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Talking To Travis
I don't want to be angry, uptight, pissy, threatened, compromised, psychotic. The summertime dude is popping into the picture. He's a dude that inhabits all of us around here. He is a temperature-related phenomenon. As the daytime temps rise with their humid luggage in tow, dude speaks out.
A young local person with whom I have had the utmost, minimal, peripheral contact is calling out to me from the street, while I'm weedeating the property, or--and all this just in the last few days--I've even heard him call out to the house while I'm inside--"Hey white boy." Today walking back from the Robert's around the corner at Bienville and Broad, a place I rarely go because the panhandlling outside is too overwhelming and if I needed another reason, the NY strip steak I purchased from there today was tasteless and tough. Of course that galvanized boat of boiled crawfish first thing entering might get me back. Anyhow, walking back from the store up Dorgenois and I hear the kid about a half block behind me, calling out, for the second time today, "hey white boy." The first time, this morning coming back from the Home Depot, turning into my driveway while he dawdles by on his bicycle, and he, waiting till he's twenty feet away says, "hey white boy," and I call out loud enough but perhaps he did not hear, "hey punk."
Now, I try to maintain a placid disposition towards the aggravation that must infiltrate our lives, but the audacity of this young man has really got me boiling. Travis Bickle talks back to me from the mirror. Oh god, please not that again. Give me a break, let me focus on the meager pleasantness of my simple days. I talked to my crack consultant and he said I should dress the boy down, which is exactly what I didn't want to hear because that's what Travis was saying too. We can always hope for an amusing anecdote out of all this or that this brief reporting is the anecdote, and all there is to it.
I had a friend in town some months ago who was similarly treated while he walked up Iberville on his way to the Rite-Aid at Canal and Broad. This crude appellative way of talking to a complete stranger is not appropriate in the least and I would have felt really bad for my friend except that he is one who visits regularly enough that in his case being called "white boy" by a black person on an isolated street in New Orleans is something he would eventually have to experience, due to the prevailing sentiment of the louder minority of the overall majority, and because me being here is somewhat stretching the lines of demarcation for this particular part of Mid-City. One must expect some resentment when one moves and lives outside the "natural order" of things. The black man has an historical perspective from which to judge the white man harshly just as the white man has a relation to his ascendants who throughout history have feared the man of color and moved in any direction which would keep them separate. Still all and all, and not discounting the harsher accountings of history, most people don't give a good goddamn about the color of someone's skin and are at their worst only paying lip service to the weaker judgements of their perspective races. This is what I like to think, anyhow. That is me explaining to Travis why certain actions should be curtailed lest they be judged in the simplest manner by the simplest minds.