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Golfing Buzzards
Not a lot of the big name golfers come to New Orleans for the HP Classic, formerly known as the Compaq Classic, which was formerly the Entergy Classic, or something. It's out at English Turn, a gated community w/ golf course east of Algiers, in Orleans Parish. I've started a job out there painting a newly constructed home in the Parks section. I don't know how they run off the buzzards for the big golf classic but they do, I feel sure of it. There are perhaps a hundred, or probably more, large buzzards that sun themselves on the roofs of half million and million dollar homes along a very particular stretch of English Turn Blvd., and just inside the Parks. I forget, if buzzards regurgitate or defecate their waste matter, but whichever it is, they leave long white streaks of it on the roofs of a handful of select two-story homes. I did not however see a single buzzard this morning. They are not always there in the Turn but I'm sure it's not a coincidence that has them missing for the golf classic. It is a little bit obscene the money surrounding large professional sporting events. I'm not sure why the big time golfers eschew the New Orleans classic except maybe most of them want to be in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area for the Byron Nelson Classic, which is like the week after, I think. And I don't know, maybe the prize money is lacking in New Orleans. This year's winner only walked away with 900,000 dollars. I am not so much a buzzard lover, and as a homeowner myself, I feel for those afflicted English Turners with multiple carrion eaters on their roofs. But also, it is with a sense of wonderment that I see this phenomenon from time to time, and invariably, it seems to make me smile just a little.
"Dick"
by Antonya Nelson, in 05.05.03 New Yorker.
This Guy
This guy hates me as I stare back at his puffy red listen to me I mean business head with I don't give a(n) f-you eyes. He mandates and runs, leaving one more questions than one had to begin with. I am always a bit curious as to which jobsite it is he runs off to in such a hurry. Safe to say it is always the one I am not on. The shortness of his visits do though facilitate my natural inclination to ignore his sorry ass, and go about the simplistic movements of my career. For the rest of the day I imagined various scenarios in which I became jobless because I am not a team player. In all the imagined scenarios I was out the door so fast, free at last, that I could not tell if his puffy red face was wearing a self-satisfied grin, or not. In one I was given a several thousand dollar cash severance and a two-year-old Chevy truck, which is better than imagining myself forlorn, tattered, idly roaming city streets with a sack of aluminum cans slung over my shoulder, but still, come on, imagine it better, baby.
Ghetto Jogging
I was glad that my DC area friend, my best buddy from childhood, showed up unannounced at my doorstep Saturday morning. He had jogged from Convention Center Blvd. up about twenty blocks of Canal Blvd., which is no small feat, but one I had seen him do in my imagination months previous. He survived it then and now. Saturday or Sunday mornings are probably best for it. I told him he was forever off the sissy list. That jog is a dangerous one but one that I've seen other non-urban oriented people do, and survive. I think surviving that jog without any altercation is possibly a thing that would happen as much as ninety percent of the time. The angle I'm still not accurately addressing is how the good times here roll parallel to the depravity and murder, without much of the latter bringing harm to the former. I think that is the story from here I'm trying to get but not getting right just yet. I had a great time with friends, moving around town freely and safely, drinking and eating well. But all around us people were committing the ultimate crime of killing their brothers. Not really a threat to those around them because almost exclusively the young men and occasional woman who die on the streets here die of point-blank gunshots to the head. Not that many stray bullets really and a person here who minds their own business has remarkable survival chances. Overall crime is down in NOLA, but murder is up 56 per cent. Just a reminder, old news, just a reminder, our urban youth are surgically assassinating each other at alarming rates. Still. This Jazzfest weekend set attendance lows records and you almost wish you could blame that on a fear factor affecting prominent whites--too much murder let's stay away (then of course somebody would take the problem seriously, smirk). But mostly people come here with the accurate assumption that everthing will be fine and some might even be completely unaware of how close they are to the real thing. Six murders over three days during Jazzfest. Two of them very local to Jazzfest commuters. And several more specific to the area over the previous month. I don't have a point about it, I just like lining the disparate possibilities up next to each other. As for jogging in or near the ghetto--surviving real threats may be good for the heart. Exercise some caution.
Health Care Professionals
My friend Mark missed a plane or something and somehow found himself in Houston instead of New Orleans so he rented a bright red Mustang and drove on in. Sure it was midnight when he clomped heavy-footed up my steps waking me from deep sleep but I wasn't dreaming so what of it. He brought a girlfriend, some bedding to separate him and herself from my floor, and various assorted beverages and snacks. I told him about towels and soap and he told me which of his snacks might most appeal to me. The girlfriend named Diane is nice and referring to her first trip to the deep south and a stop at a Baton Rouge area Walmart I asked was it a Super Walmart and she said, well it was all right (drum and cymbal). She's a veterinarian so I clued her in to the spiders that live here, the chameleon under the washer/dryer and the geckos living over the kitchen sink. I alluded to giant flying cockroaches but those really must be seen to be fully appreciated. I let her know right off about wild dog bb gunning and she doesn't approve, but I don't think we are going to blows over it. I don't approve of it either, even as I do it. The thing I didn't mention is Killer's pyschiatric problem and what, I want to know, is she going to do about it. As a visiting animal health care professional I think it is her responsibility to do something about that dog's anti-social behaviour. But her and Mark are out galavanting so Killer's emotional well-being is on hold. Lucinda Williams is about to go on one of the Jazzfest stages but I'm not there, as is my custom. I could take a nap but I would probably just dream about Killer barking, barking, barking. I got another Mark, a Craig, and a Jeff coming in later, staying down by the convention center. This convention center Mark just got certified to needle away problems with acupuncture. Maybe he will help Killer.
Conspiracy Of Mondays
Of late there has been a conspiracy of Mondays to shape and color time and events with a uh almost manic despair. That's the best you got!!!, I'm yelling at no one in particular, remembering back to when I had not the previous experience of it. I don't get very far on the puzzle and then its Monday again.
His Happy Trick
I'm so happy, I am the happiest man in the world. I'm happy about war, I'm happy that the US Treasury is going to collect every penny I have saved over the last year, I'm happy to be stuck, I'm happy to be going nowhere, I'm happy.
I'm happy my job sucks, my car is dying, my cat is dead. I'm happy I couldn't find his body, I'm happy there is no closure.
I was so happy to come home today and see that my neighbor had hired heavy machinery to tear down that building on his property that was the only architecturally interesting structure on this block.
I'm happy to be happy.
I'm happy the high hopes I entertained last night about meeting new people were dashed to bits. I'm happy I didn't dig 'em, didn't get it, don't dance.
I'm happy that every idea I have is faulty.
I'm happy to be here, I'll be happy to leave.
No kidding, I'm happier n' all get out.
College Basketball
I've been following over the last several months the reporting of violent crime (rape, armed robbery, and murder) in the 2200-2400 block of Dumaine. There's something bad happening over there and you can't guess or predict when it will stop and move somewhere else. Having it move somewhere else is the best you get around here. The murder last night on Dumaine, near Phillis Wheatly Elementary School, was one of two in the city, and I don't think either one of them account for the gunfire I heard in my own neighborhood around the same time both of the murders occurred. That's one thing about having a TV, you don't hear as much gunfire at night. I have noticed, in following crime trends in other neighborhoods, that eventually the murders bring about a lull in violent crime. Some of the bad people move away in simple acts of self-preservation, and the others, well, they're dead.
There's nothing to do about it. I don't want to sound like I've lost hope but the truth is today I don't have any. I can't write about these violent deaths everytime they occur because it amounts to an inconsideration of my audience. I mean, who needs it? I'm only reiterating simple facts that can be found in any newspaper in America.
It's better when you don't hear gunfire at night. It's such an angry, permanent sound. I can't always stand the pictures I see when I hear it. It hardly ever happens on Bourbon Street though. I guess that's what matters.
Congratulations to the Syracuse Orangemen, College Basketball Champions of the World, ya'll seriously kicked some Big 12 butt those last three games. I hope you enjoyed your stay here.
May Contain Doom
P came over disgusted to tell M that MH was beating some kid's head into the sidewalk, why didn't M do something about it.
"Yeah, stop the killing," I said.
There had been a shooting a bit earlier just around the corner, on Dorgenois, right where I had applied the break pedal a month previous and said to visiting friends that, "this is kind of a rough corner." It is a most unassuming kill zone but still, lots and lots of gunfire, blood, and death on that corner in the last ten (20? 30?) years.
M was asking me did I read about it and what was the condition of the shot cab driver. I said critical but didn't know any more than that. She said the shooting had stirred the kids up and was why they were fighting. The kids, a group of 3--15 boys aged 12-21, know the shooter, a 16-year-old neighborhood boy. The shooting at the corner is not an everyday thing, but maybe only once or twice a year with a free year skip every once in a while. I think its not a stretch to say that a 20-year-old man from the Sixth Ward of New Orleans will have had near or up-close exposure to as many as five or ten actual shootings, and better than casual knowledge in those twenty years of as many as forty murder victims.
"Yeah, you need to stop that killing," I reiterated.
Earlier in the year there was a ten day stretch with no murders, then in one day a four-year-old found his daddy's gun and shot himself dead and a 14-year-old boy accidentally shot dead his 15-year-old cousin.
There's a new School Superintendent, a guy named Amato from Connecticut, who given a treasury missing 31 million dollars is promising great improvements even as he stares down a monumentally ineffective, perhaps criminal, and often combative, school board, in a town that is steeped in failure.
Well, I was going to try and ascend towards a happy(er) ending, a bit of bright side, but the last three paragraphs have contained more bad mojo, so I'll just stop here for the day. At least I got my health (cough).
The Unimproved Guinness
(This is a piece of something from October of last year)
...so that taken care of, I have shifted my ire to yet another great wrong going on in this world. I speak, of course, of the new Guinness Draft in a bottle. What the holy hell is up with that widget? I don't want a rattling plastic rocket ship in my beer bottle. Eh, Uh, no, no, no. For any reason. No.
I refuse to believe this new packaging idea is the brainchild of an Irishman. The Irishman living in my imagination would never water down a perfectly good full strength Stout, call it Draught, and then pour only 11.2 ounces of it back into a sexily shaped bottle with a plastic skin and a plastic rocket rattling around inside and then implore me to "drink straight from the (rattling) bottle." It doesn't work. It doesn't work even if I couldn't tell the difference in a blind taste test between the bottle and a draught in a bar. I mean I probably couldn't. On one level--the level not being assaulted by that widget--the taste is very authentic draught, which I like Ok, in a bar, with 16 or 20 ounces of it in a heavy glass. But 11.2 ounces of very very smooth almost watery non carbonated supposedly stout beverage on a football Sunday is unacceptable. Good thing the full strength is still available, which then really gives me nothing to complain about.
December 17
(I found this in one of my draft files. It was written the week before Christmas. Time to get rid of it.)
I'm just unsure about where I am at. And I got too comfortable. Or I am misusing my comfort. Last year I closed off the front two rooms from the rest of the house and used a couple of small electric heaters to warm me through the winter, but this year I got the gas (finally) hooked up and the central system has me toasty. The house is still not finished really but did I mention hot water? Last year I took cold showers all winter, contorting myself so that the water only cascaded over key areas, and then maybe I would rinse myself with water boiled on an electric hotplate. Now though, turn a knob and this lovely lovely hot water comes pouring out the shower head and I just stay in there long after I'm clean and love the liquid warmth.
I've decided that not finishing the house is some sort of control freakiness, where like I'm in charge of inactivity. I am the best at it. Do not compete with me. I am very good.
Sometimes I think I'll use all forty gallons of hot water myself, but I get too sleepy before that happens, and I end up looking me over and thinking damn man, you certainly have developed a beer gut for such a skinny guy. Or like I'm the pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, without the breasts, acting ability, or deep throaty voice.
It appears I can say anything I want.
Let's see, also, since August, the dancehall got torn down and so now when I go into the kitchen for beer or whiskey or nachos or chicken salad I can look out the window and see across Iberville to the Pentecostal Church, which is not an awe inspiring edifice, yet does have a blue neon outlined cross atop its steeple. I bought a washer and dryer so I don't have to go the the Laundromat anymore, and I got a gas stove while I was at it, which I don't use alot, but a kitchen should really have one.
I think I already told you about getting a phone, and oh yeah, the mailing address thing finally took hold after some confusion about my existence. No hard feelings on that one though, I mean, that's what I'm getting at--this confusion about my existence. Like I can blame the post office for not understanding where I am at. I had to call in a favor to M to get that taken care of (ok, actually the gas meter too) because I finally realized I had invested too much of myself in not making the necessary phone calls. I had to find a place from which I could deal with the fact that I'm inaccessible even to myself and once I got there I asked for help. I'm not afraid to ask for help, I just forget it as an option.
And if I think about a thing and it goes on sale for 99 dollars, then I buy it. That's right. I upgraded the 5 inch b/w TV (In rereading some of the old stuff I realize I had another 5 incher for a few months back in 98) for a 13 inch color with built in VCR. Oh, and it has a remote, and I feel like, even though I'm not Catholic, saying--forgive me father, I have sinned. I rent movies, drink imported beer, and Irish Whiskey, I take hot showers, I recheck library books by phone, I have low speed Internet access via same phone, and I don't really do anything for anyone these days.
I mean the kids. I don't hardly see them anymore. I haven't seen Erica in two years, but I know more or less where she lives, in the 7th Ward, and I have heard recent reports that say she has gotten taller, and that she still looks like Erica, which is a good thing. Hi Erica. I think about you a lot. Merry Christmas. Are you nine?
My Barbecue Grill
If Satan were a dog he would look like Killer.
Of the three Bienville fronting houses that back up to my side yard, all three of them have watchdogs. Pertaining to my property, Sheba, an ancient female pit bull, when not napping, guards the back. Killer (my naming), the newest, some version of pit bull, guards the middle, and Watchdog (my naming), a Border Collie mut, guards the front.
I have this miniature barbecue grill. It is not a hibachi. I store it under the house, right across from Killer's territory. Killer does not exactly differentiate all that well between friend and foe. When getting out my grill I can calmly turn my back on Killer only because he is restrained with heavy duty chain in addition to a chain-link fence being between us. Still, that sound of chain dragging across dirt and the rattling of the fence when Killer rushes to defend territory is not calming. I try, sometimes without success, to not yell at Killer, as that only exacerbates his bad attitude. Once in awhile I might try soothing baby talk like--"that's my baby Killer, yesss it is, that's my sweet little Satan from Hell." Such sweet nothings have so far yielded no positive results.
The college basketball team (Oklahoma) that I was hoping would make it here to New Orleans for the Final Four lost it's semi-final game so that's that. I guess I will cheer now for my alma mater but I'm a dropout so maybe that should be al mat. Go you Longhorns, go. And yet, if I had cable I would tonight watch and cheer against those (Lady) Longhorns. Go LSU, go. Temeka Johnson rules.
I'm having to work in Hammond again this week, so I have to leave a little earlier, 5:30 a.m., to meet my boss for the commute. I am not comforted by the small group of guys hanging out across the street in front of my neighbor's house. She is pretty much a squatter over there; there is no electricity, and the plumbing amounts to little more than dripping water in a stained tub; the toilet is not connected to a water source and is only loosely connected to the floor over the sewage line. I was called in once as a consultant a couple of years ago. Supposedly she had twenty-four hours to fix the toilet or would be thrown out. I told her that fixing what existed there in that period of time was a hopeless proposition. I guess the "landlord" did not have the heart to put her out on the street. She doesn't pay rent. She's seventy and her health is not that good. She is an avid reader. We sometimes share books. When her reading glasses break I try to tape them together. I used to be friendly with her companion but he's gone now. She bums money off me and when I'm flush and feeling generous it's no problem, but when she's got that many shiftless guys hanging out on a regular basis and comes asking me for money I feel much like the chump. Someone finally stole those two pieces of wood under the house. I blame those guys over there. It is towards them that I direct my enmity. I hope they start keeping a lower profile.
Final Four In Lebanon?
This is the greatest damn country in the whole world, and anyone who feels counter to that is simply jealous of American college basketball in March. We are a family here, and like any family we don't all get along all the time. Sometimes our family has a patriarch who is not ideally suited to the job. The great thing is, if we don't like our patriarch, a bunch of us get together, go behind a curtain, punch a few buttons, and presto, we get rid of our patriarch, cleanly, with none of that icky patricidal mess.
When I was a boy my mother would suggest that if I didn't like her I could just go on down to the 7-11 and get myself a new mom. She would always suggest a red head, I don't know why, except I guess she herself was auburn-haired once. She had me, the youngest of her six, in her pre-matured graying forties, so that's all I've ever known of her hair color. I always liked that though, that idea of freedom she presented to me--if you don't like it sonny-boy, try something else. I ran away when I was about 18 months old. Again, when I was ten-years old, and finally for good when I made my 18 years. Her and my father were pretty tolerant of my behavior and always seemed genuinely pleased to see me after I was away for awhile. That didn't hurt me none.
Both of my father's parents were Lebanese Christian immigrants escaping Turkish oppression during the end of the 19th century. They came to America for the promise of freedom. They did ok for themselves. My grandmother Elizabeth (Aziza) had the opportunity to be a dressmaker in NY but continued across country to Austin, TX to be with her childhood sweetheart. They married. Had thirteen kids. Grandpa ran a grocery store on Sixth St. I never knew him but my grandmother lived until my 14th year. She was a beautiful woman with translucent wrinkled skin and long long white hair that she kept in a braided ponytail. She mostly spoke Arabic. She baked the best (unleavened) bread any man has ever eaten. She once talked on the phone, in broken English, to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was then vice-president of the United States.
I don't know what it is about war that makes me think about family. It is war though that I have to get around before any other thought will come out. There is much atrocity in the world, of that there is no doubt. If it were my goal to do so I could make you cry describing simple truths that exist minutes, seconds, away from this computer screen. There is much to be improved in America. To the extent that each of us will do something positive to bring about improvement, we will see improvement. As for America's current foreign policy, I don't know. There is a place you can stand and see that we may mean well. That something good may come of all this. I try to stand there occasionally so that I don't lose hope. I have this not completely formed hypothesis that it is possible to bring good to people who don't, on the surface, act like they want it. I am pretty much certain though, that beneficence cannot be delivered with arrogance. As a country, we might work on that some. In 2004 I will vote to oust the current administration. Until then (and after I suppose) I will be expecting the worst, hoping for the best. Now I am off to my television, where I hope to watch the Wisconsin Badgers beat the crap out of the Kentucky Wildcats.
Litterbug
I'm trying to watch the war, will you please shut up Watchdog and Killer. I think it's that yellow bastard that's got them all up in arms, barking like it's a code red or something. That yellow bastard saunters by the chain link fence taunting chained up dogs by spraying forth that essence of himself.
Spring is in the air all right.
I try to watch with Discovery Channel-like detachment the courting ritual of cats as they go about procreating in the recently mowed weeds next door. I can't tell if it's Shorty or Spinks that that yellow bastard is dominating. It's not as subtle as TV, looking out my kitchen window at this. I have to turn away. I need a commercial.
Last night there was more barking so I got up off the couch to look out front. I slipped on a New Yorker and fell, totally out of control, at the last minute grabbing onto a bottle of Arizona iced tea, which buffered the momentum of my elbow heading for the hardwood floor. It was just a car turning around in my driveway. Thanks Watchdog. I try to console myself after the ignominious falling by assuring myself that if I never get off the couch again I'll be safe.
Later, there is loud rap music, and voices, from over yonder. There's been lately some cars who think it's a drive-thru service over there, honking loudly and repeatedly until someone comes out. It is sloppy behavior and it makes me feel fed up. This is a very quiet block and it is in everyone's best interest that it stay that way. That's the way my thinking sounds when I'm fed up.
I'm looking out the front door glass again. There he is, quintessential urban gangster, in a shiny Cadillac with spoke rims. That music is going to burst his eardrums. He is eating fast food from a sack. Finishing, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, wads up the sack, and tosses it into the street before screeching off in a fishtail down Iberville. That littering really chafes my hide. I see one of myselves layering off from the others and running outside to grab that sack. He runs down Iberville toward the projects, screaming--hey man, hey man, you forgot this, you, you, less than fastidious bastard. Soon he arrives in no-mans land. I can't help him out there. He is way too far out of context. He should have stayed on the couch with the rest of us.
Nonplussing In America
I was never keen on the word "nonplussed." For years I would just read around it; didn't even want to know what it meant. I figured if I ignored it long enough it would just go away and be replaced by a more pleasant-looking word. Now though, in view of current events, I feel that to be in a constant state of nonplus is perhaps the only sane way of being. I think it could become a national trend. I think one day soon this gape-jawed condition may even infect our youth and that it will be a common thing around neighborhoods to hear mothers calling to their children, "Billy, Susy, ya'll quit all that nonplussing around and come in for dinner."
I've been listening to an oldies radio station at work and today was prepared for the worst when the hosts solicited for listeners to call in and give their opinion on the start of this war, baiting the question with the idea of "have we done enough or should we unleash the heavy guns?" These guys are towing the incumbent party line and from past experience with this show and others like it I was prepared for some heavy duty flag waving jingoism. But no one called in. The hosts chummed the waters some more by playing the more awful bits from Jr's speech last night, and then waited for those calls to come pouring in. But no one called in. They played Whitney Houston's Star Spangled Banner, and Ray Charles' God Bless America. Finally someone called--a woman, with apparent time on her hands, and that Southern twang in her voice that one might unfairly associate with conservative politics, or worse, and I was like, oh boy, here we go, the floodgates of nationalism are now open. She said, "I've got a son over in the Middle East, I'm not allowed to say where..."
Last week I was working out of town, north of here, up in Hammond, and Tickfaw, and I had listened to a local country station that had people calling in, waving flags. They were all mostly loaded with the undeniable fact that that bastard Saddam had started all this what with that 9/11 thing, and payback is a mther***ker, so get back Loretta. Maybe nonplussed is too light of a word to describe my bewilderment.
Jesus, I can't even imagine what a true liberal must be feeling. I can't really claim to be a true liberal, as I am on record as backing Bush in his war on terrorism, to the extent that meant capturing (or killing, I wasn't going to quibble) all those responsible for the WTC attack. I was even willing to go so far as to back his blowing up of a country which harbored al Qaeda fugitives (and Afghanistan was a freebie). But Bush doesn't seem to have any interest in blowing up Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Pakistan, or Lebanon.
Strangely, there is a kind of perverse pleasure in backing the policy of someone whose policies you generally do not respect at all. And I was willing to indulge in perverse pleasure for my country. But this shit with Iraq, excuse me, this shit with Iraq, I'm sorry, this bullshit with Iraq is setting precedent I cannot get behind, even if I do not totally disagree with the ousting of Hussein as a thing that could possibly benefit the greatest number of people.
Mr. Bush, Maureen Dowd today points out that your boy Cheney tries to build you up by saying you're like Reagan, and Reagan said "you've got to be revered and feared," to which Dowd responds--"This crowd [your crowd Mr. Bush] has the fear part down cold. They have a long way to go on the other." Thank you Maureen.
I cringed a little waiting for what the woman on the radio was going to say. The hosts interrupted her with congratulations and prayerful wishes regarding her son and then the woman went on to say that she thinks we got no business being there and this is a big mistake and how she can't make any sense of why we are invading Iraq and that she can only imagine it will make our country less safe and when the one host interrupted and said--but your son must feel differently, she responded that she could not speak for her son but implied no son of hers is a goddamned fool so figure it out for yourself. The host slung a jingoistic fastball at her but she didn't flinch not a little bit and said right back to him that she thought current foreign policy was a path to WWIII. She seemed genuinely fearful.
These morning discussions are a regular part of the station's format and often run for 6 or 10 calls and maybe a real gem of a caller will be replayed throughout the day. But on a day one might have predicted a flood of patriotic response the switchboard was not taxed. If there was one other caller it would have occurred while I briefly worked out of hearing range. Shortly after that though I was near the radio again and nobody else called to refute the words of the mother, all morning. And the hosts dropped the question, played music instead of talking, and jingoism died for a day.
Somebody In Boots
I was getting in a little weed eating before it rains again. The other day the Pentecostals cut the weeds on the part of the L that is visible from their church but not the part that runs next to me. I sometimes let their slovenly behavior influence me to be messy too, as it seems silly to cut my few little weeds when they've got this veritable jungle growing up next to me. If I called and complained they'd probably come mow things down but then I wouldn't have anything to write about.
There is some, uh, urban-type activity in one of the houses across from me, and today while pausing in my weed massacre, one of the gentleman who is part of a newer crowd over there came up and offered to sell me a car battery for ten dollars. I said no thanks I really don't need one and then thought how funny it would be if this guy came in the night and stole my battery so that I would need one. And then I thought maybe this is the guy who did steal my battery many many months ago. So I thanked him for asking, real polite, as an effort to dissuade the gods of irony from making another funny thing happen to me. From across the street before going back inside, the fella said--seven dollars.
For unknown reasons I haven't lately been able to read much so I was happy to get through the New Yorker short story about the caterers with a kid named Pill who bakes magic bread. I then tried the Louise Erdrich in a previous issue but I couldn't make myself pay attention. So I moved on to the Nelson Algren I had started several weeks ago and had placed the bookmark sixty pages into, after what was possibly the beginning of my current long-running attention deficit. It's his first one, from 1935, Somebody in Boots. It is not an easy read. His working title for the novel had been Native Son, but he changed his mind about it and offered the title to his sometimes pal, fellow Chicagoan, Richard Wright. Wright used it and did pretty well.
Somebody in Boots is like a more hard-core, less political, slightly pornographic, less cheerful version of Grapes of Wrath. The protaganist is a nineteen-year old kid named Cass McKay who is learning the ropes of being a rail riding hobo during the depression, and is in and out of whore houses, soup kitchens, and jail for most of the hundred pages I have read so far. Last night in thirty pages he was witness/participant in the gang rape of a black woman, then jumping into a moving train at night he lands on the stomach of a pregnant white woman, causing her baby to be still-born; a little bit later, looking for food in a trash can his hand comes out covered in human excrement; and if none of that is bad enough, in a fit of hunger driven hallucinatory lust, he attempts on his own the rape of a young woman who turns out to be a ten-year old child. I can only guess that Algren knew the reader would not recover from that last scene and so Cass snaps out of it at the last moment, and let's the little girl escape. And there is jail rape and one awful thing after another. As I mentioned, it's not an easy read, but in a sense feels necessary. Like If I were paying attention I could learn something useful regarding the graphic horror story that is mankind.
Without The Harley
Maybe things aren't that bad I thought this morning at 7 a.m. on the back porch of a 5000 square foot home in the walled but not gated community of Southlake, in Kenner La. I have watched over the last several months while working on this and two other nearby homes the complete layout and infrastucture-building of a new neighborhood that is now nothing but hauled in river sand and two parallel streets. Nobody is buying the half-million dollar homes we have finished and so it is encouraging to see that someone with juevos grandes is banking on the future, developing the land behind this last street of finished or nearly finished homes as if we were in a Clinton-era heyday, instead of this Bush-is-a-failure doomsday.
I was acting like Peter Fonda at the campsite, except Jack and Dennis were missing and there were no stand-ins, which is to say I was alone in the treachery of my self- abuse. I use the past to predict the future so I was comfortable in my meager lawlessness. I try to respect the natural order of things even as I am pretty damn smug about being good at what I do. People like my work, and so who are they to question what it is I do in preparation? Of course, there is no future in getting caught so when I Iooked behind me into the house and saw the supervisor coming down the stairs I exhaled fully and dropped whatever it was and walked back into the house. He, yet another Jim in construction, met me just as I came back inside and said, "I slept here last night," which is a joke but one I briefly considered as literal truth because of the hour. It was early for Jim to be on the job. I pictured one after the other at rapid speed the possible scenarios that would account for a grown, moderately successful man to sleep on a construction site. I have a lot of sympathy for whatever it would be. My jugular was pounding visibly as I went through the motions of conversation several hours before I am generally capable of it. I was using too many words. He showed me something upstairs he thought was very important and I assured him the best I could that I would make it look better than it looked now. That's all he wanted. He left. I changed the radio station and went about doing what it is I do for a living.