Help From A Surprising Source

I woke up this Tuesday evening about an hour before the sun started going down, thinking that it was Wednesday, and that I had slept through another opportunity to grab the couple boxes of food that are available to me each month from a certain charitable organization, based upon my income level having qualified me for food stamps.

Well, now it's Wednesday!

It is basically food that might have been donated to them and that they are prohibited by law to hand out to the homeless, because it is stuff that has to be cooked.

Ask the owner of the building on Canal Street that a homeless guy burned to the ground a couple years ago, trying to cook hamburger, why there might be such a regulation in existence...

But, since I have a UL listed and inspected oven at the residence that I can prove that I live at, I can get the frozen chicken, or the ham roast each month, along with the rice and beans and other stuff that has to be cooked.

All I usually have to do is stay up from 2 AM, when I get back from busking, until 10 AM, when the van leaves Sacred Heart for the place.

But, once the sun comes up in the morning, I fade fast. I've already probably had 4 cups of coffee while reading or working with Audacity and so, another one, to keep me up for the van ride, is usually ineffective.

A solution, of course, is to make enough money playing at night to cover food of my choice, along with cigarettes, weed, kratom, coffee and a Robert A. Mitchum book here and there.

But, this is only after taking money "off the top" for strings and harmonicas and batteries for my spotlight -something that, in my cozy studio, I had neglected to consider.

I woke up, thinking that it was Wednesday (I had even written "it is Tuesday night" erroneously on yesterday's post) and knowing that I had just about nothing. I had the heavy feeling of having eaten a lot of peanut butter the night before. I even had it with pasta, realizing that that was just another instance of combining a grain with a vegetable protein. Maybe if I had added some greens it would have digested better. But, my initial urge was to sleep some more, when I first woke up at 5 PM.

There was 8 cents on my coffee table and no cigarettes.

Harold had not touched a dish of food that I had put out for him, leading me to think that there was something wrong with it...had I spooned it out of the can onto his plate using a spoon that had something repulsive to cats on it, like cocoa or peanut butter or coconut oil?

I still had some weed, but looked at it as something that I could ill afford to smoke, in such a situation.

It was the fact that I had taken the previous night off, smoking weed and messing around in my studio, getting less than half the amount done, that I would have, had I done it straight, on just coffee that had put me in the bind, which is starting to feel like The Daily Bind, lately. Mirrored by the constipated feeling from the peanut butter.

Dwelling upon the conundrum of: "Yeah, but then it wouldn't have been as fun," I decided that I would hop on my bike and make a huge 2 mile circle, looking for half cigarettes, and not ruling out the possibility of finding a can of cat food just sitting somewhere (a New Orleans specialty") then would return to Sacred Heart where I would see if Bobby in building C' would loan me the $1.75 plus tax for a 4-pack of AAA batteries for my spotlight.

At that point, I would be set up, at least, to busk.

I could hit the Starbucks on Canal Street with the gift card in hand that I have had since the Lidgleys sent a February surprise of a parcel to me which included it. It still has about 25 bucks on it, I recall. I've been doing all of my blogging at the Uxi Duxi and not getting to that Canal Street area until it is after they close at ten, and when I am usually hustling towards the Lilly Pad and abusing myself over how I could have gotten to run so late...again.

There, should I be able to buy someone their coffee using the card, in exchange for cash "of a lesser value" then I might think of making a run to the Uxi Duxi before their own closing time of 10 PM.

We are in the slow season.

This is the time that I had picked to make a trip to New England, with July 1st, penciled in right now. Regardless of whether I am properly "prepared" to go, or not.

I am going to embrace the uncertainty of putting myself in a situation where, as soon as I step off a Megabus in Atlanta, or Savannah, or Charlottesville, I might be broke and have to immediately start playing.

Waiting until I have new strings and harmonicas and all the bus fare, plus food money, and ounce of kratom, and all my other ducks in a row before leaving has just not "worked out" for each of the past 6 or 7 years since I have started to say "This summer, I'm definitely making a trip to New England; I'm not getting any younger, and...etc." every winter.

The work I have been doing in my studio has just not been lucrative enough to justify my having taken time off from busking. At least if I stayed in all night to make a drawing of a random face off the Internet, I could set it up next to me as I played with a price of, say, 25 dollars on it.

In the back of my mind, I envision an agitated man approaching me and demanding to know: "Why do you have a drawing of my daughter?!? In a bathing suit?!?"

But, the stuff I do in the studio only translates into dollars and cents in the sense that, I may have added a song to my repertoire after having run through it a million times recording it. I can now satisfy requests for "Yesterday, When I Was Young," for that very reason.

Well, now it really is Tuesday night, and it is 11:30 PM, and, conventional wisdom would tell me to stay in and try to be awake for when the van leaves for the food bank, and then to start playing in the late afternoon, attempting to do the 4 PM until 1 AM shift at the Lilly Pad.

The next day after my next decent money night, I will log on to the Megabus website, and maybe glance at the Greyhound one. I'm pretty sure that looking out at an unfamiliar city will be like a slap of Aqua Velva to the face, to get me on my toes as a busker. No smoking a bowl and playing a 12 minute "Imagine" by John Lennon for me out there...

So, I started riding slowly toward the Holy Ground bar at the corner, the one with the ashtrays that are sometimes guarded with a baseball bat by one particular bartender there.

Ahead of me was Jeffrey, who lives in our building, and who is a distinguished looking white guy of probably about 45 years old. He seems to have a little bit going for him, wears decent clothes and owns a laptop which he can often be seen using, around the building.

I have a hunch that Bobby, who is both of ours weed guy, has given Jeff the pass code for his wireless, maybe in exchange for a little money every week. He might not have extended me the same offer, either because he knows I am strapped for cash usually as it is, or because I live more than a hundred feet from his signal, or because he fears that I know too much about computers and might use his I.P. address for criminal purposes, or all the above.

But, Jeffrey, I learned, is not above picking the ashtrays at the Holy Ground, which I saw him do, rather discreetly, about a hundred feet ahead of me as I headed that way. He picked a butt with his left hand and deposited it in his right rear pocket, able to block his actions with his body in that way.

"Watch out for the guy with the baseball bat," I said to him when I got there.

"He's not going to hit someone with a baseball bat in broad daylight in front of at least a dozen customers," Jeff reasoned.

"I guess you're right," I said, and grabbed one for myself.

Then, I heard the voice of who turned out to be Christina Friis, say "Daniel!"
She had been standing there at the periphery of my vision, wearing a full length cotton dress that blended so well with the background that she appeared almost like a face hanging in the trees.

She told me that she was leaving in a couple weeks, and that she wasn't going to do street performing any more, at least in New Orleans.

She said that she had decided that it wasn't a good venue for her music.

I suspected that there might have been a negative incident of some kind, but didn't pry.

She did say, though, that CD sales have declined "out there," to which I tried to tell her about how Tanya Huang has a large bar-code type thing where she plays, which allows people to pick and choose individual songs out of her now pretty impressive block of them.

Why buy a CD and be stuck with the other songs on it that you might not like...Metallica and Carol King on the same disc, type of thing, when you can do it that way?

And, plus, the CD, as a physical medium is fast becoming a relic of the past. When's the last time you saw someone walking down the street listening to music from a disc that is spinning away in a Walkman, chewing up a set of batteries every five hours, and being stuck with that artist and those songs all day?"

Christina is going to Las Vegas shortly, and then will settle down somewhere else.

She had been in our neighborhood talking to someone who was doing the liner notes for her latest relic of the past disc of her original songs.

She was in the situation of not having cash for the street car and not being able to find a Chase Bank, and was preparing to walk back to the Quarter, a half hour stroll that I have taken several times.

I decided to walk with her, since I had only been making a large circle looking for tobacco and hoping to find a can of cat food just sitting somewhere, anyways. I told her how unfortunate it was that I had only eight cents on me at a time when I would have gladly given her the buck and a half for the street car.

When we got to the corner of Broad Ave and Canal, though, she spotted the Rite Aid, where she knew she could get cash, and offered to buy me a can of cat food out of there.

When I got to the register with the cat food, she had gotten cash -broken so she would have street car money- and she turned to me and asked: "Could I please give this to you?" holding out a ten dollar bill.

"Not the best venue for my music..."

I told her, as long as she wouldn't think that I had been following her, hoping she would to just that.

I saw her off onto the street car. "You know, I've never ridden the street car before!" she had said.

"Enjoy your first street car ride," I said, as she was figuring out where to slide her dollar. "I've ridden it a couple hundred times. This is one of the best drivers," I added, which brought a smile from the black driver whom I hadn't seen since before I got my bike. "He stays on the tracks pretty well!" He was smiling as the doors closed in front of him, and away went Christina Friis, perhaps out of my life forever.

I was then a man who had gone from just trying to get a can of cat food to: "I think I can still make it to the Uxi Duxi before they close!"

The good luck persisted as, arriving at the Uxi Duxi just before 10 PM, I found a semi-distraught Erin, a 20 something good looking skinny girl, who was all alone in the store, and visibly nervous about it, it seemed.

When I walked in, causing the door bells to chime, she was not in sight, but soon her face appeared with a look of apprehension, horror and dread.

She breathed a sigh of relief, saying that it had been so slow that evening that she had feared being in there all by herself. She gave me a full shot of Yellow Borneo kratom instead of the half shot that I had asked for, out of appreciation of my being there, and even added: "And, you're even one of the easiest customers to serve, just a shot of kratom, no ruby-red grapefruit honey infused tea with kava and ginger, or anything..."

So, I guess this means, I go back to the apartment to work some more on the song that I had decided to put aside because it was not a lucrative enough pursuit. My time working on it having been sponsored now, in a sense...