On the Edge Without an Exit

The flies landed on Trevor Jones’ plate of beans -- two, then five, then 10. The demons and the delusions came at him next. Everybody hates me, he decided. Everybody is watching me. Silently, he was becoming the latest victim of the storm. He was not dead, but he wished he was. It was time, finally, to get out.

Just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, at a smattering of public housing apartments, members of the city’s deep underclass -- AIDS patients, schizophrenics, heroin addicts, shriveled amputees with thick cataracts and drool on their chins -- were the only ones left.

In the nearly two weeks since Hurricane Katrina struck, they have hunkered down in pillbox buildings with ominous nicknames such as “The Hole” and impossibly sunny ones such as “Mary Poppins.” The names of gangs -- the 5X9, the ABM Boys -- are spray-painted on the buildings. Pieces of garden hose used to siphon gas, when it can be found, litter the ground alongside beer bottles, syringes and shingles.

The people here are mostly adults, and include the elderly, but there are a few kids left too. And they have learned the vernacular of disaster. One boy popped a wheelie as he rode down the street on a blue bike and then shouted over his shoulder: “Y’all FEMA?”

They have learned to survive with little food, little water, no power, no sanitation and no social structure. One by one, they are discovering that a last piece of deprivation -- no medicine -- is tipping the scales and forcing them to try to get out. But though helicopters and buses have swept people in New Orleans to shelters, there have been few similar opportunities available to people in outlying towns and suburbs. For thousands of people who were living on the edge before Katrina, it has been difficult to escape.

“These are the forgotten,” said Michael Lomax, a social worker who cares for the homeless and the poor, and who lives in Gretna’s public housing. He has stayed behind to try to keep people alive and relatively stable.

Like many others, Jones was coaxed back to reality by Lomax, who is running a mobile pharmacy and therapy service. Lomax gave Jones 50 milligrams of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug that another resident had given him before leaving town.

On Saturday afternoon, Jones, 25, sat on the couch in his first-floor apartment, his shoulders slumped, his eyes glassy and puffy. He had thought he could stick it out, he said. He was wrong.

His girlfriend, Sade Walker, 17, was down the hall sitting on a bare mattress, flipping through family photos. She is two months pregnant -- she hopes it’s a boy -- and is running out of prenatal vitamins. She has a doctor’s appointment coming up, but her doctor is nowhere to be found.

Jones feels guilty that she’s here; he persuaded her to wait for him the night Katrina began blowing into town. He works two jobs, in the morning as a dishwasher and at night as a manager at a sandwich shop. By the time he got home, his brother had hit the road with the rest of their relatives. Jones and Walker had no car, no ride, $170 between them, nothing to spend it on and no evident method of evacuating. They were stuck.

After the storm, the heat became unbearable. Raw sewage from a burst pipe bubbled up next to the sidewalk outside. Jones and Walker got so bored that they pulled all the DVDs off the shelf, not to watch them -- there was no power for the television -- but to read the covers. He tried to ask police what he should do but, he said, “they just yelled at me for not leaving and made me feel worse.”

By the time Lomax checked on him Saturday, Jones had locked himself inside the apartment with all of the windows sealed; his eyes were stretched wide open but unable, or unwilling, to see.

“Everybody has their breaking point, and I cracked,” Jones said. “When those flies landed on my food, I just sat there with my fork and looked at them. I thought: ‘Why eat? Why live?’ Before this, we were doing OK. I work hard. I pay my taxes. I don’t do that to live in a Third World country. It’s like we’re on an island, and nobody cares. If you got out, you got out. If you didn’t, it’s over for you. Over.”

At every turn since Katrina struck, these people have fallen through the cracks.

For one reason or another, they did not leave before the storm -- some because they were more concerned with scoring another rock of crack, Jones because he had to work, his neighbor because her ankles swelled so much during a three-hour wait for an evacuation bus that she gave up and went home.

Authorities have moved aggressively to persuade anyone left in New Orleans to leave, but the same thing hasn’t happened just outside the city limits. There is no centralized evacuation program. If you can catch a ride or luck upon a stranger or an ambulance or a military convoy willing to give you a lift, you can get out. If you can’t, you can’t.

Compounding their dilemma, most of the stragglers here refuse to go to an out-of-town shelter, some because they have heard tales of rape and disease, others because they have never left the New Orleans area and are frightened of what’s out there.

Even if those left behind wanted out now, none of the authorities contacted in the area Saturday said they knew how to get them out at this point.

None of the authorities contacted even knew they were there.

Inside the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office Saturday, a message scrawled on a blackboard suggested that authorities were still preoccupied with more fundamental tasks. It said: “Objective: Secure Parish. Obtain Food.”

Deano Bonano, the area’s emergency operations chief, said four medical clinics staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses had been opened in Jefferson Parish. But the parish is 645 square miles of water and land, and the closest clinic to this smattering of apartments is in Marrero, two towns away.

“There’s nothing we can really do for people” like these, Bonano said. Asked how many of them were still holed up in Jefferson Parish, he said: “We don’t have a clue.”

Word has spread in the New Orleans area that the pocket of apartment buildings, though damaged, is in a dry part of town and mostly in one piece. More significant, perhaps, word has spread that Lomax, 50, has stayed behind to help.

So they have come by the dozens.

Two men in wheelchairs came from a New Orleans nursing home, where the staff members had fled and people were dying.

One man, a middle-aged heroin addict known only as “Eyes,” dragged an ATM machine across the Crescent City Connection bridge -- the towering landmark that crosses the Mississippi River -- to the apartments in a vain attempt to get some money.

Lomax gave him a pile of candy, which addicts often chew to suppress their cravings. Then Eyes disappeared.

“Heroin addicts are usually the worst,” Lomax said. “The crack addicts I can handle. The heroin addicts will kill you. But this guy, Eyes, I kind of miss him. He was all right.”

Every day, Lomax makes his rounds. He siphons gas to fuel his car, which he uses to try to find ice, candles and water.

“Then I hold myself to one trip a day,” he said. “And it better be worth it.”

He has maxed out his credit card, but he keeps buying. His small apartment contains an inordinately large pile of medicine, mostly donations -- Xanax and clonidine and insulin, but Pepto-Bismol too -- that he acknowledges, with a smile, he is entirely unqualified to dispense.

When new people show up, Lomax finds them a place to stay. Some who got out have left him their keys. Other times, he just breaks into an abandoned apartment.

He has managed to get a few people out, focusing his efforts on those with acute medical needs. Among them was an AIDS patient who had run out of medicine; Lomax managed to connect her with a relative who drove in to get her.

“She was burning up with fever,” Lomax said. “She was really bad. Her temperature was 103 degrees. She was all blotched out.”

Even when Lomax can find someone a way out of town, it doesn’t always work out. He got two mentally ill men a ride to a shelter in Pennsylvania, then found out Saturday that once there, they had simply walked out the front door.

“I’ll never hear from them again,” he said. “They’ve got nothing, and they’re on the streets in a place they’ve never seen before.”

For some, it seems, there is little to do but hang on and wait for the New Orleans area to show signs of life, for the social services network to be reborn.

Barbara Wilson, 44, ambled through the buildings of the Mary Poppins complex Saturday, swatting the flies from her face with a towel. A clump of baby powder was curdled in the sweat on her chest. She said she had mental problems but didn’t want to talk about them much. Lomax said he had seen her at the AIDS clinic five times but she had never once remembered him.

Wilson managed to make her way last week to a shelter in Houma, 60 miles away, then found a ride back home.

“I couldn’t stay there, no sir,” she said. “Too crowded. And there were sickly people, all coughing and sneezing. No telling what they got. I can’t deal with that.”

She walked back into her apartment, where black mold had formed on the ceiling where the water came through after the storm. She began flipping through some Polaroids that she took after the storm -- of her mattress, which was soaked through, of a window that was not broken.

“I just want to show this to the government so they know what I’ve been through,” she said. “Maybe I can get some compensation.”

As Lomax drove through Mary Poppins on Saturday, a man flagged him down. It was Jerry Daniel, 59, a portly, mustachioed man who has lived at the complex for 16 years. He was waving a prescription order for Seroquel. Lomax stepped out of the car and shook his hand.

“Keeps the nerves down, right?” Lomax said.

“Mm-hmm,” the man said.

“The dreams too.”

“Mm-hmm. How do you know all that?”

“I’ve been around,” Lomax said. “I’ll try to get you some help.”

He drove slowly, past the downed trees and power poles, to his apartment and found a few ambulances. Word had finally gotten out that some people needed help.

A volunteer doctor was talking to a diabetes patient, convincing him that he needed to be taken to a shelter. The man agreed to go and walked inside to collect his belongings, including a Bible and a pile of nickels.

Jones and Walker were out too. An ambulance was waiting outside for them. Jones sat on his couch, shouldering a bewildering range of emotions -- relief at being taken out, but shame because his girlfriend had depended on him to take care of her, he said.

A single tear fell from his left eye, stalled briefly on his cheekbone, then fell onto his couch, between an empty pack of matches and a can of beans.

They were leaving, though many more would remain behind.