I'm Outta Here

Gettin’ outta town. Okay. I admit it. I have to get out of here, if only for a week. The news is never good. Our mayor is about as effective at governing our city as my next door neighbor is at keeping her mongrel dog from crapping on the sidewalk in front of my house. ALWAYS a steaming, fly infested heap between my front door and my car door. I’m about to staple the little beast’s ass shut! The dog’s ass...not the mayor’s. Anyway, it must be time for an attitude adjustment. A list of things to be grateful for (in no particular order):

1. My house (damaged, but fixable).

2. My job. I have a job that doesn’t involve phone solicitation, digging ditches or slinging tacos (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

3. My hair gets colored for free by my friend, Lexie. (Otherwise I would be a brunette and I’m kinda digging the whole blonde thing).

4. My boyfriend. He’s always improving and by now has reached the maturity level of a 12 year old — on a good day ----which perfectly matches MY maturity level of a 10 year old — also on a good day.

5. My kids. None of them are in jail or exhibit any abnormally bad habits (that I know of).

6. My granddaughter. Of course I’m too young to have a granddaughter, but she’s worth it as long as she calls me “Maymo” (and NOT maw maw or mee mawa or anything else...it’s MAYMO!).

7. Autumn in New Orleans. Okay. So it’s still the middle of Summer AND hurricane season. Looking forward to Fall here is what keeps me sane through the summer.

8. My bug guy, Ivan. Now there’s a man who holds my peace of mind in his hands. Ivan makes sure that if I do see a giant flying cockroach, it’s a dead one.

9. My zero credit card balance. Because of Hurricane Katrina, my credit card debt is paid off. Of course, I no longer own a cute little beach cottage in Mississippi, but at least it was insured AND there are still three very nice concrete steps to eventually build a house around.

10. My younger sister. I have a sister in San Francisco to go visit when I need to pretend that I live anything even close to a normal life.

Cracking Up the Neighborhood

My neighborhood (Faubourg Marigny) is diverse. And the block where my 150 year old house is located is well, neighborly, for lack of a better word. The Marigny is an historic district and known for its live and let live bohemian lifestyle. Our block contains several artists, a smattering of musicians, a family with school aged children, at least one transvestite and a woman who is rumored to be a witch. Everyone knows everyone else, at least in passing, and watches out for each other.

And so it was with collective dismay that we realized that the charming blue double across the street had somehow become ominous. The house is owned by an old gentleman who had evacuated to Arkansas after the storm and left the house in the care of a relative…a nephew I think…named J. J occupied one half of the double and the other was always rented to a Section 8 tenant. Some of the tenants had been a little odd (even by the neighborhood’s standards), the weirdest being the troupe of “scary clowns” who lived there briefly. When I say scary I don’t just mean in the usual way that clowns can be frightening. These particular clowns had their clown makeup tattooed onto their faces. And it wasn’t a jolly look. But still. They didn’t really cause any trouble and moved on within a few months as most of the tenants seemed to do.

By January we realized that J was dealing crack out of the house with the help of his tenant. And they weren’t exactly hiding it. Crack addicts aren’t the least bit subtle in their quest for the rock. 24/7 banging on the doors, shouting, cursing, waving guns around. And it was depressing. As J began to unravel he started pulling garbage out of the house and piling it all in the street out front. The collection grew to roughly the size of two SUV’s and flies were buzzing around the putrefying mountain of broken furniture, leaking household refuse and unidentifiable bits of flotsam and jetsam. And it was added to on an hourly basis by J’s customers who would throw their wadded up fast food containers into the roiling heap.

Even worse, at least one of J’s customers, a jittery scrawny woman with tattoos would arrive pushing her baby in a battered stroller. She would park the child next to the fly infested mound of garbage and go inside to get her shit. Another of J’s customers came in his pick up truck with a beautiful little girl of about 4 in the passenger seat. He’d leave her in the truck alone watching fearfully for her father to come out again.

And the traffic. Cars from at least 4 states. Around the clock. Flashy SUV’s from Texas with large men in lots of gold jewelry, a dented convertible containing a stick figure of a bleached blonde and two glaring, surly thugs, cadillacs, pick-up trucks. And an endless parade of bicycles.

Crack dealers and their customers aren’t all that amiable either. At least once when I was walking to my car in the morning I got a “What the fuck are YOU looking at???” from a scruffy hispanic named H who was last seen bashing a guy in the head with a pipe at 1 in the morning. The recipient of the attack sat on my steps by turns crying, screaming into a cell phone, and bleeding until H came out and brought him inside where I’d like to think they made nice, but who knows?

We christened one guy “Scratchy” because he was always hanging around pacing and scratching like a flea ridden Chihuahua. J sort of faded away and in his place was a motley assortment of movers and shakers in the drug world. The drill was the same. Pounding on the door through the burglar bars, “Hey! It’s me. Open the door!” Sometimes they would jump the fence and go around back to get in. And depending on how the transaction went down, they would either leave content or shouting obscenities. The whole drama was having an emotional effect on everyone. I felt like I was stuck in the Twilight Zone episode of Deadwood.

Everyone in the neighborhood was feeling the effects of J's crack cocain empire. And it was nothing nice. Even in a live and let live place like the Marigny, I guess there are limits to what a person will tolerate. Or maybe since the national guard arrived the police can focus on the ever rising crime in our city. Maybe the people in charge of these things have made the connection between drug dealers' turf wars and the sky rocketing murder rate.

Finally a response from law enforcement. The police arrived yesterday pulling everyone from the house and evicting them. Apparently the whole neighborhood was raided. All I know is for the first time in months we slept through the night without incident. When I opened the door to pick up my newspaper this morning the atmosphere was noticeably uplifted. The house across the street was quiet…even serene.

I began to feel hope for the first time since the storm. Now let's just pray that the judicial branch of our city's government does its part. I have my doubts, but stranger things have happened.