The Prisoner

It was an accident one man told me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, just wrong place at the wrong time. “Not even the wrong place, at the wrong time,” he said, correcting himself. “I had every right to be there at that place and that time, doing nothin’. So that’s what I was doing, nothin’, and then the cops arrest me for doing nothin’ at a place and a time that wasn’t wrong. It’s a public sidewalk in the evening so why couldn’t I be there?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said because honestly I didn’t, didn’t know what nothing meant to him, when he was on that particular piece of sidewalk at that particular time.

He leaned closer. “To tell you the truth,” he said. That’s what he said. “Here’s the God’s truth. You can be arrested in New Orleans for insulting a hamburger.” He leaned back to watch how I would react.

“A hamb…,” I said.

“God’s truth. Insulting a hamburger,” he repeated.

“OK,” I asked, “how do you insult a hamburger?”

“Oh, that’s easy. You take off the tomato and pickle and throw them on the ground.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, looking more comfortable, like he was more sure of his footing with me now.

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “Are you positive you aren’t getting arrested for throwing food on the ground, for littering?”

“Nooo ma’am,” he replied. “No one cares about litter. It’s all about insulting a hamburger.”

I wasn’t sure where to go with this. This was a newly released prisoner, let go from jail, just this afternoon, still in his baggy pants with the wide rings of black and white up the legs and his oversized lime green t-shirt. I liked his t-shirt because of the color, and wanted to like him as well. There were a dozen prisoners there with him; I could see them all sitting at various tables around our site, intently talking to the case workers, filling out forms to apply for financial aid, meek as lambs. But still, who knew what they’d really been arrested for, hamburgers or something worse. Who could trust a group of prisoners, still vacant-eyed when they told about being locked in cells with flood water creeping every higher. Who wouldn’t have been terrified being trapped like that, but how would an arrested man act when he has nothing to lose but his life? How would he react now, being free to wander the devastated streets, no clothes except for the prisoner outfits, no ID, no money, no possessions?

“All I had on me when I was arrested was lost in the flood,” he told me. “I have nothing. I could work in the Quarter, don’t mind working, but who would hire me looking like this?” He was right, no one would hire him. There was no way he could get food with no money, no where to sleep in the whole destroyed city that wouldn’t get him re-arrested the minute curfew began. The cops were not going to be kind to him. As it was, TV stations across the nation were running the tape from just last week: a man, seemingly harmless, a cop brutalizing him, for doing nothing, it seemed. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The cops were all jumpy, everyone knew that. They were trapped in their own form of hell, out on the cruise ship docked behind the Convention Center, nothing to do but look for trouble and then go back to their cabin and brood. They missed their families in Houston and Georgia, worried about them, didn’t want them to know the reality they saw every day: the bodies, the moldy houses, the neighborhoods abandoned, marked with orange X’s on every door. They were stressed, stressed beyond belief. “We were trapped,” one of them told me, staring at the air in between us. “Couldn’t get anywhere because of the water. Rode the storm out in the building just down the street. We’re stuck for days, wearing t-shirts like tourists get in the Quarter. All of us in those t-shirts.” He didn’t say how they got the shirts; I assumed they got them the same way everyone got everything in New Orleans, in the terrible days after the storm. No law in New Orleans, at that time, in that place, just desperate people, doing desperate things.

So here was a prisoner, docile and pleading, still seeing the water rise in front of his eyes, still seeing them rise on the inside of his eyelids when he closed them as he talked. No money, no food, no ID, no clothes, except for what marked him for what he was: a criminal for doing what he shouldn’t have been doing, or doing nothing at all that was wrong. Turned lose in this place with nothing. No one to hear his side of the story except me listening to him talking about insulting hamburgers and wondering how I could ever save him, give him one more chance in this wreck of a city, one more chance to believe that is was all an accident, a mistake, and that from here on out, starting with absolutely nothing, that somehow things could be better someday, although I had nothing at all to give him except the chance to speak.