Portraits and Observations (68 page)

TC:
Big Junebug Johnson married? Nobody wrote me that. I thought you were a devout bachelor.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
Can’t a gal change her mind? Once I got over the Ed Jenkins incident, once I got that view out of my noggin, I was partial as the next lady for men. ’Course, that took years.

TC:
Jim? That’s his name?

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
Jim O’Reilly. Ain’t Irish, though. He comes from Plaquemine, and they’re mostly Cajun, his people. I don’t even know if that’s his right name. I don’t know a whole lot about him. He’s kind of quiet.

TC:
But some lover. To catch you.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON
(eyes rotating): Oh, honey, don’t let me
commence
.

TC
(laughs): That’s one of the things I remember best about you. No matter what anybody said, whether it was the weather or whatever, you always said: “Oh, honey, don’t let me
commence
.”

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
Well. That kind of covers it all, wouldn’t you say?

TC:
Just how long have you been Mrs. O’Reilly?

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
Three years next July. Actually, I didn’t have much choice. I was real confused. He’s a lot younger than me, maybe twenty years. And good-looking, my goodness. Catnip to the ladies. But he was plain crazy about me, followed my every footstep, every minute begging me to hitch up, said he’d jump off the levee if I didn’t. And presents every day. One time a pair of pearl earrings. Natural-born pearls: I bit them and they didn’t crack. And a whole litter of kittens. He didn’t know cats make me sneeze; make my eyes swell up, too. Everybody warned me he was only after my money. Why else would a cutie like him want an old hag like me? But that didn’t altogether figure ’cause he has a real good job with the Streckfus Steamship Company. But they said he was broke, and in a lot of trouble with Red Tibeaux and Ambrose Butterfield and all those gamblers. I asked him, and he said it was a lie, but it could’ve been true, there was a lot I didn’t know about him, and still don’t. All I do know is he never asked me for a dime. I was so confused. So I went to Augustine Genet. You recall Madame Genet? Who could read the spirits? I heard she was on her deathbed, so I rushed right over there, and sure enough she was sinking. A hundred if she was a day, and blind as a mole; couldn’t hardly whisper, but she told me: Marry that man, he’s a good man, and he’ll make you happy—marry him, promise me you will. So I promised. So that’s why I had no choice. I couldn’t ignore a promise made to a lady on her deathbed. And I’m soooo glad I didn’t.
I am happy
. I am a happy woman. Even if those cats do make me sneeze. And you, Jockey. You feel good about yourself?

TC:
So-so.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
When was the last time you got to Mardi Gras?

TC
(reluctant to reply, not desiring to evoke Mardi Gras memories: they were not amusing events to me, the streets swirling with drunken, squalling, shrouded figures wearing bad-dream masks; I always had nightmares after childhood excursions into Mardi Gras melees): Not since I was a kid. I was always getting lost in the crowds. The last time I got lost they took me to the police station. I was crying there all night before my mother found me.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
The damn police! You know we didn’t have any Mardi Gras this year ’cause the police went on strike. Imagine, going on strike at a time like that. Cost this town millions. Blackmail is all it was. I’ve got some good police friends, good customers. But they’re all a bunch of crooks, the entire shebang. I’ve never had no respect for the law around here, and how they treated Mr. Shaw finished me off for good. That so-called District Attorney
Jim
Garrison. What a sorry sonofagun. I hope the devil turns him on a slooow spit. And he will. Too bad Mr. Shaw won’t be there to see it. From up high in
heaven
, where I know he is, Mr. Shaw won’t be able to see old Garrison rotting in hell.

TC:
After his last trial, Clay wrote me and said: “I’ve always thought I was a little paranoid, but having survived this, I know I never was, and know now I never will be.”

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
What is it—paranoid?

TC:
Well. Oh, nothing. Paranoia’s nothing. As long as you don’t take it seriously.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
I sure do miss Mr. Shaw. All during his trouble, there was one way you could tell who was and who wasn’t a gentleman in this town. A gentleman, when he passed Mr. Shaw on the street, tipped his hat; the bastards looked straight ahead. (Chuckling) Mr. Shaw, he was a card. Every time he come in my bar, he kept me laughing. Ever hear his Jesse James story? Seems one day Jesse James was robbing a train out West. Him and his gang barged into a car with their pistols drawn, and Jesse James shouts: “Hands up! We’re gonna rob all the women and rape all the men.” So this one fellow says: “Haven’t you got that wrong, sir? Don’t you mean you’re gonna rob all the men and rape all the women?” But there was this sweet little fairy on the train, and he pipes up: “Mind your own business! Mr. James knows how to rob a train.”

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON:
Lord save us. I ought to be halfway home. Jim has to have his supper on the table seven sharp, and he won’t let anybody fix it for him ’cept me. Don’t ask why. I can’t cook worth an owl’s ass, never could. Only thing I could ever do real good was draw beer. And … Oh hell, that reminds me: I’m on duty at the bar tonight. Usually now I just work days, and Irma’s there the rest of
the time. But one of Irma’s little boys took sick, and she wants to be home with him. See, I forgot to tell you, but I got a partner now, a widow gal with a real sense of fun, and hardworking, too. Irma was married to a chicken farmer, and he up and died, leaving her with five little boys, two of them twins, and her not thirty yet. So she was scratching out a living on that farm—raising chickens and wringing their necks and trucking them into the market here. All by herself. And her just a mite of a thing, but with a scrumptious figure, and natural strawberry hair, curly like mine. She could go up to Atlantic City and win a beauty contest if she wasn’t cockeyed: Irma, she’s so cockeyed you can’t tell what she’s looking at or who. She started coming into the bar with some of the other gal truckers. First off I reckoned she was a dyke, same as most of those gal truckers. But I was wrong. She likes men, and they dote on her, cockeyes and all. Truth is, I think my guy’s got a sneaker for her; I tease him about it, and it makes him
soooo
mad. But if you want to know, I have more than a slight notion that Irma gets a real tingle when Jim’s around. You can tell who she’s looking at
then
. Well, I won’t live forever, and after I’m gone, if they want to get together, that’s fine by me. I’ll have had my happiness. And I know Irma will take good care of Jim. She’s a wonderful kid. That’s why I talked her into coming into business with me. Say now, it’s great to see you again, Jockey. Stop by later. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. But I’ve got to get my old bones rattling now.

Six … six … six …: the voice of the hour-bell tarries in the greening air, shivering as it subsides into the sleep of history.

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to
be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. To know such cities, to unwrap them, as it were, one has to have been born there. Venice is like that. After October, when Adriatic winds sweep away the last American, even the last German, carry them off and send their luggage flying after them, another Venice develops: a clique of Venetian
élégants
, fragile dukes sporting embroidered waistcoats, spindly contessas supporting themselves on the arms of pale, elongated nephews; Jamesian creations, D’Annunzio romantics who would never consider emerging from the mauve shadows of their palazzos on a summer’s day when the foreigners are abroad, emerge to feed the pigeons and stroll under the Piazza San Marco’s arcades, sally forth to take tea in the lobby of the Danieli (the Gritti having closed until spring), and most amusing, to swill martinis and chew grilled-cheese sandwiches within the cozy confines of Harry’s American Bar, so lately and exclusively the watering hole of loud-mouthed hordes from across the Alps and the seas.

Fez is another enigmatic city leading a double life, and Boston still another—we all understand that intriguing tribal rites are acted out beyond the groomed exteriors and purple-tinged bow windows of Louisburg Square, but except for what some literary, chosen-few Bostonians have divulged, we don’t know what these coded rituals are, and never will. However, of all secret cities, New Orleans, so it seems to me, is the most secretive, the most unlike, in reality, what an outsider is permitted to observe. The prevalence of steep walls, of obscuring foliage, of tall thick locked iron gates, of shuttered windows, of dark tunnels leading to overgrown gardens where mimosa and camellias contrast colors, and lazing lizards, flicking their forked tongues, race along palm fronds—all this is not accidental décor, but architecture deliberately concocted to camouflage, to mask, as at a Mardi Gras Ball, the lives of those born to
live among these protective edifices: two cousins, who between them have a hundred other cousins spread throughout the city’s entangling, intertangling familial relationships, whispering together as they sit under a fig tree beside the softly spilling fountain that cools their hidden garden.

A piano is playing. I can’t decide where it’s coming from: strong fingers playing a striding, riding-it-on-out piano: “I want, I want …” That’s a black man singing; he’s good—“I want, I want a mama, a big fat mama, I want a big fat mama with the meat shakin’ on her, yeah!”

Footfalls. High-heeled feminine footsteps that approach and stop in front of me. It is the thin, almost pretty, high-yeller who earlier in the afternoon I’d overheard having a fuss with her “manager.” She smiles, then winks at me, just one eye, then the other, and her voice is no longer angry. She sounds the way bananas taste.

HER:
How you doin’?

TC:
Just taking it easy.

HER:
How you doin’ for time?

TC:
Let’s see. I think it’s six, a little after.

HER
(laughs): I mean how you doin’ for
time
? I got a place just around the corner here.

TC:
I don’t think so. Not today.

HER:
You’re cute.

TC:
Everybody’s entitled to their opinion.

HER:
I’m not playing you. I mean it. You’re cute.

TC:
Well, thanks.

HER:
But you don’t look like you’re having any fun. Come on. I’ll show you a good time. We’ll have fun.

TC:
I don’t think so.

HER:
What’s the matter? You don’t like me?

TC:
No, I like you.

HER:
Then what’s wrong? Give me a reason.

TC:
There’s a lot of reasons.

HER:
Okay. Give me one, just one.

TC:
Oh, honey, don’t let me
commence
.

Time:
December 1977.

Place:
A New York restaurant, The Four Seasons.

The man who had invited me to lunch, George Claxton, had suggested we meet at noon, and made no excuse for setting such an early hour. I soon discovered the reason, however; in the year or more since I had last seen him, George Claxton, heretofore a man moderately abstemious, had become a two-fisted drinker. As soon as we were seated he ordered a double Wild Turkey (“Just straight, please; no ice”), and within fifteen minutes requested an encore.

I was surprised, and not just by the urgency of his thirst. He had gained at least thirty pounds; the buttons of his pinstripe vest seemed on the verge of popping loose, and his skin color, usually ruddy from jogging or tennis, had an alien pallor, as though he had just emerged from a penitentiary. Also, he was sporting dark glasses, and I thought: How theatrical! Imagine good old plain George Claxton, solidly entrenched Wall Street fellow living in Greenwich
or Westport or wherever it was with a wife named Gertrude or Alice or whatever it was, with three or four or five children, imagine this guy chugging double Wild Turkeys and wearing dark glasses!