Mark Jacobson - The Lampshade

Dani tossed the roses into her van and turned back to her brother, who was standing in the doorway of his house wearing nothing but a pair of droopy gym shorts.

“Is it possible for you not to screw me up one damn time?” Dani screamed at Dave, and drove away.

To characterize Dani’s relationship with her younger brother as “difficult” would be something of an understatement, says Dani’s husband, Alvin Babineaux. “I’d call it more like tortured. Dave’s the torturer and Dani is the torturee.” Alvin is an outgoing, friendly guy in his fifties who was born in the border town of McAllen, Texas. A professional musician, Alvin has been employed at Pat O’Brien’s, the always mobbed tourist joint in the French Quarter, for the past forty years.

“I play the tray,” Alvin says. He stands on a small stage between two piano players (Alvin’s mother was a Pat O’Brien’s piano player) and provides the one-man rhythm section to the Billy Joel/Elton John songs by beating on the bottom side of a metal bar tray with his fingertips, on which he wears a variety of thimbles, each producing a different sound. Often attired in wild, sequined costumes worn to celebrate ultra-drinking days like Saint Paddy’s or Mardi Gras, gyrating his body like a genial belly dancer and mugging rubbery features until the cows come home, Alvin is what is usually called “an institution” in the French Quarter. Indeed, since the death of Eddie Gabriel, the original New Orleans tray player, Alvin is probably the only living practitioner of the form. A few years ago Dani helped him patent his tray and thimble setup. “It ain’t Buddy Rich but it pays the rent,” Alvin says of his gig.

Alvin and Dani have been totally devoted lovebirds for several years now, but Dave remains a sore point in their relationship. “I like Dave, but he’s done nothing except give us a pain in the butt,” says Alvin of his brother-in-law. “One time I went over to that mess of a house of his and he’s got, like, thirty-five bicycles in the kitchen. Now, why is someone going to have thirty-five bicycles in their kitchen? Next time I go over there all the bicycles are gone down to the last one. I don’t have to ask where the money goes. All I know is every time there’s a water bill coming due, who pays? Me and Dani. Every time a light bill comes due, who pays? Me and Dani.”

Dani says, “I love my brother. I want to make that clear: I love my brother. But it isn’t easy. It has never been easy.”

Dani told a story about the day she and Alvin were married. “This is the biggest day of my life. The day I always dreamed about. Before the ceremony David says, ‘Hey, Dani, your car is dirty. You can’t go on over there like that. It’s your wedding day. You have to come in like a princess. Let me go get it washed for you. Make it nice. It’ll only take a minute.’

“Made me feel good, you know. Because I thought David realized what all this meant to me and he was trying to be a good brother, for once. I should have known.

“So now it is time to go. They’re calling from the church, and David still hasn’t come back. I was in a panic. I wound up having to almost hitch a ride to my own wedding. It was very embarrassing. Then, just as the service is about to begin, David comes roaring up in the car at, like, a hundred miles an hour. The car wasn’t washed. It was dirtier than it was before. I didn’t even want to know where he claimed to have been.”

Dani says that even though she would never do it, there have been times she thought about never talking to her brother again. “But that would break my mother’s heart.”

This is true, says Patsy Dominici, a marvelously brassy woman in the New Orleans style who has “been through the trials” of being Dave Dominici’s mother for more than fifty years. Sitting in her “temporary house” near the Kenner border while she waits for her Road Home settlement to rebuild her St. Bernard Parish home that was “washed away whole,” she says, “I know what the other kids think, that I pay more attention to David than I do to the rest of them. I love all my children, but David, he needs more. He was the most difficult of my deliveries. I had to go back to the hospital three times before he came out, they had to induce labor, then he got stuck in the birth canal. That boy just didn’t want to be born.

“David took it hardest when my husband, Mr. Dominici, died. He was sixteen, and no one could get him to leave the coffin. People say I’m blind when it comes to the boy, because I’ve given him so much money, tried to get him out of so many jams. But when it comes down to it, maybe that’s just the way mothers are: blind. God made them that way. David is my cross to bear. He’s like I was: a free spirit.”

Dani says that the cemetery thefts were “the worst. Dave was on the front page of the paper every day, and people were looking at me like, ‘Isn’t that your brother?’” She has attempted to take Dave’s questionable life choices in stride. She did, however, sound upset when she called me on the phone shortly before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“They’ve got David locked up over there at the OPP,” Dani said, using the local shorthand for the Orleans Parish Prison, New Orleans’s infamously overcrowded and violence-ridden city jail. In New Orleans just about every arrestee, from murderers to parking ticket delinquents, sooner or later winds up in the OPP. Years ago Johnny Cash made a record about the place, “Orleans Parish Prison,” easily his worst prison song, which kind of fits.

Dominici had been in and out of various lockups since his teens. The difference this time was, Dani explained, “they got him on the tenth floor, in the psych ward. They’re going to give him a Lunacy Hearing.”

It was another of those New Orleans things, not simply the way Dani pronounced the word loo-na-cee in her sweet Chalmette accent, but also the fact that this was the official name for a state-sanctioned practice, the way a term like psychological review might be employed in other places.

“David doesn’t need a Lunacy Hearing,” Dani went on. “He might be a lot of things. He might not take his medicine like he is supposed to. But he’s not crazy. He doesn’t belong with those maniacs they have up there. My mother is sick out of her mind worrying about this—”

Then, without warning, Dani interrupted herself. “Do you know something about a lamp?”

“Lamp? You mean the lampshade?”

“Yeah, lamp shade . David keeps talking about some crazy lampshade. He said you knew about it, that’s why I’m calling you. Look, I don’t know what David told them over at the courthouse, but would you mind writing a letter to the judge telling him you’re a reporter from New York and you know about this lampshade, because they think David just dreamed the whole thing up. That’s why they’re giving him the Lunacy Hearing, because of that lampshade.”

Over the next few weeks the story would become clearer. Actually I knew a good portion of it already. Apparently, around the time that he scavenged the lampshade, Dominici had also “found” many other objects to his liking. “Believe me,” Dominici told me one evening, “if you have a discerning eye, you can find some very fashionable things.” Sometimes, Dominici said, if he wasn’t crazy about what he was wearing at the moment and he ran across some garments that were generally clean and his size, he’d change clothes right then and there. “I’d leave my stuff there, in trade.

“One night I found this nice pair of Wrangler jeans, folded and broken in, and I’m driving back to Piety Street in my little old Amigo pickup. It didn’t have any headlights or windshield. But it’s New Orleans after the storm, so who the fuck cares about a couple of headlights? The National Guard didn’t give a shit. But the N-O- fucking- P-D, they’re all concerned. Running without headlights is just the kind of crime they figure they can handle. So they stop me because of the lights. They want to see my license but of course I don’t have my license. I gave them some other shit with my name on it for ID. I see them looking at it with flashlights. Then I hear them laughing. They’re saying, ‘Look who we got here, Mr. David Dominici. Step out of the car, Mr. David Dominici!’