You know what I miss most? Miss more than electricity? More than my microwave? More even than phone service so I wouldn’t have to hike to the Fair Grinds cafe to read my e-mail? Traffic lights, that’s what I miss. Most of them in the city are still down, so we observe the protocol of a four-way stop. Whoever hits the intersection first gets to go. But what if it’s a tie to the intersection? What if it isn’t clear who was first? What if someone doesn’t want to wait his turn? I could get seriously killed around here.
I parked my car at the house, between piles of rubble, wrote out checks to pay some bills, and went walking through “Debris City” to the one post office that’s still open, built high up near Bayou St. John. Why not wait for the mailman, you ask? What mailman? I haven’t seen one on my block since August. Have you?
I waved to my neighbor, Thelma, who was still in her robe and sticking her head out her front door for a breath of fresh air. The flood didn’t cause her any structural damage, but the mold growing in her house is making her sicker by the day.
I passed the horrendously expensive coffee place where a giant yellow banner declares “NOW OPEN” in foot-high letters. If a thirsty believer parks his car and hurries over to grab a hot morning java, he will see the banner’s smaller print with the address of the company’s other franchise way across town that actually is open. This location is closed, locked, and bare to the walls.
As he fumes and curses, the thwarted customer can read that the place across town is hiring “barristas.” From the name, one might surmise a “barrista” to be a little lawyer, or maybe someone who builds prisons for Chihuahuas. But it’s actually a person who makes a living pouring horrendously expensive coffee.
Ubiquitous as blue tarps on roofs are the “NOW HIRING!” signs. With the city’s working poor scattered among forty-two states, there is no unemployment here anymore. Anyone willing to get up in the morning can have a job.
Most of the eager laborers who have poured into town are Hispanic, some in the country legally, others not. The change in the makeup of our population is audible. Streaming from screened doors and car radios are Mexican harmonies instead of rap rhythms.
I passed piles of debris ten feet high: dented “white goods” (refrigerators and washing machines, not sheets and pillowcases), soggy Sheetrock, faded furniture, muddy children’s toys, and felled giant live oaks that would make enough firewood to power the whole city till summer if only Entergy could burn it for fuel.
I passed a skeleton propped up in a window holding a crude cardboard sign: “WAITING FOR FEMA.”
I smelled something dead, bigger than a cat, smaller than a person, and crossed the street.
The supermarkets are boarded up for miles around, but a mom-and-pop Italian grocery is back in business on a cash-only basis. They can’t process credit cards without a phone.
Walking along Orleans Avenue, I trod on multiple stencils of an invective directed toward a certain public figure. The public figure’s name has four letters and so did the invective.
I detoured down narrow side streets looking for watermarks. The one at our house is about the height of the front porch. But this neighborhood was considerably below sea level and the grainy brown lines were almost as high as the rafters. I passed blocks of abandoned houses and stopped at one to decode the graffiti on the door. There was spray-painted a large X. The space on top had the date, “9–6.” To the left were the initials or ID number of the rescuers. “AZ” for the Arizona National Guard, for example. Or “TX”: There’s Texas. “NJ”: Yay, New Jersey!
The right space designated “NE” for “No Entry” or “LE” for “Limited Entry.” At the six-o’clock position was the number of people found, living or dead. Usually this number was zero. The zero always had a slanting line through it so it wouldn’t be mistaken for the letter “O,” as in “OK,” for the Oklahoma National Guard. Two blocks over, the messages included “TFW,” for “Totally Full of Water” and if you don’t believe the words, note that they appear at an elevation of eight or ten feet and the scribe had to be sitting in a boat at the time.
SPCA volunteers had made the rounds soon after the Guardsmen and left their own messages: “Two Dogs Under House” or “One Cat Outside” and “Dog Food Drop” or “Cat Food Drop.” Someone had left a pan of dry cat food and fresh water in a clean and sparkling glass bowl. A thoughtful amenity for a fastidious feline refugee.
I saw a little yellow house spray-painted in red: “SPCA: Need F/W” (food and water) “2 Pit Bulls, 1 Baby.”
Oh dear! There was a baby in there with those pit bulls? (“Wah! Wah!”) I think they probably meant “puppy.” A human baby wouldn’t live very long in the custody of a pair of ravenous pits.
We have a strong dog and cat culture in this town. One of the stirring images of the Katrina coverage was that of a young black man kneeling on the I-10 overpass, clinging to his dog’s neck. He had probably been up there without food for days but refused all offers to ride to a shelter. The dog wouldn’t have been allowed to go with him. It was only a mutt of no real value, but the man declared that it had saved his life and he wouldn’t abandon it no matter what. Then the TV cameraman who was supposed to be neutrally recording the episode did an unprofessional thing. He took the pooch aboard his news helicopter and taped the reunion in Baton Rouge two days later, the man in tears, the dog wagging and licking.
Multiply this situation by thousands of New Orleanians who stayed behind in the city, enduring terrible hardship, even dying, because they wouldn’t leave their pets to drown or starve.
I walked three blocks down to see Angus Crawford’s house with its grisly message on the door. The date on top was “9–5.” The figure at the six-o’clock position was that chilling “1 D” for “One Dead.” Looking closer, I was surprised that the waterline was only halfway up the window frames on the first floor. The old cuss could have just walked upstairs.
Why didn’t he just walk upstairs?
I saw a man-shaped shadow move across a front window and decided it must be Angus’s son, Doug. One of the heroes of the storm.
On reaching the post office, I picked up a flier — “Get Rid of Mold” — and got into line. While reading the cleaning formula (one cup of bleach to one gallon of water) and trying to figure out what an N95 mask was, I eavesdropped on two postal workers. The letter carrier said he was living in a tent until the sodden, crumbling Sheetrock in his house could be replaced. The clerk behind the counter said he was still waiting for his FEMA trailer.
“I was five days on the neutral ground. The water was all around us.”
“You spent five days sleeping in your car on the neutral ground?”
“I didn’t have the luxury of a car.”
“What did you sleep in?”
“My clothes. I had two women with me — my wife and our daughter — so we couldn’t go to the Superdome.”
No, they couldn’t. What happened to some women and girls up there was much worse than staying outdoors during a category-three hurricane.
“Then they put us all on different buses,” the man went on. “My wife and daughter wound up in Houston and Dallas. I got a cot in a skating rink in Mamou.”
Our cow-pasture accommodation was starting to look like the Paris Ritz.
When I got home, I joined Julian in the backyard and helped him refill the generator with gasoline, my mission being to hold the funnel. “Good day at the gallery?”