note to readers: this was written with the star wars imperial march playing in the background
the new official car of new orleans is the honda element. i dont know what the old one would have been. probably a cadillac hearse. or maybe an aluminum bottom air boat. but that doesn’t matter any more, because a year after katrina rolled through, the people left in new orleans, the ones that can afford it anyways, are all driving new honda elements. this is actually a well thought out move. when you think about it, it’s the perfect hurricane evacuation vehicle: all wheel drive, a fuel efficient 4 cylinder, plenty of room for all your worldly possessions, family and pets, and perhaps most importantly, rubberized floors so you can just hose it out afterwards.
the japanese know all about flooding
this is the only time i’ll make commentary about new orleans, post-katrina. it’s long, but hopefully worth the read.
the last time i was in new orleans was something like 8 years ago and it was only passing through. a friend of mine at NAU was moving back to atlanta after only one semester in flagstaff. she had brought her car out and wanted somebody to drive back with her cross-country. unfortunately none of her girlfriends could drive stick. hell, some of them couldn’t drive period (danielle mitchell, if you’re still alive out there, shoot me an email!), so being the chivalrous gentleman i am, i offered to drive back with her. it’s a trip that i should prolly chronicle at some point, since it is another grand example of my ability to destroy vehicles, but i’ll get to that later. the important thing to know is, when we were there, louisiana had finally been forced to raise the drinking age from 18 to the national standard of 21. the students at UNO and tulane were ready to stage a coup. there was blood in the streets.
in a lot of ways, the city today isn’t too different. i meant that comment about blood as a joke about college kids figuratively threatening to riot over the drinking age, but as case pointed out, new orleans has a proud tradition of pointless murder in large numbers. when i was there last time, there were signs up protesting the fact that there were killings every night in the 9th ward and down in the quarter and yet the city was spending more money on meter maids than police patrols. the nights we went out, on saturday before halloween and then again on halloween night, d and i went home before 1AM. both times on the following day case told us that there had been shootings on the street where we had been the night before. he said, “that’s what i love about this city. we’re back up to pre-katrina murder rates. half the population still hasn’t come back, but we take up the slack!”
yes, my brother does live in the 9th ward. not the lower 9th ward, where the levee broke, but on the other side of that canal in a part of town called the bywater. basically because, well, it’s by the water. there was serious flooding on that side of the levee as well, but it was salt water from the lake and most of the houses were still standing when the water receded. two houses on either side of us were broken into while we were there. one while the owners were out, the other at 3AM while people were at home. we heard all this shouting, “who dat? who dat?? who da fuck’s down there? mutherfucker! mutherfucker! get the fuck out mutherfucker!” we all went to the window and watched as the house, a creole duplex, spewed out 5 or 6 people of both sexes, all dressed in their night clothes and several armed with sticks, one of whom announced that he was gonna get the motherfucker and drove off down the street in his BMW X5 to run somebody over.
this was uptown
and there you have the dichotomy that a lot of that part of the city represents. relatively wealthy people in repaired homes next to some of the sketchiest, poorest ghetto slums you’ve ever seen. i KNOW i’m gonna fuck this up, and case will yell at me later for messing up or misstating the history of the neighborhood. the bywater is row upon row of 19th century new orleans faubroughs and creole cottages, classical french styled southern houses with high roofs, floor-to-ceiling shuttered front windows and ornate wood work and awning supports. i think even before the storm, gentrification of some of these neighborhoods had started, but now it’s become even faster with hurricane damaged homes being sold on the cheap. there’s a large gay population in new orleans. in fact, we went with case and some of his friends to a gay bachelor party the saturday before halloween. there is a concerted effort by several people in the gay community there to reclaim and renovate sections of the bywater, which is 10 minutes by foot from the french quarter. case calls them the gay mafia in a joking and yet somewhat reverent tone. over the last year as individuals they’ve bought up and renovated the neighborhood one block at a time. they are the vanguard of a white wave, slowly making the neighborhood a desirable place for a middle class couple to buy a house in. case calls it urban homesteading. buy a house, buy a shotgun and let the crack dealers on the street know you’re there to stay and they ain’t gonna run you off your land! eventually others will join you.
still, despite the marginalization of the poor (read “black”) residents of those neighborhoods, at least people have returned and are living there. case took us on a drive through the city, through the parts that were still abandoned. we started in the neighborhoods where the houses had flood lines at about 5 feet, with FEMA trailers out front of some of them, and headed up to the neighborhoods near one of the university campuses where the canal pump stations had failed. then we went to the lower 9th. it reminded me of one other place i’d seen before; sarajevo in 1996 when i was probably literally the first fucking tourist to go to that city. it gave me a lot of the same feelings too. particularly about taking pictures. macabre and voyeuristic. like the guilty feeling shooting pictures of the bombed out houses had left me with inside. at first danielle took shots from the moving car and i was sure somebody would come out and yell at us like they had at me back in bosnia, but eventually case pointed out that nobody was around. nobody was living there anymore, except maybe for squatters in the condemned houses. these people weren’t coming back. he said, “these people want you take pictures. they want to get the word out, so more relief donations will come in.” that was about the point we noticed the tour bus rolling through.
houses on top of cars. houses on top of houses. slabs where they had been washed away. many of them were cracked down the middle or completely collapsed in piles of rubble.
we took d home and case and i went out to get some supplies for a plumbing job he was doing. we headed out on I-10 east to east new orleans. unlike the houses in the city, I-10 is elevated for it’s entire length through to mississippi, which gives the driver a particularly good vantage point to observe the devastation flying by. we drove on past completely abandoned malls and shopping centers, with their signs twisted and missing pieces. sprawling concrete and steel structures with garbage strewn asphalt lots and a mad-max, post-apocalyptic aesthetic. the houses were nicer as well, albeit just as empty. case told me those were mostly professional black and vietnamese neighborhoods. as we drove past case said, “everybody talks about how new orleans is coming back. they ain’t coming back. i mean, look at all this.” it continued on for miles and then suddenly in the middle of all this, right smack in the middle of the lowlands, being reclaimed by the swamp and the mosquitos, right down the frontage road from the boarded up toys-r-us and safeway and across the freeway from a neighborhood where there wasn’t even a FEMA trailer to be seen was a brand new home depot. open for business baby!
we missed the exit for home depot and had to continue east for another mile or so. all of a sudden an abandoned six-flags theme park popped up on the horizon. as we drove past the the the towering roller coasters with their trellises of interlacing beams and supports, i could only think of one thing….
i was thinking, “1000 years from now, when man has reverted to the stone age, as he wanders the earth, marveling at the wonders of the ancients, THIS is the shit that’s gonna confuse him the most.”
