The road from New Orleans to Chicago has been a long one for bartenders Webb Rhodes and Fritz Voght.
Two months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged their city and destroyed their way of life, the longtime friends are still scrambling to find work and a place to live. It hasn’t been easy.
”We only have seven dollars and we need 10 to get a phone card to make some calls,” said Voght (41) explaining that they had run through their savings buying necessities like food, clothing and camping gear for their long journey north.
”We’re used to having cash on hand — not enough to buy a colour TV, but enough to go get something to eat, have a drink after work,” he said.
Now, they have joined the thousands of displaced Katrina victims who remain homeless and dependent on handouts from church groups, the Red Cross and the government.
The burly bartenders rode out the hurricane in Rhodes’s bar on historic St Charles Street. After spending a night and a day playing backgammon with a few friends in the three-story brick building, they went home to find their apartment had sustained less damage than expected.
”It was perfectly okay. We had running water, we had food and we figured the electricity would be back on in a day,” said Rhodes (39) ”Then the levy broke.”
Panic spread faster than the floodwater as chaos and looting broke out across the city. People in the apartment complex were getting nervous, so Rhodes suggested everyone try to relax by the pool and used battery powered boom boxes to drown out the sounds from the street.
”When we turned the music off you could hear them rattling the gates, screaming at people trying to bait them out,” Voght said.
The next morning the taps were dry and the mayor said it would be months before the city’s water supply would be turned back on. They caught a ride out of town in a friend’s van and got Rhodes’s father to pick them up in Lafayette, Louisiana and drive them to his home in Texas.
The first couple of weeks were spent wading through the bureaucratic nightmare of applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and trying to find an apartment in nearby Beaumont.
Determined not to be a burden, they used their Red Cross cash cards to buy groceries for Rhodes’s family.
Then Hurricane Rita formed in the Gulf and bore straight down on them. Two days before the storm tore across the state, Voght’s Fema cheque arrived. They used the money to buy camping equipment and food and joined the massive traffic jam formed by 2,5-million people fleeing the coast.
They made it to Lake Charles — the Louisiana town hardest hit by Rita — when their borrowed truck broke down.
”You could see the start of [the storm] — we could feel it right on our tail,” Voght said.
And if it weren’t for the kindness of strangers, they would have been stuck camping there.
”We got some incredible help on the way up here,” Rhodes said.
The man in Lake Charles who fixed the broken fuel valve then invited them to dinner with his family.
The pastor in Little Rock who found them spark plugs when the truck broke down a second time.
The church group from Texas which tracked them down in Illinois and offered to pay a security deposit and three months’ rent on an apartment in Chicago.
The Red Cross worker who stayed late to make sure they could get off their friend’s couch and into a hotel.
Rhodes still hasn’t received his disaster assistance check from Fema, but he’s determined to look on the bright side, saying repeatedly that they’re doing a lot better than many.
The hardest part has been going two months without working. But even though they have jobs waiting for them back in New Orleans, they have no intention of going back to the Big Easy.
The goal now is to find a three-bedroom apartment near a good school so Voght’s girlfriend and her 13-year-old can join them in Chicago.
Then they can get started on a new life free from the storms and stresses of watching friends fall prey to drugs, alcoholism and the drudgery of being stuck in a dead-end job.
”New Orleans is a hard place,” Rhodes said. ”She wants her pound of flesh.” – AFP
