"YOURS MORE THAN most, though," my son had said there in the He'p-Se'f Center out in Gentilly, on Elysian Fields, New Orleans' own Champs-Elysees, for which (like so many other things in the city) there had been all manner of grandiose plans, none of them ever within sniffing distance of fruition, the street, built at great expense, all its life little more than an interminable bus stop lined with rathole cafes and cut-rate stores, step-up cottages with cheap cement steps and gaps between thin shingles of siding hurriedly hammered on, nothing at all by way of internal walls.
Within the week I was transferred to a halfway house in midtown, a once-grand home now given to dangerously sagging porches and balconies with railingslike decayed teeth, across the street from a service station recently converted to a falafel house, sheets of plywood still stacked along the side. Holding on for dear life, and for lack of any other entertainment, inmates sat out on the balconies to watch citizens come and go.
A couple of weeks later I was home, where this time Zeke, in turn, met me at the door.
"This is my son, Brother David," I said, and everyone laughed: Richard Garces, Don, Deborah, Norm and Ray "RM" Marcus from up the street. All of them had come to see me home. And they'd all brought food.
For the next hour or two we worked our way through, around and over pots of red beans and rice with grilled sausage, steaming gumbo from which protruded various claws and halves of bivalve shells, tasso on a bed of mixed greens, boiled crawfish. We'd covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Garces and Norm Marcus were in competition to see who could collect the biggest heap of crawfish bodies.
I'd taken one look at my own pile of bodies, all the mail that accumulated while I was away (life goes on), and dumped it in one of the boxes people had brought food in. Over the next few weeks that box would move otherwise untouched from kitchen floor to pantry to a closet shelf to the trash can I set out curbside each Tuesday and Friday.
Zeke made untold pots of coffee and, for Deborah, cup after cup of tea, which he delivered to her on a small tray complete with cream pitcher, lemon slices, vat of sugar and a demitasse spoon he'd found somewhere. Hard to tell whether she or he got the bigger kick out of it.
Music was catch as catch can. Whoever firstnoticed the last record, tape or CD was done went over and put on whatever he or she wanted to. Irememberhearing Fats Waller, Mozart's horn and clarinet quintets, Arrested Development, Frank Sinatra punching out lounge-lizard standards (no idea how that ever got in there: not mine), Blind Willie McTell and wife, the Charlie Christian Minton sessions, Irish music recorded live at Matt Malloy's, Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad. At one point someone even pulled out Buster Robinson's old BlueStrain record and put that on.
Hours later Don and I found ourselves sitting on the bench under the tree in the backyard, by the slave quarters. People still moved around inside the house, in the light. Dark out here. Moonlight pushing through clouds, through humidity that shelled the moon in nacreous layei's, made it a pearl. A few more neighbors had shown up, a teacher or two, Sally Mara with her latest young man, the two of them all in black. Keith LeRoy wearing perfect English.
"I hope you know how happy I am for you, Lew," Walsh said. "I mean that."
"I know you do."
"So what's up? David planning to stay here awhile?"
"I hope so. I've asked him."
"Good. That's good."
Inside, Garces, Norm and RM were trading dance moves. They were about equally bad, and loving it. Heads thrown back. Laughing.
"And Deborah? How do things stand there?"
I shrugged. "We'll see. Give time time, as the twelve-steppers say."
"Yeah. Has to be tough for her, all this coming down on her at once."
"Yeah."
"No question how much she cares, you know. All she can do just to take her eyes off you in there."
Zeke pressed his face against the glass and peered out at us. Don and I waved.
"Do me a favor, don't fuck this one up, Lew."
"I'll try."
"Sure. Sine you will." After a moment he added, "I'm pulling for you."
"You always have."
"Just don't expect as much out of her, out of the rest of us, as you do from yourself."
"You're saying this to a man who three weeks ago was drinking dregs out of beer bottles, cigarette butts and all."
"Yeah, but I didn't say anything about what you do. I was talking about what you expect of yourself."
We sat together awhile without saying more. Faintly I could hear people's laughter from a neighboring yard. Some guest I didn't know stepped just outside the kitchen door to smoke, nodding politely towards Don and me. A squinel leapt from roofs edge to banana plant, came within half an inch of not making it.
"He was a fuckup, Lew. Always had been. Lazy as overcooked spaghetti. Weak. No skills, social or otherwise. Never gave me reason to think he'd ever be anything else."
Minutes went by.
"I loved him, Lew. No one else can understand that the way you do.
I miss him. Always will."
I slid my arm up over my friend's shoulder there in the close New Orleans night, in that struggle of moonlight.