Don't Have To Live Like A Refugee

Marcus, a New Orleans search-and-rescue worker who lost his mother, his home, and possibly his sanity to Katrina. Photo by the author

To walk into the Red Cross hurricane evacuation shelter at the Baton Rouge River Center is to be assaulted by rapid-fire hand sanitizer. The Americorps chick with her hemp necklace and plug earrings pumps a slick, sick-smelling glob on your palms at check-in, a chubby fifth-grade volunteer squirts you some more at the cot pickup, and finally a yellow-shirted Scientologist comes to your cotside and gives you your own little bottle of the stuff, just in case you wake up in the middle of the night and start to feel a little unclean. I’m not sure where this is going but I figured it must be significant, as the first word I managed to write on my notebook when I finally caught a plane out of Louisiana was “cleansing.”

For a place that has built its entire identity around dirt, sin, and vice, where strip clubs and casinos and the drive-thru daiquiri industry are actually big government lobbies, cleansing has become a surprising statewide obsession for Louisiana. “I hate to say it,” a bar owner in Slidell, one of those lakefront suburbs where the only thing now open for ten miles around is a bar, told me one night at Natal’s Lounge, “but this has really been a great cleansing for the city of New Orleans. And now people like me and Mr. Ingraham here can go in, and buy real estate…”

“Yes, a cleansing!” added Mr. Ingraham, a thin white-haired man in sunglasses who was halfheartedly feeling up the knee of the underage-looking girl next to him. Mr. Ingraham, it turned out, was the distinguished gentleman who had “lobbied” local officials to lift the post Katrina alcohol ban so the bar could open up a miraculous four days after the storm was over.

“What Katrina has done, is speeded the process of New Orleans going down, down…”

“…And if you read it, right there in Revelations 13,” finished a castrated-sounding AM radio preacher I heard on my way from Slidell to Baton Rouge the next morning, “the earth is cleansed of all of its evil, all of its sin, all of its temptation, and the righteous rise up into heaven and there are no humans for miles around, and the Devil does what? The Devil does what, ladies and gentlemen? What does the Devil do?

“The Devil takes a holiday!”

Ah, but not for long. “I haven’t been clean but four months of my life,” said Moe, a 51-year-old I met outside the shelter with white hair and teeth that looked like toenail clippings. That’s not counting those 11 years before a junkie stuck Moe’s first needle in his neck at the playground, or the four days he went without any dope as his walls were shaking during Katrina. “Yeah, I was in withdrawal,” he said of the post-hurricane heroin drought, and I would have tried to go with that, to re-create the scene all harrowing and lifelike so you, the reader, could feel what it was to be writhing and cold flashing and vomiting in the middle of a world that wouldn’t stop spinning only to find that the world had started literally spinning, and spitting out water from every direction, water so vast and plentiful it could swallow you and your dog and your shit-filled toilet…

But Moe wasn’t in a very evocative mood. “It was real scary,” he said slowly, then, by way of explanation, “I shot up an hour and a half ago.”

Moe was the first man I met at the River Center Red Cross shelter, and while I found it coincidental that we shared a name, it seemed to be a much larger coincidence that Moe happened to be a junkie and I had come to Louisiana looking to research the substance abuse problem. But being a junkie in Louisiana, I would learn, is somewhat akin to being a comic book collector at a comic convention. By which I mean, Louisiana is not one of those places, like most states with high rates of poverty and low rates of literacy combined with a Bible Belt bias toward treating junkies and pillheads as cretins who have allowed their souls to be possessed by Satan, that has a merely above-average rate of serious drug addiction.

No, Louisiana is something else entirely. And as Moe told me his life story, which involved repossessing cars for the mob and 19 counts of burglary and a beautiful crackhead girlfriend, I looked out across the street from the shelter over the Port-a-Potties and the Argosy Riverfront Casino into the pissy gray sky above Baton Rouge, and tried to figure out what that was.

It was hard to say, now that it was all being cleansed.

Moe was outside doing God knows what when I came back to River Center the next evening and checked in to become one of the shelter’s 1,400 “clients.” Probably because he was high, he didn’t seem surprised to see me again. When I’d met him the first time I’d had a digital tape recorder and a cup of Starbucks; this time I was armed with only a broken umbrella and a head full of wet hair, another stupid kid who had been driving around at midnight during a hurricane only to find my rental car beginning to float. I’d say the experience rendered me just like one of the “clients,” but that would not be true, as a woman named Linda who slept in the cot next to Moe pointed out as soon as she saw me.

“Linda, this Moe,” Moe said carefully, as though it was commanding every ounce of his concentration. “No, I mean, the other Moe.”

Linda wore glasses and an oversize white sweatshirt atop a floral-print nightgown. She was somewhere between 60 and 80 years old with a voice that suggested she’d been smoking for at least 50 to 70 of those. Like a prophet or a sage, Linda seemed to see right through things: the blankets wrapped around amorous couples, the doors of the bathroom stalls, and me.

“Oh! You’re a writer! You’ve come here to get a story! You’re from a good family, a good family, I can tell! You’re undercover! You’re a writer! You’re gonna hear a lot of stories, let me tell you! Just go to the bathroom, you’ll hear some stories! Not this bathroom, not this bathroom, the other bathroom! This one is filthy. You wouldn’t believe what you’ll see in there! You wouldn’t believe the germs!”

A National Guardsman clomp-clomped by in combat boots. He carried a rifle bigger than the small child who ran ahead of him. The small child wore red pajamas with footies. Everyone, come to think of it, was in pajamas; footed fleece for the kids, plaid flannel for the adults, eyelet-trimmed nightgowns on the ladies. It looked like a middle school slumber party, only with military police. But not to Linda; you couldn’t fool Linda.

“You’re from a good family, I can tell!” Linda hissed into the darkness. “So, you have a car! Where’d you park it, in the lot next to the casino? They don’t have security at that casino! You’d better listen to me and not park that car at that casino! You know what happened in that parking lot the other day! The other day, two men came in the shelter! And two five-year-old girls, well, they snatched them up! And you know what they did with them! They brought them back to the parking lot, and guess what they did to them! Guess, guess what they did to them! They scooped them up, they scooped them up and they raped them.”

The convention center was pitch-black, but the air was filled with the sounds of moving diapers and combat boots, and the wheezing and yawning of 1,400 people trying to convince everyone else they’re asleep. Another two pajama-footed kids raced by; another clomp clomping National Guard; with enough rhythmic regularity that the right person could probably be lulled to sleep. Linda was just not that person.

“Isn’t it noisy? There are people doing all sorts of crazy things in here, having sex and doing drugs and God knows, God knows what,” Linda said.

“You want some pills? I can give you some pills. They’ll put you out,” said Moe, who was just as promptly out himself.

“Does it make me uncomfortable, those men walkin’ up and down with them big guns? Hell no! I’m a black man! You think I haven’t seen police with guns?”

A man in plaid flannel pants and a Texas Rodeo T-shirt named Reggie had joined us. Reggie wanted to sleep with me, I think, so I asked him about his profession.

“What do I do? Well I get a check, you see, from the government, SSI, do you know what that is? Because you’d be wrong, see, SSI means they say I’m crazy, they diagnosed me as a paranoid schizophrenic, so I get a crazy check. But I’d rather be crazy than stupid, or a fool, ’cause have you ever heard of a stupid check? Ever heard of a fool check? Naw! But I get a crazy check! And I’ll tell you who else should get a crazy check! I’m talking about President George W. Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for putting us in a war that’s just as crazy as Vietnam—”

“Reggie!” Linda interrupted. “Remember? Remember? Remember when they had those tents over there? Remember the tents? Remember what people were doing in the tents???”

“Aw yeah,” Reggie said. “Yeah, when they had them tents you’d go inside and people would be havin’ orgies and shootin’ up back there, man. Those were the days! Ha, ha!”

Reggie was not a junkie, though he said he’d “done it all.” He was entirely too lucid and clean, anyway. Whereas Linda seemed to have acquired her mental illness in the month since she’d been at the shelter, Reggie was one of those crazy people who seemed remarkably sane, given the context. He was in his element, the pillar of the River Center, a rock whose state of mind no number of dead bodies or snoring roommates, armed guards or Scientologists could disturb.

A small, vulnerable-looking white girl, a tanned little blonde in a YMCA T-shirt and plaid pajama pants, sauntered up to Reggie and buried herself in his arms.

“Reggie, I need a favor. I got myself set up to have a real romantic night, no fucking or anything, just cuddling, and I got these nice sheets and blankets, I got some extra pillows, and I just need one thing from you: your radio.”

“Lady girl, every man in here would be lucky to have you,” Reggie said in his best wise-uncle voice, “Refuse them all and you’ll wake up a queen.”

The girl began to weep. “I don’t want any dick!” she cried, “I just wanna borrow your raaaaadio. Pleeeeease, Reggie!”

“Ashley, that’s quite enough!” Reggie shot back, “I have no responsibility to give you anything!”

“Pleeeeeeeease, Reggie?” More tears.

And with that, Ashley began to stumble around like she’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. Her face grew instantly pale and prevomitous; she started tripping on the floor and reaching out to the air for balance. Almost as suddenly as she’d appeared, a National Guardsman was escorting her away.

“So, uh,” I finally asked, when she was gone, “What are you guys going to do when they clear this place out?”

“Who are you asking, ‘you guys’?” Reggie demanded. “What do you mean, ‘you people’? I can only speak for myself! I can’t speak for all the other losers in here! I can only speak for Reggie! What am I going to tell you about that one, or that one?” He started pointing around the room. “Who are you to ask me what are these people doing? I am not one of you people. I am done with you, Moe.”

And Reggie stood up grandiosely, left my cotside, and marched exactly three feet across the aisle to his own cot.

Moe the first awoke long enough to make a face that seemed to say, “I would shrug in bafflement if I weren’t so fucking loaded right now.”

“Here, take my blanket,” he finally said. I did. And it only took about three hours to get to sleep.

At seven o’clock the convention center lights went on, and at seven o’clock Ashley was standing above my cot fidgeting like an excited dog.

“Hey, I’m Ashley, who are you? Where are you from?”

I rolled over. I had drooled all over my sweatshirt and my hair was sticking to my cheek. “Um, well,” I said, trying to sit up without tipping over the cot. “I’m, uh, not from here, but I was staying with this family, in Slidell.”

“Slidell! That’s where I’m from! You come with me, I bet we have a lot in common. Come smoke a cigarette! Do you have any eyeliner? What about clothes! Let me see your clothes! You wouldn’t believe what happened to me! They took me to the ER! I woke up with an IV!” She pulled up her halter-top to show me her Band-Aids.

“Come on! Do you have any cigarettes?”

I did not, but Ashley was one of those kids who could bum a few ounces of cocaine and a Cartier watch off another kid if she wanted, partly because she was cute and partly because you worried that if you didn’t give her what she wanted she’d be forced to hit up some poor fool who actually thought he was going to get pussy out of the deal, and you didn’t want to be around to witness the aftermath of his disappointment. As we walked out to the smoking area in front of the shelter, maybe six guys held out cigarettes. Ashley smoked Newports, and she also liked black guys—“they just have so much style”—and this did not please her father, which is part of the reason she hadn’t gone home.

The real reason she hadn’t gone home, though, was that her parents were both pillheads. Her father’s back had given out in some job before she was born and he had four doctors supplying him with some ten separate prescriptions for pain pills, and she couldn’t do anything at home with all of them dragging her down like that. So here she was, hanging out with black guys in a sanitary, comparatively clean environment, and…

“I only took like, only like three pain pills and two Somas,” Ashley was saying to James, the purveyor of the Newports, of the prescription-pill cocktail that had gotten her sent to the ER. “I mean, actually I guess I took five Somas.” She giggled.

In Ashley there seemed to be some powerful metaphor about New Orleans and Louisiana and race and vice and the temporariness and permanence of problems. She was a pillhead and she’d been in and out of jail 11 times and she was only 18. She told me her dad had started giving her two Vicodin a day when she turned 14 to get through the school day because she couldn’t focus on account of learning disabilities, and I believed her because she wasn’t a very good liar. She’d failed out of school. Her mother was a pillhead, too, but she liked alcohol better. Her older brother was in a halfway house for heroin. In the past three weeks she had been thrown out of a Catholic shelter and the Cajundome in Lafayette, and been admitted to two jails and three emergency rooms, all because she was a pretty hopeless addict. But one thing Ashley was not was a racist. In the dynastic trajectory of Ashley’s family, race relations was the only thing actually showing signs of improvement. The dudes back at the bar sitting around talking “cleansing” had sort of made it seem like evil racist bastards were a real problem for Louisiana, but at least the kids of Ashley’s generation knew that was all denial, that only a fuckup with fuckups for kids and fuckups for eventual grandkids would, first thing after a hurricane leveled the town, lobby the mayor to get the alcohol ban lifted so they could resume sitting in the bar every night blaming their problems on their former slaves.

(Before I forget, James showed me a trick in the parking lot of the center. He touched his dick with his tongue.)

Breakfast was two glazed doughnuts thoroughly smushed, a plastic bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and a box of chocolate milk. By now the bathroom was filled with women washing their hair in the sink (the outdoor showers were closed because of the hurricane) and curling their hair at the changing table and drying their hair at the hand dryer. Two women had the following conversation:

“Look at these jeans? You know what size these jeans be? 9-10!”

“Shit!”

“I be wasting away on this food.”

“I been losin’ weight, too! I’m down to a 13!”

“Someone gotta come in here and cook some gumbo!”

“Shit! They gotta get me in to cook for everybody.”

“Aw, yeah.”

Food at the Red Cross shelter sucks. It does not help that the Red Cross workers, if you ask them, will tell you how incredibly awesome and succulent and home-cooked all the food over at their shelter is, or that when you go across the street to the casino and ask to eat the lunch buffet, they will ask you if you work for the American Red Cross, in which case you have to pay $5.45, and if you say, “No, I just sleep every night in that shithole,” they will charge you $10. It also does not really improve morale that, after the Red Cross people finish off their $5 calamari salad and coconut cream pie, they complain about the weight they’ve gained and then come back to the shelter and try to get everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” to the Red Cross employee whose birthday happens to fall on that day.

“Come on, everybody sing now!” the smoky-eyed Scientologist was saying into the microphone when I came in, “You got a house to go home to, you sing!” one man yelled out.

The weird thing was that most of the other people actually sang. I’m not sure why, but most of the people at the shelter seemed pretty happy. Maybe the advent of reality shows like The Surreal Life had taught them to bask in the absurdity of situations like this, but the kids smiled, the moms braided hair, and the men attended sessions with companies like AccuClean that were giving out jobs cleaning out New Orleans.

Moe played blackjack and won eight bucks. I asked if he’d used the FEMA money. “Shit, naw,” he said, “A man like me has gotta worry about his retirement.” He had also written down the numbers of some treatment centers to go to for his addiction. Moe had remarkably good handwriting.

Ashley’s new boyfriend Shawn had an inmate tag he was using for ID, so that was a conversation starter. He’d been released a week before the hurricane. He’d gotten caught with heroin when he was 18. His mother was a junkie. Shawn was clean and going to work for AccuClean, and we were going to the laundromat so he could clean his clothes before work on Monday. Shawn didn’t know where his mom was, didn’t care, hated her ass, was planning on assembling his own family unit in Baton Rouge and wanted Ashley to stay and live with him and get clean too, which would have been a good idea but for Ashley’s aforementioned thing for black guys (and the other aforementioned hopeless addict thing.)

“My boyfriend said, once you go black, you don’t go back,” she said. “Do you think he’s cute?”

“Yeah,” I said. He was cute like Mike Bibby. Like, if you like black-looking white dudes who wear enormous pants he was in the 98th percentile.

“Plus he’s got a big dick. Shane’s got a big dick!”

Weird pause…

“You don’t even know my name.” Shawn turned around and headed into the laundromat. I felt bad for him, and Ashley did, too. “It’s not like I’ve known him more than two days,” she said, but time moves differently when you’ve chosen to eliminate all the pollutants and get clean, and Ashley hadn’t.

Shawn had gotten some fried chicken when a man named Marcus appeared in the parking lot. No one was sure how he got there, because he didn’t appear to be capable of standing up, and no one knew where he’d come from, because he said he’d been at the shelter, but the three needles taped to his chest suggested he’d been hooked up to an IV. But he’d somehow procured a 40 in a paper bag. His skin was a deep burnt-orangeish shade, like a tan that had been dyed over with Kool-Aid, and his face and chest were covered in thick beads of sweat. His hair was soaking. He said he’d been in New Orleans search and rescue. He said he’d lost his mother and his rescue dog. He said it all as if it happened yesterday, even though almost a month had passed, so for a while we thought he was crazy.

“Chimicals and smoke, the refawnery, pawsonous gases, ah was exposed to everything. But I had to go, man, ’cause that was mah job, search and rescue, ah could not lit those people stay there and die,” he told Ashley. “A tidal wave hit us that was 30 foot hah, and it all happened in about 30 seconds flat; I looked outside and saw that sunnabitch and I was like, oh, mah Gawd, and it was blowin’ up houses as it was comin’ because the pressure in the air was so low, zero point five millibars. And the gas meters were poppin’ out and the oil came crushin’.”

A man came out afterward. “Marcus, I can take you back to the shelter now,” he said. He hadn’t known Marcus more than 20 minutes longer than we had, but he said he was from Metarie, near the oil refinery to which he had been referring, and the story checked out: he wasn’t hallucinating; it happened just like he said, which is to say, we’ll never know because it was too big and too horrible and too awful and too brief to really put into words (though I’ve heard a Sean Penn movie is forthcoming).

“I think,” the man said of Marcus, “he just needed a beer.”

They’ll always tell you in addiction class that getting clean takes getting rid of people, places, and things; do that effectively and you’ve got Hurricane Katrina. Sure, it’s a nice thing when the poor can get help and the status quo gets shaken up, when kids like Shawn can find jobs and guys like Reggie can share with the world their wisdom, and if you believe in the virtue of Noah sailing and Christ dying and the exodus from Egypt, of colossal sacrifices and excruciating middles for the sake of jubilant, miraculous endings, well, good for you; good for America. That’s hope. But if you don’t think you’re on someone else’s roster of people, places, and things; on some other dude’s list of demons he still needs to face down, of enemies or enablers or simply psychotic ex-girlfriends he’d like to cleanse, well you’re in fucking denial.

Which brings me to the conclusion that there is no conclusion. As I’m writing this I’m remembering this other guy I met, a character I didn’t introduce because he didn’t seem relevant to whatever themes the “narrative” is trying to get at here, by the name of Dwight. Dwight was pretty much illiterate and he had serious heart problems, but for some reason—and I naturally concocted my own theories on the basis of the intense redness around his eyeballs—Dwight felt all right. “I can’t stand these people telling me they don’t have nothing, that they lost everything, you know?” he said. “Tell that to the lady who drowned, the man who’s dead on the street, that you lost everything. It’s a lie! You’re still here, aren’t you?”

And, all told, pretty much everyone still was.

Moe, if you’re interested, ended up getting arrested along with his friend Joe, at least the way Linda and Reggie told it, though a clerk in Baton Rouge Corrections told me no one by the name of Maurice Downey had been through the jail. Ashley disappeared again. Shawn showed up for work. And the son of the nice family I stayed with Slidell, the sweet but hopeless alcoholic son who had never been in an accident but had gotten pulled over on the way home from Natal’s Lounge and charged with his fourth DWI, is awaiting a sentence of between 18 and 35 years in state prison by some bastard judge who probably thinks he is cleansing the streets of an incipient killer. No one learned any big lessons from Katrina, except the few who maybe did, and the vast majority who at the very least learned the importance, when living in a convention center with 1,400 other potential dirtbags, of liberal amounts of hand sanitizer.

MOE TKACIK

Inside the River Center shelter in Baton Rouge