The Boy in the Shopping Cart

The Boy in the Shopping Cart

by Donnamaria Bonner

Hi All! It's been 2 full years since I've posted here in Katrina Reverb! Today, July 14, 2012, after a year's worth of healing meditation, I've found that I'm recovering memories of the disaster long repressed. So, I've written this story of healing. Please enjoy! 

All My Best, Donna

I guess this story has to start with the boy, although it didn’t begin with him. Lots of other things happened first and lots more happened after. But I guess, in my heart, I’m hoping it all might end with him. Now, that is, that I’ve started to remember.

He was lying there in that shopping cart, sneaker-clad feet splayed out the end, head perched near the front where a child might sit or you might deposit a carton of milk on your way to the checkout counter.

I don’t remember him well, not most of the time anyway. He fades in and out—sometimes more or less real. For about 5 years I didn’t remember him at all. I think every time I started to remember, I grabbed a bottle or a pipe or, better yet, I let myself fade out, put my mind to sleep and let my spirit float out of my body and up to the clouds. Not thinking, not thinking; not feeling either.

John and I were walking down Esplanade. It was the day after the storm. We didn’t yet know about the levee breaks. It seems funny now to say that we were out “checking for damage” because what we meant by “damage” was leaky roofs and trees downed by wind. We didn’t yet know we’d encounter dead boys stuffed in grocery baskets. We were totally unaware of what we were dealing with.

What I remember is red and white colored sneakers with red and white clothes matching those sneakers. The clothes weren’t expensive or fancy but everything matched. He’d dressed with care. Somehow that in particular touched me. 

We New Orleanians, we’re spiffy dressers.

The hole in his chest—or I should say gunshot wound—was small, tiny even, and, as I remember, it sat on the right side of his chest, only a small smattering of blood and a tiny tear marred his otherwise clean shirt.

Not too long after we saw him, I left my body for the first time. By that time, John and I were standing on Canal Street—the city’s main thoroughfare, looking at the ruins. We were holding hands—like the happy couple we were, but even John’s strong grip couldn’t keep me on the ground. I floated up, up, up, above the debris in the streets, above the cops gathering at the foot of the river. I floated away from the dry downtown where we stood, above the flooded neighborhoods where the living and the dead floated in the water.

That was how I found out about the levee breaks. I knew, but didn’t really let myself understand, that things would never be the same again.  

Like the boy, we hadn’t dodged this bullet. Instead, it had hit us at the heart. There might not be much blood but, like the boy, our insides were eviscerated.

“Save yourself. Save yourself.”

It was as if the angels sang these words to me as I floated with them in the sky. It was as if god were whispering in my ear.

“Save yourself. Think about the pain tomorrow.”

When my spirit plopped back down into my body, I was surprised to find I had super powers. I could see further and move faster. I could sense danger coming from behind. My mind was like a razor, cutting through the chaos to find those methods that would take me through this hell to the other side alive.

I turned to John.

“We’ve got to get back to the house,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered quickly, the look on his face mirroring all I felt.   

We headed back to Royal Street in the un-flooded French Quarter where we were sheltering in an empty apartment on the second floor of a building owned by John’s parents.

We didn’t discuss the boy that day or any time during the disaster.

After we escaped the city, John and I each told as many people as would listen but no one seemed to believe us and pretty soon we learned to shut up.

Eventually I learned to put the boy out of my head, employing a special type of forgetfulness I’ve only otherwise encountered in rape victims and soldiers.

John never forgot what we’d seen, but even so he and I didn’t discuss the boy together until seven years after the disaster, when I stopped picking up bottles and pipes and finally started to remember.

After Katrina, after we fled the city and landed in a FEMA motel in Texas, I just sat on the air conditioning unit, staring out the window of this room that was now my home. My actual home was under water four times my height. My actual possessions floated in filth.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette, blowing smoke out of the tiny opening allowed by the big panel window that covered one wall of the room. Inside me, grief churned and anger bubbled, but on the outside I was still—completely still. I don’t even think I blinked. I wanted to be just like the boy in the shopping cart. I didn’t want anyone to ever be able to hurt me again.

The New Orleanians we met in the FEMA motel, those who hadn’t stayed in the city for the disaster, seemed so innocent and naïve, even in their loss and pain. They wondered if their homes were still safe, if the city would recover. I looked at them with pity.

I also looked at them with envy. They still had hope while I’d left mine behind with the boy in the basket.

After we moved out of the FEMA motel and into a small apartment in Texas, I found I had no desire to find a job or in any way interact with others.  

I’d been laid off from my teaching position in New Orleans, via mail forwarded from the address of my flooded home to the newly rented apartment in Texas. Within 2 months, I received another letter letting me know my health insurance had been cancelled.

The material I’m trained to teach is specialized, so there weren’t many positions for me in Texas. But, in truth, it wasn’t that that kept me from moving forward. It was like I could no longer focus on the mundane things that make up every day life.  

Although I wasn’t consciously remembering the dead boy during that time, my focus was nonetheless always turned back towards that place on Esplanade Avenue where I’d seen him.

John was bad off too. Once we’d gotten the apartment and bought some furniture, he spent most of his time in bed, not moving, staring at the wall or the television, always—it seemed—turned away from me, while once he’d spoiled me with his full attention.

When the FEMA money ran out, we lived on our savings. Then, we took money out of my retirement account. I planned to kill myself when the money ran out.

Three years after the disaster, John and I broke up and he moved back to New Orleans and lived with his parents. He started doing cocaine and heroin. I lived alone and didn’t let myself think.

When we’d gotten to Texas after the disaster, I’d told a reporter about the boy, sure my story would cause outrage. When I watched the news that night, I’d been edited out of his feel-good, let’s-help-the-poor-Katrina-folks story. I called the reporter and left messages but he never called me back.

A few months later, I told John’s parents about the boy and they told me I’d imagined it.

“Nothing like that,” John’s stepmother Anne had said, “could happen so near our house, right in our neighborhood.”

Yeah, that’s right, I thought, nothing bad can ever happen in a rich neighborhood, not even during a disaster.

Well, maybe she was right. At least her house hadn’t been destroyed by the floods—not like those in my neighborhood.

There were other bodies, bodies at the Convention Center along the river that the entire nation saw on television. Bodies in the Superdome too. How proud the city and the nation were when these landmarks reopened within months of the disaster. I felt like throwing up.

“Dance on their graves,” I thought, “you dumb ass mother fuckers. I’ll die before I live in denial like you.”

What scary promises are born of pain, no?

Of course, in truth, I too was living in denial. Even as I cursed the reopening of these landmarks from the safety of my Texas apartment, I was stuffing the memory of that boy deep into my subconscious, keeping him at bay, thinking this might stop him from haunting me.

How could I be so naïve? How could I commerce in such great denial?

I tried to kill myself 4 years after the disaster. I drank two bottles of wine and, for the first time, allowed myself to sob uncontrollably for my lost home—the same beautiful place where I’d grown up and, in the years before Katrina, cared for my Mom during the extended illness that lead to her death.

When I finished sobbing, I calmly lay in bed and, with a little leftover wine, swallowed a handful of orange-colored Valium I’d stolen from a neighbor.

Unfortunately, like everything I tried at the time, it didn’t work.

Even without remembering the boy, I hurt more than I could stand.

When did the boy start to come back to me? When did his image start popping up unbidden at all hours and times of day, as I washed dishes or walked to the store?

It was the strangest thing that brought him back to me.

Six years after the disaster, I was on the phone with a friend from Egypt who manages a curio store in the French Quarter. I was still in Texas and Haffez, my Egyptian friend, was in New Orleans minding his store.

Haffez had been a journalist in Egypt and he’d left ten years earlier because of threats from the Mubarik regime. I’d called to congratulate him on the fall of the government.

“But isn’t it a problem, Haffez,” I asked, “that the military is taking over?”

“No,” he said with a joyful certainty born of the optimism of the hour, “the Egyptian military is one with the people.”

“It’s not like here,” he continued, “where the military didn’t even show up after Katrina and then, when they did show up, they left the bodies to rot in the streets.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking of Egypt anymore.

I was on Esplanade Avenue with the boy.

Without letting myself think too deeply, I blurted out, “We never talk about the bodies, do we Hafeez? None of us ever mentions them.”

But Hafeez, quite naturally, didn’t want to discuss the bodies in this time of joy. Instead, he ignored my distress and kept talking about Egypt. Finally, I also let the boy drift from my mind.

After all, I hadn’t bidden the boy. I didn’t want him around anyway.

A few days later, I told my therapist about the boy but even as I spoke the memory to her, I felt as if I were making it up, to earn her attention or garner her sympathy.  

This couldn’t be true, I thought, this can’t be true. If this had really happened, we’d talk about it. Wouldn’t we?

Within about a month, without even trying, I forget the boy again.

Sometimes, I have dreams I can’t remember.

I wake up scratching, big red welts running up and down my arms like rivers and streams cut into my flesh by my fingernails.

Even after I wake, the itching is like torture.  

Right now, as I type these words, I feel that itching coming on.

But I refuse to stop typing. The boy is too important.

His eyes looked straight at me, unblinking, clouded over by the hazy film of death. His skin was dark but his eyes were light blue. He was probably in his twenties. He reminded me of one of my favorite students.

Who shot him? Why? Does it even matter?

He didn’t ask me for anything. He didn’t even ask me to remember him.

Of course, he also didn’t ask to find his final resting place in a shopping cart on Esplanade Avenue, but he did.

And, although sometimes I’d like to blame him for haunting me, deep in my heart, I knew it wasn’t his fault that, once I’d seen him, I couldn’t let him go.  

“Why hadn’t I saved him?”

That was the question that haunted me.

What a stupid question, of course. He’d been dead when I’d met him. How could I have saved him? Still, why didn’t I?

Why didn’t I save them all, all of New Orleans’ dead, all of my people who perished while no one noticed? Why hadn’t I taught my students to swim rather than to think? Surviving, after all, was much more important than any thoughts.

The other night I started truly remembering the boy in the shopping cart.  

Seven years have passed since I saw him on Esplanade Avenue, well, to be precise, 6 years and 11 months.

I’ve recently given up my bottles and pipes and everything has become much more raw again, as it was in the days immediately after the disaster.

I was talking to John on the phone. He is living in New Orleans. I am still in Texas.

About a year ago, he finished a residential rehab program. He is, I think, doing pretty well and has a full time job in a lawyer’s office.

I was bitching about how hard it is being sober.

As he shared with me methods he employs to stay sober, I suddenly interrupted him.

“You didn’t see the boy,” I blurted into the phone, “That’s why it’s easier for you. You didn’t see the body.”

Where the hell did that come from?  

“Yes I did,” he said, “you mean the body on Esplanade, in the shopping cart. I saw him.”

“You did.” I said, stunned. We’d never discussed this before, not anyway that I could remember.

“He was real?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “we both saw him. We were together, walking down Esplanade towards the river. We told people about it after we got out but nobody wanted to listen.”

“It was real?” I asked again.

“It was real.” He said.  

A feeling of relief flooded my body. I hadn’t made him up.

Then, everything inside me tightened and I felt one of my spells coming on. The fear bubbled. The anger surged.

“He was real,” I pronounced to the heavens and myself.

The next day, I woke with the boy floating above me, a tiny figure in a shopping cart, floating as if on Alladin’s carpet near the ceiling of my apartment while I paced the floor below.

I went outside on to my porch and looked up at the sky. The clouds were big and white and fluffy like pillows. The sun shone out golden from behind those great big pillows.   

The boy in the cart will never see this again, I thought, unless he can see the clouds from the other side now.

I smiled just a little. Tears began to run down my face.  

I brought my hands to my face in prayer position and kissed them up to the heavens, to the boy, to the sky.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said to the boy floating above me.

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t lying. He was real.

I can’t process him out of my head. I can’t ever forget him because he is part of me now. But I can let him live in the heavens as well as in my memory. I can do him the honor of remembering him without a bottle or a pipe.  

And, now that I can see him clearly and remember him as flesh and blood, I can also tell him how very sorry I am for him and for our city.

One of my greatest fears since Katrina, the thought that enters my head when I have one of my spells is: SOMETHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME & NO ONE IS GOING TO NOTICE.  

To the boy in the shopping cart, I just want to say: I NOTICED.

Copyright Donna Maria Bonner, 2012