CULTURE
Mystery Mike is Gone
By Kevin Leeser
I met Mike Wright in the parking lot of Zappardos Mall in the newly decimated town of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
Hurricane Katrina had just come through. New Orleans flooded, but Bay St. Louis (pop. 8,209) was wiped out. Mike looked at me and I looked at him. We were surrounded by hundreds of strange, weary faces, victims and volunteers all mixed together.
I guess if you’re a parking lot, you can’t suffer much damage in a hurricane. But if you happen, through luck, to be above sea level, you can be a Point of Distribution (POD) for the semi-trailers filled with relief supplies that were pouring in. Mike looked at me again, then hefted over another box of diapers.
Neither of us knew exactly how we found our way here. We just headed south in the wake of Katrina and started pitching in. Food, water, blankets, whatever showed up on the next truck, we unloaded it and re-packaged the contents into family packs. When ice arrived, we had to put it in a special tent the military set up to keep it refrigerated. Electricity, refrigeration, ice, they were all a luxury now in Bay St. Louis so the parking lot at Zappardos stood out in the wasteland like the Taj Mahal.
The relief line formed early. 6 AM? 7 AM? What does it matter? By noon, the good stuff was all gone. And so was the toilet paper, our small ration of gasoline, and our bottled water.
If we still had bleach -- the wonder drug that kills the toxic black mold from the storm water and makes your home habitable -- we were God’s gift to Mississippi. We never seemed to have enough bleach, sponges, mops, gloves or masks. But whenever we ran out, Mystery Mike always managed to find some.
Mike was around 45 or 50 years old, slight of build with a little potbelly, gray hair and a moustache. He blended into the process so much that sometimes you didn’t even know he was there. If doing what it takes is the definition of relief work, Mystery Mike embodied the concept.
We had giant pallets of stuff to take off trucks every day and distribute to people. Canned goods, tampons, cat food, batteries, you name it. During those hectic and sweltering days, Mike and I worked together unloading the trucks without saying much.
After the sun went down, we would hang out around the tents and campers behind the mall with everyone else who somehow wandered into this resort on the edge of the apocalypse. There were mountains of cardboard boxes and piles of clothes strewn about. A boat tossed about by Katrina was wedged up against a wall. You could hardly see it because it was buried under tarpaper ripped from the mall roof. Huge steel air-handlers torn from the rooftop lay mangled on the pavement.
One night, Mike pulled out his guitar. He said it was a “New Yawk" Pro he picked up in a junk store on his way down from Maine. He said in such a thick northeastern accent that I kidded him about Maine. Isn’t that where FEMA sent our ice by mistake? He laughed.
We pulled up our folding chairs, nursed some beers, and passed around Mike’s guitar. Sometimes Mike and I joked that we felt like we’d just landed on Mars. We weren’t affiliated with any sort of church group. We didn’t wear matching tee shirts or blog about our good deeds. We couldn’t tell you what drew us to this place. We were just here because this was where we should be.
I never believed in God – yeah, I like him if he’s there – so I was afraid The Southern Baptists in Bay St. Louis might look at me askance. But as long as I kept unloading the trucks, they tolerated my secular ways. The women in charge of our POD said God had sent me nonetheless (I just didn’t know it.) They were an amazing group of women, the most dedicated, determined and generous people I have ever met. As hard as we worked, they worked harder. I sometimes secretly hoped God did send me to reward them for their faith.
When the rest of us went to sleep, Mike would go to his car and write. I don’t know what, but he was always writing. He wasn't writing up any agenda for tomorrow. He had no plan of attack. Whether or not he thought the relief effort was well-managed, he never said. He just worked, and wrote, and worked again the next day.
The work was fast, hot, confusing, and disorganized. Mike got his nickname “Mystery Mike” because when he was working, he barely said a word. When a semi-trailer pulled in from Pensacola, filled front-to-back with everything imaginable, Mike would jump in the sweltering 54-foot beast to drag the stuff out. He’d steadily drain its contents until it was empty to the core. He wanted to get it out of there and into the hands of the people as fast as possible. Nobody worked more or complained less.
One day, Dale Neeves, the Air Force Major who commanded the 255th reserve unit assigned to help the women of Bay St. Louis, decided to “coin us.” He went around giving each volunteer a coin and patch emblazoned with the emblem of “The Fighting 255th” to commemorate our help in the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina. There was no ceremony or anything. Just a handshake. It was the most money any of us got for our efforts.
As things started to get back to normal, Mike told me he might be moving on. Years ago, he’d been a Navy man, and he thought he might head down to Mobile to see what had changed at his old base.
All the way down from Maine to Katrina, he said
he’d been following The Blues Highway. He’d crisscrossed to the
places that needed him, but he still wanted to find the end. He left in the
middle of the night. In the closeness of our tents, I heard the zip-zip of
bags being packed. Around 4 AM, I thought I dreamed I heard him walk past
my tent and say goodbye. When I woke up the next morning, Mystery Mike was
gone.
I got a call last week telling me that Mike was dead. None of us knew, but the whole time Mike was working he was dying of a liver disease. The man never gave us the slightest indication that he was even a little bit sick.
Even after we both got home, we talked on the
phone about life in Bay St. Louis. He told me whenever he disappeared, he
was running to Wal-Mart to get supplies that would eventually get distributed
on the line. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money filling in the
gaps in our inventory.
I told him about Pearlington, another impoverished Mississippi town I was
thinking about going down to help. But he said he wasn’t sure he could
make it. “Not enough money, and not enough time,” he said.
When I heard that he died, I thought that was just like Mike, to put it all out there for everyone to see – and tell no one.
“Not enough money, and not enough time.” God himself couldn’t have said it better. But only Mystery Mike understood.
