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The Jazz Burning
Its so complicated you see. The needy hard working disenfranchised poverty stricken desperate illiterate frightening drug using prostituting gun toting day to day living on a cellular level exacty like you and me kind of people who inspire the attitude of and share space with the people who would say stay away from me I pay taxes and send my kids to private schools and wished you did not exist are so inextricably twisted like twine together as a part of the greatness, the pure essence of twine that is a place like New Orleans, which is a place like no other--although I think there is a pill you can take, or possibly a room at DisneyWorld that simulates this essence, and there's nothing wrong with simulation, in fact consider the benefit of not having to wash your hands afterwards--that city planners and city councils and such must face many a nail biting decision-making process when things like this come to their attention, i.e., the owner of the First Street home where Buddy Bolden lived for most of his creative years, 1895-1906?, wants to have it razed because of damage from a recent fire. A home and a neighborhood inhabited by the same people I have been describing (not quite rightly but maybe I'll get it someday), for the last three years, and there is nothing remarkable about any of this and we shouldn't put too much stock or pride in the fact the property has already been declared an historical landmark because it can go just like Mr. Armstrong's entire neighborhood went in the 60's? to make way for a park with his name which created a northern buffer for that necessary ($$$) French Quarter, that is, made Rampart Street less frightening than it is was, but trust me on this--don't ever under estimate the potential for danger on Rampart Street, or any points within twenty blocks north.
I say fuck it, let's raze Buddy Bolden's house, afterall who the hell was he but the best quess anyone has as to the paternal parent of the music known as jazz which only complimented and inspired the blues which has absolutely nothing to do with modern rocknroll and let's face it, without which, Britney Spears would never have been inspired to get that boob job, the discussion of which is almost a cottage industry on the Internet.
Did I just say "fuck it, let's raze Buddy Bolden's house"?, what I meant was fuck it let's raze the whole planet. I will apply for the European Dozer and I'll go for the Prado first thing, too many Bosch and Bruegels in that pigstye of art. Do you feel me?
"'Slim25, please return to your cage."
Peewee And Ken
I can't yet tell my good friend and financier of Rocheblave this but the 30K he loaned me to purchase and begin renovations on the property that struck my fancy is uninsured. I do not possess an over abundance of good sense or perhaps I have a fair amount but have real trouble accessing it. I took possession of the property on Leap Day of this year and as we speak (me and me, that is), I am only within a very real proximity (bottom line, uninsured), of having the property insured.
Insurance, however necessary, is not only boring, but in my mind almost sinister, I'm a freak, and living with it.
That being said, I am to be true to you my dear reader confessing that I do have an ongoing relationship with an insurance salesman. It is not at this point a sexual relationship but if things with Barbie don't work out, who knows(?). We have never met, me and this salesman, but we have traded voices and emails. And I say this with all the passion of indecision--I do not dislike this insurance salesman.
He wants--relative to my budgetary constraints--a huge sum of money to insure just pretty much the exact sum of money, including renovations, that I will be spending on Rocheblave. My response to his emailed figure was--"ouch."
(And then the phone rings which I'm not ignoring, temporarily, because I must deal I mean deal with the business of humanity and it's KK calling for Shelton and me reeking of benevolence take the phone to Shelton on the porch playing dominoes with Jermaine and a dude I've never seen before with shaved head and abundant gold teeth and an undeniable charisma I profile as (I'm not ashamed of that, I can't get fired for it, I'm not running for office, and I never wish to be on anyone's list of most politically correct), a medium/high level drug dealer, God bless him, or fuck him, I am ambivalence).).
I'm going to insure the property though, probably during this first week of July, because it has to be done, and also because I just got back a call from a plumber (who also subs out the central A/H work) and for both the major plumbing and central air he quoted a price which was a couple of thousand less than I imagined (I was working with nothing more substantial than "imagine the worst" scenarios) just the plumbing would cost, although I did agree to break out the concrete in the driveway myself. The truck is falling apart and I left it with Del Cid on Broad and there's some hundreds involved but all in all I'm feelng pretty perky, fiscally speaking, poor PeeWee lookin' mf-er that I am.
Peewee And His Barbee Doll
I was in Dallas recently attending the wedding of a niece named Alex to a guy named Denny who is waiting for a heart transplant, and in attendance were the usual crowd of people I only see at weddings and funerals, and of these my favorite is fellow May '59 Taurean, and my junior by fifteen days, cousin Jim Harris. That's Father Jim to you. Jim is a Catholic priest and so it was he I asked the question which I hoped might lead to answers.
"Jim, Voodoo and Catholicism are kind of the same aren't they?"
"Sure, there's some overlap," he said, smiling.
And then I told him my story, thinking that his insights might be useful. I was speaking across the table and spoke elusively at times so as not to offend my mother, or younger nieces and nephews also sitting at the table. Jim's brother, my cousin Ronnie, was also at the table and provided some encouragement later on.
"Have you ever heard the expression--most often this would come from a black man to a white man--'you PeeWee Herman lookin' muhfuh?'" Muhfuh is code for motherfucker. I wasn't sure if my cousin, the priest Jim Harris (although an ardent admirer of PeeWee and his big adventures), would be familiar with the expression so I said it twice, kind of humming the muhfuh part to underscore the hidden indecency. I think he got it, and anyway, if not, I was feeling kind of stupid for humming a version of motherfucker at my mother's dinner table.
"It's meant as an insult, a major putdown, but as insults go it would be one I'd be proud to receive. Still it struck me right off as a kind of hanging by effigy of the only white boy in the area when I saw that familiar PeeWee Herman doll on my Rocheblave neighbor's clothesline. With his chest protruded, arms to his side but behind his side actually, PeeWee it could be said was hanging by his armpits on the backyard clothesline of my neighbor's hatred for all things white. But that statement (bad metaphor), is not only awkward, but probably inaccurate. I am not unpracticed at ignoring the unpleasant but after a week or so of slow diligence at the renovation site I began to suffer from severe pain in my shoulders and forearms. Now before I go suggesting Voodoo victimization let me confess that such pains are pre-existing, bad genes combined with repetitive blue collar work motions. Still, the pains exceeded all previous versions, and I was daily considering some sort of medical, or heretofore untried non-prescription cure. This is how serious I was--I even considered acquiring (through a friendly black market), prescription strength non-narcotic pain killers. To go to the black market for something non-narcotic is pretty serious in my book. I think on a couple of occasions if the pain had been less enough to allow me, I would have cried. Such is the human life. Later the doll was thrown over the cyclone fence and into my discarded wood pile, and my pains are no longer of the mentionable type. And that's where he lays now, arms and legs bent in unnatural directions, which I would be remiss not to correlate with Austin sister-in-law Judy's recent dream about me in a tragic car accident that left me similarly positioned. Everything can mean so much, or little, depending on where you stand, but on the gravity of dreams, and literal interpretations, my brother the criminology professor and I agree: if I can continue to have those few but precious lucid and wildly erotic dreams of me casually outperforming my real self, then I will gladly trade that for the ones that have me hurt and positioned oddly. And with that in mind I'm wondering what I should do with PeeWee. Which is why I'm glad to have a priest in this family of Methodists. What do you think Jim? I mean what if I cleaned PeeWee up and put him in a place of honor, perhaps even hooked him up with a nice Barbie doll? 'Man needs a Barbie,' that's in the bible somewhere isn't it? I just don't know about it all. Can a man affect his own Voodoo doll, should he try?"
My cousin Jim the Catholic priest is no damn fool and he chose his words of response carefully. "I'll meditate on that," he said.
His brother, my cousin Ronnie, was supportive in a different way. "I like the Barbie idea," he said, smiling.
It's His Coma
There is a theory that all these children around here don't really exist but are simply my alter egos manifested inside a coma dream.
I was lurking online climbing branches at the tree when Mandy came in and asked was there any chance I would drive Glynn fifteen blocks up Dumaine to where he stay on that one way Roosevelt with his Grandma, practically across the street from that American Can Company renovation. I was drinking a quart of ice cold budweiser, a quart because the Magnolia got its liquor license revoked and is only selling the residual stock from its sad and lonely looking nearly empty beer shelves to premium customers, lucky me. Freddy's wife imitated Schulz from Hogan's Heroes, "you know nothing," and I agreed wholeheartedly, saying, "that's very true, and I can prove it just by opening my mouth."
Mandy said she had already drunk a beer and a half and did not want to drive and I always encourage the good judgement of others. "Yeah, I'll take him," I said. Glynn had earlier driven his bike into the pole that supports the Magnolia sign at the corner of Dumaine and Broad and given himself--I am not a doctor making 200k a year--a mild concussion.
As I was driving up Orleans, instead of Dumaine, it occurred to me that all the children that are making up the alter egos inhabiting my coma dream, and who used to live either exactly in the 2600 block of Dumaine, or pretty close, now live scattered to the wind, but still find their way to this block almost every day.
Hunter snuck up on me at the Rocheblave job today (I paid him six dollars an hour to help me one day last week so he could go to the SuperFair at the Dome), and he said he just wanted to see what I was doing. I told him, "nothing really," and asked him did he come to work. He said he was on his way home. I thought he still lived around the corner from 2600 Dumaine, on Dorgenois, but no, he living with his grandmother on Bienville and Roman. I admitted I did not know that, and offered him work on Tuesday.
And Lance, who is here everyday, lives way out in the east with Sandra, the nurse his dad Billy had taken up with just before he got busted selling marijuana with that illegal weapon. Lance has brothers living lives elsewhere and one of them was murdered in New Mexico this past week.
Heather (and big sister, Kizzy, with children Raticia, Shadrica, and little Corey, and mom Barbara), lives on Iberville, near Galvez, not too far from the Rocheblave house.
Fermin, and his sister Julia (15 and pregnant), live with mom Evelyn on Touro, several blocks on the river side of Claiborne, a good distance from 2600 Dumaine. Michael Harris lives near there too.
Jacque, Nettie, Tiesha, Roshona, and mom Ramona Lewis still live on Rocheblave, at Orleans, in the Lafitte Projects.
Bryan Henry still lives across the street, and his cousin Irving visits occasionally.
After Mama D died many stopped coming to Dumaine. For instance, I haven't seen Shentrell in almost a year.
Kojak (Clifford Lewis), out of lockup, was playing dominoes on the porch recently, but I haven't seen Clifford Junior in a good while.
Erica Lewis I don't see very often but I think Ba(y) Ba(y) and Lulu are taking good care of her over on Claiborne, near Frenchman. Lulu (17-18) is pregnant.
And as I may have mentioned before, Shelton Ray Jackson is living inside this house, and we are recently trying to be nice to each other.
My new Rocheblave neighbors across the street are a woman named Mebo? and her husband, nice people, she's a sculpter, and I'm not sure yet what he does, but she was offering I don't know what today, condolences? about my break-ins, and I was speaking unguarded, big mistake, and she was offering me advice (all good, and all things I have considered), but I felt this childish competiveness and kept saying things like, "I know what's up," and "Dumaine and Broad make this block look like a daycare center," and she was thinking "what an asshole," who can blame her, but the thing is she kept irritating me with placations to my condemnations, saying things that were supposed to make me pause and consider the hardships of my fellow men, like--"everyone's got a story," and me wanting to grab this cloistered artist living behind the locked iron gates and theories of her urban domicile and scream, "no fucking shit?"
The Rewards Of Bad Behavior
If you listened to the well-intended instructions of all the inner voices and were therefore able to disrupt all mishaps headed your way, would you be a better person for this, or just a well-tuned obedient soldier, safe in the comfort of your knowledge, and obedience?
That's what Slim was asking himself as he sat on the steps leading into his blighted dwelling which was now minus the $200 front door he had ignorantly installed much too early in the process of the dwelling's renovation. "Shouldn't have waved my razor knife in that guy's face the other day," Slim mused out loud.
The next day when the house was violated from the side--but nothing stolen--Slim concocted wild revenge plots remembering an incident years ago where someone kept stealing the hallucinogenic mushrooms he was drying on a windowsill so that he felt forced to replace his "cooling pies" with another variety that he knew--from very reliable second hand sources--to cause violent, blood streaked vomiting. Slim wasn't by nature a vindictive person but he did occasionally lapse into unpredictable behavior.
But back then he was a child playing with children and now he was some version of an adult playing with people who could play hard, in fact had nothing better to do than terrorize some uppity land owner while searching for that next blast.
A man had come onto the property a few days previous and had annoyed Slim in such a way that Slim had lapsed into one of those aforementioned modes of unpredictablility and before he knew what was happening he was threatening to slice the other man. When the other man had finally retreated after an unconvincing pantomime of attempted murder, Slim listened to, but could not really make out the far away rants of this unsuccessful drunken solicitor, but he felt there was to the man's message the basic warning that Slim would pay for his disrepectful ways.
Now he thought about leaving the side entrance ajar and gluing razor blades to the door frame right where he knew one had to place their hands to pull up into the house, and maybe a panel of sharpened nails screwed to the floor would be a nice touch. Instead he went out and bought eleven sheets of plywood and in a frenzy similar to the hectic boarding up that occured in his area when hurricanes threatened, Slim cut to size and screwed plywood over all the windows.
And the list of suspects grew in Slim's mind. Hell, the morning before it was stolen hadn't that feeble old church going woman commented on what a nice door it was? How can she not be on the list? And when the building inspector who had come out that day to inspect the rafters had uttered that it was probably the first person who had been nice to him, Slim could not deny he had been thinking a similar thing himself. About the man across the street who occasionally helped Slim with the chores of renovation and was a self-admitted, and rather obvious, crackhead. And he seemed now two days later to be tweaked way beyond what that fifty dollars Slim had paid him would do. And yesterday he had to excuse himself in the middle of his rather suspect commiseration about the missing door to attend to the 'ho who was lingering at his door across the street. "Excuse me, cousin, let me see about gettin' me some of that pussy." The man was living large.
On the third day when the house was entered from underneath, and a section of the temporarily nailed plywood subfloor was pushed up into the house, Slim suffered a brief spell of despondency. Would he have to live in this unfinished hotbox in the middle of this urban swamp in the middle of summer to protect his possessions? He did not fancy that idea. He was getting verrry sleepy Then he went to find a phone and call the police.
A pretty, young, black, female, police officer was sent to respond to his call. She had a nice manner about her and made Slim feel better about his world. In answer to his question about how far he could go in protecting his property she implied that Slim could go ahead and do what he had to do, as long as he projected an attitude of fear about his predicament. "I am afraid," he said to her. When she left he felt more calm, but lonlier.
The Shiney Black Shoe
The joke was Shelton asking Mandy would she mind it too much if he went to Slidell to stay with his cousin Joe for awhile.
Mandy came home from work that first night--and these days (perhaps) sadly it is not unusual for me to barely look up from what I'm doing when she comes home, and vice-versa, but that night I made eye contact--and she said "is he gone?," like that, with total disregard for his proper name and I nodded with a sigh and she told me that joke about him asking would she mind.... It was almost a moment of bonding, old times relived, a shared total lack of caring what the fuck happens to a most disadvantaged youth from the inner city. It's too heavy sometimes. All the necessary emotions involved in the day to day dealings of this life I love cannot always co-exist. There are limits, and I have found them. Unfortunately, having found them, or defined them, doesn't make the excess less
And speaking of (often) excess(ivley) bad behavior, Shelton, and Joe just got back. Come on, that wasn't even three days was it? I came out of the bath with eyes blinking saline solution which hoped to rinse the residual Rocheblave soot away and I see, sort of, Joe sitting there on the phone, "hey joe," I say; Shelton to my flank offers his hand which I firmly grab but cut short the ritualistic long version and Joe with his hand out says, "its like that is it, Mr. Jim?" I look at Joe and realizing the insult respond, "I'm sorry, Joe, I didn't see," and grab his outstretched hand and also abbreviate firmly.
And it seemed Mandy was reaching her limits as the throngs of needy children hoping to take advantage of a Sheltonless dwelling (for example Marqin tapping on her bedroom window as soon as I left the house at 6:30 this morning), drove her to shut down Le Blanc House on Dumaine, and after a twelve hour Rocheblave Saturday the solitude would have been nice. But I get a good bit of solitude on Rocheblave so I shouldn't complain. The exception to the solitude could prove the rule as today on one of my frequent breaks, having finished eating a somewhat dry banana, and contemplating the can of sliced peaches, I was intruded upon by a sloppy drunk. Give me an HIV positive heroin addict any day over a sloppy drunk.
One of the many fine things about this little crib on Rocheblave is that it is set back from the street, unlike the Dumaine house which is right up on the sidewalk and street. A person doesn't have to trespass to annoy you on Dumaine, but on Rocheblave its a good thirty feet or so to the temporary steps on which I often find myself sitting enjoying possibly one of the better summer breezes to be had in all of New Orleans, being that I have a pretty rare New Orleans inner city circumstance with my prevailing Southwest unobstructed by building or trees for perhaps as large a dimension as 75 X 300 yards.
I have recently become the definition of zero tolerance and my brother the criminology professor can attest to that during a recent visit where he saw me taunt a rich white lady in a high end SUV after I ran a stop sign and she angrily honked and gestured. The situation allowed that after my indiscretion I was stopped by traffic only a shallow intersection away from the offended damsel and while she honked and grimaced a great deal more, I turned fully around hanging my upper body out the cab of the truck and insulted her quietly with full frontal confrontation. And boy did that seem to make her mad. Lucky for me I drive a vehicle which is instantly recognizable, and somewhat memorable. We were uptown where Carrollton meets St. Charles. She was probably a Mafia Princess. I call it the suicide of life.
But back to the downtown side of Mid-City, Rocheblave, and this drunk, who thinks he knows me because in one of my more tolerant moods I had entertained his supposition that he was the drywall man I would want to use when the time came. But today he's coming up my cracked drive carrying a cheap shoulder bag amd waving one patent "leather" high heeled men's shoe. I dismiss him with the insult of my shooing hand and he takes offense right off, gurlgling something or other about not waving my hand at him and as I mentioned before he is way into my territory by the time he stands in front of me, showing his goods. Realilzing the shoe is not to my taste he takes from his bag a used, but clean t-shirt with the slogan, "I'm a Quitter," and the picture of a cigarette inside a circle with a line through it. I insult him again by challenging his assertion that the t-shirt is new, and he, truest denizen of the street sticks to the code--lie and deny, the t-shirt is new, smell it he demands of me more than once. Have I already mentioned this, that I am not a very tolerant person right now? I am going to so to speak cut to the chase as we now have me waving my razor knife in this guy's face threatening to disembowel, repeatedly reminding him how far into my territory he has strayed, a mistake I should hope him not to make again, and him saying how I should not be trying to punk him like this, and me totally done with the sloppy drunk so much so that when he tries to save face by reaching in the back of his pants for his imaginary gun I just shake my head sadly and sit back down on my steps. I feel not as bad but similarly to the feeling of last night at ten-thirty when I yelled at little Raticia for ringing the bell and asking for water. Today I disconnected the doorbell. I know what I am right now cannot be effectively communicated to children, so I just hope for the best, and occasionally contemplate the inefficient but perhaps necessary short term move away from Dumaine, until Rocheblave can on any real level, be lived in.
I hate to write about some of this as it seems to glorify shitty behavior, which is not my intention. My only writing instructor, David Ohle, at the U. of Texas, once gave the assignment to write about something you're afraid of and it is that which keeps me going, because not unlike the young Ms. Nowottny from New Jersey I am so often so afraid of me.
Pobrecito Jim
I can hardly finish a beer (or two), these days without nodding towards deepest stupor; cheaper than dilaudid but not quite as fine.
Pobrecito Jim works all day as the house painter for the rich and famous and then comes home to work some more in a neighborhood that most would see as a ghetto, and in fact poor little Jim sees it that way too, but the New Orleans community has the rich and poor all swirled together so the ghettos of poverty, drug dealing, depravity, and violent death are surrounded by neighborhoods mere minutes away which offer all that is good and safe and clean and honest. So one is never stuck; one can always choose: have a blast, or a latte', poke a vein, or have a beignet.
After getting the permit to renovate and getting fully juiced with electricity the Rocheblave project has Jim working 13 hour days, seven days a week, in a subtropical climate that is so hot, ninety with a gentle breeze is considered very pleasant. Jim has to work such long days because he makes lots of mistakes and has to redo much of his work, but that's ok because Jim can't dance.
Jim has put in a front door but he still boards up over it because his crack-head consultant has told him the crack heads will steal it if he makes it too easy for them. Jim already knows this but it's good to have an experienced consultant nearby to remind him of the obvious truths. Jim is one day Candide and the next Pangloss, benefitting, it seems, little from either, so it is best when he accepts counsel.
And Jim has ripped up and replaced the bedroom and bathroom floors, and today got a good few of the burnt rafter ends scabbed in, braced, screwed and glued. Jim doesn't really know what he's doing but he convinces himself daily that he has the right stuff, and the deception is effective, and the work gets done.
Last night at 9 p.m. Jim was snoozing on top the covers in the dining room that is his bedroom and study, aware of the neighborhood children passing to and fro throughout the house as they are apt to do around here, and in and out of stupor Jim had that awareness of nothingness going on, which is his preferred state, when out of the dark he is kissed on the cheek by Erica Lewis, and eyes opening into hers he kisses her hand and falls back to nothing better than that.
My Country 'Tis Of Thee
With his jailhouse mentality he may be seeing it as a sign of weakness but be that as it may I apologized to the golden toothed motherfucker today because the opportunity presented itself and I selfishly wanted to see if such an act might indeed be good for the soul. I presented my case and suggested that in the future should something similar happen it would be best not to linger around my porch afterwards. Also the whole story of the egg throwing was presented to me by various sources and the true culprit was pointed out to me (one of the haircutters over at Maurice's Impressive Hair Design), and so I was made to look hard at my flaming behavior towards golden tooth and there really isn't any reason he should have taken both barrels of my wrath. He is in theory the kind of person I have a great deal of sympathy towards but over the years he has so worn thin my capacity to feel that sympathy that in all truth I'm glad I apologized but I'm also glad I called him a motherfucking bitch. His younger sister has always made an extra effort to be respectful towards me and his younger brother is a good boy I have written about many times and so I try to consider golden tooth in the light of his siblings and I have caught glimpses of him as that scared little boy growing up in the eighties with that new and improved crack cocaine cutting its devastating path through the inner cities of America (My Country 'Tis Of Thee...), and a mother more in love with it than him, and the things you read about happening all around him, I mean all around him: his fellow children armed with semi-automatic weaponry, not pretending as we did as children, but actually putting loaded gun barrels up against the head of another child and pulling the trigger, once, twice, three times, flinching at first blood but not so much after that first one, after realizing no one is more powerful than you, giver and taker of life. A sobering reality to say the least. A reality where school work is for the weak, because if you're black, and you think school work is going to get you out of here, you are just stupid wrong, because the white man is not going to let you out of here, is not going to let you succeed. It is your destiny to sell crack cocaine to your father, and when your mother gets out of jail and back to whoring herself for nickles and dimes you can sell to her as well. So much hogwash, and yet which one of us cannot admit to seeing some truth in it? How could I not apologize? How can I not be ashamed of heaping more garbage on a life such as that of he with the golden teeth?
The last three library books were all winners and I am recommending all three: This Much I Know to be True, by Wally Lamb, and The Diary of a Yuppie (a reread) by Louis Auchincloss, and Bagombo Snuff Box (some previously unreleased short fiction) by Vonnegut. With a nice preface.
This Car Going Up
Thursday I got off early from work and went down to City Hall to get that building permit that one needs to do any serious house renovating. They did not ask and I did not volunteer that I have been renovating already for two months, albeit at a lollygagging pace, and lately, frankly, not at all. I have heard a lot of criticisms from contractors about the way they run things down at Morial's City Hall and that combined with my own really very impressive lack of ability at dealing with power structures had me in a mood that could best be described as--tense. If I were still a cigarette smoker I would have been through half a pack just getting out of this house.
But everyone down there was very nice to me, even the old man behind the information desk who must have thought me a complete ninny for asking--"do the elevators only go down?" Well, there were two buttons and all, one on top of the other, but when you look above the doors there is a plastic arrow above each one that lights up when the elevators arrive, and they all point down. There is not an up arrow. I had pushed the up button and had waited a pretty fair length of time during which I witnessed all six or eight elevators arrive, and go down. And so I walked over to the information desk and asked my question.
The grey afro-headed man behind the desk did not yell out--as he had every right to--"son, I've been working here forty years and that is by far the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me, 'do the elevators only go down?' What turnip truck did you just fall out of?" he could have asked me, but didn't. He tried his best to answer a question that had never before been asked, which is not easy, and finally had to resort to familiar strategy by asking me to which floor was I headed. I told him seven and he said--now back within the realm of his expertise--"oh, that's Permits and Conveyances," or something like that is what he said, and I rushed back to the elevators to avoid a possible change of heart wherein the old man cried out--"hey everybody, check this out, this little hayseed cracker just ask me do the elevators only go down..."
Twice or four times as big as the down arrows is a square plastic box that lights up and reads--This Car Going Up.
Up on seven I was politely told to fill out a form and then give it back when I was finished, and wait for my name to be called. I went over to the little table with forms and sat down feeling pretty smug as I looked at several strings attached to the table which serve the purpose of keeping people from stealing the pens or pencils but the strategy had not worked for the pens or pencils were all gone. I had brought my own pen knowing there would be none readily available and that asking for one could result in dire consequences, even punishment.
And then there was a fortuitous convergence which had me finishing my form at just the moment a permit agent became available and me and her went through a Q&A session where at one point she asked was I licensed to do the renovation (uh oh, the guy I called yesterday said I didn't have to be if this was a renovation of my personal home), but instead of panicking I tried to bluff by leaning towards her a bit and whispering, "no, but I'm capable." Even at the time I had to ask, who is this nimrod? Are you hitting on this woman, or what? Luckily she paid me no mind and continued to tell me what I had to be if...but I interrupted her to clarify that this was my personal home, and yes, that did change things, so we were back to cooking with gas, and then just as she's about to lead me into the inner sanctum of permit inspectors, where I will be grilled by some guys with white shirts and colorful patches and silver engraved name tags, this more bigger nimrod than me starts whining about how he was here first. I aim to placate and immediately do a languid side step towards the couch but miss my mark and so find myself kind of leaning over when my butt does eventually find the cushion, but I recover nicely and if not for the German judge, my score would have been good, very good.
This guy, for lack of a better thesaurus, is a real pussy. He's going on and on about his pitiful existence and at one point even mentions how just asking for a pen had been a huge ordeal. Now let me tell you, if I was feeling smug before, I am now pure uncut, unadulterated, in your face, smuggier than thou. I glance over at the professional looking gentleman to my left and we share a smug chuckle that shows us to be guys who know about the necessity of a good pen in your pocket. As it turns out the guy needed a drawing of what he was trying to do so he had to go back to that table, And he had to ask for another pen.
As if we were lovers who had been interrupted by a telepone solicitor, me and the permit agent quickly got back to our business, and this time, as if on cue, an inspector walks in and she hands him my paperwork and he leads me through the doors to his desk. Things were not completely in order with my request but wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we're gonna get you a permit. And when he said I need a check for $130 made out to the City of New Orleans I was ready. I'd brought checks, cash, credit cards, even a bag of quarters for the parking meter. Sometimes its all about preparedness.
A Dumaine Day4.23.99
It's no big secret me not being all that finely tuned so it didn't strike me
as unusual that my mom considered it a possibility that my phone call to her
on April 21st was blatantly coincidental instead of an intentional
commemoration of my father's death.
"Do you know what today is," she asked, and I answered in the affirmative.
She said, "I went to the cemetary this morning." And I asked, "so how is
he?" and she said, "he's fine, ornery as ever."
Conversation was somewhat stilted at first, with me never knowing exactly
which of life's informational tidbits are appropriate, and there was some
brief panic as Clifford Louis' depression era sensibilities about waste
(long distance phone calls and such) kicked in. But we pulled out of that
conversational nosedive beautifully and soon enough were talking the basics,
about Mrs. Arista (she never leaves the house), Mr. Walden (first year he
hasn't been able to mow his own lawn), Nephew Ben (hit a double, stole third,
and scored the winning run in highschool baseball game), my brother, Paul,
(and the plans to disinherit him), neighborhood children, and politics
(Clinton's just a man and she wishes people would stop talking about his sex
life). I told her I thought people were talking about other things now.
Right now is a perfect example of how it goes. One minute I'm sitting here
hogging the six hundred square feet of space that includes two rooms, a
foyer, and half the kitchen, and the next minute I'm sharing it with (almost)
two-year-old Clifford Lewis, (almost) six-year-old Erica Lewis, who seems
very much the grown up by comparison, and fourteen-year-old Lance Price who
is being tutored by Mandy in Algebra. Clifford the two-year-old gets kicked
out by Lance the serious student because he was batting a plastic bowling
ball across the wood floor with a badminton racket. A few minutes later
there is banging on the door, and feeling quite the permissive paternal
lord, I get up to answer it. Clifford blows by me, glancing off my knees as
he picks up the bowling ball first thing, and staggers about the room
deliriously, looking for the badminton racket. Fourteen-year-old KaKa
McCormick takes advantage of the open door to ask can she speak to Miss
Amanda. While she's here (getting a piece of fruit) she punishes Clifford
and throws him outside again.
And out on the street it can be just the same. Throughout an average day
there is little to distinguish this block from any other (blighted inner city
block). It is often quiet, with only the normal flow of extra foot traffic
that you would expect from having a corner store in the neighborhood. And
then a couple of guys show up with pit bulls.
I have been in and out of the house talking to my mom, going inside with the
passing of each loudly vibrating, rapping sedan. I'm standing in the foyer
with the door open when the one man just briefly looses his grip on the
leash, and we have instant fido on fido, and in a matter of seconds there are
twelve to fourteen people circling the dogs, cheering.
"What's that noise," Mrs. Louis wanted to know.
"Some fighting dogs, pit bulls, and people cheering," I said.
"Are they fighting?"
"It looked like they were going to but I think this is another false alarm."
"This goes on all the time?"
"I wouldn't say all the time, or even frequently, but this isn't the first
time I've looked out the window and seen such a thing. I'll shut the door."
"Oh, you don't have to. You don't have a lot of dull moments there, do you?"
"It does get dull here, but patience is always rewarded."
And then in a matter of ninety minutes the rooms are mine again and I feel
the faintest remorse as I suffer through the quiet, an empty nester, longing
for the company of a gangster's son, and the sound of a plastic bowling ball
bouncing on a wood floor.
Where'yat
Back in '95 a well known area renovator/activist/realtor--while showing Mandy and I around this area--known as Treme--and her area, across Broad towards the Bayou--known as Fabourg St. John--told us she loved this house too and would look into the procurement of it for us but later reneged because this block was uncharted territory for young white renovators and as she so caringly put--"I don't want ya'll to get killed."
I love life pretty much, sometimes a lot, other times just a little, but it seems to me an inescapable part of life is that eventually it does kill you, so the concerns of Jeanne Tidy did not weigh all that heavily in the decision making process which eventually (after six months of looking, rather quickly actually) led to the owner financed purchase of this 1600 sq. ft. 103 year old double bayed Victorian cottage, with wood floors, twelve foot ceilings, two (of four original) fireplaces, a claw foot tub, 7.5 foot doorways above which are workable transom windows, and a front porch that was at the time, and now five years later continues to be, somewhat of a community property for neighborhood children, current and former grown-up neighbors, and area gangsters (the modern day inner-city variety who sell crack and powdered cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, and occasionally kill each other for wrongs real or imagined).
The purchase price was $22,000. The house was, and to large degree still is, a wreck. At the time we survived on my 9 dollar an hour job and our good credit ratings. We made the $5000 down payment with a cash advance from a credit card, and then shuffled that balance from one low rate introductory offer to another for the couple of years that passed before Mandy became employed and we were able to erase our high interest debts. Originally, $3000 (mostly saved cash from our days in North Carolina) was spent to get the front three rooms, kitchen, and one (of two) bathroom(s) livable/usable, although not really "finished" by a long shot. We did the work ourselves. The back two rooms consist of a 14X18 bayed bedroom w/ small bath, and a door leading out to 10X25 raised deck. The last room which connects by doorway to the bedroom is 12X25 and has a (somewhat leaning) fireplace freestanding in the middle. And the floor in this last room is half wood, half tile. These back rooms are completely unfinished and as wrecked, cracked, and unusable as they were five years ago.
The owner-financed mortgage on this house is 250 dollars a month for a term of ten years, of which five remain.
As chief executive officer in charge of finances during this period, the idea was to live as comfortably as possible in the unfinished primitive state until such time that we were able to pay the accumulated credit card debts (which we did) and then continue to live primitively (well, we have hot and cold running water, a flushing toilet, and new stove and fridge, and a new washing machine, and used dryer) until we saved an amount in cash ( 8--10K) that would finish the renovation and make this house, although not richly appointed, a pretty kick ass little $35,000 soon-to-be-paid-for crib.
And we did that. The saving part anyway. However, after thirteen years of all being said and done, Mandy and I did not desire to live together anymore. So we split the cash and put the division of property decision on hold while I started looking for another ghetto property to renovate. I found one half as big, in worse shape, for exactly the same price as this one cost five years ago. Had to have it. A good friend who also knows how to save money is doing the financing on this new blighted property so to erase for me what can at times be an almost insurmountable difficulty in dealing with power structures, i.e., banks, and bureaucracies, and whatnot.
So that's where I'm at: the beginning stages of another dance with Shiva. Am I going to take you along with me through the destruction, and scraping, and cutting, and hammering? I don't know, but its an idea.
Human Shields
March on Mamas, I support you.
But would not Rosie O'Donnel be more effective as a human shield in some war torn area like...
I have at 7:30 am finished my ablutions in the bathroom which is in Mandy's bedroom when the doorbell rings and Mandy squints open one eye toward the bedside clock and says--7:30?
It is 17-year-old, KaKa, at my door with my newspaper in hand and unwrapped from its protective plastic. The Metro section has been separated.
"There is something you wanted to read?"
"Oh, yeah, Ima put it back, Mr. Jim, I uh just came to get my flags," and she enters the foyer and picks up what must be some sort of drill team practice flags. I take the paper from her and she leaves.
The front page announces 55% of Orleans Parish fourth graders, and 63% of eight graders failed the state mandated LEAP tests and will therefore not be passing to the next grade.
Kids don't read enough but yesterday about the same time I was screaming about broken eggs, two blocks closer to the Bayou, and one over, on St. Ann, two boys made the ultimate sacrifice to change all that. Because kids will read the Metro section to see which of their friends and acquaintances got murdered the day before. It is pertinent to their lives. That's what I knew when I saw KaKa reading the Metro this morning at 7:30. She could not give a rat's ass that Morial wants friends as judges, or, Bus that got stuck in Quarter is fined. But, 2 men gunned down on a corner at midday, hits her where she lives, or actually dead smack between where she lives, and where she hangs out much of the time.
So March on Mothers, there is much work to be done.
Chill Pill
Awhile back there was a drive-by attempt by someone I hold dear against someone I hold less dear. It was a failed attempt which kept the potentially grieving family from fighting over who would get those gold teeth, because there ain't no way that boy will get buried with those teeth. They are at this point in time the only thing that defines his value. My rant goes like this: You HAVE to have some value to the world around you, otherwise...
Evil courts me. At English Turn this morning I swear to God I passed address number 66 just as my truck odometer read 666666. Shortly after that I was made to pause for the three prominent gentlemen who walked abreast blocking the incoming side of the narrow English Turn Blvd. Is this some sort of revolution of the affluent, a taking back of the streets from those ubiquitous and tiresome construction workers, none of whom by the way wish to be working inside this uptight gated community? Or are these salt-and-pepper-haired stooges my own little Father, Son, and Holy Ghost representation? I've never in my years working the Turn seen such blatant disregard for progress. Am I to make a choice now? Is this yet another crossroads?
For now I choose to not run them over, I creep behind them while I wait for some outgoing traffic to pass.
The vacant lots surrounding the jobsite are abundant with color from these miniature flowers which are everywhere sprouted from the stems of a succulent weed.
...what good are you, who needs you?
And I don't know about all that mystical shit really, I really don't, yet at the same time (exactly the same time), I believe wholeheartedly, and I mean I have no doubt that a piece of Mama D inhabits my vessel for the purpose of eternal retribution against those who helped her to that early grave.
"You motherfuckin' egg throwin' bitch," I introduce myself to he with the gold teeth. This is me after returning home early from English Turn on a Friday, as has been our recent habit and who am I to complain getting full pay? Before my tirade, which doesn't include much variety of wording other than the above, I had spent an hour cleaning dried broken eggs off the front of this house. Several direct hits on the wire mesh of the security door made for an especially gratifying chore after a half day at the Turn.
The dime had been dropped by a neighbor, not on Gold Teeth specifically but on--those boys that sit the porches (this one), and stoops (all the ones across the street). This egg throwing I am told is a game they've been playing since last night.
He just happened to be sitting there, on my clean porch, at the wrong time.
"Get the fuck off my porch, Get the fuck off my porch, you fuckin' bitch."
"Man, Ina get off this porch but you need to quit calling me that."
"Quit calling you what you worthless piece of shit. Get the fuck away, I'm calling the cops."
"Thas all right calla cop."
He's ready to go back, that motherfucker, it's no threat, his destiny awaits. He won't fight it.
Me either, I'm not fightin' any of it. There's other stories than these and I'm trying to retrieve them, but these are what it is for now. This is me and my life, and I cannot even conceive of another way I would have it (because I'm stupid). Although, I think it should be pretty obvious, I probably need to get laid sometime, anytime. Chill, Slim.
Which Is Which
There is something I've been wanting to get out of the way for some time, can never really find the exact wording in example, so now I would just like to put it into so many words: I am an evil son-of-a-bitch.
Back when we had conversations, and I acted in ways that were playfully sinister, Mandy used to call me evil with a mirthlessness that would cause me to look a little harder and say, yeah, might have a point, I think I see what you mean.
Over the years, and especially during my years here in New Orleans (and then especially during the summer), when my fantasy life starts running darkly, and I imagine and whisper, and chant into that well-occupied dominion of maleficence all the dank thoughts of my secret self, I have for the most part not been challenged with a solitary object at which to direct my hatefulness.
But a bad hop at second base, a planetary misalignment, or a fluttering of wind during the coin toss has me now living with that child I agreed to abort twenty years ago, or one of the seeds accepted, not rejected, at that gate of tied tubes. My whipping boy, Shelton Ray Jackson, son of imprisoned Myrna, and imprisoned Shelton Sr; the boy quite literally no one wants. He is the bully you feared in school; the boy who's behavior helped you to understand first hand the term--bi-polar disorder; the boy who devours the helpful hand like a Lays potato chip; the boy segregated from decent children by concerned mothers.
He is the embodiment of tragedy and is too intelligent to trade that away cheaply.
He was a cool kid when he lived across the street and at night you could shut your door to the ghetto he came from and fly as far away as your mind would allow. He is now approaching sixteen and can bring home no (short term) friend who is scarier than he is. The neighborhood toughs are all wimps compared to him. His life has been one of few compliments, but many insults; a life whose daily hardships would fill up a treasure chest. His father is being a man in some cell in California, and does not communicate; his mother calls frequently from her cell (and the machine says, if you will pay for this call, press 3), in central Louisiana, asking for money. His happiness at her efforts to communicate are short lived when he hips up to the motivaton behind her calls. His self-image is a shattered piece of obscure glass, and to this last observation I can add--and I helped.
A little mouse of a boy outside my front door, up on my porch, and I am towering over him in all my freakish glory, asking him gently are you the boy she is talking about? He nods, and I look down to the sidewalk where his young mother is ranting loudly, and apparently, into the face of Big Mike (aka. Chicken). Mike has a great smile, and a sense of irony about him, and it doesn't fit anything I know to have him involved in the harming of a child.
Stink, and another gangster boy are loitering nearby, and it appears they have been sitting on this porch but are in the preparatory stages of high tailing it. And she has her cell-phone in hand and is calling 911 to inform them of an incident at 2646 Dumaine, and without missing a beat Mike (mis) corrects her, saying--St. Philip. And she says St.Philip into the phone right after him and I have to turn around and look into the house, and smile. I look back down at Mike and he is mouthing something to me but I can't read it so I just shake my head and look off down Dumaine to the corner of Dorgenois, where none of this is happening.
The little boy now interrupts my staring by saying, does a boy named Shelton live here? I answer affirmatively and the little (9-year-old) boy says, well he punched me in the nose, demonstrating by pushing his own index finger into the tip of his nose, just in case I was unsure of the area in question. This is the kind of accusation that none of us who know Shelton would doubt for a second, however, Shelton is not a little boy anymore and if he had punched someone in the nose, even half-heartedly, there would be more damage than the little boy is exhibiting. The young woman did see something (that Shelton is culpable of some wrongful act, I have no doubt), and it is this and a long list of other suppressed sins against herself and her son she is now relaying to the emergency operator.
I don't mean to be rude but as she has not addressed me personally, and her lament is one I have seen and heard many, many times on Dumaine, I turn around, go inside, and shut the door. The little boy will be safe for awhile as the Demon of Dumaine was last seen running off in the direction of Esplanade.
Mandy all this time is sitting at the front table reading, perhaps glancing out occasionally. When I come in we discuss the event, and the eventual arrival of police, as if we're talking about the weather.
The police who arrive are that fric and frac couple I have seen around here recently, first district rookies, no doubt, being given the ripest territories for domestic disturbance calls. Dumaine was a haven for it during the Mama D years, but not so much anymore. They ring the bell and then follow with two loud raps. (Man, stop that stupid shit, you want me bangin' on your door that way?). He's tall, white, red headed burr cut; she's short, white, and overweight, but you know those vests add a few pounds. She immediately looks down at my bare feet and John Schwarz says (whaddayou lookin at). I, however, have better sense than that and begin a polite discussion with Mr. Cop about my "son." I assure him, man to man, that Shelton will be punished, and briefly explain the circumstances which might contribute to his misbehavior. The cops leave out saying they will look for him off towards Esplanade. Do they think he's white or black or what, I don't know, but there's a Dunkin Donuts at Esplanade and Broad so...
I don't say anything to Shelton when he comes home that night, but yesterday as he comes in I glanced up from this high quality 900 page novel I'm reading, and make what appears to be direct eye contact with him standing there in the foyer. I am lost in a fictional world of schizophrenia and brotherly love and to be honest not really looking at Shelton at all. Shelton also is not quite connected to the world he has just entered and wearing that stupid looking Hulk Hogan do-rag he queries me thusly--"what are you looking at?" When my eyes focus on him all Rasputiny-like he starts back-stuttering, "no, I mean, I just..."
I've been trying lamely to accept the defeatist stance of if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, because I don't like that dude who yells at Shelton when he fucks up, he's a scary, weird motherfucker, and I never signed on to share this body with him. Oh but look, there he is. Shelton sees him too.
"First thing, I look at any goddamned thing in front of me, which in this case is the BOY who brought the police to my front door, FOR HITTING A NINE-YEAR-OLD CHILD, congratulations son, you've made me real proud."
And I have been meaner to him than that. I can't forgive him for being a bully to others. I'm practicing the art of evil on someone who is for all practical purposes, mentally retarded. Congratulations Slim, I'm proud of you too.
Wrong again (JimB), I guess this wasn't one of the amusing ones.
It Is Funny
It was two days after I had been let out of the San Jose County Jail on my own recognizance (instead of extradited back to Texas on a felony drug warrant) that I was visiting a girl named Kerry in Santa Cruz. I remember being in a booth at a restaurant having pizza when Kerry commented, while picking some invisible matter off her tongue, that she thought maybe she had some of my hair in her mouth. There was a pause while we both thought about what she had just said, and then we broke out laughing. It felt good to laugh after spending two weeks in jail with a bunch of guys who didn't do much laughing, and although it would have been even more joyous if we had been laughing at the reality of what we were purportedly both laughing at, it was still a good thing going on for me, this laughing. Kerry had hours before cut my hair (hence the possibilities in her mouth), in a fashion so short that a few days later in San Franciso, another friend, Patti, said it made me look gay, which, if I had been in hiding would of been a good thing, according to the B. Kliban philosophy of "always hide where there are a lot of the same things." Still later after driving back cross country to Huntsville, TX. to visit my brother who was studying Criminology at SHSU--and lived pretty close to the penitentiary at which I would be getting butt-fucked if things with my lawyer didn't work out--a neighbor of his quietly asked him did his brother just get out of the penitentiary, on account of that haircut and all. But things with the lawyer did work out because there is right now a picture of me in a desk drawer in my boyhood bedroom in Dallas TX. taken in Tomkins Square Park in NYC some months, maybe a year, after the arrest and haircut, and the hair grew out nicely, so that sometimes while I'm visiting my mom there in Dallas who lives alone with the curvature of her 82-year-old spine, and I look at that picture in the drawer, I think--that was the best haircut I ever got. It did for awhile bother me that Kerry had confided to a mutual friend that she felt guilty about all the laughing she had done with me because it reminded her of laughing with her father in an effort to please him, and she was, you know, trying to be a woman in this world independent of the need to please men. But it doesn't bother me anymore, that, because I'm just looking for a laugh wherever I can find it--back then, up ahead, wherever.
Bloody April
I say this first part to tack on a little vicarious value to a people who apparently have little value to anyone, including sometimes, themselves.
New Orleans is a small town, and the housing projects--which sprang up in the forties with those good intentions leading to hell--are spaced pretty evenly throughout, and there is no neighborhood here, rich or poor, very far from a project. They are inhabited at this point in time mostly by black people, but that was not always the case. When Marlon Brando as Stanley K in Streetcar Named Desire bellowed with angst for the lost love of STELLAHHH!!!, he was doing so at the Desire projects.
So it is with great sadness that I bring you the news that Marlon Brando was shot dead last night outside his apartment at the Desire. No motives, no suspects.
Also, this in the first weekend of the two weekend event known as JazzFest which is a musical (and food eating) event held at the Fairgrounds race track. Each year it draws approximately a half million predominately white people. This is a number equal to the (predominately black) population of Orleans Parish.
So it is with great sadness that I bring you the news that yesterday 220 white people were gunned down in random acts of violence in and around the Fairgrounds. There is a palpable sadness in the air today and enraged citizens marched on City Hall demanding measures be taken to stop all this killing. JazzFest promoters say the event will go on, remarking that as tragic as this number may be it is still considerably less than have been gunned down in random acts of violence during previous JazzFests, citing the 1994 and 1995 numbers when 420, and 360 white people were killed.
That was the first part. The second part goes like this...
To close out the month of April I have to tell you that yesterday an 11-year-old boy was shot in the stomach near his home and is in critical condition at Charity hospital. Police were in the area to break up an altercation between two groups of youths at the nearby Magnolia project, and think the shooting might be related. The critical boy's name is not being released, because as he lays nearly dead, gut shot, with his internal organs a shredded mess,there remains the possibility that the shooter, or a minion thereof, will come into his hospital room and slit his fucking 11-year-old throat.
I have to start working on the Rocheblave house again, soon. That should shut me up, thank God.
Punctuation Bitches8.29.97
Oh those pesky drug dealers. It seems that the beginning of the school
year may be a time of reminiscing for all the Dumaine based dealers as
there has been a swarming of comraderie lately.
Note: KaKa (KK) is Kenosha, LuLu is Keyana, BaBa is Keshonika. Also
Kizzie is Kizzy. Kizzy's daughter Ritisha (3) is Raticia and neither
grandma Barbara nor Mama Kizzy know how to spell Shadrica (18 months).
Shelton doesn't like to see me sitting on the porch alone so he comes
over about nine last night (which is one hour after curfew) and keeps me
company, sitting real close, throwing off heat, asking questions and
telling tales.
"What are you thinking when you sit over here by yourself?" Shelton asks.
"I'm thinking about things that make me happy, and things that don't."
"I had a parent/teacher conference today," he tells me.
"Did you get kicked out of school?" I ask.
"No, I just had to have someone (other than his mother, Myrna, who is
back in jail) come talk to the teacher and they let me back in. Do you
know what happened?"
"The other kid started it," I say.
"How'd you know that?," he says, smiling, obviously flattered that I'm
paying attention to his life.
Heather and KaKa got kicked out of school today.
But I ignore his question and ask, "What really happened, Shelton?"
"I can tell you for real, what I said and all that?"
"Of course."
"Well, this boy, he come up to me and he say, 'fuck you, man,' and I say
right back to him, 'fuck yo' mama, bitch.'"
"So Shelton, when you said 'fuck yo' mama, bitch,' you were using 'bitch'
as like a punctuation mark, huh?"
Nobody around here really appreciates my sense of humor, especially the
children.
But I don't care and I go on and elaborate a bit more with the 'bitch' as
punctuation theme. Shelton has learned to be patient and polite during
these episodes and is clearly willing to wait me out on this one. When
he feels that I am pretty much finished, he says,
"Mr. Jim, when you get ready to go inside, to go to the bathroom or
something, would you ask Miss Amanda if she is coming out on the porch
tonight?"
If the children had to choose between me as a father figure or Mandy as a
mother, they would choose Mandy every time, which is a good choice.