SALON

Stephen Elliott

Sunday, Sep 4, 2005 9:24 PM UTC

Gimme shelter

Trying to force authorities to open an Air Force base as a shelter, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders picked up 150 evacuees at the squalid New Orleans Airport and headed into the night.

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Gimme shelter

The New Orleans Airport sits on the north side of the city, removed from the bulk of the disaster that struck nearly a week ago when Hurricane Katrina battered the buildings, smashing through the levees and flooding the town. The highway leading into the airport is deserted, open only to official vehicles. The giant concrete overpasses are surreal empty loops, though nothing compared to the images inside the city itself.

I arrive at the airport Saturday afternoon with a convoy of three air-conditioned buses, two SUVs, and a state police escort. I’m with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, her husband, Ambassador Sydney Williams, chair of the Louisiana Black Caucus Cedric Richmond, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and State Sen. Cleo Fields. Cleo Fields has a plan to bring people to England Air Force Base, a decommissioned base in Alexandria, La., four hours northwest of New Orleans. The idea is to show up with hundreds of disaster victims and force the federal government to open the empty buildings. They did not receive permission from anyone to take the evacuees there. On Saturday a U.S. Army spokesman said bases, including England, were being considering as shelters.

When we left the Office of Emergency Management in Baton Rouge, Sen. Fields responded to harsh questioning from a television crew. The reporter wanted to know if they had working sanitation facilities at the base, and healthcare.

“These people are living beneath a highway,” he responded incredulously. “It’s been six days. Do they have healthcare now? Do they have beds now? People are dying, not from the storm. People are dying because they are being left to die.” The reporter wasn’t impressed. She wanted to know what would happen if they couldn’t get in the base. “Worst case scenario: They’ll sleep on the buses. It’ll be the best night they’ve had in a week.”

On the way to the airport we see six buses full of people, pulled over at the side of the road. We pass about 150 buses sitting empty on the opposite side of the highway. We see many other buses, also empty, driving in both directions. “You’d think they were full if you were taking pictures from a helicopter,” a cameraman says. “All those empty buses moving around.”

Around the airport the neighborhood is mostly empty, the stores closed. Many buildings were heavily damaged by the storm but not affected by the water that has submerged most of New Orleans.

Approaching the airport there are large groups of people sitting on the lawns in front. The airport looks like something out of a science fiction novel. Thousands of people are waiting outside the terminals next to an enormous pile of refuse. A large force of Guardsmen and police keep the peace. They patrol with automatic rifles at their waists, watch wearily from the roofs of sand-colored military transports. It’s 90 degrees and the air reeks.

The people outside of the airport mostly arrived in the morning. Shuttled in from the Convention Center, the Superdome and the highways — the causeway over Lake Pontchartrain and the I-10. Thousands of victims were waiting in the three spots. Less than a day ago there were reports of 4,000 people who were living beneath the highway, in the shade of the overpass. Most of these people have been stranded since Sunday in subhuman conditions. But the conditions now are no better. There is trash everywhere and people stand nervously in line, afraid to lose their place, hoping to get inside the airport where there is at least air-conditioning. Nobody has showered in a week.

“We were at the Convention Center five days,” Charlotte Bradley tells me. “There was feces everywhere. Young girls were being raped. One night the lights went out. People were dying. People died in wheelchairs and they just put a sheet over them.” With Charlotte is her blind sister and autistic son.

Also with Charlotte is her friend David Tousant, Sr., whose son is also autistic. “First we were on the bridge,” he says. “I saw the waters rising and bodies appearing from the water. We were there two days when they came and got us and took us to the Convention Center. Then this morning they brought us here.”

Thousands more people are inside the airport. There’s a giant triage facility, like a big sloppy hospital. Seriously wounded and sick individuals lie on rows of dark green stretchers on the floor, some of them strapped into their stretchers. An old man sits on one stretcher in the middle of the floor, away from the others, a yellow band tied around his wrist. He’s not wearing shoes and his pants are rolled over his knees. A doctor kneels next to him, asks him if he knows where he is.

A line of elderly women in wheelchairs sit nearby, their only possessions strapped in small bags to the chairs’ handles. Each stares patiently ahead.

In the other part of the airport people are waiting in lines to be flown out or for buses to take them away. Nobody knows where they are being taken to or when. Time has nearly ceased to matter. Some people have bags; many others have nothing. Some just wander aimlessly. Families sit in corners, tribes that have formed since the disaster. A man in a blue shirt lies on a cardboard box next to the closed doors of the Body Shop, with its absurd signs behind the glass — blemish cream, two for $10.

The people inside the airport are the lucky ones. They have air-conditioning and bathrooms. They don’t want to go outside where the others are. They might not be allowed back in.

We fill the three buses quickly with the people waiting outside. Priority is given to women and children and elderly people as well as families. We take 150 people. Nobody asks where the buses are headed. Nobody cares. And I begin to worry. Permission has not been given to transport these people to the Air Force base. I worry that these victims are being used as fodder for a political agenda. I wonder where they would have been taken if the Black Caucus had not shown up with their own buses. Somewhere better? But then I think at what point do you just go? I wouldn’t wish that airport on anyone. I console myself with Sen. Fields’ comments earlier: Even if these people sleep on the buses it will be better than their last six nights.

The bus I’m on is dark and I keep my misgivings to myself as we travel through Louisiana late at night. There’s a DVD playing on the small screens. Someone says they had forgotten what a television looked like. The movie is “Rain Man.” When that’s done the driver puts in “Bad Company,” starring Christopher Rock and Anthony Hopkins. It’s not a very good movie.

A man named Charlie Armstrong and his family are sitting behind me. Charlie spent 20 years in the Army, went overseas six times, served in the first Gulf War where he was based six months in Saudi Arabia. “My best friend died over there,” he says. “I didn’t re-enlist after that. I missed out on Afghanistan.” Instead he went to work with his father and brother, doing construction.

Charlie and his family were stuck in a house through the storm. “The first floor was under water,” he says. “The roof was mostly gone. We were on the second floor getting rained on. They were dropping us food and water through the roof. The storm came right through that roof. I sure am glad to be out of there.”

The senator, Jesse Jackson, and the congresswoman are all riding in a car ahead of the buses. I don’t know if they received word that they would not be able to use the Air Force base, or if they decided to change plans because of the lateness of the hour, but we go to a shelter in Alexandria instead.

When we arrive, police surround the buses and refuse to let anyone off.

“They’re treating us like prisoners,” Charlie’s aunt says.

“You will absolutely not get off this bus,” an officer says. When Jesse Jackson gets out of the front car he’s immediately accosted by a shelter resident.

“You can’t bring those types of people here,” the man shouts. “Those are rapists and looters.”

“Now hold on,” Jesse says.

“Get the hell out of here,” the man says. The police guard the buses but make no move to stop the man, who seems like he might attack the reverend. “It’s not a race thing,” the man continues. “My wife is half-black.” He points to a pregnant woman standing nearby. “We don’t want your kind. This is a good place.”

The people on the bus are not allowed off. Apparently the shelter is 85 percent full and has only 20 open beds.

Fields says that someone called ahead to the shelter and was told it was all right to go there. But the leader of the Red Cross at the shelter vehemently denies that anyone called her. Jesse Jackson grumbles that they were set up.

People at the first shelter tell them that there is another shelter with space nearby. The convoy leaves the first shelter, driving five minutes across town.

It’s past midnight now. At the second shelter things go much better. We’re greeted by Police Chief Jay Barber, a kind man with a strong resemblance to Terry Bradshaw. Whoever the officers were at the first shelter, they apparently didn’t work for Barber. Barber’s men wear blue. The officers at the first shelter wore green. “I’ve got room for 150,” he says, about the number of people on the buses. The shelter is clean and well lit. There are large televisions, food, air-conditioning, cots, showers and a separate play area for the children. The people are taken in small groups. Each is disinfected for sanitary reasons. Bags are searched for weapons. “We had an incident a few days ago,” Barber says.

I ask the Rev. Jackson what happened at the first shelter on the other side of town. “When people act like children,” he says, “you have to act like an adult.”

“We’ve been waiting for folks for two days,” Barber tells me. “We’ve been expecting people. I’ve been taking walk-ins.”

I can’t believe what he’s saying. These people were lying in shit two days ago. We passed hundreds of empty buses on the way to the airport. How could a well-staffed, clean, secure, working shelter with 150 open beds in Louisiana sit half full for two days while people are being turned away at the Astrodome in Houston and bussed to Utah?

Leanne Murphy, the CEO of the Central Louisiana chapter of the Red Cross, is on hand. “We’re going to do everything we can for these people,” she tells me. “We’re so glad they’re here.”

“What if 300 more show up?” I ask her.

“We’re going to find a place for them,” she says.

The people at the shelter are genuinely decent, particularly Chief Barber. It makes it hard to understand what happened at the first shelter. A woman getting off the bus wraps herself around Jackson. She can’t stop crying. “Thank you so much,” she says, burying her face in the reverend’s shoulder. “I’ve been in the Superdome since Sunday. You have no idea what it was like. Nobody wanted to help us.” I wonder if it’s relevant to point out that she is white. Most of the people on the buses aren’t.

With operations well underway at the shelter I leave with the reverend and the politicians for nearby England Air Force Base. It’s nearly 1 in the morning and I’ve been sleeping the last three days in my rental car, living off potato chips, peanuts and candy bars, but I’m not particularly tired. The people on those buses were so happy to get there.

We’re greeted at the base by Bridgette Brown, vice chairman of the Airport Board. She tells us, “Today the board voted unanimously to accept people from New Orleans.” She thinks it will cost $1.6 million to the community. I wonder where the federal government is in all of this. I also wonder whether the board would have moved to open the facility if it had not been for the Black Caucus’s intervention.

Brown takes us on a tour of the facilities. There are four buildings with 480 double rooms capable of medium-term housing for 960 residents. The electricity and water work. The buildings clearly haven’t been used for a while and need a cleaning but don’t seem terrible. Compared to the airport they don’t even need a cleaning.

“We should have this place ready in two days,” she says. “We could have had it ready earlier but not everybody was in agreement.”

“How many acres do you have here?” Sen. Fields asks.

“Three thousand.”

“That’s a lot of tents,” he replies.

The Rev. Jackson gives me his take on the situation. “We used to have a war on poverty,” he says. “We need that here. Most of these shelters are temporary but it’s going to be a long time until people can return home. We need housing that’s appropriate, longer term like these unused military bases.”

“You use these buses to take people to Utah, you’re taking that bus out of commission,” Sen. Fields tells me. But lack of buses is not the problem. There are unused buses — I saw 150 of them on the road — and unused buildings. There are people living in conditions that would be unacceptable in the Third World.

Jesse Jackson shows me a letter from Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, offering planeloads of aid, soldiers and firefighters, and thousands of barrels of petroleum. “We turned him down,” he says.

At 5 in the morning we arrive back in Baton Rouge. I shake hands with Sen. Fields and hug Rep. Waters. I drive off with Ken Hooks, a lawyer and a friend of the senator. There are no hotel rooms available in Baton Rouge. A policeman in front of the Marriott tells us there’s no hotel rooms for 90 miles in any direction. Ken lets me into his office east of the city, gives me a pillow, and I fall asleep on the rug.

Above: The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., meet with evacuees at New Orleans Airport on Saturday, Sept. 3.

Sunday, Sep 4, 2005 1:19 AM UTC

“I want to keep living here, but I can’t”

Along the Gulf Coast, the devastation is complete, with Biloxi casinos just stones along the shore. In Jackson, refugees wait for their next move.

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It’s only at the Gulf that one gets a full sense of Katrina’s devastation. The Gulf of Mississippi is destroyed. As far as one can see in any direction the beach is filled with wreckage, twisted docks, trucks turned over, trailers impaled on cement barriers. The parking lot at the Copa Casino in Gulfport is broken in pieces, littered with beams long as houses, tires, glass and odd fabric straps. Steel pylons wrenched from the concrete, which is cracked like plaster.

Casinos in Mississippi are not allowed to be land based, so the casinos are actually boats. The six-story Copa is a barge as large as a city block. It sits unmoored 300 feet from its dock. Several holes have been ripped in the side of the Copa. The slot machines sit in rows next to the opening, tops covered in black plastic bags. Split wires lay across the floor and dangle from the roof. The nearby Grand Casino has also been lifted from the sea and thrown ashore. Bricks lie peeled from the face of the adjoining hotel.

It’s 80 degrees and a cool breeze rolls slowly from the water. The air reeks of rust and rotting chickens from a truck that overturned in the storm, spilling frozen poultry across the street. In nearby downtown most of the buildings are missing windows, as if they’ve been blown out. In fact, within a mile of the shore, the effect is what one imagines is left after a carpet bombing. Storefronts twisted like pretzels.

There is a 24-hour curfew in this area south of the interstate. A few press buses park near the coast; the broadcasters narrate in front of the disaster. But a picture or a video could never fully capture the damage here. It’s overwhelming and endless and in every direction. Guardsmen and police patrol up and back. There’s nothing to defend. These casinos, which accounted for a third of the economy of Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, are just large stones in the rubble. Nearby in Biloxi the president has landed and is giving a speech. Many think he is too late.

Stan Wheeler lives two miles inland from the casinos. He sits in front of his small wrecked house, the front painted red, white, and blue. Inside, everything is soaked and ruined. He’s lived in this area all of his life, along with most of his family. “I want to keep on living here,” he says. “But I can’t.” He has no electricity. For days he’s carried water from ditches to flush his toilet.

As he’s speaking his nephew arrives to say goodbye. He’s driving to Atlanta with some friends. They think they have enough fuel to make it to the state line and hope to be able to buy gas there.

“I have to get out of here too,” Stan says after his nephew leaves. He looks inside his window. His small house is full of garbage bags. “What I need is a van. I’ll work for it. I want the government to give me a van I can park right here and live in it so I don’t have to leave.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Many who leave go to Jackson, the capital of Mississippi. Plenty of people still don’t have electricity in Jackson, and there are streets blocked by fallen trees. In the coliseum, near the capitol building, several thousand refugees bide their time, hoping to return to homes that have been destroyed. There is medical triage, stacks of water and snacks. There are workers in red shirts taking information, handing out blue bracelets. Cots fill the center and line the walls. Children play in front of the building. A woman lies with her husband and daughter. The daughter is just a baby and begins to cry. Soon her mother is crying too. The three of them arrived days ago from Biloxi. They stopped in Jackson when they ran out of gas.

The shelter is hot but not unbearable and there are enough security to keep the peace. Thirty people sit around a table watching a small television set, scenes of looting in New Orleans. The people watching the television don’t like the depictions.

“What do they expect us to do?” a young man says.

“I’m not homeless,” a woman says when the television refers to the looters as homeless. Like many others in the shelter she’s from New Orleans. “Homeless people don’t have an address. I have a home.”

There are no hotel rooms available in the capital; all of them are full of the displaced heading north. In the other direction toward the Gulf one begins to see the wreckage of Katrina and the trail of tears that has created the new population of American refugees. At first, a few signs hanging from their hinges bear reminders of level 4 winds. Then stores with giant trees crashed through their roofs. Seventy miles south of Jackson there is almost no electricity, no phone service. People huddle in groups around closed banks. There are many impromptu aid centers doling out water and ice from the back of trucks.

South of Hattiesburg just past 7 in the morning hundreds of people wait in line in front of two gas stations. Many wait in cars but just as many are pedestrians carrying red fuel containers. Neither station is selling gas. Eventually one station opens the doors of the convenience store. Six people are allowed in at a time emerging with cases of warm soda, bags of potato chips, candy, cigarettes and popcorn. The registers don’t work. Cash transactions only. All of the canned food is already gone.

The people in line are frustrated. “He could open the pumps if he wanted to,” somebody says. A brief scuffle occurs across the street, two men shoving each other.

“It’s the heat,” says a man in blue shorts and no shirt. “Makes people crazy.”

There’s a lot of blame directed at the government. “What do they expect us to do?” one lady says. “They didn’t start handing out ice for three days. By then everything had gone bad.” Further south the destruction becomes more intense, nearly every building sustaining some sort of damage. Later in the morning some of the gas stations are selling fuel, and the lines at these stations stretch for miles with wait times of four hours.

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Saturday, Sep 3, 2005 11:15 PM UTC

“They’ve got to open the base”

Louisiana black leaders, along with Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson, want to take Katrina victims to a shuttered Air Force base instead of shelters. And I'm going with them.

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I got on a bus with California Rep. Maxine Waters Saturday afternoon, not sure where we were going, just knowing we were headed to New Orleans to pick up Hurricane Katrina victims. Even as television news is showing pictures of people being rescued by military helicopters and chartered buses, local and national black leaders are seething at the mismanaged evacuation, as well as the haphazard way even the rescued people are being handled. So they’ve come up with their own plan: to load the remaining residents on buses they’ve chartered and bring them to England Air Force Base, a shuttered military installation in Alexandria, La.

“My soul wouldn’t let me sit and watch this on TV,” says Waters, who represents South Central Los Angeles. “I’m just shocked that people have been living for five days, and dying, on the streets of this country. So I came down here, and my friend Cleo Fields came up with this wonderful possibility.”

That wonderful possibility, hatched by state Sen. Cleo Fields and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, is to house the displaced residents at the Air Force base instead of shelters and sports stadiums like the Astrodome, many of which are full anyway. They haven’t gotten permission to do that, but that’s not stopping them. The black leaders say racism is behind both the late response to the emergency and the dispersal of rescued residents far away from New Orleans.

This morning I saw City Council President Oliver Thomas near tears at the Federal Emergency Management Agency office. He’d just heard the story of a bus of 200 refugees that had been turned away the night before, because all of the city’s shelters were full. “So what if the shelters are full?” Thomas asked. “What do you mean full?”

Thomas complained that many people had been turned against New Orleans refugees because of media emphasizing stories of looting and violence, and he asked why they couldn’t be housed closer to home. “Texas is being neighborly, while Louisiana is rejecting people. Why do we have to send our people to Texas?”

“The people in Jefferson Parish,” Thomas continued, referring to a mostly affluent and white area to the northwest of New Orleans, “have been very clear; they don’t want them here.” Jefferson and other neighboring parishes were also hit hard by Katrina, and many have no electricity and little or no water pressure. But while Thomas acknowledged that Jefferson had its own problems, “they wouldn’t even allow their parish to be used as a staging area.”

Thomas’ complaint is part of why the Legislative Black Caucus, headed by Fields and state Rep. Cedric Richmond, announced they would bring three buses to pick up those still stranded in New Orleans. The base has not been opened to admit people, but Fields says, “it’s better than what they have now. People were airlifted from their homes four days ago and left on the highway. They’ve got to open the base to these people. It’s ridiculous in America that people are sitting on a highway for four days without food and water.” Fields reportedly appealed to federal officials to open the base Friday but didn’t get an answer. The Rev. Jesse Jackson will also reportedly accompany the bus caravan to England Air Force Base.

I decided to get on one of the buses headed for New Orleans, even though our exact destination wasn’t certain. As we left there were reports that people were still stranded along Highway 10, and I was told the intention was to go get them. But Waters was under the impression we were headed for the New Orleans convention center. After we’d driven a few miles we got word that both the highway encampment and the convention center had been evacuated, and it was decided that we’d head to the airport, where thousands of people had been moved from downtown.

“I hope to get people on this bus, and also to see for myself where people are being sent,” says Waters, who’s the ranking member of the subcommittee on housing of the House Financial Services Committee. “This is Labor Day weekend and it’s normally time for a little R&R, but my conscience would not allow that.” The feisty Waters almost sounded like she was enjoying herself, though.

But nobody could enjoy themselves once we got to the airport. We were not prepared for what we found. Though it has been touted as a solution to the squalor of the convention center and the Superdome, Louis Armstrong International Airport is on the way to re-creating it. Already there’s a huge pile of stinking garbage, and thousands of people outside who can’t get in. They’re being promised that planes and buses will evacuate them yet again, but they’re still waiting. There’s no violence because police and soldiers are everywhere, but there’s filth and despair.

Our buses filled up quickly, and most people aren’t even asking where we’re headed.

Coming Sunday: Will we make it to the base?

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Saturday, Nov 6, 2004 9:00 PM UTC

Darkness falls in Florida

From the author of the grimly hilarious campaign memoir "Looking Forward to It," a final, post-election chapter you won't find in his book.

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Darkness falls in Florida

I was in the voting equipment center in Broward County, Fla., on the night of the election. The streets were blocked off and they were counting votes in the back room of the building. Brenda Snipes and the other election officials were sitting behind a large oak table and occasionally arguing over a challenged ballot. There were 30 to 40 journalists and politicos watching a black-and-white screen as the numbers from the county slowly trickled in. The Democrats took 65 percent of the county, which is about what everybody expected. But only 60 percent of the county turned out to vote. People had been hoping for 70 or 75 percent.

Larry Davis, one of the head lawyers for the Democrats, left early to have a beer and I decided to leave with him. But I got lost on the way, turning into the airport, and driving around the streets surrounding it for an hour. By the time I had my beer things were pretty much done.

The repercussions are obvious. There will be no unifying our divided country. Unification is for Democrats and the Republicans control everything. Mandate is what Clinton had when he beat Bob Dole by 10 percent. That was our chance to declare evangelical churches political organizations, take away their tax status, jail their leaders, and send the rest of them off to reeducation camps.

I’m just kidding about that, kind of. If we have to act like Republicans to beat Republicans, then I’m not sure what we win. The good news for the Republicans is that thanks to underfunding education people are getting dumber. Ignorance is bliss and there’s a lot of minimum-wage earning, uninsured, poor white people wearing big smiles today.

Not long ago, on the last night of the Republican convention, I was sitting with Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne in a French restaurant on the Upper West Side. We had gone there subconsciously to avoid Republicans. French food is like Republican Kryptonite.

The Republican convention was a hate fest, a downer from start to finish. Rudolph Giuliani had stated that Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction, intimating that we had gone to war over a metaphor. Zell Miller had proclaimed that American troops are always liberators, never occupiers. Freedom was on the march but Freedom didn’t mean what it used to, nor did Optimism, Liberalism and a host of other words pulled and twisted from the latest dictionaries.

By midnight the restaurant was full with the staff of National Public Radio, Harper’s and Air America. It was quite funny at the time, how we had all gravitated to that spot. And I remember saying to Harold, “I hope when this is over I can go back to writing fiction.” He got what I was saying right away. I was longing for a situation where I cast my vote and went back to work. Where the stakes weren’t so high that nothing else seemed worth doing. Where the election of one candidate over another didn’t mean that hundreds of thousands of people would die for no good reason. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

On Thursday, my final morning in Florida, I sat with Larry Davis, the chief Democratic lawyer for Broward County. He had 600 lawyers working under him during this election. It was a still morning in southern Florida, with a clear sky. We were both still a little depressed, though I had to admit Thursday felt better than Wednesday. I had lost $120 on the election and I was trying to focus on that. I could handle losing $120. Larry told me some stories of the previous day at the office. A friend of his who had come out as a homosexual six years ago had called to ask what he should do.

“Go back in the closet,” Larry quipped.

“There’s no silver lining to this,” Larry told me, and I had to agree. We started talking about the Swift Boats but neither of us felt like playing the blame game. Larry asked if after a year on the campaign trail all of this was over for me and I told him I guessed it wasn’t. He nodded his head.

“You know, after people were done contemplating suicide or moving to Canada, by the end of yesterday we were saying, ‘I wonder who’s going to run in 2008? Hillary/Obama?’”

“That’s if there’s a presidency to run for in 2008,” I reminded him.

Larry laughed. He has children older than me. “Oh. There will be,” he said, getting up, preparing to head to court. That was the end of our conversation and the end of my time in Florida. I’d like to stay in Florida but I have things to do back home. I always try to end things on a happy note. Nobody likes a sad story.

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Wednesday, Oct 27, 2004 8:00 PM UTC

“I love you, man”

An excerpt from Stephen Elliott's hilarious new book, "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process."

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I run into John Edwards’ press secretary, Jennifer Palmieri, in the basement of Holloway Hall at the University of New Hampshire just before the debate is about to start. Outside it’s cold as hell, but there’s a snack tray set up here with coffee and brownies. “You’re with GQ,” she says.

“I’m with Harper’s now,” I reply. (1)

“It’s down to Dean, Clark, and Edwards,” she tells me, and I feel like we’re picking up an old conversation, except last time we met Clark wasn’t in the race, and maybe he still isn’t. I’m going to need to meet the general soon, figure out where he’s really at. The Washington Post has a quote from him talking to a counter woman at a Dunkin’ Donuts — “Do you make your donuts here?” “No.” “So how do they get here?” I talk with Jennifer for a while and at some point she narrows her eyes on me, like she’s suddenly seen deep into my soul. “You’re smarter than you look,” she says, and I realize that before this election is over she will tell me lies and I will repeat them, because she is strong and I am weak, and now that she’s found me out I won’t have much of a chance against her.

I still don’t have a place to stay tonight. There’s a postdebate party for credentialed press sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party. I’m going to head there later and see if I don’t have something I can trade.

The problem with the debate is that, with Al Gore endorsing Howard Dean, there isn’t a whole lot to debate, except who is willing to bow out so a single machine candidate can mount a legitimate challenge to Howard Dean’s thick-necked juggernaut. Most of the candidates are just pissed off by the whole thing. You can pretty much see it plastered over their curled smiles, just dying to get out, “Fuck fat fucking Al shit fucking Gore.”

Kerry says the election isn’t over until the votes are counted, which sounds good but simply isn’t true. I can’t blame John Kerry for being angry, though. He was supposed to win this thing. Sharpton says that nobody is going to tell the voters who they have to vote for, they will make up their own minds. But Sharpton isn’t even running for president, not in the real sense. And saying that the voters will make up their own minds is really giving too much credit to the average American. Lieberman says he thinks his chances are better now that Gore is endorsing Dean. He says the money is pouring in and people are stopping him in airports. Edwards’ basic response to every question is that he is an outsider. Edwards’ constant harping on his outsider image really starts to wear me down in a bad way. It doesn’t match his hair style or his suit. It might be when John Kerry says, “I love John Edwards,” that I lose faith completely. It’s the most amazing confession of the debate, and I have to turn to Shir Haberman from the Portsmouth Herald to make sure I heard it right. “Did John Kerry just say he loves John Edwards?”

“Yes, he did that.”

After that every time John Edwards says he’s an outsider I hear John Kerry saying I love you:

John Edwards: “I am very much an outsider.”

John Kerry: “I love you.”

John Edwards: “I’m an outsider. I have not spent my whole life in politics, like most of these folks.”

John Kerry: “I love you, man.”

John Edwards: “The question is, Who is in the best position to change what’s going on in Washington? People who’ve spent a lot of time there, people who’ve spent most of their life in politics? Or somebody who comes from a different place, who’s been fighting these people all his life? That’s me, and that’s why people should vote for John Edwards.

John Kerry: “I soooo love you. I’m just completely into you. I don’t know what to do about it.”

There are two hundred reporters in that room watching a big-screen TV but I am probably the only one who changes his mind about John Edwards.

Footnotes:

1. I’d lied about the GQ affiliation. I was lying about Harper’s.

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Thursday, May 2, 2002 7:30 PM UTC

Swimming with the online card sharks

In the world of virtual Texas hold 'em, the money is real and so is the addiction.

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Swimming with the online card sharks

“Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.”

– Pope John XXIII

I have a poker table that dominates my studio apartment in a seedy neighborhood in San Francisco. I have clay chips that were given to me as a present last Christmas. The difference between the clay chips, which go for $10 a pack, and the cheap Walgreens plastic numbers is palpable.

I grew up playing spades in state homes for wayward youth. In college I won the dorm euchre championship (we cheated, but that’s how you play euchre). My compulsive card playing reflected disastrously on my college transcripts. My friend Louie got me into blackjack laying around our squat in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green while the men rolled dice on the sidewalk out front. I lost my last $600 the first time I played poker in West Yellowstone on the way to see my girlfriend in Seattle. Our relationship never recovered.

Grandfather was a cardplayer. The Nazis killed off his entire family and all anybody knows of him is that he worked hard and played cards every day until he died, whittling away his final years playing pinochle for pennies down at the Levy’s center in Chicago. One time he smacked another man in the teeth over 20 cents. Old age made him cheap, but he could still smell a rat.

Now 30, I host a poker game every Tuesday night with anywhere from six to 10 participants. We play low stakes while the hookers scream on Folsom Street down below. My editor likes to come over and stay for every hand, bragging loudly that the pots are too small to merit taking, the bets not worth folding over. My editor drinks too much and has a tendency to lose, and everyone is always happy when he shows up to give us his money. Like most losers, though, my editor wins sometimes too.

Among my group I’m one of the better poker players. We play 10 cent, 25 cent, 50 cent. Some people show up on Tuesdays ready to lose $10. They figure it’s a small price for a pleasant evening with friends. Like my editor, these people are also welcome.

One Wednesday, after a particularly invigorating night of playing, I start searching online for poker tips but find instead poker rooms where I can buy in with real money online against real players, 24 hours a day.

“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.”

– Kin Hubbard

I put $500 into an account with Firepay, part of Surefire Commerce, a publicly traded company based in Canada. I put it on my credit card and they ask me before I am done if I intend to use the money for gambling. I check the box that says “Yes.”

I log onto Pokerroom.com. I don’t have to download any software. I sit at a 3-D table with stereotypical gambling types: the bald man in the bad shirt, the chubby black woman with tight curls, the fat guy with the white suit and cigar. And of course the babe, in the thousand-dollar dress, half cleavage, half legs.

I make rules for myself. Whenever possible I will play as the bombshell. (Very few women play poker so you pretend to be the woman and maybe the guys will give you a break.) I will stay out of the high-roller rooms. I will quit when losing. I will lose my $500 or win $1,000, then I will write an article about winning $1,000 playing online poker and get out for good.

There are five rooms for Texas hold ‘em. $1/$2, $2/$4, $3/$6, $5/$10 and $10/$20. I decide that the suckers are in the $3/$6 room. They have too much money to be bothered with $1/$2, but aren’t good enough to keep up with the high rollers. I want to find a room full of my editor: people who think the stakes are too low to matter, who will stay in when they should fold and chase inside straights with two aces showing.

“God doesn’t play dice.”

– Albert Einstein

Texas hold ‘em is a simple but popular poker game in which the dealer has an incredible advantage and the deal rotates after every hand. Every player at the table is dealt two cards down — hole cards — and then there’s a round of betting. The first two rounds are low, meaning on a $3/$6 table in the first two betting rounds you can only bet in increments of $3, and in the last two rounds in increments of $6. After the first round of betting, three cards are laid in the middle of the table. This is called the flop. The three cards belong to everybody. Then another card is dealt, called the turn. Then a fifth, the river. Between the two cards in your hand and the five on the table, the winner is the one who can make up the best five-card hand — unless everybody else folds, in which case the winner is the last one standing. Everything is determined by how well you play your cards in the hole. In his book “Hold ‘Em Poker,” David Sklansky, a world-class player, says you should never play hole cards worse than a king-9 unsuited (belonging to different suits).

One of the ways you can recognize a sucker is by what they win with. For a player to win he has to show his cards. If a player wins with a 7 and a 2 you know you’ve got a sucker, because while any cards can win sometimes, nobody should pay an ante with a 7 and a 2.

On my second day I beat a player named Morenos with two pair to his two kings. He starts referring to me in the chat rooms as an ass. I don’t respond to his criticism but I don’t go online to get abused. Asleep at night I dream I am at court with my queen, my jack, 10 servants and my grandfather. We’re all wearing velvet shirts with hearts across the stomach. We are ready for anything.

I pull $600 in my first three days in 10 hours of play and find myself hooked.

On the third evening I am out with my closest friends, two couples very much in love. We have a few drinks and then go for pizza where we order a bottle of wine. Everybody decides to go back to Ben’s house and play board games: Boggle, Trivial Pursuit. I say I am going to go home and write a student recommendation. Wendy keeps asking if everything is OK. She says I seem fuzzy. I say, c’mon, I’m the only single one here. Online aces are floating across the landscape of my mind. My friends beg and cajole and rib but my mind is set, I have things to do. I lose $150 standing in front of my iMac, hardly trying in my dulled, drunken state, the moonlight slashing across my walls. The same rules apply: Don’t drink and play poker, anywhere, anytime.

Day 4

“Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn’t play poker.”

– Amarillo Slim

I wake up on my fourth day, a Saturday. There’s a message on my machine from a girl I used to like but who hadn’t returned my calls. Now she wants to hook up. I don’t feel fresh; in fact, I have a little bit of a headache. I have a plane to catch at noon for a reading in Los Angeles. I was supposed to leave last night but missed my flight. I log on in my socks to check out the action. Major Tom is sitting alone in the $3/$6 room. We spar mano a mano and I find him an easy hustle. I bluff him out for a quick $30. We are soon joined by more players, including SeeMePlayBad sitting in the sexy blond’s chair. It takes me $200 to realize that SeeMe is a ringer, a serious poker player. I scope the online lobby. Early Saturday morning all the $5/$10 rooms are empty. So my theory that the best players stick to the $5/$10 rooms doesn’t wash. Our little $3/$6 room was the only action going, and I was up against a pro. Frustrated again, again I log off, my winnings down from $600 to $250.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. If I don’t win $1,000 then I can’t write my article. Worse, I may not be as good a poker player as I like to believe myself to be. If I can’t win $1,000 then online gambling is nothing but a dirty con, and I am a fly caught in its net.

I duck into the $10/$20 room. Two early-morning high rollers are betting back and forth, with the pots reaching upward of $100. Mark W. from Sydney has $4,000 in his account. TPF has only $200. I am down to $250 (I have withdrawn my original $500 stake). I like the action. The low player is running scared. I take the seat immediately to the left of the high roller so I have him in position. (Rule of note for aspiring online gamblers: Sit to the left of the best player at the table. You have an advantage over whom you follow — it’s why the dealer is at the best seat on the table: The dealer follows everybody.) Twenty minutes later I have cleaned TPF out with a full house, 2′s over aces, to trump the three-ace hand she had bet the farm on. These things happen. I am back up $600.

Who is TPF, I wonder, clicking offline. And what am I doing in the high-roller room? That’s against my own rules. Rules in poker, like in writing, like in life, stand to be broken like Buddhist statues in the Afghan countryside. I wonder if TPF is struggling to support a couple of kids, living in a trailer with a 14.4k AOL connection. Does TPF have the money to lose? I doubt it. And all the while, the casino, online like any other, silently pulls its 5 percent rake. That is, the casino pulls $1 out of every $20 clicked into the pot.

On the way to the airport I close the car door on my pinky finger.

The Poker Room is not an American company. In fact, its Internet domain registration lists an address in Costa Rica. Gambling online is not legal in America, so American companies are not allowed to operate online casinos. This drives Harrahs and other big American casinos nuts. As far as they are concerned, American money is being lost to foreign merchants. It’s not enough for these chains and the powerful casino lobby that gambling is now legal in 28 states. The big companies tout the benefits of gambling, as their boats and their rising crime rates sail into communities like Joliet, Ill. They talk about the neighborhood benefits. The fun, the jobs, the economic development. When that doesn’t work, they talk about their rights to a bigger piece of the pie.

Current estimates list approximately 2.5 million people as pathological gamblers, another 3 million as problem gamblers and another 15 million people as at risk. Casinos and lotteries survive on problem and pathological gamblers. The economist Earl Grinols calculated that 52 percent of casino revenues come from problem gamblers. Of course, you never have a problem as long as you’re winning.

Day 5

“He had the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.”

– Mark Twain

It’s Sunday morning. In five hours I have a reading at a bookstore in West Hollywood and the cafe on the corner offers Internet access for $5 an hour. The $7 left in my pocket buys me in for an hour and a cup of coffee.

TPF is back in the $10/$20 room with $500 in her account. Somebody bought back in because I wiped TPF out yesterday. We play one-on-one but it’s early and she catches me chasing a flush with a pair of queens. It only takes a couple of hands to lose $300 and now I’m staring across cyberspace at TPF, her three dimensional graphics, her cartoonish smile. I type into the chatbox, “I am going to take you.” She types back, “You are not going to take anything, never have.”

The room fills and I play tight. There’s five of us betting $10/$20. But pots are only $50 or $60. This is a room of people that can’t afford to be here. The slow betting proves that. I buy a couple of small pots and sit tight for the monster hand. Then we’re joined by Jeffage with $2,100 in his account. High roller. He bets fast and loose and players drop out but I’m winning and soon it’s just Jeff and I alone. Jeff’s got a tendency to bet and then fold, and once I figure that out it’s time to plug in the vacuum cleaner. By the end of the hour my bank account is at $804, only $196 away from my stated goal.

The cafe waitress is tapping my shoulder when I sit out. You can win or lose $300 in a $10/$20 room in 10 minutes. It’s like driving a fast car through a back-alley shortcut or drag racing in heavy traffic. You get where you’re going quicker, but the harder you speed, the greater the risks.

“Where are you going?” Jeff types in.

“My time is up,” I tell him.

But before I split I take one last look into the lobby. Flushdraw is there as usual. A regular, a steady. So is Major Tom, a sucker, a mark. Morenos is not around, probably sleeping off Saturday’s losses. I’ve got a reading to go to. I have to prepare myself emotionally to talk about my topic, group-home children, wards of the court. A state system that preps our lost children for failure. I’m an expert on this topic. Perhaps I’ll tell my small audience that group-home children, among other problems, are prone to excessive gambling as adults and compulsive behavior. What can we, as a society, do about that?

Day 6

“It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.”

– Joseph Conrad

Major Tom leaves the room shortly after I walk in. I have his heart, and he knows it. It’s early Monday and I resisted the urge to play last night after having two beers and witnessing a spectacular car crash where a pickup truck trying to beat the light at Ninth and Harrison got pegged by a two-door and skidded on its wheels, then flipped over onto its hood.

I follow Major Tom from the $5/$10 to the $2/$4. I’m up $850. I’m so close to my goal I can taste it. It could take hours to make $150 on the $2/$4 table. So I head back to the $5/$10.

There’s a couple of players I’m afraid of in the $5/$10 and the boards are slow. The $10/$20′s empty, making this the high-roller room.

I sit for an hour running between $796 and $904. I fold time and again on jack 7′s, queen suited, two 6′s, only to see two of my cards flop. Playing loose I could have taken $500 easy. But I do notice a trend. With the exception of Roger666, nobody is betting very much and Roger is pulling a lot of small pots. Finally, I’m dealt an ace-4 diamonds. Roger raises and I stay in. The flop brings me two more diamonds and another ace. I have a pair of aces whether I make the flush or not. Better still, I’m one card away from a straight. I’ve got a great hand and all of the “dangers” point in my favor — any additional card that improves the hand on the table improves my hand also. I raise, Roger raises back, I have a fish on the line. The hand ends with a 5-high straight to beat Roger’s three aces, bringing me to within $20 of the end zone. A few hands later I come out of the big blind with two jacks and I call it a day, $1,016 to the good, pure profit for a cumulative workman’s average of $50 an hour over six days of playing.

When I play poker I think about my last girlfriend. Her name was Wilhelmina and she was a bitch. But she released certain chemicals in my brain that felt a lot like folding on a 5-8 suited only to see two 5′s and an 8 follow the dead hand. She made me feel the way a nice girl never could, like a loser with a chance.

I call my friend Laura in Vancouver. I confess to her that I’ve been playing poker online in my apartment for a week. She says that sounds like a bad idea. I tell her actually I won $1,000. She asks me if I’m going to quit. I tell her I intend to. Of course, nobody can see into tomorrow, but I did cash out. Laura worries maybe they won’t send me my check. (They do, two weeks later.) Her consumer confidence is low. Seems to be a lot of holes in the chain, places to fall through. But I figure the casino is already making 5 percent on every dollar that’s bet, and I must have bet at least $20,000 together, so they’ve already made their $1,000 off of me.

In poker the casino is just a middleman, like a credit card, getting in the middle of a transaction, taking a cut and giving nothing back in return. You never beat the casino. Like stockbrokers, the casino gets paid no matter what, win or lose. The $1,000 I took came from real people. And I don’t know if they are rich or poor or what their story is. I don’t know if they can afford it, if they’re guys or girls, or if they’ve ever looked straight into the sun. In fact, the 5 percent we all pay the casino is the only thing any of us have in common for certain.

Worse still, while winning, I realized all the ways a person could cheat playing online. Two people could play together while on the phone, doubling each other’s raises, eliminating cards from play, not a huge advantage but enough to tip the scales. Also, if your connection is severed, you automatically go “all in,” which allows you to play your cards and potentially win, without having to match a bet that your cards don’t justify. Sometimes pulling the plug is the right thing to do. Still, there’re so many suckers in cyberspace, they counterbalance the pros.

In 2000, Harrah’s Entertainment took in $3 billion. All of that without ever producing a product. Maybe if there were no casinos the world would be a better place. But what’s the alternative? Everybody wants to find a way out of the day wage. If asked, I would vote that gambling be illegal everywhere except Vegas. But I wasn’t asked, so of course, I have to get mine too.

The rules of the game

“In a bet there is a fool and a thief.”

– Unknown

Here’s all I have for you if you do decide to go online.
1) Don’t, it’s a bad idea. I didn’t get a thing done last week. Deadlines passed, phone calls went unreturned, my life fell apart.
2) If you think you’re in a room with good players, leave the room.
3) Always stay in with a pair in the hole, even 2′s: Take it to Fourth Street [the fourth flop card] no matter what the cost.
4) Don’t do it, it’s not worth the risk, there are six losers for every four winners, somebody has to lose for the house, the odds are against you.
5) Sit to the left of the chaser, the guy throwing money after every card; this will enable you to pick up double bets on your good hands.
6) Fold when you don’t have it.
7) Don’t drink and play; I know I said that earlier but it’s important. Not a single beer.
8) The dealer seat is worth extra; if nobody has bet yet and you’re the dealer, you bet.

“The track takes 15 percent, but what’s 15 percent of a dream?”

– Charles Bukowski

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