by Dan Baum
But his heart lifted when his big sister Dorothy stepped from the back, dressed like to meet the queen. “I think this may be the first Sunday I ever missed church!” she hollered, thrusting out her arms to hug him. “You knew I couldn’t resist a ride in no limo!”
Ronald kissed her and told her to wait right there. He signaled to the Little Rascals, then hustled back inside the door. The Little Rascals broke into “Do Whatcha Wanna,” Ronald pushed open the Ponderosa’s front door, and the Double Nine was on the streets. Ronald danced out first, swinging his hips and waving two enormous fans festooned with black-and-white ostrich plumes. His knees ached, but he pushed through the pain. Pete danced out right behind him, waving his own fans, and then came Edgar, Ricky, and the rest, bobbing and spinning and mugging for the crowd as the Little Rascals blared.
Oh, those plumbers and laborers and dishwashers in their thousand-dollar finery, Ronald thought as he whirled and danced on up to Claiborne Avenue with half the Lower Nine falling in behind. We don’t need any guns up under our clothes to be somebody on the streets of New Orleans! Men! Using money we earned by working to light up these streets—celebrating our community no matter how whipped, underpaid, or neglected! This is a day when no policeman is going to demand you turn out your pockets, no gangbanger is going to stick a gun in your face and take your wallet, no ten-year-old boy is going to be told, “Here, run this up the street a ways and I’ll give you five dollars.” This is a day to remind the world that that man you usually look straight through—that sanitation man, that busboy, that gardener, that truck driver, that man you never see—that that man is a king! That that man is somebody!
FRANK MINYARD
718 BARRACKS STREET
October 30, 1994
The main part of Frank’s house—the part whose salmon-colored stucco facade faced the street—was divided into two small apartments. Joe Maumus and his boy were still living in one of them. Frank had stuck by Joe all through the Adolph Archie mess because that’s what friends do. He and Joe had too much history together for him to turn his back when Joe was in trouble. The second front apartment Frank had converted into a cozy club for entertaining. One wall had a great mirrored bar running along it. Another was made of broad, dark rough-wood planks pulled from a barge that had floated down the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. There was plenty of comfortable seating and a terrific sound system. Photos of Frank’s musician friends—Harold Dejan, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Milton Batiste, and more—smiled down from frames. Some legendary parties had taken place in this room, parties that could have cost a dozen or more public officials their jobs had details ever leaked out. Frank smiled at the memory of those parties as he sat on his leather sofa, sipping a bullshot and waiting through the commercials. Then a big ticking stopwatch appeared on the screen. Frank’s big moment of fame was at hand.
The talk of New Orleans for the past six months was that 60 Minutes was preparing a big story on the brutality, corruption, and ineptitude of the New Orleans Police Department. That it was finally airing now seemed a pity to Frank, since a new chief had just taken over two weeks ago and the poor guy hadn’t been given a chance. On the other hand, some cops had just shot a woman dead on the street for having the temerity to report police brutality, and the feds had uncovered a big cocaine ring operating right inside the department.
For months, Mike Wallace’s people had called Frank, asking him to be interviewed on camera about the Adolph Archie case, and for months Frank had refused. The whole topic was painful. It was Charity that messed up, he believed, by failing to notice on Archie’s medical chart that he was allergic to iodine. Charity had injected Archie with an iodine dye before running him through a CAT scan, and Archie, seizing up, had slammed the back of his head against a bed rail. That was the cause of death. Frank was sure of it.
But he had to admit he’d made a mess of the whole thing by running his mouth early on. The Times-Picayune cartoonist had printed a caricature of Frank standing over a shrouded body labeled “Truth” and saying, “She accidentally slipped at the First District Police Station.” Then had come a lawsuit against the city, and a Justice Department investigation, and autopsy after autopsy. At the end of all that, who knew what to think? Frank ultimately had stepped in the shit all over again by ruling Archie’s death “homicide by police intervention.” Even his old and dear buddy Charles Foti, the criminal sheriff, had called him up and scolded him. “For Christ’s sake, Frank,” Foti had said. “Just do cause of death; leave the blaming to the goddamn grand jury.”
But despite all the rallies demanding Frank’s head, he’d hung on as coroner. And no charges were ever pressed against Joe or any other cop. He and Joe had both kept their jobs.
Any other city, both Joe and I would have been canned, Frank thought as he waited for the show to start. I love New Orleans.
The 60 Minutes people had been very persistent. Finally, Frank had thought of a way to get them off his back. He agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they let him play his trumpet on camera for a full minute. Through his intermediaries, Mike Wallace had agreed. Frank had rented the bar at the Fairmont Hotel for three hours, paid for an open bar, and had gotten a half-dozen members of his band together. Mike Wallace and his crew had shown up and kept their big camera trained on Frank the whole time. Frank had played a few numbers, everybody had some drinks—a great time. Frank had recently made some hilarious posters of himself, bedecked in a gleaming white suit and playing his trumpet on the Ninth Ward levee. “Dr. Jazz,” they said. It was very vain, sure, but perfect for an occasion like the taping at the Fairmont. He’d presented a copy of the poster to Mike Wallace, who’d asked him to autograph it.
Then had come the interview, which took a lot longer than Frank had expected. It went on and on. Wallace didn’t seem to know anything; his aides kept whispering questions in his ear. But the long interview meant Frank had been able to make his whole case, which felt good. At the end, he’d looked straight into the camera and said, “This is my palace of truth.” It was a perfect conclusion. When people see that, they’ll finally have to believe me, Frank thought as he watched the stopwatch ticking. And what a hoot to play trumpet on 60 Minutes!
The segment started with an interview with Joe Orticke, who’d only been chief for a year and now was gone. Then came an NOPD cop talking from federal prison about the money he’d taken and the people he’d beaten up. Finally, Wallace got to the Archie case. Suddenly Frank was watching video of himself on national television. Wallace was saying: “Dr. Frank Minyard is New Orleans’s coroner. At a news conference, Minyard said that Archie had fallen backward and hit his head on the floor after being punched by an officer and that, according to the coroner, caused Archie to go into a coma and die.”
Well, it figures Wallace would home in on that, Frank thought.
“But the U.S. Department of Justice,” Wallace went on, “suspecting a civil rights violation, sent their own pathologists to check the cause of death and they disputed the coroner’s version.”
Now the screen was full of Wallace as Frank remembered him, sitting in Frank’s high-ceilinged office.
“He had massive skull injuries, broken facial bones,” Wallace was saying. “His teeth had been knocked up into his head. He had a fractured rib. His larynx was crushed. His testicles had hemorrhaged.”
Frank remembered this moment. Wallace had ambushed him with an autopsy Frank’s own people hadn’t conducted. It had been the very start of the interview, and Frank remembered stumbling along but recovering nicely later. We sat there for hours, Frank thought, and this is what they’re using? His own face filled the screen, looking confused. “Now, hold on, hold on. What you’re reading …”
Cut to Wallace, peering cruelly. “Yeah?”
Back to Frank. “Is the third autopsy.”
“Right,” Wallace said.
“My pathologist didn’t find any of that,” Frank said.
“And he didn’t come across the skull i
njuries, the facial bones that were broken …”
“He came across the sk——No, he came across …”
“The teeth knocked up into his head, the fractured rib, the crushed larynx, and the hemorrhaging testicles?” Wallace pressed. “He somehow missed that?”
“He didn’t miss it,” Frank heard himself saying. “He didn’t miss it, because it wasn’t there, is what I’m telling you. It was not there.”
“Well,” Wallace said, drawing out the syllable in exasperation. “Who did all this damage to the corpse?”
“I don’t know,” Frank’s image on the television said, and the camera instantly cut away to Mary Howell, the incredibly persistent attorney that Archie’s family had hired, saying that no cop had ever been arrested for killing Archie.
Frank felt himself go cold all over. The only thirty seconds he’d flubbed out of a two-hour interview were the thirty seconds they’d used.
It’ll be okay, he told himself, when they get back to him and he makes eye contact with the audience delivering that “palace of truth” line into the camera. And his promised one minute of playing the trumpet will be a knockout.
The segment went on. Lots of Mary Howell, lots of the cop in prison, more Orticke, and good old Antoine Saacks, a couple of chiefs back until he got fired for corruption and retired as a millionaire, telling Mike Wallace he didn’t take a vow of poverty when he became police chief. Oh, brother, Frank thought. Then Mike Wallace appeared on camera again. “Two weeks ago the mayor of New Orleans appointed a new chief, Richard Pennington of Washington, D.C.,” Wallace said. “His mandate: to reform and rebuild the New Orleans Police Department.” And then the stopwatch filled the screen again.
Frank’s mouth fell open.
The show never returned to him. They didn’t use his “palace of truth” line. And where was the one full minute of him playing the trumpet that they promised him?
Frank went straight to his desk and pulled out a piece of stationery. “You’re not an honest person,” he wrote to Mike Wallace. “I want my poster back.”
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
SARAH T. REED HIGH SCHOOL
1995
Wil pulled in to the parking lot of Sarah T. Reed High School, a cinder-block box at the far end of New Orleans East. When his eighth-grade shop teacher, Theodore Jackson, had called to say he’d become Reed’s vice principal and needed a band director, Wil had driven right down from Baton Rouge. He was about to get his music education degree from Southern University and was ready to come home.
The entry hall looked like the reception room of a county jail—stark, unadorned, overseen by a fat police officer wearing a gun. Reed was the Orleans Parish School Board dumping ground—the last stop before a kid was expelled. Lord knew if they had uniforms, or even instruments. But that was fine with Wil. It’s schools like Reed, he knew, that most need a good band. He wasn’t afraid to work. Watching Da play a gig with two bloody stumps for fingers had set the bar. He was Wilbert Rawlins Jr. There was no job too hard for him.
The fat cop pointed Wil to the office, where Mr. Jackson stood amid a swirl of students and secretaries like a rock in a river. Wil’s heart lifted. Mr. Jackson’s thick beard was graying, but his suit was still as precisely creased as ever, his posture like an upright piano.
“We don’t have bad children here,” Mr. Jackson said as he ushered Wil into his office. “We have bad parents.” Wil sank onto a stained gray couch. Mr. Jackson tilted back in his swivel chair, facing the door. “They want to be their children’s friends because they’re children themselves.” He leaned forward, brown eyes intense in his big, square face. “I don’t need anybody here who is going to like the children. I need someone who is going to love them.” He leaned back, tapping the tip of a pencil on his desk. “So let me ask you something, Wil. What do you see as your work hours?”
Wil shrugged. “I figure I’ll always be working, what with band practice, writing scores, and such.”
Mr. Jackson nodded, and his beard cracked open in a smile. “That’s the right answer. Teachers who say, ‘Eight to three thirty,’ I don’t hire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You married?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s her name?”
“Michelle.” Wil smiled. “We call her Luscious.”
“Children?”
“She has one, a little boy.”
“This can be hard on wives, Wil. A lot of hours.”
“That’s okay. We’re saving to buy us a house.”
Mr. Jackson launched into a long, grim discourse on the state of New Orleans’s schools. Desegregating the schools in the 1960s had one distinct downside: it did away with corporal punishment. No white parent would stand for a black teacher whipping his kid, and no black parent would stand for a white teacher whipping his—it would have been too stark a reminder of slave times. Teachers had become afraid to discipline, Mr. Jackson said, so the kids run riot. No teacher wants a disruptive or inattentive student back in his classroom, so they promote unqualified children to the next grade or have them expelled. The result, he said, was a whole generation of children graduating high school without being able to read, and the really troubled kids—the ones who need the most attention—wandering around the streets.
“You can see where this is taking us,” he concluded.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wil, let me tell you why we have an opening,” Mr. Jackson said, lowering his voice. “This school had a band teacher last year. Nice man. Good musician. Led the band in the Mardi Gras parades. But something happened; we don’t know what. A bunch of kids set on him and his wife with a baseball bat after a parade: band kids. Beat them so bad I don’t know if he’ll ever return to work. So we have an opening. We need a band teacher, and we’re having trouble finding one. You hear what I’m telling you?”
JOHN GUIDOS
SOUTH RAMPART STREET
1995
The diabetes syringe was pencil thin. John stuck its needle through the rubber cap of the estrogen bottle, filled it, and twisted to reach his buttocks. He injected himself deftly and started to toss the syringe in the trash, but on second thought he plunged the needle into the estrogen bottle again and, his butt still stinging, injected himself a second time. Then he pulled up his jeans and closed them with a big death’s-head belt buckle. He reached into the medicine chest for a bottle of Premarin. “Once daily,” read the label, but what the fuck did that nellie doc know? John was in a hurry. He shook three tablets into his big palm, tossed them onto the back of his tongue, and swallowed them with a slug of Southern Comfort. He closed the medicine chest and looked in the mirror at a new man. Sort of. He had a ponytail, and a beard that gave him the look of a pirate, but leaning forward he could see the reflection of his growing breasts. He ran his hands over them, soft under his palms. His mother and grandmother had been big busted; maybe he’d get lucky.
A wave of nausea overtook him, and he leaned on the chipped sink. Whenever he pushed the hormones too far, his liver acted up. Sometimes it got so bad he had to lie low for a couple of days, backing off the pills and shots. But as long as the doc was willing to keep writing scrips, John was willing to chance getting sick. The doc’s whole practice seemed to be people like John, chemically adjusting their sexual identities. He was a godsend, really. John was lucky to live in a place like New Orleans, with a French Quarter full of experimenters. As the queasiness spiraled through him, his eyes roamed over the peeling paint on the bathroom wall behind him. His warped and splintery old house here on South Rampart Street, the edge of the Quarter, was a million miles from the Green Street palace he’d shared with Kathy in Metairie. By a lot of standards, he’d come down in the world. His job didn’t pay much and kept him on the road all week. But it was all worth it. Sharing his femininity on weekends was like being released from solitary confinement into the French Quarter’s community of sexual sophisticates—people like the delicate, kindly, and elegant Donnie Jay, who was thor
oughly male as Chef Don at Jaeger’s House of Seafood on Conti by day and convincingly female in a lip-synching act at Travis’s by night. Down at the Roundup, Gregory’s, the Double Play, the Wild Side, John was finding that he was attractive to men. He was playful in the way of newcomers. The old-timers liked that. He was more of a social success than he’d ever been among football players and bowlers. The Knights of New Orleans, a leather club, had elected him vice president and insisted that he play Mrs. Claus at their holiday ball. He had Deaf Fuck, a boyfriend of sorts, with whom he could be a woman all the way and who, Lord knows, didn’t gum up a nice evening with a lot of conversation. On weekends, John was starting to call himself JoAnn.
As the queasiness subsided, John took a sip of Southern Comfort and reached for the sports bra that pressed his breasts flat. Then came a work shirt, and over that a heavy black leather vest with breast pockets. Now his growing breasts were invisible. On his head he cocked a flat-topped, black-leather cap so that the visor shaded one eye. Now he was fully John, the barrel-chested, biker-leather type known to hospital administrators all over the South as the guy who maintained the MRI and CAT scan machines. He looked a little weird for the Baptists in Oxford, Shreveport, and Little Rock, but that was okay; they expected a little weirdness from New Orleans. He was competent and painstakingly respectful—lots of “sir’s” and “ma’am’s.”