Daily Dose # 46 (07/13/11)

A KATRINA STORY: PART 1

Watching the televised weather reports in New Orleans in the last week of August, 2005 was an exercise in fear management.

By Friday, that big swirl of clouds called Katrina filled the entire Gulf of Mexico and looked as if it was headed straight at the "City that Care Forgot."

My life had finally settled down some by that point. I was playing at a duelling piano bar called Pat O' Brien's. If not very artistically rewarding, it was the best money I ever saw as a professional musician, certainly enough to live on, get health insurance, and build a retirement fund; Maybe even buy a house.

Playing piano bar "hits" for five nights a week with Mondays and Tuesdays off ("Piano Man,"Tiny Dancer" "Brown Eyed Girl", "Sweet Caroline","Lucille", "Margaritaville", etc...) wasn't exactly how I thought I'd end up, but that cash money can make you swallow a whole lot of shit sandwich, especially when you've lived your entire life on the edge of total economic doom.

I wasn't getting any younger. At 45, you start to think about real life issues like being able to go to a doctor. I know that may seem inconsequential to some, but I had lived my whole life not having access to medical care. Having the stress an economic sword of Damocles constantly over my head (How am I gonna eat? How am I gonna pay the rent?), was a lifetime of daily stress, and I was tired of dealing with it.

Especially for a concept of "Artistic Integrity" that at 45, was looking increasingly like a bad investment as far as a life strategy was concerned.

So you start to sell that integrity off. I knew what I was doing the minute I took that gig. Instead of selling it off piece by piece, I had a fire sale and sold it all at once.

There were plenty of artistic and professional rationalizations that I had for doing so besides economic ones. I didn't have to hustle gigs. I didn't have to hump gear; just show up and sit behind a piano and play with a random partner. It was going to afford me the opportunity to intimately acquaint myself with the "Great American Songbook". I was going to learn a new skill as I had never played "solo piano" before.

Ultimately making a comfortable living playing the piano and singing was what turned me out.

If I was going to be a whore, I was going to be a well paid one. After two years, walking the four blocks from my 900 block Bourbon Street apartment to Pat O's on St. Peter's for a shift felt like walking to Uncle Charlie's world famous plantation-vibe house of ill repute. Just slam a shot of liquid courage before your shift started and smoke the occasional cheeba on your breaks for head maintenance issues: All I had to do was close my eyes, never "kiss", and give the drunken "johns" the songs they wanted with absolutely no personal emotional investment attached but yet appear to be totally invested. I got real good at faking orgasms from behind a copper coated piano.

Keep smiling, Monkey Boy... You got through the night and stuffed your pockets with mondo tip money. It'll be allright by 4am. It was routine, and it was ritual.

It was just like work at a factory assembly line, only you got to play music instead of assembling widgets. I had worked at an actual assembly line, so I had the ability to compare the experiences.

As long as the cash registers rang and you didn't fall off the pianna stool, you still had a job the next day. Uncle Charlie wasn't one for validation, feedback, or constructive criticism. He just left you alone.























I was cool with the Devil's Deal. Nothing in life is for free, and through a lifetime of experience, Satan knew I could drive just as hard bargain as he could. He may have gotten my soul, but I didn't walk out of those negotiations empty handed.

Far from it. In fact at the time, my trump card was that I knew that Satan had over-valued what he was after. My soul was damaged goods, but I hid that fact pretty well. That was his massive strategic mistake, and it resulted with me ending up with a pretty great package of perks.

There were other advantages to a somewhat normal life, with a regular schedule and finally an economic safety net below me. My aging parents could finally relax and let go of the regretfully aching "What are we going to do about George?" conundrum that had been a constant irritant in their adult lives.

I finally knew where my next meal was coming from. I could go to the dentist, and pay the bills. I could buy the dogs their own food instead of considering having to share it with them. I could start to let go of some artistic and emotional demons that had me rotating over a spit for the past eight years. But the biggest prize that I beat out of the Devil?

Amy.

Amy worked as a piano entertainer at Pat O's as well. I guess through work schedules and proximity factors, we became friends first, and then discovered a little later on that we had a mutual attraction.

I had never experienced a "May-December" romance before. The age divide between us didn't come without a set of cultural and emotional maturity disconnect problems all its own, but we were negotiating them gracefully. At the onset, a 20 year age difference indicated to me that the relationship had a pre-programmed short shelf life, but she was such fantastic soul I didn't care, although in retrospect I should have.

I was just grateful for each day she chose to spend with me.

At the time we became lovers, I truly felt that my capability of feeling love and being able to reciprocate it was no longer in my future, in perpetuity. She proved me very wrong.

In that last week of August in 2005, Amy and I were just starting to organically take those small steps to a long term commitment. Although she still maintained her Mid-City apartment, she spent most of her time with me in the Quarter. I finally had put half my clothes in storage, and made room in the actual and metaphoric closet for her to move in permanently. We were having discussions about the future, and maybe starting a family. We had even started to shop for a condo to share together in the Quarter. I never thought I'd ever have the chance to start a family of my own, and now I found myself in a position to consider it with a truly loving partner.

Things, if not perfect, were as perfect as I could have crafted them. I had a future finally, and one that was clearly mapped out and visualized.

But as that week in August ticked down toward the weekend, and as you watched that behemoth of a category five hurricane aiming dead nuts on New Orleans, no matter how hard you tried to rationalize or go into an outright state of denial, you could feel the impending doom in your bones.

Your perfect life was going to take a roundhouse punch. All you could hope for was minimal damage after the fact, and the ability to raise yourself off the canvass before God counted to ten.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #18 (06/14/11)

MY FIRST SNAKE OIL

(A Lake Boy Tale)



The first love of my life was Mary Von Zastrow. Her family lived next door to us on Gayle Road in the bucolic Finger Lake Village of Skaneateles, NY.

What does a five year old kid know about love? In retrospect, not much, but to me at that time, my undying love and devotion to all things Mary was very real.

With the exception of my older brother Alfie and Scotty Gregory, I didn't like playing with boys on Gayle Road. They were older, and they treated their little brothers like crap. They were rough. They hit, and they played with Tonka Trucks. I didn't understand them, and I never gravitated towards them. And they never lifted up their skirts in the back blue bathroom on 12 Gayle Road, and pulled their panties down around their ankles so I could initiate and then continue my life long interest in that particular area of female anatomy.

I guess I was an early bloomer.

She had a page boy haircut, and her mom always dressed her impeccably in little plaid or gingham dresses, white leggings, and patent leather mary janes. She was all girl to me, and she was my girl.

Mary and I were inseparable. She was the first person I wanted to marry other than my mother, and I would publicly declare my intent of betrothal at any opportunity, much to my mother's chagrin.

The only obstacle between Mary and myself riding off on a white steed into the sunset forever was her father, Etto.

Etto was an imposing figure. He was extremely tall and wiry, bald as a cue ball, and spoke in a low, thick and menacing Germanic accent. He had zero body fat, and his face looked positively skeletal. There was a rumor going around that he was a concentration camp survivor, or maybe a Nazi war criminal in hiding among the little kids of Gayle Road. He was mean.

All I knew was that he was having none of me. Probably because he knew just how much Mary and I were obsessed with investigating each other's genitalia every chance we got, but he never really directly confronted me with that particular parental conundrum. He just figured if he scared the beejeezus out of me, I'd keep my distance.


One Saturday morning, perhaps inspired cliche "Mad Scientist" and "Dr. Jeckyll" characterizations found in cartoons of the day, Alfie and I decided to play at fantasy chemistry. We got two plastic buckets, and started raiding the house for any type of toxic chemical we could find, along with other items such as condiments from the fridge.

We mixed lawn fertilizer with mayonaisse, a dash of vinegar, two teaspoons of comet cleanser, laundry detergent, kool aid, toothpaste, etc. All assiduously measured and the amounts recorded just in case we happened to accidently discover something of real value that might need to be re-created.

We were scientists, you know.

I think that perhaps the object of these experiments were two-fold. The first was to practice our Mad Scientist cackles and "MWU-HA-HA-HA-HA" evil laughs to perfection as we tried to best each subsequent attempt at creating the foulest mixture of toxic crapola ever known, stirring our respective buckets with Mother's wooden spoons.

The second was to hopefully come up with an accidental chemical cocktail that would smoke like dry ice, although at the time we didn't know what dry ice actually was. The reason Alfie was recording measurements and amounts was probably in case we did in fact, hit the right combination to cause that particular chemical reaction, we could re-create it for time immemorial.

So as the lazy day progressed, Alfie and I mixed noxious goo in buckets, laughed like "Eville" mad scientists, realized were weren't going to get the desired smoking result, dumped the buckets in the back field behind our house, rinsed them out, and started over again. It was a good way to pass a Saturday with your big brother.

By the time we got to the last batch, Alfie got bored. He floated a couple of ten-cent smoke bombs that were readily available at Talbot's Five and Dime on top of the goop in the buckets, lit them, and we had the cackle fest to end all cackle fests in clouds of sulpherous yellow and pink smoke.

Right at that point, I had a five year old epiphany of science.

What if the smoke bomb made the goop into something that we weren't originally looking for? What if the smoke bomb was some kind of catalyst? What if we had accidently created something like Flubber, but hadn't realized it?

Perhaps inspired by multiple Saturday morning viewings of "The Rabbit Of Seville" Bugs Bunny cartoon, where Bugs as the barber pours hair tonic and Figaro Fertilizer on Elmer Fudd's bald pate, and grows stemmed flowers on Elmer's head, maybe I had concocted my own five year old version of Rogaine and didn't know it. And if I had....

I would give it to Etto the next-door obstructionist.

If I could create a magic tonic that would grow hair atop his furrowed brow, he would finally love me as the discoverer of a miracle, delivering him from baldness and allowing Mary and I to live happily ever after with his consent!

I informed Alfie of my intent, and we designed an experiment.

So I collected six rocks, and placed them in a shoe box. Then I dug into the storage shed of the garage to find a trim paint brush, and on our backyard patio slathered five of the rocks with noxious goop, leaving one as a control.

I can remember the sun setting in the west over Lakeview circle, the sky ablaze with red and purple as I did this with Alfie looking over my shoulder. It was a beautiful and hopeful moment, and I knew in my heart that I would succeed.

As I layed me down to sleep, it was just like going to bed on Christmas eve. I couldn't wait to wake up to see the results (hopefully succesful), and then announce my triumph of science and social engineering to mean old Etto. I nodded out dreaming of Mary, and our possible impending happiness.


Well, Alfie had an epiphany as well. After I went to sleep, he grabbed a pair of scissors and snipped just enough fur off of Harvey, our family basset hound, to make it look good. And then he artfully pasted clumps of Harvey's hair on the five rocks, leaving the control rock hairless.


Just like a kid on Christmas morning, I woke up early at around 5:00am with the rest of the Rossi clan still snoozing away. I looked to my box of rocks on the nightstand, and slowly lifted the lid with the Buster Brown logo on it, praying to God for the results I so desperately needed. Buster had a page boy haircut too. A good omen. Tige not so, but I wasn't aware of Alfie's chicanery.

EUREKA! I had done it!


I grabbed the shoebox, and dashed to the Von Zastrow's front door, practically kicking it in as I leaned on the doorbell screaming, "Mr. Von Zastrow! Mr. Von Zastrow!"

The gaunt visage of Etto appeared as he slowly opened the door. He was dressed in blue striped pajamas, that due to his frame, he was swimming in.


I excitedly babbled as a five year old kid would under these miraculous circumstances and explained to him my experiment: that I had discovered a magic hair tonic and that it grew hair on rocks, see? Here's the rocks and here's the evidence and if it can grow hair on rocks it will grow hair on him and he didn't have to be sad or mean anymore and I did it for him so he would finally like me.

I was positively beaming. Radiating with love.

Frowning, Etto reached down, and with his bony index finger and thumb, delicately pulled a clump of freshly glued dog hair off one of the rocks in the shoe box that I held up to him like a gift of the Magii.

In the morning silence, he held the clump of fur aloft and against the sky, backlit from the orange light of the rising sun. He slowly inspected it, rotating his bony wrist as he did.

And then without a word spoken, he gently shut the door in my face.

After that, the reciprocal agreement that my mother and Mrs.Von Zastrow had to watch each other's youngest children came to an abrupt end. Mary announced that she was no longer allowed to even speak with me, let alone play with me.

The Von Zastrow's moved from Gayle Road shortly thereafter.

THE END

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #10 (06/07/11)

THE BEST OF TIMES AND THE WORST OF TIMES PT.I ("Falling In Love Again, Never Wanted To...")


I moved down to New Orleans in the autumn of 1997, and I got hit by lightning a year later.

My first year of my unexpected Yankee Relocation Agenda was going pretty well. I thought I was only going to be visiting "The City That Care Forgot" only momentarily to produce a the 25th anniversary recording for The Wild Magnolias, but the project went long, and I spontaneously decided to escape for good.

I scored a great little furnished inlaw apartment in the back of a mansion on the 600 block of Esplanade Avenue, and in the attached slave quarters the New Orleans offices of NYNO records was right next door.

NYNO was a joint venture between Allen Toussaint and Josh Feigenbaum, who owned a bunch of radio stations up in NYC, hence NY-NO. But the staff and the artists alike could always be found poolside in our shared courtyard. Trisha Boutte, The great gospel artist Raymond Myles, and even Mr. Toussaint himself could always be found looming about my backyard on any given day. For a skinny assed Yankee invader who loved New Orleans music with all his heart, I really was living in a surrealist dream come true.

I was picking up gigs here and there, playing with Cyril Neville and The Uptown Allstars, James Andrews, and a few others, just trying to slowly assimilate and soak up the culture. Life was slow, but sweet as the night blooming jasmine scented air.

One (freakishly to me) typical New Orleans summer night, I was walking back from a little pick-up gig at Donna's on Rampart with another Central New York musician transplant, Mark McGrain. We decided to pop over to Royal Street to pick up a bottle of wine and some smokes at the Verti Mart before we hit his apartment. I walked in, and that's when lightning struck.

She was at the counter, buying a pint of vodka and a pack of American Spirits. She turned around, her blond mane swinging sympathetically, flashed her smile, her eyes sparkling like corn flower colored stars, and gave Mark a hug. They were friends. I just stared at her dumbfounded and tongue tied. She had a sexy rasp in her voice that mere mortal men would die for to have whispered directly into their ear.

I can't even remember if he introduced us. Before I got my bearings, she was ambling out the door, and into the driver's side of an illegally parked caramel colored VW Super Beetle.

I never believed in the concept of love at first sight. My Dad, when talking about the first time he laid eyes on my Mother, always said that at that very moment, he knew that this was the women that he would marry. I never believed him until I found myself in front of the counter of The Verti Mart, staring at Miss Kimberly Ann Krohn. Now I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Me: "Who was that?"

Mark: "That's my friend Kim... and George, don't even think of going there. She's out of your league."

Me: "I'm in a league? Since when?"

He wasn't going to knock me off this path, no matter how hard he tried... and he tried valiantly that night. I was having none of it as I pretended to accept his warnings in earnest and nod my head in assent.

She met up with us at Mark's apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Cheryl. Evidently she was a piano entertainer at a duelling piano bar called Pat O'Briens, and had a few minutes to have a glass of wine with us before she hit the stage. I really don't remember much of this, because all I could do was be mute, stare, and try not to be a fool by opening my mouth and removing all doubt. I'm sure I didn't leave much of an impression.

But I did leave Mark's apartment with a prime directive, along with the critical tidbit of information about her place of employment. The actual battle plan would have to be developed, but I knew down to my toes that this women's heart would be mine, or I would die in the attempt. Victory or Death. Failure just wasn't an option.


But I'm a "slow" player. I just went down to Pat O'Brien's randomly every night, until I casually and not so coincidentally "bumped" into her.

But there was a flaw in my "stalk subtly" methodology: The dueling pianna plunkers at Pat O's appeared nightly in two sets of two, and alternated shows every hour on the hour. Every time I went down there, the alternate set of duellists would be playing, and since I didn't know how shit worked down there, I made the erroneous assumption that the pair on the the stage were going to be there for the duration of the evening. I never knew there was going to be a second pair of entertainers coming up at the top of the hour.

It was just bad timing. I never arrived during a "switch-over", so I would just show up, sit at a table, drink a Heineken, be crestfallen, and then leave depressed. I lost her before I even had a chance.

This went on for about two weeks. Flaming courtyard fountains, sticky table tops befouled with Hurrican juice, and abyssmal piano reductions of "Brown Eyed Girl" can quickly lose allure. I could only hang for twenty minutes at a crack.

But I was not to be deterred. Every time I decided to make an appearance with my chances slim, I still walked down to St. Peter Street filled with hope even though I knew there was a high probability of returning home about a half hour later with hope dashed. And for two weeks, with that dashed hope, I'd walk out of Pat O's breezeway entrance, stop at the A&P to make some groceries, and take the left turn down Royal and mosey dejectedly home; Listening to the palmetto bugs scuttling across the sidewalk in the dim gas light infused darkness. The iconic Blue Dog in Georges Rodrigue's gallery window would mock me as I walked past it , despondent. I would mutter aloud for it to go fuck itself after every failed attempt.

Kim was probably right across the street from Pat O's at Johnny White's on her one of her three hour long breaks, but I never thought to look there.

It was a typically steaming New Orleans summer. Not much going on in August, especially at tourist destination French Quarter entertainment spots. And not much going on for the people that work at them. In retrospect, my timing couldn't have been better, even though I was being the victim of bad timing in the short term.

So finally, the planets and the stars aligned, and my persistence paid off. When I walked into the piano bar of Pat O's that night, I walked into the beginning a dream. There she was, all decked out in some sort of sequined ensemble, on the stage commandeering one of the copper sheathed pianos.

Her singing and her playing outshone the dress she was wearing. I was done for.

It was the last set of the night. Again, in her presence, my cognitive and comprehension skills were short-circuited, my rehearsed patter inaccessible. But I must have made enough of an impression, because in very short order she just adopted me like the lovesick puppy I was, and took me home for the night, and the greatest romance of my life commenced.

The first night was a little bumpy, but I must have showed potential. Maybe she just was bored. But by the second, we got all the kinks worked out, and by the third we both knew we'd be inseparable lovers, so she gave me a spare key to her flat that sat atop The Cafe Brasil on the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres Street.

Not exactly pragmatism at its finest, but when you are caught in the middle of the maelstrom of an endorphin fueled biological imperative, pragmatism gets thrown out the window. The sound of her voice in my ear reduced me from human form into a puddle of gelatinous, pre-evolutionary primordial goo.

I would lie awake and wait in her boudoir, the walls painted Chinese red with a Pepto-Bismol pink trim, like a starving lion waiting for prey to pass his sight line. I had only one mission. Devour completely. And when she arrived home from work (at either 3:15, or 4:15am, depending on the rotation at Pat O's), devour I did. By the break of every day, we dropped out in total exhaustion in a bedroom that had transformed into an apres meal bone yard permeated with the sweet stench the human funk of love gone mad. My tarot card had been dealt, and my future foretold. I was a way gone daddy.

Our lifetime bond of friendship was forged in the foundry of the unbearable heat of a sweat-soaked New Orleans summer.

She was talented, charismatic and beautiful at first encounter. Everything that I was not. But as those lazy days passed, I discovered more and more. She was brilliant. Well read and whip smart, equipped with a razor sharp Dorothy Parker-esque wit. Unending laughter was part our deal. She had boundless energy, and a lust for life experience that I had never encountered in any singular human... she was absolutely fearless, or it least it seemed that way. She had a complete set of R.Crumb trading cards carlessly tossed about her coffee table! I often talk about reading and receiving the subtle signs gifts that The Universe offers everyday, but I was caught in a Universal torrential rain, and experiencing total sensory overload. The Universe broke out the sledgehammer, took aim at the space right between my eyes, and swung with all of it's infinite might to make sure I didn't screw this one up.


When she walked into a room, she commanded it. Kim didn't just walk down the street, she sashayed down it, and all attention spans followed her wake, like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and she was absolutely oblivious to what was obviously happening all around her. And I was more than happy to walk behind her, assuming the role of a long haired Arthur Miller in sympathetic vibration to this French Quarter Bohemian version of Marilyn Monroe.

Every day revealed a new discovery for me, and although I had resigned myself to a lifetime of lonliness prior to meeting her, everyday I fell down the rabbit hole of consuming adoration that was seemingly bottomless, deeper and deeper. I was in total free fall. If I hit the bottom at high velocity and ended up as a fiery ball of mangled human wreckage I didn't care, because the eventual Wile E. Coyote poof of smoke at the bottom of the canyon was going to be worth every minute of the trip.

Love, and lightning, strikes when you least expect it. Especially in New Orleans, the land of dreams and epic thunder and lightning storms.

"Lightning and Thunder; Puts the World All A-Wonder"... Big Chief Monk Boudreau of The Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Tribe.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK, WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Birth of a Dog Nation

The deal between my chronically alcoholic girlfriend and myself was this: Stay sober for one year, and we’ll get pregnant and get married.

She held up her end of the bargain, and it was a very good year for us…. so as she was ingesting prenatal vitamins and going to AA meetings twice a day, in the tenth month of her sobriety, the rings were purchased and the birth control pills were shelved. Birth certificates were excavated, and licenses applied for. The hall was booked for the reception, and regular meetings with Father LeDoux were scheduled. Plane tickets were purchased to fly both families down to New Orleans. She even made me go to “Catholic Camp” for a weekend as a premarital couples indoctrination / retreat.

And we got pregnant. The first foray into parenthood for both of us.

During her third month, she miscarried.

I’m not going to go into great detail here, for this is a story unto itself…let’s just say, as miscarriages go, this one was as bad as they get. Health care in New Orleans has always been a crap shoot, and it took three trips to the Charity Hospital emergency room to finally convince somebody that was pretending to be a qualified physician to give her a D & C….and as I held her hand, a glass vial was shoved in our faces with the contents of the procedure, the “Dr.” querying: “Wanna look?”

The period of domestic bliss (and it’s prerequisite sobriety, I feared) was officially over.

Giving herself no recovery time to heal psychologically, a few days after the miscarriage she looked at her three dogs and announced: “If I can’t have a baby, then somebody in this house is gonna get pregnant”, the only candidate being her 3 year old Shih Tzu, Dalai.


Little Dalai was about to be rechristened, “The Dalai Mama”.

I strongly advised against the idea, with a marriage, collected family invasion, a freshly unprocessed miscarriage, and a tenuous sobriety hanging in the balance. Having a litter of puppies in an apartment that already contained three dogs, one cat, and a fish whilst trying to pull all that off was lunacy, and I could see the hand writing on the proverbial wall…something was going to break, and it was going to be sobriety.

In retrospect, she knew that too…. she always needed to give herself a “rational” reason for starting to drink again. Part of the pattern.

So “play” dates were arranged with with an AKC male Shih Tzu (four dates, $500), and she got Dalai knocked up.

On a crisp night in the fall, Dalai’s pregnancy came to term and as she started to go into labor, she didn’t know what was happening. She was scared, and the safest place when experiencing any type of fear ( per example, a New Orleans thunderstorm) was on my chest.

So as I lay on the bed, gently stroking her, she gave birth to the first of three pups on my breast… it was amazing.

They say that in the animal world during times like this, instinctual “knowledge” kicks in, but with Dalai, this was not the case. She didn’t know what to do, so I had to break the pup out of his sac, rub his little shoulder blades until he started to breath, dangle the afterbirth in front of her face like a dog treat to get her to eat it, and affix the pup onto a nipple.

My betrothed had gone back to work by this time (She was a piano entertainer at Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane and Plantation Vibe Emporium). Every other hour on her breaks, she would come home to check on the process, and by 3am, we had three new Shih Tzu babies in our home, clumsily named Uno, Duo, and Treo until we could come up with something better.

It was a wonderful night. The last one we would share for a while.


DRINKING, DEATH, AND DESTRUCTION


The drinking started, and by the time we got to Christmas, the wedding had been called off, the hall had been cancelled, Father LeDoux was notified, and we barely got through the Holidaze with some family members who decided to make the trip to New Orleans regardless if there was going to be a wedding or not.

When she falls off the wagon, it isn’t a gentle climb down to the ground. It’s more like a full-on swan dive straight into the gutter. Zero to 120 mph in about three days.

So to ring in the New Year, with an apartment of 8 pets, including three newborn puppies, the drinking ramped up to “condition critical”… Three liters of vodka per day, flat on her back, non-ambulatory, defiling the bed because she can’t stand, let alone walk to the bathroom.

During these times, I couldn’t be around that scene…I could monitor it, if allowed, but I couldn’t live in it. I kept a small apartment just for these occasions, a necessary survival expense. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been to the “try and drink yourself to death rodeo”.

My basic stance was to leave, and dangle support in front of her like bait. I would only reinsert myself into her life if she got her shit together enough to be admitted into our favorite Detox center, St. Vincent Depaul’s.

I don’t know if this was right or wrong…. but at the time it really was the only viable option. She’d go on a bender, screw up our life, and then when she finally decided not to die and get into detox, it was my job to clean up the apartment after three weeks of total pet and human neglect, and try to put the pieces back together again. This was our cycle, our own dance with Doom.

One of her favorite pastimes during the bender phase was to “Drink and Dial”…. continuously torturing me, always with the intent of securing the promise that if she did make it to detox, that my support would still be intact…which of course, it always was.

It was then that I got this call, in barely translatable slurred speech:

"Uno’s dead, and Treo isn’t going to make it”

They weren’t nursing, and of course, being on her way to chat with her maker face to face, she neglected to notice.

So I scrambled down to the apartment, and broke my pact with myself. She could drink herself to death if she wanted to, but I couldn’t sanction having innocent little lives be lost as the result of that decision. I grabbed the puppies and hustled to the vet.

The vet informed me that, yes indeed, these dogs were both dehydrated and malnourished to the point that, at least for Treo, survival was unlikely…. and the most humane (and most cost effective option) thing to do would be to let her die.

I asked the vet, “Just for the sake of argument, what would I need to do to keep Treo alive?”

His response: “ You would need to insert a catheter down her throat, and inject formula and antibiotics into her stomach once every three hours…for the next six weeks. But the little one isn’t going to make it through the night.”

So against his better judgment, he hooked me up with the needed feeding implements.

I was about to become a Dad.


HAPPY ENDING

These are my children. Renamed Huckleberry (Duo) and Doodle (Treo), after another rocky two years, I finally assumed full custody after one of many subsequent swan dives.

Doodle still has the quirk of sucking on my fingers, a reminder of the many times I fed her by slipping the catheter into her stomach.

The future ex-wife is history, but this dog love is forever.

They were born in the French Quarter above the Voodoo Museum on Dumaine Street.

They were born amidst much human suffering, and they’re extremely adept at soaking that suffering up, and returning nothing but unconditional love… I know: cliché but true.

They have been through hell and back with me…from their rocky start, through a hurricane, a long separation (I had to leave town to take care of my father: Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) and my own personal descent into suicidal madness… and never once did their loyalty or love sway.

They are by my side. Constantly. (Frankly, one’s in my lap and the other at my feet as I type this little story.)


I used to say that the only thing in my life that has never let me down was my love of music and my relationship to the piano….but that isn’t entirely true.

These little moppets are also in that select company. They have never let me down.

Dog Only Nose.