Life in the Post-Collapse Zone

Early in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, we see construction foreman Geremio di Alba warning his boss about shoddy safety standards and building materials. Sure enough, the building collapses, and Geremio and his crew of workmen are trapped in gruesome deaths. Geremio’s is particularly so: his genitals convulse due to “the cold steel rod on which they were impaled,”1 and he attempts to gnaw his way to air through wood and hardening concrete until “his teeth snap[…] off to the gums in the uneven conflict.”2

Ah, nothing like a little literature to let you know how bad things could be. “You call that a collapse? The place was abandoned, for Chrissakes! Now, I’ll tell you about a collapse….”

I am, however, truly thankful that the collapse of the house next door was merely alarming, as opposed to tragic, and that we don’t have a little Paul di Alba running around the neighborhood telling people of his bereft and poverty-stricken family's plight: “Look…the newspaper here…see…papa’s job—la jobe-a collapsed; the building—fell…ca—caduta…!”3

The yellow tape is gone. It didn’t bother me all that much; on a certain level, I had a glimmering memory of those pseudo-halcyon evenings when my friends and I would escape from our high-school dormitories and seek out abandoned buildings as sanctuaries in which we could do…uh...our homework…um, never mind.

Anyway, all that’s left now are some bricks, an empty space where the wall next to our patio used to be, a broken and sloppily reassembled gate, and dust, lots of dust.

I would really like to have an intact fence again. I was developing into something of a fussy gardener. I need privacy for that. Plus, the workers told my roommate that they were putting rat poison out to handle any vermin fleeing the destruction. Hearing something like that just makes you want to put up walls.


(1) Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete. New York, Penguin: 1993. Originally published 1937. Page 16.
(2) Page 17.
(3) Page 24.

Bricks, Get Your Freshly Fallen Bricks Right Here

I was drafting another post about music and memory and somesuch, but I will have to save it for another night. Why? Oh, no big deal. The wall of the abandoned house next door fell down, filling the space between it and my house with bricks that burst open the front gates and spilled out into the street.

My dogs are barking at the firemen in front of our house. We have yellow tape. Now we know that we’ve really moved in.

Let me set the scene. I was just finishing dinner. The dogs and the cat were wandering about, taking turns asking for food. I was about to take my dishes to the sink when, with no warning (you would expect a rumble of thunder or at least a stiff breeze), the entire house shook, accompanied by a sound that fell somewhere between breaking teeth and a thousand blenders filled with rocks.

Did I just hear the firemen calling all hands to my street? Is that good or bad?

I thought my house might be falling down, so I did the sensible thing—I ran upstairs and downstairs, looking for signs of broken house or toppled shelves. Then I went outside, stepping into a foot of rubble—nothing compared to the two or three feet of rubble in my yard. The neighbor from across the street came over, and we engaged in the following bit of dialog:

MURK: Huh.
NEIGHBOR: Holy…Jesus Christ!
MURK: Yeah. Hrrm?
NEIGHBOR: I mean…Jesus Christ!
MURK: That’s…really…impressive?

And so on. My roommate and her boyfriend drove up in the middle of it all. They got to experience my manic telling of the story, which ended with something along the lines of “That there is fucked up, is what that is.”

A fireman just knocked on the door and gave me some basic information. They didn’t find anyone in the building, thankfully. Also, we’re in what they consider the “collapse zone.” If we leave our house, we should make sure to exit to the right. Well, all righty, then.

This is Murk, live from the collapse zone.

Evacuation Kits and Going to the Dogs

To prepare a good evacuation kit, you must consider your destination. In all cases, of course, you want the essentials, the basic supplies of food, water, toiletries, and changes of clothing, but different sanctuaries have different specific additional needs. In the case of my step-uncle’s pool house, my roommate and I considered the following factors:

• A probable loss of electricity for an uncertain amount of time, meaning:

—Limited refrigeration.

—Limited air-conditioning.

• A lack of alcohol outside the categories of Captain Morgan and Coors.

Therefore, when we went to our corner grocery for supplies, we bought, in addition to the staples of batteries and filtered water, several bottles of wine, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of vodka.

In considering the needs of the pool house, however, we had not taken into account the facts that:

• The electrical outage would be incredibly widespread and prolonged.
• The lack of electricity meant a lack of water, since the well’s pump was electrically powered.
• The only road out would be blocked by, I shit you not, half a mile of toppled trees.

When you are battered by heat, have limited water, and are uncertain when you will feel relief, the experience of time’s passing becomes disjointed. At points it seems as if you have never lived any other way, as if existence has always been characterized by a weak struggle to endure, broken only by complaints and muddled attempts at problem-solving.

Here’s how our time went.

It’s hot. Okay, this has to be as hot as it can get. I can manage this.

Let’s eat the cheese and the other stuff in the refrigerator first. With those trees, who knows how long it will take to get the power back on, and everything else will last.

Okay, now it’s hotter. But it’s still within the manageable realm, as long as I don’t move around or breathe too hard.

These are the unopened bottles of filtered water. Let’s put them over here. Okay, that’s for drinking. Here are the empties of the water bottles and the wine bottles. We’ll fill them with the water in the tub and put them over on this side. Okay, that’s for washing our face and hands. Is there a bucket? Okay, here’s one from under the sink. We’ll fill it with water from the pool and use it to flush the toilet. All right. That’s all set. Let’s make sure to remember: drinking, washing, flushing.

Oh my God, it’s so hot, I might cry.

It was a taste of living in the eighteenth century, but without the eighteenth-century skills. Truthfully, in those moments, a five-year-old from the eighteenth century would have been our hero. “You can get food and water from the land itself? Are you magic? Will you be our leader?”

We sat in the car with the engine running a couple of times, trying to cool off in the air conditioning, but we wanted to save gas in the event that we could actually drive out of the place.

There was, of course, the pool. However, we had not brought swimming suits. Also, the water in the pool was, to put it delicately, rather unappealing. There was a dubious brown scum around the edges that was probably residue from rotten leaves, but who wants to take the chance? In all frankness, flushing the toilet seemed the pool water's most appropriate use. To come into actual contact with it—well, there would have to be a compelling reason. (I’ll discuss my compelling reason in another post.)

Since we didn’t have a pre-industrial whiz kid to show us the way, I began, like many problem solvers of the past, to look to the animals for solutions.

It was dusk, and I was trying to hypnotize myself: There is no heat, breathe in, breath out, there is no heat, breathe in, breathe out. Then I noticed the dogs. They were lying on their sides against the tile floor, as dogs often do when there is a tile floor. Hey, the dogs are lying on the tile floor…that’s brilliant! I’m taking a page from the book of the dogs.

So I did. I stretched out in my evil-smelling T-shirt and filthy shorts on the floor, getting as much skin as possible into contact with the cool tile.

Don’t you judge me. I would do it again. Because, you know what? It works. As long as I was in contact with the floor, I was cool. I was actually able to sleep for a little while that night. Truth be told, I’m a little ashamed that the dogs had the idea before I did.

My advice is, pack your evacuation kits as full as you can. But understand that you can never pack them well enough, and don’t be proud. You can sit in your sweat and fantasize about ways to MacGyver the air conditioning all you want—without tools and a reliable power source, you’ll still be begging the unseen gods for a good, steady breeze at the end of the day. Or, you can look to the nearest animal, the expert at enduring without frills, and—within reason—do what works.

Elevators, Angst, and Our Ongoing Downfall

Have you heard of Jester Center, the dormitory at the University of Texas with a capacity of nearly three thousand? I lived in it for two years, one on the eighth floor and one on the tenth floor. Whenever possible, I took the stairs. Elevators and people do not mix, which is an unfortunate design flaw—devices meant to transfer us safely from territory to territory in the turf wars of our daily lives also point out how uncomfortable with other people most of us are.

I have to take the elevator several times a day. In my office building, you can take the stairs only in the event of a fire drill. Therefore, I propose some rules:

Rule Number One. Don’t get mad if someone is looking at you. With so little space, you’re probably looking back.

Rule Number Two. Don’t comment on other people's hangdog expressions, even if you’re trying to cheer them up. You’ll only cheer them down, and they may end up writing about you for everyone to see.

There should be other rules, sure—move to the back, compress all of your belongings into yourself, resist commenting on how quiet everyone is—but the above two are the most important.

I was making my afternoon coffee run a couple of days ago, and a woman walked into the elevator and said to me, “Don’t be so grim.” I must give her some points on originality here, for this statement is at least a variation on the “Smile—it can’t be that bad” jibe that has to be my biggest pet peeve. Every time I hear it I want to respond, “What if it is? What if it is exactly, precisely that bad? Oh, God, why, why? Don’t run away…hold me, please hold me!”

Of course, I never say that. Instead, I try to self-deprecate my way out of the conversation.

For instance, my reply to the woman on the elevator was, “This is just my natural expression.”

“You look like your dog just died,” she said.

Nice. Go ahead. Bring my dead dog into it. It’s not enough to berate me. You need an animal to ridicule as well.

Maybe I was thinking about something sad; maybe not. I might have been thinking about Spider-Man, or trying to remember how to conjugate the future tense in Italian, or pondering the opening of the book I was bringing on my coffee break, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (which, in fact, does include a dead dog, so maybe the woman was on target in her own way). At any rate, I wasn’t thinking about any of that any more; instead, I was thinking about my apparently preternaturally morose mug.

Thus, Rule Number Two.

And the truth is, I already know that my expression in repose is probably less than cheery. The elevator doors in my office building are mirrored. (Decorative public mirrors—another pet peeve. Stupid Limited.) Now and then, the doors of my elevator open and I catch a glimpse of a face in the elevator across the hall. The hell you looking at, you grumpy yutz? I think, and then realize that it’s my face in the mirrored door.

So I understand where the breakers of Rule Number Two are coming from. That’s why I propose Rule Number One. I need to work on tempering my reactions to the reactions of everybody else.

But come on. Let’s drop the commands to smile. It’s just basic manners. If we must be forced into the kind of closeness generally reserved for the people who love us, warts and all, we should have the courtesy to stare at the floor and pretend that we’re all flawless.

The Death of Morphy's Father

I’m reading David Lawson’s biography of Paul Morphy, the nineteenth-century American chess master from New Orleans. I read a description of Morphy a few years ago in a chess handbook, and I have since wanted to know more about the tale of his rise in the chess world and the subsequent breakdown in the rest of his life. On a basic level, I was just curious—why wasn’t this famous figure from New Orleans history better known? Why, for instance, didn’t they teach this in Louisiana History when I was in junior high, instead of spending all of those hours talking about flags and making us learn the names of the parishes?

However, when I read non-fiction, a different kind of curiosity comes into play. I find myself diverted by strange details that seem meant for life in short stories or poems.

I haven’t been disappointed with this book in that regard. Early in the biography, Lawson describes the death of Morphy’s father:

“…about a month after Paul’s challenge to the American chess players, tragedy struck the Morphy household. One September day, while Judge Morphy was conversing near the courthouse, he turned suddenly in response to a friend, and the large brim of a Panama hat cut across his eye. Although in pain, the Judge paid little attention to it until the next day, when the eye became inflamed, and a physician was called who had him confined to a dark room for some time. His health became impaired, and he died on November 22, 1856, of apoplexy or congestion of the brain, leaving an estate of $146,162.54.”1

Death by Panama hat. Think of how absurd that must have felt, especially to someone accustomed to pursuing logic. Morphy was not only accomplished at the chessboard, he also completed college, a master’s degree, and a law degree when he was still too young to be able to practice law legally in Louisiana—he was more than a year from the designated age of twenty-one. If his father gave little initial thought to an encounter with a straw hat, think of how the rest of the family felt at the removal of the patriarch through haberdashery. Were they all sorrowful? Was anybody gleeful? Did anybody see it as some sort of morality tale about pride and privilege brought low by ridiculous means?

In his lecture “Reading,” Robertson Davies mentions telling students that they don’t have to go far to find correlatives to what must seem to them the both grandiose and absurd tales of literature: only to the daily papers, where “you will find the great themes of the Bible, of Homer, of Shakespeare, repeated again and again.”2 This little kernel about Paul Morphy’s father, a brief aside in the 400 pages of an already-unique life, fits well with Davies’s claim. The complications of actual life are often so random that they paradoxically appear planned.

1 Lawson, David. Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1976. Page 45.
2 Davies, Robertson. Reading and Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Page 7.

On My Former Storm Hubris

Where I grew up in Louisiana, I had to show some respect for hurricanes, but little fear. The fifty or so miles north from New Orleans to my family’s house was a crucial buffer, enough to make a twelve-year-old see a hurricane as more an annoyance than a danger—I might miss The Rockford Files, but I probably wouldn’t have to slosh through muck, moving the household gods to higher ground.

Of course, that outlook changed when I moved to New Orleans itself years later. It didn’t change enough, though. I suffered from a sort of hurricane hubris. I was one of those who thought that the city had a sort of mojo—it might suffer glancing damage, but the storms would always veer off at the last minute. In my experience, they always seemed to. I knew the history of the city—it wasn’t like Betsy had hit in the Dark Ages. But I just put on the historical blinders and went about my day.

I still respected the storms—I’ve never been one of those hurricane-party sorts. I didn’t want my car to be flooded, or to have to worry about my pets, or to lose electricity or be stuck in the house for a couple of days. So I always evacuated. But, let’s face it, evacuating was comparatively easy for me, with family nearby in a generally safe zone. I’d just leave for a few days, come back, check around my windows for signs of water seepage, and clean out my freezer. The neighbors without a car who didn’t know anyone outside Mid-City—they were the ones who actually had to worry about a storm.

So on the Thursday night before Katrina, I was out celebrating the graduation of a friend from the Ph.D. program, drinking too many margaritas. When discussion turned to Katrina, it was dismissed almost immediately. We felt sorry for the Floridians who would be taking the blow again.

The next day, tired at work, I fended off calls from my roommate, telling her that we would keep our eyes on the storm’s track, but that it wasn’t time to panic yet. I thought she was overreacting. If it showed any signs of heading our way, we would just go to my mother’s house. The new forecasts were a concern, but we had plenty of time to prepare.

Even on Saturday morning, I was calm. Okay, we should leave the city, but we still had time. After I got gas and supplies, I might go to my karate class. Then I would need to shower, of course. And actually, there had been talk among some of my friends of a picnic, so I might want to stop by that before leaving the city.

In the face of my blasé calm, she was growing more nervous. In the end, I skipped karate to board up the windows, since the landlord said he was too busy. I was following my philosophy—prepare but don’t panic.

We left town for my step-uncle’s place at around three in the afternoon. He had a pool house we could stay in, and his property was even further north than my mother’s house, by about twenty minutes. Based on past experience, I thought we would be driving well into the night, but we were there in three hours. It was just another sign that everything was running smoothly.

It was just over three days later when my Pollyanna side crumbed. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Being trapped by fallen trees, lying with my face against the tile floor in an attempt to cool off, actually having to work out a system to ration our water—these events were a bit startling, and I promise that I will write about them later, but none of them fazed me. The breakdown came when we finally got to a place where we could hear the news. When we reached a hotel that had room for us, checked in, turned on the television, and heard the announcement that New Orleans would be closed for at least two months, I realized that I wasn’t going to be driving back into the city the next week, my biggest problem revising syllabi to make up for lost time. I realized that things had changed for many, many people. And I thought about the fact that I was one of the lucky ones, no matter how distraught I felt, and about how sad that was—that, in one day, more or less, we had all gone through such a drastic, surreal shift that our scale of misfortune would have to be recalibrated, and displacement with some measure of control would have to be considered a fairly good state of personal affairs.

I still had the Pollyanna fragments, though. For example, at that moment I would not have considered the possibility that over a month later I would be obsessively watching footage of the city, finding the roof of my house on satellite maps, drinking bourbon and brooding and wondering what was going to happen next. Katrina and subsequent events have required that I reexamine my basic ways of living and learn to deal with uncertainty in less self-destructive ways, which in itself is not a bad thing.

However, I don’t think we should reduce disasters to our personal laboratories for self-growth. In the last two years, several people have mentioned the recently ubiquitous saw about the Chinese character for crisis being formed by the characters for danger and opportunity. On the one hand, the message behind the assertion has that tone of mature acceptance that strikes a chord somewhere in my core, probably from too many adolescent afternoons watching Kung Fu reruns. On the other, it has the preachy tone that makes my pre-adolescent self want to shout, “You’re not the boss of me!”

And now I learn, thanks to University of Pennsylvania Sinologist Victor Hair, not only that the adage is a misrepresentation of the meaning of the individual characters, but also that it is based on a misunderstanding of the way terms are constructed in Chinese. While my adolescent Kung Fu watcher feels let down, my pre-adolescent mutineer exults.

It’s a recurring dilemma, convincing those two to get along. In the end, though, if I left them in the woods and waited to see who would walk out, the adolescent would probably lose. He would still vaguely believe in a mystic ability to turn aside the tempest. The pre-adolescent knows where it’s at. Sometimes, you should just take one look, and then run like hell.