Last night as we were putting Tin to bed and going through our goodnight ritual, we looked at the photograph of my mom and where I normally say for Tin, “Goodnight Mimi,” instead I slipped and said “Goodnight mom.” Broke my heart.
Lisa decided not to be interviewed for the book, she said the tattoo said what she had to say about Katrina.
Vanessa and the candle still burning
Vanessa Niemann
Singer/Songwriter – Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue
Vanessa had just moved out of the French Quarter to Metairie right before the storm and was looking forward to being in the ‘burbs, away from the bars.” Like everyone else, when the mandate came to evacuate, she and her boyfriend at the time left with the clothes on their backs and their cats. “We immediately hit stopped traffic on the way out, and I was getting emotional because there were cars packed full of families, 8 or 9 people jammed in a car. There was a guy in slippers getting something out of a cooler in the back of a car and when the traffic started moving, the car took off without him,” she said.
They went from Brandon to Memphis to Nashville trying to find a place to wait out the storm. “We wanted to forget about what was happening, but we couldn’t. By the time the levees broke, we couldn’t get in touch with anyone and all we could think about was what we had left behind. We had just hired a new drummer and the band was at a crossroads, trying to play a lot and we hadn’t made it out of Checkpoint Charlie and onto Frenchman Street yet.”
We connected with other musicians who had found their way to Nashville and we saw musicians and the Grand Old Opry while were there. We kept trying not to deal with what we were dealing with. We looked at property to buy because we didn’t know how bad it would be in New Orleans. One member of my band lost everything, he is a strong man physically and mentally but when I saw him he was so hollow, so emotionally drained from what he had to deal with.”
“We left Nashville and made our way back towards New Orleans, stopping in Pearl, Mississippi where we lived in a migrant workers hotel. We were super emotional at this point and didn’t go out of the hotel room for one week straight. We wanted to go home.”
“I’m glad I stayed. I don’t blame anyone for leaving. So many good people left. I thank god for program such as the musician’s clinic that helped people.”
The tattoo helps me take feelings I have and put in an art form. I have tattoos from different emotional times in my life. When my grandmother moved out of her house and left her raspberry and rose garden. My 18th birthday, I got one.”
And for Katrina, Vanessa’s tattoo is a candle still burning, with a horseshoe, a question mark and an hourglass. “I have no idea what will happen to New Orleans, so we better make it the best time we can. And the question mark is that there are so many questions and there will be more to come.”
“I put Katrina in picture form, and it is the pain taking away the pain.”
Todd and the origami rabbit
Todd Windisch
Contractor/Designer/Builder
Todd’s tattoo of an origami bunny is in memoriam to his friend Jason Sweznic who died shortly after and because of the storm. “Jason was the second person I met when I moved to New Orleans. He was a bartender at Café Degas for forever,” Todd said. “And he was my friend.”
Todd evacuated with his wife, Erin, and was in Atlanta only two weeks before coming back. He spotted a 4’ by 8’ hole in the roof of his apartment on Google maps. “The roof of our building got blown off by a tornado that ripped through the day of the storm. Our landlord had stayed and my friend, Jason had stayed. Jason called and said you need to come back and deal with your apartment because everything is getting ruined,” Todd said.
His landlord had covered up Todd’s musical equipment with plastic but when he got back, he said it took three to five days to grasp what had happened because he was in shock. “There’s no other way to put it, riding around in knee deep in water to board up houses and businesses around the city. Poker machines were looted, people were wrecking stuff for whatever reason, maybe maliciously. There wasn’t a stitch of light. The first couple of nights I heard gunfire and was too afraid to start up my generator during the day.”
Todd’s friend Jason came by to move his sofa with a chainsaw because they could not get it out the door. “Jason was very stressed; he could not grasp what was going on. He had moved across the lake and had gotten involved with a bad crowd and at the time he and I were not seeing eye-to-eye because of the way he was not coping.”
Jason died of an overdose shortly after the storm. “He was not a weak man, but the effect of the storm was that bad. There were five different substances in his system according to the toxicology report,” Todd said.
“Jason was a big kid. He was a guy with a huge heart. He got to be friends with my two kids and they all carved their names in a tree in City Park. He was an origami expert, could take a piece of paper and make a rose or a rabbit, drunk or sober. He had gotten bunny tattoos on each of his triceps before the storm. He loved bunnies for whatever reason.”
“I miss the guy. I miss walking into Degas and seeing him hanging around. I don’t want another person to be forgotten because of this freaking storm. It’s a damn shame. We’re not much further along two years later, but I guess everything is baby steps.”
Erin and hurricane tattoo
Erin Eastern
Green Market Manager
Erin hails from a demographic group she believes was hit the hardest by Katrina – young, no longer dependent on parents albeit living month-to-month, with no insurance, and no savings. She and her roommate began an evacuation journey that started with following his family to Covington and then heading to Florida to her grandparents, where they sought shelter for the duration of the evacuation. “We had no money to buy clothes and had two pairs of underwear with us. So we needed someone who could take care of us,” she said.
When it was okay to return to New Orleans, Erin’s roommate opted to stay in Florida and she came back alone. “It was a ridiculous time. My friend, Rachel, moved into the apartment with me and even wore my roommates clothes,” she said.
This was not Erin’s first tattoo. “I had marked important moments in my life with a tattoo. When I turned 18, I got my first one – a lizard – it means nothing. I had a pair of boxer shorts with lizards on them. For me it’s not so much about the design. I don’t care if I don’t like it in 30 years. It’s a permanent marker of what I did like at the time.”
The next one was during her college sophomore year, when she thought she would never come back to New Orleans. “I was living in Berkeley and had a masked man tattooed over my heart to symbolize my love for the city. But then I realized that I wanted to make my life in New Orleans, and I had a feeling this was 100% home because I loved the place,” she said.
For Erin, the tattoos are part of accepting things never turn out the way you want, but they turn out okay in the end. Her Katrina tattoo is what has become for many here the iconic hurricane swirl. “My best friend would never get a tattoo. ‘How can you put that on your body?’ she’d ask me. But we were driving around the city after the storm and she said she wanted to get a tattoo with a hurricane symbol. She asked me if I would get one with her and could I say no? No. So we got the same tattoo. This symbol wouldn’t have been something I chose.”
“My best friend ended up moving away from New Orleans a few months later. Everyone thought she was so lucky because she had kept her job through the storm, but she wound up moving to New York.”
Dan and the art of flight
Dan Tague
Artist
Dan was living in MidCity before the storm and decided not to evacuate. He holed up in his studio, where he did mix media, sculpture and photography, behind the Rock N Bowl instead. What started out as Dan and five others riding out the storm, quickly became a group of 16 people, 8 dogs, and 4 cats.
“The rain and wind pounded on the doors when the storm was coming through. The next day, there was a little bit of water on the floor, but when we went outside to take the plywood off, three feet of water came rushing in. We had a boat there as a joke, so we took it out and paddled around. The next levee breach came on Tuesday. The water was coming fast, rising 8 or 9 feet and eventually we were all on the roof.”
There were two filmmakers on the roof who were filming the entire time. “We took the boat out and started getting people off porches and bringing them to the end of Canal Street to higher ground so they could get to the Convention Center. There were already bodies floating in the water and by the third day you couldn’t go out because people were shooting and stealing boats. By day five there was too much diesel in the water and some chemicals and people were starting to freak out.”
Once rescued, Dan drifted around cities before finally heading to New York. He sought refuge at a Katrina hotel near JFK, where he stayed for eleven months working on 3D models of skulls, from words he found that said decomposition. He had a show in Chicago and did two shows in New Orleans.
“All of my work I had done in the last twelve months was gone. It was nice in a weird way to lose everything. When I came back to New Orleans the first time, Mid City still had no lights. I was here three days and went straight back and then did a residency in Santa Fe for about two months. I went back to New Orleans later and it stank. There was no law being enforced, people were being held up. So I went to Berkeley for two months and then France for two months for another residency.”
In August 2006, Dan returned for a show – Camelot after the Deluge at the Contemporary Art Center for White Linen night. He moved back in January of 2007.
His tattoo covers the entire surface of his chest. It is an eagle from the back of a quarter, the official American Eagle. “The neck ruffles and head are of a vulture preying on the dead. It has the look of an eagle with a banner that says NOLA. There is a whiskey bottle in one hand and a crown with a fleur de lys on the feathers. It symbolizes the destruction of things.”
“The tattoo took three sittings. It was painful. It was good that it was so painful. Kind of a cleansing.”
Dale and the iconic fleur de lys
Dale Hrebik
College English teacher
Dale had just purchased a typical New Orleans shotgun double with a friend and was putting down official roots when Katrina hit. “I fell in love with New Orleans when I came down here from New York seven years ago,” he said. “I found out where I wanted to be and got my dream job here and bought a house and everything was coming together, then bam.”
His parents were visiting when the mayor ordered a mandatory evacuation. “The idea of not coming back never occurred to me. It didn’t occur to me that people would leave and never come back. It took a while for me to realize how extensive the devastation was and that it would take several years of rebuilding.”
The day the storm hit was the first day of class for most of the schools and universities in the city. After five weeks, Dale returned, having been bounced around between Jackson, Mississippi, Virginia, and New York before getting home.
“I had been thinking about getting a tattoo before the storm. I have three of them, each one identifies the place I got it, which is part of the reason. I was thinking about what I wanted to get and the storm hit and in Jackson where we were all waiting out the storm, we started talking about fleur de lys tattoos – joking about getting them on our middle fingers.”
Immediately following the storm, I wanted to get back to the city and get the tattoo. It took a few months after returning to sort things out and then I sought out Walt. I wanted the fleur de lys because it was so connected with New Orleans and I wanted something that symbolized the passion and determination I had to stay. And I wanted it to be positive. A lot of people were getting the hurricane symbol – I felt like that was focusing on the bad.
Actually two years late, things are going quite well for me. I have my old job back and got a promotion and a raise. My best friend was a contractor so I was able to fix my wreck of a house pretty quickly. I have a group of friends who are very important to me that are here.
Charles and the Garbage Truck route
Charles Handler
Industrial Organizational Psychologist
Charles’ tattoo was not completely Katrina related although he said the event did bind together a lot of themes into one piece of artwork that now spans half of his chest and covers his entire arm like a sleeve. “The decision to cover my whole arm was a big decision and I knew the image should not be arbitrary,” he said. The tattoo is a watershed depiction of the harshness of New Orleans post-K. It is a negative theme of the destruction of all things important, softened by the appearance of cute fuzzy animals.
The starting point is a garbage truck with New Orleans’ area code 504 written on it. “What did I see when I got back? Garbage. Slime oozing. There were things you normally see and things not normal. How does my wife, Anne, want to be depicted? As a horse? A horse on a surfboard? Cars are represented. There is a robotic pit-bull totem I invented a long time ago. There’s vintage musical images. The storm had a big impact on music. A New Orleans water meter ends the image – sort of an ashes-to-ashes as you cycle down the sewer,” he said.
“What clouds my mind is the ruination, the disgusting muck, but that’s not going to be my state of mind forever,” he said. The muck is depicted by green slime that fills in all the dead space of the tattoo.
The decision to undertake such a detailed tattoo was directly related to Charles’ Katrina experience, which he said taught him to not be afraid to “express who I am.” The tattoo took many sittings to accomplish and a lot of pain to endure. “It taught me patience. This isn’t the type of thing you can do at once.” Every two weeks, Charles would go for a sitting and then his body would have to take a break to heal. “It’s tough on your body,” he said. “Your body can have a reaction to the ink; it traumatizes.”
Many people describe their Katrina tattoos as a rite of passage. Charles described it as a willingness to accept “who I am and cultivate the part of me that I pushed under for so long. The creative side of me that says I don’t care what others think.” More importantly, he said, “The tattoo places me in a different category of people. It helps me be me. Even the act of doing it, enduring pain and being patient, which is not manifested in the artwork, was part of the experience for me. The willingness to put myself out there was, in the end, cathartic.”
“The beauty of living in New Orleans is that people don’t judge you by the way you look.”
I was going to do this book that came up as an idea when I was speaking to my friend Anne at Bacchanal one day after Katrina. It was to do a coffee table book of people who had gotten tattoos to commemorate Katrina. The book did not happen even though it was well intended and I even thought Taschen would be the ideal publisher.
Here was the genesis for the book. Start wtih Anne and the lotus tattoo and the theme of overcoming:
Anne Churchill
Chef/Caterer
Anne’s tattoo was originally going to be a waist chain with charms that could be added over time. She was spending her summer vacation in Cambodia and Australia and was going to be on the lookout for designs and ideas while traveling. A week into the vacation, lounging on a beach in Vietnam, she heard about a Category 5 hurricane headed to New Orleans.
New Orleans was soon underwater and in Australia, despondent and miserable, Anne went through the motions of her vacation. She found herself unable to get out of bed for a pre-arranged surf lesson. Her then husband, Charles, convinced her to get up and go on. “I had this thing to conquer the water and since the storm, it was the first time the knots had disappeared in my stomach. When I got up and rode the wave in, the water became symbolic for me of overcoming,” she said.
“There was a manic urgency when I came back to the city to rebuild, to reestablish the social network. Post-storm, we were full of a conviction to do better and I still feel that. But there was sadness too. I can remember [Louisiana musician] John Boutte said something interesting to his grandmother around this time. She went to see him and he gave the most rousing performance of his career, but he said he looked out at the crowd and didn’t see a single black face. We are worried about our culture fading in the aftermath of the storm.”
“My tattoo is a lotus, which is about transformation,” she said.
I think I’d like to write a photo book – the coffee table kind. I was going to do one about people who got tattoo’s because of Katrina, but now I think I want to do one on the dogs of Buffa’s. Everytime we go to Buffa’s it’s a new dog there. Last night it was Linda. We sat at a table to split a burger and Linda sat at the table next to us and her owners were dead set on showing us how she likes to jump through hoops that they make with their arms but that was only after they ordered her her toast, which she also loves.
We thought of mom and how she said when we see dogs that would be her showing herself to us. Well Linda was most certainly my mother incarnate. She sat there in all her glory, eating her toast, and occasionally jumping through hoops to satisfy the whims of the two men who own her.