1 Dead in Attic (30 page)

The Tuesday-night Rebirth gig at the Maple Leaf has iconographic standing in the lore of New Orleans nightlife, like the Thursday-night zydeco stomp at Mid-City Lanes or the Sunday-afternoon
fais do-do
at Tip's.

Something you can count on. No need to consult a schedule.

Long before Katrina, the Rebirth shows at Maple Leaf were where I'd drop in from time to time to remind myself why I live here, why I love here. Why I am here.

For the uninitiated (and if that's you, shouldn't you ask yourself why?) the Rebirth Brass Band is one of the veteran standard-bearers of the New Orleans brass-band renaissance and I realize that if you ask me what that means, well . . . I don't know. What is New Orleans brass-band music? Got me.

Jazz, I guess, in its basic DNA. Layered with rock influences. Smothered in hip-hop beat and attitude. All rolled together in a scary marching band.

It is an explosion of sound, just drums and horns—who needs anything else, really?—and it is the sound of Mardi Gras, of second lines, street parades, and house parties. Of New Orleans.

The Rebirth Tuesday-night gigs have been colossal draws for years, crowded, sweaty, throbbing, disorganized affairs packed with Tulane students, downtown hipsters, stiff-collar types, and soul brothers.

It is so energetic, so in the groove, so diverse, and so perfect that it almost looks contrived, like if a director wanted to create the quintessential bar scene for a movie, this is what he would make.

But Hollywood could never make this. Not on a Tuesday night. And not in any other town.

It's organic. Sexy. Maybe even mildly dangerous—all that sweat. In the ultimate act of self-absorption, I'm going to quote myself, from a tourist guidebook I wrote several years ago, trying to capture a moment at one of these shows: “Loud. Fast. Free-falling. Funky. You've got 10 new friends. The girl in your arms—what's her name? Who cares? Dance. If you saw yourself in a mirror at this instant, you wouldn't recognize yourself. And that can be a good thing.”

I couldn't say it any better myself. And this past Tuesday night, that's what it was. Good medicine. As I knew it would be.

“Bounce” is the name of another kind of New Orleans music, our unique and commercially successful ghetto rap scene, but it should be the name for brass-band music, too. Because that's what you end up doing. Bouncing.

It's impossible not to. If you can't dance to this, you are on life support or maybe already dead.

If I don't feel better after doing this, I told myself on the way to the Maple Leaf, then I am irretrievable.

But I did. In the thick of a too-hot crowd full of strangers and old friends, watching ten, eleven, maybe a dozen guys packed on a too-small stage under bare lightbulbs and a pressed-tin ceiling, feeling the release of the fist-thrusting call-and-response, staring into a wall of horns whose music is so muscular that it almost takes on a physical manifestation and reaches out and beats you about the head and grabs your collar and screams in your face, “You are
alive,
boy!
Do you understand?
” And I do. And I am home again.

So the season is upon us.

In some pockets of town, I see the banners, flags, bunting, and lights with the colors that speak to my spirit, and I hear Al “Carnival Time” Johnson on the radio calling me to fall in.

By this time of year, I have usually wiped down the ladder that has been stowed in the shed for a year, making sure the safety straps, bead hooks, and cup holders—especially the cup holders—are tight and secure.

Sometimes I'll have added a fresh coat of paint.

But it's still in the shed as I write this. I'll get it out. Soon.

I see the empty stands down on The Avenue, waiting for the revelers to come. For some reason, I have always been rendered wistful by the sight of deserted stands and stadiums, and this year it's a small hole in my heart.

Even though they're at least a mile away, maybe more, sometimes in the afternoon if the wind blows just so, I can hear the St. Aug marching band—what's left of it—merged with St. Mary's and Xavier Prep, practicing their grooves in the streets of Uptown.

It is music from Heaven. If Heaven had a lot of trash on the sidewalk.

I see those roadside carny food trailers parked down by Lee Circle, and even though I have never bought a corn dog from them and probably never will, for some reason, as I drove past those monstrosities the other night, I felt . . . happy?

That's not the word for it. Happy is a tough place to get to these days. Especially with no street signs.

And “normal” isn't the word, because this Mardi Gras certainly won't be.

Comforted? Maybe that's it. I don't know.

Who can't use a little comfort these days? Who doesn't want their momma to hold them tight and tell them everything is going to be okay?

Maybe Mardi Gras is our chicken soup this year. For the soul. For the heart.

Will the first post-K Mardi Gras serve to reinvigorate civic pride and community cheer and our sense of esprit and renewal? Or will all the parading about on the only remaining sliver of habitable ground in a larger desolate wasteland only serve as a disjointed reminder of just how out of whack our lives have become?

Will the Carnival season, traditionally so full of rollicking good-time music, crawfish boils, and paradegoing throngs, remind us of how good it feels to be in a crowd of like-minded souls—our irrepressible community—or will it more resemble one of those painful New Year's Eve parties full of forced cheer and false promise?

I hate those parties.

In the relentless tides of emotions that batter us about in these hard times, I waver these days between dread and wistfulness, wistfulness and longing.

It's like getting stuck on some girl you knew in high school. Really stuck, for some odd reason, maybe because things aren't going so well at home, and you Google her late at night when no one will know.

You want to know what happened to her. Where she is. It becomes a strange fixation and you keep looking, even though you know you probably shouldn't. It can't lead to anything good.

Well, I just tried to Google my Mardi Gras of the past, and I got no hits.

I am so thankful I have little kids right now. I can perch myself on the backs of their ladders and make it all about them. The kids are who I always tell people it's about, but in truth, any parent (hell, any adult) knows that it's really about us and that the kids are just a necessary impediment to our unvarnished search for Total Joy.

It goes without saying that this Carnival season shall be like no other.

Several parade krewes had heavy water damage to their floats and some went to great lengths to obscure the flood stains, but others have purposely left the water damage in view.

I know of at least one krewe that will have a dark and riderless float this year as a reminder. Of what has happened. Of what is not here anymore. Of who is not here anymore.

A reminder that we are changed now and will be changed forever, maybe until the day we're all old biddies who talk about how we made it through Katrina like the old biddies around here used to talk about how they made it through Betsy and Camille.

Well, you don't hear them talk so tough anymore.

But we carry on. We deal.

My family will find a new street corner on The Avenue this year.

Our friends who hosted us for so many years—storing our ladder for three weeks, putting up with our kids and out-of-town guests, cheerily suffering through our overstayed welcome, year after year—well, they've sold their house and moved away.

I will miss them. But I miss a lot of things. Some are big and some are small and here's the weird thing: it's the small ones that can make you cry in your car when you are all alone.

I mean, Mardi Gras hasn't really gotten into swing, so I don't even know what it is I am missing—but I am missing something.

Ah, but aren't we all?

We've got other offers, other street corners we can go to. Our little perch at the corner of Milan and The Avenue is now but part of our scrapbook of family memories.

We'll plant our ladder in a new place and make new friends with the folks who've been there forever—as we used to be at our corner—and we will deal.

Who knows? Maybe a change of scenery will be refreshing. After all, it's just a parade, for cryin' out loud. Such a little thing, really.

Sweet sorrow. Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras, home again.

I hear Al “Carnival Time” Johnson calling my name, and I shall answer the call.

I gotta go get that ladder.

I have decided to free myself of the yoke that burdens me. I am removing the boot heel from my neck.

From now on, I don't care what THEY think.

THEY think we're drunk, insouciant, lascivious, and racist. So be it.

THEY show the images of revelers flashing for beads on Bourbon Street as some sort of distasteful microcosm of the libertine life of New Orleanians—our callous dancing on the graves of the hurricane dead at Mardi Gras.

And the people in the Great Elsewhere watching these images in their living rooms are horrified at our behavior, but is anybody going to point out that 98 percent of the people flashing and taunting for beads on Bourbon Street are from THEIR hometowns?

That THEY are watching a mirror of THEMSELVES, not us?

Do they know that we don't actually hang out on Bourbon Street? That karaoke and cover bands and Huge Ass Beers are not where we're at, culturally speaking?

Not that there's anything wrong with Huge Ass Beers.

Bourbon Street is of great local value, don't get me wrong; it employs hundreds if not thousands of locals and serves as a licentious call to Middle America to come down here and forget your cares and maybe even your clothes.

But that's not us. That's not where I show my wits, so to speak. But if you watch cable TV coverage of Mardi Gras, THEY would have you believe that's US.

So be it. I can't bring myself to care about that anymore.

If you watch the news and read the papers in the Great Elsewhere, you will see Mardi Gras framed in simple, easy-to-grasp terms: it is rich people in Uptown drawing rooms, dressed in gilded capes and gowns that look like Liberace and waving scepters and wands at one another over the heads of their debutantes, the lily-white chosen few.

And then it is profoundly destitute black folks who are pushed to the margins of the celebration, left out, dismissed, forgotten, and trod upon.

Never mind that the story line leaves out several hundred thousand of the rest of us.

It's a journalistic device, and it works. National coverage of the flood has largely been played out to pit the rich white folks of Lakeview against the poor black folks of the Lower 9th, never mind that the flood itself ignored such devices and claimed lives, property, and peace of mind indiscriminately and equally across race, class, and gender lines and across hundreds of square miles.

The failure of the Corps of Engineers was true democracy in action. Or would that be inaction?

I have a friend, a citizen of the fallen nation of the Lower 9th, and she tells me that she is fed up with the reaction she gets when she tells someone that's where she is from.

“They immediately think I am poor, uneducated, have no car, no job, and was too stupid to get out of town when a hurricane comes,” she says. “I was in Dallas; I'm not stupid.”

Nor poor. Nor unemployed, nor, well . . . what the hell am I telling you for?

I live in a dreamworld.

That comes from living in New Orleans, of course, where healthy doses of denial and delusion are as vital as food, water, and prescription medicines just to make it through the day.

I assumed that the flashy cable outlets would stick with the “tits and beer” story line but that, all in all, New Orleans would shine at this monumental crossroads: the first Mardi Gras after . . . The Thing.

I figured the thoughtful news organizations (yes, there are such entities, rare though they are) would “get it.” But I would lump the
Chicago Tribune
into the “thoughtful” category (maybe I'm a newspaper sentimentalist) and I was pretty bummed out to read its recent front-page take on the matter.

It was a long story. Nicely written. But, in the end, it came down to this subheadline:
CARNIVAL'S 2 FACES REFLECT CITY'S DIVIDE.

It's the story line that has played out ad nauseam across the globe. Rich white folks pitted against poor black folks. No shared interests or goals between the two.

Rex versus Zulu. The whole story.

I suspect it is too much to expect them to understand that this is probably the most complex ethnic and cultural port of call in America, that many Islenos of Plaquemines Parish have darker skin than many African Americans and that St. Patrick's Day is commandeered by rowdy Italians in green pants and that the cowboys of the prairies of southwest Louisiana don't look like John Wayne or Heath Ledger but are French-speaking black men with blue and green eyes.

There's the Quarter, of course, where men are men and women, too. Our canines, black and white, march together in parades. A metaphor?

I don't know. I live in a gold mansion and flew in teams of Israeli commandos in Black Hawk choppers to protect my silver and china when the looting broke out.

Okay, maybe I'm too sensitive. Maybe I'm too defensive. Maybe I have lost my path. Maybe it's I who don't “get it.”

The city editor of this newspaper recently addressed a National Press Club banquet in Washington, D.C., and when he mentioned that Mardi Gras was viewed here in New Orleans largely as a nightly festival for children, he was greeted with snorts and guffaws.

By the men and women who are covering this thing, making the words and images that the Great Elsewhere consumes for dinner.