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Email From NOLA IIo
This morning the male dog sits smack in the middle of Iberville St. as I saunter with an exaggerated menace to my step up that same middle (on my way to the newspaper box at Canal and Broad, which this morning will be completely empty), both of us knowing the liklihood of vehicular intrusion is nominal. He isn't going to let me come right up on him so I wish he would quit acting so casual. Go on and get up and saunter your potentially threatening self over to the sidewalk. God gave me dominion over all this. Nowhere does it say--and stray dogs shall inherit the earth. The puppies are fat. People from animal rescue teams are going around leaving aluminum basting pans full of food and water and all the wild animals are fat. The skinny neighborhood cats have bellies that almost drag the ground they so puffed up with animal rescue kibble.
The male dog is big enough to hurt me--he appears to be a Rottweiler mutt--and I don't want to push this imagined superiority thing too far. It is just play acting really, me being the one that is superior. I kid no one, least of all myself. Even though I am the one doing all the moving I say, ok that's close enough, please step to the curb. He doesn't right off, but he does eventually. The puppies are outside the fence for the first time that I have seen. They are on the curb, all five of them. All five of their fat selves. The runt barks at me and the other four perform excited circular maneuvers and fall all over each other. Mrs. Rottweiler is standing in a sort of passive aggressive crouch that says--I am afraid for the welfare of my family, they grow up so fast you know....
I keep moving and cut diagonally through the gap in the blown down fence and walk behind the Rent Your Life Away establishment with the vinyl siding half blown off to expose its original turn of the century paint peeled wood, glancing to my left to see the cop on guard in the Rite Aid parking lot (who guards the portable trailer full of drugs, outside the gutted store). I keep moving through the wide gap between the two buildings, where the dumpster used to be, next to which would often be a thrown away rent a couch, occupied by free spirited downtrodden budget wine enthusiasts. Not today though, or 35 yesterdays. I approach the paper box and put two fingers in my jacket pocket and get two quarters, anticipating the day's headlines. And...turn dejected circles in New Orleans, Louisiana. I circle the box twice more, to rule out hallucination.
I walk back the way I came, without a folded newspaper under my arm, which for me has been seeming like my passport to let the drug watching security cops know that I am not sauntering with lack of purpose or ill intent near that trailer full of drugs. Back on Iberville, Mr. and Mrs. Rottweiler are nowhere to be seen, the puppies are alone. I stand on the opposite curb and take a picture, but I'm too far away I know, so I move into the street and one step closer at a time, take pictures, which, when later viewed, all came out blurry.
I diagonally enter the newly mowed football-field-sized vacant Pentecostal lot and come up on my house from the rear. Mr. and Mrs. Rottweiler (she is not a Rottweiler by the way) are checking out the aluminum basting pans on my block and then they go in the wide open house of questionable repute, across the street from me. The house is still full of its moldy, flooded contents; the house sits four feet lower than mine, in a neighborhood that took four feet of flood water. Mrs. Rottweiler comes out and looks over at me sheepishly.
You don't have to look that way Mrs. Rottweiler, don't you get it? There's seven of you now, you are the new majority, you could rule this neighborhood, briefly known as Louisville.