1 Dead in Attic (28 page)

A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons—make daiquiris.

That's not what Sanders was making, though. He was making art.

He was sitting crouched in front of a massive canvas in the Magazine Street gallery that bears his name—and where he lives—and he was putting the finishing touches on a bold, colorful painting and listening to the radio.

At this point, my mental images of New Orleanians—not so mental really; they were from TV—were people dangling from choppers and dying of thirst in front of the Convention Center, and here's this dude, painting.

I was thinking more about foraging for fuel and food, maybe fending off the roving gangs I had heard about—and here's a guy making art.

I need to talk to this cat, I thought.

So we talked. We talked about the city and we talked about art and this guy was so rock steady—or maybe he was flat-out nuts—that he settled me.

Like many of the more eccentric characters in this city, he's not from New Orleans (born in Pineville, actually) but settled here about a year ago after a young life traveling the globe because it feels like home. He's been here a year, just kind of muddling along; an unknown in local art circles, just trying to make a name.

And here's the thing about the painting he was working on: It was the final panel of a series he had been working on for four years, a commemoration—of all things—of the September 11 disaster. It was a list of the names of the dead.

Well, if you're a fan of irony. . . .

I glibly remarked that he shouldn't have any trouble finding subject matter for his next project.

“Yeah,” he said. “Disaster can be like that. It makes death, despair . . . and art.”

He told me this week, all these months later, “I felt like an obscure guy in a lost place. There was all this hell going on. I was just trying to find some inner peace.”

At age thirty-eight, Sanders is throwing his own New Orleans coming-out party tomorrow night, announcing his arrival on the local art scene with a show about September 11 and Hurricane Katrina and some things in between.

The work that emanated from his quest for inner peace is colorful, passionate, political, and New Yorky. He used to run in Basquiat's crowd in Gotham City; maybe that's an influence.

There's lots of text, for those who like to read their paintings. There are stark photos he took of passengers when he was a cabdriver in Baton Rouge. He's showing a movie he made, projecting it onto the front of his building.

Every time I drive by that building now, I remember what amounts to the strangest day of my life so far, and I will always remember stopping there to talk to a stranger and feeling better.

I will always remember that building and the moment of humanity I found in its doorway and how I pedaled away thinking: We can do this.

One thing the Aftermath has proven is that if you are not an adaptable creature, New Orleans is no place for you.

Staying in New Orleans necessitates redefining oneself. Marco St. John would be a good example.

St. John is a “decorative painter,” which means he does commercial murals, trompe l'oeil paintings, and fine-art restoration.

But in the post-Katrina world, there's not much demand for $8,000 billboard-sized reproductions of Michelangelo's
Creation,
fine art being one of the final frontiers of discretionary spending, and “discretionary spending” being one of the final frontiers of the current New Orleans vocabulary.

There is, however, a huge demand for housepainters.

“It's almost funny,” St. John muses in the bright yellow living room of a freshly restored home on Palmer Street Uptown. “I was finally getting the kind of clients I wanted and I was booked for a whole year. And then.”

And then.

“I quickly realized I had to be as utilitarian as possible. And this idea kept resonating with me: people can't buy paintings if they don't have walls to hang them on. So I decided I would help them get walls. And then it suddenly clicked with me that I could band a lot of my artist friends together to do this.”

Thus, St. John is now managing three full crews of interior housepainters who were visual artists left unemployed by The Thing.

And with such a gesture—hiring photographers, mask makers, graphic designers, and landscape painters to restore a home—comes inadvertent slices of comedy and unintended character studies of the methodology of the artistic temperament.

“They're all wonderful artists,” St. John says. “But they bring a level of craftsmanship to the job that, quite frankly, doesn't belong here. I am learning how to run a business, and I have learned: Time is money.”

The foibles of a team of meticulous aesthetes attacking the job of refurbishing a flood-ravaged community almost plays out like some weird reality TV show on Bravo.

To wit: “The photographers seem to understand how to do this because they're used to the immediacy of the artistic process,” St. John says. “The mask makers, they're used to such meticulous work. When it comes to filling in little nail holes, they excel at it, but faced with the huge expanse of a living room wall, they pick up little brushes and just start dabbing.

“And the realist landscape painters! They can get fixated on a piece of rotten baseboard and you can't get them off of it. They could spend hours caulking and recaulking the same spot if I let them, and I can't afford that if they're on the clock.

“There's no question that we're very good at what we do,” St. John says. “Fast is what we've got to get.”

Korey Kelso, a former illustrator at the Lionel Milton Gallery on Magazine Street, is one of the artists St. John was able to bring back to New Orleans.

He was waiting it out in Massachusetts when St. John called. “I wasn't sure what I was going to do,” Kelso said. “I wanted to come back and be a part of all this, but I didn't have the means to do it. This allows me to be functional on my own again. It gives me a chance to make a living while I put a portfolio back together again.”

And there are subtle rewards to it all.

“I don't see an incredible nobility in painting houses,” St. John says. “But we're the last ones in during the renovation process, so we're here when the families start moving back in, carrying their children's furniture back into these houses.”

He pauses. “I'm proud of that. I don't envision being a housepainter for the rest of my days, but we're doing something good here. And rest assured: once we've got all these big blank walls finished, we're not shy about letting them know who to call if they need something to hang on them.”

At the same time Hurricane Katrina was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean last August, Katie McClelland was attending a seminar in Atlanta on animal rescue techniques.

The instructor, Meredith Shields, a rescue specialist with the American Humane Association, had been closely following the storm's track and asked the class, “If this turns into something serious, who's interested in helping out?”

McClelland put her hand up.

At twenty-nine, McClelland had recently switched careers from television reporting to working for the Atlanta Humane Society. “I wanted to get out of the hustle and bustle and work with animals,” she said.

When Katrina took out the southern coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana, McClelland said, she went to her supervisors at the Atlanta Humane Society and asked for a leave of absence to help. They said no. She went anyway.

“I don't know,” she mused. “I just felt this was something I had to do. I had just come out of a relationship and my life was in flux and I wanted to get involved in something that wasn't about me.”

So she signed up with Shields and the American Humane Association as a volunteer and headed to New Orleans.

At the same time, across the country in Eugene, Oregon, a pharmaceutical sales rep named Paul Dyer got word that his National Guard unit was activating immediately for deployment to New Orleans.

At twenty-eight, he was floundering also. He felt static, as if he wasn't moving forward. Like McClelland, he'd been thinking about a career switch and had also just extricated himself from a bad relationship.

Getting called up for emergency Guard service was almost a relief, freeing him from introspection and locking him into his autopilot, duty-bound role as a captain in the U.S. Army.

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina—with no central command to guide them—military, medical, and humanitarian organizations fanned out across the Gulf Coast, looking for dry, safe areas from which to stage their search-and-rescue operations.

Dyer's 186th Infantry Regiment set up camp on the campus of Delgado Community College in Mid-City. Their tasks included clearing Esplanade Avenue for passage, powering up and securing the New Orleans Museum of Art, searching for survivors by airboat in the City Park area, and stemming the rising tide of looting activity from Esplanade Ridge through Gentilly.

Several days later, the American Humane Association showed up at Delgado and set up camp in the same parking lot.

“We were two independent organizations; we didn't know quite what to do with each other,” Dyer says.

But one thing was clear in the lawless environs of New Orleans: the animal rescue folks were going to need security.

Dyer was handed supervision of the security details. He assigned himself to Team 6. That was McClelland's team.

And so began a story of love among the ruins.

For three days they worked side by side, nonstop, breaking into homes whose owners had contacted a national hotline for help.

At night, he slept on the roof of a classroom building in the open air; she bunked down with her team in the parking lot. They spent what little free time they had hanging out in the college courtyard, getting to know each other.

“Her dedication was amazing to me,” Dyer recounts. “I mean, I was in the Army and they called me and told me we had to do this. I just got shipped here. I didn't make a choice. Not her. She gave up everything and came here to help. That's a real volunteer. She's the real hero in all of this.”

It was September 19 when they met—one year ago today—but three days later, the impending arrival of Hurricane Rita sent their outfits in different directions. They talked every day by phone as they continued their respective missions into October.

As they headed home to their respective coasts—without ever having shared as much as a kiss—they made a promise to each other: the first one who could find a job in the other one's town would move.

By Halloween, McClelland had dusted off her television résumé and landed a job as a ten o'clock news anchor with the Fox affiliate in Eugene. Duly motivated, Dyer enrolled at Portland State University to study for an MBA in hospital administration.

When it came time to plan a wedding, it was a no-brainer: the courtyard at Delgado.

So, this past Sunday night, McClelland, Dyer, and two dozen friends and family members gathered for the event.

Though the bridesmaids wore matching linen gowns—a sign that at least some planning went into the affair—the postceremony “reception” consisted of flowers purchased from Sam's Club in Metairie, a lemon cream cake from the A&P on Magazine Street, and four bottles of champagne from a downtown liquor store, chilled in four ice buckets “commandeered” from their hotel rooms in the CBD.

A nondenominational New Orleans minister, Don Bohn, performed the service. His wife, Samantha, did the photography. McClelland and Dyer had found them online.

As the bridesmaids and groomsmen lined up and McClelland walked into the courtyard from a nearby parking lot, the crowd took up an improvisational a capella version of “The Wedding March”: “Dum dum, da-dum . . .”

During the brief service, a visibly nervous Dyer pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and read this:

One year ago my life changed in a way that only poets can dream. I was shipped to a city in ruins to help others recover from a terrible disaster. The funny thing was: My life, much like the city of New Orleans, was a disaster.

I had little direction, little guidance and little confidence I would ever find what my life was meant to be. Then, on a muggy afternoon in this very parking lot, I was introduced to a woman who, unlike me, volunteered to help rescue helpless animals with no home, no food and no water. Little did she know, but she rescued my heart that day as well.

My life has changed. Like the city of New Orleans being rebuilt, my life is being rebuilt in a way that I can be proud of. To everyone here as my witnesses, I share with you this: True love is real and oftentimes it is found where you least expect it.

The only sounds were sniffles and crickets. They were pronounced man and wife.

Asked about the difference between this moment and when they all met a year ago in this same spot, bridesmaid Colleen Porth, a pet rescuer from Austin, Texas, said, “We smell better now.”

Said McClelland, “It seems like everyone we worked with here changed after they left. Everyone either got divorced or changed jobs or moved to a new state or just started over again in some way because of what they saw here and what happened to them here.

“We went into these homes together and we would find clothes laid out on someone's bed for work the next day and the people were now a thousand miles away and it made you realize: you never know when it's all going to be over. New Orleans changed all of us so much. It will always be a part of us.”

Once the cake was cut and the champagne poured, Walter McClelland, the father of the bride, raised a plastic cup as the sun set over the courtyard and said, “Paul, welcome to our family.”

A sentiment to which I would like to add, if I may, to Paul and Katie, and your friends and family: Welcome to our family.