The Happy Hour

The Happy Hour Theater was on Magazine Street, about two blocks from Jackson Avenue.
It's amazing what five nickles would buy when I was a kid.
The Mummy, The Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein....
Fifteen cents to get into a movie house crammed full of anxious eyes...and two nickle bags of popcorn.
Life was sweet...at least for a little while.
My cousin Mibby and I taking in the show...watching, daring one another not to hide our eyes.
Mibby would scream. Girls did that.
The boys would throw things at the screen...at the monsters and the bad guys.
And sometimes the ushers would come with their flashlights and threaten the really rowdy ones.
It was easy to be brave in a whole crowd of kids, but on the way home, we ran...
I was so afraid that something would grab at us from a dark alley, some doorway, in the midnght that stretched between each lamp post.
But there were other movies, movies where people burst into song.
Mibby was never the same after she saw Elvis sing "Love Me Tender" at the Happy Hour. She went to see that same movie over and over.... Her mother Roberta spent a lot of change on Mibby's Elvis phase.
She would get mad, and sometimes hit me when I made fun of Elvis....
"Elvis the Pelvis!" I came up with that, not even knowing what a pelvis was...
"Love me tender, love me sweet. Take off my shoes and kiss my feet..."
Pat Boone got my attention.
I wanted to transmorgrify into Pat Boone...like a werewolf under a full moon.
Pat Boone had it all.
He would sing "April Love" or "Love Letters in the Sand" and the softest, most dreamy girls would sigh.
I don't know what I would have done if one of those girls would have come close to me and sighed, but it looked like something important to achieve.
White buckskin shoes, that perfect hair and smile, and that Thunderbird.
Mibby never understood Pat Boone, but I did.
I would never have the perfect hair and smile. And even if I did, my glasses would ruin the whole effect.
The T-Bird was out of the question too.
But I learned his songs. They were a part of me. I owned them like I eventually, miraculously talked my mother into a pair of white buckskin shoes.
But the transmorgrification never took place, no matter what phase the moon was in.
In the mirror, I was still a chubby, little boy with thick glasses.
But on the weekends, I could go to the Happy Hour and be brave in the face of horror, defeat evil, and sometimes even be Pat Boone.
I would later move on to the Beatles, but for Mibby, it would always be Elvis.
Decades later, after Mibby died, I went back to Magazine Street to get another look at the Happy Hour.
It had been gutted by a fire, and I can't describe the sadness I felt.
Gone.
Gone like the Woolworth's across the street from it, gone like the po-boy stand down the block, gone
like Mibby and Elvis...
Gone like a lot of things that helped me get through...and become a man.

Bubba

William (Bubba), my mother referred to his family as "scrubby Dutch". When I asked her about this once, she said that German (Dutch) women in Philadelphia, where I was born, would scrub the stoops to their houses. Very clean and orderly was the point.. Not rich, just whole and solid.
I envied Bubba's life.
He lived directly across the street from Thomas Jefferson Elementary School...a real plus because of the playground.
He had an older sister, Marsha, a chubby little blonde, who blushed over anything and everything... even me.
And his homelife. That was the big thing I wanted...but would never have.
His dad was always there in the evening...day after day, week after week. Always doing something with Bubba...like building a crystal radio... letting Bubba help when he worked on the car. Stuff.
His mom stayed at home...all the time. She was forever across the street at the school...helping Mrs. Kieth, my 4th and 5th grade teacher, put on the Fall Festival...help in the library. Stuff.
I had none of that...and I wanted it really bad. Probably a lot of kids did. When I watched TV, I would see families like this and wonder what it would be like to break into the TV to be a part of it all. So many times.
I don't know who came up with the idea that we needed electric fans in our classrooms. ...a magical vision that brought so many of us together...together in ways that made this one of the best
periods of my childhood.
The need was obvious...kids in classrooms with their sweaty arms sticking to their writing tablets and textbooks, clothes and hair damp. Misery. But there was no money for electric fans in the Irish Channel.
That's where the vision came in.... A paper drive!
We were told that the rag man (a pioneer recycle!) would come around to the school each Wednesday morning. That meant scouring the neighborhood between Tchopitulous Street and Magazine for old newpapers, phone books, whatever...
What made the whole thing fly was competition...fierce competition.
Each class was given area along the fence that surrounded the school. On Wednesday mornings there were heaps....mountains of paper along that fence. And these were weighed and tallied. Reports were filed. Why, because the winning class would be given money to spend on something for their classroom.
Wednesday morning meant bringing in paper, sure...but guarding it was tricky. And then someone noticed that magazines weighed more than newspaper...hmmm...
It was magic. Kids in my class united.... John (Peanut), Hennessy.the cousins Gary and Wayne, Bruce,
me.... Bubba's yard became our headquarters, his dad's garage our storage....and everyday I got to see Marsha blush. Good times.
Everyday, we would go door to door....houses, businesses, anyplace. We told people about the fans...
They called it the Irish Channel, but there were Germans, Italians, French...and they all saved paper for
our fans. They understood New Orleans heat and humidity.
Peanut's daddy drove an old Cadillac hearse...and sometimes it rolled into Bubba's yard full of paper.
Like the hearse, we never knew where he got it all.
And after the collecting,there was some kind of ball involved in some kind of game until it got dark, and then I went home to something a lot different than Bubba's yard.
This was all with kids who just wanted a fan, bragging rights at school, and something special for their
classroom if.... And we did.
It took two years, but every class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School got a fan. And the kids in our class won...in so many ways from this effort.
We voted to buy a microscope with the contest money. We looked at EVERYTHING under it. Hair, blood, insect wings....you name it.
It was magic. Bubba's parents were magic too. People in just the right place at just the right time to give some of us a vision of wholeness. Clean.

Emma

When I was seven or eight, my mother dressed my up in my very best outfit, bought me a one-way ticket from Philadelphia, Pa. to New Orleans, where I went to stay with my grandmother in the St. Thomas Housing Project.
A kitchen, a small living room, one bedroom, and a bath.
In this small apartment were five of us: My grandmother Emma; Sidney, my schizophrenic uncle; my mother's sister Selma; and her husband, Eddie Senyetter.
Quite a crowd.
I know that Emma was born in 1898 in rural New York, lost her parents early on, and was shipped off to some finishing school in Mississippi. And not much more.
How her husband Joseph Wakely Wallace entered her life is a mystery...and so is the reason that Joseph changed his name from Wakeley to Wallace. Last names in my family have always been a confusion.
Some things never change. Emma's life certainly never did in the years I knew her.
She had very little, and that little was volutarily shared with needy family members like me...or it was stolen from her by Selma. Emma's life was like that.
My grandmother may have lived in government housing, but her mind was still in upstate New York where there were table linens, full table service, and a piano, a grand piano.
Her living conditions and her mental landscape never really jived. And that may have been her salvation.
Sidney was "poor Sidney", Selma was "poor Selma", but she never saw herself as "poor Emma"....
The Emma who fathfully visited Sidney during his many stays at the mental hospital in Jackson, La...
The Emma who had her Social Security checks regularly stolen by Selma...
The Emma who took me in when my mother just couldn't deal with an abusive, dead-beat, common-law husband, her job, and me...
Emma was finished with finishing school a long time ago when I met her.
She was as neat as a pin...all 58 chubby inches of her. Always with a starched house dress, always with stockings, and never without a hat in public.
My grandmother was quiet in a family where loud, creative profanity was common. And they mocked her quietness, her reserve.
I can remember her cleaning the kitchen, quietly singing to herself...if she felt really rushed, she'd whistle some manic little tune. And I learned not to get in her way when she whistled.
I loved my grandmother, dearly. She would talk to me...
Telling me the same stories over and over again like they were fresh and new.
She took pride in her knowledge of German, French and Latin....bragged that one of her relatives had been the first Methodist bishop in the United States...that she had come from an "important" family.
And Emma read her Bible. Daily. She liked the devotionals in The Upper Room.
It was Emma who saw to it that I went to church and Sunday School every Sunday.
She was a rock, a steadiness when everything else in my life seemed to be sliding.
Emma never really fit into the vibe, the rhythm, the motion that I came to know as New Orleans. She was just there to feel the heartache as New Orleans and its funk tore apart her family and its fibre.

I must add that Emma spent an entire Social Security check to buy me a suit when I graduated from high school. None of her children or her grandchildren had ever done that before.

Miracle on Magazine Street

A Miracle on Magazine Street.
Coliseum Place Baptist Church, directly across the street from Andrew Jackson Elementary.
A church with spiral wooden stairway that kids stormed up and down on, a ground floor that was said to have been used to hide Confederate horses and men, and a pipe organ.
An old, red brick church with history and a tall steeple that was eventurally blown down in a hurricane.
It's no more. First went the steeple. Then the whole place burned down.
My grandmother, Emma, went to Coliseum for years, sang in the choir, and probably dreamed of being the church organist. But that job went to Mrs. Waller, and that's probably a good thing.
There was an electric pump for the organ in modern times. But wouldn't it be great to have been the boy who pumped the bellows before technology stepped in to ruin the coolness?
Our apartment on Magazine Street was directly across from the school, a block from the church.
Andrew Jackson was where I got chicken pox and got evaluated (for something) by Mr. Thorne. He met with me once a week for a while, asking me a lot of questions about my family. How I felt about things.
About the future. His visits were nice. He listened.
How could I tell Mr.Thorne the real stuff? About picking roaches off the wall of our bathroom with a rubber band gun. About the on again, off again parent fights. About needing new glasses. About any of my reality?
The family rule: Never let outsiders know what really happens in your family. They will never understand. They might take you away.
My mother especially stressed this when there were belt marks and bruises on my legs.
"Bobby, you show people those marks, and they may put you in a home."
Mr. Thorn got the "Leave It to Beaver" version of my life, I lied about fishing trips my father and I never took. A thick and meaty lie. It was all fabrication. And I wondered if he really believed it all.
I did good. According to mom, Thorne estimated my I.Q. at about 135, and the teachers backed off a little.
Somehow the punish work never eased up much.
Report cards from the period read: Conduct - Unsatisfactory. Robert does not work well with others.
Robert makes poor use of time and materials.
The bottom line: Me writing endless copies of the mutiplication tables.
One weekend, I had put off doing the punish work to Sunday afternoon. When my mother got wind of it, she told me that I would stay home from the Sunday night service at Coliseum and write and write...
Off she went to church, and there I was. Alone, and no church, and no watching Mrs. Waller play the pipe organ.
She would slip off her shoes to play those deep notes on the pedals with only stockings on.. I'd watch it all, never realizing how erotic the whole thing was to me.
Something had to happen.
I've always used reason to my advantage.
I began to think how pleased God would be for me to go to church. Faith, that's what I needed!
Faith! God would do my multiplication tables!
I prayed. God listened.
I would trust Him to deal with my multilication tables, laying out lots of paper, sharpening a couple of pencils with a kitchen knife.
Off I went to church.
Things went well until my mother saw me making my way to sit by Mrs. Waller.
"What are you doing here?" "What did I tell you?"
Mom then got the story of God doing my work for me, the sharpened pencils and everything.
I was trusting God. How could she find flaw in that. A miracle on Magazine Street.
"Bobby, do you really believe that?" I knodded.
"We'll see."
Mrs. Waller was in fine form. And then there was the walk home. It was quiet....real quiet.
We were in the kitchen. The pencils, the paper....blank. It was all there. No miracle.
Mom didn't say a whole lot. But she made a cup of coffee, and then she sat down by me and began to write.

1 X 1 = 1
1 X 2 = 2 .....

It didn't hit me right then, but Mom was part of God's miracle that night. Faith, it works.

Eugene

"I'll play it, and I'll tell you what it is later." This is what Miles said while they were in the studio recording "If I Were a Bell" for the album, Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet.
While I was growing up, we did a lot of that in our family...go about our lives, laying it all down like an improvisation...never quite sure what it was until it was out there. It was all about the moment...all about now, and we'd give it a name later.
Sure, it was exciting, but excitement could be packaged up wirh changes charged with pain, anger, and freefall....like the falling in a dream where it's all about wondering when you'll hit the cement....
Falstaff Brewery was on Tulane Avenue, not far from the New Orleans Parish Prison.
On top of the brewery was a tower of letters that spelled out "Falstaff"...and on top of that a globe.
At night this whole thing would light up, giving people for blocks around a weather forecast. The red letters spelling out Falstaff would go from the top downwards...or from the botton up. The direction of the next day's temperature was all there. And the big lit globe on top let everyone know if the next day would be rain (red), or clear (green).
And it was faily accurate....one of the most useful advertisements ever. There were times when it would have been nice to have something like this for me, just a tiny, quick peek at where the whole jam was going.
That's maybe what a good drummer or bass player does for a band....bar by bar, phrase by phrase, things are rock solid.
I remember the last time I saw my father, Eugene. I was taking the Tulane trolly to meet my mother at the Winn Dixie when she got off of work, and it was just getting dark.
The plan was for the two of us to put in a grocery order together... As I passed, I looked at the Falstaff brewery, at its advertisement...but it told me nothing about what was about to go down.
I usually took forever to pick out a box of cereal because I was always checking out what came inside the box...what toy...what little gadget. It drove my mother crazy....
Finally, we were at the car stop, each carrying a bag of food. It was dark, Carrolton Avenue full of traffic and noise. And then out of nowhere, my father.
The three of us hadn't lived togerher for months....it went like that.
A fight where people got hit and things got broken and all sorts of things were said....bad things. And then my father would't be around...just mom and I. And then we would be back together again for a while.
Changes, like key changes in a song....but these changes were never smooth.
Well, here he was tonight, drunk...smashed...and smelly.
First he was trying to apologize for the last time around...how it would be good for the boy (me), but mom just kept asking him to leave... And then the apologies ended, and out came the anger and rage....
Alone...the traffic just kept going by... and I kept praying that the trolly would hurry.
I didn't know what to do except plead with him to stop...
He got mad....reached out, tore at the bags we were holding...groceries all over the street....there was my cereal. Then he started hitting my mother....
When I tried to pull at him, my mother begged me to stay out of his way....and Eugene pushed me off.
He got enough of it and stormed away. And my mother and I got down on the ground trying to salvage what we could of our grocery order....the bags were gone.
That was all of Eugene...never saw him again.
Two years later, my Uncle Cliff told me my father had died at Charity Hospital. He had been staying around Lafayette Square when they brought him in...pneumonia, I think.

"I'll play it, and I'll tell you what it is later."

I stilll don't know.

St.. Alphonsus

St. Alphonsus Catholic Chruch was on Constance Street, right off of Magazine, not far from Jackson Avenue...still is.
Perhaps the thing I most remember about this church was that it was always open. That made an impression on me. That church trusted people, even me.
Houses and apartments in the Irish Channel were not air conditioned. In fact, not many places were.
Air conditioning was such a big deal that businesses advertised it. There would be a penguin somewhere on the door or front window of a place to get the point across. St. Alphonsus didn't have a penguin, but word got out.
My cousin, Mary (Mibby), and I would be out playing in the streets during the summer, and when the heat got the best of us, we would go over to the church, pull open one of its big doors and.....oh, the cool!
It was Mibby who knew about the holy water in the bowl at the entrance. I would put my hand in it, lick it, wipe it on my cheek. Holy water felt good.
It was a beautiful place! I partucularly liked all of the prayer candles in the back. We were not Catholic, but we loved lighting up all those candles in little red glasses. I think we were supposed to pay something, but no one ever fussed us for doing it.
All those candles lit up was an amazing sight.
St. Alphonsus smelled good too. Later on, I would find out about incense. But at the time, the cool, the glow of candles, and the rich, heavy smell were very special.
Sometimes there would be ladies kneeling, praying silently. Some would go into the small rooms to the side of the church where is was said that priests waited to speak with them. There were times when I tried to get Mibby to go with me to see what the priests had to say. We never did.
We would get into a pew and sit or kneel....taking in the wonder of the place, it's art.
No other place I had ever been was like this...with it's quality of light, its richness. Some people might have thought it odd that this jewel of a place was in the middle of such poverty and need. But maybe we needed a jewel all of our own.
There were statues everywhere. Mary holding the baby Jesus, Jesus on the cross.... The statue that made me curious had Jesus reaching into His chest for His heart. What was He going to do with it?
It was so quiet and peaceful! Someone coughing, the knock of a kneeler being put back into place, the rustle of a woman's dress as she got up. Only sounds like these pupnctuated the silence and made the lack of noise even more obvious.
At some point, we knew we better go....it might be that we knew a case of the giggles was on its way.
That wouldn't be a good thing for the magic of the place and the people who had come seeking it out.
Opening the door as we left the church, it was all out there waiting for us....the glare of the sun, the heat, the noise....and in the distance the red brick of the St. Thomas Housing Project. There was something significant that we were leaving...leaving a place that made me feel cleaner, lighter.
But we knew that we could always go back whenever we wanted to. They trusted us.

Mary Ida (Mibby) died very young of breast cancer. It would be a good thing if she made it to some place like Saint Alphonsus.

Mr. Tweety

I loved Mr. Tweety....
Exactly when I started going over to the apartment that he shared with his mother, I don't remember.
But there were many hot summer afternoons that i spent there with the drone of an electric fan making the afternoons seem timeless.
At first we played checkers, his aged mother bringing in glasses of iced tea. And as we played we talked about anything and everything....it was easy. Later on, we progressed to chess, "the real game".
There were days that I'd walk in to find him listening to a ball game on the radio while putting together a jig saw puzzle at the kitchen table. Tweety loved the Yankees.
Mr. Tweety made it a point to read his Bible a certain number of times each year...he kept score. And he had plenty of time to read because he was disabled. But it wasn't the Bible that I really had in mind when I talked to him.
Most adult men I knew wanted to talk about their military exploits in WWII or Korea. It seemed like that's ALL they talked about....a lot like a burned out athlete who wants to relive the great games....sometimes for a drink at the corner bar.
Tweety had never been called to serve because of his deformed back. He was bent over and looked at people out of the corner of his eye....looked like he could see clear through you...
I was afraid not to tell him the truth.
And as a young man, Mr. Tweety had been injured in an accident in a print shop. It was hard not to look at what remained of his left hand: a piece of the thumb...all the fingers gone.
What I wanted for Tweety to share came from him with fire in his eye....his career as a jazz musician in the speakeasies of New Orleans. There was a lot of hot music being played back then. Someone older might have wanted some details concerneing some of the other entertainment going down in those clubs, but for a kid like me, the music was enough.
Jazz, that was what defined the man....not war. It was all about the music, the clubs, the people he knew....a life of cool riffs and excitement. I remember the day he passed along to me the idea of using a rubber toilet plunger for a wah wha mute. And you can believe the first thing I did when I got home was to run to the bathroom and get our plunger from under the sink and give it a go. Tweety said that Sharkey Bonano, a man sacred in New Orleans' jazz circles, was known to use a derby for the job.
Monk Hazel and his Bienville Roof Orchestra with Sharkey on trumpet!
The only time Mr. Tweety picked up his horn anymore was when he brought it to church, a large Baptist church on the Airline Highway that sent a bus into the housing project to pick us all up on Sunday morning. Tweety played in the church orchestra.
If I sat by him during the service, I got Life Savers...Tweety had an endless supply.
Right before the service, as the people were comeing in, talking and getting seated, the musicians would warm up a little. That's when I got little bits of what Tweety had been. He'd quiety knock out a quick little riff, and then turn to me with a wicked little gleam in his eye to see if I had caught it.
In time, he taught me some pretty useful stuff...like how to transpose music by sight...bumping it up a half step so that I could play with a piano.
What I came to realize is that New Orleans is full of Tweetys. Men and women who define their lives by the jazz they play...or the jazz that has touched them with its soul. But not all of them took on the task of drawing in rudely abrupt, quirky kids like me....kids with nothing but a hunger for a life.
Yes, and then there was the music.

JoAnn

JoAnn was wild. She was married to Wesley who was much older than she, and they had two young daughters. My aunts Burt and Selma would hold up in her apartment for hours smoking and drinking stong coffee....and talking. When my mother wasn't working at the supermarket wrapping meat, she would join them.
With JoAnn, everything was ok...nothing I did was ever wrong. She seemed to take joy in finding things for me to do that my mother would never allow...like throwing noodles on the wall to see if they were cooked. If they stuck, they were cooked, and you could see over the stove where she had done this many times.
JoAnn gave me a very big part of my life....music. For months I had been after my mother to buy me an accordian. Accordians were big, impressive, made a LOT of noise, and Billy, a crippled boy I played with, had one...with pearl buttons and lots of keys.
Well the accordian thing was just not going to happen. But one afternoon at JoAnn's, she and I talked about me getting into the elementary school band with Miss Tisdale. But I needed something to play.
JoAnn thought a minute, went into her bedroom and came out with a scuffed black case. She told me that when she was a girl in Mississippi she had played in the high school band. She opened the case...and there on purple velvet was a tarnished silver cornet.
It wasn't an accordian, but it drew me. She took it out of the case, put the mouthpiece in...and handed it to me. "I can play it?" She nodded, and just that quickly I put the thing to my lips and blew.
The sound was AMAZING.
Then I looked at the horn more closely. There were dents in the bell, some of the finish was wearing off....but on the bell it was engraved with all sorts of scroll work...and it had a name: "Olds".
An Olds cornet....B flat!
The case and the horn smelled old...old spit, old valve oil...just old.
I produced some terrible noises on the thing, and JoAnn just laughed. And then I went out on her second floor balcony. I gave everyone in that square of project houses a piece of my mind. It was nothing about technique and tone quality or coherent notes ....It was everything about letting loose with stuff....some deep feelings whipping out of that horn. I was wailin'!
I didn't know it then, but it was maybe some of the most pure, honest stuff I ever played. It was jazz!Oh yeah! And the people in those other buildings must have hated me for it....but not JoAnn.
JoAnn gave me that wild look of hers and laughed.... Then she showed me how to give a horn a bath and grease it up with Vasoline and get the valves seated right....stuff like that.
After promising to practice and take care of the thing, she let me walk out of that apartment with one of the few things she had that linked her to what she was before Wesley and the babies...and the housing projects.
So generous and free and.....wild!

Street Scene

12 years old, I would walk from the Iberville housing project, in back of the big department stores on Canal on weekends or during the summer....
There was a fountain pool on Rampart Street where people would throw pennies. If it looked promising, I would take off my sneakers, roll up my pants, and wade in to get a little spending money. Sometimes, I would hunt for soft drink and beer bottles and sell them at the grocery.
My walks would take me past parking garages, shoe repair and barbar shops as I eased into the Quarter.
I would walk down Bourbon Street during the day. Trucks would be loading up the clubs and restaurants with beer and seafood. There were pictures of dancers in outrageous costumes in the windows...Chris Owens, Linda Bridgette, they were famous. Al Hirt was a trumpet player like me....with his own club.
If I crossed over to Royal, there were antique shops, and the coolness of the lobby of the Montleone Hotel. I wondered what it would be like to stay there. The lobby full of marble.
The shop owners were very kind to me. I would ask questions about the paintings and the furniture....endless questions, like I was actually in the market for the stuff.
There were coin and stamp collections to look at in glass cases. And jewelry, and sculpture, and lamps.
So much to see. The world opened up.
My grandfather, Joseph, had shown me how to get bags full of bananas by picking them up under the conveyor belts unloading the boats into the warehouses by the river. It was a rush to come home with them and feel like I had done something important. Someone said there were poisonous spiders hiding in the bananas, but I never saw any.
My grandfather said that it was always good to carry a bag with you. You never knew.....
By the river were railroad tracks to walk, the smell of beer from the brewery, and big barges pushed by tugboats churning up chocolate...all foamy. Sometimes, I would catch the Algiers ferry just to stand by the railing and watch the water. I think that's where I first thought about the chocolate.
On Decatur Street there was a place that had alligator hides all salted down and furs the trappers brought in. I went for the smell of the place, and they let me go and rub my hands on the hides. I felt dangerous.
Central Grocery was on Decatur...still is. The cheeses and the spices..... There were sacks of beans sitting on the floor, dried fish, and coffee.
Except for a quarter or two, I had no money, and the whole time I walked, I felt like I was in a bubble, floating through all this...just looking and smelling and sometimes touching. But it wasn't really for me...and yet it was mine, and it still is.