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I'm Just Saying
Come to think of it her name may have been Mrs. Jackson, my 7th grade teacher that is. She was like a military personnel, harder than we middle class baby booming Dallasites were raised to expect, but she always said former students came back to praise her which is better than coming back to haunt, or may be the same.
Now it's clear to me, her name was Mrs. Jackson, which I don't think I realized when a few years ago I made 13-year-old New Orleans inner city miscreant Shelton Jackson memorize the poem "If" by Kipling for the priviledge(?) of spending one night over here at 2646. Now he lives here, but is about to move on, having learned all the dysfunction we can teach him.
I've had to medicate against pain and would like to imply some sort of apology for the slothfulness of my thinking, writing, arithmetic, spelling, cadence.
Real men don't complain or mention their discomfort.
I hurt all over. If I began with the swollen left index finger and strayed nary a bit from only the left side I could go on and on, but when you think about it, who couldn't? I don't think there is anything wrong with whining but that's only because I'm the one doing it. If it were you, I'd be mighty tempted to tell you just to shut the hell up.
Damn I'd like to tell you a thing or two about today but I can't. Not even about parking over on the side of Armstrong Park after a hellacious morning in Madisonville on the North Shore (that's across the 26 mile Lake Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge), with fifteen hundred cash dollars stuffed behind a paper napkin in the cab of my truck like I was positioning myself for a drug deal, only I wasn't. I was eating Popeye's chicken and listening to the blues show broadcast from the Park 2-4 pm weekdays on WWOZ. I was only a hundred yards or so from the origin of the broadcast and when I left out of there, with that transmission which catches enough to take me anywhere I care to go, I could not help but notice the poet John Sinclair discussing God only knows what with God only knows who, on that path away from the radio building.
God (again)--I wish I could tell you about that ethereal young brunette with the white skin and the pretty smile and the meandering up the entire length of one arm tattooed stitches bicycling confindently through the heart of Treme while her awsomely and beautifully confident cookie colored pitbull ran the sidewalk as her protector, and like a swimmer turning his head to the side for air, checking his master with a regularity of stroke, excepting when he would pass the predominately male stoop sitters whereat he would in full moving stride with no apparent malice but no bullshit whatsoever lean into the crowd and cock his head their way--but I can't.
Good As Any
The piece I lost last night was the greatest piece in the history of mankind, and yet my disappointment at the loss, as I stared at the frozen screen, and jiggled the mouse maniacally, was less than phenomenal. What was I going to do? Blame my reliance on new fangled technology? Of course not. It could have just as well been written on a shovel blade with coal and my kind hearted wife might have let the neighbor borrow that shovel to deepen the pit for his outhouse, my inspired thoughts smeared away in deference to a higher purpose.
I believe I was attempting to offer an opinion on The Beat Generation, or that's what it sounded like before the crash. Starting out my point was only going to bring up that I never realized the number of suspicious deaths related to that group: Lucien Carr killing that dude in NY and dumping him in the river; Kerouac helping him get rid of the guy's eyeglasses; and although I had heard the "Burroughs in Mexico shooting the glass off wife Joan's head, and missing," story many times I did not know until recently that she had initiated a love affair with this Lucien Carr character shortly before. Well, Burroughs was gay so it couldn't have been jealously that made him a less than crack shot that night, or why couldn't it have been? And the "suicide" of one of Neal Cassady's many wives made my eyebrows rise, but that's besides the point. Yesterday I never really got to the suspicious deaths part which in my mind was somehow going to eloquently segue into my own On the Road experience in '60 or '61 as a toddler in South Oak Cliff hell bent for the highway, or East Kiest Blvd. But I didn't get to tell it before the crash and I'm not telling it now. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lee Harvey Oswald would have had bit parts in the story as if you needed more reasons to beg me to tell the story, but no, I order you, like you a dog, to quit that begging, and I mean no disrespect oh dear audience but discipline is freedom and you will all do well to remember that.
Anyway, it was an inspired piece, unlike this, which is me grinding to the tune "discipline is freedom," if you hum a few bars I'll be annoyed.
I am almost finished insulating over at Rocheblave and will probably order the sheetrock this weekend. I was going to hire out the hanging and finishing but now I think I prefer to do most of it myself and just hire out the hanging of the ceiling because I'm too tired and arthritic to do that even with a decent helper which is hard to find sometimes. I think I'm going to have to buy that small lot next to me for an exaggerated price so doing instead of hiring out the sheetrock work will save me a few bucks towards that eventuality.
Shelton will be moving out soon to go live with his sister, Tesa (Erica's mom), and her new husband, and family (he has some other kids), but not Erica, she's living with Aunt Gwynn in the Seventh Ward. They will attempt to restart the SSI payments of five bills a month, which Mandy had discontinued to underscore her platform that Shelton was not a commodity to her but a human being she cared about and wanted to see do well in this difficult world into which he was born. But whereas she may have coddled him at times (by hugging him and buying him Nikes?) in the years previous to his living here, there were a few standards she set for him as a resident of 2646 that probably got a good guffaw from father destiny. She was not pretending to be an unconditionally loving mother. There were one or two cardinal rules, he broke them, he's gone.
And despite the fact I was not strictly in favor of his living here, I wish him well and hope his super charged spirit, and temper, and ability to see the world clearly, will not lead him to see that the ruinous alternative is as good as any.
Wishing you could make a difference is not enough, and the attempt itself might be only so much vainglory, but to just sit on your blanket and watch and be confounded by those damn ants, ocassionally squishing a generation or two because of your dominion, is probably inexcusable. But as all of us are on the exact same path towards dust we the most of us can probably get by quite well with our indifference and ineffectuality. That's what I'm hoping.
Shine
Somewhere in the writing it became dark, and I had to wonder where went the children outside who lifted my spirit with their cacophony, which had greatfully come to replace the obscenity laced tirade of a golden toothed gangster who earlier in the day had threatened one weaker than he with a toy rifle to the head and the admonition, "don't you shine me motherfucker..." (and so on, the threat and noise of it a painfully eloquent thing that has no end, has no remorse, yet somehow, inexplicably, has no depth.), and it became quiet so that here I am now with nothing but the after images burnt into my... what?
Surfing Poorly
I don't surf but I think of the loss of the writing habit when measured in more than a few days to be similar to missing the wave; I'm just not paddling fast enough or I have picked the wrong wave to go after or I'm not one with the water or lets face it I shouldn't be on a surfboard in the first place.
It is never a loss of subject matter or ideas that causes the pause. Sometimes it is embarrassment and extreme self-consciousness, the consciousness which is me seeing me on the surfboard.
Advice
Advice to self: I think its better to have an idea before you start because if you don't have an idea you might find yourself spouting off just to make noise which is not only pointless, but noisy.
Back To School
For most of a year I'm a real dandy of a worker; the housepainter of your dreams; a super employee. Once a year though there opens a window of opportunity for me to express that undeniably less than stellar part of me that best expresses itself bluntly thusly--fuckit. I see those portals, the one in southwestern Virginia, and that one in Utah, and I can see myself walking towards them as those that trusted me shake their heads sadly and reduce me verbally to "a flake" of a man. I wish I knew what they meant. Its so true the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
What a hand I've been dealt, I don't know what to do with all my jokers.
Now I remember why I sat down here. I wanted to tell a story. It was going to be a story submitted to mrbellarsneighborhood.com, a site accepting non-fiction stories with a NY theme, and I only have a few, although Edgar Oliver swears I picked up a rat and threw it out his window on E. 10th (or Psilocybin ) and that's not even one I remember so who can say how many stories exist. But what's to be gained really by becoming a dot on the bellar map, or the many others, no disrepect, but the telling is all that matters, and where it ends up is truly secondary.
This story contains no sex whatsoever and I'm not protecting the lady's name I simply cannot remember it. She was pretty though, and kissing her on a bench at The World on Ave D (?). was heavenly, which is an adjective or adverb meant to make this more a spiritual piece because like I said, there is no sex in it. Before that we were somewhere else which is where we began to show an interest in each other, but there was another guy playing too and although he was the loser, in the end I did have to wonder if maybe he would have been better off as the winner, and it is my impression he might have played my part better than I played my part. Plus he was a New Yorker and perhaps more familiar with local customs, and I was, I don't know, probably a Texan.
Pausing after some more real fine kissing in the cab on the way to her place somewhere in the forties, she said, "I hope you're not one of those guys who's gonna come to my apartment and hassle me for sex."
I'm a real naive guy even to this day so its no real surprise that this was my first clue that me and this young woman were not on the same page. Which at the time in the back of that cab I tried to see as a sunny side and responded simply, "I won't hassle you."
But that query in the cab did me in I think because once up the many elevator-ed stories to her less than modest apartment I only wanted to be non-threatening and polite. Which I was, sitting by myself on her plush couch as she excused herself with seductive implication to the boudoir. She came back once, it seems, just to make sure I was still there and then she quickly disappeared again and came back with a deck of tarot cards. I did what she instructed as non-threateningly as possible--picked a card, any card--and the card I picked was a doozy according to her and she quickly disappeared again. When she returned she was in a nightie. Not the image of pure seduction but she did have my polite attention. I gazed noncommittally at her waiting for a more direct clue as to how I might meet her needs. She answered my polite patience with an obscurely seductive gesture--she curtsied and then lifted her short nightgown to show to me that perfectly desirable and well groomed enigma which earlier I had been admonished not to hassle her for.
I followed her to the bedroom and gleefully accepted her suggestion that I give her a back rub. Every positive suggestion, however, had a stop sign on the other side and she was right when she said "you seem tenative," for I surely was, and the both of us knew that was unlikely to change. It was the other guy (the so-called "loser") that would have appreciated her rape fantasty, or whatever syncopated love symphony she was trying to orchestrate that night, and while I paused supinely pondering where went the simplicity of mutual passion, she fell asleep, or pretended to, and I went back to my couch and slept for the few hours into morning. By a long shot she wasn't the best piece of ass I never had but she was so very sweet in her own way and making that long walk back to the east village, or tribeca, on a winter morning that required little more of me than putting one foot in front of the other, I couldn't help but wonder if I should start attending classes, or something, you know, to get in touch with my bad self.
Bombs Bursting In Air
We've been told to drop the dime on our neighbors if they shoot off guns tonite but I really don't think that will be necessary in the 2600 block of Dumaine. It is also illegal to possess and set off fireworks in Orleans Parish and even though personal fireworks useage is a crime largely ignored in New Orleans, 11-year-old neighbor Bryan Henry is really pushing his luck as far as I'm concerned.
He's a good kid, has a good mother, and a couple or three male relatives living with him who don't seem to be too shabby as role models. His mother earns a modest living as a cafeteria worker and exercises her right to raise Bryan in a conservative manner. However, as an only child he does receive special treatments--a (razor) scooter for Christmas, and the latest game playing devices over the rest of the year. And he is supplied with a modest pile of firecrackers in early July and late December.
Bryan is a good kid, did I mention that?, but...
The other day the gangsters over at St. Philip and Dorgenois set off at once a low estimate of ten thousand firecrackers that lasted approximately ninety seconds and had many of us Dumainers poking our heads out our front doors to determine more accurately the proximity of these explosions. The sound was the most exacting clue as to where these firecrackers were being set off but the huge cloud of smoke and its choking odor got the other senses involved too. The frighteningly rapid sequential and concurrent explosions reached such alarming crescendo on two occasions that I found myself grimacing as if preparing for the individual blasts to become one large one which would easily blow us all to kingdom come.
...the thing about Bryan Henry is that for the last several days--a couple of which I have stayed home all day because its cold and I'm a woos--he, and one or two of his cousins will start setting off firecrackers at 8 a.m. and continue until late evening, like this: 1-2-3, wait five minutes, 1-2, wait one hour, 1-2-3-4, wait five minutes, 1, wait two hours, break for lunch. Then in a fit of orgiastic abandon a string of 25 are set off all at once. Then silence for two hours, and so on, so that my nerves might require more medication than I have readily available, or maybe I should have saved what I had. If I had a modest trust fund and I wanted to be sure it would last throughout the rest of my life I would give it to Bryan Henry to manage for me, but I don't, and so the thing about Bryan Henry is--he's gotta go down.
911
"Emergency Operator"
"Yeah, uh, I've been hearing around that ya'll want people to call if we hear gunshots."
"Yessir, what is your location?"
"Um, I live at, um, on 2600 block Dumaine."
"Can you see the person shooting sir."
"Uh, well, yeah, I can."
"Describe the person for me sir."
"Well, he's short, say about four and a half feet, and uh male, black, black male, with a parka and a hood on it, and uh he makes fun of me sometimes..."
"...you know this person sir?"
"Oh, uh uh, no, not really no, I don't know him."
"You said..."
"...I don't know him at all."
"Can you determine this person's age sir?"
"Maybe he's twelve."
"A four and a half foot 12-year-old black male with a hooded parka who sometimes makes fun of you is firing a gun in the 2600 block of Dumaine."
"Well, now that you put it like that, I don't know, really, for sure if its a gun, but it could be, couldn't it?"
"I can't really say from here, sir, but we have cars in the area, we'll pass one by."
"Ohhhkay, well, thank you and..."
...click.
Hey, don't look at me like that, I'm just being a good citizen here, and uh, anyway, those vicodins really suck. What a total waste of opiate, mixing in all that acetaminophen. The wine spritzer of dope. Desperate time, desperate measures.