1 Dead in Attic (25 page)

I remember Dorothy's Medallion on Orleans Avenue, watching Walter “Wolfman” Washington back up Johnny Adams while he warbled love songs that could change the world.

This, I used to think. I like this.

When I first stumbled onto the second-line scene down in the Treme and Central City, my life was energized. I was hooked from the moment I fell into my first snaking street parade of horn players and revelers bumping and grinding through neighborhoods I had never seen before—or at least had seen only through my car windows.

This was about twelve years ago, right after I met the woman who would become my wife. In fact, much of our early courtship took place on the parade grounds of this city. Kelly and I would bounce along the streets to the blockbuster vibes of the city's brass lions on Sunday afternoons and duck into dark corner bars to check out the score of the Saints game and we'd nod and shuffle in the way that white people who are dressed all wrong do when they're hanging out with a bunch of black folks who are truly tripping the light fantastic.

We danced, we got drunk, and we were long, long gone into the unbearable lightness of being in New Orleans. We became part of the scene, made friends, shed our self-consciousness, and just blended in.

Occasionally, there would be a menacing character or two—or more, quite frankly—lurking around the edges of these celebrations, particularly at the end of the parades, when massive street parties would form, streets would clog, and evening would come.

But we never felt personally threatened. Ever. We'd introduce friends to the scene, telling them: You gotta check this out. But mostly, we realized that big chunks of our social circle had no particular interest in joining this ritual of ours.

Then one afternoon, about ten years ago, Kelly and I broke a run of many, many consecutive weeks of second-lining to do something else on a Sunday afternoon; I don't know what, but it must have been important for us to skip out on our favorite pastime.

That afternoon, in August 1995, the second line we missed ended in gunfire, lots of gunfire, two dead and six wounded on St. Bernard Avenue. We didn't go the next Sunday, either. Nor the next. Somewhere in there, there was another shooting at a parade.

At this point, we felt personally threatened. As weeks and months passed—or am I embellishing this out of frustration?—it seems the Monday-morning paper would too often carry a story about a shooting or a stabbing on or very near a second-line route the day before.

These clippings litter the files of
The Times-Picayune,
leaving a bad smell.

We had kids now, Kelly and I. A part of this city's culture that I desperately wanted them to know and understand and embrace was out of our reach. It was not an option. I wasn't going to lead my kids into danger simply because Daddy thinks they need to be dialed into the fundamental currents of my city.

With the exception of a few high-profile events—Ernie K-Doe's funeral, the Mardi Gras Indians on Fat Tuesday, or Super Sunday—the second-line scene was dead to me.

Then, earlier this year, word got out about the big homecoming second line in the city and it was said that thousands of folks were coming from exile in Texas and Mississippi and that the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs were going to replant their flag in this city and take back their streets and bring back what is among the most vital and enduring traditions of New Orleans.

I told my wife that Sunday afternoon: Things are different now. The city is different.

Let's take the kids.

And we did. We didn't catch as much of the parade as I would have liked; we caught up with it on the very busy and inhospitable Rampart Street, where car traffic was all backed up, instead of a cozy side street where the walkers rule.

But we saw it. My kids saw it. I have no idea if it registered with them, but I didn't care because now I knew: We can do this again. We can go back to the second lines and our kids can understand this city in ways others don't and—let's cut to the chase here—I can dance in the streets again and not give a damn how stupid I look.

There is a tangible freedom in dancing in the street. I ask you: What better public expression of joy exists? Where else in the world do horn players and drummers just wake up in the morning, strap on their instruments, and start wandering around making an unholy racket and then hundreds, thousands of dancing lemmings fall in and follow them to the sea?

Well, you know how that second line ended. Gunfire. Blood. Sirens. A thousand people there and no witnesses to the crime, police would later report.

It was a day of profound disgrace for this city and one that probably would have had greater impact and provoked very heated and very uncomfortable public discourse had not our mayor given a famous speech the next day that completely distracted the citizenry from the violence at hand.

We focused on the Chocolate City instead of the Killing Fields.

No matter. My wife and I decided not to go back to the second-line parades again. It's not for us, I thought. There is such a disconnect between my value system and the culture of guns that permeates our streets that I don't even have the words to make sense of it.

My kids don't know what happened at the end of that parade, and I'm not going to tell them. We do other things on Sunday afternoons because the odds of their getting capped at the zoo are pretty slim.

And then there was this weekend. Hundreds of folks in from Texas and Mississippi, trying to regain their footing and traction here, trying to get back into the New Orleans life cycle, and here comes a gang-banger bent on revenge and willing to put his entire community at risk to prove he is a man worthy of respect.

Nobody of reason wants this. Black, white, no one. And in the same news cycle a guy walking in the Frenchmen Street music district takes a bullet in the chest—after surrendering his wallet to a thug.

So here we are. Back where we were before, when locals and visitors alike cowered in fear of the predatory generation we have loosed unto our community.

You can't care about this city and then read about this crap and shrug and say either (A) It's not my problem or (B) That's just the way it is.

That's not just the way it is. It is perversion and error.

And it
is
your problem. Our problem.

Our city lies in such delicate balance that the return of indiscriminate killing ranks right up there with another hurricane as a compelling reason to pack your bags and get the hell out of town while you're still alive.

The psychic toll of Sunday's police blotter is immeasurable. And it is fodder for the New Orleans haters, the tolerance fighters, and the racial jihadists—of both colors—who think that murder is what this city is about.

I reject it.

It's not us.

As I loaded my two sons in the car to head off to the pet store Sunday afternoon, I saw a guy walking on the sidewalk across the street.

He wore all the trappings of generic urbania: oversized jacket, big baggy pants, all in black. He was traveling alone, with very busy eyes, taking in the details between houses on my street.

Before Katrina, I was a fairly attuned city dweller; I've generally had a good nose for trouble. So I was dialed in on this guy.

As I pulled away from the curb, I thought about making the block, doubling back just to make sure everything was copacetic. That's what I would have done in the past; I've done it many times.

But I have developed this profoundly naive notion that if you are in this city right now, living in this mess, you are one of us. I have this delusional optimism that we're all in this together.

Of course, this doesn't make sense, because not one day goes by that I don't hear from people in Lakeview, Fontainebleau, Gentilly, and the East who tell me that their houses are getting looted. Repeatedly. Still.

But I didn't make the block. I told myself this cat just happens to favor thug fashion regardless of how people may react to him and treat him as a result, and that's his business, not mine.

I guess I'd sound like a cranky old fart if I suggested he dress like—I don't know—me?

So it turns out that, two minutes after I pulled away, my wife saw my bicycle flash by our living room window. She ran to the front door to find this guy mounted and ready to roll.

The purpose of this theft can only have been a joyride, an easy way home for a lazy thief, because there is absolutely no black market for my bike. It is a rusted, dorky dad bike, one speed—but not retro—with a bulky child seat mounted on the back.

I've always had a particular fascination with people who steal stuff that obviously belongs to kids.

Anyway, my wife, she's like me: a little raw. A little roughed up by all of this. With all that can go wrong around here on a minute's notice, she's in no mood to let her day be ruined by a punk, a bad guy, part of the problem.

So she unfurled a bloody tirade against this guy, who may or may not have been armed but was so stunned by her fury that he babbled some lie about “That guy said I could borrow it” and she continued with her furious but rather persuasive diatribe.

She grabbed the bike. He got off and walked away.

“Moseyed,” she tells me.

Since I moved to this city twenty-two years ago, I have been stolen from more times than I can count on both hands. I was burglarized three times in my present home before I got an alarm system and a crazy dog. In my former house in the Marigny, I was burglarized twice.

I have been cleaned out, literally. One thief was apparently a 40 regular, because he stole my clothes in addition to everything else. And never mind the litany of bikes, weed whackers, garden tools, and other small stuff that has walked off my property for the past two decades.

The same thing has probably happened to you, a lifetime of petty aggravations—some not so petty—that amount to a constant assault against your peace of mind.

Amazing, how you can adapt to a life surrounded by thievery. How you can accept as part of your lifestyle the fact that a huge number of people you live near would steal anything you've got lying around if you turned your back for just one moment.

The post-Katrina looting is still the most disturbing thing to me about this whole Grand Catastrophe: how some citizens of our community turned on their own, using the devastation as an open call to Christmas in New Orleans.

Everything for free. The wasted homes of Lakeview, Fontainebleau, Gentilly, and the East? Just take what you can find in the ruins.

I ask you: What kind of man picks over the bones of a destroyed life?

I am not naive enough to believe in a theft-free city; a few junkie burglars are inevitable in any society, even the most civil. But a town teeming with opportunistic predators is not in my job description anymore.

We don't have to suffer the ills of our past. You know, Dawn of a New Day, and all that. And this ragged sumbitch is lucky I didn't make the block and come back and find him coming out of my backyard.

I'm pretty sure I would have run him over.

Yes, for a stupid bicycle.

I'm not going to take this crap anymore. I'm not going to let two-bit predators get inside my head—and yard and car and house. I'm not going to secure my psyche with a lock and chain as I have for all these years.

I shouldn't have to put up with this while my city tries to put itself back together.

And if you think I'm all worked up about this, trust me: You do not want to cross my wife when she is walking on the edge.

You will rue the day. This I know.

Me and my new friend Shaq were shooting hoops this week at Wisner Playground, Laurel and Upperline Streets, 13th Ward Uptown.

I used to play softball here. I remember a guy on my team once crushed a home run so far that it cleared the right-field fence and cleared the basketball court behind right field and hit a car parked on Upperline.

That's a mighty swat, let me tell you. A thing of beauty.

But the poetry of the moment was broken by the discovery that the car belonged to one of the guys playing hoops that night and a near riot (I kid you not) ensued as we all figured out—in a not-so-civil fashion—whose responsibility the damage was.

The local hoops players didn't invest much authority in the city recreation league softball umpire, who declared all vehicles parked in the area to be inherently at risk.

The incident ended with baseball bats brandished as weapons but no blows struck. It was stupid, really, the way these incidents always are, awash in clouds of race and class and distrust and a supreme failure to communicate.

That was a long time ago.

The basketball court is still there. The softball field is not. There are brand-new backboards on the court, with bright green Sprite logos on them, so I guess the soft drink folks are underwriting what little passes for recreation around this town these days. The softball field has gone the way of just about every other once-wide-open space in this city: now paved over in stones and all fenced in, home to rows of gleaming white trailers that look like nothing more than isolation cells in a modular prison yard. I look at this and wonder whose bright idea it was to put all the FEMA trailer parks on the city's playgrounds rather than around the city's playgrounds.

You don't have to be forward-thinking to realize that putting the trailer parks around the playgrounds instead of on them would have created common green spaces that would have served as de facto community centers and kids would have had places to play other than on debris-strewn streets and sidewalks filled with rotting garbage, roofing nails, and rats.

We're a city that never seems to tire or even despair of doing things simple, dumb, and cheap and—as a father in this town—I can tell you this: kids are pretty much the last consideration in just about every public policy decision around here.