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.