August 29, 2005 My family and I got ready to evacuate. Mom always stressed putting my computer on top of my loft bed and anything else that was very important to me I was to bring along if it could fit. So obviously I took all of my comic books. All my JTHM, Squee, Powerpuff Girls and various Slave Labor Graphics comics that I held so dear to me. Now I'm glad I did because I still have those babies, one of the few things I still have from before the storm.
We drove up to Tunic, Mississippi and stayed in a hotel room. That night, my family and I were standing right in front of the tv, in the little hotel room, when news reports said Katrina hit the gulf coast. The levees broke. New Orleans was flooding. What about Bay St Louis? On don't worry the news mentioned us. We watched the videos of all the flooding and I remember, at 14, crawling a little inside of my head. I didn't understand what it meant that it was flooding. Okay, big puddles and more humidity.
Mom tried to explain that our house probably got destroyed. Except she didn't explain, she was talking in circles fanatically, repeating "oh my god" and "what are we going to do?" I remember staying pretty quiet.
Dad immediately drove back down south when the water went down. He wanted to see the damage that had been done. We could not afford to stay in the hotel long, so my mother took David, Petey, Chris, and me to Mc Comb, Mississippi to stay with our grandparents in their tiny trailer that smelled of dog pee. When we arrived in Mc Comb, which was also more inland Mississippi and thus did not get flooded, the power was out. Due to the hurricane all electricity was gone, so no air conditioning. You may think "Oh, first world problems! Not having air conditioning isn't so bad." But allow me to assure you, after Katrina it was dangerously hot. My grandparents metal trailer became a baking oven and so we slept outside on an air mattress. We put a canopy over the mattress to block out the sun and lived on the mattress, in the grassy yard of a trailer park in rural Mississippi, for a week. It was the hardest week of my life.
Gas Stations were only letting people have so much gas and it was expensive and the lines to get some were too long. The community provided MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. They use them in the military and look like this:
The crackers sucked, you had to put jelly on them, or the spreadable cheese. The teryaki chicken was the best one but David ate almost all of them. The roast beef one was okay too. You heated up the food by putting water in the green bag, which had some sort of magic in it that heated up and warmed the food. David was fascinated by the MRE heating magic and often just added water to bags to watch how it worked. Water was sparse and there was zero running water in the trailer. The land lord of the trailer park would put the water on for only one hour a day and me, my 3 brothers, my mom, and both of my grandparents had to try to all fit in time to shower. The shower also only gave out cold ass water. I'm kinda amazed how that water was so freezing since it was so hot out. But showering was the best part of the day during that week. We were all so dirty. We were all sweating a lot, we had no clean cloths and we were living outside in grass and dirt.
Not to mention the bugs. So many bugs I'm sure we got high off of bug spray. A few nights that week, my mom went to sleep with Chris in the bath tub in the trailer. The tub was the coolest place in the trailer and Mom was worried about all the bugs biting Chris. Chris was only 2 at the time.
During this week I was reading Battle Royale and a drew a picture of my Mississippi friends all together. Sitting on a rail gun wtf. During this week I think me and David's friendship solidified into a strong bond. We had each others backs and tried to keep each other sane while sitting around on that air mattress.
We all got staff infection eventually, and proceeded to have staff outbreaks on and off for the next one or two years. Chris got it the worst though. For the next three months, Chris had about 8 boils on his legs at all times. Not just little ones either. Big and blue/purple. We didn't have access to doctors all the time so for the next few months Mom would hold Chris down while I popped the boils with a warm wash cloth. He would scream and cry so hard that sometimes he didn't even make a sound. His face was also blue/purple from the screaming.
We drove down to meet up with Dad, he had begun making big piles in the front lawn of our house with everything we owned. Our house had 4 -5 feet of water and via flooding and mold, we had to throw away everything and gut the entire house. Dad gutted the whole place with help from some family.
This isn't my house but it looked something like this, just about everybody's houses looked like this.
Mom took us kids to Milton, Florida, where some nice man let us live in this apartment he was trying to rent out. In Milton, we got mattresses to sleep on and eventually got a tv in there too. David and I started high school there, and we hated it. Seriously, for some reason every kid was a goth at Milton High. It was bizarre, like we were in a poorly written Tim Burton movie.
We didn't have many clothes but Mom took us to Target to get a few things. I got a pink Pink Floyd shirt that David started wearing, and it was around this time David and I started to wear each others clothes. And flannel, I got very into flannel and started dying my hair red and purple.
My adolescence is weird because I don't know if I started doing the standard "teenage rebellion" thing because I was 14 and starting high school, or if I was just so depressed and hateful because of the hurricane. Either way, we took teenage angst to another level.
After 3 miserable months in Florida, we got a FEMA trailer in our back yard of our Bay St Louis home. For some god awful reason our FEMA trailer was only a single. We fit 6 people in a single FEMA trailer, we should have had a double.
Our school was in FEMA trailers too. Trailers just lined up next to each other. Class was basically a joke though, and we didn't learn much that year.
As soon as the house was gutted and there was walls up in the house, David and I moved our thin little mattresses from the FEMA trailer and put them on the concrete flooring in the house in our rooms. We used a storm light at night, and that when we got into drugs and alcohol.
Basically what happened is there was a town that was completely destroyed, full of teenagers who were sad and bored. So what did we do? We looted.
We looted old plantation houses, they had the nice stuff. We got things like weird French porno mags, CDs, DVDs, and whatever else. Stuff with Jesus on it. David and I started collecting Jesus knick knacks to decorate the concrete floors of our empty rooms.
We also looted gas stations, since there was a bunch of flooded gas stations there was flooded bottles of alcohol and cigarettes just hanging out waiting to be snatched. It was that freshman year that I first got drunk. We had like 30 kids over at our house, my parents and little brothers were gone somewhere, so we started a bon fire in the wooded balcony in our back yard and drank flooded bottles of champagne. These bottles had flood mud all over them and we'd just wipe off the top and chug em back. The flooded cigarettes were kinda nasty but we smoked many many packs.
I'm surprised I'm still alive.
This kid who was kinda friends with David started living with us since he had nowhere to go. He was always bringing over more alcohol and pot. David, this kid, and I all had the house to ourselves (parents and little brothers were still living in the FEMA trailer) and we were always getting messed up just about every night.
The last day of my Freshman year, I went home with some girls we knew. We all dyed our hair. These girls weren't really ever my good friends, but one ended up mothering my niece. After hair was dyed, I went to Burbon Street in New Orleans for the first time.
One of the girl's older sister went with us to show us around. She used to be a stripper on Burbon Street so she knew how to not get killed or robbed or raped. I was the youngest one in the group. Everyone else was like 15-19 and the stripper was about 22 or 23. Nonetheless, a bar owner stopped me on the street and asked me what I was doing, the stripper swooped in and told him I was fine, I was with her. He said he meant no harm, he just wanted to offer me a drink. The stripper later explained, "He was just trying to get in your panties."
That night we all got drunk and on the ride home David was in the passenger seat of the van, he stood up on the seat and stuck his body out the window and pissed. The urine trailed the entire back windows of the van and I'm sure some got on Highway 90.
That summer I learned I could chug down a 3rd a bottle of Takka Vodka (not anymore I cant! x.x) and started getting into Chuck Palahniuk books. I learned that I hallucinate when I smoke a lot of pot. I started wearing make up. And boys were suddenly interested in me. Ahh yes, just like Degrassi High.
Later that summer my family went to Disney World, and then up to NYC to see family. For some reason that kid that lived with us went on the family trip too. It made all the family photos awkward.
As you can see, I'm adorable. But that random tall scene kid is out of place.
Anyways, time went by. Eventually we were able to move into our school again and out of the trailers. My family moved into their house too.
And Bay St Louis is finally just about done rebuilding.
Many of my missed friends, I don't talk to much anymore. I still collect comic books. My grandparents, unfortunately, still live in that dog pee trailer. Luckily, their trailer has electricity and running water now. I live with David now and we fight like a married couple. We plan on ordering some MREs online, since we can't get them now.
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