Straight Street Music

I can still vividly remember those early New Orleans morning rides to work as if it was yesterday. Even now, it’s almost as if it constantly hangs in my memory, like some free-floating, suspended dream. Leaving my house still half-asleep, and often in a hangover haze, I’d hop on to my beat-up bike and ride down Burgundy St. in the direction of the French Quarter. Cruising over those bumpy, pot-holed roads with open-eyed sun rising, with that slight breeze blowing in from the Mississippi River (where I’d spent many a sunsets tongue-drunk-silent sitting on termite-infested sinking docks, watching the barge ships file out towards the Gulf or out to Baton Rouge), surrounded by hundred-year-old Creole and Victorian houses, I would have the feeling that I was amidst a painting full of wild and beautiful movement.

From the Palmettos shading front-yards and the Oak trees that hung over the streets to the rusted railroad tracks that held the wheels of the Norfolk Southern every day and night; to those empty lots and old steel warehouses barely standing, with the faded traces of the days of dockworkers and longshoremen; well it all seemed a bit surreal.

Down through the Marigny and past Esplanade, the store owners unlocking their front doors and the city workers spraying down the sidewalks as the ferns from third story balconies dripped down on to their heads. The homeless would be passed out and lying in drunk stupor on steps and as I’d pull up to the back alley of the restaurant I’d greet the five stray cats that lived under the building and when I opened the back door the dream, well at least the romantic part of it, would start to fade.


For ten hours a day I’d stand in this kitchen the size of a hallway, huddled over a sink, hands in dirty dish water, watching the roaches poke their heads out from the exposed brick. I’d go out into the dining room and clean off the tables for your run of the mill tourists, overhearing rather drab conversations, often times wondering how it was that I always managed to end up at these bottom of the barrel jobs.

Anyway I’d be out on the patio bussing the tables, watching the crowds go by and I’d hear the saxophone coming from down the street. Sometimes it’d be a cheesy tune; something like the theme song from The Godfather or Sesame Street; maybe something by Elton John or Billy Joel. I figured he just threw those in for the musically uneducated tourists, because the other half of the time he’d play an old R&B hit, maybe Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding. Other times he’d really jazz it up with some Sonny Rollins or Parker or Coltrane. Even though I was a good block away I could tell this guy really knew how to play.

Every now and then I’d walk by him on my lunch break. He was a little ball of a fella’ in a wheelchair, maybe three and a half feet at the most if he was able to stand. He’d sit on the corner with a bucket in front of him and sometimes I’d see an older, raccoon-eyed guy with an ice-cream cart sitting close by. The first couple of months I never said anything to either one of them. I’d just kind of nod; every once in a while I’d throw some change into the jazzman’s bucket.

One day I decided to go on over to the corner and sit down with the two guys. As I was eating my sandwich the jazzman looked over at me and said, “This ain’t no free entertainment. What, you think you can just sit here and eat?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, smiling.

“Oh, I’m just playin’ with ya’”

The jazzman held the tenor sax in his lap and watched the people file down the street for a few minutes. He shook his head and said, “Lazy, lazy day. Man. Just don’t feel like sitting out here today. Wish I was out fishing.”

“Yeah, fishing would be pretty nice right now,” I said.

A few feet to the right of the jazzman was the guy with the ice-cream cart. He sat in a beach-chair with his eyes closed and his chin slumped against his chest.

“Hey Bob!” screamed the jazzman. “You’re sleeping on the job! You got business!”

“Huh, what’s that?”

Bob opened his eyes and stood up, still half-conscious. An older woman was standing in front of the vending cart.

“Oh jeez, so sorry mam’. It’s that sun, ya’ know. Just takes the life right out of you. So what can I get you?”

“I’ll take one of those ice-cream sandwiches.”

“Well, all right, you got it, one sandwich. One dollar.”

“Thank you mam, and you have a wonderful day now.”

Bob sat back down in the chair. “See Melv, you stop playing and I’m a goner.”

“What, cuz you’re bored you think I just gonna’ jump up and play a song.”

“Well, I know you’re sure as hell not jumping,” Bob laughed aloud, slapping his knee.

Melvin quickly wheeled over close to Bob, pointed his index finger at his face, and said, “Watch yourself Bob. Don’t get smart. I might just take one of those Popsicle sticks and shove it up your ass! Ya’ heard me?”

“Yeah, yeah, Melvin, I hear ya.”


A couple days later I was back in my lunch spot. I made a couple of sandwiches for the guys, figuring it was an equal trade-off for letting me sit alongside and hang out.

It was Friday and the streets were packed. From what I could tell Melvin was doing pretty well. He told me he was up to eighty bucks. There must have been something go on that weekend, maybe it was just the magic of The Big Easy, but the beautiful women were everywhere and Melvin was having a tough time sticking to the music. One girl in particular was wearing a short red skirt, her big boobs popping right out of a thin black blouse. She had one of those wild-curved bodies that just screams out at you and turns the brain and muscles into a ball of mush. Melvin played two quick notes that sounded like someone whistling. The girl turned around, smiled, and then walked on.

Melvin’s eyes lit up. “Oooeeee! Give me that smile. Say, baby, ever been with a man in a wheelchair? Once you do, you’ll never go back to regulars.”

Bob and I broke out in laughter.

Seconds later, another woman, a little older, but still with that all-class, all-style look passed by. Bob stood up and yelled out. “Hey lady! Ever been with a fifty year-old ice cream man?”

This woman wasn’t so friendly. She turned around and gave Bob a deathly stare and suddenly it became obvious to me how unattractive, spiritually speaking, she was.

“Damn Melv, guess you can’t win em all,” said Bob.

“Yeah, some of these woman now, they ain’t got no sense of humor.”

“Wait! Hurry Melv, play that one song, you know the Egyptian…”

“The snake-charming one?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Melvin put the sax to his lips and played the tune note for note.

“You ever been married?” Melvin asked me.

“Nah, I got a hard enough time keeping a girlfriend around. Not much love for the starving dishwasher artist.”

“Don’t do it. Believe me. It’s just a pain in the ass. You know what; the problem with women today is that hey just don’t know their place.”

Bob and I kind of gave Melvin a strange look, not particularly sure where he was heading with the conversation.

“Now, wait a minute Melvin…”

“No, listen, and I ain’t talking about no barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen kind of shit. What I’m talking about is inspiration. You see, it’s like this. The world is a pretty brutal place. It’s rough. It’s cruel. And every day a brother goes out into that world. He’s got all kinds of messed up shit he has to deal with. It drives him crazy. And when he comes home he wants to be around a nurturing, loving woman, a woman he can confide in, you know, share his love with. Not some woman that’s always yapping, always complaining about what he doesn’t do right. What the woman don’t realize is that’s what drives the brother back out on the street. Who the hell wants to come home to that? Like take my old lady. We been married over twenty years and she still won’t let me practice the sax in my own house. She says it makes too much noise. Too much noise! Ya’ see, what she don’t understand is that if I can practice I can get better. If I’m better I’ll make more money. That’ll make her happier. Ya’ heard me?”

Melvin was really starting to get juiced up. He was wheeling back and forth between Bob and I. He had the look of a preacher on the pulpit except he was sitting down.

“For instance, take Helen of Troy. You see. Helen was the wife of Menelaus who was King of Sparta. But she left him and went off to be with Paris, son of the King of Troy. So this Menelaus guy launched a war against the Trojans who refused to return Helen. Now they fought a battle for ten years. Over a woman! Over a woman! Now that’s inspiration. Y’all know the Taj Mahal?”

“Uh, the place in India?” I said, recognizing the name, but rather clueless as to how it all tied into the inspiration diatribe.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Have you ever seen the pictures of that building? Ornate architecture, painted ceilings, gold everywhere. It’s beautiful. And you know what. It took twenty-two years to build it. 20,000 workers. And it was all paid for by one man; Shah Jahan. His wife died and in memory of her he built one of the finest buildings in the world. Just for one woman. Love. Friendship. Ya see, what I’m talking about is inspiration. Ya heard me?”


Everyday I’d look forward to those lunch breaks out on the corner. It helped me get through the monotony of dish after dish that stacked up alongside of me. I don’t really know how to put it, but there was just something about hanging out with the guys and sharing stories as the rest of the city paraded by, well it make some kind of sense.

So Bob was sitting behind the cart, looking bored as hell, an umbrella giving him a little shade from the blistering summer heat. Melvin had taken the day off to go fishing down in the Grand Isle and Bob was excited just to have someone to talk to. He was a pretty easy-going type. He’d always flash that black front tooth of his and give you a good ol’ smile. He was polite as hell with the customers, in a Southern gentlemen kind of way.

I was kind of curious how it all worked out with the cart so we got to talking.

“Oh, I get the cart for free. Company stocks it all up and then I get 40 percent of whatever I sell. Right not it’s slow, but when it’s busy, sometimes I’ll walk with two or three hundred bucks. It ain’t bad. Sometimes it’s a little boring, but hey, I’m pretty much my own boss. Work my own hours. Get to sit out here. Listen to Melvin. I use to work the Lucky Dogs stands. They’re the same people that own this one.”

Lucky Dogs were made famous in john Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, but anyone that’s spent a highly intoxicated night on Bourbon Street has probably seen one of the many carts that take up every corner. It’s likely they’ve also forked out the four dollars for the disgusting dog and then found themselves hours later, either vomiting or shitting their brains out.

“Man, no offense, but those hot dogs are gross. I met a guy in Jackson that said he was down here with a friend partying all night. Got a Lucky Dog sometime in the morning before they headed back home. About twenty minutes later his friend’s face was looking like a blueberry. Had to take him to the hospital for food poisoning.”

“Oh, jeez, you don’t got to tell me. You should see some of the guys. They don’t even replace the dogs from each night. They’ll just leave the leftovers in the water and then serve them up again the next day. It’s all about the bar crowd. After 3 a.m. they don’t know what the hell they’re eating anyway.”

Bob said years ago he’d bartended out in California and then for a while in Palm Beach, Florida. They were pretty good jobs, but at some point his wife divorced him, he got into some trouble (I didn’t really pry him on exactly what he did) and then, like a lot of people that lived in New Orleans, he just somehow ended up here.

Off to the side of us Big Mama Sunshine was sitting with her little Casio keyboard in front of her. Big Mama was a huge haunch of insane love-radiating woman. One could find her on a different street of the French Quarter a couple times a week, playing honky-tonk and fast blues, growling out words you sometimes could understand and sometimes couldn’t. She’d wear all kinds of wild dresses, always with the same panama hat that a huge red feather sticking out of the brim. Her big jowly face would wobble around as her chubby fingers bounced across the keys.

So Bob and I were sitting out there and I was kind of dreading going back to the kitchen and staring at those plates and dishes for the rest of the day, when I noticed two Spanish women walking down the street. One I guessed was probably in her middle forties. She was very exotic looking. She had this creamy olive-skin and long black-hair and there was this smooth and hypnotizing rhythm to her movements, like she was walking on water. The woman holding her arm, who I guessed was her mother, was very frail and you could tell it was a little hard for her to keep up. But there was a wonderful energy exuding from her face, this brightness in her eyes, a warm, youthful smile. You could tell she was digging it all: the music and the art and the old buildings and it was like she was a little girl all over again, as if she had that same sense of innocence and excitement. I could tell she was enamored once she caught site of Big Mama Sunshine.

The two women stood in front of Big Mama and watched her play.

“Hey there ladies! Owww! Where you from?”

The younger woman said something in Spanish to her mother.

The old lady smiled and said, “Venezuela.”

“Oh yeah, Venezuela. I know just the song!”

Big Mama pulled out a little book that I guessed had program settings for the keyboard. She flipped through the pages, put in some numbers, and then screamed when it wasn’t working right. A few minutes went by until she finally got the one she wanted. La Cucaracha.

“Bum, bum bum bum bah bum.”

“Ay,” shouted the old woman.

“Wait, hold on,” said Big Mama.

She fished through a dirty bag and came out with a tambourine and a pair of cha-chas. The woman had it all. Suddenly, the two Venezuelan women were dancing on the sidewalk, shaking their instruments, moving to their own beautiful rhythm as Big Mama banged on the keys and growled. They were stomping and swaying and dancing, all full of religion and sex and love. It was like the old woman had just been injected with some wonderful youth potion and had the energy of a ten year old. Bob I sat there, shaking our heads and laughing.


“You hear about the black drawers?” Old Creole asked me. Old Creole was occasionally Melvin’s runner. He’d get him food and drinks throughout the day. He was just a stick of an old man with tiny, bloodshot Asiatic-looking eyes. He’d always sit on an empty milk crate and he didn’t say a whole lot. When he did it was usually something perverted. We were all chewing on sandwiches I’d just made when Big Mama came into the conversation. Melvin was teasing Old Creole about how she had a thing for him.

“Nah, you talking about her underwear?”

“Yeah,” said Melvin. “He was teasing Big Mama the other day, saying how she was crazy and couldn’t play. So yesterday I got this big crowd all around me. They were really into it too, at least ten people standing there. So all of the sudden I see Big Mama Sunshine walking towards me. She was looking even crazier than usual. Wearin’ a purple dress with yellow stockings. So what does she do? Bends over right in front of me and him and lifts her dress up and screams, ‘Check out these black drawers!’ It was disusting. Man, everyone left right then. All my tips: gone. That crazy lady ran them all away.”

Old Creole slapped me on my knee, nodded, and said, “Dat woman crazy.”

“Shit, you never know man,” I said jokingly to him.

“Hell no. I tell ya’ this. I went to the nurse back in ’85. Had me some of that clap you know. So the nurse took one look at it and told me I better keep that sucker in my pocket. Haven’t let it out since. Not for no woman. Dat’s the truth. And I don’t understand. What’s with all this Viagra? Man, just last week my neighbor, he be knocking on my door in the middle of the night. I say, what the hell you want, and you know what, he asking me if I got any pills. And what kind of pills? He asking for Viagra. Viagra! I say what da hell you need with Viagra? Man, this place just ain’t the same. I remember it used to be speed. Heroin. No. Now it’s viagra.”

“Wait, hold on guys, did you hear that?” said Bob.

“What,” said Old Creole looking down the street.

“Shit, is that Big Mama? I think I hear her footsteps.”

Old Creole darted up like he was going to run around the corner. After a few seconds though he saw us laughing and realized we were all just fucking with him. He sat down on his crate, slapped my knee again, and said, “Laugh all you want, but dat woman is crazy.”

A few minutes later a woman walked up to Melvin and said, “Hey Jazzman, play me something good.”

Without a word Mevlin nodded, (as if it was rite of passage, as if this is what he was put on this earth to do) lifted the sax towards the sky, and belted out a high sweet-piercing E. I didn’t know the song, but the lady obviously did because instantly she was shouting out. “Yeah! Yeah!” She started to sway and snap her fingers giving the tune a steady beat. And now Melvin was really getting into it, the notes all electric and floating every which way. His cheeks were so puffed out that he looked like a jellyfish. The wheelchair even started to roll all around the sidewalk, as if it had a spiritual life of its own.

“Oh yeah, play it hunny, hmmmmmmm, hmmmmmm,” said the woman. She was shaking her hips like only woman with soul know how to do.

I glanced down at my watch and noticed I was five minutes late. Fuck it, I thought, those dishes weren’t going to miss me anyway. I mean there’s certain moments in life where amidst all the insanity things make sense, where you feel like you’re part of something special. This was one of them. I put my arms behind by head, leaned back against the fence, and as the sun lit the back of my eyes, I let Melvin and the dancing music of the street slowly carry us all away.