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Movers
From my driveway after rolling down my window I did a screeching L of a backup and stopped by the opposite sidewalk where sitting on a four hundred-pound block of rough-cut granite was neighbor and agent of the street, C.
He had recently overcome a grass-cutting career ending clogged filter on the weedeater I had given him and it and the red plastic gas can that came with the deal were sitting on the ground next to him.
"I need to get rid of my couch and love seat and bed, can you move them, use them, or in anyway get them out of my house for me? And I mean without any effort on my part because if I have to expend energy to get rid of them I have numerous options that don't include you, or actually, may include you, but not in the fashion I am attempting to include you at this point in time."
He said, "Of course, let me think about it. She around the corner is offering me that upstairs, a room and board kind of thing in exchange for me doing some work for her…"
"Fuckbuddy?"
"Naw mane, just renovation work. So I maybe could use the bed but I don't wanna haul no couches up there. She say she has to run a water line up there and will run an extension cord so I can have electricity" (a thing the little shanty behind him hasn't had for over a year.)
"Hmm, could be ok," I said.
He seemed similarly enthusiastic. "When you want this?"
"Soon as possible, but maybe not the bed tonite."
"Okay, let me talk to Junkyard, he has a better clientele for selling larger items like that, maybe he can make it something worth the while for us."
About sundown they came and got the couches and stacked them across the street on the sidewalk, by the chunk of granite. This morning they were gone.
Temporary Christianity
I have joined in partnership with God and the US Federal Government to provide housing for those that need it.
A woman from the Pentecostal church has been coming by to visit me. Yesterday between knocking and me answering she was singing a little bit and I thought--who that singing? I don't know singing people. It was her though, just checking up. I said I was lagging a bit and she said we were on God's time and he would direct us to our mutual best advantage. Cool, cool, very cool, dig it, I see the attraction. Give it to God.
She wants to rent the place but needs section 8 assistance and I need guaranteed rent money and a reasonably decent tenant. So the Federal Gov will pay her rent (110% of market value) directly to me and I will proudly side step my potential as a gentrifier. As to which level of hell is my due for partnership with the US Government I say one is like another, only different.
I am preparing to head back to that bucolic Rappahannock hill I was on last Fall and early Winter but I don't want to move, or ascend, to quickly and get the bends, so I'm moving slow, and my future renter's assertion that God is leading us I take as my convenient due.
I was on Dumaine earlier today; Mq did not get juvenile life and is out looking good. Just like his older brother (who last year committed suicide by motorcycle at an Orleans Street intersection, and previous to that was regularly in and out of jail for serious crime), Mq looks healthier and younger and more innocent after a lockup. He said hey Mr. Jim and I just smiled at him and he smiled back like he the definition of innocence. And in a way he actually is. F somehow has inherited the weight of the block, to carry by his lonesome, until backup returns. A recent shooting around the corner has certain players laying low. He could barely afford me a whisper and even when he did say hey I inadvertently ignored him.
Me and M we own and rent out a house together in North Carolina and sometimes, actually on a pretty regular basis, they miss rent payments. This last one is a kind of unique twist for us and when M called to check up the man told her everything was cool, they've been making the payments. So we said maybe (even though mailed statements show no such deposits), shit happens, we'll check with the bank, and by we I mean M, because I took the first seven years and she gets the next seven. As mean landlord, or bitch as she says, I say sure, and she says, yeah I guess it works for you.
I don't really dig confrontation that much (or read--he's a pussy) so I would during my term just deposit about a thousand dollars a year into the account from which both the mortgage is subtracted and the rent supposedly is deposited into. For the most part this would cover their slackness. At 300 dollars rent we ain't really making any money, just covering the mortgage. They get a small house on 2 acres backing up to hundreds and hundreds of undeveloped wooded and tobacco fielded acres. We put in new deep well a few years ago. Draws about a million gallons a minute, or so.
Sometimes we feel their pain; mostly we are pretty well individually immersed in our own. Just wish they'd pay the fucking rent.
Well the next day M gets a call from the wife all worried about being thrown out onto the street, or in the case of the North Carolina property, gravel road, or woods, and says she has been keeping her poor fiscal management a secret from hubby and can she make amends by such and such a fashion, please don't tell hubby. So that's the deal, for now. Partners in deception.
Christians are everywhere. Had a conversation with one, a friend, on Dumaine today. Hey, have you seen the Passion of Christ, I asked her. She said, No, I said don't bother. Two very enthusiastic thumbs down. She wasn't having it. I'm not attacking the story of Christ or religion in general (although I kind of blathered up to that later), I just think the movie sucked. Evidently the movie can't suck, from a Christian standpoint. Later I said I wanted to come to her BFC (big church, often televised) and spout my insane notions about the appropriate role of Christians in a modern world and she said no. But I could come if I just wanted to be a quiet little sheep. I pretended a great and fiery disdain for that alternative; I wanted to be up at the pulpit, to preach, to question what is the good coming from all you people sitting in your seats every Sunday?
I love this woman for letting me talk ridiculous shit to her. At one point she asked me what it was I was seeking and I said--someone to play with, an admission as truthful as it is pitiful.
She tried to get me back on safe ground, talking about movies. Yeah, Kill Bill 2 sounds good, and I told her I had rented the vampire/werewolf movie Underworld and liked it ok, Kate Beckinsale, yum, and she mentioned a new one, monster movie, haven't seen the ads I said, but saw one a minute ago, how serendipitous (yeah I know she was in something like that too), the new monster movie stars Kate Beckinsale. My Christian friend did not know, or mention this. She likes a good horror or science fiction movie though, or one with a high violence factor. So I suggested she see Passion of Christ as fourth on a list of what's out now. She wanted to see Hellboy, too.
I went to G's high school baseball game the other day and he sure do like to crowd that plate. Life in the 6th Ward has provided him with a courage that finds him smirking at the limited possibilities of pain from a 60 or 75mph fastball. He stands tall and perfectly still at the plate, none of that fashionable wiggling or bat waving. He took a pitch to the thigh, and advanced to first base. On his teammate's single and the subsequent bad throw to first base, G found himself safe at third after a head first slide. He scored that inning, giving his team their first run, against the opponent's seven. The pitcher for G's team gave up three homers and committed three errors and probably did not get the game ball. Still, G's team made a go of it, only to lose eleven to eight. G had a triple, and scored another run. Ran down and tagged a runner caught between the bases. Later made a long and strong throw from third base to out the runner at first.
Towards the end when the second base umpire made a couple of bad calls things turned a little racial and as me and that ump and one of the coaches from the opposing team were the only white people among the 150 or so black I just bowed my head a little bit and felt the warm protective glow of temporary Christianity course through my veins.
Up on that Dumaine porch people pass on the sidewalk right in front of you and some you recognize and acknowledge and others you don't. There is a sort of halfway house up the block a ways and there is this one long time tenant whom I recognize but only to just nod at. To unfairly judge by appearances, this man may have a mild mental disability. The Christian and me had paused in our conversation and this fellow passed by. The Christian and M acknowledged the man and when he was by me I gave him a cursory glance, a brief smile, and a quick hey. This was more or less like a hundred other passings by this man over the years. This time however, the man paused, extended his left hand, which I grabbed onto with my own outstretched left hand, and the man said to me, Praise the Lord, and then immediately continued on down the block towards the Broad Street bus stop.
It's Always Also
You might as well call it a crisis situation when you get a call from Dave just checking up. Just admit whatever errors have been committed, reconsider whatever messages have been relayed, and move on. Don't be blue, there's no reward in it. What are you dwelling on and why? Be cheerful, here we go.
I remember writing about stepping in dog shit and admonishing City Park area residents to pick up after their animals, even though poop scooping is not really mandated here in New Orleans. What I didn't write about was shortly after that, a day or two, I was parked in semi-rumination along City Park Avenue and I watched a dude, a hipster-looking thirty-something, walking his dog back through the neighborhood across from the park and his dog shat on an avenue yard. There was nobody watching but me and I was invisible. The dude looked around him, taking more than a little time about it, and found some trash on the street, a paper cup, and then went back to the pile of shit and rather ungraciously on several tries scooped up his animal's discard and then walked out of his way to place it in a trash can.
I also wrote about these dog walkers who were making a daily habit of using the unused Pentecostal lot next door to me to train their pit bulls and how it drove my neighbor's dogs crazy every day at precisely the hour I had chosen to begin chilling. One of the guys had sat on my side porch and I told him not to mainly because I was pissed about this appropriation of the Pentecostal lot which caused the everyday wildly barking dogs, not because I resented his mild trespass. I only said to the guy that the barking dogs caused me to be aggravated; I did not imply that the lot was mine, or that I had any authority, other than the implied authority of the uptight honkie. But still, they never came back, those pit bull walkers.
I haven't mentioned anything about good deeds going on but there are some.
And there are honest, if plodding, efforts to reform the New Orleans public school system, a school system that the word travesty barely even touches as description.
G, the only boy left from the original core Dumaine group who hasn't dropped out of school, is on the John Mac high school baseball team, and starts at an infield position. He has made preliminary efforts, with M's assistance, if not insistence, for college entrance.
And the weather here from December to now mid April has been close to idyllic, so much so that occasional reports from the east assuring me that it is indeed warming up there cause me to wonder just what the hell is meant, oh, you mean it's not sixty-five (or eighty) and sunny elsewhere, everyday(?).
I heard this local professor on the radio yesterday morning and it turned out to be my nephew, and I just keep saying, to the truck radio, wow man, you talk good. I liked the way you slid up to that crucial issue regarding the history of local school integration, and then how you diplomatically slid back away from it, and then slipped it in, white flight, without impregnating it with all that related fuzzy disgrace that we sometimes feel during our drunken conversations. I'm glad you got here and are tuned into the bittersweet essence of the city. And that you and J are raising your three kids here, when, uh, everyone else (including myself) is escaping. Orleans Parish population numbers are dipping again. Of course you realize that just means more beer for you, although let me suggest that the annual nine a.m. Tad Gormley all-u-can drink for five bucks beer party is hard on a body as it gets older.
The new streetcar line is up and running, I can look out the Rocheblave windows and see the pretty red cars moving up and down the neutral ground of the newly re-paved Canal Blvd. a few hundred yards away. And the Mid-City Bayou St. John, and City Park lagoons, have been stocked with more fish so kids and others can have easy access to the calming exhilaration of fishing. And those birds, those small green parrots, or large parakeets, I forget what they are actually, are everywhere now, so some populations are up and healthy. The wild dogs, ironically or not, remain some of the healthiest creatures roaming the city streets and outmatch the rather hapless occasional efforts of the local dog-catchers.
I was down to the French Quarter Festival Friday, which is still the best festival in town, even though it is very close to outgrowing itself and doesn't really so much feel like a festival for locals, as it was once advertized, and I saw Ingrid Lucia and her Flying Neutrinos, and the Ellis Marsalis trio, with son Jason on drums, and the Irvin Mayfield Quintet (who may represent the best Jazz coming out of New Orleans today), and I drank more than a few Bloody Marys and feasted on crawfish with lobster sauce and then later, barbecued chicken livers with greens and rice, before staggering back through the length of the Quarter to my regular parking space along side Armstrong Park.
The first day of the streetcar running was yesterday, Sunday, the last day of the Quarter Festival, and I thought about taking the streetcar downtown, but this idea seemed like a good one to a lot of other people, and the streetcars, by the time they got to my lower mid-city neighborhood were full of upper mid-city residents, and one car after another passed through this neighborhood too full up to fit anyone waiting on the neutral ground. Not that I was waiting, I just observed this while going out for my Sunday (Robert's Grocery) plate of pork loin with cream gravy and three cheese macaroni and boiled cabbage and beer six pack. Saturday's plate is baby back ribs and one or two of these, cleanly stripped of meat, I have tossed over the fence to my good friend, Killer.
Now I don't imagine that anything I have said up to now really falls into the category of cheering up but more just a walking in that direction.
Also, in New Orleans (pop. 470,000), yesterday, Sunday, April 18, in three separate incidents around town, five people were shot, two, to death. One of the three wounded was a 14-year-old girl.
American Inner City
I had hoped that many of them from that block, the ones I knew anyway, would become like ideas dredged from dreams, not odious but unrealistic, like nothing in the world they inhabited, that they would be retards, geeks, not cool at all, baton-twirling, toe-tapping freaks, not the least bit cool, not at all in synch with the beat of the street; they could wear suits and deliver bibles door to door or they could have nasal twangs and say yessir and no sir. It would be neat, really neat, if they could have gotten roughed up at school and come home crying with gold stars pasted to their foreheads. I wish they had not the talent to blend in so well, had no friends, had no sense of community, were aliens. I wish they weren't so smart, so proud, so good-looking, so strong, surviving by rote, the credo, kill or be killed. But hoping is a past time of luxury and it didn't turn out that we were dreaming the same dream. Instead they became dark super heroes, mini-gods, suave, silky-moving monsters. The beautiful thing is there is no one to blame, we don't have to take responsibility, we are profoundly dumbfounded by the simple, permanent truth of it. They are what we are and never wrong. They are the mirror of a good day, and the bad. There are no motives and there are no suspects.
What?
Was a while back that me and my siblings fretted over my aging mother's lack of hearing and we badgered her to get hearing implementation but she resisted and we capitulated.
We adjusted to eardrum splitting TV and telephone-ringer volume. We forgive her for constantly saying "what?" when we forget to yell out our conversation. Or at least yelling is what it feels like for a soft-spoken person.
We try to forgive ourselves when we lose our minds, lose patience, get pissed off at the nature of things as represented by an 86-year-old mother with a pronounced widow's hump, lack of hearing, and an incrementally progressing dementia.
Her independence, desire for autonomy, ability to fight off our suggestions of professional assistance we console ourselves as evidence of her strength in the battle against disappearing from the map of usefulness. Nature is harsh.
That she wants to carry on alone in that big house we holler out cautiously, hallelujah.
That when anyone visiting leaves the house she immediately begins worrying about them we find charming.
That those that left the house are in her mind of a number far greater than actuality and that we can't answer when are they coming back with any more confidence than ten years ago we could play the role of dad's secretary when he gave you/she instructions from the realm of near-death dilaudid dreams, we just right off as curious but not debilitating.
That she maintains the grudge against the potentially helpful neighbor who once cussed at her ten years ago while going through his divorce trauma we just consider no big deal.
That the formerly vivacious woman across the street who lost her husband shortly after our mom did ten years ago, and then went into virtual seclusion, and who has now started making yard maintenance appearances but seems pissed off at our mother for some imagined or real insult we just say yeah well shit's weird all over.
That our mom can't sit in her nice private back patio without obsessing over the neighbor's over-hanging tree and whether or not it will crash into the house during some future storm from hell, but which she does not want to rightfully have trimmed because she doesn't want to get in a hassle with the neighbor and yet doesn't sense the irony that lack of communication is the cause of all her neighborly hassles, we just see as testimony to the fact that we are all fucked up in different ways.
That she is going to be able to maintain the allegiance off the autistic yardman who has been doing her yard for fifteen years and who persists with the insane, absolutely insane assertion that she owes him 30 dollars, we can only hope.
It's funny how things play out. How independence was taught and glorified as a strength and how you yourself know it to be one of the most alluring drugs, of the many you have tried, and yet how it seems to limit so much the experience of those under its spell.
At the beginning of my bachelorhood a few years ago mom expressed a totally non-insulting concern about my lack of mate and progeny to sustain me in old age and that is the cruelest of the many ironies that bombard me daily because of her six children, 20 grandchildren, and handful of great-grandchildren, not a lot of us are around to ''sustain" her. And this is no slight to my siblings that live near her and do obviously more than the rest of us combined to assist her. It's just that she is so goddamned stubborn, which is fine, but in old age is playing out less than fine. It seems we are all resolved to wait it out, for an incident that forces action. Until then, autonomy rules the day. I know it sometimes crosses her mind these last ten years without the old man around to annoy her, just what a long day it is.
My sister and I were talking recently, after a visit with moms, and we laughed, sort of, nervously, like you do about things that don't strike you as particularly funny, "remember when it was just her hearing we were worried about?"