I Rode My Bicycle
Then I Rode My Bicycle Again
I wrote this in the hotel in Monroeville I mention in my recounting, August 30, 2005, the day after Katrina, mainly so i could email it to friends instead of repeating the story over and over.
The day after Katrina I made it to a little hotel in Monroeville, Alabama, a hundred and fifty miles from Biloxi, making my way along back roads and around lots of downed pines. The Indian guy who I guess owned the place was watching CNN while he was checking me in, unaware that I was probably the first of many refugees he was going to see (and probably not have a room for) in the next couple weeks. I felt like I should have been dripping wet, seaweed in my hair or something. And so the story won’t build up or take a different spin, I’m getting it down once, because everybody’s going to be asking me, and if they ever think I’m not a complete idiot they can refer to this and remember that I am.
Despite dire warnings Sunday night from a good friend who works at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and how they were ordering body bags for the Coast, and despite a spirited effort from my boss Theresa that afternoon to pick me up and evacuate with her husband and kid to her mom’s house in Mobile, and despite watching the late news early Monday and noticing a decided skew of Katrina to the east, toward the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I decided to ride out the storm, mainly based on a neighbor in my apartment building telling me that during Camille water “only got up to the steps” of the apartment building I live in. That’s…”only to the steps…” For anyone who doesn’t know where I live–lived–it’s an old cement, 2-story, 8-unit building a block and a half from the beach in Biloxi, almost directly across from Beau Rivage, the big building you’ve probably been seeing on the news.
I did, in a last minute effort, move most of my precious, precious electronics into my big, walk-in closet, blew up an air mattress, laid in some cookies, a couple candles and a bottle of Glenlevit and made me a fort.
August 30, 2005, Biloxi, MS
The Day After
I went to sleep on my real bed for a couple hours and woke up around 7 a.m. to some pretty forceful wind and rain. I turned on the TV one more time to hear how I should not have been where I was, how New Orleans was doomed, and how most of the big stuff that was going to hit the Coast would be over with around noon. I unplugged my new 32” Panasonic flat screen LCD TV and put it in an elevated place of honor in my fort. I made a bowl of steel cut oats I never touched and almost by the time I decided the winds dictated manning the closet the power went out. I took a Xanax. I laid down on my mattress. After laying there about an hour the winds got even worse and the phone started ringing (my ring tone on my Palm Treo is Tubular Bells from The Exorcist). So that was good, I still had phone service and was talking back and forth to my brother Larry in Orlando and my sister Sanny and her husband Andrew in Eritrea, Africa.
Satellite View of Ground Zero
It went on and on, well past the promised relief of noon, then past 1, then past 2. I don’t know at what point or at what time there was enough pause in between gusts to crack open the door and have a look-see, but eventually there was, and I was surprised to see the crap I piled up on my bed still piled up on my bed. The blinds were blowing like crazy but it was actually dry in the bedroom itself. I imagined taking a nap on my bed when it was over. Also, at this point I decided I might actually make it through the whole thing, and took back the Lord’s Prayer I had mechanically recited earlier just in case, and became a big, bad, avowed atheist again.
I’d say around 3 p.m. there were enough breaks (and still enough bad gusts to send me skittering back to the closet) to step out into the other rooms. I had noticed in the closet that it was starting to drip water from above and indeed this was happening all over the apartment. But the other windows had held. The carpet was drenched but everything else was intact, including my beloved books. Outside though, was another story–I saw an at least five-foot-high pile of debris surrounding the building, and all down the street. Around 4 p.m. I was able to open my front door, to discover piles of styrofoam “rubble” from somewhere, and lots of glass. The front entrance and back entrance of my building had been totally blown away, supporting frames and all.
About 4:30 I went back into my closet and conked out. I woke up at 6. It was still extremely windy and reddish water was dripping all over me, and when I realized it was also dripping on my Burberry shirts I “mopped up” the ceiling, my first effort at disaster recovery. I got up and made jaunts outside my apartment building.
Trust me, what you’ve seen on the news cannot begin to convey the utter, utter destruction in Biloxi. My building stood, though almost every window in every other apartment was blown off and it was obviously there was something going on with the roof. I wandered around a bit in zombie-like trance, then went back inside and laid down on my incredibly comfortable bed, my $100 pillow and under my Ralph Lauren down comforter.
Within minutes I woke because of a shimmering light from outside and people screaming in Mexican (OK, Spanish, I know). I got up, ran out and saw a car on fire in my parking lot. I ran back in, got the one thing I would take if pressured to pick the One Thing I Would Take–my laptop–and waited for my apartment building to burst into flames, a fitting end I thought, to my retarded “survivor” story. And trust me, I didn’t care at this point. From out of nowhere a fire truck arrived and extinguished the blaze. I went back in, back to sleep and woke up to a whole new day.
