ARTICLES

- A Short, Unhappy Life
- Citys Fotograf Räddade Studenterna
- Katrina Blues

Katrina Blues

ACT I

On the day before Halloween, the season of the dead, in the time after the hurricane, I flew into New Orleans with a woman I’d barely met. It had been two years or so since I’d been in that city with 016 and in the days before leaving my guts were tied in knots as my brain told me to stay static, don’t go weird places, stay in bed until something happens. On the night before departure my barely-known traveling companion called and we talked of anxiety but by then mine was almost gone. The last thing she said made me smile, “Whatever happens, tomorrow we’ll be somewhere else.”

I looked around my living room, picked up my bags, walked out the door and stuffed them in the back of our friend Tara’s big truck. She drove to Akron and the first plane took us away as the sun barely silhouetted the trees in blood red. Our first ticket was 666. Gate 6 at 6:05 a.m., Seats 6 C and 6 D. The second plane took us out of Cincinnati to Memphis and by then the point of no return had been breached. We were two States away and the airport smelled of barbecue, sounded of the blues and the King’s face was everywhere. There was the final flight, the last leg south, and soon we were nosing down, skimming over bayou, touching Louisiana.

“God,” she said, “Look, there’re no planes.”

The big American airport had four, maybe five jets lined up at one small section of the terminal. Jetway after jetway hung limp and empty, impotent. A lone cart crossed a huge expanse of concrete and the man with the batons seemed very far away, raising them high in the air as if to say, “Hey, Hey airplane! Over here!”

We deplaned and a Louie Armstrong’s sweet growl played softly over the loudspeakers. That was all, no announcements, no notice of the next flight. The restaurants and shops were shuttered and dark. No one was eating a Sonic burger, no one slurping down a first or last Hurricane at the Big Easy Daiquiri Bar (21 and over, please). The place smelled vaguely of bleach and cleaning agents, remarkably clean with little of the normal overtones of lonely sweat and fear and jet fuel.

Thrifty Rental gave us a big late model Jeep Cherokee and we blew down I-10 towards the Quarter, past what appeared to be rather prosaic damage in the suburbs – board fences knocked half over, a few roofs with blue plastic sheeting, more random litter and debris along the highway edges than normal in Louisiana but less than Central America. She tuned the radio station she had known from living here and on WWOZ was strange and demonic jazz tracked over wolf howls and desperate laughter. We made the looping turns onto the overpasses. A lone man was walking on the roof of the Superdome. We dodged a large chunk of compacted sheet metal to enter the expressway and I called “Lookout again,” because in our lane was a refrigerator door which we slipped to run over several boards whose nails we blessedly missed. Hitting that fridge door at highway speed probably would have flipped us off the overpass, hurtling right into some recently FEMA salvaged house, a splattering fireball through the roof of a newly returned family. The possibility of instant death added a certain piquancy to the morning.

We found our way undamaged into the Quarter, past Red Cross ERVs and loitering cops and dredlocked men on bicycles parked in the middle of the street licking something off their palms. We parked and dragged our bags into the mansion on Ursuline Street. A car outside the iron gate was spray-painted “Abandoned” and some joker had plastered it with UPS Next Day Air stickers. There were refrigerators standing around like big white mailboxes or boxy robo-cops, waiting to be hauled off to that mythical refrigerator graveyard. I wondered if all the dead refrigerators and their escaped Freon would be blamed for more global warming and thus more hurricanes which would result in more dead refrigerators, a vicious, endless cycle like that being played out in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian Hurricane Vs. Israeli Frigidaire and all of it obviously the fault of George W. Bush.

But the sun was shining and people were out in Le Vieux Carre. Machine gun toting looters may have had us in their assault weapons sights but we bravely decided to exit the Not-Up-Armored Jeep Cherokee. After stowing the luggage we walked into the bright warm day. People smiled and said hello. None of them seemed to be armed. The Quarter seemed to smell better than on my last visit, as if it had gotten a good washing. I saw another photographer with two big digital pro-bodies around his neck walking around looking frustrated. “Would someone look tragic for me,” his look seemed to say. The street artists waved and there was very little accurate gunfire. We turned down Pirate’s Alley and stopped into the open Pirate’s Alley Bar.

“Let’s have a cocktail,” said Heidi. I didn’t know her very well but we were getting along so far.

The bartender, Brent Boudein, mixed us two absinthe and champagnes, which he called a “Death in the Afternoon.” He said I was the first to know it was a Hemingway reference. I agreed with Papa that the absinthe tasted like liquorice, which is my least favorite flavor in the world. Still, it was somehow appropriate so I choked the beastly thing down and the afternoon took on a pleasant green-gold cast.

I slept the sleep of the dead, which isn’t completely accurate since I awoke in the morning to find myself alive. I remembered putting my head down, then darkness and dreams of gothic girls and running from the dead while the permanent gas light flickered outside the bedroom door. I was deeply rested, if disturbed, and the nightly dreams would only get worse and more haunted until there were nights when I would wake up gasping and strangled-screaming with the bad ones sitting on my chest and laughing.

The first morning there was a note on the table that said, “Gone to find bottled water.” I’d not heard her come in nor leave. I showered in hot, clean smelling water but didn’t open my mouth and brushed my teeth later with the last of the bottled water, an inch or so left in a wine glass. Precious stuff.

She returned with the day’s itinerary and asked if I had any requests or amendments. I requested coffee and beignets at Café du Monde. She said it was a beautiful morning out. I put on my boots and slung on my cameras. We walked down the dark hallway and opened the iron gate onto the street outside.

It was bright and sunny, blue skied and perfect. We walked past creatively painted refrigerators to the world famous coffee shop.

The Vietnamese waitresses joked with each other and took an order the house usual, two café au laits and an order of beignets for $5.25. I put my camera in its bag to spare it the falling powdered sugar. We drank and ate and I ordered a second coffee, black, and another plate of beignets which I ate by myself while a Black Hawk helicopter circled overhead. We loaded the Cherokee and headed into Bayou St. John. The farther west, by a matter of blocks, the more the damage increased. More refrigerators lined the streets surrounded by piles of debris. Houses stood at odd angles. Limbs of the fine old oaks were strewn about, the trees themselves looking strangely topped or truncated. At one intersection the air was foul and she said, “It smells like death.”

“No,” I replied, “That just smells like shit.”

At Lake Ponchetrain, in the lee of the levy, waves broke white in rhythm from a deep blue calm. A building down the pier stood strangely canted. Next to it was a gutted and blown out Joe’s Crab Shack. Even the franchises were not immune. The air had a strange smell, not completely unpleasant but unnerving and unsafe, like raw chicken.

Boats were piled on yachts, lying on the curb amidst televisions, beer bottles and Mardi Gras beads, random debris strewn everywhere. After a while I started to subtly feel unwell. The air was poison. No residents were in evidence only ceaseless trucks of construction workers and people there to take pictures… and a fair number of those.

We drove through blasted areas where cars had been parked on the raised grass medians as they do here in storms, an extra two or three feet might often make all the distance. This time the muddy high water marks were three inches below the top of four-door sedans and well over the sides of pickups. Most dwellings bore a spray-painted mark, an X with the number of dead found inside, though most were zeros. Not all.

Now if New Orleans, the modern Sodom (or is it Gomorrah?”) was wiped clean by the wrath of God, why did the French Quarter survive? The 9th Ward may well have been, to quote Mr. O.W. Kenobi, a “Wretched hive of scum and villainy,” but it was also the home of the poor, the workers and many who had nothing else in the world. At present I’m staying in a beautifully restored 19th century mansion on Ursuline Street, a two-minute walk from Bourbon Street. The house was essentially untouched and I sleep in a king-sized bed with a Pasha’s ration of silk pillows. The working fridge survived because it contained no food, only mineral water and a stack of Portuguese Vinho Verde bottles that I am pleased to report were completely unharmed and of excellent vintage.

I walked down the length of Bourbon Street from Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop to get a Krystal burger and though the Hustler Barely Legal Club seems temporarily shut along with the notorious gay dance club OZ, one can still see live-sex shows, buy a moronically vulgar t-shirt to wear and a highly alcoholic slushy hurricane to drink whilst strolling past hard-eyed cops and out-of-state MPs, while listening all the while to live jazz, rock and blues.

So, if you are of the opinion that The Lord Almighty smacked New Orleans instead of Katrina being an unfortunate confluence of meteorological events, one must, therefore, conclude that God loves live music, sex shows and the rich, hates impoverished minorities and other commoners and is only mildly annoyed with homosexuals and Larry Flynt.

Of course, given other recent weather atrocities, one might conclude that in addition to being annoyed with New Sodomorleans, The Lord also doesn’t care much for Texans, Floridians, Guatemalans, Caribbean Islanders of all shades, Hondurans, Nicaraguans and especially Pakistanis. We did pass a relief SUV with an Oregon license plate. On the side was painted the legend, “Portland, The City That Works.” That being eminently true, as compared to The Big Easy, one might also conclude that, other than the occasional ice storm or tornado, living in Ohio and the Midwest is its own punishment.

Later there were costumes involved. There were pirates and monkeys and glitter-covered blondes in flowing Grecian robes and half-dressed women in tight camouflage, naked statues draped in beads. But that’s not the story I’m telling. Not that I wouldn’t except that the point is that, for all the conjecture, the party and celebration of death, life and the weird hasn’t changed in this dark and corrupt old place.

The pop-media loves to conjecture (UP TO 10,000 DEAD!!!) because they’re not clever or brave enough to come up with a real story or be able to say, “At this time we have no real idea what’s happening, but this is what we have.” They all want to be instant investigative journalists without the drudgery of investigation. I understand that the news cycle has moved on and reporters are not obligated nor expected to be here picking up refrigerators.

I walked around, hungry, for an hour or more looking for a place to eat, not because nothing was open but because nothing appealed. I finally found a dark doorway that looked right and sat at the worn bar.

“Are you serving food, sir?”

“A few sandwiches and the gumbo,” said the old man.

“Get the gumbo,” said another old guy down the bar.

“You sold me,” I replied to the bartender.

“Nah, the guy down there did.”

It was the best I’ve ever had, a huge bowl with a thin layer of oil on top, meat and vegetables thick in every spoon and crusty bread on the side, all the flavors distinct and perfectly melded at the same time. The bartender, Frank, was telling me that he had stayed out the hurricane, right in this place, that immediately afterwards the only relief group worth much was the Salvation Army.

I asked, “Where am I, what street?”

“Evelyn’s. Chartres Street.”

I looked in my notes, remembering something and my friend Mike Butcher, an old New Orleans hand, had told me a week before to come to this place, order the gumbo and ask the old guy behind the counter if he was on work-release from prison. I asked Frank that question then, blaming it all on Mike, and he said I must be looking for trouble but smiled and kept telling me stories, how Evelyn’s had once been an English Merchant Seamen bar called Stonehenge, how he had once owned a fine dining restaurant on Bourbon and had tolerated no impoliteness. He understood bad behavior but could not tolerate ungentlemanly behavior. I was glad I had chosen to call him sir. He deserved it.

ACT II

It was early and everyone went to bed. I debated doing the sane thing and sleeping myself but opted to walk around the corner to Lafitte’s. I was sitting at the piano top bar listening to Johnny Gordon singing “Walking To New Orleans” in his own inimitable way, writing in one of my last OFFICIAL REPORTER’s NOTEBOOKS left over from my Daily Record days when a woman walked up to me and said, “Who are you working for?”

I smiled and replied, “Freelance and unemployed,” and she said, “Oakland Tribune.” I offered her a seat. We looked each other over and realized we were dressed almost identically in khaki pants and black shirts. We talked for a bit and the urge to show off struck us both so we ran back to our rooms to grab our PowerBooks (mine 12 inch, hers 15 inch) and sat back down ten minutes later to “What a Wonderful World” with our Macintoshes touching. Our Domke bags met later. After trading websites and photos and tall tales that weren’t lies we took a walk. A young punker looked us over and said, “You’re reporters aren’t you?” That struck us both as vaguely hilarious so we interviewed him.

We agreed to meet the next day as we were getting off the street in time to avoid the 0200 curfew and she asked if I was with the CIA.

“No,” I replied and she replied back, “The fun thing is you may be lying to me. There is no way to know.”

We shook hands and said goodnight.

I’d forgotten that I was going to cook dinner for six the next evening so I couldn’t meet her earlier. I made my hosts steak au poivre in a traditional brandy cream sauce and tuna au poivre in a Cointreau and rosé reduction with herb roasted potatoes and asparagus on the side served with an excellent Rosé de Anjou and gateau au chocolate from a local bakery paired with Veuve Cliquot non-vintage. Again everyone went to bed early and I went down to Lafitte’s hoping I might run into photographer-woman to continue our conversation on Nikon vs. Canon and other important topics.

Sure enough, five minutes later, she came in and we resumed where we’d left off. She was doing a video documentary in addition to everything else and realized, near the time the bar was closing and military curfew started, that she hadn’t gotten any of the music on tape.

“Run,” I said, “I’ll hold him.”

She got back in time with her Panasonic DVX 100 and John consented to keep playing: “What a Wonderful World,” “Walking to New Orleans,” “House of the Rising Sun” and a few others we suggested. She circled him to get different angles and I cleared the chairs out of her way and when I photographed him she guided my lighting. I had made a new friend. The bar closed and we talked on the corner with two of the New Orleans horse cops, a big black guy and a small, jockey-like white guy. They told us of the days after the hurricane when an out-of-state SWAT team was politely trying to get armed people out of the houses and how finally the local law took the microphone to say, “This is NOPD, come out now or we’ll light you the fuck up.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“They came out with their hands up…” was the deadpan reply.

“Maybe we have time to hit another bar, get some more footage,” said Jane.

“Not if we want to avoid curfew. Why don’t we take a bottle of wine and sit on your balcony.”

“Good idea. The military will be out soon.”

She was staying not far down the street from me in a hotel that claimed not only to be the original House of the Rising Sun brothel but the place where Jimmy Buffet lost his virginity. Her room was strewn with black and grey bags, cameras and silver computers and we sat on the porch with the Argentinean wine until there was a funny light in the sky over the Ursuline Convent where they keep the vampires.

“Damn dawn,” she said, “We need sleep if we’re going to work.”

She wrapped herself in the blankets and I lay properly away wrapping myself in my Harry Black and the Tiger jacket and that is the last I remember until being shaken awake.

“If we’re going to the ninth-ward we need to go now.”

I called Doctor K in Brooklyn while she was getting coffee to let him know where I was, then we drove in her rental down into the bad parts, where the Army was on the corners. We photographed Fat’s Domino’s house and while doing so a shiny civilian Hummer pulled up, funny looking next to the nearby drab HUMV’s. An attractive couple got out and we all photographed everyone photographing everyone else. Jane saw a sign for Flood Street and asked if it would be cheesy if she shot that and I replied, no, that she might as well since it’s digital anyway and might come in handy as an establishing shot. While she was getting that I walked around the corner to find a convenience market with the wall fallen off. I walked inside and twenty feet in the flies descended and the smell hit hard and I began to retch uncontrollably. I got out, puking up what I didn’t have in my stomach, and heard her camera clicking away and then she had my shoulders and was giving me cold coffee to rinse away the taste of rot and vomit.

People are asking, “Why can’t I go back to my home?”

And so buses are being run into the ninth-ward to show them why. Houses lie two blocks off their foundations wedged in between other houses on top of cars. It is still collapsing. Power poles at crazy angles sink and fall into churches with stained glass windows more decrepit than the day before. The structural damage is stunning. Block after block for miles is shattered and all of it inside is coated with deadly black mold. There is nothing that can be restored or repaired. Nothing. We rode the bus in with Red Cross types and people who had once lived there in that neighborhood. They wore dust-masks and held handkerchiefs over their faces to stop the dust, mold and tears like they’d been warned to. Jane and I didn’t need those because we had cameras and they protect you.

Near the end I couldn’t take any more photos and sat in the open doorway while the bus maneuvered through downed wires and broken things. When the ride ended I got off and walked away. Jane asked if I was all right and I said, “Sorry, having a moment,” thinking again that all I did was take photos instead of anything useful. She gripped my shoulders and told me she had broken down the first time she’d seen it. We lit cigarettes and she drove me back; she had a plane to catch and dropped me on my street, kissed my cheek and told me I was great. I told her she was great too, and said, “See you in Uzbekistan,” and she replied, “Yes, probably.”

I got out, grabbed my bag and told her “Vaya Con Dios,” and she was gone. I walked for close to half an hour, never quite able to find my way home. I had been up for over 50 hours.

ACT III

That night they were having what was billed as a “Happy Party” with catered Middle Eastern food, printed invitations and an endless supply of Beaujolais. I was dangerously, unhealthily tired but showered and put on a shirt and tie and blazer, civilized mental-health clothing. Of course no one else dressed like that and there were a lot of men wearing makeup but I didn’t care much what anybody did or looked like. I did have shuddering thoughts that my black cashmere coat felt like the toxic mold growing in the houses down there and despite the injunction that the party was a happy one and no ugly disaster talk was allowed the conversation topic was still the hurricane, at least in my corner of the patio. Most of the time I spent talking with Dong, a Vietnamese immigrant, about the war his country had gone through and the necessity of stopping Stalinists. To me, at the moment, that was happy talk. He had lost his dwelling in the storm but not his business and told me, “You don’t worry about the girl. Girl come. You do what you have to do.”

Brent Boudein the bartender showed up and I went out with him at the end of the happy party and back to his bachelor mess of an apartment strewn with cutlasses and flintlock pistols where we drank rum and talked of piracy and history. I eventually fell slowly to the floor, thankful to wrap myself in my jacket, anything but silk.

The next day my hosts had gone off to Florida and I stayed behind to collect more pictures and stories, sleep and write and walk. I bought pralines for my mother. I had a coffee with Brent the pirate and on the tenth day they returned and we drove the not-up-armored Cherokee back to Thrifty Car Rental. Our bags sat on the same few feet of grit-covered sidewalk among the same colony of scavenging ants. Though there seemed to have been more people on the French Quarter streets in the last ten days the Jet-ways still hung empty. In the time before takeoff I bought a Time and a Newsweek to read, feeling somehow that I’d been out of the world for months and months not days and days. I offered her a magazine and she refused it, sat with her own thoughts and I thought that maybe we knew each other less than before we had left. The call came, we boarded in silence, and the plane took us away from southern-sunlit afternoon into cloud-shrouded northern Cincinnati night.

“Let’s get a nightcap or something,” she said.

My stomach was rebelling. I had been stupid and opened my mouth in the shower. Who knows what new internal wee-beasties I’d acquired this time, but all right, OK. We went to the sterile sports bar and even if I’d quit smoking I still think airports don’t smell right without it. The stereo was playing a version of Warren Zevon’s “Splendid Isolation,” from his post-death cover album, “Enjoy Every Sandwich.” True titles, the both of them. We had escaped New Orleans again, at the very least.

I drank my beer and she her tall gin and tonic.

“So this is it,” she said, “maybe it never happened.”

“Oh, it did. And it isn’t over yet. Not until we get back through our respective doors.”

“And kiss the ground? Is that it?”

“Yeah, something like that.”