Table of Contents
Introduction XV
Who We Are 1
Early Days
Facing the Unknown 7
The First Time Back 10
Survivors 13
Life in the Surreal City 16
Hope 19
Rita Takes Aim 22
The Empty City 25
God and Strippers 28
The More Things Change 31
Enough to Feed an Army 34
Tough Times in the Blue Tarp Town
Blue Roof Blues 41
The Smell 44
The Elephant Men 48
Mad City 51
1 Dead in Attic 56
Despair 61
The Ties That Bind
My Introduction to New Orleans 67
The Funky Butt 72
The Hurricane Kids 75
Traveling Man 78
Have Barbie, Will Travel 81
Prep Boys and Jesuits 84
Good-bye 89
Groundhog Day 92
Coming Home 95
Life in the Refrigerator City
Civil Unrest 101
Refrigerator Town 105
Lurching Toward Babylon 107
The Cat Lady 110
Caving In 113
The Magnet Man 116
The Last Ride 119
Lights in the City 123
Let the Good Times Roll 127
Our Katrina Christmas 131
Tears, Fears, and a New Year 134
Misadventures in the Chocolate City
Chocolate City 141
Tutti-Frutti 145
He Had a Dream 147
He's Picking the Pairs for Nola's Ark 150
Rider on the Storm 153
Car 54, Where Are You? 156
Not in My Pothole 160
Survive This 163
Love Among the Ruins
September Never Ends 169
The Muddy Middle Ground 172
Misery in the Melting Pot 176
The End of the World 181
A Huck Finn Kind of Life 187
Our Very Scary Summer 192
Songs in the Key of Strife 196
The End of the Line 200
We Raze, and Raise, and Keep Pushing Forward 210
Echoes of Katrina in the Country 215
The Purple Upside-Down Car
Second Line, Same Verse 221
Don't Mess with Mrs. Rose 226
Shooting the Rock 229
The City That Hair Forgot 233
A Rapturous Day in the Real World 238
Big Daddy No Fun 243
Peace Among the Ruins 247
Artful Practicality 250
"She Rescued My Heart" 253
Miss Ellen Deserved Better 257
Things Worth Fighting For
Rebirth at the Maple Leaf 267
Melancholy Reveler 270
They Don't Get Mardi Gras, and They Never Will 274
Reality Fest 278
Love Fest 281
O Brothers, Where Be Y'all? 285
Funeral for a Friend 289
Thanks, We Needed That 292
Say What's So, Joe 296
A Night to Remember 301
Eternal Dome Nation 308
Falling Down
On the Inside Looking Out 317
A City on Hold 320
A Tough Nut to Crack 323
Hell and Back 327
Letters from the Edge 340
Where We Go From Here
Children of the Storm, It's Time to Represent 347
Thank You, Whoever You Are 353
A New Dawn 358
Acknowledgments 363
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Writing an introduction for a book like this is tricky business.
Intros I have read over the years are generally composed of personal anecdotes and references to the body of work that follows. But, in this case, what follows is the personal work, the veil pulled away, the soul of a city -- and a writer -- laid bare.
Newspaper reporters are used to covering death and disaster -- it's our bread and butter -- but nothing prepares you to do it in your own town. Usually, we parachute into trouble, fill our notebooks, and then hightail it back to the comfort of our homes and offices.
Katrina changed all that.
Our comfort zones disappeared, turned into rubble, wastelands, and ghost towns. I went from being a detached entertainment columnist to a soldier on the front line of a battle to save a city, a culture, a newspaper, my job, my home.
Whether we won or lost the war remains to be seen. New Orleans is still a work in progress. The observations, lamentations, and ruminations that follow are the story so far, as it unfolded to me in the first sixteen months after the flood.
It's probably too emotional for conventional newspaper work. Too sentimental. Too angry. And way too self-absorbed, particularly for someone who weathered the storm remarkably well -- in a material sense, at least (I suffered a broken screen door and a loose gutter) -- and whose career not only survived the storm, but actually thrived in the aftermath.
I got a book deal, a movie deal, a Pulitzer Prize, dinner with Ted Koppel, and a mention in the social column of The Washington Times. If that ain't Making The Grade, then I don't know whatis.
Natural disasters are a good career move for a man in my line of work.
But you didn't have to lose your house, your car, your dog, your job, your marriage, or your grandparents in an attic to suffer the impact of this storm. Unfortunately, most folks around south Louisiana and Mississippi did lose some or all of this.
Others lost less tangible assets: their peace of mind, security, serenity, ability to concentrate, notions of romance, sobriety, sanity, and hope.
The toll it took on me is in the book; I'll not belabor it here other than to say Katrina beat the shit out of me. It beat the shit out of everyone I know. This is our story.
In the winter of 2006, I self-published a collection of my post-Katrina columns from The Times-Picayune, a slim volume of love letters to New Orleans, howls of protest, cries for help, and general musings on the surrealistic absurdities of life in a post-Apocalyptic landscape.
I called it 1 Dead in Attic, a phrase I saw painted on the front of a house in the city's 8th Ward; words that haunted me then, and haunt me still.
Within six months, I ran through five printings of the book, collected great reviews from publications large and small, and sold 65,000 copies. I'm a neophyte in the world of independent publishing, but I'm told that's a real good number for a self-published volume. In fact, it's a good number for any volume.
And that's how the book came to attention of Simon & Schuster. I was preparing a follow-up to Dead in Attic, another collection of stories that I was going to call The Purple Upside-Down Car, a declarative observation my four-year-old son made from our car during a tour of the Lower 9th Ward that I clung to as the perfect metaphor for the whole of New Orleans and not just some wasted, toppled vehicle lying in a field of debris down on -- get this -- Flood Street.
The irony in this place could kill you.
Simon & Schuster bought the rights to Dead in Attic and the as-yet-unpublished Purple Upside-Down Car and we put them together and that's what you're holding in your hands. Faced with two titles but only one book, we went with the former because it already has brand recognition and because, well... the other one kind of sounds precariously like a Dr. Suess book.
This book takes the reader up to New Year's Day, 2007. A lot has happened since then, to the city, to me. On the eve of publication, I split with my wife of eleven years and went to rehab for an addiction to prescription painkillers, which I turned to in my ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression.
It would be easy to lay this blood on the hands of Katrina, though there is more, much more, to the story.
There always is.
But I guess that's the next chapter, the next story. The next book.
-- Chris Rose New Orleans, June, 2007