Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

“They blew him out of the water off Veracruz.”

“No way, man. Not Tony. He got out of the life and had to stay off the radar. He’s coming back.”

I lie on my back, the nape of my neck cupped restfully on the roof cap, small waves rolling up my loins and chest like a warm blanket. I no longer think about the chemicals and oil and feces and body parts that the water may contain. I remind myself that we came out of primeval soup and that nothing in the earth’s composition should be strange or objectionable to us. I look at the smoke drifting across the sky and feel the house jolt under me. Then it jolts again and I know that maybe Miles is right about seeing Tony, but not in the way he thought.

When I look hard enough into the smoke and the stars behind it, I see New Orleans the way it was when we were kids. I see the fog blowing off the Mississippi levee and pooling in the streets, the Victorian houses sticking out of the mist like ships on the Gulf. I see the green-painted streetcars clanging up and down the neutral ground on St. Charles and the tunnel of live oaks you ride through all the way down to the Carrollton District by the levee. The pink and purple neon tubing on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glows like colored smoke inside the fog, and music is everywhere, like it’s trapped under a big glass dome — the brass funeral bands marching down Magazine, old black guys blowing out the bricks in Preservation Hall, dance orchestras playing on hotel roofs along Canal Street.

That’s the way it was back then. You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee, and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round. New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.

I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us. When Miles and me are way out to sea, I want to ask him that. Then a funny thing happens. Floating right along next to us is the big wood carving of Jesus on his cross, from the stucco church at the end of my street. He’s on his back, his arms stretched out, the waves sliding across his skin. The holes in his hands look just like the petals from the bougainvillea on the church wall. I ask him what happened back there.

He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.

“Yeah, I dig your meaning. That’s exactly what I thought,” I say, not wanting to show how dumb I am.

But considering the company I’m in — Jesus and Miles and Tony waiting for us somewhere up the pike — I got no grief with the world.

(Originally published in 2010)

Warehouse District

I’ve always been one to keep an eye open during a church prayer — not because of my lack of faith in God but because of my lack of faith in people. What I learned by watching was that others were doing the same. People mistrust people. Each of us pulses with our own agenda. In New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter, those agendas cross frequently.

That night I was in my own house of worship — JoJo’s Blues Bar — with both eyes closed tight as I chased a shot of Jack with a cold Dixie. Fats’s band banged out the last few chords of “Blue Monday,” his lazy sax matching my own black mood. Each drink softened that black mood into brown melancholy.

A December drizzle rained outside. Cold droplets fell a muted pink along the window lit by JoJo’s neon sign, only a few regulars in the bar with ragged fedoras pulled low. JoJo’s niece Keesha, the only waitress on duty, tapped her foot slowly to Fats’s music. While she smoked, she read the Bible by dim candlelight.

“Keesha, how ’bout another Dixie?”

“You know where they’re at.”

And I guess I did. JoJo was my best friend and this was my second home. I took off my trench coat and old scarf and walked behind the bar. Pushing up my shirtsleeve, I reached into the slushy ice bin and grabbed a beer. My hand instantly went numb.

“Who’s closing up?” I asked.

“Felix,” she answered, stuck somewhere in the middle of Corinthians. “JoJo and Loretta went to Baton Rouge.”

The set finished and the sparse crowd clapped. Most of them were old men like JoJo who had frequented this place since the early sixties. JoJo’s was the only decent blues bar in a city dominated by jazz. A Little Delta on the Bayou , is what the sign outside read.

Fats pulled up a stool next to me. His face grayed under the tiny Christmas lights strung over the bar’s mirror. I looked across at both of our reflections and tilted my head. He said my name dully back to me.

“How ya been, Fats?”

“ Hmm .”

“You know why JoJo’s in Baton Rouge?” I asked, for lack of anything better.

“Naw.” Fats shifted in his seat and coughed, politely turning his head away. He looked over at Keesha with her head close to the Bible.

“What? You got religion now or somethin’?”

“Seek and ye shall find,” Keesha said, blowing smoke in his face.

“ Hmm ,” Fats said. “Ain’t that some shit?”

Someone opened the two rickety Creole doors and a cold breeze rushed in off Conti. A horse-drawn tourist carriage clopped by with a guide pointing out famous sites. Fats popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, shell and all.

“You hungry, Fats?”

He looked at my face for the first time, right in the eyes. “Yeah, I could eat.”

Fats was known for gambling or drinking away his weekly profits every Friday. He usually lived on Loretta’s leftover gumbo or handouts from JoJo.

We walked over a few blocks to the Café Du Monde. I asked for a couple orders of beignets and two large café au laits. A Vietnamese waiter set down the square donuts covered in powered sugar, and within a minute Fats ate them all.

“Hungry?”

His coffee sat empty before him. I ordered another round for him.

Fats didn’t say a word. He leaned an arm on the iron railing and looked across the street at St. Louis Cathedral. Or maybe he was looking at the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson. I’ve always liked to think it was the church, with the spotlight beams illuminating the simple high cross.

“Is it the track?”

“Naw.” He laughed.

“You need help?”

“No,” Fats said. “What I got, pod’na, is a fair deal. Just like Robert Johnson said, Last fair deal goin’ down. You know about Johnson?”

“Sure.”

“He sure played a weird guitar. I’ve always tried to make my sax do that. But it just ain’t the same.”

“What’s the deal, Fats?”

He laughed again and shook his head. He looked up. “You ever been in love, Nick?”

“Every Saturday night.”

“No, man. I mean really in love. Where it make you sick jus’ to think you ain’t gonna get no more.”

“I guess.” I looked at him as he brushed a hand over his gray suit to get off the fallen powdered sugar.

“Let’s just say I found somethin’, all right, big chief.”

“That’s where the money went?”

“Thanks for the eats, Nick.”

And with that, Fats reached down, grabbed the handle of his battered sax case, patted it like a child, and was gone. I sipped on another café au lait, warming my hands on the steaming mug.

Two days later, JoJo called to tell me that Fats was dead.

The sleet played against the industrial windows of my loft, a 1920s lumber storage in the Warehouse District, on the blackest early afternoon I could remember. Tulane was on Christmas break and instead of teaching blues history, I found extra time to loaf. I was practicing some of Little Walter’s harp licks on my Hohner Special 20 when JoJo buzzed me from Julia Street.