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The Adopted Father Of Dumaine 6.15.97
Fun projects for the kids: An empty 20-ounce coke bottle becomes a macabre, lifeless, terrarium, in this easy-to-do project for children ages 6 to 12. Simply put two live chameleon lizards, with or without tails, in bottle. Make sure to screw cap on and don't puncture bottle as any breach in the plastic will extend the life of your lizards. Pass bottle between children, lettting each child torture these fascinating and harmless creatures to their satisfaction. Slick and gooey with bloody contusions, your lizards will soon stick to each other in a myriad of real life positions. Marvel as your children learn to recognize the everyday predicaments of life in an airless vacuum. --Look at 'em making love. --that one on the bottom look none too happy. --Look at 'em fight. --that one on the bottom look none too happy. --I think they dead. --that one on the bottom look none too happy. As an added fun feature to this project, witness your children as they explore the applications of Darwinian theory. Yes, stronger children really can hold down weaker children and place pulverized lizard parts on their heads…
Note: the lizards were already dead by the time I came to witness this little science project. I did not interfere with their fun until they began exploring the sewage line access at the front of the property. It has an eight inch square cast iron lid with the address of a Rampart Street plumber from 100 years ago and is about ten inches deep. A four inch ceramic pipe can be seen at one edge of the hole disappearing under the sidewalk.
The players: Shelton Jackson 12, Jacque Lewis 11, Bryan Henry 9, Marqin Lewis 8, and Erica Lewis 3. All players are now huddled around this hole when Shelton says, "Mr Jim, come see."
Grumbling, I step down from the front porch and stand over the hole. I see the tops of five children's heads.
"You seem "em Mr. Jim."
"No."
Erica squeals, "lookit Mr. Jim, lookit." Erica, the sweet dark angel of Dumaine--father unknown, mother 17, is hiding in California to avoid a local warrant--is now squatting over the hole to get a closer look at…
…"Oh how nice, baby rats." And as I watch these children open and close the iron lid, banging on it with sticks and then opening it again to see what affect they are having on newborn rat babies, I wonder what is going through people's minds when they query me as to why I have no children of my own.
"Shelton! Do not torture those rat babies!
"I won't Mr. Jim."
"I mean it, Shelton. I didn't come out here to watch a bunch of pyscho kiddies torture animals."
"I know that Mr. Jim. Ya'll cut out all that banging."
"And don't poke them with sticks."
Shelton slaps his cousin, Marqin, across his head. Marqin says,
"Why you hit me, Shelton.?"
"Mr Jim don't want us torturing them babies."
"That right Mr. Jim?"
"That's right Marqin."
"We can look at 'em Mr. Jim."
"Just look at 'em Marqin."
And I'm trying to figure when I'll have the opportunity to throw some rat dope in that hole to kill the bitch rat. Fuck a bunch of rat babies.
Don't Pull Out Your Penises In The Park 6.2.97
I proposed a few months ago to some of the neighborhood boy children (ages 6-12) that if they would clean the street on Sundays I would take them on road trips: to Audubon Park (where I say--come on guys, don't pull out your dicks and pee off the jungle gym, go behind a tree or something. Or they call each other "motherfuckin' nigger" in front of the rich white children), or to the New Orleans lakefront where I supervise their illegal swimming until the park police come and bust them, or to that suspect strip of beach in Waveland, Mississippi where a carload of good ole boys drives by yelling out--"hey you niggers," or to an Uptown music festival where Shelton, 12, punches out Eric, 10, or this weekend to a festival in the French Quarter where Mandy and I went with three boys and came back with only one. Even knowing that all these boys roam the Quarters on their own and that they can walk or bike the distance faster than you can drive it didn't relieve me of guilt for leaving the two boys (after waiting several hours in one prearranged spot, which only one of the boys bothered coming back to) behind. And they know I don't mind, would even expect them to stray to Bourbon Street, to ogle outside the titty bars, as long as they check in once in awhile. So while Fermin hung close, got an outlandish balloon hat from a clown (who wouldn't accept my money but took everyone elses), got his face painted (also for free), and shared a po-boy with us, also a special treat because I normally require Mama D provide their baloney on white bread sustenance, Shelton and Eric disappeared to do god only knows what. When Fermin tells us he needs to be home to take medicine, we drive home, I drop him and Mandy, pick up two more boys, Glynn and Michael, and head back to the Quarters to at least make the pretense of a search. I centrally locate myself, next to that damn clown again, and send boys off into the Quarters. They go to the River, the French Market, Bourbon Street and back, get free balloon hats each (the most extravagant that clown made all day), and I say so you guys looked for Shelton and Eric to which they respond, oh yes, and we head back home. Shelton and Eric are there, leaning against the iron railing at Dumaine, and knowing I'll be mad try to sucker punch me with "why did you leave us down there," at which point I yell some grown up stuff at them (although not once did I call them motherfuckin' bitches as their guardians sometimes do), and banished them from the next Sunday's activities. To which they responded--what about the Sunday after that? I guess I showed them.
Short Answer
"Is it really that dangerous in New Orleans?" She came right out with it, intuiting better than I that ours would be a short conversation, and she wanted answers. It was a question to the point, or to my point at least, as I seem to be always telling stories of danger and death on the streets of New Orleans. I tried to convince her that while I wasn't making anything up, still, life goes on. It is not a threatening place to be, New Orleans. Not always anyway. Not everyday. I don't even know I'm doing it until I reread a string of ten or twelve and realize somebody dies violently in more than half of them. I'll never get over it. I'm going to keep telling it 'till it stops. I'm going to keep telling it. That's what I'm deciding right this minute. I had for awhile been thinking about it before she asked me is why it struck me so hard. I had the days previous been thinking about getting a new angle, one more kind and gentle, but I won't. Not as long as Eddie Green picks me up at the airport.
I was broke leaving New York and in Jersey City the ATM spit my card back telling me it was expired. Well, so it was. I wouldn't be taking a cab home. I called a friend. She said she would pick me up. When I called her from the New Orleans airport she was in the middle of a small crisis. Hunter had been picked up in front of the Dumaine house on a curfew violation. She sent Eddie Green, Hollis Price's high school teammate. Eddie chose football over basketball and attends Southern University in Baton Rouge on scholarship. He is a 6' 1" 230 pound Linebacker.
"Hi Eddie."
"Hey Mr. Jim."
"Jacque."
"Mr. Jim."
"Mr. Jim, this is Stacey. She stay next door," Eddie Green said. I remember that name. I had that name written on a piece of paper somewhere. I had a couple of years before met her younger sister, Brianna, and thought what a nice young girl. They had just bought the house next door on Dumaine. Brianna had told me they would be getting an alarm system installed. I told her they wouldn't need it. No one would mess with them. I had been told the same thing several years previous, and it had proved true.
"Hello Stacey."
"Hello," she said, turning to profile in the front seat.
"Eddie," I said, "In New York City a few hours ago I heard on the television," and I imitated an announcers voice, "Hollis Price leads the Oklahoma Sooners into the final four."
"Mr. Jim, I'll be on television someday."
"That's not necessary, Eddie."
The year after Hollis and Quannas left, Eddie hit a three pointer at the buzzer, winning by one point the last big game for St. Augustine. On their way to a sure state championship repeat, they were punished for a minor recruiting violation and had to forfeit that game. Now, two years later, Eddie's shot stands as the last great moment in St. Aug basketball, as they haven't even won their own district in the last two years.
Jacque Lewis and I in the backseat watched Eddie try to impress Stacey.
"I'm not about all that ghetto behavior," Stacey said at one point, explaining why she was never seen outside. Later she convincingly told Jacque about summer job opportunities.
Eddie took the 610 split, exiting at St. Bernard, passing the DeSaix/Gentilly right turn. I never take St. Bernard all the way to Broad, but Eddie does. At the corner I could see the MacDonalds and realized this was Eddie's old St. Aug neighborhood. Once a Purple Knight, always a Purple Knight. Eddie is 21. Stacey is 21. Three days before at this same corner:
"A 21-year-old man about to board an RTA bus near his 7th Ward home was ambushed and fatally shot Thursday morning as students sitting in the stopped bus looked on. William Jackson was standing at St Bernard Avenue and Broad Streets about 8 a.m. when the gunman came around the corner of St. Bernard Avenue and fired at least three shots at Jackson. The victim, who was hit in the head and neck, died about 2:30 p.m. at Charity Hospital." (New Orleans Times Picayune, 3.22.02)
Speculating about why the police were strictly enforcing curfew laws at Hunter's expense, I suggested the many recent First District murders perhaps was the reason. My friend thought it may have to do with the 9-year-old boy run over on the West Bank the week I was gone. He was hit by a car. The car stopped, occupants got out and moved the 9-year-old to the sidewalk, then drove away. The boy died.
Visiting Dumaine three successive days to update my archive and I see one of the boys, one who used to be good at algebra, but now is a young hustler clinging to the best available peer group. He calls across the street to an older boy, "you heard C got smoked?" The older boys responds with a barely perceptible nod, and walks on, towards Dorgenois. The next day I read this, same paper quoted up above:
"In Tuesday's shooting, one was killed and a second wounded in a drive-by shooting in the 9th Ward about 10:45 p.m. Corey Williams, 29, of Mid-City, died at Charity Hospital about 11:25 p.m. after receiveing four gunshot wounds to the head, chest, thigh, and arm, officials said."
My friend and I and another neighbor used to attend Nonpac meetings the first Tuesday of each month at the First District Police Station. Five or Six or Ten people would be an average number attending. You can at these meetings, if you choose to do so, voice your specific concerns regarding crime in your neighborhood. You can in this way get a small measure of special treatment. I don't go to the meetings anymore. My friend goes occasionally, and the neighbor goes somewhat regularly, partly because she dates cops. The neighbor said at the last meeting there were 70 people in attendance and they were all mad as hell. There has been recently a rather obvious spike in violent crime.
So it may be like my friend Bill said when I was telling him of the AKA query--Is New Orleans really that dangerous? Bill said, "the short answer is--'yes.'"
Reliving Cerviche At The Alias
I was seated between friends at the bar of the new Alias restaurant in New York City's Lower East Side situated on the front porch of a home in River Ridge, Louisiana, performing my duties as the dedicated housepainter, inside the vibrating buzzing world of a dual action sander, which was acting as facilitator to my duality.
My boss had missed me in my absence and had already warned me of the owner's professed experience with refinishing fine furniture, and how this owner had taken issue with the use of a DA sander on the cypress doors we were preparing for a natural finish. The door frames would be painted. My boss and I had discussed this at 6:30 in the morning which is when we start our work day and is an hour when we can cuss homeowners with impugnity. "Well, he can kiss my ass," I had said before removing the three dip stripped cypress doors from their frames, and taking them to the front porch for sanding.
I wasn't just inside a daydream, I was back in NYC, despite recorded information showing me gone from there two days previous. I was back at the restaurant seated at the bar, on Clinton St., actually living in the past. Successful transportation. The maitre d' was pouring wines all night long. I was drinking them--the reds, the whites, the desserts, the champagnes, I have no idea. It was a relaxing luxury, no one was sniffing corks or pausing between the taste and the pour. Brief consultations, bottles opened, bottles emptied. The tables behind us were covered in white tablecloth but the atmosphere was pleasantly devoid of pretense. Glasses were removed and replaced with appropriate counterparts without me knowing of the switch. Trust was involved, and rewarded.
Commuters converged from three different directions and departed for their own worlds but I was not with them. I was the early bird doing my job with the sander, spring had sprung, the air was warm. I would not leave this restaurant ever. I would not step out into the frigid air. I was frozen in time. I would not be aware of the homeowner lurking nearby, not until the last cork was extracted. I would not.
Bastard's not going away.
I could hear him before he spoke. My lack of focus proving both salvation and damnation. I turned the sander off and faced him. "Comments?" I said. I was already pissed. He has no idea how complex is the simple luxury. How far I've travelled to have this absolutely unneccessary conversation.
"Uh, yes, uh, don't you have one of those..." he pantomined an orbital palm sander. I am normally a polite person, but I could tell from the get go on this one, I wasn't going to be.
"No, I don't." If I kept it short, I reasoned, I could still make it back for another champagne, or hell, I could rewind to the backrub of mistaken identity, and the opening Guinness. "Hey, what's with that new bottle," I could have asked, even though I did not ask it at the time.
And he proceeded to tell me of his past with furniture, before his ascension into the world of digital cable sales. I nodded, impatiently. Is there any way I can communicate how totally uninterested I am in what you are about to say? Could we please avoid what is now the certainty of my imminent rudeness? Eventually I would bottom line with the question "do you want me to stop?" The guy was looking at a middle part of a process and deeming an unseen final product unacceptable. I wasn't getting back to New York. My heart rate was way too high now for such travel. Bastard. Like I get out all that much.
I had opened with a line I never imagined I would actually use in serious conversation.
"This ain't my first rodeo." He countered saying it wasn't his either.
Erlich and crew are burning down, slinging gourmet at all who come through the door. They are the proverbial purveyors of good taste. Everything I sampled was delicious, the shrimp, the pork, the trout, but it was the sea bass cerviche appetizer that rocked my world. I'm not there to see it or taste it, I'm only remembering it. I could have though. I was working up to reliving the cerviche, before the interruption. Late, an off duty chef comes in. He doesn't like the nickname so stop using it. Don't make me get rude about it.
I said, finally, deciding consciously to be plainly rude, "If I'm doing it, I'm using my methods and my tools." The tone I used implied a great many other words, none of which I use regularly in polite conversation. He threatened to tell my boss, cancel checks, etc. I smiled, I mean grimaced. He left me alone. Later that day his wife came and apologized, clearing the cloudy air with a few smiling words. I apologized to her, explaining in less detail than this, what he had interrupted. She understood. Women, you gotta love 'em.
What was almost lacking from that evening at the restaurant was not lacking. At some point very late in the evening I had the opportunity to look deep into myself to wonder just what the hell was happening in college basketball. March Madness. This being a rare year where I had a team moving close towards the final four. I had for a couple of years followed a Louisiana highschool team on their trips to the state playoffs and two players from that team, Hollis Price and Quannas White, play for the Oklahoma Sooners. But nobody in this group has any reason to give a holy hell about that. Except the kid. The kid might know. So I asked him. He did not know if Oklahoma won the previous night, but he knew of the Indiana upset over Duke. We made a simple bond. A bit later, leaving the restaurant, and the kid turned around from where he sat with his girlfriend and said, "Oklahoma." I said, "Hollis Price." He repeated it.
They got it going on down at the Alias.
Limestone Magnificence
I wasn't sure if the airport bus still ran from the corner of Tulane and Broad so I left my house three hours before my flight and walked up Rocheblave across Canal and zigged over to Dorgenois. There were a few little dudes hanging out in front of that store at the corner of Palmyra with whom I purposely made no eye contact or in anyway let on that I was aware of their presence lest they think I was hunting for drugs. I fit the profile.
This was nine o'clock in the morning and although it was an unreasonable thing for me to be thinking I still felt somewhat secure in my walking. The two recent murders in this five block stretch had not left a psychic residue that I could feel unless you suggest that this writing is proof to the contrary. Over the years dozens and dozens of people have been murdered in this area which surrounds the Courthouse/Parish Prison of New Orleans. The killings were happening when a young Louis Armstrong ran around this neighborhood and they continue to happen. That the situation hasn't improved in one hundred years is just a fact I am laying on the table like loose change. You can put the change in your pocket or you can toss it in a cup, where you forget about it and don't care all that much when your kids steal it.
Standing on the corner by the pay phone I waited for the bus I wasn't sure would come. The Chinese restaurant was to my back next to the bright yellow Bail Bond office next to the brand new Taco Bell/Pizza Hut. Straight across Tulane Ave. is an original 50's style MacDonalds. Caddy cornered from the corner on which I stand is the Courthouse rising up in all its soot covered limestone magnificence.
Some fellow riders approached and I asked one of them did the airport bus still stop here and she told me yes it did but I had better wave it down when it came or it might pass right by. It was only a few minutes later when the woman said "here it comes" and I was on my way. It cost a dollar fifty which I thought was a good deal considering a cab ride would be twenty dollars.
Before I was on my way, before any fellow riders had approached, I was standing alone. The three lanes of traffic between me and the median are travelling north. Stopped at the red light protecting Broad St. is a red high end SUV. The clean cut well dressed young man in the driver's seat is bobbing his head to loud rap music vibrating from his car stereo. An attractive young woman moving towards me in the crosswalk pauses in front of the young man's car and does a little dance. He just looks at her. She smiles at him. The light is staying red longer than I thought was normal.
The woman said, "you heard your friend was killed?"
"Who?"
"Cal."
"No, when?"
"Two days ago, in his driveway."
"I haven't been seeing him much," the man said.
"Yeah, he's dead," the woman said, moving towards me now on the curb. The light turned green and the young woman waved at the young man but he did not wave back.
What You Don't Know
The boy finally pled guilty, was given credit for time served, was told to stay away from the victim, was given a bunch of hours doing community service, was told he must re-enroll in highschool, and was assigned a probation officer. During his time in he would call collect from the jail to any number he had memorized, including that of the victim, and beg for help. Everyone had heard it all before and began to let their machines screen calls. The recordings on the machine were prefaced by a pre-recorded message from the parish prison that indentified the call as coming from the prison and allowed a blank in which the inmate could say his name. The boy was always one to think outside the box and having grown up around it enough to know how people are when being bugged by inmates he took advantage of the blank to say more than his name. Instead of saying like most this is Bill Bill Bill, or John John John, or Jeff Jeff Jeff, he would say who he was and then threaten to kill his 2-year-old nephew. This was the type of frustratingly hurtful outburst he had previously in his 17 years saved for quiet moments with a cherished cousin or niece, perhaps having them in a clinch, or after letting their heads come up from under the water. There have been bestselling books written about winning through intimidation. The boy was the anti-poster child for such a book. He redefined the concept. He disallowed any positive connotation for such gibberish. Though if you met the kid you'd be drawn to him. You would even come to trust him. He knows more about trust than you do. And you get the feeling he knows more about everything, without being able to quote a single line. He is the challenge that amounts to everyday facing that everything you know is wrong. And he is free.
God Frowns
I was on my way to dinner at the home of a former girlfriend, carrying a tabloid of some repute which was however printed on cheap paper with cheaper ink. I hoped to spy the object of a crush, the roommate of this former girlfriend. It was a hot, sultry, summer day, and I sweated profusely as I walked the distance, switching the paper from one hand to the other. I would occasionally wipe the sweat from my brow.
How lucky am I to be greeted at the door by the object of my crush, whom upon inspecting me, somewhat rudely I thought, burst out laughing? God, was she pretty. It seems the cheap ink from the cheap paper had melted onto my sweaty hands, and everytime I had wiped my brow it had made a black streak across my face. She offered me a paper towel before retreating, with snickers, to finish her preparations for that evening's date. At one point she came out rubbing baby oil along the length of her thin arms and I could of cried. A German fellow from her economics class had asked her out and as he had no transportation of his own, would be paying for her bus fare, as well as her dinner. So it was all about confidence I was being prompted to learn that night.
Later, long after the night of her laughter, I heard she married a man who mistreated her. It was, at best, unreliable information, and I chose to disbelieve it. Later still, I heard of this man, or the one after him, I really don't know, who, walking the walk of the big dog through the developing development of his design, was pissed on from above by an unaware construction worker. God smiled. The worker was fired.
Watchdog Backfire
My neighbor has a watchdog. I once worked on a ranch near Bridgeport, Texas. If you have to ask, it is probably a backfire.
The watchdog is not a pet, it is a watchdog. The watchdog is not an animal you show love for no good reason; you show love only to give the watchdog hope and encouragement so that the watchdog will perform duties admirably. The duty of the watchdog is to watch, listen, smell, and bark. The watchdog is always on a chain and is fed well and treated well within the parameters of its profession. A good watchdog will not bark at cats but the cats around here know the limits of her chain and tease watchdog, so I don't blame her that barking. Me and the watchdog sleep only a few feet away from each other.
On the ranch in the passenger seat of the jeep roaring down the rocky dirt road after that renegade dog--Buck shouted, "get em Jeeuhm," and so caught up in the moment of consensus revenge I casually pointed the 12 gauge shotgun in the dog's direction and pulled the trigger. It was a hit but the dog kept moving and so did we. I felt like me and the dog might get a reprieve but on the return trip the dog was dead along side the road. The ranch was nine or fourteen hundred acres; we were replacing four strand sagging wooden post barbed wire fencing with taut five strand metal t-post fencing, even across Rattlesnake Hill. The dogs we were chasing were deer dogs. Area hunters would release a pack of five or seven dogs under a fence and the dogs were trained to find and corral deer and bark in unison so the hunter could follow the sound and sneak over to shoot him one. Every so often a deer would just die of fright. The rancher I worked for did not shoot deer, only doves. Sometimes the rancher's registered Hereford heiffers got mixed up in this deer corralling and became very upset. The possibility that they would hurt themselves was high. This is why Buck and I were locked and loaded. Bad dogs.
I read something recently where the author commented that people in urban areas would hear gunshots and try to convince themselves it was just a car backfire. This may have been in Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, him describing Chicago. My truck politely backfires on occasion, and earlier today I heard a backfire, and I thought about a few months previous a visiting friend asking was that loud report a gunshot? At some point around here in New Orleans after the current police chief (who just lost his bid to be mayor) implemented more severe penalties for public gun firing and concerned groups made concerted efforts to educate the public about the hazards of falling bullets, the gun firing became less noticeable. Especially on New Years Eve, but also day to day. These days people just aren't firing guns unless they really need to. Still, occasionally, and especially at night when you can listen better, you will hear that sound that is not a backfire and you tend to feel very different about it, compared to how you feel when you hear that other sound, the one that makes you ask the question was that a gunshot(?). One feeling is like fear, the other is closer to curiosity.
I felt bad about killing that dog on the ranch but Buck told me not to worry about it. Buck drowned unwanted kittens in a burlap sack in the stock pond. Buck was a hard working earnest country boy, maybe 55 years-old. He chain smoked, had bright, crystalline blue eyes, one of them squiggy, and dripped saliva through the gaping holes in his rotten choppers when he worked bent over something. His face was craggy. He drove a Ford. At breakfast and dinner he had a fondness for canned biscuits thickly smeared with margarine (smeared thick as cream cheese on a bagel), and drenched in real mapel syrup from a plastic bottle with a red push/pull cap.
Watchdog is very sensitive. She does not like cats, free dogs, crackheads, teenagers, people who block my driveway with their cars, or in general anyone casting off the odors of a malingerer. Which on occasion includes me. There is a 12 foot space between my house and the six foot cyclone fence behind which watchdog stays. I call this my side yard. It is shaded almost all day long, and would be a good place for a summer barbecue if I ever got a grill and some meat and lighter fluid, and matches. Watchdog's backyard is one of six that belong to four houses that orient themselves perpendicular to this one and front Bienville Street.
On the ranch after I killed that dog and Buck and I had put a godalmighty scare into the rest of that pack, one of the group showed up lingering around the pens where Duke and the other bird dogs were kept. These bird dogs were trained like watchdog and were not pets. You did not really pet them, or talk to them silly like you might do a dog who has seen the inside of a house. You cleaned their shit from their cages and added fresh hay to their bedding. They were like horses in this sense. Beasts of burden. They seemed happy when they were let out, briefly, to run free, but otherwise their demeanors were described by adjectives like polite, jittery, hopeful, and patient. The lost dog, the one from the deer hunting pack, was goofy. I have a penchant for goofy. So I petted the dog (Buck told me not to) and the dog, never before petted, became mine. At some point Buck let me know that it was my chore to deal with and as I did not think I could get the dog into a burlap sack and I was done with shooting for awhile I coaxed dog up into the cab of my truck and drove him a few miles up the road to Paradise. There, at a cemetary, I let him run free. I drove away, unencumbered at least by dog.
Not a Haiku
So what happened to that kid you used to write about, you know the one?
He's in jail.
Why?
He'd been breaking into my friend's house, stealing things; she caught him in the act coming through a window; he ran away; eventually cops found him because he doesn't hide very well; she's pressing charges; he won't cop a plea thinking she will drop charges; she won't.
Is that a dangerous situation?
I think it may be.
For whom?
For everyone.
What will happen?
I am not fond of my thinking on this issue.
What does he need?
I think he needs his parents.
Where are they?
In jail.
Heroin
As I purport not to make things up I would like to offer a correction to a recent post wherein I stated that a specific local murder had to do with anger when in fact I had no idea if anger was an issue or not. Also, I said the victim was shot three times point blank in the head. I made that up. I have no idea in which part of his anatomy the man was shot, the one found lying dead in the middle of 2500 Palmyra Street, New Orleans. Three times point blank was from another area murder that I have not mentioned, one which was suggested to be a revenge murder. Or I'm making that up too.
It is my idea that revenge murders, and intimidation murders, the latter being when people are silenced to keep them or their family members from testifying, are often carried out with particularly violent affect, multiple head shots and whatnot, to send a message, and one that is mostly very effective as very few people will testify against these unimaginably violent street killers. One intimidation killing can go a long way in suppressing the civic-mindedness of even the most upstanding member of any given neighborhood. This may be all wrong. I am making it all up. But as they are only my thoughts I make up I hope to plead to a lesser charge than the one I am guilty of when I blatantly change or make up facts.
It was two guys, young heroin junkies, that killed the man on Palmyra, and it wasn't out of anger but for the the man's late model Ford F150 pickup truck. The victim was 68-years-old.
I've been thinking about violent crime a lot lately because it is locally on the rise. Law enforcement seems less visible than it was for a few years. Crack cocaine is less the scourge of our neighborhoods (not because it is less in use but because the users are co-existing more comfortably with non-users) as heroin cycles back into the picture to be the drug of choice among the young, reckless children of forty-something crackheads. I've been watching particular young heroin addicts for a few years now but ignoring it, and news reports that call heroin the new threat I ignore too. Paying attention to facts is hard and sometimes ungratifying. Times were a little rough here during the economic grandness of the nineties. Now with recession the Iines at the food bank are spiking the graph. The poor are getting poorer. And with that anti-crack, heroin, making new dedicated customers by the day the face of local drug dealing changes, and its like we have to start over with the rudimentary stages of the greed and power struggle.
There are also some positive things happening here in this great New Orleans gumbo and someday I hope to relay to you a few of those things as well. If I can see my way to it.
Dead Kitty
That was a mean and thoughtless thing to do--naming that kitten Notyetded, is what I'm thinking as I approach my driveway to see a little lifeless black and white ball of fur curled up on the grabble (tm) apron, with a small piece of intestine protruding from the young belly. As this is perhaps the fifth or sixth dead cat on my property since I moved here I have to say I really don't know if people dump them specifically by me or if the deaths themselves occur here. A pretty good pack of dogs worked this neighborhood for about three days recently and after this kitten showed up in the driveway the dogs have not been seen. So maybe it was the dogs. I left it there overnight and in the morning scooped the rain soaked stiff carcass onto a shovel blade and transported the dead kitty to a clump of weeds on the Pentecostal property. The little left paw was curled at the wrist, covering the nose. I don't know what happens but after about a year if I go look for remains, there will be none. Like I said, I've done this five or six times now, but you'd never know it to search the Pentecostal property.
Well, a couple of days later I see Notyetded crawl from under the "cat gap" I left under the NO EXIT sign which boards up the side entrance to the dance hall. I'm thinking about calling him Frank as there is that slight resemblance to my boyhood cat. But Frank was a warrior cat and this little one is not that, I think. I probably won't call him anything.
Slim Luck
Seeing as how you suffer from the illusion that I tell you everything let me clear up a few things about my driving record. And let's just forget about that thing with me chauffeurring all those Houston lawyers around during New Orleans JazzFest 97.
Other than the story of the winter I fell into that deep rain-filled ditch--(I remember coming up once, telling my brother to wait, and then going down again heavy with winter coat and hard soled shoes with eyes open in muddy ditch water, seeing the bubbles around me, before coming up the second time to find a floating piece of construction lumber to hold onto) when I was seven and my brother's race across North Dallas farmland (that is now developed miles in all directions) and his busting through the back door of my best friend's house while the nine of them ate dinner and yelling Jimfellinaditchfullofwater!!! which caused the oldest to leap from the table and race back across North Dallas farmland to save me--the stories my family most like to reminisce about are the ones where I got caught sneaking out the car when I was fourteen and fifteen. It is good family fun and is a context in which I enjoy being the center of attention, I will admit.
On a recent visit to Dallas a brother commented that after our mother dies he cannot foresee the occasions that will bring the remaining six of us together. Seeing as how we're having a pretty hard time of it while the mom is still alive I had to concede he was most probably right. So when we are together I like playing the role that is most natural to the dynamic of us as a family, the role of the youngest ( yet greying ) rascal, the one of us most out of step, when the truth more likely points to each of us as misfits in our own unique ways, as befits our upbringing. It was in my home an orthodox of Christian Existentialism, if such a thing is possible. The original eight of us were so individually autonomous it is more amazing that any of us still connect at all than it is that a few of us have real (or imagined?) differences. Even the twins seem to hardly recognize each other these days.
My brother recited a tale of me getting caught with the car after he and his twin and the two parents came back early from a rained out baseball game. His take on it was that I came in and confronted everyone with a big shit-eating grin and an attitude of whaddaya gonna do about it? I don't remember this caper at all, and as for my attitude, although they may have been the first to interpret my expression in that way they would not be the last. I know I have offended people with that expression he was referring to. But its like really shy people being accused (inaccurately) of snobbery. The shit eating grin is sometimes a grimace, which in fairness, in its own right, in particular contexts, can be offensive too. But whaddaya? Making a living outta digression? Lookin' for absolution? Also, I do have and frequently use a shit eating grin which can be taken at face value. I'm so complex.
But it may have been that particular car stealing event (although I think it was another one) which a day or two later led one of those twins to beat me savagely with a long metal pole while I reclined on one of the den sofas, or the beating may have been the result of a cumulative disgust with my overall anarchistic (relative to my solid Methodist upbringing) behavior, the car stealing being simply the final straw. I do remember the oration that went along with the beating was about the danger I was putting myself and others in by driving before my time. This incident I guess was my first real life confrontation with irony. And I'm just kidding about the beating being savage. The hits were hardly more than love taps. My brother was then and is now, no dummy, and I think he too understood the irony of beating up someone to prevent that person from hurting himself, or others. I really only bring it up because it was such an uncharacteristic display of anger on that brother's part, his and the other twin's preferred methods usually involving psychological terror, especially effective when they did tag teaming. It was mostly laughs in my family though, although I would have to think about it harder than I care to right now to figure out at who's expense did we laugh. And anyway I was little more than a room and boarder at that N. Dallas house from '64 to '77, spending all day everyday down the street with my pal, where I learned long before my peers about Zappa, and Zen, and other things not taught in the lower level Sunday school classes. It was usually one of the twins who were sent down to inform me that supper was now being served.
But here's the thing I really wanted to get at here. During my recent trip to Dallas one of the last things my mother relayed to me was the first story, the one I'm not sure I'm going to live up to, as it attributes to me almost super human abilities, or more likely, just luck, which you hate to think about too much because of the nature of it, which is to eventually run out.
This at the house on East Kiest Blvd. (a busy six lane thorougfare divided by a thin median strip) in South Oak Cliff, where I lived my first five years. Jimmie and brother Stevie Ray Vaughn lived in this neighborhood south of Downtown Dallas for some years, and it is also the neighborhood to which Lee Harvey Oswald ran after his truly amazing sniper job in '63. We, the Louises, knew neither the Vaughns nor the Oswalds, I mention, regretfully.
The story is simple. As a toddler, I escaped the family compound by maneuvering through or around several obstacles, the final one being an (apparently) unclosed chain link gate, and made it to the front yard. As I always heard it I toddled to the street and across three lanes of traffic and plopped down on the median. A truck driver stopped at the Illinois Ave. light rescued me and brought me to the nearest house, asking my hysterical mother did I belong to her. That's the whole story. But the way my mother told it this time was a little different. As I have previously mentioned, at 84, she seems to be having minor problems with her short term memory. Her memories of the distant past however seem to be sharper than ever. So I don't know if this version is definitive or not, but her addition of a couple of small details make the story much more interesting to me. Her version has me not on the median but sitting in the middle of the street, and cars are lined up past the light in the street in front of the house, not honking, waiting for someone to do something. For how long I don't know. How long should we wait before acting? The not honking was the other detail left out of previous stories. Preternatural silence. I had always imagined it noisey as cars whizzed by on both sides of me. That's all I really wanted to say.
Chump Pheromone
The first thing I did when I learned I would soon be broke was go out and buy a few used books. I bought three hardback Hemingways, two Fitzgeralds, and a Saul Bellow for $1.91 each. A pristine hardcover of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full was almost four dollars. The paperbacks go for 50 cents a piece. I got Salinger's Nine Stories, an Amy Tan, an Anne Tyler, and to rinse the palate, two Grishams. I subscribe to the local New Orleans newspaper, and have been receiving as gift the New Yorker for a couple of years. Quality reading material is essential to a happy poverty.
The next thing I did was make preparations for visiting out of state friends. While poverty is imminent, the current bank balance, prior to the most obvious upcoming debits, is fat. As a number it would make me appear to be someone a long way from living paycheck to paycheck. I know otherwise, and am privy to facts which lead me to take action in the opposite direction of fiscal responsibility, towards at least a meager attempt at vacation. While the getting is good. I called my pal in Northern Virginia and although his offer of "come on, whenever you want," is purely sincere, a closer inspection of his and wife's calendar makes middle March look like the preferred date. It means sleeping in a bed, and high tech toys, and good whisky and food, or hotdogs and popsicles and intelligent, humorous children, and adults for that matter, in a vibrant settting that is most decidely not New Orleans, and perhaps a children's birthday party and laser tag. For me it is almost like Disneyworld, although I've never been there to support that as a valid comparison. And if his seven-year-old son hasn't improved at all, or better yet, fallen off his game since my last visit, I might be able to compete with minimal success against him playing various real and made up contests of skill.
So I'm thinking about all these things at work today, which has been irregular of late (but I'm not complaining even as I walk the plank towards the poor house), and telling my boss how if I have to I'll go work with the Mexicans and Nicaraguans for a spell and he's hip (as it appears he's getting beat out of 7k on the Roaf job) and not sure his ownself what he's going to do during this period until our schedule becomes steady with work again.
It's been over an hour now since I got taken for twenty bucks and he, the complete stranger, said he would be back in an hour, he promised. I really have to wonder if there is such a thing as a chump pheromone, and if there is, today I was secreting up a storm.
I was just back from the first day of a two day work week, feeling a little tired but good, unwinding with ice cold budweiser sitting on the side steps overlooking the devastation of the Pentecostal property, musing on the life of ground doves, getting squiggy eyed and becoming comfortably comtemplative while I waited for a bird, any bird, to land in the leafless mulberry tree to my left.
A man and child approach and let me say a child is a good prop. With the hat pulled down low over those long pig-tailed cornrows I could not say for certain if the child was boy or girl, but I was thinking girl, despite hearing the man refer to her as "son" at one point.
The man was, according to himself, 58-years-old, but he looked 47, with just a tinge of grey on the tips of his short afro. As he made his abrupt vere towards me from the sidewalk sixty feet away holding the miniature hand of the four-year-old my first thought was "con," and then, "come on." I smiled serenly but perhaps unnoticeably at the waddle of youth. The man was smiling confidently but not smugly twenty feet away and spoke those two words that are at the same time both interrogative and statement of fact--"Gettin' it?"
I spoke inside my head with a smile and he approached more eagerly and from a few feet away said again, "Gettin' it?"
"Yeh, but slow," I said. This didn't seem like a con anymore, but retrospect would like to teach me to consider the numbers. How many people off the street have approached me here for any other reason. Still I'm guessing to the end I'll feel it necessary to resist the attitude of the jaded to support my naive opinion that only the eyes of the babe can see what it is worth seeing. One day, Jesus Christ Himself will step off that sidewalk with a solicitaton and I feel I should be ready with a fresh open mind.
The man introduced himself but I can't remember his name the minute he said it (although I don't think he said "Jesus Christ") and we shook hands. I did not offer my name. Was I back to thinking this a con.?
Did I know where Charity Hospital was? Yeh. He has a van parked somewhere, it's burgundy and tan, he knew I had seen it parked over there around the corner. I'm not sure. He was my neighbor he said, stayed with Miss Izzy. I have not met all my neighbors. Right there he said, the blue and white house, my back door is practically right next to your front door. I nodded. Somebody down at Charity had nine dollars but he needed $18.95 for a bendix spring.
I look at the child who seems to have heard all this before, is really not very interested, not the least bit curious about me, or perhaps is just shy, head down looking at her tiny tennis shoes. It now seems to me the man is asking me for money. I make the mistake of telling him about my financial woes. How many times will I make that same mistake when being asked for money I really don't have? If it is your heartfelt intention to say no, just say no, as quickly and simply as possible, using the fewest words possible, while (if you must) still being polite. No one under any circumstances really gives a flying fuck about your financial woes, especially if you are drinking ice cold budweiser, and they are not.
He misses not a beat but to his credit does not scoff at, by word or facial expression, my admission of money problems. In the past other hitup artists have waved a hand or verbally dismissed my sincerity in ways I have found offensive, although in the end many of them have still reached their goal. This man professes to understand but to trump me raises his shirt to show me a deep scar running from above his belly button down into his pants. He has had recent problems himself, he implies, but to me the scar looks none to fresh. He shows it to me again later, but I'm not scoring him too high on the scar. I really don't care about it. It doesn't affect me.
This is a con now but a good one and I am committed to playing by the rules, even if they are rules I made up myself. Effort, originality, and a smooth obfuscating of facts will win a prize in my court of law.
He will not ever in so many words ask me for money, in fact, he actually says he is not asking me for money at one point, explaining how the payback will be so quick I won't actually be giving him money. I can't get this logic, but he's pretty good, and I must say again, the kid is a fine prop, lending an air of innocence to the affair. I mean who would run a racket with a kid in tow, except Fagin of course, but that's just a story. And this guy is my close neighbor. The fact that in two years I've never seen or met him before, is immaterial. I gave him twenty dollars.
He said he would be right back. I'll just wait here. But you know, I wonder why he refused my offer of a ride to the auto parts store, and when he referred to it himself he pointed in the wrong direction?
Mardi Gras
Today (Feb. 12) is Mardi Gras, and a perfect day for it too. Several years ago, when I attempted more eager participation in the festivities, Willie Mays was grand marshal of the Zulu parade, but it rained that day and I never got to see Mr. Mays. Willie Mays was the "Say Hey Kid," and the epitome of professional baseball in my early youth. He would catch fly balls in the outfield in spectacular fashion, practically trademarking the over the shoulder football-style catch. And he could hit home runs. He and I share the same birthday, month and day but not year, and as a kid that, in my mind, made us practically blood brothers. This year I have yet to participate in Carnival unless you count Saturday night when I walked all of 300 feet from here and from the far sidewalk watched a bit of the Endymion parade, which is the only Krewe using the Mid-City route. Even the "Mid-City" Krewe moved to the Uptown route this year. I got to see grand marshal Jason Alexander, who played the character "George" on that popular TV series, Seinfeld. In fact his float stopped right at the intersection of Rocheblave and Canal, and in that way--possibly the Budweiser in one hand and Jameson in the other was affecting my thinking--he and I became blood brothers. I understand he enjoyed the float riding so much that he hitched a ride as an anonymous masked rider on the back float of the Bacchus parade the following night. Nicholas Cage was the grand marshal, up front. I didn't see it. It was an Uptown parade. Cage has been in town for awhile, bought one of the Esplanade mansions around the corner from the vacation home of his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. Cage has recently been directing a movie around here and is seen at nightspots in Fabourg Marigny, wearing lots of leather and Bono-esque eyeware surrounded by a possee of escorts also decked out in leather. I thought he was pretty good in Raising Arizona, but I'm not sure about the rest of it.
So, I just got back. I walked down Canal to the fringe of the Quarter and watched half of the Zulu parade from the corner of Iberville and Basin. A Japanese tourist asked me "where was the parade with bare boobs." I told him he would have to cross the parade route, which is not impossible but takes a little confidence, and head seven blocks or so to Bourbon St. It is not a parade down there but bare boobs are often shown. I think he had heard that girls raise their shirts at passing floats to get better beads and this does happen but probably more on the Uptown side of the route. Once the parades get downtown the crowds are 90 percent, or more, black, and although I have not done extensive research on this, it is my feeling that black girls are a little more conservative about showing their bare breasts in public. The Bourbon street crowds are predominately white. It was a good day for standing on the street. I was scared at first because some of the teenagers from the nearby Iberville projects project an image that is scary, and it's not all bluff. Some black cowboys on horseback clopped by in front of the house just now. The Zulu parade disbands a few blocks from here, at Galvez and Canal. No one blocked my driveway for either Saturday's Endymion or today's Mardi Gras festivities, which is heartening. Not that I'm going anywhere
No Motives, No Suspects
When I returned from Dallas--I was very good there and improved on recent behavior by not losing patience with my mother who through no fault of her own is losing small pieces of her mind and large chunks of her short term memory--I was pleased to find my New Orleans residence intact and apparently not victimized by any sort of unlawful invaders. Some of my newspapers--those that were not used by my housesitter to line her cat's litter box--were rolled up neatly by my pallet on the floor. I glanced at headlines for a few minutes while a few blocks from here one man grew angry enough to kill another man.
An older brother had brought me to the Dallas airport while it snowed and snowed and snowed. It had been snowing steadily for seven hours but it would not stick to the ground. My mother was suspicious that we, my brothers and I, were conspiring to gang up on her and force her into an old folks home. We were conspiring no such thing but since she brought it up, one brother and I talked about it at length over lunch at an all you can eat Sushi Bar on Greenville Ave., the day before I left in the snow; the day before one man pulled a gun from his pocket in the 2500 block of Palmyra, here in New Orleans. I like Sushi okay. The red snapper really did taste like raw fish.
Another brother, he lives in Kansas, was in town, coincidentally, on business (or so he said. I suspect he is a government agent), and he was doing my mother's taxes when I arrived by cab on Saturday. The TV was on, loudly (we've agreed to leave my mother alone on the issue of a hearing aid), and first thing I see--ignoring my mother who is saying to me "look who's here," and my brother, who may be a government agent, and is the one mom is referring to as being "here,"--is Hollis Price on the free throw line sinking two for the fourth ranked OK Sooners. "Hey, I know that kid," I said, and go on to explain how I followed him in high school all the way to the state championship game in Lafayette, Louisiana three years previous. It was actually his first off the bench teammate, Eddie Green, whom I was following, but truly, who cares? My mother, who is purely kindhearted, said, "oh, reallly?" My brother, practiced at the art of deception (which is a line from a song, right?), said, "Oh yeah?," and went back to form 1040A. This was four days before the "incident" on Palmyra.
My 84-year-old mom had organized 20 years worth of my correspondence from Austin, Brenham, Yoakum, and Liberty TX, NYC, Great Falls, VA, Eugene OR, Seattle, Bushy Fork, NC, and New Orleans, and it's not that much, into a couple of folders, which I read through to kill the time. Some of it fueled memories which made me tired to think about it. It's all in that dresser I was going to pick up with my truck during Christmas, but didn't. As it turned out, I learned this over Sushi, my mother spent Christmas alone. Kind of defeats the purpose of having six children, 15 grandchildren, and 3 great grandchildren (and she started late), I am thinking. I must spend Christmases in Dallas from now on. Maybe it was a lack of Christmas cheer that caused the one man on Palmyra to shoot the other man three times in the head, point blank, leaving him a lifeless sack of flesh in the middle of the street, while I unpacked from my trip to Dallas. By the time I drove by an hour and a half later on my way up Dorgenois to Tulane, the street was empty, and quiet. There was no evidence of life, or death
The Happy Wholesome Addendum
The thing I didn't tell you about the wounded French woman whose baby was murdered by a New Orleans inner city youth was that the events of that day changed her life. You would say how obvious is that? and I would concede pretty obvious but what she did in response to her loss is what haunts me and is the reason for this addendum. She stayed behind. While her husband continued with his plans to move abroad she stayed here in New Orleans for over a year and joined local groups which address the issues that contribute to such crimes as the one which rocked her world. And she lectured and looked for meaning where there is none and she cried at night making ghastly sounds that no one heard and at some point, with or without that popular emotional concept known as closure, she moved on, geographically, away from here. I never knew her but I cannot forget her. I've never felt her pain, to the degree she must have felt pain, yet I sometimes tear up when I think about her. And unashamedly I write about her and the rest of it to get it out of my system, for my own damn good, because once I started writing about such things I find not writing about it too painful, and counter-productive to that happy and wholesome carefree life to which I aspire.
Rangers Meet The Baby Entienne
While I pack a few hours before my first post 911 air travel I worry myself with visions of a federal inspection employee who pauses as his meaty fingers fiddle with my few possessions and yells out for everyone to hear, "hey man, you didn't pack no underwear? I hope you're not going to visit your mother that way?"
There is a USA themed material draping over the eight foot cyclone fence surrounding the entire SuperDome. All area streets have been blocked off for days. The main entrance has higher fencing and US Military guards who are surrounded by their military green vehicles. Fans are being urged to arrive five hours early for the strip searching of Britney Spears. I have looked forward to this SuperBowl spectacle since the last one, in '97. It brings to town things not seen everyday, and the surplus of military/local law enforcement types always cheers me up. I saw uniformed US Army Rangers patrolling Decatur in the French Quarter early this morning, and that guy imitating a meat locker imitating a corner newspaper guy with the Ranger haircut seemed to me a failure as a deep undercover guy while at the same time he imbued his corner with an air of safety. I don't intellectualize often on the overall film of danger that often pervades large blocks of this city. But when you see Rangers on duty in your town and feel cheerful about it it does cause one to pause and question just to what extent you have been shielding yourself from certain realities, one of which is being surrounded by that small number of misdirected youths who are every year killing each other with guns on the streets all around you. And all around the ones the tourists are traveling too. That we all don't just huddle under our beds is an amazing testament, but to what I don't know. Oh yeah, survival. Anyway, I drove around this morning looking for NFL inspired moments because I wanted to have something to think about while I visit my mother in Dallas on SuperBowl Sunday.
Once, a perfectly photogenic French(?) woman and her diplomat(?) husband were preparing to move back overseas. They lived in the Irish Channel neighborhood a block behind Magazine which put them that same number of blocks from an area of fine, historic, monied homes known collectively as The Garden District, a "don't miss" on any standard guided tour of New Orleans.
About six blocks from her location was a notorious, 40 acre area, rich in local culture but occupied by many suffering through poverty and poor education in two story brick buildings that had become maintenance nightmares. They were the St. Thomas projects. Similar or identical in construction to the several other major housing developments in New Orleans. It is on one level the same story becoming trite by repition, the same one Elvis tells in that song "In the Ghetto." And in the story nothing ever changes and the ghetto baby grows up and gets a gun and kills someone.
So you know where I'm going when the French woman straps her baby girl into the car seat and prepares to drive off to an area photographer. The kid steps up with pointed gun and attempts a broad daylight carjack. We all know the woman is not giving away this car with her baby strapped in. So she drives off and the kid stands tall in the middle of the street in the middle of the day and fires off round after round at her fleeing car. The woman is wounded but makes the first two right turns before crashing her car into a live oak tree on Magazine. And of course you know her baby, who was two or three days away from growing up perhaps more safely in some European city, was dead, riddled by the ill intent of a teenager from the St. Thomas projects.
This morning I voted for Ray Nagin, one of the fifteen mayoral candidates, and then did the drive I do, in and immediatedly out of City Park, down Esplanade to Decatur to the St. Peter split, taking either one, and then down Magazine and/or Tchopitoulas, and today was the first day I had ever exited right off of Tchopitoulas onto Josephine and driven straight into the middle of The St. Thomas projects, parking at the corner of St. Thomas, or Chippewa. I looked out over the forty acres beyond that grouping of mature live oaks and seeing what can only be describe as improvement. The land is completely cleared now and is adjacent to a reputed hip neighborhood known as the Lower Garden District on one side and the Mississippi river on the the other. A view of downtown buildings and the Mississippi River Bridge make this new found property a most eye pleasing area. Plans include a rebuilding of residential structures with a percentage of those being section 8 housing. There is a stall in the overall plan for the area because there is serious talk about putting a WalMart store on a large piece of the land. I have back and forth been adamantly against this idea and somewhat for the idea. People against the idea of WalMart are labled most notably either racist or elitist. I don't know. I don't know what they did with all the St. Thomas residents. I have no doubt some of the large number were unhappy about being resettled. But they are resettled I take it because there is not a brick left on the site. I drove to Jackson Ave. and doubled back toward the river and then U-urned into a trash strewn vacant lot which is offered the same eye level view of downtown and the bridge that was for the last sixty years obscured by the St. Thomas. It looks like too good a chance to do something right to give up so easily to the allure of this nation's most successful company. But for me looking at this pristine piece of ground the idea of assaulting it with almost any version of modern construction is repellant. The idea of a park enters and no one would ever even need to know why it was called Entienne's Park.