View current page
...more recent posts
Monday Evening
I saw some of the 6th Ward neighborhood boys yesterday, some of whom I used to know and used to hang around with on Sundays, and they all looked good, even in just five months they were taller, fatter, more grown up.
Some have been in and out of jail over the last couple of years but it seems everybody--the kids, the mothers, and the fathers--is out this year for Christmas.
One or two from the old group are sitting on stoops now, assisting those people in the neighborhood that have herbal and chemical dependencies.
"We can make them disappear just by going out on the porch," my two adult friends assured me.
"I hope you will be careful with that, nobody respects you THAT much," I said, and the one friend nodded knowingly and then the two of them mentioned the name of the new scariest bad dude around.
"He's scary," they both agreed.
The football player was standing down by the group that some consider malingerers and he called out and I called back and he came across the street and said, "We won the Conference, Mr. Jim," and I said, "I know, that's so great, you must have had a really great year, graduating from college and playing on a winning team and you're big as a house now so that may come in handy…"
"We were 12-1."
"I know, that's amazing. Are you gonna try it?"
"Well, one of my roommates is an agent so he gonna shop me around…but if it don't…you know, I have the degree for backup."
"I wish I was you."
"Sure, Mr. Jim. Hey, J calling you."
I looked down the ill-lit block and a shadow on a stoop waved to me. "All right J," I yelled. He came down and we shook hands. Even after a life altering multiple wounding he still holds himself up proud and confident and he's always polite. Even years ago before the multiple wounding when he was threatening to burn us out he was polite. He is one you can judge harshly and he is one you can admire and somewhere between those two is the truth of who he is.
Somebody must have shot out all the street lights because it really was dark, just at dusk, and I didn't recognize the little dude at J's shoulder, but then I did. "There you are," I said, and we shook hands but he didn't really say anything; light years have passed since those few years ago when he was an honor student and I'm sure he felt, perhaps correctly, that I know nothing about him. I heard a while later that he had just been bailed out so he was probably a little grumpy from all that. I remember the first time I yelled at him for misbehaving, seems like a lifetime ago.
One of the other kids from that core group of long ago is also working the block, but the other end, the more dangerous end, and is affiliated with a different boss. "He's making real good money," I have been told.
Keeping in mind that there is some temporal limitation to all things good and all things bad I report this last bit. Shelton has a job.
(I tried to post this earlier at the library on Canal in Lakeview but all four computers are non-responsive so I have this to add after reading today's--Tuesday's--paper, and then answering the knock on the porch--she can't climb the stairs.)
"I hate to ask this but can I get ten dollars, I'm so hungry and he ain't been around…?" I always go inside to get the money even though it's always on my person. "Thanks babe, I'll get you after New Years," she said. I bet she really missed me when I was gone. I said to her, "Hey, I was just reading the paper and one of our neighbors, a nineteen-year-old from one block over on Dorgenois, he…"
"Oh, cut that little boy…"
"Yeah, over a Playstation…"
"Uh huh, the police were all up and down here, and running through the alley back there…right after you left, I guess about 2 or so…"
From the Times Picayune Metro section, 12/23/03, paragraph one--"A 19-year-old man was arrested Monday and booked with attempted first-degree murder for repeatedly stabbing a 10-year-old boy who was fighting to keep the man from stealing a Sony PlayStation from his Mid-City home, police said."