1 Dead in Attic (3 page)

Everybody here has a dead-guy story now. Everybody here will always be different.

I passed by the Valence Street Baptist Church and the facade was ripped away and I walked in and stared at the altar amid broken stained glass and strewn Bibles and I got down on my knees and said Thank you but why? why? why? and I'm not even anything close to Baptist.

It just seemed like a place to take shelter from the storm in my head.

The rockers on my neighbors' front porch are undisturbed, as if nothing ever happened. At my other neighbors' house—the ones who never take out their trash—a million kitchen bags are still piled in the mound that's always there and I never thought I'd be happy to see garbage, but I am.

Because it reminds me of my home.

I haven't been down in the kill zone yet. I haven't seen the waters. I haven't been where all hope, life, and property are lost.

I have only seen what I have seen, and we took the hit and it is still here. This is where we'll make our start. This is where we'll make our stand.

And when everything gets back to normal—whenever that may be—I'm going to do what I've been putting off for a very long time. I'm going to walk next door and tell my neighbors that they really do need to start taking out their trash.

They're telling the people they have to go. They're going door to door with rifles now.

They came to our little hovel on Laurel Street Uptown—a dozen heavily armed members of the California National Guard—they pounded on our door and wanted to know who we were.

We told them we were the newspaper, the Big City Daily. I admit, it doesn't look like the newsrooms you see on TV. I suppose if we wore shirts, we'd look more professional.

The Guard moved on, next door, next block. They're telling people they have to go.

It won't be easy. The people who stayed here have weathered ten days of unfathomable stench and fear, and if they haven't left yet, it seems unlikely that they're going to be willing now.

In a strange way, life just goes on for the remaining. In the dark and fetid Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas, an old woman I passed in the pet food aisle was wearing a house frock and puffy slippers and she just looked at me as she pushed her cart by and said, “How you doin', baby?”

As if it were just another afternoon buying groceries. I love the way strangers call you “baby” in this town.

Outside the store, there's an old guy who parks his old groaning car by the front door from sunup to sundown. There are extension cords running from his trunk into the store, which still has power—don't ask me how; I have no idea—and he watches TV in his front seat and drinks juice.

That is what he does, all day, every day.

At this point, I just can't see this guy leaving. I don't imagine he has any place else in the world but this.

And life goes on. Down on St. Claude Avenue, a tribe of survivors has blossomed at Kajun's Pub, where, incredibly, they have cold beer and cigarettes and a stereo playing Elvis and you'd think everything was in standard operating procedure but it is not: the Saturday-night karaoke has been suspended indefinitely.

The people here have a touch of Mad Max syndrome; they're using an old blue Cadillac for errands, and when parts fall off of it—and many parts have fallen off—they just throw them in the trunk.

Melvin, a bar owner from down the block, had the thing up for sale for $895, but he'll probably take the best offer now.

Melvin's Bar and Kajun's Pub have pooled their inventories to stay in business.

“We've blended our fortunes together,” said Renee dePonthieux, a bartender at Melvin's. “We carried everything we could down here, and we'll make the accounting later. What else are you gonna do? In case you haven't heard, Budweiser ain't delivering.”

A guy with a long goatee and multiple tattoos was covering a couple of aluminum foil pans of lasagna and carrying them up to the roof to cook them in the sun on the hot slate shingles.

Joann Guidos, the proprietor at Kajun's, called out for a game of bourré and they all dumped their money on a table and sat down and let the cards and liquor flow.

A National Guard truck pulled up and asked if they were ready to leave yet. Two guys standing out on the sidewalk in the company of pit bulls said, “Hell no.”

DePonthieux said, “We're the last fort on the edge of the wilderness. My family's been in exile for three hundred years; this ain't shit.”

I just don't see these people leaving.

Uptown, on what was once a shady street, a tribe is living in a beautiful home owned by a guy named Peanut. There are a seaplane in his driveway, a bass boat in the front yard, and generators running the power.

Let's just say they were prepared.

All the men wear pistols in visible holsters. They have the only manicured lawn in the city. What else is there to do all afternoon, really?

Christine Paternostro is a member of this tribe, an out-of-work hairstylist from Supercuts in a city where no one shaves or bathes. Not many prospects for her at this point.

“Everyone will need a haircut when this is over,” I offered.

While members of this tribe stood talking on their street, a woman came running out of the house, yelling, “Y'all, come quick. We on WWL! We on WWL!”

Everyone ran in the house and watched a segment about how people are surviving in the city. And these guys are doing just that. (Although I think the airplane in the driveway is a little over the top.)

As I was leaving, the WWL woman asked me, “Are you staying for dinner?”

I was not, but I asked what they were having. “Tuna steaks,” she said. “Grilled.”

If and when they rebuild this city and we all get to come home, I want to live near people like this. I just can't imagine them ever leaving.

They make me wonder if I ever could.

You hear the word “surreal” in every report from this city now. There is no better word for it.

If Salvador Dalí showed up here, he wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. Nobody could paint this.

He did that famous painting of the melting clock, and our clocks melted at 6:45 the morning of August 29. That's what the clocks in the French Quarter still say. That's when time stood still.

The Quarter survived all this; you've probably heard that much. Most of what remains unscathed—and I'm using a very relative term here—is a swath of dry land from the Riverbend through Audubon Park, down St. Charles and Tchoupitoulas to the Quarter and into the Bywater.

It's like a landmass the size of Bermuda, maybe, but with not so many golf courses.

There are other dry outposts in the great beyond—little Key Wests across the city—but I haven't seen them.

The weather is beautiful, I don't mind telling you. But if I wrote you a postcard, it wouldn't say, “Wish you were here.”

There are still hearty rosebushes blooming on front porches, and there are still birds singing in the park. But the park is a huge National Guard encampment.

There are men and women from other towns living there in tents who have left their families to come help us, and they are in the park clearing out the fallen timber. My fellow Americans.

Every damn one of them tells you they're happy to be here (despite what you've heard, it still beats the hell out of Fallujah), and every time I try to thank them, on behalf of all of us, I just lose it. I absolutely melt down.

There is nothing quite as ignominious as weeping in front of a soldier.

This is no environment for a wuss like me. We reporters go to other places to cover wars and disasters and pestilence and famine. There's no manual to tell you how to do this when it's your own city.

And I'm telling you: it's hard.

It's hard not to get crispy around the edges. It's hard not to cry. It's hard not to be very, very afraid.

My colleagues who are down here are warriors. There are a half dozen of us living in a small house on a side street Uptown. Everyone else has been cleared out.

We have a generator and water and military food rations and Doritos and smokes and booze. After deadline, the call goes out: “Anyone for some warm brown liquor?” And we sit on the porch in the very, very still of the night and we try to laugh.

Some of these guys lost their houses—everything in them. But they're here, telling our city's story.

And they stink. We all stink. We stink together.

We have a bunch of guns, but it's not clear to me if anyone in this “news bureau” knows how to use them.

The California National Guard came by and wanted an accounting of every weapon in the building and they wrote the serial numbers down and apparently our guns are pretty rad because they were all cooing over the .38s.

I guess that's good to know.

The Guard wanted to know exactly what we had so they would be able to identify, apparently by sound, what guns were in whose hands if anything “went down” after dark here at this house.

That's not so good to know.

They took all our information and bid us a good day and then sauntered off to retrieve a dead guy from a front porch down the street.

Then the California Highway Patrol—the CHiPs!—came and demanded that we turn over our weapons.

What are you going to do? We were certainly outnumbered, so we turned over the guns. Then, an hour later, they brought them back. With no explanation.

Whatev. So here we are. Just another day at the office.

Maybe you've seen that
Times-Picayune
advertising slogan before: “News, Sports and More.”

More indeed. You're getting your money's worth today.

Amid the devastation, you have to look for hope. Forward progress of any kind.

Even the smallest incidents of routine and normalcy become reassuring. For instance, I was driving down Prytania, and at the corner of Felicity, the light turned red.

Out of nowhere, in total desolation, there was a working stoplight. I would have been less surprised to find a Blockbuster Video on Mars.

And the funny thing is, I stopped. I waited for it to turn green, and then I drove slowly on my way, even though there were no other cars anywhere and the likelihood of getting a ticket for running the only traffic signal in town seems very unlikely right now.

Considering.

Also on Prytania, there was a gardener watering the plants on the porch of Nicolas Cage's mansion, and I guess that's a good sign. Life goes on. In very small ways.

The toilets flush now, and I never thought that would be a sound of reassurance. Even better was finding out that WWOZ is broadcasting on the Web—radio in exile—laying out its great New Orleans music.

That's important. I have no idea from where they're operating or which disc jockeys are spinning the discs, but I can tell you this: The first time I hear Billy Dell's
Records from the Crypt
on the radio again, I will kiss the dirty ground beneath my feet.

On Friday, you started to see guys with brooms cleaning Canal Street and Convention Center Boulevard. Up until then, any tidying up required a backhoe, a crane, or a Bobcat.

God only knows where they're going to put all this garbage, all this rubble, all these trees, but they're gathering it up all the same.

The streets of the French Quarter, absent the rubble of the CBD, basically look and smell the same as they do the day after Mardi Gras, except with no broken strands of beads in the gutter.

Okay, maybe it was a real windy Mardi Gras, but you get the point.

It just needs a little face-lift, a little sweeping up, and a good hard rain to wash away . . . all the bad stuff.

A counterpoint to that scene would be Uptown on Broadway—Fraternity Row—where the street is actually cleaner than usual, and that's because the fine young men and women of our universities had not yet settled into their early-semester routines of dragging living room furniture out onto their front yards and drinking Red Bull and vodka to while away their youth.

I wonder where all of them are. When this is over, who will go there and who will teach there?

What will happen to us?

One thing's for sure, our story is being told.

The satellite trucks stretch for eight blocks on Canal Street and call to mind an event like the Super Bowl or the Republican National Convention.

It's a strange place. Then again, anywhere that more than ten news reporters gather becomes a strange place by default.

I saw Anderson Cooper interviewing Dr. Phil. And while Cooper's CNN camera crew filmed Dr. Phil, Dr. Phil's camera crew filmed Cooper, and about five or six other camera crews from other shows and networks stood to the side and filmed all of that.

By reporting this scene, I have become the media covering the media covering the media.

It all has the surrealistic air of a Big Event, what with Koppel and Geraldo and all those guys wandering around in their Eddie Bauer hunting vests, and impossibly tall and thin anchorwomen from around the region powdering their faces and teasing their hair so they look good when they file their latest report from Hell.

“And today in New Orleans . . . blah blah blah.”

Today in New Orleans, a traffic light worked. Someone watered flowers. And anyone with the means to get online could have heard Dr. John's voice wafting in the dry wind, a sound of grace, comfort, and familiarity here in the saddest, loneliest place in the world.

It's a start.

The slightest rain fell here Thursday morning.

You know, the kind of New Orleans rain that just gives everything a light coat and sheen, that tamps down the dust of the old shell roads and washes down the oyster stink in the French Quarter gutters and slicks up all the playground equipment and makes New Orleans smell—is it possible?—so fresh. So southern.