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Crazy White Renovator
One thing about doing a gut renovation in your spare time is that it taxes your energy and patience levels to such an extent that you often fly off the handle and utter weird, or even mean shit to people who normally would not be victims of your wrath.
A couple of weeks ago I was sweeping the kitchen floor over at Rocheblave (it was a day during which I felt great ambivalence about the fate of nesting pigeons) and I observed through the broken glass panes of the back door--which is in the kitchen--a man lurking directly below me. The house is pier and beam and sits three cinder blocks high. And this man is fiddling with the screen door which I have wedged so tight it can't be open, and the door itself is nailed or painted shut, so I'm feeling almost mirthful standing off to the side watching this man's attempts which will end in failure.
Now the side door and front door of this house do not exist (as well as any steps up to them), so they have been replaced with plywood sheets which I screw (with cordless screw gun) on and off as needed. I have the bottom panel of plywood--there are three stacked panels--off the side entrance and when I see the man head that way I too head that way, leaving the kitchen and entering the hallway. The man does not even hesitate before making his initial leap into the house (even for the most athletic it is a two step process) and before he can follow through with the motion which will have us sharing the same space, I jump, so to speak, all over his shit.
"No uh uh, this shit gotta stop, no more visitors, the house is closed, you have just met the new owner and he is an asshole."
"I heard noises over here so I came to check it out," he responded.
That response did stop me for a minute, causing me to make a more careful inspection of this man: Medium height, medium brown skin, bright (blue/grey) eyes, fiftyish, some facial hair with slight greying, overall a good looking man, but the clothes and shoes register on the homeless meter, and so I start up again.
"Well the noises you heard are me working in here, and I'm going to be living here, and I'm not looking to make any new friends, and if you're the one who was living here before and are responsible for the fire then I'm especially not happy to see you..."
"Naw uh uh," he interupted me, "this house too wide open for me, I stay back there," pointing towards the not very well boarded up Iberville dance hall. And then he further disarms me by introducing himself and offering up (as he is still standing below me, outside the house) his hand. "My name is Joseph, but they call me Pigman."
I shake his hand and offer that I don't have any problem with his general existence but that any intrusion of this property will not be smiled upon. He shakes my hand again as if to say, "that's not too much to ask you uptight whiteboy," and we part company.
There are a couple of churches nearby that offer help to the downtrodden, so there is in the area a pretty fair population of needy, on top of the general population which in many cases wishes not to be classified as such. Also, Rocheblave is somewhat of a highway for scrap collectors, being that it carries not a great deal of automobile traffic and is the most direct path to the recycling plant a few blocks away, closer to the Lafitte projects. Which is to say I'm meeting a lot of transients pushing grocery carts full of treasure and therefore am carefully cultivating my reputation as "that crazy white boy," not a hard thing for a white man to sell to a black man, as our history shows us not always on best behavior.
On another day I was sweeping the cracked pavement of my driveway when a fellow walked right up to me and apoligized for not being better prepared as he tried to hold the sixteen ounce Red Dog in his armpit while seaching for the prop in his wallet. The beer on his breath was ripe and implied that the one under his arm was not his first of the day, even as this was only eight in the morning. He then produced a handwritten list with a heading that was some young girl's name and various signatures with dollar amounts by them. He told me how this young girl was his niece and she had recently been shot dead and the family had no insurance so could I help. A great con. If indeed it is a con. But how can one be sure? I act as if I have no money but would like to contribute if he could give me more information. I ask about the MacDonalds where she worked, because KaKa used to work there and maybe she knew the dead girl. A good con artist does not give up easily and will dance to the steps of his mark. But this mark tires easily and after I make an especially dimwitted response the man touches me on the shoulder, and says, "you don't seem to understand, this girl dead." And his touch and words inject me with more truth than I can bare and his con has become transparent before me and I am immediately furious, going through a transformation like the Hulk, only I'm still rail thin afterwards. And I call him a motherfucker and a bunch of other things and suggest rather harshly that he not bring anymore stupid bullshit by me, and in response to his apology I tell him its too late for that, get the hell away from me. I was relating this incident to my new neighbor, Charles, somewhat of a hustler himself, and he said, "Aw man, that's an old hustle. He should'na tried to run that around here."
All that being said, Rocheblave is a considerably more relaxed neighborhood compared to Dumaine, at least before I got there.
The Slim Dandy Renovation
This doesn't have to be a metaphor, it could simply be the way things are. On the other hand it does make a dandy metaphor: the pigeon poop inside my new kitchen.
I know pigeons ain't nothing but rats with wings but in the wake of recent local teenage killings, and the disappearance of one of our inside cats, and at the same time the disappearance of the newborn outside kittens (great-great grandchildren of Point Blank) from the Point Blank clan, I just could not kick that pregnant pigeon out of her nest above one of my still glassless kitchen windows. I either am a heartless bastard or, for sure, on occasion can be a heartless bastard, but I did not have what it took to do that deed. I feel like I'm being punked by the PETA people, or am suffering from an ingrown conscience, or am paying the balloon on my Karmic debts for shooting those moles with Jeff Franzen's BB gun out near Lake O' the Pines in East Texas thirty years ago.
I've avoided the kitchen for weeks now, instead working on the outside, breaking out the old broken glass window panes so the neighborhood kids won't be so tempted to vandalize (which has me thinking again of my own childhood and yet more Karmic debt). And I have been scraping the windows down to their cypress beginning, all as part of preliminary efforts in what will be the replacing and reglazing of 112 panes of glass.
So yesterday I'm outside on a small scaffold working on the miniature double set of windows above what will be the kitchen sink, and I can see across the kitchen to the other window, above which, on the now exposed framing header, sits the nest. And the grown pigeon is in her nest acting in a way that I will only describe as "unladylike." But soon she leaves the nest unattended, which from my recent observations is an unheard of thing because previously she would only leave after another pigeon (the male?) came to take her place (to sit on the egg, I guess). The settng sun is working against my vision but after some correctional squinting I can see that in the nest is indeed a newborn. A glorious thing, this new birth, but also, I wish I were a geek (or more of one) so I could go in there and bite its little head off. But it's not going to happen that way so I'm left pondering how many days now till this young bird will leave the nest? And who's going to clean up that cumulative pile of poop on the floor?
Pre-Postal
People, all of us, we don't know why we feel the weight of it but we do, like a ton of bricks, or a washing machine balanced on your chin, the pain of it, the endurance.
For the record: I believe in the death penalty. By my way of thinking the only problem with the death penalty is that we don't use it enough. Those people in the toll tag lane who know goddamn well their tag is expired, or who don't have it affixed to their windshields and idiotically wave the tag in front of the sensor and are therefore wasting those precious few seconds of my time, under my regime would die, in fact instantly. It could be done. My brother and I figured out the way to do it years ago, over twenty I think. Death ray devices installed atop every light pole in the world. Be smart or die could be a motto.
This month the lunatic menstruators [sic] of the world are joined by a far greater number, and some of us know who we are.
Asked to comment on the full moon this month, he replied, "it was very heavy."
And the planets are lining up as they should and everyone, please, just take a number.