1 Dead in Attic (19 page)

But somebody done brought it on.

Some folks say it's God's work, some say the Hand of Fate, but I have to think it's because of all the trailers we've got around here now. It's a bad joke, but when you create the world's largest trailer park, you're going to have tornadoes.

That's true science. It's in the chapter right after fossils.

It was such a tough wind came down this neighborhood that it knocked over DeWitt's, the little vegetable stand that's been there on River Road forever, taking with it the big, faded
HARRY LEE
sign that somebody put there the first time he ran for sheriff in, what—1950?

I never thought that sign would go away. I thought it would outlast Harry Lee, in fact.

But nothing will outlast Harry Lee. At the End of Days: cockroaches, Harry Lee, and Johnny White's Bar.

I suppose there is a certain poignancy or entendre—double, triple, quadruple; I don't know—that one of the buildings that got clipped on Iris Avenue last week was the storage warehouse for Mardi Gras City.

There, in the middle of the street, was half a building, and left behind, standing in plain view from the street: boxes and boxes and boxes of beads. Neatly stacked. Ready for loading.

Is somebody trying to tell us something? Throw me something, God. Perhaps a colorful strand of baubles rather than a roof this time, if you please.

I have a co-worker, Renée Peck, who was among the first in her neighborhood in East Lakeshore to rebuild a house that was whacked by The Thing last fall.

Maybe you saw her story in Saturday's paper: her family was among the first to empty the contents of their house onto the sidewalk and the first to gut the insides and the first to get teams of roofers and carpenters and everybody else, and this week, the painters were due and they were going to move back into that house this month and plant one of the first flags in the Vanilla Wasteland, lay claim to a spot of land, and say: Here we are. This can be done.

I'm guessing you know where this story is going.

Wednesday night, when the torpedoes—er, tornadoes—came roiling through the area, one of them took out half their house. It imploded. Dust to dust. Bricks and rubble. A front-porch portico was found two streets away.

Wake me up when it's over.

You could hardly blame someone for waking up last Thursday morning and telling himself: I can't do this anymore. I won't do this anymore.

But we will.

I am listening to the car radio and it's WTUL and they're broadcasting out of the Rue de la Course coffee shop Uptown because they lost their studio, and when the deejays come on, you can hear the baristas pounding their empty espresso grinds on the counter and you can hear plates clatter in the background, but they're getting by. The coffee shop and the radio station, doing what they have to do to bring us the essentials of post-Katrina life: caffeine and music.

At the corner of Napoleon and Claiborne, Chill the Barber is set up between two gas pumps of the shuttered Shell station and he cuts hair there because the building marked C
HILL'S
F
IRST
C
LASS
C
UTS
around the corner is a literal shell.

Chill is just getting by, barbering with power supplied by his car battery. Come hell or high water, people will still need haircuts. Men will still need a place to talk politics and sports. Even if it's a gas station island.

I was with my family on the levee in Algiers Sunday afternoon, looking across the river at the city, and my daughter said, “That's where my new best friend lives.” And I asked, “Where are you talking about?” And she pointed to a cruise ship docked at the Convention Center.

Her deskmate at school, a first-grader named Brooke, lives there on a big boat in the Mississippi River until, well . . . until when?

The ship is called
Ecstasy,
and I swear, if we gave it a chance, the irony around here could just kill us.

Because it's beginning to look like nothing else can.

Punxsutawney Phil stuck his head out of his groundhog hole in Pennsylvania last week and made the official forecast: six more weeks of September.

We can take it. Bring it on.

I went to Mid-City, looking for a friend.

There are still so many folks I used to run with whose fates and misfortunes I do not know since The Thing came down.

Every couple of days, I try to track one down, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. Sometimes I find him, sometimes I don't.

I love Mid-City. I've always loved tooling around there. It has its own vibe and languorous pace and never seemed to be in sync with society's inexorable march to revolutions in retail, food service, upholstery, auto repair, and flooring.

You could still buy remnants in Mid-City. You could still get your car fixed by a mechanic named Sal.

Mid-City has its own alluring architecture—some Creolized version of the antiquated American cottage—and I've always felt that if I were transported blindfolded to the neighborhood and then was asked to divine where I was, I would look around and maybe smell the air and think: We're near Liuzza's.

You can just tell.

Mid-City seems like one of the (many) forgotten neighborhoods in the Aftermath. Not as rich as Lakeview and not as poor as the Lower 9th and not quite as whacked as either but very much whacked, indeed—soaked, sodden, gutted, and blanched in the sun like a dead fish.

Not black, not white. Not so easily categorized and labeled and affixed in the political order we are being force-fed, the notion of Us and Them.

That's probably one reason I like it.

The brown line, the watermark, the stain of our national disgrace—sometimes it's over your head here.

Sometimes I'm in my car and I look at the line and realize I would be completely submerged where I am driving if it were six months ago, and this is so hard to fathom, to process, to make peace with.

I try to picture the corner of Banks and Carrollton as some sort of lake, but I don't see it. I look at a building now and think: It looks fine. Where is everybody?

Over a few blocks, Mandina's is a shell, not to open for many, many months, but at least it will reopen and that's important because when you break things down to their very basic fundamentals, you'd have to question whether living in a New Orleans without Mandina's would be worth living at all.

Mid-City was always so full of classic neighborhood joints with lively and eccentric crowds day and night. Venezia, with its beehived waitresses and “sit anywhere ya like, dawlin',” and, down the block, the gray men whose elbows were permanently affixed to the sticky bar top at the Red Door, smoke from their unfiltered Camels streaming from tin ashtrays straight into their listless eyes.

I spent much of the night of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 at the Red Door, grabbing buck-ten-cent Carlings and going out on the neutral ground on Carrollton with friends and grabbing tree branches and letting the wind lift us up.

Young, wild, free, and stupid. My friends and I greeted Andrew with a game of bourré, a bottle of Pinch, and mud slides on the neutral ground until one in the group got covered with red ants and, later, got out of sorts and hit another in the group with a baseball bat.

Paul Sanchez, from the band Cowboy Mouth, wrote a song about it, “Hurricane Party.” I'm guessing they're a thing of the past now—hurricane parties, those homages to the bravado and insouciance with which we used to greet the news of impending hellfire and destruction.

Now it's not so funny.

The Red Door is whacked and Venezia is whacked and Liuzza's is whacked and the barest few Mid-City businesses have been able to limp themselves back into order, now six months later, seven months later, time marches on.

The New Orleans writer Jonathan Hunter recently lamented his favorite neighborhood's state of disrepair with a hopeful paean: “I look forward to the return of the Liuzza's waitresses yelling ‘Draw one!' over the buzz of the crowd drinking frozen schooners of beer on a Friday afternoon. A plate of fried pickles was only a dollar. They were weird but good. And I certainly hope that my barber continues to interrupt my haircut to take bets on the phone: ‘Gotcha covered, babe.' ”

We will be part of what we were and a part of something new. Maybe Sal will fix your car. Or maybe you'll have to go to Jiffy Lube on Vets.

I was in Mid-City looking for my friend Tracy Jarmon, a waiter at Mandina's and a painter of lively abstracts that I started collecting about two years ago. A man of interminable—even borderline annoying—good cheer, he was one I had wondered about.

I called recently, but couldn't find him. So I went to his rented raised double, where I had been twice before to buy paintings right out of his garage where he worked and struggled to make an artist out of a waiter; no easy task, that, particularly when the canvases are given away at a hundred bucks a shot.

His house on Bernadotte Street was empty. Cleaned out. No trace of life. No paintings. No interminable cheer.

I'm assuming that all his work was destroyed and his Mandina's gig is gone and whatever. Thing about Tracy is, he's probably laughing it off somewhere. He's got that New Orleans thing crawling all over him, the good stuff, that We Are the Champions, to hell with the rest and I'll just start over kind of attitude.

There was a neighbor on a cell phone on the sidewalk on Bernadotte, and I asked if he knew what happened to the painter down the block and he said, “Oh, that guy? Yeah. I don't know what happened to him.”

This guy and I on the sidewalk, we did the obligatory small talk that has become so surreal attendant to what happened here. I did what I hate doing, what I swear I won't do anymore, but that I continue to do: I asked a stranger how he is doing. How his block is doing.

The guy paused a long time. Then he said, “We're doin' all right.”

Isn't that the way? You can either tell the truth or you can say “We're doin' all right” and keep the stiff upper lip.

That's what I have taken to doing. When someone asks me how I'm doing these days, I ask them back, “What are the choices?” It's sort of my personal joke that no one gets. But either you beat this thing or it beats you.

Pandora's snowball stand has reopened on Carrollton and shirtless boys from the Jesuit cross-country team run through the rubble of the neighborhood every afternoon and there's your metaphor: not a sprint, but a marathon.

Snowballs today, fried pickles tomorrow, Mandina's ever after. Gotcha covered, babe.

It has been seven months.

I am walking down Toledano Street, the wide pitch from Broad to Claiborne, ten blocks of classic urban American landscape: sad grocery stores, chicken, pig's feet and dirty rice to go, brick revival churches, funeral homes, auto parts stores, and ramshackle row houses.

There was a time when optimistic paint jobs—orange sherbet, burnt sienna, and sea foam green trims, posts, and porches—did their best to cover the age and decay, but it's all laid bare and painful now. The optimistic veneer here—everywhere—was stripped by the water.

Seven months ago.

The corner of Broad and Toledano once marked a turf war for customers between Cajun Chicken and Cajun Seafood, two catty-corner carryouts owned by Asians in a black neighborhood.

Welcome to the melting pot.

But the war is over; both stores have been shuttered. For seven months.

Just down from the corner at Broad, there's a sign that says,
NO DUMPING: $500 FINE
.

That's almost funny. Eight feet above the ground, the crooked sign has the brown watermark across it. And there are, about every hundred paces, big piles of debris, like a dump—carpet, plaster, furniture, and televisions, lots of televisions.

You have to figure the local Nielsen ratings took a beating in this hurricane. The revolution was televised, but all the TVs are broken.

This is one of those puzzling neighborhoods where you look at some of the houses and you tremble at their altered states of decline but you sometimes realize: this one or that one was falling down even before The Thing.

The Rhodes Funeral Home anchors this unwieldy boulevard, all stately, grand, and white, looking like nothing more than a mausoleum itself. It is gutted now, and masked workers are removing the floor with shovels.

You don't want to think about what happened in the funeral homes. The only consolation is that at least the people inside were already dead.

But still.

In the middle of the afternoon, there's a wan ghost town feel to Toledano, with weeds gone wild and power lines dangling and swaying in the breeze like electric spiderwebs and Styrofoam cups and potato chip bags drifting this way and that as motorists speed by on their way to or from Uptown or the interstate, destination always someplace else—anyplace else but here.

It's easy to fall into a listless state after a while out here on Toledano. You get an irritation in your throat, or maybe that's just your imagination—that Katrina cough that people talk about, but is it real?

The work crews around here are spotty and slow-moving; there seems to be no urgency.

Many houses have been gutted, but that's as far as the work goes in most cases while the residents wait to learn the future of Broadmoor, this neighborhood, designated “green” by many specialists who suggest that low-lying areas such as this should be returned to their natural state and their natural state didn't include crawfish egg rolls or jazz funerals.

Or Bible study or happy hour, so both the Pleasant Zion Baptist Church and Tapp's II are gutted and waiting. Capt. Sal's Seafood is cleaned out and cleaned up with shiny stainless-steel counters in place and a fresh paint job, but there's no one on the premises, hardly ever is, all boarded up and waiting.