a long thing I don’t expect anyone to read; or, why I won’t be talking about an arbitrary “anniversary” of Hurricane Katrina
so the Chicago Tribune posted this outrageously offensive op-ed (warning: is disgusting, do not read unless you want a rage-y stomachache) about how they wish a real rain would come and wash away all the scum from their streets. by scum the writer means corruption or whatever. I guess she never thought we’d interpret it as some piss-ignorant, vile human being saying, boy, I sure wish the world could view MY city as a giant unflushed toilet of toxic water and actual dead people, like dead grandads and family pets, and the media obsessing over the looting thug looter black thug crooks looting on national TV. I guess she never thought about what I’ve thought, always with a tinge of guilt – how horrifying it must have been to stay. the cops came back before I did. the power came back on in my zip code before I set foot in my apartment again. I still *had* an apartment. the disconnect between what I can empathize with and what I can only imagine, that disconnect keeps my mouth prudently shut. I won’t be retrospecting about katrina, not where my real name is, and not where it would overshadow anyone else’s real pain. katrina was, and is, an inescapable part of living here. but I didn’t lose my house, or my mind.
this isn’t a Katrina Narrative ™. there’s already plenty of those. but as this is, y’know, a personal blog, i’ma get personal. i never think of myself as Having a Story about it. but it’s a part of my life, and one i think about every August, every hurricane season.
‘05 was already a strange, seasick sort of time in my life anyway. the year before, I had lived in the fox valley for 23 years and never lived anywhere else, then came to a town that makes outsiders feel like tourists and makes transplants feel like assholes. compass points don’t matter, and when somebody asks where you went to school, they don’t wanna hear “Neenah High, Home of the Rockets.” new orleans was full of new and little things to disorient and dismay me. I didn’t have any friends. my cellphone had limited minutes. I couldn’t understand lots of people when they talked, and you only get 2, maybe 3 chances to ask them to repeat themselves before you sound like a total asshole, and then when you tried to pronounce anything, you did it wrong, and everybody would laugh at you. the sun is hotter there, because you’re closer to the fucking sun. there was (and still is) no drunk food, and there was (and still is) no bar close, so I’d be stuck miles from home with my parrrtaaay roommate-friends until 3 in the morning, hungry and tired. some nights i’d sneak out of the club we were at to leave long, overcompensatingly cheerful voicemails on my wisconsin friends’ phones. groceries cost more. there was garbage in the streets. every time it rained, everything flooded. streets had potholes that could pop your tires. directions made no sense. no one used turnsignals.
I had just spent two months home in wisconsin recuperating from my first year living in new orleans. I had mostly been miserable in new orleans. my “friends” all sucked. they were roommates I depended upon as company. I don’t communicate with any of them now, don’t feel a rapport with any of them. they were fine, I guess, but I was older than them, less into dancin’ at the club. that, and I was the only one of five of us that didn’t grow up in a family that employed a maid. I reached lower and lower nadirs of homesickness and sadness. I have a distinct memory of spending one saturday night in my room looking through my photo albums, listening to Alice and Chains, and crying.
my “friends” liked most especially to go out on thursday nights to these places, in this order: Vera Cruz for 2-for-1 margaritas; Club 360 for oontzy music and dancing; Friar Tuck’s for “Ladies Night” which required even me, the DD, to buy a $5 cup to drink out of. I was always the driver. I woke up one Friday morning with some Friar Tuck’s patron’s vomit dried to a crust on the lid of my car’s trunk. I hadn’t noticed it the night before. I made my shitty roommate help me bucket-brigade hot water from our 3rd-floor apartment down to the parking lot so that I could soften, then clean it away.
plus I’d of course been dismissed by a boy, one of the first ones i’d met going out on my own to make Real New Orleans Friends. we went out a couple times, slept together, then he stopped answering calls. because of course.
so I’d gone home to wisco with relief. two months I spent there, working and going out and thrifting just like i had been, and while I never doubted I would be going back to new orleans again for school, I guess I did wonder if it would ever get any better. I was hopeful, though. I’d made a few tentative friends, fellow graduate assistants. I’d no longer be at the mercy of my clubbin’ roommates if I wanted to socialize. I’d just leased an apartment in the beautiful Garden District, a one-bedroom with a tiny baby stove in the kitchen in the only ugly building on the block in a neighborhood a half-hour across town from school. mostly my mentality was, the first year was the most miserable year of my life… the second year has to be better. besides, did I want to run home crying, move back in with my parents, fight with my parents, and run away to Perkins every night? a fine life for a 19-year-old, if you never wanted to grow up. but I was supposed to try to do something a little bigger.
I am not setting up a narrative for a “and then my life changed,” by the way. my life changes as it changes. I was affected by katrina, but not in any way that I think is important. I did not lose my home. I did not lose any family. I didn’t even have a horrible evacuation like I had the year before with Ivan. That one, my clubbin’ roommates found out that school was canceled and an evacuation was possible, they invited some dudes over and had a drinking party at the apartment. This one, I cracked a whip on it.
I moved back in the beginning of August. The weather was so miserable we didn’t bother moving all my stuff out of storage – I did end up losing what there was left in there to the flooding, but it was mostly books. It was a lonely couple of weeks. I got takeout a few times, re-re-decorated the house, played Nintendo, watched Monty Python. I got one TV channel, and I watched the news (and Oprah) every day. I did my teaching-assistant prep, exhaustively and early. I tried out various routes to UNO from my place on Harmony Street, cropping up some nice sunburn on my left forearm. I made friends with Bob Breck, that koo-koo weatherman with a weather plan. He was het up from the start about this tropical storm spinning in the caribbean, and I was all about hearing him talk about it until CSI came on after dinner. By the time everybody was back, the old roommates back in Lakeview and the fellow grad students back at Parkview Tavern, Bob was convinced that the storm was coming our way.
a lady running the drive-thru at the Wendy’s next to campus made me cry the day before classes started. I was at my old roommates’ new place, hanging out by the pool and getting a thoroughly hilarious sunburn in just the cutout in the middle of my one-piece. we were all broiling in august heat, so we bundled into the car for frosties and french fries. I waited at the window for my chance to ask for more ketchup. “ma’am? ma’am?”
“WHAT you waiting on?” she roared at me.
“nothing,” I said, and drove away crying. it was okay. my oontzy friends had extra packets back at the apartment.
I taught my first ever class on Thursday, sweating with nerves and wincing every time my bra bit my circle of sunburn. I managed to stretch a syllabus-reading and a one-page writing exercise for 45 minutes of the class, then set them free so that I could smoke in the faculty courtyard and get my nerves back. On Friday I fussed over my teacher’s clothes all day, then attended two welcome-back parties that night, one with the grads and one with the clubbers. At each one, I said, well, better get going, I gotta go home and pack up in case there’s an evacuation called.
from several people at each party: “there’s an evacuation?”
And like I said, with this one, I cracked the whip on the old roommates. no fucking around like we did with Ivan. that evacuation took 22 horrible hours.none of that this time. We’re going when I say we’re going, because we’re going to my auntie’s house in Houston and I’m calling the shots. And they fell right in line.
I got up early on the saturday and heard the official news – evac time. I called them over in Lakeview and told them to muster, then threw a weekend’s worth of stuff in my bag and gassed up. Around town there was activity, but not an alarming amount of or lack of it. I passed by houses with people nailing plywood to the windows. I was worried there would be a line at the gas station; there wasn’t. Then it was all head-em-up, move-em-out. This time, secondary roads. Three cars full of international students from UNO, all of us trundling along to Houston on the state highway. It only took 8 hours because one car got a flat. Aunt Helen greeted us with open arms and far more barbecue brisket than we could have possibly eaten in a weekend.
And that’s kind of where the story stops. I remember all of it in detail, up until. We lounged around my aunt’s big, comfortable, stupendously air-conditioned living room and watched on the news. We saw buildings we recognized, places where people lived, all the racist reportage, all the madness, all the lack of solution. School was canceled for the semester. I still had my little bundle of writing responses from the first day of class with me – I was going to grade them during the evacuation. Now there was nothing to do but go somewhere else. The internationals ate brisket at Helen’s kitchen table, their laptops in a ring, all day. Their parents bought them tickets home. We shuttled them to the airport, Helen and I, then I stayed a couple days longer. I wanted to keep her company before her house was all empty again, and I wasn’t ready to deal with whatever came next. I bought a pair of jeans at Ross that I ended up wearing for 8 years after that, until even a safety pin wouldn’t keep them together. (note: everybody who evacuated has Katrina clothes. ask them about this. this is one thing that no one will dry you up about.)
The drive up took two days. The only remarkable part of it was the small-talk I had with a hotel desk clerk in Missouri; when she found out I was still on a rambling evacuation from new orleans, she gave me a lower rate. “we’ve been saving rooms for you guys.”
UW-Oshkosh hadn’t even started classes yet. I signed up and missed no time. UWO got 4 evacuees, all Nursing majors. I had only been gone a year, and the faculty didn’t know I’d even moved, they just assumed I’d taken time off. I got back my same job at the warehouse driving forklift part-time. The whole thing felt like it never happened, unless I was reading the news. or unless someone asked me the two – the only two – questions that ever came up:
1. so is everything ok there now?
2. so is everything still under water?
I worked, I read, I did homework, I wrote papers. I chainsmoked over stephen king novels at perkins, I hung out with friends. i felt a little guilty at how easy being a part-time forklift operator and part-time graduate student at oshkosh really was. my new orleans life felt like a failed experiment – until my landlord started charging me rent again. even for the month in which it was not yet permissible to live in my zip-code. but hey, only in new orleans amirite.
I flew back for a few days in October to get clothes I would need for the winter. an acquaintance, a fellow grad student known to all of us as Wisconsin Jeff, picked me up from the airport and drove me around on the condition that he be able to crash in my apartment and that i help him pack up his stuff. my apartment had suffered no damage from the storm. there was a chunk of the apartment building’s back hall roof missing, and some water or something had leaked in, and either as a result of this or some other fragrant something-or-other that had since been removed, the whole building smelled peculiar. a friend later told me it smelled exactly like the Vitamin C supplement powdered drink she’d had to drink as a child in the Ukraine. my nightstand, which I still have next to my bed three apartments later, still has that smell coming from the unfinished wood of its drawer interior. I don’t know how this can be, but it’s true. every time I open that drawer, I think of vitamin C and the way insulation looks when it’s been torn and strewn around by the wind, like moldy Fiddle Faddle all clumped together.
my apartment had power, the river side of st. charles had power, downtown had power. me and wisconsin jeff hung out, went and got food a few places, went to UNO to reclaim his stuff from a Fiddle Faddle second-floor apartment. one of my first-year acquaintances was there at the same time, doing the same. her jewelry box had been stolen. my old roommates had just leased an apartment down the street. their TV was stolen, one of them had her closet drenched, all the clothes unsalvageable.
I remember riding from the UPS in metairie through West End, past block after block of ranch houses striped with uniform flood lines, past the refrigerator graveyard on West End Boulevard, through to Canal Street and back toward my place. it was pitch dark, approaching light in the center of town. I had never felt so emptily terrified as when I rode in wisconsin jeff’s goofy station wagon down residential streets with no light and no people. miles of darkness. those houses didn’t sleep; they were dead. streetlights didn’t have power past halfway down Canal. we raced toward the light. it sounds corny, but it was easy to imagine zombies boiling out of every window of every home. I was taking a Romanticism class at UWO at the time, and the week after I got back we discussed the Sublime. something overwhelming, awe-inspiring and terrifying. like looking at a mountain and seeing your own mortality in it. in discussion it was asked “can there be such a thing as an urban sublime?” and I kept quiet as they discussed what one might feel while gazing upon a skyscraper. i hadn’t told anybody i had come from new orleans. i told them i was from Neenah. where’d you go to high school? Neenah High.
the first businesses that came back were convenience stores, strip clubs, and fast food joints. burger king on vets at causeway had a huge sign up for months that said NOW HIRING - $400 MONTHLY SIGN-UP BONUS. there was a sign inside the airline McDonald’s that promised store managers $55,000 annual salary. I still kick myself sometimes for not jumping the grad school ship.
I evacuated in August with a half-full bowl of pasta salad, a bottle of milk, some cheese, and some lunch meat in my refrigerator. I fully expected when I got back that either I would have to battle sentient beings when I opened the door, or that my fridge had been duct-taped shut and taken to the graveyard on West End with thousands of others and stacked into one of the fermenting pyramids and I would have a replacement. neither outcome happened. someone had gone into the apartment, thrown away the spoiled food, and left an empty bowl with a cracked glaze of dried mayonnaise in my sink. the fridge forever smelled like spoiled milk. I got in the unshakeable habit of double-saran-wrapping everything.
i got my winter clothes, bid wisconsin jeff farewell at the airport (it turned out to be the last time I saw him – he finished his grad degree in michigan and moved to maine) and flew back. the blue tarps on all the visible roofs in kenner, metairie, when I took off, it became a measure of progress for the next couple of flights I took. some of those blue roofs took forever to be replaced by actual roof.
I came back in spring. spring was better. even though whenever I blew my nose, there was a little black stuff in the kleenex, even though I caught double pinkeye so bad that I had nightmares one night because my eyes were literally glued shut, it was better. everybody joked about katrina cough and drove around the potholes. looking back I think people were even a little sweeter for a while.
nothing was open past 9 p.m. not even wal-mart. and if it was wal-mart you were going to, good luck. you’d be in line for an hour, because everybody was at the fucking wal-mart. grab a book. don’t look at the floor. janitorial staff can’t keep up with how streaked black the floors were in there.
I remember going on a pilgrammage one night with my soon-to-be roommate to find ice cream. sonic didn’t have any, wal-mart closed at 9, wendy’s frosty machine was broken. we waited in the drive-up at popeyes for almost a half-hour to get vanilla shakes, which were obviously delicious.
SUNO had been nearly submerged, which of course made no one’s national headlines, because it was SUNO. presumably tulane’s one knocked-over tree or whatever made the nightly news. UNO got its campus half-dipped in water, half-looted. the computer science department caught flack, from what I understand, about not locking up all the labs quite as tightly as they needed to be. the computers in the Teaching Assistant offices weren’t stolen, but the coffee-can bank we had near the front door was. we had been pooling money so we could buy an eHarmony account and interact with one of the liberal arts professors under a false identity; as I remember we were nearly there. the bottle of peach schnapps my office-mate kept in her drawer was untouched, as was the rest of the room. in spring we basically picked up where we left off. I taught in the Engineering building on campus. the water didn’t work on the first floor. the liberal arts building had some kind of alarm in one of its vestibules that never stopped beeping the entire spring semester. it became as dependable as an entry bell at a department store, just part of the background.
rents skyrocketed. I used to go on craigslist and troll landlords and rant and rave in Rants and Raves about it. i paid $575 a month for a one-bedroom in a nice nabe, a very respectable amount; the landlord informed me that the rent was going up to $700 on the new lease. so, nope. I moved into a post-K refinished basement. hardwood floors, of which my new landlord was defiantly proud. “everybody says I’m crazy to do it, but they look so nice.” I scrubbed the post-K tub. I helped paint the walls, paint over the visible line in all around the walls. there, it was just about a foot and a half up. I made mental notes for if I ever needed to evacuate again. I’d stack everything on the back stairs above the fourth riser, piece of cake.
but it was better. I had friends. I even eventually had a boyfriend. the air cleared. most of the houses visible on the main routes in town got repaired. the lush, 4-foot lawns got tackled by the city eventually.
people with money or insurance spiffed up their homes. but that does mean that the inverse was true. is true. all over town, always. new orleans east was left to fester in the stretch between gentilly and the vietnamese village. I was taught the wonders of banh mi sandwiches and was making journeys out to the far reaches of the city for them, constantly going past these rotting buildings, old seedy clubs and low-rent apartment complexes covered in trumpet vines. the ninth ward, hardest-hit by the actual punch of the levee break (the water hit strong enough to physically move homes) got a smidge more attention and a smidge more work, thanks CNN and Brad Pitt, and places like bywater and holy cross gained a hipster street-cred sort of power, which brought some fixin’-up money at the cost of having a neighborhood with an increased percentage of white belts holding up skinny pants. hipsters reopened the circle market, they got the st roch market, they brought douchebag restaurants selling food to themselves. but they did fix up a few houses. they’re available for short-term rental on AirBnB.
property rates have increased almost 50% in the decade since katrina.. but only in Orleans parish. they have only increased by one percent in Jefferson parish, because it has never been cool, ever, to be in metairie, and although we call it the Bestbank with varying degrees of irony, it’s actually not the Best, it’s across the fucking mississippi river from anything you’d want to do except go to malls or go to dinner then come back to new orleans.
people still think we flash our tittays on bourbon street and sleep spoons with alligators while eating pralines and king cake in bed – a bed we’re in all day, unless we’re at a jazz club. journalism regarding katrina ten years ago, if it took the time to personify the city, did it the opposite of a favor by personifying it as a saggy southern belle prostitute. a Time retrospective said that Katrina “tore the chemise” off the “aging, yearning” city. thanks, Time. we’ll just be here being a sad old naked hoor.
the truth is this is still a town that it’s hard to be a grown-up in. it’s a town that knows how to party and hides its grown-assitude because why be boring when you could not be boring? and as one of many consequences, it’s hard to get people to take its tragedy seriously. I don’t speak for myself – katrina had a definite impact on and place in my own timeline here, but what did I lose, really, except a couple boxes of books and photos in a storage unit and my respect for america in a lot of ways? is everything ok there now? is it still flooded?
I remember everything around the edges of what anybody’s going to talk about for the next month. which is why I’ll have to suspend my facebook, avoid conversations about everything except football, movies, and restaurants here that are safely not on the Ain’t Dere No More list, and occasionally look at videos of baby sloths taking bubble baths just to perk me up. new orleans is hard. katrina is harder. I’ve never lost the anger and disappointment I’ve felt toward the rest of the world ever since. Every bit of the After has made me not want to start talking for fear that I would never stop.
so. that’s what’s on my mind. i’m sort of hoping that’ll get rid of it til after the “anniversary” is over. anniversary. fuck’s sake. as if it ever stopped happening. c’mon down here and take a look. just not on one of the (absolutely really real) Katrina Tours they give.
