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Is That The Color?
Whoever recently lost their upper respiratory congestion in the newly and ill-formed Louisville area, please contact me for immediate return. No ID required, but please bring your own phlegm bucket.
Was up at six yesterday and over to Dumaine to clandestinely run a cord from the temporary pole on the right side of Esnard Villa so I could power up my little spray rig. It will run off the small generator I have but not without over-am ping it. I sprayed the trim woodwork high and low and was done by seven so I retired to Betsy's for breakfast while the paint dried in the morning sun.
I had the special but done ala carte fashion because it being a holiday, they were not offering the special per se. It was about three dollars more expensive that way, which is not a complaint, just a report. I had ice-tea instead of hot coffee.
By eight I was back to Dumaine to start brushing the front weatherboards.
A crew of Mexicans had the previous day emptied the contents of the former Mama D's house onto the sidewalk in the neatest damn constructed debris pile I have ever seen.
This day the front man for the debris removal team working Memorial day at time and a half (26 dollars per hour) called out to me, while surveying the neat pile his crew would soon de-construct, remove all electronic devices, and then re-pile across the street. He called out to me--you painting that by yourself? I said yes, not giving Fermin any credit for the few days he helped me or for that matter those three New Yorkers and that solitary Californian, who spot-primed the front.
You a real painter, he said, in a tone that would easily accept the word painter being replaced by, man. Well, jiminy-fuckin'-shucks if that wasn't enough to make my already substantial-sized ego bloat to weather-balloon size and float high above Dumaine.
I crossed the street, and from the shade, sitting on the steps closest to the dumpster, admired my own damn work and conversed with a fellow worker man, about the ways of the world.
Later, BeBe came by to borrow a tape measure, and said, that the color? I said yes, is it all right, do you hate it? She said no she didn't hate it, it was nice, it gonna be real cute.
In the afternoon, Joe came by, which I had sort of been dreading, because I had a month ago let him pick some colors from a chart, and I did not end up using those colors but at the time had enthusiastically said I would. I changed my mind about his selected color scheme and was ready for his--hey man, that's not the color I chose harangue. However, when he came by he said, that the color? and I said yes and he said, that's good man, that's the color I like, (even though it is not even remotely similar to the colors he picked.)
Even later in the afternoon and the shade is my blessing on the porch. I'm up on the eight foot step ladder painting the porch ceiling and Phillis calls from across the street, hey Jim, that the color? I said yes and she said, ohh, I like that, that gonna look real nice. Which is all good, because its she and Joe and BeBe that are going to be looking at it everyday.
It is similar but a bit more electric than the color it is replacing, of the blue/teal family, and I wanted it to be a sort of recognizable color memorial to all the boys that grew up there, under M's guidance. I want them to be able to pass by with pride, say, I planned my first felony up in there, or really, in many cases--that place was part of my saving. I would have been much worse off without that place.
In those days gone by, wrapped up thick in the middle of it, I never answered in the affirmative when asked--do yall think you are doing any good there? It was all so yet to be seen. But with the affording of a little distance and the re-acquainting with some of the boys recently, I can say that at least a few of the literally 100+ children who passed through that house, benefitted from the passing through. And there is something good about that, perhaps almost equal to being called a real painter/man.
Shadow Boxing
I started putting the finish coat on the Dumaine exterior today. It's very, uh, teal. I do not like being in charge of color selection. Anyway, it's pretty well prepped and the color won't be offensive to everyone and as a protective coating it will be good and the prep work to repaint at some future date will be miniscule compared to what I had to do, that is assuming the next person to paint it doesn't wait twelve years, like I did. Twelve years is too long to wait between exterior paint jobs.
The guy who came by a couple of weeks ago and vomited three times while talking to me, came by again today. He's on heroin, but pretends to be on something else. He did some shadow boxing (actually very impressively) and said he misses having people to fight with.
Hunter, a kid I have watched grow up in the ghetto over a twelve year period, came by today, first time I've seen him since being back, and he has grown into a very slick looking young man. Said he's working in the oil fields, or offshore, I can't remember. He was as glad to see me as I was to see him and he hugged me both on the greet and the depart. He's got him a nice little car.
Two more decomposed corpses found in vacant New Orleans' homes this week, nine months after the flood and three days before the official start of a new hurricane season. The death toll is now around 1,500.
The levees are in ok shape but not great shape and the best thing for New Orleans would be no Katrina sized storms this year.
The next best thing would be the rounding up and setting on fire of all high level insurance executives. All of you who have instructed your lackey employees to put up hindrance to those who are in need and have paid their premiums year after year, I hope, if you do sleep at night, you dream of being set on fire, because such things, in an imperfect world, do happen.
You Cannot Fail
This is a lot different than those first several months without electricity, sitting here inside Rocheblave with the central air blasting, and I don't know if I can stand it, but I think I can.
Today was my last day of work. I worked in Metarie and in Lakeview, got my last check, and said goodbye to Bossman, with whom I have worked a total of10 years.
In Metairie I finished the painting except for punch out, on a remodel/flood job for a new builder and he pays us 50 cents to a dollar more per square foot than our regular builder and came onto the job occasionally and said stuff like, it doesn't have to be this good, which is gratifying I guess, but I didn't do anything special for him.
In Lakeview, well I don't know what to say about Lakeview, you have to see it for yourself.
Lakeview, being a white middle class to upper middle class neighborhood, for me, ghetto dweller, is a bit shaking to my core, the visualization of how quickly an affluent neighborhood can, in wide swaths, take on the appearance of ghetto. But you know, I love the ghetto, so I guess it's not all bad.
I don't want my nephew and his wife and three young children, rebuilding in Lakeview, to frown too hard at the last paragraph because I think you are doing the right and courageous thing. Sissies have never made it in New Orleans. As you face your future doubts realize you will never be without what you truly need. What? No!, you cannot borrow a dollar.
I had to go get an extension cord on Dumaine this morning so I could spray some shoe molding at the Metairie job before the carpenters (bossman did not trim that job) put it down, and approaching the former kill zone at St. Philip and Dorgenois, I saw one of the chicken/rooster pairs rummaging around a debris pile. I am easily satisfied by free range ghetto poultry.
Three Friday's in a row my garbage bags have been picked up on Rocheblave, and I'm sick of it, this regular garbage pickup has got to stop.
I love New Orleans, but still, I'm leaving.
For those of you staying, embrace your mayor. That other guy with his promises was all wrong. Promises are a comfort to fools.
And if you get frustrated at the pace of recovery, get out and do something, any fucking thing. In New Orleans you cannot fail.
Cop Loving Scum
The Sculptor does pottery too and today she gave me a belated BD present of these two really fine super-fine planter pots she made. I'm gonna hate to put dirt in them. I told her I had some time today so I should start tape and floating that little ceiling of hers. She gave me a key and I went over there after she left for work and accidently hit her dog, Sam, in the head with a four foot aluminum level. I didn't mean to hit you in the head, Sam. The rock hanging done by an ambitious electrician, was kind of shitty but hopefully my floating will be less than shitty, although I'm not sure it will be. I taped it and put on the first float today.
Then I crossed the street and started painting the inside of my Rocheblave house. The front two rooms are a kind of putty brown (which looks less crappy than I thought it would against the stained woodwork) and the bedroom is green and the hallway will be a darker green and the bathroom will be even darker green and the kitchen is staying that three year old shocking yellow orange color that would probably be ok if I hung upper cabinets (which my kitchen does not have because I am a cheap cheap bastard) and some other stuff to cover the walls so the orange yellow only peeked out instead of what it does now--kablammo, right in your face. Anyway, I'll finish it up tomorrow, except for the front room, which will only be cut in once. I will need another gallon of that putty brown color.
The bedroom is finished except for painting the baseboards and that's where I'm at now, drinking Red Stripe, luxuriating in the green. I'm not ashamed to say this, I like green.
I walked over to Betsy's and had breakfast at 6:15 this morning and Betsy should of had my interior designer because that blue is too blue. The first job I did after going back to work for bossman was finishing up a flood job and the whole inside of the house was that blue and I can't take it, I'm cracking up over that blue, totally freakin'. It's not that bad really. Yes it is. Aren't you painting the Dumaine exterior blue? Well, exteriors are a different thing, and uh, actually, the blue going on there is of the teal family. Teal! You hear me?
A woman honked at me from the Iberville corner and then pulled up in front of my driveway sometime this morning after breakfast but before I actually started doing anything, or maybe I had removed all the switch and receptacle plates and moved stuff around, away from the walls, and feeling accomplished, was just wandering around Louisville central. Say every hateful thing you want to say about me, but I like being honked at by women. I think it is politically correct.
I walked out to the street feeling the thrill of incipient adventure. The woman was about sixty, with white skin and hair colorized from the blond box. She was upset and rather animated. I was neither, as befits my station as lord of Louisville.
She wanted to know where the PIB (Public Integrity Bureau) was and I pointed to a building front one block away. She really was upset and needed to warn me about bad cops, I should know about bad cops. She had no way of knowing from my appearance that I am a cop lover. I mean, I've cussed a few, probably have some more of that in my future, and even though I am myself, as a long-haired, skinny, therefore drug addled appearing miscreant, not probably loved at first sight by most cops, still, I have only a modest patience with people who go on about cop mistreatment after they've broken some law. I know a woman who as a teenager was hanging out with some people from a minority group, and taking up for this minority group being hassled by a bad cop, was beaten quite severely with some scrap lumber, and hospitalized with potential brain damage. I've never heard this woman speak a negative word about cops in general, or for that matter, about the cop who beat the shit out her. It was to her, I think, just a bad thing that happened, and which she survived. If you think her lack of outrage is because she got her spirit beat out her I can only assure you that does not describe this woman. And uh, anyway, the bad cop was not loved by his peers and something permanent bad happened to that cop some time after the incident.
So the lady ran a red light and/or a stop sign and the cops were rude to her, threatened to take her to jail, and this same type of thing had been reported on the TV news, overzealous traffic stops, blah, blah, something has to be done. I listened politely, offering no opinions, cop-loving scum that I am.
I think I'll insert this now--I have "met" some cops I didn't really enjoy, much less loved.
Anyway, I didn't like to see the woman so upset. It upset me. Then she made an anonymous reference to Paul Hardy, hitman for some bad cops back in the nineties. Back then a woman had made a complaint to the PIB about a certain Len Davis, a cocaine warehousing cop who she had witnessed beating up a citizen, and word got back to Len, which is really bad form for the PIB, and Len asked Paul to kill her and while being recorded on an FBI tape Paul calls back saying he had done so, and he had. And he's on death row, the woman said. Yeah, I was here then, I told her. Good, she said. I guess she thought she might get whacked for complaining about overzealous traffic cops. Law abiding people on Dumaine who knew Hardy, not specifically as a hitman but as an area property owner, called him, Paul, with fondness, just to throw out there, everybody has admirers.
Right after this incident with the upset woman, I was Uptown getting paint and got stuck behind some college girls in a new convertible who were making an illegal left at Louisiana and St. Charles. What is so hard about making a U-turn and a right, for a left turn, in New Orleans? Nothing, there's nothing hard about it. Make my blood boil, petty criminals. Truly, where are the bad cops when you need them?
Work In The N.O.
There are four jobs going on concurrently that the bossman and I are working on. He's starting to trim a house in Lakeview while I prep a house for paint in Metairie and then we have the four-plex off of Clearview to punch out and the converted garage of our building contractor in River Ridge to finish up. In the evenings and on weekends I have the 1897 Victorian Dumaine house to exterior paint, the Rocheblave house to replace a moldy section of sheetrock in the return air vent and at least three rooms to repaint in the next six days and I did promise the Sculptor across the street that I would tape and float her small section of ceiling in the studio portion of her home. It's only about a two inch description of work though so it can't be all that hard. Sitting here right now doing nothing is sort of a guilty pleasure except that I don't feel guilty or for that matter all that pleased.
Yesterday like Cinderella on her knees scrubbing while the ugly step sisters are away having fun (except the shoe will never fit and my boss is not an ugly step sister) I scraped with a six foot section of trim molding the sawdust and bits of wood left by another carpenter crew so I could freely navigate the rolling scaffold, which is quite an expediting device when caulking, puttying and painting crown molding.
The builder (not the one we usually work for) came in while I did this and spying that pitiful picture of me on my knees, perhaps felt guilty and asked did I want him to clean up the place and I said if he could that would be nice, at least sweep everything to the middle of the rooms. He said he would because if I was starting to paint tomorrow all the dust would get in the paint and that would not be good. I did not say, Really? This guy has never seen my work so doesn't know that I can make his woodwork glass smooth even in a windstorm, but I like a clean work environment, so let's hope he cleaned up the place last night and moved all that unused trim molding out of the hallway.
Ok, that's it, off to the I-10.
Another Brother
I found a warm Guinness wrapped in a plastic grocery sack in the Dumaine foyer so I sat on the porch and drank it after priming a few dozen window sashes yesterday evening after work.
A dude I recognize but not by name comes up and starts talking to me like an old friend, which was touching on one level, and then, not really all that touching, as he rambled on with the utmost elusiveness regarding anything specific about who we knew, mutually, and I, offered up everything just shy of my bank account numbers.
He was really surprised to see me sitting there, on those steps where I used to sit, and now sit again.
He excused himself three times and walked over to the short southern fence, and saying the red sauce (spaghetti sauce) was burning in his stomach, expelled it with projectile force into the dead brown banana trees. And then between each vomiting would come back and explain the problem with red sauce in general and also specifically the red sauce he had just eaten.
He was an intelligent speaker with an occasional stutter as he pondered how to phrase his next sentence and at one point looking at the sharp Anglo edges of his bronze-black face I thought, me and this guy could be related. And when I said I had to go, and clean up, he gave me the soul shake and shoulder bump and I realized we were, related.
He walked up the sidewalk toward Dorgenois and that's when he called back and said, I was really surprised to see you sitting there. I called back, yeah, its been awhile.
500 Angry Nikes
There is a 110 year old wrought iron fence in front of the Dumaine house. The porch railing, also most likely originally wrought iron, is now white wood spindle, minus a few due to urban teenager attrition.
Before the recently added wood railing the porch was rail-less and was for many years, between 1995 and 2002 or 3, the Dumaine domain of many a child and grownup, working class and white collar, gangster and innocent.
The young thugs, who we were convinced would show some respect if we offered some (and would not kill us no matter how we treated them, if we tutored--mostly M--and mentor-ed, their little brothers and sisters), would invariably use the aged wrought iron spear tips as a push off point for their Reboks and Nikes when leveraging themselves up onto the porch. And they would plop their butts down on the tongue and groove porch and then rest their feet on the same wrought iron spear tips. "Please don't rest your feet on the railing" was always obeyed until the next time.
Two or three tips have been broken off over the years in acts of Herculean urban teenager angst.
I was ruminating on that railing this afternoon while it rained on my last ditch efforts at long put off exterior paint prep, sitting on a five gallon bucket listening to battery-powered radioed live "Jazz Tent" Jazzfest, as the prevailing winds blew sound onto the porch from the 7 block distant fai-do-do stage.
Take The Curtain
Not getting it done sitting here. You are going to need a very long extension pole to paint that Dumaine house if you persist on sitting on your air mattress watching the sun rise, on Rocheblave.
I made the walk to the Canal/Broad paper box this morning, Friday, my day off from work so I can work day. Epictetus was leaning on the box talking to himself, 16 oz. beer in brown wrapper resting on the top of the box. In all my years over here admiring the survival skills of the stoic Epictetus, I was never sure he could talk, or even had vocal chords, but today he's talking fine, if only to himself.
I said good morning to him and he responded similarly and moved away from the box so I could get a paper. I wanted to give him something, a paper or a fiver, but he didn't ask for anything so I chose not to presume his needs. I did ask him if he was doing all right and he said--still standing.
Went to Betsy's, got the special, left a 30% tip.
Chevron is moving out of New Orleans to the North Shore, taking 500 workers with them. See ya, bye, don't let the screen door hit ya on the way out.
Same goes for me though. I'm leaving in a few weeks to resume my duties in the Virginia countryside. Not because it's too hard here or because I think there is no hope for this region but because Virginia/Delaware are part of my world now, and have been for two years.
Even without electricity and gas to my house for the first four months of my stay, this has been perhaps the easiest and most relaxing seven months of my 12 years here. I know it has not been easy for many and I don't mean to make light of the great hardships suffered by many but I honestly see nothing but good here. That the city has come this far 8 months after being underwater is nothing shy of miraculous. That there is still a long way to go is obvious but the New Orleans I have lived in for these years (on Magazine, on Dumaine, on Rocheblave) was in a very real way much more disadvantaged and dysfunctional than the New Orleans I see rising from the muck.
I am eager to reacquaint with my east coast family but equally so, jealous of you getting to stay here.
Thank you to everyone that has been nice to me this trip. To my neighbors, the Sculptor, the Chauffeur, The Smiths, Mr. Clarence, FreddyB, Raheim, and to those who invited me site unseen into their homes for food and drink and on those coldest days this winter, an occasional hot shower. I tip my glass to Laureen, EditorB, Cade Roux, and Rene. And to my blood, renting Uptown while they prepare to rebuild in Lakeview, I offer you my admiration and love, which you can either accept or trade right now for a six pack of Guinness, or what's behind curtain number 1 (and the crowd yells--take the curtain, take the curtain!)