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First Two Talking
Hey Slim.
Leave me alone.
Feeling grumpy?
Eat me.
I was just wondering...?
You better quit dicking with me.
Come on, let's talk, you'll feel better.
Nothing wrong with how I feel.
Want some Midol?
All right, bitch, what do you want?
I was just wondering when you're going to get back to work on the house.
Been busy.
Really? Doing what?
Relaxing, reading, avoiding completion...
That's what I'm talking about, why don't you just complete the damn thing?
There is joy in work avoidance. You have to take what you can get.
But what about that sense of fullfillment you would get from being finished, living legal, instead of being a squatter...?
That fullfillment you talk about is an overrated fairy tale, and I'm more in harmony with my environment the way things lay now.
Deep, but they ain't gonna let you live like that forever.
Too many "theys" out there to be worried about any single one of them.
Hey, maybe you could just pick up some materials today and then maybe if you felt like it, today, or during the week, you might actually accomplish something.
Yeah maybe. But if potentially today is the last day of the rest of my life I don't want to spend it working.
Rather be on the beach?
I ain't so crazy about beaches.
Me either.
Amazing we have that in common.
Not really so amazing considering we're the same...
Don't even think it, we ain't that, you just the front and little else, so back away from those easy comparisons.
I don't have to let you out, you know?
Don't be so sure about that, Mr. Jim.
Thorazine
I do not use a lot of illegal drugs and that's because such consumption is simply not covenient at this point in time. Not to mention I am more mature than the young man looking like me, but fresher, who was formerly into random abuses. I mean I used to pick up pills off the street, and convinced I was acting in the name of science, eat them. I got a hold of some thorazine once, given to me by this madman with a convincing smile, whom I had met inside a smoking van (it would finally throw a rod south of San Franciso) full of fellow hitchhikers after stepping off that rock in front of the Mercedes dealership in Santa Barbara that says "stand here" after escaping unscathed that strip search at the border of Mexico the previous day. I was making extraordinarily good time for a hitchhiker. I had not even made it to the end of the entrance ramp in El Paso, or even stuck my thumb out, when two young men in a small pick-up determined to drive non-stop had picked me up on their way to Santa Barbara. What I was doing out there in the great american west was being a college dropout, a work avoider, a mundanity suppressor, a scaredy cat. Anyway, I knew precious little about thorazine except I had seen it work wonders at a party in Austin where a fellow was having adverse reactions to one of those hallucinogenic chemicals. Also, I had had brief discussions about it with another fellow who worked at the state hospital there in Austin. I was not completely ignorant on the subject because I was aware of the term "thorazine shuffle," which as it turned out for me was a slightly painful, most embarrassing, contraction of various muscles which caused me to move through the streets of San Francisco looking like a poorly conceived, cheaply imitative, Hollywood Igor. My home in San Francisco was an underpass at Second and Folsom, or thereabouts, and where I ended up that day was at a movie theatre near that chocolate factory by the bay where I hid out in the dark watching the original run of Hollywood's version of Keroac, the one in which I think it was Nick Nolte playing Neal Cassady. It was a painful day the day I learned thorazine is not a recreational drug. And, not to talk down to you, or be overly obvious, but that earlier part about being more mature was a joke.
Running Onward
Yesterday about dinner time I stepped out into the watery blast furnace known as the local climate and saw a young man emerging from the weed and tree choked lot next door to me; the one owned by the Pentecostals. He was bisecting the lot on a self made path that was bringing him more and more to my attention. He kept turning around and looking towards the direction he came from (most likely that skinny alleyway which fronts out to Iberville and runs along the dance hall). The other sneak attack access to the weed and tree choked lot is pretty much impassable what with all that garbage the Pentecostals left there last year, and in that way I should be greatful but I may in fact be less than that.
I was on my way to the grocery up at Canal and Carrollton because they sell plate lunches and if you get there early enough in the evening you can call it dinner, or supper if you wish, before they bag it up for the day. Thursday is Crawfish Etoufee with praline carrots and let me tell you those carrots are some good. Got a kid won't eat vegetables?, sic a plate of those candy coated carrots on him. Turn him into a regular vegetarian in no time.
So I turn to the guy because it looks like he is determined to occupy "my" space and he is clearly on the run in some fashion, looking out to the street now, nervous, yet seemingly in good spirits, and so as he crosses my driveway in front of the little Toyota I'm about to escape in I look right at him and raise my eyebrows, which may or may not have arched above my cheap sunglasses, and he expresses in the local colloquial that he means no harm by saying--"I'm straight." To that I said "all right," and began to get into the car. The young man on the run paused, and said, "hey, which way you going?" So it was my turn to pause, briefly, while speed spinning the microfiche of a lifetime of responses, and then I had to smile, and laugh a little before grunting, "uh uh." He took no offense, laughed a little himself, and moved off towards Bienville.
An hour earlier a neighbor with whom I have set bad precedent by loaning (giving) money came over, cigarette in mouth, and said "let me get five dollars, neighbor." Shifting the can of budweiser from one hand to the other I stepped out onto the temporary steps of my nearly finished recycled home and shutting the door to keep in the cool air provided by the temporary window unit, said, "uh, no neighbor, can't do it." She ran by me some of her hardships, a not unfamiliar list, and which did not include any moaning about all the crack heads coming in and out her place all night till sunrise. I have been pretty put out with this woman since the last time she came over, during one of my naps, and banged repeatedly on the side of the house until I woke up groggy and red-eyed, and gave her four dollars. That was when I decided this shit would have to stop. I had a good neighbor on Dumaine who used to hit me that way, expert at waiting a lengthy enough time between hits so that I wouldn't feel he was taking unfair advantage. I like(d) the dude, but it would get so I felt a strong need to avoid him, and I can't see, at this advanced age, making all those same petty mistakes, even if I have to seem petty to accomplish that. So that's the way its gotta be neighbor, and that's at the risk of you unleashing your army of ne'erdowells, and expert petty thieves on me. It's what I was thinking over when the kid on the run ask me where I was going. Onward is what I have decided. The neighbor lady said, "that's ok, Jim, we're still friends." Okeedokey.
Night Out
I came over to Dumaine tonite because it is Night Out Against Crime and I'm against crime, where's the free food?
It's raining.
The Dumaine boys had helped hand out flyers last week for the Zulu version of a street party but when they showed up over there tonite for the party the Zulu's said no children allowed. I did not know the Dumaine party was not going on. That's why I came over. I was hungry. I was counting on deviled eggs. They call them stuffed eggs around here. Evelyn is here now, cussing, calling her son a bitch, calling me her husband, I tell her I don't like that language, she tells me she can kick my ass too ( that would be in addition to everyone), I don't argue, I'm realistic, Fermin asks me do I think she talks too much trash? I cannot really console the son against the mother.
I'm really hungry.
Shelton's not here in New Orleans. He's in the Bay Area. So any a ya'll out there keep an eye out.
Jermaine, Terrell's daddy, is here playing solitaire on the computer. In the years past, when crime was more palpable, and there was more of a territory question going on, Jermaine had threatened to burn this house down. It was a good natured threat, as threats go, and was made in a context that did not imagine he would ever get to play solitaire on one of the computers.
Evidently, the kids were allowed to partake in the Zulu feeding afterall, I guess they just were not allowed into the inner sanctum, I'm sure that goes for the rest of us too, but they all coming back now declaring the burgers nasty, school burgers, soy bean, and the hotdogs, hotdogs. That ain't no proper Nite Out feeding. The Zulu's going budget on the hoodlings. You can't fight crime with soy bean.
I'm still hungry. I'm only writing because I can't deal with the reality of my choices. It's late (for me), I've already eaten fast food at least once today. I was really counting on a Dumaine feast, barbecue chicken, ribs, jambalaya, meatballs, macaroni, dirty rice, deviled eggs. I'm against crime. I really am. Beer and whisky.
I miss Mama D. I really do.
Open This
I have to tell you the truth, I'm not really all that nice to ill-behaved children.
My boss brought his pride and joy eight-year-old-son to work today, which is ok, the kid has some work ethic and sticks close to his dad for the most part and I did not mind, in fact enjoyed, playing stickball with him during break, and his dad did not interrupt or even disapprove, as far as I could tell, of my light badgering--"you hear this ball whizzing by your head? It's saying you can't hit me, you sissy, you can't hit me on your best day."
Later, after lunch, which is very close to quitting time, and is a period in which I will sometimes get lost in reflection, similar to but slightly less hopeful than the place I go in the morning period before break, and the kid snuck up on me while I was crouched low to the floor straightlining a piece of baseboard and said "boo," scaring me out of my dreamworld where human frailty is the shortest distance between two points, and I barked at him, "boy, this ain't no game, get away from me."
And I meant it is the funny thing, and still do, even in retrospect I mean it. Evidently, I take my work seriously.
At lunch his dad kept saying ok that's enough but kept pitching the tape ball to him inside the house and I kept at the ready as catcher, saying things like "come on batter," and "hey batter batter," and, "sissy boy can't hit." He averaged out at about .600 though.
Before lunch the boy's dad had him moving all the paint cans from the master closet into the garage so carpet can be laid next week and I was painting the access panels along side the whirlpool bath and when the kid tried to muscle a full five gallon paint bucket I told him to leave it. He was determined though so I put it this way--"doing what you can't do is not worth the effort. Trying to move that bucket is not heroic, does not make you strong, does not mean you are a man. You will only hurt yourself." He countered that he wasn't hurting himself and I countered that lifting something heavy the way he was lifting it--with his legs wide open and the whole of his upper body hovering over the heavy object--was the most sure way to hurt yourself. "When you get to be twenty and thirty and you won't be able to do heavy work and you'll look back on this day and say 'if only I hadn't been such a knucklehead when I was eight.' Just leave it, I'll get it later." He lost interest and went off to find his dad.
Shortly before quitting time and I was painting the windowsills in the garage and the kid was misinterpreting some request his father had made and was trying to remove the lid from an empty plastic five gallon bucket and I was glancing over seeing him having trouble but was pretty much done with the child care aspect of my job for the day so I let him have his trouble. It was late in the day and the lustre was waning from the shiny chrome of his work ethic and so he gave up, and said, or rather, demanded, of me, of all people--OPEN THIS FOR ME.
Well, I am a busy man, and paid, not overly but adequately, to perform a job which I have previously, long ago, made clear does not include responding favorably to pissy attitudes.
I glanced over at the boy and said, "I'm sorry? What did you say?"
"Open This For Me!!!" He was looking at me like he thought I actually would.
I stopped performing my task and turned to face him fully, and looked at him with what I hoped would pass for disdainful incredulity. "Boy, I don't know who it is in your world that let's you get away talking like that but it ain't me, so you best run along now and let me work." He didn't like that and went to tell his dad, who yelled at him, so he came back and played noisely with an electrician's ladder, right beside me, and I took his punishment as my due.