Down These Mean Streets, Such Beauty Comes...

This whole day has felt like a dirge. This morning I drove my wife Darlene to the airport. She's headed up to Vancouver for a month; a little business, and she's opening a solo print show at Dundarave Gallery on Granville Island. On my way back in to town, instead of taking the I-10 freeway I took the old Jefferson Highway through Rivertown in Kenner and on through Harrahan. It's sounds like a picturesque drive, and parts of it are. But most of it is straight out of the noir-est parts of a James Lee Burke novel, an endless stretch of used muffler shops and hot-pillow, rooms-by-the-hour motels. Pickles Bar and Grill. Crabby Jack's Seafood. Batman's Snowball Cave. A colleague in the music department, Baty Landis, had organized a march today on City Hall, protesting the recent spike in violence. Baty's significant other manages the Hot 8 brass band, so she knew Dinerral Shavers. She was also close to Dr. Paul Gailiunas and his murdered wife Helen Hill. After getting off the freeway at City Park avenue and turning onto Orleans avenue towards my house, I impulsively stayed on Orleans toward the Central Business District. I figured I could at least catch the last part of the march. Things were just breaking up as I got there. I didn't see anyone I recognized, except for a few members of the Hot 8. I was told that about three thousand people had turned up, but what was left when I got there didn't seem like much of a crowd. Maybe the argument I overheard as I walked back to my car took a bit of the wind out of my sails. It was between a black man and a white man. A thirty-ish, hard looking black guy who was holding a sign saying "News Flash: White Woman Killed In New Orleans" was getting into it with a bohemian-looking twenty-something white cat who kept saying "but it's really not just about these two people." Well, maybe not, bruh. But doesn't it just make you feel tired to see how black folks get shot here almost literally every day, but it takes a white death to make the national news? I mean, no disrespect to Helen and Doctor Paul, but Dick Shavers was a good guy too. He was a teacher, a father, a musician, a leader in his community. But I don't see his face on fuckin CNN. I could have said those things, but I didn't. What's the point? Why is it so hard for white people, even well meaning, liberal white people, to admit they've got a big edge in this world? I'd parked my car in front of St. Joseph's church on Tulane Avenue, and on the walk back the sun suddenly burst through the cloud cover, bathing the vista before me in orange, mid-afternoon sunlight. It was a view you're never going to see in a tourist brochure. On my left was the rotting hulk of Charity Hospital, a huge, Dickensian pile of a building. Pre-Katrina it was the main repository of uninsured and indigent patients in Orleans Parish, scene of farcical happenings like the guy who went in for treatment of a hernia and wound up getting killed when a piece of the ceiling fell on his head. It flooded badly, and there are no plans to re-open it. The smell of mold is overpowering as I walk by. In front of the church I walk through numerous homeless black men, some of whom are so socially disconnected they fail to acknowlege my greeting, a generic "how ya doin" (this is a serious breach of etiquitte in this city, where failure to greet a stranger on the street marks you immediately as a tourist). Others respond with "fucked up, bruh." As I put my key in the lock I look further up the street at the giant pile of the Dixie Brewery, rumoured to be re-opening even as looters continue to make off with it's equipment, sometimes brazenly constructing ramps to do so. On the other side of the Avenue, in the shadow of the Orleans Parish Prison, for Christ-sakes! some raving optimist is redeveloping the old abandoned Falstaff brewery into luxury condominiums. It'll be interesting to see where the residents shop, since virtually every business within a two block radius is either a bail-bondsman or a criminal attorney (Turn-Em-Loose-Bruce, Easy Credit Terms! Dial 1-800-Not-Guilty!). The realization smacks me in the face, as it has so many times before. I love this place, man! What, am I fucking crazy? It's like a Tom Waits tune with real bullets, it's no joke, my friends. It's for keepsies. I love every square inch of ground, it's all I can do to keep from falling to my knees and kissing it. This place is like a sickness in the blood. I can't help myself. Louis Armstrong saw all this, and understood it. You gotta love people, you really do. Good, bad, or indifferent, we're all we've got. I look around me at all the sad-ass, fucked up motherfuckers on this street, and I could hug every one of them.