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I Don't Say
I got up early and drove the three or four minutes to St. Philip alongside Armstrong Park and brought the truck to a stop on the right side of the street by the fire hydrant near the side entrance to the park, right inside of which is a cluster of buildings and inside one of these is the headquarters for the public radio station, WWOZ. On the way back from the French Quarter (which at this point in the telling I have yet to reach and), which begins just outside the park on the other side of Rampart, I sat on the first of the two green benches on the right side of the driveway leading up to the building inside of which is the radio station. On those benches you can catch a little early morning sun if that is your inclination.
In the French Quarter I had walked its length or breadth all the way to Decatur and was one of the first customers at the Café du Monde, which is nearly an impossible thing to be considering that it is an establishment which operates 24 hours a day.
Walking back to the truck along St. Ann and then Dumaine I had passed some Quarter residents walking their dogs--one dog was a very cute puppy and I smiled at it--and a Creole-looking gentleman in a billowy dark pink shirt who greeted me a little more directly than I found to my liking but I just said back to him as my greeting, "all right," with none of the more street-wise urban inflection.
In the café trying to drink my small coffee black and eat my beignets before they got cold I was taken by the manner of a well dressed, grey-headed businessman who looked nothing like my father but reminded me of him just the same. My father is dead but he used to come here to New Orleans on business related to politics and it is possibly that, the headlines about yesterday's elections that I can see as the grey-headed man turns the pages of his newspaper, which triggers the part of my mind where my father is stored.
Right after I finished my coffee I contemplated briefly the beauty of the two young daughters at the table to my left but I felt myself drifting too far from the piers of provinciality so I got up quickly and left out of there, walking up that ramp to the moonwalk where there is a cannon that if operable could shoot a hole in the front of the St. Louis Cathedral. If you are looking at the Cathedral from up there the Mississippi River is behind you shimmering like some really impressive metaphor. Tankers and ferries and tugboats pass by. The two side by side grey steel suspension bridges are off in the distance stage right. The early morning winter sun is bright, blinding, and low in the sky.
When the grey-headed gentleman in the café turned to the metro section I read the headline about yesterday's shooting death at the corner grocer's in Central City. I was watching a Stephen King movie on tape last night and bored with a particular scene I had switched over to a news channel and caught the silent movie surveillance tape from the store. The tape showed a group of young masked boys exiting the store, the last one extending his arm straight out towards off camera behind the counter and calmly firing with very little recoil of his handgun the kill shot at approximately head height.
Bare Breasts Of The Bourgeoisie
The thing about trying to keep in tune with your environment is that you sometimes run the risk of already having a lot in common with your environment and it's not all good, you, or your environment. But you have pledged allegiance for better or worse and the thing that is your days, and your environment, will play itself out with or without your accord. You can set a thing into motion, which you cannot stop, until it plays itself out to its final act.
I've stopped reading books that make me want to kill myself and have set about the task of completing the thing I have tried to control for so long by not completing, Rocheblave. Church lady passersby sometimes pause and say "that's really pretty" and I go and assume they have been around long enough to know what was here before and I feel pretty good about it I don't mind saying.
I have to redo two of the three sets of stairs and put up a railing and this I started after much "let's wait just one more day dwelling in darkness." I was even doing other unnecessary detail work on the house rather than complete the thing that grants me this modicum of freedom; a taste of "you're not a complete fuckup."
I re-glazed the last 18 panes of glass on the two salvage yard replacement widows that I paid too much for but had to have to plug the fire-ravaged hole in the eastern wall of the bedroom. And that only needed doing in the sense that I knew I would use it against me if I didn't re-glaze them. I cleaned up a few years worth of giant sycamore leaves and accumulated construction debris from under the house and hauled two heavy pickup truck loads to the dump on Elysian Fields.
I had to listen to Killer bark relentlessly for two days and breathe in the smell of wet fermented dog shit on successive, hot, muggy, New Orleans days. In the end I was calling him Butch and suffering his sporadic and inexplicable silences. I used a reciprocating saw with a jagged blade to trim some junk tree limbs from the fence which separates us while his master lady yelled at him to leave me alone and I wondered would I increase or decrease his intense feelings for me if his snout got slashed while he tried getting his fangs on my white knuckles.
The book, excellent, despite the fact that only Dreiser's Great American Tragedy has depressed me more, was The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. Here's your excerpt: "If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope."
Mardi Gras happened. Three bystanders got shot and one killed on St. Charles on a stretch of the neutral ground (median) that is known as the "freedom zone" (although that's not the exactly what it's called), which is a length of about 8 blocks prior to Lee Circle where rival gangs (although gangs are not exactly what we have here in New Orleans) and their families are supposed to co-exist peacefully for the duration of Carnival parades.
Also, I am told there was a letter to the editor in the Times Picayune bemoaning the fact that in 2004, the 21st century, 40 years after the hard won successes of many a civil rights battle, that in Metairie, the first westerly suburb of New Orleans, and the recipient of the great "white flight" legions those 40 years ago, that an all black New Orleans marching band participating in the suburban version of Mardi Gras, was racially berated along stretches of the parade route by a small but hateful and vociferous minority.
I quit going to Metairie parades after witnessing a similar situation eight or nine years ago. Anyway, there is always a whole lot going on here, during Mardi Gras, and otherwise, and not much of it makes it onto those tapes sold on independent TV stations featuring the bare breasts of the white middle class on Bourbon Street.