Tuesday, January 29, 2008

By Richard A. Webster

These are the days of the Treme, loose pit bulls ripping out the throats of old, porch-sittin' men after feasting on the ears of innocent girls playing hopscotch on the chalk, body-outlines crisscrossing these neighborhood streets.
It's all true.
I swear.
It happened a few weeks ago, just a few blocks from my apartment. A pair of pits ran rampant and ran blood from the bodies of an elderly man and a prepubescent girl.
The man died.
The girl survived, though terribly maimed.
On the exact location many months ago a crew of slug-nutty gun aficionados let loose with a sheet of bullets after an organized community basketball game.
No reason to get into the reason why they did it.
Would it matter?
It's just a lot of bang bang and the Treme is turning out to be the perfect spot to settle down if you truly enjoy the boom boom of the steel cock.
And just tonight, on this the 29th day of the first month of the 2,008th year of our purple toad king and lord, a three-alarm fire broke out at the corner of Esplanade Avenue and N. Derbigny Street, four blocks from my humble home.
I was crunched over my computer typing out a love letter to Jackie Clarkson when I heard the guttural wailing of the fire fleet intermingled with the occasional rat screech of a cop car or two.
At first I ignored the amorphous blob of sound and light, having come to terms that this is the permanent soundtrack to my life in the Treme. I turned up the stereo, opened another 16 ounce Budweiser (fuck all you beer snobs) and bore down on the thoughts I was trying to get down on page, or screen as it may be.
"Oh Jackie my sweet temptress, my leathery angel! Oh if you would allow my trembling fingers a moment's passage through the thicket of your mane of skunk-stricken hair, I would fall to my knees in a fit of passion and pledge to you, my cadaver Queen, to spend the remainder of my days donkey-punching the homeless women huddled under the Claiborne Avenue overpass! Last night I made love to a pineapple. I have not been able to stop the bleeding to my extremities but it was worth it. As I made my move on the armored husk I closed my eyes and imagined I was rubbing my love against your own impenetrable hide of poisonous spines. And just when I was reaching a crescendo of absolute pain and scar tissue, I turned on the TV, the broadcast of a City Council meeting, and fixed my stare on your terrible visage as you introduced a resolution to drug the homeless, wrap them in wax paper and set them on fire. And just at that moment, Jackie, my sweet Jackie, I felt….."
It was at this point in my love letter to Jackie that I heard the sirens.
Goddammit!
I was so close to getting at the truth of our love. But I have long since lost the capacity to concentrate on two things at once.
Brain cells are now at a premium.
A low point.
What?
No matter.
Slow down.
Concentrate.
What was I talking about?
The fire.
That's right.
The terrible fire.
The sound of the sirens overpowered the thump of Arular pounding out of my stereo. I opened the door of my apartment that is situated in the back of a house facing Villere Street in the Treme, one block off of Esplanade Avenue.
Thirty minutes ago a fierce rain lashed at my windows.
Thirty minutes later the rain had passed, replaced by a volcanic spout of black smoke bulging over nearby rooftops obscuring the night sky.
I threw on my shoes and a black hoodie sweatshirt, grabbed a beer and made my way to the disaster, down Villere to Esplanade, towards Claiborne where the crackheads and dealers square dance to the belching traffic groans of the Interstate.
The red lights of the fire trucks lit up the Avenue. The first parade of the second week of Mardi Gras.
The smoke poured out of the three-story house with aspirations of reaching the heavens but just as soon gave way to the hard winter winds and gravity. Shadows lined the sidewalks searching for the best perspective of the catastrophe.
I passed the corner liquor store where the low-slung thieves and murderers pushed back forties.
"We'll let you pass tonight," they said to the growing crowd of onlookers. "But try this shit tomorrow night when the army of cops and firefighters aren't out and see how far you get."
I get it, I said. I respect the wide berth.
The bang bang and the boom boom and the dangling ears and open blood vessels.
I found myself a spot along a metal fence and watched as the fire department shot high-pressured streams of water into all three floors of the burning structure.
"Does anybody live there?" I asked an old black man.
"Yeah."
"You know how many?"
"I don't know shit," he said. "I just pass it every day."
End of conversation.
I moved on, across the street to the neutral ground.
A fat white man in a New Orleans Fire Department jacket stood next to me taking pictures. From this vantage point I could make out the entire length of the house, your typical New Orleans building, fat, wide and deep—once a mansion, now cut up into at least six units.
"Anybody live there?" I asked the fat fireman.
"We don't think so," he said. "It looks like it was vacant, under construction. Of course, that doesn't mean that there wasn't anybody inside of it at the time of the fire."
Vagrants, crackheads, homeless people desperate for shelter from the rain that let up just an hour or so ago.
I moved a block closer. As close as I could get. A police officer gave me the eye. I reached into my pocket for my press badge but had left it at the house.
Fuck it.
I moved quickly, with purpose, across Esplanade to North Derbigny until I was just a few yards from the flames and spray of the hoses.
It's something I've learned as a journalist. Don't hesitate. If you want to move from point A to point B, but a surly cop is standing between the two, ready to clothesline anyone who makes the jump….make the fucking jump with blind determination. Don't put your head down. Keep it up and act with purpose. And move fast as if you're on a mission. But don't run. Running arouses suspicion. But don't move too slow for that also arouses suspicion.
Move with a steady pace. If you got a cell phone put it to your ear and talk loudly, describing the scene as if you're talking to someone important.
"It looks like the fire department and police have it under control! What? Yeah, I'll go in for a closer look! This is a front page story and the fire chief told me to call him in five minutes! Get Mayor Nagin on the phone!"
Of course, none of this is necessary if you have your press pass but seeing as how I forgot mine I had to resort to these childish tactics.
"Hey asshole!"
"What?"
A cop fixed me in the glare of his flashlight.
"Get the fuck back on the sidewalk! You can't go there!"
"But I'm on the phone with the John McCain! He just won the Florida primary!"
I went too far.
I should have said I was on the phone with that sexpot Jackie Clarkson. You mention her name in this city and every door opens as easily as a can of beer.
After 20 minutes it appeared as if the fire department had the blaze under control and the crowd began to thin out.
Just another fire in New Orleans.
No story here, I thought.
"Show's over," the guy next to me said. "Just another abandoned building gone up in flames."
No. The show couldn't be over. I wanted a story. Something fantastic to write about.
And that's when I saw the Cro-Magnon man, a homeless Vietnam vet with a bad drinking problem. He was passed out against a Volvo a block down the street.
I kicked him in the liver.
No reaction.
So I stepped on his rotting toes.
Still no reaction.
Perfect.
I wrapped my arms around his torso and tried to lift him off the street but he flopped around like a 200 pound rubber corpse.
Shit.
"Hey man!" I shouted at a 20-something year old kid sucking on a blunt. "Help me lift this guy up."
"What the fuck for?"
"I want to toss him in that burning building. The fire guys say it's empty and that doesn't give me much to write about. But if we toss this here vet inside all of a sudden I got a tragic tale about a dead military man's life gone wrong. Get it? If you want we can toss him somewhere where you can easily jump in and save him. That not only gives me a tragic victim but also an unlikely dope-smoking hero. You want to be a hero, right?"
The kid dropped his joint on the sidewalk and lifted up his shirt exposing the handle of a gun.
"You touch that drunk motherfucker and you're a dead man, ya heard me?"
"Listen, I'm not the bad guy here," I said. "I'm just trying to make something more dramatic happen because we….."
The kid slid the gun out of his waistband.
"Ok," I said, slowly moving away from the passed out body of Cro-Magnon Man. "Another burning building. An empty burning building. Another disaster without any meaning. I'm just trying to assign some poetry to this senseless destruction."
He didn't get it.
No one does.
And so here I sit, back at my computer in my apartment on Villere Street stinking like burning nothingness.
But it ain't so bad.
It was all just a momentary distraction from my seduction of my very own Medusa with the angelic, barbed-wire hair.
"Oh Jackie! I tried to implement your noble wishes and sacrifice a member of the poor but one of their own stood in my way. But if you were there, I know you would have marshaled the strength to face down that bullet, throw the limp body of that human refuse on your manly shoulder and trudge through the muddy slush towards the inferno into which you would have thrown his body with a glorious scream of ecstasy. Sweet Jackie, my spiny, pineapple whore!"

It's 12:36 a.m. on this Wednesday night.
The wind is whipping like a sadist.
The fire is extinguished.
The sky is once again clear.
I have much to confess but feel better allowing it all to evaporate in the lust of my addiction.
Nothing happened tonight in the Treme.
Nothing ever happens.
It's all a lie.
We have picnics and give each other cheeky nicknames like Palomino and Light Bulb and White Boy.
I fed Lil' Axl bits of ham and hamburger buns.
And then I got drunk and listened to the clouds shriek as they collapsed on my roof.
I tried to tell my self that wasn't true, but even as I type this, I can hear them scream, "Why me! Why me!"
Stupid clouds.
They're no different than any of us.