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Free Sex
Down at the bayou hoping for maybe one last lick from the Duchess two gabbing female joggers pass behind me as I listen to Hendrix Drifting and the only word I can hear over the music comes from the one on the left saying to the one on the right, "asshole." I am not so sensitive, or gluttonous for the punishment I am capable of self-serving, to think that the word was intended for me and yet how can the word not be considered my own special gift from this bayou to which I come for just such gifts?
You wouldn't think so many doubts and insecurities could be interconnected, separate, but joined in mass like black raindrops. What an impressive shitstorm is to be had if you only seed your own clouds with your own crappy thoughts.
I am going to remember this first part of 2004 and use it against myself (for myself) when I later on am being deliriously happy and guilty about it because imprinted inside of me is a world populated by so much misery and degradation. Just a small example of which lives a bit off center from across the street and to which I have lately been offering assistance and shitting on at the same time, a combination I find most contemptible. Thanks babe, you are so right. I am an asshole. But enough whining, self-debasement, how about a little free sex?
I do not mind admitting that I have some sort of mental problem. It does not embarrass me to admit this, nor do I care if it embarrasses you, however unkind a light that last admission might put me under. But there's going to be the mention of sex here, not the actual thing but the mention of it. The tension of it? not really, but what the hell, are you getting so much really good, uncomplicated, passionate and peaceful, self-regenerating sex that you are not at all intrigued, vicariously interested in my sex story? Hey everybody, free safe sex, come and get some.
I mean literally I am now running inside and locking my door to avoid having sex. She's out there right now (in a temporally artistic licensed sort of way), sitting on those steps across the street, waiting for my slightest nod, obviously not the least bit concerned that I now know that the two dollars and seventy-five cents I earlier gave her was not for bus fare to Kenner, but probably for cigarettes, or a couple of Hubig's sweet potato pies.
She showed me her tits. I'm not happy about this lack of decorum, neither the showing nor the mentioning but it's a thing that has happened; I swear to god I spare you quite a bit in the long run of things. Do you think I'm happy about unseemliness? Forget about it.
She told me she was m'dear's grandchild (m'dear is the mistress of the nearby crackhouse), snuck up on me to tell the lie, and me in the closest state I'll ever get to being ambitious, really giving it somewhat my all to complete this Rocheblave project after four years of drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops. I don't take you for a dummy, I know you know I ripped that from Hendrix, but that's what I had my ears plugged into (again) when she snuck up on me to tell the lie.
I went to get the two dollars and seventy-five cents from my change cup while she waited and prepared to seduce me for profit below my new steps (the ones I just re-did because they didn't fall right according to the last inspector who busted me against his natural inclination to respect me in all my less than perfect glory.)
When I came out she had her blouse up, adjusting her bra. I turned away in a half-hearted attempt at being a gentleman and when I looked again she was still fixing herself and cussing m'dear for something about the bra which I did not understand. I gave her eleven quarters. She smiled at me. I smiled, sort of, or grimaced. I gave her eye contact and she was right there waiting for it. She had something on her mind. She lifted up her blouse again, innocently trying to fix something that wasn't right. I'm pretty slow but hit me in the head with a brick and it hurts so I knew now that her offered flesh and her leering were meant for me. I looked at her chest this time because it seemed impolite not to.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked me and I should have said yes but I said no.
"Do you live alone?" she asked me and I should have said no but I said yes.
She was onto something, she thought, and I was preparing to back peddle, amazing myself again at how gullible I have remained after all these years.
"Do you like black girls?" she asked me and I should have said, ewww, no, ick, but I said--of course, what's not to like?
She said, "some white guys don't like black girls," and I said I bet that number is less than you think.
She asked me if I would like for her to come over sometime and she didn't need to be Halle Berry for me to say, well you're here right now, why don't you come in, but in truth, she would need to be a little bit more Halle Berry than she was. Crackwhore seems like a really unkind characterization and honestly I don't like how it implies the superiority of those that might use it to describe someone, because you know you ain't a hell of a lot better than what you think you mean when you say crackwhore, but all that said, ain't no crackwhore coming in here. In the unlikely event that Halle Berry takes to the street and shows up here on my doorstep, soliciting herself for the contents of my change cup, well then, I will just do my best to live with the earned title--hypocritical, crackwhore-fucking, shitheel.
But I just said I'm not seeing anyone or wanting to see anyone for a while longer, thank you, and she made a last ditch effort, no, you know, I mean if you need somebody to do some cleaning for you and I said no. She went away after a few more frighteningly unsexy come-hithers, and I went back to being dumbfounded about the specifics of the porch railing I was attempting to build.
90 Degrees To The Street
Five years ago he sank a three-pointer at the buzzer that gave his high school team a one point win that would have advanced them to the state semi-final game. The team had an illegal backup player and the losing squad as a secret weapon brought this to light after the disappointing loss. A brief investigation led to the disqualification of the winning team and put a nix on their chance for back to back state basketball championships. For five years after the team could not even win their district even as former players rose to impressive levels in the college and pro ranks. This year they made it back to the championship game in Lafayette and lost by one point. The former player who sank the three-pointer went on to college on a football scholarship, was red-shirted as a freshman and will finish his course studies this year. Back on Dumaine, his "cousin," an affable, high-spirited, dreadlocked youngster, who did not earn one of the very few available urban exit visas, was shot dead late Monday night in the 28 hundred block.
These past ten years in New Orleans are bookended by national recognition as the country's number one murder capitol. In the 26 hundred block there are fifteen children weaving and bobbing amongst each other and between passing cars. They are clustered by the portable basketball goal near the corner by the store. The rim is loose on the backboard and has a single strand of net hanging down at an angle that should be 90 degrees to the street but is not. The children are from adjacent neighborhoods and may be the children of children. They are the ages of the boys who lived around here ten years ago. Some of those boys from back then are graduating high school this year, some are not. Some are attending community college. Some are self-employed and highly visible. There is not ten years later the same degree of lawlessness on 26 hundred but the difference might not be discernible to an untrained eye.
Also two blocks away from the hanging piece of a net a murder did occur last week at St. Ann and Rocheblave. For the most part the kids are not literally dodging bullets.
A shiny brown Chevy with chrome rims and illegally tinted windows stops across the street and three white undercover cops get out and cluster around J who is leaning against a broke down car. They make him lift up his t-shirt. They are either admiring the scars of past bullet wounds or checking for the weapon that is not there. Time is money and less than a minute passes before they are back in the car, cruising slowly through the throng of juvenile basketball players.
My Friend, Killer
I can hear the guy plopping down on my side steps and there is no real drama around here these days and there is no real harm in him plopping down out there but I'm so pissed at this new routine where him and his brother or friend bring their pit bulls for a walk in the Pentecostal lot, and make Killer next door go absolutely nuts for about thirty minutes every night that I rip open the door and glare even as he is jumping up and apologizing. I just tell him it's nothing personal but his presence makes that dog go nuts and the farther away from me he and his pit bulls are the better. Even the logic of it sounds screwy to me. Why shouldn't someone make use of that park next door? So what if a perpetually chained dog is screwy in the head and doesn't like the smell of free dogs in close proximity? My whole point starts from wanting to be an asshole, not wanting to offer any kindness to someone whose dogs contribute to a situation that makes me suffer from lack of peace. Why should he get to sit on my steps and I can't even fully appreciate the moderate buzz from my second Heineken? It's a weak beginning to a good point. I don't know how to best address such a situation. Um, I'm thsorry, could you pleaazze not promenade your canine creatures in my vahthintity. I jus wanna enjoy some peacthe and quiet. So.
I am approaching the construction of my budget porch railing very cautiously and while I am making headway I really got to say that having no experience at something you are trying to do pretty much sucks. That's where I'm at on that, the pretty much sucks stage. But I go at it a little everyday, lining up all the difficulties in neat little rows, waiting for the lightbulb to come on. The thing about construction, oh hell, life too I guess, is that all your previous careless mistakes visit you in subsequent and perpetual fashion until you correct and address them properly and even then you run the risk that when it's all said and done the code inspector (God?) might tell you the whole thing is wrong, wrong, wrong, tear it down and start over.
I've been spending a little quality time with Killer (whom I now call by his Christian name, Butch, during those periods of quality time.) An idea that has crossed my mind is that Killer may be racist. This is not a point I am going to belabor. Regarding racism I tend to remember the words of Shelton who as a teenager once said to me "I really don't care if they call me 'nigger,' Mr. Jim." At the time I had wished he did care and equally admired him for not caring. Anyway, I don't think Killer's main thing is a problem with my whiteness. Finally it came to me last night, he's just lonely, and unhappy with his chain. He wants to play.
I set up my table saw in my side yard right outside his fence partly because the bitch in me was rising and I was tired of avoiding that part of my property just to accommodate that mthrfking whoredog, Killer. In between ripping 45 degree angles off the three and a half inch top side of pressure treated two by fours I would flick pebbles at Killer, the first time out of meanness and all the other times because he thought it was a game and he would lurch for them and cease barking for up to a minute at a time. He would almost look happy, in that expectant "hey throw me the ball, throw me the ball" sort of way that dogs have. And as if I'm not happy unless I'm considering a scene in its melancholy aspect the thing about this time with Killer is--I think I may be the best friend he's got.
I Don't Say
I got up early and drove the three or four minutes to St. Philip alongside Armstrong Park and brought the truck to a stop on the right side of the street by the fire hydrant near the side entrance to the park, right inside of which is a cluster of buildings and inside one of these is the headquarters for the public radio station, WWOZ. On the way back from the French Quarter (which at this point in the telling I have yet to reach and), which begins just outside the park on the other side of Rampart, I sat on the first of the two green benches on the right side of the driveway leading up to the building inside of which is the radio station. On those benches you can catch a little early morning sun if that is your inclination.
In the French Quarter I had walked its length or breadth all the way to Decatur and was one of the first customers at the Café du Monde, which is nearly an impossible thing to be considering that it is an establishment which operates 24 hours a day.
Walking back to the truck along St. Ann and then Dumaine I had passed some Quarter residents walking their dogs--one dog was a very cute puppy and I smiled at it--and a Creole-looking gentleman in a billowy dark pink shirt who greeted me a little more directly than I found to my liking but I just said back to him as my greeting, "all right," with none of the more street-wise urban inflection.
In the café trying to drink my small coffee black and eat my beignets before they got cold I was taken by the manner of a well dressed, grey-headed businessman who looked nothing like my father but reminded me of him just the same. My father is dead but he used to come here to New Orleans on business related to politics and it is possibly that, the headlines about yesterday's elections that I can see as the grey-headed man turns the pages of his newspaper, which triggers the part of my mind where my father is stored.
Right after I finished my coffee I contemplated briefly the beauty of the two young daughters at the table to my left but I felt myself drifting too far from the piers of provinciality so I got up quickly and left out of there, walking up that ramp to the moonwalk where there is a cannon that if operable could shoot a hole in the front of the St. Louis Cathedral. If you are looking at the Cathedral from up there the Mississippi River is behind you shimmering like some really impressive metaphor. Tankers and ferries and tugboats pass by. The two side by side grey steel suspension bridges are off in the distance stage right. The early morning winter sun is bright, blinding, and low in the sky.
When the grey-headed gentleman in the café turned to the metro section I read the headline about yesterday's shooting death at the corner grocer's in Central City. I was watching a Stephen King movie on tape last night and bored with a particular scene I had switched over to a news channel and caught the silent movie surveillance tape from the store. The tape showed a group of young masked boys exiting the store, the last one extending his arm straight out towards off camera behind the counter and calmly firing with very little recoil of his handgun the kill shot at approximately head height.
Bare Breasts Of The Bourgeoisie
The thing about trying to keep in tune with your environment is that you sometimes run the risk of already having a lot in common with your environment and it's not all good, you, or your environment. But you have pledged allegiance for better or worse and the thing that is your days, and your environment, will play itself out with or without your accord. You can set a thing into motion, which you cannot stop, until it plays itself out to its final act.
I've stopped reading books that make me want to kill myself and have set about the task of completing the thing I have tried to control for so long by not completing, Rocheblave. Church lady passersby sometimes pause and say "that's really pretty" and I go and assume they have been around long enough to know what was here before and I feel pretty good about it I don't mind saying.
I have to redo two of the three sets of stairs and put up a railing and this I started after much "let's wait just one more day dwelling in darkness." I was even doing other unnecessary detail work on the house rather than complete the thing that grants me this modicum of freedom; a taste of "you're not a complete fuckup."
I re-glazed the last 18 panes of glass on the two salvage yard replacement widows that I paid too much for but had to have to plug the fire-ravaged hole in the eastern wall of the bedroom. And that only needed doing in the sense that I knew I would use it against me if I didn't re-glaze them. I cleaned up a few years worth of giant sycamore leaves and accumulated construction debris from under the house and hauled two heavy pickup truck loads to the dump on Elysian Fields.
I had to listen to Killer bark relentlessly for two days and breathe in the smell of wet fermented dog shit on successive, hot, muggy, New Orleans days. In the end I was calling him Butch and suffering his sporadic and inexplicable silences. I used a reciprocating saw with a jagged blade to trim some junk tree limbs from the fence which separates us while his master lady yelled at him to leave me alone and I wondered would I increase or decrease his intense feelings for me if his snout got slashed while he tried getting his fangs on my white knuckles.
The book, excellent, despite the fact that only Dreiser's Great American Tragedy has depressed me more, was The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. Here's your excerpt: "If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope."
Mardi Gras happened. Three bystanders got shot and one killed on St. Charles on a stretch of the neutral ground (median) that is known as the "freedom zone" (although that's not the exactly what it's called), which is a length of about 8 blocks prior to Lee Circle where rival gangs (although gangs are not exactly what we have here in New Orleans) and their families are supposed to co-exist peacefully for the duration of Carnival parades.
Also, I am told there was a letter to the editor in the Times Picayune bemoaning the fact that in 2004, the 21st century, 40 years after the hard won successes of many a civil rights battle, that in Metairie, the first westerly suburb of New Orleans, and the recipient of the great "white flight" legions those 40 years ago, that an all black New Orleans marching band participating in the suburban version of Mardi Gras, was racially berated along stretches of the parade route by a small but hateful and vociferous minority.
I quit going to Metairie parades after witnessing a similar situation eight or nine years ago. Anyway, there is always a whole lot going on here, during Mardi Gras, and otherwise, and not much of it makes it onto those tapes sold on independent TV stations featuring the bare breasts of the white middle class on Bourbon Street.
Rules Of Engagement
By the time you pass that corner, you have been so studiously avoiding everybody's street business that you are electrified by the calling of your name and the implied kindness of that declaration in that it says you exist in a way that is not a threat to others and that in fact he really is glad to see you, this despite or partly because you have hated each other for brief periods over the past seven or eight years (as love demands.)
You always knew you had no business asserting your idea of rightness into a system that in large part is disdainful of your presence but to let yourself be scavenged seemed right enough and in the end it turns out nobody took anywhere near as much as they gave.
The childish exhilaration of a (jailhouse) kid who is now a man by law and for so many years lashed out at the world at large for holding him back from this rightful position (king of a corner for a day?), is the part that gets me.
This simple thing he is telling me, him on the corner, me in my idling truck, as the cars line up behind me, is an admission of a shared lifetime lived out over a few lazy afternoons spent lollygagging about town with him and his cousins. I can't hold up traffic too long, it's not allowed. I want to get out and jump up and down with giddy abandon, and tell him just how "neat" is this thing he is telling me which in and of itself is nothing, nothing at all. But I'm way too cool for that, and besides, that would also be a thing that's not allowed.