Chapter Eight-A Lonestar
Education
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Ashley –November 1, 2003-When I thought about having
children, I imagined my own childhood. I
wanted to be as good a parent as mine were.
After I found out I was going to have my first baby, I was
overjoyed. Ethan and I had always wanted
a family. Ever since my little brother
was born, I wanted to be a mom.
Ashley
and I were joyous and pragmatic. An
ultrasound revealed a female gender indicated by a lack of structure between
two lines in a black and white resonance.
Lacey was there with an over the top high-five fervor wired into
Ashley. That little space gave Lacey
permission to go ape-shit acquiring every Lilliputian pink bootie, dress or
dolly-brigade her Euro-mind could fathom.
Lacey could finally have access to the girly-girl pseudo-progeny Ashley
or Jeffery never achieved. Ashley was
far too straddled to the fencepost handing Hilton nails to be a daughter of
lace recitals.
We
got the nursery-nest twigged together, new flooring and a butterfly ceiling
fan. I painted the walls violet and
green. Grandma JoAnne bought a changing
table. My mom and dad got a rocker. Hilton finished the wood flooring and
replaced the old doors. Our family was
merging in more than church promises.
Ashley
balanced work and pregnancy. There were
no excuses, no complaining or allowance for a lowered expectation of
performance. We went to Lamaze
classes. Our daughter would be born at
Mercy Baptist off Napoleon and Claiborne in Uptown New Orleans where the
hobbit-sized female obstetrician Ashley chose performed all her deliveries. We took a birthing class and learned infant
CPA and nutritional factoids.
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I
got to name our daughter Penelope after a happy memory. In high school I helped my father’s friend
move. He was a camera operator at a
local news station. His daughter was
about four with blonde hair and an “it’s raining shooting stars” smile.
I
remember playing with Penelope in between the movements: puzzles and teddy
bears. A few weeks later the local ABC
affiliate ran a community promo.
Penelope was smiling on her front porch.
I thought to myself if I ever have a daughter I want to name her
Penelope just like that little girl.
Penelope
got Ashley’s middle name which in some Dutch tradition got passed down several
generations in her mother’s family: Sicily. Somehow an autonomous region of Italy
became a Dutch trade-name imbedded in the middle of our daughter’s trilogy of a
moniker.
Ashley – January 4, 2003 - When you were still in my
womb, about the size of a nut, I emailed Paw Paw. I sent him pictures and facts about where you
were in development. Ever since the
email where I told him you were the size of a nut, he started calling you
Peanut. The name caught on. I am known as Sweet Pea so it is a tradition
that you are Peanut.
The
pregnancy was wonderful and difficult on Ashley’s body, but Ashley loved being
close to our baby. Ashley could protect
Penelope, nourish her and hug her all day.
Ashley enjoyed not asking for help and taking on a challenge.
Pregnancy
for me was a lot of foot massages, back tickles, and curing a semi-obsession
for Chick-fil-A iced tea that I had to buy by the gallon and keep in the
fridge. I also had the health insurance
bill to cover and that sliver of an unspoken husband, father dangling participle
praying everything would carry out to a beautiful and healthy fruition.
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On
Valentines Day, I went to a doctor for red-rash hives splattering my
chest. The nurse injected my standing
exposed flesh hip with a steroid shot. I
passed out and cracked my skull against the office tiles. I fainted from what is referred to as a
Vegovagal episode. My trigger is the
scent of rubbing alcohol. My heart rate
drops, hands tingle, vision blurs, and pseudo-impending death approaches in the
fog. I now know I need to lie down to
give blood or inhale the ether-like sterilizer.
Some
theorists hypothesize this is an evolutionary adaptation, that in times of
stress a human on a battlefield would faint to appear felled and deceased to
avoid slaughter. Medically the body
involuntarily deprives its own brain of oxygen then the FEMA of our organism
prompts our descending position to lie parallel to the Earth to re-flush the
cranium with blood. Sometimes I wonder
how opossum I am, from the tennis ball arm-holsters to now; would I ever cross
the Cyclops line in the garden regardless of how many ears were sliced off?
I
was sent in an ambulance to the emergency room as a precautionary procedure to
appease my steroid shot doctor’s legal indemnities. There was no lawsuit, just foiled Valentines
Day plans for our last February fourteenth sans out-of womb progeny.
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Ashley
was a dead-on “what does the research say” type of mother, reading every “what
to expect when you are expecting” encyclopedic collection. Birthing was the most natural of human
experiences. Ashley prepared to pass the
bar.
The
weekend before the birth, I got a menagerie of art supplies from a local craft
store: a canvas, paints and these three-inch-size wooden animal figures. Ashley and I plopped down on the floor and
painted the figures in a spectrum of an eight-color box of crayons: puppies,
farm animals, sea shells, kittens, a palm tree, a whale, a car, and an African
safari. I set the zoo over the chair
molding circling Penelope’s room to smile back at her as she grew.
We
used the canvas to paint green grass and a blue sky with three flowers. Ashley was a red tulip. Penelope was a purple semi-circled petal
shaped kid flower and I was a yellow sunflower.
Our leaves gripped like arms holding each family member in a
tendril-triad. The top said in red
letters, next to an orange sun, “You are loved,” with “Love Mommy and Daddy” at
the bottom. These were our final little
pre-birth welcome gifts to Penelope. I
think the art helped Ashley with her nerves, because Ashley was in this “could
happen at any minute” mode. I was out of
Frankincense.
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We
went to the hospital on the following Monday evening. Ashley was induced. Penelope was past due. Ashley was busting at the seams of every cell
stretched and swollen irregular and in tow with few uttered grievances bearing
the bulk.
I
drove us in as scheduled around six p.m. to the hospital wing that was still
under renovation. The induction drugs
intravenously invaded around nine p.m.
The cycle-tide effects of Pitocin rose into Ashley’s blood stream mixing
with Ashley’s natural hormones. The
business of being born held its initial public offering. Ashley wanted a natural birth, to score the
fourth quarter game winning touchdown at preggers stadium.
Ashley
started having contractions around midnight.
A puissant loin battle-cry shot out at around one a.m. Ashley’s water broke. I was trying to get sleep anticipating a
longer haul, but Ashley was too excited like she was responsible for getting
Santa down the chimney all at once.
Hours
of labor, at ten a.m. the doctor started delivering ultimatums. Penelope was caught in traffic. Ashley’s body was under material stress. The Lamaze was disbanded by the group leader
hours ago. Ashley had better business
practices to implement.
I
was the best yes-man I could be. This
was Ashley’s body. Between the hormones,
the physicians, the pharmaceuticals, the Lacey, the guilt, and the will of
Penelope; I knew my place was somewhere about eighth on the priority list. I was just below ice chips.
The
on-floor doctor dictated that either Ashley get an epidural or “harm” could
come. Ashley read up on the intimidation
factor of doctors, the drug pushers. Her
real doctor was not available at the moment; she was probably off building a
miniature frigate in a glass bottle.
Ashley knew the numbness would start a self-contradicting cycle of
bodily chemicals predestined for her feared cesarean section. Ashley wanted natural, but her body was
making below exemplary marks in Ashley’s mind.
The
hours were toiling, sixteen and it felt like half-time. I knew what Ashley wanted. I wanted to fight for her like a man absent
of fear as if this bull-nosed confidence could not be transfigured as misguided
arrogance in the mortal perils of still birth or bleeding out. My decision was never material to this
equation as Ashley relegated her position with the election of the
anesthesiologist.
Ashley
labored all of Tuesday. Around six p.m.
with ripping perineum unbolting the gates, Ashley’s small-handed preferred
obstetrician presided and emergency breaks were made. Ashley was rushed to the operating room. A cesarean black-out wipe-out extraction was
performed. Penelope’s chord was wrapped
around her neck. Life flashed.
Penelope
breathed that all-applause breath. The
hopeful opiates swelled in Ashley bursting the slalom of chemical drips and
repair mechanisms to prevent an obit.
Ashley wanted to be perfect like her Euro-mother and stretch that
vaginal canal and off-shoot our young one into life’s battleground, absent of
all this science. But twenty-four hours
there and twenty-two from the first inducement, something had to give. Something was not right, but Penelope was
perfect. Ashley was perfect to me.
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I
remember Penelope’s face looking up at Ashley with her light blue eyes, brown
hair, beautiful skin with rosy cheeks and sweet lips. Ashley and I kept saying, “I love you. You are so beautiful.” Ashley and I held Penelope for thirty minutes
telling Penelope how wonderful she was and how much we loved her. Pheromones mapped brains.
I
went with Penelope to the nursery at the given time and bonded. I remember seeing my parents through the
window taking pictures through the glass as Penelope gripped on to my finger
like a tendril-vine life preserver.
The
hours circumnavigated the clock.
Penelope stuck like a sticker to Ashley’s skin. I imagined the hours, of mitosis into
uterine-wall implantation, into the divisions of self doubling self over and
over into the barriers of cellular into soul-filled mathematics computing into
this present: mother holding child.
Feeding
and sneaking in this work away-time.
Night fell and the time of simultaneous independent jurisdiction between
Ashley and I was over. From this day in
waking until some computed day eighteen or twenty years from this smatter of
hours, one of us would preside an accountancy over Penelope knowing we mattered
more than just a single frame of bones and flesh. There was this other, this baby girl for
however long this world blessed us with Penelope’s grace.
Penelope
fell asleep on my chest as I pressed an orange and a yellow pair of hospital
chairs together to make a seat for my bottom and a resting place for my
feat. I cradled my daughter in her
papoose of a white hospital issued blue and pink striped wrap over my
lungs. The air elevated and decompressed
in undulation of this first titillation to mimic what Ashley had shared with
Penelope for so many months.
My
role up until Penelope’s birth was limited to reading, “Good Night Moon”
in-utero to Penelope. We would lie on
the bed. Ashley’s belly of exposed skin
was its own mountain rage on the mattress like an incubator Superdome. I talked to Penelope inside that stretched yurt. I told Penelope stories. In June Ashley gave me a photo card with
impressively self-printed lipstick painted letters, “Happy Father’s Day” of her
belly.
Our
collectively married body was recuperating in stasis of stretch marks and with
whatever discount rate a father computes in this present value equation. Maybe parents equal out in some variable of
finance, but at this point in time Ashley was contributing more than I
was. I could strap in car seats. I was a supporting actor.
Ashley
could breast feed. Ashley pumped her
beneficial hormones family dairy full of the antibodies in mammalian lactate to
aid the bacterial ecosystem in Penelope’s intestines to stabilize for one day
solid food. The Baker factory farm
produced and labeled packages of air-pumped breast milk for storage.
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Ashley
went back to work at the law firm in three weeks. I remember our discourse as if it were a
two-way conversation, the assurances of motherhood and career and hearing none
of the, “things will be fine without.”
Calls were made.
Wonder
woman had the invisible plane to jet back for lunch time feedings sandwiched
between mid-morning and mid-afternoon pumping.
Ashley could lasso that charge with an electric feel for motherhood and
corporate controller. Formula entered
the food chain four weeks after Ashley started back with the lawyers.
I
wanted Ashley to have her home-sewn time with Penelope. Nannies were hired into our house three days
a week. The first was an Australian au
pair. We purged the Aussie after she
cleaned Penelope’s privates with rubbing alcohol. The next quit after the first paycheck had
taxes withheld. She said this was
unacceptable for her social security situation.
She explained about past understandings.
We explained how a CPA license and tax laws are interrelated, how it is
not cheaper for us to follow the law.
The third was Anne Thomas a boomer retired at fifty-five former teacher
who was devoid of chemistry experiments or a need to bilk the American
taxpayer.
Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday were Nanny Anne.
Tuesday and Thursday were Oma Lacey.
Lacey brought her twine and twigs, burrowing in a Hingle-nest in our
home. Practices and plastic toys
accumulated in a spoiling spree to be.
The years and times of recognition of this Lacey the Oma world was
forging. So many days were spent on that
three-seat-er bike peddling like in a Muppet movie of Ashley, Penelope and
Lacey. I was out auditing, preparing tax
returns, reviewing 401k plans, paying for health insurance, diaper runs and
formula powder canisters from Sam Walton’s cartel.
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We
brought Penelope to mass her very first Sunday with us assuring her seal of
God. A month later, Penelope was
baptized. I held Penelope in my
arms. It was the only time I have ever
seen Ashley’s parents in a church since the wedding. Hilton wore a tie.
Sometimes
it all seems so arbitrary, that God could judge some innocent infant for an
expanse of time where her parent’s failed to pour this water over her
hairline. How can so many people of one
religion obsess in every ritualistic obedient practice and others entirely
utilize separate sets of ideological and theological idiosyncratic and
eternity-altering pursuits without deviation, consequence, or marred remark
upon the record to reconcile the difference between our paths? How can any of these sacraments have any
meaning, any pertinence in the nuance when the obsession is entirely
selected? But as with most Catholics, I
guess I just went with it. I was
baptized and so was my daughter.
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After
the breast feedings dissipated, Ashley and I had an every other night getting
up with Penelope agreement. The verbal
contract avoided that hand bumping, “No you go” debate between mother and
father in response to infant two a.m. cries.
Penelope spent her first night in our home in a shower-bestowed bassinet
by our bedside. After that night
Penelope slept in her crib in her own room.
We never wanted Penelope to need us to fall asleep or to come between
the sheets of our bedroom.
There
are children and married adults. I was
adamant Ashley and I always put each other first in that balanced
parental-concerned dynamic. There are
what people term as sacrifices we make joyfully as parents, but ultimately the
spirit of one’s offspring levitates beyond the nexus of parental control into a
self capable of partnering her own love in this world.
A
child will be married and leave such nests.
What then for the mother or father that has constructed his or her own
life on the pillars of what a child must remove in order to build her own
estate? Where is the parent’s partner,
life? So much is in the wrinkles of bed
sheets, crib placements. At the center
is a mature understanding of the responsible facets of love.
Love
is not quantifiable. If you give love to
one person there is not a depleted vessel that can not love someone else. There is just a difference between marital
and parental love. What a marriage needs
and deserves is different from the love for a child. The way a parent loves a child is understood
to be absolute. There is no expectation
of reciprocation in a commensurate manner for the child to repay directly. The way a child pays back the parent is to
show a similar love to their own child and thus their parent’s grandchild. To see that is a true parental joy and a
reinforcement of our Darwinian self-interests.
Loving your own children is ultimately selfish.
A
marriage is balanced through reciprocation.
In marriage a spouse thinks of the other knowing what the other spouse
needs and wants. There is a sense of joy
in the partnership that is created and in the individual identities still
maintained. A healthy marriage has a
balance of couple activities and individual hobbies that develop and feed each
person’s true self.
Part
of those couple activities includes being parents. Each partner will do everything that parental
love guides. One day each child is going
to grow up and find her own individual identity. She will be independent and will find her own
partner. In marriage, she will commit to
that new person with all of her being to build the foundation for that healthy
and life-long mutual commitment.
A
parent who has put her spouse rather than her child first will see the joy of
her child’s independence and relish in the child’s happiness. A parent that prioritized his child above his
marriage will feel a deeper void to fill and a separation from his marital
partner because of rationalizing the marriage’s continuance by an unhealthy
percentage based on the parental contract he shared as a couple that is now
missing. If this occurs it is then up to
the couple to try to recognize the truth of this missing element and fill it
with renewed mutual commitment to one another and coupled activities.
I
remember talking to Ashley about these dynamics when we went to Engaged
Encounter. Ashley told me this would be
a struggle for her. I do not think
Ashley ever understood my multi-layered perspective. Democrats, Republicans; who ever listens?
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Our
lives were filled with the constant punch-clock of hours of newborn
parenting. Work responsibilities
tempered with the desire to be in two places at once and dare to whisper
request temporary reprieves to maintain a sense of self. Ashley took Penelope to her medical
appointments and bathed her. I cooked
dinner and balanced out my overtime.
I
was trying to get use to what little girls were like. I never had a sister or any minor female in
my common space. Were there hidden
secrets that came with a vagina and XX chromosomes? I could clean and rectify a dirty diaper. I could produce a formula potion from the
canister and supply the makeshift mommy nipple in a sanitary speedway. I could read a story. I could wake up at two a.m. and rock-a-bye
back to sleep. I could blanket the floor
and play, but I could not present flush breasts and a former nine month hotel
bill to be repaid over the next sixty years in amortized loan payments of
preferential treatment.
Inside
whatever was not deemed perfunctorily-mandatory by Ashley that I do, I was not
encouraged, instructed, or guided to perform.
It was as if Ashley had learned this limited world of what masculine
hands could handle. Ashley was skeptical
like an atheist watching a religious zealot’s countdown to the apocalypse biblical
book of revelations clock. Sometimes I
felt like feminine body parts were omnipresent: eyes, breasts, hands, labia,
ears, nostrils, ovaries, mouths. I felt
like an illegal immigrant. If I was
detected to be in violation of the feminine civil codes for something on page
five hundred and twelve of the parental handbook, I risked being deported or
put on restricted duty.
Ashley
was certain there was no problem in her hoarding of motherly moments, tasks and
activities. The idea that I told Ashley
she did not need to be perfect did not even register with her
consciousness. Let alone our divergent
concepts of parenthetical perfection.
I
had a one-shot sperm bank withdrawal.
These nights and times were the ties that bind, but the hours could be
exhausting. Ashley claimed to be
oblivious to the pressure. Sometimes I
tried to talk to Ashley before we went to bed about the exhaustion, but the
first rule of mommy club is do not complain about mommy club.
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For
Halloween we dressed Penelope as a miniature wrapped-up in-shell cloth
peanut. We sent pictures to the whole
family. For Thanksgiving we had our
renovated home on display. The pool was
blue. Most of the backyard concrete was
now grass. The sheetrock, the wood
floors, the painting, the nursery and our family home danced as a triad. We had both sides of the family over in a
hand-held ring of aunts, grandfathers, sons and daughters. Ashley and I were the center; a marriage
forging the new generation solid in Catholicism and love. Ashley exited the cocoon as the new Granny
Darling.
Christmas
brought Penelope in a Santa hat and the first falling snow in New Orleans on any day in decades. Ashley made Christmas cards with photographs
I took of Penelope at the base of the tree.
At Valentines I wrote a poem to Ashley.
To my Valentines – Little steps, the silence rests,
the warmest parts of me attach. My girls
entwined with the love to give my hands, to raise our child, to hold my wife to
know a life where I could wish for nothing more.
First
Mardi Gras parades masked. Easter bunny
bounties were dispensed. Penelope was
more interested in our old cat than the basket.
Penelope scooted in her walker with a dashing glee. Summer came with Penelope’s one year July
birthday with an ice cream theme of popsicles and Baskin and Robbins
first-flavor cake. Ashley got everyone
parlor hats. We had balloons and cheers
with our family gathered in our so-grateful home.
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On
August 29, 2005, Katrina bombed. We
evacuated on a Friday evening. The whole
city was focused on a preseason game between the Saints and the Ravens in the
Superdome. Harbingers went out over the
local news casts. The swell amassed like
a microwave’d cancer in the Gulf.
Katrina could be a storm parents of every south Louisiana child discussed like Betsy or
Camille. There was little doubt this
African named cumulonimbus bitch was headed straight for New Orleans.
We
packed up our possessions as best we could into our gray minivan: baby
supplies, the cat, photographs, data discs and as much clothes deemed
pertinent. Ashley got her law firm’s
server to be able to operate remotely.
Cloud computing involved a barometer.
We
headed north to Nottoway. Most of the city appeared in a stunned
lethargy and would evacuate on Saturday.
We sat in the Hingle’s living room in rapture with the words of local
meteorologists Bob Breck, Dan Milham and Nash-Roberts-clones barking out where
this spiraling cantankerous expanding-circumference computer-graphic maelstrom
would run asunder. What would be left?
The
fear that we were not far enough north inched in around nine p.m. Saturday
evening. The concept of sleeping in Nottoway bartered with the very measure that makes one a
parent. If it was just us, what choice
would we make, but it was not just us any more.
We packed our rations with Hilton calling us crazy under condescending
breathes and piled into a pickle-packed inching-forward highway headed north
with little clue of where to find a room, just a cell phone and hope.
Lacey
found us a reservation with a bed and breakfast in Natchez Mississippi
after working the phones with Ashley as I drove. We waited with our play-pen and our canned
goods. Penelope and I made a fort out of
the vanity cabinet under the bathroom sink.
My hometown was under siege on the news.
The enemy at the gates rowed closer with each stroke towards
category-five Viking landfall.
The
storm came on Sunday, jutting the eye to the Mississippi Gulf
Coast at the last
flinching blink in a game of federal emergency management chicken, but that was
a big fucking eyeball. The power went
out in Natchez. The winds downed the lines. This was just a fringe lash of the storm, not
even close to the brunt iris.
Ashley
did not say much. No fear uttered, just
these looks at me with our daughter; that I was going to make everything
ok. Fathers and husbands make everything
ok. The image of Ashley supporting
Penelope’s back as they peered out the window after the power went out in the
tinted storm-cloud mid-morning sun still sticks in my mind. Their common brown hair, the world was out
there, inside, stood the treasures of my life.
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On
Monday we began to regroup, to find out the casualties. No phone worked. Cell phones were a sea of busy or no-service
signals. Nottoway may have been a
twisted Wichita and New
Orleans a deluged Baghdad. Everybody had their own reclamation
agenda. I packed up the van with a plan
to head south to Nottoway. We went to get gas. All the pumps were out with the
electricity. We regretted not filling up
on our way in because of how busy it was, having an infant and wanting to set
head to pillow.
We
got on the interstate. After a
draining-distance of miles we started to eye gasoline pumps like Pavlov’s
dog. The desperation began to sink in of
the “this is not Kansas
any more I think we are in a Mad Max movie variety.” Post-apocalyptic vampires salivated for
gasoline like it was human blood.
We
tried two exits. The power problem
appeared to be an epidemic. Speedway was closed,
blacked out. No place had electricity to
turn on the pumps. We were in an America
where no one could get gasoline. The
reality of this cage of metal turning into an infant-baking oven and us having
to set out on-foot down the interstate gripping water and base rations began to
sweep into our heads. We were glad
Penelope was not fluent in parental fear and that the van had a flexible
definition of the letter E.
The
fuel ran out in Ashley’s parent’s driveway.
Nottoway did not flood, but trees were
litter. Roofs, fueled cars, electricity
and sanity were precious commodities. I
hoped the rest of my family was out at my father’s hunting property in nowhere Mississippi.
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Nottoway was out of power for two weeks.
We set up an intermittent generator in the ninety-nine degree heat. There was an old service station with
non-electric pumps capable of supplying gas.
Lines formed every morning. Lacey
and Ashley acquired fuel, like African princesses trudging to a remote water
source. Relatives gathered. Pieces of facts fluttered down via the radio
like 911 Manhattan
tower office papers.
The
storm actually missed New Orleans. Gulfport
got the nuclear bomb. Sunday night was
dry. Monday morning the levees
broke. The world saw my city die on CNN
while Governor Kathleen Blanco practiced petrifaction. Somebody needs to change CNN’s fucking
programming.
After
a few days I snuck past the interstate roadblock with Hilton through the
National Guard to head towards New
Orleans. We
told a story about Hilton having to do work on a chemical plant he had this
badge to enter.
The
ride was eerie, desolate with more camouflage humvees than F150’s. There were more abandoned gas-parched
commuter carrion vehicles than moving ones.
Helicopters buzzed the air like crows eyeing the interstates. The airport in Kenner was a vulture nest of military
craft. The stark unearthly nothing where
there should be so many something’s was the most prominent presence.
The
road to our house had been pumped out or drained via reluctant gravity. Power lines were still down. Road-level tree canopies made for serpentine
routes. From the outside it was hard to
tell. From the inside it was
obvious.
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The
stench hit me in the face like a brick.
The water must have been knee-high.
So much of the city got an NBA player reaching his pinky on his tippy
toes. Our roof was part shingle-pitched
and part flat. The shingles scattered,
but held. The flat succumbed and
pealed. The flat-roof rubber massive
black bed-sheet crushed a neighbor’s patio two houses down and landed in
between two dwellings.
We
had the “thank God we had flood insurance” reprieve from the grand New Orleans
chicken or the egg insurance debate of who pays for the water damage when your
roof rips off before the levee breaks and floods your home? So many people got fucked in the ass on that
one: one federal department engineers the levee, another offers optional
insurance for flooded acts of Noah-proportions.
Allstate won’t pay for anything that could possibly have come from
another source, because who can prove what happens in an evacuated home. That is why we have cell phone cameras, to
disprove Allstate and Ahmadinejad.
I
got garbage bags for the refrigerator contents.
I threw the blobs in the back of Hilton’s truck. Who knew when garbage collection was
coming? A tree was in the pool beginning
the transformation into a mosquito cauldron.
The fence was down. Penelope’s
plastic playhouse was scattered like Lego’s.
The ceilings were busted where the weight of the water found a
nadir. The dark-green sofa and loveseat
were soiled. The floors buckled. The mold spores were spreading. Our renovated home was in need of renovation.
I gathered a few orphaned accoutrements,
but mainly just a sunken lump walking outside staring up at a clear blue sky of
helicopters.
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In
the coming weeks we discovered the seventeenth floor windows facing Lake Pontchartrain blew out in my office. Boudreaux and Borges was never so
bitter-sweet to be a paperless auditing firm.
The whole building was in need of mold remediation by men in
beehive-looking suits like in E.T.
The
roof ripped off Ashley’s law office.
Water gushed in soiling the carpet.
One random day we pulled the middle seat out of our van. We brought a few of Lacey’s laundry baskets
and went in Ashley’s office with the attorneys to rescue legal files down the
storied “no operable elevator” staircase as we held our breaths. The halls smelled like Pepé Le Pew raped
the wallpaper.
256
Life
was crazy. The two-century-old “locals
only” New Orleans
was like its own third world country.
Jokes were no longer funny. Will
Smith’s Independence Day was here with the aliens played by Mother Nature and a
federal levee that made a city into a bath tub.
Except in place of suds we had a black brew of diesel, sewer entrails,
distended appendages, Honda Accords, copies of A Confederacy of Dunces,
larva, attic insulation and shit people didn’t even realize was gone until
months later in cascading torment.
How
quickly the lines of society break down.
We revert to our true natures in disaster. Three days of hell: food, shelter, humanity
were magnified in some, diminished in others. Under the right conditions, any American city
can fall to hell in give or take four hours.
L.A.
riots, Katrina, when humans sense reinforcements are not coming; the guns come
out, the wolves salivate, sheep pray, dogs survive.
So
many people had it worse than we did: crapping in buckets, bribing freelance
shirtless camel-smoking look-alike roofers with Budweiser and being tarred and
feathered in the fetid stench of desperation.
Angel-faced Hispanics migrated from Texas framing and roofing suburban towers of
Babble fueled by Chicano Taco trucks.
Rotten-egg Chinese drywall corroded wiring for lawsuits buried behind
sheetrock. Salvation was random. Perdition was encompassing, thick like
humidity in the air.
Thousands
lined outside the Convention Center as if celebrating before ashes forty days
prior to Easter. Most elected the glare
of that sauna sun dehydrating to avoid the stench of shit, urine and vomit
wafting out the clogged toilet cave interiors.
Hoodlums looted drug stores to dispense bottled water to the sick and
babies first in sidewalk purgatory.
Helicopter, truck, and bus transport were absent. Authority was homeless. Geriatric aunties became vulture meat. No room for the dead or the living, maybe,
sheets, but no morgue. No wheeled
floats, just boats in a toilet, only beads of sweat. Fifty dollars in a checking account, no gas
money to run, no Hilton reservation to book; have-nots huddled like rats in
tree limbs above ten feet of mucked liquid.
I was a have, and damn grateful.
Our
renovation was now junked, but there is a difference between water just above
the baseboards and water past the top of the doorframe. The difference comes in the population of
mold spores and the consequences of the inner contents of a family home
resembling a washing machine with gasoline, dirt and cigarette butts as
detergent.
Spray
paint X’s marked the houses with cold acronyms.
Top quadrant date, left initials of search squad, right hazards: downed
wires, rats, gas lines. Bottom was for
body count. The lines read like a NOLA
INRI, a deciphered execution cipher for later generations.
New Orleans was in the shit-pothole of its American journey. FEMA trailers, gutted houses, speckled-pox
sheetrock ceilings, dotted the I’s of former lives. All Saints Day passed uncelebrated in
northeastern tangent realities. Raised
graves were under water. Holiday Inn
suites packed with thirteen six-month long sort-of relatives are no holiday.
August
was burning up one-hundred-plus degree humidity. Only five air conditioners in the city
worked. Life was sweltering like being
carried out inside a stray dog’s mouth with gum-disease swirling its salvia at
every scared face that would dare brave the surface world that might provide or
be something to eat.
Growing
up I often referred to the summer heat in New
Orleans as the surface world. Our planet was heated up like Mars in the
movie “Total Recall.” Concrete and
melting death clogged the pours of every life.
When a person had to move across a supermarket parking lot to attempt to
obtain rations from air-conditioned shelter, ones head might explode with
bulging eyeballs like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Post Katrina life was no sci-fi with a Hollywood
ending.
257
Above
ground cemetery bodies were finally fully buried. Drugs, guns, and Humvee National Guard
patrols brought “bring your gun to dinner contemplations.” Four, five, sixteen dead and counting from
humans desperate for something structured and familiar; this was Mogadishu-New
Orleans reissued for a cat’s stretch.
Junkies were in forced detox.
Bullet holes and asphyxiation by levee water end the same.
Transplants
lived parallel-lives in other cities, as if New Orleans never happened. People could pretend they were always New
York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys or Atlanta Braves, but never Falcons. These lobotomizes refugees worked with a past
life removed, like how whatever a vampire did when he was still human is
entirely forgotten. Yet for us the
mirrors still worked and the same face stared back every waking hour.
St.
Bernard nursing homes baked elderly cookie-dough craniums in the sweltering post
Mr. Go flood. Humans were un-evacuated
with no plan feasible for that end of the life stringed spectrum. There were too many oxygen tanks to refill,
ambulance-mandatory pumps to function, back-generators sitting in hospitals,
time was ticking down for the time-bomb.
Grandmas had mother’s day in May, but Christmas was now
questionable. Life was bleak from the
waves of red tide that rolled through the lower nine.
In
the Tsunami kamikaze-medical supplies at Memorial Hospital
on Napoleon Avenue
dwindled. Makeshift-patriot Kevorkian’s
did the deeds that needed doing.
Morphine was injected for the time left for the death sentence handed
out as if the hospital was late on its Entergy bill. Lights went out. Generators were buzzing for how long?
Big
publically-traded nuclear plant facilities could not bail out Katrina. The lines were down. The water was rising. Who was coming in a helicopter to drop-ship
in gasoline or drinking water to run the hospital my daughter was born in? Americans were heating up in attics. Stragglers gulped at impenetrable
shingles. Winners raised bed sheet-flags
for whirly bird and flat boat rescue to join arenas of new shit to deal
with. Thanksgiving dinning rooms boiled
like soda cans in microwaves.
258
Crime
was backing people into corners. Life
was like a mother trying to remove her infant from a summer backseat, but the
oven-car was a whole damn city wide.
Sons wandered into a ransacked Wal-Mart to find rations. Oblongata had gone oyster bisque. Blow on the surface and try to stir the
steam. It was too hot to see the beams
of heat swimming like sharks in with the mollusk-meat.
Chocolate City
drizzled over the Danziger
Bridge like a rain of
police bullets fondue fountain. Six
people were shot September fourth 2005, two killed. Civil rights violation convictions handed out
August 4, 2011. Police busted their
vowed code of silence.
Fourth
District Police hurried burned bones with Henry Glover’s skull melted naked in
William Tanner’s incinerated Chevy backseat with a bullet in the chest. Algiers
levee did not burst, but it secluded the corpse, others floated like logs in
the streets. Glover was assumed to be a
looter. Four days later divergent
reports surfaced.
Officer
Kevin Thomas was previously shot in the head by a looter. The City was on high alert, brazen acts; got
to protect the Chuck E Cheese. Tanner
was driving by; hospital was too far.
NOPD was camped at an elementary school for aid; handcuffs were
applied. Tanner’s keys went missing with
Glover in the backseat alive.
Union-based officer got fired in May 2011.
Gretna bridge standoffs confronted a Lynrd-Skynrd-enthusiast
flagged white-wall with transient Orleans Parish refugees. How do you fire-fall Oakwood mall? O.P.P. let out for fear of flooding into
crazed bracelet pigpens. F.U. Mr. Go
(Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) got to go.
Guttural
reaction, “Fuck their sympathy. I get to
say that. They don’t. They don’t get to understand us even if they
do.” We are an entire city depressed, anxious
and out of our brain patterns searching for a fix solace, drugs, phantom peace,
all on the verge of suicide. Warren
Hogan rest in peace.
259
We
fight wars with insurance companies.
Fuck you Allstate, State Farm, Citizens insurer of last resort: pennies
on the dollar mailed to addresses no longer inhabitable nine and half months
later. These Faustian-Bargain
pittance-checks are not worth cashing, because that would be like vindicating
their argument that this was fair?
No
flood insurance for some. Home-owner’s
does not pay when the roof blew off first and the federal levee broke
after. Intermediate undocumented
realities do not apply here. What do you
call levee insurance; federal income taxes?
Yeah, we pay those too mother fucker.
What is the replacement value on a water-logged molded family Bible?
We
were a service economy being shit on.
Curfew, dead-body streets, positives and negatives do not always cancel
out. Zero sum game, New Orleans was negative 911. Bill Jefferson with $90,000 in his freezer
was almost re-elected. Dollar Bill got
foiled by a Vietnamese Versailles Republican.
FEMA field office conducted shake downs.
All these tree-folk here have stubborn roots inoculated against spilled
gas tank suck-up.
It
is like our whole city had a family member commit suicide on top of all the
ones that actually did. For some the
city was a parent, a grandmother, a son, an auntie. The pain was felt in different ways, but in
all it was personal. Everyday, every
action was adjusted. There was a gap, an
empty seat at the dinner table to stare at blankly. Every look at your front door was for the
spouse that was never coming home.
Every
look at the black-spotted ceiling memory that does not fade from your vision
was like staring at the sun for too long.
It leaves a burn on the retina of your soul. A body was dead, staring at you from beyond
the grave. Oh, did I slip up and use
past tense. Something you love is
dead. It will never be the way it
was. No more missionary, only doggie
style. We can no longer stand to look
each other in the eye, my lover and I.
260
My
sense of predicable outcomes was like a pot of water set to boil evaporating on
the stove. My office was operating out
of Houma Louisiana. I had occasional “come and see the progress”
visits back to Boudreaux and Borges’ Metairie
office. All the lake-facing windows
became internal pointed hose spickets overlooking Bucktown and Lakeview.
Lakeview
was an Orleans Parish neighborhood with a fourteen-foot levee failure report
card. Between my office and Lakeview was
the stark contrast of the 17th
Street canal.
To the left Jefferson Parish Bucktown was dry. To the right Orleans Parish Lakeview was
flooded. The site was like a blimp view
of Israel and Palestine as if divided by
a busted wall. All the lawns in Lakeview
were black in patches of overwatered sludge.
At dusk the electric poles twinkled like Christmas for the left
hand. To the right Lakeview and New
Orleans East beyond was a blackout.
Lakeview
was affluent. It was not some poor-me
government assistance porch-all-day destitution infomercial. New Orleans East was the biggest middle-class
population in New Orleans. These were taxpayers building a Pyramid of
Giza from their former housed lives with rancid materials like spoiled
groceries form Lowes or Home Depot. The
Lakeview refuse-mountain rose out in the neutral ground between both sides of West End Boulevard.
261
Ashley
was working remotely over a server. We
were getting paid, but for how long? What
was this economy going to become? What
was an accountant with no companies sustainable to audit? My firm was in chaos. My mortgage and student-loans were still
due. What was the point of becoming
partner of such a smaller-pie hell-town?
We
had Penelope. We were young with Tulane
educations. Cell phones were beginning
to work. Ashley’s grandfather had
internet. Moster.com became our
friend. Resumes went out. Within hours recruiters and offers
followed. Every city, but our home was
our oyster. North
Carolina, Oregon, Florida, Texas;
what life did we want?
Ashley
put the crux on me. The big decisions
were always on me. I counted the
fractured roofs and flooded rooms. What
happens next summer when another storm swirled?
262
In
weeks Hurricane Rita hit the western part of Louisiana.
We planned a trip to Tampa
for a week of set up interviews. We each
got multiple offers: Jabil, United-Health, private and public. We could double our salaries in a day.
On
the weekend we went house shopping with a “free” buyer’s agent. Ashley and I saw the real estate market
soap-bubble in our eyes afraid of the burst.
A $150,000 home two years ago in Tampa
was now $400,000, not even close to the water.
Even with the jobs weighed against the unknown of being able to sell our
New Orleans home, Florida housing was independently someone
else’s problem. We had enough of our
own.
I
was ready to get out of public accounting and go into industry. Then I got an offer with a firm called the
JBA group in Dallas. I quickly learned you are only worth what you
negotiate in life, not a penny more. All
this Andersen-knowledge suddenly had a value again. Like a combination-remembered safe I kept
under my bed, I could pull my brain out of storage.
263
We
became Texans. I said my goodbye to the
head audit partner at Boudreaux and Borges reluctantly. He was a good mentor. He hung himself in his levee-flooded home not
too far from where Michael grew up a few months later. It made me imagine what suicide was; even in
catastrophe; it’s the precept of normal that breeds self-execution.
Suicide
comes drenched in banality at 2:15 p.m. on a Wednesday of an overrun lunch hour
moored to a sitting chair. The
mayonnaise on rye clogs a mouth like paste to fill a body in tacky glue. The moment creams in normal. Death comes in the emulsion of egg and oil
tradition of rise at five a.m. work to industry to five p.m. Children’s less innocent faces stare in a
salad of gray-green mulch dressed in pale-white condiment that tastes immutable. I imaged this is when suicide comes, in
bright mirrored glass blinding the protagonist from all that connects us. The self-choice spills the blood to address
the violent nausea of an unflinching normal.
Neither
New Orleans normal nor Texas normal, were normal. So I guess I was safe from self-murder as
long as I kept perspective. We rented a vacated
could-be-anywhere American Saltine-cracker house with beige carpet, beige walls
and what-we-could-manage furniture. The
house shared a cookie-cutter façade to at least two homes on every adjoining
block just south of the George H. Bush tollway.
The house was no FEMA trailer. It
had cobwebs, but it was no “gutted to the studs” honeycomb-hornet’s nest of
memories. We were lucky.
Ashley
was taking care of one-year-old Penelope.
We potty-trained Penelope at fourteen months to meet
Montessori-preschool admittance standards.
Penelope was the youngest in her class, like the way I met her mother,
working a year ahead.
We
had to choose between this brick posh-private over-the-top academy complete
with a water park pirate ship, indoor rain forest simulation and ballerina-bar
dance studio, a straw place that fed cheerios to kids in penned areas like they
were farm animals, or this little pocket of Popsicle sticks and fertile
creativity Montessori school. We loved
that little school. Dallas was a
different world, but it made sorting out our lives so much easier having a
happy and guiding place for Penelope and not having to worry about the Big Bad
Wolf coming along and blowing everything down.
My
job was the only anchor we had. Dallas was a sea of concrete, leased spaces and more
restaurants and malls than any where in America. All of it was just a paved over cow pasture
where everybody seemed to be from somewhere other than Dallas
trying to show off how Dallas
they were. Where was the soul in this
place? Our neighbor next to our rental
told us we were the first people to come introduce ourselves in the five years
she had lived in this two-thousand home neighborhood. Was New
Orleans that different?
We
flew back to Louisiana
and shared Thanksgiving at Hilton and Lacey’s house. Our house was unusable, but I still got to
say the prayer.
Thanksgiving 2005 – in Nottoway
– We stand at a precipice, a jagged moment, we stored out of sight and prayed
never to be forced to reveal. This storm
has come and unveiled truths about our capabilities as a community: to
reconstruct brick and mortar, to reunite the bonds of scattered families. As we stand here with our hidden
uncertainties about what the next day and year may bring, we stand here a
family.
We stand here with God. In His eyes we contemplate difficult
choices. I pray as miles may expand;
hearts pull closer. That the life-altering
subtleties of daily events can evolve before a consciousness that is a family’s
sight. No matter where this storm may
change us; God is here through the hands we hold.
264
After
we flew back, Ashley went to work for an internet sports retailer that sold
official jerseys, clothing, lamps and merchandise by managing professional and
college websites. I tolerated Ashley’s
employment’s tacit endorsement of the Dallas Cowboys, but I was still a firm
parishioner of the Who Dat Nation.
Ashley’s boss was a disorganized train-wreck of a GM. Ashley was brought in to save this man’s
season. I was busy, like Arthur-Andersen
busy, sixty no-paid overtime hours in five days. I was helping implement the same paperless
system I used at Boudreaux and Borges.
One
of the nights when Ashley was feeling down, I took Ashley and Penelope to get a
Christmas tree at the local big-box Lowes.
I was amazed at the service. Then
I remembered there was not a big fucking hurricane here with hundreds of people
patching together the fragments of their lives checking out everyday. The cashier woman even offered me a comment
card after I complimented her assiduity.
I
was often at some out-of-town client.
Airports and roadways dominated my January and February. I spent four weeks of Monday’s through
Friday’s in Grants New Mexico. Do you
know what is in Grants New Mexico? A
hotel, a Mexican restaurant that serves amazing meat-stuffed sopaipillas, scores
of beautiful cacti, and a utility plant for an industrial paper-roll factory to
make boxes twenty miles further off into the desert. You would think it would be hot in the
desert, but in February it was eight degrees.
I was a south Louisiana boy driving a
rental S.U.V. through the snowed-out New
Mexico desert.
Ashley
was not happy with me gone, but she never would talk. Ashley’s parents flew up constantly, stayed
over and took us out to dinner. I was
still getting over the few weeks of living in the Hingle house in cramped Nottoway.
Ashley
was still trying to be all things.
Underneath Ashley trembled for her mommy and daddy to make this all go
away. Ashley missed those weeks of
post-hurricane layover in her hometown.
What was panic mode for me was like this bizarre vacation, mother and
child reunion for Ashley.
265
My
biggest male-stress was our house and coordinating with our realtor and
contractors to try get the house on market and sold. Selling the house represented the pass-card
to progression. The sale had to occur
before the rental house and our old mortgage’s grip could thrust that
Atlas-weight back into the ocean from which Katrina came.
Our
realtor had an abundance of homes to sell.
Most of which were customers much closer to the city than we were. Despite the apparent dearth of housing in the
city, getting that house sold was like trying to sell water to a blind Romanian
gypsy lost in the desert. You know she
probably needed the drink, but nothing was normal or trustworthy about the
situation.
I
remember going to work in Dallas
on Mardi Gras Day, like it was just a Tuesday.
It was the first time in my life I was not off from school or work. Nobody else in the office even noticed. The storm mocked in subtle kidnappings.
It
was like the storm transplanted our whole life into this flotsam wreckage
jettisoned to a transient wayside to rot in a mire of a minority-percentage
choice. The choice had to be owned as an
anchor to the landscape of redefined daily tasks. The people we spoke with, the food purveyors,
the refueling stations were now by-default alterations. No Tastee Kastleburgers! No Manda andouille for gumbo! No Danny & Clydes Leidenheimer bread
Chisesi Ham po-boy! No Hubig’s pies! No Bud’s Broiler number four with the sauce
and no god-dam mother-fucking Haydel’s King Cake!
In
the macro-level devastation, the remaining local survivors huddled down in NOLA
had to relinquish the entitlement of complaint.
In every urge to extol a release of tension to a sympathetic ear, all
anyone could find were qualifying empathetic ones. Any who could listen were also corrupted by
the stale wrath of nature and man.
Was
our humanity corroded and purged by the flood?
External smiles showed luminous.
Jovial retorts aired, but inside home was gone or at minimum disfigured
like acid sprayed on exposed flesh.
History was mutated in the dichotomy of war with a life we compressed
the gall to declare we deserved in private conversations with the Lord.
We
were alive in this flooded wasteland.
Every joy was precious. Our
challenge in the driftwood strand was to let these doppelganger former selves
that we could have been, keep washing by.
“Do not grasp their hands. Their
fingers are dark leaches draining any future with tainted hopes no longer
feasible in this altered beyond-Thunderdome future that demands our
attention. Let them drown, so we can
filter the oxygen through these fetid breaths.”
New Orleanians could only hold what could fit in our hands as we
scavenged in the debris; so we grabbed our culture tight.
I
started to realize more of the unsalvageable possessions. Mr. Roberts’ Mont Blanc
pen was missing. Pre-digital family
photos were gone including this book from our wedding that got smeared in the
water.
Ashley
changed jobs after her daddy-figure boss was too big a failure. Ashley got a job doing tax work for a wealth
management company that handled individuals with over twenty-five million
dollars. Translated that is, she worked
as part of a team of professionals to reduce the taxes of the moderately-mega
wealthy as much as possible. Some rich
guy saw he needed a crew just to handle how much money he had, (accountants,
lawyers, financial analysts, and bankers), so the guy made more money by
starting a company with his team to help other rich people like him keep the
government away from their money.
(This
is how the spectrum of disparity of wealth is maintained. Such machines perpetuate the perception of
living individuals requiring respiration, the consumption of water and food,
fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature to imprint upon
their own self-view an enhanced upward mobility that is not only capable of
being obtained, but an achievement of past fact. For the very concept of the threshold of
monetary wealth required to foster prosperity in one bucket is a pittance
compared to the threshold to constitute moderate wealth in another.
The
great magic act is beguiling a man to misunderstand the comparative size of his
own bucket, while adding a lesser measure to his own than he does to another;
in the sense that the ounce he adds to his own is below the threshold of
necessity for daily repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and
food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature, while the
measure he adds to the other is above similar thresholds. One is obtaining necessity, the other excess.
These
twenty-five million dollar buckets contrast with a Texas school teacher, an
Indonesian miner, a New Jersey bus driver, a Parisian nurse, or the
geographically independent chief executive officer of Pfizer. Imagine the volume of contents like water
spilling upon a floor the size of Tanzania, prompting the burgeoning
of life like a Serengeti flood. If the
smaller buckets spill, a few weeds or bushes may sprout. If the largest buckets spill; a great deluge
will ensue, drowning animals and grasslands in a chaotic melee. The entire system will die in excess. So it is we must balance the supply exiting.
This
water is not like water on earth; energetic wealth is not finite, the quantity
is not a zero sum. The amount can be
nothing or a raging fire depending on the choice of individuals. However when the largest buckets, release
such a minimal liquidity in comparison to the consolidated abundance, the
concept of a moderate bucket becomes skewed.
What is the top two percent of wealth and what is the bottom two percent
of humans separate in such a variance that these statistical strata become
alien species, of perceived divergent needs, despite completing the daily
repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion
and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature.
These
traits: the acts of breathing, eating, shitting, drinking, and sleeping, become
so distant in one and all the more intimate in the other. The priority system of processes leaves us
focused on our disconnection as if one is climbing a great building admiring
the view; the other is drowning in a great ocean. Each is blinded by the sun, shinning above
both by an immaterial difference in the universal scheme. One sees the rays reflected off the water
incapable of seeing any floating bodies.
One sees the rays cascading into his direct vision causing any attempt
to see a building to produce black flecks upon his retina or the haze of clouds
wafting kilometers below where Jack’s beanstalk reaches its canopy.
So
you see, it is what we so often can not see; that is the perception of who we
are in comparison and in common that blinds us.
This is how it is that once one is on the thirteenth floor of the building;
it is all the more easy to get to the thirtieth; and so on the five-hundredth
to get to the thousandth. So once one
begins in the basement, how is one to see the street, to knock on the door? The difficulty exponentially increases lower
to the planet; it mirrors gravity in this way.
However we must see an inverse gravity operating in a duality; for
gravity functions based on mass, not a planetary core. One mass is human bodies; one is a cluster of
bank vaults; clouds and roots; each tearing away at a middle.
For
surely some measure of men must occupy each floor, each purpose, supplying the
work to achieve such climbs. We can not
have nations of flatness in a squalor of industry devoid of standing
structures. It is in this balance we
find our societal conundrum; it is in this balance that we eternally vibrate,
primarily stationary, yet constantly pulled by the gravity of either end of the
spectrum.)
So
it was, each my wife and I found ourselves employed; doing work adding to
buckets. God bless America. Life was more sanitary, but everyday was a
synthetic step.
266
In
December of 2005, my mom, Sara got laid off in a mass firing from the Orleans
Parish school system. Coworkers were in
trailers fighting for survival. In came
the pink-slips. Her pension and
collective bargaining rights eventually got truncated to some charter school
reconfiguration forced “retirement.”
Over
time we got into all these discussions about teacher’s unions, education and
the monetary realities of retirement plans forcing inefficient decisions
because the labor laws are archaic. This
was in the works before the storm with the state. Governor Blanco declared the system prime for
state takeover. Katrina was the
opportunity to carry the blood letting out like a one-time flush. Maybe that was squawking up Blanco’s skull
rather than giving Bush the ok to bring in the military.
Campuses
were over-crowded with diminished capacities.
Some kids could not find a school to take them. The working environment was hostile to
teacher’s personal and professional needs.
The hurricane exposed the governmental employee union war begging to
break a different type of levee in America. My mother got out of education and went to
work for an insurance company.
After
seeing all the shit going on in the schools, I wrote some stuff in my
blog. Kids still graduate high school
illiterate, clueless of a self-sufficient purpose. What the fuck America?
My
mom after getting disillusioned with the school system and my dad having an uninhabitable
domicile washed out from Katrina were forced to relocate to the Westbank of the
Mississippi River. The New
Orleans version of the Westbank is geographically
famous not for conflicts between Muslims and Jews, but rather when you drive
from the west bank to the east bank in the morning you stare into the rising
sun. My father felt so out of place on
the Westbank compared to Orleans
parish. Orleans was all he knew. Sometimes he felt he might as well have been
in Houston or Philadelphia.
267
After
busy season in April of 2006, Ashley and I’s house was still not sold, but we
started scavenging the Metroplex for a permanent house in Dallas.
Ashley would phone Lacey. Ashley
and I found this heroic house with a wraparound porch. Ashley’s face lit up with a vagabond smile,
but it was not for sale.
We
found a quaint lot that backed up to a creek that was. Ashley got excited that maybe we could build
a house with a porch like that. The
location was good for our work commutes.
Ashley
got back on the phone with Lacey, exuberant.
Lacey brought up the subject of a lot down the street from her house in Nottoway. The
question hung. Ashley did not have the
bravery to ask it out loud, as if I had all the decision-making power. Ashley did not want the culpability that came
with the choice. I asked Ashley to find
out at least how much the Nottoway lot might
be.
Ashley
responded with, “I did not think that was even a possibility.” Lacey researched the Nottoway
lot like a Luneburger pig on truffles.
The acre lot was not even really for sale, but it was big enough for a
wraparound porch house. We used our
Texas-sized salaries and bought the lot based on a memory with recent sight
unseen.
Ashley
felt like she got out of prison fifty years early. Ashley started talking with Lacey daily. Ashley looked at internet house plans,
designs, structures, and decorations. My
wife hoped with fire. Our college debts
got a stayed execution.
Penelope
was about to finish her preschool year at twenty-months old. I was about to disappoint a bunch of JBA
partners who were getting ready to promote me to this big new retail client
account. I remember pausing things when
talking to the South African head-partner Ashton about how we were going to
handle the logistics, “Time out, I am moving back home.” Ashton’s plan for me to be his golfing Dallas cash-cow died.
268
I
was not going home, but Nottoway was my wife’s
home. Ashley was my family now. I was headed all in on a John Prine Spanish
Pipedream, with peach pits in my pocket.
I did not care where we lived, as long as I had Ashley and Penelope my
world was blessed. I knew nothing about Nottoway except for mother-in-law visits and I needed a
job. Lacey attended to that too.
Lacey
got me in touch with the audit firm that Lacey worked with under Tracer’s daddy
the parish sheriff. I drove down from Dallas on a Friday in a
majorly overdressed suit. I interviewed
with the sole-partner, Henry Huckabee. I
took the job to anchor our return. Henry
promised me that if I came in and implemented this paperless system and it
worked then pretty soon I could make what I was making in Dallas.
I would be a manager. I would
have liked to search around, but what was the difference. We needed to ride coach out of Texas.
Our
U-Haul cattle-drive assembled. We moved
back in with Ashley’s parents after seven months. We still needed to sell our house in New Orleans. Ashley needed a job. Penelope needed a school, but the lot was
like a golden-gate salvation song to sing.
In
July of 2006, Penelope made two and found Nemo in the backyard pool at Oma’s
house. We found a Montessori school
near-by that worked with an ex-hippie commune-style that drove Ashley a bit
nuts with her Republican mantras, but it was for Penelope. Ashley never let her real views espouse in
public.
Ashley
went to work as a controller for a home builder. The guy was an alcoholic running a single
office in desperate need of organization and aid. Ashley had a graduate degree in managing such
environments.
269
Living
with Hilton and Lacey was living with one’s in-laws. Hilton was stubborn and protective of his
territory. I lived with Hilton’s
constant male-pheromone emission usually detected when the bull of the species
urinates on the border lines. I was only
tolerated because Ashley and Penelope were there. The illusion was never even pretended that my
queer city-boy presence was providing the minutest quantity of a desired or
beneficial byproduct to their home pack-environment. I wrote poetry for fucks sake.
Hilton
and Lacey suspended their chain-smoking with Penelope’s entrance into the
house. One weekend trip with some of
their friends a few months in and they were back as surrogate chimneys. We had to watch Penelope’s diet. Oma had sugar and McDonald’s bribing
addictions. I could tell Lacey would
half-heartedly moderate her behavior after a while when I was around like I was
the spoil police. The worst part was I
could not even get to treat my own daughter on the occasion it was warranted. There were at least two if not three
omnipresent people ahead of me in line to access Penelope.
I
tried to cook occasionally in between the rodeo of adults. I got into a habit of doing the dishes. This served two purposes. One, I could be by myself and avoid having to
annoy the Hingle’s with my presence in post-dinner conversations. Two, I could find some at least remotely
tangential masculine productive task to accomplish that did not hinder Hilton
or Lacey’s dominion. They usually wanted
to go smoke after dinner.
The
living materials we accumulated in the U-Haul were placed into a local rented
storage facility. The New Orleans house was going to sell. I could hold my breath. We slept in an upstairs guest bedroom with a
baby monitor. The sound of Amtrak and
East Camden freight trains passing through Nottoway
at odd hours serenaded us.
After
a while the horns drowned. I guess that
meant I was closer to mutating into a local.
Two-year-old Penelope was across the hall in a freshly Hilton-painted-before-our-arrival
pink bubblegum-hued Disney-princess room that made my “what self image are you
trying to give my kid” eyes roll. Lacey
even found coordinated princess bed sheets and posters.
The
Cinderella-Disney stories always end with a marriage. Betrothal is treated as a culmination of love
rather than the infancy of its growth.
To argue the reverse is to exalt an engagement as the pinnacle, which
begs the inquiry, “Why marry?” This was
one of the many reasons I did not want my daughter dwelling with such frauds on
her walls.
It
would be of utmost benefit to young lovers to see the entrails of marriage
digest first love through eroticism and passing the banality of economics,
fate, the wrath of nature, and the jetties of familial bonds formed through the
legal contract. Living with one’s
in-laws is a prime example of such practical hurdles. Kids should not be given a carriage exit and
a happily ever after as their only guidance.
Shouldn’t
we expose ourselves to stories that teach us practical skills in how to nourish
a married love? Maybe with parents like
the ones I was blessed with, still together, through peak and valley, and yet
what for the populace; allowing that longevity is neither a firm indication nor
culmination of sound example? So in this,
marriage is the great wilderness. Ashley
and I were on safari.
270
Our
quarters were Ashley’s old room still painted in her black and white color
scheme from high school. A sweet pea tile was grouted in the bathroom vanity
counter. I got a three-foot section of
closet between Lacey’s hat boxes, Lacey’s Dutch doll collection and stuffed-in
retired clothing.
The
mattress was worn. Occasionally I
pondered Ashley’s high school history. I
remember one Saturday afternoon Ashley was on O number six and trying to hold
her voice down, because Penelope was playing with Lacey in the backyard.
I
had to always wear condoms. The pill
made Ashley nauseous. Sometimes my dick
would stay full mast like I had my own elevator call button. The condoms made it hard to feel anything at
all. Occasionally we would sneak one in
the pool, when her parents were gone. We
manufactured our moments. What is a man
to do with his mother and father-in-law always within respective sniffing or
swinging distance? My world was
indubitably muffled. My DNA was hiding
in an attic.
On
our anniversary in July, I wrote Ashley a poem:
Sea Turtles –I walk the beaches of her island, digging
up my own secrets until the moonlight finds them crawling up like sea turtles.
One by one, breathing life in her ocean sun. I fell.
I could be anyone, even myself with the eggs hatched. The fears dispatched, arms in the breeze
grasping, that two lives had peace knowing nothing remained below the sand.
Five years in colors of dreams realized and ready, I
find myself unfolded, naked and blind to all that is outside. Burgeoning reflection collected as quickly as
the days will allow permanent fixture on my history, the protagonist expounds
upon the script of my life as all I had hoped for in the role of my wife.
271
Ashley
and I were playing Monopoly with Lacey and Ashley’s brother Jeffery. I got a glimpse of how Lacey played board
games. Monopoly can nudge even the
tightest family to war. (Damn you
thimble on St. Charles Avenue!) Lacey was scowling at the board when the dice
did not tilt to the correct summation.
In one property-swing buyout of Jeffery’s elimination from the game,
Lacey’s entire demeanor transfigured into a New York slumlord. I took it as a warning. Never put myself in a competition with this
woman. Lacey had to win. If she did not, there would be one hell of a
pout.
272
On
September 25, 2006, on a Monday night the Saints returned to the
Superdome. I watched the game by myself
at Hilton’s house. Tim was in the
dome. Hilton was with his buddies in his
backyard cabana. Hilton made it clear in
that “this is my territory” way that I was to remain segregated. The city was reconvened for at least one
night. Green Day played with U2 with a
trio of songs including, “The Saints are Coming.” The congregation united in one church of the
Saints.
Maybe
the nation could see it on our faces, our times and what it meant to be a
city. We Catahoula mutts were still
alive. You may rip our scalps off with wind;
claw our wedding albums out with blurry-ink petrochemical water. Bono screamed, “I am an American.” More people believed Paul Hewson in his Irish
words than our own. I sat in my in-laws
living room alone. My wife was off with
her mother, not even watching the game.
My father-in-law was back in his cabana smoking Marlboros. I cried.
I shed tears. I still do every
time I hear the live version of “The Saints are Coming.” “I said no matter how I try I realize there
is no reply.”
Destitute
ransacked America
stranded on rooftops molded out of commission is not supposed to happen without
the word South or Central in front of Vespucci’s namesake. There are sculpted rules bread into America’s
implied European heritage encoded into our voting districts that the grid plan
funded by our taxes will ensure successful remediation’s to such
travesties. (Oh wait, we did not all
come from Europe, my bad.)
Gulf
port and Plaquemines Parish Katrina wrath were natural disasters. New Orleans levees that was the Army Core of
Engineers, corrupt local government and a blanked-out governor who did not want
to play nice with W.
America just acted differently with more black faces on
rooftops than white. That shackled
European-historical byline surfaced like turtle heads peeking out from the
water. Some will call bullshit. I call Iowa
caucus. I call, would this happen if the
Atlantic revolted into Manhattan or San Francisco cracked off
the cliff into the Pacific? (Them’s got
more congressional districts dawlin.) I
call Electoral College.
Maybe
we are on our own more than we realize and Katrina was a wake up call. We are our government. Blame has little place in the solution. “Boo rah, we’re fucked” and now we know a
little bit more just how hard. “Hooray
apocalyptic aftershocks. Score one for
God. Man is down a point.”
The
Saints kicked Michael Vick and the Falcons’ dog-ass all over the field. Drew Brees would later become New Orleans’ Jesus. For a majority Catholic city that is saying
something. I think if we had our way
Brees’ game used towels to wipe his face would be preserved like Shroud of
Turin-relics bearing his prominent facial birth mark. If the Saints had the balls to print and sell
them, we could outsell Pittsburgh’s
Terrible Towel three fold. I heard Brees
does not encourage us calling him Breesus, but we do and I own a WWBD,
Storyville T-shirt.
If
there was one force that reunited our city, it was in that dome that
night. The fervor exploded with Steve
Gleason’s block of a first quarter Falcons’ punt. (Immortalize that empowered ALS man. His hands are our iconic Iwo
Jima no white-flag raise.)
We unleashed a welled-up pain in a physical way. Thousands of us scattered across this frail
Earth celebrated in isolated not-ours living and hotel rooms, trailers and
relatives’ hospitality. Ashley could not
even share that with me. Ashley was home
now. How could she understand?
We
had season tickets through the year before.
After Penelope was born, Ashley chose to attend zero games with me the
season prior to Katrina, claiming new-baby duties. It was what was best for the child. We declined to renew our tickets even before
the storm.
That
is why I was not there that Friday night for the Ravens preseason game. That is why I was home packing my world into
a gray minivan. That is why the season
before, the Superdome seat next to me sat vacant every game with me kicking the
peanut shells over to the open floor space to the shadows under the seat to my
right.
Continue to Chapter 9
Continue to Chapter 9
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