Ace Atkins: Dark End of the Street

Didn’t seem to matter to JoJo. We guessed Rolande had died about an hour ago, collapsed into his Jack and Coke with a thin smile on his lips. He was a wiry scruffy man who’d worn a scrunched Jack Daniels baseball cap for at least the last decade I’d known him. Rolande still wore it in death, just drooped a little farther down in his eyes.

“Bring the bottle, Nick,” JoJo said. “Shit, son. Don’t you learn nothin’?”

I swung back behind the bar, a Marlboro drooping lazily from my lips, and grabbed a half-empty bottle of Jack. I plunked it before JoJo and settled into the booth crossing my worn Tony Lamas at the ankles.

Joseph Jose Jackson – a.k.a. JoJo – had to be in his late sixties by now. Black man with white hair and neatly trimmed mustache. Black creased trousers, white button-down shirt rolled to his elbows. Hard to explain the completeness of my relationship with JoJo. To begin with, he was a surrogate father, harmonica teacher, and all-around Zen master on life.

I asked, “On the house?”

JoJo pulled out a well-worn wallet from Rolande’s coat pocket and said, “Ain’t no such thing.”

The men laughed like tomorrow held more promise than today, all was right in the world, and God was watching down from heaven with a smile on His bearded face.

On JoJo’s left sat Randy Sexton, my colleague and head of the Tulane University Jazz and Blues Archives. I’d known Randy since my early retirement from the Saints when I returned to Tulane for a Masters in music history.

Randy was usually physically out of step with his subjects – a white man with a big head of curly brown hair – but always spiritually in tune. He was the author of about a million books on early New Orleans jazz players and had been featured in Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series.

Always cracked me up when Randy got drunk. This man was one of the most respected music historians in the country, but sometimes I swear he acted about thirteen.

“Fuck, man,” Randy said. “I’m wasted.”

I was sandwiched by a three-hundred-pound black man named Sun on the one side, and a transsexual tattoo artist named Oz on the other. Sun was crying for his lost friend, his straw hat shredded to bits in his almost-ham-sized hands. Eyes red, damn near sobbing.

“Rolande always love you, Nick,” he said, kind of blubbering. “Remember that night when you dumped that Gatorade on your coach’s head?”

“Yep.”

“Well, he love you for that. Love you for tellin’ the man to go fuck hisself.”

I smiled and said, “Oh, I try.”

Oz didn’t seem to be listening. He was just singing along to Otis’s ballad to a late-night love. He had on his standard black lingerie with thigh-high stockings. On his face he wore white pancake makeup and black lipstick.

He’d strolled into the bar just minutes after a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The movie was his obsession. His life. Based every decision on what Dr. Frank-N-Furter would do.

“Good Lord, pour the man another drink,” Oz said in a recently acquired British accent. “Death is so hard for some people to get over. Isn’t that right… What was his name again?”

“Rolande,” JoJo said with a slight edge. “Rolande Goodine. You sure remembered it when you need him to rewire that piece-of-shit tattoo parlor.”

“It is, first off, a house of medicinal cures and potions.”

JoJo raised his eyebrows and looked over at me.

“Goddamn, Nick, I don’t mess around with none of them hoodoo fuckers. I don’t care about the way he dresses, ’cause whatever gets you through the night and all that, but I will not mess with any of that hoodoo shit. You hear me?”

“It’s cool,” I said. “It’s cool. Let’s just drink. This is Rolande’s last party. He wouldn’t want us fighting.”

I reached across the table and filled everyone’s glass to the rim. JoJo looked away from Oz, over at Randy still grinning like a fool, and then over at sobbing Sun.

JoJo shook his head. “Goddamn, no wonder he wanted to leave this world. Look at y’all. Like a fuckin’ freak show in here.”

“I know a man who can drive a railroad spike through his nose,” I announced. “You want me to call him?”

“I know a man in Algiers who’ll bring back your friend for fifty bucks,” Oz said with pursed lips. “But then Rolando would be a zombie and kind of a grumpy pain in the ass. You know how zombies get.”

“Nick!” JoJo yelled.

Rolande’s head rolled over to JoJo’s shoulder, mouth agape.

The music stopped. And no one said a word as a brittle wind blew down Conti Street. I could only hear Sun’s heavy breathing and a rock band jamming at the new Irish pub a few doors down.

Suddenly, the back door burst open and Randy dropped his glass on the hardwood floor. The glass scattered in shards dripping with amber whiskey.

And even my heart skipped for a second until I saw it was Loretta, JoJo’s wife. Her flat face was full of frustration and exhaustion. She wore a long camel hair coat and her hair had been pulled back into a net.

A hard wind shot inside.

“What you want, woman?” JoJo asked like a man who wasn’t afraid of shit.

Loretta – a two-hundred-pound-plus woman whose voice could make the bar jump when she sang – didn’t even glance at the men. “Not you, you ole fool,” she said. “I need Nick.”

I crawled over Sun and followed her out to a loading dock facing a crushed shell lot where she crossed her arms and stared at JoJo’s 1963 Cadillac. Withered leaves from a dying palm tree brushed against the stucco outside the bar.

“I’m sorry, Loretta,” I said. “I was the one who asked JoJo if we could… you know, like the old days when… you know.”

She shook her head.

“It’s not that,” she said. “Nick, I need some help. In the worse kind of way, baby.”

LORETTA JACKSON DIDN’T ask for favors. She sang deep, soulful blues from the pit of her big, curvy frame, she cooked jambalaya so sweet and spicy that all other food tasted hollow, and she took care of the ones she loved with such intensity that it even patched over that old familiar hole in my heart. A favor from Loretta wasn’t a favor at all. It was an opportunity to do something for someone who’d given me everything she had.

We walked down Conti to Decatur and then continued upriver north under wooden signs swinging in the fall wind and beneath wrought-iron balconies heavy laden with palms, banana trees, and stunted magnolias. Twisted Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers and little skulls burned from the rusted ironwork. We passed the new, tourist-friendly Tipitina’s, dozens of gift shops selling lewd T-shirts and cheap posters, and tired old restaurants serving reanimated crawfish, dead since spring, and watery gumbo.

We turned down the flagstone walkway running along Jackson Square – closed since dusk – and toward St. Louis Cathedral. The air smelled of the Mississippi’s fetid brown water and cigarette smoke from a loose gathering of skinheads playing with a mangy puppy by the front doors of the church.

Loretta ignored them and took a seat on a nearby green bench. I didn’t figure for wandering about tonight and had only worn a thin suede jacket over my black Johnny Cash T-shirt. It was the pose Cash did for Def Jam records when he wanted to thank the country music industry by saluting them with his middle finger.

I was pretty proud of it.

“If you don’t want to do this, you tell me,” Loretta said. “Right, baby? You don’t owe me nothin’.”

“Nothin’ but the world,” I said, grabbing her hand. “What’s on your mind?”

“I just been thinkin’ while we were walking ’bout all the things you do for folks. Like when you kicked the butt of that man who dress like Jesus. You know the one who took Fats’s money? And what you did for sweet Ruby Walker in Chicago last year? Nick, you ’bout got yourself killed to get that ole woman out of jail. I don’t want to be no burden.”