around and trying to see where j. might be. i assume he left n.o. east with his parents?
From: Fontenot
To: Cheryl
Subject: Re: how are things?
I feel the exact same way. This morning I walked out of my apartment feeling like I wanted to start punching the wall. Let me know if you get any news about J.
From: Jake and Cheryl
To: Helen
Subject: Fwd: makes me cry-photos from mid-city landmarks
Here are some photos from mid-city that someone just sent me.
Cheryl and Jake
From: Bobbie
To: Cheryl
Subject: Red Cross will give you a debit card
hey,
it is true. we went to red cross tuesday and they gave our household $965. my mom got $360 for her self. the catch…you only have 15 days to spend it!
anyway, i just read an e-mail from my friend who is stuck in new orleans and who is also a police officer. she said it really is as bad there as the national news makes it out to be. we should truly stay away until they say it is safe to return. she said people were insane. they were stealing stuff just for the sake of stealing it. they broke into blockbuster and stole dvds. oh the horror!!!!!! our house is totally completey ruined. it makes me sick.
talk to you later.
Bobbie
From: Cheryl
To: Jim
Subject: Re: news?
how long do you think house wiring can sit submerged in water before it corrodes, rots, or is otherwise unusable in yr professional estimation? that is if the foundation does not collapse?
From: Jim
To: Cheryl
Subject: Re: news?
I have no idea about the wiring. If the water is salty, I don’t know. Maybe you get some FEMA money and rewire the place completely. Put a whole new service in. That’d be best, wouldn’t it?
Came across our pictures of you and Jake on your steps yesterday. What’s your address there?
From: Cheryl
To: Helen
Subject:?
dear helen,
hope y’all are all still doing well over there. I’m wanting all my hammering back that i did at my dumb, soaked house since april (and 1998)!
Cheryl
From: Fontenot
To: Cheryl
Subject: the lucky poor
Barbara Bush: Things Working Out ‘Very Well’ for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans By E&P Staff
In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: “Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.”
Then she added: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”
From: Mom
To: Cheryl
Subject: Re: Fwd: Hurricane Katrina—Our Experiences
that just makes me so sick. It’s hard to believe, but i know it’s true. i hear only sadness.
love, mom
Chapter 4
what the fuck? still
It seemed suspicious to some of Tanio’s friends that he had refused invitations to Burning Man for well over a decade. He used to play in Berkeley-area dissonance-funk bands and frequent Barrington Hall punk “Wine Dinners.” He used to sculpt metal. He had friends with both trampolines and half-pipes in their converted-storefront living rooms. He worked at a video-game company with a friend who had a trapdoor that led to an arcade game museum under his kitchen. All this made it suspect that Tanio had never cared to see the desert art spectacle that was Burning Man. Tanio tried to explain that he liked to shower and hated being sandy. He had not been raised to show his genitals in the desert.
Nonetheless, they had finally gotten to him. A woman who used to work with KoKo the gorilla was setting everything up. Bike, tent, food, goggles. All he had to do was show up on August 30.
But Tanio was a Nola expat. His stepmother’s business had just flooded on Napoleon Avenue. The hurricane just washed away his dad’s retirement plan—smashing his fishing camp in Pass Christian and punching holes in his sailboat. With New Orleans underwater and martial law, his family was stuck off in a hotel somewhere. And his co-dog, Clotilde Robichaux, was flooded and homeless. It all made for one big Burning Man bummer.
Tanio and I had seen each other through the green part of our twenties. Some people thought it was odd that we were still friends. I preferred to think of us like one of those old, gay ex-couples who still strapped on a few sequins or chaps and bud-died around for Decadence in the Quarter every few years—especially when the other paradigm seemed to be all my friends’ bitter, incommunicado divorced parents.
“This is the guy I’m going to hang out with,” Tanio e-mailed.
Attached was a news photo of a bespectacled, twenty-seven-year-old antisocial who planned to seal himself inside a ten-by-ten Plexiglas box to observe Burning Man’s tripping art festers from a close but insulated distance.
“Can you believe this shit is going on and Tanio is hanging out with the boy in the plastic bubble?” I asked Jake.
“Yes,” Jake said. “I mean, no. I don’t know. He better figure out where his dog is going to live.”
“Clo’s mine,” I reminded him.
Clo didn’t look homeless. She looked plenty relaxed stretched across her foam bed by the fireplace. She peered out of two slits when she heard her name, but decided not to get up.
“She’s not yours if he took her and then tried to give her back. She’s his,” Jake pointed out. “Especially if we don’t have anywhere to live.”
A few years prior, Tanio had given Clo back to me, and I had accepted her on the semi-down-low. My subterfuge had gotten on Jake’s nerves. But I felt bad for Tanio. He loved Clo. His neighbor, a ghostly thin medical marijuana devotee trailing an IV pole, had confronted Tanio in his Oakland driveway one night, claiming that Clo’s barking was literally killing him. In
