Welcome to Zombie Town

Walking the half mile from the house to CC's coffee at Magazine and Jefferson where I can get coffee and WiFi (and power to recharge my computer) it doesn't feel like a ghost town at all. As soon as I step around the corner onto Napolean, I am confronted by a large collection of vehicles making its way across St. Charles. On all the corners there are stacks and stacks of garbage and debris. On almost every house, some window, somewhere, is broken. Refrigerators stand, or lie, along the sidewalk every few feet.

There are a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of work, but it is all mostly demolition or construction. There are people on the sidewalks, but they walk around in a fog.

Les Bon Temps Roulez on Magazine, one of my favorite little clubs in town, sports a big blue flag above the door that reads, "Don't Give Up The Ship." Les Bon Temps is open for business and Eric Lindell, with whom I share the bi-coastal behavior of living in Northern California and New Orleans simultaneously (to quote Firesign Theater, "How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"), played there Tuesday and Soul Rebels will be there tomorrow night; a make believe normalcy that feels a little like "fake it 'til you make it."

As I approach CC's from down the block I can't really see if they are open, but as I get closer I see a few faces looking out the window and I know I will at least get coffee. I utter a prayer for WiFi (yes, I really did) and figure that there will be a few people inside but nothing like the crowds I found B.K. (before Katrina).

Boy am I wrong! The place is packed. Every table and every power plug, is filled with people tapping on their laptops, sipping onn coffee and holding cell phones to their ear, the new communal office. A hand drawn sign stands by the counter. It silently declares, "Welcome Home! We Missed Y'all." Next to the sign is a large stack of employment applications that telegraphs the fact that a rather large segment of Community Coffee's former employees have vanished into the air.

The woman behind the counter looks at me with hopeful eyes and asks, "how're you doin' today?" The question bears the weight of two months of chaos and the confusion of what lies both behind and before. I smile weakly and say that I'm doing okay. Then, I volunteer the information that this is my first full day back. "Well, welcome home," she says as she taps my order into the computer. I thank her, smile back through a foggy interpersonal distance that is almost solid enough to touch, but hard to get a handle on.

The guy across the table from me is a construction sales director and he never stops using his cell phone. He just told someone, "When you get here, believe me, you won't get bored." New Orleans has never been boring, but that's not the kind of excitement he's talking about.

People are friendly, helpful and patient with each other (mostly), but everyone (even the obviously wealthy white women who desperately, and unsucessfully, attempt to project an air of normalcy and sophistication) seems to be in shock.