I Ain't Scared Of No Ghosts

I got a call today from my buddy in the Guard who is down in New Orleans with his unit doing relief work. He reported in today from an industrial canal over on the Jefferson-Orleans Parish line. It is still a mess over there. He says that there are houses that still have water up to the eaves. There is no electricity. He says that it will be really interesting to see this particular area when the water finally gets pulled down.

I know that area well. My buddy Don, the one who foolishly sat for the bar exam in North Carolina last month, used to live in an apartment over there on Monticello Street just over the Jeff Parish line right next to an industrial canal. Probably the same one from which my friend was calling. Anyway, Don's apartment was infested with wharf rats the size of Volkswagens. He named them Trigger, Tank and Silver. I was over there when Trigger bought the farm. Don had bought a rat trap the size of a closet door. When it went off, it sounded like a .38 had gone off in the house. Even at that, it only stunned Trigger who struggled to escape the watery grave Don consigned him to when he flushed him down the toilet. The other two eventually succumbed to poison but not before they had ingested a hell of a lot of it-or so it seemed to me-before it started to disagree with them.

My point is, they had a problem with the rats over there even before Katrina. I shudder to think what it will be like once they get the area drained.

Still, his news today was mostly positive. Or as positive as things can be when there is six feet of standing water. The good news is that they weren't finding as many dead bodies as they were prepared to endure. The total last Tuesday or so, was 6. As of 9 am this morning, the number still stood at 6. No one seriously believes that they won't find more bodies, but the numbers are trending well, as the pollster might say.

I told my friend that they may well find bodies in that canal but that their presence there might not be attributable to Katrina. Perhaps you may not have heard but New Orleans is a hotbed of Organized Crime which is yet another tax-free generator of revenue, along with the churches, in Orleans Parish. It is easy to forget that there is so much organized crime in New Orleans especially in light of the fact that so much of the criminal activity we have been seeing lately from down there is of the disorganized variety.

But New Orleans is mobbed up to its eyeballs. Always has been. And when I was there, they used to dump their stiffs into the industrial canals. The one over by Don was one of their favorite places of casual, if not expedient, interment. My friend has been told this already and they will keep their eyes out for any corpses that are wearing Rolexs and that are sporting a bullethole between the ear.

Katrina can't be blamed for everything, after all. Fair is fair.

The other good news is that Entergy seems to be doing a bangup job of getting power back to the city. The CBD and the French Quarter have lights. The Hilton should have power by this evening. They think that with any luck the Garden District and Tulane should have juice in 10 days or so. My friend described Entergy as an army marching North bringing the lights with them. Which is pretty much the opposite of what happened to them down there during the Great Unpleasantness back in the 1860s but I digress.

My friend says that it appears that Mayor Nagin is going to throw in the towel on forcing the evacuation of the rich white folks over by Tulane in the Garden District. What the hell. They never sustained much water damage. They have water pressure now, so the Fire Department can put out any fires that occur. These guys got food, water and alcohol sufficient to last a month. Some of them have private security guarding their homes and their power will be back on in a week. What the hell. The Mayor has bigger problems than this.

Speaking of housing, the most interesting news my friend related is that some folks have fashioned temporary accommodations in a most unusual place: Mausoleums. I'm not kidding. But first, some histoire.

One of the more interesting aspects of life in Orleans Parish that immediately presented itself to the early French and Spanish settlers was the fact that buried people tended to not stay buried there. At least not for very long. You would think that this phenomenon would have given them some clue as to the larger design difficulties that the sudden reappearance of Uncle Arnaud after his funeral Mass foreshadowed. Indeed, Bienville's engineers thought he was quite nuts to have picked a spit of land 6 feet below sea level upon which to build a city. But there was money to be made and the old town was built there anyway over the reservations of the French Corps des le Ingenieurs.

So they began interring their dead above the ground in mausoleums. The practice continues to this day. And some of them are quite ornate with a square footage that would make them compatible with some outbuildings in Pleasant Valley or Chenal even. Hell, you could fit my little house here in the People's Republic of Hillcrest into some of them.

As a matter of survival tactics, you could choose worse. They are pretty much waterproof which is an attractive feature in a building in Southeast Louisiana nowadays. Many cemeteries are gated communities if security is a concern. As far as aesthetics go, they are well maintained with plush lawns and pleasant gardens. And you are pretty much guaranteed quiet neighbors.

And it beats all hell out of living in the Superdome.

So that's the latest from the Big Easy. Where heavily armed white folks insist upon the right to observe the cocktail hour from their homes on St. Charles Avenue and other people are sleeping with those who have gone on to that great Jazzfest in the sky.

You couldn't make this stuff up. You really couldn't.