"Naw. I ain't seen him. 'Cept the other day when we went and grabbed a snow cone. Started talkin' to some gap-toothed carriage driver 'bout him beatin' his horse. Nick said how'd he like to be cloppin' 'round wearin' a silly hat and listenin' to some fool talk all day. Skinny black fella started talkin' shit, but he back down when he got a good look at Nick. I'm tellin' you, man, Nick gettin' back in some kinda shape. Not much different than when he was playin'. You think he's considerin' it? Playin' ball again?"
"I doubt the Saints will take him back," Randy said, raising his eyebrows.
Nick had been thrown out of the NFL for kicking his coach's ass during a Monday Night Football game. He knocked the coach to the ground, emptied a Gatorade bucket on the man's head, and coolly walked into the tunnel as the crowd went crazy around him. Nick once told Randy he'd changed his clothes and taken a cab home before the game ended. He never returned to the Superdome or pro football again, and Randy never prodded him for the whole story.
A few months after the incident, Nick enrolled in the masters' program at Tulane. Later, he earned a doctorate in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi before sporadically teaching a few classes at Tulane.
"JoJo, tell him to call me if you guys talk."
"His band ain't playin' til . . . shit . . . Friday night," JoJo said. "Whatchu need Nick for?"
"Got a job for him."
"Yeah, put his sorry ass to work. Soon enough he'll be back to the same ole, same ole, drinkin' and smokin'."
At the foot of the bar, an old man watched the two talking. A cigar hung from his mouth as he brushed ashes from his corduroy jacket lined with scar-like patches. His gray eyes darted from JoJo to Randy then back down to the drink in front of him.
"If you talk to him, tell him to call me," Randy said, getting up to leave and offering JoJo his hand. He knew JoJo would find Nick. He was the man's best friend.
Randy took another sip of coffee and stood watching Loretta. She had a drunk tourist on stage and was getting him to hold her big satin-covered hips as she sang the nasty blues. The old man at the bar watched her too, his face flat and expressionless. His black, parched skin the same texture as the worn photographs on the wall.
Randy and the man's eyes met; then the old man looked away.
"One of our colleagues left for the Delta a few weeks ago," Randy said. "He's disappeared."
"The Delta? Lots of things can happen to a man there," JoJo said, looking him hard in the eye. "Nick'll help; he's a fine man."
"Yeah, I think a great deal of him. He's a good guy."
Chapter 2
Nick Travers was drunk. Not loopy, hanging-on-a-flagpole drunk, but drunk enough to find simple enjoyment in the soapy suds churning in the Laundromat washing machine. It was two A.M. on St. Charles Avenue, and he sat sideways on a row of hard plastic seats--baby blue with flecks of pink. He had three loads now in the machine as heat lightning shattered outside like a broken fluorescent bulb, a tattered Signet paperback of
The Catcher in the Rye
in his hands.
"Goddamned phonies," he muttered, thumbing down a dog-eared page, waiting for his clothes in white boxer shorts and battered buckskin boots. His white T-shirt and faded jeans were in the wash, and there was no one around except a homeless man drinking whiskey from a brown-bagged bottle. A classic wino, even missing a few teeth.
"You know what I mean, they screw it up for everybody," Nick said.
The wino nodded.
Nick liked the hard sixties decor of the place with its stainless-steel rims circling the glass of the washing machines and its occasional elevator music over a busted speaker. But now, he only heard the sound of the dry summer wind blowing Spanish moss on the oaks that canopied St. Charles Avenue like the gnarled fingers of an old man in prayer.
An old black woman with her hair tightly wrapped in curlers walked through the open front of the Laundromat and saw Nick in his underwear and boots. She immediately turned and left. The wino watched her butt as she walked by him.
"Get me a piece of dat," he said, his head bobbing as if he had no neck muscles.
Nick turned to the washing machine. So this is what it had come to: washing clothes for enjoyment and talking to derelicts for a social life. Jesus, life changes in five years. Not that life was crappy now and all that sorry-for-self bullshit. Just different. Apples and oranges. Yin and yang.
Sometimes he could hear the deep resonating cheers echoing from the Superdome and wished he was still in there, grabbing some sissy quarterback by the jersey and slinging him down. But then he thought about lacing up his cleats for a five A.M. practice and would smile. Yeah, life was simple now. Teach a few classes on blues history, play some harp down at JoJo's, and just enjoy life.
He'd watch the bubbles as the world pulsated in an electric vibe around him. Not quite in, not quite out. Somewhere in the middle. In his mid-thirties and getting soft mentally and physically. No challenges. No immediate goals. He needed to get back on it.
He reached down to the plastic chair beside him and grabbed a handful of quarters from a pile of keys and Dixie beer caps. He tossed the soggy clothes into a double-load dryer and walked next door to an all-night convenience store. He bought two quart bottles of Colt 45, one for him and one for the wino. The Vietnamese woman never blinked at his pantlessness.
"Hey pal, here you go," Nick said, handing him the water-beaded beer.
"Tanks, Chief," he said.
Nice of the guy to say thanks. Proved he was all right. It didn't matter that he was homeless as long as he had some manners. Nick had seen some rich bastards not even thank a waiter for bringing them a meal at Emeril's. "You from here?" he asked, unscrewing the cap.
The man jerked his head back giving him a double chin. "Naw, man, dis ma' summer home. Just on a vacation from France."
"Well, you don't have to get all surly about it. You could be just passin' through."
"Naw. From New Awlins. Stay in New Awlins."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like I can't leave, as much as I hate this fuckin' city sometimes."
"Yeah, I know, man. Listen, I know. Twenty-nine, ninety."
"What?"
"That's the degrees this city sits on, man. Like a big magnet, it draws folks in." He set his hands a few feet apart, then crashed them together. "
Smack
. Just like that, your ass is stuck and you can't leave."
"I could get out if I wanted to," Nick said.
"Reason you hangin' out here is you ain't got a woman."
"Had one."
"Had me a meal yesterday but my stomach still empty."
"Brown hair and eyes like morning coffee. Voice kinda raspy like a jazz singer and a comma of hair she constantly kept out of her eyes."
"I ain't ask you to unload on me. Jus' sayin' you need a woman."
"I need to get back on it."
"On what?"
"Life."
"Life is easy," the man said, gathering his rags and a dirty plastic bag of crushed aluminum cans. "Livin' is hard." He winked at Nick and disappeared into the thick night as a streetcar clanged past.
Chapter 3
The Warehouse District Streets were empty the next morning, just a few parked cars outside the art galleries and handful of restaurants. The old district had changed a lot since Nick bought his 1922 red-brick warehouse on Julia Street. Back then, it had just been a few crazy artists who needed the space to work. Now, there were restaurants and renovated apartments for the Polo shirt crowd. But, God love them, there were still plenty of weirdos left. Nick had bought his dilapidated building on the advice of JoJo, who was good friends with the former owner. A stocky Italian who just wanted to unload the place, he'd been using it to store stolen goods--from televisions to mattresses.
It was a great deal for the district, but the old building needed a lot of work.
Nick kept the bottom level a garage but added a new metal staircase to the second floor, where he created a loft apartment. He installed an open kitchen and an enclosed bathroom. The deeply scarred and water-stained red maple floors were sanded and resealed. When he uncovered the stamped tin ceiling and brick walls, it was like taking a pound of makeup off a naturally pretty woman.
Nick did most of the work with his ex-girlfriend but left the dangerous stuff for the pros. It was still a work in progress, but the warehouse had certainly come a long way.
He admired the brass intercom system he'd reworked as he walked out the side door onto Julia Street and toward Louisiana Products--the only grocery in the district. He walked under a warped awning and past a flophouse where the yellow marquee flickered like Las Vegas, beckoning patrons to AIDS and weekly overdoses.
A block over, he tramped into the general store's tall, bleached doors and bought two blueberry muffins, orange juice and coffee. He ate at a checker-clothed table, waking up and watching his eclectic band of neighbors doing the same. They included a sculptor who worked only with old Harley Davidson parts, an artist who painted his pet chicken, a massage therapist from another planet, a bodybuilding lesbian couple, and an eighty-year-old woman, still in her nightgown, talking with her imaginary friend.
As he sipped on the chicory coffee, thick as motor oil, he tried to stare away from the old woman picking the scabs on her head as she read
The Times-Picayune
to the chair beside her. He knew he should feel sorry for her, but instead he squashed the second muffin in his napkin, feeling sick.
He thought about offering her some Head and Shoulders from the rows of toiletries Louisiana Products kept for the district's residents. Instead, he filled up his Styrofoam cup again and walked back to his pad.
He took a shower, heated the coffee in a speckled pot on his gas stove, sat at his desk, and just stared through the dirty panes of industrial glass. But the work wouldn't come.
He sipped on more coffee and glanced back down at his notes for the biography of Guitar Slim he was working on. It was the same pain from last night -- the feeling of being out of the loop, like a fat kid at a basketball court. He put on a record from Slim's Speciality recording days to jar his thick head into the fifties.
Back then, Slim would wear his outrageous red suits with white shoes and prowl through nightclubs with his two-hundred-foot guitar cord. His preaching-soulful blues was a forerunner to soul and rock and roll, a sound that came from singing gospel music back home in the Mississippi Delta.
Nick couldn't find out much about Slim's early life other than that his real name was Eddie Jones, and he was a ladies' man around the local jukes in the Delta. He'd conducted four interviews with people who knew Slim before he joined the army in 1944. But the bulk of the biography would be about when Slim came to New Orleans in 1950 and formed a trio that included Huey "Piano" Smith.
It was in the Big Easy that the tall, skinny flashy dresser gained his nickname. JoJo had already told Nick some stories about Slim that made Elton John seem demure.
More than for his panache, Slim was known for his soul-powered blues number "The Things I Used to Do," which sold a million copies. "I'm gonna send you back to your momma and, Lord, I'm goin' back to my family, too," he sang, backed by a young Ray Charles on piano. Some have even said Slim's blues lyrics in a gospel bar structure heavily influenced that young, blind percussionist.
But just obsessing over patterns and similarities in music wasn't the fascination for Nick. He never cared to be a desk professor theorizing about recordings. He wanted to know about the men and women who made the music. It was far more interesting to know about Slim's first recording session for Atlantic Records with producer Jerry Wexler.
As Wexler tells the story, they were waiting for Slim the day before and were worried the performer wasn't going to show. But soon, a tidal wave of people poured down the streets announcing, "Here come Slim! Slim on the way!" Slim rolled up with a fleet of three red Cadillacs and a harem of women in matching red dresses. A throng of others surrounded him as if he were a king holding court. One of the ladies in red explained to Wexler that the performer had picked her up in Las Vegas just three days before. "You know that two-thousand-dollar advance you gave him?" she said. "Well, I got most of it now--at three hundred a week."
That kind of story was what it was all about--the reason Nick became a blues historian. That was the gold nugget after sifting though mountains of dirt and hundreds of hours of tape. It brought a humanity to a man who felt life like a lightning bolt.
Slim's role in the big blues picture ended quickly. His hard drinking and living caught up with him, and he died in New York from pneumonia in 1959. He was only thirty-two years old.
Listening to Slim's music just made Nick more depressed. He stared back out the warped window panes and sighed. The coffee tasted over-brewed and bitter. Above him, he saw a spreading dark spot on the ceiling he'd just painted.
Then JoJo called. He said Randy Sexton was looking for him, even came to the bar last night. Randy probably wanted him to teach that Postwar Blues class for fall quarter, instead of waiting until winter when he rolled back on.
Nick had thought he'd have the fall to finish the Guitar Slim book, but hell, the funk he was in wouldn't do the master justice. So he started his old black Jeep and drove down St. Charles Avenue toward Tulane University.
On the way, mottled shadow patterns of oak leaves fell over him like jigsaws.