6.

The last thing was the worst thing we never did. It was Wayne and me on the prowl, Saturday night in the Big Easy, though nobody except tourists called it that back then. Both of us were legitimately single, not screwing around on some innocent girl at home sewing our letters onto our jackets. No, high school had left us behind like the last ship to leave Elba and we were mired in the real world of college and shitty jobs. Wayne had not yet found God or the police force and was open to almost any sort of skullduggery. So there we were at some Tulane bar drinking nickel draft and hitting on the chicks. I was always a failure at that sort of thing. Bukowski said to avoid bars and churches but I hadn’t read Buk yet and knew no better. I thought alcohol and pheromones were a good combination. Our experience that night indicated otherwise, or just how far astray a man might go if he was lonely and angry and drunk and immature and generally a piece of shit. Which was me. Or how far Wayne might go, a lonely man with the memory of a pizza face and no girls ever walked up to him and said, “I want to fuck you,” which is what happened that night at a bar on Claiborne Avenue. And there we were, the three of us, Wayne and a blonde from Missouri and me, drunk and giggly and going for a ride in the Honeybee. I had decided that we were going to do her, me first, then Wayne and he thought that was a brilliant plan. Missouri was drunk and high and cared not a whit. As Wayne wheeled us randomly through the uptown streets, she and I made out in the backseat, pulling at each other’s clothing. I’d given her a fake name and Wayne giggled every time she used it.

“Stanley,” she said. “No.”

Yes, she said no. Maybe I was simply imagining what she said earlier, the whole part about wanting to fuck. If so, why was she here in the Honeybee with two guys she’d known for less than an hour? Why had her friends let her leave? Didn’t they know how dangerous and stupid this was? And shouldn’t someone teach her a lesson?

“Stanley,” she said. “Take me back to the bar. Stanley, please. Please don’t do this.”

And she was crying, terribly afraid. Wayne looked over his shoulder when we stopped at a light. He was still smiling. If I had started punching that girl in the jaw he would have laughed like it was TV wrestling. If I had ripped her blouse off and pinched her nipples, raised her skirt and yanked down those panties put on so prettily earlier that night he would have still been smiling. If I had destroyed that girl’s life, utterly ruined her mind, ended her college career in New Orleans, shamed her family, shamed hers, shamed her friends and of course shamed Wayne and me and everyone who ever lived to breed us, he would have still been smiling. I had taken him that far; farther than I ever wanted to go. It would have made us brothers in a way we never would have intended. I wonder if Wayne would have joined the police force if he had raped that girl with me. I wonder if I would even be alive to have that thought. I might have simply thrown myself off a bridge with a long fall to ask forgiveness for the worst night of my life.

But of course that didn’t happen. I told Wayne to turn around and take this whiney bitch back to the bar.

“Thank you,” she said, moaning. “Oh thank you so much Stanley.”

“Stanley,” said Wayne with a laugh. He made his voice high-pitched like a shrill housewife. “Stanley, I need you to take out the trash.”

The light changed and Wayne made a u-turn, taking us back to the people we were before we left the bar, before we let ourselves almost give in to the worst side of our souls. I’m grateful we didn’t cross the line. I’m sure Wayne is too. The only gift I could ever give him was not leading him so terribly astray. If there’s a heaven, he’s in it, that special place where dead policemen go to watch over us mortals. There they are in their ghostly squad cars, patrolling the Earth, fulfilling their mission of saving us from ourselves.

5.

The irony of it all is that Wayne always wanted to live and I always wanted to die. That must be the case because I was hell for leather for throwing everything and everybody away. I saw death as a calm and easy escapade, something one could pull off effortlessly as if they’d trained for it their entire lives. Yet somehow the messenger would survive his execution, the suicide mission would return, the martyr would climb down from his crucifixion to applause and good reviews. I didn’t know how to live my life back then, gobbling it up in great irresponsible gulps. Meanwhile Wayne worked on his car.

He had graduated out of the Honeybee into a 280 ZX. It had some mileage on it but had been well-maintained and when you punched it, it took over the road. He wouldn’t let anyone else drive it. He barely allowed himself to take it to work. Every nickel he made at whatever job he was doing went to the car. He would live with his mother until he got married. A situation that precarious was bound to unravel. His only love was the Z. His car defined him as a person, a powerful motor inside a thick torso; a bit plain yet somehow exotic as if Wayne had returned from a foreign war, years after it ended. The car and the man, the man and the car. With a roar he’d leave my apartment, blazing a trail of new self respect down the street.

The night his car was stolen he collapsed in an alcoholic fugue. That’s why the roach had to die.

A cockroach the size of a silver dollar made the mistake of wandering onto the counter top about midnight. At that point Wayne was on his tenth beer since he’d learned from his sister that his car was gone from the driveway. To his credit he hadn’t cried. He’d simply sat there watching us play Mexican, drinking his way through a case of Coors. He watched the passing of the cup with the rattling dice and the lying that was the sport of Mexican and his eyes were dead chunks of coal in a pasty pie face topped with tufts of thin red brown hair and his entire mien was that of a man who knows that his wife is a whore or that the news from the hospital is bad or the job called and said You’re fired! He wanted to die that night even as we were so fucking alive. The music was playing the hits of yesteryear. The girls were pretty and underage. The carpet was dirty and the toilet was jerry rigged but the beer was here and cheap and we all smelled of good cologne to cover the sweat.

And the roach wandered onto the counter top and the girls screamed and Pete jumped up because he hated cockroaches and I just watched as Wayne took an ashtray and slammed it down on the roach. Bam and that primordial monster was immobilized. But not dead. Crippled beyond the ability to escape, it struggled in its own acidic juices while Wayne prepared the flame. Then like a modern Torquemada, he went at la cucaracha with hammer and tongs. I lit a joint and laughed as the music got louder and the roach burned. The aroma was not unpleasant and mingled with the ghetto weed we were smoking back then it had the atmosphere of some 60’s cult. We continued the game. Mexican! Everybody drink. Wayne kept after the roach, burning its separate parts for hours, the roach battling on, struggling against death. If it felt any pain I’m sure we would have heard it, those cockroachy screams. But I don’t think a roach feels shit. At least I hope it doesn’t.

In the morning there was a black blister on the Formica counter top, a future reminder of the roach and better, simpler times.

4.

The first year of college had come to an end. There were some victories. I had made the LSU football team as a walk-on defensive back. I had gotten a good bit of playing time in the intrasquad scrimmage, the first and last time I would ever play in Tiger Stadium, a.k.a. ‘Death Valley.’ I had broken up two passes that I could have intercepted and I had gotten my bell good and rung, so good in fact that my neck would possess the muscular recall for years. I’d done okay in my Honors class, slogging through the Middle Ages, engaging Born Again’s in debate in which they found themselves rejecting Christ himself for his humble origins. I had also lied, cheated and stolen, collecting a cornucopia of bad karma. Somehow I had managed to retain the love of JW through the infidelities and thefts, through the dip in my reputation, through my rejections and failures. None of this had come without a price. LSU had informed me that I wouldn’t be welcomed back in the fall.

So I packed my shit and put it on the curb in front of my dormitory. Wayne pulled up in the Honeybee and I loaded it with clothes I didn’t need, books I didn’t need, stuff that would have served me better if I’d set it on fire and walked away. I was on all the wrong paths back then but the most devastating was the need to acquire cool stuff. Wayne didn’t care. He had his crappy jeans and a tight-t-shirt across that barrel chest. He laughed at the thought that we’d be packing two more people and their gear into his compact car.

Again, this was me, overextending, telling a friend we had room, ignoring the mountain of shit that JW had. When she heard I’d offered Roger a ride back to New Orleans, her mouth dropped.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “We’ll never get all of our stuff in Wayne’s little car.”

Ah, but we did. Wayne took it as his personal mission to fit luggage and boom boxes and curling irons and extra blankets, shoes galore and three human beings besides himself into that tiny car.

“Heh, heh,” he said as we jumped on the Interstate for the hour drive to the Big Easy. Roger was wedged in the backseat like a hidden bottle of booze. JW was on my lap with bags piled in front of us blocking half the windshield as well as the passenger window. Wayne navigated using one mirror and his mother wits. Of course we survived. Hell, we thrived on those pressure situations. That was Wayne, always ready to save the day.

I’m sure he hated me, to tell the truth. I was decent enough to him but the way I treated JW made his bile rise. It had to. She was as lovely as a rose, smart and gentle and ready to laugh. She exuded sensuality, grace and charm. She was way too good for me and Wayne knew it. He accompanied me on many of my forays through New Orleans to other girls’ houses. He remarked favorably on my Playboy status, a girl at school and a slew of girls back home. I must have thought I was a trained dick back then. Through it all Wayne just smiled and gave me a ride. But he loved JW. It had come right out in the open last semester. Once JW found out about me and the Ghetto Girl she held nothing back. She told me about how she’d kissed Wayne in her dorm room the day she moved to Baton Rouge. When I confronted him about it he looked me square in the face and said, “I love her.”

“Good, “I said. “She needs a lot of people to love her. I can’t do it alone.”

3.

We painted houses and talked Saints football. That’s how the summer before junior year passed. My parents paid Wayne and I to paint the trim on our nearly new brick home; a few neighbors saw us working and when they heard our absurdly low fee, they hired us out. This was all Wayne. I was simply the muscle who lugged cans and ladders and could be trusted with the roller but not much more. He had the hand of an Italian, those deft brush strokes as he worked around the little panes on the French doors, taking the pride of a craftsman with every move of his frame, every bit of evidence that he had ever been there. I just wanted it to be done. You could only get so sun burnt and so hot under the relentless New Orleans sun before you fell in a heap next to the azalea bushes and sucked down your body weight in ice water and sweet tea.

And always the subject was the Saints. Would this be the year that they finally won more than they lost? Our goals and their goals were so dim. A winning season, that’s all we wanted. It was like taking a class and striving for a C minus. But that was the reality of the Saints fan. Only three years ago the fans were wearing bags on their heads. Then Bum Phillips had come to town with his belt buckle and his cowboy hat and his passel of strange Houston Negroes, some of whom were ex-drugheads, a dangerous ingredient on a troubled team. Scandal after scandal had surrounded the Saints' teams of the late 70’s. It seemed reasonable to assume that drugs had been a factor in the team’s underperformance. How many times did they stride out to an early lead only to get pummeled in the second half? Clearly their special medications were wearing off. What was needed was a clean slate and Bum seemed to provide that. Run the football and stop the run. It was an admirable philosophy, one that recalled the era that had molded Bum. Tough football. We drank the Kool-Aid because we knew no better, though we should have. One need look no farther than the Saints’ own division to see the future of pro football. It was called the West Coast offense and it had already brought the 49ers the first of many championship trophies. Meanwhile Bum was stuck in 1970 when Vietnam was still hitting and grown men feared for their lives. Football had been different back then, more pressure, more violence, cheaper shots, dog eat dog. The game was changing. The players were realizing that they were essentially on a universal team and the enemy was the owner. The game needed to become more finesse-driven to protect those finely molded frames of muscle and bone.

That’s what I was thinking as we argued about starting quarterbacks. Wayne favored the Snake. I was a Wilson man. Each had their valid points. Ken Stabler was as grizzled as a trapper, a hard living Huckleberry Finn immersed in the body of a 90 year old man. He had one move when the pass rush came: duck. That was it. He couldn’t throw much farther than I could and he smoked cigarettes on the sideline during games. But he was the crafty old veteran who’d taken the Raiders to the Promised Land and thrown a lot of touchdowns to Biletnikoff and Branch. It was Stabler who brought the Raiders back from a 35-14 deficit that beat the Saints on Monday Night Football in 1979, a paralyzing loss that epitomized everything that the Saints of that era stood for. It was hard not to root for that dirty old man. But I liked Dave Wilson because I wanted to be Dave Wilson. Tall and blonde and strong-armed and freckle faced, he was California Tom Sawyer and he looked like the future on wheels. But those wheels had already taken a lick. The previous season against Houston, Wilson had taken a hit to the knee that shocked the schoolboy genius right out of his body. He’d never ever be the same quarterback but I couldn’t face that knowledge and neither could he and neither could the Saints. So I argued for that strong arm and those good looks and Wayne just smiled and said, “Shake ya’ Snake.”

The best part of the day came at the end when the brushes were washed and the hands were clean and our sweaty bodies were done with painting or hosing or scrubbing or whatever stage we were at in the job. Then we’d take Wayne’s car, the Honeybee, a Datsun B-210 painted yellow with a little bee on the door, down the road through the expanding neighborhoods of New Orleans East to a Time-Saver convenience store where they never asked for your ID as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing when you put a 6-pack of Tallboys on the counter and said, “Gimme a half pint of Bacardi Amber” when the man asked you if that was all. 99% of the time we were successful in procuring the adult rewards for our underage selves. Then it was time for the ride.

The ride is everything and nothing. The ride is the best part of living but you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it with just anyone. It has to be someone who doesn’t talk a lot. It has to be someone who can See, really See this world with all its fabulous beauty and all its cruel surprises. It has to be someone who appreciates a vintage 7-Up sign. It has to be someone that thinks the sound of crickets is one heartbeat closer to God. It has to be someone who can match you beer for beer and yet never get drunk. It has to be someone who likes music that you abhor like Country and watches shows that you avoid like pro-wrestling. That way you have things about each other that are uncertain. You see the humor where once you saw the mundane. You hear the keening sound of hearts breaking in a Texas wind under a Texas moon. You see the world anew on the ride with the friend who takes the ride with you, who drives and laughs and shakes his head at the stupid things you do and the stupid things you say. I miss those rides.

2.

One night when we were 18, we borrowed John William’s Trans Am. TC’s older brother had no more use for the old warhorse, barely 5 years old and already beaten to shit. But the motor was still strong; it rumbled at the stop lights and could take almost anything on the streets. Wayne and I put on ties and oxford shirts and set out to cruise the city. We were both in college, me at LSU, Wayne at the University of New Orleans. JW and I were still together but I found it more convenient to pick up other women without her. Wayne was always on the lookout for the girl of his dreams. He’d been burned badly in high school when he fell in love with his foster sister. That had gone over like a fart in church and now he was banned from St. Bernard Parish. No matter. We had booze in our veins and a boom box in the back seat (the car stereo was long gone) and several hundred horsepower at our fingertips. We rumbled up and down St. Charles Avenue, stopping off at places where we were nobodies, Fat Harry’s and AT II’s, bars that catered to the Tulane crowds. We were white trash shit bags and we knew it but we looked handsome and we had a little money to drink and the night was ours if we wanted it. So what if our best days were already behind us? So what if I was destined to fail out of LSU, break up with JW, throw away my friends and family like so many peanut shells? So what, so what. That night was a time.

We were stuck in traffic on Canal Street when the heckling began. A car full of assholes started yelling at Wayne and me. Fag, stuff like that. I guess we might have looked like a pair of queens but we weren’t, we were just nice boys. Not to those dudes we weren’t. They leaned out the window and spit on the car. They shouted obscenities and even got out of their car to come tap on the window. Wayne and I just sat there, feeling like the biggest pussies in the world. Without a gun I was gutless. I hadn’t been in a fight since 8^th grade. My stomach clenched and I laughed uneasy. But I was worried, and only got more so as they followed us into the French Quarter. Once I lost them on a U-turn, but they managed to maneuver their way back into traffic and eventually got several cars ahead of us. We rolled up the windows and locked the doors as two of them got out at a stop light and approached the car. They had their shirts off, skinny fucks, and I wondered where my courage had gone. Lord knows Wayne wasn’t about to kick any ass. He kept cracking the same lame jokes until I asked him to put on some music. He pressed play on the tape deck and ‘In the Air Tonight’ filled the car. Outside my window was a gay basher, bashing a non-gay.

“Get out of the car,” he said, trying to start a brawl in the street in front of Jackson Square. Cabs and mule drawn carriages were pulled against the curb. Tourists poured in and out of the Café du Monde. The light changed. Their car, propelled by traffic, moved forward, leaving two of their companions, shirtless and stupid in the streets. I stomped the gas. Now we were following them. Wayne laughed and turned the music up. ‘And I have been waiting for this moment for all my life.’ Cars peeled away and soon I was right on their ass. The Quarter was a maze of one-ways streets and they’d fucked their buddies good, leaving them blocks behind with little chance of getting back.

“We’ll see how bad ass you are now,” I said, trying to sound like the tough guy I wasn’t. Wayne laughed, heh-heh, more at me than with me. He’d seen what a gutless wonder I was and was probably wondering if I even knew my own words. But I did. I wanted some kind of revenge for the feeling of helplessness and pussiness I had felt. Maybe I would be a coward forever but tonight I could ram this steel monster into the back of their Ford Escort and kick a little Jefferson Parish ass. ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord.’ Wayne turned the music louder as I chased those shitbags out of the Quarter and onto Rampart Street. They pulled a fast U-turn and I followed, the Trans Am easily keeping up with them. But they had seen too many episodes of Starsky and Hutch or something because they slammed on the brakes and I crashed into the back of their car. Wayne and I jumped out of the Trans Am. Our red ties swung in the air above our sweat stained yellow button downs. Our penny loafers slid on the asphalt. I ran at the driver who had gotten out of the car.

“You guys don’t feel so fucking tough now, do ya punk? Four on two is the way you play? You assholes.”

Both of them stood in the street looking at us. They were kids, skinny kids who’d borrowed mom’s car. Wayne surveyed the damage.

“Your taillights are all busted out,” he said with a laugh. Meanwhile the Trans Am looked the same, beaten and scraped but still capable of inflicting great damage. Traffic honked. We were blocking half the street. All of us returned to our cars. I put the Trans Am in gear and pulled away.

You’d think we would have been satisfied with this outcome but of course I wasn’t. We sped back to TC’s house where we found him asleep and his new Celica in the driveway. Like the jewel thief I had always wanted to be, I slipped into his room and snagged his keys. Minutes later we were on the streets again, and this time we were armed. Wayne had raided the sports closet and retrieved a golf club and an aluminum baseball bat. I had raided the liquor cabinet and retrieved a gallon of gin and a half gallon of scotch. With these as our fortifications we set out to find our tormentors. What were we thinking? Were we thinking at all? Did we really think we’d find those guys, shirtless, standing in front of the fountain across from Jackson Square, waiting for us to come assault them with deadly weapons? We cruised for an hour, finding nothing but the memory of how stupid we were. We took sips from the scotch and chased it with gin. We cranked the boom box as Phil Collin’s ‘The Westside’ filled the car with feelings of longing and alienation that we’d never be able to recreate. At last we headed for the Fly, the park that overlooked the Mississippi River. It was closed until dawn but I sped past the signs, hit the railroad tacks like a demon and raced over the hill. The place was deserted and I sped past the soccer fields and the concrete concession stand that somewhat resembled an abstract butterfly and then took the turn fast through the parking lot where we usually came to drink and watch the sunset. My turn went wide and I lost control of the car briefly. We jumped the curb onto the grass, the tires spinning, sending plumes of dirt and sod into the air.

I saw them just in time. A man and a woman were on a blanket in the grass. She was on top of him, their half-clothed bodies caught in the wicked white lights of the Celica.

“Oh shit,” said Wayne as I jerked the wheel to the left. The car fishtailed, nearly crushing them on their blanket. A cloud of dust enveloped their terrified faces as I screeched to a halt. Wayne and I jumped out of the car, the music blaring, the engine running, the brake lights glowing up the predawn darkness like a camp fire.

“Are you all right?” I called to the couple.

“Yeah,” said the guy.

“Assholes,” said the girl.

The 99^th Name

1.

We had spent so much energy trying to not get busted by the cops it made sense that one of us finally crossed over and joined the Man. We were proud that Wayne was doing his duty, keeping New Orleans protected and served. The Fuzz had always seemed like an alien species to us, enigmas wrapped in sky blue. Some were corrupt, some were cool, some were racist, some weren’t. We had all gotten for busted at one time or another for public urination, trespassing, no driver’s license, speeding, etc. Actually, all of that had only happened to me. I was by far the most incorrigible of my friends but by the time Wayne joined the force I was living out of town or even out of the state. I didn’t warrant his protection if he would have even offered it to me, which is doubtful. I was still the same old chucklehead but Wayne had changed. He’d taken on all the trappings of adulthood that I was avoiding. He had a wife and a steady career. He was raising her daughter from another marriage and they had their own baby in the oven.

The NOPD took him out of the squad car and put him behind a desk, not because he was inept but because he was one of the few officers who could handle all the paperwork. Wayne had failed out of Ben Franklin high school because he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up with the work but now he was the man of letters for the boys in blue. But friends said he craved the action of patrolling and thus it was natural for Wayne to volunteer for extra duty if it got him out of the station and on the streets. He loved New Orleans the way a man loves his mother. She may be an old bitch with tons of problems but she raised you and loved you and no true son would just sit back and watch her go under, drowning in her own crime and filth and disease. I had never felt that way, though I loved the city too. Perhaps I had just fucked up so many times that I couldn’t ride the streets without passing numerous sites of my disrepute. Wayne put all that behind him and so there he was one night, training a rookie cop on the graveyard shift when they got a call from the dispatcher. Armed robbery at a bar in the 9^th Ward. Wayne and his partner were the first to arrive. As they pulled up alongside the bar, the robbers burst out a side door and opened fire on the squad car. The rookie, who was riding shotgun, ducked as the bullets passed over her into Wayne’s neck and head.

Wayne’s wife was staying at her mother’s house in Pass Christian, Mississippi. At 4 a.m. she received a phone call from the New Orleans Police Department. Something had happened to Wayne but they could provide no further details. In any event, she needed to get to New Orleans ASAP. The cops put in a call to the Mississippi State Troopers who gave an escort to the state line. There she was met by a pair of equally stoic and silent officers who proceeded to escort her all the way to Charity Hospital. With a trooper in front and a trooper behind they whipped through the darkness pushing what little traffic there was to the side. She had carte blanche to drive as fast as she wanted but she had borrowed her mother’s truck and there was a governor on the motor that prevented the truck from exceeding 100 miles an hour. Crying and praying and pounding the steering wheel, her foot mashing the pedal to the floor, knowing nothing but her own worst fears she stared at the green 99 shining out of the dashboard like a beacon of hope in a storm tossed sea. She raced time itself to get to her husband and our friend before he expired from this plane but she never had a chance. Wayne was DOA at Charity and all that was left to do was make funeral arrangements and begin tracking down his killers.

All of that would happen. The cops would catch one guy that night and three more the next day and within a year or so all were on death row in Angola State Penitentiary. Wayne’s face was all over the front page on the Times-Picayune, more famous than any of us had ever been. He looked the same as he had in high school, the thin hair and uncertain smile, the tragically handsome and pockmarked face, the look in his eyes that said you could ask him for anything and no matter how assed out you were, he’d say yes. He’d drive you places, lend you money, forgive your excesses, indulge with you, outdrink you, try a new drug, go along with any hare-brained or criminal idea. That was Wayne and there he was in his blue uniform under a headline that screamed ‘Officer Slain.’

I missed the funeral, but I understood that no eye remained dry. Friends tried to talk about him and failed. No one could tell the story of Wayne because no one really knew who he was. Father, friend, husband, policeman, high school and college graduate, once a sinner, now born again, but who was Wayne? The NOPD had an answer. They put Wayne’s name on the list of officers killed in the line of duty. There’s a plaque with that ever growing list down at City Hall. Wayne Russell is the 99^th name.