Читать книгу Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around - Cheryl Wagner - Страница 11

It seemed suspicious to some of Tanio’s friends that he had refused invitations to Burning Man for well over a decade. He used to play in Berkeley-area dissonance-funk bands and frequent Barrington Hall punk “Wine Dinners.” He used to sculpt metal. He had friends with both trampolines and half-pipes in their converted-storefront living rooms. He worked at a video-game company with a friend who had a trapdoor that led to an arcade game museum under his kitchen. All this made it suspect that Tanio had never cared to see the desert art spectacle that was Burning Man. Tanio tried to explain that he liked to shower and hated being sandy. He had not been raised to show his genitals in the desert.

Nonetheless, they had finally gotten to him. A woman who used to work with KoKo the gorilla was setting everything up. Bike, tent, food, goggles. All he had to do was show up on August 30.

But Tanio was a Nola expat. His stepmother’s business had just flooded on Napoleon Avenue. The hurricane just washed away his dad’s retirement plan—smashing his fishing camp in Pass Christian and punching holes in his sailboat. With New Orleans underwater and martial law, his family was stuck off in a hotel somewhere. And his co-dog, Clotilde Robichaux, was flooded and homeless. It all made for one big Burning Man bummer.

Tanio and I had seen each other through the green part of our twenties. Some people thought it was odd that we were still friends. I preferred to think of us like one of those old, gay ex-couples who still strapped on a few sequins or chaps and bud-died around for Decadence in the Quarter every few years—especially when the other paradigm seemed to be all my friends’ bitter, incommunicado divorced parents.

“This is the guy I’m going to hang out with,” Tanio e-mailed.

Attached was a news photo of a bespectacled, twenty-seven-year-old antisocial who planned to seal himself inside a ten-by-ten Plexiglas box to observe Burning Man’s tripping art festers from a close but insulated distance.

“Can you believe this shit is going on and Tanio is hanging out with the boy in the plastic bubble?” I asked Jake.

“Yes,” Jake said. “I mean, no. I don’t know. He better figure out where his dog is going to live.”

“Clo’s mine,” I reminded him.

Clo didn’t look homeless. She looked plenty relaxed stretched across her foam bed by the fireplace. She peered out of two slits when she heard her name, but decided not to get up.

“She’s not yours if he took her and then tried to give her back. She’s his,” Jake pointed out. “Especially if we don’t have anywhere to live.”

A few years prior, Tanio had given Clo back to me, and I had accepted her on the semi-down-low. My subterfuge had gotten on Jake’s nerves. But I felt bad for Tanio. He loved Clo. His neighbor, a ghostly thin medical marijuana devotee trailing an IV pole, had confronted Tanio in his Oakland driveway one night, claiming that Clo’s barking was literally killing him. In Clo’s hour of need, I had shocked both Buster and Jake by welcoming my first dog back with greedy, open arms. Irritated, Jake warned that Clo was sent back South because she was now an ornery grandmother—one that would ultimately require intensive hospicing.

I had told Tanio there was nothing he could do to help New Orleans or his family all the way from California, but I was starting to wonder. Cavorting at Burning Man when your family and co-dog’s future was in serious question seemed sketchy.

“You know y’all could come out here if you need to,” Tanio had told me on the phone. “I can send money if you need it. I can leave you a key.”

“I know,” I said. “We really appreciate it.”

“Only I’m not sure what we’d do about Clo and Buster. In my new building they won’t let me have them.”

The next ten days hurt. All the LSU hurricane doomsday guy’s dire prognostications were coming true. Fire, floods, floods on fire. The giant ball of floating ants arrived. Our governor and mayor were on the television with eyes red from crying.

The phone kept ringing and what was coming out of it hurt my ears. Friends stuck on balconies and roofs, friends calling crying because they thought they killed their cats, a woman dead on the sidewalk on my friend’s block, a friend handed a rifle and commanded to guard kids on respirators, rumors of friend’s parent’s neighbors dangling from trees in Mississippi. No one had ever called me to say things like that, much less so many people.

We didn’t know what to do. Our friends didn’t know what to do. No one knew what to do. As days passed, it seemed the single worst idea was to make irrevocable life decisions based on the crazy TV. Television reporters held microphones up to New Orleanians who screamed things like, “These old people are needing water! Get us the hell out of here!” and the reporters, well-coiffed and hydrated, had turned back to the camera and opined, “It’s hard to say what would help this situation that has so gravely deteriorated here….” People were suffering, not speaking a foreign language.

“THEY SAID THEY NEED WATER AND TO GET OUT OF THERE,” I yelled at the TV before Jake would turn it off.

Feeling guilty, well-fed, and helpless, I camped out on the bed with my laptop and cell phone. I tried to help friends find lost people. I transferred the desperate Please-Go-Save-My-Elderly-Aunt-and-Disabled-Cousin-Stuck-on-Palmyra-Street postings of strangers from nola.com into the correct Coast Guard rescue website and then called their emergency phone number and repeated it. It seemed inconceivable that this could help, yet also inconceivable that people were posting desperate SOSs on the Web that trapped relatives had phoned to them in the first place. Jake walked back to the bedroom occasionally. “Are you still doing that?” he said. “Fuck!” he exhaled, falling face-first next to me on the bed.

Our two-night evacuation jaunt had long since turned to Jake’s worst trip home ever. Something about wiping the dogs by-now sterile feet five times a day and padding around barefoot for no reason to protect hardwood flooring only emphasized the river of water on our own street. The longer we were there, the edgier Jake got around his mother. A few days into the long-distance mayhem, into spectating our own disaster, Jake stopped shucking his shoes every time he walked in the door.

One day we were getting out of the house, driving with both dogs hanging out opposite back windows on one of those nowhere drives around Gainesville, just taking in all the orange-and-blue bunting on squat cement buildings for University of Florida’s upcoming first game of the season. Maybe I was trying some time-worn coping strategies on for size—wrapping a lot of words around the spreading wound—because I was prattling on that in the great scheme of things, in the cosmos scheme of things, how insignificant we all were, how our existence was fleeting galaxy confetti and, as such, it didn’t matter. Losses or gains, all the same. Jake looked at me like he wished I would shut up.

“You know that was everything we’ve been working for,” Jake said.

He was right. I felt it in my chest. Galaxy confetti or not, we had to trod this earthly veil—if we weren’t lucky, as two full-grown adults on someone’s mom’s couch or under a bridge. Shit.

Since Jack and Brenda had recently both sero-converted to birding, the backyard had sprouted contraptions stocked with peanut butter, carob, nuts, and granola. The view out the back patio doors was a study of bird and squirrel obesity. During visits I would sit on the sofa with a book or laptop open, and, if Clo was acting too crazy trotting from garbage can to garbage can, her leash in my hand. Jake was slumped in a soft chair near me watching some rare Florida woodpeckers gorge themselves extinct, when his mom brought up some retention pond across town for the third time that day.

“Do you think we could flood here? Maybe we should check our insurance,” she fretted.

“No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”

“The rainwater hit the edge of the patio that time,” Brenda said.

Jack frowned and shook his head.

“It did,” Brenda insisted.

“That is miles away,” he said.

Jake had settled into a look of stony misery by then, yet it seemed this flood fantasy might either crumble him completely or snap him to scary life. I reached over and squeezed his hand. I wondered if people across America were sitting watching the black water rise and seeing water stains blotting their own curtains and floors. It was either the sickest form of empathy ever or the most pure. I couldn’t tell which.

As days wore on, everyone’s short-term evacuation plans unraveled. Friends called to say they were running out of motel money but had nowhere else to go. People started sounding weird. A lawyer friend said he had gone and bought all new clothes at Wal-Mart and he was going to relax and go to northern California for a while, probably quit lawyering all together. Get a job sweeping up at a Starbucks or something. O-kaaay, I said.

“I’m going for a walk,” I told Jake.

I was taking the dogs on long rambles a few times a day to try to clear my head. Around the subdivision into a nearby school’s sandy back lot and around again we’d go, rickety Clo trotting ahead and sometimes falling to her arthritic knees. Buster and I hustled to keep up. My cell phone rang. I answered and held it a little away from my ear. The heat of people’s news was giving me an automatic headache.

“Aunt Mary’s son won’t leave Uptown and he’s too old. He doesn’t have enough water. People are acting crazy. His kids are worried sick.”

I didn’t know what to say. She did the same thing, only not in the worst place. It made me wonder about that infamous Hungarian (or was it Louisianan?) stubbornness.

“And I have some sad news. You know my cousin Dorothy we go take berries to?”

When Dorothy was a city teenager and Mom was a little settlement girl, Dorothy would come visiting from New Orleans. Mom was Dorothy’s favorite. Dorothy used to sneak Mom to the outhouse and smoke a cigarette, then threaten to stick my mom’s head down the black hole if she told. More recently, she was sick. Mom and I would go to her little house in Metairie during spring with a flat of Albany strawberries. Mom would say, “These are the sweet ones, not like they’re planting now,” and Dorothy would tear up over her oxygen mask. The ghosts of city cousin and country cousin would rise in the sickroom between us—two girls in hand-sewn cotton dresses, grappling in an outhouse over a cigarette in the forties.

“What about Dorothy? Is she okay?”

“Well, your cousin who takes care of her? He died in Houston during the evacuation. In his motel.”

“What?” I said.

“They had to put Dorothy in the ICU, and he saw on TV about the hospitals losing power and thought his mom died. He felt guilty for leaving her there. He shot himself. But Dorothy made it fine.”

I stopped walking.

“What the fuck. If anybody was doing his damn job, this wouldn’t be going on so long,” I said. “People’s minds are breaking.”

Mom was silent.

“I’m sorry I’m cursing. I can’t help it. I need to do something.”

“There’s nothing you can do. You have enough to worry about. I just thought you’d want to know. I have to go. Roberta’s coming in a minute to drop off stuff. I’m washing state trooper underwear.”

“Why are you washing state trooper underwear?” I asked, feeling a million pointless miles away.

“They need me to. Other people are going to hand out toothbrushes for the Red Cross.”

“We’re going in as soon as the water goes down. Maybe sooner.”

“How are you going to get in?” Mom said. “Just stay put where you are. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Did Harvey and them go over there with their fan boats?” I asked.

“I haven’t heard if they did or not,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I had read online that Cajun and fishermen types had heard the call and were chugging into the city with their outboard motors and fan boats to help. I pictured my father’s best friend, a Cajun alligator and turtle farmer and swamp man whom I’d always liked but, as a child, been vaguely afraid of, steaming over from Lake Maurepas down my street to rescue left-behind neighbors. It was surreal to think of my whole known universe folding up on itself like that. Like Raid Man—the bald man who lived alone with ten cans of Raid lined up near his front door for macing kids who walked too close to his porch. I pictured Raid Man stranded and lonesome on his roof, his cans of Raid bobbing down the street. Would Raid Man take the hand of Swamp Man and step into his boat?

“Just stay put,” Mom said. “I think Roberta’s here. I have to go.”

The dogs and I strolled around the corner. Near the cracked and empty racquetball court that shielded the neighborhood from the cars whizzing by, Buster peed on the grass. Not to be outdone, Clo squatted and let loose a stream on top. Across the street, an old, pale man with slicked-back gray hair and suspenders came rushing out of his house. The day before, Jake and I had walked by a house and been amazed to see a small bag of dog poop hanging in effigy from a nasty sign in the middle of a lawn. What kind of people hung dog poop in effigy? “Florida people,” Jake had said.

“We have a real problem around here with dog waste,” the old man yelled. “Real big problems.”

I took a deep breath. I looked at the square lawns lined up in a rigid row. Forever in a drought and loosening their belts only on game day, the stucco-over-cinderblock houses full of mean, mean north Florida people. I could not wait to get back home to New Orleans. The old man stepped off his curb toward us and blocked the street. An aging country bully and sadsack us—his last viable targets.

“We don’t live here and I pick hers up anyway,” I said, waving my empty white plastic bag like a flag. “She just peed.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Urination! All dog waste!”

In New Orleans, you could walk your dog for miles without getting yelled at. In New Orleans, strangers would roll down their car windows and tell you about the first basset they had and how his feet smelled like popcorn. Old men would stop their bicycles, tip their hat, and pet your dog. In New Orleans, people who knew how to live were dying and in Florida the life misers and sapsuckers of this world dragged on and on.

“How can I pick up pee?” I yelled. “Get a real problem!”

I was surprised to see the old man backing up and going into his house. Maybe I seemed unhinged. I was embarrassed. I had never before wanted to punch an old man in the face.

“I yelled at your neighbor,” I confessed to Jack when I walked in the door. “I’m very sorry, but he really deserved it.”

The edges of Jack’s white mustache sagged. He had already set up a scrubby, shade-friendly native plant habitat under the towering trees in his yard instead of clear-cutting and rolling out a neat lawn carpet. He had told his neighbors that this was because he was an entomologist, but he was probably mounting a one-man restoration of Florida’s hardwood hammock habitat. Now he had gone and introduced two bassets and New Orleanians to the mix, upsetting the delicate neighborhood ecosystem.

“Which neighbor?” he said.

“On the corner. Maybe you shouldn’t walk in that direction anymore.”

“Which corner?”

“By the highway,” I said. “The old dog poop nazi. In suspenders.”

“Okay then,” Jack said. “Well. I never liked that direction anyway.”

Sometime after the frat guys started to line their kegs up along Main Street and break out their jumbo blue-and-orange foam fingers and their perma-tanned girlfriends started to back-that-ass-up behind them, we went to stand in the Red Cross line with the other victims. We had our dogs, our laptops, one car, a weekend’s worth of clothes, a flooded house, and, being freelancers, no idea when we would have work again. We had bills due and savings I was hoping not to touch unless absolutely necessary.

I don’t know when the white envelopes started arriving, but they were worse than the Red Cross line. Family friends started giving us envelopes with money like at a Southern funeral. Someone is in big trouble, I thought, seeing the handwritten checks for $20 or $30. Something about the white envelopes made our totally-fuckedness seem more official. The first envelope Brenda pressed into my hand, I did not want to take.

Because the house was small and walls were thin and Jake was tired of seeing his mom crying, we were whispering a lot by then.

“Hey,” I whispered to Jake in bed one night, pointing to the small but growing pile of envelopes on the nightstand. “They must think we’re really bad off. We’re not that bad off.”

“How do you figure?” he asked.

It was not that I thought the whole flooded house and flooded van and dubious employment outlook of dead city thing was just a mild setback, it was that I knew other people were worse off. True, we might have to start over from scratch somewhere we didn’t want to be with next to nothing, but we had college degrees with which to hopefully quickly get emergency jobs we hated.

“We’re not dead,” I said. “We’re not on a roof or in a shelter. We have a car left. We evacuated and didn’t have to swim to the interstate and heatstroke in the sun and see firsthand the shit that is going to ruin people’s lives.”

At moments the TV and the WWL Internet radio blow-by-blow rendered our real disaster virtual and creepy, an electronic port-hole with a very real sea whipping on the other side of the glass.

What you saw out that window might rob you of something. But the glass also buffered you from it.

“We don’t have anywhere to live. We can’t stay here. We can’t go to your mom’s. We don’t have any clothes. I lost all my equipment. We’re down to one crappy car.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I feel like we should give at least some of those envelopes to someone else.”

Jake looked at me like I was crazy.

“We’re keeping them,” Jake said. “Do you have any clue what this is going to cost? What this has already cost? We’re taking everything and anything we can get.”

In the turbulent fifties and sixties in north Florida, Jake’s grandfather was a well-loved, anti-segregationist Methodist minister. One day a white envelope came in the mail addressed in shaky old cursive to Jake. “You don’t know me,” the note inside said. “But your grandfather saved my life.”

“That’s crazy. That’s crazy,” Jake said. “Are you serious? That’s crazy. I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”

“What?” I said. “What?”

Jake shushed me. “I don’t know about that, man. Well, yeah…maybe. I hope not. I don’t know. So you say. I don’t know. Be careful.”

“What?”

Jake made a gun with his hand and cocked his thumb.

Dave kept calling and talking about guns and mean dogs, which was strange. Dave used to play occasional percussion in Jake’s band and, in his own band, sang sweet falsetto Cuban songs of love. He lived a block away in Mid-City and was getting together his own Rush cover band. He was a very convincing Geddy Lee. What did he need with a gun?

He and his new wife, Marcelle, had evacuated to her parents in Baton Rouge. The television news was whipping people up and now Baton Rougers were spreading rumors that people from New Orleans were raping and looting their mall. Dave was saying he was going back to his wreckage with a gun and some mean dogs.

“No one’s raping anyone at the mall in Baton Rouge,” I said.

Unlike people whose every family member and friend lived in the greater New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf Coast area, we were not without short-term options. A music video director friend called to say he wanted, no needed, some hip Katrina refugees to accessorize his couch out in L.A. Old roommates materialized from the ether e-mailing that they could keep one or the other of us for a few weeks. But what about after a few weeks, and what about Buster and Clo? People kept saying there was no New Orleans and there wouldn’t be for at least a month until they pumped the water out and then what was left would be dregs. How could a city be dregs? It did not seem possible. I refused to believe it.

Jake and Paul kept puzzling about insurance on the phone. Paul and Helen were friends of ours in Mid-City. Paul was from Canada and Helen was a filmmaker from South Carolina I had met in the late nineties at a film festival in Charleston. She had shown a charming, handmade film about her grandfather who could do handstands and where loved people go when they die. She told me she used to live in New Orleans and was moving back and would look me up when she returned, and she did. Later Jake and Helen taught a video class together for teens. They and the kids made a stop-motion animation of squirrels that smoked cigarettes and fell from their tree.

Jake and Paul both were in bands. We were similar, but different. Paul and Helen were cheery freebirds who dressed colorfully and as they pleased. The jobs I’d had required me not to wear most of the clothes I wore the rest of the time. We were just vegetarians; they were vegans. We had chubby Buster; they had Rosie, a miniature pig who loved cookies and had swelled to a snorting, barnyard size that Buster feared. My backyard chickens-and-compost-phase lasted only a few months until my neighbors complained about the crowing. They invited their neighbors over for cotton candy parties. I usually avoided mine.

But once Paul and Helen bought a house in Mid-City, they always had an open door. My mom and I sometimes strolled over to Helen’s while Paul was at work to see what was germinating on her cluttered animation table or admire her towering sunflowers or trial lettuce patch. Strolling to Helen’s house with my mom reminded me of Saturday drives we took to the settlement when I was a kid to see what vegetables or berries or pecans relatives had ripening.

A radio show I had done work for previously called, and I did a flood story that I was surprised my fingers could still type. I knew Helen liked the show and was marooned, too, so I told her to listen. She e-mailed back.

Just now I heard your piece. How could I have forgotten on Sunday…oh yes, that hurricane has me quite scattered…you sure state my predicament. Our friends in California are trying to lure us over there to some vegan animation paradise, but I don’t want to leave the south. My mama’s heart is already nearly broke that I don’t live in Columbia and I don’t want to move way way far away from her.

Paul left this morning to drive to Baton Rouge, hoping to get into New Orleans tomorrow and see if our cats made it. Lolis Elie rescued cats from 2 or 3 houses in Mid-City yesterday and they were all ALIVE. I sure could use a hurricane mirâcle. I am absolutely dying to see it all…but I’ve got a nursing baby attached to me and I don’t want him anywhere near the city. I’ve been waiting and hoping Paul would go, and he’s finally gonna give it a try. I’m afraid he has quite an aversion and is not one to want to row around and look but I’ll see if he could have a look at your house…They say it is easy to get in, but it may be hard to get out!?

I couldn’t believe it. That was it. The final straw. Nothing against Paul, but Paul was from Canada. A naturalized Louisianan would be back in my city before I was? No way. If Paul was going, I was going.