1 Dead in Attic (34 page)

All the meanderers in the hallways and bathrooms were running into old friends, hugging the ticket takers just because, tipping like madmen, yelling incoherent cries of pride and defiance.

And the drunkest of them yelling, “Super Bowl!”

Funny, just about everyone in the visiting media made Super Bowl references—that was what it felt like—but they failed to realize that Super Bowls have no home teams. There is no sense of desire, longing, and need at a Super Bowl.

Irma sang the national anthem. Jesus wept and I died. Then and there. Died over and over. Live, die, rise up. Live, die, rise up. Over and over.

I was exhausted. I was ready to go home. And the game hadn't even started.

The game. When they blocked the punt and scored the first touchdown, something inside me that I didn't know was there broke loose. I let out a yell so loud that my throat still hurts today.

I fell into a human scrum that consisted of a tall skinny guy, a short woman, a cop, and a beer vendor. Every layer of authority and sociology was stripped away. We literally fell on top of each other. I have never experienced a flash point of sudden emotion unloosed so fast.

No drug, religion, or meditation has ever taken me there. And I don't know: maybe people in cities with great teams do that all the time, but this was a crazy good thing. Love Potion No. 9. I started hugging everyone in sight.

And, well, you know what happened after that. After the game, I thought about going to the Quarter or finding all my friends and waking the dead but, in the end, I turned to my wife and said, “I've given everything I've got.”

I remember being all worked up in the daze leading up to the game, worried about the message we were sending America, and worried about what the guys in the broadcast booth were going to say, but the fact is, I don't know what they said or how it all looked because I was acting a fool and hugging strangers and too busy making seventy thousand new friends to give a hoot what everybody else thinks.

It is superficial and meaningless and a sign of total loss of perspective, but I stand before you and I declare: It is good to feel like a winner.

And out my window today as I write this—my open window, oh, glorious day—I hear the same sounds I hear every day—chain saws and hammers and drills—and it would be foolish to suggest that the workers have more pep in their step today and that everything is going to be easier now because, well . . . because it's not.

It's a long road home no matter what colored glasses you're wearing today, but there is something about waking up in a community that is thinking the same thing, that is feeling—if only for a moment—as if we had all just accomplished something together—when actually it was a bunch of millionaires whose names we hardly know.

Ah, but let us live it, just for today, because who around here hasn't felt as though we've had a big
L
stamped on our foreheads for the past year and I, for one, am ready to wipe it off, like all those silly kids had to do at Lusher Elementary the other day when the principal brought the hammer down.

Only a game, you say?

Like hell it was.

My euphoria over the Saints dissipated this weekend, but it was long before their loss to the Carolina Panthers.

Though I'm still inspired by the team and their determination, it must be remembered that they are merely an enjoyable diversion from the massive challenges at hand—challenges for which the nation's goodwill and assistance are most vital.

But I have come to the discomfiting conclusion that all the hoopla and feel-good that we displayed to the country leading up to and during the
Monday Night Football
game did not translate in the American Heartland the way we might have hoped.

I was under the impression that we would win back America's love and admiration for our steely reserve and equanimity in the face of adversity and our ability to come together in communal celebration despite personal lives shrouded in sorrow.

Despite ESPN's sensitive handling of the tricky “New Orleans is back/New Orleans is definitely not back” message that we needed to send out, it seems that lots of folks did not buy into the Superdome extravaganza as a good thing at all.

This became clear to me as I read the letters to the editor in the weekend edition of
USA Today.
And while I am somewhat loath to let
USA Today
set the tone of dialogue on south Louisiana's recovery, there can be no getting around the unanimity of views of the six letters published on this topic.

To summarize their words: We—we being anyone who cheered for the Saints or greeted the Dome's reopening as a forward step in recovery—are wrong.

Let me offer a sampling from each letter.

Ravi Mangla of Fairport, New York, wrote:

Using the New Orleans Saints' home game at the Superdome as a metaphor for a city returning to normalcy after a horrific disaster is such arrant dreck. I found myself frustrated Monday, hearing reports describing how “inspiring” and “uplifting” it was for New Orleans' citizens to finally get their team back. What would be more inspiring and uplifting, in my opinion, would be seeing all the people of New Orleans finally getting their homes back.

Mark Washington of Omaha, Nebraska, wrote:

As an African-American, I was disturbed about things I saw on TV: Thousands of mostly white faces in the stands being serenaded by white rock musicians. It wasn't exactly a vision of a returning New Orleans.

I highly doubt that the vast majority of former New Orleans residents, who happen to be African-Americans, would have selected U2 or Green Day as their preferred entertainment.

Jack Wood of Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote:

Federal funding contributed hugely to the $185 million it cost to renovate the Superdome in New Orleans? Where are our priorities? With garbage still clogging the streets and people still homeless, what could that money have done to correct those conditions? This appears to be just another example of badly placed priorities by Americans. We should all be ashamed to put a football game ahead of human suffering.

Mark Van Patten of Bowling Green, Kentucky, wrote:

The restored Superdome is an ugly concrete monument plopped down between interstate highway loops. It reflects the difference in the classes in New Orleans.

When it was convenient, the poor were inhumanely herded there to await rescue. Now, the Superdome is ready for business, but the poor will not be welcome because they don't have the money for admission or they have been relocated to another city.

Ira Lacher of Des Moines, Iowa, wrote:

How many of the thousands of displaced New Orleanians could have rebuilt their homes with the $185 million that was squandered on restoring the Superdome for the use of overpaid professional athletes?

And Donald and Anna Mulligan of Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, weighed in:

Very few hospitals and schools have opened in the city. And most business owners are still out of luck. But the city says, “Let the games begin.”

As we've always said, when you have a city that prides itself on booze, food, gambling and parades, what can we expect?

May God help us all.

All righty then. Thank you, America, for your comments. Now, before I respond, let me pause here while you, the reader, go refill your coffee cup. Or your big glass of bourbon or while you take a break from the blackjack table or between lap dances or while you rest between bites of an overstuffed alligator and hogshead cheese po-boy.

Where to begin? They don't give me enough space in the paper to say all I want to say, but here we go.

Let's start with this: If we did not open the Superdome for Saints games, presumably we could not then open it for the Bayou Classic, the Sugar Bowl, Tulane football, the state high school football championships, the Essence Music Festival, rock concerts, religious revivals, car shows, home and garden shows, or anything else that happens there in the course of a normal year and that generates massive spending, jobs, and activity in the community.

No Super Bowls, no NCAA championships, and no chance at the national political conventions. And, worst of all, no monster trucks.

I'm guessing those opposed to repairing and renovating the Dome for $185 million wouldn't buy into the concept of building a new stadium from scratch for about five times that amount. And therefore the logical extension is that all of the above events be moved to Houston, Atlanta, or somewhere else and Tulane can just play their games at Muss Bertolino Stadium in Kenner and this community can just muddle along without the perverse spectacle of “games” in a building that housed sorrow and despair.

The Saints? Send them to San Antonio. The Sugar Bowl? Please, don't trifle around while there is still garbage to be picked up.

The arguments posited in
USA Today
seem to suggest that there be no compartmentalization of funding for recovery. In other words, that repairing the Dome prevents homes' being rebuilt in the 9th Ward. Or that patching potholes on Bourbon Street is keeping hospitals from opening. Or that reopening the Aquarium of the Americas—or doing anything with federal dollars that rebuilds our economic engines rather than homes—keeps people homeless.

Pardon my plagiarism, but that is arrant dreck.

That people were “herded” into the Dome during Katrina is an interesting word choice. Here's some numbers for you provided by the Dome's administrative office:

Prior to the levees breaking and the water pouring into the city, there were approximately 10,000 evacuees inside the Dome. After the flood waters rose and trapped a population across the region, 20,000 more were delivered to the Dome by air and boat and bus.

I ask you—and those twenty thousand people: Better to be at the Dome or trapped on your roof or in your attic for those four days?

The fact is, the Dome, for all its squalor and misery, saved lives. It wasn't Abu Ghraib. The toilets didn't flush and there was no cold drinking water and not enough medicine, but toilets didn't flush anywhere and there was no ice or medicine anywhere and it's crazy to think that only folks who were at the Dome or the Convention Center have a lock on the misery that befell the Gulf Coast in early September 2005.

Everyone's got a story in this town, in this region, and not one I've heard is a day at the park.

While we're at it, let me toss this gasoline on the fire, a snippet from an editorial in the current issue of
The Nation
:

The reality of refugee apartheid is hardly a memory. The game was held hostage to the awkward fact that the folks starring in ESPN's video montages of last year's “cesspool” were almost entirely black and the football fans in the stands were overwhelmingly white. But recognizing this would contradict the infomercial for the new Big Easy that was designed to appeal to the typical family, which finds gumbo too spicy and thinks of soul as something consumed with tartar sauce.

A guy named Dave Zirin wrote this; another guy who wasn't there telling me how white it was. Zirin also took umbrage with U2 and Green Day playing instead of the Neville or Marsalis families.

Well, I would have liked that, too, but guess what? The Neville Brothers won't play in New Orleans. And the Marsalises? I don't know, except that I saw Branford on the sidelines joshing around with Spike Lee, whose enthusiasm for the evening was palpable, so add his name to the roster of folks who just don't get it.

Not to suggest that Zirin is a conspiracy theorist or anything, but he also said that ESPN blocked out the live sound from the Dome and played fake cheers on the air when former president Bush was introduced because the sound of booing was so resounding in the Dome, and again—why are people who weren't there talking about things that didn't happen?

That is utter nonsense.

Why are we having this discussion still? Why are people from other places spending so much effort to tell us that, as a community, we are wrong, misguided, amoral, and racist? Why are they making things up?

I mean, I can't really fathom how to craft a sensible response to a black man from Omaha who was offended by the appearance of U2. I mean, is this really an issue?

No African Americans on the Saints roster or in Southern University's band or in the attendant media or Dome employees or security staffs or Irma Thomas or Allen Toussaint or the first responders who were honored or African-American season ticket holders chose to boycott the game, and maybe that's because they don't get it.

If there weren't thousands and thousands of black folks in the seats Monday night, then I am blind. And it might be worth noting—just because I'm feeling ornery—that when you incorporate surrounding parishes and trace a map from southern Mississippi up through central Louisiana, the demographic makeup of the Saints' potential fan base is not an African-American majority.

In fact, it's not even close—but acknowledging this would weaken the demagogic arguments of outsiders who keep hammering home just what a cesspool of humanity we've turned out to be here in south Louisiana. Human dreck. Unworthy.

Let me ask you something, Omaha: If you get your ass kicked by a tornado, are you going to tell the College World Series to permanently relocate somewhere else so you can get your priorities in order?

Hey, Bowling Green: If Louisville or Lexington gets whacked with a dirty bomb and has to rebuild from scratch, where will the Kentucky Derby and Wildcats basketball fit into the recovery? Disposable entities, last on the list?

Hey, Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania . . . oh, never mind.

I called the editorial-page editor of
USA Today
to ask if he thought those letters were representative of American thought on the matter, but he didn't return my call.

Unlike some of that newspaper's correspondents, I don't speak for black people. And I don't speak for other white people. I speak for me, and I'll take the grenade on this one if my priorities are so misplaced as to think that the opening of the Dome was, above all else, an enormous boost to our economy—to say nothing of our spirits.