Death Interrupted Part I I I

Ever aware of my surroundings, I lumber on towards my room on Westmoor Dr. I love the name, Westmoor. It sounds like an estate in England. To me that name denotes a dock westward, a mooring--quite appropriate since I'm indeed "docked" here. It's probably just some city official's last name who was on the Fulton County Commission in the late 19th century.

My room on the top floor at 1066 (the year of the Battle for Hastings) is adequate, but this not a good final landing place on my life's journey. I expect better of myself. Though the structure is totally renovated, the original oak flooring creaks, plays melodies from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. When you open or close my door you'll always hear a Wayne Shorter sax lick coming from the hinges. I could pour cooking oil on them but I keep forgetting to.

Someone must have picked up my color preferences by telepathy because the walls are painted forest green: a calm and restful hue. At age 18, for one day only, I was a plasterer's helper in Detroit and can appreciate the patterns in the ceiling. The lime made my nose bleed so I had to quit.

On quiet days I can practice, study, and enjoy the generous verdance just outside and beyond my wonderful back window. Tall maple, oak, sycamore, and birch are bending about like the faithful sentries they've been since before the Civil War. The periodic strong winds through the leaves play symphonies and string quartets; then they are like so many reeds in a horn or a pipe organ. I actually listen to it and watch faces and omens appear within and about the sundry shrubbery.

Sometimes the rattling leaves sound like ocean waves or the rapids on a river. After all, they are full of water. This is splendid verity in the midst of grand illusions. My favorite illusion is the shape of a cowboy on a horse that takes form in a particular clump of the leaves and branches. I take it as a sign I'll ride away someday.

Train tracks are just three houses south of my crib but the incessant train horns and clacking don't bother me--makes me want to play a harmonica. All the way from northwest Canada, my girlfriend 'D' hears those air horns over the phone. The lonesome wails draw her closer into the scene.

The trains beckon me to travel to far off lands as they blow day and night with rhythms peculiar to whatever driver is pulling that chain. If it's a young driver, I surmise, there are short bursts. Older drivers try not to disturb the neighborhood so much. They do one or two long ones and that's it. I may be wrong. I try to figure out the chords. No wonder the jazz horns of the 30's and 40's sound like trains.

Because of the spreading oaks, it's nice and dark in there during the day--I've been a day-sleeper since 1971. The enthusiastic rains pelt upon many quadrillions of leaves and hypnotize me into deep meditation.

On bad days there is noise beneath me from coming from a ceiling fan located right next to my bed on the underside of my floor, attached to the ceiling of the folks under me. It keeps me up, clanks at me. I pop on my industrial grade-machine shop hearing protectors and all is silent again but they are not easy to sleep with these on your ears. Sometimes I manage it but my ears don't like it. The earmuffs create a dual circle of pain around each ear. Downstairs and the floor beneath them, folks play loud, redundant beats and rap music. Where did you go Al Green, Marvin? This place is at once a jinx, a torture, and a taunt.

There use to be 'producers' with a studio living below the middle apartment there on the bottom floor. Back then, rappers would park out front, leaving their car doors open for everyone to hear their latest efforts. The bass makes their cars rattle with glee. Of course, I'm the one out of step with these times.

The there's some little boy downstairs running and stomping everywhere he goes, bless his happy little heart. Boom boom boom boom--bam bam . . . plop. Prior to this current family, who came in the middle of the night, just last week, there was no one in the whole house except my roommate and me for about a good three months after the producers 'disappeared.'

On any given night or evening, there are sexual moans, whoops, whelps, and groans emanating from the bedroom directly below me in time with that ceiling fan. For some reason, these girls want everyone in the building to hear them engaging in so much regular copulation, as if to imply that all within earshot should eat their hearts out and crave some of that action. This is live porno without paying a subscription fee. It's been so long, I say to myself:

"Hmm, so that's how it use to sound; yeah, sex. . .I remember sex."

I'm not impotent or bereft of libido, but I prefer not to hear such a performance if it's not my show. The one downstairs happens everyday before dinnertime usually. I am such a square now--I prefer the sound of rustling leaves to that of this whimpering maiden. I produced a group once named The New Breed. They wrote a tune entitled Poor Folks Have Better Sex. Could be. That is perhaps, high epistemology. The studs who perform these services are always silent, concentrating on enjoying the torture they render, also wanting everyone to know of their prowess to evoke such wild responses. It gives the lady an aural stage upon which to strut her stuff and achieve fame here at 1066.

Then there are kids who on occasion, like April Fool's Day come up to kick a hole in my back door, or bust the glass in the same door just to break the monotony. The owner is in Texas. He leaves it like it is. Just last night someone either lit a cherry bomb or fired a pistol while standing in our backyard. I doubt if it was a cherry bomb. There are no fireworks stores in this part of Georgia. I characterize this as 'lite' black-on-black terrorism. The kids finally break in and rob the place six months after I move out.

Ghetto is not a only a place or condition or a slang or a swagger. It's a state of being. Construction folks can come into these old communities, renovate and rebuild, but the ways will be what they are. You can remodel the buildings, fix the roads, or as Lightnin'Hopkins said:

"I can fix your hair, but I sho'caint fix yo'head."

Neither politicians, social groups, nor government programs are going to interfere with cycles of poverty or near-poverty. The Great Society is a myth. Poverty will always be with us. I am with it during these times, it's nothing compared to the abject fine art of poverty one can witness in India, Mexico, parts of South America and even Tunica, Mississippi. This is just a typical low-income ghetto flat. The bathrooms have Jacuzzi tubs, the toilets work. We have electricity. This is not squalor. At least. We are lumped in here together because we can't afford to live anywhere else. So my self-esteem is shot to pieces. Something bad is slouching this way.

Between '98 and '02 I lived in The Darlington Apartments up in Buckhead, the first high-rise ever built in Atlanta. That's up near the 'hood where the president of First National Bank lives along with the super-filthy rich, old Georgia families of yore. Westmoor is light-years away from that as well as Hidden Hills where I resided and played golf when I was married.

Pro football players (the underpaid ones) live in Hidden Hills--Stone Mountain, Georgia where the infamous Ku Klu Klan held annual rallies back in the day. Membership in the Hidden Hills Country Club was $5,000 and we paid it , ate dinner there, and I played golf at least three days a week. My then-wife and I were beyond bourgeois. In the African American community there is a secret, derisive term for that distinction. I will whisper it you. I have no shame: "we wuz . . . niggah-rich." Notice the word was not nigGER--that particular variation is deemed a 'fighting word' in a given court of law (lessness) . It is a term of resentment, not endearment which is the usual excuse for use of that word within the culture. But at my age I am impervious to all name calling and slurs except "Pops." Call me that and we're finished.

This has been a long slow fall since 2002 after my duties with OutKast expired. The 'then- wife' I mentioned, from a 28-year marriage, would gloat and perhaps even cheer if she were a fly on the wall. We'll, she's already destined to gloat and slouch this way two months hence when I'll be out of the hospital, sitting in my room dizzy from medicines, broke, alone, and hungry albeit cheerful as can be.

I forgive her for that existential cruelty because in my wisdom I have acertained that none of us ever get it (life) completely right and I have received miracles that require that I use everything in my power to make forgiveness salient to how I live out the rest of my days.

But I am dying to give you the details of the attempted wicked cruelty to which I refer. Why, It didn't even raise my blood pressure nor did it fill me with the regret she intended.

More about that coming up in Part I V. . . .