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Nine Life Metaphor
Kitten got it good. She shiny. She soft. She got the perfect black and white markings of cuteness. She got people. She got life.
Kitten does not appear to be in need of anything. One of those boy cats from her clan (same markings) was sniffing her up out there a minute ago and she turned around and batted boy cat upside his head, with impunity. Impunity, that mean no harm came back her way.
I saw a black cat up on the roof of Mr. Bunn's store and I wondered if it might be Shorty because she ain't around here no more. I don't think Shorty is dead because she survived too long to forget how to do it in just the few months I was gone. I did not spoil Shorty with too much food scrap because I figured that to be her death. I maybe spoil her a little though. So she could be dead. All science fiction aside and no offense to the imagined richness of your existence but it may be true that we all dead. So cheer up. If we all dead, Shorty lives.
I see the yellow bastard. And I see Johnny and Susie and I see Michael and Robert and…that lady on Romper Room never did once see me. I was always right there with my common name and she would just look right by me. Arlen and Cassius my ass.
Ain't no cats want to hang around here now with that Pentecostal lot all manicured. No place to hide from the evil that lurks. It sure is improved though. Man, property values just skyrocketing right through the roof. Right through the roof.
They be waiting to build that fence to see if I am going to sue them right back to the stone age (that'll cramp a body's style) for accidentally cutting down my little weed trees when they cut down those big shade trees. I ain't gonna sue nobody but maybe I will, I unpredictable. Crapshit. Who knew I was gonna say that? There a time period after which you can't sue a body and the day after that you will see a fence next door to me. They a wily bunch them Pentecostals. They also got the patience of Job, which ain't no big trick when you spend all your days in a church building. Affecting a religious metaphor I mean is the part that ain't a big deal.
I was doing the math a few days ago, counting up how many of my nine lives is left and I became discouraged after the count to six so I just quit counting and what a bunch of nonsense that is anyway. I mean what are the rules for determining the potentiality of your expirations? Nine lives my ass.
Step Sitting
I have driven the six blocks back to Rocheblave to get some tools because Jacque said he could put the new rim on the portable basketball goal if he had a pair of grip pliers, also known as vise-grips. The goal, with its plastic base which acts as ballast when filled with water or sand (or on Dumaine, has an eight foot piece of 6"X8" heavy lumber laid across it) has been laying on its side up against the curb across the street with a rim bent almost closed for I don't know how long. One hundred basketballs, three entire goals, two or three extra rims, and a dozen nets, or more, have come and gone in the nine years I have been acquainted with the activities up and down 2600.
On Rocheblave I also plan to change clothes because it is ten degrees cooler on Dumaine, which is a fact noted by many but understood by few. Charles, the man who does good work for me, is recently out of jail, and comes over from across the street. I tell him my plans about the basketball goal, changing clothes, etc., all in a rush because the sun is setting and I want to watch some street basketball and changing a rim on one of these new-fangled portable goals is not as easy as you might think. Charles is always polite but as if this needs to be said, my problems are not his so what can he do for me to earn a few bucks. "Not a goddamn thing."
"Let me cut those weeds for you."
"Nope, don't care about those weeds."
"Well, what then?"
"Nothing, then."
"I gotta be able to do something."
"Let's see, you could try to sell me a parking space in my own goddamn driveway like you did that first time we met."
"I would if I thought you'd go for it."
"If I weren't so hip to the angles of your deceit?"
"That's a pretty way to put it, I guess."
Daylights burning. I'm still in a hurry. "I could offer a shot of Irish Whisky?"
"And I would gladly accept," said Charles.
I go inside, change my clothes, pour a double shot of Jameson's into a cleaned out yogurt cup and take it out to Charles sitting on the front steps. Then I go back inside and find the tools.
On Dumaine Jacque collects the tools and I sit back and watch him and the boys go at it while I sit on the steps where I used to live and drink one of those tall Heinekins. I had spent most of the day over here working. I started out jumping the fence into Esnard Villa and cutting off the creeper vine that grows on the shared fence and up the side of M's house. If you don't attend to it every once in awhile it will literally envelop an entire dwelling. I would take breaks and sit on those brick steps that once led into Buddy's apartment before that day when the cumulative bad decisions of the new owner led to her being burned out by the wife of one of her lovers. The night of the fire I had sat on different steps, at four a.m., across the street at Mama D's, drinking her whisky from a little white styrofoam coffee cup as the blaze destroyed a grand house that had stood pretty much intact and unaffected by time, termites, war, and two or three Category 5 hurricanes since its construction, in 1854.
Other than trimming back the creeper vine I was harvesting from that little side yard in Esnard Villa what for me is some of the purest raw emotion to which I have access, which comes in handy when circumstances find me in need of some. As for the gangbangers not familiar with me, eyefucking me from way across the street, I have mumbled reminders of how close is our hatred to our love. Peace, you little bitches.
Before Jacque had asked me for the tools but after I had cleaned up the vines, and the trash along the curb from corner to next door neighbor's, and severely trimmed back five years worth of overgrown bamboo in M's backyard, I was sitting on the front steps of M's house, drinking my first tall Heineken, and Shelton appears from the horizon of the corner store. He's in pretty good spirits these days and like old times he sits down and tells me of his defeats in a way that makes them sound like successes.
"Still Working at MacDonald's?" I said.
"Naw, the manager threatened to fire me so I just quit."
"What about?"
"What what about?" he said.
"Why did you quit, why did they threaten to fire you?"
"Oh, you know that girl I told you about, work in the kitchen with me?"
"The one you liked?"
"Oh Lord no, Mr. Jim, uh uh, no, no, no." Somehow the thought of it trickled from his brain into his nasal passages down to the back of his throat and became a bad taste in his mouth. He popped a few colorful Skittles onto his tongue to cleanse his palate of my ridiculous suggestion. "She just worked with me washing up, she was the same as me but she tried to act like she was my boss, telling what I could do, what I couldn't do."
It crossed my mind to say "she was trying to 'handle' you?" but I knew he would laugh at me, one, for trying to be too cool, and two, because the idea that a woman can handle a man has yet to fully sink into his consciousness. I know that it will one day occur to him that it's not of matter of, if, but a matter of, which one, he will not be able to resist being "handled" by.
"No, she just get on my nerves, being bossy, so I threatened to knock her out, and she tell the manager. The manager act like I'm the one done something wrong and tell me he can fire me for that but I don't need that so I just quit."
"Probably shouldn't hit a girl."
"She wasn't no little girl, Mr. Jim, she probably could knock ME out."
"Sounds like she wanted to move up out of the kitchen, show she could manage people."
"Well she didn't manage me."
Yeah well, not that you realize.
Shelton is very eager and confident to talk on camera so I shot a few grainy thirty-second videos on my little Casio. He said he would talk about anything so I got him situated sitting up on the railing with the banana trees behind him, got him framed in the way I liked it and said, "ok, tell me about your childhood." He lost his cool, blushed, grimaced, laughed, and shook his head, so I said, "sorry, just kidding, tell me about jail," at which point he gained back all his confidence and told me a few things from his experiences.
Across the street they did not absolutely need my help but out of selfish desire to watch basketball I offered it anyway and took charge of the unscrewing of a difficult nut or two while Jacque handled the actual reconstruction and cars rushing to the corner whizzed by my right ankle which I had bent behind me into the street as I poured cooking oil along the threads of a nasty bolt.
"Don't we need a bolt on this side too, Jacque?"
"Naw, the hole stripped out, it'll work with just the one side."
After the goal was up people just appeared out of nowhere and there was a game. Occasionally grown men would park their cars on the street and join in for a shot or two before going around the corner to do whatever they had come to do.
M said, "See what you did? It was quiet around here before you showed up and helped them put on that new rim."
It will not go without saying that the rim came out of her foyer.