The Long Pause

Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand.

Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the funny characters.

A Last Whiff of Fulton 's Fish, Bringing a Tear

By DAN BARRY

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of

glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes;

fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada ,

Florida , and the squid-ink East River . Of funny

fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat

onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with

coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented

ice.

This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one

place in the New York vastness: a small stretch

of South Street where peddlers have sung the

song of the catch since at least 1831, while

all around them, change. They were hawking fish

here when an ale house called McSorley's opened

up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln

spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a

bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.

Take it in now, if you wish, if you dare,

because the rains will come to rinse this

distinct aroma from the city air. Some Friday

soon, perhaps next month, the fish sellers will

spill their ice and shutter their stalls, pack

their grappling hooks and raise a final toast

beneath the ba-rump and hum of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive .

And on the Monday, they will begin peddling

their dead-eyed wares inside a custom-made

building in the Hunts Point section of the

Bronx , to be named the New Fulton Fish Market

Cooperative, and the old Fulton Fish Market —

that raucous stage of open-air overnight commerce — will be no

more.

The fish market's closing should come as no

surprise, though it does. From the beginning,

New York questioned the location of this rough

and odoriferous trade. In 1854, a city elder

wondered whether "a more advantageous

disposition may not be made of that valuable

property by the removal of the Fish Market."

And in 1859, another sachem suggested moving

the market uptown, in part because the ebb and

flow of the East River was, as The New York

Times delicately put it, "not sufficiently strong to carry off the

>offal."

Offal and the official's concomitant complaint

of a blanket of maggots on the water were not

issues in the decision to move the market

finally to Hunts Point (a plan that dates back

at least to the mid-1950's). Instead, the

creeping conversion of Manhattan into a

monstrous mall for the affluent played a role,

as did the grudging realization that the market

had become impractical, anachronistic.

Fishermen haven't unloaded their catch there for more than a

generation.

Before it leaves us, then; before it lives only

in news footage and movies like "Splash": one

last look at a part of the city taken for

granted, save by fish people, nighthawks and

urban anthropologists. One long, last

inhalation of the exquisite Fulton Fish Market bouquet.

Three in the morning, and forklifts clatter

over rutted pavement, unloaded trucks sigh in

escape, and workers pierce wax-coated cases

with grappling hooks — whup! whup! — as they move fish from here

to

>there.

Some lights of the market stand before the

silvery truck of a man who calls himself Steve

the Coffee Guy. Beansie, the union official, is

there, smoking a cigar, and Richie Klein, a

burly fish salesman, savoring a cigarette, and

Joe Tuna, on his forklift, drinking tea. When

Joe Tuna glides over curb and cobblestone, his

meaty biceps jiggle so much that the tattoos move like cartoons.

They wear rubber boots and soiled sneakers that

never cross the thresholds of their homes;

clean jeans and fish-bloodied shorts; polo

shirts and T-shirts, some torn in the back by

the tips of the hooks slung over their shoulders.

In winter, the East River winds blow through

you no matter what you wear, so Steve the

Coffee Guy will warm himself with a propped-up

propane heater, in homage to barrels of flames

that once flickered wickedly along South

Street. On this summer's night, though, the

muggy air clings like lotion to the skin, and

coolness is found at the coffee truck's icy bed

of soda, over which hangs a dated photograph of

a beautiful young woman in shorts, briskly walking.

The rumor, or the hope, is that it's South

Street Annie, also known as Shopping Bag Annie,

that shrunken woman with wild gray hair who

strolls the market calling "Yoohoo!" Selling

cigarettes and newspapers from her red-wire

cart, she is coarse, ribald, ubiquitous: the

flawed mother of fish town. A worker confides

that on his first day in the market more than a

decade ago, he was instructed to kiss one of

her pendulous breasts — for good luck.

In the market, superstition demands that you

watch out for stray animals and broken people.

The men take care of her, enduring her rants,

her feigned grabs at their crotches. The New

York Post costs a quarter; the men give her a

dollar. The Daily News costs 50 cents; they give her a dollar, maybe

two.

Thank you, sweetie, she says. What a guy.

Burly Mr. Klein grabs his coffee and walks over

to Stall 31, where he and a partner run Third

Generation Seafood in what is known as the New

Market Building; the old building was

demolished after a chunk of it fell into the

river in 1936. He passes crates of croakers,

porgies and "day-boat" Montauk fluke, which

means it was caught less than 24 hours ago.

He pauses to watch one of his fillet men,

Wilson Quirizumbay, slice a tuna carcass so

close to the bone that only maroon wisps of

flesh remain. "They have a feel for the bone,

and for the knife," Mr. Klein says. "The

skill is in the yield. He's gonna give me 70 percent."

In the next stall stands Vince nt Tatick, of the

Joseph H. Carter Fish Company. His father ran

Frank Tatick Fillet under the old Sweet's

Restaurant. Both are gone now, and here is the

son, twirling a grappling hook as though it

were a child's toy. He wears a dark-green

shirt, dark-green pants, and a camouflage

headband, sports five pencils and a pack of

Parliaments in his breast pocket, and keeps a

Marine Corps knife on his hip. Rambo among fish.

Mr. Tatick has no opinion about the market's

move, he says, other than: what is, is. But he

wonders about leaving behind the nuns at St.

Rose's Home, on the Lower East Side , who nursed

his father in his final two years. During that

time, the Taticks agreed that it would be nice

to give the nuns some fish, 25 pounds worth, every Friday.

When his father died, Mr. Tatick says, "I

didn't know how to say, 'Sorry, the deal is off.' So I never said

>anything."

That was more than 40 years ago, he says. "I still give them

fish."

This is just one story among thousands, tens of

thousands, to rise from the fishy swirl, only

to dissipate from memory with the passing of time and old

fishmongers.

All those market fires, including the

devastating blaze of 1878, possibly caused by

rats munching on matchsticks. That strange,

huge turtle brought to shore in 1900. The dream

that a customs official had during Prohibition,

leading to the discovery of 2,000 bags of

whiskey hidden among tons of fish in the hold

of the schooner Caroline. The dead fisherman

found hanging over an ice machine in 1939,

leaving nothing but a last known address of the

Seamen's Church Institute, 25 South Street .

Many of the stories centered on characters who

worked hard for their nicknames: Iceberg Tommy,

who settled his nerves by immersing his feet in

ice; Shrimp Sammy, who promoted the freshness

of his shellfish by eating them raw; Porgy Joe,

who strolled the market with two live crabs

clinging to his ears by their claws. Men of the water, now dust.

There was Alfred E. Smith, governor and

presidential candidate, who often bragged of

earning his degree from F.F.M., for Fulton Fish

Market, the educational institution of his

fish-peddling youth. And Joseph Lanza, a

mobster who controlled the market for decades

— whether in or out of prison — and whose

sobriquet of " Soc ks" referred to his penchant

for punching those who refused to pay him for the right to sell

fish.

A hearing in 1931 became one of the first

tutorials in the true ways of the market,

thanks to the testimony of several

uncomfortable witnesses, including a fish-store owner named James

>McAleese.

"A man called up and told me to send down $40

by my buyer, or the carriers would not deliver fish to my truck."

"Why did you pay it?" he was asked.

"Because I wanted my fish."

The mob and the market became so intertwined,

with tribute to wiseguys as common as a buck to

Annie, that a government investigation of some

kind always seemed under way. Successful

crackdowns have considerably reduced the mob's

presence, but still: one section of the city's administrative code

begins with the assertion that the fish market "has for decades

been corruptly influenced by organized crime."

More than the ghosts of characters, though,

more than the whiff of the mob, there lingers

in this city corner a palpable, connective air

to who we once were; what we saw; what we said.

The eels wriggling free along Fulton Street .

The hook fights among fishmongers. The

ice-coated masts of sloops in winter. The

fedoras, the aprons, the scales of fish

justice. That market man who, on one summer's

night in 1872, called out an order:

"Lively, Jim , 10 baskets of lobsters."

On this night, one of the last, it is Frank

Minio who calls out. "Lemon sole is

one-thirty-five today, and the large is

one-fiftyI got one day-boat gray sole left, three-fifty."

Mr. Minio is bald, muscular and in full command

of his domain, a business on the west side of

South Street called Smitty's Fillet House. A

college graduate, he had planned to "pursue

theater," as he puts it, but his father died

in this very stall 27 years ago, and, well, it's a family business.

He says he looks forward to some aspects of the

move to the Bronx : not freezing in winter, for

example, and not paying for so much ice in the

summer. Still, he wonders, couldn't the city

have built an enclosed market here, alongside

exhibitions that celebrated New York 's inextricable connection to

the

>water?

"It's been done this way a long time," he

says, before moving toward a man poking at the

cheeks of fish. "Good morning," he says to

the bold customer. "One-sixty on the pollock."

The sky begins to lighten. Below a for-sale

sign on an old brick building, circa 1830, a

fat man eats a turkey-on-a-roll near a gray

mound of grouper. A skinny man shovels ice,

shoosh, onto some snapper the color of the

pinkish dawn. Someone calls out, "Frank-e-e-e!"

Another forklift clatters past. South Street

Annie appears, selling fresh news. Behind her,

the Brooklyn Bridge , looking almost new.

————————-

May 11, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition – Final

Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 794 words

About New York ; An Old Hand, Betrayed By His Belt

By DAN BARRY

JOE GILLUM of Harlem fell from the sky last

week. He plummeted silently through the air of

a Silk Stocking neighborhood and broke upon

impact, as did that extra appendage of his, a squeegee.

He washed windows for a living, often working

so high above the ground that your hands

perspire just thinking of it. At 68, he was

still strapping on his trusty old belt — too

old, it turned out, and not so trusty — and

suspending himself in the air, his back to the

world, his silhouette reflected in the soot-caked windows of others.

Until last Thursday, that is, when he dropped

nine stories in about the time it takes to soak

a rag in a pail of soapy water. Up above, the

two canvas straps that he had secured to the

sides of the window could do nothing now but wave goodbye in the

breeze.

The initial police report on his accidental

death attached his middle initial of L to the

end of his given name, and so in most of the

brief news accounts he was rechristened Joel

Gillum. "It was Joe," said his wife, Ollie. "It was Joe."

Mrs. Gillum, 67, small-boned and white-haired,

sat deep in a couch's hug in the worn apartment

on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard that she

had shared with her husband for more than 30

years. She seemed composed, but this was Monday

morning, within the exhausting awkwardness that

comes after the death and before the wake.

The telephone beside her rang again, but her

sister-in-law, Marie Colbert, in from Oklahoma

for the funeral, was fielding calls and jotting

messages in a spiral-bound notebook. "Thank

you for calling," Mrs. Colbert said again into the receiver.

Some of the callers were friends and relatives.

Others were wondering where their window washer

was. "His clients don't know," Mrs. Gillum

said. "They're expecting him today."

Joe Gillum, of Georgia, and Ollie Colbert, of

Oklahoma , met nearly 49 years ago in a Harlem

nightclub on Eighth Avenue . He was working in a

hospital morgue then, and she was setting fake

gems in costume jewelry at some factory. They

talked about where they came from, how they had

wound up in New York City — jobs, basically —

and what they liked and disliked. At some point

she revealed her love for apricots. Next day,

here comes Joe Gillum, bearing apricots.

They married in 1957, and shared more fruit,

bitter and sweet. The first child, Joe, died in

infancy. The second child, Sabrina, would give

them three grandchildren. And one of those

three would give them a great-grandson.

The years can blur into one long workday. But

Mrs. Gillum said she is sure that her husband

started his own window- and floor-cleaning

business in the mid-60's, because it was after

President Kennedy's assassination and before Martin Luther King

Jr.'s.

After 30 years of wrestling electric sanders

over parquet floors — those machines have

minds of their own — his back hurt so much

that he decided a decade ago to concentrate on

windows. By then he had built up a good

clientele, which meant that every spring he was out, and up.

"He never was afraid of heights," said Mrs.

Gillum, her eyes looking for distraction from a muttering

television.

"That was his life," said her brother, Nemiah

Colbert. "That's what he did for a living."

The telephone rang again. "They're calling for

him to come to work today," Mrs. Gillum said to the television.

LAST Thursday morning, the Gillums made plans

to go food shopping that evening. Mrs. Gillum

told her husband that she might be a little

late from her job minding an apartment on the

Upper West Side . "His last words, and it was

so soft," she said, "was, 'I'll be right here waiting for you."'

Then Mr. Gillum headed for a job at a nice

brick apartment building at 430 East 57th

Street, carrying, his wife recalled, "his

belt, his pail, and his squeegee." When asked

whether her husband ever updated his equipment,

Mrs. Gillum slowly shook her head and said, "Uh-uh."

By 11, he was dead. By noon , his blood had been

scrubbed and sprayed from the sidewalk by one

of the building's employees. And by the

afternoon, a neighbor of the Gillums who had

spoken to detectives had taped a note to their

door, saying, "Please see me, it's an emergency."

A funeral service was held at Canaan Baptist

Church in Harlem yesterday morning, followed by

the long ride out to Calverton National

Cemetery on Long Island for the burial of a fallen window washer.

For the record, his name was Joe Gillum. Joe L. Gillum.

——————————

November 2, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition – Final

Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 861 words

About New York ; Button Up Your Overcoat

By DAN BARRY

E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com

THESE days have been uncommonly mild for

autumn, but Derek Ivery insists on wearing a

sweater and jacket over his tall and very thin

frame. He cannot get sick. He has things to do.

Mr. Ivery is an office worker in a city of

office workers. He works Mondays through

Fridays, 9 to 5 , in the biology department at

Queens College . He answers the telephone,

registers students for classes, and makes sure

that professors get their mail. Then he walks

to the home he shares with his mother in Flushing .

An average man, living an average life. But he

is only 26, with plans to go to graduate school. He has things to

do.

Growing up, he did not stand out among the

3,300 students at John Bowne High School , save

for a brief speaking role in the school's

production of "Les Misérables." And he didn't

stray far when he enrolled at Queens College ,

down the street, to become one student among some 17,000.

His only extracurricular activity was with the

college's peer advisement program, which trains

students to assist others in making the

sometimes-difficult adjustment to college life.

Soon, he was helping to recruit other students for the program.

One day in 2002, he met another one among the

17,000: Nidha Mubdi, a young student who wanted

to become a peer adviser. The daughter of

Bangladeshi immigrants living in Briarwood,

Queens , she had a riveting smile and an upbeat

demeanor that belied the life story she shared with him.

In August 1998, when she was 18, Ms. Mubdi was

told she had leukemia. When she was 19, she

underwent a bone marrow transplant. When she

was 20, her kidneys failed — the payment due

from all that chemotherapy and medication — and she began dialysis

>treatment.

Through bad movies and graduation parties and

gentle teasing, a platonic friendship developed

between this Muslim woman and this Methodist

man. Mr. Ivery became accustomed to her

dialysis routine. Three mornings a week, she

sat for three hours in a medical office in

Jackson Heights , hooked up to a machine that

did the work her kidneys could not. After that,

several hours of sleep. This was her life, at 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

A year ago, Mr. Ivery had an idea, but set it aside. No, he decided.

No.

Then, a few months ago, Ms. Mubdi e-mailed to

her friends the address for her Web site, which

included a section called "My Story — Looking

For a Miracle." It began: "Could you be a

person of selfless sacrifice & godly humanity

able to donate their spare kidney?"

That idea returned to Mr. Ivery. Without

telling his friend, he had his blood type

checked and learned that it matched hers. Then

he sent her an e-mail message that opened with

a couple of goofy jokes and ended with the

words: "But if you want a kidney you can have mine."

Ms. Mubdi did not answer right away, and has

trouble articulating why. In the past, others

had expressed interest in donating a kidney,

but for this reason and that reason those plans

fell through. "I was taken aback," she says.

A WEEK later, the two friends went to a

fast-food place on Union Turnpike. He had a

vanilla milkshake, she had some strawberry-ice

concoction, and they talked about it. She was

surprised that he didn't have any questions

about the process. He was surprised that she

was so quiet — brought to wordlessness, it

seemed, by the enormousness of what was being offered. .

That evening, the Methodist gently patted the

hand of the Muslim. "To let her know it's all right," Mr. Ivery

says.

The two friends underwent testing to confirm

the compatibility between his kidney and her

body. He had to meet with his "transplant

team." He had to have a C.T. scan. He had to

be examined by a psychologist, to make sure he knew what he was

doing.

Through it all, Ms. Mubdi has assured Mr. Ivery

that he can still change his mind — it would

be all right. Mr. Ivery has assured her that

this is what he wants to do. They both worry

about complications, including the possibility of rejection.

Now the time is upon them. Ms. Mubdi and Mr.

Ivery are scheduled to report early Friday

morning to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia

hospital in Upper Manhattan. But they have been

warned that the transplant will be postponed if either one of them

gets

>sick.

That is why Mr. Ivery bundles up during these uncommonly mild autumn

days.

—————————————-

September 8, 2005, Thursday Late Edition – Final

Section A Page 1 Column 2 Desk: National Desk Length: 1215 words

STORM AND CRISIS: STREET SCENE; Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on

Union

>Street

By DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7

In the downtown business district here, on a

dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank

automated teller machine, across from a parking

garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse.

Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on

Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves

with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a

parting snapshot like some visiting

conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the

body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around

the corner knew all about it: murder victim,

bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The

police marked it with traffic cones maybe four

days ago, he said, and then he joked that if

you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and

another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not

shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane,

there are surely hundreds, probably thousands.

What is remarkable is that on a downtown street

in a major American city, a corpse can

decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse,

half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood

to say strange things, and then return into the

rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate

and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge,

and old signs from les bons temps have been

replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

The incomprehensible has become so routine here

that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On

Sunday, for example, several soldiers on

Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads

of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics

store.

A car pulled right up to this tense scene and

the driver leaned out his window to ask a

soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"

Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here

— not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here — is

rooted in the intensive news coverage of the

hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and

obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the

concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity

of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the

nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.

Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news

conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has

granted haunting glimpses of the past, present

and future, with the rare comfort found in,

say, the white sheet that flaps, not in

surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St.

Charles Avenue.

"We Shall Survive," it says, as though

wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that

will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and

rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether

different New Orleans.

Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where

open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed

on these streets; where one of the many

gag-inducing smells — that of rancid meat —

is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the

presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.

The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a

soldier's boot print. The "take-away" signs

outside restaurants taken away. The corner

kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New

Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim."

Rush hour in downtown now means pickups

carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses,

S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters

hungry for action, and the occasional tank.

About the only ones commuting by bus are

dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from

the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.

Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the

portal to the Williams Super Market in the

once-desirable Garden District. And who could

blame them if all they wanted was food in those

first desperate days? The interlopers took the

water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They

did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.

On the other side of downtown across Canal

Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous

and most unreal of American avenues is now

little more than an empty alley with balconies.

The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone

cooing "ma chère," of men sporting convention

nametags and emitting forced guffaws — the

absence of us — assaults the senses more than any smell.

Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight

breeze twirls the overhead fans for no one,

past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a

man emerges from nothing on Royal Street. He is

asked, "Where's St. Bernard Avenue?"

"Where's the ice?" he asks in return, eyes

narrowed in menace. "Where's the ice? St.

Bernard's is that way, but where's the ice?"

In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods,

the severely damaged streets bear the names of

saints who could not protect them. Whatever

nature spared, human nature stepped up to

provide a kind of democracy in destruction.

At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude

Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from

the crushed door, offering a view of the

complementary coffee table. A large woman named

Phoebe Au — "Pronounced 'Awe,"' she says —

materializes to report that men had smashed it

in with a truck. She fades into the

neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman

named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.

"They used sledgehammers," she said.

Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks

rumble past a smoldering building, the roads

are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The

city parked them on the riverbank for the

hurricane, after which some hoods took them for

fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded

them.

On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire

continues to burn where a warehouse once stood,

a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke

to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights

without power or water have been tough,

especially since the police took away the gun

he was carrying — "They beat me and

threatened to kill me," he says — but there are benefits to this

new

>world.

"You're able to see the stars," he says. "It's wonderful."

Today, law enforcement troops began lending

muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow to evacuate

by force any residents too attached to their

pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched

the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and

that woman whose name sounds like Awe.

Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of

another evening crept like spilled black water over someone's

corpse.

—————————————

October 3, 2005, Monday Late Edition – Final

Section A Page 19 Column 1 Desk: National Desk Length: 1554 words

CORRECTION APPENDED

STORM AND CRISIS: NEW ORLEANS; One Month Later,

Flickering Lights Reveal a City That Is Far From Being Reclaimed By

DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 2

Abandoned city buses on deserted streets, doors

opened for the boarding of ghosts. Fast-food

restaurants, darkened and reeking of rancid

meat. Tainted tap water, unsafe for contact

with skin. Entire neighborhoods of empty, moldy

houses, waiting for that bulldozer's first punch.

No children.

If you can imagine this. If you can imagine a

helicopter that crashed weeks ago still planted

across from a post office, like a piece of

public art. If you can imagine officials

warning that you enter many parts of this major

American city at your own risk. If you can

imagine all this, you can begin to imagine what

it is like in New Orleans a month after the deluge.

True, those from the luckier west bank section

of Algiers can hug their children and sleep in

their own beds. True, discarded refrigerators

now stand like upturned white coffins on the

high-ground streets of Uptown and the Garden

District, signaling that housecleanings have begun.

And true, some lights have returned to this

city's naughty-Disney thoroughfare, Bourbon

Street, the reports of which may have led

people elsewhere to sigh and think that

normality, as manifested by the tossing of

beads and the flashing of breasts, cannot be far behind.

But consider what those lights now reveal: more

businesses closed than open; pockets of

stinking garbage; gawking bands of

firefighters, disaster relief workers,

journalists, all from somewhere else. Traffic

on the street means a United States Marshals

vehicle, then a sheriff's pick-up, then a

National Guard Humvee, then a New Orleans

police cruiser with one headlight out.

And the lights of Bourbon Street do not shine

upon, say, the Martin Luther King Jr.

Elementary School and Library in the Lower

Ninth Ward. The school's doors gape open, mud

cakes the floor, mold creeps across the

portrait of the namesake. Outside, not far from

a brimming sewer in which small fish dart, a

volume of a youth classic lies in the muck, and

it is almost too much: S.E. Hinton's "That Was Then, This Is Now."

Anyone who dares to return home might be fooled

at first by the illusion of quick recovery. The

bus and train terminal has a bustling air, but

only because it serves as a makeshift jail.

Cars without telltale flood marks glide along

the streets but belong to postcatastrophe

cleanup companies with names like Amigos Restoration.

And some businesses operate amid the rising

mounds of garbage, including the Sheraton

Hotel, where the 1,000 or so guests — mostly

journalists and people with the Federal

Emergency Management Agency — can almost be

fooled into believing that what was New Orleans, is.

Hotel valets will park your car in a garage so

that the powdery mist of recovery work does not

cloud your windshield. Hotel buffets on the

second floor offer an option to the Salvation

Army food truck outside. Hotel televisions

offer HBO, once you click past the in-house

commercials for the "chocolate dipping

fountain" at Harrah's New Orleans Casino, just

down the street and all boarded up.

And the rooms, especially ones on the 40th

floor and above, offer a Zeus-like view of a

metropolis in seeming repose. But leave the

hotel womb, and you remember again that this is

not urban repose, but urban shock.

A month after the hurricane, nearly two-thirds

of the power is out, telephone and Internet

connections remain down, and tens of millions

of cubic yards of debris need to be carted away

— with "debris" the catchword for everything

from tree branches to family possessions.

In once-desirable Lakeview, hard against the

17th Street Canal that famously gave way, the

several feet of water that sat for weeks has

finally receded, leaving behind a

neighborhood's skeleton to bake in the hot sun.

Walk past a tossed-aside car, past the dangling

strips of siding that slap and groan in the

warm breeze, across a silt-browned lawn that

once received a lot of care, and peer through

the beveled glass of someone's front door. This

is what you see: black mold several feet up the

white walls and three-quarters up the carpeted

stairs; thrown furniture wearing a mucky

veneer; and mud on the floor that is still

shiny wet. The whiff through a cracked window is of something awful.

These conditions were not bad enough, at least

not yet, to earn one of the orange city

stickers that are suddenly so ubiquitous,

saying, "This structure is unsafe and its use

or occupancy has been prohibited by the building official."

The other famous markings, of course, are those

left by rescue-and-recovery teams on every

building, every abandoned bus — even that

downed helicopter, across from the Mid-City

post office — to answer the question: Bodies inside, yes or no?

In Uptown, two of these markings festoon the

porch at 4734 Laurel Street. One dates from

early September (one body), the other from late

September (no body), an inadequate account of

why the house's owner, Alcede Jackson, lay dead

for nearly two weeks before men in white

protective suits finally came to collect his body on Sept. 12.

The different-colored scribbles on a house

nearby provide a dialogue between animal-rescue

crews: dog in yard; dog given food and water; dog still here; dog

>"taken."

Of course, virtually no one is here to read

these markings. A visitor can drive for miles

along dusty, mosquito-infested streets and not

see a soul, especially through poor

neighborhoods like Bywater and the Lower Ninth

Ward. A war zone is not the proper analogy; something approaching Chernobyl is.

Stop anywhere, and uneasiness takes hold. Pull

into the parking lot of the Sarah T. Reed High

School in New Orleans East, and park between

the vandalized Ford Windstar and the vandalized

Dodge pickup. That crackling beneath your feet

is not autumn leaves, but hundreds and hundreds

of dead perch. And those abandoned dogs racing

toward you: they are not looking to be petted.

The few people moving across this deserted stage have stories to

tell.

Here, leaning against an old car on Dauphine

Street in Bywater: Dennis Landry, unshaven, and

Donnalee Eyraud, in Winnie the Pooh sneakers,

drinking in the unnatural evening quiet with

whatever is in that cooler on the ground. They

talk simultaneously to create a symphony of

hardship: no power, cigarettes hard to come by,

a days-old Times-Picayune cherished as though

it were the Gospel, looters still lurking.

"I'm telling you, I've been packing a gun in

my pocket for a week," Mr. Landry said.

"Not me," Ms. Eyraud said. "I have my machete. I'm not into

guns."

And here, sitting on the ground outside a work

camp in Algiers, waiting for The Man to pay

him: Tyrone Brustie, just one of thousands of

workers from near and far who are now cleaning

out putrid food lockers, picking up fly-swarmed

piles from the curbs, buzz-sawing through downed trees.

He is a Tom Joad of this disaster. A carpenter

from the city, he was evacuated to Houston,

hitched a ride back with a Pentecostal

minister, hooked up with one of the many

disaster-relief contractors and got a job

collecting garbage from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. He

sleeps in one of those tent cities cropping up

along General Meyer Avenue in Algiers, where

the men in the exhaust of their nights talk about how they better

get paid.

Mr. Brustie is supposed to be paid $10 an hour,

and that was why he was waiting patiently for

The Man, who drives a black Humvee. Others who

wanted to get paid — a few subcontractors, a

truck driver, a secretary — shuffled nearby,

and their muttering made sheriff's deputies

guarding the camp get out of their cruisers.

There was no confrontation, though, because The Man never came.

When nighttime falls on this city under curfew,

it conceals the devastation like some Mardi

Gras mask. But New Orleans always lived for the

night — for the food, the talk, the music. And

just as there are no children, there is no music.

Except here and there on Bourbon Street. In a

club on Saturday night, a crowd of 20 listened

to a zydeco band called the Bonoffs sing old

songs for a spectral city, with an exuberance

intended to wake the dead. Their words called out to empty streets:

Talkin' 'bout, Hey now! Hey now!

I-ko, I-ko, un-day

Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né.

Jock-a-mo fee na-né.

A large man in Louisiana State purple and gold

raised his fist in the air and howled long and loud, as if to say: Exactly.