bamaboy

   DOWN-AND-OUT IN THE BIG EASY

    I'm new at this blogger thing and don't really know how to begin. I'm originally from a planet in the far reaches of the galaxy called Alabama and currently reside in New Orleans. I came here looking for opps and found none and there's hardly any money to be made here at all. I'd go back home if I could get some trucking money. Maybe I'll get a brake. Recently signed on with a talent company and still waiting to get a call. Penned a couple of poems while here. I'm a little new at that, too. Maybe I'll post them and let someone critique them for me.
    I came here in a pick-up truck that's done broke down now, a 1983 Ford F100. Banjo fell off my knee on the way over here and scattered all over the highway. Had a little solid black female cat with most of her tale missing and I never knew just how she lost it. Thought she might have gotten under the hood of some ones car. I found her as a kitten in Mobile and lost her in the Big Easy. Hated that. She was a good little cat. I was ill-advised to put her in a pound by someone supposedly employed to help the down-and-out, and being reluctant to do that I asked some one if he knew anyone who could keep her for a little while because I was living on the streets and he said he could keep her temporarily. I later heard from him that he had to turn her over to animal rescue. I wish I had kept her instead. She was a good little cat. Other homeless people that I was sleeping around had pets, mostly dogs. One couple who slept in a van had a ferret.
   About six months and eight days I slept in the cab of my truck, in a parking lot near the French Market at a spot we called "the wall" where different church groups used to go to feed down-and-out people every night. Homeless and down-and-out would line up, often around two hundred at a time, to eat in a parking lot owned by the French Market which is controlled by the city of New Orleans. The city finally closed it down, from what I here, after thirty years or more of feeding because of some disrespectful types that didn't have much regard for anyone. Always cutting line, leaving their litter all around and an occasional fight would break out.
    Friday was fried chicken night. And some other night, which I forgot, was hot dog night. There are other places as well, some "soup kitchens" in town, that would feed. One is the Catholic Relief Rebuild Center or "the Rebuild" as many called it and then Ozanam Inn, or "the Oz", a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Then  St. Judes on N. Rampart St. and then the Bridge House, who would feed and give out clothing. The food at these places was okay at times, but often bland, high carb and nutritionally unbalanced, and sometimes single course meals, with maybe a piece of bread. Sometimes some jambalaya or maybe some spaghetti with sauce . Other times just beans and rice. It often wasn't enough. Sometimes we had to walk from one soup kitchen to another to add up to a complete meal.
   The first place I ate was the Hare Krsna temple on the 2900 block of Esplanade. I was fed without having to hear one word about their beliefs. Indian food and vegetarian with lots of rice. It was okay.
   One has to respect one thing, though. Some people did have to go through some trouble and expense to prepare these meals. I didn't go too much for the preaching coming out of some, although some of these people were nice. Sometimes some church groups, high school or college students, would come from different parts of the country to come out and chat with us. Some were more open-minded than others. I could tell some of them that I was a staunch pluralist without a problem. Others were more forceful. One guy approached me asking me if I was saved and had accepted Jesus. He had a big smile on his face, but he was still forceful about it. Just to  get him off of me I answered yes to both questions, but didn't tell him what I considered myself saved from or that I quit believing in it.
   Of course this story wouldn't be complete without mentioning Randy, or "Wandy" as he said his name. Sounded tongue-tied, but I believe he had a brain disorder and a learning disability and  would tell you himself that he couldn't "read at all". He had a big heart, though, and would befriend almost anybody. Shared just about anything he had, food, drink, put gas in your vehicle from a disability check he got each month. Both homeless, we often parked our trucks next to each others and joked that we were "next door neighbors". Four years older than myself, he couldn't walk very far because of his gout. Left homeless by Katrina, his house in Chalmette having been devastated, losing everything, including two pets, a cat and a dog, everything except for his truck that he slept in for four years. He finally got off the streets after getting bitten by a spider and laying up in the hospital over night. He then went to live with his brother in Chalmette. That was the last I have seen of my good friend Randy in 2009
   Then there was Johnny from Ohio. Brett Maverick I called him because of his taste for gambling and talent for card tricks that I can't figure out to this day how he did. He liked hitting the casinos in town, sometimes blowing in whatever money he could get holt of. I once told him that he needed to learn to quit when he was ahead. He came here through Birmingham, Alabama and got stuck in the Crescent City as I did. Befriended some "gutter-punks", I guess you could say kind of a neo-hippie type group, idealistic and free-willing, and some a bit unruly.  I let Johnny sleep in the back of my truck before I finally landed a job in a hotel working part time in exchange for lodging along with other formerly homeless.
   Some of these gutter-punks aren't so bad. One can see some of them amongst the street musicians in the French Quarter. String bands, playing sort of an old timey proto-type of country and blue-grass. And I heard one band throw in an Italian tune.
   Some of the street musicians are quite good. I've seen one guy on both Bourbon and Royal, playing blues on his guitar and his motorcycle parked nearby in the street, his case opened up on the pavement displaying the CD's he had cut. Once I saw a Georgia tag setting in the case. Then there's this old couple, a White guy and a Black woman playing some old timey kind of gospel and folk and such.
   As far as I know, most of the people I knew on the streets are off now. One guy got a call from Chicago with a job offer. Last I heard Johnny went to Vegas.
   I now have a part-time job in a hotel in exchange for lodging. I need a cash job. I may have one soon. They want to put me though a few hours of training and I think maybe see how I work out. As a doorman  at a lounge. Something new for me but I need to get out of a lot of low skill, back breaking menial labor.
   I also need to get back home some how. I don't suppose if I clicked my heels together while chanting "there's no place like home" that I could be teleported back home to Alabama.
   Been rough here so far.
   Not too bad in some ways, though. Some people aren't so bad once you get to know them. Although I have run into a few shady types, really nothing that can't be found most anywhere. I've made a few friends here, but a couple of times I have had the occasion of being harassed by someone after hearing my Alabama accent. A lot of people I met here aren't from here either, like a couple of people from Georgia. They don't talk much differently from us.

   Just got stopped in the neighboring town of Metairie by a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's deputy for panhandling after the first time I'd ever tried my hand at it. He asked for my ID and I handed it to him. "You from Alabama?", he asked, and I replied "yes sir".  He said they had orders to arrest anyone caught panhandling after a woman got accosted by a homeless man right across the street. Luckily, he said, he lets people off with a warning the first time, but if he catches me again that I would take a ride across the river to jail. Then he confiscated the cardboard sign that I had made reading "DOWN & OUT -- GOD BLESS" then handed me back my license.
 

   One time, when I was still on the streets and beginning to feel some deep despair, I was walking down Esplanade getting ready to go into the French Quarter, and seeing a white limo cruising around, I said to myself "they're not gonna help us." This was after seeing it cruising around at least about a couple of times before and already becoming pretty critical of the attitudes of some wealthy people back home, some seeming to be strictly for their own elite little cliques, and then coming here and winding up on the streets of New Orleans. I try not to judge every individual within any group as the same, I have met some pretty nice rich kids. But after living on the streets for a little while I began building up resentment against the wealthy. Then I began developing a more classist attitude and after seeing that white limo cruising about a few times, I finally spat at it. As of this writing I've been off the streets for about a year, so that was over a year ago prior to this and now I'm looking back on it and thinking that was a stupid move on my part. The tint on the windows being pretty dark, I had no idea about who the occupant of that car was, but decided to take out my anguish on and show my resentment to whoever was in that white limo
   Whoever it was might have been the one to help me, in which case I would have just shot myself in the foot and made my doubts about them not helping come true for me. Talking self-fulfilled prophecy. I guess I owe this person an apology. My nerves have settled now somewhat since then and I realize now that I was wrong to take my anguish out on the occupant of that vehicle and on the rich in general, although I've come to believe that wealth should be spread more evenly.
   One problem I've confronted here was running into some riff-raff that said they for some cock-n-bull called the "master-plan". I've known about it already and always thought it was stupid. Its something that started with some corrupt cleric standing behind a pulpit with an ear-to-ear smile and saying that God gave him a message to  deliver. It claims to be the perfect solution to racism through the oppression of White rural-Americans. As if increased tensions are really going to create racial harmony.
   I think embraced more by urbanites, most of the ones I met around Mobile were mostly White upper-crust and usually elitists. Most I've met in New Orleans were lower-class Blacks, two were White are all were cut-throats and riff-raff.
   I believe the master-plan to be something led by a group of elitist demogogues trying to build a power base made up of minorities and urbanites using Southern White rural-Americans as a scape-goat for all their problems by circulating rumors and excagerating the worst aspects of their culture and covering over certain facts.