Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

New Orleans has never really been in the first world, per se. Two hundred years after the Louisiana Purchase, when New Orleans and most of the Great Plains came into the Union (which is an odd pairing, really - millions of acres that will directly be filled with tidy, useful farms and tidy, useful Lutherans yoked onto a bowl of gin and French whores), the city still runs with the giddy inefficiency of a colonial capital. As you might imagine, this has been exacerbated by the hurricane. We went from being a relatively well-run and desired colony - roughly Curacao - to being a barely remembered, held-out-of spite colony - the Ellice Islands, or perhaps Comoros. The phones barely worked - I tried to call 911 to report a fire, and it was busy. Six times. The leaky fire hydrants disgorged thousands of gallons of water, which was no great waste because the water was full of either sketchy bacteria or the colossal amount of treatment chemical they put in to stun the bacteria. Also lead. Everything was coated in a fine, ineradicable dust. Everyone was sick all the time. Road signs were either absent or ignored. No one ever knew whether or when anything was open. Audubon Zoo mailed me something in December and I got it in April.

A few months on, things are better. We’ve clawed our way up the charts to sort of a French Guiana level - we can vote, occasionally, and things work a lot of the time. The water is far from tasty but not actually toxic. The police have enough leisure time to pull you over for not wearing a seatbelt (I hate seatbelt laws, and I also hate when people don’t wear their seatbelts, so I am never happy about the situation). You can have relaxed phone calls, instead of rapid-firing information so that you can get it across before the connection fails.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, my awful shower. The graduate student dorm and the building that housed the radio station and navy took on too much water to be worth saving, so they tore them down and installed temporary buildings on the site for students to live in. They greatly overestimated the number of people who would need housing, so whole floors of real dorms are lying fallow, but by G-d they bought those temporary buildings and people were going to fucking live in them, come hell or high water. (Get it?) So. Imagine a FEMA trailer, widen it a little, take out the kitchen, put two end-to end, stack two atop those, put another unit like that across the way (for a total of eight units) and connect them with some stairs and little decks made of pressure-treated wood, and there you have it. The Particleboard Palace. The Bitchin’ Pad. Discount Living. The interior is a vision in particleboard, fauxrmica, and that weird hard-pack industrial carpeting. The fusebox is in the living room. Since I’ve lived there, the shower has leaked into the bedroom either twice or three times, depending on whether maintenance actually fixed it the first time and it broke again or whether they just lied. The sink is persnickety in a way I honestly don’t know how to describe. The temperature on the heater/AC must be changed with pliers. I saw insects there in varieties and volumes I had never seen before, including a beautiful yellow moth and a tiny but terrifying spider with ceaselessly working mandibles. (It could jump, too.) There have been three tornado warnings since I have lived there, including one scary enough that me and my dad went and crouched in the garage. I can’t use the phone indoors, because the building is coated in corrugated tin. It has a rich, crisp odor, which one of my friends identified as “the poison they put in pressure-treated wood to kill termites.” The poison, incidentally, is chromated copper arsenate. The copper kills fungus, the chromium is an ultraviolet-resistant fixative, and the arsenic kills insects. also people. “Housewives prefer chromated copper arsenate - three, count ‘em, three toxic metals for the price of one.”

What the hell was I talking about? Oh, yeah, my awful shower.

So as I’ve lived there, the shower knobs have gotten harder and harder to turn, to the point that to turn the shower off I have to put all of the force my wee body can muster into turning the knob. Last night, the hot tap finally bested me. I spent fifteen scalding, naked minutes trying to turn off the shower. Couldn’t do it, but I did manage to reduce the flow. I went to go ask my friend Small Cajun (aka CHUNK) if she thought this was a “maintenance emergency” that I should call in or not, but along the way I got to eating pistachios, and then we went to a bar, and then to another bar, and then one of our friends got arrested… anyway, I forgot to ask her and got hammered, so when I got back the Particleboard palace was a hothouse. I was, as mentioned, drunk, so I turned on the air conditioner and went to sleep. This morning, everything in the unit was coated with a fine, springlike dew. I took a shower, and this time I couldnt even kind of turn off the hot water, so it’s just going, full steam ahead. The linoleum in the bathroom has begun to warp. The veneer on the particleboard is beginning to peel. I am not strong enough to turn off my own shower. I am a bad tenant of a trailer.

Mama would be proud.