Hell or High Water

I thought I was going to have to eat a gigantic slice of humble pie, but in reality it was just a shit sandwich.  It was October of 2005.  Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had smashed the shit out of much of New Orleans and the surrounding area.  Rumors were running rampant about mobs of armed thugs and the rule of the jungle.  I had just been sent home from an overseas detail under less than favorable terms.  Sitting in the tattoo chair in Ybor City Florida getting my arm drilled on for 8 hours a day for a week straight I get a call, they are offering me another job.  Money starting to dwindle and my life coming apart at the seams I jump on the chance.  In retrospect the money was good for stateside work, when you’re broke its hard to complain about a paycheck, but the job nearly pushed me over the edge for good.

I pack only the bare essentials, still in a trance after the week of tattooing, my girlfriend is like a jackhammer in my ear half the time and wont even talk to me the other half. Hell, I even cut my sideburns to show up more squared away. I talk repeatedly with some other contractor buddies of mine, trying to figure the angle on this New Orleans security gig.  We all figure its got to be a cakewalk, I mean, compared to Iraq it can’t be that bad.  Well we were all in for it in ways that we could never have predicted.

I get off the plane into the smothering humid air of the airport.  Dirty, hot, like breathing from one of those little hand fans in a bowling alley.  There are packs of red cross workers all trying to posture and act “cool” in front of each other as they sit in small groups with varying levels of confusion.  They all look like fat sickly tourists, snapping pictures of each other in front of the airport, ready to soak up all the horror stories that their fast-food swelled heads can contain so they can brag about this shit to their bible study group back in whatever backwater suburbia they crawled out of.  I sit there on a bench and wait for my ride.  After about 2 hours an unbelievably fat black man approaches me and identifies himself as my transport.  On the ride to what they are calling “tent city” he tells me the short version inbrief.  His voice sounds like a bubbling stew.  He apparently is a cop in Detroit, but one look at him and I can already smell bullshit.  I mean, the guy looks like a 300lb bag of gravy.  He calls himself “Big Man”, and he rattles on and on about how he is running the camp, he tells me that he is the head dude and that we all take direction from him, don’t fuck with him or he’ll have “the general” (some retired army general who is running the security force for the company) get me shit-canned.  I’m still half reeling from being sent home and the tattoo and my chaotic relationship, so I just keep my mouth shut and try to stay under the radar.  I have to admit that for a talking brown glob of dogshit the guy had a lot of confidence.

I finally get to my rack in the large army tent they have set up around 3am, only a few hours of sleep before a shower, shave and a 0700 muster with “the general” and I can finally in-process and get assigned my site.  After about 5 minutes I realize that I want to spend as little time as possible in tent city.  I get issued my shit from a cocky little redneck who insists that I will have to pay for everything that I don’t turn back in about 28 goddamn times.  Just for the record I kept everything and they can fucking choke on it.  So the days slow down and time almost grinds to a halt.  We of tent city spend most of our day picking up cigarette butts and washing cars.  Apparently the general will raise a total shit-fit if his rental minivan has any mud on it.  I feel humiliated, dejected, miserable.  This job was supposed to be an opportunity to get back in the good graces of the company but it was really starting to look like a big mistake.  They have us doing all sorts of busy work to justify our salary while we await movement to our respective sites.  Most of these assholes just got put in charge by accident, showed up at the right time and got stuck with a pen and a clipboard.  They all act like they’re the toughest dick in town but 9 out of 10 of these turds hasn’t even been overseas.  The company told them some bullshit story about how if they prove themselves on this job then they will promote them to work in Iraq.  It’s a total lie but the hiring practices of the firm have been so derelict that I wouldn’t put anything past them.  God knows the qual is so pathetic that a fucking monkey in the monkey cage could fling shit on a wall and score high enough to get the job.

I sat there in the mess tent one afternoon squishing ketchup from one end to the other in its small plastic baggie while the steaming fresh aroma of canned corn and cut up hot dogs rose from the white styrofoam plate in front of me.  I hear my name mispronounced by some inbred fuck, my time has finally come, I’m being sent to Jasper Texas.  They give me keys to a car, 100 bucks for gas and send me on my way.  I stop and buy supplies for the journey.  Maps just to figure out where the fuck Jasper is in the fist place, beef jerkey, donuts, coffee, and a couple redbulls.  I drive all day and arrive just in time to take over the night shift.  It seems like things are really taking a turn for the worse until I bump into another ex-teamguy at the site, Colin.  I had heard stories about the dude back from my days at the team, like how he would just sleep with his ruck and all his kit on during missions, about how he could be drunk and chain-smoking cigs but still be first on a run, basically the kind of shit that makes you a hero to half the guys on the team and the mortal enemy to the rest.  Colin looks like the bastard son of Rodney Dangerfield and has the voice of Krusty the Clown from the Simpsons.  We remember each other from VA Beach and get on the same sheet of music immediately.

Located in the heart of Deep East Texas, the City of Jasper is situated in the Pine Timber Belt of the State. Positioned between Beaumont and Lufkin, the City’s close proximity to LakeSam Rayburn, ToledoBend Reservoir, and LakeB.A. Steinhagen has helped transform it into a center for outdoor and recreational activities.

Incorporated in 1926, the City achieved Home Rule status in 1964. It operates under the Council / Manager form of government. The City Council is composed of five (5) Council seats and the Mayor’s office. Elected officials serve two (2) year staggered terms and are limited by Charter to three (3) consecutive terms in office. Local representation is based on a single member district system with each of four (4) Councilpersons representing a single district. The Mayor and one (1) Councilperson are elected on an at large basis.

The City of Jasper’s present incorporated population is approximately 7,657. It is the largest city within a sixty (60) mile radius and thus serves as a shopping and services center for an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people. Timber related industries and tourism constitute the backbone of the areas economic base.

Covering a land area of approximately 11 square miles, the City of Jasper is a full service city. It is progressive in its attitudes and has worked to move forward with the expanding horizons of the area. Recent completion of a new City Hall Complex, Municipal Law Enforcement Center, an outdoor recreational park, extensive remodeling and expansion of fire station facilities, and full service library support this firm belief in the future.

The only real claim to fame of this bucolic shithole in the middle of nowhere happened back in 1998 when 3 white supremacist members of the Aryan Nation beat, dragged behind their truck, and beheaded an unemployed black hitchhiker (James Byrd Jr.).  He was picked up and murdered on Martin Luther King Blvd..  Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles said Byrd’s head, neck and right arm were found about a mile away from the rest of his body.

Here is a .WAV file of Sheriff Rowles regarding the motivation for the murded – this will give you a pretty good idea of the type of people we are dealing with here…

So, I mean, what the fuck, at least we had that going for us, right?

Our days consisted of sleeping from 8 am to 8 pm then getting drunk and fucking off for 12 hours straight at the worlds’ largest abandoned trailor park.  It was our official job to make sure that nobody fucked with or stole any of the 2000 mobile homes that were parked in this giant field on the outskirts of town.  FEMA, in its infinite wisdom, bought up every trailor home in the U. S. of A. between 10 and 25 thousand dollars so that they could support the people who had lost their houses in the hurricanes.  Sounds like a great idea, right? WRONG!  Turns out that bureaucratic bullshit internal to the mechanism itself put the nix on the whole deal from the start.  Apparently the only way that someone could qualify for the FEMA trailor was if they could provide proof that their house had been smashed by the hurricanes, and have working water and sewage.  Well, as it turns out that half the fuckers didn’t have that shit to start out with, and the area was so devastated that there was no way that plumbing would be restored for a long long time, like years.  A total paradox, fucking impossible.  Well, the outcome of this was that no more that 5 fucking trailors moved off the farm the whole time we were there.  I even asked the FEMA clowns about it and they told me that they were just doing what they were told, no sympathy or sense of mission when it came to their job, basically shut up and fuck off.  In fact, even though myself and the other goons were sleeping in the dirt and getting fat on gas-station food, these fucking FEMA turds were bitching about their accommodations.  You know they bought 4 ‘mobile command centers’ for them to live in while working the relief effort.  These were like super mobile-homes.  250 thousand bucks a pop and they had all four of these fucking things sitting there right in the middle of the lot.  The irony of these FEMA fucks complaining about living in a million bucks worth of RV’s while having no sympathy for the people they are supposed to be helping when they refuse to give out the 10 thousand dollar shit boxes bought specifically for that purpose.  It was a total debacle.  You know peeps would show up and ask questions about the trailors, try and find out how to get their hands on one, maybe put a roof over their tired, dirty, displaced family for one fucking night, and the FEMA clowns had us turn them away with guns and beatdown sticks.  Not only that, but they put up the most insensitive sign in the entire history of insensitive signs.  “Its not about you, its about the victims”.. Now you would initially think this would be to motivate each other to work harder for the victims but in fact it was an accusation that the people who came up to ask questions were all goldbricking frauds.  Insult to injury in the first fucking degree. The funny thing is that they wrote “author unknown” so as to completely blow off any responsibility for the quote.

Tired, cold, getting fatter by the minute, miserable, disgruntled, disenchanted, on the verge of either burning the place down or making an anonymous phone call to CNN we struggled on.  The nights were long and totally uneventful.  We passed the time playing life and death games of skill and cunning.  “Shovel Ball” where you take 2 shovels and a basketball and play a strange adaptation of 1-on-1 lacrosse.  There was the ever popular “Quad Polo” where teams of 2 men (one driver and one stick man armed with a broom) would try and score on the opposing team by hitting a basketball between a set of cones.  “Jousting” which was a 1-on-1 game played between 2 men on quads using the unscrewed handles of pushbrooms tipped with a small orange plastic cone.  Combatants used trashcan lids as shields but that was the only protection.  “Quad Tag” in which each man would ride a quad and one person would be “it” at a time and tag the next “it” person by ramming into their quad.  There were other games and other strange mutations of the aforementioned games but you get the idea.

For the first 2 weeks it was just the three of us.  Colin, myself, and a dude we called “Mongo”.  A hefty ex-army Mexican from Temecula who had some kind of speech impediment for which we gave the guy a never ending stream of shit. “Mongo” turned out to be a pretty good mug and right on time when it came to the fucking off that ensued.  So the three of us led the charge into the dizzying depths of our own laziness.  Sleeping for as much of the night as our job security would allow.  Completely blowing off as much responsibility as the blind eyes of FEMA workers would permit.  We each, in our own ways, embraced the deepest forms of our own inner shitbag and then pushed it past what we thought we were capable.  It was existence in its most dire and depraved form.

The weather was wet and extremely cold.  Nobody knew what to expect when they arrived so no one of had packed any cold weather gear to deal with the zero degree temperatures that racked our bodies nightly.  We scrounged together what we could from the devastated WalMart but it was barely adequate.  Beer and fucking off were the only things we had to keep us warm and alive and both were wearing thin.  It was only the arrival of a new teammate that finally broke the stalemate between us and a cold death.

The phone rang in our ears like the voice of an estranged lover one morning.  It was the headshed back at Tent City.  They were sending us another man, it was the one they call “Big Man”.  Yep, that same bloated fucker that was ruining everybody’s lives.  Selfish, fat as fuck, cocky, on a power trip.  We looked at each other after the call was over and declared in unison,

“Payback is a bitch!!”

Tent City told us that we needed to PT the guy. Apparently he had been too fat and too visible, and in order to keep his job (which was already on the verge of being snatched away for attitude issues) he was gonna have to drop about a hundred pounds of pure buttermilk.  Colin and I talked to 2 minutes before coming up with what from that point would be called “out science experiment” – namely, for us to see how fat we could make “big man” get.

We went to Wal*Mart that day and bought these giant industrial sized bags of snickers bars and hot pockets and recee’s pieces, bags of combos and chips and cheese dip and egg nog, and damn near everything else that would put pounds on you.  We used the team fund to purchase everything because this was going to be a team effort.  Not only were we going to just get the fucker as fat as possible, but we were going to condition him like pavlov’s fucking dog not to eat any healthy food.  We accomplished this task with chocolate ex-lax powder on power bars and in his meal replacement shakes as well as verbally assaulting the dude whenever he tried to buy vegetables or anything else that might actually be somewhat healthy.  Additionally in a side experiment to finally test the bounds of what this fat fucker will actually eat we picked up a giant bag of candy corn and left him alone with only that bag every time we all left the trailer. Unbelievably he ate the whole fucking bag.

And so we pressed on through time.  A few moments stand out like the sound of a bell through fog.  They aren’t really much in the grand scheme of the universe, but fuck it all, what the hell really is?

— We were sitting in a trailor one night getting drunk and watching Batman Begins on Mongo’s computer.  Fatty fell asleep leaning against the bulk of his own stomach girth.

Mongo excitedly, “Look, look!”

We then proceed to fuck with the useless shit until he wakes up and lumbers off.

— At the video store the guy wouldn’t even get a movie, he would just load up on candy bars and 2 liter bottles of soda.

— He was late one night and we walked in to see the horror which is a 350 lb man wearing only tighty-whiteys.  Then, like a scared animal, Big Man went running around the room frantically trying to get all his shit together before we leave him behind.  God damn it all, it was like an orchestra of moving parts, all of them brown and soggy and bouncing around like epileptic jello.

— We bet him 100 bucks that he couldn’t run from one end of the field to the other in 20 minutes (the field wasabout a mile and a half in length).  We won. We actually felt bad about taking his money so later we bet him double or nothing that he couldn’t run a half mile in under 10 minutes, this time he won his money back.

— One night after eating his 13th Snickers bar Plumpy spit a lougie that could have filled up an ice-chest.  Colin, Mongo, and I all dry heaved for nearly 15 minutes.

— We pulled off the highway simply to fuck with a smelly nasty dead deer on the side of the road.  This became a pivotal moment in the history of our team for some strange reason.

— One day we treated ourselves to the only restaurant in town that wasn’t smashed three ways to the weekend.  It turned out to be the worst Mexican food on planet earth.  No exaggeration.  THE FUCKING WORST!  We pulled into the parking lot at least 5 times to shout obscenities at the place after our meal there.  Now, I can just hear people asking “Dude, what does the worst Mexican food on planet earth taste like?”  Well to answer that imagine a corn tortilla filled with Heinz yellow mustard and bloody dogshit.  You probably wish now that you didn’t even ask so you’re welcome.

Aside from humiliating the dude outright we created grip of nicknames for the guy.  Somehow part of “our science experiment” became only acknowledging him when he referred to himself by one of the degrading names we had already established.  Here is a list of some of the more popular names although it must be said that we actually used more names than any of us could ever remember.

-“Plumpy”
-“Fat Ass”
-“Plump Dog”
-“Fatty”
-“Plumpback Whale”
-“Plumpy Dumps”
-“Saddle Bags”
-“Fatty Fatty Fat Fat”
-“Fat Back”
And my personal favorite…
-“Gravy Tits”

Now it may seem that we rode this fucker relentless, and there was a part of me that wishes that we did, but unfortunately our own good nature won out.  Fucking sucks.  But as it turns out that even though we gave the dude hell for being a total dick and morbidly obese and a cop (which is worse that the other 2 reasons combined) – we brought him onto our team of misfits.  I guess because of all the reasons I listed already (and probably a bunch more) dude never really had a crew of friends before.  Well, all we had was each other out there in Jasper and we weren’t gonna let no redneck asshole lynch anybody on our team.  The fucked up fact was that Colin was the most ‘normal’ looking in that particular time and place.  Me with my tatts, Mongo being a swollen tongued wet-back, and Plumpy was a friggen black dude, we were strangers in a strange land.  For fuck’s sake!? Go click on that fucking sheriffs soundbite again and let it brutally sodomize your imagination.  We even started calling ourselves “Team Whale” after that fat fucker.  We all took on whale-style callsigns and then turned our backs on the whole place altogether.

* *

Colin = Sperm Whale * Mongo = Blue Whale * Fatty = Plumpback Whale

Well just like a hangover the fun couldn’t last.  We got another call on the celly and all four of us were yanked out of our rural daydream and shoved deep between the spread open legs of New Orleans.  We had no clue how good we had it in Jasper.  Since we were already on the night shift they kept us all on the night shift.  Fucking perfect.  So we loaded up our rental minivan and headed back to Louisiana.

New Orleans was like a spilled over trashcan that had been pissed on by 98 bums and I think the hurricanes actually improved the place.  Boats in trees and overturned cars on rooftops were like high-class wreckage, most of the place looked like a trailor park had barfed all over the city.  They put us all up in a hotel that appeared as if the help had all run off a year ago.  There was this contrived sense of abandon, like trying to lose your virginity for a 2nd time, that just made me feel kind of dizzy and out of place.  There are some places that affect you in ways that you can’t quite comprehend completely, and New Orleans left me feeling like I had been squeezing ground beef through my fist all day in the sun and all I really wanted to do was take that greasy fist and grab a cold sweating bottle of beer.  It was tense and oily and seemed like it could have been a really kickass place back around the turn of the century but time and technology had left its personality limp and irrelevant.

I ended up working at the FEMA headquarters guarding a beige collection of underused desks.  The HQ was down at the docks, right next to the 2 cruise ships that were rented to house FEMA personnel, the police departments, and their families.  The place was utterly corrupt.  Myself and the guys spent most of our time sending each other through the X-ray machine and racing forklifts through the warehouses stacked full of relief packages waiting to be sent out.  My last few days dragged on almost forever.  It was an orgy of corruption and indolence.  Dishonest cops robbing people, looting, getting into gunfights with each other on the ships, beating drunks in the street for pocket change.  FEMA workers going on tours of the devastation laughing all the way, taking photos of themselves in front of ruined neighborhoods like war tourists, talking shit on the displaced homeless masses.  Hurricane victims looting like mad, burning homes and businesses, stealing relief money, squandering relief money on hookers, gambling, booze, and drugs.  It was like everyone’s vices were put on steroids.  This on top of the more publicized issues of levee failures, local governmental corruption and misused public funds, rampant heath issues, etc.  The oil industry in the area was completely shut down.  The storm interrupted oil production, importation, and refining in the Gulf, and by this had a major effect on fuel prices. Before the storm, one-tenth of all the crude oil consumed in the United States and almost half of the gasoline produced in the country came from refineries in the states along the Gulf’s shores. Additionally, 24% of the natural gas supply is extracted or imported in this region. The nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve is also stored here.  Before the storm, the region was already one of the poorest in America with one of the highest unemployment rates. The media was completely saturated with apocalyptic messages in reference to the hurricane that were, in themselves, contributing to the victim’s sense of trauma, isolation, and abandonment.  And in the end, the scary thought that echoes through my head like the cries of a baby being burned alive is that in the longer term, the effect will likely be an end to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the United States, and end to a large degree the cycle of self-perpetuating poverty contained there.  Its that fact that really makes me start to think twice about the true goals and intentions surrounding this mess.

My last 2 days on the job were spent watching highschool football games at a stadium near tent city.  I had completely ditched out on the cigarette butt details and the car wash committees.  There was no way I was going to be able to bring myself to lift one single finger to assist in any way after being completely put through the ringer on this job.  They told me that if I didn’t help paint this shed white that they would withhold my final paycheck and I just told the assholes to go fuck themselves.  I still got paid, but it was a nightmare.  I had put on 10 pounds of blubber because my diet was shit and I hadn’t worked out the entire time, my sleeping schedule was utterly devastated and my face was pale, zit covered, and creepy like every other nightshift zombie, I was even further estranged from my soon to be ex-girlfriend, I was frustrated with the company, the government, and the American people all in one breath, and in the end I think I was truly frustrated with myself.  It was the kind of eye-opening experience that I would never trade for anything but that leaves you polluted, feeling seedy, and alienated on many levels.  In the end, I felt no sympathy for the “refugees” or “evacuees”, I felt no contempt for the cops, and I felt no disgust for the FEMA workers – they were just people doing what people do.  It’s always been like this and it always will.  This is not my defeatist attitude creeping in but simply a realization as to another facet of human depravity.  The news was full of human interest stories when I got home, heroes saving kittens and little kids, but I never saw any of that when I was there.  I just saw the squalor and the gritty splendor that was a once thriving pleasure palace in ruins. Yet again I tell a story with no moral, no dramatic conclusions, no overarching metanarratives, no unraveling or denouement… just another collection of fucked up facts and observations.

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