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The Disconnected
I started renovating a small house for myself almost two years ago and I'm right towards the end but I will not allow myself to finish which is not an unusual trend for me and is why I feel something akin to worry except there is nothing nagging about it. I mean I nag me a little but then I just tell myself to screw off, and I do, not offended in the least. I read a lot, write very little, sleep on the floor, shower with ice cold water, eschew all appliances (except the hotplate), and telephone devices, and human contact for that matter, and feel, if not contentment, then something like it--which may be comfort.
I don't always know what to do with comfort. I see the homeless person, that androgenous public hermit who sleeps upright, bundled in layers of clothing and head gear on that little half wall on Cleveland Street near the Whitney Bank here in New Orleans. I see him/her every morning about six a.m. on my way to the construction work which is my living and even in the 42 degree rain he/she seems almost comfortable. You might think I'm projecting a wishful thought here and you may be right but when I want your opinion I will say the words "so what do you think?" If you don't hear those words, just keep it to yourself, ok?
But the homeless person for me is like a benchmark. I see him/her and I say to myself, "quit your whining, bitch." And I do. I quit whining, sort of, except for this, which strikes me as whining. The Whiner Therapy, by Dr. James Phelgm.
For Christmas I had considered driving a seventeen-year-old truck, which claims among its various mechanical maladies a questionable head gasket, to Dallas, and back, a distance totaling a thousand miles. I have another seventeen-year-old vehicle but something is wrong with it too. It is not even able to leave the driveway at this point in time and anyway is most coveted for its air-conditioning which will of course not become a priority issue again until May. Although tomorrow is Jan 23 and the New Orleans temp may approach eighty. (81, a new record).
To prepare mentally for the trip to Texas I recalled a mechanical challenge 15 years previous driving from Portland, Oregon to NYC and DC in a '72 Ford Maverick four door which had suffered complete main brake failure in Portland and which I brought to gradual stops by abusing the emergency brake all across America. It was blue with stock tires that were thin enough to create the illusion that the Maverick was actually a big bicycle, but it had that coveted Ford 302 V-8 engine, and really could run like the proverbial scalded dog.
At the moment when gradual break failure became total I was at the bottom of a hill on a dark, unpopulated downtown street and this man apparently addicted to crack I had befriended was in the passenger seat looking with too much interest at all my possessions stuffed in the backseat. By this time in my life I had been naively trusting the untrustworthy for a few years and so intuited that his curiosity was not of the purest nature. I called him on it, saying, "Why you lookin' in my backseat?" He assured me he was innocent of ill intent but because I had read his mind he became leery of me, and this new found respect was I think based partly on the faux talismans I had hanging from the rearview mirror and partly from the chill in the air caused by that brief toggled transformation that had seen me go from diffident and naive to--Dirty Harry. It was all psych like something learned from one of those winning through intimidation manuals, chapter 17--Playing Against Predators--and my companion had played his predator card too early which allowed me to use his new found suspicion of me against him the rest of the night. We had another misunderstanding later on but that was all on me, and I was glad to be quit of this joker at night's end.
In Manhattan I remember the fun of necessarily becoming one of the very aggressive NY drivers and how liberating it felt going easy on the brakes.
One day after parking at a job site in the DC/Northern VA. area the emergency brakes finally froze up for good and the wheels would barely spin. It was an expensive fix firstly because I had done a lot of damage to the system and secondly because my address at the time was in Great Falls, VA., a somewhat affluent area.
But the trip to Dallas involved the consideration of forcasted winter weather and the fact that I hoped to bring a couple of pieces of valued furniture back with me. I was reminded of transmission melt down with fully loaded van (and M trailing in the Maverick) outside Burly, Idaho moving back south after a brief life in Seattle, maybe the '89 labor day weekend. It was a knockdown three day drag, and I wasn't sure I was strong enough for a repeat. I see a length of dry rotted rope tied to Elisabet (that was the Maverick's name) driven by M, connected to the van, with me tying and retying the rope as it broke twenty miles outside of Burly, then 17, then 8, then on the off ramp, at 3 a.m., Burly time, southern Idaho. It was cold at night in early September.
So the memories fueled my anxiety about Texas and at the very last minute, after realizing the level on the truck's dipstick was actually increasing instead of diiminishing over time, I chickened out, called my elderly mother, whom I haven't visited for over a year, and broke it to her.
I imitated her disappointed voice-- "wellllll that'sss all right"-- to a co-worker and we both laughed ourselves to tears, not because it was funny but because the opposite, and this was a co-worker hip to it. Also, it was patently obvious that day that neither one of us had laughed in a good while so we had jumped at the chance. I don't see this co-worker that often because his trade is different from mine and the builder we both work for is dying of cancer and therefore not building so many new homes. But this guy lets me experiment off the cuff; he allows if not encourages my little banters, work riffs, spoken releases. We try to get each other laughing. As often as not it doesn't work and then out of the blue you take it to tears. It's fun at times.
I started acquiring titles and deeds at some point and am owner or co-owner of four properties. Two or them are Closet to Go Mediterranean/Baltic-like properties and the other two might be valued closer to the light blue ones up the board less than ten spaces from Go. (Oriental?...). I'm not a magnate you understand; liquidation would barely afford me a new Lexus and a year of conservative idle living, and I often wonder if the occasional hassles of ownership make that paltry potential payoff worth what is involved. I mean attention to taxes and maintenance and rental income, so forth, and blah deon. It's boring and does not inspire me in any way, but there are a couple of things in life like that so I just manage these affairs in the way that causes me to deal with them as little as possible.
It is only the Bushy Fork, North Carolina property that is rented and so when the rent stopped showing up on the bank statements (deposited directly into an account from which the mortgage is directly withdrawn) I did not immediately leap to action. The renters are the same ones that took over the house when me and the ex left NC seven or eight years ago. They do all their own small repairs and will only call with dire emergencies like a few years ago we had to replace the well pump. They traditionally miss a couple of months a year and that fits in to my grand economic scheme of owning things that while making me absolutely no money, still do not cost me all that much to maintain on a yearly basis, and help me pull off the charade of respectability.
After four months of missed payments I had to alert M that we might have a problem and I stress "we" because with the added responsibility of this here my new but slightly unfinished ("slightly"--relative to its beginning state anyway) renovated residence I could not afford by myself to cover a thousand dollar loss, and the continued dollar drain that was looming. That 250 a month is only a few dollars less than the mortgage payment on the rental house and is also equal, I think, to what you can get for Baltic Ave. with a hotel on it.
I grunted to another co-worker about this missing rent because it is a mundane problem I thought he might relate to and with this co-worker, with whom I spend much time, it has gotten to the point where I have stopped relaying most of the more juicey tidbits of depravation (like being witness to autovehicular blow jobs in my driveway at six am.) to which I am privy because I began to feel like he did not appreciate it. Sometimes we will not talk at all because I can't think of anything to say, because I don't have anything appropriate to say. So I'm going on to this co-worker like a world weary beleaguered landowner, man-of-the-world type, chagrined at the ineptitude of those under my rule, but shrugging it off as men of the world will do. I felt at the time like it was a pretty successful conversation inasmuch as there were words spoken by both me and my co-worker.
As we have reached a little over the midway point of the fifteen year mortgage on that NC property I suggested to M that maybe she would like to take over the managing and possible eviction of its decent, but somewhat hapless tenants. She agreed and after making some phone calls to NC property managers felt like she could if necessary make the moves to evict. Which is an action that takes a good bit of pysching up for.
I myself was once a property manager, in Arlington, TX, and rented apartments to not only members of al Qaida but to college students and let me tell you those Muslims left a lot of water on their bathroom floors but it was those American college students who were making me old before my time so I quit after about eight or ten months and told that pillar of Arlington society, who was offering me a sizeable cash payoff if I hung with him for three years, that I couldn't do it. I took off for NC to hook back up with M who would not do Texas and had told me this before I took the job and had gone to NC at least partly to get away from me. But I never evicted anyone there in Arlington, though many deserved it. It is a hard thing to do.
M, in NC, was not that happy to see me when I arrived, as she had learned in those several months apart that it was easier getting used to my actual absence than to that absence of me when we were together.
When M finally got in touch with the tenants (something I had been unable to do not so much because of being phoneless and primitive but because I am determined at times to be as ineffective as possible), she found that they had been trying to make payments but the bank was rejecting them for some reason. They had put aside the one thousand dollars though (this astounded me) and after I called the NC bank (had to because the account is in my name) and found out what the problem was they were able to make the deposit, on Christmas eve of all days.
Also M found out the tenants have a new baby, the well had run dry, the furnace was kaput, and the septic tank tends to overflow into the yard; so we are slumlords.
The tenants have devised an alternate heat source and the septic tank is just a thing so that leaves us with the well as the only crucial, somewhat expensive maintenance to deal with immediately. I say this while chasing Irish whisky with Dutch beer and find myself contemplating issues of priority, judgement, and hardship. I think what I'm thinking is that you can be hard on others or you can be hard on yourself but why bother with it if it doesn't keep whisky in your glass or put water in your various pipes. But I guess there goes the DSL line I was planning to afford. After canceling AOL over on Dumaine, M hooked up with a no frills ISP for about 12 bucks a month. It seems to work ok. DSL money goes to NC for awhile.
I was standing with my hand on my wallet in the middle of Dumaine the other day while teenager Glynn paused from his fast drive to the basket to remind me of a football bet we had made months ago which had me pipe dreaming and him solidly behind the St. Louis Rams.
I was massaging the wallet now trying to figure out how much I owed him, while gangsters smoking blunts watched from the stoop of the house across the way, and rush hour traffic eased on by to line up at the Broad intersection. Although I was acting all distracted I really enjoyed this time with Glynn on trash strewn Dumaine, a corner defying that grey primer rolling anti-graffiti artist with it's recently black spray painted message that this is the corner of the "Dumaine Nigga." I enjoyed him getting the better of me, or of anything, and I liked the way he dapped me down low without me even realizing I had formed a fist. I was wishing I had more interaction with the kids than I do but I'm the busy, distracted Mr. Jim now and I can't be bothered with all that.
I daydream about being involved more, I think it would be fun to open a library like in Richard Brautigan's, The Abortion, where kids (or anyone) could come and place anywhere on the shelves the books they themselves had written and put together. There are a couple of Brautiganphiles in the US who have done this already. Though probably here in this inner city there might be more a need to attend to the fundamental aspects of literacy than to the high falutin world of vanity publishing. But I don't know. I just feel these kids here are an inadequately tapped treasure. I mean shit, the stories they could tell if they could tell stories! And more than that, I miss hanging out with them, as their lives seem connected to mine; I mean they seem familiar; they remind me of a better, or at least funner me, back when. Of course the comparison weakens me and strengthens them in light of the fact that there was very little, if any, overt drug dealing, murder, prostitution, and deep despair on the streets of my youth. These kids are surviving and having fun under tougher circumstances. But still they seem familiar, literally, like blood relations. I try not to inactively worry about them too much because I think they have everything they need except formal education, and higher echelon connections, and fathers, and guidance, and sometimes food, shelter, and Nikes. But they ain't pussies, none of them, and will get along famously, I keep hoping.
The kids remain for me unforgotten because they will on occasion exude these brilliant bursts of spirit that shows them all lit up and beautiful, against the backdrop of their vibrant but limited playing field, and it tends to--even if you're paying attention only a little bit--break your heart. And there are other times where it seems wrong to imagine that you have anything better to offer these amazing spirits.
The kitten lives. By virtue of cuteness survives famously despite odds against it.
And there is some action in the jungle of Kitten's birth, the Pentecostal vacant lot, which I can no longer refer to it as "weed and tree choked"--for they have cut all that down--but now must come to grips with a renaming which would have it called--"the broken up slabs of concrete and brush piles amidst brick and oyster shell laden mounds of black earth"? That flows. Men from the church come over with the borrowed backhoe and learn the fundamentals of backhoery while I watch in horror/envy through my windows. And then just like with my project here nothing gets done for weeks and weeks until one day for a few hours possibly even the preacher himself shows up and backhoes right up against my house, scratching the property line deep and abrading a limb of the Mulberry tree before retreating back to the church. I can tell watching through my windows it was not as satisfying as he had hoped it would be.
Satisfying backhoing in our age of instant gratification is best done in soft, sandy earth. The mystery is given more easily. This ground around here is archaeologically layered hard scrabble; it defys the hydraulic superiority of the backhoe and is mean and bitter and full of bricks below varying thicknesses of early attempted slab foundations, mixed with just plain mucky clay and oyster shells for flavor.
The backhoe no longer sits in the grass corner of their newly asphalted parking lot at Iberville/Dorgenois so maybe their borrowing time is up, job done. Interesting statement. Is it Pentacostalese for fuck you? The lawyers next door had complained about the tall weeds and trees growing in the lot and contacted the Pentacostals who in turn called Bubba who lent them the backhoe.
It's a new look and will take some getting used to. I will concede it does showcase more favorably than the weeds allowed, my No Exit on plywood up against the dancehall.
In between all this backhoery weekend warrior privy digger archaeologists show up and I give them all the blessing I am capable of and they come back with a bunch of mostly common one hundred year old bottles, the greater number of which they give to me, taking only that really fine looking tall emerald pentagonal container.
But I was saying about the kitten (Kitten)--it now appears it has been successfully adopted by one of the Bienville fronting neighbors and can be seen not often sitting on the back steps over there, just cute as can be, healthy looking, with black and white markings and a symetric black/white facial mask that just underscores cuteness in an environment that does not always reward such wholesome concepts. Over a year old now and still maintaining optimal smallness, it has made it a long way from almost getting chopped up by Pentecostal mowers in it's youth.
Kitten reminds me of one of the Dumaine boys who was seven or eight when I first met him and is now twelve going to thirteen and plays his small/cuteness for all it's worth and I mention that not as rye observation but cringing behind a voluntarily blurred memory which knows this boy living pretty hard, and between those ages traveling the streets, some that are stained with the cumulative danger of almost 200 years, from aunts in the lower Seventh Ward who wanted him out of their hair to safe houses in the Sixth ward to be met at Dumaine sometimes by me telling him to go away, house closed, his cuteness going unrewarded, if not completely unappreciated.
There were days at Dumaine that coming out of the house you had to step over a pouting child huddled up against the front door, a child who understood that they couldn't come in just anytime they wanted but couldn't understand why they couldn't come in when they realllly needed to.
I do a bit of accidental birdwatching, and have counted in flight over Bayou St. John, eleven medium sized solid green parrots. Regularly, four or five of this group visit the trees around here at Rocheblave too, which is nice. And while keeping an eye out for the parrots I will occasionally see a black throated grey warbler which may be a downy woodpecker (Today is like a week later and I saw it again today, its the black cross on the back of its white head that is most distinctive but its definitely a woodpecker of some sort as today, unlike the other day, I saw it pecking at the trunk of a tree, and rather wildly and inexpertly it seemed. Also it was really small). Saw one of the finches awhile back. There's a mockingbird I call Mike, who has this thing going on with Dana, the Dove. There are thirty or forty pigeons who sit on the Rocheblave high wires waiting for Miss Celita to throw out her crumbs; and there are crows, and sparrows, and blue jays, and cardinals, and that pretty much rounds out my limited awareness of birds in my vicinity.
The Pentecostal lot is actually starting to regrow this winter with all the warm rainy days and natural and man assisted re-seeding. Magee planted all sorts of stuff over there during his Thanksgiving visit and maybe Texas bluebonnets or some other flowers and weeds will start showing up soon. The regreening can only increase the value of this 50x150 foot lot, home of Kitten's apparent sibling, whom I call Kitten2, same cat, slightly less cute. K 2 spends its days foraging and frolicking with the newest kitten, whom I have not yet named because of the high feline mortality rate around here but with that in mind could be known as Notyetded.
Notyetded's mother is the small undernourished black sphinx ( I call her Spinks because its easier to say) who has been playing chess with my emotions for the last year, apparently blaming me for certain societal ills which I ignore from the throne of my obvious affluence.
Notyetded had a sibling but that kitten did not make it.
BigHead is the patriarch and comes by once or twice a day mewing in a way most unbecoming a Tom of his influence. But I guess it's sort of a signal because if she is around to hear it, Spinks will come running to let BigHead sniff out that most private of (her) territories. He then walks around the lot spraying his scent on weeds and pieces of broken up concrete. And his spraying seems pretty effective if his goal is to keep out weaker cats, but the wild dogs will infrequently yet viciously come in the night and are not the least bit impressed or repelled by the scent. They of various lineages gone feral threaten, and, sometimes in brutal actuality, kill all accessible felines.
I admit to feeding the strays. I take the food onto their property, over near the plywood "No Exit" sign. I try not to do it too often. When you start interfering, how do you know when to stop? So I'm cautious. I put out three medium sized raw eggs the other day, cracked them on top of an unlevel triangular slab of broken concrete. I understand that presentation is a fair part of finer dining so I tried to make them stand up, like in the Sherwood Anderson story, but with their broken tops revealing the yolks as brilliant orange sunshine in a shell, floating in their own clear ocean of fluid crystal.
The heartening moment is when I leave but sit back by the house to watch Spinks, followed awkwardly by the galloping kitten Notyetded. Spinks did the initial tasting but was quite brief at it before she stood back from the table and let the kitten inhale as much of the gooey mess as it could, which will surely imbue the kitten's coat with a finer sheen, and swell the small belly to a more affluent size, and hopefully increase the somewhat homely Notyetded's chances for an area adoption.
Army-looking security force helicopters fly around the neighborhood at night I imagine as practice for the upcoming football exravaganza known as the Superbowl, or the complete breakdown of society and subsequent insertion of a jack booted militia, the former of which is occurring smack dab in the middle of the two week Carnival season which culminates on a final day known as Mardi Gras (that's "Fat Tuesday" for you xenophobes), a day during which one is encouraged to over indulge, live fully and perhaps recklessly before giving it all up for the next forty days during which you pick something to abstain from, like Snickers. I wonder what would happen if you chose Catholicism. I am suspicious of encouraged lunacy as I feel there is already more than enough spontaneous lunacy. After a few years as a local it begins--for some of us--to become as attractive as a bad joke retold over and over by that loudmouthed nincompoop from Bossier City, or Altoona, who is drunk on a multi-liquored sugary concoction in a trademarked container, and keeps complaining about not seeing more bare boobs, and is forever vexed by the local kids who spend all year long playing street corner sports intercepting footballs and lobbed basketballs on oily asphalt surfaces, kids who have no context for the dry humor of "why don't you go out and play in the middle of the street," because that is where they play basketball and football games, with portable hoops pushed up against curbs and games that pause as necessary for passing cars, and during Carnival have the clear advantage as agile local athletes to fly through the air or dive at your feet for beads or toys that were being thrown right to you, or your precious daughter up on her ladder, "and then that damn racial epithet just took it all from us, ruined everything."
Which is not exactly a chamber of commerce-esque recommendation so I'll soften a bit and admit, truthfully, it can be fun, in doses. And everyone, I mean everyone of the hundreds of thousands who line the streets during the final few days of Carnival, and who make nominal effort, can catch more beads and cups and junk than you would think possible, considering the competition. And if you are willing to leave the somewhat family oriented parade routes and venture on into the decidely not family oriented French Quarter, well, you can see whatever you look for, and then some, (which can mostly be summed up by the Big Two: bare boobs and penises, and live sex acts). You gotta really dig a crowd though. French Quarter crowds on the final long weekend will accept you into their throng much easier than they will let you out. Think, huge bi-sexual frat party, which was then crashed by every independent drunken fool you ever met, and a shortage of bathrooms that might cause you to hope it is just beer that is being sloshed on your shoes. I don't myself do the Quarters during Mardi Gras, or perhaps I'm still looking forward to it which to hear it said, sounds less than likely.
I haven't gotten anywhere near the bottom of this self-made affliction which has me living technically in a state of illegality in an unfinished home in the Fourth Ward of New Orleans. When a passive aggressive personality goes up against himself in all out battle it is a quiet, yet ugly, scene which is played out in a series of moves or lack of moves that defies one's alter ego to do anything about it. Lucky for me there's more than two of us in here otherwise there wouldn't be any spectators at all to appreciate the grandiosity of my mediocrity. There wouldn't be anyone here to write what must be numbering now near five or six pages of unadulterated crap. Ok, ok, maybe some of it is adulterated crap.
I had an instructor at the university, named Winslow, with whom I got off to a bad start, by making fun of badminton (he was right, I later came to see the sport in all its awesome glory), and later learned, from fear of failing what was supposed to be one of my better subjects, just how to manipulate Mr. Winslow (and therefore the world at large) to my advantage.
He liked sports stories with an underdog theme and so to fulfill an assignment to write about an inspirational character I wrote about one of my twin brothers and how he overcame, I don't know, something, I mean we were middle class, comfortable North Dallas folk, with plenty to eat and read, and godforbid, that television, so my brother couldn't have overcome all that much to achieve his goal of a college baseball scholarship, but in my essay he did. I didn't make anything up, to my disadvantage I don't really do that--make stuff up, but I had him overcoming something, maybe it was self-doubt, or an ingrown toenail. The essay was written with a pen dipped in an ink well of sincerity. Mr. Winslow saw the essay as a great improvement over my earlier free form, innuendo-laden, ramblings. I am sure he was as right about that as he was about the badminton thing.
Also my brother would years later sneak through the drawers of that desk in Dallas (the same one I was going to bring back here to NO over Christmas) where I have over the years left some of my stuff for safekeeping--which is a joke because who is not going to curiously go through drawers left unattended for years and years, I would--and found that essay, and commented to me that he never knew I thought so highly of him, and I did not tell him otherwise, because I do think highly of him, and enjoy very much seeing him whenever I do, but the essay was a gag for the grade, and as such lacks what may be an unrealistic and unattainable goal--that is a purity of emotion untainted by regard for self.
I know that some parents achieve that emotional definition with their children (at least up until the children become teenagers), but I have wandered toward the hope there could be something like that without the propagation, and diapers.
How do you end a disconnected structure of essentially boring facts? Anyway you can.