View current page
...more recent posts
The Neighborhood
Yesterday coming home to Dumaine I almost ran over this drug dealer, him riding his bicycle in circles through the intersection and being so leisurely solicitous at the corner of Dorgenois and St. Philip--that's one block diagonal from the Dumaine crib, and is where I make my right turn up Dorgenois almost everyday--and there is no place in my personal history from where I can criticize this guy's lifestyle but I do have a long-standing New Orleans history of absolutely no business at that intersection where quite frankly too many people get killed and too many automatic weapons have been fired. And my right turn is protected by that stop sign to the left so I always crawl right on through that corner, cautiously, but don't get in front of me thinking I will stop, because I won't, and the guy on the bike, perhaps just out of jail new to the neighborhood, not aware of this particular white boy's buying habits, solicits me. I guess that's what he was doing; go figure that brand of American English spoken on the street, part grunt, part code.
And as sure as I say I'm not working twelve hour days, I work twelve hour days--am I operating with some sort of code language too?--and I don't have time for any of this street bullshit right now, so I say, "get out of my way," but clearly (and to my benefit) he's not imagining there is such a thing as this uppity white boy that is me, and he figures my words were one's of longing need. So while I'm making my slow turn he adjusts his turn back into me, and as I mentioned earlier I don't brake for endangered species, or their opposite, the drug dealers, at this corner, so, really, it is his miscalculation which finds him almost kissing my front bumper. I keep moving and he curses me as a, "bitch." I'm still moving as I yell, realizing or not the Doppler effect in my favor, "fuck you." There is an old turn of the century police station at that corner, vacant, awaiting a long promised renovation as a mini cop shop and community center. And the years pass.