Despite the orders to leave, roadblocks had been set up, and nobody was being permitted to enter or leave the city. Molly's, a local bar, opened by candlelight and the rumor spread like wildfire: They have ice. If evacuated residents and proprietors had been allowed to return, to take a stand, some public order would gradually have prevailed. Yet the only advice from the city was to head for the convention center.
The city's heavy-handed tactics made me bristle. "We got too many chiefs and not enough Indians," the mayor complained. I knew what that meant: Nobody was in charge. The Homeland Security police state had collided with Caribbean inefficiency, and the result was disaster. I took action. I latched the shutters, kissed my deceased mother's rabbit-foot and cat's-tail ferns goodbye, and in five minutes had packed a bag. In a daze, I was acting out a recurring nightmare: The borders are closing, the Nazis are on their way, grab grandfather's gold watch and run.
I'd heard that hotels might be busing their guests out, and the place to head was the Monteleone hotel on Royal Street, a Quarter institution. So at 5:30 p.m. José, Claudia, Kip and I arrived trailing luggage and low expectations. But it turned out the Monteleone had gotten together with several other hotels to charter 10 buses to the Houston airport for $25,000, to do privately what the authorities should have been doing publicly. We bought a few of the remaining tickets at $45 each. The sweltering lobby was littered with fainting bodies, grandmothers fanning themselves and children seated in shadowy stairways, a scene straight out of "Hotel Rwanda." The last bus out of New Orleans was set to leave at 6:05, the Austrian hotel clerk informed me. I had my doubts.
We weren't the only locals in line. I spotted the legendary jazz musician Allen Toussaint. "Allen," I said, "where did you hear about this?" He shot me a broad grin and walked on, as if we shouldn't talk about such things. By 9:30 that evening the buses still hadn't arrived, much less left and about 500 people were milling around in front of the hotel, guarded by a hotel-hired security force of teenagers in "New Orleans Police" T-shirts with shotguns slung over their shoulders. An obscenely obese man was hauled in on a beeping forklift, and a row of passengers in wheelchairs formed at the corner. A run on the buses was expected, and we were warned that only those with tickets would be allowed to board. Anyone else would be dealt with by the kids with rifles.
Bus headlights appeared at last. A cheer went up. And then a single yellow Jefferson Parish school bus rattled up, bearing the news that the 10 chartered buses had been confiscated by the state police. We heard on the sly that this bus was offering passage to the Baton Rouge airport for $100 a seat. Allen Toussaint was the first to jump on, and after negotiating the price down a bit with the driver, who I assumed was an evacuator trying to make some extra money, we crouched on the floor and held our breath. Ours was the only vehicle sailing along a dry, unlit highway. Why, we wondered, isn't the city providing hundreds of these vehicles to carry people out by the same route? The authorities may fix the electrical grid one day, but who is going to fix the authorities?
Later a neighbor who stayed behind told me that the 10 chartered buses never did show up. "You mean you all escaped on that stolen school bus ?" she shrieked. The news, she said, was all over town. As in the Battle of New Orleans, the pirates were better organized than the soldiers, and saved our day.
We're now luxuriating in a friend's air-conditioned house in Baton Rouge, taking hot showers and sucking on ice cubes. I'm safe and dry, but however comfortable, this isn't New Orleans. The minute the lights flash back on, I'll be back home, unlatching my shutters and staring down a French Quarter street that I hope stretches as far into the future as it does into the past. As Stella says to her sister Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire:" "I wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want to get out of."
James Nolan, a poet and writer, teaches at the Loyola Writing Institute of Loyola University in New Orleans.
