1 Dead in Attic (22 page)

Funny thing is, I have been noticing all the sunflowers popping up in random locations.

“Maybe that's a good omen,” he said.

The other day, my kid's grade school principal said to me, “The magnolia trees around here are amazing. They're so broken and battered, yet they're blooming like crazy.”

There are your metaphors, if you're looking for some. Flowers. Those time-tested symbols from art and literature of hope, beauty, youth, and rebirth.

Let's hope they're not all false promise. Let's hope they're telling our story. Let's hope we've got what they've got.

All I wanted was a piano. I did not seek a reality check or a meaningful moment or a story to tell in these pages.

I just wanted a lousy piano, that's all.

My editor had said: You need a break, take a day off from Katrina; go do something to forget.

He recommended gardening—digging dirt and pulling weeds—for that's what had cleared his head of the malaise that had stalked him the weekend before.

Indeed, my yard desperately needs attendance. But I'm not as interested in yard work as I used to be, or golf or cooking, and I realize that losing interest in your hobbies is a bad sign, but I reasoned that replacing old hobbies with new hobbies would be a sure way to end-run the case of the mean reds that hunts me.

Fool the mind to save the body.

Several weeks ago, I sat down at a piano at a friend's house with a resolve to learn it and within an hour realized that I had found a new salve.

I was terrible, of course, but the ease with which I coaxed out a few simple melodies delighted me. A natural? Far from it. But, like Stella, I just want to get my groove back. A piano, I thought, would help.

I had no idea where to get one. I wanted something simple and compact. A modest electric model would do.

In the yellow pages I came upon the Bitsie Werlein Piano Company in Metairie.

Surely you know the name. The Werlein family opened their first music store in New Orleans in the mid–nineteenth century, and there has been a store operating under their name—first on Canal Street and then on Veterans Memorial Boulevard—ever since, with only one interruption for the Civil War.

When the family closed the Vets flagship store three years ago, Bitsie started her smaller operation around the corner on Severn Avenue.

I guess I am still sometimes fairly naive about the scope and distance of the flooding that occurred in Jefferson Parish—and in other places, actually. It seems that you can drive and drive and drive in all directions and never find the end of it.

But I didn't realize until I pulled into the parking lot of the somewhat nondescript shopping center that housed Bitsie Werlein's shop on Severn that her pianos had marinated for weeks in Katrina Stew.

The store was vacant and closed.

I stood there looking through a storefront window at empty space. First it took the Civil War. Then, 140 years later, it took a fierce wind coupled with government incompetence to shut Werlein down. Cue Joan Baez: “The night they drove ol' Dixie down . . .”

I tracked Bitsie Werlein down. I wanted to know what had become of her. I apologized for bothering her at home.

“That's all right,” she said. “My customers, they find me. Even when I was evacuated, they managed to find me. You know, when most of my customers leave my store,” she added, apropos of nothing, “they usually kiss me good-bye. That's the way the piano business is.”

She said her longtime staff is scattered to the wind but she will open—alone—sometime, some place, down the road.

“We were like family, but things aren't the same anymore,” she said. “It's been a long haul, but I am finding my way anew. I will be re-established.”

When? Who knows? Where? Who knows? Like everything else around here, it's a work in progress.

I hung up the phone. Stared into windows. I came for a piano and instead got a sad song. So I went back to the phone book, where I found the Hall Piano Company on David Drive.

The Hall Piano Company was not affected by the wind or the water. I just wanted to get inside the air-conditioned showroom and bend my head over some keyboards and forget, to lose myself into music and otherness.

I was in the digital piano studio in the back when another customer pointed out to the salesman, “That's the one! It was just like that. That's the one she used to have.”

Good God, it's following me, I thought.

I looked at the customer, the man. He wore the vacant and pained expression of the tribe we all belong to—the Elders of Loss. This guy was here, in a piano store, trying to put back the pieces of his family's life, and one of those pieces was a piano.

And then I realized, or wondered, actually: How many pianos? How many were destroyed? Thousands upon thousands, I suppose.

Like everything else.

Watching the dynamic of the Hall Piano Company, I suddenly realized you can drive around enough to get away from the brown waterline but you can't escape the storm no matter where you go. Welcome to the Hotel California.

Here, inside this pristine showroom, a bunch of guys in shirts and ties who simply used to sell pianos now have a new job description: grief counselors.

“Everyone who walks in here has the same story, but it's a different story—if you know what I mean,” sales manager John Wright told me. “I mean, there's always a twist to it.”

It starts with the piano, of course. It was the grandmother's, back in that old house she had in Gentilly, and then she moved to Chalmette, gosh, back in the '60s, and then she died, and, well . . . it was in our house in Lakeview when, you know . . . when it all happened . . .

Then come the stories of everything that happened around that piano for the past fifty years, and wrapped inside the small story of a piano are the larger stories of lost homes and scattered families and dreams torn down and everything just . . . sorrow.

Watching folks buy pianos at Hall's, you'd think they were selecting a casket in a funeral home, so filled with grief and remembrance they are.

“Pianos are like members of the family,” Wright says. “They've been part of the family forever, a centerpiece of their lives. Even if it just sits over in the corner against the wall, it's always been there, usually longer than any other piece of furniture in the house.”

So the guys at Hall Piano listen to the stories, as all of us—postmen, pharmacists, waitresses, barbers, UPS guys, meter readers, coffee shop clerks, real estate agents, reporters—listen to the stories. That's all of our jobs now, because all anyone really wants—all anyone really needs around here—is to have someone listen to their stories.

The same story, but different.

“People really get attached to their pianos,” Wright says. “I'm willing to guess that when someone walks into Best Buy to replace the fifty-four-inch plasma TV they lost in the flood, they don't pull out pictures of their old TV to show to the salesman. We get that all the time.”

Me, I just wanted a piano. And so I got it and, obviously, much, much more. It's a Yamaha P-140. It's nice. Nothing fancy.

At night, I stare at the keys, try to look inside the machine, to see if I can find a song, a melody, even just a slight phrasing that's not about all this. I sit at my new piano and try to remember how to tell a story about something else.

And nothing comes. Not a single note.

Every day is a matter of taking stock. Ten months after The Thing, you still look around to see what is here and what is not here anymore.

Every day, it seems, you can find something missing. While following the ongoing financial drama of the New Orleans transit system, I discovered that the city's most (in)famous bus line is defunct.

The bus named Desire is no more. It ran its last route on Sunday, August 28. When the Regional Transit Authority rolled back to life last winter, the Desire route was not among the resuscitated lines.

With last week's announcement that the Feds will pick up the tab for limited bus service until November, it's unlikely Desire will roll anytime soon, if ever again.

And so goes a small and curious piece of the city's history.

•  •  •

The New Orleans Railway & Light Company debuted the streetcar named Desire in 1920. The Tennessee Williams play
A Streetcar Named Desire
opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947. The real streetcar ran its last route in New Orleans almost six months later, on May 30, 1948.

The bus that replaced it more or less followed the same route, from the vast 9th Ward residential sprawl to the Quarter via Decatur Street. Legions of restaurant and hotel workers relied on it for decades.

A few years ago, Desire's route was shifted and its traditional route through the Bywater, Marigny, and French Quarter was streamlined into a straight shot from the 9th Ward to Canal Street via Claiborne Avenue.

I decided to retrace the route of the final bus named Desire this week by foot and bicycle. I don't really know what I was looking for. Maybe a glimpse of history, or maybe just to see what's out there in the city now that everything is different.

Maybe I was just taking stock.

•  •  •

The bus named Desire's official departure point was the corner of Elk Place and Canal, the nexus for a huge portion of the RTA fleet; buses headed Uptown, to the East, to Kenner, and to the West Bank all stop here.

There's a statue on the neutral ground at this spot where all the buses converge. It was made by the New Orleans sculptor Enrique Alferez in 1943. It's a tribute to the women of war, called
Molly Marine,
and she is one tough broad.

But no one ever seems to notice her. She's just so much landscape, like the untended shrubbery and the busted marquee of the Downtown Joy Theatre or all the pay phones on the wall that nobody uses anymore. Invisible.

The bus named Desire would head west on Elk, then right on Tulane Avenue to Claiborne. It passed under the shadow of Charity Hospital, another institution gone with the wind and water.

The first thing you notice at the corner of Tulane and Claiborne are the waterlines on the walls. On Desire's outgoing route, the water was thigh high. Across the street—a stretch of dead zone under the interstate—it's at shoulder level.

The second thing that strikes you, heading down Claiborne past Canal and into the desolate stretch between the auto pound and the back of the old cemeteries, is the litter.

Everywhere. Every five feet, within every rotation of the bicycle wheel, within every step.

It's not storm debris. It's litter. Trash. A discarded hardpack of Kool menthols, an empty bottle of Bacardi, a bag of Doritos, a Styrofoam takeout container, napkins, envelopes, on and on and everywhere, the ubiquitous tumbleweed of downtown New Orleans.

You wonder: How can people contentedly settle into a life surrounded by their own detritus? It's a sociopathy I have never understood.

•  •  •

It's June and it's hot and most of the activity on the streets, sidewalks, yards, and rooftops is repair crews, fixing what Katrina hath destroyed. The sounds of jackhammers and generators and that ubiquitous pneumatic
tat-tat-tat
of roofing nail guns; this is the music of the summer of 2006, the sound of a city putting itself back together.

Down Claiborne, I pass a couple of indie hip-hop record company offices and hair extension salons and Club Fabulous and Ernie K-Doe's Mother-in-Law Lounge, where six freshly glazed cast-iron bathtubs full of newly planted flowers line the sidewalk.

I pass two old men sitting on their stoops, one white, one black. Their imperceptible nods—the slightest tilt of the jaw—are the only signs that they are alive.

Rounding the bend on Claiborne at St. Bernard Avenue, I pass the old classic rounded facade of the Circle Food Store and I get the first—and strongest—of the powerful whiffs of decay that will assault my olfactory sense on this journey.

The Circle Food Store, it smells like last October, and if you were here you know what that means and if you weren't, be thankful you don't.

The old route of the bus named Desire went past the newly opened Family Dollar Store at Claiborne and Elysian Fields and it is positively bustling, a beacon of commerce here at the entry point to ruin.

Across Elysian Fields, then Franklin, the road begins its climb up the overpass that shadows the railroad tracks below. Off to the right, in the train yard below, there are two sheet-metal Mardi Gras dens all blown apart by the storm and you can see from here the hallucinatory papier-mâché smiles of the jesters and mythical characters of several wrecked floats.

The Easter Bunny and Little Red Riding Hood—or is it Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
? it's hard to tell from here—have fallen out of the front of the float dens and tilt toward the train tracks, greeting the conductors upon their arrival to New Orleans.

From atop the overpass, you can see back over the city skyline, downtown. From here, it looks just like a regular American City.

•  •  •

As the Claiborne overpass descends into the 9th Ward, there at the bottom of the ramp, on the right, is the unassuming brick facade of the New Light Baptist Church. As I pass by, the Reverend Gregory Davis is out in the churchyard spraying citrus wood cleaner on a 1954 Hammond C-2 organ. It's a classic model, the staple of Southern Gospel church music.

With Davis is David Tarantolo, who stands next to a white van marked
THE ORGAN DOCTOR
. Together, they are bringing the organ, which was halfway submerged for three weeks, back to life.

“The electrical components work; they missed the water by just a few inches,” Davis says, his eyes shaded by a ridiculously oversized sombrero that his wife picked up once at a Chevys Fresh Mex restaurant but that does the job it's supposed to do. “We're working mostly on appearances now.”