1 Dead in Attic (27 page)

Even if I haven't been out of the city for a while, I ask friends who have just returned from vacation or a business trip (or rehab) what they noticed when they got back, and most of the time they actually come up with some positive stuff that confirms my purely anecdotal theory.

That's why this past Saturday was such a grand experience for me. Without leaving town or setting out on a contrived mission to look for signs of recovery (and cranking up the Supremes), things jumped out at me all day long. The butterfly spreads her wings.

That morning, I was driving down Prytania Street and noticed a line outside the Bluebird Cafe and I know there's probably always a line there on weekends because it's such a popular breakfast spot, but everyone looked happy to be there, chatting with strangers around them, and it looked like the Bluebird of old.

Shortly after that, I passed the old familiar sight of movie trucks and trailers and lights and there were scads of self-important young people rushing around with headsets and clipboards, and this is a welcome sight—at least to anyone who can muster enough civic spirit to prioritize the city's long-term economic recovery over his own personal parking hassles, and I am aware that not everyone can.

Minutes later, I passed by Mother's on Poydras, and again, there was a line down the block. Not long after that, I drove past Port of Call on Esplanade, and same thing. Customers, lots of customers, waiting to get in for lunch.

These three sights compounded to lift my spirits. Commerce! Activity! A living, breathing community!

Continuing about on my errands, I dropped off a friend at the airport and had assured him that he'd get to his plane in no time because there was never anyone at the airport. But in fact, the cars dropping folks off at curbside were two deep all the way down the concourse level.

Of course, these cars represent people leaving town—arrivals are downstairs—but presumably the great majority of them came from somewhere else to visit or are from here and will return. It looked almost like the airport of old.

Down in the Central Business District and the Quarter, there were pedestrians all over the place, some of them showing off the visiting 49ers colors, and outside Anne Rice's old house in the Garden District (it's been years since she lived there) the crowds still gather to gawk, take pictures, and search for ghosts.

The weather Saturday was, as you know, profoundly clear and crisp, and Sunpie Barnes was singing about Creole tomatoes on WWOZ when I got stuck in traffic because there was a caravan of Mardi Gras floats bouncing up Rampart Street behind tractors, headed for who-knows-where and who-knows-what, but obviously somebody was having a big party somewhere with all these strange and beautiful indigenous means of transportation.

Saturday evening, a friend of mine went to Brennan's to eat, but they told him it would be an hour's wait so they went to Galatoire's instead. At the Galactic gig at the Maple Leaf, David Letterman showed up in the crowd and Paul Shaffer sat in with the band. Over at Rock n' Bowl, Jimmy Buffett showed up at the Sonny Landreth gig and joined in for a few numbers, and, funny: it's December, when, even before Katrina, there wasn't usually that much going on around here.

There seemed to be people everywhere, a city—what's left of it, at least—jumping and alive.

At Tipitina's that night, Lusher, my kids' elementary school, held its annual winter fund-raiser. The music for this event is generally supplied by the school's jazz orchestra, which is positively phenomenal. They are young members of the true cultural elite—the very future of this city's musical heritage.

Music is also supplied by the parents of students who happen to be professional musicians, of which there are plenty. There are Iguanas and Imagination Movers and members of $1,000 Car and various jazz singers and more and it was crazy to see the mothers of my kids' classmates, women who generally look pretty frazzled and hurried just like me when I drop off my kids at school in the morning, suddenly wearing cocktail dresses and singing torch songs and transformed and what is it about this town that everyone is an artist of one kind or another? Everybody's got something happening on the side.

Last year, the fund-raiser seemed to be a somewhat forced affair, held a few weeks after the school reopened in January and muddied by the still-humid aura of shock and uncertainty.

But Saturday night, it was a rocking affair, and I realized it felt that way because now, fifteen months into this thing, everyone who showed up to support the school—although we are mixed incomes and religions and ethnic backgrounds and philosophies—all had one thing in common: We're here. And we're likely staying. And by our very presence, we're obviously committed to making this a better community for ourselves and our children.

Some of the folks I knew and some I didn't, but I looked around the room at people laughing and dancing and living here in the center of the universe because, in case you haven't heard, that's still what New Orleans is.

Like my travel theory above, this opinion is based purely on anecdotal evidence. But wheeling all over town Saturday with the windows down and WWOZ rolling out one New Orleans chestnut after another, I couldn't imagine anywhere else in the world I'd rather be. When we've got our game face on (insert appropriate Saints metaphor here), there is no place like it in the world.

Now, I realize that at that very minute I was having a golden moment, other people all over this town, this region, were staring at hollowed-out houses with glassed-over eyes and their hands on their hips, wondering how they'll ever find their way back to peace of mind.

I know there is plenty of bad stuff out there. Good and plenty, to be sure. But I didn't see any of it Saturday, and maybe it's good not to see it every now and then, to get away, whether by airplane or simply by cranking up the radio.

It's the ever-present and always alluring possibility of this type of near-rapturous experience that I had Saturday that makes people want to be here, I guess.

I swear, if some loathsome creature had accosted me and axed me where I got my shoes, I could have transported myself to a dream state where you could almost believe that the things that have happened here were all just a bad dream and in fact, life is groovy.

But despite the insistence of some to the contrary, we live in a reality-based world and what happened happened and that's that, but it is mighty damn refreshing once in a while to feel as if we're crawling out of the hole.

Even with a flattened landscape and so many challenges ahead of us, I don't remember a single person on Saturday asking me how I made out in the flood, and if that's not a change for the better, then I don't know what is.

My family went to Ye Olde College Inn for dinner Thursday night.

This local institution has a new look and a new menu since The Thing—heck, it's even in a new building—but it still verily throbs with local charm.

You look around at the patrons at the bar and in the dining area, and whether you recognize them or not, they just exude that strange and familiar essence of this place. I don't really know the proper words to describe it—the exact metaphor escapes me (in fact, it has escaped every writer who tried to find it)—but you know what I mean if you've ever walked in the door of College Inn or Uglesich's or Domilise's or Dunbar's or any other of a million places where the talk is too loud and the calories too high and the energy is that just-right, impossible stew of languor, insouciance, comfort, and anticipation.

Ah, this place.

We were told it would be twenty minutes until we could get a table, and we understood in the New Orleans lexicon that meant it would be forty-five minutes until we could get a table so we decided to take a walk rather than try to rein in our kids amid the hungry and waiting masses.

They were drawn immediately to the scene down the street, a wasteland of rubble that covers an entire city block, that stretch of Carrollton between Claiborne and Earhart where those huge brick mansions all burned to the ground—or should I say to the waterline—back in September.

All that stands today are steps and chimneys, and otherwise it's a blackened potpourri of ash and bricks, glass and appliances. You can make out the charred skeletons of bicycles and hot-water heaters and bedsprings and a few other things.

To you and me, this scene generally evokes horror and anger and sorrow, but then again we see it every day so it also strikes a chord of the familiar—as familiar as walking into your favorite old restaurant, I suppose.

It is part of our life. A New Orleans thing.

To the kids, it's something completely different. “Where are the bathtubs?” my two oldest shouted from the sidewalk that borders this mess, and this was a strange question since my kids don't spend much of their time or energy in their own home seeking out the tubs.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's what popped into their little minds and they actually wanted to go prospecting in the rubble for bathtubs but Big Daddy No Fun put the clamp down on that idea.

We did walk the perimeter of the block, hunting bathtubs, and even walked up a few front stoops to get an “aerial” view.

We found two tubs.

For my kids, this was a game and for me some sort of cautionary lesson/observation period: Let the kids absorb this. Let them keep absorbing this.

But then you think: This was someone's house. Someone's life. Someone's stuff. Hopes, dreams, memories, and probably lots of not-so-pleasant things also, the grist of life, reality and struggle—even before it all burned down and washed away.

I guess I've kicked around so many busted houses that it's easy to lose sight of that—lose the proper sense of respect and perspective. I hope I haven't crossed the line, but if the reason you do this—to gawk at all the ruin around here—is to learn and to never forget, then is it okay?

Is it okay that my kids played here on the site of someone's extreme loss? Even if the larger aim—in my mind—was a lofty ideal of understanding?

I don't know the answer to that. I suppose whoever owns these properties can tell me some day.

Across the street, directly behind the restaurant, someone had obviously just gutted their house; that ubiquitous mountain of wasted domesticity was piled up six feet high on the curb.

Such a familiar sight. A New Orleans thing.

It's amazing how free and unburdened little kids can be in this stark environment. There was a huge stuffed Snoopy in the maw in front of this house and my kids asked if they could keep it and I don't have to tell you how Big Daddy No Fun responded.

My kids have seen the depths of the devastation here. One Sunday afternoon, we drove them down to the Lower 9th for reasons that elude me now other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.

They spoke very little and I didn't even try to narrate our driving tour but let the landscape speak for itself, a vista unlike anything they've ever seen in movies or on TV.

My son Jack—four years old at the time—looked out his window and said, “Purple upside-down car.”

That's all he said, and in those four words of simple declarative observation (there was indeed a purple upside-down car), I realized that maybe Jack will be the next writer in the family, for so perfectly did he capture the metaphor that has eluded me for all these months.

New Orleans is the Purple Upside-Down Car. A bright color with no sense of direction. A stalled engine. A thing of once-beauty waiting to be righted and repaired. Something piled up on the side of the road.

I am a father and my kids are riding shotgun in this purple upside-down car. We drive the streets of the familiar and the horrible. We use the seat belt. We live our life. We move on. We do the things that make us feel comfortable in these discomfiting times.

At the College Inn, I went with the foot-long fried oyster, melted Havarti, and bacon po-boy, drenched in mayo and Crystal Hot Sauce. A wondrous spectacle to behold. A truly ludicrous thing to eat.

Such a New Orleans thing.

Those first hours and minutes, they stay with you forever. The very first time you rolled back into town after The Thing.

I was dropped off at my house by another reporter. I had a car parked there, but it was out of gas.

So I retrieved an old rusted bike that I had inherited from a neighbor and I was going to hit the streets, see what was here, what wasn't here, absorb the meaning of it all.

It had a flat tire. I didn't care. I took it and started walking it down the middle of the deserted street, having become—after just ten minutes in town—one of those zoned-out, postapocalyptic zombies doing things that make no sense.

I had joined the tribe.

The first two guys I met—you remember the first living people you saw—were good Samaritans sent my way. They pulled up alongside me in a pickup, and I had met them before—a friend-of-a-friend thing—and we went through these strange reintroductions and the thing is: I can't remember today who they were.

But I remember what they had: a bicycle pump.

In what would become a season of strange and inexplicable occurrences, this was the first. Here I am, feeling like the only living soul on the planet—with a flat tire—and the first guys I meet say, “Do you need some air in that thing?”

Even at its lowest hour, New Orleans has the capability to surprise you with her penchant for serendipity and delight. The human element.

We parted ways. I was, for the moment, a little less frightened by The Thing, having been rescued from my first physical plight so quickly, easily.

Then I ran into Terrence Sanders, and he was the first to smooth out the mental rumples in my head, to make me feel—even on that first day back, a time when New Orleans still smelled of death and rot and panic—that one has many choices to make in life and one of those choices is simply to carry on.