Cottonmouth
by Sam Vargo
[ places - january 06 ]
“Wouldn’t you think that all that sun will evaporate the water in a few days?”
I looked straight ahead, watching the sun’s first streams break the long night. The hotel behind me was dark. There was no air conditioning. Hurricane Katrina came and left, but in her wake lay a human misery so intense she was with us now more than ever. I wanted to be positive but couldn’t help this handicapped kid buy into the fanatically, fantastically impossible. God could come down after this 31 August apocalypse and outdo the parting of the Red Sea; but the gambler in me made such a possibility a very, very long shot.
The hotel, a relic, was not one of Jackson’s finest lodging facilities. A week before all that water, all that wind, and primarily, all those people “crashing” Jackson, I had found purgatory. I had no business living at a motel; but then, I had no business being kicked out of the boarding house where I had previously stayed. My eviction came down to a personality difference: elderly and middle-aged men living in a boarding house with other curmudgeonly bachelors act like little boys, not adults. I was paid enough to get my own apartment. If I had, things would have turned out more smoothly - being cheap cost me a lot of money.
Hindsight is blind sight. Two days after Katrina, bright sunshine was accompanied by August, the hottest month. There was so much humidity in the air, I could feel myself swimming through it. My introspective meanderings were associated with my immediate future.
“There’s something about that city that makes you always come back,” I remember the black youth in the wheelchair saying before I left Mississippi just after sunrise on 2 September. “I was born in New Orleans. I’ve lived there all my life. I’m not all that old, but I really don’t want to live anywhere else.”
“You’ll be able to go back, in time. Some day, let’s hope,” I told him.
“I bet that sun evaporates all that water in a few days. That sun’s hot, I’m telling you. You go there every week on your courier route, so you know. There’s no place like New Orleans. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world where the sun doesn’t beat down so hard.”
The boy was pleading with me to agree with him. Funny, I never got his name then and I can’t even attempt a sloppy stab at it now. But I chose not to respond. I definitely did not want to lie. I wasn’t going to agree and make it seem like all was well. All wasn’t well. In fact, all was hell - for the millions of us who lived in close proximity to New Orleans, anyhow.
The day before Katrina, I had more or less attached myself to this boy’s three-family/nuclear family. By the time I was ready to drive to Jacksonville, Florida, I was a friend to the youth in the wheelchair. Just as importantly, he became a friend of mine. I needed someone to talk to, and he, his grandma, his aunts, his uncles, cousins and his mother thought I was okay. I helped them out a bit in their stay over in the epicenter of the Magnolia State. I got out of myself by thinking about this large group. In putting them first, I forgot to worry about me. I drove around the day after the hurricane and brought them back seven heavy, very wet, two-dollar 12-packs of brand-named soda. Some who were doing business in Jackson - namely the companies selling gasoline - were profiting from all this human misery. But it was nice knowing that where I bought the soda - at Fred’s on North State Street, right at the top of Triangle Drive - prices remained deep discounted and category-killerized to the max. Like one of the news people said during that non-stop week of media coverage, the worst times bring out the worst in some and the best in others.
It’s amazing how greedy some people can be when misfortune, heartbreak and disaster strike others. The north Jackson hotel charged flood victims hyper-inflated prices. There was nothing - no water, no lights, no air conditioning. I tried to sleep and couldn’t even breathe. The hotel gave each room a candle. I don’t know what happened to the families I was friendly with, but I can only surmise that the management was unresponsive to their plight: those who lost the most had to pay the most. Some guests complained that the hotel was charging not $100 per room, but per person. No cash, no room. The only accommodation: four walls to keep the wind and water out. On a photocopied letter from the Mississippi Better Business Bureau, the hotel owner scribbled that in one room he lodged “wall to wall people” the day Katrina was throwing trees around, tearing off roofs, slamming cars, trucks and buses around and acting like a total psycho bitch.
When I checked out, the clerk told me I could use a credit card since I’d been there the week before the storm. My account would automatically click in that I was paying for another week, since I came as a weekly and not a daily guest, she said, and when the juice came zapping back into Jackson, I’d be charged only for a day’s stay. I didn’t think of asking for a receipt or, for that matter, even a scribbled note as a substitute.
Preoccupied with putting the tires to the asphalt, I left Mississippi for Florida. A few days later, I called up my bank account on the Internet and found I had been charged just under $200 for the one-night stay. Most of the people I knew at the motel were driving around with all they owned in the back seats and trunks of cars. When I left Mississippi that day, I had to leave a lot of my belongings at the hotel and other places in Jackson. And I had to file a series of grievances through the Mississippi Attorney General’s office, the Bureau and my bank to try to get that outrageous one-week stay reduced to one night. Finally, right after New Years, Regions Bank decided that I was overcharged and credited my account.
I rewrote this around Thanksgiving, 2005. I redrafted it a few days before Christmas, too. It’s been a work in progress since the week following the hurricane. An earlier draft was up on another literary ezine in early October, but I pulled it after a week; I didn’t feel comfortable with it waving on the World Wide Web like some hideous exercise in misery. The piece seemed too forced; the writing too premature, speculative and born of resentment and fatigue. So here it is, just months after the worst natural catastrophe in United States history. My story. And parts of other stories, too.
I’m blessed. I was fortunate enough to have a church group help get me in a small efficiency apartment on Jacksonville’s West Side with my Federal Emergency Management Agency number as the gateway ticket. FEMA hasn’t paid a dime for rent disbursement to me or the company that owns this apartment complex; but they did come up with some digits thrown together that made for a bureaucratic-looking panacea of promise. I’ve cashed in my IRA to make rent. The Florida Christian Homes organization that is my landlord was benevolent enough to give me shelter, but they want to get paid. And as silly and dysfunctional as the whole FEMA mismanagement charade has played out, FEMA has knowingly and willingly dumped hundreds of hurricane victims into housing facilities in north Florida that have financial obligations; yet FEMA seems to prefer not to pay anything for sheltering them. In other locales, like Texas, FEMA is reportedly more than willing to pay expensive hotel and motel tickets for hurricane victims. FEMA officials have been stating in press releases on CNN and Fox News, meantime, that they do not want to pay for short term, motel- or hotel-style lodging.
Though I still had a job when I left Mississippi, signs jutted out from everywhere that the further one got away from the Mississippi-Louisiana Gulf Coast region, the better. An omen came on 2 September, when I drove up to High Street to get gasoline. I had passed at least a dozen closed gasoline stations. The only open stations had what appeared to be miles of cars waiting to get to the pumps; the two on High Street, not far from the Interstate exchange, had a good half mile of cars waiting in line. I decided to get gas at the Shell station: driving around looking for a short line seemed futile and would burn a lot of gas. After two or three hours, I got to the pumps. There were armed police there, four or five of them, so I asked what was going on. Violence was erupting at the handful of open gas stations. I had to buy premium gasoline at more than five bucks a gallon - almost $60 to fill up my little Nissan Sentra GXE.
Compared to troubles nearer to the coast, this was trite. Some stories were harrowing and stark reminders of how defeated this country was in the face of Killer Katrina. Ethel Freeman was found in a wheelchair outside a large convention center in New Orleans. She was a frail little woman, slumped over in a poncho, who had reportedly been dead for days. She died alone, in the midst of disaster, with desperate people all around her doing desperate things. What a way to die: confined to a wheelchair at nine years shy of being a century old.
I wonder if the architects who designed that convention center had it built to assist hurricane victims.
I wonder if Ms Freeman was given a FEMA number.
Uncertainty. Mother and child reunions in the Superdome. For some, finding loved ones among the dead. Looting for not only food, but for shoes, diamonds, appliances. A sniper shooting at a helicopter offering aid to the throng of unfortunates left in the flooded New Orleans streets. Large warehouses with flames as ominous as wild, crashing ocean waves. With no means of extinguishing these mega-infernos, all a nation could manage to do is watch the aerial view, and see the warehouses burn and burn with nothing more than a feeling of ennui and helplessness. These are some of the things we’ll remember about the first week of September, 2005.
The Mayor of New Orleans felt the heat and screamed, swore and called for a “moratorium of press conferences.” On C-Span, the caucus of black national leaders, many of whom were silenced in Congress after the Florida ballot recount, used a political sledgehammer to bludgeon top federal administrators for their dismal response to all that had become New Orleans. Their collective rhetoric was longwinded and inflamed, with scathing criticism of our national leadership’s ineptitude regarding aiding the citizens of New Orleans as the centerpiece of this roundtable diatribe.
Look at the New Orleans flood pictures: African Americans are very well represented in the huddled masses. African Americans, indeed, made up a majority of all represented in New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath. But the tragic, harrowing death of Ethel Freeman and at least, more than a thousand others (white, black and every color in between), shows not only that race played a part of this mass tragedy, but that whether this prejudice was intentional or not really isn’t the issue. This cannot happen again. Disparities of class cannot decide who will live and who will die in the next natural disaster.
The government’s reaction - federal, state and local - was beyond dismal. Until Labor Day, there was no food, water or shelter for many stranded in New Orleans. Never in modern history has there been a more glaring example of suffering humanity among American citizens. Although Mayor Nagin’s caustic critique of the slow federal response acted as the catalyst for help, why did he have to almost seem in need of anger management training to get federal aid? Where are the 40,000 relief workers who were sent to help?
But there were complaints that Nagin hadn’t done his homework. His evacuation plans were called iffy, if not actually suspect, by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and others reporting at the national level. The New Orleans daily Times Picayune reported long before the disaster that federal officials had washed their hands of any commitment to build a better levee system; there was graft, corruption and cronyism in government programs designed to protect the city from hurricane disaster.
Hundreds of New Orleans police officers were reported missing that first week of September; more than half, according to some accounts. There won’t be many teary-eyed folks wearing black NOPD caps in other American cities in homage to their heroism. But who can blame someone for jumping off a sinking ship? With levee breaks, snipers and looters or urban terrorists, New Orleans was as dangerous as a war-torn country. There was no place to put criminals. In a comical - yet bizarre and nightmarish - news photo of a policeman standing knee-deep in a flooded street with a couple of “criminals” strung together with a makeshift chain, it’s easy to see that criminal justice was hard to manage under the adverse conditions of hurricane flood waters. Unlike other tumultuous times such as 9-11, there was no heroic salvation. Firefighters and police in New Orleans will never be held up with the same near-reverence as was the case when the Twin Towers collapsed in NYC. When the saints come marching in, they won’t be wearing blue uniforms and badges. But on a human level, the police in New Orleans were hurricane victims, too. They and New Orleans emergency workers lost property and loved ones after 31 August. It’s easier to get a new job than a new life.
I remember the wreckage as I drove through small towns in southeastern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama on 31 August. This was my first experience with a hurricane. Until about four years ago, I maintained my home base above the Mason-Dixon line in Northeastern Ohio, my favorite place of all places. But back to below the radar and inside the calendar: I couldn’t reach many parts of Jackson the day after Katrina hit because of downed power lines, blocked streets and traffic tie-ups. The rural landscape of my route to Florida was littered with fallen trees, broken signs and damaged buildings. I never fathomed how big a swat a hurricane takes. This wreckage, ironically, wasn’t the main topic of conversation; most talked about the high gas prices, or their despair when they couldn’t buy any - many gas stations had none.
For the past year and a few stray months, I was a self-employed contractor for a commercial courier outfit based in Memphis, Tenn. I was on the job seven days a week, traveling more than 100 miles on a slow day and as much as 500 each Friday, my stacked day, when I delivered a baker’s dozen of cash-letters from seven or eight central Mississippi banks to an operation center in New Orleans for processing. Jackson to New Orleans is about 400 miles round trip. I did this workweek-ending route for six months. Sometimes I stayed overnight and went to the French Quarter or other places of interest. The day before Katrina hit, I was on a 210-mile run to rural hospitals - like Kings Daughters Hospital in Yazoo City and Magee General Hospital in Magee - to collect testing specimens in a medical cooler for Baptist Medical Center’s central lab on North State Street in Jackson.
The Yazoo City trip was routine. I always made good time because there wasn’t much traffic on Route 49 North into the lower part of the Delta Region. Driving down Route 49 South, however, I realized I’d made a big mistake. I shouldn’t have gone to Magee. A good 10 miles of bumper-to-bumper cars were coming up Route 49. This was the Sunday flood of evacuees from places south of Hattiesburg, like Gulfport, Biloxi, and destinations throughout southern Louisiana. I arrived at Magee General in good time; but coming back took nearly two hours longer than usual. A one-hour trip extended to nearly four hours. Up until late in my Sunday, eight-hour work-day, I hadn’t given the thought of the hurricane much attention.
What was coming our way? It had to be very big and bad.
In my first week in Florida, I landed a part-time teaching job. It was only part-time, but it was very much a job. The University of North Florida hired me several weeks into the term. It turned out to be a good class, although it was small. Whether a blessing or a curse, time will only tell: on more than a few days, the only reason I didn’t return to Mississippi was my obligation to teach this undergraduate class.
The class is over now as I redraft this in mid-December. The three women who made it to week 15 were all given As. They were instructed to write on the aftershock of Katrina. When the class was well underway, Hurricane Wilma occurred and we decided to open up the course to include Wilma and its victims in south Florida - The Spinnaker, the student newspaper, sent a reporter to the class to interview me and published a nice story on the class and my exodus from Mississippi. The prose writing course became “creative nonfiction”, though it was more along the lines of a journalism class. It was a small, informal workshop - everyone shared a lot and, perhaps most importantly, we had a good time.
When I originally wrote this essay, I was sitting behind my customized PC at an extended-care facility on Philips Highway in south Jacksonville. The air conditioning was gushing full blast like a pristine mountain stream - it was downright cold. I’m a Northerner with a good deal of Slavic blood, and I’ve finally come to the strange realization that I like cold; living in the sweltering heat of Jackson, Miss., for nearly four years was not the most conducive environment for my physical makeup.
My mouth felt dry and parched no matter how much I drank. A slang term for this discomfort is “cottonmouth.” Back in those days, a 'creature comfort' in New Orleans was a water moccasin or - in the vernacular of the Deep South - a “cottonmouth”, a very poisonous, aggressive snake indigenous to much of the United States which thrives around that neck of the Ole’ Man River where Mississippi and Louisiana embrace. It is a dull brown with hazy gray-to-black markings in blotchy stripes that keep it hidden. They like water - swampy, muddy water. They enjoy sunning themselves on rocks near the shores of rivers, creeks, lakes or swamps. This snake is a fisherman’s worst nightmare - cottonmouths sometimes drop from trees into boats, a Louisiana fisherman told me. A fisherman’s chance of evading snakebite in a small boat with little legroom is next to nil. The striking snake’s open mouth is white as cotton. Thus, the affectionate name of “cottonmouth” has been given to this hideous reptile.
I named this little ditty 'Cottonmouth' because when man meets nature in our technological age, nature usually loses but always seems to somehow hold a grudge. So when the playing field is lopsided and nature is on the up side of things, a hurricane usually isn’t enough natural phenomenon. Good old Ma Nature will inadvertently throw in a cottonmouth as an added bonus like a flashy, flashing slot machine’s “slider” jackpot in one of those fancy New Orleans riverboat gambling joints. Sometimes cottonmouth is a natural disorder, a dry mouth lasting a week or so. Other times, it comes with fangs.
Payback? Hardly. It’s just the bouncing ball of nature and the dimwitted realization that mankind has a part in this great design. It goes with that pseudo-intellectual egoistic arrogance that God didn’t create man, man created God. Secularly speaking, many tend to look at it as Mother Nature’s wrath and leave it at that. Then some blame God for it all, since Mother Nature is only some kind of analogy to the Great Design. Isn’t part of almost every religion some ecological mandate that humankind respect the earth? Haven’t we all been warned about humankind’s irresponsibility in the face of the natural order?
I didn’t have a job when I arrived in Jacksonville and I still don’t have a full-time position, though I’ve worked part-time for UNF since Week One in northern Florida. I’ll probably teach there again - if not spring 2006, later... I had to cash in investments to pay for rent, food and auto upkeep. This morning, I scheduled an interview to discuss selling investments and securities for a large corporation. This afternoon, I’m going to apply at a branch office for a security officer’s position. This, like the investment sales gig, came through initially applying on an online job board. Earlier this week, I applied for a short-order cook job at a West Side restaurant. Last week, I interviewed for a taxi driver’s job - the owner said I didn’t know the city well enough. I tried the courier thing for a while, but realized that I didn’t want to drive my car all over Florida. Two bucks a stop for more than 40 stops on a hectic weekday morning route isn’t my idea of work - it’s more like punishment. Late last week, I was offered a job as a life insurance salesman, but with the salary totally contingent on commission sales and with my desperate need for hard cash right now, I opted to pass in hopes of securing short-term monetary gain. My first week here, I applied at some newspapers. They’d rather hire a wooden salt shaker than me. I must have applied for a hundred jobs in the last three months. Bottom line: there’s a lot more jobs in Florida but there’s more competition for them, too. On 15 December, the human resource department of a school district in the Greater Jacksonville area okayed me to teach in their public school system. I’ve been getting interviews and once I’m hired, I’ll work diligently towards all required certification. This is what I want to do - it fits in well with my interests and background. It’s what I’m most qualified to do and will probably prove to be the easiest career path to walk down for right now.
FEMA notified me in October that the only program I qualified for was an SBA small business loan. I applied, and received a form in the mail that told me no loan would be given to a man who was declaring an income of only $700 a month. A spiral of insufficient funds meant my checking account became overdrawn by nearly $1,000. I’ve got it down to only a few hundred dollars now, but over the Labor Day weekend I rudely awoke to the realization that there is no branch or ATM outlet for my bank in Jacksonville. One of the main reasons I became overdrawn was that there was nowhere to deposit money - I had to travel nearly one and a half hours into southern Georgia, or an hour and twenty minutes down I-95 on Florida’s east coast to make a deposit or withdrawal.
Being overcharged over $150 by that Jackson hotel really threw off my bank balance: I anticipated that the hotel would charge me, at most, $30 for a one-night stay; instead, it charged me nearly $200 for a whole week. Regions Bank’s Mobile, Alabama, office kept calling me several times a week, reminding me of my negative balance. It’s funny - about half of the overcharge came from bank fees. And in early-January, just as I was about to file a BBB complaint against Regions Bank for price gouging and unfair business practices, I was fortunate enough to get the sympathetic ear of Ms Betty Cattrell, a banker in Regions’ Montgomery, Alabama, operative. She knocked down that big fee in no time, after viewing some documentation I sent her.
It’s tough keeping a sense of humor about this. To repeat an old song by the late, great Johnny Cash and friends: “There ain’t no good in an evil-hearted woman, and I ain’t cut out to be no Jesse James. You don’t go writing hot checks down in Mississippi and there ain’t no good chain gang.”
Like an angry ole’ Gravely tractor mows thick brush, nature’s cutting wrath is final, quick and far reaching. Initial news reports involving this tragedy were premature. At first, Katrina was estimated to have caused 10,000 deaths. In later September, after parts of the flooded areas of the city were made more accessible, the death toll was much lower than originally expected. And in late November and early December, bodies were being recovered from heavily damaged places in New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast. The death toll was, again, on the rise. On 6 December, the official death toll of Katrina was 1,053. Although there were closer to 1,100 deaths, those being killed by bullets and other means not directly related to the storm were not in this count, according to an AP report on that date. Unless they dredge the Gulf of Mexico, I don’t think they’ll ever tally the Katrina death toll. And the politics of all that flood water got more rancid. In an early September broadcast, Fox News ‘No Spin Zone’ pundit Bill O’Reilly hammered Republican National Leader Newt Gingrich on the pathetically slow game of horse shoes New Orleans had become for federal officials: “Why did it take the President 24 hours to respond to all this?” Gingrich ended the interview after telling O’Reilly that their disagreements were too marked for rational discussion. His main suggestion: federal leaders should get together and discuss why the federal government is so ineffectual when it comes to responding to things that need immediate response.
Although the President took a real lashing for being too slow to respond - some even questioned whether he cared - George W Bush is a human being, not a demigod. There’s only so much a man can do in the face of such ominous disaster. In the later weeks after Killer Katrina, Bush acted in a humble, humane manner. The President even admitted that he fell short in his actions when looking back on Katrina. Meantime, other leaders involved continued pointing fingers here, there and everywhere. Some were lambasted by comics and satirists for being hypocritical and phony.
Though I like President Bush, I fear he is not qualified to be President. His slow reaction to 9-11 and Katrina cannot be written off by saying “his intentions were good.” Others like Bush, too. Like Fox News personalities. About a week after Katrina hit, ‘No Spin’ O’Reilly showed what a petty political parakeet he can be. O’Reilly and Fox Special Correspondent Geraldo Rivera complained that the New York Times falsely reported that Rivera had pushed an emergency worker out of the way to appear on a news broadcast as a sort of Lone Ranger savior, helping carry an invalid survivor downstairs at Katrina’s “ground zero.” And so the grandstanding begins in the ‘No Spin Zone’: more than 10,000 presumed dead and billions in property lost, and overexposed “talking heads” making a big deal over nothing.
I remember sitting in a political science class in the late 70s, listening to a professor lecture about international politics. It was a two-hour block class, and once in awhile, he’d lay his wire-rimmed glasses on the podium and stray from his notes. Once, he began talking about The Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding and published in the mid-50s. In the final scene, teenage boys stranded on a deserted aisle are being flown to safety. The professor said that this was not an ending, but a precarious beginning of life in society’s jungle for the youths.
There are no happy endings in life or good fiction. That water in the Big Easy will go away by large, man-made means, if evaporation doesn’t do the trick. We saw horrible death and destruction during hurricane season 2005. We also saw triumphant tales of people who had lost everything except the only important thing: life. There were plenty of strong stories in newspapers, in magazines, and in online publications - on disaster, destruction and death. But just as many compelling tales appeared on humanitarianism, heroism and triumph. There was more than enough finger pointing here, there and everywhere; yet there were throngs of outstretched hands wanting to save, to pull others in from the wreckage...
Quo vadis?
