1 Dead in Attic (23 page)

Davis's flock is largely scattered, from Houston to Atlanta and everywhere in between. He figures about a third are here in town but the church has had no services yet, so he can't be sure. The church's drum set, sheet music, and Bibles are stacked all around him in the yard and he works every day, getting it fixed, getting it ready.

“You know, when I first came back here [in November], it seemed that there was no hope,” he said, and that's a serious problem for a man who makes his living dispensing hope.

“But looking at it through the eyes of faith, I see that there is progress. Just to see a red light function, I rejoice. A gas station opens, a grocery store opens—I rejoice. I rejoice at the small things. They give us hope.”

On the second Sunday in July, Davis is going to send a brass band into the neighborhood to gather the people and lead them back to the church. Then he will conduct the New Light's first service since August.

Now there's cause to rejoice. For hope. For new light, indeed.

Tarantolo—the Organ Doctor—mostly smiles and says very little. Finally, I say to him, “Organ Doctor? You must hear every stupid joke in the world.”

“I've heard some good ones,” he tells me. Then he pauses. “But not in the presence of a minister, please.”

•  •  •

When you're on a bike, you notice all the other people on bikes. At the corner of Robertson and Desire, where the bus used to take a left into the flatlands of the Upper 9th, I ask a fellow rider where the closest place is to get a cold drink.

I have a feeling—which would prove to be true—that once I head toward the lake, there will be no open businesses.

He sends me on a detour down to St. Claude, and then he rides up alongside me, asks if I'm from the neighborhood. I tell him no and ask the same of him.

“I'm from the Lower 9,” he tells me, “but I'm staying by here since I got back to town. I was only one block from where they blew up the levee, and if it wasn't for a Bobcat tire, I wouldn't be talking to you right now.

“I can't swim—couldn't swim from me to you right now to save my life. I was trapped in an alley, and a Bobcat tire floated up and I grabbed it and floated out and then saved two other people with it. We got to a rooftop and then got out.”

Everybody here has a story. New Orleans was always a place where people talked too much even if they had nothing to say.

Now everyone's got something to say.

As we part, the man asks me, “Got fifty cents?” I reach in my pocket, find seventy-five, and give it to him.

•  •  •

Back on the bus route, riding up Desire, more wasteland. You know the drill: Piles of household debris. The occasional FEMA trailer. All the houses bearing the inscription of our loss, the Xs and Os, like morbid football plays, painted on the weatherboards and doors.

It's third and long. Very long.

At the improbably named Bunny Friend Playground, two federally contracted security officers—one from California, one from North Carolina—sit in lawn chairs under a makeshift shade cover.

They tell me the job is pretty easy. The California guy tells me, “We heard this neighborhood used to be pretty bad, but it's all good now. All the trouble is Uptown these days.”

Bunny Friend, like so many other playgrounds in the city, is paved over with stones. It doesn't exactly exude neighborhood warmth, no family-friendly vibe from all these pristine trailers crammed together like cell blocks.

Not much of a place to raise kids, but it is what it is. There's a brand-new playground set in the corner of the lot. That's a start, I guess.

At the corner of Desire and North Miro, Georgiana Mitchell sits on her stoop finishing off a cheeseburger and a Coke. Her nephew is gutting her house.

“It used to stop right here in front of my house,” she says of the bus named Desire. She rode it for thirty-one years, as the dining room manager of Le Pavillon Hotel and also as a salad maker at Antoine's restaurant.

She's retired now. Trying to get back in, get back home. Thieves recently made off with what little survived the flood.

“My crystal, my mama's china,” she says. “They took it off the porch.” She pauses. “We thought we had lost everything anyway—before we found it—so I guess it doesn't matter.”

She gives me a look that says: It matters.

Her family, all of whom lived within three blocks of this corner, have spread as far as Hammond, Houston, and Atlanta. They're not coming back. But she wants to.

“I just love New Orleans,” she says. “It gets into your blood. I'm seventy years old, and I thought at this point in my life I'd just be out here in the yard fooling with my sunflowers and rosebushes and going to the Wal-Mart. That's what I was going to do.”

And now, this.

“Look at my grass. I can't believe there's no Saint Aug at all! Let me tell you: when you come by here someday and see all the pretty grass and all the pretty flowers, you will know I am back.”

•  •  •

Further up Desire, there's a boat on the side of the road, right where the flood deposited it. It's a Scottie Craft, about fifteen feet long. It's called
Zombie.

Perfect.

A shirtless, heavily tattooed guy with a Billy Idol haircut, rocker shades, and pierced nipples is gutting a house. He's the only white guy on the block—in the whole neighborhood, for that matter.

His name is Eli. He's a general maintenance man at the tony Bombay Club in the Quarter, and he tells me, “I'm the only one around here who's not related by blood or marriage. But it's a good place. Historically, it's not a bad neighborhood. It's a poor neighborhood, and crime tends to gather in poor neighborhoods. But it's pretty quiet now. That's for sure.”

He cooks on a wood fire in the front yard and had been sleeping in a tent there until the woman across the street got power and now he runs an orange extension cord across the street to power a fan so he can sleep.

“I went from having $200,000 worth of material possessions to what was in two duffel bags,” he tells me. “I had my pity party, but you dust off and say, all right, it's time to rebuild. The family that lives on this block, they're all coming back. You can see: it's the only clean block around here. We're going to turn this little block into a Garden of Eden in the middle of Hell.”

It does get hellish up the block, toward where the big Desire housing development used to cast a gloom over the whole area until it was torn down. Now it's all empty fields and empty hair salons and juke joints and grocery stores; that smell.

The rats have become legend around here. Someone tells me the firemen come by and shoot the rats with paint guns, but I don't know if I believe that.

Here at Desire and Florida, the bus used to head down to Mazant Street and start its loop back downtown.

•  •  •

At Mazant and North Galvez, a stunning spectacle breaks the pale and dusty horizon. A man has moved himself and what few belongings he has left onto an abandoned corner lot, and, in the process, he has become a bona fide Southern Gothic art installation.

He has positioned broken cars, trucks, and barrels around himself as a perimeter. Yard umbrellas and tarps make his shade, and flags and mirrors and stuffed animals and plastic flowers and just plain stuff, lots of random stuff, are scattered throughout, making for a strange oasis.

It's a junkyard, but an artful junkyard.

The man says, “I am Willie Gordon, sixty-four years old, 1425 Egania Street.” He says this as though he says it a lot, and from the Superdome to Houston to a series of Texas hospitals to FEMA to the Red Cross and everybody else, he has.

He says to me: “That's
Egania.
Do you know how to spell that?”

I tell him I do. He pauses. Says, “You know, I lived there for eighteen years and just learned how to spell it six months ago.”

He's a truck driver by trade, an eccentric by birth, and, from the look of all the empty bottles on the premises, a drinker.

“I'm the Special Man!” he tells me.

Egania is in the Lower 9th. His house is still there, but he says he's afraid to go back.

“The water . . . ,” he begins, and he tells an hourlong story about the water rising around his car and his long walk through it and the surgeries for the infections he got from it and the cabdriver in Houston who scammed him of his money, and the story, which began as a mirthful exposition, takes him from playful wisecracker to the depths of human sorrow and he begins to sob.

It's hot outside. Hot as hell. I don't know what to say to this guy. “I'm shook up,” he says. “I'm scared. I'm sixty-four years old, and I am alone. What am I going to do?”

He has big gold earrings like a genie would wear. He was wearing boxers when I arrived, but he has put his pants on now.

A guy in a muscle T-shirt rides up on one of those too-small bicycles that gang-banger types favor and he starts to sing: “Dun-dun, DAH-dah! Dun-dun, DAH-dah-dah-dah-dah.”

It's the theme from
Sanford and Son.
The guy on the bike asks, “What's up, Fred?” and Willie Gordon gives a good-natured howl in response. The guy looks at me and asks, “Where y'at, Lamont?” Then he rides away, his laughter echoing in the canyon of broken houses.

A man across the street, on a cell phone, yells into it, “What do you want from me?”

Willie Gordon looks at me and says, “Women.”

•  •  •

The bus used to roll down Mazant, which matches Desire in its presentation: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The route turns right on Claiborne to head back downtown, and along this stretch, volunteers from Common Ground are gutting houses.

On the street, folks around here tell you they trust white people more than they used to because of all the help from Common Ground and groups like it. It's kind of weird, but almost all the volunteers you see working in the 9th Ward—upper and lower—are white.

Young and white, from out of town, dressed in space suits, and doused in patchouli, gutting out the ruins of a city they never knew.

The route runs past the recently refurbished Stewart's Diner, where the mayor, the governor, and the president stopped for lunch one day in March. Bush had red beans and rice with potato salad, smoked sausage, veggie.

On the menu, it's called the President's Special now. Served five days a week. $8.50.

I ride my bike, my big red bike, down Claiborne and under the interstate where a million cars are waiting to be carted off. The tires are missing off a lot of them. Those are just about the only salvageable parts on the waterlogged auto farm, and in a town where everyone gets a flat tire once a month, they are no negligible commodity, those tires.

I ride by the newly opened Cajun Fast Food To Go, operated by Asians and patronized by African Americans, and isn't that a New Orleans story?

•  •  •

Back at the corner of Elk and Canal, the bus named Desire would have finished its run. But it doesn't run anymore, so I look at the buses that are here, loading and unloading passengers, and I see on the marquee scroll on the front of a bus, in those letters made from green dots of light:
SULLEN
.

This bus goes to Algiers. To Sullen Place, to be exact. And I am astounded.

The bus named Sullen instead of Desire, and what is there to say?

Taking stock of things, that's pretty damn funny.

I drove down Louisville Street in Lakeview the other evening, one of the Avenues of Despair that I have incorporated into my regular rounds of the city as I seek out the progress of our recovery.

I have several friends who lived here. One of them had not mucked out or gutted his house since it soaked in its own sewage last fall and, rather than take offense at the disaster tourism phenomenon that abounds in our region, he welcomed visitors—friends and strangers alike—to enter his home and experience the full sensory shock of what happened here.

To walk into this foul and infected house and gaze upon the domestic carnage was, in many ways, a more effective storytelling device than driving past miles and miles of wretched and abandoned exteriors. The eyes burn, the breath shortens, and the weight of lost history, memory, and family is crushing.

“Imagine if you came home to this,” I used to tell my visitors.

This week, my friend James had that house—where he had lived for fourteen years and raised two sons—torn down. He left work one morning to witness the act with his wife. He bought sodas and ice cream from a passing truck for the work crew, went to Subway for lunch, and then went back to work.

Three blocks down Louisville, I drove past my friend A.J.'s house. His block was nearly pristine, having been recently mucked, weeded, and scrubbed out by one of the legions of young-volunteer groups who have come from elsewhere to aid our city in its distress.

Across the street from his house, a woman and her daughter were sweeping the sidewalk. They have already moved back in. She asked me for A.J.'s phone number and called him right then—he's in Covington now—to invite him to a neighborhood get-together, a gathering of souls and survivors to commemorate just being alive.

Next to A.J.'s house, I was taken aback by the spectacle of a house in transformation; it had been raised that afternoon on giant piers, looming above the shoulders of a profoundly cheerful woman who stood in her yard, planted her hands on her hips, regarded me, and asked, “Whaddya think?”

What do I think? I think she's crazy. Bonkers. Stark raving mad. That's what I think.

But what I wanted to tell her was that I loved her. I wanted to hug her. And what I said was “Looks great!” and I continued on my journey, strangely comforted by what I have come to consider the nearly delusional optimism of our populace. Life gives you lemons? Make icebox pie.