Searching for Destruction

A pale-skinned woman with fleshy love handles pressed a sheet of cardboard against her naked chest.  Her sign read PHOTOS OF TITS FOR $.  A short, pudgy lady entirely painted in glittery silver waddled past me as I stared.  She wore only a pair of panties; two Saints’ logos covered her nipples. Leaning out of a doorway nearby, a thinly clad black woman wore undergarments that accentuated her toned muscles and barely-hidden lady-parts.  You didn’t need a resume to find work on Bourbon Street.  

If you couldn’t get hired by a professional to sell your body, then you could expose your skills right there on the street and earn pocket change or sweaty, crumbled-up dollar bills.  The pedestrians who strolled down these sidewalks were likely to pay to satisfy their baser, bodily urges.  The famous street in New Orleans’ French Quarter is the perfect market for bizarre commodities.  

If there is a supply, no matter how vulgar, there must be a demand for it.  I saw a disheveled, dorky-looking homeless man who held up a sign that read:  “For $5 you can kick me in the ass.  For $10 you can kick me in the balls.  This is no joke.  I’m that desperate.”  I wondered how many sadistic customers support this shameful business.  I find that many people don’t have the gall to meet a homeless man’s gaze, so what kind of person would kick a man while he’s already so down on his luck?  I was both fascinated and ashamed of the man’s desperation, but I wandered about my role as a tourist in a deviant, sex-infested, morally-corrupt side of town.

When I travel, I search for views pleasing to the eye and meals that satisfy my taste buds.  I search for the places that distinguishes the city from other spots in the world.  This is a very common goal among vacationers.  We find a beautiful beach with soft sand or a cozy ski-lodge with easy access to smooth, downhill rides.  But there, too, is a perverse side of travel in which the wanderer seeks strange places stained with dark histories.

I’ve been to the battlefields of Gettysburg and a penitentiary in Philadelphia that housed Al Capone.  I visited the former on a field trip to learn more about the fight to preserve the union and to appreciate the dead whose blood stained the soil over a century ago.  But the grass I saw was green, not red, and the earth, although it may contain the skeletons of soldiers, swallowed the evidence of war. 

The prison, too, was a relic of the past.  It was decommissioned in 1970, and soon nature threatened to overtake the facility.  The wild grasses in the exercise field were cut, but the paint on the barred doors is chipped and the metal is rusted. Even though the stories inside those cells are relatively young, the layout of the prison, although a break-through at first, is mostly outdated.  This is a window into the past with a distant view of rapists, murderers, and famous gangsters, but their lack of immediacy only stirs my imagination and reminds me of black-and-white crime pictures from the Warner Brothers’ golden age. 

There is something that happens to a story when all the players are gone and the buildings grow decrepit from lack of use.  Such important events become lodged inside books in the form of bold words that grade-conscientious students highlight for answers to possible test questions.  With each successive generation, both the details and the emotions fade.  Upon discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, I was horrified, but not as much as those who witnessed the concentration camps firsthand in the 1940s. 

I remember being shocked on the morning of September 11^th while watching the Twin Towers smoking on television, and I will always remember where I was when I heard the news, as many Americans will.  Twenty years from now, 9/11 will be a history lesson studied by kids who weren’t alive during the terrorist attack.  They couldn’t possibly understand the vulnerability one felt and the slight tinge of fear when one boarded a plane for the first time after all those jets were hijacked.  There are certain moments that need to be lived to be truly understood.  The aftermath of disasters can provide insight, but time dilutes the effects.

I have never visited Ground Zero, but while I was in New Orleans I wanted see the evidence of another deadly story of my country’s past.  I wanted to see the Lower Ninth Ward where Hurricane Katrina inflicted the most damage.  At the hostel where I stayed, I met three German women and a man from Singapore, and I asked them if they wanted to see the neighborhood wrecked by the hurricane.  They all agreed, and we took a bus to the Lower Ninth Ward. 

As the facilitator of this unplanned detour, my friends followed me as though I knew what I was doing.  When we got off the bus, I wasn’t sure what to look for, or even in which direction to head.  I had recently led us to a Park Service walking tour that was cancelled, so I didn’t want to disappoint them again with an uneventful outing.  I felt a perverse desire to show them memorable destruction.  I yearned to see damaged houses and to discover stories full of death, racism, and a lack of justice by the U.S. government and President George W. Bush.  I was slightly troubled by this urge, but, after all, wasn’t this partly why I wanted to visit New Orleans? 

The sidewalks were uneven, and there were sections completely overgrown with high grasses, but that was the worst you could say about the neighborhood so far.  It seemed like any other low-income area.  I scrutinized roofs for damage and pointed desperately at sheds with crooked frames.  There was a shelter that looked like a gas station with its guts ripped out.  Underneath the awning, scraps of wood were strewn about, and I could only guess what the place was once used for. 

After we crossed a busy road, we were the only ones walking through the streets.  There were no stores or cafes nearby.  Aside from the traffic behind us, the place seemed deserted until we passed a black man cutting his grass.  Upon seeing us, he cut the engine on the mower and opened the gate to his fence and greeted us with enthusiastic fist-bumps.  In a very welcoming manner he asked if he could help us find something. 

Since I was the one who initiated the plan, I decided to be the spokesman of our little group, but I wasn’t sure how to word my request.  I didn’t want to say, “We’re searching for homes that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.”  This man lived here, and there’s a good chance he was around when the neighborhood flooded in 2005.  I didn’t want to treat a personal tragedy like a tourist attraction.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything.

“Are you all searching for the Brad Pitt homes?” he asked. 

Having recently read that Brad Pitt donated money to rebuild the neighborhood, I indicated that this was precisely what we were looking for.  I had no alternative plan, and this was the best lead I could find.  The man didn’t ask us why we were here.  He gave us directions, wished us a pleasant day, and returned to his yard work.

We followed the man’s instructions and turned into the right neighborhood when we passed a white man in the bed of a large truck designed to haul construction equipment.  As we passed him, he asked us in a southern drawl what we were doing here.  I explained that we were looking for the Brad Pitt houses. 

He pointed toward a colorful house raised above the ground and said, “They’re the goofy-looking ones.” 

I thanked him, and we carried on until he ushered us back. 

“Wait a minute,” he said.  “I was talking to you.  I want to know what you’re doing here.”

I trekked back to the man alongside Ian, who is originally from Singapore but is studying in Chicago.  We stood behind the truck as the man sat down on the bed and dangled his legs toward the ground.  The three German women halted roughly ten meters behind us. 

“Tell the girls to come over here,” he said.  He heard them conversing with each other in German.  “They speak good English?” he asked. 

“Yes,” I said, then told the girls to come over while silently trying to reassure them that no harm would come out of this.  When we entered the low-income neighborhood, I told them I was showing them the real and impoverished part of America that few foreigners see.  I’ve heard a few Europeans admit that when they came to America, they worried about being shot.  With this in mind, I tried to convey to the Germans that, yes, this man is probably undressing you with his eyes and he’s hoping that this trivial encounter will somehow lead to the bedroom but as long as the sun is still out nothing will happen.

When the Germans neared the man, he asked them all their names and what they thought of New Orleans and America in general.  The Germans said they liked them both and didn’t delve into specifics.  After the man finished questioning the Germans, I asked him what he was doing here.  He was leveling out a plot of land.  He encouraged us to return in a half hour to see the finished project and so we could talk some more.  Before we parted, he told us to be careful, and we vowed to avoid this particular route when we returned to the bus stop. 

The Brad Pitt houses are brightly colored boxes on stilts.  The structures are simple and symmetrical but massive and highly functional.  If another hurricane strikes the area again, these houses won’t float away.  Instead, the water will run underneath them.  You could even park an SUV under the house to keep it out of the rain. 

As we perused the neighborhood, a black man from across the street sat behind a table covered in T-shirts with Brad Pitt on them.  He ushered me over from across the street and asked us where we were from.  He was trying to create an open and friendly environment for visitors to learn about the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the efforts to rebuild the area.  During relief efforts, the neighborhood, largely consisting of African-Americans, developed a distrust for white people visiting.  Although this attitude wasn’t helpful, I began to understand their disdain.    

When I was in junior high, I remember listening to Jay-Z’s song “Minority Report” in which the rapper criticized George W. Bush’s slow response and accused the president of hating black people.  I had seen photographs of black families stranded on rooftops, and I heard that the Superdome was used to house locals who couldn’t evacuate the city.  In other words, only the poor were left behind.  The evidence was eye-opening and racially-charged, but there were many shadowy details de-emphasized or ignored. 

The man selling the Brad Pitt shirts pointed me toward a museum of remembrance where I read an account of someone who sought refuge in the Superdome.  Inside, the refugees roasted in the heat and spent nights in complete darkness.  They went to the bathroom all the over the place.  Dead bodies were not removed.  I once thought it was an incredible gesture that the city transformed a football stadium into a safety shelter, but I changed my opinion after learning the horrid conditions that news agencies weren’t able to show.

As the flood raged on outside, people waded through the murky water searching for food in damaged convenience stores.  A picture of a white couple was accompanied by a description of the two finding food.  A black man had the same idea, but his actions were labeled as looting. 

The police forces were given permission to shoot looters, and several black people were killed for breaking laws that should be abolished during the chaos of deadly disasters.  If my house floated away and I swam through seawater where I usually walked, I would take a loaf of bread in an abandoned gas station, and I wouldn’t think to leave the money on the counter.  What use is money or laws when everything you know is floating away?

I read survivors’ accounts of watching relatives fall into the water and drown, and they were left to grieve on a rooftop slowly sinking beneath the encroaching ocean.  The levees weren’t built properly.  Relief was slow.  White cops gunned down blacks in the name of the law they were clearly breaking.  To local authorities, this natural disaster seemed a convenient way to flush out the unwanted black neighborhood, so it was no wonder that some blacks didn’t want privileged whites poking around in their neighborhood. 

Contrary to the rumors that the area was unsafe, all the blacks I met were very welcoming and friendly, but the whites I encountered were skeptical of my presence and made me feel as though I were in danger.  As my friends and I walked back to the bus stop, a white guy driving a pick-up stopped next to us and rolled down his window. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked. 

The truck driver helped me realize why I was searching for destruction.  I was nowhere near Katrina when it struck the southern United States, and my home has never been damaged by storms.  Aside from one caved-in roof and high grasses sprouting through the cracks in the sidewalk, I saw little evidence that this area was ever ravaged by both flooding and injustice.  

The people still bore the scars, but even those were fading with each plot of land leveled and every new house constructed.  We don’t visit sites like the Lower Ninth Ward or Ground Zero or Auschwitz to reimagine the horrors that occurred there.  We visit these places to pay witness to a resilient people who have seen death on a massive scale but found a way to keep on living.          

Confederate Moonshine

On a bus from Mobile to New Orleans, I scanned the remaining open seats.  I spotted an Australian guy with whom I spoke on an earlier train and moved toward him but the man in front of me beat me to it.  I learned quickly that when an opening pops up, I must seize it immediately.  There is no time for manners on a Greyhound where comfort is concerned.  Having two seats to yourself is an extremely enviable position worth a hard fight.  Sitting next to someone with a pleasant odor is akin to a silver medal when selecting a seat-buddy. 

Slightly crestfallen, I scoped out the scant leftovers and hoped for an attractive and single woman eager to hear my life story.  At this point, I would settle for a docile man who is likely to make little noise.  I realized my chances were slim and accepted my slim picking.  A chubby black man sucking on the meat of a chicken leg offered the spot next to him.  I could hear his lips vacuuming the tiny tendons and inhaling them off the bone.  I plopped down in the seat. 

As he spoke quickly and mumbled with an Atlanta accent, I had trouble understanding him.  He was once a boxer who never got a shot at a big gig.  After taking too many blows to the head and the body, he quit and started drinking, for both business and pleasure. 

He’s an independent contractor who sells beer at football games and concerts, mostly in the South and the Midwest.  He was heading to New Orleans to attend a meeting at the Superdome where the Saints play football.  He frequently traveled back and forth to Texas to Georgia and up north to Ohio.  There’s good money to be made in his business, he said, but he works a lot, even though he dictates when he works. 

His job keeps him from seeing the woman he first referred to as his baby mama.  Later in our conversation, he confirmed that this woman is his wife, who was recovering from a severe illness in the hospital.  I thought it unwise to inquire about his wife’s maladies.  I did not know the man’s name, but he seemed very distressed.

“I hope she don’t croak,” he said, “But what can you do but keep working and supporting the family?”

Although the subject matter was gloomy, this is what I loved about sitting next to strangers, especially the revealing ones.  This man was unveiling incredibly personal information as though I were a priest onboard this Greyhound confessional.  He obviously felt the need to get this information off his chest.  I don’t think he needed anybody to listen and give him advice; he just needed to console himself by talking.  What better way to accomplish this than to unburden your thoughts to a complete stranger who is unlikely to go around circulating the news?

I didn’t press him about his wife, but I did inquire about his drinking problem.  I realized the topic is sensitive, but this man had already divulged so much personal information that I thought he wouldn’t mind if I asked him.  My family has a history of alcoholism and because of that I don’t drink, but I am always curious to see what drives a man to abuse the booze.  This objective opportunity allowed me to learn about his motivations without getting tangled in sympathy or nepotism.

Then he told me about moonshine, a highly illegal substance brewed in the backwoods of the American South.  Having recently moved to Florida, I wanted to develop a better understanding of life in the southern United States.  Despite my upbringing in the north, I am familiar with rednecks, and country music introduced me to themes such as southern hospitality and the desolate landscapes that most people fly over.  I’ve grown accustomed to the aggressive-driving, Obama-hating, slightly-racist populace, but moonshine remains an enigma worthy of folklore.  Florida Georgia Line mention the drink in some of their songs, but they don’t discuss specifics.

When I asked the man on the bus where one acquires moonshine, he said way out in Georgia country, but he was laughing, too.  He must’ve believed I was trying to score this outlawed drink, and he couldn’t picture an innocent white boy from Pittsburgh poking around in the Appalachian hills searching for back-country brewers.  I wasn’t asking for directions to his dealer; I was just curious, although if offered to see the headquarters I would not pass down a guided tour. 

I mentioned a show I saw on the Discovery Channel where mountain men brewed the concoction using bananas, and I asked him how they make moonshine. 

“That’s just for TV,” he said.  “It’s not the real process.”

The media would not show the general public how to make the real stuff because it is illegal.  You could spend five years in prison for possession of white lightning.

With a trunk full of hooch, the man was driving home from the boonies when a cop pulled him over.  A bottle had smashed in his trunk and a hundred dollars’ worth of moonshine spilled.  The police officer found the illegal booze and offered to let the man go, on one condition:  he give the moonshine to the cop, not for confiscation but for personal consumption. 

The man beside me on the bus laughed and said, “I’ll throw in a couple of dollars for you if you want, I said to him.  Just so long as he didn’t take me to jail, I didn’t care.”

His story reminded me of bootlegger's tales of peddling booze and speeding away down country lanes to avoid the police during the Prohibition.  I could imagine a weed dealer making an exchange with a customer, but buying moonshine out in the sticks still seemed a foreign concept to me.  I imagined a family of moonshine makers who passed down their trade and their hand-me-down overalls from generation to generation. 

The fact that moonshine was still being made consoled me.  I liked the idea that certain sections of the United States didn't change much.  The ruggedness of our modernized country is steadily being compartmentalized into shopping districts and cookie-cutter neighborhoods connected by non-descript highways.  It's nice to know you can still drive into areas without cell-phone reception where you can buy illegal substances from hillbillies.