In the Land of Dreamy Diaspora, Part III

"I couldn't catch them during the real Mardi Gras and I can't catch them now." ~ George W. Bush, commenting on beads falling at his feet while visiting a Habitat for Humanity site in Covington, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina (costumed in hardhat, work gloves, and a wraparound tool belt, perhaps from Nordstrom)

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Home Alone

Spray painted on the front of Squalor Heights is a large orange X inside a circle. It looks slightly like a 1960 peace symbol. At the top, "C L B," then the poetic date, "9-11," and finally the number of dead found inside, "0."

I slept that first night back on a pallet in the living room. It was eerie, but it was home and I needed to be there. The garret looked like a hurricane had hit it - which is to say about as it always looks. There was no one else in the neighborhood. There were no lights, no street noises, and no noise inside the building that I didn't make. What if someone broke in? There was no phone to call for help. There was no help to call! Fortunately, there was no one to break in. I slept uneasily, awakening every time a gust of wind fluttered the Pope's Flag covering the front dormer.

Next morning, standing at the kitchen dormer, looking towards the blank wall of the worrisome new house built inside the courtyard of a Creole cottage three doors down, I wondered if that wall had blocked winds that might have blown through my dormer and lifted Squalor Heights up over The River. On the corner one block over, the wall of an ancient two story brick building lay tumbled into the street.

One block from Squalor Heights

Crossing the Electric Divide

The nearby faraway French Quarter beckoned with electricity, telephones, water (poison then but now said to be just yummy). Even Bacco was open - sans their famous ten-cent martini. Public washrooms had big jugs of potable water for hand washing, and garbage trucks rumbled about the streets exchanging smells and trash.

The air was vacant of automobile fumes and fat with aromas leaking from duct-taped refrigerators curbside in front of every building in Town. People posted their thoughts on them with indelible Magic Markers. "Voodoo 2005," was on all of them. This, it was said, would keep scavengers from washing them out and reselling them.

"Catch this, Bush!" was painted on one.

After Saints owner Tom Benson's shabby grab for all the FEMA funds, "Do not open, contains Benson's heart," appeared.

We took evening beer at Molly's on Decatur, staying past dark listening to Nina Simone on the Juke Box singing, "Put some cream in my Sugar Bowl"

There was not one light crossing Esplanade into Faubourg Marigny, and I had to pick my way through piles of rubble, and feel my way up shaky stairs to Squalor Heights.

All The City smells. Our parts (the less damaged parts) are very depressing. I avoided the devastated parts but noted driving out towards the freeway how the watermark followed us growing ever higher.

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Le Beat Goes On

Weeks later, I rode over from Lafayette to New Orleans with Stephen Latimer, first cook at Upperline, and his wife, Lisa. By then his restaurant's owner, JoAnn Clevenger, had announced they were reopening. His job was secure. Lisa, a City librarian, was not so lucky.

Squalor Heights was still a shabby lady in waiting. It is damaged and will support neither utilities nor tenants for some time.

I've been in New Orleans a few days, as I write this, dog/house sitting in a French Quarter home untouched by more than delivery of a huge new refrigerator. Every morning I walk to The River to drink Café Du Monde coffee beside John T. Scott's sculpture, "Ocean Song." Scott lost his home and studio. His lovely sculpture lives on, flashing sunlight at The River and recalling power and good times.

Curfew has been raised to 2a.m., and Andrei Codrescu read at The Gold Mine one night. Later in the week, Stacy Hoover threw a party with good wine, jazzy jammin', artists waxing, hustlers hustling, and a few angry young poets. Most New Orleans writers fled Katrina knowing well the developing plot line. They trickle back slowly. Tonight the young scribes rule.

It was a good party, though less like Paris and more like Berlin in '29. We danced on our grave with a wary eye towards survival. In the courtyard three young men thumped their chests and said Bush was not dumb, "just lacked TV presence" to sell his ideas.

They forgot it was his idea to confuse September Eleventh with Iraq; plunder our national treasury; abandon levee improvements before the storm, and our rescue after.

All Sailors know scuttling your ship to steal the brass is dumb. No matter how many youths are willing to sail with a crazed captain he is still dumb.

* * *

Everyone is making trash piles, it is the new art of New Orleans. I sit at my desk cleaning out drawers. Would the I. R. S. ever really want my pocket calendar from 1989? Outside, hammers fall in rhythmic staccato. Five people are now on my block and they all have hammers.

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On Track Again

New Orleans' population is down (or up) to sixty-thousand. After the forced evacuation following the storm, it was thought to have been sixty.

The wonderful Marigny Brasserie has reopened, and more scribes are back. Dean Paschal (BY THE LIGHT OF THE JUKE BOX") and I shared a meal there that would have been great pre Katrina. A "hippie" free food kitchen and supporting tents have taken root across the street in Washington Square. The non-homeless speak of running them out of town for their good works. Sigh!

On November 4th, the Sunset Limited arrived, for the first time since the storm. It came from Los Angeles, with stops in refugee towns like Houston and Lafayette. It arrived in New Orleans four hours and four minutes late, but it was a welcome sight discharging among its passengers L. A. Norma toting a hand grip and a carton of Camel Cigarettes.

"I haven't had a cigarette in three days," she said lighting up outside the station. "Where is everybody?"

Editor's note: LEJ's Yours Truly In A Swamp has been picked up by The African-American Village, "the magazine of African-American colleges and universities."