Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (18 page)

Ms. Connie lives alone with her dog, Abu. Her husband died years ago. Both he and Ms. Connie were traveling preachers. She invites me inside her home. In her living room there is a large hole in the corner of the ceiling, damage from Katrina.

“This is my skylight,” Ms. Connie says, chuckling. Though legally blind, she can see just enough to move around, but not to clean. The apartment is a mess. A thick layer of dirt and dust covers everything.

“I don’t trust law officials,” she says. “They can’t make up their minds.” She isn’t sure what she would pack if she were to leave, and she has nothing to pack her belongings in. The suitcase she used in her traveling days is broken. On the refrigerator is a hand-drawn sign in smudged ink:
JESUS IS LORD
.

“
I’m
not sure where I will end up,” she tells me, “but
God
knows where I’ll end up.”

The police officer returns and tells Ms. Connie she can bring Abu along.

She believes it’s a sign. The time has come to go. “I believe the Lord gives you guidance and will give you guidance, if you listen…”

“God is still watching over New Orleans?” I ask.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” she says, smiling. “Will she rise again? Absolutely, absolutely.”

AN OFF-DUTY HYATT HOTEL
manager reeking of booze takes us on a late-night tour of his Shangri-la. The Hyatt is where the mayor and his staff were holed up throughout the storm. It’s within running distance of the Superdome. Cleaning crews have been busy disinfecting the lobby. It looks immaculate. The smell of mold and garbage is nearly gone. The manager takes us on a ride to the top floor and opens up the Regency suites for us to see. The whole side of the building, the outer wall of glass, is gone. The hotel won’t be back in business anytime soon.

“Do you want to see the phone where the mayor called the president from?” the manager, asks, a plastic cup of beer in his hand.

“No, that’s all right,” I say, deciding it’s time to call it a night.

“I can get you into the Superdome,” he says. “I’ve been there three times already. These soldiers and police are so disorganized. It won’t be any problem.”

“Thanks,” I say, “but I’ve already been.”

BACK AT THE
Royal Sonesta Hotel the booze has stopped flowing. I give a producer some cash and ask her to organize a beer run to Baton Rouge. Each night, we’ve been collecting around the empty hotel pool—small groups drinking, unwinding. It’s quieter than at the daiquiri bar, and the crowd is mostly CNN personnel. The gatherings are important—a reminder to each of us that we’re not here alone.

The hotel’s power comes and goes. Tonight it’s off; a fire in the electrical supply room has apparently shut it down.

“I guess we’re back in crisis mode,” a handyman says to me as he picks up a flashlight and casually strolls down the hall, his stooped stride anything but a sign of crisis mode.

I introduce myself to a man at the bar. He’s a local resident who’s been helping CNN crews get around town. He doesn’t recognize me, and when I tell him my name, he seems surprised.

“I thought you must be some old geezer,” he says, merlot on his breath, Mardi Gras beads wrapped around the stem of his glass. “When people say your name, they shake.”

“I doubt that’s true,” I say, laughing.

“No, really,” he insists. “You have the power of a thousand bulldozers.”

I leave the bar and go to my room. I can’t get the image out of my head: a thousand bulldozers. I don’t think it’s true, of course. I don’t like to think about my job that way. I’ve never paid much attention to the business of news—who is watching, how big the audience is, what time slot I am in. That information always seems to take away from the work. Katrina, however, is different. So many times in Africa I wanted people to know the suffering of others, but I long ago gave up believing that it would really change anything. Now people are watching, and I feel that maybe I
can
be of some help. I see it in people’s eyes; they talk to me on the street: “Hey, Anderson, somebody’s got to do something about what’s happening over in St. Bernard,” they’ll say. Or: “You gotta do something about the bodies. Why aren’t they being picked up?” I don’t want to let these people down, this city, down.

I WORRY I’VE
forgotten what’s important about my brother, what’s not. I recall looks, images, arguments. There was the time Carter punched me when I was an infant. The time in high school when he screamed at me, “You’re not my fucking father!” and stormed out of my room. The day I scrawled, “I HATE HIM!” in a diary.

“Were you close?” Inevitably I get that question. Sometimes it’s right after a person finds out about my brother’s death; sometimes it’s only after weeks of their knowing me. Were we close? Not so close that I knew he was going to kill himself. Not so close that I understood why he did.

I knew his laugh, his smell. I knew the sound he made when he walked through our front door, the jingle of his keys, the particular way his shoes scraped on the floor. We didn’t talk, however. I didn’t ask him deep, probing questions. Do any brothers do that sort of thing? I knew what I observed, I knew his surface, but clearly that was not enough.

I still dream about him, and in my sleep he seems so real. They’re not happy dreams, however, because I know he’s going to kill himself, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I wake up believing for a moment that he’s alive. I wake up filled with dread.

I found a Polaroid of my mom, Carter, and me celebrating his birthday. It was the first one after my father’s death. The cake is small and has twelve white candles almost a foot and a half in length. Carter bends sideways in a half hug with our mom. She’s smiling, and I’m next to her. I find these photos from time to time—frozen moments, I can’t remember. Every time I do, the violence of Carter’s death shocks me again. I keep the pictures, as well as his scribbled notes and magazines—the things I found in his apartment. I tell myself that one day I’ll go through them and perhaps discover some clue that will help me understand, help me answer that question: Were we close?

“THEM BODIES SMELL
like some stanky ass pussy,” a Border Patrol agent tells me. Behind him a stripper in a cop’s uniform hangs upside down from a pole. “That shit gets in your clothes, you can’t get the smell out. Goddamn stanky ass pussy.”

We’re in Déjà Vu, the first strip club to reopen in New Orleans. It’s just over three weeks since the storm. Beneath some colored lights, a handful of girls bump and grind on the bar, rubbing their breasts in patrons’ faces. The place is filled with the storm’s flotsam and jetsam: cops and soldiers, National Guard, Border Patrol, Customs—you name it, they’re all here, their badges and guns badly concealed. They’re clutching dollar bills, horny as hell and twice as bored.

I’m here to meet a New Orleans police officer, but he’s not around. I call him on his cellphone, and he answers in the middle of a fight. “Fuck you, get the fuck out of here!” he yells to someone, then, finally tells me, “Anderson, I gotta call you back.” A few minutes later, he’s in the bar, apologizing.

“This National Guard guy took my seat when I went to the bathroom,” he says. “When I get back, I tell him, ‘That’s my seat,’ and he tells me, ‘Fuck off.’ Fuck off? He’s with the National Guard. What the fuck is that? I’m the PO-leese. So I grabbed him and took him outside. Bullshit.”

The night grinds on. Buying beers and whisky shots, the cops come and go, off duty, tired. Their wives and girlfriends are gone; they have no homes to go back to.

“You gotta do something,” one cop tells me, inches from my face. It’s late, everyone is drunk, the stripper’s G-string is filled with wet bills. “No one gives a shit,” the police officer tells me, tears streaming down his face.

Earlier, the police were asked to pass a hat for a fellow officer shot in the head during the looting. He’s in a hospital in Houston; the money is for his family.

“You can’t let them forget. We’re counting on you,” he tells me. The stripper finishes her set, and another takes the stage.

“I love you, man,” one cop tells me. He doesn’t mean it, of course, but right now he thinks he does. They’ve been screwed and abandoned, and I’m buying the rounds.

EVERY POLITICIAN I
talk to seems to say the same thing: “Now is not the time to point fingers.” Spin doctors even come up with the term
blame game.
“I’m not going to play the blame game,” they say, dismissing you when you ask for answers, for the names of officials who made key decisions. I notice that some reporters start using the term too. I can’t understand why.

Demanding accountability is no game, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to understand who made mistakes, who failed. If no one is held accountable for their decisions, for their actions, all of this will happen again. Not one person has yet to stand up and admit wrongdoing. No politician, no bureaucrat, has admitted a specific mistake. Some have made blanket statements, saying they accept responsibility for whatever went wrong. But that’s not good enough. We need to know specifics. What was done wrong? What were the mistakes?

I ask any official I can. No one will answer. The only “mistakes” they admit to are actually veiled criticisms of others. The mayor should have declared a mandatory evacuation on Saturday, instead of waiting until Sunday. Precious hours were lost. The governor could have done that as well, but didn’t. They could have moved hundreds of city buses and local school buses to higher ground and used them to evacuate the nearly one hundred thousand residents who had no access to private transportation. They didn’t. There were plenty of mistakes to go around. I just want someone to admit to them.

THE MAYOR ANNOUNCES
a plan to repopulate the city, but three days later after heavy criticism, he backs off, blaming Hurricane Rita. Rita is on the cusp of becoming a category 3 storm, and it’s heading this way. It’s projected to make landfall around Galveston, Texas, and already the media is gearing up, pulling out, like children drawn by shiny objects.

After weeks of asking, the mayor finally agrees to an interview with me, but after it’s done, I feel as if I blew it. We spoke a lot about Rita, because it was in the headlines, but I wish I’d focused more on Katrina mistakes. I worry that politicians are trying to divert attention away from the failures, to delay and distract people until they forget.

At the end of the interview I ask the mayor if he’d be willing to come back on again and discuss what he did wrong and what others did wrong. He says he would be happy for the opportunity. For the next four months, however, he declines my every invitation to sit down and talk.

Over the phone my producers are telling me that I’m doing great. Each day they tell me the ratings for my broadcast are high, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear about it. This is not a “story”; these people aren’t characters. It doesn’t feel right to talk about plot lines and rating points.

At times I feel like a failure, as if I’m not up to the responsibility. At night, when I try to sleep, I go over the questions I’ve asked interview subjects, the wording, the accuracy. Did I stutter and stammer and beat around the bush? Was I fair? Was I too emotional? Did I give the guest a chance to answer? Did I let him ramble on too much? Did I get spun? I worry that our cameras are not capturing enough. I’m not sure it will ever be possible to capture it all.

I HEAD TO TEXAS,
for Hurricane Rita, and when I come back to New Orleans, I notice a change. I see the number of TV stories about Katrina start to lessen. I can feel the viewers’ interest ebbing. As the floodwaters drop, the tide is slowly turning. It’s the fourth week since the storm, and I suppose it’s inevitable, but when it happens it still comes as a shock: Each morning we ask ourselves, “What can we do that’s new? What haven’t we seen?”

“We haven’t seen enough,” is all I can answer. My mind is racing; at times I feel manic. My thoughts jump from one to another: make sure the audio in the cop interview I just did is usable; cancel this month’s appointments; call Mom; check on the dog; track down names of wounded police officers. The list scrolls endlessly in my head.

I don’t want to go back to New York, to my job, to the way it used to be. Stories about missing coeds in Aruba and runaway brides, stories that titillate but aren’t as important. I talk to friends on the phone but don’t have much to say. I want to yell at them, “Don’t move on! Don’t go back to your normal life, get caught up in the petty falseness you see on TV!” It’s the same feeling I had weeks after my brother died. I was back at school, and everyone else seemed to have forgotten.

Martha Stewart has a new TV show starting. I see her picture in
USA Today.
I take it as an omen, a sign that the country has moved on. In the French Quarter a broken newspaper machine still holds the last edition of
USA Today
to hit the stands before Katrina hit. Martha Stewart’s smiling face is on the front page. We’re back to where we were before the storm. I’ve started to believe in signs and magical thinking. If I tie my shoes in the next ten seconds, people will still care about the story. If I make it through this intersection without having to slow down, I can stay here another week.

I REALIZE I’VE
been dehumanizing the dead, calling them “corpses” or “bodies.” I should be ashamed of myself. They’re our neighbors, our countrymen. They’re people, and they deserve better care. I can’t understand why it’s taking so long to retrieve them. FEMA announces that when they start to collect the people who have died, they won’t allow us to videotape it. They say it’s to preserve the dignity of the dead. I don’t believe what they say anymore. I’m convinced that they want to cover up the horror of what’s happened. If they were so concerned with dignity, they would not have tied the bodies of storm victims to stop signs so they wouldn’t float away; they would not have let them lie out for so long uncollected, uncared for. We are not going to take pictures of storm victims’ faces. We are not going to be responsible for someone seeing a loved one’s body on TV. But America should see the conditions our countrymen have been left out in. If anything, covering up what really happened to them is what will deny them their dignity. CNN decides to sue to be allowed to videotape the body recoveries, and the case is settled. We are allowed to videotape, but when the recoveries actually begin, emergency workers on the ground often make it difficult for us to get a picture. They position their vehicles to block the shots.