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Pobrecito Jim
I can hardly finish a beer (or two), these days without nodding towards deepest stupor; cheaper than dilaudid but not quite as fine.
Pobrecito Jim works all day as the house painter for the rich and famous and then comes home to work some more in a neighborhood that most would see as a ghetto, and in fact poor little Jim sees it that way too, but the New Orleans community has the rich and poor all swirled together so the ghettos of poverty, drug dealing, depravity, and violent death are surrounded by neighborhoods mere minutes away which offer all that is good and safe and clean and honest. So one is never stuck; one can always choose: have a blast, or a latte', poke a vein, or have a beignet.
After getting the permit to renovate and getting fully juiced with electricity the Rocheblave project has Jim working 13 hour days, seven days a week, in a subtropical climate that is so hot, ninety with a gentle breeze is considered very pleasant. Jim has to work such long days because he makes lots of mistakes and has to redo much of his work, but that's ok because Jim can't dance.
Jim has put in a front door but he still boards up over it because his crack-head consultant has told him the crack heads will steal it if he makes it too easy for them. Jim already knows this but it's good to have an experienced consultant nearby to remind him of the obvious truths. Jim is one day Candide and the next Pangloss, benefitting, it seems, little from either, so it is best when he accepts counsel.
And Jim has ripped up and replaced the bedroom and bathroom floors, and today got a good few of the burnt rafter ends scabbed in, braced, screwed and glued. Jim doesn't really know what he's doing but he convinces himself daily that he has the right stuff, and the deception is effective, and the work gets done.
Last night at 9 p.m. Jim was snoozing on top the covers in the dining room that is his bedroom and study, aware of the neighborhood children passing to and fro throughout the house as they are apt to do around here, and in and out of stupor Jim had that awareness of nothingness going on, which is his preferred state, when out of the dark he is kissed on the cheek by Erica Lewis, and eyes opening into hers he kisses her hand and falls back to nothing better than that.