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Great White
Well I don't want to be one to go on about ghosts but I had a few minutes to spare while I waited for the avowed racist to load his tools into the gang box and so I told him I saw a ghost this weekend and he said what? what? and I responded ghost, ghost.
The man making templates for the granite countertops I have shared space with on many jobs over the years but there has never been a reason for bonding so we traditionally go about our jobs without even the most minimal of contact. It was therefore curious to me to find him standing in what might be considered the "ring" of conversation as I began the story you've already heard (or can hear if you make one step backward).
He of course had his own story and like me never thought much of the reality of ghosts but was of the type to be open minded. He was on a job in old Algiers studying a sheet of paper with measurements when he became aware of a presence and out of the corner of his eye saw what he took to be a woman's shoe, albeit retro. Then into whatever portion of his vision he was allowing for this event he noticed the dress of this woman was coming almost to the floor and he thought how odd that was and looked up and over to see nothing. His admission, contrasted to his general standoffish and rather serious demeanor over the years added that bit of chill which caused both the racist and I to admit to goosebumps.
And then it came to me something I have noticed around here over the years and that is that it is pretty hard to find someone in this area who doesn't have a ghost story.
A guy named Magee from the old college days was in town for Jazzfest last week bearing gifts both baked and of manual labor. The deserts were sweet enough but his manual labor towards the detailing of Rocheblave was sweeter still. He attended the fest for three of the four days during it's second weekend, but somehow wisely missed the Saturday to end all Saturdays during which the previous attendance record was broken almost in two I guess you could say. Previous--ninety some odd thousand, Saturday 2001--one hundred sixty thousand. Both of those numbers exemplify what I don't like about Jazzfest, although it is a pretty amazing event. I ventured out on the Thursday and saw some locals and then was able to hear, but not see (the crowd prevented), Lucinda Williams, who I was worried would not translate well to a middle of the day crowd in an open field but I was completely wrong and her voice I guess combined with a pretty fine sound system was so pure that at times I had to wonder maybe she should be recording these as re-releases of her top songs. So that was good. I fled immediatedly after though because her stage was one that had required me to travel deep into the unknown territory of others, although I must admit some of the "other's" were truly inspirational to behold.
While Magee was being a worker and I sat and drank beers gleefully a denizen of the street walked right up to us with a bucket of tools offering them for sale. The recent neighborhood robberies combined with the fact that he had completely ignored me and had straightaway approached Magee made me behave badly I'm afraid and before I knew it I was laying the old "well it's my property you're on and I'm telling you we ain't interested." The salesman walked off in a huff accusing me of bringing up that old "white" thing. I felt like an a-hole but in the new Rocheblave regime a no-sale is a good sale so I'm happy in a sense to have discouraged another solicitor.
I am the great white a-hole, so what?
how'd you know I was gonna do that?
Visitations
I was talking to myself first and then later to my neighbor and crack consultant regarding things Rocheblave. The first conversation was a self loathing exercise meant to get to the bottom of things and the second conversation was part play acting, part truth by way of absurdity.
"Goofy boy seeing ghosts. Stupid sumbitch."
"l'm just reporting what I saw."
"A ghost?"
"Seems crazy I agree but either way the audience wins. Ghost stories are always fun or if not that then watching the step by step of a man losing his mind could be good too, that is, I mean, entertainment-wise. Reality-wise it wouldn't be fun or funny, it would be mostly tiresome. 'The day he saw the ghost in broad daylight would be a summary early in the chronology of things and later the summaries might read like--The day he started his church, and The day he recruited his first parishoner.'"
My neighbor said, "looks like a compound over here." The new six foot chain link fence does lend an institutional air to the project but whatayagonnado? Some securing of property within budget must occur.
"Yes," I said, I'm thinking of starting a church, how'd you like to join? May I offer some Kool-aid?"
"I should get some of that you're smoking."
"I am sober of mind and the body is free of foreign intoxicants."
"So you say."
"Doubt not the pastor of your new church but embrace his ideology with all your heart and let loose the purse strings into his coffers, for there is much need here in this my new church."
My neighbor pulled his pants legs up and walked about tippy toe.
Later
"But seriously," and then I prefaced and qualified the hell out of what I was trying to say as is my custom, "...and you know it's always nothing, just a shadow, or a moving reflection caused by a distant passing car or..."
"It's not always nothing," my neighbor said.
He's probably just being supportive until I give up the ice cold budweiser he asked for, is what I think at the time but go on to tell him "...anyway, I'm sitting there in the back and I have this sensation that someone is at the front door so I do what I do which is lean my head down low, I'm sitting on a bucket you see, and look under the house to spy legs or feet out front but what I see instead is a face, not black or white but more red, or just a white person with all the blood rushing to his or her head, It was hard to tell the sex of it, looking at me looking at it, both of us more or less with our heads upside down. We stared at each other like that for several moments until I decided to get up and rush the sixty feet to find, well, nothing, of course. There was no one there, and the front door was firmly shut. But not locked. I felt certain that if a person had existed they were now in the house, because it would have been hard to disappear, completely, if they had just run off when I got up. So I push the door open hard with a breezy but nervous 'hello,' and then enter the premises of a place temporarily not my home. I pick up a hammer and the heart is pounding away as I look in cubbly holes and behind sheets of plywood leaning against the wall. I get to the last possible hiding place which of course now is a place where all my cumulative fear can focus and I start hissing, or some bizarre emission of sound, maybe a little fricative thrown in, and I have to admit I was almost scaring myself, but also psyching up to bury a hammer into the ephemeral flesh of the intruder. I honestly never thought of the presence as flesh and blood. Anyway, I found nothing or no one in the house."
"What are you gonna do."
"Nothing."
My neighbor then told me about visitors from beyond over at his house and how it pisses him off and he wants to get a BB gun to scare them away. I offered that I was not so sure about the efficacy of BB guns for scaring ghosts but..."it's such an unknown area of study..." "...except for Ghostbusters," he cut in, ..." but you know, yeah, maybe a BB pistol would be good."
My neighbor and I might not know exactly where the other is coming from on any given issue but he plays along with me as well as anyone will so I have to give him his props for that, though I'm pretty sure we were both mostly serious for awhile during our ghost discussion.
"...and sometimes I look over here at night from across the street and see this guy standing here like this..." and he made his arms extend outward, like a limp crucifixion, with fingers toward the ground.
hello nola, I'm not getting much computer time lately, spread thin between dumaine and rocheblave. i saw a ghost under the house at rocheblave today, looking at me looking at him/her. This looks good and like a lot of work, thanks webmaster jimb
Cat Story
I just now saw something that I have never seen before and hope never to see again.
There are flies in the Dumaine house and this has come to mean one thing to us the residents here. Something dead: in the walls?, the attic?, or under the house.
To get to the beginning of this we'd have to go a ways back to the day I quit smoking while a slightly insane fellow named James sat with me on this Dumaine porch bumming what I told him would be the last, "so let's live it up." I have not seen James since that day. It was late August of the year 1998, almost three years before this day today when I would see something I have never seen before, and me a guy with eyes wide open. Mama D was still alive at the time.
Near the end of the pack a matronly feline who would soon be named Point Blank (posthumously, I'm afraid), ran in front of a small red car and became in an instant nothing more than cooling meat on the asphalt covered brick pavers of Dumaine. I scooped her still limp facsimile of catness with a shovel into the dumpster across the street. I wrote a piece about it and ended it or nearly ended it with the sad sad imagery of Point Blank's recently born progeny lurking longingly by the dumpster.
Those cats begat and so on until there were three fairly identical balls of pitiful fluff begging for food at the back door here. This will be if nothing else a lesson: Don't feed the strays.
One lost half his tail, one got eaten by wild dogs, and one remained, with or without our care, feeding, or watering, she remained. I did occasionally entertain what now can be seen as fairy tale versions of how she survived.
Is that enough clue? Just twenty minutes ago now I'm looking for the paper which might have been thrown over the fence into the side alley (yard) and what I witnessed is what I'm telling you. The little cat, scrawny, no bigger than an adolescent kitten but truly an adult, bent over a sleepy newborn kitten, sucking it's fur. However the kitten is not sleepy but dead, and its mama is not sucking but chewing, and the kitten is not all kitten but half gone; the hind quarters are missing.
And I've toyed with the theme of kitten as metaphor for the urban reality here but the metaphors are not up to it, are not up to describing or enhancing a reality so severe as a scrawny feline you shoo away from rubbing against your leg because the vibrating neediness of it repels you, you suspect a con, you have good reason to suspect a setup, and the needs you don't provide for another are often met in ways you'd rather not suspect.
Incident Free
I have mentioned before the Church's Chicken at the corner of Broad and Bienville because it is the only local fast food establishment that has in recent years had a cold blooded murder occur inside it's doors.
I have for some years fantasized about eating healthier and for this reason have become a semi-regular customer at Church's because they offer collard greens as a side, and I, perhaps ignorantly, think that greens are the healthiest food on the planet.
Last night for my dinner fix I went to Church's (mostly for the biscuits and greens but got some disgusting greasy chicken to go with it because it is afterall, a chicken joint) and was met at once by a time/space warped reality occuring inside a jail cell, which did however also offer chicken, biscuits, and collard greens for the hungry, so I placed my order, sat down, and waited.
"I kill all you mthrfkers and think no more 'bout it. I just finished three so I ain't worried about the time."
"They'llah give you death for that," his partner responded.
There were in all four or five teenager/twentysomethings in their group and the leader was the one just out of jail and this may have been his victory celebration. They were very loud and abusive in a very controlled manner. They had made the inside of the small glass walled chicken establishment a worrisome and threatening place to be. The cashier had the look of someone who came to work to get away from the stupidily loud aggressive behavior of the street warrior and here was met with its most boisterous example.
He sauntered up once and said to her, "How about yous come to work for me?" but he couldn't seem to conjure just what it is he did or what it is she might do for him. Her pained expression showed previous experience in dealing with the ignorant showman.
At one point I was the midpoint of a diagonal path between the big man and his second in command and there was to be a tossed exchange of a packet of ketchup. I could see my order being boxed up and was hoping to flee this place without incident because as I have alluded this was not a place one could consider "incident free."
The packet went wide around my table as if my hope for all things to be copacetic was in itself a beneficent polarity shield. Upon fleeing I did not look back, nor do I wish to, anymore.
As April Ends
This may come as a shock to few but it looks like I'm behind schedule on the Rocheblave job. And judging by my apparent need to rest once in awhile it appears I will not be making up any lost time any time soon. But it does have a more finished unfinished feel to it so I am now getting a jump start on the acclimation to a new home process, which includes hot boiled crawfish and cold beer in the middle of the day followed by a nap.
The bottles rise to the surface showing themselves as possible shards but are easily spied as more than that by the avid bottle hunter/renovator/archaeologist. Today's specimen is an intact three inches tall with a short tapered neck and a beveled rim, the opening ostensibly shut by a stopper such as cork. The light weight and the visible seams on either side lend a sense of cheap imitation, but imitation of what? The five three inch lines of raised lettering say this:
Sample Bottle
Dr. Kilmer's
Swamp-Root
Kidney Cure
Binghamton, NY
I didn't say damn yankee carpetbaggers but I might have been thinking it, standing in the side yard over at Rocheblave clutching the now empty cure.
There is a full house at Dumaine.
Friday I met briefly with the more frightening alter ego that inhabits Shelton.
I found the belt I had been missing for six months; it was right where I left it, in a place where I would almost touch it each night; I ordered six new pair of painters paints and had them delivered to this front door without leaving the keyboard or talking to a salesperson; I found a ten dollar bill in a parking lot and a pair of cheap sunglasses picked up from the Dumaine gutter are the lenses I prefer.
There was a good bit of confusion going on between me and the Sewerage and Water Board over what the actual address is at Rocheblave. It ( a former structure) used to have five addresses attached to it and I picked one of the middle ones while Sewerage and Water Board was using the first one. It came down to an all business letter with a threat to disconnect which would then put me in a category placing me at risk to be visited by another city agent who could determine my home uninhabitable. I did not want that to happen so I went down and gave them the deposit they wanted plus a few dollars for the current water bill. There was that little bit of irony that I had yet to be hooked up to city water at the time but if all the previous confusion between us could be cured by the greater part of a Ben Franklin far be it from me to bring up a distracting detail like that. Three days later in the mail I received a check for the amount of deposit. And I can say it was a pleasure doing business.
The weather has been lovely which I say while I still can.
There's a new guy beginning a renovation on Rocheblave and if I see the sculptor who allowed her trash haulers to pile trash in front of his place I'm to tell her..."yeah yeah, you betcha, I'm all over it, let me write this down," I mumble to myself as the aura of his self-importance diminishes the smaller his back becomes.
Dishwasher
There's a kid over there in the front room of Dumaine playing one of those first person shooter games on that COMPAQ computer that onced vexed me day after day, crashing repeatedly until I just gave up and took it as a loss, writing it off as Compaq rubbish with a flaky FEDERAL warranty. The next year Compaq suffered huge losses, FEDERAL was being sued, and the store where I bought the computer went into bankruptcy and shut down, and I had by then received a 300 dollar replacement system from an online auction that has worked like a charm for a couple years now. So I felt pretty well vindicated.
I'm not even sure of names as this point, some of this new bunch I don't really know that well and the energy involved to start from scratch explaining why I want the front door closed when the AC is on, etc., blah, blah, and I'm only here for a few hours today and I want everyone to chill (no volume on games, no loud talking, let me rest).
At one point a loud kid said to a less loud kid, "stop that cussing..." something something...,"Mr. Jim." And I glanced over, heavy lidded, and glassy-eyed to tell the truth, thinking I don't care if you cuss if you can do it quietly. And the glass picture in front of the less loud kid explodes with blood which then drips down the inside of the screen, game over.
I saw the kitten creep from under the dance hall three days ago, briefly. Shelton, I haven't seen at all for weeks now, and wonder what is up with him. It is as if they--Shelton and that kitten--are living by the survivalist credo of the ground soldier--limit your exposure.
Took in the French Quarter Fest for a few hours Friday nite, had two Bloody Marys, rice and greens with chicken livers sauteed in sweet hot pepper sauce, and a bump on the one hitter which got me thinking about how far I was from the car and how derivative the music currently was and since I had earlier been wowed by local jazz virtuoso, Irvin Mayfield, I left out of there and drove off to the suburbs where I bought some discount t-shirts and mosquito repellant at the Walmart. It takes a lot of courage to leave the house sometimes because the number of cultures through which one can travel around here can be dizzying.
I think I had a pretty good buzz on laying down last night at Rocheblave with a cool breeze blowing across my mosquito repellant skin, some classical music on the radio, and a bit of confidence about the next morning's task which was to start building a small side deck (or landing), with stairs descending down the left and right side. I'd been studying this one on a DIY building site on the Web, so unlike so many of the tasks I have attempted for the first time, this one I had a little schooling about, which judging by today's apparent lack of mistakes, has proven useful.
And then I tried to follow the guy who had just stolen my neighbor's dishwasher and was pushing it on a handcart down the middle of the street, but by the time I put my shoes on and got in the car he had utterly disappeared. I headed off to Dumaine to make that call which was going to make a long night (the police don't respond to calls like they did in the hey day of reformation a few years past), and see a couple of cops parked at the local grocery. One is engaged with a teenager in a fancy car who is playing a new CD the cop really likes. The other is getting ready to make a pay phone call and this one I ask to speak to after he is finished. Several minutes later me and him head off to the crime scene, from which he soon departs, saying, "I may know who this is." I go in and lay down, contemplating the warm dregs of a sixteen ounce budweiser beside me.
About twenty minutes later the cop honks so I go out and see he has a creep in his back seat but it turns out it's just some kid he caught in his net while looking for the thief. He's gotta take the kid to lockup so he can't really help me anymore and has no suggestions for what to do about the neighbor's wide open door behind the locked security gate. I go back to bed and am up every hour throughout the night to spy greater thievery. Sometime before dawn the door had been shut, possibly by wind.
Saturday afternoon the homeowner was very upset when she heard my words of greeting and disclosure and interrupted my stream of verbal conciousness, which I had prefaced by saying--'"just let me get rid of this whole story (which I had been holding for her for fourteen hours)," by suggesting better ways I could have dealt with the situation. She wanted me to just scare the thief away with the old "I've called the cops" routine but with all due respect to that nifty idea, I'm thinking after all the neighborhood breakins recently (my house spared, but is someone over there right now?) I want a little good old fashioned vengeance, that is, someone in jail for the grievous disrespect that has lately been shown to my most immediate neighbors, five in all. So that's why I followed the guy, unsuccessfully.
I finally met her husband though, nice guy; like her, a sculptor, and before he tried to steal away from my verbal bombast I made him give me the phone number where they staying. Because I'm taking her advice for next time, goddamn right I'll call and lay it on you, "scared 'em, TV's in the middle of the street, later." The cop by the way had no problem whatsoever with my attempt to find the thief's hideout, nor did he seem to think anything was out of order with my illegal lodging at Rocheblave.
Sunday I have completed a four by five foot landing, three feet off the ground, no stairs or railing yet. I had some beers and whatnot to celebrate.
Sack O' Candy
When I was a puppy my mom and dad, both devout Christians who also believed in the Easter Bunny, would go to some effort to hide eggs in our yard, first in South Oak Cliff, and then North Dallas.
One Easter when I became older and the simple pleasure of finding candy on the ground in a controlled environment was soon to be no more, I spied my mother inside the fenced back courtyard with a paper sack full of cellophane wrapped hard sugary colored things and she was dipping her hand into this sack, grabbing handfulls and tossing them haphazardly across the fence into the neatly cut St. Augustine on the other side.
The next year somewhat elaborate place settings were set--for me and my two brothers who hadn't yet left for college--that included chocolate covered versions of that harmlessly pagan floppy eared Easter diety. Most decidedly not Bugs I remember thinking.
Thirty years later I can hear childish laughter happening now at this decent interval past sunrise.
Toms
The Tom I call BigHead is limping in a daze with two fang marks in his neck. I haven't seen the kitten in over a week, and there is rumored to be a yellow Tom in the mix now. And there is the consistently ocassional smell of death which emanates from a nearby clump of weeds.
And unbelievably, the Rocheblave property is for the first time in ten years, or more, hooked up to city water, and a toilet flushes, and a sink and a shower do what they do but only with cold water. Much work still to be done, but at least a break in what was seeming like a bad joke being played out by a fairly competent plumber on a sometimes fairly much overwhelmed rapidly aging boy in the hood.
Dumaine swarms in Shelton's absence with a new group of boys joining Fermin, Glynn, Jacque, and other core members and if you give them a piece of colored chalk they will declare themselves the Dorgenois Boys. They seem pretty polite and respectful, some having game, others having sense of humor.
Same To You
When you start floating up from the bottom of a murky lake, nearly out of breath but not quite, it is because Failure losens its grip, allowing you to rise one time for a full gasp, which is enough to make you heady with aspiration.
I remember the words of a urine soaked bum not first hand but as told to me by M who between dropping out of University Texas and graduating University Oregon took a year in Harlem, shacking with John in a student housing walkup, where he attended Columbia Law and she was admitted (out of order for godssake) into a graduate creative writing program. She completed her year and he dropped out after one and they headed off to Springfield, Oregon together and then broke up, he heading south and her staying in Oregon and taking freshman english again because U. Oregon didn't accept some of her credits from Texas and seemingly was not impressed by her graduate work in NY.
Before that happened John's family came to NY in March or April to visit John and M and while they were all marveling at some site or just loitering perhaps outside a library or museum a homeless man with a disabled bladder reeking of the full spectrum of bodily function entered the consciousness of M's group with his unique sincerity by saying--"Happy Easter Little Family."
Getting There From Here
Outside of Delacroix I started thinking about Bob Dylan but not able to conjure up any meaning from it I grooved on the almost cliched beauty of a bayou surrounded by swamp and marsh, and the requisite moss covered trees, the yellow and pink flowers, the yellow and white honeysuckle, the waterfowl so different from the sparrows left behind, and the fact that no one was following me, which in a driving excercise on a two lane road is moderately to extremely rare.
An early Sunday morning jaunt driving blindly away from any aspect that resembles responsibility. Or goddammit, I'm tired of working; I'm tired of making mistakes; I'm tired of knowing I'm going to make mistakes and then plunging headlong into the mistake. I need a vacation. So I take a little one while on the way to what was going to be my only responsible act of the weekend: picking up materials at the Home Improvement Store. I don't wanna, therefore I don't hafta. Nawh.
I'm not saying I don't have a place to hide but I don't. Dumaine has mostly never been a hiding place, what with the insurrgence of children that just seems to happen naturally (t)here, and Rocheblave is not yet home, although I sure wish it was. Wish in one hand...
So from this part of the world take a left on Rampart and head east, vere right once, and before you know it you are in Delacroix, deadended, with nothing to do but turn around unless you came to charter a fishing boat, or have a camp nearby, or need to buy live bait. Can you say cockahoe? No matter.
The way back lacks magic, but you already know you can't have everything.
Piggly Wiggly
The girl behind the meat counter at the Piggly Wiggly in Madisonville or Mandeville said, "who gotta holta you?," referring to the bloody bandaid covering the spot near my left temple that gushed blood into my mouth this morning after my run in with the 380 pound Viking convection oven.
The plate lunch at the Piggly Wiggly was turkey and cornbread dressing, w/ salad. And I got a large coke Icee on this sultry April preview of summer like day.
I drove my boss's truck from the small exclusive ungated ("we don't really need gates on the North Shore") subdivision, a nice metallic blue 95 Chevy long bed with large engine and glass packs that make it rumble not loudly, but slightly.
Just a mental image that I play with--imagining to what far off destination my plate lunch and I could arrive at before my boss realized I wasn't coming back, A/C blasting, heading to one of the four corners, presets on the radio changed before the first fillup.
Duck And Cover
But the cute little black and white kitten wasn't shredded to a soft furry pulp that day and so lived to see another sunrise.
The lanky man was not a predator, at least this appeared to be the case, and so the kitten ventured out one afternoon from under the relative safety of a New Orleans dance hall and into the trash heap in front of lanky man's house.
Lanky man would have been moved to a moment of eye moistened sentimentality if he had seen the kitten's wide-eyed wild stare, framed as it was by the random debris of urban renovation just outside the door of his modest dwelling. Instead, it was another one of those blink of an eye moments when what one sees is the result of an action one sets forth, and which can't be stopped: in this case the half empty cup of soft drink arching towards the exact spot where lay hidden the watchful feline, its cuteness at once and forever in rapid retreat into the bowels of debris.
Consider The Kitten
When last month the people from the Pentecostal church did the human bush hog number to the vacant lot next to me so they could park eight bus loads worth of Pentecostal brethren for the big, super, grandaddy, Mardi Gras parade known as Endymion, they dislocated a kitten I've had my eye on.
The Pentecostal property does a twenty foot L behind my property and the big pile of debris they removed and 'hid" in the L looks similar to the big pile I had accumulated clearing my lot last year, and later with some considerable effort relocated to a dumpster in the front. I'm thinking the Pentecostals have forgotten the big tree limb laden weed pile because its not like its in their back yard; the church is actually two blocks away. "Bastards" is what I would call them if they weren't such a reputable church going group of people. I'm not talking about your East Texas Snake Handling Pentecostal Orthodoxy here. This is a more mellow, and biracial, bunch, although I would have to accept the invitation to one of their Saturday men's prayer breakfasts to prove that point.
Kittens are cute, even if you're a psychopath>speaking of cute.
"I'll give you an extra ten if you scoop up the dead cat over there on the side and throw it over there by the dance hall," is what I told the man I hired today, and only bring up now to illustrate a high feline mortality rate.
I'd see the kitten periodically after the great mowing and parking spectacle so I started thinking of it as a survivor, and even knowing it would grow into another sad, dingy, mewing, flea-bitten excuse for a mousetrap, I was still struck by it's black and white cuteness.
But the Tom I call BigHead is also black and white, and the obvious patriarch of this small piece of feline drama that surrounds the 200 block of Rocheblave, and he's a bad sumbitch is what he thinks but he surely does know a thing or two about pecking order which is why he spent an hour of his day today beating up the kitten: chewing on it's neck, and throttling it with battering hind paws.
Corner News
Now this might be taking the acclimation in the hood thing a bit far, but leaving Rocheblave a few minutes ago I approached the Bienville intersection with some cautious aggression, in front of the man getting ready to cross in front of me, and then nosed out with a little pump of acceleration (because sometimes at intersections the truck's transmission won't catch), and then did a hard brake in deference to the young man on the bicycle traveling in the left lane of Bienville at dusk--I'm the only white boy in this scene--and I nod vaguely to the kid on the bicycle while looking left up Bienville at the same time the kid says to the man who has now crossed behind me and is heading towards Broad on the easterly sidewalk--"whatsup m'nigger."
Now the movement of my nodding to the kid is timed so that me and the kid both know this ain't right: the white boy responding to the affectionate vernacular, so the kid, God bless him with the quickest mind, bails us out by raising up his head just so slightly and saying a quiet "whatsup" to me but for the benefit of us all.
It's been about a month, or a little less, since sixteen-year-old Shelton Jackson was thrown from this house on Dumaine out into the urban abyss of the New Orleans Sixth Ward. M made the arrangements for his relocation to a local chapter of Boys Town because even the allure of his SSI stipend was not enough, in the end, to entice any of his many blood relatives to take him in, and while he appeared to go with the flow of this, at the last minute when the social workers actually showed up, he flew. So in a sense he is a wanted man, or rather, young boy.
Those who grew up here on Dumaine cannot seem to leave the sense of home it gives them so I see Shelton on a pretty regular basis. He does makes a concerted effort to stay from the sight of M because it was she he disappointed the most with his frequent misguided attempts at manhood.
"Hey, Mr. Jim, " he yelled to me from across the street yesterday, as I was changing vehicles to go from the paying job to the Rocheblave job, "how you feeling?"
"I'm ok, hower you Shelton?" I said.
"I'm good," he said, and then I turned away from him and got into the car and started the engine. I did not know the older boy he was with.
As I'm looking right to merge from the curb to the corner of Broad which is only a hundred and fifty feet away but during certain times of the day can take a while to get to and Shelton is knocking on my window glass. I roll it down. He wants to shake hands.
"So how are you?" I said, again.
"I'm not doing anything illegal," he said.
"Good," I said. And then as afterthought, I instructed him. "You know, Shelton, if you're gonna tell stories like that you should write them down"
"Whatchu mean?"
"Like the one you told J's mom who told Miss S who told M, about how M has gone to the pipe and me pimping her out to Jermaine."
Shelton tried to explain to me how illogical that story was by saying how Jermaine hardly even hangs around this porch no more.
"Neither one of us are too worried about people thinking the stories are true, but it's bad business telling lies about people, or even about yourself."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"I mean you getting kicked out of here and trying to make it sound like you just had to leave a bad situation. You know I made it no secret I wasn't all that crazy about you staying here, but M was only trying to give you a safe place to hang out, you shouldn't disrespect her with lies that help you gain sympathy and favor from others. There's no shame or blame to any of this, a thing doesn't work out, and then you try something else. There's nothing wrong with the truth of who you are, where you come from, and where you're at. If you need to tell a story, the truth is the easiest one to tell, and the easiest one to defend," I directed into his glazed expression.
"All right, Mr. Jim." He shook my hand again and headed for the hoop and the company of those gathered in that small parking lot/transaction area which extends behind the Magnolia corner store, and the Impressive Designs haircutting establishment.
How Far To His Next Life?
I accepted the invitation of an avowed racist yesterday. When he said, "wanna burn one before you leave," I pantomined my arm behind my back.
Sure as the population of English Turn residents who are having houses built on man made (pond) "Bonita Bay" grows, so are we workers destined to smoke 'em when we got 'em.
So me and this guy, I'm not going to name him this time but I've named him before, if it matters, which I don't think it does, unless you value the recorded literal over interpretion, which is your prerogative, I got nothing to say about it, but me and him are sitting on buckets looking out over the pond, me staring at the reference point of the hard core hip hop rapper Cash Money residence, who for all his money will soon be not personally but specifically, if such a thing is possible, reduced to a term that won't leave us alone or leave our conciousness because 1) its a hateful term, and 2) because of who uses it and in what context, which is the more complicated issue, and therefore set aside for the dissecting by someone less simple than me, which is to say more smarter.
All I want to say is me and this guy are smoking marijuana, for which we will go straight to hell, kids, don't do it, it leads to degradation, and...TV watching, and he's a straight in your face racist, which is to say he just does not like non-white, but the "niggers," if truth be told, are his pet group. Me, I hate a lot of people but have "evolved" to a state where I don't delineate simply by race. I hate people of all creeds, colors, and affiliations. I guess the thing is, I have to meet the people first, or be otherwise presented with evidence which would cast a person into a mold worthy of hatred. But hatred is bad, kids, don't do it, it leads to degradation, and...TV watching.
So this guy is still working with us but has recently moved to the country (of central Louisiana), where, he had previously bragged, "they don't allow no niggers." What he's basically going on about is something I don't like either, so I'm sympathizing with him because I like him enough to do that. He moves to a small town where God is good and Good is god, and lo and behold this white nigger kid moves in next door and brings with him a full blown black nigger. And they listen to loud rap music, which goddamn it the town has an ordinance against, and besides, these kids are surely the ones broke into the store, everyone knows this and agrees, and as he describes this knowledge to me I can see how easy that rope was/is thrown over that tree limb.
I'm high on his weed though, yet frankly have better things to be doing, off early on a Monday with a new home to finish, but sitting on an unfinished back porch overlooking a pond in an exclusive gated community is ok, and contrasts my deep in the New Orleans 'hood lifestyle in such a way that I can go with this flow, and besides it is my position I fear he treasures, the one who won't agree with him, and say, "yeah, fuckin' niggers," but still can find a way to verbally pat him on his thick little skull and say, 'now, now, there, there, everything's gonna be all right.'"
Still, I gotta laugh when I think of him thinking he can hide from himself by traveling those few 150 miles every weekend.