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Positively Puzzling 7.22.98
Poochie's four year old daughter, Shentrell, and Shentrell's cousin, Erica, and her nine-year old uncle, Marqin, are
pestering me for a puzzle when I come home yesterday.
"I'll have to ask M," and when I do I agree with her that someone will have to be
with them or our dwindling supply of donated puzzles will be one less because
by act of God or just common carelessness the puzzle will be lost, stolen, or
destroyed, if two four-year olds and a nine-year old are not somewhat
supervised.
And neither M nor I are interested in heat of the day porch sitting.
And that is exactly what I eloquently explained to Erica, Shentrell, and
Marqin.
"So go get us one Mr. Jim," Erica said.
"I know you wouldn't lose it on purpose," I go on, gently and expertly.
"Which one you gonna bring out," Erica demanded to know.
"Yeah, bring the puzzle, Jim," Shentrell said.
"We won't lose it really, Mr. Jim," Marqin said.
And this goes on for awhile until they have me where they want me--broken,
unsure, and full of self-doubt, the three sisters of invention, so I relent,
crafting as I go.
"OK, I'll get one, but not one of the one's you really like, and if you all
three can play together nicely and not destroy the puzzle, then maybe on
another day I will let you play with a good one."
"Yea," they exclaimed.
And then, just for the hell of it, I give Marqin some explicit instructions,
and shut the door.
About an hour later the doorbell rings, and rings, and rings, some knocking,
and more ringing. "I'll get it," I said to myself.
I open the door and the three of them are stark raving mad with bubbling
enthusiasm.
"Here it is Mr. Jim, we didn't lose it, see," Marqin said to me with big teeth
smiling.
"Yeah, we thought we lose two pieces but we sittin' on 'em," Erica stammered.
"We sitting on 'em," Shentrell giggled.
"Erica was sittin' on one, and Shentrell sittin' on the other," Marqin
explained.
What a bunch of nerds, I thought.
"You are the greatest children in this whole world, and I am happy to know
you," I said.
Erica and Shentrell offer me kisses which I gladly accept, and thanking Marqin
I began shutting the door while pushing Shentrell's tiny hand from the jamb.
And tonite's play on Dumaine was as pure as this life will offer, but I don't
have the words for it.
A Guarded Good Morning 7.19.98
Heading for the river at 7 a.m. I see as I cross Bourbon and then Royal, on St.Peter,
an ambulance and some victims at the corner of Chartres--fat white brawling
tourists, and their blood, begin dotting the sidewalk. Following the drops I come to the
motherlode spot, ouch, and glance over to see a victim shimmied onto a
stretcher. And a pile of poop steams at the base of a no parking sign, the
obligatory vomit and the urine and beer make the sidewalk slick. And plastic
cups and paper fill the gutters
Heading home over flagstone with the Pontalba on my left and the wrought iron
of Jackson Square to my right. A black woman about my age in colorful ethnic
garb is sitting in the area reserved for artists and fortune tellers. The area
surrounding her on the bench is filled with treasure laden shopping bags.
Fifty feet away and I have entered her space and acknowledged her presence in
an offhanded way. At twenty feet I make shaded eye contact. Her eyes are
more tired and experienced than mine. Her expression is guarded, hopeful, and
resigned. And I know what she means by that and it makes me smile at her, and
say, "good morning." She returns my smile and years drip off her face, for
but a second, and then its gone, as if her cheek muscles, unpracticed and out of
shape, cannot bear the weight of momentary happiness.
I Saw Movies
I've seen some movies this summer. Here's what I think.
Down here in New Orleans, where men are men, except in the Quarter, where sometimes men are women, and you start questioning your sexuality, or the just the general idea of sexuality, because you really couldn't tell the difference, obviously you couldn't, the way you were staring at that woman (who turned out to be a man), surely a manly man could tell the difference, and eventually you console yourself with some laissez faire rigamarole like its only a chromosome or two separating the sexes anyway so don't be so hard on yourself, live and let live, go to a chick movie if you want. And back and forth and back and forth I went just to get up the nerve to go see Possession with Gwyneth Paltrow. I have two words for the movie: ick.
After all that though (my indecisiveness concerning Possession went on for days), I was all steeled up, so it was nothing at all for me to go see The Good Girl with Jennifer Anniston. Two observations: pretty damn accurate portrayal of housepainters, and, Jennifer Anniston is ok when she's not on TV.
Staying with the theme of chick movies I also this summer saw XXX with Vin Diesel. Vin, as you may know, is a homosexual. I read that on the cover of a tabloid at the grocery store. I went to work with that news and said, "Jerry, did you know that Vin Diesel is a homosexual?" Jerry said, "No, Come on!!??" "Jerry," I said, "live and let live man, what do you care who the man buggers?" Jerry said, "I really don't care, I liked that last movie." So there you have that.
I didn't see Like Mike but I recommended it to my friend from France and she, stranded for seven days in Dallas, took her 12-year old son who is a basketball and hip hop fan. They thought it sucked. Too Disney-like. Time constraints, at least, prevented them from accepting my offer to round up some of the Dumaine kids for a street game during their short visit here last month. And I'm sure Cadillac Shelton would have consented to blaring the rap from his most adequate sound system. His taste in modern urban music--like I'm any kind of judge--is actually pretty decent. Of the crowd that would have likely been sitting on stoops that night, one is dead from a (possibly suicidal) motorcycle crash at the corner of Galvez and Orleans, one has seven recent bullet holes in his body, and one is in jail for car theft, a count of murder, and two counts of attempted murder. Nothing Disneyesque about the Sixth Ward of New Orleans.
Road to Perdition was slick, maybe a tad too slick, and stylized, but I liked it, at least partly, if not altogether, for the same reason I liked A-I--that reason being--Jude Law.
Speaking of Tom Hanks, I saw the Greek Wedding flick, because Jerry at work said he laughed his ass off. Jerry is dating. People who date tend to laugh their asses off for reasons that are not entirely clear to the rest of us. But single people, like myself, huddled alone, by themselves, wallowing in singularity, attempting to assure themselves that singularity is greaaat, require actual funny material to make them laugh. I did not laugh my ass off but did not either feel like I should be refunded my money. I'm happy for the lotto-esque success of the Greek standup comic/female lead.
I saw some other stuff, can't remember it though, but can say with the utmost certainty that it was all either ehh ok, or, hey man who you think you dicking with laying off crap like that? Oh yeah, Signs, with Mel Gibson, two words--yawn.
And Slim really liked Undercover Brother, gives it his one very enthusiastic double jointed thumb up.
The Mean Month
I'm hearing that distant helicopter again. Last night the search light blasted briefly through my undraped windows; it was better than the effect of a disco ball, even if I don't dance. I judged the distance by the muted sound of the chopper. Chopper is slang for helicopter. It is also what the local youth of the street call the fully automatic weaponry--some hybridization or bastardization of the Israeli Uzi or the Russian AK-47--that is so prevalent on their streets. But let's not talk about modern aviation and weaponry.
On Monday, with primitve motive and that relatively primitve butcher's knife, two youngsters, brothers they were, murdered a college student on Fourth and Magazine in the Irish Channel, adjacent to the Garden District. The student had adopted the admirable but bad habit of allowing those in need to come to his door for small monetary handouts. The girlfriend upstairs heard the boyfriend say he didn't have any money to give, she heard a struggle, went down, saw the two brothers carrying the student by his hands and feet, she then ran back upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom and dialed 911. When the police came they found the front door open, the boyfriend dead with two stab wounds in his chest, and apparently a couple of minor items stolen from the house. The girlfriend was noted to be (understandably) hysterical. Ten thousand dollars quickly added to the standard Crimestopper's reward (you can remain anonymous, identified by a file number, and don't have to testify in court) had the brothers dimed out and in jail within 24 hours. A third brother was arrested the next day for accessory after the fact--letting the brothers hide in his crib.
On Wednesday a major drug sting in the Iberville Projects (bordering the French Quarter to the north) culminated with 14 arrests. Police also collected 100 pounds of weed, 1.5 kilos of heroin, a few hundred rocks, 250,000 dollars in cash, and a tractor/trailer. A product of the First (police) District himself, new police chief Eddie Compass III remarks that the drug activity in and around the Iberville projects was directly related to the high murder rate for that area--25 per cent of the First District's 44 murders for the year have occurred in or around the Iberville. He boldly, perhaps too brazenly, stated that we will see a drop in the murder rate in that area. There have been two, possibly three murders near the Iberville in the three days since he said that, but we can still hope for better days.
For his part Chief Compass is determined to do more than just hope. He has enlisted the help of the state police and for a few days now there have been joint operations in the city's high crime areas. I assume the helicopter with the spotlight is part of that.
I am grateful for the efforts of the previous chief, Richard Pennington, who after losing his bid to be mayor, accepted the top job with Atlanta's police department. He did in his years here unquestionably bring improvement to a department nearly crippled with corruption. And he promised to cut the murder rate in half, and he achieved that. What I have lately come to realize though is that that promise was a bit of political snow (blow) job to ease the minds and hearts of the New Orleans citizenry, and which was at least somewhat calculated, I think, to pad the resume of a basically very decent guy with high ambitions. He was playing with a fairly obvious spike in the murder rate graph. The 420 murders that year were statistically very unlikely to recur, with even the slightest intervention from an improved police force. All I'm saying is--at the time it seemed like a remarkable thing to promise and when the promise came to be, we all got blinded by the apparent greatness of the accomplishment. We loved our chief. I don't know jack about statistics but I think what we have been left with here is something that goes by the title--the mean numbers. How appropriately descriptive that is. And I think our beloved chief knew that is what he was promising us.
Bottom line though, Richard Pennington was good for this city at a time when only an outsider could have affected the necessary changes. Now though, with our mean numbers to deal with every year, we are lucky to have a hometown boy in the trenches. I think Eddie Compass will be part of brighter future for this city. He's seen enough. We've all seen enough.
On Thursday, Eric McCormick, a young man I have known for several years, and have referred to by various names, was, while in jail for car theft, booked on one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder for an incident in New Orleans East back in December. His younger brother, Glynn, is one of the core Dumaine kids I used to spend time with each Sunday, and still see ocassionally.
On Sunday in the BW Cooper projects a crowd of nearly 200 people gathered to celebrate the murder of that project's most unfavored son, Alexis "Slam" Williams. While his family wept, word of the killing moved quickly throughout the complex and people came in numbers, kids eating candied apples and snacks, and adults drinking beer, as they gathered around and rejoiced at the sight of Williams' dead body under an oak tree. Suspected of several but charged with only one murder himself, Alexis Williams was a person no one would testify against.
On Monday, the Times Picayune's editorial department ran a scathing indictment against those people who celebrated the William's death.
On Thursday Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald ran a column also lamenting the behavior of the residents of the BW Cooper (aka. Calliope) projects. He yearned for a day when such residents might gain the "intestinal fortitude" to deal with the Slam Williamses of the world by turning to the police before circumstances lead them to behave in such unkindly fashions as murder and celebration thereof.
Several days passed with no murderous crime reported. It is these days which keep the NO murder rate down as an end of year number. Which keeps this city in the top ten per capita murderville every year, but not number one.
Then tropical storm Isidore came through and dropped 25 inches of rain. The Wednesday before landfall the heaviest rains hit and I watched from my windows and front porch as Iberville Street, and half of my block of Rochebalve Street, flooded mildly. Three or four inches of standing water in my back and side yard were all there was at Rocheblave. I was at Dumaine today (Friday, long enough to realize the A: drive wouldn't accept my movie reviews, so nothing for the dmtree, but did not ask any of the ten or twelve teenagers residing therein how high the waters got. I did remind Glynn that his St. Louis Rams have lost eight in a row, but Glynn remained hopeful and loyal, which is a thing I greatly admire about him. He did not think my suggestion that perhaps Kurt Warner's contract with the devil having expired was a theory worth considering. It did not hold water, in his opinion.), and I could see the ruts in the grass of the neutral ground on Broad Street which prove the water got high enough to scare people to park their cars up there, a six inch advantage which often is all the difference between dry car and flooded, stinky carpeted car.
In the Wednesday-Thursday twenty-four hour period during which Isidore was all the worry, there did occur six murders. I have done the per capita comparison to a large city like New York before; in this case it would calculate out at 120-140 murders in a single day. Which I think would be world news. (Would link in nicely with the assassination style murder madness in DC/Maryland occurring a few days after this. I can't help hearing Barbara Walters reporting "tonight on 20-20, Madness in America, what is weely going on?")
One of the NO dead was a 7-year old kid named Ishmael, who while trying to protect his mother from being beaten by her 49-year old boyfriend was chased from the house by boyfriend and then repeatedly stabbed in the chest until dead, in broad daylight while stunned church-goers watched.
And the only reason the murder count wasn't 7 in a 24-hour period is because the gun jammed when the alleged gunman, 19-year old Bryan Nelson, fired at Amy Briede as she lay on the floor of her home in Fabourg St. John (near the Bayou St. John and the Fairgrounds), next to her husband Christopher, who had just been executed with a gunshot to the chest. Amy had been carjacked to the nearest ATM on Broad Street and was then brought back to the house where the gunman's accomplice(s) held hostage her husband. The click of the gun was her salvation, and she lives.
The hurricane Lili produced a frightening lot of wind. Between the two storms the most notable violence was the surviving of a man on N. Villere, in Treme, who was shot twenty-five times.
Invariably, those artists and celebrities of the cinema that come here from elsewhere, and are famous enough to be quoted, say the same thing when speaking about the unspeakable allure of New Orleans. They, each and every one, use the word "Ghosts" to describe what they most notice about this place. And they got that right. In many cases the blood is barely yet dried when they walk around that corner where reside the spirits they talking about.
Hexes And Religious Allegories 4.12.98
"Who are all these new children on Dumaine," I asked Mandy.
"I know some of them," she said, "they're from two blocks up Dumaine that way."
She's pointing up Dumaine away from Broad, Dorgenois is the first block and Rocheblave is the second. Rocheblave--that's Miss Liddy's corner, I'm thinking. I used to stop by her store on the way home from work when I was renovating the house over two years ago. Her "store" is just one room of a
big old house and her stock is limited to chips and candy on a couple of shelves, pickled pig parts in a couple of jars, and a refrigerator with a case and a half of beer, usually Bud and Coors. At that time, one of her teenage daughters had recently committed suicide, strung out on bad life and bad
drugs. She left a daughter behind whom Miss Liddy takes care of along with countless other children who seem to belong to her.
"You have children?" she ask me once.
"I most certainly do not, Miss Liddy."
"If a vine is growing but producing no fruit, what good is it? The Lord say cut that vine down."
She was charging 85 cents for a can of beer back then, sometimes having change and sometimes not. I had gotten into the habit of just leaving her a dollar for each can purchased. On this day I gave her two dollars and walked out.
There was a hex on me now, I knew that.
It was about three months later when I found out that for the previous two months Mandy had been sneaking those young boys from the neighborhood into the house while I was at work. It was summertime and those boys would be lounging
on the front porch when I came home. I did not know there names yet and they pretended they did not know mine. And then there came full disclosure and the floodgates broke and for awhile kids and adults streamed through this house at
will. Drug dealers had to stay outside though, on the porch. I will not lie. I never really liked the idea and sometimes still don't, but our efforts to shoo these children away has been in vain.
"Come the school year ya'll won't be hangin' around here drawing pictures and playing games. You will do school work or you won't come in at all." Speaking the words of a full grown adult was the surest way to repel children, I thought. But come the school year I was proven wrong, again.
And then I might have made the mistake of taking the boys to the park to play football one weekend and they began to expect it every weekend. And when they started whining I would lose my temper and yell at them: "You want something
you gotta earn it, (another adult impersonation) by cleaning this street or something." I was really certain that particular mandate would free up my weekends. Wrong again. Wrong every Sunday for over a year now.
I'm hoping Miss Liddy understands that while we're not into production here at 2646, we are looking after the harvest and trying to make a little wine from the fallen fruit. Unhex me now.
Miss Noemi 4.12.98
I haven't mentioned this but the house on the side of us that is not a burnt shell of a pre-Civil War two story structure, is a one story four-plex in which resides one 87 year old white woman. Mrs. Noemi Rodriguez has lived next door to this house for over 40 years. Her people and an occasional nurse look in on her from time to time but essentially she is
alone. Sometimes I selfishly worry what things will be like next door when Miss Noemi dies and the four-plex next door, instead of housing one frail and very quiet old woman, might become the habitat of 12-20 new and exciting Dumaine players.
I have not seen Miss Noemi in her back yard picking bay leaves from her tree in over a year. On Mondays and Thursdays she will begin the momentous trek from her raised porch to the sidewalk to put out her one very small bag of
trash. More often than not she will be intercepted by Shelton who will accept the quarter she keeps in the pocket of her worn house dress and puts the trash by the street so that Miss Noemi does not have to leave the confines of her
fenced property.
I was frightened of her at first, assuming that anyone whose body formed so many right angles to itself, must be in severe pain, and therefore must be mean, and cranky, and cantankerous. I was in my postage stamp back yard one
day pulling weeds and Miss Noemi came out to pick leaves for a soup. I had never really seen her face because her torso bends at the waist and head at neck so that her face is always at the ground or into her own bosom.
So when she straightened up that day, first from the waist, and then the neck, to greet me with the most gleefully youthful smile, I was once again confronted with that annoying sensation of feeling that everything I know and
everything I think, is wrong.
I was relieved when last week the ambulance left out of here without Miss Noemi.
Synchronicity And The Jaded Warrior Boy 4.6.98
Yesterday, on our way out of the hood heading for the swamp and driving down Ursulines through the sixth ward, Shelton spots his mom, Myrna, and yells for me to stop because Myrna waved to him and that means she might give him some
money. I pull over after about a block and Shelton scrambles out of the back seat (Fermin is riding shotgun on the way out, Shelton will ride on the way back) and starts running back up Ursulines. In the rearview mirror I watch him run as Myrna runs from the opposite direction to meet him. On the radio
is playing this rather soulful, full of lament, love song about "how I used to love you," and I can almost imagine the field of daisies which in fact they are not running through. Glynn in the backseat says,
"Look at Shelton and his ma running like that with that music on the radio, its like..."
"Yeah, I was just thinking that myself, like this commercial I remember..."
"I know," Glynn says, "its just like that." And Jacque, next to Glynn, says, "what are ya'll taking about?"
As we approach the swamp in Laffite (as in Jean, the pirate) Shelton is really put out with this surprise location and in his best 'Mississippi gee golly shucks' voice starts up with,
"Wowww, there'll be trees and water and wierd plants, wowww, and maybe we'll see an alligator or sumthin.'"
Shelton is almost always the dissenting voice and has voiced displeasure at virtually every new place to which I take them. When we get out of the car and find our way to the beginning of the trail Shelton really can't get it.
"What are we doing here?"
"We're going to look around."
"Why?"
"Look Shelton," I say, "on Dumaine I gave you the choice of coming or going and you came, when I parked the car I gave you the choice of coming or going and you came. Now that you're here with us it would be nice if you could try not to ruin things for the rest of us."
But June Cleaver doesn't always make sense to Shelton so he says, "But really, I'm just asking, what are we doing here?"
So I hit him with Hendrix and say, "Existing Shelton, nothing but existing."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean much of the the time we are simply existing, without a clue or a plan or a future. Today is one of those days Shelton. But one of the small things we have control over is where we exist. Today, it will be in a swamp. Unless of course you would rather exist in the car.
Later he gets into running a head on the path and hiding behind cypress trees so he can scare us when we pass.
Mardi Gras Day Five 2.18.98
Day Four was an off day so after all that weather on Sunday and then no Monday parades, Tuesday was much anticipated by all us masses.
I ain't taking ya'll to all the parades this year I had warned the boys two months previous as we drove through McDonald's.
So tonight I took Mandy, Marqin (you can insert a U there after the Q if you want), Fermin, Glynn, Kizzy, Greta (Mooses sister from California), and LuLu, the honor student, and brought back Shelton, Moose, Mandy, Glynn, Fermin, and Marqin.
Kizzy is pregnant again, number three in her nineteenth year.
"Feels like gunfire in the air," I said to Mandy.
"You think so huh?" Mandy said
"Yep, I'm using Marqin (8) as my barometer. He seems a little too keyed up. Not a good sign."
"Hmm." Mandy said.
So when a minor panic stampede started and the young girl next to me asked where her baby was and no one seemed to know and people began running up St. Mary's away from St. Charles and the four policemen who had heretofore been loitering in our area stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of St. Charles waiting for the worst, I had to boast that damn yes, I'm good. But similar to the last time we witnessed
a panic stampede, which was at a second line parade, it all turned out to be an emotional mistake, or someone showed someone else the gun they were carrying and one witness panicked and then...
Shelton and Moose showed up towards the end of the parade with a big garbage sack full of stuff.
Shelton started counting his cups.
"Fifty six," he said.
"If you expect me to hold this stuff, it will cost you twenty percent," I said.
"What's that," he said
"Well, ten percent would be 5.6 cups so twenty percent will double that--11.2 cups."
"I can do that," Shelton said.
Back on Dumaine everyone piled out of the car, Moose thanked both Mandy and I, wow, and Marqin remained curled up into a ball in the back seat.
"Time to go home Marqin," I said as I picked him up still in a ball and plopped him on the street.
Mardi Gras Day Seven 2.21.98
Day six got eaten or pissed on. Computer magic. I'm a little bit bleary-eyed. I think day six was about three teenage girls (Heather, Julia, and KK) being told to get on the "fucking" ground by over zealous New Orleans policemen (with guns drawn) who considered the girls' flight as possible culpability in a crime that had occurred in the Iberville Projects as they were walking home from the parade. Translation: they
saw a boy with a gun being chased by cops so they ran. Cops let them go. Could have slapped them around a little for being curfew violators, but didn't.
We got Evelyn situated in a metal folding chair on the St. Charles neutral ground Thursday night for the Babylon parade. With the red plaid blanket wrapped around her legs and the blue bandanna covering her head, and the plastic straw of the 32 ounce beer filled go bottle clenched between her teeth, she did look a bit like aunt Jemima's evil step-sister, which may be why people were covertly staring at her this night. Or it could be because of her enthusiastic directions to the passing drill team squads.
"Come on now girls, smile, that's right, let me see that smile, you know you wanna smile, there you go, you got a pretty smile, you." And when the bands started playing and the young scantily dressed girls began to shimmy towards sensuality:
"There you go now baby, shake what you got, ooh yeah, looking good like that, ya'll keep a straight line now girls, there you go, that's very good."
Evelyn has been suffering from some as yet undiagnosed medical problems so the wobbly legged stagger was not completely beer induced as I took her by the arm up Phillip street into the Garden District so she could pee in a dark corner of someone's grass driveway.
Mandy was catching beads and cups and keeping an eye on the fat couple (from Ohio?) who were constantly popping peanuts into their mouths but never seemed to restock their hands from any mother lode peanut source.
After the parade passed we decided to race ahead and catch it again.
At the corner of Camp and Canal I was realizing a great navigational mistake as Evelyn ranted on about something.
"Evelyn, I have to concentrate here so I'm going to ask you to shut up," I said.
And the world was suddenly silent.
Across Canal I'm into the French Quarter and I take a left on St. Louis. When the three cars in front of me stopped at Bourbon street begin to inch forward, easing their way through the throngs of revelers, I stay bumper to bumper, and sigh relief as I begin moving again at normal speed up St. Louis. After circling the blocks several times I find a spot on
Rampart that only a Festiva would fit into (using both front and rear bumpers several times, at that) and we walk over to Basin, near Iberville. Before that, I was standing behind the car working my zipper as Evelyn peed on the curb and Mandy into a cup in the back seat, and a cop cruising the other side of Rampart, stopped, and shining his spotlight on me, yelled out, "put it back in your pants." I nodded. I didn't need to pee anyway, I was just checking the equipment.
A cop on Basin very politely tells Evelyn that she needs to move her chair a little ways back from the street. This is near the end of the parade route, in a neighborhood that photographs from the turn of the century show as being completely lined with elaborate two and three story whore houses. They all gone now, though.
It would seem that other than Mandy and I and the cop and the float riders, few white people see this part of the parade route as a viable area to catch beads and live to tell about it. But it's all good. The krewe members were unloading their beads and trinkets with reckless abandon as they prepared to disembark from their floats and have their ball at the Performing Arts Center in Armstrong Park.
We walked back to the car with light heads and heavily laden bags of treasure.
Mardi Gras Day Eleven 2.26.98
The Orpheus parade on Monday evening featured Tommy Tune, Forest Whitaker, and, as it does every year, Harry Connick Jr., this year looking particularly bored. One of the women (maybe his wife, recognizing my NY Mets cap) threw me a nice pair of beads though. None of the celebrities
actually perform, they just stand up on the lead floats and wave. One year, however, Junior's dad, the New Orleans District Attorney, Harry Connick, sang some pretty swell Sinatra-type crap.
Jacque Lewis (aka, alligator boy) and Shelton Jackson came with Mandy and I. Instead of parking on the Garden District side of St. Charles, I found myself in the neighborhood on the other side of St. Charles, at Third and Dryades, which is one of the many N.O. killing zones. I don't know if its extraordinarily dangerous now but '94 and '95 news reports
made this corner one to remember. Remember to stay away from, that is.
"You can park there if you want," the man said after Mandy rolled down her window in response to his tapping, "but I can't guarantee your car will be all right. Now for five bucks you can park in this yard over here and I'll be right here watching it till the parade's over." Mandy became impatient with the huckstering and started walking up Third to St. Charles. I asked Shelton his opinion and when he shrugged I asked
him if he would cough up some money. He gave me his last two dollars and we pulled into the man's yard, behind the only other car, a Ford Bronco. "Don't let me get blocked in here, Ok?" He assured me no such thingwould happen, and it didn't.
Jacque and Shelton disappeared as soon as we got to the front lines but shortly Jacque reappeared and, despite Shelton's wishes to the contrary, stayed with us throughout the whole parade. Shelton would go away for awhile and then show up with two or three unopened (and intercepted) bags
of beads. But he didn't stray as far as he usually would, and
occasionally we would look up to see him lifting some other family's small child up on his shoulder for the passing floats.
Orpheus is one of the moneyed parades and some of the floats were truly a marvelous sight to behold as we gazed up from our playing field on the St. Charles neutral ground.
At no time did we see Jacque boot up pure cane sugar but his energy becomes so frantic at times that one does wonder. Jacque is impressively creative and imaginative and can hit you with a wry comeback that's enough to make you jealous, wishing you could be so clever. And then
he's an eleven-year-old boy again and we're having a knife fight with miniature plastic swords while a passing group of gang bangers exhales pot smoke into the air we breathe. And a rubber band becomes a device of torture and I taunt, "hey Jacque, look at this. You know what I use to
do with these when I was a kid?" And he's off and running, darting behind a light pole which doesn't hide him but does offer good deflection possibilities from dangerous projectiles, rubber, and otherwise. Clever alligator home boy.
The Seven Per Cent Solution
I'll admit I felt kind of cowardly, on the battlefield, in my living room, doing nothing. The day after I heard six or eight small caliber gunshots pierce the silence of my quiet Rocheblave neighborhood the new head cop and the new mayor admonished all of us to get involved in reporting criminal activity. The murder rate is spiking again, it's August, the month of greatest desperation.
Fuck it, I thought, supine on the couch catching up on unread New Yorkers which have laid on the floor unattended while I have read light fiction over the last month or two. I was reading about the ex-Dallas mayor, Democrat Ron Kirk, running for the Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican, Phil Graham. Anyhow, the gunshots had the feel of the air murderer, angst released skyward. Also, I don't have a phone, let someone else report it. The boys and girls at the NOPD internal affairs office are as close as I am to it. Let them report it. Is there a dead body on the corner, I wonder?
Ron Kirk has the plain speaking ability to sum things up--his success, he says, is reliant on whether or not the white voters of Texas will vote for a black man. And then he has to be the careful, calculating politician, glad-handing West Coast liberals and the most recent Democratic President without actually appearing to be of that ilk. That is a difficult position. His election to the Senate by the people of a state that worship that lame brain in the White House is essential to the Balance.
Today I watched four youths on bicycles steal a tiny kid's bicycle from my neighbor's yard, while Watchdog barked her head off. Poor Watchdog. She must think, what's the use? I do my job, nobody does nothing. Whiteboy just watches. I tried like hell last month to save him his extension ladder but he doesn't respond to my warnings, nobody does. I'm just a barking dog in the city that care forgot.
To round out a month in which two preachers got shot dead, a woman is brought home from church to a neighborhood she had lamented to her friend, was going to hell. She was embarrassed by the gangs of youth who congregated near her corner and expressed this to her church friend. Seconds after they passed a group of boys in the street, a shot rang out, the rear window of the van exploded, and the woman slumped over dead from the bullet in the back of her head. A sixteen year old boy had mistaken the van for that of an enemy.
Another sixteen year old boy, last known address the 1400 block of Rocheblave, is wanted in last month's shooting of the eleven year old girl in Eastern New Orleans.
Murder is up seven per cent for the month. Later, say a month from now, when there are only 22 murders instead of 30, they will bounce off that figure to show that crime is down, rest easy.
Last week a man in Eastern New Orleans witnessed from the balcony of his apartment another man stealing his car down below. From up on the balcony he shot and killed the man. Public sentiment, on talk radio, and around the water coolers, was adamantly in favor of this death penalty for the car thief. People are so fed up and scared they are now condoning the killing of unarmed men. With my co-workers I argued against this particular death penalty, but I have a very good feel for the context from which sprouts this violent reaction to the overall crime in our city, and more sympathy for the shooter than I have for the victim. The shooter, a grown man with children, has very likely been exposed to unspeakable crime in his lifetime here. If you live in this small city, and your head is not buried deep in the sand, it is hard to express how palpable the threat of violence can be, even as we dance in the streets. The shooter's justification in the paper that he was worried about the safety of his family, as words, factored against our common sense, and the awareness of proximity of shooter to unarmed car thief, do not ring true. But in the balance, in this city, how can we doubt a man who says he is worried about the safety of his family.
I've been thinking about the words of that stoic, Epictetus, and how his thoughts might relate to any of this or perhaps even provide a bit of consolation. He seems to differ from the "bell tolls for thee, no man is an island" school, by suggesting that we not sweat that which we have no control over. Why let that which has nothing to do with you, concern you? he seems to say. I guess it's the idea that if you can't change a thing, why even think about it? And that's, I think, why I can't get over this inner city murder and mayhem as a theme. Because we don't really, I mean really, think it is something we could not change if we chose to change it, do we? Slim?
Mardi Gras Day Three 2.17.98
Day three was a rain out for us but I took six boys and dropped them off
in the rain and 40mph wind to parade their hearts out.
Shelton said he almost got blown over three times. Moose and Fermin and
some of the cousins from Slidell were with Shelton when he intercepted a
cup from a white man who proceeded to chase them over four blocks
yelling out--"Hey you black niggers, give me that cup and some of those
beads."
"Don't give him no beads Shelton, that man call us 'black niggers',"
Moose said.
Then Moose, while holding a private part of his anatomy, told the man he
could suck on it.
The man suggested that Moose suck on his and called him that name again.
Moose suggested that the man's mother might be a black nigger.
Shelton interrupts the telling and said, "Oh yeah, I owe ya'll a cup."
"At least," I said.
"Can I have a dollar? Julia selling candied apples for a dollar,"
Shelton said.
"No, I think that one you're holding is my last one and I want to save it
for an emergency."
"What kind of emergency a dollar good for?" Shelton asked.
"Beer," I answered.
"OK," Shelton said.
Shelton said he got in a fight at school today.
"Why?" I asked.
"I don't know, the boy just come up on me wanting to fight and I had to beat him
up."
"Whatayah gonna do?" I said.
"I know," Shelton said wearily.
Shorty
The one I haven't named I'm going to start calling Shorty. Shorty is the first one of the Rocheblave cats I have touched. I'm going to guess its a girl cat, kitten, about as big as a fist or two, and black, and bony, and not very shiny. She eats chicken bones; swallows pieces bigger than her head. And the other day her mother, Spinks, caught a mouse over in the Pentecostal brush pile and brought it over to her. I was preparing myself for some cat and mouse theatre but Shorty was a one act kitty. She ripped the struggling rodent from mom's mouth and with no ceremony or foreplay whatsoever bit into and swallowed the thing in two bites.
The other day I was putting out some leftover chicken where I put it and Shorty came running across the lot straight for me so I just stayed there, squatting, and said "come on over here, you." She came over without too much hesitation and walked right up to my outstretched hand and licked my index finger. With even less hesitation she turned tail and bolted away at great speed, leaping with legs splayed, over bricks and mounds of dirt, and bending tall stalks of grass with her tiny moving mass. As abruptly as she had started she stopped, turned around to face me, and then deliberately, accusingly, licked her lips with disgust as if to say what manner of beast are you?
BigHead is tired. Kitten is scared. K2 is imitative. Notyetded has developed a patch of brown along the back of his black and white hide. Spinks is waiting for, dreading, the next suitor. The yellow bastard is missing. The three kittens across the street, stay there. Another small black and white cat and her tiny black and white kitten sometimes lounge on the small patch of concrete on the back shady side of the house. My slightest movement scares this little kitten under the fence and into the yard of Sheba, the aging pitbull.
This last month, a week or so before the cop was murdered, a visiting preacher man from Memphis was murdered, but not robbed, in his Mercedes. And then officer Russell. And then the next week a local preacher man was murdered. And mixed in before and after all this is the 18-20 other murders to make up the monthly New Orleans average. These other murders are perhaps well represented by last week's shooting death of a 23 year old man at Eighth and Dryades in Central City, just a few blocks off the revered St. Charles Avenue. Seven years previous at Seventh and Dryades the young man had survived an attack which put five or six bullets in his 16 year old body. And the undercurrent of desperation suggested by these events is just that, an undercurrent. If we don't get off the boat we will all be just fine.
Jobs
I've had jobs I hated so much I couldn't get them out of my mind. I would hate them when the sun came up over that rise and I would close my eyes and let that sun, you know, bathe me in its warm glow, and then I would begin worrying myself because I knew the warm glow was just temporary but the shitty job was forever. Maybe I had that backwards but there is no logic to a shitty job. I would open my eyes and spend the next eight hours doing something someone was paying me to do. The best thing about shitty jobs is how good you feel when you quit them. The longer you stay at a shitty job the better you feel when you quit. If you could bottle that feeling and sell it for a nickel you would never have to take another shitty job ever again.
The job I have now is a long way from being shitty. But still, I have my days. Yeah, that's right, its me, all me; it has nothing to do with the job. It's the attitude. Five cents please.
Paying at the pump with a shitty attitude I am thinking how easy it would be to make this a gas stop on the way to nowhere; how being at a gas pump barely awake reminds me of that being on the road sensation of running away, of being purposefully purposeless, of traveling through those states of mind where possibilities pretend to be limitless. I only need to plot point B. And muffle that annoying voice of reason.
Mardi Gras, Day 1--The Booker T Love Child 2.14.98
This is my fourth Mardi Gras and I have not been anticipating it with
quite the fervor that one would expect one to anticipate "the greatest
free show on earth." But no one escapes Mardi Gras. Even if you forego
the 12-14 days of parades and stay inside watching reruns of Family
Matters, you are effected by Carnival. The Dominoes pizza guy will be
late because he had to travel eight miles out of his way to circumvent
the parade route.
Metairie, where all the white people flew after six-year old Ruby Bridges
integrated the New Orleans school district in 1960, has its own parades.
Algiers, still in Orleans Parish, but on the Westbank across the river,
has its own parades. Gretna, also on the Westbank, has its own parades.
At work today I was Telling Nick about the one Metairie parade M and
I went to last year.
"I try not to get all that wrapped up in whether people say nigger or don't say
nigger but I do take it as a bad beginning if its the first thing some
white trash shithead from Metairie says to me in a pitiful attempt at
small talk. We were on this guy's parade turf and I guess he was a little
juiced and also upwardly prideful of his place in the cosmos. 'You won't
see no niggers anywheres along this stretch of ground.'"
"Wow," I said.
"That's not the best place to see a Metairie parade," Nick said.
"This isn't something that just came about since I moved to New Orleans,
and I don't really have any particularly specific love for black people,
but sometimes white people really scare me. I mean really scare me."
But I'm pushing the envelope of blah de blahness here and all I really
wanted to tell you was about this one young man from the Booker T
Washington High School Marching Band.
Broad and Canal is not an integrated stretch of parade route. Unless
those two skinny white people count towards any real integration. And
this particular parade is made up of all black people, which is rare.
Zulu is the only other all black parade krewe and has been parading for
eighty years on the last day, Fat Tuesday, which is the English
translation for Mardi Gras.
Ostensibly, we are all standing on the parade route, acting or being as
peasants, to receive throws (trinkets, beads, moon pies, Frisbees,
cassette tapes, cups, underwear) from the royalty up on the floats.
But this kid from Booker T was giving out laughter, with his hair coifed
high on his head, and his sexuality of an alternative nature, he shook
and shimmied to the music with an exaggerated femininity, and seemed
perfectly at ease with who he was and why people might find it amusing.
M to my left was laughing, and with the matronly heavy-set woman to
my right, I was sharing big teeth and crinkled eyes.
Esnard Revisited 2.5.98
The charred remains of Esnard Villa were visited today by owner Y, and her friend and protector, Kooleo, and D (9), and
C (6).
The century and a half year old peg jointed cypress framing timber is
broken and burnt to ashes at two places in the roof, the remaining
roofing timber is also badly burnt and occasionally pieces of this
crippled stucture fall in on itself. A crack and tumble in the night.
The stairs to the second floor are located in the back and to the left,
where the fire started. The stairs are still navigable by an adventurous
nine year old under the fool-hearted tutorage of his twenty-seven year
old mother who is standing down under a second story window accepting
lofted shoes and lofted memories from said son.
"Oh these shoes all right, " Y says, "D go back and get all
my shoes."
D disappears from the glassless window he had been leaning out of
and runs back into the blackened, gloomy interior to look for more.
Shoes start flying out the window, and photo albums, and a bible,
cassette tapes, a suede jacket.
C has found his way to the unstable second floor. Kooleo directs
grumbles of profanity at C. Y leans over to inspect her
salvageable memories and property, putting the keepers in a forty gallon
plastic trash can.
I had spoken to Kooleo earlier. The good news and bad news are the same:
"They gonna fix it."
Just Another Night Out
The coals on the barbecue grill were too hot so I burned a bunch of fat leg quarters to begin my duties as Night Out Against Crime chef on 2600 Dumaine. With sideways glances I caught a lot of skeptical looks from the guests who were seated in chairs and on stoops. Smoke billowed profusely. I sweated. I was failing miserably at a pretty simple task. Good thing for everyone the majority of the food had been pre-arranged and sat safely inside Phillis' house.
Evelyn arrived from the 7th Ward and said, "it's not barbecue if it's not burnt."
"Thank you, Evelyn."
"You know I got your back, baby."
"Oh baby, its you and only you."
"I got your back, Jim, I got your back."
The cops buried one of their own earlier in the morning. A few days ago a senior cop with a trainee were responding to an armed robbery of a bar on St. Roch. When they pulled up to the bar four recidivists came out and were in no way blocked from escaping but when the trainee yelled "gun" and ducked in the front passenger seat one of the four shot into her window, hitting the senior cop in the head, causing his instantaneous death. Three of the four were apprehended soon thereafter, one slightly mauled by the police dog, and the fourth was caught the next day. Three will dime out the fourth and he will rot in hell. The implications of a society in which we allow our cops to be murdered are too severe to calmly consider. The cop's pregnant wife and five-year old son have a folded flag and a bunch of kind, laudatory words as consolation.
As I took Evelyn to her home near St. Anthony and Claiborne we became momentarily sidetracked down some of the surrounding streets, Derbigny, Elysian Fields, N. Robertson, saw dealers and derelicts and prostitutes and unattended children slinking through the ill-lit night, and a young man on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance, and I said I don't think I'll be coming around here sightseeing at night. Oh no baby, you don't wanna do that. Evelyn complained that she had tried to get her neighbors interested in a party but they afraid to have an anti-crime party what with so many criminals in their families. I had to admit that the idea struck me a little strange the first time the idea came up on Dumaine. Evelyn agreed. I said I guess they would just have to try it one time to see that you can have criminals and cops and judges on one street on one night and that everything can work out most copacetically. Even with a lame chef.
It sometimes seems like its more fun, more popular, to see the cop as the videotapes show him--as the bad guy beating up the innocent or not so innocent citizen, or just in general being an unnecessarily intimidating presence in a society that, sure, needs him, but not if he can't behave properly. Me, I'm willing to forgive all but the most heinous cop behaviour in exchange for his and her protecting me from what I feel would be an even worse scenario than the one we see when the occassional bad cop hits the news--a world without cops. Christopher Russell, NOPD, RIP.