New Orleans

I haven’t set foot in New Orleans since I was 7 years old. My family and I packed into a car…it’s been a while so I don’t remember what make of car…in June of ’63 and we made the cross country trek from the Crescent City to the City of Angels (there was a breakdown...intriguing for me, harrowing for my elders…somewhere in the expansive wilds of Texas but otherwise the trip went well.)

I lived in New Orleans…my mother grew up there…for only a few years and my memories are sporadic but some of them are still powerful.

I remember the pungently sweet aroma of my grandfather’s cigars and his easygoing smile…I remember seeing JFK in a motorcade…I remember being the valedictorian of my preschool class but refusing to give the little speech they wanted me to give…I remember the bats that sometimes hung out at night in the park down the street from our apartment…I remember catching a rubber frog from a pretty lady riding on a Mardi Gras float on the street I could see from the balcony of our apartment…I remember wanting to be a fireman…or the conductor on the streetcar that went down Napoleon Avenue.

Most of my mother’s family moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles when I was child. My grandfather died when I was child. I never had occasion to return to the city.

And still watching New Orleans battered by Hurricane Katrina and submerged by the rising waters and broken levees left in her wake leaves me with a strange melancholy…seeing streets I barely remember walking clogged with brackish water, the rubble of people’s lives, and the desperate living and the forlorn dead inspiring an illogical sense of personal loss.

Both the best and worst angels of human behavior have been on display during the first few days of the catastrophe…from New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama…people rise to their glory or choose less noble roads and actions depending on their own personal spirits, demons, desperations, needs, and impulses. I have no right to sit in judgment of any of them…I’m not there…so I won’t.

New Orleans is not my hometown…I grew up in Los Angeles and my mother still lives there and so that’s what I think of as my childhood hometown, the place that sheltered and sustained me as I grew from child to man…but I still feel a profound and personal sadness witnessing her current travails. I’d imagine that a lot of other people in this country feel much the same even if they’ve never set foot in the “Big Easy”.

* * * * *

If you want to help:

American Red Cross

Second Harvest

Operation Blessing

Father's Day (Part 3)

Some months later, Kristin made good on her promises: she delivered a healthy, caramel-colored baby boy and she went from the hospital to an airliner that carried her all the way to the other side of the country. Jason tried to convince her to stay…first by pleading and then by trying to shame her. He succeeded only in making her cry. When she left Jason felt a petulant anger, a palpable feeling of loss, and a growing sense that he was perhaps in over his head.

He pushed his fear and doubt aside…there was no time for it. With the advice and initially reluctant support of his mother and his sister, Jason learned how to be a single father as best he could.

* * * * *

With the evening wearing on, Jason Robinson takes Christopher to his crib to lay him down for the night. The child stirs as his father fussed with him. "Don't you wake up, little poop bear," Jason whispers. "It's Father's Day and your present to me is gonna be a whole night's sleep..."

Jason smiles at his optimistic hubris. "Well, maybe that's too much to ask..."

Christopher Robinson snuggles into his blanket and drifts back into the deeper, carefree sleep of the innocent.

Jason, his heart full, his eyes stinging with warm tears, looks down on his slumbering son. My boy...my boy is gonna be something, he thinks. And as he gingerly closes the door, Jason was sure that he could feel his father smiling down on both himself and on his son. As hard as the past months had been Jason feels, despite occasional times when he wanted to be shed of the responsibility he took on so willingly, like it was all worthwhile as he watches the baby slumber.

Jason eases into his favorite chair and made sure the baby monitor was working. Then he relaxes and gets lost in a familiar web of thoughts...thoughts of Christopher...of his father, who worked himself into an early grave...of his mother, who hadn't been the same since (but who had come more alive than she had been in years since Christopher was born)...and of Kristin.

Despite the fact that he hadn't heard from her in months...even when he sent her photographs of Christopher...she was still never far from his thoughts. Sometimes he resented her almost to the point of hatred…but mostly he wanted her to come back to see their son, to be with the both of them.

Almost as if on cue, there was a soft rapping at the front door. Jason starts, visitors at night being extremely rare, and then rises and walks warily over to the door.

The soft knocking is repeated once more just before Jason opens the door. He is only partially surprised at the identity of the visitor. She holds out a single red rose to him and, tears streaming down her cheek, she smiles and says, "Happy Father's Day, Jason."

Jason frowns and studies her for a long anxious moment, not sure how to deal with having exactly what he wanted. Jason shrugs and swings open the screen door. He gathers her into his arms and hugs her tight. She tenses at first but then sighs ever so softly and melts into his hug.

"Happy Father's Day, Kris," Jason says softly.

"Jason, I'm..." Kristin begins.

He puts a finger to her lips. "Hush...please don't say that you're sorry...we both had to do what we had to do…"

He bends down and kisses her, ever so gently, and she relaxes once more into his powerful embrace. Jason takes her hand and leads her into the house. "Come on, Mom," he says with a happy, hopeful smile, "it's time that you were reacquainted with...our son..."

Just before he closes the door, Jason glances up at the starry sky and nods knowingly and smiles warmly. "Maybe…just maybe…I’m two out for three now, Dad..."

soldiers on the playground

Forty years ago today the Watts Riots exploded in Los Angeles. A spark was stricken during a traffic stop on a hot summer day and the tense relationship between the community and the police department flared into a conflagration that, I would learn years later, was at once both startling and all-but- inevitable.

I was in the third grade at the time.

I lived outside of the Watts section of the city…more towards the center of town in a neighborhood that included both the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the University of Southern California…and, for the most part, the businesses and homes in our neighborhood were not being looted or put to the torch (there were a couple of exceptions but they were just that.) But we were close enough that we were under curfew…under, for all intents and purposes, martial law…for the duration of the conflict.

Two blocks from the house where I lived was a high school…Manual Arts…that I passed every day on my way to my school…Menlo Avenue Elementary. Manual Arts was one of the staging grounds for the National Guard during the Riots.

At the time, I didn’t understand why the Riots had started…I didn’t understand why people were burning down parts of the neighborhoods were they lived…I didn’t understand why we had to be off the streets by 7 PM…I didn’t understand why armed soldiers were patrolling my neighborhood not so much to protect us as to contain us…and I certainly didn’t understand why I passed tanks and soldiers mustering for war on the athletic fields and parking lots of the high school I could see from my front lawn.

I remember one morning walking past the Manual Arts parking lot and catching the eye of a young Guardsman apparently patrolling the perimeter of the chain link fence. He looked at me…I remember him seeming being both unusually pale (it was years before I realized he might have been afraid of what was to come when they marched into the heart of the riots in Watts) and unusually young for a soldier…and smiled tentatively. I waved back shyly…both fascinated and frightened by his rifle and his uniform…and went on my way to school.

In time, it was over and the fires went out and the soldiers left the high school. It was years before I understood why the Riots started at all.

Father's Day (Part 2)

Jason Robinson hated waiting rooms. There was, he thought angrily, no way to be comfortable in waiting rooms...the chairs were always too hard, the magazines too old, and the waits...the waits were always too goddamn long.

Jason had spent a great deal of time in this particular waiting room of late, pointedly ignoring the inquisitive, occasionally disapproving, glances of some of the other patients and their helpmeets. He should have been used to all of it after all of the long weeks of coming to the office.

He wasn't.

Jason yawned and rubbed his eyes with his great, brown hands. Silently, petulantly, he cursed the woman for, yet again, not allowing him to join her in the examination room. A little late, he groused with passing rancor, to worry about modesty.

Such dark thoughts quickly gave way to rosier dreams of the future...his future...their future...a sunny future filled with new life and rekindled love. Jason, ever willing to actively search out silver linings, smiled contentedly. He knew it was stupid…she had made herself perfectly clear…but he liked to think about the possibilities just the same.

And then, in turn, he thought back...back to the days when he and Kristin were fast and faithful friends despite their apparent differences. Their easy intimacy made them the butt of endless office gossip and, occasionally, lewd speculation but they pretty much ignored all that as they teetered perilously on the thin line separating friendship from romance.

However, romance seemed to have very little chance because while "everything"...their emotional compatibility, their mutual trust and burgeoning affection for each other...seemed so right, "everything"...the fact that they grew up on different coasts in very different circumstances, the fact that Kristin was almost a decade older than Jason, the fact that they were of different races...also seemed so wrong.

Their friendship had kept at a status quo until one fateful night when longing and loneliness and a shared bottle of wine combined to lead them into a wildly-passionate night of blissful lovemaking.

The uneasy admixture of relief and regret that they woke with the following morning had subtly colored the memory ever since. And when, almost as a matter of course, Kristin found that their night of indulged passion had created a child, the regret was magnified.

Kristin James smiled perfunctorily at her doctor when he patted her distended abdomen as they were re-entering the waiting room. The doctor murmured something to the receptionist and then disappeared back into the examination rooms.

She casually double-checked her upcoming appointments while Jason waited by the exit.

Once they finally got back into Jason's car, Kristin gently rubbed her belly. "He's okay," she said, casually breaking the icy silence between them, "the baby's healthy as a horse."

Jason noted a hint of bitterness in her voice but, not wanting to get into yet another argument, he let it pass without comment. The baby...his baby...was okay. He started the car and pulled out. He took a deep breath and said, "Kris, I'm..."

Kristin interrupted him with an irritated sigh. "Oh, sweet Jesus, please don't say that you're sorry again, Jason!" she said, the edge in her voice somehow being blunted by her New England accent. "You know that you're not sorry! You talked me out of...ending this..."

"You wouldn't have had an abortion no matter what," he replied resolutely though he really wasn’t sure that he was correct; at one point that was the avenue she was leaning towards.

"Maybe not," she said wistfully. "But we'll never know for sure, will we?" The sarcasm in her voice was aimed equally at Jason and at herself.

They fell silent. Kristin gazed absently out the window, lost in her own thoughts. The thought of presenting her father with a...mulatto grandchild...filled her with a dread the like of which she thought she had left in childhood. He simply would not understand. Or approve. Or accept. He simply wouldn't.

That said, the idea of aborting Jason's baby...her baby...had been almost equally abhorrent. Almost.

After turning down, with more than a little reluctance, all of Jason's dutiful proposals of marriage...her father wouldn't understand a black husband any better than a half-black grandchild...Kristin agreed to carry the child to term and give him to Jason to raise as Jason had pleaded with her to do.

She would quit California and, just as her father had predicted when she left, return home to New England to regroup...and, hopefully, to forget the pieces of herself that she would surely be leaving behind.

"Kris?" Jason said softly, disrupting her reverie.

Kristin glanced around; they had arrived at her apartment building.

Jason got out of the car and came around and opened the passenger door. He took one of her delicately pale hands into his leathery brown ones and helped her out of the car. "I'm really sorry that you have to go through so much discomfort," he said. "I know you're only going through with this because of me...because I twisted your arm..."

"...not completely..." she replied enigmatically.

Their eyes met for the first time that day and they both smiled self-consciously.

"Need any help getting to your place?" Jason asked.

"Don't fret so much, Jason," she replied with a dismissing wave. "I'm not an invalid," she continued, "I'm only pregnant..."

She patted her stomach and then rose up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. "Happy Father's Day, Jason," she said with an earnest tenderness that surprised both of them.

She turned on her heels and disappeared into the building before he could react or reply.

Jason touched his cheek at the place where Kristin's kiss still burned sweetly and he frowned pensively. For the umpteenth time, Jason wondered what it was he was getting himself into. Who the hell was he to think that he was ready to be somebody’s father? He sighed. Ready or not, that was exactly was he was about to be. “Happy Father’s Day,” he murmured with equal measures of wonder, fear, and rancor in his voice.

Sleep Writing

Last night I slept fitfully for some reason. Not sure why...it was humid but it's been humid, off and on, for a little while now. At some point...round about 3 AM (and yes I remember thinking about the Matchbox 20 song "3 AM", I very often associate music with things going on in my life...including and especially the seemingly insignificant moments)...new pages for my novel in progress flooded into my head.

Or at least I thought they did.

At this point, the separation between the dreaming world and the waking world was quite blurry and so the scene of me tumbling out of bed, powering up the computer, and, after my eyes had adjusted to the intense glare of the computer screen (did you know these things shine like the sun in the 3 AM darkness? Yeah, me neither...), adding 3 new pages to the manuscript could have been either a vivid dream or an unawake reality.

Stumbling out of bed (again?) at 7:30 after continuing the fitful slumbering for a few more hours, I had my first cup of tea and made my way here...to the computer. Microsoft Word was open as was Soul Deep. But there weren't 3 new pages...there were 5 new pages.

Wow. Sleep writing. Unbridled creative impulse or troubling sign of an unchecked id? You decide...me, I'm just going to go with the flow (hey the pages flow nicely into the ongoing narrative and that's all good with me :-)

* * *

After reading over the pages, I checked the e-mail and found a copy of press release announcing that I was one of three inaugural winners of a biannual writing contest. New pages written into my novel while half sleep and now $400 worth of swag for another story...this writing stuff is pretty cool sometimes :-)