Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [65]
That’s the thing about suicide. No matter how much you try to remember how that person lived his life, you can’t forget how he ended it. It’s like driving by a car smashed on the side of the road. You can’t resist craning your neck to take stock of the damage.
“Will I ever feel again?”
That was the question my brother asked moments before he let go of the ledge he was hanging from. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. I’d even forgotten he said it until my mother recently reminded me.
We both had tried to cauterize our pain, push our pasts behind us. If only I could have told him that he wasn’t the only one. I abandoned him long before he abandoned me. I see that now. I could have reached out to him, talked with him, but he didn’t make it easy, and I was a kid, and had myself to worry about.
Several months before he died, my brother went back to Quitman, Mississippi, back to our father’s hometown. I didn’t know it at the time. I found out only after his death. I went to his apartment and noticed a roll of film he’d never developed. The pictures were from his trip. My father’s sister Annie Laurie was still living in Quitman at the time. Carter could have gone to visit her. He didn’t. He simply wandered around the town. I realize now that in those last months of his life, he was searching for feeling, but he just couldn’t reach out.
IN EVERY DISASTER I’ve ever been to, there’s always been someone making money. Even in Somalia, some people got rich running guns, selling khat, providing security and cars to reporters. Who knows how many people continue to get rich off Iraq, with shady deals and crooked contracts? In New Orleans, while parts of the city are still underwater, investors are already circling, looking for properties to buy up on the cheap.
“I’ve been doing real estate for twenty years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Brandy Farris says, maneuvering her silver SUV through New Orleans’ Garden District. “It’s just crazy. We have a lot of investors calling; they’re wanting to buy New Orleans property, wherever it is. They’re buying them even underwater.”
Farris is a broker with Century 21 in Baton Rouge, and she’s come back to New Orleans for the first time to put FOR SALE signs up on some new listings. She has buyers in Miami, Seattle, and New York.
“They say, ‘I want to buy land sight unseen.’ If it’s flooded they don’t care. They did this with Hurricane Andrew—bought up all the properties that were flooded and they rebuilt the houses when it was time.”
On her business card is a photo of Farris, long blond hair and a startling white Southern smile. In person she looks the same, except she wears a wireless cellphone headpiece attached to her ear at all times. Her phone seems to ring every few minutes.
“There are a lot of ifs,” she says, momentarily wrinkling her nose. “We have to assess what the damage is, see if we can even change title from the courthouse. We don’t even have a way to file anything in the courthouse. A lot of people say their paperwork is underwater. They have no way to show who they are, what their mortgage is. We may just take purchase agreements and see what happens.”
Her trunk is full of Century 21 signs attached to stakes, which she hammers into what remains of some people’s yards. She also has another sign with her name on it and her commission—4 percent for a ninety-day listing.
“We’re certainly not trying to take advantage of anyone losing their home,” Farris says, concerned about how all this may look. “In any situation, you’re always going to have the vulture investors, but there’s something for everyone here. Rich, poor—investment, rentals. I hope it’s going to be great.”
We get out of the car and head toward a home