30 Aug The Chocolate City Report, Part the Third

Gentle Readers,

 

I am back in my customary spot on Magazine Street in the Rue de la Course coffeehouse, amongst the tattooed, the pierced, the dreadlocked, and the tragically hip. I feel right at home. THESE are my people. I shall never sleep again. I shall never move from this spot. [Much to YHN’s dismay, the Rue de la Course closed down for renovations a few years later and never reopened on Magazine Street. Their new location is Uptown at Carrollton and Oak but I haven’t been in yet.]

 

So, after my report yesterday I hooked up with the folks back on St. Charles and went out to a classical music recital at Tulane. It was the first post-Difficulties event presented by the Friends of Music, postponed from the original starting date of the series in October of last year. The Enemies of Music are having a thing tonight but I’m going out to dinner with the Commodore instead—those EoM events tend to be a bit confrontational. The Acquaintances of Music opened their season last week but I understand it was rather a lukewarm affair.

 

Anyway, for the FoM event Dixon Hall over at the Newcomb side of the Uptown campus was packed to the rafters. The place had been under three feet of water and the flooring, the carpeting and the seats had all been replaced within the last 10 days. The president of Tulane gave a rousing speech at the beginning of the concert and one felt that it was a real event—there were a lot of people there who obviously had not seen each other in months and the primary question being asked was ‘When did you get back?’ I saw my old Tulane School of Architecture pal Steve Jacobs [Sady, Steve passed away in January of last year.  I was actually in town but unaware that he had been seriously ill. Steve’s legacy lives on at Tulane: He left his self-designed house to the School of Architecture as a home for visiting scholars.]. Steve related that his house on Freret (I think it was Freret?) a few blocks across Carrollton had not been flooded but had been badly looted. Reports vary on the extent of looting in the city, from some saying that all reports were grossly exaggerated to those (as with the Commodore) stating that the looting was extensive, Uptown as elsewhere. Hard to know exactly what to think but firsthand reports such as from Steve seem to add credence to the latter scenario.

 

The Pres of Tulane said that there was a time in September when it really seemed doubtful if the university would ever reopen. There were 84 flooded buildings on campus, students and faculty dispersed to the four winds, and no way to know what would happen in the days immediately following the deluge. He said that he did not want to be the one to preside over the final days of Tulane’s 172-year history and that proved to be strong motivation. So, huzzah to Tulane. The campus looks pretty darn good and everyone seemed very enthusiastic.

 

Since it had been a while since my last physical I made an appointment with Brobson Lutz for a general checkup. I went up to his office yesterday to be poked and prodded. He wanted to get some blood taken for the other stuff and the Uptown/Downtown medical establishment is still in a state of almost complete disarray. The closest clinic where they could draw blood and do the various tests was a joint out in Metairie—the others were in Kenner or across the lake. NOTHING in Orleans Parish at all. So, with the help of print outs from MapQuest [Keep in mind, Gentle Reader(s), the Katrina disaster, although only ten years ago, essentially took place in the pre-smart phone era. The first iPhone wasn’t released until June of 2007. The mind doth well and truly boggle.] I headed out this morning for the not-so-tender mercies of Clearview Parkway and the lakewards suboibs.

 

No problem getting there, as it turned out, but as I was parking the rental I could hear somewhere nearby a high-pitched screaming that sounded like a woman shrieking her head off. There was an apartment complex next door to the clinic and I thunked to myself that they must have a peacock in the courtyard or something. I got out and started wandering around the offices looking for the door to the clinic and the screaming persisted. The closer I got the more obvious it became that it was, in fact, a human female and not a peacock or any other manner of beast. There was a white van parked in the lot and there were several people in the van and a few more standing around it. The shrieking was emanating from the van. There was a lady in a security officer uniform standing there looking at the van and listening to the screaming, but neither she nor the other people standing around seemed in the least bit concerned. Interested, but not concerned. I walked up to the security lady and asked where the office I was looking for was and she pointed it out. I didn’t say anything about the shrieking and neither did she.

 

Everyone had told me that the blood-taking procedure only took a couple of minutes and that I’d be in and out in no time, but when I opened the door to the office there was a collection of about a dozen very strange—and I mean strange even by New Orleans standards—people sitting around the waiting room. I was rather surprised but I walked over to the window where one would typically expect to see a receptionist sitting. There was no one there but there was a sign-up sheet and a pile of medical forms to fill out specifying what tests were to be performed. I signed in and put my form on top of the pile of forms and went back into the waiting room and sat down. Across from me was sitting a black woman of indeterminate age. She was heavily built and dressed in something like a shabby old house coat or whatever those things are called. She might have been in her 20s or her 50s—it was pretty much impossible to tell—but the most striking thing about her was that she had only the odd clump of hair here and there on her haid. For the most part she was bald. She was babbling to a woman sitting on my side of the waiting room but I couldn’t make out a single word she was saying. Next to her was sitting another black woman, probably in her 30s. She had on a sort of pajama top/smock type thing and sweat pants and she was actively drooling on herself, apparently with not a bit of concern. Strangest of all was what appeared to be either a white woman or an albino black woman who was, again, of indeterminate age. She was somewhat under five feet tall and about four feet wide and TOTALLY baldheaded. She had on large opaque glasses and seemed to be more or less comatose. She bore a strong, and I mean uncanny, resemblance to Uncle Fester from the Addams Family. [All of this may be horribly politically incorrect, but this is what I saw and the way that I described it at the time. Please forgive my trespasses, Gentle Reader(s).]

 

There was one older white woman with a gravely voice who looked rather like Wallace Beery who stuck her head in the room every once in a while and made a comment or two before withdrawing to another part of the waiting room. A painfully skinny white woman with a sort of hillbilly look (i.e., no teeth) darted around the waiting room for a while and then finally ducked out the front door. The drooling woman and the patchy-bald woman got up every couple of minutes and disappeared further into the building past the empty reception window. Every time they got up the woman sitting to my side said to them ‘Weh you think you goin’?’ ‘Da batroom,’ they’d say.

 

After about a half hour of this a young white woman in a white lab coat came into the room and announced ‘The bathroom is out of order, so if you have to go you’ll have to go somewhere else.’ A while later I looked up from the magazine I had been thumbing through and noticed that large puddle of water was beginning to flood the room. There was a bad smell. The woman sitting to my side noticed it and said ‘What the hail ya’ll done in dat batroom? Who made dat smell?’ She got up and returned with the woman in the lab coat who looked into the waiting room and said ‘Oh my gawd,’ and disappeared again. She came back with a piece of paper and stuck it on the outside of the front door. She locked the door and said ‘That’s it. We’re closed.’ The drooling woman across from me got up and started walking towards the back of the building and the woman at my side said ‘Where the hail you think you goin?’ ‘Da batroom,’ the drooling woman said. ‘SIT YO ASS DOWN! The batroom broken—ya’ll stuffed all dat paper down in there!’ the woman next to me said. ‘I din broke it,’ said the drooling woman and sat back down. Two minutes later she got up again and started to walk to the back. ‘Where the hail you goin’ now?’ the woman next to me said. ‘Da batroom,’ said the drooling woman. ‘The batroom BROKEN!! What I jus tole ya? Sit yo ass DOWN!’

 

Every two or three minutes either the drooling woman or the patchy-bald woman would get up and start to walk to the back and the woman next to me would yell ‘Sit yo ass DOWN! Ya’ll broke that terlit, dammit!!’ There was a white guy who was sitting at the other end of the waiting room watching everything and after a while he couldn’t stop laughing. The woman next to me said ‘I keep telling’ them they gone make me crazy as they is. I say whatever it is they takin’ I’m gonna need some too! I’m like to go out my own mind.’ Someone banged on the front door and the woman in the lab coat came out and opened it and said ‘We’re CLOSED!’ The guy outside said ‘Not to me you’re not.’ It was the plumber so she let him in.

 

The scene continued on for an hour and a half and, fascinating though it was, I was seriously considering giving up and leaving. By that point I had been there for so long that it seemed like a waste, so I stayed. I got a bit bored with the magazine I was reading and picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan that was sitting on a table. It was from 1998. Finally, all the strange people and their minders had been bled and they got up and left. It was clinic day for some institution for the mentally challenged and it had been my particular good fortune to show up at exactly the same time. Timing is, after all, everything. It was like being inside of a Diane Arbus photograph or a Fellini film or something. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Once I began to clue in on it I really had a hard time figuring out which ones were the mentally challenged ones, which ones were looking after them, and which ones were just baffled patients like myself.

 

When my name finally got called the woman in the lab coat was very apologetic. She said ‘I keep telling those people at the group home not to bring all of em down here at once. Every time they do it something like this happens.’ I said ‘So you’re here all by yourself?’ She said ‘Yeah—my coworker went home with a headache and never came back.’ I had been there since 9 o’clock myself so I said ‘When was that?’ ‘Last week,’ she said.

 

And so it goes in Chocolate City, my friends. The fun just never stops.

 

Over & out,

DC