1 Dead in Attic (8 page)

I wouldn't.

But she is a New Orleans girl. To hell with no house, no car, no job, no prospects. This is where she belongs. And her mama lives here. End of discussion.

He moved back to Atlanta. She stayed. He came back. Try again. Work it out. Whatever it takes.

A few nights ago, they drank wine and, in some sort of stupid Romeo and Juliet moment, decided that they would kill themselves because all hope was lost and living here amid the garbage and the rot and the politics and the profound sense of failure was sucking the marrow out of their bones.

Not even love could overcome. Here, in the smoking ruins of Pompeii, sometimes it's hard to see the light.

She told friends later that she didn't really think they would do it. Said they got caught in the moment and let the bad stuff crawl all over their minds. The darkness can be so damn dark, and they weren't thinking straight. But she didn't think they were really going to do it.

But he did. Right then, right there.

So he's dead, and a family in Atlanta has lost a son, a brother, a friend. Another notch in Katrina's belt.

My stoop is empty these nights. None of us really knows what to say anymore.

This is the next cycle. Suicide. All the doctors, psychologists, and mental health experts tell us the same thing: this is what happens next in a phenomenon like this. But has there ever been a phenomenon like this?

Where are we now in our descent through Dante's nine circles of hell?

God help us.

The most open, joyous, freewheeling, celebratory city in the country is broken, hurting, down on its knees. Failing. Begging for help.

Somebody turn this movie off; I don't want to watch it anymore. I want a slow news day. I want a no news day.

A friend of mine who used to live here said on the phone from Philadelphia the other day, “I don't know how you guys can even get out of bed in the morning.”

Well, obviously, some of us don't.

But we have to try. We have to fight this thing until there is no fight left. This cannot be the way we go out, by our own hands.

My neighbor is in a hospital in another part of the state now, learning how to deal. She talked to friends over the weekend and said she is not going to run away from this. She is a New Orleans girl, and this is where she is going to stay and try again. And again. And again.

She told her friends this weekend that she still has hope.

I don't know what flavor of hope she's got or how she got it, but if she's got a taste of it in her mouth, the rest of us can take a little spoonful and try to make it through another day, another week, another lifetime.

It's the least we can do.

I was sitting in Donna's on Rampart Street last Saturday night, shaking my legs to a righteous swing session with the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, when a stunning realization hit me in the face: it was a hurricane, or something very close to it, that had brought me to this city in the first place.

It was November 1980. I was in school in Wisconsin, floundering both personally and academically. I had a friend in the same situation. We decided to blow off our classes and head out of town the week of  Thanksgiving, pointing south with a tent and two sleeping bags in an attempt to decide whether we wanted to stay in college or find another direction in life.

I had told my parents in Maryland that I had a load of schoolwork and would not be home for the holiday. And off we went, destination South Padre Island in Texas, where I had gone for spring break the year before and had a gas.

But South Padre was miserable. It was deserted. Oil from a runaway well in Mexico was fouling the beach. And worst of all, the wind was relentless and borderline scary. It blew our tent all over the beach, and when we'd party a little and try to play Frisbee, the disc would get caught in the wind and take off three hundred yards down the beach.

A state trooper told us there was a mighty storm brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico; that the situation was certainly not going to improve and, in fact, might get a lot worse.

He suggested we leave.

So we packed up and decided to head for the Florida panhandle. Nice beaches, we'd heard. And so we hit the road again, passing through south Louisiana in the middle of the night.

Somewhere out in Acadiana, we stopped at an all-night gas station, and the girl at the cash register was wearing a baseball cap that said, “I'm a real Coonass, me.”

Okay, I'm thinking. I'll take the bait. “What's a Coonass?” I asked her.

“Me,” she replied.

I turned to my friend, also named Chris, and said, “Let's get the hell out of this state.” Two hours later we were passing the interstate exits to New Orleans.

What did I know about New Orleans at the age of twenty? At this point in my life, I was already a Meters, Wild Tchoupitoulas, and Neville Brothers fanatic, having been turned onto them by my older brother, who had incorporated annual trips to Mardi Gras into his life's journey.

My sum total knowledge of the place was that it was probably a great place for a couple of lost college boys to do some serious partying.

We considered this option, but between us, Chris and I had less than $100 and we hoped to road-trip for at least a week or so, and then we'd need gas money back home—1,000 miles to Madison.

So we bypassed New Orleans, figuring to sleep on the beach in Florida and eat campfire beans, which is what we did. For one night. Then whatever storm had been brewing in the gulf descended upon us. The same lashing wind sent sand stinging into our legs.

Someone told us the storm had kicked east. It was going to get nasty. For two down-and-out, borderline depressed guys, this trip was simply not working out. We've got to get out of here, we said. New Orleans, we agreed, money or not.

The first New Orleans bar I ever walked into—a rite of passage as meaningful as your first car or your first kiss—was Tujague's on Decatur Street. I'll never forget the impression that the tiles and the sexy lighting and the lazy ceiling fans and slow-moving clientele had on me: What year is it? I thought. This place is gone, man, long ago gone.

We ate dinner at what I believe was Café Sbisa, but I'm not positive, all these years later. All I know is, we could afford only a couple of appetizers and we were surrounded by a busy and talkative staff of tall, thin gay men and this was all very exotic to us.

Next, naturally, we were on Bourbon Street. We put $40 in the glove compartment of our car for gas back to Wisconsin (forty bucks to Wisconsin, imagine that), and we decided we would hang out until we ran out of money.

That took about six hours.

Bourbon Street was jumping. The street was packed. The night before, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran had sparred in the Superdome in one of boxing's truly legendary fights. It was the night Duran exclaimed,
“No mas!”

We didn't know or care much about that. We just knew that we had never seen anything like this place before.

At the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter, there was a slow jazz band playing and a young black man singing “The Christmas Song.” You know: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”

The man was beautiful. I had never seen skin quite his color, and I don't think I had ever seen a black man with green eyes before.

And his voice. Wow. It wasn't Aaron Neville or Johnny Adams or even in their league, obviously, but to me it was angelic and new and soul-settling. I just stood there with my mouth open, filling my open mouth with much beer, but also just in plain awe.

He didn't use a microphone, and everybody in the place was quiet, just hanging on to the moment. I doubt that Bourbon Street has many musical “moments” anymore, having descended over the past few decades into a cacophonous sprawl, but to my young and nearly virgin ears, I had found something.

Something beautiful. Something that would stay with me, it turns out.

We listened to a few more songs and then left. I wanted to stay, but we agreed that this was no place to meet girls—too mellow and refined—and we wanted to meet girls, and so we wandered.

The story, at this point, becomes dramatically less poignant and sentimental, so I'll run through the details quickly: we were thrown out of three bars on Bourbon Street and were entering a fourth when a police officer took hold of my collar and said to beat it.

We were the exact same two guys I now witness from time to time lousing up our streets downtown. I see their immature, careless behavior and think: Idiots. They don't get this town and they never will.

But now I know there is hope for fools like me.

We ended up in Luther Kent's old bar over on Toulouse Street and the band was big and brassy and loud and we met these beautiful Scandinavian girls and the night was so far beyond perfect that I thought I was in Heaven.

I drove from New Orleans all the way to Wisconsin on Thanksgiving Day, pausing twice to stop at gas stations and once to eat Thanksgiving dinner at a Denny's in Illinois.

The following Monday, I returned to classes. Chris did not. I started listening to the Neville Brothers more and more.
The Neville Brothers,
their 1978 debut record, became my “date” music. I'd play “Washable Ink” and “Vieux Carré Rouge” and “Audience for My Pain” and I thought I was one very cool brother.

For my male friends, I'd play a cassette of the Wild Tchoupitoulas record with “Brother John,” “Hey Pocky A-Way” and “Meet de Boys on the Battlefront” and I'd watch them try to figure out what the hell that was all about.

Not that I knew myself. I just knew I dug it. In between all the Springsteen and John Prine and Little Feat that consumed my musical interests back then, there was this deeper appreciation for sublime funk.

I graduated from college with a journalism degree, moved back to Maryland, and was working there when a friend who had wound up at
The Times-Picayune
called me in the spring of 1984 to say there was a job opening here.

“You'd love this city,” she told me.

I thought about that music. That six hours of immortality I had once lived there. I thought about that guy singing “The Christmas Song” and thought how sexy it all was in New Orleans. “Yes, I'd love that city,” I agreed.

And Jesus, what a ride it has been.

I had not thought about that road trip to New Orleans in years, and when I was sitting at Donna's the other night, they were singing these great swing tunes without microphones and it was smoky and intimate and it felt like 1952 and it also felt like that moment I had in 1980. And then it hit me: I first came to this city because I was fleeing a storm.

I have spent hours online since I left Donna's the other night, Googling weather sites and other sources of meteorological data, trying to find out what was in the Gulf of Mexico that last week of November 1980.

I found that a moderate hurricane—Jeanne—was in the gulf about ten days earlier and Karl was off the southeastern United States that week. Neither amounted to much. But I can't find any reference to a severe storm rolling from Texas across the gulf to the Florida panhandle in those exact days.

Maybe it was just a tropical depression of some kind, or just the turbulence between Jeanne and Karl, but it was wild and windy when I evacuated into—not out of—New Orleans for shelter and safety and that's how I discovered the pulse of this magical place.

It's far past irony to reconsider this event. It's almost absurd, now, to realize how I got here. And it's also the best thing that ever happened to me, to have seen, known, loved, and lived this place called New Orleans.

When I moved to New Orleans twenty-one years ago, I was—to use a contemporary phrase—all in. I loved it from the minute I smelled the burning sugar cane from the Celotex factory across the river, a sweet stink I have always found oddly sexy.

But there was always a caveat to my love affair with New Orleans. I stood firm, fast, and unbending on one point: I was not going to raise my children here. No how, no way.

My reasons were obvious: school system, crime, litter, racism, politics.

I thought this place was great for getting my ya-yas out in my twenties and thirties, but I was off to Wisconsin when baby-making time came around. And I was going to make sure I found a wife who believed the same.

And I did. Sort of. We were vague about our discussions but talked often about where we might go—Wisconsin included—when the time was right. We both agreed: This is no place for kids.

But Sonny Landreth changed all that. Yes, that nebbish-looking, Ubangi-stomping guitar god from the southwest Louisiana musical stew made me rethink it all.

True story: It was JazzFest, 1999. My first child, Katherine, was five weeks old. Against the advice of our friends who had children, we took her to the Fair Grounds for an afternoon.

This was less for her, of course, than for us. She was too young for us to leave her with a babysitter—that new-parent protective coating being tough as tungsten—so if Kelly and I wanted to go, then Kate was coming, too.

It was hot. Scary hot, actually, and really humid, and that new-parent oh-my-God-we're-harming-our-new-baby thing kicked in. Total buzz killer.

But some nearby sage, and I wish I could remember who it was all these years later, comforted me with these words: five weeks ago your daughter was submerged in 98 degrees and 100 percent humidity. And she did just fine.

Interesting point. I'm sure the American Medical Association would find many flaws with this logic, but it helped for the moment. And we soldiered on.

We were wending our way through the crowd early on, unable to find a good spot to plant and actually listen to some music. Just one or two bands, we thought, then a plate of some wet, brown food and then we'll head home.