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Beauty berries

Today I listened. Today I walked outside with the idea that I do not know the blessings this world has to offer me and will not know unless my eyes are open.

In an empty lot next to the house where my friend Angie lives, all of what she and her workers have cut, branches and stalks and vines, sit four or five feet above the ground. The whole lot is like the snow that plows used to push up against the fence when I was in grade school. On top of those cold hills we played King of the Mountain. The last one to still be standing was the winner.

New Orleans knows no snow. I know that I no longer need to be the king. I know that this allows me to listen. I knew the son of the woman who we worked for. The last message he sent me said, Cherrinam Slurry. This was in response to my asking whether or not anybody wanted to buy surinam cherry plants. This man drew creatures with giant penises and beetles and scarabs and nipples floating in the corner. What he drew led me to believe in a world that existed, a world that only he could see. He did not draw these creatures to make money or become known. He drew them because he had to.

The way I sometimes write because I have to, because the words are inside of me and I don’t know what they are until I sit down. 

The street where his mom lives, up around Riverbend, has been under construction for over three years. She said she has lived in the house where we worked for forty-seven. Said the vibration of the machines and the shaking of the earth has lifted tile in her bathroom.

I told her that her garage impressed me, the way every nail and screw and hook and any kind of hardware has a space and a label and its own see through clear plastic box.

“That’s OCD,” she said.

“It’s still impressive.”

“It gives you the feeling of control.”

“That’s all we want,” I said. “It’s an illusion. I want control and certainty. I want permanence.”

I clipped the top of a bush so that the limbs did not hang too far into the concrete spot where people must gather on the red outdoor chairs at times. I wondered what I might be like were I to have a child. I wondered what I might be like were that child to die. 

We swept up the limbs we cut. We bagged this for the giant pile in the lot. The mother cut some of the crawling plants at the edge of the sidewalk.

“It must be soothing for you,” Angie said.

“Sometimes I need to clear things away,” she said. “To get a sense of peace.”

We packed up the tools and told her that we would be back the next day. Then we drove to the house of the father. He showed us art that his son had done. He gave Angie a t-shirt commemorating his life. He was not many years younger than me when he died.

Sometimes we forget, after having been clean and sober for sometime that most of the people die. Sometimes you don’t remember until you stand on the front porch with a father you don’t know, with the notion that he doesn’t want you to leave, that in his almost eighty years this is the most pain he has ever experienced.

“I really like these,” Angie said.

“They’re growing all over around the country house.”

I touched the bright purple beauty berries. I have heard that the native Americans used to use them. I knew that I had written about them weeks before. I did not know that they would take on a new significance. I did not know that their life might from this point remind me of the life of an artist. An artist who left drawings and writing and pain in the hearts of those who knew him. An artist who left joy. 

An artist who like so many other artists could dance only so long with heroin.