1 Dead in Attic (32 page)

Yeah, it was real Vegas-y, but the man sweated and he said the right things and he gave all and what more can you ask—especially when some dear to our hearts give little or nothing?

The man gave all. And God bless him for that.

He rolled out the hits, an embarrassingly large portfolio of familiar songs, the lyrics of which are imprinted into the cerebral cortex of every American between the ages of thirty and fifty-five, at least, and probably more like fifteen to seventy-five. So with a shrug the crowd said bring it on, and what the hell, and the hits rolled out and everyone kind of looked at one another and asked: Is it okay to dance to this? What if anyone from work sees me?

But of course it was okay to dance to this. This is our festival, so let's dance. All of us.

But you go first.

I guess somebody finally went first because everybody fell in and everybody sang along and what are you going to do? Instead of “Hey Pocky Way,” “Yellow Moon,” and “Sister Rosa” we got “Brick House,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” and “All Night Long.”

A friend next to me plopped into her folding chair and said, “I don't know if I'm going to make it. I'm running out of irony.”

I told her: We're alive. Embrace the Lionel Moment. Seize the Lionel Moment.
Be the Lionel Moment.

Truthfully, at that moment I would have danced to the sound of a fluorescent lightbulb humming. Because it's our moment and because we were there and even though it was a somewhat imponderable moment—no Neville Brothers at JazzFest?!?!—we did what we do because we are us.

The JazzFest had run out of beer and it went thirty minutes overtime and we danced. In the mud. In our hearts. On the ceiling.

The man gave all. And we gave it back. That is our obligation to any who will sing us a song and lift our spirits in this time of our unbending sorrow.

Sing to us, Aaron. We miss you.

A jazz funeral during JazzFest celebrates the life of yet another soul lost in the storm.

In this space last Friday, I made the case that New Orleanians should take their out-of-town visitors this week—or any week, for that matter—on a Misery Tour so they would better understand what happened here.

I followed my own advice Saturday morning and took two friends from California and my brother from Maryland—along with my three kids—to Gentilly and the Lower 9th for a look around before heading out to JazzFest.

They'd already seen Lakeview and Mid-City the day before. More than anything else, the emptiness of it all is what stirs the soul. That's what tells this story. Eight months later, the question still hammers home: Where the hell is everybody?

While we were tooling around the 8th Ward, we turned up St. Roch Avenue and got stalled behind a gathering in the street and, unaware of what was going on, I backed up and took a circuitous route around St. Roch Cemetery and then ended up in front of the crowd.

It was a funeral. A jazz funeral, of all things.

It was small. A hearse, one limo, and maybe forty people following. Several men with matching T-shirts followed close behind the hearse, with their hands on the back of it and their heads bowed. A ragtag band played a slow dirge.

Unlike the big and brassy processions that follow the passings of famous musicians around here, this one was off the radar. It was just some family and friends and none of the attendant video and camera crews that can turn these intimate gatherings into culture vulture documentaries rather than unique spiritual reckonings.

The St. Roch area is still so blown out and desolate that this pocket of humanity and color lent a haunting quality to the landscape. It looked like an apparition in the hushed grayness.

“Is this for real?” my guests asked me, and I told them yes, this is what happens here.

I felt intrusive—pulling over and opening the car doors for my guests—but how could you not stop and watch? I took off my hat, my one pathetic gesture of respect for those gathered, most of whom took no notice of us as they passed by.

As they turned a corner, the band shifted from mournful to mirthful—to that “Oh! Didn't He Ramble” sort of street jig they play when a jazz funeral turns its party switch on. And we watched from behind as the men cut, shuffled, and buck-jumped and took their brother home sweet home glory hallelujah.

“It's like a movie,” someone in our group said, and that is indeed what it felt like. But real movies make events like these look so contrived and clownish that I suspect most people outside of New Orleans don't think there really are such things as jazz funerals but here it was, in its lonesome, wistful reality.

This spectacle told my guests so much more than my words ever could, so I turned on WWOZ and headed for the Fair Grounds and we set about the business of celebrating the life and survival—albeit somewhat tenuous—of this profoundly soulful city and its culture.

And then this week, in a moment of downtime, I rifled through some old papers stacked in my living room and found a death notice from last week announcing that a “Celebration of Life” would be held for Derrick Arthur Brown at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church on St. Roch Avenue last Saturday morning. And that's what we witnessed: a celebration of life.

I read more of the death notice and found out that Derrick Arthur Brown had graduated from McDonogh 35 and played football at Jackson State and used to mask with the Cherokee Hunters Mardi Gras Indian tribe and was once employed by a place called B-Neat Cleaners.

He was forty-seven, with two daughters and three grandkids, when he died.

And it said this: “Derrick Arthur Brown passed away on or about Aug. 29, 2005.”

Eight months later, to the date, he was sent to his final home, and the measure of this information leaves me stupefied.

What to say? We're still burying them. Still burying us.

I don't have the words to comment on this, to lend any clarity or perspective. It just sits in your head with everything else.

Where was he all this time?

It fails to shock or stun because the bar on shock value around here has been raised so high. It just is what it is. And if nothing else, we find in a back-of-town street on a cloudy Saturday morning a small act of celebration, defiance, and closure for one more death in our family.

A severely injured Kirk Gibson is sent out of the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout to pinch-hit in the ninth inning of the opening game of the 1988 World Series, a truly desperate moment; watching him walk to the plate, you doubt he could even run to first base if he hit the ball, which he probably won't do because he's facing arguably the greatest relief pitcher in history.

Then, amazingly, improbably—impossibly!—he homers and limps his way around the bases, fist pumping in triumph.

It's 1998, and Michael Jordan cans a jumper as time runs out, clinching his final championship with the Chicago Bulls. His victory leap becomes an iconic image of success. Nike's stock price rises 23 percent.

The 2000 World Golf Championships, eighteenth hole. It's not that daylight is fading; it's actually nighttime. Tiger Woods takes a literal shot in the dark with an eight-iron, 158 yards, and the ball somehow finds its way to within inches of the cup. Tiger taps it in for a win as flashbulbs explode to capture the moment.

It's 2006. Reggie Bush takes a handoff left and sees what Saints running backs have been seeing all their careers: the broad backs of their teammates' jerseys being pushed back at them.

So he cuts a hard right and, while twenty-one players on the field are moving in one direction, he is moving in the other and he gets 44 yards before anyone can catch him. The Reggie Bush era begins.

Okay, three of these are considered among the greatest moments in contemporary sports history. But only one was truly important.

I think you know where I'm going with this.

Truth is, no one outside New Orleans will ever remember what happened the other night. First of all, it was not only a preseason game, but it was the preseason
opener,
not just football's—but the entire world of sports'—least meaningful event.

If anything memorable happened at the game Saturday night—something that just might make the history books, in fact—it was that our backup quarterback was run over and injured by a golf cart driven by the Tennessee Titans' mascot.

How the hell does something like that happen? Aren't these people supposed to be protected from nonsense like that? I mean, when the Saints play the Falcons, can we send Whistle Monster or Holy Moses down to give Michael Vick a pregame wedgie or something?

Anyway.

Reggie's run was no Miracle on Ice or Hail Mary Pass or Immaculate Reception. (Please note the overtly religious overtones of great moments in sports history, for it is well documented that Jesus was mad for all sports, with the exception of bowling.)

But I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that those 44 yards—the first glimpse of the potential of this guy Reggie—were fraught with implication, both real and imagined.

The first point is: it gave us something to talk about that was completely unrelated to The Thing—if anything that happens around here can be said to occur outside the all-consuming context of The Thing, which I doubt it can, but let's go with it anyway.

I watched part of the game in a loud and crowded Bourbon Street bar Saturday night and was amazed at how I witnessed a single run from scrimmage play a small part in making some people whole again. Right before my very eyes.

I heard at least two conversations in which the term “play-offs” was bandied about, and I thought: Wow, I miss that playful delusion that everyone around here used to have. That completely illogical yet congenital attachment to schemes that don't work and if there was ever—historically speaking—a scheme that doesn't work, it's the Saints.

Now, truth is, I'm not a Saints fan in the conventional sense. I watch every game and listen to the postgame shows and all that, but I have always been fascinated by the Saints more as a sociological phenomenon than as a mere sports team.

We could dig deep into the well of New Orleans clichés about how we don't do anything the way they do it in other places and our relationship with our football team is certainly up there on that list. Their performance seems to have such a profound influence on the mood of this community and never more so than this year and I know that sounds superficial and, in fact, it is superficial.

Only a game, right?

Not anymore. Not here. Not now.

We need a real juggernaut to lift us up, and it turns out that a big fireworks display and masquerade ball, as our mayor suggested, to commemorate the drowning of New Orleans wasn't quite the answer.

But a winning football team? Ah, that would be something.

In fact, I'm worried that if the team doesn't deliver, it could deal a devastating blow to the psyche of the city. More than anything else Saturday night, I was hoping and praying not that Reggie would play well but that he simply wouldn't get injured—by an opposing team's linebacker or a middle-aged man wearing a big furry costume.

If Reggie goes down, I told a friend on the phone Saturday afternoon, it could be the proverbial straw that breaks this camel's back.

Levee failures, looting, death, destruction, murder, corruption, depression, suicide, bankruptcy—those we can handle.

But another losing season? Oh, the horror.

So mark it in your memory lockbox—that 44-yard run—just like remembering where you were and what you were doing when you heard that Kennedy was shot or O. J. Simpson was on the run or a man had walked on the moon.

That was one small step for Reggie Bush, one giant leap for New Orleans.

Dear Joe,

Welcome back to New Orleans. As you have probably noticed, a lot of the city looks like it did when you were last here, whenever that may have been, in our pre-Katrina state.

Admittedly, all those windows blown out of the Hyatt downtown have an ominous look about them, a jarring reminder of what went down here a year ago. And since they loom over the Superdome, they'll make for good TV images, and that's why I am writing to you.

I am offering you some unsolicited and perhaps unwelcome comments on how you should do your job Monday night.

Joe, I hate when strangers give me unsolicited advice on how to do my job. But you and me, Joe, we've got history together.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., and was a young man when you came to the Redskins and gave us a new attitude and our first Super Bowl win. That was a night to remember.

It was 1982, before the era when “fans” of NFL and NBA teams began that wonderful tradition of looting their downtown stores and burning cars to celebrate winning the championship.

Ah, the old days.

And by the time L.T. busted your leg on
Monday Night Football
all those years later, I was living here in New Orleans and watched the game with some friends in a bar in Kenner and I want you to know, Joe: I was there with you.

It hurt me as much as it hurt you.

Well, maybe not.

But I'm straying from the point. The point is, I don't know much about all the other sports guys who are in town this weekend telling America our story. But it worries me that they won't get it right, so I wanted to write to you to ask you to get it right.

There's that guy on Fox Sports named Chris Rose—he does that
Best Damn Sports Show
thing—and I suppose maybe he's the guy I should be talking to but I don't know Chris Rose and the whole idea of talking to a guy named Chris Rose is a little weird to me.

But I know you, Joe. When you're in New Orleans, you hang out at my neighborhood bar, Monkey Hill. Hell, Joe—we're practically family.