Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.01.2006, Side 40
Not a Standard Night at the Movies:
The Októberbíó Iceland Film Festival
Hurricane Parties and Refugees
“I’ve been volunteering all my life. I worked [Hurricane] Ivan,
I’ve been in the Navy, but I just can’t do another hurricane,”
a young chef at the most celebrated grub house in Mobile,
Picklefish, tells me. “I’ve been helping people for 14 years, but I
think I’m going to get out and go to Europe now. You just can’t
do it anymore.”
His colleague, a young woman selling beer to college
students on the way to see Jason Mraz at the local auditorium,
explains that her home town, Pascagoula, Mississippi, is com-
pletely destroyed.
“My childhood home, that’s there. But across the street
there’s nothing. It just makes you sick,” she says.
Handing off a $2 Pabst, she then admits that she has a
mixed attitude about hurricanes in general.
“This thing was horrible, but it’s hurricane culture here.
And, I mean, you really have to experience a hurricane party
once in your life. It’s amazing.”
Given the news stories, the thousands of dead, combining
hurricane and party seems unthinkable, but she explains that it’s
just something you deal with.
“What happens is you get the warnings, and a lot of people
get out. But if you can’t get out you just realise you’re stuck and
you party like it’s the end of the world.”
She sees that I’m taken aback.
“It’s really safe, if you’re up high. And it’s just local people.”
To prove her point, she waves down a number of locals, asking
them to explain how hurricane parties work.
A man who moved to Mobile for school acknowledges that
“you hear about hurricane parties, but I don’t know of many
people who take part.”
Shortly thereafter, our hostess informs us that in addition
to the dangerous behaviour of participating in hurricane parties,
she also used to deal “mostly pot and a little meth” when she
was younger. She has since become a Buddhist, she tells us.
Our host’s background notwithstanding, people are drawn into
the discussion. We consistently have half a dozen locals discuss-
ing Mobile and the hurricane.
Standing only a block away from a plaque announcing
that Nicola Marshall, who designed the Confederate flag and
uniform, lived in Mobile from 1871-1872, I ask our friend how
she felt about the realisations that New Orleans was a segre-
gated city, and that it treated blacks worse than whites during
the evacuation.
“You should know about Prichard, then,” she says. And we
are told that Mobile, like New Orleans, is extremely segregated.
Officially, Prichard is outside Mobile, but it happens to be
just against downtown Mobile. Were there a flood in Mobile,
Prichard would be the 9th Ward.
“They’re the ones who got the worst of Katrina,” the volun-
teering chef announces. “You read about the refugees they got
killing people. There are some bad people with these refugees.”
There is a local point of pride relating to Katrina, though. Fa-
mously, blues and rock great Fats Domino was barely evacuated
from New Orleans, his home in the 9th Ward of New Orleans
all but destroyed, and 18 of his 21 gold records looted, accord-
ing to the Washington Post. The man who took Fats Domino
in happened to be a Mobile native, Jamarcus Russell, a star
quarterback at LSU, and, according to a local DJ, the nephew of
Uncle Ray Ray, a legendary blues DJ of Prichard and Mobile.
As we prepare to leave Mobile, we’re told of places to look up in
New Orleans. Our bartending friend tells us that New Orleans
will be cleaned up, and that we have just barely missed a great
Halloween concert.
The local DJs are a little less optimistic. “They are rebuild-
ing,” we’re told. “It’s good to promote some tourism, but there’s
not going to be anything there for a while.”
New York Was Nothing
We arrive in New Orleans at the same time Bill Clinton and
George Bush, Sr. arrive to donate $90 million for clean-up.
New Orleans dominates the national news, in fact, as Mama
D, Leah Hodges and others from the 9th Ward are testifying
before Congress about the outrageous treatment they received
when the city’s poor blacks attempted to flee.
From the I-10W, we can access the damage easily enough.
Two and a half months after the hurricane, there are burnt out
cars, household possessions, and a sea of blue roofs—plastic
tarps put over the hundreds of roofless houses. Our colleague,
who claims to have been to Sarajevo in 1999, says New Orleans
looks worse. The comparison to a war-torn capital seems apt.
The interstate plays a peculiar role: built on high land,
it allows us too good a view of a destroyed city. There are no
traffic lights, very few functional buildings, and no cars moving
outside of the interstate, so that the city looks very much like an
accident—the kind you drive by, but that your instincts tell you
never to stop at.
Ours is the only car to turn off at the French Quarter exit.
We pass only one moving car as we drive through downtown
at 11 in the morning of December 6th. Finding parking is, of
course, easy. For a moment, we worry about theft—we have
passed four gentlemen with carts or wagons carrying masses of
TVs and seemingly expensive items. But as we lock up our car,
we see a few TVs and bottles of liquor spread around—without
homes or a functional city, carrying things, or even stealing,
seems like wasted effort. We assume, correctly, that our car will
go unmolested.
The magnitude of the destruction still hasn’t set in as we
make our way to Bourbon Street. Every house has a refrigera-
tor in front of it, most have For Sale signs. But there is also
the lingering smell of vomit and beer. We figure this might be
the smell of America’s most celebrated party street. When we
reach Bourbon Street and see the mass of tourist clothing shops
open for business and selling Katrina Shirts, or Girls Gone
Wild shirts—the two hurricanes that hit New Orleans both had
women’s names, so the name for the Girls Gone Wild series,
videos that showed Mardi Gras guests showing their breasts,
has been taken up to describe the New Orleans tragedy.
Three hours into our visit on Bourbon Street, we have seen
a sum total of 12 tourists. I finally ask someone about the odour:
it is the bacteria from the flood. There has been no partying in
the French Quarter, even though this is the neighbourhood that
best survived the hurricane.
At a local coffee shop, a woman explains to me that a flood
is even more unpleasant than it looks: “every single scrap of pa-
per in your home is destroyed,” she tells me. “Every document.
Your birth certificate, everything. Every book. Ruined.” She
is at the coffee shop trying to surf the Internet to arrange for a
birth certificate, so she can get her passport and leave.
The Gambit Weekly, a sincere weekly alternative newspa-
per from the area, is full of stories of similar struggles. While a
literary issue the we came across seemed to offer an immense
amount of hope, including an affecting quote claiming “for the
first time in my life, outsiders are pouring into New Orleans to
do something other than drink,” the week that we arrived, the
cover story, written by the former editor, was titled “And Miles
to Go” and showed the editor’s car as he drove away from his
beloved home.
The amount of damage that had been done started to sink
in. Having lived in New York in September 2001, I reverted to
the retarded logic of that era and of what Mayor Giuliani told
us to do – I set out to find a bar that needed some money. I set
out to spend things right.
Bourbon Street was loaded with bars that needed money,
and we found one that seemed like it usually held 300 or so
people on a typical day a year ago. Today, there were 20 locals
watching television.
Again, trying to be generous, I ordered the drink that the
bar most proudly advertised, pointing to the ad and waving my
money.
“You want the special hand grenade drinking glass, honey?”
“I don’t think that would be appropriate. This isn’t a party
town anymore, is it?” I said, realising how depressing my com-
ment was as it came out of my mouth.
I gave her a hefty tip, walked out with a hand grenade in a
glass, and gave up on saving the economy by pretending nothing
had happened.
An hour later, Stu, a local musician wasting his time away
at Lafitte’s Blacksmith, a legendary music house, told me: “I
visited New York. I’m from upstate originally, so I saw the
damage after the attack. I tell you, that was nothing, nothing at
all compared to this.”
Casually, resigned to his fate, he explains to me and the
bartender, the only two people in this large club, how New
Orleans will never recover.
From the face of the city: “You fly over, and people think