Chris Rose returns!
ByWell, let there be (emotional) light, one of the city’s treasures has returned.
For them what don’t know, he’s a Times-Picayune columnist who stuck it out Post-K and documented the mental state of the populace. The ups and the downs. The survivor’s guilt. The overwhelming scope of the Thing. And yes, even from the beginning, small shining examples of hope and recovery. (Click for the title column of his book, “One Dead in Attic.” Complete with photos. As he says: Keep a tissue handy.)
After a while, there were those who felt he got too whiny and it was time to suck it up and move on…but he reminded us that there were some of us who just weren’t able to do that.
We went and saw him doing reading from his collection of columns after the storm, and it was totally, wonderfully cathartic, in a horrible, sobbing sort of way. He was thin bordering on gaunt, a man haunted by the ghosts of the city he loved. As it happened, we sat next to his wife and subjected her to the same damn gushing conversation I’m sure she was always enduring- and still she smiled politely, kindly. It was a few weeks later that he posted a long column about how bad his depression really was and how he’d finally gone for professional help.
I know…I know. He can be maudlin. He can be overwraught. He’s made some missteps, and who knows where he’s been for 6 weeks.
But in the end, he wrote the following damn column for the last day of that dread 2005. We were all so glad to see it go, and still so worried about what was to come. And for this column alone, I’ll always adore him. That damned mouthwash gets me still. I can’t find a link at the paper for it, so I’m going to cut and paste it from somewhere else along with the byline and hope that’s considered fair play.
Cry me a New Year ~ Times Picayune
Whether you’re looking back on 2005 or ahead to 2006, the advice is the same: Keep a tissue handy. And keep the faith.
Chris Rose
When I look back on the year 2005, nothing comes to mind more than the opening line of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Except for that “best of times” part, it describes New Orleans perfectly.
How did we get here? What happened to my tough-lovin’, hard-luck, good-timin’ town?
Mercy.
I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. The fear of injury, the fear of disease, the fear of death, the fear of abandonment, isolation and insanity.
I have had seared into my olfactory lockbox the smell of gasoline and dead people. And your leftovers.
I have feared the phantom notions of sharks swimming in our streets and bands of armed men coming for me in the night to steal my generator and water and then maybe rape me or cut my throat just for the hell of it.
I have wept, for hours on end, days on end.
The crying jags. I guess they’re therapeutic, but give me a break.
The first time I went to the Winn-Dixie after it reopened, I had all my purchases on the conveyer belt, plus a bottle of mouthwash. During the Days of Horror following the decimation of this city, I had gone into the foul and darkened store and lifted a bottle.
I was operating under the “take only what you need” clause that the strays who remained behind in this godforsaken place invoked in the early days.
My thinking was that it was in everyone’s best interest if I had a bottle of mouthwash.
When the cashier rang up my groceries all those weeks later, I tried, as subtly as possible, to hand her the bottle and ask her if she could see that it was put back on the shelf. She was confused by my action and offered to void the purchase if I didn’t want the bottle.
I told her it’s not that I didn’t want it, but that I wished to pay for it and could she please see that it was put back on the shelf. More confusion ensued and the line behind me got longer and it felt very hot and crowded all of a sudden and I tried to tell her: “Look, when the store was closed . . . you know . . . after the thing . . . I took . . .”
The words wouldn’t come. Only the tears.
The people in line behind me stood stoic and patient, public meltdowns being as common as discarded kitchen appliances in this town.
What’s that over there? Oh, it’s just some dude crying his butt off. Nothing new here. Show’s over people, move along.
The cashier, an older woman, finally grasped my pathetic gesture, my lowly attempt to make amends, my fulfillment to a promise I made to myself to repay anyone I had stolen from.
“I get it, baby,” she said, and she gently took the bottle from my hands and I gathered my groceries and walked sobbing from the store.
She was kind to me. I probably will never see her again, but I will never forget her. That bottle. That store. All the fury that prevailed. The fear.
A friend of mine, a photojournalist, recently went to a funeral to take pictures. There had been an elderly couple trapped in a house. He had a heart attack and slipped into the water. She held onto a gutter for two days before being rescued.
It was seven weeks before the man’s body was found in the house, then another six weeks before the remains were released from the St. Gabriel morgue for burial.
“Tell me a story I haven’t heard,” I told my friend. Go ahead. Shock me.
When my father and I were trading dark humor one night and he was offering advice on how to begin my year in review, he cracked himself up, proposing: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
That’s close, but not quite it. “It was a dark and stormy morning” would be closer to the truth.
What a morning it was.
I was in Vicksburg. I had just left the miserable hotel crackhouse to which my family had evacuated — it must have been the last vacant room in the South — and was looking for breakfast for my kids.
But the streets and businesses were abandoned and a slight but stinging rain was falling, the wind surging and warm, and while my kids played on a little riverfront playground, I got through on my cell phone to The Times-Picayune newsroom, where scores of TP families had taken refuge, and I remember saying to the clerk who answered the phone:
“Man, that was a close one, huh? Looks like we dodged another bullet.”
I suppose around a million people were saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. What I would have given to be right. Just that one time.
I was trying to get through to my editor to ask: “What’s the plan?”
By late afternoon, that’s what everyone in the Gulf region was asking.
Of course, it turns out there wasn’t a plan. Anywhere. Who could have known?
The newspaper was just like everyone else at that point: As a legion of employees and their families piled into delivery trucks and fled the newspaper building as the waters rose around them, we shifted into the same operational mode as everyone else:
Survive. Wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something. And call your mother and tell her you’re all right.
Unless, of course, your mother was in Lakeview or the Lower 9th or Chalmette or . . . well, I’ve had enough of those horror stories for now. I don’t even want to visit that place today.
This was the year that defines our city, our lives, our destiny. Nothing comparable has ever happened in modern times in America, and there is no blueprint for how we do this.
We just wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something.
You’d have to be crazy to want to live here. You’d have to be plumb out of reasonable options elsewhere.
Then again, I have discovered that the only thing worse than being in New Orleans these days is not being in New Orleans.
It’s a siren calling us home. It cannot be explained.
“They don’t get us,” is the common refrain you hear from frustrated residents who think the government and the nation have turned a blind eye to us in our time of need. Then again, if they did get us, if we were easily boxed and labeled, I suppose we’d be just Anyplace, USA.
And that won’t do.
We have a job to do here, and that is to entertain the masses and I don’t mean the tourists. They’re part of it, of course, but what we do best down here — have done for decades — is create a lifestyle that others out there in the Great Elsewhere envy and emulate.
Our music, our food, yada, yada, yada. It’s a tale so often told that it borders on platitude but it is also the searing truth: We are the music. We are the food. We are the dance. We are the tolerance. We are the spirit.
And one day, they’ll get it.
As a woman named Judy Deck e-mailed to me, in a moment of inspiration: “If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.”
Yeah, you rite.
That, people, is the final word on 2005.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.
