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February 21, 2007

My Katrina survivor has died

Bob Fabrizio
1946-2007

In September 2005 I got a call from an old friend, Bob Fabrizio, a Providence native and longtime Pawtucket resident who hated winter, and had moved to New Orleans nearly 20 years ago. That night, he was calling from a shelter in Houston, where he had been evacuated after Hurricane Katrina.

I had given him my "Producer, projo.com" business card during a brief reunion in New Orleans in June 2004, and after a few days in Houston with no resettlement plans forthcoming, he pulled it out of his wallet and said he'd been "talking to the press." Shortly thereafter, he was given a voucher for a plane ticket to anywhere.

I wrote about his calls from Texas, and his eventual return to Rhode Island, on this blog. Some links are below.

This morning, his sister called to say that Bob has died.

We had him over for Easter dinner last year. He suffered from severe heart and lung problems, as well as cataracts, and traveled with a portable oxygen system. Soon after he arrived, he realized that his air was running out. He had inadvertently turned in a full oxygen bottle, and brought along a nearly empty one. I called the V.A. Hospital, and a nurse offered us an emergency bottle. We took his ID and picked it up, and it saved the day.

Nevertheless, it was obvious he was very sick. He died alone in his studio apartment in Pawtucket, having refused to live in a hospital or nursing home. When his sister hadn't heard from him for a few days, she went to his home to check on him and found him dead, probably from a heart attack.

He will be cremated. There will be no services. He is survived by one grown daughter, named Stefanie, who lives in Virginia, and a sister, Angela Gage of Cranston.

You can read about his Katrina experience here.

Sept. 6, 2005: Displaced Rhode Island native calls from a Texas shelter:

I got a call from an old friend last night, a friend who's now a temporary resident of Ben Garza Gym in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Bob Fabrizio (he'll be 59 on Monday) is a native Rhode Islander who has spent most of the last 20 years working for Lucky Dogs, the venerable and distinctive New Orleans hotdog firm with hotdog-shaped carts...

When I first knew Bob, he worked overnight at the Brown University Bookstore, unpacking books and stocking shelves. Eventually, he read the entire Eastern religions collection.

He'd call every few years to keep in touch. In the spring of 2004, he called two days before I was heading to New Orleans to receive an award at a columnists convention, my first trip there ever. We had a reunion in a little bar on St. Charles Avenue. Bob met my husband for the first time, and he didn't recognize the woman with us as my daughter, the little girl he remembered well. ...

He had the 80-bed home to himself during the storm, with a good supply of food and water. After the power went out, he found a room with its own generator (for a ventilator), a bed, a fan, a phone and a TV. He called an emergency number to say he was there, but he was alright and fetching him was not a priority. He watched the rescue efforts on TV. He answered phone inquiries from residents' families who didn't know where they'd been taken.

When the generator's batteries died Friday, Bob walked two miles to a pickup point and, after a bus ride, ended up under a highway overpass in Gretna with thousands of other displaced people and just three portable toilets. He says only that it was disgusting there overnight, but at least there was food and water, distributed by the National Guard.

When the buses arrived Saturday to evacuate them all and the throng pressed forward, Bob hung back. "I said to myself," he told me, "If Buddha can be the last one to achieve nirvana, I can be the last one on the bus." He ended up getting one of three seats in a helicopter to New Orleans International Airport, and eventually found himself on a plane to Texas....