I would like to say that I have met some real assholes at the Salvation Army. Some kind of Janice or Jasmine follows me around telling me many times about how God spoke to her through the newspaper (NOT the tv; she is emphatic) and showed her the best way to help with this disaster. What, by being irritating?
She�s only monotonous, hardly a big deal. I can deal with the churchies. The office lady is the only one who angers me. I'm supposed to be helping people box up shampoo (thousands of bottles) and we have run out of tape. I ask around for more tape and am told specifically to go ask the office lady.
She has no time for my shit, doesn't pause her personal conversation for eight minutes (I tend to time anything I think is going to piss me off), doesn't have any tape and treats me like a moron for thinking she might. Then she dismisses me from her office with a shoo-ing hand gesture and a "Giddy-yap." I am telling you that she literally said that word to get rid of me.
That's the worst I encounter on Tuesday, and it's not so bad because I go back upstairs and immediately tell all the boxing ladies what a tremendous bitch the office lady is, and then I feel better.
Most everyone I work with is sweet and funny. One lady laughs at me when I don't know the difference between oil sheen and cholesterol conditioner. She sighs and says, "Poor little cracker. Let me do that, hon." Another lady mentions that her daughter owns a beauty salon and has offered to spend her weekends doing the hair of the people staying at the shelter.
This is my second day working with Pat, who says she always hated going to the salon and wasn't all that sad when her hair started falling out a few years ago. She says she took thinning hair as a sign that God didn't want her to waste her Saturday mornings anymore, "and about damn time too. Now I just brush my wig and say to hell with it." Interestingly, she does not wear a wig to the shelter - her head is all chicken-assed with thin pale wisps, and she doesn't seem to care.
About New Orleans, she says, "I've never been. I'd like to see it sometime. I mean. I would like to have seen it." Funny, the revision of verbs after a city is removed from the earth.
I am given a U-Haul brand extra-sturdy cardboard box which measures about two feet by two feet by three feet. I fill it to the top with loose toys: dinosaurs, checkers, barbie cellphones, dolls, zoo animals. Someone says I need a snow shovel. Without one, I can only bend and scoop, many many times. I tell Pat that I once ran down Bourbon Street naked (true, but I was a baby) and she says she'd like to try that. "Maybe I'll go to Carnivale," she says, and pounds the fiftieth teddy bear into a box.
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That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, something happens.
On Wednesday, I take my bags of donated stuff to the same entrance I've been using all week. The doors are closed. A woman inside sees me coming and comes outside to ask if she can help me. It's not really a question. This is a woman I've been working with for days, but today she doesn't recognize me and won't meet my eyes.
I say, "Um. Food goes in the lobby, right?"
She says, "Uh. Yeah. Um well you can just leave it out here. Someone will come get it."
I say ok and start to unload cans from my backpack. She disappears. I finish up and head for the lobby doors again. It's the only way I've ever gotten into this building, and it offers a logical path to the volunteer desk.
Before I reach the doors someone from inside comes out again. He asks me what I want. I say, to volunteer. He snaps that I can't use this door. I say it's the door I've been using all week. He says "Well. That hallway. Too many people were going down that hallway. So we can't use it anymore. You'll have to go around the building." Mystified, I say ok and turn to go. He says, "Did you drive here, is your car in this lot?" Yes. He freaks. "Well you'll have to move it! You can't be this close to the building!"
All right. So I move my goddamned car. I drive around the building into a maze I didn't know was there - a complicated network of buildings, parking lots, and little streets and passageways. I'm disoriented so I park randomly, walk back to where I started (out of sight of the forbidden lobby doors and the unpleasant people) and go on foot around the building, trying to remember how long the inner curving hallway is, trying to figure out where to go to find the volunteer desk.
I find it. I'd forgotten it was visible from another set of exterior doors. This means that as I walk up to the building, I can watch the three women inside react to my approach. They don't look very pleased.
There is, by the way, no one outside. At all. Nobody dropping off food and nobody sorting it. No stickered volunteers rushing back and forth. Nobody loading up trucks.
I try the door and find it locked. The three ladies are right inside the door, just a few feet away. They don't open it. They look at each other, say some things, look back at me, say some more things. I just stand there like an idiot, wondering if I should try the secret knock or what. I mean I'm visible, right? Finally one of the ladies gives the nod to another, who opens the door for me and says How can we help you.
I say I'd like to volunteer and before those words are out of my mouth, the main lady says "We�re overstaffed today."
Funny. On Monday and Tuesday you were overstaffed, but you had to check the list to find that out. And the extra volunteers were lined up waiting for assignments on a long bench, which is now empty. I'm standing in the secondary lobby, which offers tremendous visual and audio access to other parts of the main building - the church, the curving hallway, the mean office lady's office, a curving staircase which leads onto an open balconied hallway, off which branch the various donation-sorting rooms. I see no one and hear no one except for myself and these three stern silent ladies.
I try to chat. I've been working with them all week and they know my name. But there's no chatting. I babble, trying to put my finger on what's wrong here. It can't be just me, but they Do Not want my help. I ask if they think they'll need volunteers tomorrow and they say I can feel free to call, but their phone lines have been slammed, so they can't promise anything. I say Ok, then I'll just drop by another day and see if I can help, and they don't look too happy about that, and I leave.
I am insulted, frustrated, and curious as all hell. What makes a public-service shelter transform from an open-doored hive of cheerful activity to a locked-down asshole factory overnight?
My theory (or, my first theory, or, the least-ugly theory, stay tuned for jaded updates) is that the press got in. I know the SA people in charge have been concerned about the evacuees being exploited. That's why volunteers generally have not been allowed in the living quarters. I must have spoken with thirty workers there over the past few days, and only two or three have laid eyes on hurricane survivors. And as I understand it, evacuees within the facility are always accompanied by professional, salaried (i.e. recognizeable & obviously not reporters) Salvation Army employees - there's never a time when they're left with ONLY volunteers.
So why the sudden paranoid lockdown? I have drawn no conclusions but I have to wonder whether it might not be so much about the press getting in, but stories getting out. I don't know. I read too much conspiracy. But these people have been swallowed up into the belly of a building that has shut its doors to me, someone who wants only to help cook or lift or make other people's jobs easier. Something's very wrong.
