I was seven years old in June of 1954 when my dad and I drove from Miami to New Orleans to visit his friend Albert Thibodeaux. It was a cloudy, humid morning when we rolled into town in my dad’s powder-blue Cadillac. The river smell mixed with malt from the Jax brewery and the smoke from my dad’s chain of Lucky Strikes to give the air an odor of toasted heat. We parked the car by Jackson Square and walked over a block to Tujague’s bar to meet Albert. “It feels like it’s going to rain,” I said to Dad. “It always feels like this in New Orleans,” he said.
Albert Thibodeaux was a gambler. In the evenings he presided over cockfight and pit-bull matches across the river in Gretna or Algiers but during the day he hung out at Tujague’s on Decatur Street with the railroad men and phony artists from the Quarter. He and my dad knew each other from the old days in Cuba, which I knew nothing about except that they’d both lived at the Nacional in Havana.
According to Nanny, my mother’s mother, my dad didn’t even speak to me until I was five years old. He apparently didn’t consider a child capable of understanding him or a friendship worth cultivating until that age and he may have been correct in his judgment. I certainly never felt deprived as a result of this policy. If my grandmother hadn’t told me about it I would have never known the difference.
My dad never really told me about what he did or had done before I was old enough to go around with him. I picked up information as I went, listening to guys like Albert and some of my dad’s other friends like Willie Nero in Chicago and Dummy Fish in New York. We supposedly lived in Chicago but my dad had places in Miami, New York, and Acapulco. We traveled, mostly without my mother, who stayed at the house in Chicago and went to church a lot. Once I asked my dad if we were any particular religion and he said, “Your mother’s a Catholic.”
Albert was a short, fat man with a handlebar mustache. He looked like a Maxwell Street organ-grinder without the organ or the monkey. He and my dad drank Irish whiskey from ten in the morning until lunchtime, which was around one thirty, when they sent me down to the Central Grocery on Decatur or to Johnny’s on St. Louis Street for muffaletas. I brought back three of them but Albert and Dad didn’t eat theirs. They just talked and once in a while Albert went into the back to make a phone call. They got along just fine and about once an hour Albert would ask if I wanted something, like a Barq’s or a Delaware Punch, and Dad would rub my shoulder and say to Albert, “He’s a real piece of meat, this boy.” Then Albert would grin so that his mustache covered the front of his nose and say, “He is, Rudy. You won’t want to worry about him.”
When Dad and I were in New York one night I heard him talking in a loud voice to Dummy Fish in the lobby of the Waldorf. I was sitting in a big leather chair between a sand-filled ashtray and a potted palm and Dad came over and told me that Dummy would take me upstairs to our room. I should go to sleep, he said, he’d be back late. In the elevator I looked at Dummy and saw that he was sweating. It was December but water ran down from his temples to his chin. “Does my dad have a job?” I asked Dummy. “Sure he does,” he said. “Of course. Your dad has to work, just like everybody else.” “What is it?” I asked. Dummy wiped the sweat from his face with a white-and-blue checkered handkerchief. “He talks to people,” Dummy told me. “Your dad is a great talker.”
Dad and Albert talked right past lunchtime and I must have fallen asleep on the bar because when I woke up it was dark out and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving across the Huey P. Long Bridge and a freight train was running along the tracks over our heads. “How about some Italian oysters, son?” my dad asked. “We’ll stop up here in Houma and get some cold beer and dinner.” We were cruising in the passing lane in the powder blue Caddy over the big brown river. Through the bridge railings I watched the barge lights twinkle as they inched ahead through the water.
“Albert’s a businessman, the best kind.” Dad lit a fresh Lucky from an old one and threw the butt out the window. “He’s a good man to know, remember that.”