The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  Standing outside the bar, a nervous, middle-aged woman named Cathy McRae approaches Rose.

  “I just want to say how much you meant to New Orleans,” she says.

  She gives him a big hug. He seems fragile in her arms.

  “Ten years later,” he says.

  She starts to cry, a little at first, telling him how often she’s failed to tell people in her life what they meant to her; then she completely breaks down.

  “From all of us,” she says, almost gasping. “You really made a difference. When we were in exile, you really kept us connected.”

  “Ten years later,” Rose says. “You’re gonna get me crying.”

  “Don’t,” she says.

  “I cry every day,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  His friends pay their tabs and come outside, happy to have seen him. They pose for pictures with Rose, leaning into one another with the ease of people who’ve done battle together. They ask him how his search for work is going and whether he’s quit waiting tables. They talk about minivans and leave with heartfelt goodbyes. As they walk down the sidewalk, it’s clear they’ve moved on and lived an entire decade since the hurricane, and Chris, standing back on the sidewalk outside an emptying bar, has been living the same day over and over. Their hurricane ended, and they moved on. His did not. Somehow he got stuck.

  “You look great,” Sanchez says when they’re alone.

  “It’s dark,” Rose says.

  Sanchez’s guitar is in its battered case on the sidewalk. Drury comes out, and Rose looks at her, then at the guitar, then back at her. He asks if she’d mind playing the Katrina song he loves so much. She takes out Paul’s guitar.

  “Got a pick?” Lynn asks.

  She strums, bobs her head, and sings.

  I love this city life, and the dust, and the dust-covered trees.

  Sanchez sits and shakes his head slowly, from side to side, while Rose stands and sways. He gently touches the back of Paul’s head.

  They glitter like diamonds from somebody’s broken windowpane.

  Somebody keeps time on a beer bottle. Lynn plays muted chords then full strums. The streetlights are yellow balls of fire. Cars speed by, tires on wet pavement.

  I guess, I guess I’d rather be . . . , she sings.

  . . . messed up than pretty, the table sings back.

  I guess, I guess, I guess . . . I’d rather be messed up than pretty . . . , she sings.

  . . . just like this city, everyone sings together.

  Rose sways and dances and turns. The bottom edges of his black vest flare when he spins. Cigarettes look like stage props wedged between his fingers, the avenging angel of the 504. The song washes over him, and a streetcar rattles past. There is no pain as long as Lynn keeps singing. Paul closes his eyes. Chris looks around him in rapture and says, “God, I love this town.”

  They sing the line, Messed up is better than pretty.

  The last chord lingers. Chris and Paul toast Louis Armstrong; then they toast each other. At some tables, the conversation always slides back to the storm, to a time when their pain made sense or was at least shared by everyone around them. The people who loved the city the most got hurt the worst.

  Sanchez looks right at me, with soulful eyes and a wide fighter’s nose.

  “The despair was deep enough,” he says, “guys like me and Chris, we’re never gonna recover. It was an amputation. It’s a scar that’s never gonna heal. I still think that leg is there. It’s not, you dig?”

  They sing a few more songs, and the bar moves the table inside. Paul Sanchez packs up his guitar again and walks to the parking lot in the back. In the dark, he quotes Shakespeare—to sleep, perchance to dream—and nods toward his friend out front. He remembers the Chris Rose tripping on mushrooms, driving a muscle-car convertible through a hurricane, the cockiest motherfucker you ever met in your life, lean and dangerous like a switchblade. That man is gone, and a weathered, humbled, loving father of three remains, making beef stroganoff out of a box, still trying to put back together what his poor choices and a hurricane broke apart. No media company in the city will hire him. He writes for a grocery store. Perchance to dream, indeed, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

  “That’s a shell of a man,” Sanchez says, “hanging on by a thread. My heart breaks.”

  V. THE MORNING AFTER THE LONGEST DAY

  The U.S. federal government has spent billions on new hurricane barriers in the past decade, doubling down on the belief that a city can be protected from the forces surrounding it. While this might seem like common sense on the surface, the plan ultimately will be as successful in eliminating the threat of nature as mixing a garbage can of rum and fruit juice and watching the clouds roll in. Building elaborate levees and defenses is the folly, while a hurricane party is a fairly sensible response. At least the party acknowledges the unavoidable truth of both life itself and of the city of New Orleans: It is fragile, hanging on to existence in a violent world, and although the people who live there cannot control the water around them, they can control how they respond to it. The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen hope and joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is a reflection of that choice. They choose to spend a year making a suit of brightly colored feathers to dance for one glorious day. They choose strong coffee and fried fish. They choose Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. They choose to eat gumbo in white linen suits because fuck it. They choose music.

  In the summer of the 10th anniversary, they come to mourn Officer Daryle Holloway, but something amazing happens instead. His family asks the community to stop by their house in the 7th Ward for a candlelight vigil. They publish the address in the paper, and people start to arrive late that afternoon.

  A patrol car parks out front. The department rotates shifts standing watch on the family home, 24 hours a day since Daryle died, a show of respect. One of his daughters needs to fly in from New York, and when she arrives at the airport, a police officer meets her there. The cops get her luggage and put her in the front seat of a cruiser and bring her home. Now Daryle’s 19- and 16-year-old daughters and 13-year-old son greet visitors on the porch, generations coming together. This block has been the center of this family for generations; Eunice Belfield moved here in the 1940s. She sewed costumes for the all-white Mardi Gras Krewe of Proteus. Her son grew up to be the King of Zulu, the prestigious and mostly black krewe.

  Holloway’s cousin Eric Belfield sits on a stoop next door. After Daryle’s divorce, the cousins moved in together to save money. Eric is a chef at a hotel in the Quarter. Someone brings him a plate of food and a bottle of water. The day Daryle died, Eric found the empty bowl of Rice Krispies by Daryle’s bed, next to the previous night’s supper, a fish plate. Reminders are everywhere. When he cut on the television this morning, it was on the last channel Daryle watched: the Cartoon Network. Daryle was a big kid. He loved Legos and cartoons, and the DVR light keeps switching on, recording shows that won’t ever be watched. The family sent Eric to get a clean uniform for the funeral. Sitting on the neighbor’s stoop, he starts to cry. He picks at a chicken thigh on a disposable plate.

  Uniformed officers bring loads of balloons into the house. Staff members from the Walgreens on Elysian Fields and St. Claude, where he worked security, arrive and are fed. The family feeds anyone who’s hungry, friends in the backyard dipping chicken into cornmeal and dropping batches into a pot bubbling on a propane burner. This is why they moved back after Katrina, Belfield says, pointing at the crowd gathering outside the house.

  The most powerful four-letter word is home.

  “Nobody celebrates the life and the death of our people like we do,” Belfield says. The neighbors across the street put out big speakers, and a radio station sends a DJ. Music pours onto the street. Eric dances with his sister and twirls her
on the brick sidewalk. A young girl plays a plastic trumpet.

  A man, James Wilson, walks up to the house with his bike. Leaning against a trash can, he looks broken. He worked at the Superdome with Holloway. James did concessions, and Daryle did security, and last Saturday, when Holloway didn’t show up for his shift at 1:45 p.m., James knew something was wrong. He rode here from City Park, and he looks up at the front porch of the house, where Eunice sits in a chair and sees how many people loved her grandson.

  “This is so sad,” Wilson says.

  Daryle’s mother, a nurse at the old Charity Hospital, sits on the porch too. Women fan her with the plastic plates. A crowd from the 9th Ward arrives, and people from the old Desire and Florida housing projects. Every off-duty cop in the city walks onto the street, which is almost full. They’re white and black, in combat fatigues and dress blues, names like LeBoeuf, DeSalvo, and Jones. The detectives wear suits out of central casting, with loosened ties, big guns, and cigarettes dangling from their lips. On the sidewalk, a group of teenage girls Nae Nae. Police officers stand side by side with people from the projects, locking arms, and if they can come together for a day, then anything is possible in New Orleans.

  The chief of police, Michael Harrison, looks out at the sea of citizens.

  “I have never seen a community do something like this for a police officer,” he says.

  Olander Holloway asks to speak, and a hush comes over the crowd.

  “That was my baby boy,” she says. Hundreds of people pack the street, shoulder to shoulder. Mourners gasp and sob. “I cannot believe this is for my son.”

  Those gathered light candles and sing “Amazing Grace.” The sun hasn’t set, and it all blurs together, noise and laughter and singing and tears. A brass band comes down Kerlerec Street in full swagger, the tuba bobbing above the crowd. Belfield, who plays drums, bangs on a cymbal with a screwdriver. Motorcycle engines rumble. Olander Holloway is on the porch, watching, holding it together. A police cruiser rides slowly down the street. In front of the house, the officer hits his siren.

  She starts to cry.

  The band marches and the motorcycles rev and then it happens.

  Mardi Gras Indians, two Big Chiefs, one in pink and the other in red, round the corner onto Kerlerec. A spy boy dances and yells in front of them. One chief comes from Creole Wild West, one of the oldest tribes in the city. The other comes from the 9th Ward, marching in someone else’s territory for a day, a repayment of respect for a police officer who showed it to them when he walked their streets. No turf wars today.

  It’s madness on the block, brass and stereo speakers and revving engines. Balloons float into the sky over Esplanade Avenue. Smoke rises from motorcycle burnouts. People hold up T-shirts with Holloway’s picture on them. Police officers hit their sirens. The Big Chiefs move slowly, to the rhythm of the brass band playing Bob Marley, the trill roll of a snare drum, the deep bass of the tuba. They march to the house and salute the family on the porch, two Mardi Gras Indians dancing in the light of a setting sun.

  * * *

  —

  In July, a local radio station hires Chris Rose.

  He says getting the job feels like the first day of the rest of his life. Work is starting to find him. New Orleans Magazine gives him a column called Me Again. He guides people on tours of the city for big paydays, sharing his hard-earned knowledge. One book, a biography of fried-chicken king Al Copeland, is nearly finished, and Rose is thinking of writing a memoir of the past 10 years. At least one high-powered New York agent is excited at the prospect of taking it to market. He’s grinding, pushed by deadlines for the first time in a while. Rose writes on his front porch in Bayou St. John, sitting in a chair with a towel around his neck.

  He wrote an obit for Copeland when he died. That’s how the book came about. The family loved it and sought Rose out during his darkest time. Sitting on the porch, he finds the obit online. It ran two-plus years after the storm, and in it, he ends up back in Katrina, talking about the first Christmas after. In addition to founding Popeyes, Copeland strung up the most Griswoldian Christmas lights display at his house, and traffic backed up on Folse Drive, people riding by slowly to gawk. Rose wrote:

  My kids and I were driving around town to see what Christmas lights we could find. Naturally, we ended up at Copeland’s house. It was as it always was. A fairy tale. Over the top. The Great Escape.

  There was a sign in front of the house that year. It was signed by Copeland and it had an inscription about how it was more important than ever before that he put on a show for the children of the community. It had words like ‘sacrifice’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘gratitude’ and all the right notes.

  I cried when I read it. I cried a lot back then.

  Rereading the column, Rose gets quiet, remembering his children 10 years ago, young and still believing he was the strongest man alive. That little girl is a teenager now, inside the house wearing headphones, smiling and rolling her eyes at her dad when he does things like pour coins into a jukebox.

  Earlier today, he listened to the radio station where he’ll soon work, and it ran a program about preparing for this summer’s hurricane season. When his next freelance check comes in, he says he needs to go load up on water, candles, batteries, everything he’ll need. One day, another hurricane will arrive.

  “We’ll never rebuild,” he says. “We can’t. We’ve rebuilt the city. Just like before: Do the levees work now? Who knows? Nobody knew before. They were never tested, and there’s no way to test them. You can only put 4 million metric tons of water against them and see what happens. And the first time they were tested . . . it turns out they didn’t work. Now they say, ‘We got it now; we’re all good.’ What you see around this entire city is blind faith.”

  He’s laced through with that faith, some left over, some found anew. A beat-up, black-and-white United cab is parked across the street with a broken trunk, beneath the spaghetti tangle of wires running overhead. You can’t worry about a hurricane, he’s learned the hard way. It will hit New Orleans or it will turn, but until then, the new city created by Katrina lives.

  “Now we wait,” he says.

  He’s got a shopping list, carrying with him the lessons of the past.

  “We go to Home Depot and we get our candles and duct tape,” he says.

  On the edge of his porch, little clay pots show the first sprouts of life. “I grow flowers,” he says. The colors are pastel, bright, going well with the sunflower he brought home. A thunderstorm passed through earlier, and around the city plants look green and healthy.

  “They look so much happier today.”

  * * *

  —

  Sitting in his office preparing for the upcoming season, Sean Payton feels a glow. The Saints’ facility smells like cinnamon potpourri as players stop by to talk about the off-season weight program. Payton asked an assistant earlier today to make a list of everyone who’d been part of the Saints for all of the past nine seasons, the players and coaches who arrived just after the storm, when nobody knew whether there’d even be a city of New Orleans. There are four of each.

  “We’ll walk together forever,” he says.

  As a thank-you for the past nine years, Payton is buying each of them a Rolex and hosting a dinner. He’s not telling them why he’s called them together, excited to see how long it takes the room to figure out what it is they all have in common, especially the players: Drew Brees, Marques Colston, Zach Strief, Jahri Evans. The anniversary of Katrina is making even the most type A strivers take a minute to consider their lives.

  Just yesterday, it seems, he left the stadium in Miami after the Super Bowl, climbing onto bus No. 1. Traffic snarled around them, and the buses headed back to the team hotel, and he remembers so clearly sitting in the front seat, wishing the drive would take forever.

  Two years later, he got suspended for his role in Boun
tygate. In private, he raged about a year being taken away from him in his prime; he and his son watched the NFL draft like any fan, sitting in a suburban Fuddruckers, helpless. But something else happened that fall. He coached his son’s sixth-grade football team in Texas, the offensive coordinator and playcaller.

  Payton cut oranges, mixed Gatorade, and signaled in plays, using simplified versions of the same calls he made for the Saints, the sixth-graders running Right 34 Bob, or Fake Right 35 Bob Poly. His deep anger faded on the sideline of the Liberty Christian Warriors, who dominated opponents until running into a team from Springtown called the Orange Porcupines, country boys from about an hour outside Dallas. “Listen,” Payton says, laughing. “They had a real good coach. It was one of those single-wing guys. You know it’s like a little clique.”

  His team couldn’t stop Springtown’s single-wing attack. Convinced they’d meet the Porcupines again in the playoffs, Payton reviewed the film that one of the dads recorded, then got Bill Parcells on the telephone. Together, they broke down a sixth-grade team’s offense.

  “Penetration kills the single wing,” Parcells said, and they worked out a plan. Liberty Christian did meet Springtown again in the Super Bowl for the sixth-grade football league. Payton’s team played better, and much harder, and he remembers being on the sideline watching his players make the right reads—following Parcells’s advice—spilling the guard and making the tackle for a loss. He felt proud of his team’s effort, not bitter over the eventual defeat.

  Payton told his young players that he needed them more than they needed him, and he meant it. The essence of football, that’s what he felt connected to, and in his office on Airline Drive, back in New Orleans, he pulls out a scrapbook someone made for him, pictures from that season. Even back in the grind of the NFL, he gets that glow describing his favorite moment. A kid named Paulie, who was in the band, wanted to be on the team. “We put a play in for Paulie,” Payton says. “Fake Right 34 Bob O, and the fullback, the O, pulled around and we handed it to the Z around left. And he scored a 15-yard touchdown walk-in and his mom was in tears on the sidelines and Paulie just threw the ball up and it was like when Lucas scored. And I’m telling you, it was one of the best memories ever. I had a play designed, they executed, and Paulie walked in.”