The Return

How this has just sat here collecting dust, and it may go on doing just that after this post, but since I backed into creating a MySpace just as I backed into this, I figured I'd add a bit here on this 12th day of the 12th month of the 6th year -- threes have always been a hallmark of my life, so this seems like a good day to do something different --

Back in New Orleans for many months now, no longer a refugee from the city, but still not settled, certainly not satisfied -- except for the play of the Saints, that is -- in this crazy excuse for a life in this crazy excuse for a city, it is with great joy that I get to sit back and watch the home team, a team I have suffered with all my life -- I was born in '65, they were born in '66 and it's been a stormy relationship ever since -- I've seen the first half of just about every Saints game ever played, the second half usually finding me playing outside as a kid or switching to something else as an adult -- my most prized possession is a first-year Saints bobblehead complete with the 1967 sticker on the bottom, a possession that was left during the Katrina evacuation and the thing I was most worried about upon returning -- miracle of miracles, it was exactly where I left it when I returned to check on things, along with everything else (a little mold in the fridge not withstanding) -- I've had other teams I've rooted for, most notably the Steelers (starting with Louisiana-born Bradshaw joining the squad), but the Saints have always been THE team, more like a member of the family than just someone to root for on Sundays -- I've lived and died with their play and this year, more than ever, I'm living through them -- the Saints are like a life-preserver, not only for me, but for the entire city and region, and all those opposed to using money to rebuild the Superdome can kiss our collective asses -- just like that first Mardi Gras after the storm, we need the Saints to be here, and for them to be playing like they are makes many things better, both big and small --

So, though this may sit here unread, I send out these thanks to everyone who has made this most memorable of seasons possibly -- I'm not particularly thankful for much nowadays, but the New Orleans Saints have made things much sweeter for this poor refugee from the rest of life -- Geaux SAINTS!!!

Do you know?

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

My friend of friends Hal sent that classic question out to the mojo wire, and I have to wonder about that myself -- I know he knows, and I know he knows that I know, but I wonder how many others know, really know. New Orleans is (guess I have to start using the past-tense now), was a place like no other in this country, a little slice of Catholic Europe, a cultural island in a tepid WASP sea. It’s a place many feel affection for, but how many will truly miss it -- and I’m not talking about missing your house with all the stuff in it or missing your favorite college bar on Maple Street -- I’m talking about missing the vibe of the city, that unique energy at the heart of what used to be New Orleans.

(Watching the news as I type this up and a flash of a McDonald’s from the air, that prototypical American institution, ripped to shreds -- symbolism there.)

Do you know what it means? People get married in Las Vegas, they leave their heart in San Francisco, they wear a big heart on their chest for New York -- they may think they wear their heart on their sleeve for the Big Easy (a term that no one in the city had ever heard of before the movie of the same name used it), but in all likelihood it was just a stain left over from one too many Pat O’Brien’s Hurricanes. I wonder.

I was born at Baptist Hospital on Napoleon Avenue, only a few wet blocks from the apartment that I so recently called home on St. Charles Avenue. My dad worked for K & B Drugs, one of the most beloved companies in the history of the city, the model for all multipurpose drug stores we see today (taken over and destroyed by Rite Aid like some ravaging corporate virus, by the way). We moved out when I was five (1970) because of the deteriorating conditions of the city, or maybe my dad just saw the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond elsewhere -- either way, I spent the next thirty years here in Lafayette, two and a half hours away in Cajun Country.

Even after twenty years of growing up here, I could never say I was from Lafayette -- I never sounded like a Cajun and I always felt that New Orleans was my real home. We still had plenty of family there and went back for most holidays, including Mardi Gras, of course, and that connection was never broken within me. It might have just been a case of romancing my origins, but when I finally made it back (for good, I thought), it was like I’d never left and nothing has happened since to change that love I have for the city of my birth.

After moving back, however, it didn’t take me long to notice that most people who are born and grow up there don’t really love New Orleans all that much -- they love Metairie and Kenner, Chalmette and Gretna, the suburbs where they live and go to school, but New Orleans itself is a dark and scary place, a dangerous den of thieves where tourists go to live on the edge for a while like thrill-seeking spelunkers. I’ve lost count of how many times people of all ages shook their heads in amazement and confusion when I said how much I loved the French Quarter and Magazine Street, like I was trying to impart to them the cuteness and lovability of a tarantula.

Of course, now we can all watch the news and see exactly what those dumbfounded suburbanites were afraid of as the lawless ferocity that always lay just below the surface of the inner city breaks into the light of day like a dying submarine that blows all ballast and shoots to the sky -- it’s an ugly thing, but it shouldn’t be seen as the heart of my city --

For me, the purple, green and gold of Mardi Gras are the true colors of the city, the event that shows what New Orleans is truly made of -- that amazing balance it maintains between the land and the sea (there I go needing the past-tense again), good and bad, day and night -- family at parades and lechery on Bourbon, the mob of people in the streets that would cause panic and the issuance of riot gear anywhere else, but here they stand side by side (people, not riot police), white and black, young and old, jumping for beads and diving for doubloons, handing catches over to kids or grannies who wouldn’t catch anything otherwise -- though I’ve grown to enjoy Jazz Fest more, Gras is where the flower of the city blooms for all to see.

Now my thoughts keep going back to a moment in the week before Katrina struck. I was walking down Bourbon Street around three-thirty in the afternoon, off work and heading for the trolley stop at Canal Street, talking to my brother Steve on the cell over the din of bands and stereos in the bars and T-shirt shops lining the street, catching up with him and laughing about life -- here I was coming from my job on Royal Street, strolling through the Quarter on my way home, which meant a streetcar ride down St. Charles Avenue and I said to him, you know, you can’t get much more New Orleans than this . . .

Do you know?

My New World

First of all, let me say how much I despise the word blog -- it is a lazy bastardization from a society now founded almost exclusively upon sound-bite material, everything becoming a monosyllabic shadow of itself all too quickly. So while the site name may indicate differently, this is a web log, and I will be dealing with real words and sentences and punctuation (though I am a bit loose on that last item, since years of letter-writing have produced an inordinate reliance upon dashes at the expense of periods and capital letters -- sorry).

Second, I am an American refugee fled from the new Venice, New Orleans -- I am lucky enough to have family close by and not only have a place to stay, but my own room with a TV and a place to set up my computer. I left at three the day before Katrina came ashore and you’ve never seen so many cars going one way on a highway at three o’clock in the morning. By the time I got to Lafayette, I’d been up for more than twenty-four hours, but I was here and it took less than three hours instead of the ten and twelve hours I’ve heard from others who left after the sun came up -- and still, they were among the lucky ones, because no matter how long it took, they got out and are now safe, however uncomfortable they may be at the moment. The unlucky ones are still there living in a disaster zone turned war zone -- seemingly no one prepared for this event, which while tragic, was nonetheless predicted over and over as an eventual possibility by the experts in the field.

So now, here it is, the inevitable catastrophe come to pass and what do you know, no one knows what the hell to do about it -- instead of having vehicles at the ready, boats or amphibious craft or something to get in and get those left behind, we’re all scrambling to find trucks that’ll run in hip-deep water and boats that’ll travel over the debris. We’ve been caught with our pants down after ten years of computer models telling us this is exactly what would happen if New Orleans had a direct hit by a major hurricane -- of course, the funny thing is that this wasn’t even a direct hit and the big catastrophe didn’t happen until Katrina was well past. A direct hit would have been even worse, which is probably hard to imagine at this point, but just imagine having all water and no houses whatsoever poking out the top and you’ll get an idea of what they’ve told us to fear.

With this information in hand, those of us who could get out did so, leaving those without the means to leave or without the sense to leave behind -- now we watch them on the news, all the worse elements of the city running amok among the continuing tragedy for the entire world to see. It’s not enough that we’re the Murder Capital of the country, but now we’re an uncivilized No Man’s Land, a lawless Third World hole bereft of all of the charm that made New Orleans a destination for tourists worldwide. Now those same tourists are being robbed for being tourists, stores looted, people terrorized -- looting a grocery store for food to survive being one thing, but what’s going on now is simple chaos. For a city known to be the best at crowd control (as anyone who has been to Mardi Gras should readily realize), these are the worst pictures that could come out of the city at this time and the perpetrators should be shown no mercy. I don’t think anyone could call the looters an aberration endemic to New Orleans, though -- it is the problem of the poor inner city that affects all of the country at the worst of times, and for my city, this is without a doubt the worst of times.


Switching gears from sad to pissed, I thank George W. Bush for these lovely shots of my beloved city of New Orleans -- it’s because of you, George, that the city is under water, because you’re the one that couldn’t be bothered with approving the funds for our Wetlands Restoration projects. Our Congressmen have begged and pleaded, but we’re just Texas’ sad little neighbor, good for a few laughs in our casinos and for titillating strolls down Bourbon Street, but that’s a whole mess of money to be giving us for a bit of resodding work. So now, see the fruit of your labors of inaction -- hell, it’s not so bad, you think, could have been much worse, you reckon -- if Abdul would have crashed a plane into One Shell Square, now that would have been a stain on your pretty starched collar. This? Well, shucks, this is just an old fashioned Act of God, your close pal, and what can anyone do about that but stand back and appreciate the spectacle. Hell, New Orleans has probably been a fairly big blot on your Christian conservative hand-wringing designs for the country anyway, a huge smudge on your vanilla-coated Family Values plan to turn America into a bunch of black-coat wearing Puritans again, though we’d all be wearing cowboy hats with this time.

Now one of those dens of evil is taken care of (look out Vegas, there may be a nuclear accident heading your way), the Big Easy washed clean in biblical proportions, with a little presidential foot-dragging thrown in to help -- no worries now, though, because God has taken care of it, washing away the thin veneer of civilization to expose the festering jungle that lay at the heart of our city of sin. Now you’re in your comfort zone and can handle things the way you know best: SEND IN THE TROOPS! Martial Law in New Orleans, now that has a sweet ring to it -- more fun than taking a month-long vacation during the second coming of Vietnam, more invigorating than riding bikes with Lance while faceless American soldiers die on the side of nameless Iraqi roads -- nothing like the Wrath of God to energize those right wing prayer lines, that’s fer sure.

So thanks George -- I’m sure you’ll do all you can to fix it now that things have gone so terribly wrong, but if you would have practiced that ounce of prevention, maybe New Orleans wouldn’t be a watery wasteland right now.