strike that

so if i come to your door
let me sleep on your floor

(I’ll give you all I have, and a little more.)

And today I woke up to Gym leaving, Gym who grew up in the ninth ward and who bartends in Kansas City and who better come back here in March to be communications director. Because he belongs in this city, and because he knows communications. For example the other night when I got angry at him, for reasons mostly having to do with us looking out for each other for one day and me remembering how nice that feeling is and being moody about its recent absence, Gym insisted we talk my miscellaneous moodiness out at four in the morning. Despite the fact that in terms of emotional days he was really All Booked Up without any of my shit at all.

And so today, first, he left. And fuck I wish he didn’t.

And I could have worked through that with a sledge hammer but today was a Day Off because we are all so exhausted. So Nathan took me and Heidi and Annika and Kristen to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park for a special exhibit of photographs from Katrina. Photographs of supermarkets with no food and people spray painting HELP on their roofs. I see new images every day, I stand in these places every day, and still I can’t wrap my head around it. Not even when a guy stands in the middle of the party and looks at me with his hand level at his chin and says right here, this high.

We had café au lait and beignets at Cafe du Monde on the Mississippi. The woman working register in the empty gift shop was here last year through the hurricane, not evacuated until three days later. She has a three year old and is 14 credits away from finishing a degree, and she doesn’t care about any of it anymore. She doesn’t like people any more. She doesn’t like anything any more. She started to cry. And I wonder how many people are leaning behind their cash registers here and in Texas and Wisconsin and Georgia and wondering what to hope for, now that they’ve lost everything they owned and their homes and their whole city, more or less, and they watched it happen with their feet in the water and thought they would probably die. And meanwhile one year ago today, the day after Katrina hit, as the water was still rising across 80% of an entire American city, President George W. Bush was golfing.

And do you get this yet? Because like I said I still don’t get it. Not even though Shannon and Chandra and I raced back to Nathan’s car after dinner and drove to the lower ninth ward in the fading light. The lower ninth ward that looks, today, like a scene in an apocalypse movie. Whole blocks of houses are gone. All the remaining houses are destroyed. Trees on houses. Houses on boats. Churches of jumbled, rotting pews and schools with scrambled lunchrooms, molding libraries. All of it broken and muddy and completely abandoned. This is street after street after street in every direction. This is one year later.

So we did what we could think of to do. We drank daiquiris and got tattoos and drove home through the night singing Tom Petty.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:58 AM