Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
Covid is Katrina’s ugly stepsister, and Katrina was no doll. She was a bitch, a class A bitch. She trapped old ladies in their attics where they sweltered, then died, in the August heat. She drowned those who stayed in the Lower Ninth Ward because they didn’t have the cars, or gas, or funds to flee. You see, it was the end of the month, the 29th, the point at which most of us were just marking time until our checks came in, eating pancakes for dinner and running on empty—not that we could have filled our tanks if we’d had the funds. The gas was gone. “You can siphon mine,” one friend said to another who had seen the light and was eager to leave. He fled; she stayed, until the Coast Guard hoisted her into their copter weeks after that, without her four cats. Katrina was a bitch.
Maybe Covid is more like Katrina’s evil twin, the flip side of her malice. Katrina blew in big and bold—announced—not hiding on our doorknobs or nestling in our handshakes. She kept us from our town and homes until the mayor called us back to “look and leave,” again. She filled our homes with water from the lake when the levees collapsed, toppled our trees, then turned our blocks into vacant lots when we bulldozed those homes and moved into trailers. Covid forces us to stay at home, our couches, and photos, and closets still dry and intact, cable still connected, and mailmen still delivering our mail. We can sleep in our own beds and walk in our parks, whose trees stand upright. We can wave to our neighbors across our divides. It’s just boring and scary with no end in sight.
Covid, like Katrina, is a drunk, and she doesn’t like to drink alone. She enlists a multitude to join her at the bar (read “couch”). We all drink together, alone. Before, as evacuees, we flooded the groceries of towns that weren’t ours, holding up the checkout lines with a two-fold system of pay: Red Cross debit cards covering food, our own cards laying in the booze. In a shocking lack of empathy, the Red Cross had opted out of funding our tippling. We drank nonetheless, establishing a precedent that followed us home. From my FEMA trailer I could walk the short distance to Building One when the campus gallery hung a new show. Not everyone was there for the art. A table of wine stood just inside the door. I remember a colleague reading my mind as she saw me silently doing the math: number of bottles over size of the crowd. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “If they run out I’ve got a bottle in the car.”
Fifteen years later, “plus ca change.” Covid has ratcheted up our fear and thus our drinking with access still a problem. When I call to check on my brother, Tom, he’s got a problem. “I’m out of beer.” “Well go to the store,” I answer. “But I don’t want to get the virus,” he says. “Bring your Clorox wipes, or have it delivered.” “But they’ll bring in the pox.” This is going nowhere. “I’m out of beer,” he says.
Covid, like all of our stories, is derivative. Girl, Interrupting—again. She reiterates our classic tales of menacing pursuit, a passive version of frontal attack. Katrina hit us head-on, chased us north and inland. Covid lies in wait, like a troll under our bridge.
Both times we waited too. From our rooftops, before. From our couches, now. For our FEMA checks, our debit cards, our homeowner’s aid. Now we await our PPE, our tests and ventilators, our twelve-hundred bucks, our someday vaccine. We wait for our president to get a clue.
In short, we have time on our hands as we had before. Time to think, to ponder our state. In the wake of Katrina, we played word games, inventing the alphabet’s most dire storms: for the B storm “Brownie” (heck of a job); for the S storm, “Subsidence”; for the C storm “Corps” (of Engineers); and, most dire, the Alpha storm, “Aftermath.” When no one was counting, Katrina’s aftermath took its toll: death by felled tree, by propane explosion, by suicide, by heart attack. My colleague Charlie’s heart gave out in the post-storm clean-up phase. He was fifty-one. Another colleague cleaned out his office desk, took back his library books, drove across the street to the park, got out of the car (so as not to make a mess), and shot himself. From miles away I Googled the date: Katrina Redux, August 29th.
I’m pondering Covid word pairs now, “flattening” the “curve,” a dieter’s slogan; “social distancing,” an oxymoron. What could be less social than distance? Unless you’re as brilliant as my friend, Maria, who’s organized a mid-pandemic Happy Hour. Her neighbors bring their own chairs, their own booze, and sit in her driveway six feet apart, thus having it both ways (see “Covid is a drunk”). I’m retrofitting storm words to my new life. “In the middle of the cone” meant most likely to get walloped when NOAA did its forecasting. I’m now in the middle of the Covid cone, a part of the over-seventy crowd. I’ve become, potentially, the virus version of “old lady in the attic,” sweltering from fever, outcome grim. I’m rethinking Aftermath, how literal that word will be when after this outbreak we do the math, we tally our dead.
From that distant future, I’ll look back on my encounters with Covid and Katrina and marvel at my brush with malevolence not once but twice, those new iterations of Goneril and Regan who fittingly, it’s said, derived from a plague-lull, providing Shakespeare with time to write. All is derative. Most of all I think of Huck, the consummate social distancer, who, pursued by Aunt Sally (his own loathsome lady) lit out for the territory. Today, I channel him: “I can’t stand it. I been there before.”