1 Dead in Attic (2 page)

I got a book deal, a movie deal, a Pulitzer Prize, dinner with Ted Koppel, and a mention in the social column of
The Washington Times.
If that ain't Making The Grade, then I don't know what is.

Natural disasters are a good career move for a man in my line of work.

But you didn't have to lose your house, your car, your dog, your job, your marriage, or your grandparents in an attic to suffer the impact of this storm. Unfortunately, most folks around south Louisiana and Mississippi did lose some or all of this.

Others lost less tangible assets: their peace of mind, security, serenity, ability to concentrate, notions of romance, sobriety, sanity, and hope.

The toll it took on me is in the book; I'll not belabor it here other than to say Katrina beat the shit out of me. It beat the shit out of everyone I know. This is our story.

•  •  •

In the winter of 2006, I self-published a collection of my post-Katrina columns from
The Times-Picayune
, a slim volume of love letters to New Orleans, howls of protest, cries for help, and general musings on the surrealistic absurdities of life in a post-Apocalyptic landscape.

I called it
1 Dead in Attic
, a phrase I saw painted on the front of a house in the city's 8th Ward; words that haunted me then, and haunt me still.

Within six months, I ran through five printings of the book, collected great reviews from publications large and small, and sold 65,000 copies. I'm a neophyte in the world of independent publishing, but I'm told that's a real good number for a self-published volume. In fact, it's a good number for any volume.

And that's how the book came to attention of Simon & Schuster. I was preparing a follow-up to
1 Dead in Attic
, another collection of stories that I was going to call
The Purple Upside-Down Car
, a declarative observation my four-year-old son made from our car during a tour of the Lower 9th Ward that I clung to as the perfect metaphor for the whole of New Orleans and not just some wasted, toppled vehicle lying in a field of debris down on—get this—Flood Street.

The irony in this place could kill you.

Simon & Schuster bought the rights to
1 Dead in Attic
and the as-yet-unpublished
Purple Upside-Down Car
and we put them together and that's what you're holding in your hands. Faced with two titles but only one book, we went with the former because it already has brand recognition and because, well . . . the other one kind of sounds precariously like a Dr. Suess book.

This book takes the reader up to New Year's Day, 2007. A lot has happened since then, to the city, to me. On the eve of publication, I split with my wife of eleven years and went to rehab for an addiction to prescription painkillers, which I turned to in my ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression.

It would be easy to lay this blood on the hands of Katrina, though there is more, much more, to the story.

There always is.

But I guess that's the next chapter, the next story. The next book.

—Chris Rose

New Orleans, June, 2007

Dear America,

I suppose we should introduce ourselves: we're South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we were never much for waiting around for invitations. We're not much on formalities like that.

And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn't ask for this and neither did we, so we're just going to have to make the best of it.

First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses, and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals, and everyone else who has come to our rescue.

We're a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don't cotton much to outside interference, but we're not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.

Just don't get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don't try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters.

We're not going to listen. We're stubborn that way.

You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you'd probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.

We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't.

But we'll try not to judge you while we're in your town.

Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love south Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on the pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.

Often we don't make sense. You may wonder why, for instance, if we could carry only one small bag of belongings with us on our journey to your state—why in God's name did we bring a pair of shrimp boots?

We can't really explain that. It is what it is.

You've probably heard that many of us stayed behind. As bad as it is, many of us cannot fathom a life outside our border, out in that place we call Elsewhere.

The only way you could understand that is if you have been there, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and bars and parades and music and architecture and all that hooey, really, the best thing about where we come from is us.

We are what made this place a national treasure. We're good people. And don't be afraid to ask us how to pronounce our names. It happens all the time.

When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts
are broken into a thousand pieces.

But don't pity us. We're gonna make it. We're resilient. After all, we've been rooting for the Saints for thirty-five years. That's got to count for something.

Okay, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.

But what the hell.

And one more thing: In our part of the country, we're used to having visitors. It's our way of life.

So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer us in this season of our despair.

That is our promise. That is our faith.

I got out.

I'm mystified by the notion that so many people didn't even try; but that's another story for another time.

We left Saturday, my wife, kids, and me. We went first to Picayune, Mississippi, thinking that a Category 3 storm would flood New Orleans and knock out power, but that we'd be dry and relatively comfortable in the piney woods while the city dried out.

Sunday morning, of course, Katrina was a massive red blob on our TV screens—now a Cat 5—so we packed up and left again.

We left my in-laws behind in Picayune. They wouldn't come with us. Self-sufficient country folk; sometimes you can't tell 'em nothing.

We don't know what happened to them. My wife's dad and her brother and their families: No word. Only hope.

Like so many people around the country wondering what happened to those still unaccounted for, we just don't know. That's the hardest part.

If you take the images you've seen on TV and picked up off the radio and Internet, and you try to apply what you know to the people and places you don't know about, well, the mind starts racing, assumptions are made, and, well . . . it consumes you.

The kids ask you questions. You don't have answers. Sometimes they look at me, and though they don't say it, I can see they're wondering: Daddy, where are you?

My six-year-old daughter, she's onto this thing. What is she thinking?

We spent Sunday night in a no-tell motel in a forgotten part of downtown Vicksburg; a neighborhood teetering between a familiar antiquated charm and hopeless decay. Truth is, it called to mind my beloved New Orleans.

Most of the folks in the hotel seemed to live there permanently, and it had a hard-luck feel to it. It was the kind of place where your legs start itching in the bed and you think the worst and you don't want your kids to touch the carpet or the tub and we huddled together and I read them to sleep.

Monday morning, my wife's aunt told us they had a generator in Baton Rouge. As Katrina marched north and east, we bailed on our sullen little hotel and drove down along the western ridge of the storm, mostly alone on the road.

Gas was no problem. We had catfish and pulled pork in a barbecue joint in Natchez, and the folks there—everyone we have met along our three-day journey—said the same thing: Good luck, folks. We love your city. Take care of it for us.

Oh, my city. We have spent hours and hours listening to the radio. Image upon image piling up in your head.

What about school? What about everyone's jobs? Did all our friends get out? Are there still trees on the streetcar line? What will our economy be like with no visitors? How many are dead? Do I have a roof? Have the looters found me yet? When can we go home?

As I said, it consumes you as you sit helplessly miles from home, unable to help anyone, unable to do anything.

If I could, what I'd do first is hurt the looters. I'd hurt them bad.

But you have to forget all that. You have to focus on what is at hand, what you can reach, and when you have three little kids lost at sea, they are what's at hand and what you can reach.

I took them to a playground in Baton Rouge Tuesday afternoon. They'd been bottled up for days.

Finally unleashed, they ran, they climbed, they fell down, they fought, they cried, they made me laugh, they drove me crazy; they did the things that make them kids.

It grounds you. You take a breath. You count to ten. Maybe—under the circumstances—you go to twenty or thirty this time.

And tonight, we'll just read them to sleep again.

We have several books with us because—and this is rich—we brought on our evacuation all the clothes and things we planned to bring on a long-weekend trip that we were going to take over Labor Day weekend.

To the beach. To Fort Morgan, right at the mouth of Mobile Bay.

Man.

Instead of that, I put on my suntan lotion and went out in the yard of the house where we're staying in Baton Rouge and I raked a massive pile of leaves and limbs from the yard and swept the driveway.

Doing yard work and hitting the jungle gym on the Day After. Pretending life goes on. Just trying to stay busy. Just trying not to think. Just trying not to fail, really.

Gotta keep moving.

The first time you see it . . . I don't know. Where are the words?

I got to town Monday afternoon. I braced myself, not knowing how it would make me feel, not knowing how much it would make me hurt.

I found out that I am one of the lucky ones. High ground. With that come gratitude and wonder and guilt. The Higher Powers have handed me my house and all my stuff, and now what? What is there?

I live Uptown, where all the fancy-pants houses are, and they're all still here. Amid the devastation, they never looked so beautiful. They never looked more like hope. This swath of land is where this city will begin its recovery.

There are still homes and schools, playgrounds, stores, bars, and restaurants. Not so many trees, I'm afraid. We'll have to do something about that.

The Circle K near my house was looted, but there are still ample supplies of cigarettes and booze. They just took what they needed. The hardware store and Perlis—the preppy clothing store—same thing.

Someone kicked in the window at Shoefty, a high-end shoe boutique, and what good a pair of Manolo Blahnik stilettos is going to do you right now, I don't know.

Idiots.

I myself was escorted out of the local Winn-Dixie by narcotics officers from Rusk County, Texas.

I told them I thought it was okay to take what we need. “And what do you need?” the supervisor asked me. I reached into my bag and held up a bottle of mouthwash.

I told him I will come back to this Winn-Dixie one day and pay for this bottle, and I will. I swear it.

Right by the entrance to the store, there is a huge pile of unsold newspapers stacked up from the last day they were delivered, Sunday, August 28.

The Times-Picayune
headline screams:
KATRINA TAKES AIM
.

Ain't that the truth? Funny, though: The people you see here—and there are many who stayed behind—they never speak her name. She is the woman who done us wrong.

I had the strangest dream last night, and this is true: I dreamt I was reading an ad in the paper for a hurricane-relief benefit concert at Zephyr Field and the headliner act was Katrina and the Waves.

They had that peppy monster hit back in the '80s, “Walking on Sunshine,” the one they play on Claritin ads on TV and that almost seems funny in light of what happened.

Almost.

Riding my bike, I searched out my favorite places, my comfort zones. I found that Tipitina's is still there, and that counts for something. Miss Mae's and Dick & Jenny's, ditto.

Domilise's po-boy shop is intact, although the sign fell and shattered, but the truth is, that sign needed to be replaced a long time ago.

I saw a dead guy on the front porch of a shotgun double on a working-class street, and the only sound was wind chimes.