1 Dead in Attic (6 page)

For instance, in the immediate days after the flood, it was sound: choppers, jets, boats, sirens, big trucks, bigger trucks, chain saws. And then at night, the damn scariest silence you never heard.

Then it was sight: the impenetrable darkness of the night, punctuated in the distance from time to time by a red or blue cherry top on a slow-rolling cruiser, and most likely the driver—a young state trooper from some town in the Midwest suddenly dropped into Fallujah—was as terrified as you.

There were lots of monsters under the bed in those early days.

Then came the blinding sunlight of morning—so much of it unfiltered by tree limbs after Katrina's indiscriminate and not-so-tidy pruning job—just slamming straight into your face and onto the ground.

Now the choppers are gone, and most of that other industrial noise, and at night you hear crickets. And the sunlight, so hellish weeks ago, is getting better with the approach of autumn, and the scary darkness is now sliced apart at night by streetlights and the yellow glow from occasional bedroom windows.

That leaves us the sense of smell. And, wow.

The Louisiana balladeer Randy Newman once wrote a song lamenting Baltimore's civic downfall many years ago with the line “Oh, Baltimore. Man, it's hard just to breathe.”

That would be New Orleans now. It stinks here, just flat-out stinks.

There are random piles of residential and commercial trash just everywhere, and even where there is no visible evidence, the slightest wind shift can take you to Puke City.

I mean it; it's rough. Even in places that are cleaned up and open for business, you can still smell the Aftermath. The CVS and Walgreens drugstores are open Uptown, and even though the air-conditioning is blasting and they've cleaned the hell out of those places, you can still sense it when you first walk in, just barely taste it.

A friend of mine e-mailed me recently that when she walked into a grocery store, her daughter said to her, “Mom, it smells like ass in here.” I know that's not very appetizing terminology or imagery for a newspaper, but standard operating procedures have changed around here because New Orleans, it smells like, well . . . never mind.

I'm just trying to convey what it's like, and I can certainly muster no better description than that.

On many streets, refrigerators are duct-taped shut and lined up along the curbside, calling to mind nothing so much as the image of empty Mardi Gras parade ladders all in a row. All these structures, just waiting for something to happen.

Only problem is, there are no cleanup crews following these imaginary parades to remove the debris. So they stand, sturdy sentinels, fortress walls.

We should rename the streets around here Whirlpool Way, Amana Avenue, and Kenmore Court, because that's what it looks like. The streets are paved in appliances. Where trees once stood, they are sometimes the only shade on a block.

Where are they going to put all these things? I don't suppose they can be used to buttress our wetlands as they do with discarded Christmas trees every year, huh?

Do we even have any wetlands?

And, problem is, for every person who comes back here, either to reclaim residency or just to gather some valuables and clean up a bit, more garbage accumulates. Pity the folks who had been in the middle of home renovations when this hit, because their Dumpsters are now brimming with a primordial stew so nasty that even the rats abandoned it.

Very strange side note here: There are no rats. Everyone talks about this, says the same thing—they haven't seen a rat since Day One. Here on Dry Land, where I live, we thought they'd overrun us. But I don't know.

Anyway, I remember—until it was deemed injudicious by an image-conscious administration—when the city used to measure the success of Mardi Gras by announcing the accumulated tonnage of garbage collected during Carnival season. Well, by that measure, Katrina was a very successful hurricane.

Very.

Stink is a situation that TV and radio cannot successfully portray, olfactory being one of the senses not yet conquered by the airwaves or Internet. And until
The Times-Picayune
can successfully produce a scratch-'n'-sniff version of the daily newspaper—and this technology still seems to be at least three or four years down the road—we can only fail in our efforts to accurately capture the foulness of some of these street corners.

I don't mean to be complaining here, jumping on the gripe train and all that. Compared to losing a loved one, a home, or a job, this is civic kibbles and bits. But in terms of livability, it matters. There seem to be nine hundred guys from Texas who've been trucked into town to cut down trees and limbs; aren't there a dozen guys from River Parish Disposal who can cruise around New Orleans every day picking up stuff ?

The whole idea of it makes me very nostalgic, the radio playing in my backyard on autumn Sunday afternoons in New Orleans, after a Saints game, listening to Buddy D pitching River Parish Disposal: “Our business stinks, but it's picking up.”

What a great slogan that is.

Buddy D. The Saints. Garbage pickup. Ah, memories of my old New Orleans.

Every night, we gather on my front stoop. We are multiple combinations of jobless, homeless, familyless, and sometimes just plain listless.

We sit and some of us drink and some of us smoke and together we solve the problems of the city—since no one in any official capacity seems able or inclined to do so.

We're just one more committee howling at the moon. We are a civic life support system.

It began with close friends and neighbors, gathering as we trickled back into town, comparing notes and stories and hugs of comfort and welcome home. But the breadth of visitors has widened.

One night, while I was sitting with a couple of friends, a guy pulled up to the curb in an SUV and regarded us carefully. As the passenger-side window rolled down, I assumed it was an old friend stopping to say hello, so I stepped up to the door.

Turns out, it was a total stranger. He asked, “Displaced dads?” He had a six-pack of Corona on the front seat, and he was just driving around randomly, looking for someone to connect with, someone to talk to, something—God help us—something to do.

We nodded. Yeah, we are men without their women. Women without their men. Parents without their children.

But not without beer.

And he got out of the car and he sat with us for hours and we told our stories to each other and asked about each other's families, now spread across the planet, and when it was over we had a new friend. A displaced dad. Just looking for a place we used to call home.

We stoop sitters tend to get very wry and blend dark humor with our rants against the machine, but sometimes it gets very sad.

We often deal with First-Timer Syndrome. As my immediate neighbors trickle back into town, one by one—either just to clean up and move on or to move back in for good—they generally end up on my stoop. And they often cry.

It's the first time they've been back to town and they are shaken to their very core at what they've seen and smelled and we grizzled veterans of this war try to provide shelter from their storm.

They apologize for losing it, but we tell them that many tears have been shed here on this stoop and they are ours and it's okay. It happens to all First Timers. Hell, it happens still.

They're easy to spot, the First Timers. Either they sob or they sit silent and sullen, taking the occasional pull on a bottle of beer, with very little to add to the conversation of the night.

The next night, they usually come back, and they are a little better. One day at a time. Ain't that the way of life around here?

We sit around night after night because some of us are unable to sit still in a restaurant for ninety minutes or aren't ready to go back to the bar scene. Many can't concentrate on reading and television seems like an empty gesture, so we talk. We talk about the same damn thing over and over.

We talk about it. The elephant in the room.

I suspect many folks have sat with us and thought, upon going home: You guys need to get a grip. You need to talk about something else. You need to get a life.

That may be, but I, personally, have been unable to focus on anything but the elephant. I have tried to watch TV or read a magazine, but when I see or hear phrases like “Tom and Katie” or “World Series” or “Judge Miers,” my mind just glazes over and all I hear is the buzz of a fluorescent light. That is the sound of my cerebral cortex now.

I can't hear what they're saying on TV. I don't know what they're talking about. I think: Why aren't they talking about the elephant?

Once, in an out-of-town airport, I searched desperately for some thing to read about the elephant, but we have been tossed off the front pages by other events. Finally I found a magazine with a blaring headline—“What Went Wrong?”—and I thought, finally, something about us.

It turns out, though, it was
People
magazine and “What Went Wrong” was not about FEMA or the levees or the flood, but about Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney.

And the fluorescent light goes
zzzzzz.

One newcomer to the stoop one night said something along the lines of “Can you believe that call at the end of the White Sox game the other night?” And you would usually think that such a statement made in a group of drinking men would elicit an argument, at least—if not a bare-knuckle brawl—but the fact is, we all responded with silence.

We're a porch full of people who don't know who's playing in the World Series and don't know what movies opened this week and don't know how many died in Iraq today.

We are consumed. We would probably bore you to tears. But it is good therapy and we laugh more than we cry, and that's a start, that's a good thing, that's a sign of winning this war, of getting this damn elephant out of our city—out of our sight.

It has been said to me almost a dozen times in exactly the same words: “Everyone here is mentally ill now.”

Some who say this are health care professionals voicing the accumulated wisdom of their careers, and some are laymen venturing a psychological assessment that just happens to be correct.

With all due respect, we're living in Crazy Town.

The only lines at retail outlets longer than those for lumber and refrigerators are at the pharmacy windows, where fidgety, glassy-eyed neighbors greet one another with the casual inquiries one might expect at a restaurant: “What are you gonna have? The Valium here is good. But I'm going with the Paxil. Last week I had the Xanax and it didn't agree with me.”

We talk about prescription medications now as if they were the soft-shell crabs at Clancy's. Suddenly, we've all developed a low-grade expertise in pharmacology.

Everybody's got it, this thing, this affliction, this affinity for forgetfulness, absentmindedness, confusion, laughing in inappropriate circumstances, crying when the wrong song comes on the radio, behaving in odd and contrary ways.

A friend recounts a recent conversation into which Murphy's Law was injected—the adage that if anything can go wrong, it will.

In perhaps the most succinct characterization of contemporary life in New Orleans I've heard yet, one said to the other, “Murphy's running this town now.”

Ain't that the truth?

Here's one for you: Some friends of mine were clearing out their belongings from their home in the Fontainebleau area and were going through the muddle of despair that attends the realization that you were insured out the wazoo for a hurricane but all you got was flood damage and now you're going to get a check for $250,000 to rebuild your $500,000 house.

As they pondered this dismal circumstance in the street, their roof collapsed. Just like that. It must have suffered some sort of structural or rain-related stress from the storm, and then, two weeks later, it manifested itself in total collapse.

Now, I ask you: What would you do if you watched your home crumble to pieces before your eyes?

What they did was, realizing that their home now qualified for a homeowner's claim, they jumped up and down and high-fived each other and yelled, “The roof collapsed! The roof collapsed!”

Our home is destroyed. Oh, happy day. I submit that there's something not right there.

I also submit that if you don't have this affliction, if this whole thing hasn't sent you into a vicious spin of acute cognitive dissonance, then you must be crazy and—as I said—we're all whacked.

How could you not be? Consider the sights, sounds, and smells you encounter on a daily basis as you drive around a town that has a permanent bathtub ring around it. I mean, could somebody please erase that brown line?

Every day I drive past a building on Magazine Street where there's plywood over the windows with a huge spray-painted message that says:
I AM HERE. I HAVE A GUN
.

Okay, the storm was more than two months ago. You can take the sign down now. You can come out now.

Or maybe the guy's still inside there, in the dark with his canned food, water, and a gun, thinking that the whole thing is still going on, like those Japanese soldiers you used to hear about in the 1970s and '80s who just randomly wandered out of hiding in the forests on desolate islands in the South Pacific, thinking that World War II was still going on.

The visuals around here prey on you. Driving in from the east the other day, I saw a huge gray wild boar that had wandered onto the interstate and been shredded by traffic. Several people I know also saw this massive porcine carnage, all torn up and chunky on the side of the road.

It looked like five dead dogs. Directly across the interstate from it was an upside-down alligator.

I mean: What the hell? Since when did we have wild boars around here? And when did they decide to lumber out of the wilderness up to the interstate as if it were some sort of sacred dying ground for wildebeests?