Drugs, Inc.
3: “Hurricane Blow” (New Orleans)
“People don't live in New Orleans because it is easy. They
live here because they are incapable of living anywhere else in the just same
way.” – Ian McNulty, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina
“New Orleans is the city that sobriety forgot.” -- Corey Vinegar
It’s July in New Orleans.
The air feels like thick, hot soup.
The reassuring scents of lush flora and vigorous Gulf Coast fauna mix
with the stench of vomit and urine to create a contradictory odor of
hospitality and caution. Out there in
the “normal” world of workaday folks, the Big Easy gets easier this time of
year. But here in the world of street
drugs, life accelerates through the heavy, wet heat that engulfs the city.
As a crew, we’ve set out to insinuate ourselves into the
warp and woof of street drug culture in post-Katrina New Orleans. We’re in the Bywater neighborhood to meet up
with Stumps Duh Clown, a local underground legend. Stumps is the godfather of the gutter punks,
old-timey traveler kids, itinerant youth, and circus performers. He plays a vital role in maintaining New
Orleans’ long-standing tradition of opening its arms to train-hopping,
rail-riding, cheap booze guzzling “miscreants.”
Walking down the grass alley -- festooned on both sides by overwrought
graffiti, Mardi Gras beads, and salvage art and flanked by a voodoo temple –
the crew’s expectations begin to mount.
Our saunter quickens its clip. My
producer, Jessi Mosley, and our production assistant, Joe Shriner, hurry their
pace, all of us proceeding in a vibrating silence.
Suddenly we’re standing in Stumps’ outdoor living room – a
couch, three stuffed and tattered chairs, a coffee table littered with empty
beer cans and overworked ash trays, the whole arrangement protected by a
government-issued blue tarp (the same tarp distributed by FEMA after Hurricane
Katrina blasted the city to shreds seven years ago). The first thing I notice
is Stumps’ chrome hollow-body guitar.
Then I see the crown of expletive tattoos encircling his stubble-shaved
head, making his hairline a message of unapologetic rebuff for the world of
normal. My ears prick to the sound of
him finger picking and singing his own plaintive yet sneering version of the
classic Townes Van Zandt song, “Waitin’ Around to Die.” The notoriously noisy world of New Orleans
insects fades as I sink into the song and--with a blood quickening flash--realize
that we’ve just entered the eye of the street scene’s own hurricane.
There’s someone sitting on the couch next to Stumps. He’s holding a guitar that we later learn was
gotten for $15 from Wal-Mart’s toy section, sanded down, repainted, and
re-strung to play music for money on the streets (“busking”). “This is my friend Corey Vinegar,” Stumps
says. At this moment I reflect on how
Corey’s name squares nicely with the city’s often perplexing presentation of
stark contrasts, impossible quagmires, and unresolved contradictions. At Stumps’ direction, we slump into the waterlogged
loveseat. Over a long procession of
canned beer we chat away the hours of the hot, mosquito-laden evening. As midnight approaches, Stumps suggests that
we adjourn to the local bar, a place that hasn’t seen a bona fide tourist in
its entire 50-year life.
At the bar … it becomes clear to me that Corey will be a
central contributor to the film. He’s
smart, industrious, clever, articulate, streetwise, effectively self-educated;
all in all, an immensely compelling figure.
Plus, he’s more connected to the street drug scene than anyone I’ve
met. Over a pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon
Beer, Corey explains the intricate filigree that connects tourism, the city’s
number one industry, to the world of illicit drugs: “Tourism keeps this place
going. All of the performers, clubs, restaurants, bouncers, whatever – depend
on them. This place would really go
downhill without them. But without us – the
buskers, musicians, hustlers, drug dealers -- they wouldn’t have a good time.
So it all works together.”
Above all else, Corey is a hustler. A survivor.
He’s a man who marshaled difficult, episodically violent life
experiences and put them into service as raw material for the building of
character. And boy, is he ever a
character. Corey arrived in New Orleans
literally in the wake of Katrina. When
he set out to hitchhike from Florida to his “second home,” he had no idea what
to expect. His main concern was the
wellbeing of his many friends who chose to hunker down and stay through the
Category 5 hurricane that ended up killing nearly 1,900 people, making it one
of the top 5 most destructive storms in U.S. history. “I couldn’t stop wondering how many of my
friends were part of that death toll,” he says.
“Thankfully, everyone was okay,” Corey continues, a sense of recollected
relief passing over his face, dampening his smile with the memory of all those
strangers whose bodies he did find.
Following a declaratory belch, Stumps leans into the
conversation, “For us, life is divided in two – before Katrina … and
after. We’re still trying to recover
from it.” Stumps breaks his distant
stare to order up another two pitchers of beer (they drink by the pitcher, not
the glass or bottle – “It’s cheaper that way,” Stumps explains, “and when you
drink 18 hours a day, you gotta be thrifty.”).
Corey excuses himself to the washroom, a ritual I later
discover to be relevant to our filmmaking endeavor.
Corey Vinegar enjoys altering his consciousness through the
use of cocaine. He’s very open and
upbeat about this. In fact, he’s forthright
about nearly everything it seems. Corey
might well be the most earnest soul I’ve yet encountered. For three hours Corey tells us about his
life, imparting detailed accounts of everything from his first (and extremely
intense) experience with drugs and sex to freight-train hopping adventures to
learning the songbooks of his favorite blues artists, all of whom are “blind,
black, and dead.” Though I don’t realize
it at the moment, he soon will become our trusty guide into the “underworld” of
street drugs and violence that has made New Orleans into one of the mass
media’s “go to” cities for stories about murder, mayhem, and drug addiction in
America.
At 3 a.m. Corey and Stumps approach my bar stool and urgently
inform me that “there’s someone here you need to meet.” They usher me to the bar’s back room, now
emptied of people but striated with layers of cigarette and marijuana smoke. A man sits in a wobbly chair behind a cheap
table covered in faux wood grain laminate.
Although he’s sitting, I can see that he’s tall and lanky. His eyes clock my progress to the chair positioned
at the opposite side of the grease-shellacked table. I wonder whom I’m meeting and whether we’re
going to play poker or Russian roulette.
It’s that kind of mood, that kind of countenance he’s bearing. His quiet gaze bores into me, pins me firmly
to the unsteady drunkard’s chair I’ve dragged to the table.
“This is Bix-T,” Stumps says, “and Bix, this is Greg, the
movie guy.” With this brief (and for my
taste slightly unnerving) introduction, Stumps and Corey leave me alone with
Bix and return to the half-full pitchers of PBR eagerly awaiting their return
to the bar.
It occurs to me that I’ve seen this man before. Several times in the past week, in fact. Always in bars and taverns, always mingling
with gutter punks and the “Bywater Crusty” crowd. Always in the shadows, his wispy figure
making serpentine routes through fleeting interactions marked with equal parts
cheeriness and covertness, his presence inspired in me more than a fair amount
of wary intrigue … and electrifying suspicion.
With his first words, his opening gambit, he answers my question: “I deal drugs. Cocaine.
Pills. Whatever them people
want.”
Over the next few weeks we come to know “Bix-T” pretty well
… as well as any outsider with a camera can know a drug dealer. During the day we observe that him in action
as successful construction contractor.
“I build shit. I rebuild
shit. After the sun goes down and I
change my clothes, I sling shit – and that’s where the real money’s at, dealin’
coke and pills.”
Bix-T the Contractor helped rebuild New Orleans. He quickly learned that he could “pay” his
workers more cheaply in drugs, crack and powder cocaine, than in cash. He lays out his scheme one night while we sit
with him in an abandoned factory situated on the Mississippi River. It’s one of
the many disused structures that Bix utilizes for his own various drug-selling
purposes. Tonight he’s using this place
to cut, mix, and bag up the new batch of cocaine he just got from his
supplier. He talks while his hands
adroitly apply a switchblade knife to the end of filling tiny drug bags. “Payin’ my workers in drugs made my profit
margin bigger. And them people, they’d
work like slaves. Like slaves. Man, I feel bad about that. But somebody’s gonna do it. Might as well be me.”
Over the ensuing weeks, we spend a good deal of time with
Bix and several members of his steady client base. He schools us in the deep and pronounced
racialized roots of Southern Poverty.
One sunny, excruciatingly hot and humid day we find ourselves parked in
his truck alongside the 9th Ward levee, and he puts it bluntly: “If you’re black and living in The South, you
need to have a hustle. If you don’t have
one, you better get one. Period. Otherwise, you gonna starve to death. My hustle is drugs. And I do my hustle in the best place in the
whole country to do it: New Orleans.
This here, this is an intoxication destination.” Bix explains that the post-Katrina drug
market is far more robust than it was before the storm. “There’s more drugs, better drugs, more
addicts. It’s a gold mine. All because us drug dealers evacuated like
everybody else, ‘cept when we got to Houston and Atlanta, we made connections
with new suppliers with better shit. And
we got that shit back here with all them trucks carrying water, blankets,
clothes, shoes, building materials, you name it.”
Bix states the case pointedly: “Hurricane Katrina was the
best thing that ever happened for drug dealers in New Orleans.”
It’s our last night in New Orleans. We’ve spent 30 days traversing the labyrinth
of the city’s underground drug markets, awash in heroin, cocaine, marijuana,
and various pharmaceuticals. Days have
given way to blurry nights ended rudely by sunrises casting their unforgiving
light into the nooks and crannies where users and dealers congregate and
transact--corner bars, forlorn and storm damaged buildings turned “squats,”
abandoned vehicles, alleyways, and the like.
Bix-T has returned from “re-upping” (purchasing bulk cocaine from his
supplier in Texas), and the gutter punks gravitate to a bar in the French
Quarter for a musical performance by their godfather, Stumps Duh Clown. The gang’s all here.
Bix sits alone, as usual, at a small table in the corner,
watching the expanding crowd like a hawk.
He notices Corey Vinegar: “That’s my first customer right there.” Bix-T’s well-honed prescience enjoys
validation a mere 10 minutes later as he and Corey crowd into the tiny
washroom. Corey gets a free “bump”
(small, trial-size quantity) of Bix’s new batch of cocaine. “Oh man, that’s good,” Corey exclaims in a
stuffy nasal tone. “This is gonna be a
great night, a long night, a fucking legendary night!” Bix interrupts him, “Corey, you know this
shit don’t grow on trees …” Corey smiles, “Yeah, Bix, I got your money.” Not missing a beat, Bix laughs and says,
“Well you best be getting’ it, white boy.
Like you said, it’s MY money.”
Corey bolts from the washroom, hoping to collect a cash debt from off a
fellow gutter punk whose been strung out on heroin for several months now.
Through the washroom door I hear Stumps’ slide-fueled intro
to his “prison song.” Bix looks at me
and says, “This is my favorite Stumps song.”
He stashes the cocaine in his pocket and hurries back to his table,
leaving me standing there at the sink, camera on my shoulder, absorbing the
inimitable sound of Stumps’ words folding into the sounds he finger-plucks from
the strings of his chrome guitar.
“I aint’
got nobody, don’t nobody got mine. I
ain’t got nobody, just doin’ my time.”
When I make my exit from the washroom, I find a bar teeming
with crusties, punks, travelers, old-timeys, and an eclectic mix of tourists. They’re all potential customers of Bix-T. Meanwhile, Bix sits at his table, sipping a
beer, discretely conducting his affairs.
Corey’s flying high. A few of
Bix’s competitors poke their heads in the door only to find Bix drumming them
out of the place with his cold stare.
Stumps lays into “Waitin’ Around to Die,” and I’m put in mind of a
freight train barreling down the track that leads to its final decommissioning
station. Corey sidles up to my table,
sits down, and into my ear and says, “This song is about life in New
Orleans. But it’s not sad because if
everyone everywhere is waitin’ to die.
But nobody does the waiting like we do here. Nobody waits like we do in New Orleans.” And that about says it all.
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