DIED 2013
THE BAR FOR “CRAZY” is high in New Orleans. Same with “alcoholic” and “drug addict.” I once heard someone there explain that he knew he didn’t have a drinking problem because he stayed in on Fridays. This aspect of the city’s culture made me feel right at home when I arrived in the early eighties. My New Orleans hosts were a couple of old friends who had moved down from New York State. Now they were birds of a feather in a flock of odd ducks: underground musicians, visual artists, psychics, conspiracy theorists, voodoo queens. Their main man and direct line into the indigenous New Orleans music scene was a cadaverous guitar player who, still in his twenties, was already a legend. Though his style was more experimental punk than funk or blues, his band was everywhere, opening for the Meters or Professor Longhair, backing up Earl King or Little Queenie. He was widely considered the city’s best songwriter, though few could name a single song he’d written.
Little he said made logical sense, and he was impossible to pin down about anything. His eyes looked sad all the time. He had a young son and a wife, later another wife, and he was devoted to all of them. He was kind. Acutely aware of the invisible things around us, he had personal experience with alien abduction. He also had amazing drug connections. So amazing he eventually had to leave New Orleans to get away from them and wound up living in voluntary exile for the rest of his life.
One time, The Skater and I stopped in Atlanta to visit him and his wife. They had a rambling, two-story house with a huge kitchen. Diane took us to the farmers market, where I bought three bunches of Swiss chard for a pasta dish from Sundays at Moosewood. The details of that recipe are the thing I remember best in this whole story.
Though we had been out of touch for decades, he found me on Facebook and called when he learned he was dying. He was sixty-two, diagnosed with stage IV cancer, and since I had written about my role in The Skater’s assisted suicide, he wondered if I had any ideas for him. Other than that, he just wanted to say hey.