View current page
...more recent posts
Speckled Trout In River Ridge
Mandy didn't like using the plural pronoun "we" even when she and I were a couple but overhearing her occasional use of the singular "I" to refer to things that we undoubtedly did together, and also the possessive "my" when talking about things we legally own together ( the Bushy Fork, North Carolina house, and this Dumaine, New Orleans house), kind of makes me wonder how many versions of reality might actually exist at the same time, and how wording may make all the difference in the world.
Today I was working alone doing some repainting in the home of one of the general contractors my boss and I work for, very nice home, richly appointed, River Ridge neighborhood (the ring of that should tell you all you need to know about the desirability of the area). This man, the contractor, and his wife, who sells drugs in the projects, literally, but not in the way the words imply, are good folk with busy lives and an even tempered three year old boy, named after the father, and deceased grandfather. I enjoy my conversations with the boy at seven a.m.--his sincere declaration to me that he has to pee I meet with sincere enthusiam and encouragement, "hey, that's great, why don't you go and do that," and I am proud as a father when I hear the three-year-old sized cascading echo of streaming piss into a toilet bowl a few seconds later. I'm painting a color called "leather leaf" on the beaded board surrounding the bar. When he comes back and calls me "man" I am not put out by this as I might be if a suit wearing professional used the same term, trying to be "simpatico" with the long hair. The boy probably meant it literally, probably brought the issue up with his parents the night before, wondering just what is it with that "person" who is coming to our house everyday. He seems like a man, and you all tell me to call him "Mister Jim," but his hair is long like mommy's. His mom and dad may have instructed him to see me, and refer to me as a man, so he did.
This contractor (we can call him Paul because that is his name) is an avid fisherman and had the day before taken off with his older brother, and fellow building contractor, (whom we can call G, because a lot of people do) to go fishing in this here "the Sportsman's Paradise," and came back with an astounding, or for them possibly average catch, of speckled trout. A couple of seven pounders he was duly proud of.
"I'll make you a plate before I go and you can heat it in the microwave for lunch," he said to me before leaving, and then a few minutes later while I was touching up a ceiling with "summer dew" it was his wife ( at this point I would be wrong for reducing her to four lower case letters and therefore must proclaim as Julie, and hope that being inside the parenthetical is not some sort of slight, or perhaps being outed by name without permission would be the slight, and at one time was the point being driven towards but I can see now that I'll never get there from here) who asked me did I like green beans, which of course I do, and then she came to find me caulking in her son's room, and here I would like to add she is not only a strong independent woman, but strong looking, and by that I mean the opposite of masculine strength, which is to say, she is quite pretty. She had come to recommend the best setting for the microwave, and I thanked her. She left and I was alone.
Not long after this my break time arrived and I went out to my car to retrieve my bag of salted in shell peanuts. To these I added from the pantry a great good many Famous Amos cookies and a half dozen olives from that dwindling supply in the fridge. I turned the small TV in the kitchen on and felt that guilty pleasure surging through my inexplicably disciplined non TV watching self. The day before I had looked at a seductively wrapped Marlboro cigarette with a similar sensation, except there was no guilt, and no pleasure, only a frightening burst of weak willed longing.
I recognized immediatedly the middle of You've Got Mail with Hanks and you know, whatshername (Meg Ryan, it came to me), she's way cute, even if you have to sell your soul to the devil to think so, and after about twenty minutes I know I'm at a crossroads of trouble which is fueled by my need for a drug, any drug, and in this case it's sentimentality in the easy to swallow coated caplet. I had tripped on this prescription before and the comfortability of previous experience had me looking forward to this Big Mac love story even at the sacrifice of real nourishment.
I was into touching up the white enameled woodwork at this point so I just concentrated on the areas surrounding the kitchen, and its 13 inch version of edited love. I let myself cry a little when she said "I really hoped it would be you," because I'm a drug addict and Meg Ryan had just showed up at the door with a kilo, and checking for purity is mostly an illusion. Afterwards I felt kind of dirty, but how you gonna avoid that?
For lunch I had speckled trout, green beans, and mashed potatoes with chives, and watched the last half of King of Comedy.
What He Said
He could be cheerful at will if that's what he chose to be but the simplicity of that joy was too much like cheating the retarded child at a board game.
A brother had insisted that he not make everything so hard but he chose to ignore (while remembering) that advice.
Then there was the time so early in the game when he had crawled across three lanes of potential traffic to get to a median, only to be returned to his proper place by a do-gooding teamster.
Two or three years later he was coloring a picture of a snowman with perpendicular, crucified like Christ arms, and under each he had built (drawn) campfires which were meant to melt his creation. This is what he was doing when the president was assassinated in Dallas. His mother would perhaps say she was watching him do this or she could have her own story but he would catch her in a lie if she said she didn't cry at the news as it was broadcast over the brown, square, plastic, lidded, box that was both a 45 rpm record player, and radio. It was a curious day for the kid.
Two years later he would meet and become friends with the kid in red who stood next to his mom and dad as across the way Zapruder captured (and later sold to Life magazine) the 8mm images of presidential grey matter spraying into the air. The kid in red thought the Manlicher reports were firecrackers, and the shredded upward thrusting brain of John Kennedy, confetti.
Jackie did instinctively run for it but the early spin doctors told us she was hightailing on her knees across the trunk of that convertible for help. Too many lies are told and they become better than the truth; truth then becomes better, at best, than doing laundry.
Pizza's in the oven, man's gotta eat, truth does wait.
In Deference
Speaking of paranoia I have felt a weight akin to it these last few days and nights (my dreams are cumbersome knots of frustration where I bark orders of reprimand at the boy driving at reckless speed as I see and hear the fence posts whizz by), and I've made my own mistakes in driving judgement which on the road have translated into women cussing me from one intersection to the next, down Broad Street, Treme and the River to my right, me on my way home from days that seem very long, but I'm not looking for shorter days so don't clock me as a complainer.
It's warm and muggy here, but cloudy and sunless, in mid February, and that is my witless guess as to why some of us are feeling a little restless, not to mention an awkwardness towards Valentine's Day that may pierce our hearts, and on the individual basis who can say exactly why many of us are out of sync but we are, and this is not just a misery loves company wishful thought but more
a wild guess based on high probabiltity.
And the ghetto, here in New Orleans, seems so much its lesser, more downtrodden self.
On this Sunday next my former lover and I are throwing away a human being, and the golden toothed gangster across the street tirades loudly (punctuating every sentence with Ya hoid me, you heard me?), and how can I not, as a careful but haphazard listener, hear it all, so that when he says to his hapless audience of fellow gangsters "come Monday we may have to go into that building," how am I not to give a moment's consideration that he may mean this building, and therein lies the seed of paranoia, and therein lies a seed of truth, in deference to which I will make or imagine I will make, some preparations.
Concurrent Fantasies
I did not acknowledge the nod from the woman pretending to be vampire novelist Anne Rice any more than I gave much credence to the resemblance of her companion as the poet Stan Rice. All three of us were imposters, as I was pretending to be a person who could be at the Clearview Palace theatre around noon on a Friday to see the Sean Penn flick, and they were guilty as sin in their hokey famous people incognito getups.
I meant no disrepect to the woman pretending to be novelist Anne Rice any more than this morning I thought there was magic related to my daytime wearing of a Goodwill bought Cranston, Rhode Island sweatshirt which previously had only been worn at night under the covers, but today was being worn as I waited in the neutral ground crossover at Dorgenois and Canal in New Orleans, La. behind a truck with Rhode Island license plates, which outside of RI is not a license plate you see all that often.
And all this of course had nothing to do with my morning fixation on the Creole chick at Betsy's Pancake house at which I arrived after moving straight forward across that intersection as the Rhode Island truck turned left, on Canal, toward the River. I say "Creole" really only to describe the color of her skin which was coffee colored with four creamers, and those approximately green eyes. Her golden red straightened hair flipping up coquetishly at the level of her graceful neck was a look that seemed to work well for her. And her voice which had first asked for a menu, and later for more syrup (although demurred at the suggestion of whip cream), was from somewhere allluringly foreign to this locale, and I did not rule out Rhode Island.
Later, well into the Sean Penn movie, with the imitation Rices nearby, I could only sympathize with the uncomfortability of Jack Nicholson's possibly delusional character as he was out of the blue asked--"are you sexually active." I answered for him, "no, but I've got several full blown fantasies running concurrently."
The great thing about being Sean Penn would be that you could get guys like Nicholson, and Harry Dean Stanton, and that great wife of yours, and all those other pretty fine actors to be in your flick, and you could have enough clout and balls to end a movie in such a way that is more like real life than any of us imposters hiding out in the theatres really care for.