Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand. Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the funny characters.
A Last Whiff of Fulton ‘s Fish, Bringing a Tear By DAN BARRY
It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna’s cigar. Of Canada , Florida , and the squid-ink East River . Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented ice.
This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one place in the New York vastness: a small stretch of South Street where peddlers have sung the song of the catch since at least 1831, while all around them, change. They were hawking fish here when an ale house called McSorley’s opened up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.
Take it in now, if you wish, if you dare, because the rains will come to rinse this distinct aroma from the city air. Some Friday soon, perhaps next month, the fish sellers will spill their ice and shutter their stalls, pack their grappling hooks and raise a final toast beneath the ba-rump and hum of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive .
And on the Monday, they will begin peddling their dead-eyed wares inside a custom-made building in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx , to be named the New Fulton Fish Market Cooperative, and the old Fulton Fish Market — that raucous stage of open-air overnight commerce — will be no more.
The fish market’s closing should come as no surprise, though it does. From the beginning, New York questioned the location of this rough and odoriferous trade. In 1854, a city elder wondered whether ”a more advantageous disposition may not be made of that valuable property by the removal of the Fish Market.” And in 1859, another sachem suggested moving the market uptown, in part because the ebb and flow of the East River was, as The New York Times delicately put it, ”not sufficiently strong to carry off the >offal.”
Offal and the official’s concomitant complaint of a blanket of maggots on the water were not issues in the decision to move the market finally to Hunts Point (a plan that dates back at least to the mid-1950’s). Instead, the creeping conversion of Manhattan into a monstrous mall for the affluent played a role, as did the grudging realization that the market had become impractical, anachronistic. Fishermen haven’t unloaded their catch there for more than a generation.
Before it leaves us, then; before it lives only in news footage and movies like ”Splash”: one last look at a part of the city taken for granted, save by fish people, nighthawks and urban anthropologists. One long, last inhalation of the exquisite Fulton Fish Market bouquet.
Three in the morning, and forklifts clatter over rutted pavement, unloaded trucks sigh in escape, and workers pierce wax-coated cases with grappling hooks — whup! whup! — as they move fish from here to >there.
Some lights of the market stand before the silvery truck of a man who calls himself Steve the Coffee Guy. Beansie, the union official, is there, smoking a cigar, and Richie Klein, a burly fish salesman, savoring a cigarette, and Joe Tuna, on his forklift, drinking tea. When Joe Tuna glides over curb and cobblestone, his meaty biceps jiggle so much that the tattoos move like cartoons.
They wear rubber boots and soiled sneakers that never cross the thresholds of their homes; clean jeans and fish-bloodied shorts; polo shirts and T-shirts, some torn in the back by the tips of the hooks slung over their shoulders.
In winter, the East River winds blow through you no matter what you wear, so Steve the Coffee Guy will warm himself with a propped-up propane heater, in homage to barrels of flames that once flickered wickedly along South Street. On this summer’s night, though, the muggy air clings like lotion to the skin, and coolness is found at the coffee truck’s icy bed of soda, over which hangs a dated photograph of a beautiful young woman in shorts, briskly walking.
The rumor, or the hope, is that it’s South Street Annie, also known as Shopping Bag Annie, that shrunken woman with wild gray hair who strolls the market calling ”Yoohoo!” Selling cigarettes and newspapers from her red-wire cart, she is coarse, ribald, ubiquitous: the flawed mother of fish town. A worker confides that on his first day in the market more than a decade ago, he was instructed to kiss one of her pendulous breasts — for good luck.
In the market, superstition demands that you watch out for stray animals and broken people. The men take care of her, enduring her rants, her feigned grabs at their crotches. The New York Post costs a quarter; the men give her a dollar. The Daily News costs 50 cents; they give her a dollar, maybe two.
Thank you, sweetie, she says. What a guy.
Burly Mr. Klein grabs his coffee and walks over to Stall 31, where he and a partner run Third Generation Seafood in what is known as the New Market Building; the old building was demolished after a chunk of it fell into the river in 1936. He passes crates of croakers, porgies and ”day-boat” Montauk fluke, which means it was caught less than 24 hours ago.
He pauses to watch one of his fillet men, Wilson Quirizumbay, slice a tuna carcass so close to the bone that only maroon wisps of flesh remain. ”They have a feel for the bone, and for the knife,” Mr. Klein says. ”The skill is in the yield. He’s gonna give me 70 percent.”
In the next stall stands Vince nt Tatick, of the Joseph H. Carter Fish Company. His father ran Frank Tatick Fillet under the old Sweet’s Restaurant. Both are gone now, and here is the son, twirling a grappling hook as though it were a child’s toy. He wears a dark-green shirt, dark-green pants, and a camouflage headband, sports five pencils and a pack of Parliaments in his breast pocket, and keeps a Marine Corps knife on his hip. Rambo among fish.
Mr. Tatick has no opinion about the market’s move, he says, other than: what is, is. But he wonders about leaving behind the nuns at St. Rose’s Home, on the Lower East Side , who nursed his father in his final two years. During that time, the Taticks agreed that it would be nice to give the nuns some fish, 25 pounds worth, every Friday.
When his father died, Mr. Tatick says, ”I didn’t know how to say, ‘Sorry, the deal is off.’ So I never said >anything.”
That was more than 40 years ago, he says. ”I still give them fish.”
This is just one story among thousands, tens of thousands, to rise from the fishy swirl, only to dissipate from memory with the passing of time and old fishmongers.
All those market fires, including the devastating blaze of 1878, possibly caused by rats munching on matchsticks. That strange, huge turtle brought to shore in 1900. The dream that a customs official had during Prohibition, leading to the discovery of 2,000 bags of whiskey hidden among tons of fish in the hold of the schooner Caroline. The dead fisherman found hanging over an ice machine in 1939, leaving nothing but a last known address of the Seamen’s Church Institute, 25 South Street .
Many of the stories centered on characters who worked hard for their nicknames: Iceberg Tommy, who settled his nerves by immersing his feet in ice; Shrimp Sammy, who promoted the freshness of his shellfish by eating them raw; Porgy Joe, who strolled the market with two live crabs clinging to his ears by their claws. Men of the water, now dust.
There was Alfred E. Smith, governor and presidential candidate, who often bragged of earning his degree from F.F.M., for Fulton Fish Market, the educational institution of his fish-peddling youth. And Joseph Lanza, a mobster who controlled the market for decades — whether in or out of prison — and whose sobriquet of ” Soc ks” referred to his penchant for punching those who refused to pay him for the right to sell fish.
A hearing in 1931 became one of the first tutorials in the true ways of the market, thanks to the testimony of several uncomfortable witnesses, including a fish-store owner named James >McAleese.
”A man called up and told me to send down $40 by my buyer, or the carriers would not deliver fish to my truck.”
”Why did you pay it?” he was asked.
”Because I wanted my fish.”
The mob and the market became so intertwined, with tribute to wiseguys as common as a buck to Annie, that a government investigation of some kind always seemed under way. Successful crackdowns have considerably reduced the mob’s presence, but still: one section of the city’s administrative code begins with the assertion that the fish market ”has for decades been corruptly influenced by organized crime.”
More than the ghosts of characters, though, more than the whiff of the mob, there lingers in this city corner a palpable, connective air to who we once were; what we saw; what we said. The eels wriggling free along Fulton Street . The hook fights among fishmongers. The ice-coated masts of sloops in winter. The fedoras, the aprons, the scales of fish justice. That market man who, on one summer’s night in 1872, called out an order:
”Lively, Jim , 10 baskets of lobsters.”
On this night, one of the last, it is Frank Minio who calls out. ”Lemon sole is one-thirty-five today, and the large is one-fiftyI got one day-boat gray sole left, three-fifty.”
Mr. Minio is bald, muscular and in full command of his domain, a business on the west side of South Street called Smitty’s Fillet House. A college graduate, he had planned to ”pursue theater,” as he puts it, but his father died in this very stall 27 years ago, and, well, it’s a family business.
He says he looks forward to some aspects of the move to the Bronx : not freezing in winter, for example, and not paying for so much ice in the summer. Still, he wonders, couldn’t the city have built an enclosed market here, alongside exhibitions that celebrated New York ‘s inextricable connection to the >water?
”It’s been done this way a long time,” he says, before moving toward a man poking at the cheeks of fish. ”Good morning,” he says to the bold customer. ”One-sixty on the pollock.”
The sky begins to lighten. Below a for-sale sign on an old brick building, circa 1830, a fat man eats a turkey-on-a-roll near a gray mound of grouper. A skinny man shovels ice, shoosh, onto some snapper the color of the pinkish dawn. Someone calls out, ”Frank-e-e-e!”
Another forklift clatters past. South Street Annie appears, selling fresh news. Behind her, the Brooklyn Bridge , looking almost new. ————————-
May 11, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition – Final Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 794 words
About New York ; An Old Hand, Betrayed By His Belt By DAN BARRY
JOE GILLUM of Harlem fell from the sky last week. He plummeted silently through the air of a Silk Stocking neighborhood and broke upon impact, as did that extra appendage of his, a squeegee.
He washed windows for a living, often working so high above the ground that your hands perspire just thinking of it. At 68, he was still strapping on his trusty old belt — too old, it turned out, and not so trusty — and suspending himself in the air, his back to the world, his silhouette reflected in the soot-caked windows of others.
Until last Thursday, that is, when he dropped nine stories in about the time it takes to soak a rag in a pail of soapy water. Up above, the two canvas straps that he had secured to the sides of the window could do nothing now but wave goodbye in the breeze.
The initial police report on his accidental death attached his middle initial of L to the end of his given name, and so in most of the brief news accounts he was rechristened Joel Gillum. ”It was Joe,” said his wife, Ollie. ”It was Joe.”
Mrs. Gillum, 67, small-boned and white-haired, sat deep in a couch’s hug in the worn apartment on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard that she had shared with her husband for more than 30 years. She seemed composed, but this was Monday morning, within the exhausting awkwardness that comes after the death and before the wake.
The telephone beside her rang again, but her sister-in-law, Marie Colbert, in from Oklahoma for the funeral, was fielding calls and jotting messages in a spiral-bound notebook. ”Thank you for calling,” Mrs. Colbert said again into the receiver.
Some of the callers were friends and relatives. Others were wondering where their window washer was. ”His clients don’t know,” Mrs. Gillum said. ”They’re expecting him today.”
Joe Gillum, of Georgia, and Ollie Colbert, of Oklahoma , met nearly 49 years ago in a Harlem nightclub on Eighth Avenue . He was working in a hospital morgue then, and she was setting fake gems in costume jewelry at some factory. They talked about where they came from, how they had wound up in New York City — jobs, basically — and what they liked and disliked. At some point she revealed her love for apricots. Next day, here comes Joe Gillum, bearing apricots.
They married in 1957, and shared more fruit, bitter and sweet. The first child, Joe, died in infancy. The second child, Sabrina, would give them three grandchildren. And one of those three would give them a great-grandson.
The years can blur into one long workday. But Mrs. Gillum said she is sure that her husband started his own window- and floor-cleaning business in the mid-60’s, because it was after President Kennedy’s assassination and before Martin Luther King Jr.’s.
After 30 years of wrestling electric sanders over parquet floors — those machines have minds of their own — his back hurt so much that he decided a decade ago to concentrate on windows. By then he had built up a good clientele, which meant that every spring he was out, and up.
”He never was afraid of heights,” said Mrs. Gillum, her eyes looking for distraction from a muttering television.
”That was his life,” said her brother, Nemiah Colbert. ”That’s what he did for a living.”
The telephone rang again. ”They’re calling for him to come to work today,” Mrs. Gillum said to the television.
LAST Thursday morning, the Gillums made plans to go food shopping that evening. Mrs. Gillum told her husband that she might be a little late from her job minding an apartment on the Upper West Side . ”His last words, and it was so soft,” she said, ”was, ‘I’ll be right here waiting for you.”’
Then Mr. Gillum headed for a job at a nice brick apartment building at 430 East 57th Street, carrying, his wife recalled, ”his belt, his pail, and his squeegee.” When asked whether her husband ever updated his equipment, Mrs. Gillum slowly shook her head and said, ”Uh-uh.”
By 11, he was dead. By noon , his blood had been scrubbed and sprayed from the sidewalk by one of the building’s employees. And by the afternoon, a neighbor of the Gillums who had spoken to detectives had taped a note to their door, saying, ”Please see me, it’s an emergency.”
A funeral service was held at Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem yesterday morning, followed by the long ride out to Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island for the burial of a fallen window washer.
For the record, his name was Joe Gillum. Joe L. Gillum. ——————————
November 2, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition – Final Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 861 words
About New York ; Button Up Your Overcoat By DAN BARRY
E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com
THESE days have been uncommonly mild for autumn, but Derek Ivery insists on wearing a sweater and jacket over his tall and very thin frame. He cannot get sick. He has things to do.
Mr. Ivery is an office worker in a city of office workers. He works Mondays through Fridays, 9 to 5 , in the biology department at Queens College . He answers the telephone, registers students for classes, and makes sure that professors get their mail. Then he walks to the home he shares with his mother in Flushing .
An average man, living an average life. But he is only 26, with plans to go to graduate school. He has things to do.
Growing up, he did not stand out among the 3,300 students at John Bowne High School , save for a brief speaking role in the school’s production of ”Les Misérables.” And he didn’t stray far when he enrolled at Queens College , down the street, to become one student among some 17,000.
His only extracurricular activity was with the college’s peer advisement program, which trains students to assist others in making the sometimes-difficult adjustment to college life. Soon, he was helping to recruit other students for the program.
One day in 2002, he met another one among the 17,000: Nidha Mubdi, a young student who wanted to become a peer adviser. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants living in Briarwood, Queens , she had a riveting smile and an upbeat demeanor that belied the life story she shared with him.
In August 1998, when she was 18, Ms. Mubdi was told she had leukemia. When she was 19, she underwent a bone marrow transplant. When she was 20, her kidneys failed — the payment due from all that chemotherapy and medication — and she began dialysis >treatment.
Through bad movies and graduation parties and gentle teasing, a platonic friendship developed between this Muslim woman and this Methodist man. Mr. Ivery became accustomed to her dialysis routine. Three mornings a week, she sat for three hours in a medical office in Jackson Heights , hooked up to a machine that did the work her kidneys could not. After that, several hours of sleep. This was her life, at 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.
A year ago, Mr. Ivery had an idea, but set it aside. No, he decided. No.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Mubdi e-mailed to her friends the address for her Web site, which included a section called ”My Story — Looking For a Miracle.” It began: ”Could you be a person of selfless sacrifice & godly humanity able to donate their spare kidney?”
That idea returned to Mr. Ivery. Without telling his friend, he had his blood type checked and learned that it matched hers. Then he sent her an e-mail message that opened with a couple of goofy jokes and ended with the words: ”But if you want a kidney you can have mine.”
Ms. Mubdi did not answer right away, and has trouble articulating why. In the past, others had expressed interest in donating a kidney, but for this reason and that reason those plans fell through. ”I was taken aback,” she says.
A WEEK later, the two friends went to a fast-food place on Union Turnpike. He had a vanilla milkshake, she had some strawberry-ice concoction, and they talked about it. She was surprised that he didn’t have any questions about the process. He was surprised that she was so quiet — brought to wordlessness, it seemed, by the enormousness of what was being offered. .
That evening, the Methodist gently patted the hand of the Muslim. ”To let her know it’s all right,” Mr. Ivery says.
The two friends underwent testing to confirm the compatibility between his kidney and her body. He had to meet with his ”transplant team.” He had to have a C.T. scan. He had to be examined by a psychologist, to make sure he knew what he was doing.
Through it all, Ms. Mubdi has assured Mr. Ivery that he can still change his mind — it would be all right. Mr. Ivery has assured her that this is what he wants to do. They both worry about complications, including the possibility of rejection.
Now the time is upon them. Ms. Mubdi and Mr. Ivery are scheduled to report early Friday morning to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Upper Manhattan. But they have been warned that the transplant will be postponed if either one of them gets >sick.
That is why Mr. Ivery bundles up during these uncommonly mild autumn days. —————————————-
September 8, 2005, Thursday Late Edition – Final Section A Page 1 Column 2 Desk: National Desk Length: 1215 words
STORM AND CRISIS: STREET SCENE; Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union >Street By DAN BARRY
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7
In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering ”early bird” rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.
Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.
That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.
Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.
The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.
A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: ”Hey, how do you get to the interstate?”
Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here — not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here — is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane’s aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.
Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue.
”We Shall Survive,” it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans.
Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells — that of rancid meat — is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.
The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier’s boot print. The ”take-away” signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New Orleans’s Times-Picayune: ”Katrina Takes Aim.”
Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.’s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.
Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.
On the other side of downtown across Canal Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous and most unreal of American avenues is now little more than an empty alley with balconies.
The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone cooing ”ma chère,” of men sporting convention nametags and emitting forced guffaws — the absence of us — assaults the senses more than any smell.
Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight breeze twirls the overhead fans for no one, past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a man emerges from nothing on Royal Street. He is asked, ”Where’s St. Bernard Avenue?”
”Where’s the ice?” he asks in return, eyes narrowed in menace. ”Where’s the ice? St. Bernard’s is that way, but where’s the ice?”
In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.
At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complementary coffee table. A large woman named Phoebe Au — ”Pronounced ‘Awe,”’ she says — materializes to report that men had smashed it in with a truck. She fades into the neighborhood’s broken brick, and a thin woman named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.
”They used sledgehammers,” she said.
Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks rumble past a smoldering building, the roads are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The city parked them on the riverbank for the hurricane, after which some hoods took them for fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded them.
On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying — ”They beat me and threatened to kill me,” he says — but there are benefits to this new >world.
”You’re able to see the stars,” he says. ”It’s wonderful.”
Today, law enforcement troops began lending muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s vow to evacuate by force any residents too attached to their pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and that woman whose name sounds like Awe.
Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone’s corpse. —————————————
October 3, 2005, Monday Late Edition – Final Section A Page 19 Column 1 Desk: National Desk Length: 1554 words
CORRECTION APPENDED
STORM AND CRISIS: NEW ORLEANS; One Month Later, Flickering Lights Reveal a City That Is Far From Being Reclaimed By DAN BARRY
NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 2
Abandoned city buses on deserted streets, doors opened for the boarding of ghosts. Fast-food restaurants, darkened and reeking of rancid meat. Tainted tap water, unsafe for contact with skin. Entire neighborhoods of empty, moldy houses, waiting for that bulldozer’s first punch.
No children.
If you can imagine this. If you can imagine a helicopter that crashed weeks ago still planted across from a post office, like a piece of public art. If you can imagine officials warning that you enter many parts of this major American city at your own risk. If you can imagine all this, you can begin to imagine what it is like in New Orleans a month after the deluge.
True, those from the luckier west bank section of Algiers can hug their children and sleep in their own beds. True, discarded refrigerators now stand like upturned white coffins on the high-ground streets of Uptown and the Garden District, signaling that housecleanings have begun.
And true, some lights have returned to this city’s naughty-Disney thoroughfare, Bourbon Street, the reports of which may have led people elsewhere to sigh and think that normality, as manifested by the tossing of beads and the flashing of breasts, cannot be far behind.
But consider what those lights now reveal: more businesses closed than open; pockets of stinking garbage; gawking bands of firefighters, disaster relief workers, journalists, all from somewhere else. Traffic on the street means a United States Marshals vehicle, then a sheriff’s pick-up, then a National Guard Humvee, then a New Orleans police cruiser with one headlight out.
And the lights of Bourbon Street do not shine upon, say, the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and Library in the Lower Ninth Ward. The school’s doors gape open, mud cakes the floor, mold creeps across the portrait of the namesake. Outside, not far from a brimming sewer in which small fish dart, a volume of a youth classic lies in the muck, and it is almost too much: S.E. Hinton’s ”That Was Then, This Is Now.”
Anyone who dares to return home might be fooled at first by the illusion of quick recovery. The bus and train terminal has a bustling air, but only because it serves as a makeshift jail. Cars without telltale flood marks glide along the streets but belong to postcatastrophe cleanup companies with names like Amigos Restoration.
And some businesses operate amid the rising mounds of garbage, including the Sheraton Hotel, where the 1,000 or so guests — mostly journalists and people with the Federal Emergency Management Agency — can almost be fooled into believing that what was New Orleans, is.
Hotel valets will park your car in a garage so that the powdery mist of recovery work does not cloud your windshield. Hotel buffets on the second floor offer an option to the Salvation Army food truck outside. Hotel televisions offer HBO, once you click past the in-house commercials for the ”chocolate dipping fountain” at Harrah’s New Orleans Casino, just down the street and all boarded up.
And the rooms, especially ones on the 40th floor and above, offer a Zeus-like view of a metropolis in seeming repose. But leave the hotel womb, and you remember again that this is not urban repose, but urban shock.
A month after the hurricane, nearly two-thirds of the power is out, telephone and Internet connections remain down, and tens of millions of cubic yards of debris need to be carted away — with ”debris” the catchword for everything from tree branches to family possessions.
In once-desirable Lakeview, hard against the 17th Street Canal that famously gave way, the several feet of water that sat for weeks has finally receded, leaving behind a neighborhood’s skeleton to bake in the hot sun.
Walk past a tossed-aside car, past the dangling strips of siding that slap and groan in the warm breeze, across a silt-browned lawn that once received a lot of care, and peer through the beveled glass of someone’s front door. This is what you see: black mold several feet up the white walls and three-quarters up the carpeted stairs; thrown furniture wearing a mucky veneer; and mud on the floor that is still shiny wet. The whiff through a cracked window is of something awful.
These conditions were not bad enough, at least not yet, to earn one of the orange city stickers that are suddenly so ubiquitous, saying, ”This structure is unsafe and its use or occupancy has been prohibited by the building official.”
The other famous markings, of course, are those left by rescue-and-recovery teams on every building, every abandoned bus — even that downed helicopter, across from the Mid-City post office — to answer the question: Bodies inside, yes or no?
In Uptown, two of these markings festoon the porch at 4734 Laurel Street. One dates from early September (one body), the other from late September (no body), an inadequate account of why the house’s owner, Alcede Jackson, lay dead for nearly two weeks before men in white protective suits finally came to collect his body on Sept. 12.
The different-colored scribbles on a house nearby provide a dialogue between animal-rescue crews: dog in yard; dog given food and water; dog still here; dog >”taken.”
Of course, virtually no one is here to read these markings. A visitor can drive for miles along dusty, mosquito-infested streets and not see a soul, especially through poor neighborhoods like Bywater and the Lower Ninth Ward. A war zone is not the proper analogy; something approaching Chernobyl is.
Stop anywhere, and uneasiness takes hold. Pull into the parking lot of the Sarah T. Reed High School in New Orleans East, and park between the vandalized Ford Windstar and the vandalized Dodge pickup. That crackling beneath your feet is not autumn leaves, but hundreds and hundreds of dead perch. And those abandoned dogs racing toward you: they are not looking to be petted.
The few people moving across this deserted stage have stories to tell.
Here, leaning against an old car on Dauphine Street in Bywater: Dennis Landry, unshaven, and Donnalee Eyraud, in Winnie the Pooh sneakers, drinking in the unnatural evening quiet with whatever is in that cooler on the ground. They talk simultaneously to create a symphony of hardship: no power, cigarettes hard to come by, a days-old Times-Picayune cherished as though it were the Gospel, looters still lurking.
”I’m telling you, I’ve been packing a gun in my pocket for a week,” Mr. Landry said.
”Not me,” Ms. Eyraud said. ”I have my machete. I’m not into guns.”
And here, sitting on the ground outside a work camp in Algiers, waiting for The Man to pay him: Tyrone Brustie, just one of thousands of workers from near and far who are now cleaning out putrid food lockers, picking up fly-swarmed piles from the curbs, buzz-sawing through downed trees.
He is a Tom Joad of this disaster. A carpenter from the city, he was evacuated to Houston, hitched a ride back with a Pentecostal minister, hooked up with one of the many disaster-relief contractors and got a job collecting garbage from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. He sleeps in one of those tent cities cropping up along General Meyer Avenue in Algiers, where the men in the exhaust of their nights talk about how they better get paid.
Mr. Brustie is supposed to be paid $10 an hour, and that was why he was waiting patiently for The Man, who drives a black Humvee. Others who wanted to get paid — a few subcontractors, a truck driver, a secretary — shuffled nearby, and their muttering made sheriff’s deputies guarding the camp get out of their cruisers. There was no confrontation, though, because The Man never came.
When nighttime falls on this city under curfew, it conceals the devastation like some Mardi Gras mask. But New Orleans always lived for the night — for the food, the talk, the music. And just as there are no children, there is no music.
Except here and there on Bourbon Street. In a club on Saturday night, a crowd of 20 listened to a zydeco band called the Bonoffs sing old songs for a spectral city, with an exuberance intended to wake the dead. Their words called out to empty streets:
Talkin’ ’bout, Hey now! Hey now!
I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né.
Jock-a-mo fee na-né.
A large man in Louisiana State purple and gold raised his fist in the air and howled long and loud, as if to say: Exactly.
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