by Dan Baum
Heyd was in no mood. He’d just been sued by the ACLU over the conditions in his jail. And the health of the inmates wasn’t his purview anyway. The parish coroner, he said, ran sick call in the jail. That struck Frank as odd—the man responsible for the dead was also the jailhouse doc?
Frank drove his Porsche up Broad Avenue to the hulking sandstone criminal courts building. The coroner’s office had its own, rather grand entrance around the side. A stone staircase climbed a full story to the door, above which was carved CORONER—PARISH OF ORLEANS. The secretary let him into an office whose ceiling must have been eighteen feet tall.
“Come in, come in,” said Carl Rabin. He was balding and gray haired, like a country doc.
Frank explained the methadone program, and why he wanted to extend it into the parish jail.
Rabin flapped a hand. “Junkies,” he said. “Can’t do anything with them.”
Frank paused. “You know, I work with them every day,” Frank said evenly. “Methadone is starting to make some of them productive.”
Rabin cut him off. “Once a dope fiend, always a dope fiend.”
Frank stood. “So you won’t let me bring methadone into the jail.”
“No, sir.” They looked at each other.
“Who’s your boss?” Frank asked.
Rabin smiled. “I don’t have a boss. I’m elected.”
Frank leaned across Rabin’s desk. “You motherfucker,” Frank heard himself saying. “I’m going to run against you and take your job.”
ANTHONY WELLS
When my grandfather died in 1959, Daddy went out and bought a brand-new Chevrolet station wagon with air-conditioning and power windows, and we set out for New Orleans, all nine of us, because by then we had Roger and Sharon. My dad was showing us something. “Things is different out here,” he said as we lit out across that desert. “We’re not in Los Angeles no more. You watch me and learn.” We ate baloney sandwiches all the way across. A couple of times my mom wanted cooked food and we’d stop but not go in and sit at a table like I was use to by the Chinaman’s in Los Angeles. My dad would go around back of the restaurant and come back with a paper bag. It’s different out there, man. It would make my dad walk different, too, not easy like he was here in Los Angeles, but all stiff and nervous-like. All that thing that I liked so much, that New Orleans thing I wanted to soak up—all that left him out there. We couldn’t even go to the bathrooms; had to pee out there in the tall grass. Saw my first colored bathroom out somewhere in Arizona or some shit. And it was like days and days before we saw another black face; the whole middle of the country is nothing but white folks and Mexicans.
Then one day I woke up from a nap in the backseat and everything was green. I mean like green. Water everywhere. It looked like we were driving over water that had this thin skin of grass on top, like if you scraped up a spoonful of grass you’d find water underneath. And that spooky Spanish moss shit hanging from the trees—you ever seen that? Like you’re in a horror movie. Green. And my dad’s music came on the radio. You should have seen my parents, man. Like they got their groove back. “Here we are. We’re in New Orleans,” my dad says, and I’m seeing it, this place I been dreaming about. It’s all jam-packety, pretty old houses lined up one beside the other, each one a different color, with curlicues and flowers, and, man, streets just full of people. White people, black people, mixed-race people, all jumbled up together and walking. Music right on the sidewalk, and I don’t mean like one nigger with a guitar, but a whole band and drum set and everything, like the whole city is a big party. I’m looking out the window, eyes big as saucers—eight years old—and I’m thinking, this is a whole different way to be a Negro; I’m thinking, this is where Daddy gets his groove.
We pull up to a light, and a cop car pulls right next to us. The cops are white, of course, but not like the storm troopers they got out in California; they’re kind of fat and rumpled up, like a couple of plumbers or something, you know what I’m saying? They kind of nod and smile, and Daddy smiles back. Smiling at a couple of white cops!
My grandmother lived out on the edge of town in the place they call the Goose, which wasn’t jam-packety like downtown but more normal: little lawns, little driveways. We pull up to this tiny brick house, and, man, people start pouring out of it like clowns out of a car in the circus. You wouldn’t think you could get so many people into one house. Everybody knows my name, and aunts and uncles I never heard of are crying and whooping and handing us around like sacks of corn. Googlobs of kids, man. These kids, they’re all over me, like, “You in the Ninth Ward.” Like it was a privilege. Like I might not measure up.
Running around, we kids didn’t go but about six, seven blocks, but it felt like the whole world. What tripped me out, man, was every place we’d go, no matter how far, everybody knew me. I was Ant’ny Wells, Edward and Deloris’s boy. People I never seen before would come up and say I looked just like my grandma Ceola. I could be all the way across the Goose and some lady would invite me for some bread pudding, some red beans. Kick my ass, too, if she’d a mind to, a lady I never seen before, like I was her own kid. I was connected, you feel me? It was like being in the Bible with the begats: “My auntee was married to your mother’s auntee’s second husband.”
Then I get home to San Fernando, and I’m a stranger. Nobody knows my name. Life is all cut up. Home, school. Grown-ups, children. Van Nuys Boulevard, Brownell Street. White, black, Asian, Mexican. New Orleans ain’t like that. It got me thinking.
BILLY GRACE
2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE
1969
Billy looked at the slip of paper in his hand. Sure enough, it said 2525. He looked up. The Rex mansion.
Billy had admired it all his life, a classic Queen Anne masterpiece of the Garden District, among the loveliest houses on St. Charles Avenue. It was here that the entire Mardi Gras parade crossed the neutral ground every year so that Rex, king of carnival on his throne atop the lead float, could receive the annual toast. The flags of Comus and Rex hung on stanchions above the balcony, announcing former kings and queens of carnival, going back generations, who had resided in this house. How like Anne not to clue him in that this house was in her family. She’d merely invited him to dinner “at Aunt Virginia’s.”
Billy walked up the wide steps and pressed the bell beside the imposing front door. Anne’s father, George, answered. He had longish graying hair that fell in a wave over one eye, big plastic-framed glasses, and a manner that took nothing seriously. He owned the Muzak franchise in Louisiana and was among the warmest and most empathetic men Billy had ever met. As they waited for dinner, he took Billy on a tour. “All right now, this is Robert Henry Downman, Anne’s great-grandfather, who bought this house in 1907,” he said, stopping in front of a gloomy dim portrait. “He founded the Louisiana Lottery and was one of the first presidents of the Levee Board—for what it’s worth.”
Anne’s mother, “Big Anne,” strode across the living room, chin high, pumps clicking on the intricately inlaid wooden floor. Though she was not particularly tall, her posture made Billy feel as though he were standing in a hole. In each hand Big Anne held what Billy took to be strawberry milkshakes. Ojens, she called them. The pink was Peychaud’s bitters. “Can’t use any other kind,” she pointed out. It was sweet, rich, and flavored like Good & Plenty.
George continued his tour of the wall portraits. First George’s own father in a gold-framed portrait. Lawyer to Sam Zemurray, who started out selling bananas on the streets of Mobile and ended up owning United Fruit.
“Got himself thrown into a Honduran prison,” George said.
And that’s where the next portrait came in. Senator Joe Ransdell, perhaps Huey Long’s greatest enemy and George’s great-uncle. He sent a fleet of Navy gunboats to blockade the port of Tegucigalpa until they freed George’s father.
George was as deeply rooted in the soil of uptown as anybody, and at the same time seemed to relish challenging it. The time he invited that Jewish frien
d of his to the Atlanteans’ ball came to mind; everybody uptown knew about that. In 1972, George had been a driving force behind the Rex krewe’s decision to knuckle under to Mayor Moon Landrieu’s threats and invite a few black couples to its ball for the first time. (The photograph in the Times-Picayune the next morning just about blew uptown’s gasket and cemented Landrieu’s reputation as “Moon the Coon.” But then, that was the year the homosexual krewe Apollo held its ball in the sacred Municipal Auditorium and the police shut down parading in the Quarter, so the whole season had an end-of-the-world quality to it.) Just in the last couple of years, though, George had really called down the wrath of uptown upon himself. As board chairman of the Audubon Zoo, which used to be so decrepit the federal government had threatened to shut it down, George had pushed a radical, multimillion-dollar renovation. It had taken Billy a while to figure out why anybody would object to such tireless agitation to improve a civic asset. Turned out, the people who for generations had lived in the grand stone mansions surrounding Audubon Park had come to think of it as their private playground. Black people who visited the zoo understood they were to stay riverside of Magazine Street and not be seen on the golf course or along the lovely shaded paths of the park’s vast interior. George’s plans to expand the zoo and turn it into a destination for the entire city were tantamount, among many uptown, to racial treason. Some couched their objections in terms of traffic and congestion, others were ringing his home phone and calling him a nigger lover. Billy was proud to stand beside him.
But he’d come for Anne—whom the Montgomerys called “Little Anne”—that figure, those eyes, that gravelly laugh. She didn’t care about her famous uncle, any more than she cared whether Billy drove a Bug or a Bentley.
They ate red beans and rice in a dining room fit for a Bourbon king, the walls rich frescoes done in red, black, and gold. The Montgomerys asked how Billy liked Tulane, and he said it was fine. He’d wanted to go to Dartmouth, he said, and get a taste of the wider world outside New Orleans, but his father had come up with diabetes and wanted Billy closer. At Anne’s urging, he finally got around to telling about his summer job cleaning garbage Dumpsters in the Ninth Ward.
George threw back his head and laughed. He reached over and clapped Billy on the shoulder. “Good for you!”
FRANK MINYARD
WASO STUDIO
1972
“We’re back with Dr. Frank Minyard”—Keith Rush leaned into the microphone—“who joins us each week to answer your questions about medicine and health. Let’s take a call.”
Radio took Frank away from his practice and volunteering, but if he wanted to run for coroner again, he had to raise his profile. Fifty thousand dollars he’d spent on the last campaign, and Carl Rabin had creamed him.
“Frankie?” said a familiar voice in Frank’s earphones.
“Ma?” Frank leaned into the microphone, laughing. “Everybody, I’d like you to meet my mother, Mrs. Norma Minyard. Hello, Ma.”
“Frankie, I found your old trumpet in the attic. What should I do with it?”
Keith’s face lit up.
“Give it to Goodwill, Ma,” Frank said.
“I can’t do that. I paid sixteen dollars for it.”
“I’ll give you the sixteen dollars,” Frank said.
“You should play it! Instead of running for coroner again, which is the craziest idea I ever heard.”
“Mrs. Minyard, you don’t like the idea of your son running again for coroner?” Keith asked.
“It’s crazy. After he worked so hard to become a doctor? After all our prayers?”
“Okay, Ma,” Frank said.
“Listeners, what do you think?” Keith said. “What should Dr. Minyard do with his trumpet?”
“Come on, Ma, ask me something about medicine.” Frank laughed.
“Goodbye, Frankie.”
“Hello, you’re on the air,” Keith said.
“Dr. Minyard?” The caller sounded like a very old lady. “Why don’t you play your trumpet for us on the radio?”
“Yeah!” Keith laughed.
Frank shook his head. “I haven’t played in twenty years.”
“Go home and practice,” the lady said.
“Come on, Frank.” Keith leaned into the microphone, tilting his head at Frank. “Listeners, let us know. Should Dr. Minyard play for us next week?”
FRANK TURNED THE BIG Mercedes over to the Negro teenager at the grand entrance to the Metairie Country Club and tucked his arm through Emelie’s. She liked being the wife of Dr. Frank Minyard and worried where his foray into moralistic unpaid do-goodism would take them. The more time Frank spent at the House of Bread, the methadone clinic at St. Augustine, and the civil rights marches downtown, the less money rolled into the Lakeview setup on Bellaire Drive. She wanted them to join the country club, and this evening was a chance for the membership to look them over. He agreed to make the effort. It was the least he could do.
As soon as he got inside, though, Frank felt his necktie tightening around his throat. The place was lousy with the kind of uptown swells his mother had taught him to revile. Emelie excused herself to the powder room, and Frank lurched for the bar. A Negro barman, whose white jacket hugged his muscular frame, leaned in close to hear Frank’s order.
“You look familiar,” Frank said as the man came back and set a bullshot on the bar.
“Give it a minute; you’ll get it,” the Negro said. He rubbed at the bar top with a damp towel. “The coffeepot at St. Augustine.”
“I’ll be damned.” Frank extended his hand. The barman hesitated, twitched his eyes around the room, then put out a hand so big and rough it felt like he was wearing a catcher’s mitt.
“One of the ones drinking that medicine is my old lady,” the barman said. “You got her straightened out more in two months than I’d been able to in two years.” He put a fresh drink in front of Frank. “These are on me, by the way.”
Frank flushed with happiness, glad he’d come out to the country club after all. “Hey, that’s a hell of a grip you got.”
“Oh, I try to stay in shape.”
“Me too. I bench two fifty-five. You?”
“I do all right.”
“Let’s see,” Frank said, putting his elbow on the bar, hand straight up. The barman chuckled.
“That’s not a good idea,” he said, looking left and right.
“Come on. One time.” Frank looked over his shoulder. The bar was empty; people were drifting toward the dining room. “I don’t think you can take me.”
The barman gave his head a little shake, chuckled, and bent in over the bar. He planted his elbow next to Frank’s, slapped his fingers around Frank’s wrist, and the next thing Frank knew he was flying backward off the stool, his forearm mashed flat onto the damp surface of the bar. He threw out his other hand to catch the bar but missed, and landed heavily on his butt between two stools. The barroom door swung open and Emelie walked in on the arm of the country club president. They froze, and Emelie’s eyes went dead.
JOHN GUIDOS
HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI
1973
It was nice living with a woman. John couldn’t very well paint his own toenails, but he could paint Kathy’s. He lay on the floor at her feet in the master bedroom on Green Street, tucking tufts of cotton between her toes.
Kathy said it made her feel like a queen, sprawling backward on the bed for her pedicure, her left hand adorned with a swirling diamond ring and gold wedding band. The rings had been a stretch on the salary of a college student working swing shifts in a galvanizing shop. But it was what a man does: get a girl pregnant, buy her the engagement ring she wants, and marry her. John was a husband and a father now. An ordinary man. He was doing it.
He looked up at Kathy, whose breasts rose like two perfect cinder cones. He’d always liked busty girls, enjoying the soft firmness of their breasts and the lacy brassieres that held them so alluringly in place. To have beautiful soft curves on one’s own body—t
he thought made him gasp with envy.
It was like being in a play. The character he portrayed was a guy named John Guidos—football player, husband, happy father. He had breakfast with Kathy every morning and kissed her on the cheek. He went off to class, the manly rigors of football, and then the galvanizing shop. He came home evenings, gave Kathy another kiss, and played with the baby. They had dinner together and many nights went bowling. Since the baby, he and Kathy had stopped making love because Kathy was sore and Sandy needed to feed every couple of hours. John was delighted; one scene of the drama he no longer had to perform. It was good. Kathy was great. He loved her.
But whenever he was alone in the house—when Kathy went to have her hair done or shop for groceries—John found himself in her underwear drawer, having a furtive little party.
He finished the second foot, massaging the arch lightly while he blew on the nails to dry them. “Sandy’s six months old already,” Kathy said, slapping her hands on her stomach. “I got to take off some of this weight.” John looked up in alarm. If she went down a size or two in underwear, he wouldn’t be able to fit.
“You are just perfect to me, sweetheart,” he said.
RONALD LEWIS
ST. CHARLES AVENUE
1974
The track jacks gathered in the shade of an oak on the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground, in front of a large white Garden District mansion with Mardi Gras flags hanging off the front. Ronald barely glanced at the house; it existed in another dimension. He picked up a pickax and jounced it in his hand, enjoying the heft. He handed a shovel to the new D helper. “We ain’t going to have but about ten minutes to get this done. You ready?”
It was only ten in the morning, and the man was wheezing with exhaustion, sweating like a bar of chocolate. His eyes swam, and his mouth hung slack. He had a long way to go to make it to A helper, let alone a full track repairman.