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Before Raking Leaves
I was sketching out in words this scene centered around a New Orleans youngster pulling a gun out of his sock during a three on three street basketball game. Those portable hoops with the black plastic bases are not exactly a ubiquitous New Orleans prop but they were pretty damn common to the neighborhoods in which I lived and traveled, during my ten year stay. And then just a few days later I hear from my nephew, who still lives in NO, that the city has outlawed those types of hoops in the street.
So like overnight what I was writing became history instead of what I was intending, which was a scene, although based on past experience, meant to reflect an ongoing metaphor-laden reality specifically tied to street basketball. This change in temporality is not crucial to any point I would ever intend to make seeing as how I am unclear myself on what the point is I would ever be trying to make.
Probably the street games restrict traffic flow to some degree and also I guess the gun being pulled from socks is not as uncommon as you would want it to be. And often the players will have some connection to the drug world. And there is violence and death in the drug world. No more newsworthy are the street deaths than the deaths caused every year by respectable drug companies but one might argue that the ratio of death versus benefit is more positively balanced in the world of super pharmaceutical companies. Or I should say unbalanced with the benefit side of the scale measuring much heavier in favor of the good provided by big drug companies. I mean I'm only guessing that pharmaceutical companies help more people than they kill, whereas the street dealers might be perceived, rightly or wrongly, to kill more people than they help. And so the city fathers by outlawing street basketball are again taking baby steps to curb a city problem with systemic roots of disease deeper than anyone has yet to effectively imagine a cure for. Even the drug companies are baffled because surely if they could figure a way to enter the lucrative street drug trade and rake into their coffers some of that sweet ghetto cake, they would have by now done so. The donation of Glaxo Kline Squibb Merck Beechum emblazoned backboards to the hood, as entry point to the market, is now out.
I have tons of ideas for New Orleans but they are all ridiculous and require massive hands on city-wide mentoring and out of personal pocket expense and deep personal heartache. And risk of death and lawsuits (you can invert those two in order of importance I guess) and failure. All my ideas carry with them a seemingly unacceptable failure rate, the beauty of which is--this is a thing they have in common with current practices and policies. Still, in a future world gone whack, where profit could be imagined or realized from the lifting up of our "lesser" citizens, I think I could see myself cutting off my hair, putting on a suit and sitting on some board, spewing ridiculous. "So you see, the benefit of populating floats of the (2,500 rich person only) Endymion parade, entirely with area youth from the ghettoes, and having the rich people populating the predominately poorer sections of the parade route and then the mixing afterwards at the big Superdome party, would be that of a first step towards turning the existing, and failing, system asunder..." And then the rich person says but my system is not failing and I would turn to that person and raise my left eyebrow.
Melba Got My Goat
Oh yeah nephew, well you tell that Melba I went through quite a bit of agony for her that night but if I had known what her reaction was going to be I would have done what the rest of her neighbors did--watched and done nothing and said nothing.
As to her suggestion that it didn't matter if I had a phone or not, that I should have confronted the guy stealing her washing machine on a well lit early evening, as he grinded the sides of it up against the metal fence posts trying to extricate it from the too small opening, and yelled out--"I'm calling the police now"--let me just now say that the reason I gave at the time, not having a phone, was not the real reason I never even considered such a ridiculous common sense solution to crime in that rather diluted version of the hood.
I know what you're thinking, jeez uncle, that Melba really got your goat on this one and yes you are right. Melba got my goat. Midwestern poseur. At least I never pretended I fit in that neighborhood, even though in a way I did. And I similarly drape like a flamboyant cape the drama of those New Orleans neighborhoods over the bony shoulders of my existence. So maybe I should ease up on those accusations, except in small doses I like it and its fun, so maybe I won't.
I tried to follow the guy and see where he went, and failed instantly. In the time it took me to sit down and put on my shoes and go out and start the truck, he was gone. A man pushing a washing machine on a handcart down the middle of the street just vanished in the span of thirty seconds. Did that mean he was a neighbor? Maybe, not necessarily, maybe.
It was sort of surreal nephew, because it took the guy a while to get the machine out into the street. And people were passing him on the sidewalk, and ignoring him. Some went into the residence next door and others just moseyed on up to the corner. I had been broken into three times the previous year and the previous week all five of my neighbors to the side had been burgled in one night, backyard sheds ransacked. I didn't really give a good goddamn about her washing machine, I wanted a sacrificial lamb in jail, and I thought the best way to accomplish that was to follow the guy.
Her idea was that I would call out to him that I was calling the police, he would drop the machine and run away, with his handcart. But if he had to take the handcart anyway, why would he give up the washing machine? I woke up five times that night to keep an eye on her and her talented husband's house to make sure a general ransacking was not going on. Did the bitch even begrudgingly thank me for my efforts? No nephew, she did not.
Did I mention that I went around the corner to that grocery store to call the cops from a pay phone? I had to wait to make the call though because there was a cop on the pay phone, his car idling at the curb. Another cop in a different car was ooh-ing and awe-ing over this gangster's CD collection who was handing through the driver's side window all the very latest hot shit from the Rap world. I waited patiently near the cop on the pay phone, once nodding at him with a look of inquiry and solicitation. He didn't seem all that disappointed to deal with me but he did seem like he had other things to be doing. He followed me around the corner and after a brief consult said he might know who did the burglary, and drove off towards the river. I went inside and twenty minutes later I hear a honk in the street and look out and there he is, the cop. I go out to the street and he's got some criminal in his backseat that he caught while looking for my criminal. He says he's gotta go. And that's the last I saw of the cops regarding that incident.
And anyway, what was I supposed to do if the guy did drop the washing machine? I still would have had to run after him to borrow his handcart to move the damn thing to safety. Yeah, that Melba's got my goat all right.
You know nephew, I've already told this story once somewhere on this site but your recent emailed mention of Melba just got my blood boiling all over again.
But the real reason nephew? The real reason I didn't confront the guy and scare him away as Melba implies she has done to characters malingering around my place in my absence? The real reason is I was scared. The dude I was watching out my window was scary in a way that was different from the way I may have been frightened after telling a murderer to get off my motherfucking porch, at that other house I used to live at around the corner. The combination of determination and desperation that emanated from the robber's movements and the nonchalance of the passerby, all of this in more or less early evening broad daylight, well, it sort of freaked me. I did not want to make contact of any kind with this guy. To me, he was that scary. And you know, for a couple of years, at that other house, I was stepping over on my way to and from work the heavyweights of scary local crime, as they played dominoes and cards on the porch.
Well nephew, none of that old business is germane to my current morning so I better get on with it. Just needed to vent a little, no, no, I'm not blaming you.
Anyway, technically, the truth can be how Melba remembers it. I did, afterall, watch from beginning to end, a guy steal her washing machine, and push it down the middle of the street on a handcart, in broad daylight. In retrospect I guess my only regret is that I didn't sleep through the night thereafter.