Safe Sex

Javante's mom is either Tina or Tracie or Tess or some other name that begins with "T". His grandma is called Miss Lisa, and mom and daughter fight like cats and chickens, calling each other whores and saying my man this and your man that and so on. Miss Lisa told my fiance, the first time the two of them met, that she better keep an eye on me 'cause Miss Lisa want to bite my dick. She said all the neighborhood women want to bite my dick.

     Javante was doing penance for throwing a rock through Michael's window. Michael is a former teacher and one of the guys who helps around CRISP Farms in the 9th Ward. He was the one that offered Javante the experience and saved him two hundred dollars. Javante would be responsible for helping the two of us plant peppers and okra.
     Javante's favorite part about planting was the break between each plant that gave him time to hang upside down on the gate that had no chain link and served no purpose other than a false barrier. It was a perfect size for an eight year old to hang and swing.

     The world must have been upside down to him. I didn't try to force too much. If he helped, he helped. He asked me did my lectricity get turned off, because his mama's lectricity got turned off, but his grandma's lectricty still worked, so they was staying by her.
     I told him I wasn't sure.

     "You gonna give me a dollar when we finished," he said.

     "We're saving you two hundred dollars," Michael said. 

     "What you need a dollar for?" I asked.

     "Something from the store."

     He had already eaten six or eight leaves of curly kale and red Russian kale, and even jammed an entire bunch of crisp mint lettuce into his mouth, but that he chewed and stood with his mouth open, green saliva, and green bits all around his pink tongue, and through this mess, he asked, "This is good?"

     "Is it bitter?" Michael asked.

     Javante nodded his head. We told him that he could spit it out. 

     He bent down before me while I planted okra. I had him water each hole. Then I taught him stem and leaf and the difference between the two. It took a few times of my pointing for him to go from leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf to leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf...I mean stem. I felt it was a success.

     Kids can only pay attention for so long, and it was clear that Javante had other important things to do, so Michael and I planted Scotch bonnets, jalapenos, cayennes, sweet reds, and banana peppers. At one point, I turned to see Javante sitting on the back of my truck, blowing up a balloon that kept getting bigger and bigger until it rivaled the Goodyear blimp from a distance. As I investigated the capacity of this amazing balloon, I realized that it was a condom. 

     I asked Javante, "Where'd you get that balloon?"

     "This not a balloon," he said. "It's a condom."

     "Where you got that condom?"

     "At the barber shop. I got it for free."

     Javante tied up the condom balloon and hit my truck with it. He hit the condom balloon against his chest and against his knees and stood in the back of my truck, condom balloon raised high like David about to slay Goliath. 

     Biting ants attacked my feet. I swatted them away.

     "Look," Javante yelled. "It's flying. It's flying."

     The condom rose with Javante's seemingly helium breath, higher into the sky, toward France Street and all the heroin dealers milling about. The three of us watched like it was a hot air balloon about to land on the moon. The ascension of this condom balloon made Javante's day, so much so that when the condom balloon hit Mr. Jackson's pine and popped so quick you almost heard a hiss, and then hung on the bristles with a lifelessness that defied it's former majesty, Javante did not even seem phased. Maybe, just maybe, he had three more condom balloons in his pocket, and if not, there would always be another trip to the barber.

The Rush

Do not wish for too much, nor think that the things you wish for are the only right or necessary things. You should wish only for those things for which God wishes. –Henri Amiel

This is growth. This is the love of neighbor no matter where he lives. This is joy at hearing and seeing the chickens, a realization that they were here before you and that your complaints about them eating what you plant fall on deaf ears. They do not even have teeth. They do not even know how they got here. But they have lived through a hurricane and overcome the onslaught of rocks slung by neighborhood kids. They have survived cars speeding down side streets at sixty. They have taken on a kitten and now allow that cat to be a part of the pack that roams along France Street in search of crumbs and bones.

            God wants only that you plant seeds, that you be outside, that you take time and stop to talk to the people who pass by, and, sometimes, God wants you to give to the lady in house slippers and robe, the one who asks for fifty cents and looks at you as though you have never met. She will surprise you one day by knowing your name, and you don’t know how she knows your name because you have never told her your name. You don’t know hers. Yet, somehow, her knowing yours makes her less of a burden.

            There will be a new man, a Latino named Diego. He does not know that was your first dog’s name. You do not know whether that is actually his name. He may have said Emanuel or Daniel. You can’t be sure. You only know that his presence lets you stop, pause, and remember why you’re planting. You don’t know at the time, or before, that this is why God had you plant extra seeds in the greenhouse. You don’t know that the man standing in front of you is better skilled in English than you are in Spanish. Neither of you know the exact words, but he understands that you know sol and he knows flowers and that it is best to dig a deep hole and cover most of the stem, that this will make the flowers fuerte and that these flowers are a gift.

            You do not tell him you only know frijoles because you have read the word on a menu. Instead you set the bean plant next to your own fence and mimic the motions of climbing and spreading, and the second time he repeats your words. Muchos frijoles. He points down the street to the casa where he lives and you wonder who else is in that home and what they will talk about at the dinner table that night and whether they are new to the neighborhood and where the rest of his family is. You remember the Treme, 2008, singing Pablo Neruda poems as the Hondurans played guitar and drank Budweiser from tin cans. You think of every neighborhood you have ever lived in. The stories go on and on without end.

            You would have you rush. You would have noise cycling in your head. God would have you silent, planting your own frijoles, taking the time to read the words of a man from Austria, a man who speaks of using brambles and thorns to keep wild animals away from tender seedlings, a man who suggests piling up bio mass: twigs and bushes and branches, to let the seeds find their own way. You have seeds you try to control in the greenhouse.

            Sepp Holzer would let nature decide. So would God.

            You think that you are too busy to determine just how blackberries should be pruned and that you need to get right to work rather than reading about what to do. God would have you use some of this time to see what the world says, to use the computer not as a place to judge and feel less than, but as a place to learn.

            You would go out and start cutting at the blackberries. You choose to go with God. God is the internet at the moment. The internet/God tells you to relax, that pruning is not imminent, that three blackberry plants is enough for a good start. You do more research, searching your email (still God’s work) and you find that you ordered your plants—a Shawnee, a Chickasaw, and a Kiowa—January of last year, and put them in the ground shortly thereafter. They are babies in the grand scheme of things, babies that you have ignored for the most part. You have two neglected big red muscadine plants and a crimson goji berry. You do not need to run to the greenhouse when there is work to do right outside the door. Feed what you have planted. Open the gates and see what happens.

            You miss God’s gift. After layering bags of leaves around the blackberries, halfway through planting Scarlet Runner beans along Mr. Lee’s fence, moments after Nathan passed to talk about himself and his truck and what he was going to do, you missed the moment. Mr. Lee, well past eighty, used to stand with his arms folded and watch you work. He would chew on his cigar, never lit, and when you tried to greet him he did not respond. Less than two years later, Mr. Lee gave you the materials and knowledge to build a fence at a new garden down the street from his house on France.

            You are focused on the Scarlet Runners. They are meant to fix nitrogen, to eat, to come back year after year. Mr. Lee, the old man who has become your friend, calls down from the steps that lead to his second floor. (He had to climb those steps just to see over the fence and talk to you.) His arms are not folded.

            I see what you mean about those chickens, he says, as they peck through the remains of the raised bed Patrick recently helped you move. 

            You tell him that you will have to cover everything. You tell him that you are planting beans. There is a small part of you that knows it is time for him to tell you, but rushing, rushing, rushing has taken over. You are trapped by what Allison Armstrong calls diffuse awareness. Everything you see is a task, even Mr. Lee, even this man who brought out his Brooks Brothers shoes months ago to show you what quality used to look like.

            You could have slowed down. God gave you the opportunity to slow down. Put Mr. Lee right there, perched atop his step, and you had a chance, even at the end, even as you saw the top of his head and the half cigar in his mouth as he descended, and you could have called out, Mr Lee! You should have called out. You should have shared with him what was going on in your head. He might have told you what he has told you, that you can work like that when you’re young, but what would he have said about the chickens? What would this man who has been here since horse and buggies rolled down these streets have said about the rights of the chickens? 

            You will have to wait. You can’t just walk up to Mr. Lee’s door and knock. There is an eight foot chain link fence at the sidewalk with locks too big to cut through. Behind this is a cinder block wall that is the railing of his front porch. You will have to wait to see Mr. Lee. He said he wanted some of those peppers that grow on a bush in clusters, the ones that point up, and you think he means Tabasco. You have the seeds, but he wants plants. Time will deliver plants, and time will deliver answers.

"I make you very handsome."

In the West Village there is man whose armpits smell like hard salami. His name is Roberto, if that is his real name, and I think you should meet him. He claims to be Italian, but from listening to him speak to the hangers on down at the barber shop on 7^th Avenue, he would seem to be of a Germanic or Slavic background.

            I noticed the barber shop during one of my numerous jaunts to nowhere in particular. The neon lights of a blue and red barber pole reached out, but what really grabbed me was the sign that said hot towel shaves for 14 dollars. The place was about to close. I read through the cuttings from magazines that were pasted in the window and realized that this barber shop and I had something in common. We both saw Anderson Cooper as a god. Me for the reporting he did after a big flood in New Orleans and the barber shop because he told the magazine that he got his hair cut there every two weeks.

            The hard rain of the next day forced me inside. It was a portal into a world of broken buzzers and creams and powders and sounds that were not English. Sit. I don’t know who said it. Maybe the walls? I picked a Playboy from the shelf and was tethered back to the decade we were in for the magazine was only eight years old and they were doing an expose on blondes having more fun—from Marlene Dietrich to Pamela Anderson.

            “Okay,” a fat man said, motioning to the swivel seat in front of him.

            I set down the Playboy and let the man wrap a cape around me. His shirt clung to his body like a hefty bag. Actually, I think his shirt was made of hefty bag plastic.

            “I just want the hot towel shave,” I said.

            “You need haircut,” he said. “I make you very handsome.” He already had the clippers out and was finding a guard to trim my hair even though I said I didn’t think I had enough money.

            “We have…how you say?....slot machine in corner.”

            Now that I think about it, I am not even sure that this man worked at the barber shop. But he had worked somewhere. He had a gift of gab that I couldn’t understand. Whenever he spoke the old man in the corner who had taken over my Playboy and the kid who sat in the chair just vacated by his client laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. I felt like I was in Poland or Serbia and the only thing American was the tennis being played on the small TV screen.

            I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe in the rancid salami of his armpits as he reached over me and slapped my head between his hands like a ball of dough. My chin was the guiding mechanism which he used to alert the rest of me along with the words up or down.

            Every time I looked in the mirror he was putting on another guard for the trimmer. The shelves of dusty creams and combs and scissors looked like they hadn’t been used or cleaned in years. It seemed as if all of his clipping was for effect, as if his doing this was to ensure that the inflated price of 33 dollars would be paid for the haircut I didn’t want in the first place. I wondered whether I would even get the shave that I came in for.

            “You look,” he said. “Very handsome, yes?”

            I looked in the mirror and beside the mirror to the cut out of Anderson Cooper. We had the same haircut.

            “What about the shave?”

            He backed away from the chair to get a smaller clippers, and, before I knew it, he ran a comb and clippers over my eyebrows. It appeared in the mirror as a manic Pez dispenser shooting dozens of hairs in rapid machine gun succession.

            “Wait.” He grabbed my chin like he was trying to pull it away from my face. He shaved both cheeks, chopping away the months of growth in a motion rougher than he’d done the eyebrows. I mean the entire eyebrows. Really. I have no eyebrows now.

            Salami pits then leaned across me with sweat coating his hefty bag and reached for an electric shaver that goes all the way to the skin. He squeezed my cheeks, rubbed them, and took whatever had been left by the clippers.

            “Very handsome?”

            “Yes, but what about all this?” I was left with a goatee.

            “Don’t worry. I take care of you.”

            He said something to the old man in the back, and then I heard a microwave door open, close, and run. In the same manner as before he got rid of my goatee. I heard him open the microwave door. Then he lathered my face in foam and covered it with the hot towel he must have gotten from the microwave. Finally…what I had come for.

            The musk of shaving cream overpowered the salami, and I felt that I was somewhere else, that I was a part of life, that I couldn’t hear the other men talking or the announcements on the tennis match. The horns outside ceased to exist and at that moment I knew what presence meant. The blade on my bare skin did not feel as wide as what I was used to and this I attributed to his vast knowledge and experience, the same as the way a veteran skier doesn’t need his skis to be as long as an amateur’s. I was in the presence of greatness, and even though I still was unsure of where he had been born or what his earlier days of shaving looked like, I now felt a confidence in this man’s hands, as if having a blade in one and the face of a man in the other was what God had put him on this earth to do.

            This twist of emotions was akin to the difference between Evan Williams and Maker’s Mark. I closed my eyes and let his touch take me away like a hundred-dollar massage. The microwave beeped and opened and closed, and he wiped my face with another hot towel and then massaged something that smelled like cucumber into my pores and then put another hot towel over me.

            It was the second round!

            His hand guided the blade along my face with the gentleness of a fisherman cleaning his catch. His seventy years had elevated him to the top of his profession. One day I would be able to say that I had had my face shaved by the grand champion. One day I would stand before his statue at 143 7^th Avenue and tell my children about this day. No wonder Anderson Cooper only came to this place!

            As these thoughts circled through the calm I made the grave mistake of opening my eyes.

            His hand was scratching a disposable bic razor against my skin. The whole world smelled like salami again. The microwave rang. Another hot towel. Powder all over a brush that he dabbed against my skin. In the mirror was an image that would have really appealed to those who had come to the Village looking for the Kafkaesque. Eyes without brows.

            He massaged my shoulders and removed the cape.

            “I told you,” he said. “I make you look good.”

            I told him that I only had 37 dollars.
           “Is okay,” he said. “We have slot machine.”

Who's John?

The hood in Atlanta is different from the hood in New Orleans. More spread out. Without liquor stores on every corner where men of all ages drink Budweiser’s and Heineken’s from paper bags and watch big-legged women saunter in and out of Church’s Chicken. There are trees everywhere here in Atlanta, and when you hear sirens they are coming from somewhere in the distance, they are muffled, like a trombone player using a plunger. The bells of the ice cream van sing the same song  which may or may not have its roots in racism. Kids ride bicycles and chase dogs that look hungry. They like to talk about what I am growing, and though their slang has differences, these variations often mean the same thing.

            After CJ and Matthew helped me pull up the floors at my house in New Orleans, I offered them water from a gallon I had sitting around for my sleep apnea machine. It was good enough for me, and we were all thirsty. Matthew shied away and said he was okay. He is a good kid, well raised, and perhaps he had been taught not to drink after strange men.

            “I’ll do you a fountain,” CJ told him. He held the gallon high over Matthew’s lips and poured the water into his open mouth.

            Ron opened his front door. He is my tenant, a friend, and the neighbor that fixes all the kids’ bikes. They come to his door from sun up to sun down and who knows where they get these hunks of metal and chrome that he turns into miracles.

            In Atlanta, I found a fluorescent orange Mongoose, almost as bright as Vision’s shirt, while chopping down weed trees with a machete out behind the house off Compton Street. It had a flat back tire with a blown out tube that Ron could have easily fixed. There were pegs on the back tire. Not a scratch on the bike. There was a skull drawn by a kid’s hand guiding a Sharpie marker with artist and artist’s assistants’ signatures beneath: Demarcus, Dante, Deon—the 3D GANG.

Vision is an Indian kid, maybe twenty, on the verge of growing a moustache to rival Salvador Dali. The second time we met he was wearing a multi-colored day glo shirt made of cotton. On his skinny frame, the shirt bore breasts of its own, perhaps the ghost of the large-chested woman who died before retrieving her shirt from the laundromat below where many of these kids live. The building was passed on from Adam’s grandfather to his father and finally to Adam. The kids are fixing it up, living without water, living in cramped quarters among boards and boxes and beer cans, living the dream.

            What Adam has is a beginning that I admire. He is putting something together.

            Adam’s socks don’t match. His beard and hair made me think he was a Jew even though he looks kind of like Aniz …., but he is muslim. He is smiling whenever I see him. His friends—the band, including Vision—are renting four apartments in the concrete jungle that splits Jonesboro and Lakewood. Each building space is set off by bright colors of their own and there are owls and birds and bees and dragonflies painted by olive47.  It brings life. Like ants in the crack of a sidewalk.

            I like Adam. I trust his laughter, the way he smiles when he sees me. He is skinny. All these kids are skinny born after I graduated high school in 1992 are skinny. I don’t know how it happened, but I am going to learn.

            Julian has already moved into one of the apartments. He’s white. He has a moustache. He is 21. I’m not sure whether or not his wardrobe is salvaged from the laundry. His collared shirt looks like the sleeves were cut off and then carefully hemmed. Or maybe the shirt was made that way. When Carrie told him that she would let him have the sizable one bedroom for three hundred a month he asked, “If I did some work, could I get it for two fifty?” She said, “I’m a bit stressed. We’ll talk about it later.” I would have said that if you want an apartment with a shower curtain around the bathtub you can get it yourself. The three hundred bucks a month is the quiet-down-because-there-are-no-more-amenities-than-what-you-see price. If you don’t like it, you can take your ukulele or laptop or whatever instrument you play and beg for change in Midtown, but I kept quiet, and didn’t even utter the “h” word.

Carrie took me to a party for friends of hers who were leaving South Atlanta and moving on up—to the side where Martin Luther King was born and raised and where developers have been dumping money. She says Grant Park. I say Bywater. You might say Brooklyn. Or the East Village. Or the Haight. Or Paris in the twenties.

            I was driving because I always drive because Carrie is blind. Not blind like run-into-tables-and-sharp-edges blind. Blind like you-can’t-have-a-driver’s-license blind because what sighted people see at two hundred feet you see at twenty. Since she is blind, she also has trouble with landmarks and directions and ways to turn. I have trouble with paying attention. We’re a perfect match.

            So the party—blocks from her house—took around twenty minutes to get to. We road all the way down Jonesboro Road and turned around, laughing as Stevie Nicks sang her way through Rhiannon and into a Steve Miller marathon. Carrie squinted at the numbers on her phone and asked where Mr. Bubble was. (Mr. Bubbles are all over the place: car, bedroom, bathroom. It’s how she sees small writing) We finally got the directions and we’re rolling down Lansing when I said, “Baby.”

            The gang of kids on bicycles reminded me of being back home on Lesseps.

            “Why are you stopping?”

            “Look,” I said. “Hey! Wheredja get that bike?” The kid on the back pegs hopped off and joined the other kids, far away from the Mongoose rider who now stood, bike frame between legs, alone.

            We must have looked imposing with the top of the cherry red VW bug down.

            “I bought it.”

            “From who?”

            “My friend.”

            “Who is your friend?”

            “John.”

            “Where John stay at?” I had reverted back to how I sometimes unconsciously speak while talking with kids in my own neighborhood.”

            “Up the hill.”

            I froze. I could have jumped out of the car, taken the bike, and taught the kids a lesson, but we had sixty dollars worth of Miss B’s pralines and a packet of cucumber seeds that we had to deliver because that’s what Martin Luther King Jr. would have done.

            “You tell John he better stop stealing bikes,” I said.

            The sides of the kid’s lips curled up. It was the beginning a smile, maybe a smirk, that he withheld, but I knew, and he knew that I knew, there was no John.

The party was nice. There was a beautiful mixed race baby, a manly gay man, and an older lady who invited the younger neighbors to her house for dinners. I wasn’t used to this much diversity in this tight of a space. It felt good. Like putting something together. We ate chips and salsa and chicken on a stick, and though I did not know these people well, I felt comfortable in this home. It was bright. All the paint was new. Not a spot of caulk or spackle had been missed.

            The door opened. It was a man I had never met. Chris. He was holding a two-liter bottle of cherry cola. It was three quarters full.

            “I didn’t know what to bring,” he said. “So I grabbed this on the way.”

            “And you drank some on the way?” said the lady who was moving. She was pregnant, by the way.

            “No. There were these kids and they surrounded me and they said they were thirsty so I poured them some.”

            “They had cups?” she asked.

            “No. I held the bottle over their mouths and they leaned their heads back.”

            “Ooh,” she said. “I know it touched their lips.”

            “Maybe some got on their shirts,” he said, “but I made sure it didn’t touch their lips.”

            “In New Orleans,” I said. “The kids call that a fountain.”

            Chris set the bottle of cherry cola next to the box of pralines. “That’s what they called it. A drinking fountain.”

            “Did one of them have a bright orange bicycle?”

            “I’m not sure. Why?”

            Carrie said, “Tell them the story, Zach,” and then proceeded to assist with the telling by interjecting every twenty or thirty seconds.

            

Stages

Back home in New Orleans, at CRISP Farm, we have a stage with electricity where microphones and speakers can be piped in. I get a lot of ideas. According to something I once read, over sixty thousand a day. But this is a good one. We should have a monthly talent show for all ages. Five minutes each. There will be no judging or prizes awarded. No critiques. The experience will be about the experience.

            There is something that happens when someone can feel the joy he is giving to those watching him. The energy shifts. This cannot even be controlled. Take a look at Lemon Boy D in this attached video. Watch the way his shoulders move. I believe he is feeling everyone and everything around him. There is no fear. Not everybody is this way. It is my belief that by getting together and sharing laughter we can let go of those sides of ourselves that we hide from others for fear of being laughed at and mocked. In the moment none of this matters. And even if you don’t get up there, you will appreciate what the ones who did have done. You may not say so.

            Which leads me to another question about how I need to be seen, and, because I can only see the world through my own perspective, how others need to be seen as well. And did I ruin a popsicle relationship with a woman who once wanted all of our basil and cucumbers because I was trying to sell her friends nutria tacos? And was I selling the nutria tacos because I needed to be weird or because I needed to make a statement to the Eat Local Challenge people about how much food is being wasted when nutrias are shot for three bucks a tail and their carcasses left to rot in the spot where it was cut off. And then I have to ask myself what is the greater issue here? Is it my need for attention or is it the fact that we as humans have been conditioned to only eat certain things that all must be hygienic, that the very shampoo we use is killing the bacteria we need for our skin to do what our skin needs to do? But that’s a whole ‘nother story. Let’s stick to eating. Let’s stick to the fact that perfectly good meat

is wasted daily because of the word “rat”. Rats!

            Dejuan—aka Lemon Boy D—received his nickname after eating almost five lemons in three minutes, securing his spot as champion of the weird-eating contest. The facilitators had quartered the lemons. Dejuan ate nineteen. Autumn led the women with thirteen. Even the joy in the other kids who were too cool to get up on stage or do anything even though they talked a big game could be witnessed in the way they watched and laughed and cheered on their lemon-eating friends.

            Sometimes it takes time to cross over the bridge between fear and self-confidence, and it doesn’t matter what or how much good or accomplishment is within you. Some kids just got it. Doesn’t even matter if they’re good. Others suffer from Barbara Streisandism, and it doesn’t matter how good they are. Some of these kids who are the most vocal about their skills are the hardest to be found when the talent show comes around. I believe they suffer from Barbara Streisandism. Now….what if Barbara Streisand was cheered on back in Brooklyn when she was a little girl? Would she still have had to stay away from the stage for 27 years? Is talent sliding away because kids aren’t given the chance? Is the joy of being able to laugh at yourself becoming a lost art in the computer age? Could it be rekindled at CRISP?

            This idea may not help everybody, but it will bring the people together to watch. And that’s community.

            During my years of drinking I used to try to write with anyone who would write with me. We wrote with manic hands to get as much on the page as we could because there was no pressure. In the moment. There is something that is killed by the spirit of what other people are going to think of this or that and how much has to change and….how many of you have written a piece right into the ground until the first draft was ten times better than what you have pored over for years?

            There is something in the safety of that exquisite corpse style of writing. Something that allows mistakles to be a part of the process, that allows these to be met with communal laughter rather than the scorn and judgment that comes from a need to feed the ego. The heart does not separate. The heart knows no you and me. And there is joy in coming together.

            And when I get back to New Orleans I am going to have an event. It is going to start with the neighborhood first. It need not ever grow bigger. I want to get Chief Damond and all the other Indians to lead us down the block and back to the stage. And goddamn this is gonna be fun. Just look at Dejuan’s shoulders and the way the music moves him and the excitement he feeds from the people that are watching, and sure there are kids in the chairs who will judge him and say they could have done better, but he was doing it. He will tell you, “I killed it” because he did “kill it” because he was having fun.

Pissing While Riding a Bicycle through the Back End of a Rumored Tornado

I am a test specimen, a guest of this life that I've been given to record a tornado in New Orleans just past midnight. I ride through the rain on a bike with a chain that rattles every time the pedals rotate. The sky flashes gray. Bicycle tires create a wake. The brim of my leather hat collects rain drops that fall to my chest each time I bend forward.
            I follow the front tire through the one-foot puddles of the Tremé to the other side of Rampart Street where water rises and falls against French Quarter curbs.

            Nobody sleeps in Jackson Square tonight. Nobody walks. Nobody talks. The bums have found places to hide. The Cathedral steps are silent.
            Two gutter punks share a bag of beignets on the other side of a closed Cafe Du Monde. The powdered sugar coats the dough like paste. I ride through the puddles, laughing at the tourists who duck and run and hide under balconies. The sky flashes gray. Everybody drinks inside the bars of Decatur: Molly's at the Market, Coop's Place, The Alibi.

            These streets are mine.
            There's music playing on Frenchmen. I watch the rain blow like a sheet past the lamplight above the Praline Connection. A guitar rift escapes the doors of the Apple Barrel. Tourist girls gather across the street at the place that plays reggae. Everybody's afraid of this rain save me and the two people: the guy spinning the twirling barefoot girl in the middle of Frenchmen. Taxi cabs become our guests tonight. We will become the weather. I ask the couple for a cigarette.
            She looks sexy with wet, jet black hair and beads of rain dripping between her breasts.            "I'll get you one," she says." She tries, but the people inside the reggae place are unwilling to give up what they have.

            I take off my hat and get a taste of the rain. I want to smoke now. I've got that itch to go and get a cigarette so I ride past the R Bar. The doors are open but nobody stands outside. Branches blow as I cross Esplanade. The sky flashes grey. People can hear my chain from blocks away. Only firecracker thunder drowns me out. I pass Miss Lucy, the bartender from Johhny White's, who is carrying an umbrella and cursing her dog in Spanish.
            The Golden Lantern always was a standby if I needed a drink or a cigarette; I just don't want to go inside and sit. I don't want old men trying to rub my leg. I want this rain.
            I take a right on Bourbon Street. The rain hits my leather hat and drips down my soaking wet shirt. The first three people I ask for cigarettes tell me it's their last one; I can see the outlines of cigarette packs in their front pockets. Some might blame inflation or the economy. I blame the street where I ride. Nobody on Bourbon wants to share. Maybe the girl trapped in a closed doorway of Razzoo wants to free herself from the bouncer.
            She rocks back and forth as I ask for a smoke.
            "They're Ultra Lights," she says.
            I tell her that I'll tear off the filter. "You got a lighter?"
            "Only wet matches."
            I ask her, "I can get a monkey fuck?"
            She won't look at me. The bouncer doesn't like what he just heard.
            I ride on without telling them that I simply wanted to use her cigarette to light mine. I ask groups huddled under balconies smoking, big plumes blowing above their heads. How can all of them be on their last cigarette? Do people from America not give anymore? I'm a guy with a soaking wet broken Ultra Light, and nobody will give me a fresh cigarette.
            I give up. Time to ride back home. But as any smoker knows, you never give up. Then I see a man with a big umbrella in Mardi Gras colors. Something tells me he's local. I shake my hands to get the rain off of me. The sky flashes gray. He gives me a long Marlboro Light 100. He lights the cigarette he has given me. After I get his name, I tell him, "I'm going to remember you, Doug."
            I stand across from Razzoo, safe under a balcony, slowly smoking, smiling at the bouncer who is alone. His trapped girl was found by her friends as I spoke with Doug. Thunder cracks. A drunk kid wobbles down the sidewalk like a boxer in the eleventh round, gripping onto poles to prevent himself from falling into the small stream of rain and piss and puke and beer that runs along the curb. A sheet of rain blows across neon. The cigarette tastes good. Warm. Necessary.
            I can go home now. The rain feels warmer the more I pedal, but rain induced shivers make me want to piss. I'm soaking wet. More and more drops hit me.
            Two guys kiss outside Clover Grill. I tell them to enjoy the rain as I take a right on Dumaine. I don’t care about holding it any longer. At Dauphine I let the piss run down my leg, splash onto my ankles, warming my whole lower body as I am released from the noise and the smell and the people of Bourbon Street; I ride and piss , past Dauphine, past Burgundy, past Rampart, and back into the Treme.
            I become the sky with each drop of myself that I give to the ground.
           

Carrying Home

Hemingway wrote about Michigan while living in Paris, and I guess that’s just the way it goes: the yearning of the place you have left behind is what still connects you. In Atlanta, I never wake up to CJ knocking on my door, saying, “Skew me, Mr. Zach. I could get the bike pump?” I don’t tell him that what he needs to do is get a new tire or have Mr. Ron fix that leaky flat for him. CJ helped me tear up my floor for eight bucks an hour, and because he let the word get out I then had kids as young as three come to ask if I had any work.

            These kids wanted to work, like the same kids who came around the garden and asked if I had anything to do. They were asking before money was introduced. So where does the disconnect come from, at what age? When does the desire to be helpful or to make just enough to buy a bowl of Yaka mein or a bag of hot Cheeto’s go away?

            Days after we finished with the floors, Quinn came over. Quinn is my number one gardening ally. He is seventeen. You can usually find him on a motorized bicycle that isn’t his. He started a garden on the abandoned lot next to his house. Every time I see him he is smiling, but there are some kids he runs around with who have guns. Maybe he has guns. He knew the kid who just got shot three weeks ago. Maybe this is why his name is different when he is around them. Maybe this is why I stopped saying, “You seen Quinn?” and started asking, “Where Buck is?”

            I miss the morning squawks of the roosters in the middle of the street and Miss B telling me six or eight times how she got to leave and be somewhere, while she continues to stand on my front porch, sucking her teeth and pushing Jesus, patting her shaved head and telling my friends that she’s 38 when she’s really 58. She makes the best pralines I ever tasted. I give her twenty bucks for as many as she can make along with potato salad for a BBQ. She says, “I don’t know if I’m coming. It’s supposed to be hot.” I don’t say that it’s New Orleans. It’s July. It’s always hot. I’m pretty sure she has spent all the money before making the potato salad, but then my woman Carrie wants to bring pralines back to Atlanta so there’s another twenty, and then there’s some complications so she needs another twenty from Carrie because the first twenty was just for materials and the next twenty was for labor. We did get a mess of pralines and about a quart of mustard heavy potato salad. Miss B even stopped by the party. Despite the heat. She told me bring her some chicken to the front door. Not too much though. I brought her five wings and an ear of corn. “I ain’t eating that.” I was surprised. Maybe I had offended her by not bringing enough. She turned to Carrie. “I told you that white lady brought me cookies. I threw those sons a bitches in the garbage. Birds shit. Stuff fall out the sky. And bugs…ooh bugs. You got to cover that shit. At least put some furl around it. I don’t give nobody nothing ain’t covered.” I walked back to the grill and covered her shit with two paper plates and cursed her under my breath cause that’s the only way to curse Miss B.

             I miss yelling at the kids on four wheelers speeding down Lesseps the wrong way at forty miles an hour to SLOW DOWN. I miss kids chasing kids chasing chickens. I miss Autumn who says that her mama who works at Foot Locker doesn’t like this neighborhood because there’s too much drama going on. And there’s always too much drama going on. And nobody ever knows who fired the first shot. But Autumn is an anomaly. There are lots of anomalies on my block. Autumn is quiet, respectful—she wears glasses and takes time before answering questions. She does not raise her voice to four-year-old Jade. And when I tell her that she needs to be in charge of the other kids if they want to go into the garden she listens. This is her position because she is over eleven. And how can we go wrong when one child is showing another child where food comes from and “Don’t eat the green ones” and “You got to look for bugs” and “Don’t step on that” and “That goes back in the compost” and “Use the water from the barrels” and “That’s not a weed” and “Be careful” and “No running”? These kids come to the fence and ask to work. This does not mean that all is innocence on Lesseps Street. This didn’t stop the fifteen-year-old from getting shot four blocks away. This didn’t prevent CRISP’s horticulturalist from being trapped behind the fences inside CRISP Farms while the man who robbed Family Dollar hid under A.B.’s house and cops milled about less than thirty yards away, shining their flashlights on anybody who passed by and making sure nobody came out of their houses.

            There are times when I water what we call our wild area, permaculture zone four or beyond, a host to Satsuma trees, okra, squash, and similar vegetation that needs less care, and I look through the fence that adjoins the backyards of the houses on France where people of working age stand outside all day and sometimes block the flow of traffic with very important conversations and hand signals. It is odd that our oft forgotten space borders the backyards of the oft forgotten inhabitants of France Street. I am not old enough to write these stories. I sometimes wonder if I will ever be old enough. How do you capture this: me measuring three foot away from the lime tree in each direction of the compass; through the fence a man shoots heroin into another man’s arm; I dig holes and pop yarrow out of four-inch pots; the man on the stoop bows his head in reverence to the rushing of the drug; in this moment I make no acknowledgement—there is no, “How you doing?”—for it is these same men I see when parting the sea on France Street in my black truck, and I still wave, and I still say hello, but they don’t say anything, and some of them glare like they don’t know me, but they seen me back there planting, and maybe they heard that the new owner of France Meat Market is going to stop the congregating, but if they heard what I’ve heard and then seen what I’ve seen, they don’t believe much in words anymore. I want them to believe in mine. I want you to believe in mine. I want all our words to be our bond. And I wonder where this saying came from.