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Renovating At Midnight
My boss and I, both in our forties, six years apart, moan and groan at work, him mostly doing the trim carpentry and me mostly doing the painting. Our backs are for shit and speaking of shit, today at work I made a little funny to myself in the bathroom of a Metairie flood job on which we're doing the final touch-ups. It was so dark in the bathroom, even with the light on, I remarked to myself, I can't see shit in here. Get it? I talk to myself a lot, sometimes out loud and sometimes not. I told bossman on Tuesday that I would only be working to noon until I could put my shoes and socks on in the morning without crying. It happened the next day that I didn't cry like a little baby girl so it wasn't much of a break for me. You're not taking off at noon? he asked me the day after I first took off at noon and I said, no bossman, I didn't cry this morning. Yesterday there were five of us in the house at one time and we all have the same back problem, lower left and into our buttock, and the one woman has it running down her leg a little so she's going for an MRI soon.
Crying out in my sleep doesn't count, I do that even when I'm straight. If they made a movie of my dreams it would evidently be a woeful tale of woefulness (I don't remember my dreams so well for the last twenty years or so, like I ever wanted to be Casteneda's, Don Juan).
Once, when I was twenty-something, I made a mistake in California and spent two weeks in San Jose County jail and one morning this bad seed kid hit me on the bottom of my feet while I laid in bed reading Michener and he said, hey man, you were moaning in your sleep last night, which was very embarrassing indeed, but nobody liked this kid who was sort of making fun of me and the two guys who liked him least beat the shit out of him one day and he cried like a little baby for the guards to rescue him, and they did eventually, but they didn't really like him either, his jailhouse etiquette was wanting, and so they put him in the group cell with the psychopaths, I think that was C-block, and we were all much happier then. There were about forty of us in our block, in a group cell with bunk beds along two opposing walls, an open shower area with three sinks and four non-private showers and three or four stainless steel toilets, and there was a TV room, with no door, connected to the bunk room. There was never anything good on TV but as I remember it, after early breakfast, to which we marched single file to a cafeteria and back, there were exercise shows with women in leotards and those shows were very popular.
I don't cry for no reason any more here in New Orleans, like I did when I first arrived, but if I long for that feeling of unbridled weepiness I just get in the truck and drive north for several miles and then veer east for five, six, ten, twenty, or forty miles, witnessing not even the entirety of flood wrecked homes, and then come home again, and during these trips If I want to cry (sometimes its a good thing to do) I can easily do it.
I'm not sure what is wrong with the St. Charles streetcar line, because that part of town did not flood but their unflooded green streetcars are now running on the two or three year old Canal St. line, which had pretty, new red cars (however they flooded badly in the streetcar barn about six blocks from here) and so I can look out from my front porch, like right now, to this gap, or view corridor if you prefer, across the Pentecostal-owned half acre lot next to me, and across Iberville St. and the NOPD Public Integrity Bureau parking lot and beyond that to Canal St. and can see the cars go by every once in awhile. It's free to ride them until June. And I think the city buses are still free to ride.
I believe the Chauffeur has trailer fever. I'm ready to get back into my house, he says. Not a lick of work has yet been done on his house unless you count talking about work. It is hard to find reliable contractors and none of them want to come and give you estimates because they are overwhelmed by the so many people who are required to get estimates to free up insurance money, but the contractors just want to focus on the people already with the money, who have work they want done right away. Trailer living is not for me, says the Chauffeur. I say, it's very nice in there but it is sort of jail-like. He walks away, depressed, saying, yes, it's a very nice jail.
Debris from gutted homes is still being picked up and regular trash removal, while not exactly reliable, and certainly not twice a week like before, or even once a week like promised, still, eventually, the black trash bags you put in front of your home get picked up. Some people, in some of the nicer areas, are getting pretty wrecked about this trash thing, but it doesn't weigh too heavily with me. I think, honestly, under the circumstances, things are going swimmingly here, unless it is your druthers to bask in woe, and then, let me tell you, you can bask at full throttle twenty-four seven.
I had one last thing the electrician didn't finish but I finally figured out how to fix that myself, so I can now write that jackleg limp boner, Charlie Labourd, off my "dickheads who bother me" list. Problem is, I, even with the qualifier that I don't really know him, recommended him to the Sculptor and he screwing her bad, so I'm not overly happy about that.
The one crackhouse on this block will never be a crackhouse again, I think. The Sculptor wants to buy it and tear it down and thus improve her property. Still, once in awhile, people who desire what used to be available there, mosey by and call out to people who aren't there. The moldy couches and end tables and beds and book cases offer no condolences. The madam of the house I don't think will come back and even if she does, there ain't no place for her to live on this block, unless she moves into that little shed next door, which is possible I guess. I saw her son a few months ago and he was down from Houston rummaging through the crap to retrieve some things his mom desired and I should have sent a book or two back with him, because she was an avid reader, but I didn't. I used to fix her reading glasses with duct tape and she used to hit me up for three or four dollars somewhat regularly. It was not exactly a symbiotic relationship but on two separate occasions where I was gone from here for months at a time, and with no one in my house, it was not broken into, so maybe she kept her dogs at bay, and was returning my frequent but sometimes begrudging kindnesses.
It would also be good to see Charles, who lived there and worked for me occasionally, so that we could reminisce, even though it would probably cost me twenty dollars to do that. I can be an easy touch if I like someone. He would want to do some work for the money but I don't think I would work him too hard because I would probably just want to talk with him for a while, until he became bored of me. He is an interesting fellow and skates convincingly on that plain where poverty meets richness and intellect meets ignorance. He always wanted to travel out of New Orleans so one can hope that he is happy wherever it is he ended up, if in fact he survived.
It is midnight now and I can still hear the buzz of a circular saw, someone in the neighborhood renovating through the night.
Letter To Clifford, 6
You may be musing, Jim, in the last seven months you've lost a girlfriend, a mother, and pretty nearly the city that most inspires you, does anything good ever happen to you? and if by that you mean something other than being (sort of) free, (mostly) white and (considerably older than) 21, then I would say, well, let me think on that, while you go about minding your own f-ing business, what do you think this is, some sort of online gab forum where I spill my guts about everything from safely sordid sexual encounters with boxes of fried chicken, to personal letters to my recently deceased mother? Because if you think that then you have got another think coming. But all right, Ima give you a bone, because clearly these curiosities of yours imply that you're at a commercial break of American Idol and, although generally I don't do requests or answer questions, except obliquely, or sometimes straightforwardly and you can't shut me up but that's your punishment for even talking to me. I got this gift from Mr. BC over a year ago and it was a 5gb digital music player, a pre-release limited edition, number 131 out of 500 and I don't know what value that adds to what is essentially a disposable piece of electronics but it was really just the right player for me. I had it loaded with the equivalent of about 80 CDs or albums of music and even though I didn't pay for the music any more than I paid for the player, we're talking, in some world, where people actually pay for things, about $1,300 worth of pure musical enjoyment. The music I got from this music hoarding Cajun Russian Jew who holes up on New York's Lower East Side, and on his better days seems pretty intelligent, but still insists he won't come down south for a visit--not just because all his Cajun relations are long departed, or ficticious, but--because he blames the south for the holocaust. When I tell him the holocaust didn't happen down here, exactly, he insists, "oh yah it deed, it moist cer-tain-ly deed." I sometimes suspect his accent is as affected as my every supposition, as spurious as my ability to spell it out effectively. But, accented or not, how you gonna argue with a boneheadedness so thick and complete? This particular chunk of digital music I got from him is a sublime playlist of a thousand songs which often very effectively blot out the noise going on in the internal confusion machine of my being. Stuff like The Velvet Underground, Yo la Tengo, Calexico, Dylan, Cat Power, Four Tet, Fruit Bats, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Fuck, to name a few. The thing about digital music players, and really, so many things if you think about it, is that they don't perform that well, or at all, after being dipped in soapy bleach water. Which is what happened to my Rio player when I stupidly stored it in my front pocket while scrubbing the black, greasy flood line off of my house back in November. Bending over the bleach bucket the player took a bath and henceforth did not work. I bought a little replacement player, a 1gb Ipod, and I hate it, just hate it. In fact, I bought the Ipod product just to prove to myself what I have said all along, I hate them, just hate them. The Rio player sat in my room, first on the table saw I was using as a bedside table and then, when I had to use the table saw to actually cut something, the shiny Rio sat on the floor. I would look at it occasionally, and sigh, wistfully. The other day, almost four months after the bath, exercising my option towards futility, I pushed the on button, and the Rio lit up and came on. I then crawled through the attic, my backseat, and every box I brought with me from Virginia, looking for the charger, because the battery icon was low. I found the charger and even though the player acts just a bit wonky now and again, it still performs beautifully, all the digital music data is intact, and I listen to it at work, painting, with small, cheap, over the ear headphones, the player comfortable of weight and operable through the fabric of my front jeans pocket, and there you have it, requested or not, a good thing that happened to me. I think American Idol is back on. As for me, I leave you with another Letter to Clifford. Her first name was not an informal appellation but rather her given name.
Dear Mom, 5/29/05
Today is Memorial Day and I went to my girlfriend's house (her name is T ) and worked on her (small) farm, or (very large) garden, whatever you want to call it. She is growing part of her vegetable crop in rows of concentric circles and today we weeded around and around in the asparagus ring.
I got a letter from my brother, and your son, W*lter, yesterday and it says his oldest son is getting married, I think in August, in Kansas. I don't suppose you are going and I'm not sure if I am, but I am thinking about it. His oldest son is M*cah. I think he is still in college.
I am still working on this vacation property of my childhood friend, JF, out here in Virginia, near the mountains, and it is very pretty countryside but kind of dull sometimes if you are used to lot's of excitement, which I'm really not, but I am used to being closer to excitement than I am out here. I am going to the Memorial Day gathering of some people I sort of know, later this afternoon, and that, I expect, will be as much excitement as I can stand. I like people well enough but I don't usually go out of my way to be around them. T, she likes socializing a little more than me so this is one of those things--me being a good sport. I'm sure I will have some fun, even though I don't feel overly sure of that at this point in time.
JF came out for a day with his kids and his wife and that is always a bustle of excitement but then they leave and it seems like a lot of effort and expense just to keep a property like this for such short stays. They bought the property as an investment so I'm sure they know what they are doing. There is plenty of work to do out here on the two houses and the grounds of the property, but it is kind of a strange job, with me deciding what to do more than I am ever told what to do. Like this is something I should complain about, but still, it leaves me feeling a little unsettled, at times.
T is younger than me, she just turned 30, and I just turned 46. I'm not complaining about that either and what good would it do if I were?
It's raining now. I hope this gathering later is not outside.
love, Jim.
Letter To Clifford, 5
The stop light at Broad and Bienville is working now, so the stretch of N. Broad St. most surrounding me is totally stop-lit and bigger news than that is the opening of Betsy's Pancake House at Canal and Dorgenois. Now, back to Letter's to Clifford, sponsored by Hallmark.
Dear Mom,
It's Sunday and raining here in Virginia. I am still near the Shenandoah Mountains on JF's weekend property. Most of the time I pretty much have this whole property to myself, and sometimes I share it with my girlfriend, T, whom you have met twice. Right now she is watching a movie while I write this letter.
The sun is coming out a little and behind me out the window is a fringe tree, a stand of pine trees, and a rather strange version of the magnolia, and it is called a big leaf magnolia. The white blossoms are different than regular magnolia blossoms and the leaves are not shiny. The leaves are, however, bigger than any leaf I have ever seen on any tree. Also on this property are sweet gum trees, dogwoods, crape myrtles, two different kind of chestnut trees, two elm trees, a pecan, a maple, some peach trees, some crab apples, and one or two other varieties that have mostly died out in the United States. The property is on a small hill and is elevated above the town of Washington, population 185, and it is named for the original surveyor of the town, a 17-year-old kid named George Washington. The same George who went on to become president number one. Not to be confused with that idiot in the White House today, who is also named George (and is the 43rd president).
I have been working pretty hard out here this spring. There are two houses, a cottage which I live in and then a much bigger house up the hill which is where the F's and their guests stay when they come out. The roof on the big house is metal and I am repainting it and the roofs of the few out buildings are metal too and I am repainting them as well. And I just repainted the back porch and repaired some of the rotten spots. I dug two new flower beds this year and am growing a bunch of flowers, most of which I have never seen before and have no idea what they are going to look like when they bloom. I also started a new vegetable garden and am growing a few different varieties of tomatoes and bell peppers, and cayenne, and jalapenos, okra, beets, string beans, cucumbers, and maybe some cantaloupe.
T lives five miles away and I help her in her garden, which is much bigger than mine, almost an acre, and she sells her vegetables and flowers at an outdoor market on Saturday mornings. When I'm not arguing with her I learn quite a bit from her considerable experience.
There is a pool out here and it is covered for the winter but was opened up yesterday and the pool guy gets it going right and then I maintain it for the summer until it's time to cover it up ( a fabric covering which allows rain and melting snow to pass through but keeps out falling leaves and other debris). The water is still ice cold and will be for about another month but is nice to look at and occasionally put your feet in. The fact that I am living out here like a king is just further proof that fact is truly stranger than fiction. Hope you are doing well. It was nice to see you last week when JF flew me down in the private jet with him on his business trip.
Also, remember, if the volume on the TV gets stuck too loud you can stick your fingernail around the edge of the little button on the TV that makes the volume go up and jiggle it and it will pop out and and then you can push the down volume button and adjust it to your liking.
love, Jim.
Letter To Clifford, 4
These are letters to my mom written last year. I am on hiatus. Good books I have read or am reading, Crichton's, State of Fear, not by far his best writing but extremely thought provoking and a hell of a 5 or 6 page bibliography, with notes, at the end, A Paul Auster, I can't think of the name though, about a fireman drifting meeting a skinny card sharp, and they have adventures together, really good. And I'm in the middle of Jack London's, Sea Wolf, it really good, too.
Dear Mom, 3/30/05
Spring has sprung here in Virginia. Daffodils are blooming and Forsythia is coming on and there is this hedge surrounding my back porch which I think is called Winter Jasmine and it has yellow flowers all winter so there is a lot of yellow around here. For another month or so there is still the possibility of frost or snow so the only thing going in gardens right now is spinach, carrots, potatoes or other cool weather crops. T, my girlfriend, whom you've met twice, grows over an acre of vegetables and flowers so she has started over a thousand plants indoors under lights and is now starting to harden them off and they spend the days outside. They are grown in 18X24 inch flats, each of which holds fifty plants. She is also starting an asparagus bed this year and raspberries and blueberries and a few grapes.
As agent for J and LF I am this year undertaking the task of attracting a Purple Martin colony to the property (40 acres two hours west of Washington DC). I have been given the go ahead to purchase two more expensive four-room additions to go on the existing pole with one four-plex, which I put up a few months ago in anticipation of the May-June nesting season. Apparently, the attracting of Purple Martins is a somewhat exacting science and so in the four to six week window in which I have to attract Martin sub adults to their new home I will be playing a Martin dawn song bird tape in the hours preceding dawn (I will put the tape on a timer so I don't actually have to get up to start the tape every morning), and I may have to keep some of the birdhouse holes plugged until they are needed so that sparrow and other common birds don't invade, and I may have to smear a little mud around the openings and stick a little pine straw to it so it has that messy lived in look that Martins evidently like, and I have a couple of plastic Martin decoys to attach on or near the birdhouse, and I may for all I know have to put on a Purple Martin suit and sing a little song my ownself and maybe wear a sandwich board that says--Young Martins Welcome, or, Hey, Young Martins, If You Lived Here, You'd be Home Already.
I repainted a utility shed yesterday and it looks pretty damn good.
I hear that me and my four brothers and one sister were successful in getting you to graciously accept the idea of in-home help and that there is a young woman named Katrina Washington coming by a few hours every day. I hope she is to your liking or in the likely event that she is not exactly to your liking I hope you can find some peaceful middle ground on which to stand, and be peaceful, about it.
I received your Easter card last week. The card was nice even though Easter day itself was cold and rainy.
Take care--from your youngest 45-year-old son, Jim Louis.
Letter To Clifford, 3
Dear Mom,
J's wife, L, brought out here last summer two birdhouses. They had to be put together. One of them was octagonal, you know, eight-sided, and me and her and her oldest son (10) spent the better part of an afternoon screwing together the metal sides of the two tier birdhouse. So, each tier had eight sides, which meant 16 total sides for this birdhouse. There were 400 nuts and 400 bolts, so small that a person would be better served to have tweezers instead of fingers to handle them.
There used to be little rubber pads covering the bridge of my reading glasses but they are now lost so when I bend over they fall off. While I was helping to construct the birdhouse I had to keep pushing up on my glasses. When I started sighing L said I didn't have to do this if I didn't want to but you and I know she didn't exactly mean that. And anyway, I have a lot more than one or two sighs in me for any given job.
In addition to the difficulty presented by the large number of parts there was the danger of slicing off one or two fingers because the metal was thin, and sharp, like a steak knife. Telling her son, J, to be careful, was about as useful as yelling at a deaf person.
The F's, J and L and their three sons, J, A, and W, don't usually stay out here for the whole day, and so when they left that day last summer I still had a few mystery parts to add to the birdhouse. It was a mystery I was able to solve but then I had to consider the construction of a second birdhouse. The second birdhouse turned out to be much simpler, and studier, so I decided to erect it first, out in the back pasture. The problem with this studier birdhouse is that it only comes with four bird apartments as opposed to the other less sturdy birdhouse, which has sixteen. These are supposed to purple martin houses and you need more than four apartments if you expect to attract even a small flock the first year. And you start trying to attract them in March or April, depending on which part of the country you live in. This being February I thought I should start looking.
I looked on the Internet recently and found several suppliers for the sturdy birdhouse that is known as the American Heritage Quad Pod Purple Martin Birdhouse system. As the name (Quad) implies, each unit, sold separately, had four bird apartments. I had set up just one Quad (four apartments) and the pole can hold up to three more, for a total of sixteen purple martin apartments. I was thinking two more, for a total of twelve apartments, would be adequate. But on sale they cost $125 a piece (regular price--$175). I have the ability and permission to spend J and L's money for property related expenses but I'm not going to spend that much money on a birdhouse, without talking to them first.
I have some tree trimming to do today. Perhaps that will take my mind off of $700 birdhouses.
Take care, from your youngest 45 year old son, Jim.
Letter To Clifford, 2
Due to apparent fatigue or March Madness I am, instead of my usual drivel, posting letters I wrote to my mother last year. My mom died recently, just two weeks after me and my siblings took her from her home and put her in an assisted living facility.
Dear Mom, 3-24-05
I hope everything is going well for you, but as I have heard you say, even if everything is not going well, there's not a heck of a lot you can do about it.
After visiting with you in January and seeing the ease with which you make and carry out doctors appointments*, I decided to make one for myself today because I haven't had a check-up in 10 years and they say you should get checkups more often than that. It took me most of the day to get up the courage to make the call. There are only two doctors in this town and only one of them was recommended to me and predictably that one is booked clear into the next century. But his receptionist allowed me to go onto a waiting list, from which maybe they would call me, she said as long as two months from now. I told her if I had waited ten years I could wait another two months, but I'll probably look into making another appointment in one of the larger nearby towns, like Front Royal, or Culpeper, or Warrenton.
This property I live on is a weekend property and is owned by my old childhood buddy from down the street, JF, and he and his wife and three boys (ages 5, 8, and 10) come out when they can, or not at all in the winter, and maybe every other weekend during the summer.
The property is forty acres on the edge of the quaint Virginia town of Washington (population 300) and is named for the 17 year old surveyor, George Washington, before he became a revolutionary, and first president of the US. It is the first town to use the name Washington in the United States. And there aren't many or any facts about this town much more interesting than that, which is to say the town itself is not that interesting. But it is a nice, quiet, scenic place to live. Manassas, the place where the Civil War began, is about 35 miles away so in the area there is some interesting history.
There are deer and fox and wild geese out here. And black bears, but I have only seen one of those, once.
There is a local guy who makes hats from road kill, like foxes and squirrels and such. If this guy sees a dead animal on the road, he is thinking--hat. While this seems like a peculiar avocation, the hats, the few I have seen, are actually pretty nice looking. Not that you will ever see me wearing one.
I heard that Sar*h came to visit you in February so I hope you two had some fun.
I am writing this letter on a computer. I now have to print it out, put it in an envelope with a stamp, address it, and take it a block away to my Post Office. If you receive this letter it will be proof that minor miracles do occur.
Take care,
from your youngest 45 year old son, Jim Louis
*denotes sarcasm