Chapter 9
“I’m Niznick. No shit, you don’t remember?”
Chance looked at the old man more carefully. “Oh yeah. Wow. I didn’t recognize you.”
Nizzy bobbed his head and took a long drag. A contemptuous laugh. “Well hell, that’s not too surprising. About twenty years ago my face got real intimate with the Westbank Expressway. Some cage decided he needed my lane more’n my Harley did.”
Chance winced.
Niznick smiled and tapped his teeth with a brown thumbnail. “Gotta admit, though, these are a helluva lot easier to take care of than the real thing.”
Chance looked carefully back at the thick beard and thick glasses. “Sorry to hear about that. I rode for a long time myself, though I managed to only break stuff that I can hide with clothes.”
A look of intense interest crossed Niznick’s face. “Really. No shit? I wouldn’t have expected it. What’d you ride? Not a stinkin’ rice burner, I hope.”
Chance shifted in the booth. “Well, no. Actually. BMW. I lived in Europe for a while.” He waved his hand. Why did he feel the need to explain?
A loud raspy laugh erupted, “Oh jeez of course. A robot machine.” He opened his eyes wide and nodded. “Yep. I can see that.”
Niznick pulled on his beard, and leaned back in the booth, “How the hell is Paul these days, anyway? Last I heard he’d gone to college or some damned thing. Oklahoma or something.”
“Texas, actually. Yes, he’s a general contractor in Austin.”
“No shit, a gen-rull-con-trac-tor. What’s he build, outhouses for millionaires?” His hand slapped the table with a crack. A hoarse laugh erupted from his throat, and ended with a hacking cough. He picked up the cigarette and took an exaggerated drag from it. “And what you doing these days? You still taking pictures?” He leaned forward and winked, the effect behind the glasses like a giant owl eye closing and opening. “Got any naked pictures? Can’t call yourself a pho-to-graph-er unless you get to take naked pictures.” He pronounced the long words slowly, broken into separate syllables, accenting nothing.
“Yes, still taking pictures. Did software for a long time. Navy for six years.”
The owl eyes took on a distant look. “Man it’s been a long time. Lots of shit happened.” The voice trailed off.
It was coming back to Chance, now. He’d never really been friendly with Niznick. Nizzy had been Paul’s friend, and they’d even lived in a flophouse apartment over on Chartres together for a couple of years while Paul worked on the oil rigs. Chance had drifted in and slept on their couch for about two months in ‘77.
He looked up to see the huge unblinking eyes staring at him.
“You still don’t like me much, do you?” A half smile dimmed the plastic teeth.
Chance bristled, unaccustomed to the directness. He picked up the napkin and wiped his mouth.
“Hey don’t worry about it, man. I was just remembering old times. Paul and me were pretty tight way back when. You were going to that prissy school and acted like you had a stick rammed up your ass. Even while bumming bus money.”
“Look, I’m – sorry. I guess I’ll just leave.”
“You still got the nose in the air? Got that at-ti-tude. What the hell bothers you so much? You feel like you’re slumming it here at Madmen’s ? Shit man, you came here all the time to play those machines, not nobody forcing you to be here.”
A sardonic smile creased his face, showing those white teeth. “Man, listen to me, right back to the same shit as before.” He pulled on his beard, and took a swallow from his own shot glass, then took a final drag on his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the table.
“I mean, I could never figure you out, man!”
Chance felt the old feelings – discomfort combined with a dash of contempt when looking at Niznick and the other Madmen regulars. He never understood – or approved – of the whole drug and alcohol culture. In the Navy, he was invariably the only sailor in his group that maintained a semblance of sobriety off the ship. He resented the fact that he had to haul the deadwood back to the dock, while dodging puddles of vomit. When he joined, he was told – repeatedly – that all good sailors swore, drank coffee and alcohol, and caught a venereal disease. Under those guidelines, he made a rotten sailor.
Niznick sensed the disapproval and reflected it right back. He clearly didn’t seek or require Chance’s approval, but there seemed to be some residual respect in there somewhere. Or perhaps it was homage to his long friendship with Paul.
“I don’t know.” Chance replied. “I spent a lot of time here. Brings back memories. I guess.
“You don’t come aroun’ here for what, thirty years, and suddenly you gotta see it again? There must be some other reason for you to leave your air cond-i-tioned car and be with us riff-raff.” Niznick stroked his beard, and swept the cigarette debris onto the floor with a sweep of his arm, then rubbed his arm.
“Actually, I was doing something at the courthouse. I have to wait for them to finish, and I had some time to kill.”
Niznick’s plastic ivories shined in a big grin. “You get busted or something?”
Chance squirmed in his seat, and finished off his drink and sat back. “No, it’s a, um, personal matter.”
Niznick leaned forward, and looked conspiratorial. Then he pointed a finger at Chance. “Wait, this have something to with your old man? Ain’t he dead, yet? Shit, that’s ancient history!”
Chance marveled at Niznick’s powers of inference. “Actually, yes it is about Dad. I’m just looking into something.”
The laugh was large and derisive, “Boy, how the hell did you get to be so snooty when your old man’s a thief?” The giant eyes peered at him, “Somebody with that much ‘tude is com-pen-sate-ing for something! You got somethin’ you need to tell me?” Another roar of laughter, followed inevitably by the dry, wheezing cough.
Chance’s face colored, and he looked at his hands, screw it, this was a bad idea. He stood up, “Up yours, Niznick.”
The bearded man laughed all the harder. As Chance walked away, he heard Niznick calling to him, “Oh come on Chance, don’t walk away mad, man! It’s all ancient history. I was just pushin’ your buttons, man. Don’t walk away mad!” The door closed, blessedly silencing the raspy voice.
The old saying, that you can’t go home again, certainly seemed appropriate in this case. Niznick had always found a way to needle him.
Madmen’s had completely destroyed any remaining inclination he had of checking out some more of the old haunts. Igor’s was probably gone anyway. That whole period of Chance’s life had been spent skirting the edge of the seedy underworld that was the French Quarter. In 1977, Chance endured a $70 per month attic apartment at 913 St. Peter Street with no phone and no AC. The only way he could sleep was to fill the tub with cold water, and lie in it until he drifted off.
He paid for his rent and food by playing chess and backgammon for money at Molly Maguire’s on Chartres Street across from the French Market. Most of the players were tourists. The others consisted of burn outs, hippie rejects, druggies, and other fractured freaks and were a constant reminder to Chance of how he didn’t want to end up.
It was the Summer of 1977 –the year following Pop’s conviction and transfer to Angola. They’d been kicked out of their apartment, and had stayed briefly at several places around New Orleans, shedding even more possessions with each move. Then Mother had married some idiot named Mims. A radiologist who smoked and drank with Epicurean abandon, and as vulgar as a pimp.
At sixteen, Chance left home to move into the tiny two room sublet attic apartment two blocks from Bourbon. He spent most of his free time wandering around the Quarter playing chess for money, and hanging around For Mad Men Only. He used to drop his few quarters into the slots while the juke box played “Crackerbox Palace” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“. A small stream of characters drifted in and out of the two doors open to the garbage strewn cracked sidewalk.
The proprietors of Madmen’s at that time were three characters themselves. Summer Moon and Walking Man said they were American Indians. Summer was hugely obese, her placid bovine temperament a close match to her appearance. She smoked constantly. Her brother Walker was the yang to her yin. Taller, very skinny with a fully bearded face and tiny John Lennon glasses, constantly moving.
The third was Summer’s boyfriend. He looked like a cross between Charles Manson and a Sunday school’s drawing of Lucifer. He was pierced and tattooed everywhere – long before it was cool. He was also a recent resident of Angola State Penitentiary – or at least that’s what he said. Chance didn’t press him about it, however.
At Madmen’s, Chance learned to play tournament backgammon from an old Jewish man who had recently decided to go back to his mother religion. He spoke fervently of the “Contract with God” and his father’s recent death. Like seemingly everybody else – except Chance – he smoked and drank constantly. His eyes had the characteristic yellow-red look of those twin vices.
Central casting could not have done better than the tarot reader. A middle aged woman wearing thin, brightly colored see-through print dresses with no underwear, she’d give you a reading from her tired and dog-eared deck for the price of a cigarette.
Then there was Bobby. A black man with startling bright green eyes. Always laughing and smiling. He referred to himself as a “Mary”. Chance hit it off with Bobby quite well and somehow became a sounding board for Bobby’s ongoing problems with his boyfriend. At sixteen Chance was completely clueless about relationships – much less homosexual ones.
He spent his days walking inside the four corners of his existence, completely bounded by the French Quarter: Madmen’s, Molly Maguire’s, his attic, and a religious commune on St. Phillip street that served free tea, and whose congregation seemed to be filled with chess players. Chance tried the services a couple of times, but preferred to hit Molly’s for a possible chess game.
Molly’s had three chess tables, a dart board, and no pool tables. Chance played for $5 a game, or backgammon for $1 a point. Usually, he was able to take home twenty dollars, though he was clobbered badly sometimes, too. One man, with a red beret, was famous for humbling everybody in the place. Chance played him several times, never winning.
Chance had no thoughts about the future, he only worried about scoring enough money to eat. He didn’t realize that he had become a character himself. A bit sketchy around the edges, and an object of curiosity to the others. Everybody noticed his lack of obvious vices, but he fit into the group nevertheless.
The Summer of ‘77 ended with Chance returning to his mother’s apartment after he was evicted for lack of rent. She convinced him that he had to go back and finish high school. She was damned if neither of her offspring was going to graduate, what with her being a public school teacher for twenty-five years! Guilt being her only weapon, she wielded it with exceptional effect, and Chance acceded with surprising speed.
With that, Mom packed him up in a Greyhound bus and sent him to South Carolina to live with his 70 year old Grandmother in Travelers Rest. Chance left New Orleans for a tiny rural town far away and reverted back to being a child in public school. As he passed the Superdome and myriad bridges as he made his way out of the island of New Orleans, in a clean bus, able to sleep in the cool air conditioning, it was in marked contrast from the bohemian existence Chance had led for the last several months.
It was the first time he knew a chapter of his life’s story was ending and another beginning. A conscious transition from one life to another. Chance would experience that many times since, but the Summer of ‘77 was the first time he was old enough to be able to reflect on choices he had made, and the consequences that were visited upon him.