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Speckled Trout In River Ridge
Mandy didn't like using the plural pronoun "we" even when she and I were a couple but overhearing her occasional use of the singular "I" to refer to things that we undoubtedly did together, and also the possessive "my" when talking about things we legally own together ( the Bushy Fork, North Carolina house, and this Dumaine, New Orleans house), kind of makes me wonder how many versions of reality might actually exist at the same time, and how wording may make all the difference in the world.
Today I was working alone doing some repainting in the home of one of the general contractors my boss and I work for, very nice home, richly appointed, River Ridge neighborhood (the ring of that should tell you all you need to know about the desirability of the area). This man, the contractor, and his wife, who sells drugs in the projects, literally, but not in the way the words imply, are good folk with busy lives and an even tempered three year old boy, named after the father, and deceased grandfather. I enjoy my conversations with the boy at seven a.m.--his sincere declaration to me that he has to pee I meet with sincere enthusiam and encouragement, "hey, that's great, why don't you go and do that," and I am proud as a father when I hear the three-year-old sized cascading echo of streaming piss into a toilet bowl a few seconds later. I'm painting a color called "leather leaf" on the beaded board surrounding the bar. When he comes back and calls me "man" I am not put out by this as I might be if a suit wearing professional used the same term, trying to be "simpatico" with the long hair. The boy probably meant it literally, probably brought the issue up with his parents the night before, wondering just what is it with that "person" who is coming to our house everyday. He seems like a man, and you all tell me to call him "Mister Jim," but his hair is long like mommy's. His mom and dad may have instructed him to see me, and refer to me as a man, so he did.
This contractor (we can call him Paul because that is his name) is an avid fisherman and had the day before taken off with his older brother, and fellow building contractor, (whom we can call G, because a lot of people do) to go fishing in this here "the Sportsman's Paradise," and came back with an astounding, or for them possibly average catch, of speckled trout. A couple of seven pounders he was duly proud of.
"I'll make you a plate before I go and you can heat it in the microwave for lunch," he said to me before leaving, and then a few minutes later while I was touching up a ceiling with "summer dew" it was his wife ( at this point I would be wrong for reducing her to four lower case letters and therefore must proclaim as Julie, and hope that being inside the parenthetical is not some sort of slight, or perhaps being outed by name without permission would be the slight, and at one time was the point being driven towards but I can see now that I'll never get there from here) who asked me did I like green beans, which of course I do, and then she came to find me caulking in her son's room, and here I would like to add she is not only a strong independent woman, but strong looking, and by that I mean the opposite of masculine strength, which is to say, she is quite pretty. She had come to recommend the best setting for the microwave, and I thanked her. She left and I was alone.
Not long after this my break time arrived and I went out to my car to retrieve my bag of salted in shell peanuts. To these I added from the pantry a great good many Famous Amos cookies and a half dozen olives from that dwindling supply in the fridge. I turned the small TV in the kitchen on and felt that guilty pleasure surging through my inexplicably disciplined non TV watching self. The day before I had looked at a seductively wrapped Marlboro cigarette with a similar sensation, except there was no guilt, and no pleasure, only a frightening burst of weak willed longing.
I recognized immediatedly the middle of You've Got Mail with Hanks and you know, whatshername (Meg Ryan, it came to me), she's way cute, even if you have to sell your soul to the devil to think so, and after about twenty minutes I know I'm at a crossroads of trouble which is fueled by my need for a drug, any drug, and in this case it's sentimentality in the easy to swallow coated caplet. I had tripped on this prescription before and the comfortability of previous experience had me looking forward to this Big Mac love story even at the sacrifice of real nourishment.
I was into touching up the white enameled woodwork at this point so I just concentrated on the areas surrounding the kitchen, and its 13 inch version of edited love. I let myself cry a little when she said "I really hoped it would be you," because I'm a drug addict and Meg Ryan had just showed up at the door with a kilo, and checking for purity is mostly an illusion. Afterwards I felt kind of dirty, but how you gonna avoid that?
For lunch I had speckled trout, green beans, and mashed potatoes with chives, and watched the last half of King of Comedy.
What He Said
He could be cheerful at will if that's what he chose to be but the simplicity of that joy was too much like cheating the retarded child at a board game.
A brother had insisted that he not make everything so hard but he chose to ignore (while remembering) that advice.
Then there was the time so early in the game when he had crawled across three lanes of potential traffic to get to a median, only to be returned to his proper place by a do-gooding teamster.
Two or three years later he was coloring a picture of a snowman with perpendicular, crucified like Christ arms, and under each he had built (drawn) campfires which were meant to melt his creation. This is what he was doing when the president was assassinated in Dallas. His mother would perhaps say she was watching him do this or she could have her own story but he would catch her in a lie if she said she didn't cry at the news as it was broadcast over the brown, square, plastic, lidded, box that was both a 45 rpm record player, and radio. It was a curious day for the kid.
Two years later he would meet and become friends with the kid in red who stood next to his mom and dad as across the way Zapruder captured (and later sold to Life magazine) the 8mm images of presidential grey matter spraying into the air. The kid in red thought the Manlicher reports were firecrackers, and the shredded upward thrusting brain of John Kennedy, confetti.
Jackie did instinctively run for it but the early spin doctors told us she was hightailing on her knees across the trunk of that convertible for help. Too many lies are told and they become better than the truth; truth then becomes better, at best, than doing laundry.
Pizza's in the oven, man's gotta eat, truth does wait.
In Deference
Speaking of paranoia I have felt a weight akin to it these last few days and nights (my dreams are cumbersome knots of frustration where I bark orders of reprimand at the boy driving at reckless speed as I see and hear the fence posts whizz by), and I've made my own mistakes in driving judgement which on the road have translated into women cussing me from one intersection to the next, down Broad Street, Treme and the River to my right, me on my way home from days that seem very long, but I'm not looking for shorter days so don't clock me as a complainer.
It's warm and muggy here, but cloudy and sunless, in mid February, and that is my witless guess as to why some of us are feeling a little restless, not to mention an awkwardness towards Valentine's Day that may pierce our hearts, and on the individual basis who can say exactly why many of us are out of sync but we are, and this is not just a misery loves company wishful thought but more
a wild guess based on high probabiltity.
And the ghetto, here in New Orleans, seems so much its lesser, more downtrodden self.
On this Sunday next my former lover and I are throwing away a human being, and the golden toothed gangster across the street tirades loudly (punctuating every sentence with Ya hoid me, you heard me?), and how can I not, as a careful but haphazard listener, hear it all, so that when he says to his hapless audience of fellow gangsters "come Monday we may have to go into that building," how am I not to give a moment's consideration that he may mean this building, and therein lies the seed of paranoia, and therein lies a seed of truth, in deference to which I will make or imagine I will make, some preparations.
Concurrent Fantasies
I did not acknowledge the nod from the woman pretending to be vampire novelist Anne Rice any more than I gave much credence to the resemblance of her companion as the poet Stan Rice. All three of us were imposters, as I was pretending to be a person who could be at the Clearview Palace theatre around noon on a Friday to see the Sean Penn flick, and they were guilty as sin in their hokey famous people incognito getups.
I meant no disrepect to the woman pretending to be novelist Anne Rice any more than this morning I thought there was magic related to my daytime wearing of a Goodwill bought Cranston, Rhode Island sweatshirt which previously had only been worn at night under the covers, but today was being worn as I waited in the neutral ground crossover at Dorgenois and Canal in New Orleans, La. behind a truck with Rhode Island license plates, which outside of RI is not a license plate you see all that often.
And all this of course had nothing to do with my morning fixation on the Creole chick at Betsy's Pancake house at which I arrived after moving straight forward across that intersection as the Rhode Island truck turned left, on Canal, toward the River. I say "Creole" really only to describe the color of her skin which was coffee colored with four creamers, and those approximately green eyes. Her golden red straightened hair flipping up coquetishly at the level of her graceful neck was a look that seemed to work well for her. And her voice which had first asked for a menu, and later for more syrup (although demurred at the suggestion of whip cream), was from somewhere allluringly foreign to this locale, and I did not rule out Rhode Island.
Later, well into the Sean Penn movie, with the imitation Rices nearby, I could only sympathize with the uncomfortability of Jack Nicholson's possibly delusional character as he was out of the blue asked--"are you sexually active." I answered for him, "no, but I've got several full blown fantasies running concurrently."
The great thing about being Sean Penn would be that you could get guys like Nicholson, and Harry Dean Stanton, and that great wife of yours, and all those other pretty fine actors to be in your flick, and you could have enough clout and balls to end a movie in such a way that is more like real life than any of us imposters hiding out in the theatres really care for.
I'm Just Saying
Come to think of it her name may have been Mrs. Jackson, my 7th grade teacher that is. She was like a military personnel, harder than we middle class baby booming Dallasites were raised to expect, but she always said former students came back to praise her which is better than coming back to haunt, or may be the same.
Now it's clear to me, her name was Mrs. Jackson, which I don't think I realized when a few years ago I made 13-year-old New Orleans inner city miscreant Shelton Jackson memorize the poem "If" by Kipling for the priviledge(?) of spending one night over here at 2646. Now he lives here, but is about to move on, having learned all the dysfunction we can teach him.
I've had to medicate against pain and would like to imply some sort of apology for the slothfulness of my thinking, writing, arithmetic, spelling, cadence.
Real men don't complain or mention their discomfort.
I hurt all over. If I began with the swollen left index finger and strayed nary a bit from only the left side I could go on and on, but when you think about it, who couldn't? I don't think there is anything wrong with whining but that's only because I'm the one doing it. If it were you, I'd be mighty tempted to tell you just to shut the hell up.
Damn I'd like to tell you a thing or two about today but I can't. Not even about parking over on the side of Armstrong Park after a hellacious morning in Madisonville on the North Shore (that's across the 26 mile Lake Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge), with fifteen hundred cash dollars stuffed behind a paper napkin in the cab of my truck like I was positioning myself for a drug deal, only I wasn't. I was eating Popeye's chicken and listening to the blues show broadcast from the Park 2-4 pm weekdays on WWOZ. I was only a hundred yards or so from the origin of the broadcast and when I left out of there, with that transmission which catches enough to take me anywhere I care to go, I could not help but notice the poet John Sinclair discussing God only knows what with God only knows who, on that path away from the radio building.
God (again)--I wish I could tell you about that ethereal young brunette with the white skin and the pretty smile and the meandering up the entire length of one arm tattooed stitches bicycling confindently through the heart of Treme while her awsomely and beautifully confident cookie colored pitbull ran the sidewalk as her protector, and like a swimmer turning his head to the side for air, checking his master with a regularity of stroke, excepting when he would pass the predominately male stoop sitters whereat he would in full moving stride with no apparent malice but no bullshit whatsoever lean into the crowd and cock his head their way--but I can't.
Good As Any
The piece I lost last night was the greatest piece in the history of mankind, and yet my disappointment at the loss, as I stared at the frozen screen, and jiggled the mouse maniacally, was less than phenomenal. What was I going to do? Blame my reliance on new fangled technology? Of course not. It could have just as well been written on a shovel blade with coal and my kind hearted wife might have let the neighbor borrow that shovel to deepen the pit for his outhouse, my inspired thoughts smeared away in deference to a higher purpose.
I believe I was attempting to offer an opinion on The Beat Generation, or that's what it sounded like before the crash. Starting out my point was only going to bring up that I never realized the number of suspicious deaths related to that group: Lucien Carr killing that dude in NY and dumping him in the river; Kerouac helping him get rid of the guy's eyeglasses; and although I had heard the "Burroughs in Mexico shooting the glass off wife Joan's head, and missing," story many times I did not know until recently that she had initiated a love affair with this Lucien Carr character shortly before. Well, Burroughs was gay so it couldn't have been jealously that made him a less than crack shot that night, or why couldn't it have been? And the "suicide" of one of Neal Cassady's many wives made my eyebrows rise, but that's besides the point. Yesterday I never really got to the suspicious deaths part which in my mind was somehow going to eloquently segue into my own On the Road experience in '60 or '61 as a toddler in South Oak Cliff hell bent for the highway, or East Kiest Blvd. But I didn't get to tell it before the crash and I'm not telling it now. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lee Harvey Oswald would have had bit parts in the story as if you needed more reasons to beg me to tell the story, but no, I order you, like you a dog, to quit that begging, and I mean no disrespect oh dear audience but discipline is freedom and you will all do well to remember that.
Anyway, it was an inspired piece, unlike this, which is me grinding to the tune "discipline is freedom," if you hum a few bars I'll be annoyed.
I am almost finished insulating over at Rocheblave and will probably order the sheetrock this weekend. I was going to hire out the hanging and finishing but now I think I prefer to do most of it myself and just hire out the hanging of the ceiling because I'm too tired and arthritic to do that even with a decent helper which is hard to find sometimes. I think I'm going to have to buy that small lot next to me for an exaggerated price so doing instead of hiring out the sheetrock work will save me a few bucks towards that eventuality.
Shelton will be moving out soon to go live with his sister, Tesa (Erica's mom), and her new husband, and family (he has some other kids), but not Erica, she's living with Aunt Gwynn in the Seventh Ward. They will attempt to restart the SSI payments of five bills a month, which Mandy had discontinued to underscore her platform that Shelton was not a commodity to her but a human being she cared about and wanted to see do well in this difficult world into which he was born. But whereas she may have coddled him at times (by hugging him and buying him Nikes?) in the years previous to his living here, there were a few standards she set for him as a resident of 2646 that probably got a good guffaw from father destiny. She was not pretending to be an unconditionally loving mother. There were one or two cardinal rules, he broke them, he's gone.
And despite the fact I was not strictly in favor of his living here, I wish him well and hope his super charged spirit, and temper, and ability to see the world clearly, will not lead him to see that the ruinous alternative is as good as any.
Wishing you could make a difference is not enough, and the attempt itself might be only so much vainglory, but to just sit on your blanket and watch and be confounded by those damn ants, ocassionally squishing a generation or two because of your dominion, is probably inexcusable. But as all of us are on the exact same path towards dust we the most of us can probably get by quite well with our indifference and ineffectuality. That's what I'm hoping.
Shine
Somewhere in the writing it became dark, and I had to wonder where went the children outside who lifted my spirit with their cacophony, which had greatfully come to replace the obscenity laced tirade of a golden toothed gangster who earlier in the day had threatened one weaker than he with a toy rifle to the head and the admonition, "don't you shine me motherfucker..." (and so on, the threat and noise of it a painfully eloquent thing that has no end, has no remorse, yet somehow, inexplicably, has no depth.), and it became quiet so that here I am now with nothing but the after images burnt into my... what?
Surfing Poorly
I don't surf but I think of the loss of the writing habit when measured in more than a few days to be similar to missing the wave; I'm just not paddling fast enough or I have picked the wrong wave to go after or I'm not one with the water or lets face it I shouldn't be on a surfboard in the first place.
It is never a loss of subject matter or ideas that causes the pause. Sometimes it is embarrassment and extreme self-consciousness, the consciousness which is me seeing me on the surfboard.
Advice
Advice to self: I think its better to have an idea before you start because if you don't have an idea you might find yourself spouting off just to make noise which is not only pointless, but noisy.
Back To School
For most of a year I'm a real dandy of a worker; the housepainter of your dreams; a super employee. Once a year though there opens a window of opportunity for me to express that undeniably less than stellar part of me that best expresses itself bluntly thusly--fuckit. I see those portals, the one in southwestern Virginia, and that one in Utah, and I can see myself walking towards them as those that trusted me shake their heads sadly and reduce me verbally to "a flake" of a man. I wish I knew what they meant. Its so true the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
What a hand I've been dealt, I don't know what to do with all my jokers.
Now I remember why I sat down here. I wanted to tell a story. It was going to be a story submitted to mrbellarsneighborhood.com, a site accepting non-fiction stories with a NY theme, and I only have a few, although Edgar Oliver swears I picked up a rat and threw it out his window on E. 10th (or Psilocybin ) and that's not even one I remember so who can say how many stories exist. But what's to be gained really by becoming a dot on the bellar map, or the many others, no disrepect, but the telling is all that matters, and where it ends up is truly secondary.
This story contains no sex whatsoever and I'm not protecting the lady's name I simply cannot remember it. She was pretty though, and kissing her on a bench at The World on Ave D (?). was heavenly, which is an adjective or adverb meant to make this more a spiritual piece because like I said, there is no sex in it. Before that we were somewhere else which is where we began to show an interest in each other, but there was another guy playing too and although he was the loser, in the end I did have to wonder if maybe he would have been better off as the winner, and it is my impression he might have played my part better than I played my part. Plus he was a New Yorker and perhaps more familiar with local customs, and I was, I don't know, probably a Texan.
Pausing after some more real fine kissing in the cab on the way to her place somewhere in the forties, she said, "I hope you're not one of those guys who's gonna come to my apartment and hassle me for sex."
I'm a real naive guy even to this day so its no real surprise that this was my first clue that me and this young woman were not on the same page. Which at the time in the back of that cab I tried to see as a sunny side and responded simply, "I won't hassle you."
But that query in the cab did me in I think because once up the many elevator-ed stories to her less than modest apartment I only wanted to be non-threatening and polite. Which I was, sitting by myself on her plush couch as she excused herself with seductive implication to the boudoir. She came back once, it seems, just to make sure I was still there and then she quickly disappeared again and came back with a deck of tarot cards. I did what she instructed as non-threateningly as possible--picked a card, any card--and the card I picked was a doozy according to her and she quickly disappeared again. When she returned she was in a nightie. Not the image of pure seduction but she did have my polite attention. I gazed noncommittally at her waiting for a more direct clue as to how I might meet her needs. She answered my polite patience with an obscurely seductive gesture--she curtsied and then lifted her short nightgown to show to me that perfectly desirable and well groomed enigma which earlier I had been admonished not to hassle her for.
I followed her to the bedroom and gleefully accepted her suggestion that I give her a back rub. Every positive suggestion, however, had a stop sign on the other side and she was right when she said "you seem tenative," for I surely was, and the both of us knew that was unlikely to change. It was the other guy (the so-called "loser") that would have appreciated her rape fantasty, or whatever syncopated love symphony she was trying to orchestrate that night, and while I paused supinely pondering where went the simplicity of mutual passion, she fell asleep, or pretended to, and I went back to my couch and slept for the few hours into morning. By a long shot she wasn't the best piece of ass I never had but she was so very sweet in her own way and making that long walk back to the east village, or tribeca, on a winter morning that required little more of me than putting one foot in front of the other, I couldn't help but wonder if I should start attending classes, or something, you know, to get in touch with my bad self.
Bombs Bursting In Air
We've been told to drop the dime on our neighbors if they shoot off guns tonite but I really don't think that will be necessary in the 2600 block of Dumaine. It is also illegal to possess and set off fireworks in Orleans Parish and even though personal fireworks useage is a crime largely ignored in New Orleans, 11-year-old neighbor Bryan Henry is really pushing his luck as far as I'm concerned.
He's a good kid, has a good mother, and a couple or three male relatives living with him who don't seem to be too shabby as role models. His mother earns a modest living as a cafeteria worker and exercises her right to raise Bryan in a conservative manner. However, as an only child he does receive special treatments--a (razor) scooter for Christmas, and the latest game playing devices over the rest of the year. And he is supplied with a modest pile of firecrackers in early July and late December.
Bryan is a good kid, did I mention that?, but...
The other day the gangsters over at St. Philip and Dorgenois set off at once a low estimate of ten thousand firecrackers that lasted approximately ninety seconds and had many of us Dumainers poking our heads out our front doors to determine more accurately the proximity of these explosions. The sound was the most exacting clue as to where these firecrackers were being set off but the huge cloud of smoke and its choking odor got the other senses involved too. The frighteningly rapid sequential and concurrent explosions reached such alarming crescendo on two occasions that I found myself grimacing as if preparing for the individual blasts to become one large one which would easily blow us all to kingdom come.
...the thing about Bryan Henry is that for the last several days--a couple of which I have stayed home all day because its cold and I'm a woos--he, and one or two of his cousins will start setting off firecrackers at 8 a.m. and continue until late evening, like this: 1-2-3, wait five minutes, 1-2, wait one hour, 1-2-3-4, wait five minutes, 1, wait two hours, break for lunch. Then in a fit of orgiastic abandon a string of 25 are set off all at once. Then silence for two hours, and so on, so that my nerves might require more medication than I have readily available, or maybe I should have saved what I had. If I had a modest trust fund and I wanted to be sure it would last throughout the rest of my life I would give it to Bryan Henry to manage for me, but I don't, and so the thing about Bryan Henry is--he's gotta go down.
911
"Emergency Operator"
"Yeah, uh, I've been hearing around that ya'll want people to call if we hear gunshots."
"Yessir, what is your location?"
"Um, I live at, um, on 2600 block Dumaine."
"Can you see the person shooting sir."
"Uh, well, yeah, I can."
"Describe the person for me sir."
"Well, he's short, say about four and a half feet, and uh male, black, black male, with a parka and a hood on it, and uh he makes fun of me sometimes..."
"...you know this person sir?"
"Oh, uh uh, no, not really no, I don't know him."
"You said..."
"...I don't know him at all."
"Can you determine this person's age sir?"
"Maybe he's twelve."
"A four and a half foot 12-year-old black male with a hooded parka who sometimes makes fun of you is firing a gun in the 2600 block of Dumaine."
"Well, now that you put it like that, I don't know, really, for sure if its a gun, but it could be, couldn't it?"
"I can't really say from here, sir, but we have cars in the area, we'll pass one by."
"Ohhhkay, well, thank you and..."
...click.
Hey, don't look at me like that, I'm just being a good citizen here, and uh, anyway, those vicodins really suck. What a total waste of opiate, mixing in all that acetaminophen. The wine spritzer of dope. Desperate time, desperate measures.
Waiting For Hitler
As a young man yearning for adventure and bored by the routine, Alex Louis, who was not yet my father but a west Texas newspaper reporter, told his boss that he intended to quit his job and run off to Mexico so he could interview the exiled radical socialist, Leon Trotsky, and perhaps gain some inspiration that I imagine his life was lacking in Wichita Falls. Maybe his roommate at this time was Fred ( "Old Yeller") Gibson, or maybe that would come later--and so maybe or maybe not he talked it over with Fred beforehand, or this would be a thing Fred would hear about later. The caring or opportunistic boss suggested instead of throwing it all away that my father should make the trip as a paid correspondent. My father agreed to this because he was no damn fool but one secret thing I know about the man who was not yet my father is this--a part of him just wanted to disappear into Mexico, and perhaps run into Ambrose Bierce, or his ghost, who himself had disappeared in Mexico possibly looking for Pancho Villa, in 1913, the year of my father's birth.
This was 1939 or 40 and like a distant friend of mine who forty years later would be turned away by JD Salinger's housekeeper in New Hampshire, my father's request for an interview with Trotsky was met mostly by indifference and it was not long after that Trotsky was murdered when in Mexico City a hired killer named Ramon drove a pickax into the back of his head, in August of 1940. My father came back to America and waited for the next adventure which would be the Second World War.
What Will Happen?
I was contemplating last night on how I could ever go back to work what with the overwhelming dread the mere thought of it brought to me, giving me shivers of revulsion it was, the mere thought. Work.
But that's to be expected really after having spent three holy holi-days in bed gasping for breath as the marauding histamine army tried to suffocate me with its horde of snot soldiers. I drank cupfuls of a red syrupy generic over-the-counter product until the resulting schizoid mindsets had me bobbing my head knowingly, and for a while my jaw got a gig in vaudeville doing the old over stimulated coke fiend routine. The show closed after one night. Reviews were tepid.
Like Horse Badorities once said, "the rent will be high but its not so bad if you don't pay it." That's the way I feel about work when it gets to be a really serious mental liability. Just don't go. I am paid as a sub-contractor so the only benefits I derive from my job are the ones I create. I mean other than the pay, which is fine, and keeps me centered to the real world, and out of trouble, and decent. So today I didn't go, called in sick, which I was, sort of, but as much as anything it was a rebelling against those words I heard my boss speak last week during break time. He was telling the carpenters he hoped the current jobs progressed in such a way that a free week might open up (and I'm thinking attaboy, now you're talking) so he could start on painting the outside of Willie Roaf's house, which I needn't even tell you was not anywhere on my top 100 list of things to do with a free week. But that's my boss, he can't help it, bless his heart.
What I originally wanted to tell you was more of a tourist alert for all of you coming to New Orleans for New Years: all you Florida people coming for the SugarBowl and all you St. Louis people who could still buy many of the unsold tickets available for Saturday's playoff game in the Dome. The Falling Bullets Kill campaigners have disbanded after five years of honest effort and are leaving it up to the NOPD to get out the word, which I'm sure they will, although I am certainly missing the FBK billboards around town which represented I think the best graphic art done in this area over the last five years.
What I'm talking about is chunks of lead by the hundreds soaring to the heavens before pausing briefly to become benign atmospheric ornaments, and then quickly morphing into lottery slugs--everyone's a winner--searching without malice for their final resting place: a roof, a streetcorner, a human. Not every year is someone killed by these falling bullets but I just thought it was something you should think about, especially between the hours of 10pm and 1am 12/31/00--1/1/01.
The day before Christmas a local kid turned seventeen and the day after Christmas he was shot dead, wounds to his head and chest, over on Columbus, at the corner nearest that house I wanted to buy last year, in what seemed to be a pretty nice little quiet neighborhood. Number 202 for the year.
Last night I'm reading these Peter Straub short stories when Mandy, in the room to my right, receives a call from prisoner Shelton Sr. and rather fluently and non-judgementally begins explaining her concerns about Shelton Jr, 16, and how she may be on the verge of putting him out. Shelton Jr. is to my left playing pacman and wearing headphones that vibrate rap. Mandy is saying how Jr. is not eleven anymore and the decisions he's making (among other things apparently he has chosen to take off from school most of the month of December) may effect his immediate future harshly. I do not know the weaknesses of Shelton Sr. but I am aware of his intelligence, and have seen in him a measure of integrity that sits in the scale opposite that side which weighs the years of neglect towards his son. And I am intuiting that he is hearing Mandy clearly and then the prison timer goes off and he must hang up. But he is allowed to call again, and this time Mandy gives the phone to Shelton Jr.
He is now laying on his bed which is the couch in the front room, and he takes off his earphones to speak to his dad. But his dad is doing most of the speaking and it is a riot act the young Shelton is being read. This I can tell by the responses which are mumbles of contrition. On one point the Jr. wants to rebel but only half-heartedly because he doesn't want to ruin this moment which has his father instructing him on how to be a man. And then the prison timer goes off again and the call is about over and for all the mumbling, and that bit of street slang spoken during his counterpoint, the Jr. doesn't want to be misunderstood for what he has to say next, and so it is in perfect, crisp, unaffected American English that Jr. says to Sr. "I love you dad."
Merry Christmas
I had so wanted to tell a classic Christmas tale. Have so wanted to do so. The sponsors love it. Budweiser. Microsoft. Ebay, Amazon, Nasdaq. Reap the bounty.
I wanted my tale to center around the only thing of which I am a veritable god of knowledge: dysfunctionality with aplomb.
It was going to be an improbable tale and bittersweet, with no happy ending but lots of drugs and sex and danger and death thrown in to keep them sitting in their seats through the commercial breaks.
Victoriassecret.com, Sex.com, Eatmeraw.com.
And then back to the story two white idealists move to a black ghetto where murder has become a nickname and music is produced so one can dance to the insanity and the two white folk think they can do the My Fair Lady on one of the worst but they wrong for that, and he let them know it by blatant normal teenage disregard, only the consequences of his disregard may be more dire (but only in the eyes of those that think so) but My Fair Lady says--I can't be what I can't be. And for that we can say My Fair Lady knows hisself.
Geographically incorrect snow falls encrusting the lashes of adoring wide eyed chirren as a marbelized Santa steps behind the curtain and removes his beard.
They are ready to cast him out into the abyss of indifference, a street paved with so many more like him, and he comes home early so to prove he is not completely against their caring. But his arrival may be too late, and his spirit too strong.
He will be what he wants to be, and in that the three become one.
Merry Christmas and Happiness and let's do it again tomorrow.
The Braggart
About a month ago I had the opportunity to purchase a backup/replacement vehicle for the 85 schoolbus yellow Dodge pickup with homemade plywood bedcover and Cadillac spoke hubcaps, and slipping transmission, which I have owned for little over a year. I have in that time spent a sum of money on the Dodge which exceeds the amount I would consider normal for upkeep and has nudged into that territory known as "hey, if I'm just going to throw my money away why don't I just quit my damn job, get rid of all heavy possessions and live on the street, walk around everywhere barefooted, abuse drugs, engage in illegal activities on a regular basis, tell a bunch of white lies to all the people that such behavior would offend, and etch silly nomikers like gymgahd in wet cement at the corner of 23rd and Rio Grande, Austin, TX. " The answer is obvious--decent people just don't. Plus, the highly memorable Dodge gets really crappy gas mileage--less than ten miles per gallon--and has been involved in more than one New Orleans area incident wherein the driver has acted badly and caused people who appeared at the time capable of inflicting severe bodily injury on said driver to gesture and yell just because he made maneuvers he calls his "NY moves" during peak traffic hours. The people act in ways that make him see the folly of his own occasional irrationality and therefore he proclaims it all Godsent material towards the making of him a better person.
The replacement vehicle is an 86 Toyota Corolla four door, and get this people, with air-conditioning. Forty-one years into this and I've yet to own a new car, or one with air-conditioning (until now), although that's a lie because the 72 Ford Maverick four door which sits under a shed in Bushy Fork, NC, had air-conditioning, although I honestly never used it, before I took out the condensor (?) or compressor (?) to go about my first replacing of a water pump there in Eugene, Oregon. And then after that four month trial period--where I shacked up in that guy's house across the street from the basketball courts several blocks from the university, sleeping on his fouton and in the end stealing three pair of his underwear, while he tried to figure out the meaning of his life in Bangkok, and she who was putting me up would come by during her lunch hour and laugh at my personalities, and then have sex with me--I moved in with her and her girlfriend in Springfield, while somewhere nearby the six or seven-year-old Kip Kinkel was unhappily developing into a shooter. But that's where I ended up throwing the A/C compressor for the Maverick, into that overwhelmingly dense blackberry thicket behind the house on Hunsaker, in Springfield, Oregon.
I used to keep the Corolla parked over in the driveway at Rocheblave, not using it, just happy for its backup-ability, but the crack fiends thought maybe that's being a little too uppity so back to school they took me with a sock over their hand smashing through the little rear/side triangle window, unlocking, and, apparently stealing nothing. There was a dollar's worth of change laying loose in that square blue receptacle near the parking brake. And a radio in the glove box. I had visions of joyriders (for some reason interrupted this time) and my little Corolla as the trailing throwaway, which often end up on the remote back roads surrounding English Turn--that exclusive gated community where at I sometimes work--crashed into a tree and set on fire. So I decided to pop the hood and unplug a wire into the distributor and it was then that I realized the desirable thing about the Corolla on the fated night was it's battery, now gone. I wasn't that mad although later when a guy I don't trust but still do business with came looking for an odd job, a task towards a blast, I told him I didn't have anything for him to do, but if he could find the person who stole my battery and bring to me that person's head on a stick, I would give him fifty dollars. I think he and I were both a little disappointed in the severity of my latent reaction, especially since he knows he is always a suspect, a fact both he and I regret. To atone for this I punished him several more days before giving him a job that didn't need doing, and twenty dollars.
It's a sad day when you bring something (even a little toy of a car that mostly resembles the little blue car game piece from the game of Life) to the 2600 block of Dumaine for safekeeping but that's what I did with the Corolla: took the battery from the truck and put it in the Corolla, started it, and then removed the battery and put it back in the truck. I then drove the batteryless Corolla six blocks to Dumaine and parked it behind the station wagon that belongs to Jermaine, although "belongs" might be stretching the truth. It sat for a few weeks without battery before I decided to start using it, which I do now, and adjusting my insurance coverage has made it possible to cover both vehicles with that minimum by law type of coverage that I favor, for only about twenty dollars more per year than it took to insure just the truck. So I have now what you might want to consider a fleet of vehicles at my disposal, although stop me if I brag at length.
Large Man
New Orleans All Pro Offensive Lineman Slim Jekins is as big as a house so it stands to reason that his house would be as big as a, ah, ah, The Grinch! No, that was not meant to go there. Somehow just slipped in because--even without TV--I am as susceptible as the next guy to all out media blitzes, and when I used to go to the movies often--before they priced themselves out of my personal economy--I would see that Grinch clip. So that explains that.
Jenkin's new house in "Swampland Estates" on Loyola, in Kenner, Louisiana is big. At 13.000 sq. ft. it is by several thousand feet bigger than the biggest house I've ever worked on as a house painter. Me and the Breux's (two of three generations represented) were out there yesterday priming the windows, the inside and edges of which are bare wood and the outside being metal clad. There are about 64 working casement (the kind that crank open) windows, some more that are just set glass with frame, and then most of the doors are glass with same metal exterior framing and bare wood interior. About 100,000 dollars worth of windows by Pella, which I declare, suck, because the wood parts should be pre-primed at the factory. It was bad enough some years ago when the Pella design allowed for relatively easy removal of the windows from their frames, but now they are designed so that it is impractical to remove them and therefore some crannys go unprimed, but not to worry Mr. Jenkin's, we're gonna take care of you and your Pella windows will work like a dream.
The idea of this job came up a couple of years ago and the Saints weren't much of a team and Ditka not much of a coach and we were wanting to get away from this particular builder who was killing us with his work ethic but then Jenkin's postponed and we quit the builder anyway. A great man to work for, the builder, and some good fun had working around the various subcontractors, but like I said, too much work, way too ambitous. I had always encouraged the slackening of work ethic and my boss was with me on that so for the last couple of years he makes less money, I make a little more, and work is only as hard as it has to be.
But the builder come hunting us recently, playing on our pride by suggesting the painters we gave him as replacements were adequate but he wanted something a little better for the big boy's house. I suspect as much as anything he's just tired of Jose and his boys pretending they don't speak english that well when it suits them. Jose used to work with us and not only does he speak english quite adequately, he can tell jokes in english, which I've always understood equates to near mastery of a language.
And what with the Saints giving us more than a little excitement this year the idea became almost attractive to paint this Lineman's house. I report this at the same time I am flooded with new ideas, ideas that always seem a little bigger than me, but probably are what keep me alive even though I can't access them properly. I can see them so there's hope on that front and as for the people who want to put Christ back in Christmas I say go ahead and do what you think is best.
The Obligatory Sunlight
Early morning sun enters the unwashed windows of an unfinished two story dream home capturing slants of floating sawdust which speckle the face of a worker at rest. The worker sits on an empty five gallon bucket, leaning forward, elbows to knees, hands clasped together, and confesses the dream which put color to the thing which has bothered him for some time.
"I had a dream last night that I was sharing my wife with my brother. We were living in a home like this one, two stories, and apparently the arrangement allowed either my brother or I to pair up with my wife, and this evening my brother says he's going to bed and my wife gets all frisky-like and says 'Wait up, I'm coming with you,' and they gallop up the stairs, laughing and hugging each other as they go. And then I can hear the bedroom door close and them up there giggling and jumping up and down on the bed like kids. I'm sitting on the couch and the TV is playing nothing but white static and I'm thinking this is no good, this arrangement, something has to change, and as soon as I think that my brother calls over to me from the stairway--I hadn't even heard him come down--and tells me in an offhand way that I need to start the laundry. I say offhand, but it was also deliberate, the way he instructed me, head down and eyes up as if looking over reading glasses, and punctuating with a raised eyebrow and a cluck of the tongue. He then did a casual about face and sighed, as if giving me those instructions, and the subsequent task ahead of him (fucking my wife), were heavily weighted chores."
His co-worker thought this was the most sensitive, insightful, and funny thing his boss had ever said in the six years they had worked together, and so to respect that his laughter was both loud and genuine.