That Perfect Fucking Storm
Seventeen Years after the end of the world hit New Orleans
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, I wrote a full-length play called Beautiful Late: it was the first time I’d grappled with disability in anything artistic, and it took place in my hometown of New Orleans. It was a metatation on physical existence and the boring nature of “perfection” and a celebration of bodies that are percieved as destroyed, not just human bodies like the one of the disabled protagonist, Shannon, but also the crumbling and magnificent homes that New Orleans has long been famous for. The architect that Shannon ends up connecting with has a real thing for not fixing up aesthetically-appealing destruction (though of course he leaves this philosophy behind, to make a living) and one of the strongest monologues I had ever than-written is his ode to a specific New Orleans house that he believes is perfect but that he’s forced to repair, and I was in a bit of a gothic mood as is just in my blood and wrote passionately about how this beautiful place would be even more striking in the process of being destroyed — not destroyed, enhanced, part of nature — by a cataclysmic flood. As I was redrafting that play after our memorable staged reading in one of the University Theatre Building’s luxurious venues, Katrina hit. I stopped writing. The notion of romanticizing a flood, of waxing fucking lyrical about a New Orleans’ building’s destruction, had suddenly become the most abhorrant thing I could have done. How could I have written that, I wondered. How could I how could I how could I, as though I could have stopped the apocalypse if only I hadn’t made anything.
My dad called me on August 29th and I’ll never forget his voice, his exact words: “This is The Big One. This is it. This is the one they were always telling us about when I was little.” Most people had not been prepared for The Big One: my aunt had gone to a hurricane party (New Orleans tradition at all such times) with 3 days worth of clothes, and she’d thought that was likely overkill. My aunt is a staunch wearer of stilletto heels for longer than most of you have known what they were, and she did not pack comfortable shoes.
Watching my hometown on the news-that-told-you-nothing was a different kind of harrowing than what my loved ones were going through. Being in Iowa at that time was a different kind of hell, the stiffling kind, than the one I’ll never truly know the horrors of. All I remember was what I imagined from the images that my loved ones gave me. The National Guard sounded like terrorists: “They all have machine guns,” my dad said. “We’re driving through the French Quarter while this dude is waving us through with a machine gun. It is so surreal.”
It was Biblically apocalpytic. Everyone who loved me was so grateful that I wasn’t there. But it broke my heart that I wasn’t there. All these cornfed white suburban kids with no idea what was happening shot daggers at me with their smiles, even though they didn’t mean to. (It’s Iowa, nobody means to!) I had an impossible time getting anything academic done, and I wrote to my professor, the eminent Walt Whitman scholar Ed Folsom, to explain why there was just no way I would have tomorrow’s reading done. What he did as a result of my email was miraculous.
He scrapped the plan for the day-after-Katrina and made the whole class about Whitman’s relationship to New Orleans. We read his journalism wherein he took readers on the same exhuberant sensory journey that would land him a place in our canon and consciousness for (presumably) the rest of time, but instead of focusing on abstract spiritual concepts and the hotness of male laborers, he was focused on New Orleans, my New Orleans (with, I’m sure, several appreciatory descriptions of hot sailors thrown in). It couldn’t heal me, but everything it could do at an impossible time, it did.
New Orleans being a city of death and resurrection, plans never stopped to make magic and community out of our drowned haunts. Z’otz, a coffeehouse that now only survives in a gentrified Uptown incarnation but used to be its own dark-velvet planet in the French Quarter, populated with all manner of mythical beings as its clientele, shut down by necessity but the building still stood. “Myrtle and I were thinking about giving out bagels from Z’otz,” my dad told me later, referring to the remarkable Myrtle von Damitz III, a singular visual artist who was a longtime local fixture and now lives in Oregon. At my father’s funeral a year later, I mentioned this endeavor to her, and she brightened the worst day with her crystalline laugh at the memory. “We had all these plans!” she said.
My dad was a man of plans. The ones that went through changed lives (“Let’s open the very first coffeehouse in New Mexico and also make sure it’s a live music venue so that we can support travelling musicians with an attentive, non-drunken audience”) and the plans that didn’t go through always made for entertaining imaginings. There were a lot of unplanned moments in my dad’s life that didn’t feel real, some of them heart-lifting (as a limosiune chauffer, he gave his phone number to folk hero Stephen Stills on the night of a meteor shower and told him, '“I’ll be up, you know, if you wanna go see that meteor shower,” and was not only given a call: he took the icon to his friend-and-record-producer Michael Paz’s house where they jammed all night together, piano and guitar and song and those close, liquid, catch-them-in-your-palm stars.)
Other unplanned moments in my dad’s life were horrifying, like the time we got held up at gun point in front of our house on Christmas Eve. I didn’t see the potentially fatal gleam because my dad bellowed with everything in him, “GET INSIDE HE’S GOT A GUN!” and instead of throwing the all-too-young weapon-weilder his wallet like any reasonable person would have done, he Hulked out uncharacteristically to his full 6’5 200-something-lbs stature and hurled a wine bottle at the soon-fleeing kid. I can only think of him as a kid.
Shortly after that, my dad decided he needed a gun. We argued about this. He stored it under his bed in a box and I, 14 years old at that time, never saw it. When he evacuated out of New Orleans he told me, “I sold my gun in El Paso.” I can think of country songs that sound less like a country song than this cold fact.
I didn’t get to come home until a year later, and what a time that was: it turned out to be my very last week with my father, who would die suddenly in his sleep 2 months after I took that trip. “New Orleans will recover from Katrina,” one of his friends told me at his funeral. “But we’ll never recover from this.”
I wish I could play you the material my dad was writing before he died. The single album that he produced in his lifetime recieved massive praise from a lot of listeners and one him a spot on tour with Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and others who had long been his heroes. But one printed review, which he never got out of his head, praised his virtuostic guitar-playing but complained that the lyrics didn’t match it: they were ‘pedestrian,’ the reviewer said.
He ratcheted up his lyrical game after that, hard. Some of these songs he actually completed and performed on that tour, and thank Paz, his producer, I have those live recordings, and they sound fantastic, because Paz is good at what he does. (You can’t be a record producer in a city like New Orleans without knowing what a true BANGER-record is made of.) But there was an unfinished song he wrote about a stripper. As you listen, you realize that this woman isn’t just a ball-buster in the empowerment sense: she’s a bitch. She’s a real bitch. You’re starting to wonder what happened to her, right when he gets to the chorus:
Katrina
Katrina
Katrina was her name
No matter what the New York Times tells you, the loss we all suffered in 2005 was inconcievable and it will never be repaired. If you weren’t there, you weren’t there. It was beautiful, it was harrowing, and it was unforgettable, but none of us will ever find the right words. There aren’t any.