Red Velvet – the seamy side of New Orleans
I was getting a pedicure at the salon and talking to the girls and E was relaying to me an intertwining story that if I didn’t know better I would have thought was made up. She and friends and the kids were at the house playing Clue when she saw some kids across the street fooling around on her neighbor’s porch. She went downstairs and rattled the iron gate. They couldn’t see her because she hid behind banana trees but they took off from the noise. One of the children at the apartment was the child of the man who was recently shot and killed down the street from her. One of her friends there had been friends with the guy and was still grieving.
A phone call came and it was her best friend who bartends at a neighborhood bar down the street – the friend was screaming hysterically in the phone and E couldn’t make out what she was saying, so she and her husband and another woman drove over to the bar to find her in the street banging her head on the sidewalk and screaming like a wild animal.
What had happened is two men had come in the bar and snatched her dog. Picked her right up and ran out to a third guy in a get away car.
The police were called and when they got there they said they needed a description of the dog and a picture but the owner was still so hysterical they couldn’t get her to calm down. So E and her friend ran back to the apartment complex where all of them live to get a picture of the dog off her computer. While they were in the girl’s apartment getting the picture, one of the kids from her apartment came over and said that someone was in the friend’s (who was friends with the guy who was shot) apartment. E and her friend had left the gate unlocked for just one moment while going in to do this. They came running out and upon seeing a man in the apartment they started to approach and the man came out and charged at them so they all ran back to the apartment and E had all the kids get down and turn off the lights and they called the police.
She also called her husband who was at the bar trying calm the other friend. Nothing would calm her. Two police cars left the bar and came immediately to the scene but by that time the perp had fled.
At about 3 in the morning they came home and called our neighborhood vet who said two things were at risk – they were going to take the dog to fight or they wanted to breed it. The vet told them to post flyers, take a bunch of flyers to the post office and have them given to each postal carrier, and then call every vet in the city and the SPCA.
No one could sleep, they spent the night making flyers and faxing copies of the missing dog information every where they could think. The dog owner finally got to bed sometime around 7AM the next morning. And at 9AM when E sat down to start calling vets, one of the owners of the bar called and said she drove by the bar and that the dog was sitting right out front.
When they went down to get in the car, the neighbor across the street came out and said did you see something around here last night? And E told him about the kids, and he said they had tried to start a fire on his porch.
Would it be lovely to wake up and find this was a dream?