1 Dead in Attic (33 page)

So here's the deal: I know you like to talk a lot, a whole lot—and that's okay because it's your job—but I'm like a lot of people around here, very sensitive about what people say about us these days.

Maybe too sensitive, I don't know.

I'm afraid our circumstances will end up being cast in sports metaphors, and somehow I get the feeling that we'll be portrayed as the '76 Buccaneers or the 2003 Detroit Tigers—teams without hope or redemption—when the way we really see ourselves is as the '69 Miracle Mets.

Sad-sack underdogs. The odds stacked against us. Backs against the wall, all that cliché stuff. And then—the great story line—pulling together and overcoming the odds and winning the big game!

Of course, I'm talking about the city of New Orleans and our neighboring communities, Joe. Not the Saints.

We've got bigger issues than the Falcons to deal with. We've got life. And a lot of our life depends on what all you sports guys tell the world about us and my guess is that you'll all go to our really great restaurants on your expense accounts and rave about the survival of New Orleans cuisine, so that one takes care of itself.

But there are other pressing matters at hand that might come up during your conversation with ten to fifteen million Americans tomorrow night, so I'd like to offer you some talking points.

The first is this: I'm assuming you had the professional curiosity and courtesy to drive around town and take a look at it for yourself. If you did, you now understand what we mean when we say you have to see it to believe it and you'll understand why we kind of freak out when the message that goes out is that a tiny and interesting place called the Lower 9th Ward got wiped out but everything else is okay.

And if you haven't seen the Lower 9th—or Gentilly or Lake-view or Chalmette or any area of the devastation, which is roughly the size of Great Britain—then please, don't even talk about it because you won't know what you're talking about.

Here's the message you need to give America, Joe, and this part gets a little confusing: Tell everyone that the city is rocking, it's alive and kicking with music and food and all that good-timing crazy stuff that Americans have come to expect when they visit here.

The fact is, you can spend a week downtown and in the Quarter and the Marigny and Garden District and Uptown—the small, old part of the city to which tourists usually confine themselves—and hardly see any manifestations of the storm, the flood, and its damages.

Tell people that, Joe. Tell them that New Orleans is still the best city in America. Tell them to come see for themselves, that we're happy, hopeful, joyful, and celebratory still.

Then tell them this: New Orleans is a broken, suffering mess, weakened and scared. We're not ashamed to say it, Joe: We're afraid.

Because what tourists never see is the other 80 percent of the city and that's the part where businesses, homes, and churches were wiped off the map and that's where despair and sorrow have set in like incurable viruses. Depression, divorce, and suicide are the trifecta in this town now.

Tell them that, Joe. Tell them that New Orleans is also the worst place in America, dysfunctional and angry, victimized by looters, predators, insurance companies, utilities, and even government.

Got that? It's simple: Everything is fine here. But it's not fine.

I'm not sure why people get so confused when we tell them that.

Anyway, Joe, tell them we don't want a handout. Tell them we just want a fair shake.

The Feds built crappy levees, Joe, weaker than the Packers' secondary, more porous than the Browns' offensive line, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes and possessions and all physical manifestations of their youth in the flood.

Imagine if you had no photos of your grandparents anymore, Joe, or of your Little League football team or your best friend from high school or the letters your dad wrote to you from Vietnam or the diaries you kept all your life or your wedding album or your collection of jazz 78s, baseball cards, or some other stupid thing that was really,
really
important to you.

Imagine if you had lost one of your parents to a slow and unbelievably agonizing death in a dank attic last year.

All right, I'll stop there with the gloom.

I'm just trying to say, Joe, that we're a proud people around here and we're held tighter together through age, race, and social class than the outside world has been led to believe and we are resilient and determined to save our city and our culture and I guess sometimes we hear out-of-towners say stupid things and we get all in a tizzy about it because we think no one understands us.

Then again, we don't understand ourselves. That's why we all find one another so interesting.

So have a good time while you're here, Joe, live the good life and loosen your tie and say hello to strangers and talk a good game tonight and remember that even if we can't stop Michael Vick, in the end, we're going to kick Katrina's ass.

It's third and long—real long—but there's still a lot of time on the clock and although our front office is a joke and the game plan is shaky at best, we've got the guts, the courage, and the tenacity to persevere and nobody works as hard as we do day after day because nobody else has to.

Remember that feeling, Joe? It's almost rapturous: when everyone thought you'd be a pushover? That you'd just lie down and quit in the face of insurmountable odds? And then you showed them what you were made of ?

That's us, Joe. We're
The Bad News Bears,
man. We're
Angels in the Outfield, Brian's Song, The Longest Yard, Remember the Titans.
We're
Rocky,
dammit. And we're gonna rise up. Tell the world.

How do you dress your kids for school on the day the Saints play
Monday Night Football
if you don't have any Reggie Bush jerseys in their size?

It was a dilemma that none of my self-help parenting books addressed Monday morning as the ritualistic battle over what my kids would wear took on a different tenor than usual.

To send them to school in anything but black and gold—as the administration had urged parents to do in a show of school spirit and city unity—would have been akin to sending my children out trick-or-treating on Halloween without a costume.

Basic black we've got plenty of in my house, but here's the rub: who, besides Paris Hilton and Elton John, actually owns gold clothes?

There was much give-and-take, and I finally convinced my kids by heavily referencing Mardi Gras that yellow actually is gold, at least in New Orleans.

“Yellow,” I told my daughter, “is the color of kings and Saints.” This seemed to satisfy her.

At the parent/teacher/student assembly at my kids' school Monday morning, the only “educational” item on the agenda was whether face painting would be allowed that day.

This had actually been discussed in administrative meetings that morning.

Alas, it would not be allowed. There were groans. Principals can be so exasperating at times. The many children who had arrived with fleurs-de-lis already in place on cheeks and noses would have to turn themselves in for a scrubbing before reporting to class.

Then the music teacher stepped forward and began pounding out a melody on his chest with his hand, and he asked the parents to follow his lead and chant, over and over, “Saints go marching in, Saints go marching in . . .,” which we did, maybe two hundred of us, in group baritone.

Then he led the children into a high-pitched, squealy version of the song over our jungle beat and it was beautiful, poetic, and touching.

And very strange, really, when you think about it. I looked around and thought: What the hell is going on around here?

Funny: as the meeting broke up and the kids went off to classes, many parents and teachers and kids all hugged one another before parting as if it were the last day of school, as if there would be some sort of transformation and personal growth before we all saw one another again—the next morning. You knew then that, well . . . Monday would be a day like no other.

And you keep telling yourself: It's only a game.

Who dat?

I had instructed my children that they were to respond to any questions asked by their teachers Monday with one answer: “The Deuce is loose!” and I was kind of kidding but kind of not and when my son Jack greeted his kindergarten teacher with this as he entered the classroom, she looked at me as if I were crazy and maybe I am but it's nothing a little tweaking of my medication can't cure.

What happened after that, I don't know, but I do admit—now that I've had time to consider the implications of the matter—to a little apprehension about all this.

I have witnessed, firsthand, the long-term health effects of being a Saints fan. It's not pretty. It's a meat grinder, truth be told.

You have to ask yourself, after all our children have been through around here—you know, that death and destruction thing—do you really want them to enter a culture that leaves scars worse than fire?

Ah, why not?

As I got to the Superdome about 2
P.M.
, I could see that what I had witnessed in a microcosm Uptown had layered itself over the city.

Through the fog of a thousand kettledrum grills and Webers smoldering under the interstate overpasses, in the cacophony of hundreds of minivans and pickups with their doors flung open, blasting “Hey Pocky A-Way” and “Yellow Moon,” and under portable tents set up in parking lots and on neutral grounds, jammed full of rebels without a care, it smelled, sounded, and felt like a new day, a beautiful day.

And a choir of angels did sing from on high, “Who dat? Who dat?”

Or did I just imagine that part?

Clearly, no one went to work; either that, or the term “business casual” has taken on new meaning around here.

It seemed as though all the adults in town just dropped the kids off at school and hoped some teenager to whom we paid nine bucks an hour would pick them up after school and would feed and bathe them because we had more important matters to attend to: rebirthing a city. Or at least a step in the right direction.

Now, of course, there were naysayers out there in the Great Elsewhere. All that money, they said, that could have been used to fix people's houses. All that effort that could have gone somewhere else. All this fuss—about a game?

The simple answer is that, for the city's economy to survive, the Convention Center and the Dome had to be fixed—first and fast—because they are the bread and the butter.

A more nuanced answer is this: Better a Saints game to rechristen the building than a boat show or a gun show, for the irony of that would have been simply too much, even here in the city whose chief export in the post-Katrina age is, in fact, irony. By the ton.

Bobby, my best friend from first grade, called me from Kansas City on Monday afternoon to say everyone in his office was watching the pregame stuff on ESPN and some were grumbling about our misplaced priorities, but I asked him, “Then why is everyone watching TV at your office when they're supposed to be working?”

Obviously, people care about this.

And what can you tell them? That the Saints are family around here and you're stuck with that just like you're stuck with, well . . . family?

The Saints are our crazy Uncle Frank, prone to off-color remarks and broken promises and he's certainly not the guy you send to car pool to pick up your kids when you're stuck at the doctor's office, but you have to admit: holiday gatherings just aren't as much fun without him.

And every now and then he delivers a nice present when you least expect it.

Outside the Dome before the game, the “family” swelled into the tens of thousands and the crunch of bodies on the concourses around the building was, in fact, chaotic and probably dangerous.

Crowd control was an oxymoron. I wound up pinned in, unable to move in any direction while the Goo Goo Dolls were playing and I was smooshed up against a sweaty, shirtless, moose-jawed guy whose face paint was melting in the sun and we looked at each other and we found the same spiritual impulse overcome us at the same time.

We hugged.

I hugged a sweaty, moose-faced guy and it just felt right, dammit. So go ahead, judge me.

The Goo Goo Dolls' lead singer—he of the famously pasted hair and impossibly east European name—yelled to the crowd, “Thank you for letting us be a part of this. You're amazing.”

And yes, we are.

All the stages fell silent in the minutes preceding the opening of the Superdome doors, silent in that kind of “Star-Spangled Banner” way, and a guy onstage counted backward from ten as if it were New Year's and the crowd joined in and confetti cannons blasted a storm into the air as the doors swung open and little bits of colored paper—and you know what colors—floated across the expanse and people just stood there—tens of thousands of them—silent with their arms raised in the air like it was the Rapture.

And it was.

This building, this monument to our shame, our disgrace, and our sorrow, will always be so, but it always has been and always will be more than that. Neither Katrina nor Tom Benson has been able to make the Superdome go away.

Its durability is our durability.

Untold hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were reentering the building Monday night for the first time since they had walked out of it last September—as evacuees, employees, police, and rescuers.

They will never forget. We will never forget. But we will also never surrender.

There was a game to play, but, before that, rock stars and ex-presidents, Hall of Famers and celebrities, cheerleaders and first responders and pomp, circumstance, and glory and it was too much, really—all for a game—but then again everything around here is too much, all day, every day, so why not too much here and now?