New Orleans Stories

Item 1: “BILOXI, Miss. — Cleanup continued in this Gulf Coast city in the aftermath of Hurricane Ronald, as residents and business owners attempted to pick up the pieces of their lives scattered to the wind by the powerful storm. “The most glaring example of destruction was the Beau Maison Resort & Casino, which had been near completion when the storm struck.”

Item 2: “Many of those left behind barricaded themselves in their homes, hoping to ride out what was predicted to be the ‘Doomsday’ storm that New Orleanians had awaited since Betsy in 1965 left the city underwater for a week.”

Item 3: “Opening the Dome as a public shelter seemed like a good idea initially. But it was only a matter of time before the 25,000 or so storm refugees began causing trouble, considering they had nothing to do, nowhere to go and inadequate Dome staffing or security to provide proper oversight — which was fine with Ron Beauchamp. Any physical damage to the stadium, whether internal or external, added fuel to his argument for a new one.”
Ron Beauchamp, in author Sean Patrick Doles’ “All Saints Day: A New Orleans Fairy Tale,” is the mythical and greedy owner of the New Orleans Saints who tells his head coach, “I own the team. Like the Golden Rule says, ‘He who has the gold makes the rules.’ ”

It’s been said that truth is stranger than fiction. Maybe. Maybe not.

Doles finished his book months before Hurricane Katrina hit. In it he included references to the most active hurricane season on record, tearing down public housing complexes to build the world’s largest trailer park, “even one creepy reference to replacing the Bagheads with bodybags,” said Doles, a New Orleans native who lives in Austin, Texas.

“All Saints Day” was in bookstores the weekend preceding Katrina. The book and comments from Doles were featured in this column on evacuation Sunday, Aug. 28 — a day that people may not have read The Times-Picayune too thoroughly.

If you read the book, and I recommend you do when you have some downtime, it is beyond “Twilight Zone” levels. It is where coincidence meets would-be clairvoyance on page after page.

“People who have read the book look at me like, ‘Dude, what do you know we don’t know?’ ” Doles said.
“It’s not anything that hasn’t been done or said before. I just put it all in one place — I’m not a psychic.”

In the book, the Saints’ director of finances is Byron Fielding, a thinly disguised Arnold Fielkow, who in real life was fired recently by Saints owner Tom Benson. The book does not have Fielding being fired, but it does have him saying, at a news conference, “Look, we’ve had 38 years of lousy football in this city. We want to do everything we can to make sure we have 38 more.”

Doles had his first book signings scheduled in the New Orleans area the weekend after Katrina. He said his first post-Katrina thoughts were about his parents’ and grandmother’s safety. They were fine, but their homes in eastern New Orleans were totaled.

“There was no way I could feel sorry for my situation,” he said. “It was never, ‘What am I going to do about this book?’ ”

And now he has a different plan. “There’s no way I could sell this book and take any money from it,” he said. The profits from the sales of “All Saints Day” and an earlier book, “Saving Mr. Bingle,” will be donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

Doles has book signings at Barnes & Noble today from 5 to 7 p.m.; at the Barnes & Noble Fall Book Festival in Lafayette on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m.; and at the LSU Bookstore on Sunday, before the Saints game, from noon to 2 p.m.

Doles’ deep love for his city and the Saints comes across in the book. The book is dedicated to “Hap Glaudi, Buddy D, Mr. Finks and all the patient, dedicated New Orleans Saints fans across the globe.” It is frequently humorous, occasionally poignant and it delivers a message that sports can bring people together.

The baghead photo on the cover of the book is by a talented photographer named David Rae Morris, and the message on the bag says it all: “There is always next year.”

Doles couldn’t agree more. “Even if the team is 8-8, there is always hope. If that team leaves, hope is gone.” Ironically, he said, “The most basic rule in life is to have faith, a sentiment reflected in the Saints’ new slogan this year.”

All of the book’s portentous and ominous references to the storm, to what happened during and after Katrina and to what has been going on in the Saints’ pathetic saga overwhelmed Doles.

“I thought about it as the storm was approaching,” he said. “It was an eerie, uneasy, amazing feeling. Like, wow, where did that come from?

“I just happened to put this book out that way. Everybody who has read it says, ‘Oh my God, what an amazing coincidence.”

No doubt about it.

Austin author Sean Patrick Doles isn’t as clairvoyant as his latest book makes him seem.

“I’ve had a lot of e-mails asking me if I’m psychic,” said Doles, a New Orleans native who has a new novel out called “All Saints Day: A New Orleans Football Fairy Tale.” “Somebody asked me to pick their Lotto numbers for them.”

The numbers apparently didn’t come in because Doles didn’t hear back from the guy. But it’s somewhat uncanny how many details in Doles’ paperback duplicate the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s as if the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans, and nearly Doles’ book, was stalking the book.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 29, the same day Doles’ book was hitting the bookshelves.

Then there was the way the story line followed the horrid details of real life.

The yarn begins innocuously enough with the NFL’s New Orleans Saints having another typically lousy season, until the Pope shows up for visit, sending the Saints on a run toward the playoffs.

“And in the middle of that, a killer hurricane threatens the city, thousands of people are forced to seek shelter in the Superdome, there’s this whole long list of these eerie similarities,” Doles said.

There’s mention of a female governor, a team owner who wants to move the Saints out of town, a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, global warming and body bags — all things that came to pass in Katrina’s wake.

The book even describes the living conditions at the Superdome as tawdry, same as they were after the hurricane leveled the city.

No, Doles isn’t about to open up his own Tarot card booth on Jackson Square. He doesn’t want to read palms for a living. He can’t see into the future. He says the book and the reality are similar because he did some research, he peppered his story line with past occurrences and the past just happened to mirror some of the Katrina disaster.

“All of these things are just based on history,” Doles said. “For example, in 1998, there was a hurricane called Georges. It didn’t hit New Orleans, but it came close, and 20,000 people took shelter in the Dome. What’s uncanny about it is the timing.”

No kidding. Katrina’s arrival coincided with the book coming out so closely that it was as if the storm was trying to kill it.

“I was scheduled to do all my book signings, I had about five events lined up that week in New Orleans, and of course ,they were all canceled,” Doles recalled.

“The actual printer and the distributor were in New Orleans, so I was thinking, ‘Are my books underwater?’ It was almost a month before I could actually find out because the city was flooded and there was no communication.”

If Doles had been clairvoyant, he would have known that most of his books had survived the flood. But he’s not taking any chances by fooling with fate.

“Any money we make off (the book), we’re just going to donate back to hurricane relief,” he said. “That wasn’t my original plan, but as soon as the storm hit, I knew there was no way I could make any money on this.”

When New Orleans native Sean Patrick Doles started writing “All Saints Day” (New Orleans Stories, $10.95), he laid no claim to psychic powers. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Doles’ new football fantasy with the timely title reads more like a news story than a “football fairy tale,” as he called it then.

Since today is All Saints’ Day, the title is a timely reminder of a signing at the Twig Book Shop this evening.
But it’s timelier still, in a way Doles never imagined when he was writing the story of a miraculous kicker who changes the fate of the New Orleans team. Rampant rumors of a Saints move to L.A., a 94-year-old football-crazy pope and a bottom-line-minded owner named Ron Beauchamp make for a wacky, fantastic plot. But the details ring true in surprising ways.

For instance: Beauchamp, the Saints’ 77-year-old owner who does a “Beauchamp boogaloo” when the Saints win and describes himself as “a glorified used-car salesman” before he bought the team, is using rumors of a move to L.A. to get a new stadium in New Orleans. Damage to the Superdome by “Hurricane Ron,” a Category Three storm, strengthens the owner’s hand, until the pope and a mysterious new Saints star devise a miraculous solution.

Doles’ descriptions of the “doomsday storm,” written months before Hurricane Katrina hit, are so close to recent reality that “some people kind of freak out when they read it,” he says.

He based his remarkably accurate descriptions of governmental blunders in the wake of Katrina on past history, he said. Doles, a public-relations professional, lives in Austin. He lived in San Antonio from 1995-97, where he worked with S.A. For Kids magazine.

As for the issue of moving the team, Doles has mixed feelings.

“Having lived in San Antonio, I know people there are passionate and knowledgeable about sports,” he says. “And as much as I know people in New Orleans would be devastated, I think they would rather have it in San Antonio than L.A.”

“Hey, did ya hear da one ’bout da Saints almost goin’ to da Super Bawl?”

“Nawwww, man!”

“You gotta have faith!”

Sean Patrick Doles has woven quite a tale about his native city’s football team, but that’s only the beginning of All Saints Day. Throw in the pope, a hurricane, questions about religious faith and a plan to move the beleaguered ball team out of state and you have a fictional story with its share of coincidences, some intended, some uncanny.

“People have been sort of freaking out about it, in a good way, from the standpoint of the amazing coincidences between what’s in the book and what’s transpired in actual events,” Doles said from Austin last week. “It’s a bit uncanny how it’s all worked out.”

Indeed, in All Saints Day, a hurricane threatens a direct hit on the city, and thousands take shelter at the Louisiana Superdome and eventually wreck the place. At the same time, the Saints owner and the governor (the first female one in Louisiana) are in negotiations on whether the team is staying or going. Another season kicks off and looks as if it will be like all the rest: coulda, woulda, shoulda. Then the pope comes to town and wants to meet the team and in the eyes of the pontiff, kicker Oleg is well, Jesus. Oleg is actually Jewish, but is that what he really believes in? His kicks start going further and further, and the Saints march into a winning streak like the city has never seen. It seems they just can’t lose. They’ve now made it into the playoffs, but can they really go all the way?

Doles, whose full-time job is in public relations, said he thoroughly researched the Saints history before beginning this, his second book. He employed the same writing technique as in 2004’s Saving Mr. Bingle: A New Orleans Christmas Fairy Tale, about the city’s beloved Christmas mascot. In both books, Doles took a bunch of the true stories from their history and fashioned them into fictional, entertaining tales.

The pope did visit New Orleans in the ’80s and the Saints did go to a playoff game in 1987.

“I always knew that I wanted to have a Saints story with that premise.”

In both books as well, Doles shows just how well-versed he is in “yat speak,” the common dialect of The Big Easy.

“It annoys me. I write these stories because I’ve been waiting for other people to write them, and I’m not finding them,” Doles said. “Aside from Confederacy of Dunces, there just aren’t that many out there.”

Growing up, Doles said he spent a lot of time riding the bus, listening to people, hearing the nuances of how they talk and tried to translate that to paper.

Charmaine, a Saintsation and new acquaintance of Oleg’s, demonstrates those nuances in her first meeting with the hero kicker from Poland.

“Momma says you look jus’ like Jesus wit’ ya hair all long and dat beard and ya cheeks sunken in like ya been stawvin’ ya’self a few weeks. She’s been all depressed since she missed out on meetin’ da Pope. But I know dis’ll cheer her up. And just in time for her birthday. How ’bout dat?”

Doles said getting the dialect down pat gives general readers a better idea of how the natives really talk and gives the natives something that rings true.

Doles completed All Saints Day in April, and the book was due to be released Aug. 29. But then Katrina hit, and for a month he didn’t know if the first print run, stored in a New Orleans warehouse, had survived the flooding. Both his printer and distributor are in New Orleans. Eventually, the books were recovered, and promotional efforts were refocused to the Northshore, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas. Doles, who lives in Austin, also has made appearances in San Antonio, and plans stops in Austin and Houston.

“There are a lot of people displaced from New Orleans over here.”

On his swing through Louisiana this weekend, Doles will travel to what’s left of his childhood home in New Orleans East.

“I’ll say goodbye, try to dig through the rubble and salvage a few things.”

Both his parents’ and his grandmother’s house nearby were destroyed in the storm and will be razed.

The devastation in his hometown has also prompted Doles to donate any profits from All Saints Day to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

“I knew right away there’s no way I could sell this book and take money from it.”

The Saints are off to a rough season when a killer hurricane hits New Orleans and forces thousands of people to take shelter in the Superdome.

What may sound like a brief summary of the past two months’ events following Hurricane Katrina is actually the premise of “All Saints Day,” a novel Sean Patrick Doles began writing five years before the events of Katrina.
“I’m not a psychic,” Doles said. “All I did was draw from history. Everything I wrote about has either happened in the past or has been discussed before. It’s just uncanny how it all happened.”

The book begins with the Saints off to their usual season of few wins and an unpromising chance of winning a Super bowl. A visit from the pope begins a winning streak for the Saints, a series of “miraculous” events. Doles said this actually happened in 1987 when the pope visited New Orleans, and the Saints suddenly went on a winning streak and made it to the playoffs.

“I researched the history of the Saints and took true stories and put them in a fictional story,” Doles said.
The novel also discusses the head coach of the Saints threatening to move the team if they do not get a new stadium built. Doles said in light of recent talk of the Saints moving, the Saints need to stay dedicated to their city.

“The Saints should say, ‘We are committed to New Orleans and we will be coming back,’ but they have not,” Doles said.

While the events of Hurricane Katrina have left many without hope, Doles said this book is not only entertaining, but will give many people who love New Orleans a feeling of home and hope.

“It’s the classic underdog story, but with a twist,” Doles said.

Doles’ love of New Orleans is not only obvious in his undying support of the Saints, but also in his ability to depict a city so many LSU students call home.

Doles said he had always wanted to write stories about New Orleans that would accurately depict the unique character of the city.

“Growing up, from the time I was in high school, I wanted to write stories about New Orleans because I never thought people quite got it right when they tried,” Doles said. “These stories about New Orleans are the stories I have been waiting to read, and now I am writing them.”

Doles was born and raised in New Orleans and moved to Austin, Texas nine years ago.

“New Orleans is my home,” he said. “I have always planned on going back someday, and I still plan on going back.”

Doles will be on campus Sunday to sign copies of “All Saints Day” in the Union Bookstore from noon to 2 p.m. All profits from “All Saints Day” are going to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

“There was no question that this is what we had to do,” Doles said. “I did not feel right making a profit off of this when thousands of people are suffering. There was just no question.”