Lining the uneven sidewalk littered with plastic cups and fried chicken parts were older men with skinny black ties and shirt sleeves rolled tightly around their biceps, who swung open the strip club doors and yelled, “All Naked! Nothing Hidden!” The young boys got brief glimpses of the dancing beauties inside. They elbowed each other and pointed, gawking in awe.
The wrestling team’s chaperone was also brand new to this scene, but it quickly registered with him as— Horror! He slammed it into reverse and hustled his charges back to Canal Street, onto a streetcar, and uptown to their dormitory. By then, however, the damage had been done. Tubby had bitten the apple of the knowledge of good and evil, and he was no longer satisfied with his previous rural and upright teenage life. He wanted more, lots more.
As soon as he got back to Bunkie he tackled his studies with a new purpose. College was his goal. His parents noticed the change, and were impressed. While still doing his hundred push-ups before school and staying after class for sports, he actually started to do his homework. He even turned on the TV news at night and began discussing things— the oil crisis and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, and he would also volunteer to present his arguments in class— like we ought to invade Saudi Arabia and take all the oil we want.
The Assistant Warden at Angola State Penitentiary was the graduation speaker. He urged the students to keep Christ in everything they did. Then Tubby was off to college. At the church school in Mississippi, favored by his parents, he had the good fortune to room with a rugged boy from Louisiana who became a lifelong friend, Raisin Partlow. In short order, however, Tubby set his sights on Tulane University. His father had gone there.
The young student bought a ticket on a Trailways bus from Jackson to New Orleans to explore the possibility of transferring, a venture financed by his father. Tubby was supposed to be gone only a couple of days, and arrangements were made for him to bunk in a Tulane dorm. But when Tubby got off the bus, he slung his canvas knapsack over his shoulder and immediately asked directions to the French Quarter.
Walking down the hot city streets, he kept his eyes on the tops of the buildings. A few months earlier, a man had climbed to the roof of the Howard Johnson’s and made national news by shooting at people on the sidewalks below, ultimately wounding or killing twenty-two, five of them policemen. The shooter’s motive was to avenge racist oppression by killing whites.
The young traveler with his pinstriped shirt and pressed chinos managed to get to Bourbon Street safely. Even in the middle of the afternoon it was just as funky and exotic as he remembered it from his brief visit with the wrestling team. Ambling along the sidewalk, he encountered an endless supply of interesting people. He paused to study some advertisements for a naked stripper tacked on the side of a bar and happened to come to the attention of a derelict. The ragged man had a cane and a patch over one eye and he begged the teenager for some change. Something about the pathos and worldliness expressed by the man’s good eye, yellow-streaked and red-rimmed though it was, touched Tubby’s heart, and he extracted the wallet in which he kept a quarter nestled between a pair of twenty-dollar bills his father had supplied for this trip.
An urchin sprinted out of the crowd and plucked the wallet out of Tubby’s hand as neatly as a lizard zaps a passing fly. The skinny thief rocketed around the corner, with Tubby yelling after him, and he was gone. Incredulous at this sudden change in fortune, Tubby turned to confront the panhandler, but he too had disappeared.
* * *
Sitting on the balcony in Naples, Tubby could still remember the awful lonesomeness of that moment. The French Quarter, so full of promise, enlightenment and fun a moment before, had suddenly turned dark and forbidding. Tubby realized that he had no money, and no ID, and he was miles from hearth and home. He was adrift in a dangerous and very big city.
The isolated teenager was comforted over this enormous loss by one of the newspaper peddlers who had seen this crime go down. The observer was a burly guy, like Tubby, and had the scraggly beginnings of a red beard. The hair on his head was as long and disheveled as a Viking’s.
“I’m supposed to interview at Tulane tomorrow,” Tubby moaned to the universe. He was bereft. He asked the paper seller if he could borrow a dime to call his dad.
“Not too sure about that,” the big man said. He introduced himself as Dan Haywood. Tubby said, call me “Streak,” a nickname he had gotten on the wrestling team. “I’m going to the cops,” he insisted with determination.
“I don’t advise it,” the peddler said. A nearby mounted policeman was already looking them over and smacking his nightstick into his palm.
Dan walked off and Tubby followed, too disconsolate to think of a better option.
Blocks away, on a balcony at the top of a rickety staircase, they joined a group of young people hanging out over a flowered, brick-walled courtyard, wreathed in smoke. Inside the apartment two girls were making steaming pots of lentils and carrots. All of the inhabitants, Tubby’s new friends, embraced him like a brother.
He learned about each one’s situation.
There was a draft dodger.
A draft counselor.
A writing instructor at a Catholic university.
A business major at UNO.
An illegal from Greece.
A woman who had been arrested with Avery Alexander when he had been dragged up the steps at City hall.
A pot smoker.
A country-music enthusiast who thought the rebel South would rise again.
Girls with unbuttoned shirts.
A parrot.
Tubby explained that he was a college wrestler, and they all laughed in disbelief.
The group was talking over the oppressiveness of New Orleans and the “shootout at Desire,” where police tanks had been deployed against the Black Panthers. But most of all, they talked about the latest news of the war, all of which dismayed and outraged them. There was supposed to be a peace accord, but the fighting continued, and now we were bombing Cambodia, providing more fuel for their daily demonstrations against the unspeakable conflict.
Tubby passed a very insightful evening with them. He slept well, his head on a young lady’s lap, and left early the next morning for his college interview. He clutched a handful of change provided by one of the women who cared little about material things. The interview went well. At its conclusion, he took the streetcar back downtown to grab his pack and figure out his next move. But as soon as he disembarked on Canal Street, he was surprised to encounter his new companions, who were demonstrating on the neutral ground.
* * *
Now, almost 40 years later, Tubby was amazed to recall how he had made friends so quickly. He wished he could have such ease again, such friends again. They all believed in a better future. The old order (the old people) would die out soon enough.
“I didn’t die out,” Tubby said, again forgetting that he was by himself on a breezy balcony over the Gulf.
The sun was setting once more, as it did every day, in a blaze of exotic colors, primary orange and azure streaks shooting across the edge of the flat blue sea.
Marguerite called to him, “Tubby, don’t you want to come inside and relax?”
Tubby closed his eyes and drifted back to that afternoon on the neutral ground.
III
Around the demonstrators, the sidewalks were full of people. Tubby had to clear a path through them to reach his group. The protesters were waving signs, like “END THE WAR!”