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As April Ends
This may come as a shock to few but it looks like I'm behind schedule on the Rocheblave job. And judging by my apparent need to rest once in awhile it appears I will not be making up any lost time any time soon. But it does have a more finished unfinished feel to it so I am now getting a jump start on the acclimation to a new home process, which includes hot boiled crawfish and cold beer in the middle of the day followed by a nap.
The bottles rise to the surface showing themselves as possible shards but are easily spied as more than that by the avid bottle hunter/renovator/archaeologist. Today's specimen is an intact three inches tall with a short tapered neck and a beveled rim, the opening ostensibly shut by a stopper such as cork. The light weight and the visible seams on either side lend a sense of cheap imitation, but imitation of what? The five three inch lines of raised lettering say this:
Sample Bottle
Dr. Kilmer's
Swamp-Root
Kidney Cure
Binghamton, NY
I didn't say damn yankee carpetbaggers but I might have been thinking it, standing in the side yard over at Rocheblave clutching the now empty cure.
There is a full house at Dumaine.
Friday I met briefly with the more frightening alter ego that inhabits Shelton.
I found the belt I had been missing for six months; it was right where I left it, in a place where I would almost touch it each night; I ordered six new pair of painters paints and had them delivered to this front door without leaving the keyboard or talking to a salesperson; I found a ten dollar bill in a parking lot and a pair of cheap sunglasses picked up from the Dumaine gutter are the lenses I prefer.
There was a good bit of confusion going on between me and the Sewerage and Water Board over what the actual address is at Rocheblave. It ( a former structure) used to have five addresses attached to it and I picked one of the middle ones while Sewerage and Water Board was using the first one. It came down to an all business letter with a threat to disconnect which would then put me in a category placing me at risk to be visited by another city agent who could determine my home uninhabitable. I did not want that to happen so I went down and gave them the deposit they wanted plus a few dollars for the current water bill. There was that little bit of irony that I had yet to be hooked up to city water at the time but if all the previous confusion between us could be cured by the greater part of a Ben Franklin far be it from me to bring up a distracting detail like that. Three days later in the mail I received a check for the amount of deposit. And I can say it was a pleasure doing business.
The weather has been lovely which I say while I still can.
There's a new guy beginning a renovation on Rocheblave and if I see the sculptor who allowed her trash haulers to pile trash in front of his place I'm to tell her..."yeah yeah, you betcha, I'm all over it, let me write this down," I mumble to myself as the aura of his self-importance diminishes the smaller his back becomes.
Dishwasher
There's a kid over there in the front room of Dumaine playing one of those first person shooter games on that COMPAQ computer that onced vexed me day after day, crashing repeatedly until I just gave up and took it as a loss, writing it off as Compaq rubbish with a flaky FEDERAL warranty. The next year Compaq suffered huge losses, FEDERAL was being sued, and the store where I bought the computer went into bankruptcy and shut down, and I had by then received a 300 dollar replacement system from an online auction that has worked like a charm for a couple years now. So I felt pretty well vindicated.
I'm not even sure of names as this point, some of this new bunch I don't really know that well and the energy involved to start from scratch explaining why I want the front door closed when the AC is on, etc., blah, blah, and I'm only here for a few hours today and I want everyone to chill (no volume on games, no loud talking, let me rest).
At one point a loud kid said to a less loud kid, "stop that cussing..." something something...,"Mr. Jim." And I glanced over, heavy lidded, and glassy-eyed to tell the truth, thinking I don't care if you cuss if you can do it quietly. And the glass picture in front of the less loud kid explodes with blood which then drips down the inside of the screen, game over.
I saw the kitten creep from under the dance hall three days ago, briefly. Shelton, I haven't seen at all for weeks now, and wonder what is up with him. It is as if they--Shelton and that kitten--are living by the survivalist credo of the ground soldier--limit your exposure.
Took in the French Quarter Fest for a few hours Friday nite, had two Bloody Marys, rice and greens with chicken livers sauteed in sweet hot pepper sauce, and a bump on the one hitter which got me thinking about how far I was from the car and how derivative the music currently was and since I had earlier been wowed by local jazz virtuoso, Irvin Mayfield, I left out of there and drove off to the suburbs where I bought some discount t-shirts and mosquito repellant at the Walmart. It takes a lot of courage to leave the house sometimes because the number of cultures through which one can travel around here can be dizzying.
I think I had a pretty good buzz on laying down last night at Rocheblave with a cool breeze blowing across my mosquito repellant skin, some classical music on the radio, and a bit of confidence about the next morning's task which was to start building a small side deck (or landing), with stairs descending down the left and right side. I'd been studying this one on a DIY building site on the Web, so unlike so many of the tasks I have attempted for the first time, this one I had a little schooling about, which judging by today's apparent lack of mistakes, has proven useful.
And then I tried to follow the guy who had just stolen my neighbor's dishwasher and was pushing it on a handcart down the middle of the street, but by the time I put my shoes on and got in the car he had utterly disappeared. I headed off to Dumaine to make that call which was going to make a long night (the police don't respond to calls like they did in the hey day of reformation a few years past), and see a couple of cops parked at the local grocery. One is engaged with a teenager in a fancy car who is playing a new CD the cop really likes. The other is getting ready to make a pay phone call and this one I ask to speak to after he is finished. Several minutes later me and him head off to the crime scene, from which he soon departs, saying, "I may know who this is." I go in and lay down, contemplating the warm dregs of a sixteen ounce budweiser beside me.
About twenty minutes later the cop honks so I go out and see he has a creep in his back seat but it turns out it's just some kid he caught in his net while looking for the thief. He's gotta take the kid to lockup so he can't really help me anymore and has no suggestions for what to do about the neighbor's wide open door behind the locked security gate. I go back to bed and am up every hour throughout the night to spy greater thievery. Sometime before dawn the door had been shut, possibly by wind.
Saturday afternoon the homeowner was very upset when she heard my words of greeting and disclosure and interrupted my stream of verbal conciousness, which I had prefaced by saying--'"just let me get rid of this whole story (which I had been holding for her for fourteen hours)," by suggesting better ways I could have dealt with the situation. She wanted me to just scare the thief away with the old "I've called the cops" routine but with all due respect to that nifty idea, I'm thinking after all the neighborhood breakins recently (my house spared, but is someone over there right now?) I want a little good old fashioned vengeance, that is, someone in jail for the grievous disrespect that has lately been shown to my most immediate neighbors, five in all. So that's why I followed the guy, unsuccessfully.
I finally met her husband though, nice guy; like her, a sculptor, and before he tried to steal away from my verbal bombast I made him give me the phone number where they staying. Because I'm taking her advice for next time, goddamn right I'll call and lay it on you, "scared 'em, TV's in the middle of the street, later." The cop by the way had no problem whatsoever with my attempt to find the thief's hideout, nor did he seem to think anything was out of order with my illegal lodging at Rocheblave.
Sunday I have completed a four by five foot landing, three feet off the ground, no stairs or railing yet. I had some beers and whatnot to celebrate.
Sack O' Candy
When I was a puppy my mom and dad, both devout Christians who also believed in the Easter Bunny, would go to some effort to hide eggs in our yard, first in South Oak Cliff, and then North Dallas.
One Easter when I became older and the simple pleasure of finding candy on the ground in a controlled environment was soon to be no more, I spied my mother inside the fenced back courtyard with a paper sack full of cellophane wrapped hard sugary colored things and she was dipping her hand into this sack, grabbing handfulls and tossing them haphazardly across the fence into the neatly cut St. Augustine on the other side.
The next year somewhat elaborate place settings were set--for me and my two brothers who hadn't yet left for college--that included chocolate covered versions of that harmlessly pagan floppy eared Easter diety. Most decidedly not Bugs I remember thinking.
Thirty years later I can hear childish laughter happening now at this decent interval past sunrise.
Toms
The Tom I call BigHead is limping in a daze with two fang marks in his neck. I haven't seen the kitten in over a week, and there is rumored to be a yellow Tom in the mix now. And there is the consistently ocassional smell of death which emanates from a nearby clump of weeds.
And unbelievably, the Rocheblave property is for the first time in ten years, or more, hooked up to city water, and a toilet flushes, and a sink and a shower do what they do but only with cold water. Much work still to be done, but at least a break in what was seeming like a bad joke being played out by a fairly competent plumber on a sometimes fairly much overwhelmed rapidly aging boy in the hood.
Dumaine swarms in Shelton's absence with a new group of boys joining Fermin, Glynn, Jacque, and other core members and if you give them a piece of colored chalk they will declare themselves the Dorgenois Boys. They seem pretty polite and respectful, some having game, others having sense of humor.
Same To You
When you start floating up from the bottom of a murky lake, nearly out of breath but not quite, it is because Failure losens its grip, allowing you to rise one time for a full gasp, which is enough to make you heady with aspiration.
I remember the words of a urine soaked bum not first hand but as told to me by M who between dropping out of University Texas and graduating University Oregon took a year in Harlem, shacking with John in a student housing walkup, where he attended Columbia Law and she was admitted (out of order for godssake) into a graduate creative writing program. She completed her year and he dropped out after one and they headed off to Springfield, Oregon together and then broke up, he heading south and her staying in Oregon and taking freshman english again because U. Oregon didn't accept some of her credits from Texas and seemingly was not impressed by her graduate work in NY.
Before that happened John's family came to NY in March or April to visit John and M and while they were all marveling at some site or just loitering perhaps outside a library or museum a homeless man with a disabled bladder reeking of the full spectrum of bodily function entered the consciousness of M's group with his unique sincerity by saying--"Happy Easter Little Family."
Getting There From Here
Outside of Delacroix I started thinking about Bob Dylan but not able to conjure up any meaning from it I grooved on the almost cliched beauty of a bayou surrounded by swamp and marsh, and the requisite moss covered trees, the yellow and pink flowers, the yellow and white honeysuckle, the waterfowl so different from the sparrows left behind, and the fact that no one was following me, which in a driving excercise on a two lane road is moderately to extremely rare.
An early Sunday morning jaunt driving blindly away from any aspect that resembles responsibility. Or goddammit, I'm tired of working; I'm tired of making mistakes; I'm tired of knowing I'm going to make mistakes and then plunging headlong into the mistake. I need a vacation. So I take a little one while on the way to what was going to be my only responsible act of the weekend: picking up materials at the Home Improvement Store. I don't wanna, therefore I don't hafta. Nawh.
I'm not saying I don't have a place to hide but I don't. Dumaine has mostly never been a hiding place, what with the insurrgence of children that just seems to happen naturally (t)here, and Rocheblave is not yet home, although I sure wish it was. Wish in one hand...
So from this part of the world take a left on Rampart and head east, vere right once, and before you know it you are in Delacroix, deadended, with nothing to do but turn around unless you came to charter a fishing boat, or have a camp nearby, or need to buy live bait. Can you say cockahoe? No matter.
The way back lacks magic, but you already know you can't have everything.
Piggly Wiggly
The girl behind the meat counter at the Piggly Wiggly in Madisonville or Mandeville said, "who gotta holta you?," referring to the bloody bandaid covering the spot near my left temple that gushed blood into my mouth this morning after my run in with the 380 pound Viking convection oven.
The plate lunch at the Piggly Wiggly was turkey and cornbread dressing, w/ salad. And I got a large coke Icee on this sultry April preview of summer like day.
I drove my boss's truck from the small exclusive ungated ("we don't really need gates on the North Shore") subdivision, a nice metallic blue 95 Chevy long bed with large engine and glass packs that make it rumble not loudly, but slightly.
Just a mental image that I play with--imagining to what far off destination my plate lunch and I could arrive at before my boss realized I wasn't coming back, A/C blasting, heading to one of the four corners, presets on the radio changed before the first fillup.