These Hard Sundays

“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring” – Benvolio, Romeo and Juliet Act III Scene 1

Sept. 12

This past Sunday was a hard day. And I have the heat and humidity to blame for it. The mules got called in. This happens when temperatures reach 95 and conditions are too hot and hazardous for them to work. I also saw one with a limp go back to the barn. The tourists just sat up on the buggy looking scared while the animal got checked out. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be,” they thought.

I saw a guy’s dog go down. It just laid down and wouldn’t walk anymore. We had to hose it off and pour water down its throat. One of the artists complained that people shouldn’t own dogs if they can’t take care of them. I thought to myself a little overheating is the least of a pit bull’s problems around here.

An artist everyone knows as “Mr. Pierre” was out too. He is one of the links to the old days. He always talks about the old days and he has numerous stories. Most of the former artists he speaks of always end up dead at the end of his stories. But the stories themselves aren’t about them dying. He just announces their death at the end of them as some sort of post script. “He died of cancer a few years ago” for example.

It was his own death Mr. Pierre was contemplating on Sunday. He was complaining about the heat some but mostly he complained about his wife.

“She’s trying to kill me,” he said.

I accepted it as spouting off but since I was in a bit of a “social aid” state of mind I thought to perhaps ask him if he meant she was stressing him out and it was driving his pressure up or if she was literally (making a stabbing motion pantomime with my hand) trying to kill him.

To which he replied, “I think she’s trying to poison me.”

So I need to monitor that situation more closely. Unfortunately, Mr. Pierre only comes out once a month because he lives in Assumption or Ascension or Commotion or some damn Parish west of the river. So if he ups-and-vanishes (as folks on the Square sometimes do) we will all just have to sit and wonder why Mr. Pierre don’t come out no more.

Serious marital issues aside, Mr. Pierre always outsells the majority of artists out there and rarely has a bad day. Jazz scenes on slate will pay those dividends.

Suffering

I had a case of respiratory infection this day and was hobbled and slow. A fellow artist told me, “You’re so old Lance.” WTF?

Oh, the heat. Damn the heat. I think it was compounded because everyone is now in “over this shit” mode. And they complain about it. I bitch about it most of all from what I am told. I have swarthy blood in my veins but it doesn’t mean I like living in a sauna the size of a city. I suffered through many hours working in black-and-whites with a bow tie on at a resort in my teens and twenties. You think I had AC in my ride back then? Fuck no. It was a Prelude that barely even ran! So I hate the humidity like Magua hates the Grey Hair

The artists, buggy drivers and yes, even the damn readers have suffered enough out there. Most of us have made it through intact. Bring us the cold front we deserve God dammit! The overall sticky, swampiness of the area makes all the gutter punks, drunks and hustlers more wretched.

The painted mimes suffer the worst. Blanketed with spray painted clothes and ornaments, slathered with theatrical make up. The gold guy can suffer. Fuck him. But Reuben “Robotron,” is a swell fellow and he sweats his damn ass off out there. Dancing on a box in direct sun wearing computer parts and leather is a heat stroke waiting to happen.

Know which one isn’t sweating though? The brilliant bastard that decided to take a mannequin in a sitting position and paint him all silver and put a bucket in front of him. Tourists don’t know the difference. Sometimes, the guy is at the bar drinking beer and watching TV and tourists are throwing money in his bucket outside.

This has nothing to do with the heat but the “I put Ketchup on my Ketchup” shirts are now available in a wider variety of colors and styles. In case anyone was wondering.

Aug. 27

This past Sunday was actually a bit turned down a few notches from one about three weeks ago. I was abit off because I arrived late and was set up on St. Peter almost in front of Muffin’s shop. It’s not my normal place so I felt like a strange rover there. The morning was quiet but I did observe this scene as I set up. Looks like he is thinking about mistakes he made. He finished his Colt 45 and walked off toward the river wearing a conical hat. The Old Man hasn’t coughed him up yet I presume.

Later, things got crazier. I called the PO-leese 3 times. The first was when I was walking down Royal to my pal Aaron Kellner’s apartment. He had these high-powered rare Earth magnets he wanted to give me.

I saw two cars a block up from the Cornstalk Fence and they were stopped in the middle of the road and a fella from the back car was on the street reaching inside the driver’s side door of the front car. A young lady exited the passenger side and asked me to call the police, so I did and then the bald short fella who was reaching inside the car started punching the groin of the driver, a waifish guy dressed in a hipster manner.

There was a huge break in the waif’s windshield where it looks like it had been hit with a rock or baseball. Strangely, there was damage to the front of the front car and the side of the back car.

The angry bald man saw me and screamed “they hit me and ran man! I didn’t do anything!”

I just held up my hands and shrugged my shoulders said, “Popo on the way. Popo on the way.”

The bald guy then noticed the waifish hipster getting out of the car and began chasing him around the front car in a Keystone Cops type action where they are each on a seperate side of the car and one guy goes one way and the other guy goes the other so that the car is always in the middle. Even more comically, the waif is running with the gate of a man obviously discomforted by punches to his nutsack and the bald guy is sooooo ANGRY.

The bald guy gave up on this and inexplicably tried to leave the scene of the accident he was “hit and run” at. But the front car was blocking Royal. So he screamed at the waif ordering him to move the car. He then ran down Royal toward Esplenade.

I’d been just hanging around waiting for the Popo when Aaron called me and asked what’s taking so long. So I related to him the story above and he didn’t believe a word. I told him to come on down and take a look.

Meantime the waif and his young lady friend had moved their Jeep out of the middle of Royal because folks were honking and all pissed off. This was, after all, Sunday afternoon in the French Quarter.

Aaron and I went to his very structurally unsound apartment, he gave me the magnets (which are amazing). And I headed back down Royal toward the Square and the scene of the accident. The bald man ran past me going the same direction and, seeing the roadway is cleared, jumped in his car and left.

By the time I reached the couple I ask them what happened and they said he has been chasing them for three miles and he has been after the waif for weeks.

“You know him?” I asked.

“Yes.”

So I figured: three miles (Bywater / Treme / Marigny), couple weeks, know each other, hipsters, leaving the scene of accident when Popo are on their way. Must be some sort of scandalous shit between the three of them involving who knows what. I left as a cop in a golf cart pulls up.

So there was that.

Then about an hour later. A young urban man stole a dollar (that’s ONE dollar) from silver-painted-guy-who-sits-in-a-box-and-sticks-his head-through-a-baby’s-car-carrier-on-top-of-the-box-so-it-looks-like-a-baby-with-a-grown-up’s-head. The urban kid started hollering at the silver guy that he is going to take a cut of all his earnings that day because the block of Decatur between St. Peter and Wilkinson was “his block.” I decided to call the Popo again when he said he was going to “beat everyone’s ass” and steal their money. He was also posturing in such a way that it seemed entirely possibly that he might try to.

This was a dubious start to his career as a hustler.

I must need to be more clear about the urgency of these situations when I talk to dispatchers because they never really seem to grasp that people are about to get their asses beat. This one just said, “We are sending someone out.” As if a deputy with a flash light was making his way down a dark road in a rural parish.

Well, the fighting commenced shortly thereafter and everyone kind of gathered around and an off-duty cop from some place else jumped in and sort of broke the thing up after taking off his shirt and defying his wife / fiancee/ girlfriend’s commands not to get involved. The instigator (who was either batshit or on drugs) ran off down Decatur toward Canal.

I had to call 911 again and when they asked my name I said, “Lance Vargas again.” Since this was the third time I called that day.

“I’d like to update the status of my previous call from ‘about to fight’ to ‘actual fight.’ ” I gave her a description of the guy who ran off and she said she would get someone out. Several other people must have also called because they eventually caught the guy a few blocks away.

Moments before all this, the instigator tried to shake down some tap dancers and Norbert the guitar player before making his stand taking the dollar from the silver-baby. I later found out he put the dollar back in the baby’s bowl and then demanded a cigarette which the baby wouldn’t give him. This prompted the threats and the ensuing melee. It was a short criminal career from the would-be Avon Barksdale of Decatur street.

By this time, my phone had entered, “emergency mode.” where you can’t dial any number but 911 and any 911 calls you previously made don’t show up in your phone. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I couldn’t dial anything but 911 until I removed it.

‘Ritual de lo Habitual’

Did I mention by this time I didn’t have any sales? That’s okay because about 7 people decided to buy stuff all in a 30-minute period. They were waiting in line to pay. I need someone to stand by my fence all day and just act like they love my art. You would have thought I had the new Tickle Me Elmo for sale up there. People love a mad rush. If they think they are missing out they will frantically start buying the folk art.

Soon the days events began to catch up to me. I began longing for a golden rum drink and a hot bath with some John Fahey in the background and the loving smells of my wife’s cooking throughout the house.

So I pulled the Camry into the Square, sifting through the tourists who constantly berate me for driving in a pedestrian mall, drive around to my spot and began loading it up.

That’s when I saw him. He was what was sure to be a gutter punk one day. But he wasn’t there yet. He still wore yellow. His hair looked healthy and, most telling, he had a huge smile on his face. But that’s not what drew my attention to him. What I became immediately aware of was this boy was wearing a “vintage” Jane’s Addiction shirt that had the cover of the “Ritual De Lo Habitual” album on it.

Many of my friends from 20 years ago will tell you that there was a stage in my life where I could seldom be seen without this shirt on. There was a stage when I only wore three shirts. This Janes shirt. A Cult “Sonic Temple” shirt and a Rolling Stones tour shirt from the “Steel Wheels” tour. Those shirts, Birkenstocks, a backward baseball cap and cut-off khaki shorts were my principle style one summer.

I looked for this shirt for many years on Ebay and even before the site’s recent irrelevance, I could never find it. Then, there it was in front of me on the back of a boy who looked like possibly he could use a little extra dough.

So after a very brief interlude of negotiations, I bought it off his back for $20. We both felt like it was the greatest thing ever.

Then I finished on up and went back to Pacific St. Free from the madness.

Not sure what it is about Sundays out there. I am especially examining why the collective consciousness gets ramped up on Sundays late in the summer. It might be some sort of double alignment of locals at the end of a hellacious Summer and tourists at the ends of hellacious weekends.

Whatever the cause, there is an empathic little folk artist who going grey before his time because of it.