1 Dead in Attic (9 page)

So we were up at the big stage—Acura, or whatever it was called then—and the crowd was too thick and we were trying to get through it and away from it when Sonny Landreth came on.

Have you ever heard this guy? He's making the whole thing up: the riffs, the chords, the notes. I'm no musical scholar, but I think he invented some things. I don't know if there is a specific genre to tag on his music, but it is primeval rock 'n' roll of the first element, a lowdown, fuzz-busting romp in the swamp. And we stopped to dig it.

And I looked down, and there, in the stroller, this beautiful child who had basically remained still and expressionless for the duration of her life—as newborns are wont to do—well, she started to move. To wiggle. And I swear to God, she smiled. For the first time.

I was awash. A Eureka moment: What a
great
place to raise kids. All this funk, the eccentricity, this otherness. Kind of like college, I thought: so much to learn outside the classroom.

It was a great afternoon. In a very small way, I was changed. As time went on, Kelly and I talked less and less about moving away and we had two more kids and we haven't discussed it in years and that's that.

I'm not making this up, nor is this some romantic, Katrina-induced revisionism; in fact, I told this exact story during a radio interview on WWNO last spring.

Just so you know. The record shows.

Today, my kids, they dance. They dig music, and that is the best gift I could ever give them, the best medicine they'll ever know.

At a school picnic in Maryland this fall, where they live in exile, a deejay was playing some contemporary dance club number of indeterminate provenance, and my two sons, Jack and James, started doing the funky butt.

No one else was moving—kids or adults. Some of them stared at my kids while they bounced their rumps up and down. I couldn't have been prouder.

When we go to Audubon Park on some Sunday afternoons, there'll be some massive and rollicking family cookout going on nearby and Katherine will start to shake her rear in a way I've seen only on music videos and she says to me, “Look, Daddy, I'm dancing like the brown people.”

Ain't that something.

So what's the point? The point is, Sonny Landreth is playing tonight at Southport Hall. New Orleans veterans Paula and the Pontiacs are opening the show.

If you need to be reminded why we live here—and sometimes we all do—may I suggest this as a suitable alternative to whiskey, pills, shooting your refrigerator, and running naked through the streets.

I am writing this from the house where I grew up. It's a thousand miles from New Orleans.

Could be a million, really.

I have come to visit my wife and children, who have settled here among my family and old friends in a place we know and trust.

My gang, they live what looks like a normal life here now. School. Shopping. Playdates and birthday parties. Next week, my wife says she's going to start going to the gym.

A normal life. Without me.

Life goes on, I guess. But it's hard to bond the disconnect between what life was like before August 29 and what it's like now.

Talk about loose ends.

Don't get me wrong: Chevy Chase is an amazing place. It was a homey, professional-class neighborhood when my parents moved here in 1963 and is now a profoundly wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., where famous people live.

It took a hurricane to make it happen, but now my family lives in the same zip code as George Will.

That's almost funny.

It's impossible not to like it here. It's so clean and everyone is so educated and polite and everyone cleans up after their dogs and we pass three crossing guards on our walk to school.

Although the streets are familiar to me—I've come back many times over the decades—I can't help but feel lost here. As if I were moving underwater.

After living in the specter of curfews and military troops and arson and desperate squalor, maybe for the first time in my life I get a hint of what posttraumatic stress really is. Low-grade, to be sure, but you feel it.

I don't recognize any of the kids and I don't know who the parents around me are and I suppose this happens to everyone who relocates to another city, but I don't think “relocate” is really the word for what we did.

What happened was, our lives and social structures and friendships and classmates and easy routines were blown across the globe on one fateful morning and now everything is different.

Just like that.

My daughter, she runs into the gym for her homeroom exercises and she starts playing one of those crazy hand-clapping games with a little girl I've never seen before, and who is that girl? What are they saying to each other?

I used to know the language and rhythm of her school in New Orleans, but here I stumble.

At the entrance to the school, there is a folding table set up where parents can contribute to a fund to buy backpacks and school supplies for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Victims. That's the mantle we wear now. And that sucks. In our lives—in all of our lives—the people we want to be are the rescuers in the boat, not the people plucked from the water, but that's what so many of us have become.

At my son's school, I was introduced to the teachers and administrators the other morning. “This is Jack Rose's father,” they would say, and you could see it in their eyes right away: Oh, the Hurricane Boy.

Don't get me wrong, they're unbelievably generous and kind to us. In private, I cry when I think about what everyone here is willing to do, how much strangers here—everyone across this country, it seems—wants to help, wants to make us feel welcome.

But still, my son is the Hurricane Boy, and that's not going to change overnight. In my hometown, we are the Hurricane Family.

Evacuees, refugees, whatever.

When I am introduced as someone from New Orleans, people sometimes say, “I'm so sorry.”

New Orleans. I'm so sorry.

That's not the way it ever was before, not the way it's supposed to be. When people find out you're from New Orleans, they're supposed to tell you about how they got really drunk there once or fell in love there or first heard the music there that changed their lives.

At worst, people would say: I've always wanted to go there.

But now, it's just “I'm sorry.”

Man, that kills me. That just kills me.

And by the time this runs in the newspaper, I'll be on my way back to the city, back to Sorry Town. And I'll leave my hurricane family behind here in what you could only call Pleasantville, and somehow I'll find the means to reconcile the two lives, the new and the old, the temporary and the permanent, a thousand miles apart.

It might as well be a million.

Not the biggest tale of hardship you're going to hear from this storm. Far from it. Just one man's journey. One guy wondering what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like.

Wondering where this all will take us. Wondering if any kids will come by our house on Halloween this year. Wondering who will set up their ladders on the corner where we always watch our Mardi Gras parades. Wondering who will be sitting under our shade tree at JazzFest.

It's not premature to think about these things. They are the familiar—and very special—touchstones of our lives.

They are the city where I live. The city that exists, at this moment, as a fond memory.

I'm somewhat consumed by the topic of travel because I've done so much of it lately, hopping from one bankrupt airline to the next in an effort to see my relocated family in Maryland as much as possible.

If you're from New Orleans, the likelihood of running into someone you know at even the most random of American airports has dramatically increased since the storm. So many of us seem to be on the move, coming home, leaving home, visiting family, looking for a lost dog, looking for a job . . . but where is everyone going?

While changing planes in Memphis recently, I eavesdropped on a guy who was boarding my New Orleans–bound plane. Since he talked so loudly on his cell phone, I considered it to be fair game for columnizing.

Anyway, I don't want to get too far into this particular point, but let's just say this guy was not your run-of-the-mill stud muffin; not a guy you're going to see on the cast of
The Bachelor,
for instance.

In fact, he was round. And there's nothing all that wrong with being round; it's a personal choice, and I'm not going to judge here. And he was also considerably older than me, so we're talking borderline AARP zone here.

And what he was saying into the phone was that he could make $20 an hour in New Orleans hauling trees and debris, and then “All I have to do is pass the physical.”

Mind you, the point of this is not to make fun of this guy. The point is: if you have two arms and two legs—or let's just say you've got three out of four—it appears that there's work for you in New Orleans if you want it.

As long as you can pass the physical.

I am so sick of airports. At Reagan National in Washington, I plugged my computer into the wall to power it up so I could write on the flight and it was still in my suitcase and I walked away for a second to chat with a friend. By the time I returned—and we're talking four minutes here—a gate attendant had been notified by an edgy passenger about this and they were pondering the situation and I was no doubt about to be responsible for shutting down all domestic air travel for the day until I sheepishly claimed possession of this menacing tableau.

I do admit—now, looking back on it—that the power cord running into the suitcase might have looked a little suspicious. I think I'll power the thing up at home before I leave next time. Or maybe just sleep on the plane.

My first Katrina-induced travel was, of course, the evacuation. I marvel to this day how my magnificently chaotic family of five managed to straighten up our house, pack our bags, secure our home and belongings, and be on the road on three hours' notice—and have the clothes that we threw together in such a hurry sustain us for more than two weeks.

I suppose a Category 5 hurricane rearing up your backside is a compelling incentive for effective time management.

In our mundane pre-K life, it would usually take us four or five agonizing days to (over)pack for a simple long weekend at the beach, and on the first night, someone (me) was always bound to complain that they (I) forgot some key element of wardrobe so essential to my relaxation that in its absence the vacation was now ruined.

You think leisure traveling with me is a pain? If you really want some jollies, you should try hurricane evacuating with me to some crack hotel in Vicksburg—the kind of place where the tub in the bathroom has a series of yellow-brown cigarette burns along the edge. Those are family memories for a lifetime; like telling your kids they can't take off their shoes even when they're inside.

“No, James! Put down that dirty needle!”

(If you only knew how little I was exaggerating here.)

And who smokes in the tub anyway? I guess people who stay in crack hotels, I don't know.

But now my children are safe and sound in the very leafy and upscale Chevy Chase, Maryland. When I was visiting last weekend, there was an aluminum foil display in the newly converted playroom in my parents' house and I asked my wife what it was and she informed me that it was my daughter's science project for her Brownie troop.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“They're growing mold,” my wife said. Growing mold. If my New Orleans daughter doesn't get the blue ribbon for that project—the state prize, in fact—then there is no justice in this world.

Traveling back and forth to Maryland to visit my family in exile has turned into a ritualistic exercise in tragicomedy.

On the lighter side: before each journey, I check with my kids by phone to see what they need from our house in New Orleans.

Of course, they need everything, they tell me. Every toy, every article of clothing, every piece of furniture, everything that hangs on the walls, every piece of building material down to the studs.

“Itemize,” I urge them.

“Barbies,” they tell me.

“I can do that,” I tell them.

And so my chore began one afternoon, as I crouched and crawled into their secret places in our house—small, dark spaces I have never been in, places that are not hospitable to people larger than, say, a dorm refrigerator.

In the process, I discovered that there has been a population of approximately fifty Barbies living under my roof. I did not know this.

An absurd number, I was thinking, but then I remembered that I used to collect empty egg cartons when I was a kid and I probably had a couple hundred—a closet full of them—before my mother brought the hammer down on that curious little hobby of mine.

Truth is, I don't recall even the barest notion of why I collected egg cartons nor what I did with them. I just did. So who am I to tell my kids they have too many Barbies?

Let them be, I say. I mean, I turned out okay, right?

Don't answer that.

The other thing about our Barbies is that they are all naked. They lie in heaps and piles of tangled, plastic, not-quite-anatomically-correct nakedness—a truly discomfiting sight to a father who hopes to shield his children from any and all dissolute imagery, although I suspect a contemporary child would need to be at least thirteen before these tableaux would access the lurid pockets of the imagination.

My kids, they dress and undress their Barbies incessantly, obsessively, compulsively, but—at the end of the day—they are all naked. (The Barbies, not the kids.) They are bare canvases, so to speak, upon which to begin the next morning's sartorial exercises.