Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  Another kind of space opened when I visited home.

  “Oh, social services,” friends of my family would say with a long, lingering pause when I told them about my job. They were the kind of people who praised those who helped others, but had a poor opinion of those in need. They considered charitable work an activity of the church, worthy of a dollar donation on Sundays, not a career for their children. They shot dismayed looks at my parents, but maintained their forced smiles.

  “That must be very rewarding,” they’d say before changing the subject.

  During my seven years at the Self-Help Center, state budget cuts in social programs added to my funk. I laid off staff. In 1993, I had to let go of Roberta Murray, who helped at the front desk. Formerly homeless, she would sign in people for appointments with our benefits advocate. She said nothing when I told her I’d eliminated her position. She did not seem particularly disturbed. You’re eligible for unemployment, I told her. She said she understood. She didn’t. Or she did and knew that despite my assurances, she would be doing without. After all, she had been homeless before. In the end, I’ll never know what she thought. I kept my program operating in part by eliminating her $16,000-a-year salary. Roberta returned to her Eddy Street apartment that night, overdosed on prescription medication, and died.

  Friends told me I was not responsible for her death. Maybe, but by then I’d had it. Although the state of California could continue ruining lives with its budget cuts, I didn’t have to be its executioner. I resigned in 1994.

  That year I also self-published a book of short stories, Division Point. Most of the characters were based on the people I’d met in San Francisco and earlier when I was temping across the country, people who had taken a wrong turn and were headed for a train wreck. I sent copies of Division Point to my family. My father was not impressed and threw his copy away unread. Self-publishing, he said, suggested that no one thought much of my work. He had a point. The stories had all been rejected by magazine editors.

  My mother, however, buoyed me. In response to Division Point, she sent me a 1927 anthology of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry. The leather-bound volume barely held together, its pages dry and flimsy, the binding cracked and peeling. In a note she enclosed, my mother wrote that Longfellow was her favorite poet as a child. She wanted me, my writer son, to have it for the inspiration.

  February 26, 1994

  Dear Malcolm,

  Congratulations on your first book! I want to see you go on and do more books and receive distribution through a commercial publisher. Keep going; you can do it. I had a triple bypass last November, and am just getting over that. At 68, one doesn’t bounce back as quickly. All the best, Dale

  I was done with helping the homeless but not with writing. I used my experience publishing By No MEANS to get freelance journalism gigs, and, in 1995, I enrolled in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California–Berkeley. Two years later, I graduated and accepted an internship at the Philadelphia Inquirer that led to a job at the Kansas City Star in November 1998.

  I wrote to Titler from Philadelphia and Kansas City but he never responded. After his 1994 letter, I stopped hearing from him. I thought he might just not be feeling well, or perhaps my letters to him had been lost in the mail. It was nothing, I told myself. He’s just busy. At times I considered driving to Gulfport and meeting him. After all, we had been corresponding for more than twenty years.

  I never followed through, however, afraid our relationship would somehow suffer if we met. What if we had nothing to say to each other? What if we didn’t even like each other? After all, I wasn’t a thirteen-year-old boy romanticizing a dead fighter pilot anymore. The thought of possibly spoiling what had been a wonderful pen-pal relationship by a face-to-face meeting completely unnerved me. Yet I continued writing to him, always hoping for a response, a throwback to the days when I was much younger and the thought that someone who had written a book would bother writing to me made the world feel alive and full of possibilities.

  In Kansas City I worked the night cops beat. I covered shootings, and waited in bleak neighborhoods behind strips of yellow police tape while cops walked through a house where someone had been killed or examined a car in which a body had been discovered. People would gather on the street and ask me, “What’s going on?” I answered with what I knew, and they told me their stories. What it was like to live on a street where drive-by shootings were a common occurrence. How it felt to lose a son or daughter to murder and find yourself raising your grandchildren. How they felt safer in a bus shelter than they did in their own homes.

  I listened, asked questions, took notes. More often than not, editors at the Star were uninterested in these interviews. Nice color, they said. Good for a quote or two. I thought they were worth more. After work I took my notes and wrote about lives lived beneath the news radar and submitted them to small magazines. Unlike my fiction, these pieces were picked up. I kept at it.

  Nearly three years after I started at the Star, terrorists attacked New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. That evening I asked the assistant managing editor, Randy Smith, to send me to Afghanistan. I was forty-three. If I was going to have a breakout moment as a reporter, 9/11 was it. Smith, however, was noncommittal. I wasn’t surprised. I assumed that other, far more experienced reporters would get the assignment. Still, I tried, I consoled myself.

  Three days before Thanksgiving, Smith called me into the office of the editor, Mark Zieman. Zieman asked me to close the door. As I sat down he peered at me over his glasses from behind his desk.

  “You’re going to Afghanistan,” Zieman said. “Tomorrow.”

  Stunned, I said nothing.

  I could barely get through the rest of the day, overjoyed and scared, my emotions swinging wildly between the two states. I had no knowledge of Afghanistan. I barely knew where it was. I went to Google, typed, “Afghanistan history,” and began reading in a panic. After work I bought a journal to keep a diary of the trip.

  That night I packed. Then I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering what I had gotten myself into. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. I don’t know where I’d heard that expression but it seemed appropriate now.

  The next morning Smith drove me to the airport. I flew to Washington, then Vienna, then New Delhi and Islamabad, where I caught a United Nations flight to Kabul. I arrived in Afghanistan on November 28, 2001 woozy with jet lag. The next night, I began writing in my journal. To help me focus, I decided to address my entries to friends, Titler the first among them.

  November 29, 2001

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  I flew into Kabul yesterday. This city’s shot to hell. Rubble everywhere. Collapsed buildings. Abandoned Soviet tanks from the time of the Russian invasion line either side of the roads leading into the city. I recall scenes of World War I described in your book. You spoke of a wall that spilled into a street. All the ruined and demolished houses, the blown tree trunks. That’s Kabul. I equate the city with the Tenderloin in San Francisco. The boarded-up buildings. The abandoned cars. The lost look on people’s faces. The begging. This is one big poor neighborhood. Very different to be sure from my days in social services, but still a point of comparison I use to make Kabul feel less foreign, the war less threatening.

  December 15, 2001

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  Another day in Kabul. There’s no central heating. It’s freezing and the concrete buildings here hold the cold, making it feel even colder. Everyone has space heaters but there’s no power so the space heaters don’t work. We sit by them anyway for the idea of heat we imagine them producing.

  I’ve made the rounds of key ministries part of my daily schedule. Interior, foreign affairs, defense. San Francisco had a slew of deputy mayors, one for what seemed like every activity in the city. I remember how I’d meet with them pleading for funding. Now I plead with ministers for information. Same difference. Red tape is red tape no matter what part of th
e world you’re in.

  December 21, 2001

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  Tonight I was out after curfew. My driver, Khalid, and I were held for six hours at a military checkpoint in south Kabul. We had attended an evening news conference an hour away at Bagram Air Base where American forces are stationed. On the way back, our car had a flat. We didn’t have a spare. We drove for two hours on the rim in first gear. When we reached a downtown checkpoint, a Northern Alliance soldier raised his rifle and aimed at the windshield. Three other soldiers joined him. The first soldier told us he would hold us until 5 a.m., when curfew ended. He asked for a cigarette and I gave him one. He looked at the tire and said we shouldn’t have been driving on a flat.

  January 28, 2002

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  Outside Kabul today, I saw rogue militias set up roadblocks that my driver and I paid bribes to get through. On the Jalalabad Road, American military patrols roared past us with .50-caliber guns, and women covered in body-length veils turned away from the spewing dust. Farther beyond the capital, I watched Northern Alliance soldiers barter their weapons in a market bazaar in Tokhchy village, only minutes from Bagram Air Base. Crowds mobbed the dusty clay street bartering for spices, clothes and fabric. Three rocket-propelled grenades were strapped to a motorcycle outside Rahim Tea Shop. Northern Alliance soldiers displayed their weapons inside. I wrote about one young man, Said Akeer, who offered to sell me his Kalashnikov. He said he’d been fighting since he was fourteen. First the Russians and then the civil war that followed their withdrawal, and then the Taliban.

  When I turned down the rifle, he offered to sell me a Taliban prisoner for $1,000. I told him no. He opened his coat and displayed two pistols. Again I said no.

  “I’m not fighting now that the Taliban are gone,” Akeer said. “I have to make money.”

  February 3, 2002

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  No power this evening. I use a car battery to operate my laptop. Gunfire somewhere in the city. Everyone has a gun in Kabul. So many guns I no longer notice. There was a chapter in your book where you described the Red Baron as tired. He’d look out at the muddy airfield of wherever he was stationed and just felt beat. I’ve not seen combat yet, but I’ve seen what wars leave behind. I know what it’s like to wake up and look at all the cratered buildings here and all the homeless and all the war wounded and all the infants held by widows. There is a heaviness to destruction and need that wears me down. I felt that in San Francisco, where I could help people. I feel it more here where I cannot.

  I think that parts of Kabul resemble photographs I’ve seen of London after the Nazi blitz. My parents spoke of WWII as I speak of Vietnam now. I remember them recalling newsreels of destroyed cities. How shocked they were at the destruction. It didn’t seem real, so outside the realm of where they were. It’s very real here.

  At sunset when all the rubble is darkened by shadows and the skyline is red-hued, Kabul can be really beautiful. Such a contrast to the daytime when all I see are people who lost legs and arms to mines begging in the streets. How they mob me, pleading, and I remember homeless people in San Francisco collecting around me like that but never with such intensity, and they weren’t armless and legless and they weren’t holding children who look at me with the eyes of puppies.

  I left Afghanistan for Kansas City at the end of March 2002. My editors gave me some time off. I took long walks through my west side neighborhood, trying to wrap my head around being back. Sometimes I ventured downtown, but only early in the morning when few people were about so I wouldn’t feel squeezed and hemmed in. In place of maimed men and women, I saw families arguing about which eighty-dollar sneakers to buy in malls. Instead of mud huts nestled up against barren foothills, skyscrapers blotted out the sun. Instead of Afghan police swinging metal chains to disperse crowds, I watched police officers issue parking tickets beneath a billboard of a nearly nude model promoting a brand of booze.

  I summarized my journal entries and my feelings of dislocation in a letter to Titler, but still he didn’t respond. I thought he must have died. After all, he had been sick and was getting on in years. However, I never really believed it. I’d always assumed one more letter from me would prompt a response. That he was still in Gulfport. That he was just older, slower. That he was still there with an encouraging word, bolstering me with his confidence.

  * * *

  September 25, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  Hurricane Rita struck western Louisiana last night. Before the storm, I wrote a feature about Johnny White’s Sports Bar, a dive in the French Quarter whose claim to fame is that it stayed open during Katrina. Despite Rita, the regulars were planning a pub crawl through the Quarter. Crazy, I know. They even had army cots for people to sleep off their drunk.

  I was alone in the RV when Rita came through. Norm and the other reporter had returned home days earlier. Headlong slants of rain came down in torrents. The RV swayed, and I felt it lift off the ground, and I pressed my hands against the walls for balance. The door snapped open to a howling wind and the air vibrated and trembled. Ink-black clouds convulsed against an even blacker sky, and the cries of the wind turned to screams as tree branches snapped and slammed against the RV. I thought at times that it might tip over.

  In the morning, I woke up to a gray sky blocking the sun. No birds, no squirrels. Rain pelted the RV and thunder boomed intermittently, rumbling through a whip-snapping wind. I contacted my editor for the day’s assignment, my last story. I’m to leave tomorrow for Kansas City. He told me to drive to Lake Charles Civic Center, west of New Orleans, where families were seeking refuge. The drive there was treacherous. Rain drenched the interstate. Passing military trucks swamped my SUV, and for seconds I was submerged. Drivers in military convoys blasted their horns as they passed me, and I swerved out of their way, kicking up stones and skidding off the side of the road. I saw several overturned cars in ditches.

  It took me almost three hours to reach Lake Charles. The civic center had been converted into a makeshift drop-in center similar in many respects to what I’d known at the Ozanam Center. Men and women sat in chairs facing a row of FEMA officials. They reminded me of people stuck in a Greyhound bus station—exhausted by delay, waiting for a schedule update. Their wet clothes clung to their bodies and puddles of dirty water widened beneath them. Buses stood outside to take evacuees out of town, but where? No one seemed to know. Behind fogged glass, I saw men, women and children looking out a bus window at those of us still inside. I think refugees, whether from a storm or a war, look the same. Lost and alone, with a mix of dread and resignation in their eyes that says their situation won’t change for the better, it’ll just change. They’ve crossed an invisible line, and their future—what they have of one—won’t be known for some time.

  I interviewed a man who complained that the police had rousted him out of his house without giving him time to take anything other than a pack of cigarettes. What about pictures of my dead wife? he said. My children? A woman said an oak tree fell on her roof, nearly splitting her small house in two. The hurricane, she continued, sounded like an infant screaming.

  The rain continued falling in sheets, and floodwaters spread into downtown Lake Charles. I left the civic center while the roads were still passable and stopped at a gas station. Drivers mobbed the station’s convenience store demanding supplies. The clerk shook his head and backed away from the door. Raised fists pummeled the glass. I gambled that I had enough gas and left without filling up.

  When I reached Gramercy, I filed my story, shut down my laptop, and listened to the wind howl. I’m done here. However, I won’t return to Kansas City. Not yet. In the morning I’ll drive onto I-10 once more, meld into an endless convoy of evacuees, aid trucks and military jeeps. I’ll drive in the rain toward Gulfport and you.

  September 26, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler:

  I am turning down 47th Street in Gulfport. I pull into your driveway behind a black pick
up truck and park. Looking at your house, I think of the miles I’ve traveled since I first wrote to you, a boy infatuated with the singular experience of a German fighter pilot. His life inspired me to write to you and to World War I veterans across the globe, and I began to imagine a world beyond my Winnetka home.

  Now, decades later, I find myself reconsidering the journeys I embarked on. Mr. Titler, I am forty-eight. I have lived twenty-three years longer than Richthofen. I was twenty-five, the age he died, when the Ozanam Center hired me. Since then I have been to Afghanistan and other remote places around the world and have seen the consequences of war in the faces of people whose hopeless stares bored into me until I looked away. I’ve written my dispatches and moved on, but their painful stories linger like bad dreams. As H. E. Hart said of Richthofen, I am now old enough to appreciate how young too many of the dead and suffering are.

  I can still see myself at the breakfast nook table, oblivious of war and its consequences, writing my first letter to you, slowly and carefully, my mother beside me. I felt very bold. At the start of something new, but I didn’t know what. I feel like that boy again as I get out of my car and knock on your door.

  An elderly man with thinning white hair brushed back from his forehead answers. He adjusts a pair of brown glasses and tips his head back, appraising the boy. He appears puzzled. The boy assumes that he has the wrong house.

  The old man looks past the boy at neighbors cleaning their yards of branches and other debris from the hurricanes. He sees the neat piles tied in bundles at the ends of their driveways. The streets clear, cars washed of grit, plywood removed from windows. Glass sparkles in the renewed order burgeoning across the neighborhood. He turns back to the boy.