johnbyronkuhner.com

http://choicespregnancycentre.co.uk/buy-vytorin-over-the-counter/ Tulane University.

Tālīkota I walked along Freret Street to Tulane University, where I looked for Richard Campanella, a New Orleans expert who I thought would be worth talking to about the Mississippi River. But I rarely schedule things – this gives me freedom to be spontaneous, and it allows Fate to determine the outcome of many things, but it also means I often cannot see a certain sort of person – the busy sort. I suppose this is fine – I never have much to say to busy people anyway, I’m willing to let them run off to whatever else they are doing.  And other times I miss connections which might well be great – it’s hard to know.  I found his office, which was punctiliously and interestingly decorated; but the man himself was not there.

Magnolia grandiflora in Audubon Park. I can look at stuff like this all day.

I stayed uptown until evening; this was my old neighborhood when I lived for a spring in New Orleans, and I was very fond of it. I ate lunch at the Camellia Grill, where everyone sits cheek-by-jowl at the counter, which makes me feel less lonely than sitting alone at a table; I inspected the magnificent Audubon Park, enjoying the live oaks and irises and magnolias; I thought I would visit the Zoo, as at this moment in my life nature is my great pleasure and consolation, but it was closed to the public in order to accommodate a massive school visit. The kids were definitely the loudest animals in the place, and I did not envy the teachers who were trying to corral them. Though I was enjoying everything, it was not until the evening that anything really worked out as I had planned, when I saw an old friend, Tom, in a bar down in the French Quarter.

We had grown close when I was going through my divorce, and had come down to New Orleans for some warmth and healing; he had let me stay at his place while I looked for a room of my own, and lent me his bike for the duration of my stay. Now it was his turn for a divorce. And since it was New Orleans, the whole experience had an extra insanity which made the whole thing funny but also much much more powerfully sad. He had married a woman with an eight-year-old son, and when I had last seen them five years ago I saw difficulties there which I had no idea how to manage: Tom and his wife disagreed about discipline and how to raise the boy, and I found the child disrespectful and difficult and sullen and entirely attached to his iPhone (or whatever expensive device it was) – at the age of eight. I do, sometimes, wonder about what kind of adults are being made by these machines that have attached themselves to our children. In my teaching days, I found that the most delightful and natural children – the ones who had bright eyes, asked questions, did things, spent time outside, noticed birds and frogs, and in general seemed alive – all almost without exception lived with strict rules about television and computers, often to the point of not having them at all. For Tom and his wife the kid was quite well formed already, by very different rules, and I would not have known how to deal with such a situation.
Well, as the relationship started going south the boy naturally exploited the division between his parents to get what he wanted, and rebelled outright against his stepfather. This came to a head during an argument between husband and wife which was particularly bitter. The boy – who is gaining strength – attacked my friend Tom from behind, and Tom slammed him against a wall and pinned him there. His wife called the police and had Tom taken out in handcuffs.
The experience in the St. Tammany Parish jail had changed my friend. He ended up spending two nights there on the concrete floor, awaiting “processing.”
“Isn’t there some kind of law about that? Don’t they have to charge you and do something with you quickly?”
“They said the computers were down. They didn’t process anybody. John, lemme tell you, I think some people had been there for weeks. They said they couldn’t do anything about it without the computers – they had to run background checks and all that. It was only because I got my father and my mother working on them, calling them constantly, that they let me out. And I’m missing work and everything, it was bad. Probably I only got out in two days because my dad’s in the military.”
“And you’re white.”
“That probably helped too.”
“But aren’t there laws about this?”
“I’m sure there are, but when you’re there you just want to get out. That’s all you care about. You don’t care about the law. Personally, I don’t buy that stuff about the computers. Once they decided to process me it all happened pretty quickly and it looked like they were using computers. I think they just didn’t have any space in the prisons. So they let me out when they figured I wasn’t actually going to prison – that way I wasn’t going to take up any space. But the other guys, John they got nowhere to put ‘em. So they just let us all rot there, like thirty guys all in one cell, you’re sleeping on the cement floor, and John, some of these people, they’re real scary. I mean, get this. We had these two guys, and they got to talking, and it ends up one of them was in for a drunk driving case. Well, it ends up that one of the people who died in the crash he was in, was the girlfriend of one of the other guys in lockup. Swear to God. So this one guy, he starts talking like, “You betta watch yo back mothafucka Ah’ma getchou!” and all this shit. He was really pissed. So everyone in there, we try to settle them down, but that one guy he kept sayin’, “Now I know who did this shit man he killed her, he killed my girl, Ah’ma fuck that nigguh up. He killed huh, man! He KILLED HUH!” So the other guy, he goes off to his corner, and – oh, you’ll like this. So get this. You know Bob Barker?”
“Like, from The Price Is Right?”
“Yeah, like ‘Come on down!’ and shit?”
“Have your pet spayed or neutered.”
“Right. Well get this. Bob Barker took all the money that he made on the Price is Right, and I don’t know why he did this, but he invested in a company that makes prison toiletries and shit. So like when you get taken in, they give you a little toothbrush, and it says ‘Bob Barker’ on it.”
“WHAT?? That’s insane.” I was laughing, and so was he.
“Oh yeah, you can look it up. So anyway this guy who killed the girl in the car accident, he goes off to the corner and we can see he’s doing something. Well, he’s scrapin’ his toothbrush on the cement floor. And so someone says, ‘Hey theah whachou doin?’ and he says, ‘I’m sharpin’ my Bob Barkuh man I ain’t gunna wait fo’ this shit to go down.’ So I was like, ‘Get me out of here, this is insane.’”
We were both laughing, because it was all completely crazy – mind you, this man is one of the nicest people I know, a math geek who stands up very straight, wears pretty wide eyeglasses, rigs up engines to make them more fuel-efficient, and always holds doors for old people – the kind of guy who could give his life to raise another man’s children. The thought of him thrown in jail like this was completely incongruous. But this was also New Orleans laughter: a kind of laughter that kicks in when you realize there is no other way to deal with the ten or fifteen layers of sadness implied in all the madness. In a land of many prisons, the prisons are full; celebrities are following their brokers’ advice and investing in growth industries like prison toiletries; a man loses the woman he loves for another man’s dumb drinking; people are thrown for weeks at a time into cages which would not be up to code for the housing of zoo animals, and this sort of thing is so expected that people have evolved behaviors (like sharpening toothbrushes) to deal with such situations; he, my friend, had been left there just like any other animal, for days; and his marriage was breaking up. As mine had. As so many of our friends’ had.
“So John I’m never going back there. I’ll tell you that. I’m going to remember this. I’m never going back. My wife, I can’t trust her. If she can do that to me, I know, I can’t ever go back.”
There was more. He was going to court-ordered anger management therapy. “So the theory is that we have all been trained to use violence of some sort to get our way, and it worked – but now, it’s not going to work any more. So we’re all going around and telling stories about how we learned to use violence in the past. It’s actually pretty interesting, hearing people’s stories.” Then he broke into a big smile. “But I have to say, sometimes I’m sitting there listening and I just want to burst out laughing. I mean, I’m in there for what we’ll call a relatively minor incident. These other guys around me, they’re there for like, attempted murder and shit. And they’ve got stories, man. It’s shit that’s so crazy that sometimes I just want to burst out laughing in the middle of the room, because I can’t imagine it, but I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want anyone to stomp me out, you know what I’m saying.”
“Stomp you out?”
“Stomp me out. Let me tell you that story. So there’s this one guy, and he’s talking about how he ended up in jail for attempted murder. He served his sentence, now he has to take this class. So – and let me just preface this by saying there are two white people in the room, me, and the therapist, who’s a woman. Man, you should talk to her. I bet she has some stories.”
“Doctors, you know. Rules about confidentiality.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know, probably if you slept with her she’d start talking.”
“True.”
“So anyway, this guy says he’s living in the projects with some girl, and he finds out his girl is cheating on him. So he’s all upset and threatens to kill her and all that. So she storms off. Then she comes back with the guy she’s sleeping with. And so he says, ‘God-damn that little nigguh, he gets right in my face and starts telling me how it’s gonna be. And Ah’m lahk, god-damn, that little nigguh ain’t gunna come into my house and tell me how it’s gonna be. So I had to stomp that nigguh out!’”
“So what exactly does it mean to ‘stomp someone out’?” I asked.
“That’s when you have someone down on the ground and then start kicking them in the head.”
“Gotcha.”
“It gets better. ‘So I kicked that little nigguh’s ass, and he goes upstahs, and you know the way it is, sometimes shit like that happens and everything coo, sometimes they come up behind you and they shoot yo ass. So I went up theah to make shoowah everything coo between us, and then I go back downstahs and my woman she staht acting all nice, like, ‘Honey lemme make you some iced tea,’ and Ah’m like what the fuck is this shit? So then she says, ‘Honey, come in here,’ and I come in the kitchen and she’s been heating up some oll in a pot, and she takes the pot of boiling oll and she tries to throw that shit on me! God-damn was good I knew what she was up to, o she’da fucked this nigguh up!’ So then he pulls up his sleeves, John, and there’s little pink scars all over his arms, from the boiling oil she threw on him. And he says, ‘So I says to myself, “Damn, I gotta stomp this bitch out too! So I stomped it out, and now, here I am.’
“John, I just can’t believe this stuff is happening – it’s happening all around us, John. There’s people heating up oil to throw on other people, right now stuff like this is happening.”
“God, it’s insane.”
“It is, John. It’s insane here. But you know something? I think that once my ten weeks are over, if I ever get real depressed in the future, I’m just going to go to one of the classes. I actually leave feeling a lot better.”