Notes from Under Water
LABASH, MATT
Notes from Under Water The struggle to survive the disaster in N^'w Orleans BY MATT LABASH New Orleans I'm not a big supporter of men crying. But I nearly did so while watching the flood waters...
...Some have been waiting there for days, sitting in all manner of filth, from tampons to discarded MRE wrappers to human excrement, since the port-o-johns long ago reached capacity...
...I don't know if it's the worries----" As we bake in the parking lot, I ask Lakisha why she pitched camp here, instead of inside...
...Her children are getting overheated...
...It's like I can't, you know...
...Lakisha has a gold-toothed grill, a "Ms...
...Or maybe not so crazy...
...Concerned about all the looting and crime, he keeps up a steady patter of anti-"cricket" talk...
...The only weaponry we managed to find on our way into Baton Rouge was some rubber mallets and ball peen hammers...
...He seems lonely, like he needs the company...
...So I'm forced to lean on those of Walker Percy, a good Louisiana boy who, contemplating race in Love in the Ruins, wrote: "Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn't work after all...
...Can't I come with you...
...They were an absolute roadblock, nobody was getting anywhere with those idiots...
...Three hours later, I'm on a plane to Houston, where we rendezvous and load up a giant Excursion ("the Fordasaurus," Tucker calls it...
...A block away, I meet Patricia Watts, a postal employee, standing in the back of a line for escape buses, a line she's stood in futilely for three successive days...
...I dash to the side service entrance to confirm this and am forbidden from entering by an Arkansas National Guardsman...
...A private helicopter pilot from Kentucky, who most recently picked up a young pregnant mother with her 4-year-old twins who'd been waiting on a bridge for two days, says, "You shouldn't go there without guns...
...It's the only attempt at consolation that I personally witness from even a semi-official source in the four days I spend in Louisiana...
...I put a bag on his head...
...Many have said there are no words to describe the smell, but I'll give it a shot since it's my job...
...It begins, "If found dead...
...If we don't stop, they got the right to shoot the f— out ya...
...She has no insurance, and doesn't know where she's going, but she knows she has to "get me a job, maybe two jobs...
...He tells us of the hell he just escaped, which resembled a third-world bazaar where the only product being sold is human misery...
...An old-line New Orleanian, he has a true aristocrat's distaste for seeing his name in the paper, so he tells me if I write about him I'll have to use an alias...
...Dude," says Kingfish impatiently, "I don't think you understand what's happening...
...And I smashed him in the head with a radio...
...They give me what I've come to expect from the Quarter—a few pops and good conversation...
...Thousands of evacuees are waiting below for state-sponsored rides to Baton Rouge, or Houston, or parts unknown, and Kingfish tells Fleming this is his last stop...
...We're just the only ones left...
...Showing his weapon, Kingfish sprints into the center's concourse, and I follow behind him, not so much to provide back-up as to make sure he doesn't get overly excited and accidentally shoot somebody...
...Later I go down to get a closer look, and what I see makes me regret ever dropping off Fleming...
...Go there just once, and if you see the right things with someone who knows the place, it's a city that sticks to you like a roux stain on white linen...
...We have strong souls," says Vaughn...
...Watts tells me that there are dead babies, and that they are being kept in the freezer in the kitchen of the convention center...
...The only damage it suffered was some dominoed pear trees by the jungle gym, and some slate shingles torn off the roof, now resting at the bottom of his pool, which doubles for the moment as a bathtub...
...Sorry sir," he says...
...I just had to put a dog down...
...For whatever reason, the gentleman made a move to the car," he says...
...After someone abandoned a cocker spaniel in the mud, Hughes noticed the dog face-down, breathing heavy...
...Witnesses tell me what happened...
...But Louisiana after the flood is different and darker...
...The buses never came...
...Now, now, your world's been turned upside down, hasn't it...
...These are our people...
...Katri-na killed his aunt, who lived in a Gulf coast town in Mississippi...
...She grabs me back like I'm a life preserver, saying, "God bless you" over and over again, hungry for the most meager kindness...
...The cart pusher turns out to be a Syrian butcher at a local grocery that's been looted...
...The buses don't come, and when they do, there's no room...
...It ain't for my kids," he says, "they already go to great schools...
...She starts wailing hoarsely...
...So she took to the soup...
...As I walk across the field toward the highway, I'm accosted by grasping humanity...
...There's a pair of scissors pointing at his head, which look like a murder weapon...
...I'm gone two seconds, and now they're looting our spots," he exclaims in frustration...
...F— this city," says Kingfish, when we tell him tales we've heard...
...There are no trains or buses...
...I don't understand how you can survive in these conditions, man...
...And my mother had to calm me down...
...While interviewing her, he notices a letter she's stuck to the wall that speaks to the present state of affairs...
...commiserates Gloria, who tries to calm Lurleen down...
...Black and white mix more down here, and we enjoy each other," says Kingfish...
...The people who are left have moved out to the steps to escape the excruciating smell...
...But he won't hear it...
...But we also talk a little more frankly about race...
...Using detergent buckets, they've just cadged some water from an acquaintance's swimming pool...
...The television over the breakfast bar keeps piping in the bad news about lootings and shootings and rapes, while unlucky evacuees who couldn't get a room sack out in the lobby and parking lot...
...These aren't the enemy...
...I feel so sorry for him that I take up a collection from the MSNBC crew, and run him down to put 100 bucks in his hand...
...Along the way, we make contact with the local friend of someone in our party...
...I wave him off, telling him he's being ridiculous...
...he implores...
...In a parking lot, 27-year-old Lakisha Brown stands next to two trashbags full of clothes that she floated along the top of the toxic soup that she waded through for an entire day...
...Or if you've ever downed Pimm's cups and oyster Po' Boys at Napoleon House on Chartres, one of the most hospitable places on the planet to kill an evening...
...When I turn my recorder on as I interrogate a soldier on their behalf, he grows peevish, and tells me to turn it off and move along...
...The center's only taking triage patients...
...Everybody just started doing their own missions...
...We ain't the wise men," Vaughn says...
...I pull the tarp back and see a black man lying in a pool of blood...
...Perhaps it's the scope of the catastrophe, perhaps the undercurrent of violence, but even many of the aid workers seem to have turned to stone...
...New Orleans had Voodoo doctors, and stride-piano professors, Matt Labash i^ a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...That evening, my MSNBC companions set up on Canal Street to broadcast live...
...After making serial inquiries, Lainart is climbing out of his skin, and I later find out that his team circumvented FEMA altogether, got down to New Orleans, and stayed busy for five days straight...
...That one's for now," he says of the Budweiser...
...The day after the flooding starts, I'm snapped from my melancholy by a phone call from a friend, former colleague, and host of MSNBC's The Situation With Tucker Carlson, the very same Tucker Carlson...
...What happened was," Avon says, "is I was asleep, and all of the sudden, I saw this man dead...
...I need to play a video game to calm myself down...
...Carlson's manic executive producer, Bill Wolff, assumes the wheel...
...There's so many people out here, we can't have dead animals lying around," he says...
...Some of them have known greater pain...
...What happens is," Avon continues, hiccuping out his words, "thoughts run through my mind...
...Or if you've ever pulled an all-nighter in Pirate's Alley off Jackson Square, with fantasists in buccaneer shirts clanking their broadswords after dipping too deeply into the bourbon...
...They could hardly be blamed...
...But Kingfish isn't going anywhere, nor can he take on more house guests...
...Vaughn so resembles Richard Petty that he once ran into the NASCAR great at the FireCracker 400...
...On our way down to New Orleans, the sto- is ries fly at us with greater fury...
...I walked the avenues of lower Manhattan in the days after the World Trade Center went down, and the camaraderie of people coming together was palpable...
...He's wearing tartan plaid boxers and a shoulder-holster...
...Actually, he loves his town, which is why he's still here, sparring with his wife on the phone as she and their evacuated kids sit on a beach in Florida...
...I can't play anymore...
...Well who's it up to, I ask irately...
...It's a bit late for that...
...But he mans the lobby anyway...
...One of the last people in his neighborhood, Kingfish is waiting for "the crickets," as he calls them, to find it and loot it...
...When I start eatin', it just don't taste right...
...Children with nowhere to go lived in this sludge for days without relief, and without any explanation for why relief never came...
...Because all this music came from a place...
...He has nothing, except time on his hands...
...When I approach a cop, and ask why these people aren't getting taken care of, he sips a Coke, while reclining against a squad car...
...Kingfish has a side-holster which loops around his Brooks Brothers cowhide belt...
...While opinions on the ground differ wildly as to who deserves the most generous serving of blame pie among George W. Bush, Louisiana's governor, and New Orleans' mayor, everyone I speak with agrees that FEMA officials should spend their afterlives in the hottest part of Hell without any water breaks...
...Separated from his family in the flood, Gregory doesn't even know where his four children are...
...They've been there for three days, but neither has been able to obtain answers about where or when they're going if a bus ever comes, so I grab them and pull them over some barricades to talk to some authorities...
...When we pull into his fenced compound, we're greeted by one of his neighbors, who's been helping keep watch, and who's just finished bathing in the pool...
...It's bad, and it's gonna get worse...
...He's trying to keep his head together, since from the air, he's been noticing all the childhood landmarks that have disappeared, including his parents' house, now part of the Gulf of Mexico...
...But I can't let you enter in case something happens to you...
...You can travel with our crew...
...Great," he says to me, when I inform him of his new title...
...Hell, the Meters played his sister's deb party, he says as he puts on some Second Line music from the Wild Magnolias...
...And with all the murder and mayhem going down in New Orleans (reports have armed looters trying to peg Blackhawks out of the sky), one says, "I'd rather take my chances in the Sunni Triangle...
...I brace for a confrontation, but he just says, "I'll get that," grabbing the man's emphysema tank, and helps us load him into the Fordasaurus...
...One of them, 45-year-old Michael Lucock, does get a room with his parents...
...He has no house and no employment...
...They used to net him 30 grand a week...
...Can I tell you something, man...
...One man leads me in to show me around...
...I have to leave, so I slide Lurleen 20 bucks, throwing my arm around her to give her a squeeze...
...I tell him why I've come, and though he hasn't seen them personally, he tells me it's his understanding that the story's true...
...Many of the uniformed National Guardsmen we meet at the hotel are just back from Iraq...
...His sidekick says, apropos of nothing, "I'm a war baby...
...On the street right in front of the Convention Center, I see a circle of chairs around a black tarp...
...When we arrive at dawn, we attempt, with no luck, to check into a hotel across from the airport...
...I'm a refugee in my own country...
...A local police officer tells me that desperate men were snatching babies from the arms of their mothers to boost their chances of getting on a freedom bird...
...Therefore, if urban planners can navigate the ministers and local politicos who make their bones leeching off the historically failing system, they might be able to distribute the poor more evenly around Orleans parish, taking away gang and drug-lord base-camps, and gentrifying the city...
...If they see a cricket, they'll step on one...
...The schools are some of the worst in the nation, which is why Kingfish campaigns for vouchers...
...Between evacuees, aid-workers, journalists, and other grief merchants, there isn't an available hotel room within a 500-mile radius of New Orleans (though a night later, Carlson's crack producer, Jamieson Lesko, sweet-talks us in, so we can sleep six to a room...
...That may be true, says Ted, though that doesn't keep him from breaking out the religious material: " 'On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.' 'Yea, though He slay me, yet will I serve Him.' He is my everything...
...We grab the wheelchair-bound man—he's fairly easy to spot, he's the white guy—and a black teenager darts at me...
...He has decided to rescue the elderly father of a family friend from the squalor that is the Convention Center, where evacuees are congregated by the thousands, and where all manner of atrocities—from rape to murder—are rumored to be occurring...
...Dwight Williams, who wears shorts without underwear and no shirt (what he escaped the flood waters in), says the night before, a New Orleans Police Department vehicle pulled up...
...There, I meet 21-year-old Derrick Hughes, who sits with two girls he rescued, and who tells me what they've been living through in a tumble of words that he can barely get out...
...The rest of us have Home Depot and Applebees...
...What a piece of s— he was...
...Avon Delpit, a doughy, bespectacled 12-year-old boy with a stutter, sits about 30 feet away on a step...
...Is it even possible that from the beginning it never did work...
...The s— I've seen out here, I don't think anybody realizes...
...I got bruises everywhere on me," she says...
...Parts of it are so dark that even a flashlight hardly illuminates anything...
...I settle on "King-fish," after hearing one of his pals call him that over their radios...
...Three employees are guarding it: an old retired-Navy salt named George Miller, a Richard Pryor lookalike named Ted Mack, and Vaughn Couk, a cowboy with a cigarette-smoking skull tattooed on his forearm (who also runs the Hog Bar, owned by the same people, a few blocks away, a 24-hour establishment that lives by the motto "The place to go when nobody else wants you...
...She thought I was a paramedic and complained the whole way," says Kingfish...
...We also collect the man's wife and a local freelance photographer named Matt Fleming...
...People are stealing, they're hoarding food, some people have none," he says...
...A body lies underneath it...
...Gloria, a kindly British-accented volunteer and an LSU English professor, tries to comfort her, and to get some answers from somebody...
...Aside from the floodwaters, which encroach from the north as far as Dauphine Street, it is largely intact because of its higher elevation, praise Jesus...
...The other survivors are given water and food, then left to the elements...
...Through the week, the stories get wilder and weirder...
...We can take loss of everything...
...He grows quiet, then starts sobbing...
...He's not impressed...
...Medicating himself with unhealthy quantities of Nicorette and Diet Dr...
...Right now, her total net worth is "not a nickel to my name—I'm just not used to havin' nuthin...
...He didn't see it, but he heard it, along with his mom and six-year-old retarded brother who has seizures, and who hasn't been able to get any medical assistance in the six days they've been here...
...that the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer...
...I'm hearing these gunshots, and I'm like, 'God, what am I gonna do?' It's just too hard for me to handle...
...At a time when many New Orleanians are drowning literally, Kingfish feels like he's drowning figuratively...
...Together, we look like a rap group and their manager...
...Sure, New Orleans regularly leads the league in all the wrong categories...
...Most of the stories seem too unlikely to have happened—and just likely enough, in the current sinister climate, not to ignore...
...I haven't seen my babies," he says...
...In addition to loading weapons, he's spent the week saving animals and people, most recently a dotty octogenarian who'd fallen and couldn't get up...
...Though I'm wearing thick-treaded hiking boots, I nearly go down four times on the urine-soaked floor...
...Kingfish asks Fleming where he wants to go...
...F— this here...
...So I took him back behind the Causeway...
...Pepper, he drives us all night to Baton Rouge...
...At a gas stop, a breathless black man who just escaped the ninth ward, the city's roughest, tells me Charmaine Neville, of the famed musical Neville family, was raped by thugs in his neighborhood as she was trying to help others...
...I find a rest stop at the Blues Club on Bourbon Street, across from Galatoire's...
...The sun flickers out on us, and as darkness takes over the Quarter, Vaughn insists, "You're not walking out of here alone...
...They're not worried for the most part, though Vaughn likes to point out that since the storm, his pal Ted's afro is flecked with extra gray...
...We park on the Causeway overpass on I-10...
...I love her dearly, but she wants me to come hold their hands on the beach, while I'm fighting for our f—ing lives...
...It makes me feel like I'm really homeless, which I am...
...An old man they're taking care of wets his pants, and Richard has to take him to a makeshift bathroom, which is nothing more than a sheet shielding a patch of bare ground...
...She doesn't want to go in there, she says...
...The six or so children they're looking out for, three of whom are Richard's, are suffering from exhaustion, and one has asthma, his face swollen from allergies...
...I don't even like to talk about it, it hurts so bad...
...Though they're suffering damaged houses and lost wages, they shrug the shrugs of men who don't seem to have fallen that far, perhaps because they didn't have that far to fall...
...She hasn't lost her family, which is split up, she's not sure where...
...The cop opened the door, shot him, and that was it...
...They shot that old man...
...He's frazzled, but Kingfish's New Orleans hospitality is still intact...
...I pretend everything else...
...As I stand up, I announce to no one in particular, "The three Wise Men of Bourbon Street...
...I ask the butcher where he got the shopping cart, and he says they're everywhere...
...We've got all the logistics worked out," he lies...
...We are off, from there, on a Kingfish mission...
...So he tries to engage me in a game by showing me to his favorite overstuffed chairs, but somebody has taken them...
...Her husband has no shoes, and the diapered son he is holding has no pants, since that's the way they left the house when the water started to envelop them...
...The next day, we go back, minus the Kingfish, for a lengthier visit...
...George, a recent widower, has prostate cancer...
...The lobby of the Holiday Inn, decorated in oppressive pastels that aspire to the pleasantly bland, is a staging-area Purgatory...
...They were used to cut duct tape and paper, which are attached to his torso, notifying whoever removes him of the phone numbers of his next of kin...
...A police officer tells us that after a sixth-district police station was flooded, the cops set up shop in a Wal-Mart that looters were still trying to penetrate by running stolen cars into the walls...
...FEMA was holding up everything, they didn't have a clue," complains Lainart...
...I've never done anything before like that in my life, man...
...But she's lost everything else—her job, her car, her pride...
...Name me after Huey E Long...
...But his businesses are sitting idle or under water or both...
...and Mardi Gras Kings and Queens...
...The U.S.A didn't work...
...If it wasn't for people like us, there's a lot of weak-minded, weak-souled people out there who would blow their brains out...
...She tried to stick out the flood in her water-logged abode, appealing to passing soldiers for water, "but they couldn't help us...
...Nobody's in charge, nobody's getting fed, people are s— ing in the hallways," Fleming says...
...Over at the Pete Maravich Center on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, we meet the "lucky" ones, those who were successfully evacuated...
...What he and his friends are talking about, besides brute survival, is urban planning and civic renewal...
...Many of the troublemakers in the poverty'n'crime centers that bookend economic engines like the French Quarter have been evacuated to other states...
...Fleming is reluctant to leave...
...For hours, we talk about the good and bad things we've seen in their city, and they restore my faith...
...What am I gonna do there...
...Scores walked off the job in mid-crisis...
...It features the Meters and Professor Longhair and Sidney Bechet & His New Orleans Feet Warmers, along with all those mad-genius brass bands bringing up the Second Line: Dirty Dozen and Rebirth and Tuba Fats' Chosen Few...
...She says she hasn't...
...In Iraq, his unit did things like transport Saddam Hussein...
...What Lakisha doesn't know is that she couldn't stay inside if she wanted to...
...But I lost my video games...
...We also bought a gas siphon, since things have degenerated into Road ^&rrjor-like conditions, and gas stations freely sell them...
...As I traipse through a field of ankle-deep mud, people are strewn across it, and crowding the highway, hoping to gain passage out of New Orleans...
...God forbid a reporter should slip and fall on his way to checking out dead babies in the freezer...
...Said, 'I'm never leaving New Orleans again, look what happens to me.' You're still in New Orleans, you crazy-ass bat...
...Another black man walks past me, barking, "He didn't stop...
...They are shirtless from the flood, with plenty of chest tattoos...
...Its lights are flashing soundlessly, three of its tires are flat, and the cop who belongs to it is nowhere to be found...
...It's been there since the night before...
...A friend tells me his cousin knows someone who pulled 100 bodies out of the Superdome after they'd had their throats cut and been stuffed under bleachers...
...While I've always had affection for Louisiana's political scamps, many locals hold that the corruption is a lot more charming when you don't have to live under it...
...Tucker arrives at the woman's modest house to deliver protein bars, instant soup, and three gallons of water...
...See, I have anxiety, so I was going all crazy and I was crying...
...But I felt safer there, because I knew who the enemy was...
...C'mon, we're going to New Orleans...
...Look here," says Kingfish, "Ignatius J. Reilly and his cousin...
...But it's a city you can't help but pine for, and not just because of the grace and grandeur featured in the picture books...
...I watch Fleming sag, as he starts despondently down the cloverleaf toward the mass of bodies below...
...When we get to "Cricketville," as he diplomatically calls it, there is only one police car in sight...
...Waiting outside with Kingfish, I spot a shirtless, hairy man pushing a shopping cart down the street of the abandoned neighborhood...
...He tried to force-feed it a drink, but the water just dribbled down the dog's mouth...
...As I write this, I'm listening to Doctors, Professors, Kings and Queens: The Big Ol' Box of New Orleans...
...They're a step above the criminals," says Kingfish...
...Ya feel me...
...If it were up to us, we'd have all of them on vehicles, and get them someplace safe...
...For respite, I take a walk through the ghostly French Quarter...
...They know me around here, we'll be all right...
...Then the spaniel threw up...
...And that's not even the worst of it...
...It's been the fattest city, the most corrupt city, the most murderous city, and so forth...
...I don't know anybody in Houston," he says...
...Solis says they are so undermanned, with so many people so desperate to get out, that they actually had to bring in SWAT teams to clear landing zones and keep the crowd from "bum-rushing the aircraft...
...I have no idea," he says...
...The same, he says, happened to a four-year-old girl...
...But I am skunked from what I've seen and heard...
...Two thirtysomething black gents, who introduce themselves as Gregory and Richard, want me to see the squalor of their encampment, which could give any slum in Bangladesh a run...
...His beautiful house in Uptown, where he graciously puts us up during our stay, is still standing...
...Once their FEMA checks run out, they won't have much incentive to return...
...If you packed a trashbag with used diapers, rotten produce, and curdled milk, stuck it in your garage in the heat of August, and waited for a thick porridge to collect at the bottom of the bag, then poured that liquid all over the floor, you'd be about halfway there...
...He fled to Baton Rouge for a night, then thought better of it, and joins our caravan to go back and defend his home...
...We can take pain...
...Half of them want to know if I'm an aid worker, the other half want me to "call their people," which I try, but there's no cell service in New Orleans...
...Though he shredded his hull by running over asphalt, cars, fire hydrants, and other debris, his crew saved nearly 800 people...
...You understand what it means to miss it if you ever stood in line outside now-defunct Uglesich's, a 10-table dive on the wrong side of town where even the gentry nursed Abita beers on the sidewalk, gladly cooling their heels for hours just to get a crack at the shrimp and grits...
...And the police are regarded as something of a joke...
...Wanted to talk to our supervisor...
...He doesn't know if any business is coming back, and though he's paid roughly $3 million in premiums over the years, he's absolutely certain his insurance company is going to give him the high hard one...
...He brings along two buddies, one of whom is a reservist cop who helps us navigate around the checkpoints and flooded streets of New Orleans...
...One SWAT officer says he found a bucket-full of looted hair weaves...
...With nearby Children's Hospital out of business, Kingfish took it upon himself to get a stretcher, and rescued the woman, taking her to Ochsner Hospital instead...
...He wears work pants and a shirt featuring an ascending angel, not unlike the angels standing sentry over the whitewashed crypts in Metairie...
...But his crew has been on the bench for two days, waiting for FEMA to assign them a mission...
...Whoever his people were wanted to get the hell out of New Orleans, even if it was without him...
...That's why I'm so crazy...
...But I nearly did so while watching the flood waters roll over New Orleans, drowning it in Katrina's backwash...
...A movie extra who sports a medic-alert necklace in case he goes into epileptic fits, Lucock totes around a purple velvet Crown Royal pouch in which he keeps a deck of playing cards...
...We can't let you in...
...Sizing up Vaughn, Petty took off his STP sunglasses and said, "Hello, little brother...
...Lurleen London learned this last night and the night before, as she, her husband, and their four children (ages seven and under) had to sleep on the sidewalk...
...He's flanked by a toothless sidekick, who is apparently jabbering to himself...
...I'd just rather have peace of mind...
...But they're not...
...I get crazy...
...It's made him a bit crazy...
...If the I-10 scene could pass as Dante's eighth circle of Hell, then the Convention Center would easily qualify as the ninth...
...I ask her if she's had anything to eat...
...We deposit the man and wife at a local hospital, but Fleming wants to stick with us, switching from the For-dasaurus into the Kingfish's vehicle...
...Now they're costing him 10 per...
...I said a prayer...
...He and his friends are armed to the teeth, with nine-millimeter pistols and all manner of shotguns: over-and-unders, side-by-sides, pumps—the works...
...In the parking lot outside the hangar sits George Lainart, a police officer from Georgia, who has led a flotilla of nine airboats over land to try to pitch in with the rescue...
...Not only because of the obvious human toll, but also because this Jobian plague befell the greatest city in America...
...And as a fellow New Orleans enthusiast I know says, "It's one of the last places that feels like a place...
...Lurleen starts explaining her plight on an even keel, but as she gets deeper into the narrative, she hyperventilates, panicking for her children...
...But perhaps spying the black cameraman in our party, he assures me he's not some mouth-breathing racist...
...Sitting outside the dark club, they tell me to join them, and Vaughn fetches me two bottles...
...With all the golfwear and guns they favor, they look like they hail from the lost tribe of Jean Lafitte, the one that decided that instead of plundering ships on the high seas, they'd pull an inside job on a yacht club in Newport...
...Girly" tattoo, and a BeBe baby-tee pushed-up to reveal a midriff covered with ointment, salving the wounds she sustained while escaping the flood...
...But since he's broke and newly homeless, he doesn't seem to know...
...Kingfish goes out on several more humanitarian missions with us...
...This time, I have no words...
...He asks repeatedly to be taken to a train or bus station...
...Things are so dire in New Orleans that citizens have taken to calling cable television personalities over police or medics...
...As their city gets washed away, it has occurred to many New Orleanians I talk to that if in fact the city is rebuilt, maybe this time it'll be done right...
...And just the other day, after the storm hit, he gave 200 bucks to his neighbor's black maid, and let her have one of his cars...
...Everybody will be better off if the swamp gets cleaned up, say Kingfish and his ilk...
...And Ted's wife was killed 12 years ago in a car accident, leaving him with two young children...
...On the way out, she passed humans, frogs, pigeons, and rats, some swimming for their lives, others just doing the dead-man's float...
...As we pile into SUVs, Kingfish tells Carlson to take along his 12-gauge in case things go wrong...
...At the Baton Rouge airport, commandeered by rescue workers, Louisiana Army National Guardsman and Black-hawk pilot Daniel Solis is waiting to fly another hairy sortie...
...For most of the past week, this friend was making a stand in his generator-powered Uptown house...
...It took five seconds, the entire incident...
...I'd like to think we at the Blues Club help people smile, help them out, make them understand that it's not that bad...
...Numerous reporters who've visited, including an MSNBC producer riding with us, throw up from the noxious fumes...
...A nearby shut-in has called MSNBC repeatedly to bring her supplies, and Tucker Carlson and crew are answering the call...
...The whole of New Orleans resembles a self-check-out Piggly Wiggly in the midst of a going-out-of-business sale...
...But nobody has answers...
...With all his bluster and cricket-talk, Kingfish is a bit of a cocked-fist altruist...
...My gnawing sadness returns...
...That one's for later," he says of the water...
...Grabbing a bottle of Maker's Mark, he's probably one of the few people in the city during these times who worry about whether their guests have enough cherry juice and Angostura bitters for their Old Fashioneds...
Vol. 11 • September 2005 • No. 1
