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What Will Happen?
I was contemplating last night on how I could ever go back to work what with the overwhelming dread the mere thought of it brought to me, giving me shivers of revulsion it was, the mere thought. Work.
But that's to be expected really after having spent three holy holi-days in bed gasping for breath as the marauding histamine army tried to suffocate me with its horde of snot soldiers. I drank cupfuls of a red syrupy generic over-the-counter product until the resulting schizoid mindsets had me bobbing my head knowingly, and for a while my jaw got a gig in vaudeville doing the old over stimulated coke fiend routine. The show closed after one night. Reviews were tepid.
Like Horse Badorities once said, "the rent will be high but its not so bad if you don't pay it." That's the way I feel about work when it gets to be a really serious mental liability. Just don't go. I am paid as a sub-contractor so the only benefits I derive from my job are the ones I create. I mean other than the pay, which is fine, and keeps me centered to the real world, and out of trouble, and decent. So today I didn't go, called in sick, which I was, sort of, but as much as anything it was a rebelling against those words I heard my boss speak last week during break time. He was telling the carpenters he hoped the current jobs progressed in such a way that a free week might open up (and I'm thinking attaboy, now you're talking) so he could start on painting the outside of Willie Roaf's house, which I needn't even tell you was not anywhere on my top 100 list of things to do with a free week. But that's my boss, he can't help it, bless his heart.
What I originally wanted to tell you was more of a tourist alert for all of you coming to New Orleans for New Years: all you Florida people coming for the SugarBowl and all you St. Louis people who could still buy many of the unsold tickets available for Saturday's playoff game in the Dome. The Falling Bullets Kill campaigners have disbanded after five years of honest effort and are leaving it up to the NOPD to get out the word, which I'm sure they will, although I am certainly missing the FBK billboards around town which represented I think the best graphic art done in this area over the last five years.
What I'm talking about is chunks of lead by the hundreds soaring to the heavens before pausing briefly to become benign atmospheric ornaments, and then quickly morphing into lottery slugs--everyone's a winner--searching without malice for their final resting place: a roof, a streetcorner, a human. Not every year is someone killed by these falling bullets but I just thought it was something you should think about, especially between the hours of 10pm and 1am 12/31/00--1/1/01.
The day before Christmas a local kid turned seventeen and the day after Christmas he was shot dead, wounds to his head and chest, over on Columbus, at the corner nearest that house I wanted to buy last year, in what seemed to be a pretty nice little quiet neighborhood. Number 202 for the year.
Last night I'm reading these Peter Straub short stories when Mandy, in the room to my right, receives a call from prisoner Shelton Sr. and rather fluently and non-judgementally begins explaining her concerns about Shelton Jr, 16, and how she may be on the verge of putting him out. Shelton Jr. is to my left playing pacman and wearing headphones that vibrate rap. Mandy is saying how Jr. is not eleven anymore and the decisions he's making (among other things apparently he has chosen to take off from school most of the month of December) may effect his immediate future harshly. I do not know the weaknesses of Shelton Sr. but I am aware of his intelligence, and have seen in him a measure of integrity that sits in the scale opposite that side which weighs the years of neglect towards his son. And I am intuiting that he is hearing Mandy clearly and then the prison timer goes off and he must hang up. But he is allowed to call again, and this time Mandy gives the phone to Shelton Jr.
He is now laying on his bed which is the couch in the front room, and he takes off his earphones to speak to his dad. But his dad is doing most of the speaking and it is a riot act the young Shelton is being read. This I can tell by the responses which are mumbles of contrition. On one point the Jr. wants to rebel but only half-heartedly because he doesn't want to ruin this moment which has his father instructing him on how to be a man. And then the prison timer goes off again and the call is about over and for all the mumbling, and that bit of street slang spoken during his counterpoint, the Jr. doesn't want to be misunderstood for what he has to say next, and so it is in perfect, crisp, unaffected American English that Jr. says to Sr. "I love you dad."