1 Dead in Attic (7 page)

Just farther up the road a bit are car dealerships with rows and rows and rows of new cars that will never be sold, all browned out as if they had been soaking in coffee for a week, which I guess they were.

All those lots need are some balloons on a Saturday afternoon and some guy in a bad suit saying “Let's make a deal!”

Welcome to the Outer Limits. Your hometown. Need a new car?

Speaking of car dealers, no one epitomizes the temporary insanity around here more than Saints owner Tom Benson, who said he feared for his life in a confrontation with a drunk fan and WWL sportscaster Lee Zurik at Tiger Stadium last Sunday.

Admittedly, the shape of Lee Zurik's eyebrows have an oddly discomfiting menace about them, but fearing for your life?

Just get a good set of tweezers and defend yourself, Tom. Get ahold of yourself, man.

Maybe I shouldn't make light of this phenomenon. Maybe I'm exhibiting a form of madness in thinking this is all slightly amusing. Maybe I'm not well, either.

But former city health director Brobson Lutz told me it's all part of healing. “It's a part of the human coping mechanism,” he said. “Part of the recovery process. I have said from the beginning that the mental health concerns here are far greater than those we can expect from infectious diseases or household injuries.”

The U.S. Army took Lutz onto the USS
Iwo Jima
a few weeks ago to talk to the troops about how to deal with people suffering from posttraumatic stress.

They were concerned, primarily, with the dazed-looking folks who wander around the French Quarter all day.

“I told them to leave those guys alone,” Lutz said. “They may be crazy, but they survived this thing. They coped. If they were taken out of that environment, then they could really develop problems. Remember that in the immediate aftermath of all this, the primary psychiatric care in this city was being provided by the bartenders at Johnny White's and Molly's.”

Interesting point. I mean, who needs a psychology degree? All anyone around here wants is someone to listen to their stories.

I thanked Lutz for his time and mentioned that our call sounded strange. It was around noon this past Thursday.

“Are you in the bathtub?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “And I'm having trouble coming up with sound bites.”

Like I said, we're all a little touched by Katrina Fever.

My friend Glenn Collins is living in exile in Alabama, and one Sunday afternoon he went to a shopping mall in Birmingham. He went to the Gap and was greeted by a salesclerk with a name tag that said “Katrina.”

He left immediately. He went next door to the Coach boutique, where he was greeted by a salesclerk with a name tag that said “Katrina.”

He kinda freaked out. He asked the woman something along the lines of: What's with all the Katrinas? And she blurted out, “Oh, you know Katrina at the Gap? She's my friend!”

“I wish I was making this up,” he told me. “I mean, what are the odds of this?”

He needed a drink, he said. So he went to a nearby Outback Steakhouse and ordered a beer, but the bartender told him they don't sell alcohol on Sundays.

“But I'm from New Orleans!” he pleaded. “Don't you have a special exemption for people from New Orleans? Please?”

They did not. So he drove across three counties to get a drink. He said to me, “The Twilight Zone, it just keeps going on and on and on.”

I live on The Island, where much has the appearance of Life Goes On. Gas stations, bars, pizza joints, joggers, strollers, dogs, churches, shoppers, neighbors, even garage sales.

Sometimes trash and mail service, sometimes not.

It sets into mind a modicum of complacency that maybe everything is all right.

But I have this terrible habit of getting into my car every two or three days and driving into the Valley Down Below, that vast wasteland below sea level that was my city, and it's mind-blowing (A) how vast it is and (B) how wasted it is.

My wife questions the wisdom of my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East, and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability, and I suspect she is right.

Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.

That's advice I wish I could follow, but I can't. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.

I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn't inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.

In some cases, there's no interpretation needed. There's one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: 1
DEAD IN ATTIC.

That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.

It's spray-painted there on the front of the house, and it probably will remain spray-painted there for weeks, months, maybe years, a perpetual reminder of the untimely passing of a citizen, a resident, a New Orleanian.

One of us.

You'd think some numerical coding could have conveyed this information on this house, so that I—we all—wouldn't have to drive by places like this every day and be reminded: “1 Dead in Attic.”

I have seen plenty of houses in worse shape than the one where 1 Dead in Attic used to live, houses in Gentilly and the Lower 9th that yield the most chilling visual displays in town: low-rider shotgun rooftops with holes that were hacked away from the inside with an ax, leaving small, splintered openings through which people sought escape.

Imagine if your life came to that point and remained there, on display, all over town, for us to see, day after day.

Amazingly, those rooftops are the stories with happy endings. I mean, they got out, right?

But where are they now? Do you think they have trouble sleeping at night?

The occasional rooftops still have painted messages:
HELP US.
I guess they had paint cans in their attic. And an ax, like meterologist Margaret Orr and Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard always told us we should have if we weren't going to evacuate.

Some people thought Orr and Broussard were crazy. Alarmists. Extremists. Well, maybe they were crazy. But they were right.

Perhaps 1 Dead in Attic should have heeded this advice. But judging from the ages on the state's official victims list, he or she was probably up in years. Stubborn. Unafraid. And now a statistic.

I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here—I wonder if
anyone
has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.

And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic, and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?

Was there anyone with him or her at the end, and what was the last thing they said to each other? How did 1 Dead in Attic spend the last weekend in August of the year 2005?

What were their plans? Maybe dinner at Mandich on St. Claude? Maybe a Labor Day family reunion in City Park—one of those raucous picnics where everybody wears matching T-shirts to mark the occasion and they rent a DJ and a Space Walk and a couple of guys actually get there the night before to secure a good, shady spot?

I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.

1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant, or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?

My wife, she's right. I've got to quit just randomly driving around. This can't be helping anything.

But I can't stop. I return to the Valley Down Below over and over, looking for signs of progress in all that muck, some sign that things are getting better, that things are improving, that we don't all have to live in a state of abeyance forever, but—you know what?

I just don't see them there.

I mean, in the 8th Ward, tucked down there behind St. Roch Cemetery, life looks pretty much like it did when the floodwater first receded ten weeks ago, with lots of cars pointing this way and that, kids' yard toys caked in mire, portraits of despair, desolation, and loss. And hatchet holes in rooftops.

But there's something I've discovered about the 8th Ward in this strange exercise of mine: apparently, a lot of Mardi Gras Indians are from there. Or were from there; I'm not sure what the proper terminology is.

On several desolate streets I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven't bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb—what's the point, really?—but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.

The colors of these displays are startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.

So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after an atomic explosion. I don't know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.

They haunt me, almost as much as the spray paint on the front of a house that says 1
DEAD IN ATTIC
. They look like ghosts hanging there. They are reminders of something. Something very New Orleans.

Do these memorials mean these guys—the Indians—are coming back? I mean, they have to, don't they? Where else could they do what they do?

And—maybe this is a strange time to ask—who are these guys, anyway? Why do they do what they do with all those feathers and beads that take so much time and money to make? What's with all the Big Chief and Spy Boy role-playing?

As many times as I have reveled in their rhythmic, poetic, and sometimes borderline absurd revelry in the streets of our city, I now realize that if you asked me to explain the origins and meaning of the Mardi Gras Indians—I couldn't do it.

I have no clue. And that makes me wish I'd been paying more attention for the past twenty years. I could have learned something.

I could have learned something about a people whose history is now but a sepia mist over back-of-town streets and neighborhoods that nobody's ever heard of and where nobody lives and nothing ever happens anymore; a freeze-frame still life in the air, a story of what we once were.

She had a nice house in Old Metairie, a nice car, a great job, a good man who loved her, and a wedding date in October.

A good life.

He was from Atlanta and had moved here to be with her because she is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else and even if they do, they always come back.

That's just the way it is.

For the hurricane, they fled to Atlanta. His city. His people.

Meantime, her house was destroyed, her car was destroyed, and within days she was laid off from her job. And, of course, the wedding here in New Orleans was canceled.

When all settled down, he wanted to stay in Atlanta. But she is a New Orleans girl, and you know the rest. Equanimity courses through our blood as much as platelets and nitrogen—it is part of our DNA—so she was determined to return, rebuild, recover.

So they moved back here.

A few weeks ago, they moved into my neighborhood. She arrived first. That afternoon, she came over and joined the group that sits on my stoop every night solving the world's problems.

I introduced her to the local gang and welcomed her back to the neighborhood; she had been a neighbor many years ago.

Like many post-Katrina First Timers, she was a wreck on that first night. Didn't say much. Just sat there. Not the girl I used to know. But then, who is?

To add to her troubles that first night, her fiancé, who was following her to New Orleans that morning in a rented truck, had gotten a flat tire outside Mobile and was stranded on the side of the road.

She drove on because she had the pets in her car. He called the rental company for help; it wasn't the kind of vehicle with a tire that just any John Doe can change.

He called the trucking company all day. They kept telling him that they would be there within an hour and that's what he told her so she waited. We all waited.

By 8
P.M.
, he got fed up with the trucking company and called them and told them he had started the engine and was going to drive to New Orleans on the exposed tire rim. And that's what he did, calling the trucking company every few minutes to give a new location.

When she related this news to us, we all knew right then that we would like this guy.

Naturally, the trucking company showed up within minutes and changed the tire. He arrived late that night. He met all the neighbors and they all knew the story of his driving on the rim and they all thought it was hilarious.

And so their new life on my block began. They were one of us now, the survivors, the determined, the hopeful, the building blocks of the New City. Members of the tribe.

They settled in. I used to see them walking in the park and reading the paper on their front porch and occasionally they sat on my stoop, and life went on.

But I guess things were not going so well. She was always pretty grim—not the girl I used to know—but he seemed jolly enough and we would talk in the “Hey, how ya doin'?” kind of way.

Turns out, he couldn't stand it here. And truthfully, if you weren't from here, didn't have a history here, didn't have roux in your blood and a stake in it all: Would you want to be here?