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What?
Was a while back that me and my siblings fretted over my aging mother's lack of hearing and we badgered her to get hearing implementation but she resisted and we capitulated.
We adjusted to eardrum splitting TV and telephone-ringer volume. We forgive her for constantly saying "what?" when we forget to yell out our conversation. Or at least yelling is what it feels like for a soft-spoken person.
We try to forgive ourselves when we lose our minds, lose patience, get pissed off at the nature of things as represented by an 86-year-old mother with a pronounced widow's hump, lack of hearing, and an incrementally progressing dementia.
Her independence, desire for autonomy, ability to fight off our suggestions of professional assistance we console ourselves as evidence of her strength in the battle against disappearing from the map of usefulness. Nature is harsh.
That she wants to carry on alone in that big house we holler out cautiously, hallelujah.
That when anyone visiting leaves the house she immediately begins worrying about them we find charming.
That those that left the house are in her mind of a number far greater than actuality and that we can't answer when are they coming back with any more confidence than ten years ago we could play the role of dad's secretary when he gave you/she instructions from the realm of near-death dilaudid dreams, we just right off as curious but not debilitating.
That she maintains the grudge against the potentially helpful neighbor who once cussed at her ten years ago while going through his divorce trauma we just consider no big deal.
That the formerly vivacious woman across the street who lost her husband shortly after our mom did ten years ago, and then went into virtual seclusion, and who has now started making yard maintenance appearances but seems pissed off at our mother for some imagined or real insult we just say yeah well shit's weird all over.
That our mom can't sit in her nice private back patio without obsessing over the neighbor's over-hanging tree and whether or not it will crash into the house during some future storm from hell, but which she does not want to rightfully have trimmed because she doesn't want to get in a hassle with the neighbor and yet doesn't sense the irony that lack of communication is the cause of all her neighborly hassles, we just see as testimony to the fact that we are all fucked up in different ways.
That she is going to be able to maintain the allegiance off the autistic yardman who has been doing her yard for fifteen years and who persists with the insane, absolutely insane assertion that she owes him 30 dollars, we can only hope.
It's funny how things play out. How independence was taught and glorified as a strength and how you yourself know it to be one of the most alluring drugs, of the many you have tried, and yet how it seems to limit so much the experience of those under its spell.
At the beginning of my bachelorhood a few years ago mom expressed a totally non-insulting concern about my lack of mate and progeny to sustain me in old age and that is the cruelest of the many ironies that bombard me daily because of her six children, 20 grandchildren, and handful of great-grandchildren, not a lot of us are around to ''sustain" her. And this is no slight to my siblings that live near her and do obviously more than the rest of us combined to assist her. It's just that she is so goddamned stubborn, which is fine, but in old age is playing out less than fine. It seems we are all resolved to wait it out, for an incident that forces action. Until then, autonomy rules the day. I know it sometimes crosses her mind these last ten years without the old man around to annoy her, just what a long day it is.
My sister and I were talking recently, after a visit with moms, and we laughed, sort of, nervously, like you do about things that don't strike you as particularly funny, "remember when it was just her hearing we were worried about?"
Free Sex
Down at the bayou hoping for maybe one last lick from the Duchess two gabbing female joggers pass behind me as I listen to Hendrix Drifting and the only word I can hear over the music comes from the one on the left saying to the one on the right, "asshole." I am not so sensitive, or gluttonous for the punishment I am capable of self-serving, to think that the word was intended for me and yet how can the word not be considered my own special gift from this bayou to which I come for just such gifts?
You wouldn't think so many doubts and insecurities could be interconnected, separate, but joined in mass like black raindrops. What an impressive shitstorm is to be had if you only seed your own clouds with your own crappy thoughts.
I am going to remember this first part of 2004 and use it against myself (for myself) when I later on am being deliriously happy and guilty about it because imprinted inside of me is a world populated by so much misery and degradation. Just a small example of which lives a bit off center from across the street and to which I have lately been offering assistance and shitting on at the same time, a combination I find most contemptible. Thanks babe, you are so right. I am an asshole. But enough whining, self-debasement, how about a little free sex?
I do not mind admitting that I have some sort of mental problem. It does not embarrass me to admit this, nor do I care if it embarrasses you, however unkind a light that last admission might put me under. But there's going to be the mention of sex here, not the actual thing but the mention of it. The tension of it? not really, but what the hell, are you getting so much really good, uncomplicated, passionate and peaceful, self-regenerating sex that you are not at all intrigued, vicariously interested in my sex story? Hey everybody, free safe sex, come and get some.
I mean literally I am now running inside and locking my door to avoid having sex. She's out there right now (in a temporally artistic licensed sort of way), sitting on those steps across the street, waiting for my slightest nod, obviously not the least bit concerned that I now know that the two dollars and seventy-five cents I earlier gave her was not for bus fare to Kenner, but probably for cigarettes, or a couple of Hubig's sweet potato pies.
She showed me her tits. I'm not happy about this lack of decorum, neither the showing nor the mentioning but it's a thing that has happened; I swear to god I spare you quite a bit in the long run of things. Do you think I'm happy about unseemliness? Forget about it.
She told me she was m'dear's grandchild (m'dear is the mistress of the nearby crackhouse), snuck up on me to tell the lie, and me in the closest state I'll ever get to being ambitious, really giving it somewhat my all to complete this Rocheblave project after four years of drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops. I don't take you for a dummy, I know you know I ripped that from Hendrix, but that's what I had my ears plugged into (again) when she snuck up on me to tell the lie.
I went to get the two dollars and seventy-five cents from my change cup while she waited and prepared to seduce me for profit below my new steps (the ones I just re-did because they didn't fall right according to the last inspector who busted me against his natural inclination to respect me in all my less than perfect glory.)
When I came out she had her blouse up, adjusting her bra. I turned away in a half-hearted attempt at being a gentleman and when I looked again she was still fixing herself and cussing m'dear for something about the bra which I did not understand. I gave her eleven quarters. She smiled at me. I smiled, sort of, or grimaced. I gave her eye contact and she was right there waiting for it. She had something on her mind. She lifted up her blouse again, innocently trying to fix something that wasn't right. I'm pretty slow but hit me in the head with a brick and it hurts so I knew now that her offered flesh and her leering were meant for me. I looked at her chest this time because it seemed impolite not to.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked me and I should have said yes but I said no.
"Do you live alone?" she asked me and I should have said no but I said yes.
She was onto something, she thought, and I was preparing to back peddle, amazing myself again at how gullible I have remained after all these years.
"Do you like black girls?" she asked me and I should have said, ewww, no, ick, but I said--of course, what's not to like?
She said, "some white guys don't like black girls," and I said I bet that number is less than you think.
She asked me if I would like for her to come over sometime and she didn't need to be Halle Berry for me to say, well you're here right now, why don't you come in, but in truth, she would need to be a little bit more Halle Berry than she was. Crackwhore seems like a really unkind characterization and honestly I don't like how it implies the superiority of those that might use it to describe someone, because you know you ain't a hell of a lot better than what you think you mean when you say crackwhore, but all that said, ain't no crackwhore coming in here. In the unlikely event that Halle Berry takes to the street and shows up here on my doorstep, soliciting herself for the contents of my change cup, well then, I will just do my best to live with the earned title--hypocritical, crackwhore-fucking, shitheel.
But I just said I'm not seeing anyone or wanting to see anyone for a while longer, thank you, and she made a last ditch effort, no, you know, I mean if you need somebody to do some cleaning for you and I said no. She went away after a few more frighteningly unsexy come-hithers, and I went back to being dumbfounded about the specifics of the porch railing I was attempting to build.
90 Degrees To The Street
Five years ago he sank a three-pointer at the buzzer that gave his high school team a one point win that would have advanced them to the state semi-final game. The team had an illegal backup player and the losing squad as a secret weapon brought this to light after the disappointing loss. A brief investigation led to the disqualification of the winning team and put a nix on their chance for back to back state basketball championships. For five years after the team could not even win their district even as former players rose to impressive levels in the college and pro ranks. This year they made it back to the championship game in Lafayette and lost by one point. The former player who sank the three-pointer went on to college on a football scholarship, was red-shirted as a freshman and will finish his course studies this year. Back on Dumaine, his "cousin," an affable, high-spirited, dreadlocked youngster, who did not earn one of the very few available urban exit visas, was shot dead late Monday night in the 28 hundred block.
These past ten years in New Orleans are bookended by national recognition as the country's number one murder capitol. In the 26 hundred block there are fifteen children weaving and bobbing amongst each other and between passing cars. They are clustered by the portable basketball goal near the corner by the store. The rim is loose on the backboard and has a single strand of net hanging down at an angle that should be 90 degrees to the street but is not. The children are from adjacent neighborhoods and may be the children of children. They are the ages of the boys who lived around here ten years ago. Some of those boys from back then are graduating high school this year, some are not. Some are attending community college. Some are self-employed and highly visible. There is not ten years later the same degree of lawlessness on 26 hundred but the difference might not be discernible to an untrained eye.
Also two blocks away from the hanging piece of a net a murder did occur last week at St. Ann and Rocheblave. For the most part the kids are not literally dodging bullets.
A shiny brown Chevy with chrome rims and illegally tinted windows stops across the street and three white undercover cops get out and cluster around J who is leaning against a broke down car. They make him lift up his t-shirt. They are either admiring the scars of past bullet wounds or checking for the weapon that is not there. Time is money and less than a minute passes before they are back in the car, cruising slowly through the throng of juvenile basketball players.
My Friend, Killer
I can hear the guy plopping down on my side steps and there is no real drama around here these days and there is no real harm in him plopping down out there but I'm so pissed at this new routine where him and his brother or friend bring their pit bulls for a walk in the Pentecostal lot, and make Killer next door go absolutely nuts for about thirty minutes every night that I rip open the door and glare even as he is jumping up and apologizing. I just tell him it's nothing personal but his presence makes that dog go nuts and the farther away from me he and his pit bulls are the better. Even the logic of it sounds screwy to me. Why shouldn't someone make use of that park next door? So what if a perpetually chained dog is screwy in the head and doesn't like the smell of free dogs in close proximity? My whole point starts from wanting to be an asshole, not wanting to offer any kindness to someone whose dogs contribute to a situation that makes me suffer from lack of peace. Why should he get to sit on my steps and I can't even fully appreciate the moderate buzz from my second Heineken? It's a weak beginning to a good point. I don't know how to best address such a situation. Um, I'm thsorry, could you pleaazze not promenade your canine creatures in my vahthintity. I jus wanna enjoy some peacthe and quiet. So.
I am approaching the construction of my budget porch railing very cautiously and while I am making headway I really got to say that having no experience at something you are trying to do pretty much sucks. That's where I'm at on that, the pretty much sucks stage. But I go at it a little everyday, lining up all the difficulties in neat little rows, waiting for the lightbulb to come on. The thing about construction, oh hell, life too I guess, is that all your previous careless mistakes visit you in subsequent and perpetual fashion until you correct and address them properly and even then you run the risk that when it's all said and done the code inspector (God?) might tell you the whole thing is wrong, wrong, wrong, tear it down and start over.
I've been spending a little quality time with Killer (whom I now call by his Christian name, Butch, during those periods of quality time.) An idea that has crossed my mind is that Killer may be racist. This is not a point I am going to belabor. Regarding racism I tend to remember the words of Shelton who as a teenager once said to me "I really don't care if they call me 'nigger,' Mr. Jim." At the time I had wished he did care and equally admired him for not caring. Anyway, I don't think Killer's main thing is a problem with my whiteness. Finally it came to me last night, he's just lonely, and unhappy with his chain. He wants to play.
I set up my table saw in my side yard right outside his fence partly because the bitch in me was rising and I was tired of avoiding that part of my property just to accommodate that mthrfking whoredog, Killer. In between ripping 45 degree angles off the three and a half inch top side of pressure treated two by fours I would flick pebbles at Killer, the first time out of meanness and all the other times because he thought it was a game and he would lurch for them and cease barking for up to a minute at a time. He would almost look happy, in that expectant "hey throw me the ball, throw me the ball" sort of way that dogs have. And as if I'm not happy unless I'm considering a scene in its melancholy aspect the thing about this time with Killer is--I think I may be the best friend he's got.
I Don't Say
I got up early and drove the three or four minutes to St. Philip alongside Armstrong Park and brought the truck to a stop on the right side of the street by the fire hydrant near the side entrance to the park, right inside of which is a cluster of buildings and inside one of these is the headquarters for the public radio station, WWOZ. On the way back from the French Quarter (which at this point in the telling I have yet to reach and), which begins just outside the park on the other side of Rampart, I sat on the first of the two green benches on the right side of the driveway leading up to the building inside of which is the radio station. On those benches you can catch a little early morning sun if that is your inclination.
In the French Quarter I had walked its length or breadth all the way to Decatur and was one of the first customers at the Café du Monde, which is nearly an impossible thing to be considering that it is an establishment which operates 24 hours a day.
Walking back to the truck along St. Ann and then Dumaine I had passed some Quarter residents walking their dogs--one dog was a very cute puppy and I smiled at it--and a Creole-looking gentleman in a billowy dark pink shirt who greeted me a little more directly than I found to my liking but I just said back to him as my greeting, "all right," with none of the more street-wise urban inflection.
In the café trying to drink my small coffee black and eat my beignets before they got cold I was taken by the manner of a well dressed, grey-headed businessman who looked nothing like my father but reminded me of him just the same. My father is dead but he used to come here to New Orleans on business related to politics and it is possibly that, the headlines about yesterday's elections that I can see as the grey-headed man turns the pages of his newspaper, which triggers the part of my mind where my father is stored.
Right after I finished my coffee I contemplated briefly the beauty of the two young daughters at the table to my left but I felt myself drifting too far from the piers of provinciality so I got up quickly and left out of there, walking up that ramp to the moonwalk where there is a cannon that if operable could shoot a hole in the front of the St. Louis Cathedral. If you are looking at the Cathedral from up there the Mississippi River is behind you shimmering like some really impressive metaphor. Tankers and ferries and tugboats pass by. The two side by side grey steel suspension bridges are off in the distance stage right. The early morning winter sun is bright, blinding, and low in the sky.
When the grey-headed gentleman in the café turned to the metro section I read the headline about yesterday's shooting death at the corner grocer's in Central City. I was watching a Stephen King movie on tape last night and bored with a particular scene I had switched over to a news channel and caught the silent movie surveillance tape from the store. The tape showed a group of young masked boys exiting the store, the last one extending his arm straight out towards off camera behind the counter and calmly firing with very little recoil of his handgun the kill shot at approximately head height.
Bare Breasts Of The Bourgeoisie
The thing about trying to keep in tune with your environment is that you sometimes run the risk of already having a lot in common with your environment and it's not all good, you, or your environment. But you have pledged allegiance for better or worse and the thing that is your days, and your environment, will play itself out with or without your accord. You can set a thing into motion, which you cannot stop, until it plays itself out to its final act.
I've stopped reading books that make me want to kill myself and have set about the task of completing the thing I have tried to control for so long by not completing, Rocheblave. Church lady passersby sometimes pause and say "that's really pretty" and I go and assume they have been around long enough to know what was here before and I feel pretty good about it I don't mind saying.
I have to redo two of the three sets of stairs and put up a railing and this I started after much "let's wait just one more day dwelling in darkness." I was even doing other unnecessary detail work on the house rather than complete the thing that grants me this modicum of freedom; a taste of "you're not a complete fuckup."
I re-glazed the last 18 panes of glass on the two salvage yard replacement widows that I paid too much for but had to have to plug the fire-ravaged hole in the eastern wall of the bedroom. And that only needed doing in the sense that I knew I would use it against me if I didn't re-glaze them. I cleaned up a few years worth of giant sycamore leaves and accumulated construction debris from under the house and hauled two heavy pickup truck loads to the dump on Elysian Fields.
I had to listen to Killer bark relentlessly for two days and breathe in the smell of wet fermented dog shit on successive, hot, muggy, New Orleans days. In the end I was calling him Butch and suffering his sporadic and inexplicable silences. I used a reciprocating saw with a jagged blade to trim some junk tree limbs from the fence which separates us while his master lady yelled at him to leave me alone and I wondered would I increase or decrease his intense feelings for me if his snout got slashed while he tried getting his fangs on my white knuckles.
The book, excellent, despite the fact that only Dreiser's Great American Tragedy has depressed me more, was The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. Here's your excerpt: "If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope."
Mardi Gras happened. Three bystanders got shot and one killed on St. Charles on a stretch of the neutral ground (median) that is known as the "freedom zone" (although that's not the exactly what it's called), which is a length of about 8 blocks prior to Lee Circle where rival gangs (although gangs are not exactly what we have here in New Orleans) and their families are supposed to co-exist peacefully for the duration of Carnival parades.
Also, I am told there was a letter to the editor in the Times Picayune bemoaning the fact that in 2004, the 21st century, 40 years after the hard won successes of many a civil rights battle, that in Metairie, the first westerly suburb of New Orleans, and the recipient of the great "white flight" legions those 40 years ago, that an all black New Orleans marching band participating in the suburban version of Mardi Gras, was racially berated along stretches of the parade route by a small but hateful and vociferous minority.
I quit going to Metairie parades after witnessing a similar situation eight or nine years ago. Anyway, there is always a whole lot going on here, during Mardi Gras, and otherwise, and not much of it makes it onto those tapes sold on independent TV stations featuring the bare breasts of the white middle class on Bourbon Street.
Rules Of Engagement
By the time you pass that corner, you have been so studiously avoiding everybody's street business that you are electrified by the calling of your name and the implied kindness of that declaration in that it says you exist in a way that is not a threat to others and that in fact he really is glad to see you, this despite or partly because you have hated each other for brief periods over the past seven or eight years (as love demands.)
You always knew you had no business asserting your idea of rightness into a system that in large part is disdainful of your presence but to let yourself be scavenged seemed right enough and in the end it turns out nobody took anywhere near as much as they gave.
The childish exhilaration of a (jailhouse) kid who is now a man by law and for so many years lashed out at the world at large for holding him back from this rightful position (king of a corner for a day?), is the part that gets me.
This simple thing he is telling me, him on the corner, me in my idling truck, as the cars line up behind me, is an admission of a shared lifetime lived out over a few lazy afternoons spent lollygagging about town with him and his cousins. I can't hold up traffic too long, it's not allowed. I want to get out and jump up and down with giddy abandon, and tell him just how "neat" is this thing he is telling me which in and of itself is nothing, nothing at all. But I'm way too cool for that, and besides, that would also be a thing that's not allowed.
The Tutor
M, in the privacy of her New Orleans ghetto dwelling, was tutoring a kid in her so-called spare time after her full time job as a medical consultant/grant writer and her second job as a professional tutor for less than stellar performers from the surrounding suburban ghettoes.
My back was to it while I checked email and posted my latest self-absorption and this kid was getting cut no slack at all. M does not humor punk ass bitches and this kid was standing up to the test in admirable fashion despite the fact that we should all be volunteering for literacy programs, each and every fucking one of us. Money is great if you got it, face time is better. The kid is a very bright survivor of a totally fucked up New Orleans educational system and I'm happy he could understand as many words as he could but that's only because I have heard worser. U hoid me?
A couple of kids on the border of adulthood came in making exaggerated shivering noises and M shushed them while I called them pussies and pulled up a picture of the snow encrusted mansion of my future. "Pool's in the back," I said. "Got a heater in it? Should have a heater," was the extent of their marvel.
I asked the one near adult if he had completed the online job applications M had brought up and left for him to complete while she was at work and he shook his head and I said, "you're meat." The other near adult youngster affects a harsher look, which is perfectly suitable for the neighborhood. You would be afraid of him if you passed him in his context, and I knew he wanted online after me so when I finished I said "go ahead," and he wouldn't make a move. I interrupted M and said "P wants online" and she looked at P like he a piece of a man and said, "when's the last time you did a dish in here or lifted a finger to help in anyway?," and he looked away ashamed but ready to smile his way out but M preempted that with, "don't you even think about giving me that smile." He didn't. I suggested to the other youngster maybe he could fill out those applications. Then I left to go back to my own adjacent ghetto.
I was on the front porch heading for my truck parked in front the house and a voice called out from the street and I wish my sight wasn't so fucked up but it is so I just went to meet the voice and by the time I stood in the middle of the street I saw it to be Shelton so I said hey. He was shivering.
"You cold?"
"Yeah I'm cold," he said. Said he was waiting for his father to come pick him up. He was really shivering.
I didn't know what to say so I said, "You want me to give you a ride?"
He didn't get exasperated with me being a dullard, he just said, "No, I'm waiting for my dad."
He shivered some more and told me of some flu-like symptoms, which didn't sound nice, and I asked him what kind of car his dad drove. He said it was such and such a make and model and that it was like the car Mama D used to drive.
He said he had passed by my house with a friend a few nights previous and he said he had said some nice things to his friend about my abilities as a ghetto renovator.
"What time?" I asked.
"Oh, it was late," he said.
"I go to bed early," I said.
He shivered some more. I said, "Do you want to sit in my truck and wait?" He shrugged off that suggestion and said he was going to wait in the barbershop. I nodded.
"Stop by sometime if you see the light on."
"Ok," he said.
The Flood
I was elevated on a ridge below sea level walking an area where posted signs warned not to feed the alligators but I saw no such thing to feed, just lots of tiny birds nibbling on Spanish moss. Getting off trail my leg rubbed up against the sign that said not to and I walked the twenty feet over worn marsh grass to dig my fingernails into the soil beneath the raised roots of a two hundred year old live oak tree that had grown from a thousand year old midden of discarded Indian shells. It was a common type shell I took, like that which is used if you have ever seen a shell road but this particular shell may have been handled by a native pre-Louisiana Indian one thousand years ago and I fancy that connection. There are so many things you can do that are wrong that it's hard to choose sometimes.
This was my first trip to the Barataria Preserve in winter, so called winter, I wore a jacket but it was near sixty for a high and the combination of cool air with bright sun and virtually no humans was sweet there is no denying it.
Its almost all hearsay regarding Jean Lafitte the pirate but he roamed this area as its first most famous gangster with a crew of as many as a thousand men and possibly a hundred vessels. He dealt in fine goods and flesh. He brought in slaves, how you gonna love him, but people do. You can't see the harm in it from that little raised mound of trail lined with occasional placards of interest, one in particular paying homage to a pirate who must have had a devil's worth of charm. How much that is wrong do we really distance ourselves from by any more effort than a furrowed brow in a bar over cocktails?
Beautiful fucking day though. I plotted out a strategy that has me living another 86 years just by willing it to be that way. The simplicity of it is the really beautimous part. Maybe at some point it will get more complicated. I mean I may have to start gulping down a tablespoon of vaseline a day as some long-livers advise, but that's cool, I'm up with that. I'm down with that? Well, probably it's better to stay out of synch, it's more consistent. Consistency, Regularity, Discipline and possibly a slew of other boring behaviours are the key to the long life I desire.
In retrospect the grey-headed man with wife and telephoto lens was just trying to be friendly but I had already psyched up to be non-threatening on account of I was sitting alone along the trail like a highwayman, I've read books afterall, and I know everyone is down deep expecting the worst and I just don't want to be that for them. I wasn't prepared for his, "have they all gone?" meaning birds I presume, the day's cacophony suggests that that is what he meant, and my answer of "for now" was not only uppity but suggestive of a knowledge I do not possess. Fuuccck Me. I know they were from Minnesota, the accent was a hint if I were the type to pay attention (which I am not) but the license plate in the parking lot was the dead giveaway. I didn't mean to be that way, friend. I am not all that representative of how friendly we southerners can be. By the way, what is secret of you and your grey-head companion's success? I mean, assuming you don't hate each other every fucking day of your lives. It didn't look that way. Good job man. I'm not going to make it the next 86 years without some help. I wish I knew what you knew. Huh? Oh sure, I can shut up.
Dumaine Street
She is floating by effortlessly on a single speed below sea level on a street that may not be the heart but will not be denied its categorization as a vital organ in the exquisite corpse that is New Orleans.
Maybe she believes that I really do when she says "oh, you know," in response to my asking how she is. She pedaling the circuit of two parallel blocks, on one of which shyness and lack of curiosity has prevented me over the ten years from being anything but that white boy to its occupants, especially those in the middle near the bumps where you have to slow down. I won't make eye contact with any of those guys because there is no point to our meeting but sometimes she hangin' with them and calls out my name and I wave with a slight twist of the head to prove I am not unfriendly by nature and am also a cautious driver on a street with young children learning how to ride bikes with training wheels.
I may know a little bit about it but not the thing in its totality, no matter how intently our brown eyes connect in the telling of her unfathomable despair from running free toward ruination for twenty years to find only five off the calendar.
Looking over her shoulder coasting to the corner she says while I insert the key in the door, "that your truck?" and I say, "yeh," and she says, "nice."
Fever
Okay, I really need to access some of these ideas. They, the ideas, are literally coming at me in the night with butcher knives drawn, hacking away in the darkness at my inability to pay attention. "Pay attention," the ideas scream, sometimes wearing the costume of me, my hand flailing, shiny blade finding no purchase.
What the hell do you mean to do they or I might ask, awake, again, on the edge of my fears.
It doesn't rain where I am when I am but of late the skies are striated shades of grey, offering meaning beyond my understanding.
I read of an art opening, saw a sample of birds on a wire spelling out clearly some message I can't remember. I thought it seemed kind of silly, but there they are now, on the wires above the auto title establishment, pigeons, less than random, spelling out in some language I do not read.
It has been warm here everyday of January. I don't wear shoes when I don't have to. Seems to fit the pattern.
Day Before Super Sunday
I went out looking for a smile today and despite the fact that I had no line, bobber, or hook, I snagged one after not too much fishing, so I was good to go. I read a while back about Golden Gate Bridge jumpers and this one guy, a survivor, I guess, or maybe this information comes from his suicide note, but he said the day he decided to kill himself that if on the way to the bridge he passed one person who smiled at him he would not jump. But you gotta at least consider, dude, how many people you passed were wishing for the same thing, from you?
After stuffing my face with enough food to feed a family of four I came back to New Orleans and walked it off in City Park.
You can argue that there are too many laws already and that YOU would act right without any restraints because you have some highly-tuned inner moral/ethical compass of common decency but I believe there to be way too much evidence to the contrary. Hey all you high end City Park dog walking excrement extruding celebrators--do you find nothing the least bit ironic or troubling about leaving the refinement of your palatial City Park area homes, going into one of the few serene environments that exist in this town, and then shitting in it.
Anyway, after stepping in the dog shit I crossed a bridge, walked past the new restaurant tent by that field in which the boys used to play football, and studiously avoided all the amateur Egyptologists milling around the NOMA.
They have a new sculpture garden in the park, just behind the museum, and it was free to enter which is how I like my art and I'm sure just sure it was all minor accomplishment and insignificant as art goes but good job Besthoff Foundation, did I misspell your name? It felt good to be inside the garden. I felt no more in tune with my fellow art lovers or time-killers than I did in that Dallas sculpture garden I visited over Christmas but…where ya gonna go?
I thought about walking the length of the park because I'm a hiker without a trail but circumventing the golf course was something I did not feel like doing so I just U-turned, celebrating geese and girls, and called it a minor circuit hike. Heading south in the truck back to my house I snaked through or over some bombed out roads and ended up on Bienville. When I passed Kjeans I saw Hot Crawfish scrawled on the blackboard outside so things are happening and I'm not (although crawfish this early in the season are likely to be small and therefore, possibly, overcooked.) I need to synch up. Oh yeah, that oughta do it.
Sleep Tight
One of the things I will miss when I am away from New Orleans is the fact that you can score drugs here 24 hours a day. By drugs I mean Guinness Stout. Are you wide-awake in the middle of your night? Can't find sleep's sweet oblivion, your guaranteed birthright? Don't use a needle? Question the prudence of popping too many pills? Think heroin, even snorting it, too mean a solution? Giving Herb a break?
Well, if you have a vehicle, armored or not, venture out into the New Orleans morning, noon, or night and find a 24 hour corner store. (If you don't have a car and need the fix then get to Bourbon St., if you can stand it.) If you have driven more than five blocks and haven't found a quickie mart then consult your map because you're probably not in New Orleans. The Stout may not exist on the shelf of every small store but if you ask for it, it will be there next time, no matter what the time. Here's to hoping there isn't a next time. Sleep tight sweet prince, sweet princess.
Ideas And Insults
It did not make imperfect sense when Jacque said it, that I should get a Koala Bear to tend to the bamboo instead of engaging in all these labor-intensive efforts.
I had used a sawzall to cut down a couple hundred fifteen foot stalks the other day and yesterday he and I were slicing through the large piles with a circular saw. The more manageable six-foot lengths we were then grouping into not so heavy bundles, which we contained with twine.
Before loading these many bundles into the bed of my truck and securing them with criss-crossing tie-down straps, we had loaded up and hauled to the dump on Elysian Fields, with a fair amount of frustration on my part, a huge pile of shredded banana trees that under the mandate of M had been massacred by E. Greeyne.
"E kinda effed up these banana trees," I said.
"Yeah," Jacque said.
I was frustrated. I said, "F-ing college boy."
"Yeah," Jacque said.
"I shouldna sharpened that machete for him. Made it too easy for him."
"Yeah, he made 'em like confetti," Jacque said.
About fifteen minutes apart from each other a couple of bangers who I respect made fun of Jacque, behind my back, for helping me. I like the guys but I wanted to kill them at that moment. Figures of speech sometimes aren't. The one banger came by me later, after the truck was fully loaded and I shook his hand and insulted him under the radar and that ain't right if I did indeed mean it in the way it could be construed. But fuck you man, I've had this keyboard in front of me for many years and I haven't really disrespected you in any real proportion to the amount of material I have regarding you. I know that super ego of yours has helped you through some recent hard times but you need to keep it under reign regarding me and mine.
Another man, looking like the Bigtimer, came by later, blowing hot air to M about how she shouldn't cut down all her landscaping and whether inside or outside his earshot, I don't know or care but I told him to go fuck himself and mind his own business. A fucking idea man who don't lift a finger. Sack of excrement.
Well, I awoke out of a fevered sleep, took a shower, then realized it was only one in the morning. So I wrote this. Now I don't know what to do. I can read, I guess.
Nine Life Metaphor
Kitten got it good. She shiny. She soft. She got the perfect black and white markings of cuteness. She got people. She got life.
Kitten does not appear to be in need of anything. One of those boy cats from her clan (same markings) was sniffing her up out there a minute ago and she turned around and batted boy cat upside his head, with impunity. Impunity, that mean no harm came back her way.
I saw a black cat up on the roof of Mr. Bunn's store and I wondered if it might be Shorty because she ain't around here no more. I don't think Shorty is dead because she survived too long to forget how to do it in just the few months I was gone. I did not spoil Shorty with too much food scrap because I figured that to be her death. I maybe spoil her a little though. So she could be dead. All science fiction aside and no offense to the imagined richness of your existence but it may be true that we all dead. So cheer up. If we all dead, Shorty lives.
I see the yellow bastard. And I see Johnny and Susie and I see Michael and Robert and…that lady on Romper Room never did once see me. I was always right there with my common name and she would just look right by me. Arlen and Cassius my ass.
Ain't no cats want to hang around here now with that Pentecostal lot all manicured. No place to hide from the evil that lurks. It sure is improved though. Man, property values just skyrocketing right through the roof. Right through the roof.
They be waiting to build that fence to see if I am going to sue them right back to the stone age (that'll cramp a body's style) for accidentally cutting down my little weed trees when they cut down those big shade trees. I ain't gonna sue nobody but maybe I will, I unpredictable. Crapshit. Who knew I was gonna say that? There a time period after which you can't sue a body and the day after that you will see a fence next door to me. They a wily bunch them Pentecostals. They also got the patience of Job, which ain't no big trick when you spend all your days in a church building. Affecting a religious metaphor I mean is the part that ain't a big deal.
I was doing the math a few days ago, counting up how many of my nine lives is left and I became discouraged after the count to six so I just quit counting and what a bunch of nonsense that is anyway. I mean what are the rules for determining the potentiality of your expirations? Nine lives my ass.
Step Sitting
I have driven the six blocks back to Rocheblave to get some tools because Jacque said he could put the new rim on the portable basketball goal if he had a pair of grip pliers, also known as vise-grips. The goal, with its plastic base which acts as ballast when filled with water or sand (or on Dumaine, has an eight foot piece of 6"X8" heavy lumber laid across it) has been laying on its side up against the curb across the street with a rim bent almost closed for I don't know how long. One hundred basketballs, three entire goals, two or three extra rims, and a dozen nets, or more, have come and gone in the nine years I have been acquainted with the activities up and down 2600.
On Rocheblave I also plan to change clothes because it is ten degrees cooler on Dumaine, which is a fact noted by many but understood by few. Charles, the man who does good work for me, is recently out of jail, and comes over from across the street. I tell him my plans about the basketball goal, changing clothes, etc., all in a rush because the sun is setting and I want to watch some street basketball and changing a rim on one of these new-fangled portable goals is not as easy as you might think. Charles is always polite but as if this needs to be said, my problems are not his so what can he do for me to earn a few bucks. "Not a goddamn thing."
"Let me cut those weeds for you."
"Nope, don't care about those weeds."
"Well, what then?"
"Nothing, then."
"I gotta be able to do something."
"Let's see, you could try to sell me a parking space in my own goddamn driveway like you did that first time we met."
"I would if I thought you'd go for it."
"If I weren't so hip to the angles of your deceit?"
"That's a pretty way to put it, I guess."
Daylights burning. I'm still in a hurry. "I could offer a shot of Irish Whisky?"
"And I would gladly accept," said Charles.
I go inside, change my clothes, pour a double shot of Jameson's into a cleaned out yogurt cup and take it out to Charles sitting on the front steps. Then I go back inside and find the tools.
On Dumaine Jacque collects the tools and I sit back and watch him and the boys go at it while I sit on the steps where I used to live and drink one of those tall Heinekins. I had spent most of the day over here working. I started out jumping the fence into Esnard Villa and cutting off the creeper vine that grows on the shared fence and up the side of M's house. If you don't attend to it every once in awhile it will literally envelop an entire dwelling. I would take breaks and sit on those brick steps that once led into Buddy's apartment before that day when the cumulative bad decisions of the new owner led to her being burned out by the wife of one of her lovers. The night of the fire I had sat on different steps, at four a.m., across the street at Mama D's, drinking her whisky from a little white styrofoam coffee cup as the blaze destroyed a grand house that had stood pretty much intact and unaffected by time, termites, war, and two or three Category 5 hurricanes since its construction, in 1854.
Other than trimming back the creeper vine I was harvesting from that little side yard in Esnard Villa what for me is some of the purest raw emotion to which I have access, which comes in handy when circumstances find me in need of some. As for the gangbangers not familiar with me, eyefucking me from way across the street, I have mumbled reminders of how close is our hatred to our love. Peace, you little bitches.
Before Jacque had asked me for the tools but after I had cleaned up the vines, and the trash along the curb from corner to next door neighbor's, and severely trimmed back five years worth of overgrown bamboo in M's backyard, I was sitting on the front steps of M's house, drinking my first tall Heineken, and Shelton appears from the horizon of the corner store. He's in pretty good spirits these days and like old times he sits down and tells me of his defeats in a way that makes them sound like successes.
"Still Working at MacDonald's?" I said.
"Naw, the manager threatened to fire me so I just quit."
"What about?"
"What what about?" he said.
"Why did you quit, why did they threaten to fire you?"
"Oh, you know that girl I told you about, work in the kitchen with me?"
"The one you liked?"
"Oh Lord no, Mr. Jim, uh uh, no, no, no." Somehow the thought of it trickled from his brain into his nasal passages down to the back of his throat and became a bad taste in his mouth. He popped a few colorful Skittles onto his tongue to cleanse his palate of my ridiculous suggestion. "She just worked with me washing up, she was the same as me but she tried to act like she was my boss, telling what I could do, what I couldn't do."
It crossed my mind to say "she was trying to 'handle' you?" but I knew he would laugh at me, one, for trying to be too cool, and two, because the idea that a woman can handle a man has yet to fully sink into his consciousness. I know that it will one day occur to him that it's not of matter of, if, but a matter of, which one, he will not be able to resist being "handled" by.
"No, she just get on my nerves, being bossy, so I threatened to knock her out, and she tell the manager. The manager act like I'm the one done something wrong and tell me he can fire me for that but I don't need that so I just quit."
"Probably shouldn't hit a girl."
"She wasn't no little girl, Mr. Jim, she probably could knock ME out."
"Sounds like she wanted to move up out of the kitchen, show she could manage people."
"Well she didn't manage me."
Yeah well, not that you realize.
Shelton is very eager and confident to talk on camera so I shot a few grainy thirty-second videos on my little Casio. He said he would talk about anything so I got him situated sitting up on the railing with the banana trees behind him, got him framed in the way I liked it and said, "ok, tell me about your childhood." He lost his cool, blushed, grimaced, laughed, and shook his head, so I said, "sorry, just kidding, tell me about jail," at which point he gained back all his confidence and told me a few things from his experiences.
Across the street they did not absolutely need my help but out of selfish desire to watch basketball I offered it anyway and took charge of the unscrewing of a difficult nut or two while Jacque handled the actual reconstruction and cars rushing to the corner whizzed by my right ankle which I had bent behind me into the street as I poured cooking oil along the threads of a nasty bolt.
"Don't we need a bolt on this side too, Jacque?"
"Naw, the hole stripped out, it'll work with just the one side."
After the goal was up people just appeared out of nowhere and there was a game. Occasionally grown men would park their cars on the street and join in for a shot or two before going around the corner to do whatever they had come to do.
M said, "See what you did? It was quiet around here before you showed up and helped them put on that new rim."
It will not go without saying that the rim came out of her foyer.