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My Friend, Killer
I can hear the guy plopping down on my side steps and there is no real drama around here these days and there is no real harm in him plopping down out there but I'm so pissed at this new routine where him and his brother or friend bring their pit bulls for a walk in the Pentecostal lot, and make Killer next door go absolutely nuts for about thirty minutes every night that I rip open the door and glare even as he is jumping up and apologizing. I just tell him it's nothing personal but his presence makes that dog go nuts and the farther away from me he and his pit bulls are the better. Even the logic of it sounds screwy to me. Why shouldn't someone make use of that park next door? So what if a perpetually chained dog is screwy in the head and doesn't like the smell of free dogs in close proximity? My whole point starts from wanting to be an asshole, not wanting to offer any kindness to someone whose dogs contribute to a situation that makes me suffer from lack of peace. Why should he get to sit on my steps and I can't even fully appreciate the moderate buzz from my second Heineken? It's a weak beginning to a good point. I don't know how to best address such a situation. Um, I'm thsorry, could you pleaazze not promenade your canine creatures in my vahthintity. I jus wanna enjoy some peacthe and quiet. So.
I am approaching the construction of my budget porch railing very cautiously and while I am making headway I really got to say that having no experience at something you are trying to do pretty much sucks. That's where I'm at on that, the pretty much sucks stage. But I go at it a little everyday, lining up all the difficulties in neat little rows, waiting for the lightbulb to come on. The thing about construction, oh hell, life too I guess, is that all your previous careless mistakes visit you in subsequent and perpetual fashion until you correct and address them properly and even then you run the risk that when it's all said and done the code inspector (God?) might tell you the whole thing is wrong, wrong, wrong, tear it down and start over.
I've been spending a little quality time with Killer (whom I now call by his Christian name, Butch, during those periods of quality time.) An idea that has crossed my mind is that Killer may be racist. This is not a point I am going to belabor. Regarding racism I tend to remember the words of Shelton who as a teenager once said to me "I really don't care if they call me 'nigger,' Mr. Jim." At the time I had wished he did care and equally admired him for not caring. Anyway, I don't think Killer's main thing is a problem with my whiteness. Finally it came to me last night, he's just lonely, and unhappy with his chain. He wants to play.
I set up my table saw in my side yard right outside his fence partly because the bitch in me was rising and I was tired of avoiding that part of my property just to accommodate that mthrfking whoredog, Killer. In between ripping 45 degree angles off the three and a half inch top side of pressure treated two by fours I would flick pebbles at Killer, the first time out of meanness and all the other times because he thought it was a game and he would lurch for them and cease barking for up to a minute at a time. He would almost look happy, in that expectant "hey throw me the ball, throw me the ball" sort of way that dogs have. And as if I'm not happy unless I'm considering a scene in its melancholy aspect the thing about this time with Killer is--I think I may be the best friend he's got.
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.