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Email From NOLA IIi
I'm sorry, the dog's name is Splash, not Flash. The chauffeur left him over here again because he had to make a run to Baton Rouge. It seems like really late but its only 6:59 p.m. And he doesn't like to leave him across the street, where his home is, because his home is a shambles, and only partly because of Katrina. He doesn't stay over there (oh, there he is, I can hear him, coming to get Splash. He's probably untying the frayed, yellow, nylon rope from my cyclone fence, and yes, there is the squeak of the gate and oh happy days, Splash is rescued).
I am in the darkness of my home, the one I have really yet to live in for a sequential 2 days as a finished product, now, almost six years after I procured it, in a state which was at that time (Leap Day 2000), somewhat less than pristine.
I've been watching some really bad cinema on the laptops. Sometimes the car battery gets weak and the converter kicks off and so the hundred foot extension cord running out of the truck up to and through this bedroom window is only an orange rubber ribbon, a signal of failure and broken dreams (just kidding with that last bit, the extension cord in fact signals nothing of that sort, just seeing if I could make you cringe, and I did, didn't I?). But when that happens the computer has to run on its own battery. So I have to intermission and switch the DVD from one computer to the other, if say, the computer wasn't fully charged to begin with. A former friend who doesn't speak to me anymore used to set the minimal standard for a movie as whether or not it was in focus; no matter how bad it was, she was gracious enough to admit that, "at least it was in focus." Some of these compilations, four flicks on two DVDs, for $5.50 a pop aren't focused that well. But I love them just the same because they all got one thing in common--big name actors, at a less than big point in their careers. Sharon Stone as a calendar girl, Kelly McGillis as an Army brat bent on revenge, Martin Sheen as a trapper back in the Wild West, Burt Reynolds as Navajo Joe. I haven't even gotten to the Mobster Movie collection ( could this be true? 8 feature films on 2 DVDs, all for five dollars fifty cent)?
Don't forget you have the engine running and the truck unlocked out in the driveway. You seem to have let your guard down a bit in response to your neighborhood's zero population. You need to tighten up and this I'm telling you up front so I don't have to tell you after the fact.
Yeah, I'm starting to see a few little dudes cruising by in their automobiles, windows tinted black black all the way around, driving slow on tires with shiny, glittering wheel covers, some of which do tricks and spin independently of the tires themselves.
Splash, before the chauffeur came and got him, was barking like a good dog at a disturbance over yonder at Iberville and Dorgenois, in that two story, below which was once a moderately famous soul food establishment and then became an apothecary or spiritual church or someplace that sells trinkets and incense and potions which have in common usefulness in both Catholic and Voodoo ceremony. Not a tourist hangout, mind you.
She had come by the other day, that woman who used to call me "Friend," and whose name I forget, and never really tried to learn because her on again off again boyfriend seemed sort of the jealous type, I am too, so I didn't ever try to be actual friends with her, but she was tight with both the working class and the street dudes around here. Was a good example of a normal person who did things in the hood which might, depending on how you look at it, shine an unkind light on her, but she was really just a solid citizen with tastes similar to those you might condemn as crackheads, all disdainful-like because they stole your front door, or your ladder, or your car battery, or anything not tied down. They make friends with you and then steal your shit. It is a frustrating thing. She borrowed my phone but nobody was home. I bummed a cigarette, a thing I have done four or five times in the last month, from various people, because I got tired of that accomplishment, saying I hadn't had a cigarette in 7 years, blah, blah, blah. They make me dizzy.
Well, maybe it was her over there, she said she was staying there before the storm. I'm hiding like the post I am up against my front porch column, looking back that way and a door opens and a wavering rectangle of candle light comes from inside one of the top floor apartments. Probably but not necessarily one with a roof still over it. It hasn't rained here for awhile. There is a beam of car headlight in the street but I can't see the car. People are talking but I can't tell if it is friendly talk or angry talk. Something like the size of a satchel gets thrown over the railing into the dark shadows. I hope she is careful over there because it looks like that place could fall down.
And finally, I did last night hear gunshots for the first time since coming back. And then the weirdest thing, almost instantaneous police sirens, which lasted a long time, as if a chase were happening, but possibly the two were not related at all. But I never in the past heard gunshots and sirens so close to each other.
A few hours earlier there were fire truck sirens going over to Franklin St. because more and more people are burning their houses down, either because their insurance companies had anal sex with them regarding flood damage, and fire policy is all they got left, or, maybe candles are falling over in the many homes still without electricity.
Some military guys drove by Rocheblave yesterday, all jammed into a Hummvee. They had their helmets on, which sort of scared me. Perhaps just dressed up for Veterans Day celebrations.
There is a portable toilet on Claiborne, near the Superdome exit. It has the spray-painted message "3DB" and then an arrow pointing off to a location which could be the Superdome or could be the overpass, or perhaps even, could be heaven. DB stands for dead body.