by Reecy Pontiff.
I’ll never forget the frenzied sobbing of my young neighbor from downstairs when she arrived home to find the police investigating the murder of her boyfriend. If one of us had to see Flee’s body face-up in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor, I’m glad that it was branded into my brain and not Sara’s. Regrettably, in New Orleans. it’s only a matter of time until you end up some variable in this equation.
It had always been a dream of mine to live in New Orleans. As a military brat my grandmother’s house there had always felt like home. I’d considered moving to NOLA when I was 19, but a trusted uncle strongly advised against it; I wasn’t the most likely candidate to live out a modern day version of“The House of the Rising Sun.” But with no degree, no prospects and a lack of life experience, there certainly was a possibility of the Time-Picayune reporting that the body of an alcoholic 20-year-old girl from the suburbs who reportedly “liked vaudeville” had been found in the gutter outside the French Quarter.
When I finally moved to New Orleans in 2009, at the wiser old age of 28, the Crescent City was still cleaning up from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in every imaginable sense. Even four years after the storm, people were still gutting their mold-ridden houses, fighting for FEMA and insurance payouts, and coping with severe trauma. My artist friends Otter, Aaron, and I moved into the St. Roch neighborhood, which had been on the edge of the destruction and thus on the edge of gentrification. It was on the “wrong side”of St. Claude Avenue across from the now upscale Marigny, which had escaped the floodwaters due to its close proximity to the Mississippi River.
Our block had not seen any flooding from the broken levees, but if you’d walked two blocks back you would have seen the occasional high-water marks on houses steadily rise the further along you went. As rents in the bohemian Marigny went up, the punks, artists and musicians (with plenty of crossover in between) had started to filter across St. Claude Avenue, and we three housemates were part of that trend. It made the neighborhood a hodge-podge of working-class black families in generational homes, broke-ass white kids and the occasional yuppie with an eye for rising property values.
Our pink building sat on the wide, oak-lined St. Roch Avenue, and we lovingly nicknamed our fourplex the Salmon Stroch Rocket. When we asked the tender at the bar across the street if she knew anything about our new home, she replied,“What, you mean the crack house?” Later we would hear stories about the SWAT team that had raided every unit in the building right before our landlord bought it. Shortly after we moved in, Otter conversed through the locked security screen of our front door with a shifty character who had just gotten out of jail and was looking to“get his block back.”
In the age-old story of gentrification, the police had begun patrolling our street because of the yuppies who’d started complaining about the character of the neighborhood they’d chosen to move to. The bolstered police presence could have been a good thing, except that one never knows what kind of treatment to expect from NOPD. When some of the patrolling officers started throwing neighbors onto the hood of their cruisers for what seemed like no particular reason, this incensed the more civic-minded punks in the area and they started holding community meetings, many of which I was involved in. What incensed me was that these same yuppies were unwilling to redirect their rage towards a bigger and more collective problem in the neighborhood—according to the Department of Justice, one of the best deterrents to street crime is light, and the streetlights on our beloved avenue had been out for over a month because the city had let the contract expire with the company that repaired them.
If bureaucracy is a glacier, gentrificiation can seem like river rapids. By the time we moved out two years later the Salmon Stroch Rocket was completely populated by white people, mostly arty-types like ourselves, and Sara and Flee, the young couple below us. The last time I saw Sara and Flee’s faces alive and untroubled, they peered up at me from the back yard as I inquired out my window whether they’d like some coffee. It was the first chance I’d gotten to spend some time with my new neighbors—respectful, educated punk kids who’d recently moved—or at least returned—to New Orleans. Three of them shared the downstairs apartment, working service jobs and drinking tallboys on the front porch in their spare time. The couple had just gotten a puppy. We had a pleasant chat about our Christmas plans while soaking in the New Orleanian winter sun.
We all went about our business. My two arty housemates and I had guests from out of town and that evening we enjoyed cocktails mixed with liquor from plastic bottles over a board game in the living room. Halfway through the game we heard a loud thump from downstairs—like a large appliance falling over, or a door slamming—and a yip of surprise from the neighbors’ puppy. Otter and I went to the front balcony to see what we could see. It was dark—the streetlights were still out—and all we could see on the otherwise deserted street was a guy peddling a BMX bike down the sidewalk, a common enough occurrence in our low-rent neighborhood. We shrugged and went back inside.
An hour later I was bathing in bubbles and candlelight when blue lights began to flash outside, making a surrealist nightclub of the washroom as they bounced off the mirror and white tiles. The regular police patrols made this nothing unusual—except that the lights did not fade away as the squad car cruised down the block. Soon after, the wailing began: a woman’s voice keeping from the yard, gaining momentum in the universal language of despair. It went on and on. I dried myself off and went into the living room wrapped in a towel.
Our two house guests were sitting on the couch, peering out the window with furrowed brows. They looked to me and spoke like conjoined twins. “Clothes are…” one said, “… required.” the other finished. My housemates were nowhere to be seen. Rushing to my room, I threw on whatever came to hand. I clomped down our staircase to the side of the house, dragging my dread-leadened feet. As I opened the door I immediately saw Sara on the sidewalk, shaking and crying.
From the downstairs unit a harsh light blasted into the night. As I made my way toward the hysterical girl, I couldn’t help but look through the gap in the lime green curtains of their kitchen window. I didn’t want to see but I had to: a body’s blue face resting in a puddle of maroon on the concrete floor. Still as the dead. It was an effort to tear my gaze away, to keep walking. Sara’s housemate was there with her. He seemed calm. Too calm. Keeping it together for Sara. Eventually I worked up the courage to ask him who was inside. He confirmed that it was Flee.
Sara started panicking about the puppy, still crated inside the house. A stern-faced officer told her they couldn’t touch anything inside the crime scene, but was eventually moved by her plight and retrieved the dog. A police line was strung around the trees outside our building and we were forced to move to the other side. The red and blue lights of emergency vehicles glinted off every window and bumper on the block. Neighbors milled about, murmuring to each other. Sara stood by the yellow tape, staring at the apartment, shuddering and squeezing the puppy to her chest like a teddy bear. Her friends from across the street soon came and bundled her away.
As for my household, we filed into the bar on the corner. I don’t remember pulling my wallet out but somehow there was plenty of pain when I woke up in the morning at my neighbor’s house next to a clown. I wore his bite marks to Christmas dinner at my family’s house two days later. “Reaffirming life,” Otter called it. Happy fucking holidays. We did a lot of that over the next few weeks, drinking heavily and making questionable decisions. The first time I cried about it was on the shoulder of a man I’d just met at a bar Uptown a few nights later. I recounted the story to a friend while this fellow listened in. When I finished, he said “If you’re not going to hug her, I am,” and pulled me into a tender embrace. I lost it then and there, soaking his velour hoodie with my tears. I think my friend was simply unsure how to respond and I took comfort where I could find it. I went home with the man that night and never returned his text messages. A cad under duress, I.
On Christmas Eve a detective came by for a walk-through of Sara and Jon’s apartmen“Homicide cleanup” services are expensive so Sara’s housemate had already done the dirty work of scrubbing her boyfriend’s brains off the floor. To the best of my knowledge she never had to see the gruesome scene. Some of Sara’s friends had come by for moral support and I came down as well. I was fairly accustomed to interacting with public officials, and thought it would be good to have a somewhat impartial party around to feed people sandwiches and help liaise with the cops if needed. They really couldn’t have assigned a better detective to this case. He handled everything like a champ. He seemed to understand the situation; tensions were high, and punks are not generally known for their deference to authority.
The same punks that had rallied around the cause of the neighborhood’s civil liberties came to the forefront after their friend Flee’s murder. The result was a large gathering in a vacant lot by the train tracks one afternoon. Flasks were passed as the tattooed and dreadlocked of downtown New Orleans’ underground sat betwixt their bicycles on the grass. The mood was somber.
The detective pulled up in his unmarked cruiser. He was probably in his mid-thirties, dressed in a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, wearing canvas shoes beneath bluejeans and aviators. He had chutzpah, standing in front of a crowd of anti-authoritarian kids in a city known for its systemic corruption. When he began speaking someone yelled out, “Can you please take off your sunglasses so we can see your eyes?” The detective paused at this request, then removed the aviators to reveal a calm but hardened gaze. His eye contact with the group seemed deliberate as he continued.
“I don’t care if you have priors, I don’t care if you have a dime bag on you,” he said. “I just want to catch the killer. I don’t sleep until I find the guys who did this to your friend.” He told us that if we saw anything, remembered anything, heard any rumors even, to call him, day or night. And more amazing than a bunch of punks collaborating with the police is the fact that they caught the killers from information gathered from them. The perpetrator turned out to be a 16-year-old black kid from the neighborhood, who had reportedly been terrorizing the neighborhood with a rash of armed robberies. It seems that Flee had gone home to drop off the puppy before meeting Sara in the Quarter for a drink after she got off work. He’d just popped in for a moment and he hadn’t closed and locked the front door. The kid had walked right in, demanded Flee hand over any valuables. When Flee resisted the kid shot him in the head with a small-caliber pistol, took a couple of laptops, and left. It appeared to be a crime of opportunity.
After a grand jury handed down an indictment of 19 charges—which included four murder counts—it was ruled that he was“incompetent to stand trial”and he was sent to a juvenile mental facility. This decision tore me up. My first reaction is: “no shit, a kid who rampaged through his own neighborhood with no regard for the suffering of others might not be in his right fucking mind?” My more measured reaction is that our “justice”system is very, very broken, and that it might be for the best that this kid didn’t just end on the inside learning to be an even bigger badass with an even more disturbed mind. Our system of “reform and correction”seems to lack both qualities. Louisiana is listed as the “world’s prison capital,” incarcerating an incredible 1 in 14 black men in the state, according to the Times-Picayune in 2012. The bottom line in Louisiana comes down to the Bottom Line—prisons are big business for the state. Why reform when you can cash in?
After Flee’s murder I went away for almost a year. I did return to work one last festival season but spent it feeling that every day my friends and I escaped unscathed was sheer dumb luck. Maybe not complete luck—if you live in NOLA long enough, for your own safety you begin to think,“WWCD-What Would a Criminal Do?” If you can master that skill you might be able to stave off attack. “Never carry more money that you can afford to have taken from you,”was the first piece of advice I received in New Orleans. “Don’t look like a victim”was the next. They both seem like sage tidbits of wisdom and I took them to heart, but I can’t help but feel that I played the odds and came out on top—read: alive—during my tenure in the Big Sleazy. I think that in the end, the house always wins.
I dearly miss New Orleans, the vibrant street culture, the colors, the festivals, the creative abandon. In New Orleans people create and celebrate like there’s no tomorrow, and in my experience, the truth of it is much closer at hand than in other places in America. Flee’s murder is not the exception, it’s the rule. Things like this happen all the time. It was hard to leave the random street parades, the brass band on the corner, taking my cocktail with me wherever I pleased, but I can’t live in a place where I constantly have to look over my shoulder, where it’s only a matter of time before me or someone I love is threatened with a gun in their face.
A conversation I had with a friend before I left New Orleans summed it all up:
“People leave, but they always come back,” he said.
“They leave long enough to forget?” I asked.
“They leave long enough to stay alive.”
If I had never moved to New Orleans I wouldn’t have an image of the bloody body of a kind-hearted fellow burned into my mind, but neither would I have come to appreciate life as I have. Even as she pulls you away from reality like a Siren, New Orleans puts the world in perspective.
Reecy Pontiff is a musician, vaudevillian, writer and citizen of the world. In New Orleans she created the“Ninth Ward Rebirth Bike Tour,“ still in operation today. Currently she resides in Manitou Springs, CO. Her blog can be viewed at http://reecypontiff.blogspot.com