Fables of the Reconstruction (cont.)

I waited for my press credentials and rented a car. I made my way down to Tuscaloosa to pick up Jonah, a displaced Tulane kid I trolled from Craig’s List to take photos. The Captain left me directions and explicit instructions for entering and navigating New Orleans in the aftermath. The “directions” were intersecting lines -- crooked and in brown Crayon -- on a piece of yellow legal pad paper with bits of weed on it. I couldn’t make out the names of the streets, either and hoped that Jonah was good at deciphering drunken maps of the Quarter. The “instructions” read:

Fucking call me from Bogalusa, JHD.

Jonah said: “When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.”

I thought:  True -- if he’s talking about Mother Nature.

And then he lit a Pall Mall Red and waved his hand and continued on:

“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”

Jonah should be an actor. He’s very good at memorizing other people’s words. But when he regurgitated that one I thought: He has hit the frickin’ nail on the head.

The part on the top of my head made a nice rivulet for raindrops that never seemed to stop sliding down my face, and even if I twitched or squinted or closed my eyes, beads of water ran this way and that, tickling and itching and annoying the piss out of me. They fell furiously from the sky, skimming my hairline, my forehead and down the tip of my nose. There was no rhythm to it but a frantic drip -- slide, drip -- slide movement, like the drops were running for their lives from my face. Before I could lick them off my mouth or wipe them away from my chin with the back of my pruned hands, they trickled from my body onto the seam of the boat, into the brown body of unknown below.

Jonah was intent on quoting Hunter S. Thompson for -- I don’t know -- all intents and purposes. Well, and because he was a bright-eyed stoner kid, full of college and ideals. I brought him along because he was good at capturing moments: An open diaper -- dirty, swollen and fully-absorbed --  that floated by while we were in the motorboat. Too bad he was so drunk that he dropped his camera in the water. Bye-bye, perfect shot. The camera was an omen of our trip and our intentions: ungrounded and flimsy, but journalistic nonetheless. The diaper was an albatross around the neck of New Orleans saying, this, right here, is some shit. And a mighty pile of shit it is. No worries. There were plenty of sullied subjects to spade on our documentary, our enterprise. I thought.

We sat still and waited. The Captain turned off the motor and an iridescent slick of oil amalgamated into a floating rainbow on top of brown water -- fusty, and the smell like a cess pool. I wondered what was underneath us. Dead bodies. Alligators. The varied contents of life lived in houses that once sat on dry land. I wondered why I had come, why I thought it was necessary to be a part of this rogue crew wondering around New Orleans after the latest episode of the hit reality series, “When Nature Strikes”.

The Captain didn’t just come back to check on his house. He was a friend, a book author and Village Voice writer who relates tales about cockfighting and mullet tossing and digging into the marrow of things. He wanted me to come with, and I obliged because I was eager to suck the marrow, too. I wanted more than the meager slices of information handed to us on the thin paper plates of the national news outlets. So I floated on a motorboat through St. Bernard’s Parish, or as the locals called it: The other side of the tracks. Where they keep it real. Houses were spray painted with messages: SOS, Will Shoot, Beware of Guns and Dogs.  And I was scared and dirty and hungry and tired. The Captain said this was what it felt like to be in Vietnam, except more so with the killing right before your eyes. I didn't care.  I wanted to go home.

We went to Faubourg Marigny, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, down the river from the Quarter. A particular melting pot of international flair, bohemians and brightly colored shotgun houses, I learned it is the place where the local musicians go to hear each other play. On Frenchmen Street you might catch Jeremy Lyons listening to the Deltabilly Boys or vice versa. Marigny was the home of Jelly Roll Morton and Cafe Brasil. A little secret tourists overlooked. The locals, close-knit and proud, were only a handful now, but they were loud and proud. For the CNN cameramen, Kenny said into his microphone:

"Remember, if you crack, evac!"

That was New Orleans. Like a church was made of its people and not the building itself, so it was there. And I respected that need to preserve what you had, even if it was not much and moldy. And especially if you had to start from scratch, clawing your way to the top all the way from the bottom. You don’t give up on the things that mean the most to you.