1 Dead in Attic (15 page)

And it doesn't really matter if there are superparades or even any parades at all this year. Because some group of horn players will grab their instruments and they will march down the Avenue because that's what they do, and I, for one, will follow.

If there are no parades, I'm hitching a boom box to a wagon, putting James Booker on the CD player, and pulling my kids down the Avenue and you're welcome to come along with me and where more than two tribes gather, there is a parade.

We are the parade. We are Mardi Gras. We're Whoville, man—you can take away the beads and the floats and all that crazy stuff, but we're still coming out into the street. Cops or no cops. Postparade garbage pickup or no garbage pickup—as if anyone could tell the friggin' difference!

If you are stuck somewhere else, in some other town, bring it to them. If you've got a job somewhere else now, take off that Tuesday and get all the New Orleanians you know and gather in a park somewhere and cook up a mass of food and put some music on a box and raise a little hell.

And raise a glass to us, brothers and sisters, because we're in here fighting this fight and we'll raise a glass to you because you cannot be here with us and we know you want to. Let the whole damn country hear Al Johnson yelling “It's Carnival time” and let them know we're not dead and if we are dying, we're going to pretend we're not.

Fly the flag. Be in that number. This is our battle to win or lose. Hopefully, of one mind and one message. That we are still here. And that we are still New Orleans.

To call this a Christmas like no other would be stating the obvious, I suppose. What an upside-down world we've found ourselves in here at the bottom of America.

In the big picture, maybe that helps one focus on the True Meaning of Christmas. Which is shopping, of course, but here's the thing: my local Pier One didn't sell wrapping paper this year and the Elmwood Wal-Mart didn't have strings of Christmas lights and—as I write this story—my family has been unable to find a lot around here that still has Christmas trees in stock.

Just how were we to engage in the most holy and traditional of holiday sounds—the cash register printing out debit card receipts—without purchasing all the physical trappings that mark the birth of Jesus?

Without that, all we've got is José Feliciano singing “Feliz Navidad” on the radio.

Man, that song drives me crazy . . . er, loco.

As unfathomable as it seems, my kids might not have a tree to congregate around this morning—although, as my deadline looms, my wife tells me she's making one last, desperate sweep through Metairie to find one, which worries me because I don't know if she'll make it back home before, say, Tuesday.

What about my dinner?

Which brings up this point: How is it that we lost 80 percent of our residents around here but traffic got worse? Can somebody explain that? How is it that bars close earlier but people drink more? Ah, don't get me started.

Under the circumstances, it's pretty hard to get worked up about it. It's pretty hard to get worked up about any of life's little inconveniences these days; odd, since there are more inconveniences than ever before and some of them aren't so little.

We have a house. I have a job. We're way ahead of the game. We're like royalty in one of those old Monty Python movies: we have clean clothes.

But my daughter fell to pieces about the tree thing. I thought it was the sentimentalist in her, driven to despair because a part of our revered process might be missing this year, part of our seasonal custom gone to seed.

In fact, it was because she told me that Santa wouldn't have anywhere to put her presents. Good to know that she's got her priorities together.

So I told her Santa is not about trees, he's about kids, and we've been through this before anyway, when she discovered a few years ago that we don't have a chimney, either. Man, those old storybook legends make it a hard go-round for parents in the twenty-first century.

I mean, if Santa rode a Humvee pulled by, say, a bunch of potbellied pigs, this whole Christmas thing would be an easier sell. (Funny, though, my kids never cry out for Old World porridge; they're cafeteria traditionalists, picking those they like and dispensing with the rest.)

Anyway, I wound up pulling that old parenting trick of instilling sadness and guilt in children to make them come around to your point of view.

“You know, some of our friends don't even have houses to put trees in this year,” I told them, and, unlike when my parents used to invoke starving children in Africa as a reason to finish my dinner—an oblique reference at best to a six-year-old—the fact is, they understand what it's like to be homeless.

For the past four months, they have been living a thousand miles away with hand-me-down clothes and borrowed toys.

But now they are home. And I wanted to wait until they were here so we could get the tree together, but maybe I waited too long and so it goes.

A Christmas like no other.

I suppose one positive aspect of the circumstances is that my family didn't receive any holiday photo cards with pictures of our friends' pets wearing Santa hats this year.

And we received no tiresome family newsletters from faraway friends whose children are way above average, sweeping everything from the gold medal in the 400-meter backstroke to the blue ribbon for animal husbandry at the Iowa 4-H fair this summer.

But this is small recompense. Truth is, we didn't get any Christmas cards at all this year. That has never happened. I suppose they'll show up in June. With our Christmas catalogs, no doubt. And my
Newsweek
s from October.

Funny how you recalibrate your priorities in life: No mail, no problem. Whatever.

That's Christmas in New Orleans this year. Shape-shifting. Adapting. Getting along and getting by. Pondering the heretofore unknown dilemma: what to get for that special someone on your list who has . . . nothing.

Today it will be my family and my in-laws from Baton Rouge and Mississippi coming to join us in our winter homecoming, to celebrate over a warm meal and probably a few tears and a lot of laughter.

Kind of a simple formula, really. A chance to eat, breathe, forget, and remember. One more day to just be alive and be thankful for that and to carry on and up.

And José Feliciano on the radio. Singing that dang song.

When I look back on the year 2005, nothing comes to mind more than the opening line of Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Except for that “best of times” part, it describes New Orleans perfectly.

How did we get here? What happened to my tough-lovin', hard-luck, good-timin' town?

Mercy.

I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. The fear of injury, the fear of disease, the fear of death, the fear of abandonment, isolation, and insanity.

I have had seared into my olfactory lockbox the smell of gasoline and dead people. And your leftovers.

I have feared the phantom notions of sharks swimming in our streets and bands of armed men coming for me in the night to steal my generator and water and then maybe rape me or cut my throat just for the hell of it.

I have wept for hours on end, days on end.

The crying jags. I guess they're therapeutic, but give me a break.

The first time I went to the Winn-Dixie after it reopened, I had all my purchases on the conveyor belt, plus a bottle of mouthwash. During the Days of Horror following the decimation of this city, I had gone into the foul and darkened store and lifted a bottle.

I was operating under the “take only what you need” clause that the strays who remained behind in this godforsaken place invoked in the early days.

My thinking was that it was in everyone's best interest if I had a bottle of mouthwash.

When the cashier rang up my groceries all those weeks later, I tried, as subtly as possible, to hand her the bottle and ask her if she could see that it was put back on the shelf. She was confused by my action and offered to void the purchase if I didn't want the bottle.

I told her it's not that I didn't want it but that I wished to pay for it and could she please see that it was put back on the shelf. More confusion ensued and the line behind me got longer and it felt very hot and crowded all of a sudden and I tried to tell her: “Look, when the store was closed . . . you know . . . after the thing . . . I took . . .”

The words wouldn't come. Only the tears.

The people in line behind me stood stoic and patient, public meltdowns being as common as discarded kitchen appliances in this town.

What's that over there? Oh, it's just some dude crying his ass off. Nothing new here. Show's over, people, move along.

The cashier, an older woman, finally grasped my pathetic gesture, my lowly attempt to make amends, my fulfillment of a promise I made to myself to repay anyone I had stolen from.

“I get it, baby,” she said, and she gently took the bottle from my hands and I gathered my groceries and walked sobbing from the store.

She was kind to me. I will probably never see her again, but I will never forget her. That bottle. That store. All the fury that prevailed. The fear.

A friend of mine, a photojournalist, recently went to a funeral to take pictures. There had been an elderly couple trapped in a house. He had a heart attack and slipped into the water. She held on to a gutter for two days before being rescued.

It was seven weeks before the man's body was found in the house, then another six weeks before the remains were released from the St. Gabriel morgue for burial.

“Tell me a story I haven't heard,” I told my friend. Go ahead. Shock me.

When my father and I were trading dark humor one night and he was offering advice on how to begin my year in review, he cracked himself up, proposing, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

That's close, but not quite it. “It was a dark and stormy morning” would be closer to the truth.

What a morning it was.

I was in Vicksburg. I had just left the miserable hotel crack house to which my family had evacuated—it must have been the last vacant room in the South—and was looking for breakfast for my kids.

But the streets and businesses were abandoned and a slight but stinging rain was falling, the wind surging and warm, and while my kids played on a little riverfront playground, I got through on my cell phone to the
Times-Picayune
newsroom, where scores of
TP
families had taken refuge, and I remember saying to the clerk who answered the phone, “Man, that was a close one, huh? Looks like we dodged another bullet.”

I suppose around a million people were saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. What I would have given to be right. Just that one time.

I was trying to get through to my editor to ask, “What's the plan?”

By late afternoon, that's what everyone in the gulf region was asking.

Of course, it turns out there wasn't a plan. Anywhere. Who could have known?

The newspaper was just like everyone else at that point: as a legion of employees and their families piled into delivery trucks and fled the newspaper building as the waters rose around them, we shifted into the same operational mode as everyone else:

Survive. Wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something. And call your mother and tell her you're all right.

Unless, of course, your mother was in Lakeview or the Lower 9th or Chalmette or . . . well, I've had enough of those horror stories for now. I don't even want to visit that place today.

This was the year that defined our city, our lives, our destiny. Nothing comparable has ever happened in modern times in America, and there is no blueprint for how to do this.

We just wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something.

You'd have to be crazy to want to live here. You'd have to be plumb out of reasonable options elsewhere.

Then again, I have discovered that the only thing worse than being in New Orleans these days is not being in New Orleans.

It's a siren calling us home. It cannot be explained.

“They don't get us” is the common refrain you hear from frustrated residents who think the government and the nation have turned a blind eye to us in our time of need. Then again, if they did get us, if we were easily boxed and labeled, I suppose we'd be just Anyplace, USA.

And that won't do.

We have a job to do here, and that is to entertain the masses, and I don't mean the tourists. They're part of it, of course, but what we do best down here—have done for decades—is create a lifestyle that others out there in the Great Elsewhere envy and emulate.

Our music, our food, yada yada yada. It's a tale so often told that it borders on platitude, but it is also the searing truth: We are the music. We are the food. We are the dance. We are the tolerance. We are the spirit.

And one day, they'll get it.

As a woman named Judy Deck e-mailed me in a moment of inspiration: “If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.”

Yeah, you write.

That, people, is the final word on 2005.

I wake up in the Chocolate City mad as hell.

It's like this: I'm supposed to be on vacation this week, cooling my heels, and then our mayor, Willy Wonka, loses his grip in public again and that's hardly headline news in and of itself, but this time he really lets one go.

I mean, he really gasses the place up, if you know what I mean. Now, how am I supposed to sit this one out?

First thing I do, I follow the mayor's lead and call Martin Luther King, Jr. Of course, it takes a while to get through because he died in 1968 so he still has one of those avocado green rotary dial phones on his kitchen counter and no call-waiting.