Pulphead: Essays (10 page)

He appeared to me only once afterward, and that was two and a half years later, in Paris. It’s not as if Paris is a city I know or have even visited more than a couple of times. He knew it well. I was coming up the stairs from the metro into the sunshine with the girl, whom I later married, on my left arm, when my senses became intensely alert to his presence about a foot and a half to my right. I couldn’t look directly at him: I had to let him hang back in my peripheral vision, else he’d slip away. It was a bargain we made in silence. I could see enough to tell that he wasn’t young but was maybe twenty years younger than when I’d known him, wearing the black-framed engineer’s glasses he’d worn at just that time in his life, looking up and very serious, climbing the steps to the light, where I lost him.

AT A SHELTER (AFTER KATRINA)

Coming east along the Gulf, you started picking up signs around Slidell that something ungodly had passed through there. Whole stands of mature pine had been chopped down at the knees, as if by shock wave. And the huge black metal poles that hold up highway billboards, many of those were bent in half, the upper parts dangling by spiky hinges. Weirdest of all was the roadkill. There’s always plenty in Mississippi, but now, among the raccoons and the deer and the occasional armadillo, you saw dogs, more than a few, healthy-looking apart from being dead, and with collars on—not strays, in other words, or not until a few days before. And the little black vultures they have down there, with gray, beaked faces like Venetian masks, were hopping up out of the brush to pick at them.

That was the outer edge of what the hurricane had done. By the time you reached the coast in Gulfport, there was a smell in the air you couldn’t tolerate for longer than forty-five seconds or so. I’d smelled it before but never in the First World. It was the smell of large organic things that had lain dead under a burning sun for days. Dozens of semitrailers and boats—ships, really—had been picked up and hurled half a mile, just spun around and crunched. It looked contrary to the laws of physics, to the point where you saw it in miniature, a toy box overturned by an angry child. Perfectly clean wood frames stood where some very substantial houses had been. The wind and water had simply moved through them, stripping away every brick and board and shingle. Even the toilet bowls were blasted out.

Katrina created what was almost certainly the largest storm surge ever recorded in the United States: official numbers are still forthcoming, but it was around thirty feet. A lot of the people who died in Mississippi did so because this inundation happened horrifically fast. You were listening to the wind at your windows, wondering if you should flee, then you were trying to grab at the uppermost limbs of trees as you went rushing by. One older woman told me a giant sea turtle swam through her kitchen while she perched on the counter.

In the Red Cross shelter at Harrison Central Elementary School in Gulfport, you kept hearing people say they’d “swum out the front door.” One was Terry DeShields, a trim, muscular black guy with a neat mustache and a bad, healed burn on his left arm. The hurricane had made landfall on his thirty-fifth birthday. He’d been sitting on his couch and thinking to himself, I’m not gonna run from this thing. He took a nap. He woke up and there was seven feet of water in his house. “I heard the rumbling,” he said, “and I thought, Oh, Lord, here we go!” He made it through the door just seconds before the surge “pushed the walls out.”

“The wind’s blowing me around,” he said. “I’m hitting trees. There’s snakes swimming around—and I ain’t no friend to snakes.”

DeShields was tossed through his old neighborhood, searching for something to climb. He was carried to the rear parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. There he saw two convection ovens, one stacked atop the other, and bolted down. The upper one was still above the waterline. He hoisted himself onto it and curled into a ball. The hurricane roared around him for hours. That seemed like a long time to think, so I asked him what he thought about. “Pretty simple,” he said. “I am going to die.”

When the water fell back, he climbed down and set out, looking for food. “There wasn’t no shelters yet,” he said. “Least I didn’t know where.” He had on a pair of underwear and one sock. He wandered for two days in scorching heat. He slept on the ground in the woods. When I talked to him, his hands were still puffed up like mittens from the mosquito bites. Finally, a state trooper passed him and gave him a packet of crackers and a hot can of Coca-Cola and pointed him toward the shelter. “When I saw that cross,” he said, “I knew I was saved.”

And yet the next night he snuck out, slipping back to a beach not far from where his house had stood. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “That was my beach, you know. I had to see it. Gone. All those mansions, casinos. The sidewalk, man. I sat there till four o’clock in the morning and cried.”

There was an older man, wiry and dark, who looked to be in his late fifties. He had a single tooth on each side of his smile, perfectly spaced. His name was Ernel Porché, but at the shelter they called him Boots, because he’d escaped his house with a pair of dirty white oversize galoshes on and hadn’t wanted to change them since. He told me he was worried about his aunt. “We’re a small family,” he said. “I don’t know if she got out.” When the man from the Red Cross had first switched on the TV and put it to CNN, Boots saw a picture of his aunt’s neighborhood. It was underwater. “That was very disturbing,” he said.

Gone.
That was the word everybody used. What about your house? Did it hit your house? “Oh, that’s gone, honey. That’s all gone.” The walls “was blowed out.” The future had been ripped away and replaced with a massive blank. You asked people what they were going to do, where they’d end up, how long they’d be allowed to stay at the shelter. They looked at you like they were thinking hard about something else.

*   *   *

It was past lights-out. The generator was powering only a string of emergency lights that lined the middle hallway, where people lay sleeping on bedrolls. I got assigned a spot in a little classroom with construction-paper pictures on the wall. Plenty of folks were still up, though, whispering in clusters. You could hear babies crying. An old, long-bearded white guy with no shirt on and sagging hairy man-breasts was coughing, a terrible hacking cough. “There’s a pill sticking sideways in my throat!” he croaked. Another guy kept reminding the shelter manager that he was severely manic and had been off his meds for five days now. “And you know what it’s like when you’re off your meds!” I’d heard him by then say to at least four people. I heard a woman tell the manager that the Red Cross needed to “put the censorship on the TV,” because she’d caught some children in the cafeteria watching a sex movie. “It was the real dirty stuff,” she said, “people sucking on each other’s nipples and everything.”

I got up and went out back and found a little party sitting on a patio, talking by lantern light. They were in wonderfully high spirits. Most of the people who ended up in the shelters had been living pretty close to the bottom already. Some had no reason not to assume that their new FEMA housing would be nicer than what they’d been living in for years.

There on the patio, a big jolly-looking bearded white man named Bill Melton, a shrimper with a neck tattoo, was kicking back in a wooden chair next to a black couple in their forties, R.J. and Jacqueline Sanders. I asked if they’d all known one another before the storm. Mistaking my question (or maybe taking it correctly), Melton said, “There’s no color here, man. R.J. and Miss Jackie, they’re my brother and sister now.” I heard other expressions of this almost Utopian feeling. An old man and woman were talking in the hallway. “All them rich people,” he said, “I don’t care how much money you got. We all the same now. That’s why I’m
always
looking up to God. I don’t care how high I get.”

Bill and R.J. and Miss Jackie were part of a small group at Harrison Central who appeared to be dealing with their situation by staying constantly, almost frantically active. The Red Cross had more than enough packaged meals for everyone, but this crew had convinced the woman who managed the school lunchroom to unlock the kitchen doors so they could use the food before it went bad. Boots was a cook in a restaurant; he fired up the gas burners and took the helm. They’d been serving meals to everyone, and their energy was shoring up morale. (The next morning, I tasted what Melton called S.O.S.—shit on a shingle, or meat in gravy on a roll—and found it edible.) “We feed eeeeverybody,” R.J. said. “Not just our little family here.”

“We even feed the officers!” Melton added.

Miss Jackie jumped up and told me I had to see the shower they’d made. Normally, the Red Cross doesn’t like to use a site for shelter unless it has shower facilities, but many of the original buildings they’d chosen were destroyed in the storm, so they’d been forced to take over Harrison Central.

Miss Jackie and R.J. led me past a plastic curtain into the shower area. What they’d done was pretty ingenious. With the keys the lunch lady gave them, they’d opened a metal plate in the bricks that shielded an outdoor spigot. Someone rigged a gas burner to heat a water tank inside. They’d scavenged the neighborhood around the school for metal pipe and rigged up a flow. For the showerhead, they’d taken an empty can, one of these curious white cans of tap water that Anheuser-Busch evidently produces during natural disasters, and poked a bunch of holes in the bottom. Then they’d taped it onto the pipe.

“Turn it on, Miss Jackie!” said Bill Melton. Jackie was entrusted with the keys. She opened the metal plate and turned the red knob. Warm water came spraying out of the can, a fountain of water. It made a pattern like a garden spider’s web in R.J.’s flashlight.

“We made this happen,” Bill Melton said.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Miss Jackie said.

I groped for a response.

“It is beautiful,” R.J. said.

*   *   *

When after a few days I left the shelter and drove back to Jackson in my rental, I had a
Mad Max
–style experience that I’ve thought about many times since. I started running low on gas, and the gas situation was bad. People had lined up for miles at the few pumps with any fuel left. My gauge showed well below a quarter tank, so I pulled off. The road to the station ran long and straight. I could see how far we had to go and wondered if I had even enough gas to last the line. It was unsettling to see something like that in America. In all the nuclear war movies that damaged us as kids, wasn’t there always a scene where they waited in line for the dwindling gas? Here we were. But so far everybody seemed calm, treating it like any other traffic jam. It was hot and sunny on the asphalt as we slithered over it, bumpers inches from one another, each of us an interlinked segment of some slow, determined insect.

At one point, we intersected with another, smaller road that exited onto ours, the road to the gas. Few people were foolish enough to try entering the line by this road—it was cutting, essentially—but every time someone did, there’d be tension, shouts out the window, the exiting person making upturned “What can I do?” hands. Nothing awful, though. No fighting. The radio played “Sweet Emotion.”

There was a traffic light at the intersection of these two roads, and in passing through it, as it reverted from green to red, I did something sort of awkward. An older woman who’d been immediately behind me—for an hour—was attempting to come through the light with me as well. She thought she’d be the last one in our group to make it. But she’d miscalculated, there wasn’t room. I’d gone as far forward as I could without hitting the truck in front of me, and the back half of her car was still stranded in the box. Had someone coming the opposite way, on the other side of the highway, tried to turn through our line fast, onto that road, she’d have been smashed. In my rearview mirror, she looked scared, so I did the only thing I could and gradually, with each jolt of the traffic, nosed my car over to the side of the highway, until I could edge the front right bumper up onto the grass there, giving the woman six or so feet to scooch up and out of harm’s way. It was no act of heroism on my part, but nor was it an act of sneakiness and cheating, which is what the wiry, drunken, super-pissed-off Mississippian who appeared at my side window accused me of, in the most furious tones. “I saw what you did, asshole,” he said. He’d actually climbed out of his own car and walked a good ways up the road, just to unload on me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I haven’t done shit but sit here for hours.”

He was pacing around in the road next to my car, pointing his finger at me. The line of traffic was that motionless, that he could do this without worrying about his own car.

“There’s people in this line that have been waiting for
miles
,” he said. “You can’t just jump in the fucking line.” He’d seen me execute that little maneuver, you see, to make room for the old lady, and he’d assumed (not irrationally) that he was witnessing the final stages of my inserting myself in front of her, from the side road.

Who knew what the guy had been through in the last few days. His face was bristled with long stubble. His flannel shirt was filthy. The way he wouldn’t stop moving, it looked like he was in the desert, raving at God.

The reptilian thing that takes over at moments like that told me not to get mad, but to keep
explaining
what had happened. I said, “You have to listen to me, man! I’ve been in this lines for miles.
Let
me explain—”