Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  Enough of that, he thought as he pulled in to the courthouse parking lot and switched off the engine: enterprise, imagination, and new friends will cure what ails you. Dutch Morial’s oldest son, Marc, was starting his campaign for mayor, and he had said an interesting thing: if elected, he might privatize the collection of property taxes. One of New Orleans’s most embarrassing open secrets was that residents owed millions and millions of dollars in unpaid taxes that the bureaucracy was too inept, underfunded, and listless to collect. Officials took payoffs and protected their friends. Even those found delinquent only paid an absurd 1 percent penalty; you could make money on the arbitrage, investing what you owed and paying the penalty out of the profits. The result: wretched schools and infrastructure.

  Billy crossed the courthouse lobby and descended the narrow stairway to the tax records room. He was a tax attorney. He knew what he was looking for. He spent hours, that day and many days after, leafing with Talmudic reverence through big, dusty pages of property-tax records, making marks in a leather-backed notebook. He was trying to get a sense of how many millions in uncollected taxes were out there. If he could form a company to do the collecting, and the commission was high enough, it might be a tidy little side business.

  “It’s a little early to tell,” he told his brother-in-law Westy, “but I’m guessing there’s about seventy-five million dollars out there in unpaid taxes.”

  They agreed they’d never get all of it. The big taxpayers were protected by powerful friends; it was simply a fact of New Orleans life. Even so, Billy figured this sideline might make him twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He had three children to educate. Every little bit helped.

  It wasn’t just the money. Billy needed something to look forward to, something constructive and optimistic to wash away the taste of watching his city willfully decline, of watching his beloved Rex krewe pilloried for failing to do something it should have done years earlier. This tax-collection business might help the city move forward a little bit. Business, not that sorry racial business on television, was the future.

  RONALD LEWIS

  VIBRATIONS HAIR SALON, CAFFIN AVENUE AND GALVEZ STREET

  1992

  Ronald Lewis sat back in one of Pete’s plastic waiting chairs and folded his hands happily across his belly. Not only was Vibrations successful; it was important, a place where conversations took place and things got done. People came from all over New Orleans to have Pete do their hair. Uptowners crossed the canal. Crips and Bloods flew in from L.A. on alternating weekends. Pete’s shop was giving the neighborhood the respect it deserved. Ronald leaned over to reach himself another beer from the cooler. His forty-one-year-old legs ached like old driftwood, but that’s what happened to a man who did a man’s work.

  Pete’s handsome Cherokee face caught the pink late-afternoon light from big picture windows. His long, delicate hands fluttered around Edgar Jacobs’s elegant graying hair, smoothing it in oiled waves down the back of his neck. Pete’s eyes were half-closed, and he kept up a soothing, musical patter. “That was my heart, my grandmother, that was my heart,” he said mournfully. Pete had lost his grandma, and Ronald knew how he felt. His own mom was gone three years. To this day, when the shadows got long, Ronald would say to himself, time to go set on Mom’s porch. And every day he’d experience her loss anew, a poke in the heart.

  A brutish voice burst in. “Yo! I’m next, right?” Derrick Jenkins, a husky, gold-toothed man in his twenties, sprawled in Pete’s other barber chair. Ronald had known him since he was in diapers. His mama lived over by Egania Street, good people, but Derrick had gone his own way. His posse, all younger boys, sat in a circle of Pete’s plastic waiting chairs with their knees touching, pulling wads of money from a pile of brown paper bags and making neat stacks of currency. Ronald knew all of them, all their mamas, too. It particularly pained him to see Michael, a little red-skinned fella, sitting among them, talking trash with his cap on sideways. Michael wasn’t more than about seventeen. He’d come up in the Mount Carmel Church with Ronald’s children. What Michael and the others were doing was a pity and a shame, but there was no use in scolding them. They got enough of that.

  At least they’d stayed in the Nine. Other people’s children went off to college, which for years Ronald had interpreted as a positive thing. Lately, though, he wasn’t so sure. The children who went off to college hardly ever came back. It was as though the hard work of getting that college degree bent them out of shape, focused them too much on their own personal achievement. Once you got that degree, it was all about getting ahead in the monetized struggle, and they forgot the community that raised them. Ooh, live in the Lower Nine; not me. Ooh, do a day’s work with your hands; I won’t touch that. The neighborhood gained something when one of its children went off to become a doctor or an engineer, but it lost something, too. Ronald was glad that everybody in his clan still lived within fifteen blocks of one another. That’s how they stayed strong.

  Derrick stepped up into Pete’s chair. “Put all the ones in that bag there, and we’ll hand them out,” he said to his posse. “I don’t fuck with no ones.”

  The bell above the door tinkled, and the boys in Derrick’s posse jumped to their feet. The sickening click-click of guns being cocked filled the room, and they all held big pistols. Even Pete held one—an elegant little one—sideways at the end of his long bronze arm, looking as stylish and cool as he did with a comb and shears; Ronald hadn’t known he kept a gun up under his smock. A skinny young man stood in the doorway, eyes wide, holding a long bundle wrapped in a blanket. “Whoa!” he said. “Cool! Cool!”

  “Who the fuck?” little Michael yelled.

  “Got something for Derrick!” the kid yelled, holding out the bundle.

  Derrick laughed, low and loose. “Put ’em down,” he said, flapping a hand. “It’s all right. Put ’em down. Go ahead.” Pete’s gun disappeared under his smock. Derrick’s posse put theirs up under their sweatshirts, reluctantly, eye-fucking the kid with the blanket and rolling their shoulders. The kid stepped forward, put the bundle in Derrick’s hands, and fled out the door. Ronald found he was breathing. Pete resumed clipping Derrick’s ear hairs as though nothing had happened, murmuring of the old days.

  Derrick’s voice cut across Pete’s. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” The blanket on his lap was thrown open, and on it lay the kind of gun Ronald had only seen in the movies. It was short and nasty looking, with a brown wooden stock. Derrick fitted a long, curved magazine into it. He held it up like a torch, turning it to catch the light.

  “Damn,” Pete said. “That shit’s an AK-47. I seen them in Vietnam.”

  “Later, man,” Derrick said in a dreamy air of bliss, rising to his feet. His posse rose with him. Derrick held the rifle down near his leg. In a tight little group, he and his posse squeezed through the door, looking nervously this way and that, and slithered on down Caffin Avenue. They had a lot to be looking out for, between the police and their rival gangs. Ronald couldn’t imagine how it must be to feel unsafe on Caffin Avenue.

  RONALD’S LEGS ACHED all the time, mostly around the knees. He’d been twenty-something years on the tracks, swinging those big hammers, leaning into the nipping bars. He loved the tracks, but they were wearing him out.

  He spent a lot of time now at Vibrations. It was like their clubhouse, with Pete presiding at the center chair, his comb and scissors in his hands. Edgar Jacobs often stopped by. Ricky Gettridge from the Desire Project was often there, too, sewing on a piece of his Mardi Gras Indian suit. Ricky masked with the great Tootie Montana and tried to get Ronald to make a suit of his own. “You don’t master the needle,” Ricky told him when Ronald’s big fingers were failing to make the needle dance, “the needle masters you.” Ronald had tried it for a year or two before discovering that what he liked more than actually masking was all the folklore that surrounded it—the chanting and drumming, the stories of the old-timers masking back when.

  One day Ricky was
telling them about a practice of the Ninth Ward Hunters, one of the Lower Nine’s tribes, over by the Ponderosa Ballroom. It had been off the chain, Ricky said. They’d drummed and chanted until all hours. “That reminds me,” Pete said. He’d heard that Celestine, who owned the Ponderosa, was interested in hosting a second-line club. Ronald, Ricky, and Edgar went silent at the news.

  “A second-line club?” Ronald asked. “In the Lower Nine?”

  Second-liners saved all year for their annual parade. They spent a fortune on matching suits, shoes, and hats, hired brass bands, paid the police thousands of dollars for parading permits. Then they’d take to the streets with their bands, dancing across the city for hours with hundreds of people falling in behind. It was the quintessential New Orleans art form—a jazz funeral without the body—but the Lower Ninth Ward had never gone in for it. Second-lining was a city thing, and the people here cross the canal had always remained, at heart, country people.

  Sure enough, the first thing Edgar Jacobs said was, “You know what people going to say about a club in the Lower Nine.” All that zoot-suit flashiness, that wasn’t the Lower Nine’s way.

  But maybe times had changed, Ronald thought. Maybe a second-line club was just what the neighborhood needed. It would bring a little pride back, bring a little life and hope to these streets. Right now, he thought, the only men who look like they’re having any fun, the only ones wearing fine clothes and jewelry, are the drug dealers. And what kind of role model is that for children? Put a club of workingmen out there in colorful suits and five-hundred-dollar shoes. Take over the street, from banquette to banquette, and fill it up with a brass band or two. Make the police work for us for a change. Pete put the “Closed” sign on the door, and the men talked late into the evening. Parading permit cost this much, a band that much. No point in coming out at all if you couldn’t put a three-hundred-dollar hat on your head. It would take sacrifice. The Ponderosa might host the coming-out, but who’d host stops along the way? Who’d host the party at the end? What’s the role for the wives? They chewed it all over, the pros and the cons, before letting themselves address the really important question. “What do we call ourselves?”

  JOYCE MONTANA

  ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH

  1992

  Joyce sat two-thirds of the way back on the left side of St. Augustine Church, smiling at the pink-and-white walls, the gold-leafed columns, and the little green banner above her head that read, in Swahili, “Imani.” According to the corresponding green banner across the aisle, imani meant “faith.”

  She’d had faith—faith that Darryl would set himself right, faith that Tootie would soften toward him just a little. Tootie now sat to her left, a black-and-white-check porkpie hat on his lap. Darryl sat to her right, looking more like Tootie every day, his skin glowing healthy over those high Montana cheekbones. Joyce’s heart was so full it kept overflowing. She dabbed at her eyes with a lilac-colored handkerchief. Darryl had his head back and his eyes closed, smiling like he’d been lost in the desert and it was starting to rain. She squeezed his hand; he opened his eyes and smiled down at her with a depth of joy and sadness that took her breath away.

  Prison had changed Darryl. He moved slowly now, and spoke carefully, but most of all he appreciated everything and everybody around him. He looked up at Tootie, and nodded solemnly as the Mass began.

  Father LeDoux, in a tie-dyed dashiki, spread his arms wide. “It is New Year’s Eve, what we Catholics call the Hour of Watching. Happy New Year to you all!”

  “Happy New Year, Father!” In front of and behind Joyce sat lots of Sixth Ward friends—Cecilia Galle in her wheelchair; stately, stolid Sandra Gordon, the president of the parish council; and Marion Colbert, so refined and elegant, thirty years the powder-room attendant at Brennan’s.

  The band on the raised altar jumped to life, Carol Dolliole on piano, her sister Cynthia on saxophone, the mysterious Esquizito on guitar, and on trumpet a white man with white hair and a wide, handsome smile. “I especially want to thank our friend Dr. Frank Minyard, who does us the service of playing his trumpet here every New Year’s Eve,” Father LeDoux said. The congregation clapped, and Dr. Minyard raised his instrument with a grin. “This is the only place you want to see him, though,” Father LeDoux went on. He cupped his hand around his mouth and stage-whispered, “Because he’s the coroner.” Laughter from the congregation, a rim shot from the drummer.

  Dr. Minyard stepped forward. “I’d like to play for you the first piece my mother taught me.”

  “What’s that?” Father LeDoux walked over to the altar and stood, smiling up at him.

  “‘That Old Rugged Cross.’”

  “Very good,” Father LeDoux said, turning back to his pulpit. “While he does that, let us offer one another a sign of peace.”

  The congregation dissolved into its customary pre-Communion half hour of wandering the pews—hugging friends, shaking hands with strangers, and murmuring, “Peace be with you.” Father LeDoux darted toward Joyce, Tootie, and Darryl, holding out both hands to Darryl. “I am so happy to have you with us!”

  “He’s going to get some feathers on,” Tootie volunteered.

  “That’s right,” Darryl said. “I’m trying to regain my way.”

  Darryl told Father LeDoux he was working at Great Expectations, a program for pregnant women hooked on drugs. Just this week, he’d been handing out flyers to get pregnant women to come in for help, when he ran into some of his old drug-dealing friends. “I went down there and talked to them and gave them flyers,” Darryl said, “and they said if any pregnant bitch—’scuse me—came looking for crack, they wouldn’t sell to her but would give her the flyer.”

  Father LeDoux threw back his head and laughed. “That’s marvelous.” He took Joyce’s hands in his. “You must be very happy.”

  “Life is good, Father,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe how good.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE

  1993

  James Brown opened Frank’s door a crack and pushed his face in, his beard braid leading. “Got something you should see,” he said.

  Frank followed him down the stairs to the dank basement and into an examination room. Edgar Smith stood waiting. A fully autopsied young man lay on the table, his chest cavity open and empty as the trunk of a car, the ribs and spinal column shockingly white under the harsh overhead light. The scalp was peeled down over the face. The top of the skull was missing. On a second table lay the brain and all of the kid’s organs, lined up like choices in a cafeteria. James was orderly.

  “Look here,” James said, pointing with his rubber-gloved finger to a slit in the boy’s side. “Entrance wound.” He turned to the second table and pointed to a hole in the liver. “Went through there.” He turned back to the hollowed-out cadaver. “Then it hit here.” He pointed to a small gouge in the spinal column. “From there, it goes straight up.” He touched the body under the chin. “Comes out of the lungs and goes back in here. I think it’s up in the sinuses somewhere. Won’t know till we get him x-rayed.”

  “Good God,” Frank said.

  “Then there’s this bullet,” James said, and described another tortured route, from the shoulder, through the chest cavity, and into the meat of one thigh. “And this one: ricocheted off this rib, here, and ended up in the bladder.”

  Edgar pointed to the bladder. “Now, a fourth bullet …”

  “Wait a minute,” Frank said. “How many times was he shot?”

  “Near as we can tell, eleven.”

  “Eleven!”

  “It’s going to take us most of the night, because of the way these bullets tumble. Hit you here and come out here,” he said, touching his shoulder and his kidney.

  “It’s the AK-47, man,” Edgar whispered. “We knew those motherfuckers in Nam. Tear you up.”

  “This is my fourth this week shot up with an AK,” James said. “It ain’t nine-millimeters anymore.”

  Edgar nodded.
“This shit’s a whole new thing.”

  RONALD LEWIS

  THE PONDEROSA BALLROOM, NORTH ROBERTSON STREET

  1993

  Ronald was scurrying about the Ponderosa as fast as his aching legs would carry him, lining people up. Like everybody else in the parading club, he wore a black tailcoat and tuxedo trousers, a top hat, and black snakeskin shoes. He looked like a black version of the capitalist character from a Monopoly set. Out front, the Little Rascals were tuning up. In a moment, the Double Nine High Steppers Social Aid and Pleasure Club would break out the door and hit the streets for the first time.

  A long black Cadillac limo, worn and dusty, pulled up in front—the Poo Cab. At the wheel sat Minnie’s cousin Jessie Hill, his skin an unhealthy gray, his forehead sweating. Jessie’s R&B song “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” had been a huge crossover hit in 1960, but Jessie never had really caught on again. He had debts, and liked the liquor. He was a sweet man and, as far as Ronald was concerned, a Lower Nine hero. Nowadays, he was trying to get by hiring out rides in the Cadillac limo he’d bought during his glory days. He called it the Poo Cab. It pained Ronald to see Jessie down. His decline seemed to mirror that of the neighborhood.