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Mardi Gras Day Three 2.17.98
Day three was a rain out for us but I took six boys and dropped them off
in the rain and 40mph wind to parade their hearts out.
Shelton said he almost got blown over three times. Moose and Fermin and
some of the cousins from Slidell were with Shelton when he intercepted a
cup from a white man who proceeded to chase them over four blocks
yelling out--"Hey you black niggers, give me that cup and some of those
beads."
"Don't give him no beads Shelton, that man call us 'black niggers',"
Moose said.
Then Moose, while holding a private part of his anatomy, told the man he
could suck on it.
The man suggested that Moose suck on his and called him that name again.
Moose suggested that the man's mother might be a black nigger.
Shelton interrupts the telling and said, "Oh yeah, I owe ya'll a cup."
"At least," I said.
"Can I have a dollar? Julia selling candied apples for a dollar,"
Shelton said.
"No, I think that one you're holding is my last one and I want to save it
for an emergency."
"What kind of emergency a dollar good for?" Shelton asked.
"Beer," I answered.
"OK," Shelton said.
Shelton said he got in a fight at school today.
"Why?" I asked.
"I don't know, the boy just come up on me wanting to fight and I had to beat him
up."
"Whatayah gonna do?" I said.
"I know," Shelton said wearily.
Shorty
The one I haven't named I'm going to start calling Shorty. Shorty is the first one of the Rocheblave cats I have touched. I'm going to guess its a girl cat, kitten, about as big as a fist or two, and black, and bony, and not very shiny. She eats chicken bones; swallows pieces bigger than her head. And the other day her mother, Spinks, caught a mouse over in the Pentecostal brush pile and brought it over to her. I was preparing myself for some cat and mouse theatre but Shorty was a one act kitty. She ripped the struggling rodent from mom's mouth and with no ceremony or foreplay whatsoever bit into and swallowed the thing in two bites.
The other day I was putting out some leftover chicken where I put it and Shorty came running across the lot straight for me so I just stayed there, squatting, and said "come on over here, you." She came over without too much hesitation and walked right up to my outstretched hand and licked my index finger. With even less hesitation she turned tail and bolted away at great speed, leaping with legs splayed, over bricks and mounds of dirt, and bending tall stalks of grass with her tiny moving mass. As abruptly as she had started she stopped, turned around to face me, and then deliberately, accusingly, licked her lips with disgust as if to say what manner of beast are you?
BigHead is tired. Kitten is scared. K2 is imitative. Notyetded has developed a patch of brown along the back of his black and white hide. Spinks is waiting for, dreading, the next suitor. The yellow bastard is missing. The three kittens across the street, stay there. Another small black and white cat and her tiny black and white kitten sometimes lounge on the small patch of concrete on the back shady side of the house. My slightest movement scares this little kitten under the fence and into the yard of Sheba, the aging pitbull.
This last month, a week or so before the cop was murdered, a visiting preacher man from Memphis was murdered, but not robbed, in his Mercedes. And then officer Russell. And then the next week a local preacher man was murdered. And mixed in before and after all this is the 18-20 other murders to make up the monthly New Orleans average. These other murders are perhaps well represented by last week's shooting death of a 23 year old man at Eighth and Dryades in Central City, just a few blocks off the revered St. Charles Avenue. Seven years previous at Seventh and Dryades the young man had survived an attack which put five or six bullets in his 16 year old body. And the undercurrent of desperation suggested by these events is just that, an undercurrent. If we don't get off the boat we will all be just fine.
Jobs
I've had jobs I hated so much I couldn't get them out of my mind. I would hate them when the sun came up over that rise and I would close my eyes and let that sun, you know, bathe me in its warm glow, and then I would begin worrying myself because I knew the warm glow was just temporary but the shitty job was forever. Maybe I had that backwards but there is no logic to a shitty job. I would open my eyes and spend the next eight hours doing something someone was paying me to do. The best thing about shitty jobs is how good you feel when you quit them. The longer you stay at a shitty job the better you feel when you quit. If you could bottle that feeling and sell it for a nickel you would never have to take another shitty job ever again.
The job I have now is a long way from being shitty. But still, I have my days. Yeah, that's right, its me, all me; it has nothing to do with the job. It's the attitude. Five cents please.
Paying at the pump with a shitty attitude I am thinking how easy it would be to make this a gas stop on the way to nowhere; how being at a gas pump barely awake reminds me of that being on the road sensation of running away, of being purposefully purposeless, of traveling through those states of mind where possibilities pretend to be limitless. I only need to plot point B. And muffle that annoying voice of reason.
Mardi Gras, Day 1--The Booker T Love Child 2.14.98
This is my fourth Mardi Gras and I have not been anticipating it with
quite the fervor that one would expect one to anticipate "the greatest
free show on earth." But no one escapes Mardi Gras. Even if you forego
the 12-14 days of parades and stay inside watching reruns of Family
Matters, you are effected by Carnival. The Dominoes pizza guy will be
late because he had to travel eight miles out of his way to circumvent
the parade route.
Metairie, where all the white people flew after six-year old Ruby Bridges
integrated the New Orleans school district in 1960, has its own parades.
Algiers, still in Orleans Parish, but on the Westbank across the river,
has its own parades. Gretna, also on the Westbank, has its own parades.
At work today I was Telling Nick about the one Metairie parade M and
I went to last year.
"I try not to get all that wrapped up in whether people say nigger or don't say
nigger but I do take it as a bad beginning if its the first thing some
white trash shithead from Metairie says to me in a pitiful attempt at
small talk. We were on this guy's parade turf and I guess he was a little
juiced and also upwardly prideful of his place in the cosmos. 'You won't
see no niggers anywheres along this stretch of ground.'"
"Wow," I said.
"That's not the best place to see a Metairie parade," Nick said.
"This isn't something that just came about since I moved to New Orleans,
and I don't really have any particularly specific love for black people,
but sometimes white people really scare me. I mean really scare me."
But I'm pushing the envelope of blah de blahness here and all I really
wanted to tell you was about this one young man from the Booker T
Washington High School Marching Band.
Broad and Canal is not an integrated stretch of parade route. Unless
those two skinny white people count towards any real integration. And
this particular parade is made up of all black people, which is rare.
Zulu is the only other all black parade krewe and has been parading for
eighty years on the last day, Fat Tuesday, which is the English
translation for Mardi Gras.
Ostensibly, we are all standing on the parade route, acting or being as
peasants, to receive throws (trinkets, beads, moon pies, Frisbees,
cassette tapes, cups, underwear) from the royalty up on the floats.
But this kid from Booker T was giving out laughter, with his hair coifed
high on his head, and his sexuality of an alternative nature, he shook
and shimmied to the music with an exaggerated femininity, and seemed
perfectly at ease with who he was and why people might find it amusing.
M to my left was laughing, and with the matronly heavy-set woman to
my right, I was sharing big teeth and crinkled eyes.
Esnard Revisited 2.5.98
The charred remains of Esnard Villa were visited today by owner Y, and her friend and protector, Kooleo, and D (9), and
C (6).
The century and a half year old peg jointed cypress framing timber is
broken and burnt to ashes at two places in the roof, the remaining
roofing timber is also badly burnt and occasionally pieces of this
crippled stucture fall in on itself. A crack and tumble in the night.
The stairs to the second floor are located in the back and to the left,
where the fire started. The stairs are still navigable by an adventurous
nine year old under the fool-hearted tutorage of his twenty-seven year
old mother who is standing down under a second story window accepting
lofted shoes and lofted memories from said son.
"Oh these shoes all right, " Y says, "D go back and get all
my shoes."
D disappears from the glassless window he had been leaning out of
and runs back into the blackened, gloomy interior to look for more.
Shoes start flying out the window, and photo albums, and a bible,
cassette tapes, a suede jacket.
C has found his way to the unstable second floor. Kooleo directs
grumbles of profanity at C. Y leans over to inspect her
salvageable memories and property, putting the keepers in a forty gallon
plastic trash can.
I had spoken to Kooleo earlier. The good news and bad news are the same:
"They gonna fix it."
Just Another Night Out
The coals on the barbecue grill were too hot so I burned a bunch of fat leg quarters to begin my duties as Night Out Against Crime chef on 2600 Dumaine. With sideways glances I caught a lot of skeptical looks from the guests who were seated in chairs and on stoops. Smoke billowed profusely. I sweated. I was failing miserably at a pretty simple task. Good thing for everyone the majority of the food had been pre-arranged and sat safely inside Phillis' house.
Evelyn arrived from the 7th Ward and said, "it's not barbecue if it's not burnt."
"Thank you, Evelyn."
"You know I got your back, baby."
"Oh baby, its you and only you."
"I got your back, Jim, I got your back."
The cops buried one of their own earlier in the morning. A few days ago a senior cop with a trainee were responding to an armed robbery of a bar on St. Roch. When they pulled up to the bar four recidivists came out and were in no way blocked from escaping but when the trainee yelled "gun" and ducked in the front passenger seat one of the four shot into her window, hitting the senior cop in the head, causing his instantaneous death. Three of the four were apprehended soon thereafter, one slightly mauled by the police dog, and the fourth was caught the next day. Three will dime out the fourth and he will rot in hell. The implications of a society in which we allow our cops to be murdered are too severe to calmly consider. The cop's pregnant wife and five-year old son have a folded flag and a bunch of kind, laudatory words as consolation.
As I took Evelyn to her home near St. Anthony and Claiborne we became momentarily sidetracked down some of the surrounding streets, Derbigny, Elysian Fields, N. Robertson, saw dealers and derelicts and prostitutes and unattended children slinking through the ill-lit night, and a young man on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance, and I said I don't think I'll be coming around here sightseeing at night. Oh no baby, you don't wanna do that. Evelyn complained that she had tried to get her neighbors interested in a party but they afraid to have an anti-crime party what with so many criminals in their families. I had to admit that the idea struck me a little strange the first time the idea came up on Dumaine. Evelyn agreed. I said I guess they would just have to try it one time to see that you can have criminals and cops and judges on one street on one night and that everything can work out most copacetically. Even with a lame chef.
It sometimes seems like its more fun, more popular, to see the cop as the videotapes show him--as the bad guy beating up the innocent or not so innocent citizen, or just in general being an unnecessarily intimidating presence in a society that, sure, needs him, but not if he can't behave properly. Me, I'm willing to forgive all but the most heinous cop behaviour in exchange for his and her protecting me from what I feel would be an even worse scenario than the one we see when the occassional bad cop hits the news--a world without cops. Christopher Russell, NOPD, RIP.
Premieres Cotes De Bordeaux
First let me state that I am quite obviously not French. I don't even know the meaning of the above title. I copied it off a bottle. I am a Budweiser drinking American, an admission that carries with it the essence of the idea--the ugly American. But alas, we all must live as well as we can within the limitations of who we are.
You really can't blame the French for their famed snobbery. Americans have the same class attitudes. Its like we who shop at WalMart look down on those who shop at The Dollar Store. That was the Budweiser of analogies. What I mean is--besides nothing--is that you really can't blame French people for their well developed attitudes which may or may not be based on two thousand years of remarkable culture. They, like the rest of us, are doing the best they can. I think we Americans may be allowed to judge the French only after we have shopped at WalMart for two thousand years, and not before.
So my joke at work for the last month--and let me tell you the joke works (as well as lame jokes are allowed to work) because I have set it up with months and months of candor regarding my almost monk-like celibacy--has been that I am expecting a visit from a French girlfriend. And today I worked with some old mates I haven't been around for awhile so I hit them with a fresher version of the same joke like this--I said I spent all day yesterday with a French girlfriend. They said oo la la and I said--and her husband and two kids. To further debunk this very mild attempt at humor I tell that the girlfriend is really just a friend who happens to be a girl-woman (although I do admit to a rather serious fourth-grade crush) and she is not really French but an American married to a Frenchman (although she has lived outside of America--in Bordeaux and French Guiana and Northern Africa and Laos and back to Bordeaux--for more than half her life). So not only do I not have a sex life but my jokes don't have a sex life. Also I did not spend all day with the husband and kids. I only spent it with the friend, talking like there was no tomorrow. We did talk about sex though. In six hours of conversation how could you not talk about it?
I'm drinking the straight outta Bordeaux '98 Enclos De La Ronde, one of many wines not sold at WalMart. I'm happy with it.
But I Am Afraid Of The Feds
It's not unlike me, I guess, that right after she said to me, "you're very faithful," I left her, and went to Dallas for a family reunion. I returned some days later and as she saw me approach she did a little dance and I smiled because I knew that dance was a welcome. I was deferring to the man with the cell phone but she asked me what I wanted so I told her the pepper jelly glazed chicken with the garlic mashed potatoes and the broccoli polonaise. I'm at that grocery store I go to, three blocks down from the busted Canal Street Brothel.
The man on the cell phone was no amateur and as much as I hate public displays of private conversation, I found this one rather interesting. The man was a professional of some sort, fairly intelligent in his slinging of multi-syllabic words, and wore a cologne that while noticeable, was not overpowering, nor did it seem cheap. There is some city government corruption investigations going on here in New Orleans and I thought this man might be related to that in some way. When he said, "no one is afraid of the Feds," I had to say to myself that is something of an overstated generalization and I wanted to say as much to the man but just at that moment he turned his back to me which made me think he might also be a mind reader.
My girls, and I can call them that because they are all at least twenty years younger than me, treat me very well, and today the girl was fattening me up with what seemed like fifty pounds of mashed potatoes, with a fat breast and another piece of one on top, and generous glazing. It usually takes me two sittings to finished one of these plates. There's a chef behind this menu and for a grocery store its pretty ambitious and absolutely unparalleled in the city. And for around five bucks It just becomes the logical location for this budgeted bachelor to dine. They actually have booths lining the front of the store so you could eat and watch people go through the check out lines but I always take mine home. Sometimes I also buy groceries here but not much more than bottled water, zesty garlic pickles, microwave popcorn, and beer, and an occasional steak with baked potato, Jimbo's Jumbo salted in the shell peanuts, bananas, and Famous Amos chocolate chip pecan cookies when they go on sale.
I guess the really big news is that I have been asked by Phillis on Dumaine to be the barbeque chef for next Tuesday's Night Out Against Crime party. It will be my honor to stand over a grill of hot coals on an evening that will be hotter than you can imagine and perhaps I will get to meet the new police chief who's momma lives or until recently lived not too far from that 2600 block of Dumaine. So that's where it is, now that you know it, come on over and I'll feed you. Don't be afraid to bring beer and whisky.