Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (16 page)

“We broke in with two officers to the Walgreen’s drugstore,” he tells me. “There was one broken into down in the French Quarter, and all of the foodstuffs had just been taken but a lot of the drugs had not been looted, so those police officers held the looters at gunpoint and handed me some Hefty trashbags and said ‘Okay, you got fifteen minutes, Doc.’ So I went into the pharmacy with a flashlight and just opened the bags and just went down the shelves and pushed everything into the bag, just up and down for fifteen minutes and started handing them out, and that’s how I started a pharmacy in the Sheraton.”

Two days after Katrina hit, Henderson heard that conditions at the Convention Center were bad, so he went there, escorted by a New Orleans police officer, thinking he could join up with a medical team already there. When he got to the Convention Center, however, he discovered that there was no medical team there, just evacuees. Thousands of them.

“The smell was overwhelming,” he says, walking with me through an unlocked door into the now-empty Convention Center. The smell is still revolting. The people were bused out on Saturday; it’s now Monday, one week since the storm, but the garbage they left behind is still all around. Two small dogs abandoned inside bark nonstop.

“They were packed everywhere,” Dr. Henderson says, “all the way out into the street, and pretty much on the other side of the street; it was just one mass of humanity. No air-conditioning, just people, crying and dying. Crying and dying.”

The day of the storm, officials at the Superdome had told those fleeing the floodwaters to head to the Convention Center. They said that buses would soon arrive to take the evacuees out of the city. However, no buses arrived until the end of that week. The Convention Center was not really a shelter at all. There was no medical attention, and no police presence inside. At the Superdome, people were searched before entering; at the Convention Center, no one got searched.

“I’d be walking through this crowd with just a stethoscope,” Dr. Henderson remembers. “I’m not sure if I was being more of a doctor or a priest, you know? Because there’s not a hell of a lot you can do with people this sick with just a stethoscope. The best you can do is for the ones who are not that bad and are going to make it; you can put the stethoscope on their heart and hold their hand and say, ‘Just hang on, just hang on. I promise something’s coming.’”

“When you said that,” I ask, “did you believe it?”

“I believed it somewhere in my heart. I just didn’t know when it was going to happen,” he says, looking around at the empty hall. “I knew they weren’t going to leave us forever.”

Dr. Henderson picks up a child’s shoe, and a few tears run down his cheek.

“You had all these voices,” Dr. Henderson recalls, “saying, ‘Is there any help coming?’ ‘Doctor, I need you. Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, we’re over here, over here.’ What arose over the five days of anarchy, if you will, was just sort of a general lawlessness. I heard some pretty harrowing stories, and I think a lot of those stories got a lot of press and maybe contributed to this area not getting help. I think there was a collective attitude of everyone was just murdering everyone down there. ‘Just stay away from that area or you’re going to die.’”

I am silent while wandering through the deserted Convention Center with Dr. Henderson, stunned that this could have been allowed to happen, and that it took so long for relief to arrive.

Local, state, and federal officials had all seen models of what a storm of this magnitude would do to New Orleans. Hurricane Ivan, the year before, had come close. No one seemed to have adequately prepared for Katrina. Despite extensive television coverage, Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, didn’t even know that people were stuck at the Convention Center until he was asked about it by reporters on Thursday.

“We look at each other with maybe too much hubris and say, ‘This is America, this doesn’t happen here,’” Dr. Henderson says, sitting with me amid a pile of rubbish on the curb outside the Convention Center. “This is disgraceful. This is a national disgrace. Nowhere in this country should that ever have to happen again. But unless we learn from this, it’s going to be very ugly ’cause it’s going to happen again.”

MY GRANDFATHER DIED
in New Orleans. The year was 1944. My father was seventeen and had just graduated high school. He was working at Maison Blanche, a department store on Canal Street, selling young men’s clothing. The store is gone, but the building remains. It’s now the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where Dr. Henderson was staying when Katrina hit.

My grandfather came to New Orleans for a visit. One Friday evening he lay down on the sofa in the living room and fell asleep. He never woke up. My grandmother and my father’s younger siblings went back immediately to Mississippi, but my father stayed to make funeral arrangements.

He’d never been close to his father. He feared his quick temper, his unpredictable moods. When he wrote about him in his book, he described him as a “creature of charm, magnetism, tyranny, and madness.”

My grandfather was not a religious man. He never went to church. “The Almighty knows about the people up at the church,” he once told my father. “He doesn’t know anything about me. When I die, I’ll be no different from an old rotten limb falling off a tree and lying on the ground.”

My father didn’t know what to do with his father’s body. He called the Lamana-Panno-Fallo Funeral Home. It was the only one he knew; he used to pass by it every day riding the streetcar.

When he went to collect his father’s body from the funeral home, to take it to Mississippi for burial, he was surprised to discover that the morticians had laid him out beneath the outstretched arms of a large statue of the Virgin Mary.

“I don’t know how they’d done it,” my father later wrote, “but they’d turned him into an Italian. He looked exactly like an Italian banker. There was something excessively combed and waxy in his appearance, almost as if they’d stuck on a little black moustache. Clutched in his hands was a silver crucifix, an incongruity so astounding that I might have laughed if I had not had a watchful audience in Messrs. Lamana, Panno and Fallo, who were responsible for the comic outrage.”

A silver crucifix would not have been well received in Meridian in those days, so my father asked for it to be removed before he took the body back to Mississippi for burial.

A few months after Katrina, I notice, in the
Times Picayune,
a funeral announcement for a woman whose body has recently been recovered. Her services are being held in the Lamana-Panno-Fallo Funeral Home. It turns out that they moved off St. Claude Avenue years ago, but are still in business near New Orleans. They weathered the storm, and are now helping its victims return home.

Aftermath

I
T’S TUESDAY, JUST
over a week since the storm, and the floodwaters are receding, a bit more each day. Last week there were not enough police; now there are too many. Thousands of law enforcement personnel from all around the country have descended on New Orleans. The bodies, however, remain uncollected, and hundreds of residents are still trying to tough it out, refusing to leave their homes and their pets.

“This is a dog and pony show,” a New Orleans cop says to me, laughing. “Twenty thousand law enforcement officers in the city right now, for what? Three thousand people? There are all these agencies with firepower meant for Iraq. I’ve got guys who I’m responsible to drive around and help patrol, and they’re frustrated with me because they’ve got no action: ‘We want some action, we want some action!’ ‘Well, you know, I’m sorry we can’t provide any action for you so you can go out and play war games with your toys that you’ve never gotten to use.’ It’s a joke. It’s way, way, way too much, way, way, way too late. It’s like a big Mardi Gras parade of police, only there’s nobody to catch any beads, ’cause there’s nobody left out there.”

FBI, FEMA, ICE, ATF, LAPD, ERT, NYPD—all the acronyms are here, and they all look the same: Oakley shades, narco-tactical vests, sidearms strapped to their legs. They stand around wearing T-shirts with steroid slogans, clutching high-caliber assault rifles, angled down, their index fingers at the ready.

Everyone wants to help, but there’s just not much for them to do. I get stopped at a checkpoint by some National Guard troops. I show my ID, but one of the soldiers wants more.

“Do you have a letter from the battalion commander?” he asks me.

“I don’t need a letter from the battalion commander,” I say. He nods and waves me on.

“Nice going, Obi Wan,” Neil Hallsworth, my cameraman, says to me. “We’re not the droids you’re looking for.”

I’M NOT SHOCKED
anymore by the bodies, the blunders. You can’t stay stunned forever. The anger doesn’t go away, but it settles somewhere behind your heart; it deepens into resolve. I feel connected to what’s around me, no longer just observing. I feel I am living it, breathing it. There is no hotel to go back to, isolated from the destruction, as there was in Sri Lanka. We are surrounded, all day, all night. There’s no escape. I wouldn’t want to get away even if I could. I don’t check my voice mail for messages. I don’t call home. I never want to leave.

We’re sleeping in trailers parked on Canal Street, not far from the old Maison Blanche department store where my father worked. At night sometimes, when the broadcast is done, we sit outside the trailers in small groups, staring at the silhouettes of empty buildings. We don’t need to say a thing. There is a bond that’s forming among us. We are in new territory, on the cliff’s edge. This place has no name, and all of us know it. The city is exposed: flesh and blood, muscle and bone. New Orleans is a fresh wound, sliced open by the shrapnel of a storm.

I’M NOT SURE
when it happened, when I realized that something had changed. I don’t think there was a precise moment, a particular day. It’s like when you’re mourning and suddenly you become aware that the pain has faded. You don’t remember exactly when it did. One day you laugh, and it shocks you. You forgot that your body could make such a sound.

Here, in New Orleans, the compartmentalization I’ve always maintained has fallen apart, been worn down by the weight of emotion, the power of memory. For so long I tried to separate myself from my past. I tried to move on, forget what I’d lost, but the truth is, none of it’s ever gone away. The past is all around, and in New Orleans I can’t pretend it’s not.

WHEN I WAS BORN,
my parents lived in a five-story town house on New York’s Upper East Side. Out front were two stone lions, silent sentinels guarding our home. There was a marble foyer and a sweeping spiral staircase, and though I don’t remember the house well, I recall the smell of Rigo candles, green wax, heavy scent. The candles’ flames shimmered against bottles of Noilly Prat, chilled Aquavit, and white wine in silver goblets with boar-tusk handles. There were fabric-draped walls, smooth silks, and needlepoint pillows, rough against a child’s soft cheeks. The tables were laden with bowls of polished wood with piles of sterling silver fishes jumping out.

When my parents had parties, my brother and I were always encouraged to attend. I remember walking with my father through a smoke-filled room, my small hand safe in his. I craned my neck to see those around me, catching only brief flashes of faces and soft filtered light. There were powdered women with red lips, men in heavy shoes with thick hands and French cuffs. The rooms were filled with actors and artists, boldface names in society columns and kitchen conversations. Truman Capote was a frequent guest; his pudgy lisp made me giggle. Andy Warhol was there as well; his white hair scared me.

At a certain hour, my brother and I went upstairs to our room. We lay in bed in the dark listening to the laughter down below. There were hands clapping and glasses clinking, a muffled murmur that shook the floor. We closed our eyes as a piano played; a woman sang “Good Morning Heartache, my old friend…” Her distant voice lulled us to sleep.

I never imagined it was anything special. I never believed that that life would end. I had a father and a mother, a brother and a nanny, a childhood untouched by loss. When my father died, and the chasm first opened, it seemed easier just to run away.

After his death, we moved every few years—bigger apartments, one more beautiful than the last. My mother would get restless, start to redecorate. Then my brother and I knew it wouldn’t be long before she’d begin searching for another home—a new place to settle, a new canvas to work on.

I didn’t know my mother was famous until I was about twelve. I was in middle school when she designed a line of jeans that became wildly successful. On the street, suddenly people began to stare at us and point. My brother and I thought it was funny. We’d count how many times we saw our mother’s name stitched on the back pocket of somebody’s pants.

My mother once said that she survived the traumas of her childhood because she always felt that inside herself there was a crystal core, a diamond nothing could get at or scratch. I’d felt that same rock form inside me when my father died. In New Orleans, however, it started to crack.

BOURBON STREET IS CLOSED,
but a daiquiri bar has just opened. I think it’s the first one. The entrance is boarded up, but through the heavy storm shutters you can hear the thumping bass of a stereo: Kelis sings,
“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard / And they’re like / It’s better than yours…”
It’s the first music I’ve heard since the hurricane.

To get in the daiquiri bar you have to go around back, through the lobby of the Royal Sonesta Hotel. The hotel’s only just opened up as well, and we’ve moved in after a week in trailers. The FBI is staying there too; so are a bunch of New Orleans cops who no longer have homes.

Inside the bar is a wall of drinks in refrigerated coolers: Mango Madness, Citrus Storm, blood-red Hurricanes. The place is packed: reporters, police, FBI SWAT teams, a couple of drunk nurses. Everyone’s doing shots or drinking daiquiris and beer. There are more men than women, and the young cops are eyeing the nurses—horny, hungry, hoping to score.

Earlier in the day I ran into Dr. Phil McGraw. Some volunteers had set up a feeding kitchen for first-responders, and the
Dr. Phil Show
was there with a couple of cameras. The producer approached and asked if I wanted to speak with Dr. Phil.

“You mean as a therapist or as an interview subject for my show?” I asked.

“Either way.” She shrugged.

The Scientologists are here too. Kirstie Alley arrived with a bunch of them, and John Travolta is around as well. No one beats Steven Seagal, though. He’s not here with any group. I saw him late one night dressed in a cop uniform, out on patrol with some deputies from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. He’s been going out with their SWAT team. We talk a bit, and when he leaves he puts his palms together in front of his face and bows briefly. Then he hops in a cop car and speeds off.

“Seagal’s tight with the sheriff in Jefferson,” a New Orleans cop tells me later. “There’s a bar where a lot of cops hang out, and I remember a couple years ago Seagal comes in with those guys and takes out a framed eight-by-ten photo of himself and fucking hangs it on the wall.”

“Get out of here,” I say, “no way.”

“I shit you not,” he says. “As soon as he left, a couple of us took out our pistols and shot it. Blew the fucking thing off the wall. One bullet actually went right through and hit a car-rental place next door.”

I don’t really drink, but I like the bar because there’s no bullshit here. For days the chief of police, Eddie Compass, has been blaming some of the problems the police faced after the storm on the fact that the armory got flooded and a lot of their ammunition and supplies were ruined. When I mention this to some of the cops at the bar, they burst out laughing.

“I’ll take you to the fucking armory,” one police officer tells me. “It’s fucking empty. The police force is broke, and it was broke long before the storm.”

A lot of the cops feel betrayed, screwed from above, below, and behind. They’re pissed off that the media has been focusing so much on the police officers who didn’t show up for work during the storm. I don’t blame them. Out of a force of about 1,700 police, only some 120 were unaccounted for. The vast majority of cops came to work, and stayed on duty around the clock. They were barricaded inside their stations, working multiple shifts. Over at the Sixth District, the precinct headquarters was flooded, so the police set up a perimeter in the Wal-Mart parking lot. They chased the looters out, saved hundreds of guns from getting out on the street, and ended up sleeping in their cars for weeks.

I spend a couple hours at the Wal-Mart one night. The police have renamed it Fort Wal-Mart. I tell the cops there about the French Quarter police I met my first day here, who’ve renamed their precinct Fort Apache.

“Let me tell you something,” the Sixth District commander, Captain Anthony Cannatella, tells me. “
We
are the original Fort Apache. Those guys over in the First District may be using the name, but this is Fort Apache.”

We’re sitting on benches with a half-dozen or so young cops, eating barbeque in the parking lot. Some police from Texas have come to help out, and every night they fire up the grill and barbecue whatever meat they can find. As he talks, Captain Cannatella’s face is backlit; the electricity’s still out, but a generator keeps a single light illuminating the area. Smoke swirls in the air.

“I don’t know,” I say, teasing. “They have a sign and everything—it says
FORT APACHE
—hanging right over the entrance to the precinct down there.”

“We’ll see about that,” one of the police officers says, and a couple of guys get up and leave.

Captain Cannatella’s been on the police force for more than twenty years. He is a big man with thick arms.

“You don’t want to get slapped with one of those,” a junior officer says, laughing, pointing to the captain’s hands. Captain Cannatella clearly loves the men and women he commands, and I can tell they’d do anything for him.

“A lot of us older guys underestimated the young generation of police officers,” he says, “but let me tell you, what these guys did here these last two weeks was extraordinary, and I would stand by any of them, any day.”

About an hour later, as I’m getting ready to leave, a squad car pulls into the parking lot. Two young officers step out, one clutching the hand-drawn Fort Apache sign that up until a few minutes ago hung over the entrance to the First District’s headquarters.

“How’d you get that?” I ask, laughing.

“We snuck right in there, crawled under the Duty Officer’s desk, and cut it free,” one of the guys says, laughing. “Who’s the real Fort Apache now, motherfucker?”

“I DON’T THINK
I could ever come in and look at this place the same,” Captain Casey Geist says. “I’ll never come here for a football game.”

We’re in the Superdome. It’s empty now, except for a few dozen cleaners in white hazmat suits scraping the grime off the seats and floor. It’s noisy. Miniature tractors pick up the mounds of garbage piled on the Astroturf field. Here and there you find a child’s football, abandoned wheelchairs, rotting food half eaten by evacuees. Some twenty thousand people took refuge in the Superdome, told to come by the city’s mayor, who called it a shelter of last resort. He’d hoped that help would arrive from the state or federal government within two days. It didn’t. Hope is not a plan.

Captain Geist is with the Eighty-second Airborne. He’s been to Baghdad, but says that this is much worse. He’s heard a lot of the rumors about what happened inside the Superdome, and he’s not sure which of them are true. He seems to believe any of them is possible.

“People were here, they were doing drugs. People were having sex out on the floor, shooting up,” he says, recounting the various stories he’s heard. “It seemed like just madness, uncontrollable madness.”

At the Superdome, however, there was at least some order. They had medical attention, stockpiles of food and water, and police and National Guard. When the levees failed, however, and the electricity with it, the Superdome started to bake. The mayor had warned people to bring their own food, and some did, but as the floodwaters spread, more people began arriving.

“They started defecating all over the place,” Captain Geist says, shaking his head. “You know you can go to one corner, and everyone can go to the bathroom in one spot, but, I mean, people would drop their pants in the middle of the field and just go.”

We like to think we are so advanced. We like to imagine we have protection from our own dark impulses. The truth is, it doesn’t take much for all of that to be stripped away. Desperate people sometimes do terrible things. New Orleans was no different. The lights go out, the temperatures rise, and very quickly we get in touch with emotions that the cool air keeps at bay. We are all capable of anything. I’ve seen it again and again. Great compassion, terrible carnage—the choice is up to us.