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Slim Luck
Seeing as how you suffer from the illusion that I tell you everything let me clear up a few things about my driving record. And let's just forget about that thing with me chauffeurring all those Houston lawyers around during New Orleans JazzFest 97.
Other than the story of the winter I fell into that deep rain-filled ditch--(I remember coming up once, telling my brother to wait, and then going down again heavy with winter coat and hard soled shoes with eyes open in muddy ditch water, seeing the bubbles around me, before coming up the second time to find a floating piece of construction lumber to hold onto) when I was seven and my brother's race across North Dallas farmland (that is now developed miles in all directions) and his busting through the back door of my best friend's house while the nine of them ate dinner and yelling Jimfellinaditchfullofwater!!! which caused the oldest to leap from the table and race back across North Dallas farmland to save me--the stories my family most like to reminisce about are the ones where I got caught sneaking out the car when I was fourteen and fifteen. It is good family fun and is a context in which I enjoy being the center of attention, I will admit.
On a recent visit to Dallas a brother commented that after our mother dies he cannot foresee the occasions that will bring the remaining six of us together. Seeing as how we're having a pretty hard time of it while the mom is still alive I had to concede he was most probably right. So when we are together I like playing the role that is most natural to the dynamic of us as a family, the role of the youngest ( yet greying ) rascal, the one of us most out of step, when the truth more likely points to each of us as misfits in our own unique ways, as befits our upbringing. It was in my home an orthodox of Christian Existentialism, if such a thing is possible. The original eight of us were so individually autonomous it is more amazing that any of us still connect at all than it is that a few of us have real (or imagined?) differences. Even the twins seem to hardly recognize each other these days.
My brother recited a tale of me getting caught with the car after he and his twin and the two parents came back early from a rained out baseball game. His take on it was that I came in and confronted everyone with a big shit-eating grin and an attitude of whaddaya gonna do about it? I don't remember this caper at all, and as for my attitude, although they may have been the first to interpret my expression in that way they would not be the last. I know I have offended people with that expression he was referring to. But its like really shy people being accused (inaccurately) of snobbery. The shit eating grin is sometimes a grimace, which in fairness, in its own right, in particular contexts, can be offensive too. But whaddaya? Making a living outta digression? Lookin' for absolution? Also, I do have and frequently use a shit eating grin which can be taken at face value. I'm so complex.
But it may have been that particular car stealing event (although I think it was another one) which a day or two later led one of those twins to beat me savagely with a long metal pole while I reclined on one of the den sofas, or the beating may have been the result of a cumulative disgust with my overall anarchistic (relative to my solid Methodist upbringing) behavior, the car stealing being simply the final straw. I do remember the oration that went along with the beating was about the danger I was putting myself and others in by driving before my time. This incident I guess was my first real life confrontation with irony. And I'm just kidding about the beating being savage. The hits were hardly more than love taps. My brother was then and is now, no dummy, and I think he too understood the irony of beating up someone to prevent that person from hurting himself, or others. I really only bring it up because it was such an uncharacteristic display of anger on that brother's part, his and the other twin's preferred methods usually involving psychological terror, especially effective when they did tag teaming. It was mostly laughs in my family though, although I would have to think about it harder than I care to right now to figure out at who's expense did we laugh. And anyway I was little more than a room and boarder at that N. Dallas house from '64 to '77, spending all day everyday down the street with my pal, where I learned long before my peers about Zappa, and Zen, and other things not taught in the lower level Sunday school classes. It was usually one of the twins who were sent down to inform me that supper was now being served.
But here's the thing I really wanted to get at here. During my recent trip to Dallas one of the last things my mother relayed to me was the first story, the one I'm not sure I'm going to live up to, as it attributes to me almost super human abilities, or more likely, just luck, which you hate to think about too much because of the nature of it, which is to eventually run out.
This at the house on East Kiest Blvd. (a busy six lane thorougfare divided by a thin median strip) in South Oak Cliff, where I lived my first five years. Jimmie and brother Stevie Ray Vaughn lived in this neighborhood south of Downtown Dallas for some years, and it is also the neighborhood to which Lee Harvey Oswald ran after his truly amazing sniper job in '63. We, the Louises, knew neither the Vaughns nor the Oswalds, I mention, regretfully.
The story is simple. As a toddler, I escaped the family compound by maneuvering through or around several obstacles, the final one being an (apparently) unclosed chain link gate, and made it to the front yard. As I always heard it I toddled to the street and across three lanes of traffic and plopped down on the median. A truck driver stopped at the Illinois Ave. light rescued me and brought me to the nearest house, asking my hysterical mother did I belong to her. That's the whole story. But the way my mother told it this time was a little different. As I have previously mentioned, at 84, she seems to be having minor problems with her short term memory. Her memories of the distant past however seem to be sharper than ever. So I don't know if this version is definitive or not, but her addition of a couple of small details make the story much more interesting to me. Her version has me not on the median but sitting in the middle of the street, and cars are lined up past the light in the street in front of the house, not honking, waiting for someone to do something. For how long I don't know. How long should we wait before acting? The not honking was the other detail left out of previous stories. Preternatural silence. I had always imagined it noisey as cars whizzed by on both sides of me. That's all I really wanted to say.
Chump Pheromone
The first thing I did when I learned I would soon be broke was go out and buy a few used books. I bought three hardback Hemingways, two Fitzgeralds, and a Saul Bellow for $1.91 each. A pristine hardcover of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was almost four dollars. The paperbacks go for 50 cents a piece. I got Salinger's Nine Stories, an Amy Tan, an Anne Tyler, and to rinse the palate, two Grishams. I subscribe to the local New Orleans newspaper, and have been receiving as gift the New Yorker for a couple of years. Quality reading material is essential to a happy poverty.
The next thing I did was make preparations for visiting out of state friends. While poverty is imminent, the current bank balance, prior to the most obvious upcoming debits, is fat. As a number it would make me appear to be someone a long way from living paycheck to paycheck. I know otherwise, and am privy to facts which lead me to take action in the opposite direction of fiscal responsibility, towards at least a meager attempt at vacation. While the getting is good. I called my pal in Northern Virginia and although his offer of "come on, whenever you want," is purely sincere, a closer inspection of his and wife's calendar makes middle March look like the preferred date. It means sleeping in a bed, and high tech toys, and good whisky and food, or hotdogs and popsicles and intelligent, humorous children, and adults for that matter, in a vibrant settting that is most decidely not New Orleans, and perhaps a children's birthday party and laser tag. For me it is almost like Disneyworld, although I've never been there to support that as a valid comparison. And if his seven-year-old son hasn't improved at all, or better yet, fallen off his game since my last visit, I might be able to compete with minimal success against him playing various real and made up contests of skill.
So I'm thinking about all these things at work today, which has been irregular of late (but I'm not complaining even as I walk the plank towards the poor house), and telling my boss how if I have to I'll go work with the Mexicans and Nicaraguans for a spell and he's hip (as it appears he's getting beat out of 7k on the Roaf job) and not sure his ownself what he's going to do during this period until our schedule becomes steady with work again.
It's been over an hour now since I got taken for twenty bucks and he, the complete stranger, said he would be back in an hour, he promised. I really have to wonder if there is such a thing as a chump pheromone, and if there is, today I was secreting up a storm.
I was just back from the first day of a two day work week, feeling a little tired but good, unwinding with ice cold budweiser sitting on the side steps overlooking the devastation of the Pentecostal property, musing on the life of ground doves, getting squiggy eyed and becoming comfortably comtemplative while I waited for a bird, any bird, to land in the leafless mulberry tree to my left.
A man and child approach and let me say a child is a good prop. With the hat pulled down low over those long pig-tailed cornrows I could not say for certain if the child was boy or girl, but I was thinking girl, despite hearing the man refer to her as "son" at one point.
The man was, according to himself, 58-years-old, but he looked 47, with just a tinge of grey on the tips of his short afro. As he made his abrupt vere towards me from the sidewalk sixty feet away holding the miniature hand of the four-year-old my first thought was "con," and then, "come on." I smiled serenly but perhaps unnoticeably at the waddle of youth. The man was smiling confidently but not smugly twenty feet away and spoke those two words that are at the same time both interrogative and statement of fact--"Gettin' it?"
I spoke inside my head with a smile and he approached more eagerly and from a few feet away said again, "Gettin' it?"
"Yeh, but slow," I said. This didn't seem like a con anymore, but retrospect would like to teach me to consider the numbers. How many people off the street have approached me here for any other reason. Still I'm guessing to the end I'll feel it necessary to resist the attitude of the jaded to support my naive opinion that only the eyes of the babe can see what it is worth seeing. One day, Jesus Christ Himself will step off that sidewalk with a solicitaton and I feel I should be ready with a fresh open mind.
The man introduced himself but I can't remember his name the minute he said it (although I don't think he said "Jesus Christ") and we shook hands. I did not offer my name. Was I back to thinking this a con.?
Did I know where Charity Hospital was? Yeh. He has a van parked somewhere, it's burgundy and tan, he knew I had seen it parked over there around the corner. I'm not sure. He was my neighbor he said, stayed with Miss Izzy. I have not met all my neighbors. Right there he said, the blue and white house, my back door is practically right next to your front door. I nodded. Somebody down at Charity had nine dollars but he needed $18.95 for a bendix spring.
I look at the child who seems to have heard all this before, is really not very interested, not the least bit curious about me, or perhaps is just shy, head down looking at her tiny tennis shoes. It now seems to me the man is asking me for money. I make the mistake of telling him about my financial woes. How many times will I make that same mistake when being asked for money I really don't have? If it is your heartfelt intention to say no, just say no, as quickly and simply as possible, using the fewest words possible, while (if you must) still being polite. No one under any circumstances really gives a flying fuck about your financial woes, especially if you are drinking ice cold budweiser, and they are not.
He misses not a beat but to his credit does not scoff at, by word or facial expression, my admission of money problems. In the past other hitup artists have waved a hand or verbally dismissed my sincerity in ways I have found offensive, although in the end many of them have still reached their goal. This man professes to understand but to trump me raises his shirt to show me a deep scar running from above his belly button down into his pants. He has had recent problems himself, he implies, but to me the scar looks none to fresh. He shows it to me again later, but I'm not scoring him too high on the scar. I really don't care about it. It doesn't affect me.
This is a con now but a good one and I am committed to playing by the rules, even if they are rules I made up myself. Effort, originality, and a smooth obfuscating of facts will win a prize in my court of law.
He will not ever in so many words ask me for money, in fact, he actually says he is not asking me for money at one point, explaining how the payback will be so quick I won't actually be giving him money. I can't get this logic, but he's pretty good, and I must say again, the kid is a fine prop, lending an air of innocence to the affair. I mean who would run a racket with a kid in tow, except Fagin of course, but that's just a story. And this guy is my close neighbor. The fact that in two years I've never seen or met him before, is immaterial. I gave him twenty dollars.
He said he would be right back. I'll just wait here. But you know, I wonder why he refused my offer of a ride to the auto parts store, and when he referred to it himself he pointed in the wrong direction?
Mardi Gras
Today (Feb. 12) is Mardi Gras, and a perfect day for it too. Several years ago, when I attempted more eager participation in the festivities, Willie Mays was grand marshal of the Zulu parade, but it rained that day and I never got to see Mr. Mays. Willie Mays was the "Say Hey Kid," and the epitome of professional baseball in my early youth. He would catch fly balls in the outfield in spectacular fashion, practically trademarking the over the shoulder football-style catch. And he could hit home runs. He and I share the same birthday, month and day but not year, and as a kid that, in my mind, made us practically blood brothers. This year I have yet to participate in Carnival unless you count Saturday night when I walked all of 300 feet from here and from the far sidewalk watched a bit of the Endymion parade, which is the only Krewe using the Mid-City route. Even the "Mid-City" Krewe moved to the Uptown route this year. I got to see grand marshal Jason Alexander, who played the character "George" on that popular TV series, Seinfeld. In fact his float stopped right at the intersection of Rocheblave and Canal, and in that way--possibly the Budweiser in one hand and Jameson in the other was affecting my thinking--he and I became blood brothers. I understand he enjoyed the float riding so much that he hitched a ride as an anonymous masked rider on the back float of the Bacchus parade the following night. Nicholas Cage was the grand marshal, up front. I didn't see it. It was an Uptown parade. Cage has been in town for awhile, bought one of the Esplanade mansions around the corner from the vacation home of his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. Cage has recently been directing a movie around here and is seen at nightspots in Fabourg Marigny, wearing lots of leather and Bono-esque eyeware surrounded by a possee of escorts also decked out in leather. I thought he was pretty good in Raising Arizona, but I'm not sure about the rest of it.
So, I just got back. I walked down Canal to the fringe of the Quarter and watched half of the Zulu parade from the corner of Iberville and Basin. A Japanese tourist asked me "where was the parade with bare boobs." I told him he would have to cross the parade route, which is not impossible but takes a little confidence, and head seven blocks or so to Bourbon St. It is not a parade down there but bare boobs are often shown. I think he had heard that girls raise their shirts at passing floats to get better beads and this does happen but probably more on the Uptown side of the route. Once the parades get downtown the crowds are 90 percent, or more, black, and although I have not done extensive research on this, it is my feeling that black girls are a little more conservative about showing their bare breasts in public. The Bourbon street crowds are predominately white. It was a good day for standing on the street. I was scared at first because some of the teenagers from the nearby Iberville projects project an image that is scary, and it's not all bluff. Some black cowboys on horseback clopped by in front of the house just now. The Zulu parade disbands a few blocks from here, at Galvez and Canal. No one blocked my driveway for either Saturday's Endymion or today's Mardi Gras festivities, which is heartening. Not that I'm going anywhere
No Motives, No Suspects
When I returned from Dallas--I was very good there and improved on recent behavior by not losing patience with my mother who through no fault of her own is losing small pieces of her mind and large chunks of her short term memory--I was pleased to find my New Orleans residence intact and apparently not victimized by any sort of unlawful invaders. Some of my newspapers--those that were not used by my housesitter to line her cat's litter box--were rolled up neatly by my pallet on the floor. I glanced at headlines for a few minutes while a few blocks from here one man grew angry enough to kill another man.
An older brother had brought me to the Dallas airport while it snowed and snowed and snowed. It had been snowing steadily for seven hours but it would not stick to the ground. My mother was suspicious that we, my brothers and I, were conspiring to gang up on her and force her into an old folks home. We were conspiring no such thing but since she brought it up, one brother and I talked about it at length over lunch at an all you can eat Sushi Bar on Greenville Ave., the day before I left in the snow; the day before one man pulled a gun from his pocket in the 2500 block of Palmyra, here in New Orleans. I like Sushi okay. The red snapper really did taste like raw fish.
Another brother, he lives in Kansas, was in town, coincidentally, on business (or so he said. I suspect he is a government agent), and he was doing my mother's taxes when I arrived by cab on Saturday. The TV was on, loudly (we've agreed to leave my mother alone on the issue of a hearing aid), and first thing I see--ignoring my mother who is saying to me "look who's here," and my brother, who may be a government agent, and is the one mom is referring to as being "here,"--is Hollis Price on the free throw line sinking two for the fourth ranked OK Sooners. "Hey, I know that kid," I said, and go on to explain how I followed him in high school all the way to the state championship game in Lafayette, Louisiana three years previous. It was actually his first off the bench teammate, Eddie Green, whom I was following, but truly, who cares? My mother, who is purely kindhearted, said, "oh, reallly?" My brother, practiced at the art of deception (which is a line from a song, right?), said, "Oh yeah?," and went back to form 1040A. This was four days before the "incident" on Palmyra.
My 84-year-old mom had organized 20 years worth of my correspondence from Austin, Brenham, Yoakum, and Liberty TX, NYC, Great Falls, VA, Eugene OR, Seattle, Bushy Fork, NC, and New Orleans, and it's not that much, into a couple of folders, which I read through to kill the time. Some of it fueled memories which made me tired to think about it. It's all in that dresser I was going to pick up with my truck during Christmas, but didn't. As it turned out, I learned this over Sushi, my mother spent Christmas alone. Kind of defeats the purpose of having six children, 15 grandchildren, and 3 great grandchildren (and she started late), I am thinking. I must spend Christmases in Dallas from now on. Maybe it was a lack of Christmas cheer that caused the one man on Palmyra to shoot the other man three times in the head, point blank, leaving him a lifeless sack of flesh in the middle of the street, while I unpacked from my trip to Dallas. By the time I drove by an hour and a half later on my way up Dorgenois to Tulane, the street was empty, and quiet. There was no evidence of life, or death
The Happy Wholesome Addendum
The thing I didn't tell you about the wounded French woman whose baby was murdered by a New Orleans inner city youth was that the events of that day changed her life. You would say how obvious is that? and I would concede pretty obvious but what she did in response to her loss is what haunts me and is the reason for this addendum. She stayed behind. While her husband continued with his plans to move abroad she stayed here in New Orleans for over a year and joined local groups which address the issues that contribute to such crimes as the one which rocked her world. And she lectured and looked for meaning where there is none and she cried at night making ghastly sounds that no one heard and at some point, with or without that popular emotional concept known as closure, she moved on, geographically, away from here. I never knew her but I cannot forget her. I've never felt her pain, to the degree she must have felt pain, yet I sometimes tear up when I think about her. And unashamedly I write about her and the rest of it to get it out of my system, for my own damn good, because once I started writing about such things I find not writing about it too painful, and counter-productive to that happy and wholesome carefree life to which I aspire.
Rangers Meet The Baby Entienne
While I pack a few hours before my first post 911 air travel I worry myself with visions of a federal inspection employee who pauses as his meaty fingers fiddle with my few possessions and yells out for everyone to hear, "hey man, you didn't pack no underwear? I hope you're not going to visit your mother that way?"
There is a USA themed material draping over the eight foot cyclone fence surrounding the entire SuperDome. All area streets have been blocked off for days. The main entrance has higher fencing and US Military guards who are surrounded by their military green vehicles. Fans are being urged to arrive five hours early for the strip searching of Britney Spears. I have looked forward to this SuperBowl spectacle since the last one, in '97. It brings to town things not seen everyday, and the surplus of military/local law enforcement types always cheers me up. I saw uniformed US Army Rangers patrolling Decatur in the French Quarter early this morning, and that guy imitating a meat locker imitating a corner newspaper guy with the Ranger haircut seemed to me a failure as a deep undercover guy while at the same time he imbued his corner with an air of safety. I don't intellectualize often on the overall film of danger that often pervades large blocks of this city. But when you see Rangers on duty in your town and feel cheerful about it it does cause one to pause and question just to what extent you have been shielding yourself from certain realities, one of which is being surrounded by that small number of misdirected youths who are every year killing each other with guns on the streets all around you. And all around the ones the tourists are traveling too. That we all don't just huddle under our beds is an amazing testament, but to what I don't know. Oh yeah, survival. Anyway, I drove around this morning looking for NFL inspired moments because I wanted to have something to think about while I visit my mother in Dallas on SuperBowl Sunday.
Once, a perfectly photogenic French(?) woman and her diplomat(?) husband were preparing to move back overseas. They lived in the Irish Channel neighborhood a block behind Magazine which put them that same number of blocks from an area of fine, historic, monied homes known collectively as The Garden District, a "don't miss" on any standard guided tour of New Orleans.
About six blocks from her location was a notorious, 40 acre area, rich in local culture but occupied by many suffering through poverty and poor education in two story brick buildings that had become maintenance nightmares. They were the St. Thomas projects. Similar or identical in construction to the several other major housing developments in New Orleans. It is on one level the same story becoming trite by repition, the same one Elvis tells in that song "In the Ghetto." And in the story nothing ever changes and the ghetto baby grows up and gets a gun and kills someone.
So you know where I'm going when the French woman straps her baby girl into the car seat and prepares to drive off to an area photographer. The kid steps up with pointed gun and attempts a broad daylight carjack. We all know the woman is not giving away this car with her baby strapped in. So she drives off and the kid stands tall in the middle of the street in the middle of the day and fires off round after round at her fleeing car. The woman is wounded but makes the first two right turns before crashing her car into a live oak tree on Magazine. And of course you know her baby, who was two or three days away from growing up perhaps more safely in some European city, was dead, riddled by the ill intent of a teenager from the St. Thomas projects.
This morning I voted for Ray Nagin, one of the fifteen mayoral candidates, and then did the drive I do, in and immediatedly out of City Park, down Esplanade to Decatur to the St. Peter split, taking either one, and then down Magazine and/or Tchopitoulas, and today was the first day I had ever exited right off of Tchopitoulas onto Josephine and driven straight into the middle of The St. Thomas projects, parking at the corner of St. Thomas, or Chippewa. I looked out over the forty acres beyond that grouping of mature live oaks and seeing what can only be describe as improvement. The land is completely cleared now and is adjacent to a reputed hip neighborhood known as the Lower Garden District on one side and the Mississippi river on the the other. A view of downtown buildings and the Mississippi River Bridge make this new found property a most eye pleasing area. Plans include a rebuilding of residential structures with a percentage of those being section 8 housing. There is a stall in the overall plan for the area because there is serious talk about putting a WalMart store on a large piece of the land. I have back and forth been adamantly against this idea and somewhat for the idea. People against the idea of WalMart are labled most notably either racist or elitist. I don't know. I don't know what they did with all the St. Thomas residents. I have no doubt some of the large number were unhappy about being resettled. But they are resettled I take it because there is not a brick left on the site. I drove to Jackson Ave. and doubled back toward the river and then U-urned into a trash strewn vacant lot which is offered the same eye level view of downtown and the bridge that was for the last sixty years obscured by the St. Thomas. It looks like too good a chance to do something right to give up so easily to the allure of this nation's most successful company. But for me looking at this pristine piece of ground the idea of assaulting it with almost any version of modern construction is repellant. The idea of a park enters and no one would ever even need to know why it was called Entienne's Park.