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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.