Alan Gutierrez

Don’t Fear Starbucks is an article about how Starbucks drives the sales in independent coffee shops by introducing more customers to blended coffee beverages. I thought that I might shoot this off into an email to Robert Thompson of Fair Grinds, but I thought it would be more interesting to see how long it takes him to find this post and comment. The article does describe Starbucks’ predatory monopolistic practices. (Personally, I think that Starbucks is an embarrassingly pasty white aberration of American culture.)

Last Friday I went to see Betty Harris at the Old Point Bar in Algiers. DJ Lingerie sent me a text message that she and a friend were in Algiers and that I should join them. I rode my bicycle through the Treme and French Quarter to cross the Mississippi with the ferry. On the ferry I heard that Betty Harris was playing at the Old Point Bar. I understood why I was headed there. We stood with our toes touching the stage. One of the backup vocalists was close enough to knock me while swaying. I was embarrassed for having disrupted her with my presence, yet she smiled and apologized. “Cry To Me” was haunting. Strange New Orleans evening which begins reluctantly and unfolds into unforgettable.

It rained this morning. I awoke just before 8:00 am. The force of habit compelled me to leave, to head toward a coffee house and purchase a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

I went about the first hour of the day, with an eye toward the window that fills a wall of my room. These are my first hour activities; inserting contact lenses, shaving or forgetting to shave, sorting my email inbox. It rained hard without pause. When I looked out the window I watched a film of water come from around the gable on either side of the window and spill out of view.

In the course of the day, the rain will come, deliver it’s deluge and go, in fifteen minutes at a time. The rain clouds travel fast over New Orleans. The weather changes quickly. One does not need much patience to contend with an afternoon downpour. One should not cancel their plans for rain.

The morning it seems is when the rain will loiter. It exhausted my patience this morning. I packed my computer and set out as if it were any other morning. Borrowing the smaller of two umbrellas that stood by the door.

The day is gray due to the rain. The chickens were out in the yard, wet plumes of feathers running to escape me as I set out. On St Phillip I noticed that I was concentrating my sight on the sidewalk ahead of me. Before the peculiar automotive store, Rim City, there is an unoccupied double shotgun. The steps and their railing where made of untreated lumber, which turned a rich umber in the rain. The house itself was white with wood siding and stucco around columns of the porch. I imagined the water working it’s way through the roof and walls, which prompted me to look for signs of a blue roof, but my upward glance was checked by the rain.

Thereafter, I was awake, pulling myself toward the center of an umbrella the size of a large pizza.

Across the sidewalk, I began to notice that in places streams of water formed, creating inch deep obstructions as wide as my widest stride. It was raining harder.

I came to the Chinese takeout barn at St Phillip St and Broad Ave and stepped under it’s awning to walk it’s length. A woman rounded the corner as I approached. She glared at me. I returned a blank stare. I was awake but not yet aware of the profound sense of being out of my environment that would come later when I contemplated the ratio of air to rain. She broke her glare with some almost imperceptible pleasantry, some acknowledgment of my humanity. If I reciprocated it was involuntary.

At the corner, in this alcove, I looked up Broad Ave for oncoming traffic and a generous gap in which I could walk to the neutral ground without increasing my pace. To stay dry, I figured, I had to make every movement a ginger one.

This gap was a block away and moving slowly. There was a man that emerged from the Chinese takeout barn with a bottle in a paper bag. He glared at me. I return a blank stare. I did not enjoy his company, nor that of the woman.

As I walked out across Broad Ave, a block away through the haze I saw a truck turning left onto Dumaine St. It crept. Traffic was moving right to overtake it. I noticed that I had no perception of how fast that traffic was moving, but that did nothing to encourage me to hasten. At that point I noticed that my pant legs were soaked to my knees. I shortened my stride.

At the median I looked across the next three lanes of Broad Ave. At every square inch a raindrop exploded on the asphalt. As I walked along the Broad Ave sidewalk, the Crescent City Steak House parking lot was emptying itself through a stream wider than my stride. I walked through on my heels. The water did not find it’s way into my shoes.

A the corner if Ursulines Ave and Broad Ave a fast food restaurant has been converted into an H & R Block tax service. The water from this parking was impassable, but that is not my route. I walk through the parking lot, from Broad Ave and out onto Ursulines Ave. I walked into the parking lot where the rain was collecting.

The raindrops collected themselves into a sheet of water and slid toward the center of the parking lot where they crashed into the sheet from the opposing side and turned to face the Broad Ave curb cut cheek to cheek running out into the gutter forming rapids along the way.

Out onto Ursulines Ave and under the live oak canopy. The corner grocery store that is the bane of the neighborhood organization was quiet. It’s garish new yellow with red trim paint job did not project it’s neon glow. No one came or went though the door.

A took a long hard look at that corner as I had forgotten for the moment where I was supposed to go. I asked myself if that was White St and if so, what was it doing next to Sopranos? It was Crete St. The street sign said so. Street signs are sporadic and faded when they do exist. This one was newer, bright white on blue.

The sidewalks are especially broken along Ursulines Ave due to the live oaks. They rain flowed past forming waterfalls. The rain weaved it’s way though the triangular slabs of sidewalks, smooth seams receding into the ground, jagged cracks relieving the pressure of the seething roots creating corners pointing this way and that. The rain flowed though the root systems of the oaks and out into the gutter. The rain coursed along the high curbs that rains such as this one have transformed into 6 inch cliffs. The rain fell into the drains where they would eventually meet the Wood Screw Pump that would lift it on its way to Lake Pontchartain.

Emerging from the alcove of Ursulines Ave onto White St I made a leap over a square of sidewalk that sank to form a basin. On the other I came to a portion of deliquescent sidewalk that was impassible. It had sunk and become overgrown. It was green and to step on it was to sink into a muddy sponge.

I back tracked. I walked out onto the crown of White St. White St was not recently paved. It is a patchwork road. The divots filled with either loose asphalt padded down with the back of a shovel or else water on a day such as this. I found myself on the opposite sidewalk. The high ground in this valley.

Ordinarily, White St is bright. There is no tree canopy. In the summers a street such as this can be unbearably bright. It occurred to me that the day was not gray. It was dark.

I looked at the rain. Between the rain there was air. The air was full of water. The air was soaking wet. I stood inside a pocket where the rain seeped rather than fell. A walking bell.

The houses along White St are raised. They have porches. The porches have steps and short paths that lead up from the sidewalk. The sidewalk sits right before the home, with a small lawn. Landscaping is in pots and beds in tiers. It rises with the steps to the home. Each house will collect the rain on it’s roof and eject it through the gutters and downspouts onto the driveway and onto the sidewalks. Each house produced stream that was either to wide or two deep to cross without consideration. The water found it’s way into my shoes.

On both the sidewalk and street ahead the water had depth and the raindrops did not land with the impact of concrete, rather they where swallowed by shifting mass of water giving the appearance of city street covered by a liquid skin with quivering goose-flesh.

I crossed Bell St and stepped up onto the sidewalk across the way. The branches of bushes formed an archway with which the umbrella collided. The leaves overturned and released there reservoirs. I felt the water through the water. I was wet. I would arrive at the coffee shop and hit the air conditioning and become cold. The skin on my feet would dry out in my socks. They would itch.

I began to imagine how unpleasant it would to find that I’d forgotten my wallet.

Should arrive at this, the nearest coffee shop, an officious little franchise coffee shop, wet with no currency, I would be greeted as a vagrant, turned out into the rain. It has been my experience with this chain. On Camp St, while they where washing dishes to fulfill my order, I asked for the restroom key and was informed that I would not receive it until I paid. I was aghast. I left.

Should I arrive at my destination to find myself without a wallet, I would I press on to Fair Grinds where such a folly would be overlooked. The people there would engage me as a neighbor. They would chide me for the foolishness that led me to get so wet.

I was quite certain that my wallet was on my person. The space under the umbrella where there was no rain was small. It wouldn’t do to do anything but huddle and walk in these last two blocks. My hands were occupied with the umbrella, which at this point, served only to keep my computer bag dry. This was an important service. Exploring my person, soggy as it was, for a wallet was not prudent.

I lost interest in mulling the incivility of my destination coffee shop. My mind had wandered far. Much further from the moment that I’d thought possible. As I returned, I saw my foot fall on the bricks which lay in a diagonal pattern where an end butts against a half of another bricks length to form the letter L. The pattern is bordered by bricks laid end to end on either side. The sidewalk was edged, by what must have been brutal noisy device that kept the lawn an inch away.

As I approached Esplanade Ave and the underlying Esplanade Ridge the puddles began to clear. Water was in a hurry to find a place ever so slightly lower. White St was passable along it’s brick sidewalk. The houses do not come up to the sidewalk here. There are lawns to absorb the rain. I regained stride.

With my mind off my feet I felt that the back of my shirt was soaked. The rain had worked its way through the fabric of the umbrella. The umbrella rested on the top of my head. The rain found it’s way into my hair. It ran down my neck and nape and onto my back where my blue oxford shirt wicked it away.

I arrived.

I folded my umbrella as I entered, only now realizing that I did so because of a superstition. I held the umbrella before me and began to ring it out. It is not supposed to absorb water. It did not absorb water. My hands were now wet.

There is a man here that I know. I was not prepared for conversation. We discussed the fact that he honked his horn at me a week before as I cross Claiborne pushing my bike. I recalled that someone honked their horn at me, perhaps because it’s easy recall something that is easy to imagine. I recalled that I was pushing my bike because I had two flat tires, because that is hard to forget.

He asked if I’d rode my bike to here. I wave the umbrella at the windows and asked if he was kidding. I walked. He asked from where. I said Usulines St and Broad Ave because I didn’t want to get into a conversation about where I lived, Dorgenois St. Enough questioning and he would soon be telling me something instead of asking me something.

He told me to the restroom and dry my hair and face before I got too cold. He told me we would talk after I got my coffee. I did so. At this outlet in the franchise the restroom doors are not locked.

I ordered a size medium decaffeinated coffee specifically requesting a porcelain cup. I added whole milk. I set up my laptop at one table, then moved to another where I did not have to see a sharp shadow of my own head lording over half my computer screen. I took my shoes off. I took my socks off and run them out onto the tile floor. I was too uncomfortable to feel uncomfortable behaving in this way. My socks absorbed water. They are supposed to absorb water. No one noticed the action nor heard the splatter.

I wrote for three hours.

The clothes that I’m wearing have dried. I’m wearing my socks so my body heat will dry them. I drank my coffee. I am going to get a refill.

It is still raining.

The rain came down in torrents, crashing into the live oak that fills the picture window that in turn fills the far wall of the tiny room in which I live. The branches of the oak swayed with the weight of the water. It was a green and luminescent waterfall.

Later I was standing on the front porch. The Spanish moss had opened. The tree was especially lush. There was handsome rooster walking about the yard an into the street.

A man walked by, pushing a cart full of scrap metal, assembled from two ten speed bicycles that where somehow bound together with a platform in between for the cargo.

At that point, it occurred to me that I did not have my camera. That I’ll have to forget this day, although it seems as though it wants to be remembered.

These last few weeks I’ve retreated from the City of New Orleans. Today I was at Beth’s books, a book store behind the Sound Cafe. I wondered if I could write a book. Could I write about my life and make it an interesting story? I’ve been away from the people of substance who’ve made my life rich and meaningful. It seems that I’ve found myself in the company of seekers. The runaways. People who make me think about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the story of an observer of Savannah, Georgia. How many of our resident voyeurs fancy themselves the trusted insider. It occurred to me that the only way for a Michigander to write about New Orleans would be write without explaining and without observing. No exposition. And yet, I can and do write about New Orleans as a New Orleanian, with authority, but not these last few weeks. It tells me that I’ve lost my way. I’ve found my way back to a person that I once was.

The Detroit newsletter slash website Metromode reports that SRT opens Ann Arbor office, more than triples its employees. Although, it looks as though it was a reprinted press release, the notion of third spaces is one that I’m pursuing with coworking meetups at our lovely New Orleans coffee houses.

A summary of The Jena Six in the The Town Talk, Alexandria-Pineville, LA. Not only a nice resource, but a nice format; and FAQ with linked articles.