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What It’s Like Down Here
by Sarah Inman
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How does one explain what the fuck it is like to live down here? NOLAFugees.com correspondent Sarah Inman tries to explain.
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Early one morning at the sight of crime scene tape, I got on my bike to investigate. New to the Bywater, but not to New Orleans, I could count on my fingers the number of nights spent in our single shotgun. The air still held an element of hope. It was lighter, less wet than during summer’s middle month. Across the street from the Mazant Street Guest House, just two blocks from our new home in the Upper Ninth Ward, I found the action, a couple of cop cars, a truck that looked like an ambulance, and a small crowd of onlookers, mostly milling about their front porches. I made no apologies for being there; we had just moved to the neighborhood, and I wanted to know what went on. I straddled my road pony and listened.
“That’s a meat wagon, means there’s a dead body,” a man called from his porch.
“Question is, how long has it been there?” wondered another. I watched as a human body wrapped in what appeared to be a giant trash bag was moved onto a table with wheels. The person was rather large; a swollen belly topped out the gurney.
A thin woman walked towards us, and informed, “No evidence of foul play, no gunshot wounds or track marks.” Though suspicion still hung in the air, the neighbors sighed relief. This was good news. Natural causes were preferable to sudden, violent ends, at least for these onlookers and property owners. Nine months after the apocalypse, and the Upper Nine was doing all right.
 Weeks after the body’s removal, the car remained, a brown four-door Chevrolet with flies circling it. I whispered a little prayer each time I rode past the car. The air around the automobile still smelled, not sweet like rotting piles of trash, but funky like death. Someone put yellow and blue stickers that read “Jeg’s” on the car’s back window. The driver’s side tires had gone flat, and the front passenger’s side windshield was cracked. Rumor has it the person took a heart attack or stroke.
A few more blocks away, just before the Mississippi River, sat another car of interest, a white compact with five bullet holes in the windshield. The interior looked like it once caught fire. I wondered if the bullet holes came before or after the fire, before of after the car’s abandonment. Did the gunman aim for folks behind the windshield or did he just use the already abandoned car for target practice? I wondered if the bullet holes pre-dated the storm or if they were a testament to the anarchy that ensued during the apocalypse, like the bullet-riddled white limo that sat for so long near the Wal-Mart Uptown.
 In the days following our initial return to the city, I regularly road on my bicycle past that limousine; I can’t explain exactly why I did this, but my route always seemed to take me there. The vehicle’s exterior was damaged, suggesting a small crash. The limo is gone now, but it remained from September to April, there alone behind the Wal-Mart with the brick façade on a side street rarely traveled by cars, a temporary monument of sorts. Spray-painted on the limo’s side were the words “Toula Boyz.” I never heard of this gang before, but I read one journalist’s account of pulling up to the scene behind the Uptown Wal-Mart in time for the police to make him leave. Stopping at the limo, I could imagine what the Toula Boyz’s last days were like. Wild, lawless, carefree. Is it better to die with your kicks on?
 In contrast to the lone limo, the small bullet-riddled car at the end of Mazant had company, a pink pick-up truck and a big lot punctuated by piles of junk. The foul smelling, rotting garbage has more or less been removed, but piles of scrap metal, plastic and wood remain. Last weekend from the junk heap my friend found a wheel chair, a perfectly functional one, and took it as a gift for friends of his who collect such things. Yesterday, I saw a woman dressed in red fairy wings stop near the trash mound. At first I thought perhaps she too had found treasure in the garbage, but instead she adjusted a tandem three-wheeler bicycle that was strapped to the roof of her car.
 Late one night two months ago, as we were driving home, we turned at the trash heap and then passed the car where the dead body once was. In the distance we saw red lights, an ambulance. As we moved closer, we could see the emergency vehicle on our block, lights flashing. My adrenaline surged. But there were no police and only one ambulance which drove away as we pulled up. A man stood in the road, a neighbor from two doors down, who informed us that the lady next door had had an emergency. “Her water sack broke,” he said, holding his hands in front of his belly.
When I talk with folks who don’t inhabit the Dirty South, they sometimes remember to ask: “What’s it like down there these days?”
So I tell them about my neighborhood. People scavenge for treasure from the trash pile at the end of the street, the pile that never stops growing, but no one parks in the spot where the body was found. This is, after all, a community full of good people who prefer quiet, natural death.
But it’s too soon to proclaim the cycle of life complete for just last week a Ninth Ward man was shot dead in his FEMA trailer. Armored vehicles roll along the streets, fat road toads. At least they drive slowly, mindful of cyclists, and the ghetto birds circle, filling the night air with their loud chirp.
Sarah Inman is a regular correspondent for NOLAFugees.com; she now holds it down in the 9.
photos courtesy the author.
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