Cake Walking Babies

There was nothing interesting about the bars. Never was. Never will be. The men were horrible. What they said about women, it was always awful and degrading. The ugliest men said the ugliest things about women. What they’d do to them. And the women came in all dolled up and sometimes left with these disgusting human beings. And then I got to hear all about it the next night. From the men. Not to me directly. I never spoke to anyone in bars. I used to bring books to try to cover up all the bullshit. I once tried to get through Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” at a small hole in the wall in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Jesus Christ, what a fight that was. Every sentence was a struggle to finish over the top of two construction workers debating whether it was better to use condoms during anal sex with their wives. I took in Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson and Céline and a slew of poetry which I couldn’t read. Odes by John Keats, Sonnets by Shakespeare, Yeates, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, you name them, I tried them. Poetry doesn’t work in bars. This isn’t going anywhere, and it’s all right. It’s not meant to. The nicest thing about Arkansas was a little restaurant off highway 40. The woman in charge served the best fried chicken I’d ever tasted in my life and she played Sidney Bechet’s “Cake Walking Babies From Home.” She had a small record player on top of the counter and she played old jazz.
–Eva Taylor sings on this, she said. –And Louis Armstrong blows the horn.
I didn’t know who Eva Taylor was but I knew Bechet and Armstrong.
–From 1925, she said.
Four pieces of fried chicken cost me a dollar seventy-five. I asked what the secret was.
–Buttermilk, sweetie. You gotta soak it overnight, is all.
She called me sweetie and somehow it was all right. When you’re travelling across the country by yourself, looking for work and haven’t spoken to anyone in weeks, sometimes you want to be called that. I broke my thermos of coffee just outside this place. I dropped it in the parking lot just before getting on the bus. I don’t know why that stands out now. The thermos. I remember feeling it was a huge loss for me. Maybe the coffee was good or something.

Rant O’The Day

No, no, don’t get me wrong. I’m not super-pissed that they’ve shut down practically all services here at my place of work. I’m fuming because they’ve shut them down in favo(u)r of security for one lady politician, making a last-hour, surprise decision to come and give yet another regurgitated speech to the energized suckers voters who actually believe they can make a difference in this election. I will try to compose myself (and this rant), after having waited twenty-odd minutes to just get into the parking lot at my office, only to be scrutinized and frisked and almost prodded by a handful of Secret Service goons with tailor-made earpieces and Men’s Wearhouse semi-cheap suits, driving gas-guzzling, black SUVs. My disclaimer: I am all in favo(u)r of supporting striking workers, even at the expense of services being cut off. Say what you will about the French and the snootiness, but those frogs have bigger bollix and more intestinal fortitude than a zillion Americanos put together. Here is a country full of purported paté eating snobs willing to go without mass transit, amenable to let the garbage pile up, in support of working-class strikers. In Toronto, over the past weekend, mass transit went on a short-lived work stoppage (two days) and the populace almost revolted in the streets, calling the walkouts slackers and lazy scum. Imagine that; Canadians being less than civil to one another! Our influence has rubbed off. Will we ever realize that the effects or, rather, resolution to these protests can actually positively impact and improve our lives? Apparently the French have. Not so the Gringos. Cut off water for more than two hours and see what happens. Better yet, cut off CABLE unexpectedly.

And so back to the wanna-be-lady-prez. In order for me to get to work this morning, I had to walk a venerable gauntlet of security detail. These are people that I truly despise–law enforcement in general, really. I felt like Hunter Thompson walking into the middle of that cop convention in Fear and Loathing. True, the massive hangover didn’t help, but the hyperactive, shifty-eyed gorillas brandishing many a concealed firearm outright ruined my mood and demeanor. I loathe politics. I don’t trust any of these nouveau automaton Manchurian Candidates, no matter what “fresh” ideas they bring to the table. That other bozo marionette claims he will effect “change we can believe in.” The geezer POW says “everything is possible in America.” I’ve been around for too long to swallow it. These weird freaks of nurture have been promising the same old rubbish for decades. Save the cow manure and let me get to work in peace. I’ve got a newsletter to put out to illiterate educators by the first of the month.

Quick, but related tangent here. Señor Darth Vader was also in town recently. He flew in yesterday for a few hours to meet with a group of other stormtroopers at a private residence here in the capital of this great state. His motorcade consisted of no less than 17 vehicles, most of them gas-guzzling SUVs. Following his fortified limo was an ambulance–presumably to offer assistance in case either our man’s pacemaker went off-beat, or he somehow managed to clip someone else with his buckshot-laden, duck-hunting musket. In any case, a stretch of 20 miles of highway was closed for more than two hours, so this neocon swine could make his meeting on time (whoa, that rhymes Tonto!). You can just imagine the traffic jam lined up, waiting for our man to make his graceless entrance. Bull in a china shop, y’all. Bull in a china shop.

In closing (thank Feck) my point is: I will suffer the lack of services in support of a good, social cause, but I will not tolerate enforced shortages and restrictions in favo(u)r of bottom dweller politicians peddling outdated ideas and beating dead horses. Remember kiddos, our vote most certainly does not count. Corporations have long ago become the Teacher’s Pet and any breadcrumbs that actually do reach us, have been properly funneled and processed with preservatives, anti-caking agents, enhancers, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and all kinds of acidity regulators and buffers.

I’ll leave you with some good news. Seems like the French influence is working. This is great news despite the corporate sponsorship.

Saints

First thing I ever did when I arrived in New Orleans was buy a bottle of cheap bourbon from the ABC to go with the cheap room in the cheap transients’ house on Josephine Street just at the edge of the Garden District. I set the bottle on the filthy table by the window and poured the golden juice into a small, dirty tumbler which I had packed in the duffel bag, and listened to Mahler’s 5th on my small radio. I watched dozens of streetcars going down St. Charles with happy tourists ready to pop hundreds on drinks and po’ boys and shirts and voodoo dolls and…something. Always something for sale in this goddamn town. Snake oil for the aching joints. Beads to throw in return for a peek at bare tits. People are so goddamn thick. Always, always something. Every bloody town. For sale.

When the booze ran out I crossed the street and sat down at the bar in Igor’s and ordered a seven and seven. Hard on the Seagram’s and easy on the seven. I put down a tenner. I had money from a tax return that previous year. I had worked. And I had also won three hundred dollars at the roulette in Vegas the previous week. Red fourteen. My only win, aside from the time I hit the trifecta at Pimlico in Laurel my last year in high school. That brought in a bit over two hundred. Igor’s was a great place, right on St. Charles in uptown. It had a big neon sign on the front: “A half pound burger is always waiting for you!” Inside there was the bar and then some: laundry facilities, so you could drink while you washed and dried your loads of stained, infested junk. The chippie barkeep wore short jean shorts and was all legs. And she knew it. She made sure to exaggerate her squats whenever she’d pick up a bottle from below the counters, and gave a good show to all the barflys smoking the day away. She made a good double-seven, and that’s really all that mattered.

There were video poker machines just behind me, and the most decrepit, down-n-outers were pumping coins into the bastards at an alarming rate. Somehow they had money. I drank. A storm or hurricane or something rolled in. The barkeep shift changed and the chippie disappeared into the laundry facilities. Some woman next to me snorted and said she was probably turning tricks upstairs, the whore. That’s what she called her. There was a room above the bar you could rent by the hour or day, she said. I just drank. The rain came hard outside and we couldn’t hear the jukebox with the door open like that. It sounded like some giant waterfall in Argentina.
–About time, the new barkeep said. He was an old dog with boils on his nose and cheeks and when he poured, his hand shook and spilled booze all around the shot glass. He cleaned it up with a yellowing rag. He also blew his nose with it. Right in front of everyone.
–About time, he said again first looking at me and then quickly swinging his head toward the window. Gusts were spraying water into the bar but no one got up to close the door.
–Yeh heh?
–I like it. Rain comes in and washes all the scum away. All the shit and piss on these cursed streets. The saints and ghosts and pimps…
I tuned him out and cross faded him with Travis Bickle: “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Nothing changes. Not even the weather. I left after half an hour of being bothered by a soliloquizing former pirate who had lost everything in a divorce and was looking for work as a carpenter, only he wasn’t really looking. None of us are. All he did was talk and smoke my cigarettes. And so I left.

Later I walked by Fritzel’s in the French Quarter and heard Terrence Blanchard inside. I couldn’t afford the ticket. But he was brilliant for those fifteen seconds I hung around before the big goons came out to sweep the sidewalk clean of transients. And so it goes. Chickory coffee and two beignets at Café Du Monde for buck-ninety and some lonely soul at midnight telling me how beignets ought to be made with cottonseed oil and how chicory was developed by the French during their civil war because coffee was scarce during those times, and they found that chicory added body and flavor to the brew.
–The Acadians from Nova Scotia brought this taste and many other French customs to Louisiana…
I cross faded him with…I couldn’t. He was adamant.
–Chickory is the root of the endive plant…
I couldn’t make him stop. He wanted fifty cents for his history lesson.
–Don’t have fifty cents.
–How ’bout a dollar?
And that got him to walk away and start in all over again at a table of well-fed, nocturnal warrior-tourists. Always something for sale in every bloody town. Always. Cute little black kids tap dancing on the corner: 75 cents. Man blowing into a rusty sax needs a new reed: dollar. Man with box of shoe polish and brushes:
–Skew me. Skew me, sir, you dropped somethin’
–What?
–You dropped your shine!
Deluxe job on the go with wax and moisture protection: Five twenty-five.
Shit, son…people got to make a living.

I took the streetcar back up St. Charles and jumped off at Josephine. There was a group of frat boys pissing on the side of a building, laughing and screaming something about going backdoor on some girl one of them had met, and how much she’d like it from all of them. Nothing ever changes. People are mostly shit to one another. Even the cockroaches exploit the other cockroaches. I went to my room, sat at the table in the dark and turned on the radio. They were playing The Blue Danube waltz; von Karajan conducting.