Life in the Fauborg Marigny neighborhood, just downriver from the French Quarter:
by Harry Shearer
I am trying to get to editing the footage I shot in Japan, act like I am working normally, but there is so much to do to just stay alive here. Writing about it is too hard, and there is no reason to be poetic or find a more literary way of saying Nothing Will Ever Be the Same. I am now in residence alone, Faun having temporarily bailed out back north until the world here calms a bit. She hopes to make another attempt to rehabit this Friday. Other than work, I do not intend to leave again. Electricity, water and sewerage now function. I climbed on the roof to reconnect some wires tangled by a broken gutter downspout, found some problems, and now have cable and internet. Supposedly the city will come back and turn gas on house-by-house. Meanwhile I cook on a propane grill outside the kitchens back door. Much like the backyard wood fires in antebellum times. Not romantic in any case. There is no mail or regular trash. All phone lines down in tangled heaps in the middle of streets. There is no gasoline at this end of town. A neighbor, needing gas to escape, siphoned all the gas from my old Trooper, but he came back by yesterday to offer to pay for it. No need. I am currently using chain saw gas gallon-by-gallon when i have to drive. There are two supermarkets now open uptown on Tchoupitoulas. About sixty blocks away. The tiny A&P in the Quarter is finally open 9-5, but is a madhouse with little food. Still I go, looking, by bicycle to save gas. The NOPD has become a horrible, rabid, festering animal. Luckily the National Guard remain amazingly even-tempered, and have been a life-saving defense against our own cops, keeping the twisted remains of the Police Department at bay. I don't know what will happen when the Guard leaves us. Like I don't know who is coming back. More than half the City is unlivable, and will never be again. I know now. I've seen it. Daily life, breathing, is eerie and disconcerting. I ate a hot meal at a soup kitchen at Washington Square around the corner last night, from a group of old-time hippies called The Rainbow Coalition", and felt myself a character walking knee-deep in Steinbeck. These folks from around the country raise their own money, use their own credit cards, and just drove in and started feeding and caring for people. They have a doctor and a midwife and a big battery-fed boombox with a great collection of .60.s NOLA R&B. They do not like FEMA. They got permission from the City to do what they are doing, but the NOPD came to roust the crowd when a brass band walked into the Square to play to the hungry people who were eating. .No permit.. Yes. .No permit.. Luckily a Humvee of Guardsmen showed up just then . the Coalition had been feeding them too . and shooed the local cops away. There are more flies than I ever experienced in the poorest parts of Mexico or India, and mosquitoes who have been feasting on the dead descend in clouds if you stop for more than a minute. i wear insect repellent from the moment i wake up until i go to bed at night.
A FEMA flier decorated my gate this morning. I opened it to find a warning to residents not to place cadavers or feces on the sidewalk for curbside collection. A bright yellow dust coats anything non-moving. You can watch it rise from the top of the drying black mud in the streets -- the remains of the poisonous floodwaters. Death pollen, everyone calls it. Corporate carpetbaggers are everywhere. They are taking carriage rides, as tourists, through the Armageddon movie set that is our neighborhood, drinking and raising hell as the mule-pulled carts clop and creak down streets full of rubble. The well-dressed passengers cheer and toast each other, while staring off the carriages at New Orleanians sorting through their possessions. They are making lots of money off our misery. The world still literally smells, sometimes in horrible five-minute streams of fetid air that cannot be avoided, and Bush is here again for photo ops. That said, we have community. Seven people and a steady stream of friends and neighbors were over here with two chain saw s and wheelbarrows last Saturday to cut and haul out the top of the ten-foot-deep pile of rubble from my patio, only to find the three huge trees at the bottom. Much bigger than we could move. A man who house-sat during the storm at our neighbors place said he was looking out their second floor window when he saw a tornado bounce into the middle of our block, snap off the three trees like they were matchsticks and drop them pointing east-west-north, all in less than a few seconds. It was a mess, but after a day and a half of labor we got all the other stuff to the curb just as a convoy of clean-up bulldozers and dump trucks approached. We gave them water and sandwiches and they worked hard on our block. So by Sunday morning at 10:30am i could walk -- with severe limits -- in my back yard. The insurance adjustor came a few hours later, and though he would not discuss the tree in the front, agreed to pay to take out two of the trees in the patio completely -- the one straight down the patio and the one from the back -- and to pay for the first ten feet -- from the root ball to the first big branches -- of other. And to get the fence back up, so the cats would be safe. From him I also discovered my policy has a large "hurricane deductible", but I'll be alright. The expressway off-ramp at Elysian Fields just twelve blocks from the house has almost three dozen boats still tied up there from when it was used as a boat ramp while the water was up. I hope that the neighborhood hardware stores may open soon, so we can get what we need without having to use gas. But I found a way to order a fridge on-line from Sears, and have it delivered. They are saying it will be here this week, but who knows. Right now there are thousand upon thousands of duct-taped refrigerators lining every street of the City, each a crisp-edged maggot-covered monument to decay. That's all i can say for now.
Read "The Perthian Brickburner" here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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