“You want a joke?” J.J. says instead. The gray-haired “orphans” nod vigorously.
“A guy walks into a bar with jumper cables around his neck. The bartender says, ‘OK, I’ll let you in'” – and here J.J. grinned hugely – “‘but, DON’T START ANYTHING!'”
The orphans roar, tipping their stubble-covered chins toward heaven.
So it wasn’t a great joke. But 60-year-old J.J., or John Jensen, is a vital guy to have on your side at this hurricane shelter, where a week after the storm there is a sporadic food supply, no sanitation system, one reported rape and – in the words of a Red Cross volunteer – “some kind of vomiting sickness.”
Although the infrastructure and supply chains are slowly growing stronger at this shelter and dozens of others in the Katrina-struck region, the refugees have learned over the past week to rely on each other for survival, forming networks of families, friends and, in the orphans’ case, near-strangers, guarding each other’s gear from the rampant thieves and pooling food stashes.
J.J. has emerged as their leader, and they fan out behind him as he strides through the dim halls or holds court on the concrete steps in front of the brick school. He alone among them has a fuel-efficient Geo and a genius for procuring supplies.
Scrounging around this devastated coastal town, he has produced treasures including pudding cups and portable fans. He has an intuitive grasp of which Wal-Mart just opened, which gas line is finally moving.
Before the storm, he was a bankrupt farmer from Iowa who had moved south to wash dishes and deal blackjack at one of the Gulf Coast casinos. He had no family and few friends. Now, he finds himself at the top of the heap in a shelter for 150 stranded people.
“Value is relative in this place,” J.J. explains. “For instance, a place to [defecate] has become invaluable.”
The Pink Palace Orphans heartily agree.
It was J.J. who named them that, in honor of the Pink Palace, a $75-a-week flophouse off the beach where they all lived off and on before the storm. The building was actually beige, but at some point in its history it was a memorable pink. The storm blew it away entirely, and the residents, most of them – like many people remaining in the shelters of southern Mississippi – poor and alone to begin with, have nothing and nobody except each other.
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“That’s why we say orphans,” Rhonda Rall said. “We are a family now.”
Each orphan has a distinct role. Rall, in her 50s and the only woman in the group, has the job of cleaning the dank strip of hallway where her former apartment mates have clustered their pillows and blankets, and of keeping watch for thieves who, despite her best efforts, made off with some of their meager belongings over the weekend.
There’s Robert West, 54, a line cook with a sunburned barrel of a belly who keeps the gang in cigarettes, the one thing that J.J. refuses to “run missions for” because “they’re not a necessity,” he said.
Then there’s John Moore, 56, a retired encyclopedia salesman with sad black eyes and a hacking cough who is the orphans’ unofficial bard. At night, when the lights in the shelter finally come on and the orphans toss and turn in their tangled blankets, he writes poetry:
She is a woman with much grace
Though no feminine face
Her features are much the same
Thrashing and twirling, bad winds whirling, Katrina is her name.
They are a team, an outfit, a unit. They know each other’s shirt and shoe sizes so that when the cardboard boxes of donated clothes come in, they can save the best for each other. On Sunday, Moore proudly presented a handsome pair of cherry-red tasseled loafers to West, who has much bigger feet.
J.J. does far more than his share. The storm seems to have brought out the best in him.
Even on Sunday, before the storm began, he thought about the neighbors who had evacuated to the school with him and packed extra batteries for flashlights they forgot to bring.
Now, in the aftermath, “he carries everybody’s load,” said Jaime Montezuma, 62, another orphan. “He gives us everything from food to a shoulder to cry on.”
In stinking hallways filled with listless, weeping people, he buzzes with energy, planning reconnaissance trips in his beat-up Geo for gasoline or turkey fryers or refrigerators – whatever he thinks the shelter needs.
He supplies his friends first – at one point last week the orphans were practically living in luxury thanks to J.J.’s television and microwave and personal fan, which they ran at night until the shelter’s generator gave out and he was made to unplug them.
J.J. is also the source of much of the communal food supply – cans of tuna in oil, squeezable Smucker’s jam, saltines – that the orphans bury deep in their blankets and discuss in reverent whispers.
J.J.’s secret strength is the knowledge that he has lost everything once before in his life. Five years ago he sold his family’s 200-acre corn and alfalfa farm in Iowa in an ill-advised attempt to open a chain of motels and a quilting supply store.
“That’s what really destroyed me,” he said. “Losing my quilt store.”
He landed down and out in the Pink Palace, where he was considered something of an anomaly, his nasal Midwesternese mixing with the muddy Mississippi accent, his tiny Geo parked among pickup trucks. Working as a dishwasher and dealing blackjack on the graveyard shift, he barely met his neighbors.
But then there was Katrina, spinning like a huge roulette wheel off the coast, and fortunes changed.
He and the other orphans have been at the shelter since the storm, through the first days of no food and no water, and now, through the boredom, the uncertainty and the waiting.
The other men pass the time by gambling with toothpicks or experimenting with multipart harmonies on the shelter steps, but J.J. is always moving, full of purpose, foraging for extension cords and padlocks and surgical gloves, eating dinner long after the others have finished.
In 20 years of volunteering with the Red Cross, David Heckerman, the shelter manager, has met men like J.J. before and seen other groups like the Pink Palace Orphans form. They are part of the social structures that arise after disasters.
“After the shock wears off, people wonder what’s going to happen next, and they bond together,” he said.
But “these friendships are temporary,” Heckerman said. When a shelter shuts down, refugees, no matter how close they seem to become, typically go their separate ways, he said.
J.J. is trying his best to keep the orphans together. He is collecting personal information from the others to go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and file for relief together, as a group.
Two orphans have left. One was trying to make it to Jackson, where he had distant relatives. Another simply wandered away.
Posted on the columns and brick walls in front of the schools are signs from churches and charity groups from across the country willing to take refugees.
“There’s an outreach program in Pennsylvania,” Heckerman said. “Kentucky wants to adopt families. There was a woman from North Carolina in here looking to take people.”
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One by one the orphans will depart. Montezuma heard about a bus that was taking men to Pensacola, Fla., where there might be work, and he is tempted to tag along.
“By Thanksgiving the orphans might not be together anymore,” J.J. said. That makes him sad. All his life, all he has wanted was to be around people, which was impossible, he said, cultivating rows of corn on a tractor. As bad as conditions have been, in a certain way he has been happy in this place.
Although the orphans’ shelter is to remain open for at least a week, many of the Red Cross refuges in southern Mississippi are closing as refugees find new places to stay or health problems arise.
On Saturday, a shelter in a school down the road from the orphans’ refuge closed because of a suspected outbreak of dysentery. The people were evacuated, possibly to Georgia.
They left so quickly that it was as though they had vanished. Only a chaos of towels and children’s toys and garbage bags of food remained, tossed all over the place, as though a hurricane had come through.
<!– ART CREDITCHRISTOPHER T. ASSAF : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTJohn Jensen – also known as J.J. – uses his Geo to scrounge for food and other items to share with friends at the Gulfport Central Elementary School shelter. He has dubbed his companions the Pink Palace Orphans after the hotel where they used to live.
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ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTStephen Rall helps with security at the school shelter, which is run by the American Red Cross. The shelter is expected to remain open for at least one more week.
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