I just finished reading a truly great war novel by a writer of sizable talent who has come close to war. The writer is Matthew Eck, a soldier who served in Haiti and Somalia. His novel, “The Farther Shore,” is a haunting portrait of modern warfare set in an African city governed by warlords robbing the population of international aid. The war Eck writes about is conducted in covert missions — small groups of soldiers guiding bombs from a hidden rooftop — rather than full-scale engagements between uniformed forces.

The old war novels concerned soldiers surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of other soldiers who represented nations fully aware of the engagements and the sacrifices required. Those books were often set in occupied countries, or they climaxed when one large group of men outmaneuvered another large group of men. But war no longer follows those rules. There is no draft. In response to the attacks of 9/11, our president urged the population to keep shopping. Meanwhile, the battlefield has shifted. It has become increasingly difficult to separate friend from enemy. The target is often a sect, a small group within a much larger population. Some of these conflicts are so small they hardly make the news, and we remain blissfully unaware of the men and women that taste blood and fight battles in our name.

Narrated by Joshua Stantz (an average boy becoming a man who was simply looking for college money when he enlisted), “The Farther Shore” opens on a rooftop in a strange city seemingly modeled on Mogadishu in the 1990s. Six soldiers guide bombs down on the city, the plan being to awe the population into surrender, or something like that. The soldiers don’t seem sure. They’re just doing their job.

Josh didn’t mean to find himself half a world away in a hostile city, but that’s where he ends up. When some children trip the booby traps in a stairwell, the soldiers have to get out of the city. However, their van has been stolen and thing go wrong with the extraction, the way things in war so often do. The difficulty is not in getting in, it’s in getting out. The parallels to the quagmire in Iraq are so obvious they defy mention. The result is a haunting, minimalist work painted in surreal shades of desert brown. It echoes “A Farewell to Arms” and “Dog Soldiers” yet remains unique to the new millennium. Eck writes:

The Humvee’s engine finally cut off and the vehicle slowed until we rolled to a stop.

“He’s dead,” said Santiago.

“I know.” I stepped out of the Humvee.

I saw two adults and a child approaching us in the distance. It must have been a family.

I tossed my helmet into the driver’s seat and picked up my 9mm. Sand was blowing in off the desert. I stood there leaning against the hood of the Humvee, the 9mm at my side.

None of the soldiers are heroes, but they’re not villains either. They are not always sure of their targets and they make bad decisions, more circumstantial than not. Some of them don’t make it out, but their death is as random as their cause.

The writing is often beautiful. And modern war has probably never been so fully explored as in this small, relentless novel. Eck never panders. We are not asked to cry, only to go quietly along for the ride.

The army was out there too, massing to the southwest and the northeast, along the main road that ran down the coast and through the city. We were to gauge the show of force against the level of resistance and report on whether the city was awed enough to accept help in forming some kind of government.

This near-perfect book is published by Milkweed Press Editions, a small publisher in Minnesota. Possibly the first great war novel of our generation, “The Farther Shore” will easily be one of the best novels of the year. But the question is, does anybody care? Thirty-five years ago, Nick Ut took a picture of a naked girl burned by napalm running crying down the street in Vietnam. That picture helped end a war. Now Nick Ut is taking pictures of Paris Hilton, crying in the police car as she’s driven back to jail. Novels, photography and art used to be part of the conversation when contemplating murder and death a world away.

The question of the moment is not why American fiction isn’t engaging with the world. It is. The question is why we aren’t paying attention.

In 1972 Nick took a picture of a 9-year-old girl named Kim. She was naked, running with her arms spread, 80 percent of her body burned by napalm. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize and hastened the end of an unnecessary war. Thirty-five years later to the day, he took a picture of Paris Hilton crying in a police car, returning to jail. “You look at the pictures,” he says, “they’re very similar. Her hair falls over her brow, both crying, open mouth. Also different. Kim was very poor, 80 percent of her body burned by napalm. Paris was in jail for three days.”

Nick speaks with Kim on the phone every week. Kim now works as a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations.

There are hundreds of journalists here. And tourists arriving. I meet Ashley Moore, who spent seven days in the jail back in September. She’s pretty, a business student at Cerritos College. She couldn’t make bail so she stayed in jail for a week. After she was released the judge dropped the case. She has the Japanese symbol for beautiful on her arm, a rose tattooed on her foot. “That place,” she says, pointing to the jail, “is no place to be.” But here she is, waiting to see Paris get out. She says she has nothing else to do on a Monday night.

I wait inside the jail with Pablo. His girlfriend spent the weekend here. She attacked Pablo. His arm is all bruised and cut. After she attacked him she called the police but they arrested her. He has been waiting three hours. When the sheriff’s spokesman sees me with Pablo he says, “Get out of here. You’re with the media.”

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.

As it gets closer to midnight the crowd swells. The TV reporters report live. Helicopters hover overhead. The parents pull up in a large black SUV. They have a driver and a bodyguard and the bodyguard seems to know the police well. He’s a big, bald man in a well-tailored suit. He looks like he could have been a football player once. The driver is dark and serious. More tape is stretched, to keep in the crowd. The thrum of the helicopters is like a soundtrack.

“You’re so beautiful, Kathy,” a girl cries from the crowd. The girl looks Spanish or Asian, or both. She’s wearing a tank top, her breasts pushed up.

“Thank you,” Kathy Hilton says. Kathy sits in the car waiting, the window rolled down, bantering with the press. She likes the attention. She plays with her hair.

Then the girl says it again, “You’re so beautiful, Kathy.”

Kathy smiles.

Then the girl says it again and Kathy looks ahead uncomfortably.

“Oh God, please let Paris go free!” a deranged man wails. We are in East Los Angeles near the Imperial Highway, an otherwise forgotten place, an area of Los Angeles frequently referred to as a wasteland.

There are arc lights set up. Lights of all kinds. It’s midnight and everything is bright. The reporters lean over the tape. The paparazzi wait with their cameras strapped over their necks. It has been two weeks since “The Sopranos” ended. Phil Spector is on trial for murder but nobody notices. The newspapers have been filled with reports that Paris served more time than 80 percent of people accused of similar crimes. They fail to take into account that Paris was pulled over three times. That she was swerving. That she had a signed statement saying she knew she was not allowed to drive. That she failed to show up to mandatory classes. The judges have discretion in these cases for a reason. Paris had flagrantly flouted the law. Several days ago she called Barbara Walters at 2 in the morning, 11 at night West Coast time. Nobody seems to think that’s strange. A call to Barbara Walters at 11 at night from a prison cell.

The jail holds 2,200 people. It is full to capacity. There are only eight medical beds. Paris has occupied one of them almost the entire time.

And then she is out. Paris Hilton in tight jeans and a light jacket thrown over a white shirt. She’s smiling, basking in the glow of the cameras. She looks better without makeup. She gets to the car and she is hugging her mother and then the door is open and she is inside and the tape and the barricades go down and the police cannot control the crowd. The car is trying to move, inching away. The paparazzi stand in front of the car taking pictures. Unafraid. Nick Ut stands back in the wreckage of toppled tripods, reviewing the pictures he took. He’s a little man, and this is not exactly his game. But Paris was smiling and happy, exactly as he had hoped.

The police have blocked the parking lot, so we can’t get out. Finally, I’m on the highway again. It’s 1 in the morning and I feel strangely alive. I see the helicopters above the 110, shining their giant lights like tractor beams and I drive toward them.

I met a man from Stopparishilton.com. He said they were working with Al Sharpton. Sharpton had called for a boycott of all things Paris. Sharpton, who once accused Jesse Jackson of smearing himself with Martin Luther King’s blood. Sharpton, who insisted in staying in $500-a-night hotel rooms during his meaningless presidential campaign. Tawana Brawley Sharpton. Sharpton is not the man to deliver us from Paris.

There are more than 50 people waiting at the gates of Paris’ home on the hill above the Chateau Marmont. The streets have been made temporary tow zones but nobody seems to care. They are paparazzi and mainstream media and citizens of celebrity-obsessed West Hollywood. It’s almost 2 in the morning. It’s all very American, just magnified. But Paris isn’t coming home tonight and so I go back to my friend’s house in Little Armenia, where I’ve been sleeping on the couch.

Originally I thought this was a good thing, Paris’ incarceration. It would bring attention to prison crowding, a corrupt sheriff, a justice system that works differently for the rich and the poor. And it did. But it’s not really what this was all about. In the new age we all know how famous we are. How many MySpace friends do you have? How many people read your blog? How many download your video from YouTube? We can be famous now without doing anything, and Paris has done that better than anyone else. We don’t burn down the houses of the rich because we want to be rich. And we shudder and complain about the attention Paris Hilton gets but we talk about her just the same, sometimes in quiet and disparaging tones. We talk about her more than we talk about Iraq and often we talk about how we talk about Paris Hilton when we should be talking about the war in Iraq.

But we don’t.

I’m spending the day on Wired Pussy. It’s a Wednesday. I know the people who run Kink.com and I thought it would be an interesting thing to do.

I’m with Satine Phoenix, a model who flew in for the day from Los Angeles. The makeup woman called in sick, so Satine is doing her own makeup. She has skin the color of sand and long, thick black hair. She’s exotic, extraordinarily beautiful. She’s excited to be here, excited that I’m writing about her, excited about life and filled with manic energy.

We’re on the second floor of the three-story building. There are 50 full-time employees at Kink, plus contractors and talent. A profile in 7×7 magazine said Kink.com made $18 million last year. The office is clean and well-lit with an air of efficiency. It if resembles anything it’s a design studio with all the high-end Macs and LCD panels. Except on most screens there’s some kind of porn being edited — women with their legs forcibly spread, mouths held open with steel clamps. Nobody seems to notice.

But Kink will be leaving this building soon. The company recently purchased the Armory in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Armory is a giant building that has sat empty for the past 35 years. Neighborhood activists have been trying to block the move. They say families live in the Mission. But, of course, families live everywhere. Others say the space should be used for affordable housing, but nobody has made a proposal on the space in years. Peter Acworth, the owner of Kink, points out that the Armory was originally a place where men were trained how to kill. What Kink plans to do there is far less obscene.

Today’s shoot is in the warehouse, a smaller studio off Kink’s main offices. The warehouse is intentionally weathered but the equipment is all first-rate, lights, rigs and scrims comparable with anything in Hollywood. There are 11 studios in the Porn Palace, including a barn, a dungeon, a jail cell, a bar (where they also have parties every Friday night) and a hot tub.

Satine works all the time, at least four shoots a week, which should translate to $200,000 annually, though I don’t have the guts to ask. Mostly she does mainstream porn, guy on girl, girl on girl, but she really likes fetish. She also does performance art, body painting, a bondage burlesque and a weekly radio show on KSEXradio.com. I ask if she’s saving for something. “I’m just paying off bills,” she says. “I was an alcoholic. My skin was fucked up all the time because of alcohol and coke. I haven’t had a drink in a year and a half.”

Satine has been doing porn for a year now. Before that she was a stripper in San Francisco. She made her first film in San Jose and immediately moved to Los Angeles to work full time. Kink.com flies her back to the Bay Area once or twice a month.

In the dressing room with us is Princess Donna, the Web mistress for Wired Pussy. Donna is effortlessly beautiful. She has long legs and thick black hair and big eyes that soak in her surroundings. She runs the site and acts as a dominant in most of the shoots. There are four to six updates a month, and 6,000 subscribers pay an average of $30 each. A model from Water Bondage comes into the dressing room. She looks 15, though she’s actually 23, and the wardrobe coordinator helps her into a two-piece latex outfit. Donna advises the Water Bondage model to wear color-stay lipstick and eyeliner that won’t run when they dunk her.

“I can’t wait for what you’re going to do to me,” Satine says to Donna.

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In Donna’s office there’s a large flat-panel monitor. On the screen is a still from a recent shoot — Donna on a roof in New York, wearing leopard-print tights and heels. Her foot is on another woman’s head. The woman’s hands are tied behind her back and Donna’s hand is in the woman’s ass. I can see the straining tendons in the woman’s leg, her knees bound, panties around her thighs, surrounded by Word documents and spreadsheet files.

Donna was just finishing undergraduate work at New York University when she interviewed for the position of Web mistress at Wired Pussy. She had already worked two years doing bondage porn and was a high-end stripper before that.

She remembers her first bondage porn shoot. She was tied in a box with another woman, the other woman’s foot tied forcibly in Donna’s mouth.

“I love this job,” Donna says.

Donna asks, “Are you nervous, excited?”

Satine: “Yes. I’m excited.”

Donna: “What have you done since your last shoot with us?”

Satine: “I’ve played a lot in my personal life. Flogging. Rope bondage.”

Donna: “What do you like?”

Satine: “I like duct tape. I love hair pulling and I like being face-slapped.”

Donna: “You do?”

There is one woman on the camera and another shooting stills. That makes four women and me. Donna sits offstage on a wooden crate. She’s wearing a polka-dot dress, a red belt, black heels. Satine sits on a chair, fully clothed, addressing the camera. Every video begins like this, with the talent reassuring the viewers (and regulators) that this a consensual scene. At some point Donna enters, grabs Satine by her hair and pulls her to the floor.

I take my shoes off, sit near the equipment rack. The people are nice, creative, interesting. But I wonder what I am seeing here that I wouldn’t see just watching the video. The food cart full of Luna bars and Odwalla, the camera girls scurrying around the action? Here is one of the obvious questions: Would you let someone do something to you that you enjoyed, for a fair amount of money, on camera? Why not?

When I was 21 and dancing between films at a gay porn theater in Chicago called the Bijou, I was offered a part in a bisexual porn video. The money wasn’t great, only $300. Men don’t make nearly as much as women performers. I backed out at the last minute. I was afraid it would negatively affect me later on. Now I realize it wouldn’t have. Now I realize nobody would have cared that much. I wish I had done it, just to have had the experience.

Donna ties Satine with thick rope, wraps her arms around her back, ties her hair to a hook hanging from the ceiling. Donna attaches a violet wand plate, electrifying Satine’s body so that every time she touches Satine’s nipples Satine receives a shock. Donna has forbidden Satine from speaking and her face contorts in quiet screams.

There will be four setups today with at least a 10-minute break between each. The studio is reserved for four hours and will yield a video roughly 50 minutes in length that can be downloaded by subscribers in segments or streamed in its entirety. Photographs will also be available for download. Subscribers have access to everything and can also leave comments on the shoot, for example, “more pussy licking,” and “you are so fucking hot.” Subscriptions to Kink sites automatically renew and the average subscriber stays for four months. Many subscribers switch between sites.

Between setups Satine and I talk about relationships. She recently broke up with her boyfriend, who didn’t want her doing male-female porn. She wasn’t willing to give up control over her career. “I’m an exhibitionist,” Satine says. “I like it when people watch. And I like boy-girl scenes, I like fucking. This is who I am.”

Much of the action in the second scene revolves around whether Donna is going to let Satine have an orgasm. “Do you want to come, you fucking whore?” Satine’s hands are attached to her ankles, a vibrator between her legs. Occasionally Donna shocks Satine with a cattle prod.

Observation 1: This is not fake. Satine and Donna are truly in role. Satine is feeling submissive and Donna is definitely on top. Donna is hurting Satine; Satine is being hurt.

Observation 2: Everyone here seems to enjoy his or her work. At least today.

Between setups Satine puts on a blue robe that has “slave” embroidered on its chest. I’m on the floor and she’s on the chair resting her feet on my knees. “I’m going to get a benefactor to pay for fake boobs,” she says. “It’s nice when someone will do that for you. I know people that have gotten $2,000 boobs, but it’s not the kind of thing you want to save money on. A good boob job costs $10,000.”

Satine has red marks along her belly where Donna yanked a string of clips she’d attached to Satine’s stomach and nipples. Watching it, I actually felt empathy for Satine. Satine was blindfolded. I saw Donna twisting her fingers through the white string holding the clips. I knew she was going to pull the clips and I knew it was going to hurt. I almost covered my face in my hands.

In the third setup Satine is duct-taped to a rectangular wooden beam. A gas mask is placed over her head. During this scene an electric acrylic plug is slid into her vagina. Donna slaps at it continually, open-handed, occasionally moving to a counter to turn some knobs on the machine, increasing the juice.

For the climactic scene, Satine is gagged and tied with her legs held apart by a spreader bar, her head forward and her hair tied to the front of the trunk she’s squatting on. Donna places voice-activated electrodes on Satine’s ass so every time Satine moans she’s electrified. Meanwhile Donna slaps her between her legs with a cane.

Halfway through the shoot they have to stop because Satine is crying.

No crying is allowed in Kink.com videos.

“I’m sorry,” Satine says. “It just feels so good.”

When the shoot is over Donna asks, “How you doing, baby?”

“My vagina,” Satine jokes with a Russian accent. “She is broken.” After that there is lots of talk, jokes. They talk about various sex toys, the Monkey Rocker. The Sybian. “Seriously,” Donna says. “Every time I would cane you I would get a throb in my pussy.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

When I leave the Porn Palace half an hour later it’s dark and I find that both wheels have been stolen from my bicycle. This has nothing to do with the article except to prove that it’s possible to watch someone shove an electrified plug in someone’s pussy while a thief casually takes an Allen wrench to your transportation on a downtown street. Though that’s also wrong. The Porn Palace is half a block from the largest shopping center on the West Coast, the fashionable Westfield Mall. But a half-block in the other direction is Sixth Street, the last remnant of a downtown that wasn’t always so prosperous. Filled with junkies, transient hotels, outreach centers and shooting galleries, Sixth Street is littered with the limping desperate and the drooling insane.

Which could be a metaphor for porn, an industry in an economic no man’s land. But the porn industry is twice the size of the mainstream film industry, leaving open the question of what “mainstream” really means. You may or may not be into electrified bondage, but if you’re male, chances are you’ve watched porn or bought a dirty magazine in the past year. If you didn’t, look at your friends; they did. Chances are you didn’t tell anybody about the porn you watched. Chances are you’re surrounded by people whose desires you would consider strange if you knew what they were.

San Francisco, with its open sexuality, is the perfect place for a company like Kink.com. But many porn sites are shutting down because of new regulations by the Bush administration. Some that have been closed, like Insex.com, are seeking buyers in foreign countries.

I asked Satine what she wanted to do after this was over, when she was done making porn. She told me she was just gaining experience for a graphic novel she’s writing about her life. She said she wants to move to Japan, open a sea farm. She also wants to live in India and study tantra. She wants to have a restaurant and she wants to document it all via her graphic novels and her Web site.

“Just whatever I decide to do at the time,” she said. “I go in about three-year spans. I might completely change my mind.”

Then there was Toni’s friend Tony. Tony worked at Berlin, had tribal tattoos covering half his body, long, thick black hair like a horse’s mane, and every year the free weekly paper voted him best bartender in the city.

Tony didn’t charge me for drinks either and I hovered near his bar, an oasis next to the entrance. I danced close to Tony. I never wanted to go home. I had friends but they were sleeping, and they weren’t real friends. I said, “What kind of boys do you like?” and he said, “Straight boys” and I smiled.

Tony had a fashion show and I walked the runway at Berlin in striped shorts with thin straps over my shoulders. There were so many people there, all of them high on pills, dehydrated and watching. I danced slowly past them. It was like being perfect, which is always an illusion. I was followed by a man in a straw hat, his gown covered in pale green bulbs. “Do you have any more swimsuits?” I asked Tony. “I want to go again.”

“You are so vain,” he said, patting my ass. I gave him a quick, sly kiss on the lips, before climbing back on the stage.

It was my stripper year. My heroin year. I danced Thursday nights at Berlin. Two sets, three songs, free whiskey, seventy-five dollars, occasional tips. They called me a go-go boy but I was really just decoration, cheap art. I scored heroin on the west side, piloting my giant car through the burnt out landscape, home of the ’68 riots, the stained remnants of an assassination in Tennessee, the empty lots like broken teeth. Trash and parts everywhere, pipes protruding from the rubble, chassis on cinder blocks, men in lawn chairs on corners in front of vacant three flats. I got robbed. I got beat up. Things weren’t going well. Nothing made sense. I was having the best time of my life.

I didn’t make enough money on a podium at Berlin so I danced at the Lucky Horseshoe, a front for prostitutes on Halsted Street. We weren’t allowed to sit between sets. We had to mingle with clients at the bar. We would stand and they would sit. “They like it when you pay attention,” the owner told us. “Open seats are for customers.”

I met a man who bred dogs. He stuck five dollars in my thongs after my first dance. “It’s like selling people,” he said, laying a rough hand on my waist. “Only it’s dogs, so it’s legal.” Then he let out a monstrous laugh.

The going rate was $20 a day plus tips. The going rate was $80 for a blowjob down at the Ram, a dirty theater with private booths, six painted steps below street level a block away. There were sugar-daddies that came to the Horseshoe but it was up to you to parse them from the fakers and dreamers. They said, “What do you want to do with your life? I can help you.” If you were a writer they were an agent. If you were an actor they were a director, a producer. If you wanted to go to school they would give you a place to stay while you got your act together. They knew someone on the admissions board. The clients at the Horseshoe were whatever you might need. But I needed to be found attractive. I needed to be loved unconditionally. And I was very angry about something.

I had a college degree.

This is all true.

It was 1995, the hottest summer on record, or so somebody told me at the time. It’s a fact I’ve never bothered to check. They were carrying dead seniors by the dozen in a phalanx of stretchers from the nursing homes on Touhy Avenue. I lived in a squat above a garage a bullet away from the project buildings. I could make out the top of the Sears Tower from my porch. I had a roommate and during the day we would go to the slab along North Avenue Beach and lie there like seals, diving into the water every twenty minutes or so until the sun went down. We lay on the warm concrete watching the sunset and then the stars. “Life is good,” he said.

Sunday afternoons I danced between films at the Bijou. Twenty minutes of porn then one boy on the stage, one boy in the audience. The men pulled their penises out, stroking themselves, sliding a dollar in my pants with their free hand. The Bijou smelled of bleach. I climbed over the seats barefoot. I was like a spider, crawling along armrests and chair backs, never touching the ground. I stayed away from the older men. They had been around too long. They were looking for a good deal. I paid special attention to a fat boy who sat in the second row. He was probably my age and I felt sorry for him. He was so obese with all this skin falling around his face. His hair was flaxen and I worried that nobody loved him the most. I was projecting my own feelings. I sat on his lap, squeezed his shoulder, kissed his neck. I wanted to be capable of loving him for more than a few minutes but I wasn’t. He gave me a dollar and I hugged him, pulling his nose against my naked chest. “It’s OK,” I said.

There were rooms above the Bijou. Offices, a movie studio. The manager kept a picture of me in his desk drawer. He asked me to act in a bisexual porn movie. I said I didn’t mind. I was put in a room and given five minutes to get a hard-on. This was my audition. The room was giant and empty with slanted beams holding up the roof and great windows looking across Old Town. I jerked off, paging casually through the porn next to the bed. The director burst in with a Polaroid camera. “Yes,” he exclaimed when he saw my hard-on.

The pay was $300. I was told it was very important to be nice to the woman. She was a queen. I wanted the money but I was ambivalent about the film. What I really wanted was to be tied up. I wanted to be humiliated on tape. I wanted women with strap-ons to grip me by the throat and slide inside of me. I wanted to be wrapped in cellophane, like a present, unable to move. That was the kind of film I wanted to be in. But I didn’t know how to say that at the time and people that don’t know how to ask rarely get what they want.

I danced at the Manhole on lights out night. I was four feet above the floor on a square pedestal. I had to be careful not to step over the edge. Hands came from everywhere, palms stretching below my balls, fingers trying to find my asshole. I couldn’t see past the elbows. “Stop it,” I said softly. The music was so loud, nobody heard me.

It was my heroin year. I shot bags next to the couch and slept on the living room floor. I missed a night at Berlin. Then I missed another one. Summer was over. We stopped going to the beach. It got darker earlier. It was almost Thanksgiving. I dated Stacey, a Barbie-doll stripper with a bad coke habit and implants that didn’t take. They felt like twelve-inch softballs inside her breasts. She made $400 a shift. She knew about bars in Cicero that never closed. She crashed her car and the bar maid asked if she spilled her drink. Her other boyfriend was a police officer. “He’s very violent,” she told me. “He wants to put his gun in your mouth and ask you some questions. He broke the lock on my door. Do you want to come over?”

After Stacey I dated Zahava. Zahava came from a good southern family. She had been a pom-pom girl. She had been to finishing school. It seemed like she was always happy. She was the only person I knew with good posture. She wanted me to go to law school. I turned her on to heroin. Years later she would tell me I was the first bad thing that ever happened to her. Zahava said I was handsome. I told her when you’re a stripper you don’t worry about your appearance. You always feel attractive when people are willing to pay to see you naked. It was the biggest lie I ever told. I stared at the other strippers, the bricks in their stomachs, trapezoids like baby mountains. It made me nauseous to think about. I wasn’t good enough looking to dance at the Vortex but they let me in for free. I was low-rent and I knew it. I had an eating disorder and long hair. The only advantage I had over anybody was that I knew how to dance.

I was in a small room with dark wood floors on top of a big house in Evanston near the lake. I took a hotshot and passed out with blood streaming from my nose and foam gurgling at my mouth. Just like Toni a year earlier. My friend turned me over so I wouldn’t choke on my own vomit, then he left me to die.

But I didn’t die. Firemen came the next day. They were strong and good. They strapped me to a chair, carried me down three flights of stairs. “Where’s your family?” the owner of the house asked as they hauled me past her. “What’s your parents’ phone number?” I didn’t tell her. It was the first good decision I made that year. I was paralyzed for eight days and the nurses let me piss all over myself. When I was discharged from the hospital I walked with a limp. I told people I fell down a flight of stairs. Eventually the limp went away but it took time. And it took time to learn how to eat. I lost thirty pounds.

I didn’t strip again. Or shoot heroin. I got a master’s degree. I moved to a ski resort and the clients would sit at the bar unbundling their scarves. I wore black pants, a white shirt, and a patterned vest like all the other employees. We looked like dancing monkeys. Every day someone would stare at the mountains while I refilled their cup. “I wish I could trade places with you,” they would say, maybe dropping a dollar into the plastic pitcher sitting empty on the counter’s edge.

I stop when I see two men and a woman on a porch off Magazine Street. “You a reporter?” one of the men asks me. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” He tells me about the conspiracy: people with a lot of money flooded the city on purpose. “You want some wine?” he asks. “I’ve got a hundred dollar bottle of wine.” They say they’ve been getting supplies from the Whole Foods and using water from a neighbor’s pool to operate the toilet. But now the food at the grocery store is gone. The woman’s legs are bitten, covered in bright red welts. I leave them a gallon of water and continue toward the Convention Center.

It’s only a day since tens of thousands of people were rapidly evacuated from the Convention Center after being jammed inside it for five days. Trash is strewn everywhere. There are black bags, pillows, boxes, twisted chairs, water bottles, soiled and torn clothing. Shopping carts are turned upside down and stacked on top of each other. Garbage cans lie in the bushes. Nothing in the Gulf Coast seems to symbolize the tragedy more than the excess of garbage and human waste.

The Army presence is heavy in the Convention Center. Troop transports arrive with busloads of people. They’re processed quickly, searched, loaded onto giant helicopters and flown to New Orleans Airport, where buses, planes and trains are now moving in high gear to evacuate the city.

Geraldo Rivera arrives in a Fox News truck. An elderly woman with blond hair grips his elbow. She’s wearing thick dark glasses and a pink shirt. He carries her small white dog in his arms. He’s wearing thigh-high waders unzipped to below his knees. We shake hands. “Her relative called one of our stations,” Geraldo tells me, explaining how that call went to another station, and then another, and finally to him.

The woman had been stranded in her home for six days. Geraldo picked up the woman and her dog and brought them here. The woman looks frail on his arm, though not as bad perhaps as a lady collapsed on a chair nearby, unable to move. Or a woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the truck, carrying her prosthetic leg on her lap.

“That’s the second time he brought her here,” one of the doctors tells me, nodding toward Geraldo.

“What?”

“They did two takes. Geraldo made that poor woman walk from the Fox News van to the heliport twice. Both times carrying her dog.”

“Are you serious?” I ask. He says he is.

The doctor has been here for six days, volunteering for the state. But the federal government has control now. “You can’t do anything if you’re not with the feds,” he says. “All they needed was to send in the Army. This is too big for the state. A couple of days ago, there were people being murdered left and right. I treated this one lady at the airport, a stranded tourist. She just stepped outside of her hotel. They beat her over the head, broke her jaw and raped her.”

I leave the Convention Center and head toward the French Quarter. I’m afraid to step out of my car, afraid of street corners where lights don’t work. The empty city is no place for cowards. I park the car near the river. Then I see two transvestites in latex and fishnets bicycling down Toulouse Street. I follow them, thinking they might lead me to the New Orleans I visited so many times before. I was in my early 20s and that city was full of sex and alcohol and music. I remember driving down here in February one year, living in a van below the Quarter for a week. I remember being 20 years old and paying too much money to take Polaroids of a woman in a negligee. The tip, she said, determined the kind of outfit she wore.

Soon the transvestites are gone but Johnny White’s, located on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans, is still open and serving drinks. “We never closed,” the bartender tells me. It’s the only bar open in the city. They serve warm beer and shots. As it gets darker, they light candles on the countertops.

“You looking for a story?” a guy at the bar asks me. I shrug my shoulders. Also inside the small bar are an Indian woman, and a man with his arms wrapped around his wife, holding a cigarette in her mouth. I ask for a Coke and the bartender says they only use Coke in mixed drinks, so I order a bottle of water instead. It cost me $2.

The man with the story is Greg Rogers. He was forced from his house yesterday at Louisiana and Clairborne, an area completely submerged. “I was the last person in the neighborhood,” he says. “I had a month and a half worth of food, some books. I had my two dogs. SWAT showed up and said it was time to go. I told them I was fine, I didn’t need rescuing. They said you’re coming with us or we’re killing your dogs.” Rogers says the officers took him in a boat to an overpass and told him to start walking in the other direction. He has a windup radio with him and that’s how he heard that Johnny White’s was still open. “I was so happy to hear Johnny’s was open,” he says. He tells me he knows a bartender here. He sleeps on the bar’s floor.

“I didn’t want to leave my house,” he says. “I was fine. What were they going to do? Take me to the Superdome where I’d get shot and robbed?”

Rogers sits on the chair drinking light beer. I ask him about his dogs, and he says he left enough food and water for them for two weeks. He says he can’t get home without a boat. He tells me he was a Marine for eight years, and served in the Gulf, Bosnia, and Mogadishu. He won’t reveal the unit he was with. He says they did some bad things.

After a while, the transvestites I saw earlier come staggering by. They’re drunk and one of them is bleeding heavily. Apparently she fell off her bike. When someone offers help, she refuses.

It’s almost dark now. Curfew is at 7. The only lights are the lights from a CNN crew down the street. “I wonder if I should go get my car,” I say aloud.

“Go now before it’s dark,” the Indian woman says. She has half an unlit cigar in her mouth. “I’ll be so worried about you. Especially if you don’t have any weapons.”

Suddenly the streets are filled with red berets. The 82nd Airborne, the Army elite, have fanned out across the neighborhood. They stop at the bar and ask if we have all we need. The bar manager says we need food and water. She tells them that people have been stopping by the bar for supplies and they’ve been feeding them. The berets ask her about security. Security’s been fine, the manager says. “We know all the bad people. They don’t bother us.”

I walk to my car and get a gallon of water and two Slim Fast bars, which I give to Rogers. He puts the bars on top of his guitar case, hands the water across the bar. “I was fine at my house,” he says bitterly. “Now I’m going to lose my dogs.”

A man in leather pants, a blue shirt, with long black hair and tattoos down his forearms, arrives at the bar with a cooler full of medical supplies. The bartender is now on the other end of the counter, doing speed. “I’m not really a bartender,” he tells me. “I’m a drunk. I was just helping out.” This is still the city I visited, I decide, concentrated into one bar.

The medic dresses Rogers’ wounds. He has cuts on his legs and arms, apparently from diving into the water a few days ago to save his neighbor, who had been blown off the roof of her house by a helicopter. He had to walk all day and swim to get to Johnny White’s last night. He says he was stopped and searched eight times. I spy the sign behind the bar, “Never Closed.”

It seems to get hotter in New Orleans now that it’s totally dark. Down the street, some lanterns burn. The humidity has increased. The medic’s name is Ride Hamilton. “I’m not really a medic,” he says, just like the bartender is not really a bartender. “But I’m the only medic here. I wear this uniform because it helps me get through stuff.” I wonder to myself what kind of medic wears leather pants, especially in this heat.

I ask him where he learned how to do these things. He says he watches a lot of military documentaries. (The New York Times reported that Hamilton is a firefighter.) He says he stitched up a guy a few days ago, using a sewing needle and fishing line. FEMA left the stitches in. Said they were as good as any stitches they had ever seen.

“I got a warehouse full of supplies in my house,” Hamilton says. “I went to all the places, all the pharmacies, before the wrong people got there. I took ointment and medicine while they were taking food. I’m doing this on a quarter tank of gas and a donut tire.”

I talk to the Indian woman for a while. She used to live in San Francisco, close to where I live. “I got so bored in San Francisco,” she says. “New Orleans never closes.” It’s a strange thing to say but it’s true on this particular corner. Near 10 p.m., I decide I should probably go. “Don’t,” she says. “You’re a target. People are being killed for bicycles. You have gasoline.”

Six blocks away from Johnny White’s is Canal Street, which is now Media City. Stretching for nearly a mile down the street are tents, buses, campers, generators, satellite trucks and cars. There’s a makeup area with arc lights. Heavy police presence. The Sheraton is still open, the only hotel in town, commandeered by federal agents. Workers clean trash in front of the hotel. The rest of the street is covered in broken glass.

Journalists sleep in their vehicle seats and in the meridian. I hang out for a while with the crew from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and they offer me Gatorade. They have made chairs from boxtops placed on top of a fallen palm tree.

We swap stories about the things we’ve seen. I mention the shelter in Alexandria that was ready and open for two days before the displaced arrived. One of the reporters says he ordered a shot of whiskey at Johnny White’s yesterday and it tasted like piss. We talk about the 4,000 people left for days on the causeway. A reporter says he’s never seen anything like it. “They left those people to die,” he says.

“Look at that,” someone says. It’s a row of white trucks with green stripes — Immigration. Then the red berets come marching past. Then Fish and Wildlife. The federal government has arrived in force.

“Think it’s safe to drive out of town tonight?” I ask, and everybody says no, it is definitely not safe. I have a plane to catch in the afternoon in Jackson, Miss. I’ve been on the Gulf Coast five days and there’s certainly no shortage of reporters here.

Eventually I take off anyway. I drive past the hospital and the military trucks there. Heavy weapons are set on the lawn. No one is supposed to be on the streets.

The disaster, it seems to me, is the failure of a philosophy. A philosophy of small government, tax cuts, deficits and privatization. The federal government should have arrived sooner but the federal government was doing other things.

I drive east on 90, an empty highway, but I’m forced off by flooding. I drive down to the entryway, where a state trooper is parked. He is also lost. The streets in front of us are submerged. I drive back beneath concrete columns, half a dozen warnings in my head. I turn right below the highway and dead end at a giant pool. Men sit on orange theater chairs beneath the overpass. I pass them slowly. Nobody smiles or waves. A man in a blue police shirt holding a shotgun stops my car. Two men in camouflage and bulletproof vests are with him.

“Where the hell are you going?” he asks me. I tell him I’m trying to get out of town, to Mississippi, but everywhere I try to drive is under water. The man is fat, a thick layer of sweat across his face, a lock of hair stuck to his forehead. He wants to know why my driver license says San Francisco and I give him the card of the lieutenant, who told me to call him if anything went wrong.

The fat man gives me directions. The troops keep their hands on the triggers. Earlier today, two blocks away, troops shot five assailants who opened fire on contractors. I wonder if these are the troops that did the shooting. “Man,” he says, handing me back my license. “You are in a bad neighborhood. You need to get out of here.”