It’s not hard to identify the point at which, during my second tour of press duty here, it was time to get out.
That would be when, in the course of accompanying a photographer to shoot pictures for a feature I was writing, I stood up, blacked out, pitched face forward into a tree, and lay in the grass drifting in and out of consciousness for the next couple of hours.
It was during those “in” points of my in-and-out consciousness, looking up into a profoundly beautiful blue New Orleans sky, that I thought: Maybe I need to eat more. Maybe I need a break. I wonder what my kids are doing today? I wonder if there are any job openings in the Midwest?
There I was, a body lying face up in the grass on the side of the road for several hours in a once-major metropolitan city, a sizeable gash across my forehead, one that—as I study it in a mirror—actually seems to be in the shape of the letter K, which seems a fitting lifetime reminder of what has happened here.
A little more authentic than a tattoo, no?
I was also thinking: Isn’t anyone going to come get me? Several notions came to mind.
First of all, even before Katrina (pre-K, let’s call it), a man passed out on the side of the road in New Orleans was not a uniquely alarming sight. But that’s usually a vision reserved for the tourist areas, not the shady streets of Uptown, where my meltdown occurred.
Second—and I don’t mean to be too macabre here—in the days since Katrina, a body lying anywhere on the street around here has not been a completely unusual circumstance.
You may ask: Why didn’t the photographer get me out of there? But he was the only shooter we seemed to have in the city that day and the police chief was about to resign and he had to go get the picture and so I waved him off. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
The story is important, I was thinking. Go get the story.
That was about 3:30 in the afternoon. I heard birds singing, and every now and then, I could hear the woman we had come to photograph—a Katrina holdout and survivor—cooing to her cats in the distance.
It was not altogether unpleasant, the parts where I was awake. I had some shade. But it occurred to me that this environment is no place for the overemotional and faint of heart.
If you cry when you watch Terms of Endearment, you don’t need to be here. Problem is, I even cry at the end of When Harry Met Sally, so this whole experience is Stress City.
Though people are trickling back into town and businesses are starting to light up, it’s still an impossible vista, this whole damn city, where Lakeview looks like a nuclear wasteland with automobile trunks, doors, and windows imploded from being underwater and so many things lying upside down in the street that shouldn’t be upside down.
Including reporters.
There’s a car down the street from my house that careened over a concrete retainer wall and through an iron fence and crashed into the front porch of the Cafe Luna coffee shop and I’ve actually gotten used to the sight, after all these weeks.
This little tableau is so far down on the list of priorities around here that it could be four more weeks until somebody thinks to drag that thing away.
Those are things you think about while lying on the side of the road, stuck somewhere between Armageddon and the Dawn of a New Day.
Nobody drove by. Nobody walked his dog past me. No kid rode up on a bicycle and asked, “Are you okay, mister?”
When I noticed it was starting to get dark, I got up, a little more than wobbly, and wandered to my car and drove to the Sheraton Hotel downtown where I am staying; and in the morning I wrote the story about the cat lady we were photographing Uptown by the tree that now bears an imprint of my head.
Because the story is important. We have to get the stories. This is an assignment bigger than any of us. It’s history in a hurry.
But if it’s okay with you, I think I’m gonna take a few days off.