your own punch line.

I just hope it's not the two guys who've been assigned to cut the grass on the neutral grounds for the past ten years; man, things would really be different around here without them.

I have a feeling I just really ticked off three thousand people, maybe more. But then, that would be another sign of normalcy, wouldn't it? People being angry at the local newspaper: a comfort zone if ever there was one.

A casual drive around town—or at least what remains of it—is also a compelling reminder of the old days. It reminds you how much a simple afternoon drive can involve facing danger to its core.

First of all, at least half the city's one-way signs were turned sideways by the wind and now point in the wrong direction. And half the people driving around here are guys from out of state in massive pickup trucks and the National Guard put up temporary stop signs at intersections where traffic lights are now working, so it's all a game of Russian roulette. Or maybe chicken.

A run to the local drug store/gas station/strip club has turned into a not-so-virtual game of Grand Theft Auto.

Every now and then I see some church lady tooling down the road at 7 mph in her cream-colored, four-door Grand Marquis, and I can only wonder: Why are you here?

I know it's probably bad taste to kick the city while it's down, but it is interesting/fun/mind-boggling to watch some of the old New Orleans civic quirks work their way back into operation.

For instance, the mayor has urged business owners to come back into town and open up and we residents have been encouraged to patronize them, but neighborhood restaurants and bars are bum-rushed by the authorities every night at 8
P.M.
and told to close for curfew.

I'm no restaurateur, but I can imagine it must be hard to build up a steady dinner clientele when you have to close at sunset. Oddly—maybe not so oddly, when I think about it—the strip clubs on Bourbon Street are somehow exempt from this rule and there are tons of big, beefy guys in town (who drive really big pickup trucks) with disposable cash who are all too happy to stuff garter belts full of fivers until the sun comes up and they have to report to work and operate heavy machinery on a one-way street.