New Orleans, 1980s
The wild dogs moved in a tight pack on the back streets of the French Quarter—late late at night and early early in the morning in the Jack-the-Ripper fog filled streets.
The first time Gina saw them, she had just smoked a joint of bad weed with Little Jimmy. They stood, frozen in fear, while the emaciated dogs growled as one. The dogs—a bony mass of anger and hunger—moved past them toward Burgundy Street. “We’re too skinny to eat,” Jimmy said. They walked on wooden legs to the weekly room on Dauphine he shared with his father Larry, a Bourbon Street doorman. “Can I crash on your floor tonight?” She wanted to be inside, behind closed doors.
**********
A new girl started working at the Bourbon Steamboat. Molly from Ohio. Curly blonde hair, bright blue eyes, an open faced friendliness that intrigued Gina.
Gina clued Molly in on the Steamboat regulars. “The black kids stash their shoeshine boxes behind the counter. They tap dance on Bourbon till the cops come, then they run in here, switch their tap shoes with their tennis shoes, stash their tip boxes, grab their shoe shine boxes so they can—”
“How do they know the cops are coming so fast?”
“One kid’s always the Look Out. They take turns.”
“But why do the cops hassle them for tap dancing but not for shoe shining?”
“Nobody knows.”
“I have a lot to learn. I can use it in my book. I write stories. I wrote one about when my parents got Divorced. I was fourteen and my sister was eleven. We lived in the Suburbs and our life was perfect-until-then, know what I mean?”
“No.” Molly’s life sounded like Life on Mars to Gina. “Here come the Hustler Boys.” A pack of good looking teenage boys, shirtless in tight jeans, sauntered in the door.
“The sign says No Shirt No Shoes No Service!” Molly called out.
Dino and Lucas and Ben and Pablo rolled their eyes, sat at a table near the street.
“They won’t be wearin shirts till October. Fat Phil don’t care, long as they spend money. And they got money.” Gina was jealous because the Hustler Boys made more money turning tricks with older men than she did, running errands.
“Why do they walk around with no shirts on?”
Lucas pulled out a twenty. He was the best looking of the boys, with honey blond hair and a deep dark tan. “We’re advertisin. Advertisin a nice sale. Gimme a draft an some fries, an five bucks in quarters.”
Lucas plunked quarters in the jukebox, picked out rock songs, played the pinball machine with the energy of a ten year old. “Born in the USA!” blared from the cheap speakers, mixed with Bourbon Street’s ever-present soundtrack of Dixieland Jazz and chattering drunks.
Molly dumped frozen fries in the basket of sizzling hot oil. “I can give you some.”
“Thanks.” Gina bummed a cigarette off a tourist. “The girls only come in with their pimps. They don’t have as much freedom as the boys. There’s the drag queens, they drink and fight. Don’t ever get inna middle a two trannies.” She pointed at a trio of pimply faced kids playing air hockey. “The drug dealers, they work for Bourbon Street Bob.”
Molly nodded. Lucas grabbed his food and went back to the pinball machine.
“The rest of your customers work in the restaurants and bars, the dancers, doormen, cabbies. And the tourists. You make every penny you can offa the dumb tourists and conventioneers. Curly calls em marks. You always give the Locals a deal. It’s called Street Prices. Don’t say nothin to your boss Fat Phil.” Gina crunched on her fries. “I gotta go, I’m helping Curly sell Lucky Dogs tonight.” He was an old Carney who worked the giant hotdog-shaped cart at the corner of Bourbon and Conti.
“What took you so long, kid? I gotta go to the can, didn’t wanna leave the wienie wagon alone. They all steal, just like the carnival.” Curly got up off his stool, took a few slugs from a half pint of Seagrams Seven he kept stashed in the pocket of his red and white striped jacket.
“Git yer Lucky Dogs! Git yer red hot Lucky Dogs here!” The band at the corner club launched into a lackluster rendition of “When the Saints go Marching In” for the twentieth time that night.
Molly changed after she got raped. She lost that bright blue eyed look. She didn’t tell stories about her parents, her sister, their pool, family vacations.
Gina tried to cheer her up. “You describe the guy, I could find someone. Take care a him.”
Molly poured two drafts. “Mom wants me to come home. She knows something’s up.”
“How?”
“I call her every week. She pays for my phone. I barely make enough to pay the rent, even with a roommate. I don’t know how Working Class people make it.”
Gina drank her beer and ate popcorn Molly made. “What’s the guy look like?”
“The police’ll get him. You can’t just hurt him.”
“He hurt you.” She leaned over the bar. “In this town, it costs fifty bucks to off somebody. We need to get the money.”
The Ohio wide-eyed look came back to Molly’s face. “You can’t just KILL somebody.” She started to cry. “I think I’ll go home and go back to College.” She twisted a clump of her curly blonde hair, tears falling down her round pink face, pain in her formerly friendly blue eyes. Molly was four years older than her, but Gina felt protective. “I wish it was me that guy hurt, instead of you. I coulda handled it. I coulda handled him.”
Gina stood in the doorway of the Bastille at Toulouse and Bourbon watching Crazy Dave hold court with several fellow bikers, a sidewalk commando, and a baffled tourist couple who obviously walked in the wrong door.
“I been shot. I been stabbed.” Dave lifted his black Harley-Davidson T- shirt to show off his scars. He pointed at Gina. “The best gopher on Bourbon Street. Know what a gopher is? They ‘Go fer this’ an ‘Go fer that’. She even brings back the change.”
“We gotta talk,” Gina tugged on Dave’s vest, pulled him out the swinging doors to Toulouse Street.
“Don’t touch the Colors, kid.” He posed on the sidewalk, pulled out a comb and ran it through his long red hair and beard, squinted into an imaginary mirror. “You workin the card games by Johnny White’s Saturday?”
“I guess. Hey. Could you, you could take care of a guy who—raped this girl—a nice girl?”
“In the Quarters?”
“By the Moonwalk.”
“Your credit’s good. Get me the details. Don’t tell nobody.”
“Any errands?”
“TK just called me. They busted some guy, he slipped his gun behind the bar at Shakey Jakes. Get your backpack and the bartender’ll give ya the gun and then ya bring it over to my crib. I can’t go in there. Place is fulla cops. Here’s my keys.”
“They won’t notice me?”
“You’ll look like a school kid with a backpack fulla books. Ten bucks.”
“Twenty?”
“You drive a hard bargain, kid. OK, fifteen.”
Speed the Pimp came in the Steamboat every night to walk Molly home. Speed sold bunk drugs to tourists and pimped both girls and boys. Everyone hated him, even the other pimps.
“She’s going with that squinty-eyed creep?” Little Jimmy asked. Tourists thought Jimmy looked like Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter. One girl even asked for his autograph. “Why would a pretty girl who’s EDUCATED—go with Speed?”
“She’s seeing what this life is like, she’s writing a book. Then she’ll go back to Ohio, and College.” Gina put quarters in the pinball machine. Jimmy joined her in the game.
Bourbon Street Bob popped in, looking for his teenage dope dealers. They weren’t in the Steamboat, so he adjusted his bowler hat and red bow tie and darted out the door.
“We need to find another place to crash. The rats are gettin bad in Dad’s room. An we’re gettin kicked out, he ain’t paid the rent in two weeks. You know Larry. Spends every penny on Heineken.”
“Yeah. You wanna see if any a the doormen or dancers need smokes?”
“Nah. Let’s hit the gay bars and get someone to buy us drinks. Bloody Mary’s are the best, cuz you get a stalk of celery an a cucumber.”
They split Bourbon Street and headed down St. Peter to Rampart. The wild dogs followed them, moving in a smooth silent mass.
© Copyright 2016 by Sara Jacobelli
I live in New Orleans and write fiction and nonfiction.
