1 Dead in Attic (35 page)

But then again, maybe I'm just fat, lazy, drunk, and stupid and don't get it and never will.

Just throw me something, mister, and I'll be content to mind my own business and ignore all the suffering around me while I wave my foam finger in the air and scream into America's living rooms, “Who dat say?”

Me dat say. Dat's who.

I was in Washington, D.C., recently, talking to a very educated man who was making reference to another man he knows who does restaurant consulting work in New Orleans.

The man, a school administrator, said to me, “I don't know what he thinks he's doing there. There are no restaurants in New Orleans anymore.”

Cue the ominous sound effect between scenes in
Law & Order.

I was recently working with an out-of-town TV news producer who was looking to set up a shot of neighborhood desolation and he asked me if I thought it would be hard to find any concentration of damaged and abandoned houses in New Orleans.

Cue the ominous sound effect between scenes in
Law & Order.

I was in Portland, Oregon, this week and I heard a guy in a bar hold court with stories about New Orleans. He said, “The police on Bourbon Street, they come around at night with a big cart—like a hot dog cart—and they pile up all the drunk and passed-out people on it and wheel them off to jail.”

Cue the buzzer, the gong, the cowbell.

A hot dog cart?

Obviously, the range of opinions and “knowledge” about New Orleans out in the Great Elsewhere is staggering. Said a documentary filmmaker from Indianapolis to me the other day, “Speaking for central Indiana, it's not that people don't care about New Orleans. It's more that they're oblivious to what happened. They just don't know.”

And so some folks think New Orleans is a fine and peachy place, where finding footage of wrecked houses would be a challenge all these months later. And some folks think there are no restaurants open.

And some folks, it seems, got so pie-eyed when they visited Bourbon Street that they hallucinated some bizarre vision that married the cops and the Lucky Dog guys into a harmoniously cartoonish image of civic peacekeeping.

I've been traveling a lot lately. “How is New Orleans doing?” people ask all along the way, and they do care—really, really care—you can tell. But how do you answer that question?

Unless they have two days to listen to you talk about the unraveling of the social fabric, the menace of crime, the absence of leadership, the palpable fear of another hurricane, and the fact that fifteen of your closest friends are making plans to move away—joining the other fifteen of your closest friends who already have moved away—what do you tell them?

My wife and I recently made the circuit of journalism awards banquets in the Northeast, and I watched my media colleagues and peers fall into easy shoptalk at these events, but somehow Kelly and I always stood off to the side, wondering who all these people were and what they were talking about.

We were guests at many of these events and—in some cases—honorees, as I have had the privilege of picking up several awards that
The Times-Picayune
has won for its coverage of this unholy mess.

And people are warm and gracious and concerned, but at each event I asked my wife, “Did you ever go to a wedding where you didn't know the bride or the groom?”

That's kind of what it's like to be from New Orleans as you travel around the country these days. You just can't find the rhythm of the outside. Of the other.

I am on a plane bound for Salt Lake City as I write this, and I look around and realize how disconnected my life is from those of the folks who sit around me.

Not that they don't have troubles and sorrows and issues, too, but they don't necessarily look lost in a fog of war. I look around at the sleepy faces and the faces buried in books and newspapers and the bobbing heads of folks plugged into iPods and I wonder when I'll ever get back to the place where they are.

I think I speak for most everyone in the room when I say: I am ready for August 30, 2006.

I am ready to get on with the next phase of all of this, whatever joys or traumas, comedy or tragedy, successes or setbacks it may bring.

It seems as if we folks in and around New Orleans have been stuck in that netherworld so aptly described in Dr. Seuss's immortal reflection in the pages of
Oh, the Places You'll Go!.

He called it “The Waiting Place.”

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Sound familiar? Sound like your life?

Substitute “insurance settlement,” “FEMA trailer,” and “contractor to call,” and bingo: Oh, the places you'll go.

Waiting for three cycles of the light to change on Causeway. Waiting three hours to get a new driver's license. Waiting to see who comes back and who moves away. Waiting to hear what our mayor will say next.

Waiting to feel better. Waiting to get worse. Waiting for a Better Break or Another Chance. Does that day ever come?

Yeah, you're right. And waiting for the next hurricane.

Therein lies the rub. Even more than suffering from anniversary anxiety—the cauldron of agony and memory that we are boiling in—it seems as though much of our communal psyche is caught up in the strange and fruitless wait for the next big storm to come our way to see how we handle it—physically, civically, emotionally.

It's as if we want to know if we can take the hit and get back up again. It's like being a star quarterback or running back who gets injured and waits a whole season to play again and going into that first game thinking: Just get the first hit over with.

Like being a boxer stepping into a ring with a feared competitor. Just hit me and let's get on with this thing.

Let me get by Tuesday without succumbing to all the bad stuff that emanates from the newspaper, the radio, television, and every conversation with every friend and family member.

Let me remember the good stuff: people reaching out, helping. People coming together.

I remember: 9/11 was on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, about midday, I turned off the TV and told my wife, “I don't ever want to watch those buildings fall down again for as long as I live.”

And I have never seen them fall again. Not once. It's an image television has largely shielded us from, though I suspect that in the coming weeks, that might change.

So sometimes I wonder how much I need to see and hear about last year, here.

Those people standing on rooftops with signs that say, Help Us. Do you remember the horror of that first vision—for most of us, from the relative comfort of a hotel room or the home of a far-flung family member—and the dread that gripped you when you asked, “My God, what is happening down there? This can't be happening.”

It happened, all right.

The whole damn city underwater, rooftops peeking out like alligator heads all in a row. Thousands trapped in hell. The Convention Center. That dead woman in a wheelchair with a blanket thrown over her. Wal-Mart. The looters.

We're going to see all of it plenty on TV's endless loop of sorrow. And I guess we must tune in because we must never forget.

Then again, how could we? What a disgrace, the whole damn thing, and there are so many to blame, but that seems beside the point now or, at least, not the main point anymore.

Our mayor keeps pointing fingers—all this time later—but everyone knows what went down and how it went down so, what the hell. What do we do now?

Just hit me.

Let's pick up the pieces still. Put it back together more. Let life ramble on in the new New Orleans, where everything is different and everyone is upside down in The Waiting Place.

My friend Jenni noticed that folks around here start conversations differently now. “Instead of asking ‘Where did you go to school?' people ask, ‘What medications are you taking?' ”

Try that for an icebreaker with a stranger. The next time you're waiting in line.

A high school student from New Jersey interviewed me over the weekend for a school project and asked me, “Has Katrina changed your life and, if so, how?”

Well. Interesting question.

How much time do we have?

I gave the kid a pat answer about how this whole thing has shaken us to our very core as individuals and a community and left it at that, but it did give me pause.

Forgive my navel gazing, but I honestly cannot think of a single aspect of my life—as a writer, a father, a husband, a son, a person—that is not different from the way it was before.

For instance, I haven't played golf since The Thing, and that's all wrong.

And I have lost weight. Maybe too much. All of my pants are falling down.

When people comment on this to me, I dismiss it by telling them that my dramatic weight loss is actually a political statement, a living art installation, if you will, an anthropomorphic representation of the disappearing Louisiana wetlands.

This usually prompts a quizzical stare, then a comment like “Well, okay, I was just wondering if you wanted to share my sandwich.”

And since I don't eat anymore—because eating is just a smug affectation of the bourgeoisie—feeding my kids has become a minor annoyance. Sometimes I get frustrated with their neediness. I ask my wife, “Why can't they just get by on cocktail peanuts and cigarettes like the rest of us?”

We pamper our kids too much today.

I have written extensively in this space about my personal trials of survival and adaptation in our post-Katrina world and, as a result, have been flooded with e-mails from psychotherapists and other mental health professionals who tell me that my sudden irrationality and irritability, coupled with my loss of former interests and hobbies, all paint a classic portrait of the post-traumatic stress syndrome sufferer.

I reflect on my current life and my actions, and I think: You needed to go to Harvard to come up with that?

In many ways, I feel as if I have become the New Orleans poster boy for posttraumatic stress, chronicling my descent into madness for everyone to read.

A psychologist from Lafayette, Heidi Perryman, sent me this: “You have chosen (or been chosen) to bear the cross of ‘witness' to this tragedy and, like the Holocaust survivors before you who held their lives together on the notion of telling the story of what happened, you have saved yourself from disintegration and simultaneously exposed your readers to its threat.”

And I thought it was just another day at the office. I thought it was the flood. I thought it was the looting and the burning and dead people.

I thought it was the refrigerators.

I got this from a woman in Tangipahoa Parish: “This mirror you've shown us reflects who we have become and where we'll go if we allow ourselves to become covered with darkness and despair.”

This e-mail was signed “Deputy Susie.” Now, correct me if my memory fails me, but isn't Deputy Susie a little kids' TV show personality?

Let me get this straight: Now I've got someone who teaches children the difference between “good touch” and “bad touch” telling me I am “covered with darkness and despair”?

It has come to this? This can't be a good thing.

It makes me feel as though I—with the notable exception of Kimberly Williamson Butler—have performed the most public crack-up in a city full of people cracking up.

The triumph of this phenomenon was the recent delivery of a complimentary issue of
Grief Digest,
sent to me by a publishing company called the Centering Corporation, accompanied by a note that said, “We thought you might be interested in this.”

And that's my journey—from
Golf Digest
to
Grief Digest
in twenty-eight short weeks. And “Lose Weight While You Go Crazy!” Operators are standing by.

In the Philippines. Or wherever.

Speaking of that. I was recently trying to track down a FedEx package that was late arriving to my house, and I got an operator on the line and she told me, “Sir, it seems there's a problem with the weather.”

Then she paused, clicked away at her computer keyboard, and asked, “Was there a hurricane?”

Count to ten. Take a breath. Think: Has Katrina changed your life and, if so, how?

“Well,” I told her. “Yes. Yes, there was a hurricane. It was seven months ago. The roads are clear now. The rebel forces have been defeated. Could you please tell me where my package is?”

And tell me: How is the weather in Malaysia these days?

And anyone wonders why we're all nuts?

I was part of a recent public forum on the mental health crisis here in town. The first presentation was on how to recognize the signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and when the doctor showed a list of the symptoms on his PowerPoint, everyone in the auditorium just started laughing.

I mean, they howled. Gut-busting hoo-has. Turns out, everyone in the room had every symptom and you don't need me to list them here because you're probably just curled into the fetal position on your kitchen floor, lying in a pool of hot coffee and reading the same sentence over and over and over again anyway, so you don't need me to tell you that the sensation of spiders crawling all over your face is perfectly normal.

The second presenter, one of those social-worker women who are cheerful to the point of annoying, then got up and offered ways to battle the darkness.

She listed exercise and proper diet and all that hooey. Then she got all New Agey and said that when times are bad, you should hug yourself.