Cabbies tell all

Due to the resounding cacophony of pleas from, well, Nemo, I would like to related our experience to and from the airport in our recent trip to New Orleans. I didn’t want to get into this in the previous blog, as I stated, so here is the addendum to said blog.

Saturday morning we took a cab from the New Orleans’ airport to Harrah’s. Our cabby was a very chatty and good humored older gentleman who was only too happy to regale us with short tales of his childhood, and his love of poetry. He even treated us to a version of Gunga Din. I asked him how he could recall this long poem he learned as a child. That had to be at least fifty years ago. He said that his uncle, who was a poet in his own right, told him that to memorize something you must picture what the words are saying and then it’s far easier to retain them. Makes sense to me. “Woids are only woids until you put a picture to ’em,” he said.

We asked him how he faired during the gigantic tragedy known as Katrina. His story was riveting:

He lived in a rental house close to the infamous ninth ward. He got a phone call in the morning from his cousin telling him that the streets were flooding and that there was a huge amount of water all over the place. He got the call while he was still in bed, high and dry. Looking around the room he realized he couldn’t see the furniture. That’s when the phone went dead. He got out of the bed and stepped into several feet of water in his bedroom. The furniture had either floated away or moved to another part of the room. He slogged over to the window to see the water in the streets and a boatload of people floating by. He said he also saw a dead dog doing the dead dog float. That was when he decided he needed to get the hell out of there.

Across the street was a school which was already mostly under water. The second floor was still visible and there was a small round window broken out which was still above the water line. He was in his night clothes. That was the least of his worries.

He told us he was a real good swimmer and that he thought it would be best to try to swim to that school window than to try to get to the roof of his own house. He opened his bedroom window and leapt into the dirty water. He swam for what seemed to be a longer time than he thought it would take him to get to his goal, but he made it. He grabbed hold of the window and pulled himself through. It was just the place he needed to be because from that point he could pull himself up to the roof of the school.

Don’t forget, this is not a young guy. He was probably near seventy when we met him so that would put him in his mid 60’s when this happened. But he made it to that roof and he said that he was rescued some five or six hours later. Wow. Five or six hours on a rooftop watching your home get flooded, bodies floating around, snakes, maybe ‘gaters, and who knows what all in that muck. But he made it and lived to tell his story. That he told it to us was even more precious and I can tell you Connie and I will never forget it, or him. Our cab ride back to the airport Monday morning was another story:

Our Monday morning return-trip cabby was a warm and gracious woman, about in her mid forties or so, who had the passion and humor needed in this crazy world just to survive, and especially to survive in New Orleans pre and post Katrina.

Our light conversation quickly turned into a passionate condemnation of not only the federal government’s response (“Good job, Brownie”) to the situation, but the city’s response. Mayer Nagen, who is so reviled by most New Orlineans that they would string him up in a minute if they could get their hands on him, bloviated in mock concern about this and that, and please send money to get this thing back up and running. He then proceeded to go on a week’s vacation in the Bahamas. When asked about it he had no idea what people were going on about. Billions were sent, billions were mis-spent, and the ninth ward is still languishing under the weight of the local bureaucracy. She said that if it wasn’t for Brad Pitt and his buddies they’d be in an even deeper hole.

Nagen and all his cronies are sitting fat and pretty. The cops, meanwhile, claim that crime is down. Our cabby informed us that it may be down in the chief’s neighborhood, but everywhere else it’s like Dodge City. The front page of that morning’s paper showed the picture of a preacher and his wife, married fifty years, who were gunned down in their home last evening. No motive. No suspects. Just some crazed soulless idiot. Cabby said that this sort of thing happens at least once a week. She said that just going down to city hall to do business was so off-putting that she gets sick to her stomach every time. “They talk to you down there like you don’t have a brain in your head.”

We talked about raising kids, and responsibility. She has a twenty nine year old son who now lives in New York and called her a while back to thank her for being so strict with him. He was, in his younger years, a head-banger and very disrespectful. She said at one point she told him “I don’t care if you’re straight, gay, or bisexual. If you have kids or you wind up in the pokey you are on your own. Period. I love you, but you’ll be on your own.” He now understands why she was like that. He does not get into trouble, she said, never been married, and he has no children. The way she told us that whole story reminded me of a revival, hands waving (all while she was driving, mind you), head shaking, voice quivering, and fingers pointing and poking the air. Man, we were in cabby church. But she meant every word she said, and I do believe her when she spoke about how corrupt the mayer and police are in that town.

When people feel that strongly about something so near and dear to them there’s usually a certain amount of truth to their story no matter how effusive the gestures or language. But who’s watching out for these folks? Nobody, that’s who. They are on their own. Period.