Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  There are plenty of young people caring for elderly relatives who won’t move, and many of the people we see, according to Willie, are drug dealers who have remained behind to protect their turf.

  One very old man not far from Willie’s church refuses to budge from his seat just inside his front door, which is one of those reinforced security doors with bars. Young people in the neighborhood pointed him out to us, saying he’d refused all entreaties to go. When we get there, Willie tries to tell him that the water is not subsiding and that he has to leave, for his own safety.

  “No,” says the old man. “Everything’s fine. That’s what they say on the news.”

  “What news?” Willie asks.

  The old man gets up and, taking a full minute, walks two long steps over to the dead TV set across the room.

  “This news,” he says, pointing to the gray screen. “I been watching it.”

  “Jesus,” I whisper.

  Just then Penn wades over; he’s been across the street, talking with one of the old man’s neighbors.

  “Is he coming?” Penn asks.

  “Dude,” Willie says. “He thinks his TV still works.” Sean shakes his head. Together with one of the neighbors, a burly, soft-spoken builder named Willie Richardson who is staying in the area to protect his things, it is decided that they should try to remove the old man against his will. There is no one to take care of him, and he is too weak to move more than a few feet. Unless he is taken out of here soon, he has very little chance of getting out alive. So Willie the builder rips off the old man’s barred window grate and tries to jump inside.

  The old man responds by pulling out a machete and waving it out the window.

  “You want to kill me, old man?” the builder shouts. “Come on, then, kill me!”

  “I don’t want to kill you!” cries the old man, practically in tears.

  “Come on, Grandpa,” the builder says gently, changing his tone. “Let us in, sir. We’ve got to get you out of here, do you understand? You’ve got to help us help you!”

  “I ain’t leaving!” he cries, still waving his machete out the window. “I ain’t leaving!”

  He starts crying. It is an awful scene. He won’t budge, and in the end we have to leave him behind.

  On the way back to the boat from the old man’s place I wander up the adjacent block to check on a door. I thought I’d seen an old woman disappear into it a few minutes before. When I get there I find the front gate open but the door bolted. Whoever is here has ducked inside to hide. Only a few hours into the trip, I am already familiar with this routine. Folks just flat-out hide from anyone who comes by. I am standing outside the door calling out an offer to give a ride back to shore when suddenly a powerful wind appears out of nowhere and the water kicks up all around me.

  The street turns into a wild black mist as an army helicopter, apparently having spotted me from afar, decides to swoop down to investigate. It was hard enough to jump into the filthy sludge up to my waist the first time. Now, with the helicopter hovering right overhead, my whole body is being soaked by this diseased water.

  “I’m all right!” I call out. “You can go!”

  A soldier in helmet and black goggles peers at me curiously, not offering so much as a thumbs-up sign.

  “I’m okay, really!” I shout. “I’m press! You can go!”

  No answer. He looks behind himself and seems to point me out to someone else in the chopper.

  “Listen!” I scream. “Get out of here! Fuck off!”

  Just then something lands with a loud splash right in front of me, sending even more water shooting up into my face. I look down and read

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I think.

  I pick up the package and look back up at the helicopter. He whips another package at me; this one misses me by less than a foot. Then he signals to his pilot and the chopper peels out with a whoop and a whoosh, disappearing behind the row of houses.

  I stand there in semi-amazement, drenched in black sludge and clutching my two MREs, digesting the situation. I look down the street; the old man has finally pulled his machete out of the open window. I guess he’s gone back to watching TV.

  In the end, we spend the whole day out on the water—until sundown, anyway—and bring nine or ten residents back to shore. One of our passengers is a schizophrenic whom Sean jumped in the water to save when the kick from the rotors of a hovering helicopter forced her underwater. Another passenger is a homeless man named Robert whom we found wading up to his chest in the filth-water with a huge smile on his face. He is carrying a giant pork roast wrapped in plastic that someone gave him, and once inside the boat he clutches the roast like it is a newborn baby. I notice he has a big open cut on his knee.

  “Hey, Robert,” I say. “You better get a shot, man. That knee is going to get infected.”

  “Heh, heh, it’s fine,” he says, smiling. “It’s nothing. Just got to find somewheres to cook this meat.”

  “No, seriously,” I say. “This water is diseased. It’s gonna get in that cut and you’re gonna be real sick.” He laughs and rolls his eyes. “Heh, heh. No shit,” he says. “Bet you’re serious at that. Nope, it’s fine.”

  Pastor Willie pipes in. “Hey, listen up,” he says. “Man telling you you gonna be sick. Germs are going to get in that knee. All it takes is a little cut. You hear me?”

  Robert looks up at Willie and his smile vanishes. “No shit?” he says.

  “Yeah,” Willie says. “We’re taking you to a doctor.” Robert frowns and clutches his roast. Willie looks up at me, shakes his head, and taps the black skin on the back of his own hand.

  So here we are, heading back to shore with our passengers—one an outpatient who barely knows her name, the other a derelict about five minutes off from making love to a pork roast. All of us are soaked to the gills in death-bilge and smelling, with the possible exception of Robert, as badly as we will ever smell in our lives. And what happens? When we reach dry land, the boat is stopped by someone planting a shiny black boot heel on the bow. I look up to see a tall, jowly good-ol’-boy policeman in a gleaming blue uniform. Under the circumstances, with us pulling into an ad hoc weigh station where everybody coming in and out of boats is filth covered, a clean uniform is already a bit of an outrage. Then he opens his mouth.

  “I’d like to question some of these people, if you don’t mind,” he says.

  I look up at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Some of these people you’re bringing in—let’s just say we know them pretty well,” he says. “You know what I mean?”

  “You mean these particular people?” I point at our two spaceshot passengers. Robert is rocking back and forth with his roast.

  “No, not these particular ones,” he says. “The general ones.”

  “Well, can we let these particular ones go?” I ask.

  We argue for a moment. Finally he lets our two clearly infirm passengers waddle past.

  Minutes later a different squad of police appears. It is a unit of five, dressed in khaki-colored paramilitary uniforms. I don’t quite get what they are asking, but it has something to do with needing our boat to help catch car thieves, who are tearing through a hospital parking garage nearby. A humanitarian disaster is still going on less than a mile and a half away—and these guys have the balls to stand around in clean unis and try to drum up posses to stop property crime. New Orleans, I conclude, is one fucked-up city.

  Many days later, after I’d followed evacuees back to Houston, I find people from this very neighborhood who tell very similar stories. Ollie Hull, a mother who was evacuated to the Astrodome, says she and her family had to make their own way out of her home on Claiborne and Martin Luther King Boulevard, as the police were too busy chasing thieves to help. “They was looking for looters,” she says. “We dying and they looking fo
r looters. We had to save ourselves, our children and babies.”

  “They were chickenshit motherfuckers,” chimes in Pat Downs, an older woman who was one of the few white people in the Astrodome. “They were aiming guns at women and children.”

  Like many of the controversies borne by Katrina, this is an issue colored significantly by race. “We in the black community felt like the guardsmen were there to protect the property,” says Phyllis Johnson, who spent most of the first week after the storm in the Superdome. “Nobody was helping us. They had empty trucks leaving the city while we were stuck in the Superdome. They were there to keep us from running loose in the streets of New Orleans.”

  When Johnson tried to escape—fleeing the disaster area on foot, in a stolen bottled-water truck and in a runaway city ­transit bus that had been commandeered by evacuees—the cops tried to prevent her from leaving. “In the water truck we made it as far as Westwego before we were stopped,” she says. “The cops took us out of the truck and threw us facedown in the wet grass with the ants—including the children and the old people. Then they just took the truck and left us to fend for ourselves. Empty car after empty car drove by, and no one offered to help.”

  She pauses. “All you people who came down here and partied with us, who came to Bourbon Street to hang out with us, who got drunk with us, now you acting like you don’t want to know us. Now, all of the sudden, you scared of us.”

  The flip side of that story, of course, is that New Orleans looters, once the lights went out, tried to steal everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. While Phyllis Johnson was moving from the inside of the Superdome to the ramp outside to escape the smell, forty-six-year-old Tim Johnson—one of just a few hundred whites who ended up in the stadium—was searching out safe places to sleep at night. I find Tim just a few dozen yards away from Phyllis at the Astrodome in Houston, sitting with a shell-shocked look on his face in a park outside the ­facility. He looks like a man who’s just emerged from two weeks of electrical torture.

  “They were animals,” he whispers. His eyes darted back and forth as black residents of the Convention Center passed. “The animals came out. They broke into everything. They took what they want . . . I saw a guy getting his ass killed . . . and nobody would do nothing.”

  Stories I hear from both black and white evacuees who had been in the Superdome and the Convention Center suggest that both places turned into Lord of the Flies–like hellholes for days. I hear tales of gangsters jousting with hot-wired forklifts, New Orleans Saints merchandise stores turned into brothels, ten-year-old boys selling cases of Absolut on the Superdome floor. When I see the Convention Center a week after the storm, it looks like Genghis Khan’s army had put up there for a year. Piles of garbage six feet high clutter the outside; the inside is ruined to the very limit of human aggression, with every conceivable form of debris, from bloodstained curtains to putrid sides of beef to urine-soaked Coke machines to feces smeared on the walls.

  Even now, days after the Superdome has been evacuated, the authorities seem unable to cope with the scale of the disaster. Earlier that morning, before we went out on the boats, the New Orleans police chief, W. J. Riley, announced that two officers had committed suicide. Moreover, he announced that an unspecified number of police had resigned. We found only one place in the city where there were a lot of cops: police headquarters. Under an awning at the Harrah’s casino downtown, the police had formed a makeshift command center. We’d been there in the morning and found about 250 officers standing around, looking a lot happier than the ones we’d seen out in the city. The very moment we’d arrived, news chimed in over the police radios that cops had shot and killed five looters at a bridge somewhere outside town. The news was met with a high cheer (“That’s right, motherfuckers!” was one cry), and the whole crowd was buzzed, like a bar after midnight.

  While Sean and Doug plunged into the crowd to talk to someone about a boat, I wandered over to the food table and made the mistake of wrapping a few Krispy Kremes in a napkin.

  “Hey,” shouted a SWAT officer in a plaintive voice. “Don’t take them all!”

  “Sorry,” I said, putting one of the doughnuts back. He frowned and went back to chatting with his crew.

  The police in this city were on an island, fighting for their own survival. Saving people was never going to be their ­business.

  At the end of the day, we find ourselves back at the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles. All of the people that we and the other volunteers have pulled out by boat are now huddled under a store awning—about fifty people total, the work of a half dozen boats. But the military and the police are not particularly interested in helping or processing anyone rescued by private citizens, so the evacuees sit there under the sun—as buses and ambulances whiz past—waiting for the volunteers to take them to hospitals or shelters.

  Not that there isn’t plenty of available manpower. By the end of the day, word has gotten around that Sean Penn was out in a rescue boat, and a large contingent of the international press is waiting for us when we get back from our last run. One scene I’ll never forget: a still photographer stepping over a sick one-legged black man lying on the ground in order to take a picture of Sean carrying a rifle. There have to be sixty or seventy reporters here, and of those only a reporter from the New York Daily News and a photographer from the Village Voice so much as offer to give any of the evacuees a ride to the hospital.

  By the next morning—a full week after the storm—the authorities have finally taken control of the rescue operations. Sean and Doug decide to leave, but I stay on to spend a few more days with Willie, along with a pair of young New York newspaper reporters that he’s picked up along the way. Willie has made arrangements with a friend of his, an air-conditioning salesman from the suburbs named John Ratcliffe, to take a boat out into the Ninth Ward—the worst neighborhood in the city. Ratcliffe has access to a much bigger boat than the one we’d been on the day before, a serious lake-fishing vessel, and he was to meet us early in the day and have Willie take us to the flooded areas.

  But now that the state is in charge, they seem determined to stick it to the civilian rescuers. We are on our way to the East district when a Coast Guard roadblock stops John from driving through with his boat trailer. A young Coastie of about twenty, with the face of a constipated bureaucrat, leans into the driver’s window of the truck, the whole time keeping his finger on the trigger of his weapon, which is pointed down at the ground.

  “No, we don’t need your help,” he snaps. “We’ve got things under control.”

  Willie leans over and explains that he’s been out running rescue boats for more than a week. The Coastie frowns and points at John’s boat.

  “These helicopters would flip that little thing in a second,” he says. This, of course, is untrue; I’d seen Coast Guard helicopters flying over much smaller boats the previous day, to no effect. I point that out to the kid, explaining that we’d been under helicopters all day the day before.

  “Yeah, those aviation guys are slammed,” he says—as if the aviation guys, not the people still stuck out there, are the ones having the rough day.

  Finally he orders us to turn back, explaining that the rescue is a “coordinated operation” and that no help is necessary. We are told the same thing in the nearby neighborhood of Gentilly, where Coast Guard officers repeat to us that they have the area under control. Fortunately, Willie and John ignore them and simply find another launch point.

  When we head into the neighborhood—a middle-class area of one-story single-family homes with little yards set off by chain-link fences—we find many of the same things we’d seen the day before. The authorities have clearly decided not to pick up the bodies. At one intersection, a man who had handcuffed himself to the top of a sign, apparently with the aim of not sinking below the water, hangs upside down, his eyes popping out of his head like baseballs. And once ag
ain there are plenty of residents who don’t want to leave their homes—only in this case the reasons are different.

  “I’d rather be a refugee here than sit with my thumb in my ass in Houston or wherever,” says Steve Smith, a fifty-four-year-old white man who is sitting in an abandoned bar, drinking homemade whiskey. Like most of the people we come across, Steve has heard horror stories of people being evacuated to distant cities against their will, or of families being separated, or of the government otherwise fucking things up.

  This particular neighborhood of Gentilly has been fairly heavily patrolled by Coast Guard boats for four or five days now—compared to the black neighborhood we’d been in yesterday, where the military had yet to appear in force. Here, the modus operandi is as follows: Coasties come out in little launches and offer to take people out. If the residents say yes, they are airlifted to the airport, where they join the cattle-car evacuee circus. In theory, evacuees can go wherever they want, but in practice . . . no one wants to take that chance.

  John and Willie manage to persuade four people to leave Gentilly, promising to personally drive them to meet relatives in other parts of the state. “If you’re going to go out and rescue people here, you have to have someone local to talk to them,” John says. “It’s just common sense.” As we return to shore, sailors on the Coast Guard boats, all empty of passengers, glare angrily at us.

  A lot of John and Willie’s success has to do with attitude. Everywhere you go in New Orleans, the military imports strike the same pose. There is an unmistakable air of You Fucked Up Badly Enough to Require Our Presence, So Now You’re Going to Shut the Fuck Up and Let Us Do Our Job. At one point, Willie and I try to drive out of the city; we are stopped by a young National Guardsman. The guardsman has been told to reroute everyone whose home address on their driver’s license includes a certain ZIP code. As it happens, Willie’s license features that ZIP code, although he no longer lives there.