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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Fear and violence lurk in New Orleans, where Geraldo Rivera mugs for the camera, transvestites bicycle down Toulouse Street, and rescue workers and reporters still wonder why so many people were left behind to die.
Sep 5, 2005 | I drive into New Orleans with a note from the Louisiana State Police public information officer. The highways are empty past the checkpoints, as is the city. Highway 10 ends at a barricade in uptown. I follow relief vehicles through cleared thoroughfares. Most of the streets are blocked by fallen trees. On the roads that are open, cars -- almost exclusively police and relief vehicles -- drive in whatever direction they want. Some locals ride by on bicycles. The sense of emptiness in the city is overwhelming. I pass a Whole Foods with its door propped open, alarm still ringing, panes of glass intact.
I stop when I see two men and a woman on a porch off Magazine Street. "You a reporter?" one of the men asks me. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know." He tells me about the conspiracy: people with a lot of money flooded the city on purpose. "You want some wine?" he asks. "I've got a hundred dollar bottle of wine." They say they've been getting supplies from the Whole Foods and using water from a neighbor's pool to operate the toilet. But now the food at the grocery store is gone. The woman's legs are bitten, covered in bright red welts. I leave them a gallon of water and continue toward the Convention Center.
It's only a day since tens of thousands of people were rapidly evacuated from the Convention Center after being jammed inside it for five days. Trash is strewn everywhere. There are black bags, pillows, boxes, twisted chairs, water bottles, soiled and torn clothing. Shopping carts are turned upside down and stacked on top of each other. Garbage cans lie in the bushes. Nothing in the Gulf Coast seems to symbolize the tragedy more than the excess of garbage and human waste.
The Army presence is heavy in the Convention Center. Troop transports arrive with busloads of people. They're processed quickly, searched, loaded onto giant helicopters and flown to New Orleans Airport, where buses, planes and trains are now moving in high gear to evacuate the city.
Geraldo Rivera arrives in a Fox News truck. An elderly woman with blond hair grips his elbow. She's wearing thick dark glasses and a pink shirt. He carries her small white dog in his arms. He's wearing thigh-high waders unzipped to below his knees. We shake hands. "Her relative called one of our stations," Geraldo tells me, explaining how that call went to another station, and then another, and finally to him.
The woman had been stranded in her home for six days. Geraldo picked up the woman and her dog and brought them here. The woman looks frail on his arm, though not as bad perhaps as a lady collapsed on a chair nearby, unable to move. Or a woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the truck, carrying her prosthetic leg on her lap.
"That's the second time he brought her here," one of the doctors tells me, nodding toward Geraldo.
"What?"
"They did two takes. Geraldo made that poor woman walk from the Fox News van to the heliport twice. Both times carrying her dog."
"Are you serious?" I ask. He says he is.
The doctor has been here for six days, volunteering for the state. But the federal government has control now. "You can't do anything if you're not with the feds," he says. "All they needed was to send in the Army. This is too big for the state. A couple of days ago, there were people being murdered left and right. I treated this one lady at the airport, a stranded tourist. She just stepped outside of her hotel. They beat her over the head, broke her jaw and raped her."
I leave the Convention Center and head toward the French Quarter. I'm afraid to step out of my car, afraid of street corners where lights don't work. The empty city is no place for cowards. I park the car near the river. Then I see two transvestites in latex and fishnets bicycling down Toulouse Street. I follow them, thinking they might lead me to the New Orleans I visited so many times before. I was in my early 20s and that city was full of sex and alcohol and music. I remember driving down here in February one year, living in a van below the Quarter for a week. I remember being 20 years old and paying too much money to take Polaroids of a woman in a negligee. The tip, she said, determined the kind of outfit she wore.
Soon the transvestites are gone but Johnny White's, located on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans, is still open and serving drinks. "We never closed," the bartender tells me. It's the only bar open in the city. They serve warm beer and shots. As it gets darker, they light candles on the countertops.
"You looking for a story?" a guy at the bar asks me. I shrug my shoulders. Also inside the small bar are an Indian woman, and a man with his arms wrapped around his wife, holding a cigarette in her mouth. I ask for a Coke and the bartender says they only use Coke in mixed drinks, so I order a bottle of water instead. It cost me $2.
The man with the story is Greg Rogers. He was forced from his house yesterday at Louisiana and Clairborne, an area completely submerged. "I was the last person in the neighborhood," he says. "I had a month and a half worth of food, some books. I had my two dogs. SWAT showed up and said it was time to go. I told them I was fine, I didn't need rescuing. They said you're coming with us or we're killing your dogs." Rogers says the officers took him in a boat to an overpass and told him to start walking in the other direction. He has a windup radio with him and that's how he heard that Johnny White's was still open. "I was so happy to hear Johnny's was open," he says. He tells me he knows a bartender here. He sleeps on the bar's floor.
"I didn't want to leave my house," he says. "I was fine. What were they going to do? Take me to the Superdome where I'd get shot and robbed?"
Rogers sits on the chair drinking light beer. I ask him about his dogs, and he says he left enough food and water for them for two weeks. He says he can't get home without a boat. He tells me he was a Marine for eight years, and served in the Gulf, Bosnia, and Mogadishu. He won't reveal the unit he was with. He says they did some bad things.
After a while, the transvestites I saw earlier come staggering by. They're drunk and one of them is bleeding heavily. Apparently she fell off her bike. When someone offers help, she refuses.
It's almost dark now. Curfew is at 7. The only lights are the lights from a CNN crew down the street. "I wonder if I should go get my car," I say aloud.
"Go now before it's dark," the Indian woman says. She has half an unlit cigar in her mouth. "I'll be so worried about you. Especially if you don't have any weapons."
