There is so much potential here! We found a realtor who is basically straight forward southern style! Sounds like she is from Arkansas but has lived in New Orleans since the sixties. She has taken us under her wing! She has invited us to show up at her office at eight AM every morning to view the "Hot List" properties - the new properties of the day! Investment property is hot around here but there are still finds. The whole city is infested with African termites so the strategy is to find houses where the bugs are only in the floors - once they've made it up to the walls and into the ceilings the structural integrity of the buildings is lost. Knock it down with a feather!
Also, we've learned to look for properties where the foundations are raised off the ground, which is really just mush anyway. Sagging foundations can be propped up by adding more bricks and concrete blocks. It's a lot cheaper to fix up a house you can crawl under!
II
There is too much to drink here! A person has to be careful on Bourbon Street not to look up from their shoes for more than 5 seconds after 6 PM any night of the week. We made that mistake Monday night when we ended up in a swirl of white russians that a swarm of ageing Queens were buying us left and right. Their out of town husbands were loaded with cash and they were out spending the money - Rockefeller with a southern drawl. Cash cards and bi-annual trips to the Scottish coast.
I have thought of you more than once in the last few days. God, if only you were more flexible, like the rubbery skeletal remains of crawfish bones bent by heat and sneakers - glass and grit and air pressure. If only the sensual world extended your capabilities to dream beyond your own backyard!
What can I say, when the light is direct and the cars are in motion and the street sweepers are swaying under a foul bundle of broken bottled, raw sewage pulp and the yuppies have their little dogs and jog around the black kids tap dancing on broken boxes and the fags are cruising at 8 AM with coffee, instead of beer in their perspiring palms?
I'm walking on old stone paths under the heavy smell of flowering vines and saying to myself AH! as the mules clop along, their shit held in leather pouches under their asses; and the raw cajun gutter punks chatter, their bad yellow teeth crooning Johnny Cash through the cigarette smoke, holes in their pastey white faces.
The subway is nothing but a street car, slow and electric! Taking forever is a pastime; life-time organic achievement! Here I can eat and sleep and know that I'm alright just because I exist with everything else, living and dying with the rise and fall of each breath.
