Devil water. That’s what my mother called liquor.

I have a couple of alcoholics in the family, men with control issues in positions they can’t control. Prolific reproduction patterns, low paying jobs, military service, all things that will mess with someone’s psyche and where mind-altering substances become a tempting diversion. So it was with this that my mother warned me away from the liquor cabinets.

Before he married my mother, my stepdad had the usual bachelor liquor, and brought it, unopened, when he moved in with my mother. At the house right now is a 50 year bottle of Cutty Sark, of Hennessy…and I’m trying to figure out how to bring it back with me…

Anyway, my folks never really drank. Dad had a beer maybe once a year, and I don’t remember wine or New Years Eve champagne. When I visited my bio dad when I was six, he had me try his beer; Coors and Miller, and I remember spitting it out. The taste was horrendous, and even now, I recall that memory with a face wrinkled by disgust.

I was actually out of college when I drank again, and I found things I liked drinking. Screwdrivers. Rum and coke. Then to figure out what I liked, and how it made me feel was the next step. Because I had gone to college in the Midwest and watched my peers get sloppy, SLOPPY drunk, I realized what it was I wanted and didn’t from the experience. That, I believe, is the key. The stigma was still there, but the stigma is specifically against being so blasted out of your mind that you don’t remember anything. I wanted to be in control. I didn’t want to wake up in police custody and told that I punched a mailbox.

So then it came to what I was drinking. Bourbon, whiskey, scotch, vodka, rum, in their myriad of iterations, brands, flavors…and I dove in.

As far as smoke was concerned, I blame Blue Note Records. I blame jazz for making smoking look so damned cool. Forget the Marlboro Man, the black and white photography of Francis Wolff made me want to smoke. But, I knew a ton of people who smoked cigarettes and more than a handful who died of lung cancer, so the sexy of cigarette smoking died quickly for me. But…cigars.

Cigars appealed to me because of the non-involvement of my lungs. The history of tobacco is rife with oppression, but the opening of the marketing and production to Central and South America, now Black and AfroLatino folks are more involved now, so to support and taste those takes on a historic vice is pretty awesome.

The cigar kick didn’t start til I had some disposable income and a friend group who did it.

Or, most specifically, a girlfriend group who did it. A woman I was interested in asked me if I wanted to go to a lounge with her, and we did, and sat in plush leather seats in front of a big screen showing some random crappy movie. But the leather and wood captivated me.

So to do the research, to find brands to go with, to figure out what I liked and didn’t…it has become a definite feature of summer evenings spent outside. It’s not even a weekly thing to do; I seem to have missed out on the compulsive side of these habits..

THat’s just my journey, and I felt like writing it out.

It’s been an incessant part of his life the last…how long has it been? He really doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember when he got here, but does remember those few moments before he got here; the pain, the dimness, the…what was it? It was like time slowed down, and he became aware of a growing pain…

But he beeps are incessant in this hotel room. He assumes it’s his heartbeat or pulse of simply reminding the healthcare professionals huddled around this bed that they’re on and working. His hearing is shot; he can’t make out what they’re saying and he can’t read lips, but their brows are furrowed and every now and again one of them looks at him and looks back to their colleagues.

He wonders how he looks to them. He can’t really move, and his peripheral vision doesn’t let him look around too much. He is sure he has all of his appendages; he can see his feet and his fingers, and feel the hundreds of tubs lying on him, conveying liquid to or from his body. Man, they weren’t kidding then someone described the human body as a sack of skin holding all of these gooshy, wet things together.

He can’t talk; there is a tube down his throat that hurts like a motherfucker, and as he thinks about it, one of the machine’s beeps gets a bit faster. One of the nurses pauses and looks at him, and he hopes that she can see his eyebrows arch in a concilitory way. Sorry, my bad. Just started thinking about these tubes is all, and maybe the ol heart got a bit spastic.

He is suddenly and keenly aware of a change in the atmosphere, in the room, as the medical people sense someone approaching them. They all turn expectantly to someone in the hallway he can’t see. His curiosity is piqued, but the physical strain of simply being awake for these…few minutes?…cause him to suddenly become droswsy…and he falls asleep to a steadily slowing beep.

…

She gets to the desk in ICU, directed by the nice security guard at the front door. The smell of the hospital still creeps her out but she’s here..for him. Hoping she makes it in time, hoping that she gets to see him..hoping. And because she hopes, and cannot actually do more than that, she is somewhere between hopeless and angry at her powerlessness.

The nurse looks up as she approaches, notices her air, and steels herself for a confrontation.

But, after a quick exchange, she and the nurse quickly exhale, and no conflict is had, and she is pointed down the hall to a room where she is told “all the doctors are there, so you can’t miss it.”

She hears the doctors first before rounding the corner. As she approach they hush and look at her. They know from her look and her walk that she is coming to check on him, and they steel themselves for…what? A conflict? A necessary interaction where fuzzy truth will be sprinkled with platitudes? Or one were the bare truth will be given with the minimum of bedside manner and no sugarcoating?

“Mrs…?” says the head doctor, extending his hand.

I sent someone’s laptop off for repair a while ago, and they emailed me today to find out what was going on with it.

I checked, and the repair’s BEEN done…but Fed-Ex has had it, and it hasn’t moved since eight days ago.

Where is the laptop? Dallas, Texas.

I explain that the laptop’s fixed and on its way back, but it’s stuck in Dallas.

She writes me back with “WHY?”

It took everything in me not to explode on this chick. Oh, because most likely, FedEx workers are huddled in their homes without heat or safe water, their electricity is out, and they are worried for their families’ and their safety as a their local government leaves them to die, in a pandemic, during a winter storm the likes of which the region has not seen.

Someone that willfully ignorant of what’s going on amazes me.

Whether downtown or in another state, I sing the praises of the one night hotel stay thusly…

The relative anonymity of it all leads to behavior normally reserved for the internet and interactions with people who work service industries. Walking into an opulent hotel lobby, checking in, getting those door keys.

It is my opinion that a lot of the actions of those we as a society frown upon have their genesis in actions people would rather not know about, or at least, not know the minds responsible.

Lest you jump to conclusions, no I am not speaking chiefly about the loud caterwauling of sexual congress although that can be one part of it. The decadence of ordering room service. Of being in a climate controlled suite, you alone, or you with a willing partner, being not only physically, but mentally intimate as well. Can’t pick fights in such a close proximity. So tempers are softened, and care is taken, in a little world of your making. And there’s something..raw about that. Raw and revealing.

I am a child of the US Postal Service.

Not that I am the literal progeny of a United States mail delivery system, but everything I did before I left home was made possible by the USPS. Combine, my parents spent over 50 years under their employee. Every candy sale, every field trip expense, and much of my overpriced course packs in college was thanks to those paychecks.

So to see I have a soft spot for the Postal Service is probably expected.

It is the expected thing to collect stamps, but I could never keep them, because I was taken by the mystery of sending and receiving mail.

YEs, I was that kid waiting on the mailman. I was the kid who ran in from school and went straight to the mail slot to see what was there. Considering how little mail I got, I have no idea why and how I was so attuned to the sound of the mail slot opening, but I was. IN those days, a long distance phone call was heavily regulated by Pacific Bell and AT&T, so while mail was slower, Mom and Dad always had stamps. I had plenty of paper. I had time. LET’S WRITE SOME LETTERS.

February is National Letter Writing Month, and I suggest you get out some paper and write something down to someone. Or, write it down and burn it. After I get over the fact that my handwriting is poop, I think of my friends, bored and picking up the mail and expecting bills and junk and getting a poorly handwritten letter! It’s like delayed happiness, delivered by a government employee!

Get out your pen, and scribble some clever turns of phrase. Put it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, and drop it in a heavily vandalized mailbox. You won’t regret it.

My mother is an excellent cook, and when I grew up and out the house, I would always make sure to get back to wherever home was to partake and figure out how to bring food back with me. Thanks to Southwest, I could leave Mississippi at 8am with a duffel bag full of frozen food – sausages, greens, black eyed peas – and have that in my freezer in Chicago before noon.

But one thing my mother never did was teach me how to cook. I was amiable, but my childhood was spent outside the kitchen, except to consume vast quantities of food. She was old school, with the big Sunday dinner and the big pots of cabbage and greens to serve as sides through the week. But she never showed me how to do the alchemy she was so good at.

As I got into my 30s and 40s, Mom started to openly regret not teaching me how to cook. Over the years, I’ve cobbled together a decent cooking acumen so I won’t starve, and taken classes to learn more, but there were still those dishes Mom made that I had no idea how to make, even though I’ve eaten them thousands of times.

One such dish was her gumbo. Gumbo would take all day, and was made in a pot big enough to bathe a small child. She put andouille sausage, two sizes of shrimp, boiled chicken, and imitation crab meat in hers, and made sure to fix herself a small pot of okra for her, since Dad and I detested okra. When Mom made gumbo, it was an invitation for the entire family to come to our house, and I got to play host, which I learned I really enjoyed.

At any rate, recently, I’d gotten the urge to try to make my own gumbo. Because Momis Mom, she was unable to give me exacts. No “one cup of this, two tablespoons of that” here. “A scoop of this, and a pinch of that”, which, as you can imagine, aren’t measurements n the side of your Pyrex dish.

We tried last year, and..it was almost a disaster.

The key to a good gumbo is the roux, which is basically flour and fat mixed together. If you screw up the roux, or burn it, you have to toss everything and start over; there’s no coming back from that. And after a false start and an emergency call to my sister, we got it together and it came out pretty okay.

But fam, we did it again today, and I couldn’t WAIT to tell my mother about it. That we had two kinds of sausage. That our roux was good and not too thick and not too thin. That everything was done. And we put some butter and garlic on some French rolls and put em in the broiler for a minute until they were toasted and could be used to sop up the roux that somehow escaped our greedy mouths.

Mom was very happy to hear it, but she reminded me of a saying that has followed me since childhood.

“You know why your gumbo was good?”

“Why, Mom?”

“You put love in the pot.”

I hope y”all put love in your pots, too.

Very few things make me..contented, or as..right, as having peace in my home, or just peace around me. My wife is asleep right now, hopefully dreaming good dreams. The people I love most in this world are all probably asleep right now, except perhaps my sister, who is a known insomniac.

But my peace is why I’m still awake. My brain won’t shut off, going through what-ifs and the events of the past few days. I am worried, angry, tired. I am surrounded by people who feel the same way I do, some in very different ways. Some have adopted a dark humor, others are grim and write screeds on their social media that amount to “I told you so, but you don’t listen to me.”

I want peace to reign in my house, where I can text my peoples and they have a joke for me, or an invitation, or recommendation for a new food spot or music or a good book. Not contingency plans for the worst of times. I want news of joy, not recaps of what is and what that means for what could be.

My mother is a big fan of saying, “What’s good don’t last always, what’s bad don’t last always.” But I remind her that the Jews stayed in the wilderness for a few generations before Moses got them out the paint, and while they EVENTUALLY made it out, the woods were all a few generations knew. I’m not convinced I’ll see us getting out of this wilderness.

I’m worried, angry, and sleepless on the Southside.

The year was 1994, and I decided to be an audio engineer.

Well, I figured I could do some creative work – my yearbook pic caption says I wanted to do “Graphic Design”, but I figured that, if that didn’t work out, then I’d do audio.

I don’t remember what got me on this track, I really don’t. But I do remember, as I toured colleges, that I’d ask to look at their radio stations. I wasn’t interested in the film studio; where do you mix the audio at?

So, I went to school to learn how audio worked. I spent days in mixing studios and in front of SoundEdit 16 (RIP) mixing sounds. I scored people’s films, I did group projects and took the audio part. I loved every bit of it.

Then, junior year of college. We were talking about the role of sound in film. I’ve already written about my Miles Davis experience in this space, and at some point I’ll get into Blazing Saddles, but we watched a French film called Diva in class, and I…I was stunned.

This was a movie about…sound. About recording. About high fidelity recordings and music piracy. And I drank it in.

Fast forward to grown me. I have this movie on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray. I watched it again tonight, and there were some things I didn’t remember and some things I noticed this time. I don’t think it’s especially rated as a classic to anyone, but it’s in my Top 10 Movies.

And I think of what could have been. If not for a system which encourages peonage, or taking out huge loans, or possibly being a 30 year old “intern” making $1K a month…that could have worked out for me.

But, here, but for the grace of God, go I.

This is fresh in my mind, so I’ma write on it. It’s a story of the American Dream…kinda? And how no one tells you that your hard work may be exploited by someone else wanting to get rich.

This story actually starts in 1966, when I was but a twinkle in, well, ANYONE’S eye. My mother hadn’t been in Los Angeles but a few years, and my stepdad had a dream of…something.

See, the story goes that some people got the idea that they could build another Los Angeles in the desert between LA and Vegas. With the proper infrastructure, they could attract millions of people, and they offered people the opportunity to buy lots to get in on this new growth opportunity.

Dad took that opportunity.

Mom and Dad got married in 1980, and Dad had apparently made allusions to “some land I got in the desert”. Mom says she would ask if he wanted to go out there, but he never wanted to. She got the feeling he ws ashamed, somehow.

Anyway, Dad continued to pay property taxes and kept telling my mom that he’d handle it.Mom didn’t press him; taxes looked to be about $100 a year, and we were doing okay. But every now and again, she’d mention it, and Dad would get mad.

I had no idea this existed until after college. I remember calling home, and Dad being really aggravated, and Mom explaining that someone had offered him money for the property, but he felt the price was too low and he was being taken advantage of. I found out then where it was, but didn’t want to ask anything else because Dad was PISSED.

So, after Dad died, Mom is going through his papers, and finds out more details. In 1966, Dad bought a plot of land in the desert for $3390, and had agreed to pay at least $30 a month. I’m sure it got paid off in 50 years, and he had paid property taxes religiously. But shortly after he died, Mom got a tax bill and had refused to pay it. Shortly after, we got a letter in the mail offering us CASH MONEY FOR YOUR DESERT PROPERTY, which made me look a little closer. Mom decided she didn’t feel like looking into it anymore, so we didn’t.

Lately, I’ve been trying to get more stuff in order so Mom doesn’t have to worry about it, so I took this project on; get rid of this land. Mom sent me the papers she could find, and I started looking things up.

Whoooo boy. First I found this article, which details a timeline of the whole operation.

Then, someone had done some investigative work, and found out some more REALLY interesting facts.

So, it’s with this knowledge that I proceed to figure out where to go and what to do. This is going to be a mess.

I have no idea what Dad was thinking, 50 years after he bought this plot of useless land. Maybe he was enamored of the sales pitch. Maybe he bought into a mini-Los Angeles. Maybe he decided he was going to see this through, and that he didn’t want to be a quitter. Mom doesn’t know, either.

The mysteries…

Some people complain of the must, the humidity, the stickiness of a Mississippi afternoon in the summer. To me, it’s a balm. A balm against the air conditioned offices I left behind at my job in Chicago. A cry against all of the fans I’ve waved with MLK on them into my face on Sundays. Not that I have an issue with being cool; it somehow seems sacrilege to run for the nearest enclosed space with an AC system going while I’m down here.

I’ve flown in to bury some memories, bury some regrets, and bury my father. Going down Interstate 55 on my way to the backcountry my people have called home for four generations, and with the windows open. The guy at the rental counter at Jackson International touted the power of the car’s AC system and didn’t believe me when I laughed at him. He squinted at me, and after a moment’s pause, asked, “You been down here before?”

I looked at him with a mix of “bless your heart” and “”who the fuck you think I am?” Since landing, I’d slid easily into the patter of Southern vocality, thanking the flight crew with a “God bless y’all” as I de-planed and striking up a conversation with an older white guy about the Saints while we waited for our gate-checked bags to come from the undercarriage of the plane.

But the Second City was still in me when I replied, “I’ma be aight, my man.”

He smiled, and looked back down to his computer. “You must be visiting kinfolk, then.”

Curious, I asked why he didn’t think I was there on business. I had on the polo shirt and baggy shorts uniform of the middle aged urbanite, so I didn’t think I looked too sportsy or too hood.And who’s to say a said urbanite of above average height can’t be doing business? And legal business, at that?

He looked up as my receipt started printing. “Folk here on business, first thing they want to know is how good the AC is. Folk driving into the country know they got a good chair, good food, and good laughs waiting for em, so they just want to get there.”

I smiled, and smile faded when I thought about the funeral and the hard conversations in the coming days. “You right about all that.”