I’d dropped ALIAS back at the Ninth Ward studio and picked up Polk Salad Annie from home. I’d finally taught her to hop up in the Gray Ghost with me. We parked down by the old bar so I could find Felix. Someone had rebuilt the place after the fire last year and turned it into a martini bar where everyone wears all black and compares what they do for a living.
I turned my head as I passed. The blue neon and velvet drapes were enough. I missed the old blues posters in the window and those tall doors fashioned for a Creole restaurant more than 150 years ago.
I had to find Felix and I knew where to look.
It wasn’t pretty. The top bartender in the Quarter had taken a job at Kra-zee Daiquiris down on Bourbon Street. It was the kind of place where you had the option of pouring your drink into a pair of plastic breasts or a long green penis.
Kra-zee’s pumped with that song “Mambo No. 5” and had Polaroid photos of Girls Gone Wild on the walls. The bar was long but thin, maybe six feet from door to counter, just stools lined up under a fake grass canopy like the place was in the middle of the South Pacific. I knew the building used to house a bar that had been around since the early 1800s, serving presidents and pirates in its time. But the new owner wanted to update. Bring in some new tourist dollars in the form of to-go cups.
Felix wore a Mardi Gras Indian headdress on his bald black dome. Strong forearms and quick in his step behind the bar. He was frowning, but his face brightened when I took a seat.
He gripped my hand very hard as he slid down a couple of daiquiris to two women at the end of the bar. Maybe more like plunked them down; apparently the plastic penis doesn’t slide in the same way as JoJo’s glasses.
“How you been?”
“Workin’.”
“You all right?”
“Fine,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. Hadn’t since I’d walked in.
“JoJo wanted me to tell you hello.”
He didn’t respond.
“He’s finally got the farm running again. Bought twenty-five head of cattle.”
“Good for him.”
He looked at me and then flashed his eyes away. He poured me a margarita made out of blueberries. I was thankful for the regular to-go cup with just the logo of the bar. I asked for a small glass of water for Annie. He poured it and didn’t comment on a dog being in the bar. Just normal. Crazy Nick and his friends.
“You seen Sun?”
“No.”
“Oz? Hippie Tom?”
He shook his head. “JoJo’s Bar is closed,” he said. “Ain’t you heard?”
I nodded and looked at my hands. A couple of men in pink tank tops and cutoff shorts sauntered into the bar and asked for some margaritas. They began to dance to “Mambo No. 5.” More followed. Drunk at one in the afternoon. I lit a cigarette and waited for Felix to finish.
Felix poured the margaritas with a little panache. He wiped down the cheap Formica bar as if it were still the worn mahogany of JoJo’s. He took drink orders, sometimes three at a time, and worked the stirring machines as if pouring a perfect shot or finding the right head of foam on a Dixie. I kind of respected that. A professional to the last.
“I need to find Curtis,” I said.
“Peckerwood Curtis?” he asked, laughing.
“Is he out?”
“Yeah, got out a few months back. Went back to Stella, too.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He nodded. I took a small sip of the blueberry margarita and pushed it away.
“You seen him around?”
“Puttin’ in some floors at some new bar on Decatur,” he said. “You know that place that used to be a coffee-house where them vampire people hung out?”
“Thanks.” I got up to leave and shook his hand again.
There was a long mirror behind the daiquiri machines framed in some dripping red chili pepper lights. I watched us – even as I continued to talk – and noticed the fine line of gray on the back of Felix’s normally smooth head. To me, he’d always been ageless, between forty and seventy. I’d never asked. Watching our reflections, I was jarred with a memory of when I was nine and at Disney World with my parents. It was the Haunted House, the end of the ride, and there was a trick mirror when you didn’t see who was sitting with you, only the ghosts who’d stowed away.
“You tell Loretta hello,” he said. “Would you do that?”
I told him I would.
7
The French Quarter is a shiftless little town. People gain and lose jobs the way some change underwear. You may be working as a bouncer at a club on Decatur one week and the next you find yourself as cook at a four-star restaurant on Bienville. Addresses don’t mean much. Most people just crash, always looking for the cheapest housing where you won’t be too worried about getting jacked every night. I needed to find a buddy of mine named Curtis Lee. Curtis, as I learned from Felix, had been out of Angola for at least six months and had gone straight. Again. Either it was religion or AA; Curtis always found the latest salvation. After one short stint in the Jefferson Parish Jail – this for pissing on the sheriff’s boots during Mardi Gras – he told me he wanted to become a monk and spent months at JoJo’s reading prayer books.
I parked at Decatur and Esplanade behind the French Market, smelling the strands of garlic, dried red pepper, and fish on ice sold there as I hooked Annie onto a leather leash. We walked down Decatur underneath a metal overhang and past a couple of Italian delis and a store that sold Christmas ornaments all year. Cajun Santa. An alligator Rudolph.
I heard hard hammering and the buzz of a saw. The air inside the open door smelled of sawdust and burned wood. On his knees by a miter saw, I saw Curtis, all wiry and mullet-haired, smoking a cigarette and cutting down a tongue-and-groove board.
He smiled up at me, the cigarette pinched between his front teeth. He shut off the saw and stood, shaking the shavings from his coveralls and bending the bill of his Styrofoam hat. The hat asked: GETTIN’ ANY ?
I shook his hand. He was playing some Journey on an Emerson cassette player that was held together with duct tape.
“Travers, I heard you was up in Mississippi.”
“I just got back,” I said. “Finished up the project.”
“What was it?” He said wuzzit in that redneck drawl. New Orleans was a long way from Curtis’s north Louisiana home.
“Researching the early days of Sonny Boy Williamson. Found an old partner of his who was the only man I ever met that could take a leak and walk at the same time.”
“How’d he stop from pissin’ on himself?” Curtis asked.
“He didn’t.”
He walked over to a cooler and cracked open the top of a Bud Light. He asked me if I wanted to join him and I said I was cool. I knew it was going to be a very long night.
The hammering in the other room stopped. A large-framed white woman wearing a jogging bra that could’ve comfortably held a third-world country came in and grabbed the beer from his hand. She swigged it, looked at me, and blew out her breath, foam still on her chin.
“Hello, Stella.”
“Eat me, Nick.”
“I’ll take a rain check.”
She turned back to her husband. “Soon as you finish with the professor, let’s get rollin’. You wanted to lay 300 feet today. I’m already growin’ mold.”
Annie started to growl low at her.
“That your mutt?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Figured you for the mutt, Travers,” she said. “He’s just your style.”
“Her name is Annie.”
She laughed, making snorting piglike grunts in her nose. “Hope you’re happy together.”
Curtis cracked open a beer for himself and watched his wife’s big ass waddle away. “Man, she still makes me hard.”
“Oh, boy.”
“So what can I do for you, brother? Those red maple floors of yours cracking up?”
“Nope. Need some advice on working a con.”
He nodded outside and spoke a little louder for his wife’s benefit. “Let me finish this cigarette outside. All right?”
Outside, he leaned against a metal support pole and watched a couple of Hare Krishnas banging the shit out of a tambourine. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey.”
One of the Krishnas, orange robe and standard bald head, turned around.
“Y’all fuck off.”
They started singing and banging some more but turned the other way.
“Goddamned assholes,” he said. “Jesus will turn those fuckers into an orange quilt.”
“About the con.”
“Yeah, what’s up? I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Stella. She’d keep my nuts in her purse if she knew you had something for me.”
“Need some direction. I’m working a job for an old buddy of mine. He has this kid he works with – he’s in the music business and they make rap records – and this kid got taken for a huge one.”
“What they use?”
I told him about the offices at Lee Circle and this guy named Thompson and the way they worked on the kid’s paranoia about his trust fund.
“Man, that’s some good shit.”
“Sound like anyone you know?”
He shrugged. “Not really. You say he had fucked-up ears?”
I nodded.
“I know people with fucked-up noses and necks and faces. Maybe even some peckers. But no ear things. Wow, man. How much was it?”
“A lot.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means I don’t want to say.”
“That’s cool,” he said, taking a sip of beer, starting on what would be one of the first of about one hundred today. He had small hands and yellow teeth. I knew he’d been busted last year for trying to work a handkerchief game on a couple of Lithuanians. When he made the switch and they found the bag full of cut-up newspapers, they tried to stuff him into a mail drop. Apparently the slot was thinner than Curtis and there had been chafing.
“I can ask around,” he said. “Could use a little help, though.”
I knew it’d come to this. Curtis liked to be paid and I didn’t blame him. He had Stella to feed.
“How much?”
“Five hundred.”
“Shit, no.”
“You said it was a ton of money.”
“I said it was a lot. What the hell do you think I keep in my bank account?”
“Two?”
“A hundred if this pans out. I don’t know if I’ll be paid back for this shit.”
“Done,” Curtis said, lighting up his second cigarette. Stella began to yell for him to get back inside. Her voice made nails on a chalkboard seem like chanting monks.
“Goddamn,” he said. “She’s on this new kind of diet from TV. Something that all the stars are onto. Like those little girls on that coffee-shop show in New York. You know where all the girls got tight little asses?”
“Friends.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, we was watching the other night and she says she wanted her ass to look just like that Courtney Love.”
I didn’t correct him.
“I told her I like that booty,” he said. “I like ’em full and healthy.”
Stella screamed: “Hurry up.”
Curtis’s shoulders shrank a bit. “Maybe it would make her more quiet.”
“You’re a lucky man, brother.”
He winked. “I’ll call.”
“I need this fast,” I said. “Today.”
I held his gaze and he slowly nodded, understanding. Some of the biggest fuckups I’ve ever known always come through in a pinch. Maybe they do because they’ve been in similar situations.
“What’s up?”
“My friend borrowed money from the wrong folks.”
“Greaseballs?”
“Nope,” I said. “A mucho bad motherfucker.”
“Man,” he said. “At least with the greaseballs you knew where the shit was flyin’. This city has turned to shit ever since the Mafia turned into a bunch of pussies.”
He wrote my cell-phone number on his hand.