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DONL 3
When I pulled up in front of Dumaine after ripping out the old galvanized plumbing pipes under and inside the Rocheblave house, I saw Van across the street washing Royalston's (Mama D's former companion) truck. I was negotiating my truck around the sink hole by the curb and Van was motioning me to park across the street behind Royalston's truck so he could wash mine afterwards. He does me for five bucks which is half the going rate. I'm not really looking for a wash so I just wave at him and exit the vehicle.
He pauses from his work to cross over and talk to me--touch bases as it were--about the Rocheblave job, what did I do today, and will I be needing his help tomorrow. I tell him I'm just piddling around over there, and that I'm hoping to run into Carl--my preferred electrician--on the job in the next few days so I can convince him to wire the house, but before that get me hooked up with temporary electricity so I can get some power tools running, rip out and replace a couple of floors, replace a rafter and a joist or two, do a little bracing here and there, replace the roof, and get whatever I need to get done before begging my preferred plumber to find the time to do my plumbing rough in for one bath, a kitchen, a washer/dryer hookup, and a gas water heater. Van's cool with that but he's really bored over here on Dumaine and needs something constructive to do so please let him know when I need some more help. I told him I would, and gave him an ice cold Budweiser from my cooler, and then I see--and he sees me--(from) across the street, coming from The Magnolia, HP.
"Oh Lord, and he saw me give you that beer."
Van looked over, chuckled, and said, "Don't let him fool you today, Slim, he got that money."
"Okay Van." Van crossed back to finish washing Royalston's truck as HP stumbled up to the curb and greeted me,
"Hey buddy."
"Hello HP."
"Have a beer for me, buddy?"
"No, not for you."
"Why you do me like that, Jim?"
"I need twenty-five dollars, I know you have it, I want it, I want it now."
HP reached into his pocket and brought out a quarter and showed it to me on the platter of his cracked black palm. White whiskers sprouted haphazardly on his chin and cheeks. He was wearing wrap around sun glasses, and a mis-matching blue work uniform from a career gone by, or the thrift store."This is all I have. Let me get that beer."
He was not offering me the quarter.
I took from my cooler another ice cold Budweiser, and gave it to HP.
"I seen you working on that house over by the Schwegmann's" (Schwegmann's was a local grocery chain that went bankrupt. The new store owners operate under the name of Robert's Market Fare, or something, but no one in the neighborhood will ever call it that).
"So you saw me working over there, HP, and you just kept on moving, huh?"
"You over there in that colored neighborhood, buddy."
"Coloreds, where coloreds?"
"Let me get a dollar big spender, so's I can get a cigar 'cross the street."
"I'm your sugar daddy now?"
"All right, you crazy white boy."
Ah, the race card, we have always left that one out of the deck for these games.
"Oh so now it's about skin color, yeah HP?"
"Don't make me get the rope, little buddy."
"Why are you always talking about getting that rope, HP? You gonna hang me?"
"Hog tie you, hog tie you to that fence."
"Then what?"
"You don't wanna know. Crazy white boy." And then it's as if he had never realized how liberating it felt to call a crazy white boy a "crazy white boy" because he says it a couple of more times, but loud enough for most of the block to hear. Van is washing and laughing now, and I'm acting hurt, and getting ready to pretend hurtful.
"So that's what its all about then, huh HP? Always about the color, you old crusty colored coot, you. You, you negro."
"Okay that's it, I'm getting the rope."
"Good."
"Let me get another beer, Jim. This one's almost empty."
I look down into the top of his beer and there is barely a sip gone.
"That one's still full. Why is it you're not happy until you tap the white boy. You're not my friend, you just see me as someone to take advantage of. And I gotta tell you, that really hurts me."
"That's not true, buddy. Let me get a dollar."
Crossing Roads
BB (I call him double B and he calls me double J) once told me it would be ok
if I used the word "nigger" conversationally. I don't know if that was an
official ruling handed down by higher ups in the hood or if he was just
saying it would be ok with him. I told him even with official permission
there were too many reasons why I probably wouldn't be comfortable with the
term and so "thank you my nigger, but I believe I will be niggardly with my
use of the word 'nigger.'"
Still, there a bunch of niggers hangin' on my porch today, not a one of 'em
can say they never been to jail: drug dealers, murderers, armed robbers among
the bunch, and what with the infusion of white people in the area for
Jazzfest, dealing is up and the whole scene has become too ordinary, boring
even, so I feel the need to challenge myself to new heights of scary which
has me in the car heading off to Veterans Blvd. in Metairie.
If you think crossing Delancey is a challenge just try Veterans someday; its
the area's widest corridor of retail hell. Need something? Shoes, cars,
clothes, computers, tires, oil change, books, a cappuccino or latte', a
smoothie, vitamins, bicycles, lawn or garden equipment, sporting goods, or
any damn household product you could possibly name, can be found somewhere
along the several mile stretch of Veterans Blvd. In triplicate. Hey, are
you hungry? Same story. All the food that's fit to eat and some that ain't
but still sells because its cheap. Which brings me to this:
I am a warrior for new experience. Or more truthfully--I am a coward who
likes to challenge himself. Or, I'm just too easily bored and will
cautiously try anything to beat the affliction.
And it's too late to turn back without making a scene. I am part of a queue,
singular only in number. Like everyone else here at the Pancho's all you can
eat buffet I came to get more than my money's worth, which, if we may all be
clued in to the obvious, is next to impossible. One can only eat so much
cornmeal.
So why all the hype, where's the danger? I can only give you the coordinates
and suggest you look and see for yourself. The Pancho's on Veterans Blvd. in
Metairie, Louisiana is as good an excuse for using drugs as I can find. In
fact, the mundane surreality of this place demands that one be drugged so
that there be an excuse for all the damning imagery of humanity that presents
itself at your every glance. A good writer would give the details, but alas,
I am a hack, and a coward, and cannot deliver those goods. I'll go back
though because its a well run outfit, no question about that, and I like how
the food is the same as it was twenty-five years ago when I frequented the
Pancho's in Dallas. And also, because these middle class white trash
warriors who scare me plenty represent a part of who I am, a bigger part than
I would like to admit, and it is always a mistake to turn away from these
truths when you find them.
Now, getting back to this "nigger" thing.
Besides being a coward, I'm not very bright, and therefore found myself back
at that pitiful little strip of beach in Waveland, Mississippi. Shelton,
Glynn, Fermin, and Lance have been yearning for the water now that the
weather is threatening to be permanently hot and I just refuse to listen to
the nagging inside me which says--"do not continue these trips to the beach
in Waveland, Mississippi where, in three years time, you have never seen
another black person, but have in fact had your charges singled out with the
salutation--"hey you niggers."
Today, crossing the road to the beach, three of the four boys walked in front
of the wrong car (they truly should have been paying better attention to the
traffic) and earned this--"you little niggers better watch where you go." I
was still waiting to cross with Lance and I just stood there until I realized
a truck was stopped and waiting for us to proceed. The first three boys were
walking backwards to the beach, facing me, there expressions were all the
same question mark. When we met I had for them no good news, no consolation.
"We're a good distance from Dumaine fellas, and ya'll need to respect all
the possibilities along this stretch of road."
I sat on the beach and watched them travel through the shallow water until
they were just little black specks a quarter of a mile away,
indistinguishable from each other, and from the two white boys they had met
on the way out.
A family to my right was set up on that line where beach meets water. The
chubby teenage daughter was taunting her step daddy, Art, whom she called
"Fart," by pointing first to one bikini cup, and then the other, saying, "I
don't guess you'll be having anymore cigarettes, and I don't guess you'll be
needin' your beeper neither, and no fair touchin'." Art was sitting in the
water drinking bottled beer and smoking a cigarette. Art's over weight wife
was much younger than he and had two rather large tattoos, one on each
shoulder blade. Of the three remaining children, two were young girls who
were not yet showing any signs that generations of inbreeding was a problem
to overcome. The youngest boy was a poster child for "don't talk baby talk
to your children or they'll grow up talking like adults who talk like babies."
Fermin, no doubt tired of the verbal abuse from his cousins, came closer to
shore and tried to interest me in water sport. But I'm not interested in the
salt water or all that sand truth be told, and am just trying to be a good
sport until its time to go home, which will be soon. Fermin wanders out
fifty yards or so. Art is yucking it up to his kids, "hey, look at that one,
stayed out in the sun a little too long, turned him black."
I am just trying to be a good sport until its time to go home, which will be
soon.
DONL 2
Last year I wrote to some of you about an event at the Superdome known as the
SuperFair, which is a big carnival with rides inside the Dome. It is another
predominantly black attended event at the Superdome which some of my
co-workers think would be a great event to bomb, kill the coloreds.
What I wrote about last year was a drive-by shooting outside the Dome one of
the nights after the fair. Whoever did that shooting is still at large, but
the shooting that was done in retaliation has eight or nine people facing
charges. Four are facing first degree murder charges which carries a
possible death penalty.
The idea that night after the first shooting was to go into enemy
territory--presumably the neighborhood of the first shooter--and then "kill
anyone we see." That "anyone" turned out to be a kid named Tim, and he was
called Big Tim because he was big for his age, that age being
twelve-years-old. But he looked older to the multiple car loads of searching
18-20 year olds, and the fact that he was limping from a sprained ankle did
not enter into the equation for these teenagers with a vendetta. Up
Cambronne in Pigeontown Big Tim walked until he saw a group of boys with
obvious ill intent exit a vehicle, and then he started running, as best he
could. The boys ran after him, shooting as they went. Two car loads of
boys trailed after in the street. The boys in this trailing group copped
pleas, turned states evidence and will average five year sentences. The boys
chasing Tim eventually caught him because one of the bullets entered his
spine and caused him to fall down. And this is how it goes here: after Tim
fell down from an obvious bullet wound, these boys did not freak out and jump
in their cars to flee. These four boys stood over Tim's large dying
twelve-year-old body and fired more bullets into the flesh of his torso, and
into his head.
I don't know anything about this kid, Tim. Maybe he wasn't an innocent, but
twelve-year-old's should not end this way.
I have driven around this small town extensively during my searches for
property and I know the streets and neighborhoods pretty well. When a murder
happens here I can often picture almost exactly where it happened, and these
memories have become a plotted map inside my head. And there are days when
the math comes to bear down on me and everywhere I go I see bloodstains on
the sidewalks. My first two years here the city recorded a total of almost
eight hundred murders. For a per capita comparison to a city the size of NY
I multiply by twenty and get sixteen thousand.
And I have to some degree integrated myself into this predominately black New
Orleans community and I know many of the children and I know some of the
murderers, and as frustrating as it can get here with people constantly
dropping trash in the streets, and disrespecting each other, and cussing, and
killing, I still cannot arrive at a place where I can understand this all
encompassing hatred that is felt by so many of the area whites, or the
blinding fear and intolerance which rules so many of the little minds 'round
here.
I have become kind of numb to "n" word, and try not to let offenders get
under my skin. But the cumulative effect still wears me down in the end and
there are times when my white friends say "nigger" and I just smile the smile
of system shut down, tap my foot as eulogy to the boy(s) with no father(s),
the boy no one hugged, who received no compliments ever, and never a special
treatment, but did one day gain a notoriety, bleeding out, on a street corner.
DONL 1
I bought my school bus yellow 85 Dodge pickup with Cadillac spoke hubcaps and
a homemade plywoood bedcover from a trim carpenter named Timmy. Timmy is
having marital problems which somehow have become so out of hand that his
whole family has come to witness numerous fights between Timmy and wife, and
some of these fights have occurred in front of their two children. Timmy's
mom found this last bit so upsetting that she mailed him a letter which very
uncharacteristically had her espousing the rather base opinion that by
fighting like they do at so many family gatherings, and in front of their
children, "they are no better than niggers."
As insults go among the average white Louisianan, this was a doozy. For it
to come from a mother to a son is almost unthinkable. Timmy once said to me
that the annual college football game between Grambling and Southern would be
a good time to put a bomb in the Superdome because "you could kill so many
fuckin' niggers." That pretty much expresses a prevailing sentiment among
white people in Louisiana. No, not all white people feel that way here, but
more than you would like to believe. Many, many more than you would like to
believe. Or so I presume (what you would like to believe).
I used to explain to my likeable yet so completely casual rascist white
co-workers that white and black people in Louisiana to the casual observer
that I am, have more in common culturally than any white/black population I
have ever been around. "You eat the same foods, you are influenced by each
other's music, and the way whites around here talk sounds more black than
white much of time," I would antagonize. "You say 'ax' for 'ask', you say
'zink' for 'sink', you say 'I'm going to make groceries,' whereas the rest of
the white world is saying 'I'm going grocery shopping.'"
That the two races have been "mixing" around here for three hundred years is
a most beautifully obvious thing and yet vehemently denied on individual
basis's.
And coming home from an average summer work day to be met by a front porch
full of neighborhood youth, some gangsters, and maybe a parent or two, all
black skinned, playing dominoes, or card games like pity pat, or tonk, and
the only thing more frustrating than hearing them refer to each other as
"nigger" is the absolutely ridiculous refrain of "don't say that, Mr. Jim (or
Miss Amanda) don't like you using that word up here." I suspect I hear the
word "nigger" coming from black mouths more than white. I don't know what
that means, but I've heard it used as an excuse many times: "Shit, they call
themselves that, why can't we?"
At some point I just stopped answering, out loud.