Last summer/last century

Phantasma

He rises
up, phantom, foreign
and familiar, some
unearthed dream
kindled
out of dormant
flashfires, pulsing
through
electric fingers,
flowing
us down the river,
desire
our only anchor.

If They Had Listened

On last week's episode of Haze Ablaze: As someone who's lived in numerous American cities and lived through several physical assaults, I've become very astute at reading the signs of violence, a la Gavin De Becker, criminal expert and author of The Gift of Fear. These men exhibit them all.

On Sunday night, I fell asleep to the usual sounds of arguing, screaming, cursing from my lovely downstairs neighbors and the two poster girls for white trash that have moved themselves in, my last cognizant thought being: "Hey, who knows; maybe they'll tear each other to pieces."

I woke from my half-sleep reverie an hour or so later to the sound of calm, assertive male voices under my window.

Wow: They sound like what cops should sound like.

Wow: They are cops.

Seems one of the male lovelies assaulted his aforementioned, underaged girlfriend on the front lawn - this would be the chick who threatened to hang my cat from a tree for "looking" at her.

(The funny thing is my cat now stares and stares at her every time he's out - under my close supervision, of course - he knows, and wants her to know he knows; feline is both astute and tough.)

It's good that other people in my often-lax neighborhood stepped in and called the police - though I'm not the crazy one, I really do feel like the crazy lady neighbor at times because I have to be so vigilant in asserting my presence and ensuring my - and others' - safety. When aforementioned chick threatened my feline, I made it quite clear that she was not to harass us - "clear" like shouting it at her through her screen door, which I suddenly realized I was clutching with fingers coiled into talons around the weak frame, ready to remove it from creaky hinges, and okay! maybe you've made your point now.

These outbursts of anger and indignation are becoming common on the part of those of us who call New Orleans home, not a feeding/dumping ground to vulturize.

With the housing crisis squeezing residents who have already lost homes, things are coming to a head:

Nola Shine.
Vultures: End of the Line.

Making History

Another reason to feel even less confident in this administration, as if another reason was needed: they'll even shoot their friends!

The State of Real Estate

The price-gauging running rampant in post-apocalypse New Orleans ensures that residents who lost their homes - due to the human error that produced one big joke of a levee system - not only have no homes, but can't find new ones. Apartments, for example, are now being rented for double to triple the pre-apocalypse market rate.

It's a disaster area, stupid.

And a poor city - now more than ever.

And who is profiting off its destruction?
Out-of-state and/or non-native contractors, roofers, fat cats, et al.

So, when I hear my property manager lauding the four to eight roofers now living downstairs and engaging in such noble activities as hissing, leering and wolf-whistling at me and my female visitors on a regular basis, congregating at the edge of my stairs, the only access to and from my apartment, throwing garbage, including uncooked meat packages, all over the place, shouting at and scaring my cat when we're out on the front porch, loudly discussing the 17-year-old they're "sharing," smashing bottles in the back alley, slamming doors, blasting music non-stop, posing a nuisance and, worse, a vivid threat to my and others' safety and well-being, I wonder if I've somehow bypassed reality via nightmare hallucination.

That all of the above have occurred in a disaster area, where these men are generating good, steady incomes, while a large number of natives remain unemployed, and not on Bourbon St., but on Every St. New Orleans, makes it even more offensive.

In talking to other women, all of whom have been spoken to by some contractor or another in a despicable manner, I can't help but wonder where all this male hostility comes from - just as I don't really get all the "Gasp! Ray Nagin is a racist!" ballyhooing from white people, some of whom I've heard touting "Vanilla City" buttons.

Another thing I can't stand is the question "Are they Mexican?" in reference to my neighbors when what they really mean is "Latino." The not-my-kind-of-Caucasians pose this question in response to any mention of the many, and diverse, shenanigans going on here, as if we can expect nothing more from these men, "Are they Mexican?", than jackal behavior. They have brown skin; clearly, they're incapable of human behavior.

When I was attending grad school in Los Angeles, I lived in a Mexican-American neighborhood and guess what? In the two years I spent as a renter there, I was heckled twice. In the two months I've been back in New Orleans, I've been heckled every day by all sorts of scumbags, the majority of whom are not from here, as they clearly demonstrate the "She lives in New Orleans - she must flash for beads/be a whore" mentality. This wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't literally right outside my front door.

And if my property manager, whose last psychotic male tenant routinely exposed his genitals to me and wound up in court as a result of it, yet wasn't evicted 'till the '05 apocalypse came along, could even pretend to give a damn.

Instead, she questioned every statement I made, trying to explain away the hissing, leering and ever-closer-to-my-person congregation (please give me a reason to use my pepper spray) as a "cultural difference," unmasking another racist face. I've written and sent two certified letters to the effect that, as a woman who lives alone and finds herself a regular target of sexual harassment, I don't feel very safe or at ease. What I am trying to prevent is an escalation to physical violence, as I made plain to her during my latest telephone call.

"Well, have you been attacked?" she asked in response, voice dripping with condescension.

Today, four days after her latest denial head trip, I heard her telling the aforementioned gentlemen how my second letter took her "by surprise" and how grateful she is that people "like them" are helping to "resurrect this city" - though, ah, hissing is not acceptable in "American culture."

As someone who's lived in numerous American cities and lived through several physical assaults, I've become very astute at reading the signs of violence, a la Gavin De Becker, criminal expert and author of The Gift of Fear. These men exhibit them all. And here she is announcing the identity of the complainant and casting doubt on her, letting them know that they, in fact, are heroes to her. Like a 35-year-old woman in one of the composition classes I taught at UNO, she probably doesn't know what "misogynist" means.

She's too busy being one.

Now Normal

It is

now normal, the way that sea level

has been shaken upside down,

a perfect way for have-nots

to drown.

now normal, the way the deranged order you

to pull yourself up

while they whip you

with those proverbial bootstraps.

now normal, to out an operative,

and, two tired years later, when you are finally

indicted, to be referred to as noble

by the news.

now normal,

to prosecute blow jobs,

but not treason, this

age of absent reason.

now normal,

to look back on Nixon

with something bordering on nostalgia –

but not quite.

now normal, to pretend poor people

are better off in a dome

than a home, though it is

sort of scary – for you, not them.

now normal, to rebuild a Catholic church

by adding a fountain and some

marble flooring, forgetting

the pedophiles you’re supposedly abhorring.

It is now normal.

They don’t even need

to make this stuff up any more –

unless they want to wage official war.

LGD

LGD, an acronym for Lower Garden District, a corner of Nola where community gathers not by candlelight but at fireside, with an ashy landmark called Coliseum Theater serving as the site of our latest vigil.