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Lance RIP
hey, i wanted to thank you again for the paint job. if you send me a receipt i can at least try to get you some of the insurance money. that seems fair to me.
i’ll go back to new orleans probably end of september. the whole notion fills me with dread, but i won’t be eligible for grant money unless i’m living on the premises.
bad news: lance got himself shot and killed last weekend in houston. i thought you’d want to know.
-m
New Orleans Murders Itself
Saturday, July 29, 2006
--4 found shot dead on street in Treme
Four people were killed Friday night in a shooting in the Treme neighborhood.
Friday, July 28, 2006
--N.O. man slain while changing tire
A 21-year-old New Orleans man was shot to death Thursday morning as he changed a tire on his car outside his eastern New Orleans apartment complex, police said.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
--2 held in killing of N.O. barber
Police on Tuesday night arrested a pair of roommates suspected of murdering a popular Bywater barber early last week. The pair burst into a trailer next to Clifton Barnes' barber shop and demanded cash before killing him, the New Orleans Police Department said.
--Drugs detected in 4 people killed in June
Each of the victims in a quadruple slaying last month near Slidell tested positive for at least three drugs, reinforcing detectives' assertions that narcotics played a key role in the "execution-style" killings, St. Tammany Parish Coroner Peter Galvan said Wednesday.
--Woman found dead of gunshot
The body of an unidentified woman was found Wednesday in the 4500 block of Paris Avenue, New Orleans police said.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
--Police seek identity of man shot to death on street
New Orleans authorities are seeking help in identifying a man who was found shot to death Sunday night in a 6th Ward neighborhood.
Monday, July 24, 2006
--Man, 40, is found shot dead in N.O.
New Orleans police are investigating the shooting death of 40-year-old man whose body was found at his eastern New Orleans home Sunday.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
--Marrero man shot to death in SUV
New Orleans police are investigating the killing early Saturday of a 36-year-old Marrero man who was shot several times while riding in a sport utility vehicle at Calliope and Tchoupitoulas streets, near the Crescent City Connection.
--Teen wanted in crime spree arrested
New Orleans police early Saturday arrested a 17-year-old wanted on six counts of attempted murder and a string of other crimes.
On Company Time
Freddy from Honduras said of his work mates, two are from Guatemala, and two from Bolivia. Any Salvadorans? I asked. No, Freddy grimaced. No te gusta Salvador? I asked. No, Freddy said. Porque? I asked. Because they kill women and children, he said. Cuando, I asked. Setena y siete, setenta y ocho, he said. Oh, si, recuerdo, I said, remembering back to my college months in Austin and all the love everyone was feeling for Daniel Ortega. Freddy is from the state of Limpira, which borders El Salvador. He is only twenty-five so he is carrying on a hatred handed down by his older relatives. Freddy said a nice house can be got in Honduras for $7,000. I paid $22,000 for my house in New Orleans. It was a fixer-upper.
I was talking to one of the Guatemalans around lunchtime yesterday. It was his birthday. He asked me to take him a la tienda. So I did and he got him two packs of Marlboro lights and a drink. He bought me a large Heinekin. Earlier he had asked me what I smoked and I showed him and he said, oh, Camel. I smoke Marlboro light, girly cigarette, but Camel for man (I tried to show him that my Camels were lights too but he didn't get it). Yes, I said, lowering my voice and puffing out my chest, and hacking up a hairball.
I want to now shine a brief light on the Marshall office of VDOT which has some good men and women working for it and some with rather antiquated racial attitudes towards its African-American workers. I will spare you the details because I would hate to taint a burgeoning lawsuit. But it seems they have a lot of fun down there with their workers, and even Anglo on Anglo gags are rife with hilarity. Workers have been known to duct tape weaker workers into submission and then sit on their chests and wag penises in their faces. So if you live in Virginia and pay taxes you might make a note on your next tax bill that you would prefer your money not go to projects that would include penis-wagging on company time. Unless that is something you do support. I am not here to make judgments.
Deputy Dog Lives Another Day
Dear Mom,
I don't know if you remember this but back when you were still living I wrote to you about a barking dog in Virginia, down the hill from where I stay. He would bark all night at the moon and stars and the foxes and if there were sheep out here he would bark at the sheep. A yappy bark. A high pitched yappy bark. The sound would travel hundreds of feet and come into my bedroom and make me feel insane in a way disproportionate to the aggravation. If I were a superpower I might, to show how discontented I am, fire bomb a hundred small cities and follow up with a couple of atomic bombs dropped on the citizens of two larger cities, or, say I were the bitch step sister of a superpower and some mean people kidnapped two of my people, and these mean people were a group with no agenda that I considered relevant, I might fly around in jets and drop bombs over the entire country where the mean people holed up. What, mom? The innocents? Please, please mother, there are no innocents.
By the way, speaking of ill-logic, after a lifetime of eye-wandering under-achieving, with a list of suspect accomplishments including, college-quiting, cross-country hitchhiking, boxcar riding, ghetto dwelling, and a series of moderately satisfying dead-end blue collar jobs, I have ended up as sole occupant of a rather large house on top of a hill, surrounded 360 degrees by Blue Ridge foothills on a property that has a pond, a pool, a tennis court, and as we speak, a rather ambitious re-landscaping of all the land between the pool and the tennis court. Yes mother, I am in the bighouse. What? No mother, no. I know that's what Cagney and Robinson called the...no, I don't mean THAT bighouse. No, unh uh, I've never meant it that way, don't be silly.
Anyway, to the point--I am several hundred feet higher up the hill from the yappy dog and I can still hear it, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to hear it, and so I was just wondering if maybe Jesus would let you have a dog I could send you this one. I know that after our cat, Frank, died, you said you didn't want anymore pets, but that's been a good many years ago and I think you might enjoy this dog, its no bigger than a puppy really, and...no, I wouldn't say it was cute but do you remember that cartoon Deputy Dog?, well, it looks kind of like that.
Sure, yeah, no, I understand. No, you are absolutely right, I should count my blessings. What? No, this isn't long-distance. No, really, I don't think you have to worry about that anymore, I think you are operating with the currency of eternity now and so....click...dial tone. Ok then, it was nice chatting.
One Twin Banging
The police came banging on my door yesterday. I opened the door and it was one of the twins. "Jesus man, why you bangin' like that?, you sound like the police."
"I'm not the police."
"You sound like the police, what's up?"
"Just wanted to see if I could take a quick dip in the pool."
"Of course man, go ahead." Up to this point I had thought this twin was the other twin, the one who is the far less likely to abuse the privilege. But quickly I realized this twin was not the one I thought he was and what the hell is up with these twins now starting to look like each other? They didn't use to even seem like brothers much less twins but now they are like mirror images of each other.
And then these two teenagers, his step children?, come up and he says, "I just wanted to come by and check with you and see if it was all right..." and I interrupted him and said, "it looks like you already decided it was all right."
"No man, it's not like that."
"Go ahead and get wet."
He tells his step children, teenagers both of them, to go swimming, he wants to catch up with me because I had been in New Orleans all winter and spring and he hadn't talked to me in so long. He used "New Orleans" like a currency. As if it were a valuable thing that would be of interest to the teenagers but they like the rest of the world overwhelmed by who will be the next American Idol or get voted off which island or fired from which high level job, did not, do not, give a damn. Only Brad Pitt can save you now.
I don't know if the guy was coked up (a possibility) or just really excited to see me (unlikely) but he talked a mile a minute--about what, I cannot tell you, because I really wasn't listening. I was so mad at myself for my mistake of thinking he was the good twin instead of the fucked up one. How long would I have to listen to this drivel designed to suggest an age old intimacy? You cannot be nice to people who see niceness as a weakness to be taken advantage of. From a couple of sources I have enough information about this guy's recent behaviour to just scratch him off the list of people I need to be even nominally nice to.
Well, sun's starting to come up, new day. Another bird just smacked into one of the windows up here at the bighouse, makes my heart race.
Dude banging like a cop on my door, that was a bad start.
Brother Dreams Of Clifford
My brother has been talking to my dead mother and father in his dreams. I myself don't dream, or talk to anybody. My father, a full blooded dead Lebanese (which I only mention so I can get this off my chest--fuck Israel), apparently knows he is dead, whereas my mother hasn't quite hipped up to the fact of her recent death. My mom asked after me in my brother's dream. My brother thinks she should have the decency to only ask after him in his dreams. He said he may have to tell her what's what in the next dream. I said, well, break it to her easy.
The English Of Freddy
You can't hardly do any good slacking out here what with all that worker noise.Those guys are working 13 hours a day and the only break I get from them is when I go down and paint the outside of the cottage they are living in, which used to be the cottage I lived in. I will live down there again someday but for now it is Las Casas de Los Latino's.
The Latino's, there's five of them out here, they don't seem that friendly to Freddy from Honduras. He is always working by himself while the other four guys laugh and joke and work together. Yesterday they were calling out to him in Spanish and laughing. I was skimming leaves off the pool surface. Freddy said under his breath to his co-workers, fuck you. English very good, Freddy, I said.
Poem For Ira
Well, they got him last night at Massie's Corner, after a week of relentless man hunting, so there's one less pocket-knife stabbing murderous son-of-a-bitch roaming around Rappahannock County.
They were talking about it at the diner this morning but I'd already received the spoiler by email.
This morning every table at the diner had a big fat bouquet of hydrangea blossoms. I had fresh raspberry pancakes and bacon and eggs and iced tea and cranberry juice.
The geese have returned to the property. If they mess with those new hibiscus plants down at the pond, I'll be having pate for breakfast.
After receiving the news about the captured murderer I went around unlocking doors on the property, but they were already unlocked.
Caca Rica
A helicopter with search light looking for a toothless murderer was flying around last night illuminating the tops of trees in this bucolic Rappahannock arena while I smoked a cigarette and danced oddly like a marionette puppet on the front porch of this premier 40 acre property within walking distance of the Inn at Little Washington, which notably, other than the notability of the starter meals at $230 a pop, speculatively exudes septic overflow uphill from the pond here, and is why I don't eat the fish I catch, but throw them back, because that shit is just too rich for me.
Free To Go
Like the demented circus clown booted up with chunky peanut butter I smile at police checkpoints. I have all my teeth, see.
I think there is now one law enforcement person for every 15 of us out here. A pocket knife stabbing murderous son-of-a-bitch is on the loose and has been for 6 days. Helicopters fly over, brown trooper cars speed by in reckless pursuit of a man on the run in an area that offers above average hiding potential.
Rumors abound, he's been spotted, there was a shootout, they got him boxed in down there at Gid Brown Hollow.
With a half dozen tequila shots and who knows what else coursing through my bloodstream last night I slow down at the checkpoint on Harris Hollow Road and squint through the flashlights shining in my face. Some of the murderer's teeth may be missing but I have all of mine. "We need to look in your vehicle sir." I understand. After glancing at the interior of the Jeep and finding me guilty of nothing more than being less than fastidious, I am given pardon. "You are free to go, sir."
Holy cow, the power of those words. Free to Go. Free to go where? and what should I do when I get there?
The Legend
Yesterday at daybreak in the back pasture with its hay recently mowed I saw five foxes hopping playfully and running in circles, nipping at each others' tails.
Over the Independence day weekend a bat and a snake got into the bighouse. I received a call down at the cottage about the snake and when I asked where it was the visiting guest caller said--get your ass up here!!! And I rarely use exclamation points. The caller wanted me to remove the snake alive but I just killed it and threw it out. Some people are snake lovers and for those I report that there are probably three, count them three, giant man eating rat snakes in the basement, and if you love them that much I invite you for a visit and I will set you up with a pallet on the concrete floor near where I know their den to be. You may engage in any and all manner of snake loving ritual but don't teach those snakes any of your dumb tricks or engage them in political discussion, that's where I draw the line. I don't mess with the basement snakes and they don't mess with nobody. And apparently they know better than to come up into the living quarters.
I don't know what happened to the bat.
I was talking to a local named Steve yesterday and he will go see about getting on the kidney transplant list today so he can live another ten years and I said you could probably live another ten years on dialysis, without the transplant, and he said probably not.
While we were talking that giant man eating snapping turtle came plunking up the hill again, from the pond, and across the front pasture. Steve said, that's a big one for this area.
Mr. and Mrs. BC and their youngest, little BC, came for the night and day of the 3rd/4th. Little BC was in a funk when he got here, after realizing he had been tricked into coming to a gathering of stupid adults. He pouted in quite admirable fashion, waiting in the car, for his ride home, whenever the hell that would be, however long it might take. Mrs. BC went out once and then looking out the window I saw her giving him a stern but loving good talking to, down by the old well, which I can only guess he had run off to in an attempted escape from a mother he realized was not coming out to start the car and take him the hell home. I was pretty much done with my burger and chicken and so decided to go out and just trick the 5 year-old Little BC out of his funk, which is an easy thing to do for a 47 year-old man who has the emotional development of a five year-old.
I started up the jeep-like vehicle we have out here and drove over nearby the well and just waved him over, bored, you know, daylight's burning, come on, let's roll. He wasn't sure what was happening at first but then he made a mad dash and got all strapped in (Mrs. BC said be careful and I said what's the fun in that?) and we took off across the yard and then the pastures of freshly cut hay. We drove down by the pond and I said hey let's go fishing and he seemed keen on that so we went up to the shed and got two fishing poles and I gave him the one with the best lure and said, be careful, and stepped away from him to catch my own fish. He caught one right away and then three more and as we were just about done I snagged a catfish come up from the depths to eat my ridiculous top-water popper and he gave first hellacious top water thrashing and then under water fighting which did not at first bode well for the 4-pound test line. But I got him up to the shore somehow and showed him to Little BC who was frankly enthralled with my fisherman's prowess and while I belabored over whether or not I really wanted to touch this slimy looking pond catfish, he thrashed once, broke the line with yellow popper still in his mouth, and swam away. Little BC remarked--you caught The Legend. I said, well, you know, actually he got away. But Little BC insisted--no, you caught The Legend. It was nothing I really wanted to argue about.
