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Cat Story
I just now saw something that I have never seen before and hope never to see again.
There are flies in the Dumaine house and this has come to mean one thing to us the residents here. Something dead: in the walls?, the attic?, or under the house.
To get to the beginning of this we'd have to go a ways back to the day I quit smoking while a slightly insane fellow named James sat with me on this Dumaine porch bumming what I told him would be the last, "so let's live it up." I have not seen James since that day. It was late August of the year 1998, almost three years before this day today when I would see something I have never seen before, and me a guy with eyes wide open. Mama D was still alive at the time.
Near the end of the pack a matronly feline who would soon be named Point Blank (posthumously, I'm afraid), ran in front of a small red car and became in an instant nothing more than cooling meat on the asphalt covered brick pavers of Dumaine. I scooped her still limp facsimile of catness with a shovel into the dumpster across the street. I wrote a piece about it and ended it or nearly ended it with the sad sad imagery of Point Blank's recently born progeny lurking longingly by the dumpster.
Those cats begat and so on until there were three fairly identical balls of pitiful fluff begging for food at the back door here. This will be if nothing else a lesson: Don't feed the strays.
One lost half his tail, one got eaten by wild dogs, and one remained, with or without our care, feeding, or watering, she remained. I did occasionally entertain what now can be seen as fairy tale versions of how she survived.
Is that enough clue? Just twenty minutes ago now I'm looking for the paper which might have been thrown over the fence into the side alley (yard) and what I witnessed is what I'm telling you. The little cat, scrawny, no bigger than an adolescent kitten but truly an adult, bent over a sleepy newborn kitten, sucking it's fur. However the kitten is not sleepy but dead, and its mama is not sucking but chewing, and the kitten is not all kitten but half gone; the hind quarters are missing.
And I've toyed with the theme of kitten as metaphor for the urban reality here but the metaphors are not up to it, are not up to describing or enhancing a reality so severe as a scrawny feline you shoo away from rubbing against your leg because the vibrating neediness of it repels you, you suspect a con, you have good reason to suspect a setup, and the needs you don't provide for another are often met in ways you'd rather not suspect.
Incident Free
I have mentioned before the Church's Chicken at the corner of Broad and Bienville because it is the only local fast food establishment that has in recent years had a cold blooded murder occur inside it's doors.
I have for some years fantasized about eating healthier and for this reason have become a semi-regular customer at Church's because they offer collard greens as a side, and I, perhaps ignorantly, think that greens are the healthiest food on the planet.
Last night for my dinner fix I went to Church's (mostly for the biscuits and greens but got some disgusting greasy chicken to go with it because it is afterall, a chicken joint) and was met at once by a time/space warped reality occuring inside a jail cell, which did however also offer chicken, biscuits, and collard greens for the hungry, so I placed my order, sat down, and waited.
"I kill all you mthrfkers and think no more 'bout it. I just finished three so I ain't worried about the time."
"They'llah give you death for that," his partner responded.
There were in all four or five teenager/twentysomethings in their group and the leader was the one just out of jail and this may have been his victory celebration. They were very loud and abusive in a very controlled manner. They had made the inside of the small glass walled chicken establishment a worrisome and threatening place to be. The cashier had the look of someone who came to work to get away from the stupidily loud aggressive behavior of the street warrior and here was met with its most boisterous example.
He sauntered up once and said to her, "How about yous come to work for me?" but he couldn't seem to conjure just what it is he did or what it is she might do for him. Her pained expression showed previous experience in dealing with the ignorant showman.
At one point I was the midpoint of a diagonal path between the big man and his second in command and there was to be a tossed exchange of a packet of ketchup. I could see my order being boxed up and was hoping to flee this place without incident because as I have alluded this was not a place one could consider "incident free."
The packet went wide around my table as if my hope for all things to be copacetic was in itself a beneficent polarity shield. Upon fleeing I did not look back, nor do I wish to, anymore.
As April Ends
This may come as a shock to few but it looks like I'm behind schedule on the Rocheblave job. And judging by my apparent need to rest once in awhile it appears I will not be making up any lost time any time soon. But it does have a more finished unfinished feel to it so I am now getting a jump start on the acclimation to a new home process, which includes hot boiled crawfish and cold beer in the middle of the day followed by a nap.
The bottles rise to the surface showing themselves as possible shards but are easily spied as more than that by the avid bottle hunter/renovator/archaeologist. Today's specimen is an intact three inches tall with a short tapered neck and a beveled rim, the opening ostensibly shut by a stopper such as cork. The light weight and the visible seams on either side lend a sense of cheap imitation, but imitation of what? The five three inch lines of raised lettering say this:
Sample Bottle
Dr. Kilmer's
Swamp-Root
Kidney Cure
Binghamton, NY
I didn't say damn yankee carpetbaggers but I might have been thinking it, standing in the side yard over at Rocheblave clutching the now empty cure.
There is a full house at Dumaine.
Friday I met briefly with the more frightening alter ego that inhabits Shelton.
I found the belt I had been missing for six months; it was right where I left it, in a place where I would almost touch it each night; I ordered six new pair of painters paints and had them delivered to this front door without leaving the keyboard or talking to a salesperson; I found a ten dollar bill in a parking lot and a pair of cheap sunglasses picked up from the Dumaine gutter are the lenses I prefer.
There was a good bit of confusion going on between me and the Sewerage and Water Board over what the actual address is at Rocheblave. It ( a former structure) used to have five addresses attached to it and I picked one of the middle ones while Sewerage and Water Board was using the first one. It came down to an all business letter with a threat to disconnect which would then put me in a category placing me at risk to be visited by another city agent who could determine my home uninhabitable. I did not want that to happen so I went down and gave them the deposit they wanted plus a few dollars for the current water bill. There was that little bit of irony that I had yet to be hooked up to city water at the time but if all the previous confusion between us could be cured by the greater part of a Ben Franklin far be it from me to bring up a distracting detail like that. Three days later in the mail I received a check for the amount of deposit. And I can say it was a pleasure doing business.
The weather has been lovely which I say while I still can.
There's a new guy beginning a renovation on Rocheblave and if I see the sculptor who allowed her trash haulers to pile trash in front of his place I'm to tell her..."yeah yeah, you betcha, I'm all over it, let me write this down," I mumble to myself as the aura of his self-importance diminishes the smaller his back becomes.
Dishwasher
There's a kid over there in the front room of Dumaine playing one of those first person shooter games on that COMPAQ computer that onced vexed me day after day, crashing repeatedly until I just gave up and took it as a loss, writing it off as Compaq rubbish with a flaky FEDERAL warranty. The next year Compaq suffered huge losses, FEDERAL was being sued, and the store where I bought the computer went into bankruptcy and shut down, and I had by then received a 300 dollar replacement system from an online auction that has worked like a charm for a couple years now. So I felt pretty well vindicated.
I'm not even sure of names as this point, some of this new bunch I don't really know that well and the energy involved to start from scratch explaining why I want the front door closed when the AC is on, etc., blah, blah, and I'm only here for a few hours today and I want everyone to chill (no volume on games, no loud talking, let me rest).
At one point a loud kid said to a less loud kid, "stop that cussing..." something something...,"Mr. Jim." And I glanced over, heavy lidded, and glassy-eyed to tell the truth, thinking I don't care if you cuss if you can do it quietly. And the glass picture in front of the less loud kid explodes with blood which then drips down the inside of the screen, game over.
I saw the kitten creep from under the dance hall three days ago, briefly. Shelton, I haven't seen at all for weeks now, and wonder what is up with him. It is as if they--Shelton and that kitten--are living by the survivalist credo of the ground soldier--limit your exposure.
Took in the French Quarter Fest for a few hours Friday nite, had two Bloody Marys, rice and greens with chicken livers sauteed in sweet hot pepper sauce, and a bump on the one hitter which got me thinking about how far I was from the car and how derivative the music currently was and since I had earlier been wowed by local jazz virtuoso, Irvin Mayfield, I left out of there and drove off to the suburbs where I bought some discount t-shirts and mosquito repellant at the Walmart. It takes a lot of courage to leave the house sometimes because the number of cultures through which one can travel around here can be dizzying.
I think I had a pretty good buzz on laying down last night at Rocheblave with a cool breeze blowing across my mosquito repellant skin, some classical music on the radio, and a bit of confidence about the next morning's task which was to start building a small side deck (or landing), with stairs descending down the left and right side. I'd been studying this one on a DIY building site on the Web, so unlike so many of the tasks I have attempted for the first time, this one I had a little schooling about, which judging by today's apparent lack of mistakes, has proven useful.
And then I tried to follow the guy who had just stolen my neighbor's dishwasher and was pushing it on a handcart down the middle of the street, but by the time I put my shoes on and got in the car he had utterly disappeared. I headed off to Dumaine to make that call which was going to make a long night (the police don't respond to calls like they did in the hey day of reformation a few years past), and see a couple of cops parked at the local grocery. One is engaged with a teenager in a fancy car who is playing a new CD the cop really likes. The other is getting ready to make a pay phone call and this one I ask to speak to after he is finished. Several minutes later me and him head off to the crime scene, from which he soon departs, saying, "I may know who this is." I go in and lay down, contemplating the warm dregs of a sixteen ounce budweiser beside me.
About twenty minutes later the cop honks so I go out and see he has a creep in his back seat but it turns out it's just some kid he caught in his net while looking for the thief. He's gotta take the kid to lockup so he can't really help me anymore and has no suggestions for what to do about the neighbor's wide open door behind the locked security gate. I go back to bed and am up every hour throughout the night to spy greater thievery. Sometime before dawn the door had been shut, possibly by wind.
Saturday afternoon the homeowner was very upset when she heard my words of greeting and disclosure and interrupted my stream of verbal conciousness, which I had prefaced by saying--'"just let me get rid of this whole story (which I had been holding for her for fourteen hours)," by suggesting better ways I could have dealt with the situation. She wanted me to just scare the thief away with the old "I've called the cops" routine but with all due respect to that nifty idea, I'm thinking after all the neighborhood breakins recently (my house spared, but is someone over there right now?) I want a little good old fashioned vengeance, that is, someone in jail for the grievous disrespect that has lately been shown to my most immediate neighbors, five in all. So that's why I followed the guy, unsuccessfully.
I finally met her husband though, nice guy; like her, a sculptor, and before he tried to steal away from my verbal bombast I made him give me the phone number where they staying. Because I'm taking her advice for next time, goddamn right I'll call and lay it on you, "scared 'em, TV's in the middle of the street, later." The cop by the way had no problem whatsoever with my attempt to find the thief's hideout, nor did he seem to think anything was out of order with my illegal lodging at Rocheblave.
Sunday I have completed a four by five foot landing, three feet off the ground, no stairs or railing yet. I had some beers and whatnot to celebrate.
Sack O' Candy
When I was a puppy my mom and dad, both devout Christians who also believed in the Easter Bunny, would go to some effort to hide eggs in our yard, first in South Oak Cliff, and then North Dallas.
One Easter when I became older and the simple pleasure of finding candy on the ground in a controlled environment was soon to be no more, I spied my mother inside the fenced back courtyard with a paper sack full of cellophane wrapped hard sugary colored things and she was dipping her hand into this sack, grabbing handfulls and tossing them haphazardly across the fence into the neatly cut St. Augustine on the other side.
The next year somewhat elaborate place settings were set--for me and my two brothers who hadn't yet left for college--that included chocolate covered versions of that harmlessly pagan floppy eared Easter diety. Most decidedly not Bugs I remember thinking.
Thirty years later I can hear childish laughter happening now at this decent interval past sunrise.
Toms
The Tom I call BigHead is limping in a daze with two fang marks in his neck. I haven't seen the kitten in over a week, and there is rumored to be a yellow Tom in the mix now. And there is the consistently ocassional smell of death which emanates from a nearby clump of weeds.
And unbelievably, the Rocheblave property is for the first time in ten years, or more, hooked up to city water, and a toilet flushes, and a sink and a shower do what they do but only with cold water. Much work still to be done, but at least a break in what was seeming like a bad joke being played out by a fairly competent plumber on a sometimes fairly much overwhelmed rapidly aging boy in the hood.
Dumaine swarms in Shelton's absence with a new group of boys joining Fermin, Glynn, Jacque, and other core members and if you give them a piece of colored chalk they will declare themselves the Dorgenois Boys. They seem pretty polite and respectful, some having game, others having sense of humor.
Same To You
When you start floating up from the bottom of a murky lake, nearly out of breath but not quite, it is because Failure losens its grip, allowing you to rise one time for a full gasp, which is enough to make you heady with aspiration.
I remember the words of a urine soaked bum not first hand but as told to me by M who between dropping out of University Texas and graduating University Oregon took a year in Harlem, shacking with John in a student housing walkup, where he attended Columbia Law and she was admitted (out of order for godssake) into a graduate creative writing program. She completed her year and he dropped out after one and they headed off to Springfield, Oregon together and then broke up, he heading south and her staying in Oregon and taking freshman english again because U. Oregon didn't accept some of her credits from Texas and seemingly was not impressed by her graduate work in NY.
Before that happened John's family came to NY in March or April to visit John and M and while they were all marveling at some site or just loitering perhaps outside a library or museum a homeless man with a disabled bladder reeking of the full spectrum of bodily function entered the consciousness of M's group with his unique sincerity by saying--"Happy Easter Little Family."
Getting There From Here
Outside of Delacroix I started thinking about Bob Dylan but not able to conjure up any meaning from it I grooved on the almost cliched beauty of a bayou surrounded by swamp and marsh, and the requisite moss covered trees, the yellow and pink flowers, the yellow and white honeysuckle, the waterfowl so different from the sparrows left behind, and the fact that no one was following me, which in a driving excercise on a two lane road is moderately to extremely rare.
An early Sunday morning jaunt driving blindly away from any aspect that resembles responsibility. Or goddammit, I'm tired of working; I'm tired of making mistakes; I'm tired of knowing I'm going to make mistakes and then plunging headlong into the mistake. I need a vacation. So I take a little one while on the way to what was going to be my only responsible act of the weekend: picking up materials at the Home Improvement Store. I don't wanna, therefore I don't hafta. Nawh.
I'm not saying I don't have a place to hide but I don't. Dumaine has mostly never been a hiding place, what with the insurrgence of children that just seems to happen naturally (t)here, and Rocheblave is not yet home, although I sure wish it was. Wish in one hand...
So from this part of the world take a left on Rampart and head east, vere right once, and before you know it you are in Delacroix, deadended, with nothing to do but turn around unless you came to charter a fishing boat, or have a camp nearby, or need to buy live bait. Can you say cockahoe? No matter.
The way back lacks magic, but you already know you can't have everything.
Piggly Wiggly
The girl behind the meat counter at the Piggly Wiggly in Madisonville or Mandeville said, "who gotta holta you?," referring to the bloody bandaid covering the spot near my left temple that gushed blood into my mouth this morning after my run in with the 380 pound Viking convection oven.
The plate lunch at the Piggly Wiggly was turkey and cornbread dressing, w/ salad. And I got a large coke Icee on this sultry April preview of summer like day.
I drove my boss's truck from the small exclusive ungated ("we don't really need gates on the North Shore") subdivision, a nice metallic blue 95 Chevy long bed with large engine and glass packs that make it rumble not loudly, but slightly.
Just a mental image that I play with--imagining to what far off destination my plate lunch and I could arrive at before my boss realized I wasn't coming back, A/C blasting, heading to one of the four corners, presets on the radio changed before the first fillup.
Duck And Cover
But the cute little black and white kitten wasn't shredded to a soft furry pulp that day and so lived to see another sunrise.
The lanky man was not a predator, at least this appeared to be the case, and so the kitten ventured out one afternoon from under the relative safety of a New Orleans dance hall and into the trash heap in front of lanky man's house.
Lanky man would have been moved to a moment of eye moistened sentimentality if he had seen the kitten's wide-eyed wild stare, framed as it was by the random debris of urban renovation just outside the door of his modest dwelling. Instead, it was another one of those blink of an eye moments when what one sees is the result of an action one sets forth, and which can't be stopped: in this case the half empty cup of soft drink arching towards the exact spot where lay hidden the watchful feline, its cuteness at once and forever in rapid retreat into the bowels of debris.
Consider The Kitten
When last month the people from the Pentecostal church did the human bush hog number to the vacant lot next to me so they could park eight bus loads worth of Pentecostal brethren for the big, super, grandaddy, Mardi Gras parade known as Endymion, they dislocated a kitten I've had my eye on.
The Pentecostal property does a twenty foot L behind my property and the big pile of debris they removed and 'hid" in the L looks similar to the big pile I had accumulated clearing my lot last year, and later with some considerable effort relocated to a dumpster in the front. I'm thinking the Pentecostals have forgotten the big tree limb laden weed pile because its not like its in their back yard; the church is actually two blocks away. "Bastards" is what I would call them if they weren't such a reputable church going group of people. I'm not talking about your East Texas Snake Handling Pentecostal Orthodoxy here. This is a more mellow, and biracial, bunch, although I would have to accept the invitation to one of their Saturday men's prayer breakfasts to prove that point.
Kittens are cute, even if you're a psychopath>speaking of cute.
"I'll give you an extra ten if you scoop up the dead cat over there on the side and throw it over there by the dance hall," is what I told the man I hired today, and only bring up now to illustrate a high feline mortality rate.
I'd see the kitten periodically after the great mowing and parking spectacle so I started thinking of it as a survivor, and even knowing it would grow into another sad, dingy, mewing, flea-bitten excuse for a mousetrap, I was still struck by it's black and white cuteness.
But the Tom I call BigHead is also black and white, and the obvious patriarch of this small piece of feline drama that surrounds the 200 block of Rocheblave, and he's a bad sumbitch is what he thinks but he surely does know a thing or two about pecking order which is why he spent an hour of his day today beating up the kitten: chewing on it's neck, and throttling it with battering hind paws.
Corner News
Now this might be taking the acclimation in the hood thing a bit far, but leaving Rocheblave a few minutes ago I approached the Bienville intersection with some cautious aggression, in front of the man getting ready to cross in front of me, and then nosed out with a little pump of acceleration (because sometimes at intersections the truck's transmission won't catch), and then did a hard brake in deference to the young man on the bicycle traveling in the left lane of Bienville at dusk--I'm the only white boy in this scene--and I nod vaguely to the kid on the bicycle while looking left up Bienville at the same time the kid says to the man who has now crossed behind me and is heading towards Broad on the easterly sidewalk--"whatsup m'nigger."
Now the movement of my nodding to the kid is timed so that me and the kid both know this ain't right: the white boy responding to the affectionate vernacular, so the kid, God bless him with the quickest mind, bails us out by raising up his head just so slightly and saying a quiet "whatsup" to me but for the benefit of us all.
It's been about a month, or a little less, since sixteen-year-old Shelton Jackson was thrown from this house on Dumaine out into the urban abyss of the New Orleans Sixth Ward. M made the arrangements for his relocation to a local chapter of Boys Town because even the allure of his SSI stipend was not enough, in the end, to entice any of his many blood relatives to take him in, and while he appeared to go with the flow of this, at the last minute when the social workers actually showed up, he flew. So in a sense he is a wanted man, or rather, young boy.
Those who grew up here on Dumaine cannot seem to leave the sense of home it gives them so I see Shelton on a pretty regular basis. He does makes a concerted effort to stay from the sight of M because it was she he disappointed the most with his frequent misguided attempts at manhood.
"Hey, Mr. Jim, " he yelled to me from across the street yesterday, as I was changing vehicles to go from the paying job to the Rocheblave job, "how you feeling?"
"I'm ok, hower you Shelton?" I said.
"I'm good," he said, and then I turned away from him and got into the car and started the engine. I did not know the older boy he was with.
As I'm looking right to merge from the curb to the corner of Broad which is only a hundred and fifty feet away but during certain times of the day can take a while to get to and Shelton is knocking on my window glass. I roll it down. He wants to shake hands.
"So how are you?" I said, again.
"I'm not doing anything illegal," he said.
"Good," I said. And then as afterthought, I instructed him. "You know, Shelton, if you're gonna tell stories like that you should write them down"
"Whatchu mean?"
"Like the one you told J's mom who told Miss S who told M, about how M has gone to the pipe and me pimping her out to Jermaine."
Shelton tried to explain to me how illogical that story was by saying how Jermaine hardly even hangs around this porch no more.
"Neither one of us are too worried about people thinking the stories are true, but it's bad business telling lies about people, or even about yourself."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"I mean you getting kicked out of here and trying to make it sound like you just had to leave a bad situation. You know I made it no secret I wasn't all that crazy about you staying here, but M was only trying to give you a safe place to hang out, you shouldn't disrespect her with lies that help you gain sympathy and favor from others. There's no shame or blame to any of this, a thing doesn't work out, and then you try something else. There's nothing wrong with the truth of who you are, where you come from, and where you're at. If you need to tell a story, the truth is the easiest one to tell, and the easiest one to defend," I directed into his glazed expression.
"All right, Mr. Jim." He shook my hand again and headed for the hoop and the company of those gathered in that small parking lot/transaction area which extends behind the Magnolia corner store, and the Impressive Designs haircutting establishment.
How Far To His Next Life?
I accepted the invitation of an avowed racist yesterday. When he said, "wanna burn one before you leave," I pantomined my arm behind my back.
Sure as the population of English Turn residents who are having houses built on man made (pond) "Bonita Bay" grows, so are we workers destined to smoke 'em when we got 'em.
So me and this guy, I'm not going to name him this time but I've named him before, if it matters, which I don't think it does, unless you value the recorded literal over interpretion, which is your prerogative, I got nothing to say about it, but me and him are sitting on buckets looking out over the pond, me staring at the reference point of the hard core hip hop rapper Cash Money residence, who for all his money will soon be not personally but specifically, if such a thing is possible, reduced to a term that won't leave us alone or leave our conciousness because 1) its a hateful term, and 2) because of who uses it and in what context, which is the more complicated issue, and therefore set aside for the dissecting by someone less simple than me, which is to say more smarter.
All I want to say is me and this guy are smoking marijuana, for which we will go straight to hell, kids, don't do it, it leads to degradation, and...TV watching, and he's a straight in your face racist, which is to say he just does not like non-white, but the "niggers," if truth be told, are his pet group. Me, I hate a lot of people but have "evolved" to a state where I don't delineate simply by race. I hate people of all creeds, colors, and affiliations. I guess the thing is, I have to meet the people first, or be otherwise presented with evidence which would cast a person into a mold worthy of hatred. But hatred is bad, kids, don't do it, it leads to degradation, and...TV watching.
So this guy is still working with us but has recently moved to the country (of central Louisiana), where, he had previously bragged, "they don't allow no niggers." What he's basically going on about is something I don't like either, so I'm sympathizing with him because I like him enough to do that. He moves to a small town where God is good and Good is god, and lo and behold this white nigger kid moves in next door and brings with him a full blown black nigger. And they listen to loud rap music, which goddamn it the town has an ordinance against, and besides, these kids are surely the ones broke into the store, everyone knows this and agrees, and as he describes this knowledge to me I can see how easy that rope was/is thrown over that tree limb.
I'm high on his weed though, yet frankly have better things to be doing, off early on a Monday with a new home to finish, but sitting on an unfinished back porch overlooking a pond in an exclusive gated community is ok, and contrasts my deep in the New Orleans 'hood lifestyle in such a way that I can go with this flow, and besides it is my position I fear he treasures, the one who won't agree with him, and say, "yeah, fuckin' niggers," but still can find a way to verbally pat him on his thick little skull and say, 'now, now, there, there, everything's gonna be all right.'"
Still, I gotta laugh when I think of him thinking he can hide from himself by traveling those few 150 miles every weekend.
Bon Appetit
I'm the guy standing those awkward minutes in front of ten and twelve dollar belts at WalMart or Kmart trying to make a decision I know I'm never going to make, not if you look at it like today is the last day of the rest of your life. I'm not in love with any of those belts and for a guy who doesn't wear belts nothing short of love will suffice. I need something to hold up my work pants though, so everyday, for months now (I think I accidently threw away that one belt I own, the same way I threw away my keys I guess, but I retrieved those from the trash can out front a Dumaine), I pull a section of tape from any available roll, duct, or masking, and folding it into thirds into itself I run it through the two loops on either side of the fly and tie a knot. If there is some reason during the day I need to pull my pants down I slice the tape with the ubiquitous razor knife and after walking around pulling my pants up every few minutes I realize I really must make a new belt. It is a necessary Steppenwolf kind of moment getting in touch with that white trash part of yourself. And I feel even now a better piece of a man for it.
I am moved nightly at Rocheblave by the Louise Erdrich New Yorker story which chronicles hard life beautifully, and who am I to critique the ending (?). A short short story, it takes me several nights of reading two paragraphs before my sleep mistress seduces me with her sexily whispered promise of cessation and peace. But last night I stood her up and finished the story. While I write this the sun has set and Rocheblave has two windows unboarded and floors full of tools, which is a step in a direction I have chosen. There's a fresh New Yorker and a chicken sandwich on bun over there on the bed to my left just waiting for me to finish whatever it is I think so important that it would cause me to ignore them this long. "Come on, finish up your bullshit and let's go on over to that house you've been working on for two centuries," the two pieces of nourishment kid me.
"You guys are crazy, ha, 'two centuries,' I get it loud and clear. If that isn't a knee slapper, what is?"
I've been depressed. I saw too much in a blink. No way around it, payments come due. And if that's not ending, what is?
Yayah, bon appetit slim.
Shut Up
He comes around like a guy lost without his streetcorner, and talks loudly, belligerently, and profanely, projecting himself into my living room. I've called him the golden toothed gangster, Stink, and Eric McCormick, son of Nettie, brother to Glynn, and KaKa. His nomiker, spelled Stank, is etched up down the river side of Broad, between Esplanade and Orleans. I will have to move away from the nonfiction which includes too many named people other than me. I think I will. Its never seemed right. Sometimes it was justified as protection against going down darkly without leaving clues. Other times I considered it payment for services rendered. Mostly I know it just itsn't done, for legal and ethical reasons. But being too discreet kept me from writing for a lot of years. There's a journalistic gene going on with me that I'm trying to deal with. But I ramble. I only wanted to say this:
Eric McCormick, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, you are from good stock, and you are intelligent, and those are two things that can work for you. You don't need to be a blowhard. Just be what you are quietly. In short, shut the fuck (and grow) up.
Riding With Smokey
Finally I got picked up by Smokey in a beat Chevy and we headed southwest out of Los Angeles into the desert. At his trailer in the middle of that desert I didn't even get out of the car because Smokey just needed to stop briefly to get his gun, before taking us to Yuma, where he would search the jungle there and I would--at his recommendation--catch a Southern Pacific boxcar back to Texas.
The man I met in the yard at Yuma took me under his wing after first recommending that I get back on the highway because I was young and clean like the kind people wouldn't mind too much picking up and trainyards were for the old and dirty, or like in his case, the black.
We waited two days and nights in that Yuma train yard, which was famous for its friendly bulls, until a proper hotshot longhauler came through and then against his earlier teaching ("you don't jump a moving train, wait for them to stop, and then pick your car") we did jump a slow moving flatcar, and climbed onto the next car which was a tiered automobile carrier, three levels high with Camaros.
This was January, and even so far south it was bitter cold at night so the scrap piece of rigid wire was nothing less than a gift from gods as it let us unlock a door, and as he knew their would be, retrieve from the glovebox the ignition key which cranked an engine and gave us heat, and, I'm complaining now, a rather cramped sleeping space.
In El Paso the man said it would be a felony to get caught in one of these cars so he said we had to jump, and catch something else out of the yard, which was patrolled by less than friendly, but not altogether unreasonable, bulls. He hadn't told me anything about jumping, and the train was moving faster than I care to remember, except it is one of the elapsed time periods of my life--the movement, the sound of metal clacking against metal, the two days in the El Paso train yard, dinner and sermon at the mission, the January cold, the mild concussion, the found and dispensed with bottle of tequila, the oranges, and the sardines--which I can transport to with an almost unreasonable clarity.
My feet hit first and then I was skidding along the side of my face along side a train track outside of a train yard in El Paso, Texas in January in what I guess would be the year 1980.
The two day waited for boxcar out of El Paso was boarded still, at night, with glowing cigarette butts the beacons of invitation by grisly greying bearded gentlemen.
In San Antonio sixteen hours of unaligned rocking later, the train began to slow, and I saw the Interstate, either 10, or 35, and it was my time to go. "Let yourself down slow, and get your feet running before you touch down," he told me, and I did what he said, and I was standing tall to receive his parting gesture, the upward thumb.
I was late for school by a couple of days, and as luck would have it so was this guy Dave, who had been a next door neighbor during summer school, and had scared me good n' plenty with a ride on the back of his Kawasaki 900, but was now in the more docile Volkswagen Beetle, heading north to Austin on I-35, when he saw me standing on the side of the road.
"Hey Dave."
"Hey Jim, what happened to your face?"
"Fell off a train, Dave." At the time everyone thought I was speaking euphemistically, and I did not insist otherwise.
It was nice that my roommates were gone away from the apartment on ninth street so I cleaned myself leisurely and I'm not sure why headed for the UT campus.
The flourescent glare and the studious multitudes reflected in glass at the undergraduate library were the last things I remember from that other world, from which, I did on that evening in January duly depart.
Not Yuma
Me and this guy Billy hitchhiked from Austin to Telluride for the Jazz Festival in August of 79. We had both attended summer school at the University hoping to shorten the amount of years actually spent in classrooms. It was a few months later that it came to me there was a better way to go about this but at the time I was only considering the way which had been laid out for me.
Telluride, Colorado, which is off the beaten track, and even then was being overrun by capitalistic hippies, was a destination well worth the effort getting there (The Tall Texan smoked Merits and issued many a "comeback" on that CB radio), and as if to underscore that we had arrived in a place different from what we knew Billy and I immediately found ourselves beckoned into the living room of a lovely and earthly young woman who hoped we could assist in her time of need, but for me it was more like a self guided tour, Billy behind or in front, who can remember?, but neither one of us were able to change the fact that the naked man in the bathtub was having a seizure, so we just noted whatever it was we each noted, and moved on, until we found ourselves outside, and back in motion, the smell of patchouli a sensory reference point.
Pat Metheney may have been the musical highlight, and I'm not clear who was on the afternoon blues stage but I'm thinking it was John Lee Hooker and/or Lightnin' Hopkins.
The trip changed both Billy and I, in ways we may ponder at length, and come early December he was talking about dropping out of school. I encouraged him to stay the course because it seemed like the thing to do, but I was restless too, and after a week in Dallas for Christmas break I lied to my parents saying I had a job to get back to in Austin. I then hitchhiked to Los Angeles and visited friend Mark Fitzpatrick on the USC campus. On the first night in town, or on the way out, I slept in the Rose Garden next to the Coliseum under a bed of yellow roses which I dedicated to my unrequited love. Must have been the way out because I was alone and I'm remembering now that I met a French Canadian raised in Georgia by the name of Rodney Gimberling on 290 West just outside of Austin after he had stolen some snacks from that roadside store, and we had made the trip west together. Some months later, back in Texas, Rodney would come back to haunt me and I would spend my first night in jail, for trying to beat a cab fare, in Dallas, which would then a couple of years later be the second to last jail I visited before becoming good, and honest, and wholesome, like I am now.
I think Rodney headed for San Francisco while I headed back to Texas to start my fifth semester at the University. It's hard to hitchhike out of Los Angeles. I have so far never been harmed by another in my travels but I can't help but remember the candor of what I consider the representative Los Angelian in regards to hitchhiking--after waiting four hours in one spot for a ride and a car stops and I get in and the driver accelerates onto the highway while casually inquiring "do you mind if I jack you off while I drive?" Under reacting to such a situation is a safe way to go and so a reponse like "you can let me off at the next exit" was all the defense I ever needed. I've told this story a hundred times and it bores me now to rewrite it, but I keep hoping there's some gratifying truth I can make use of by the remembering, the recounting, the recitation of it all. I have to move on now, this here as good a place as any, although I thought I'd stick it out tonight until I memoired the Yuma to San Antonio leg of this trip, but I''ve been wrong before and the experience of being wrong is maybe as good as a person gets.