Boomer at Jazz fest

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Boomer

Or

Jazz Fest Caretaker Chaos

That reminds me of the time my daughter Hypatia sent her son to stay with me during Jazz Fest, his name is Boomer; she named him Boomer, short for Boomerang, because she swore that as he was being born that he actually tried to do a 180 to get back inside her womb. He was eleven when he showed up on my doorstep; well, shown up isn’t the exact word for it, there were a series of miscommunications, ignored phone calls, emails and texts gone wild, wide, overlooked and consequently missed payments of attention that I alone was guilty of. In short, I had taken myself ‘off grid’ for my sanity and well being and hadn’t clue one regarding his impending arrival.

One afternoon I received a call from my neighbor “there’s a kid sitting on your porch and I don’t recognize him/her, you ‘specting somebody?” In New Orleans, ‘specting can be either suspecting or expecting (or a combination); so, I was a little apprehensive when I pulled into my parking space.

“Yo, G-Pops!” and I knew who it was. A rangy kid who was generally up to no good, blue eyes looking over Ray Bans, a fauxhawk mullet hair cut, oversized plaid wool shirt over a Grateful Dead tee, faded jeans and CT high tops. He was slouched in an un-natural position in a wicker chair, lap top computer in the crook of his leg; the very image of me at that age, only this one was stealing my Wi-Fi.

“Fine thanks, how’re you” I said sarcastically “and what in Sam Hill are you doin’ here?”

“Well, oh grand poobah of mine, it seems that I’ve been given a hiatus from boarding school, mother dear is off on a water aerobic yoga meditation macramé bikini retreat located inside an Indian casino and nobody home but the goldfish and the Ficus Benjamina; so, not wanting me to pull a Macaulay Culkin, she put me on the dog (Greyhound bus) and sent me down, don’t you ever answer your phone, email, OR texts? I could eat a cow, let’s get some chow and chew the fat”.

Remember when you were that age? hormones are starting to wake up, voice changing, hairs starting to sprout in peculiar places, face erupting (or threatening to), feet  growing (along with your nose); too old for kid stuff and too young for adult past-times. For the entire stay I would be peppered with questions, opinions, wishes and rejections of anything thought to be below the dignity of this little ruffian idiot savant man-child with a mind full of whys and why nots ? And, he was all of that.

His life was full of new tastes and newer situations, there were no basis’ for preconceived notions of experiences, and he wasn’t taking answers like “because I said so/ know so” because… they were not answers at all.  He was more feral than house broken, more curious than educated and more insecure than proud of who he was; and, where he was going was a mysterious adventure place because he had no conception of where the road ahead could lead? Just like me.

Off to the Fest we go. “Why are there such long lines, why do they have to search my bag, why can’t I have a beer, why are there so many old people on stage and that port-o-let smells like three day old skunk road kill”. “You’re not really gonna eat that, are you?”

At a certain age, I believe a person can lose the talent to willingly give up an inclusive world and spend waking hours exclusively focusing on the needs of another person. I ran the gamut of emotions from insult to impatience; petulance to selfishness; arrogance to martyrdom. Being on call (or AWOL) to/from a person that occupies a position of being more important in my life than me is not my cup of tea; I took that on begrudgingly because there was no one else around to foist that responsibility on to.

I have friends in nursing homes that need visiting, neighbors that can always use a helping hand, and projects that I have left half finished or neglected up the wazoo; but, I can still even at my age, turn my back on f**k all, get a cold one at Liuzza’s By The Track and watch Jeopardy in the early evening and to hell with accountability. Not so when you have a full time whatsis that you’re learning to accept as part of your twenty-four hour day. I feel great empathy for all motherhood.

The first day at the Fest, I handed him a Jackson ($20.00 bill) and told him to get lost; and spent the rest of the day looking for him. The next day we walked around together and he explained his life and times as we ate all the kid friendly food that we could find. Day three we sat on the bleacher steps powering down every sweet available and made fun of the people passing by.

Dinner was pizza or tacos, breakfast was at Betsy’s; he got used to me insisting that he brush his teeth, put sunblock on and stop saying “F**KING HOT!” whenever he saw a female that he found attractive. We ate junk food for two weeks until his mother called him home.

Waiting for the ‘dog’ to board, I admitted to him that I had had a great time. “So I can come back, eh?” he said. “Sure” I replied.

As he was boarding the bus he turned to me and yelled “hey! Your fly’s open!” I looked down, covered my crotch and found that he was lying; I looked up and saw that he was laughing his ass off at my expense. I shook my head, smiled and walked back to my car, knowing that I would miss him.

Mister Okra

Mister okra.

By

Phil LaMancusa

New Orleans, La.

Arthur ‘Mister Okra’ Robinson

Born: June 8^th 1943

Transitioned into Eternal Rest: Feb 15th 2018.

And so it occurred; a seventy-four year old black man with a catchy moniker kicked the bucket. And this concerns us how? Consider this: the obituary was picked up no less than by the New York Times, changing the question to: ‘who was Mister Okra and how did his passing relate to us as New Orleanians?’  As a vehicle to your awareness, Mister Okra may have been the last of the New Orleans street vegetable vendors.

As Sophia Petrillo would say “Picture it! New Orleanians for hundreds of years before the advent of super markets and box stores had their own network of commodity sales people; back road entrepreneurs with mule drawn wagons, pushcarts, old flatbed trucks and even wheelbarrows.” To get services into the neighborhoods in need of everyday necessities; peddlers, collectors, hawkers and hucksters roamed the streets. The ice man, the tin man, bread, seafood, produce, poultry, coal and comestibles coming around the corner and down your block bringing supplies to your door; any dinner diva, culinary consort or harried housewife would look forward to having a visit from the vegetable wagon singing out with the produce of the day. Such was Mister Okra; threading the streets of New Orleans singing “I got the mangoooz, I got caaaabidge, I got onions and watermelon red to the rind!”

Not only in the French Quarter on Levee St. (Decatur St.), where a visitor wrote in 1816 that he saw at least five hundred merchants selling their wares, but in Back-a-town, Pidgin Town, Gert Town, Bucktown, Treme and the lower wards, seven through nine (upper and lower) independent merchants looking to turn a profit by offering selection and quality to the populace. Such a man was Mister Okra, his father before him and his daughter after him; you’ll have to look close and patiently on our streets to realize that for all their disappearances, vendors still exist; walking our streets, driving through our neighborhoods, parked by the side of the road.

It’s a fact that most people can walk down the street and be unaware of things going on around them that their brain registers as S.E.P. (Someone Else’s Problem); so I challenge you. Walk through the French Quarter as many times as you have and tell me if you’ve seen Clarence on his never-ending route, selling bananas and other fruit to shop keepers, store owners and even street performers; most folks just call him ‘The Banana Man’. Have you seen the ‘Tamale Man’? ‘The Cake Man’, ‘Empanada Lady’ and where the heck has the ‘Pie Lady’ gotten off to? There’s a guy that shows up on street corners in the lower French Quarter with a scale and coolers of fresh shrimp; seen him? The vegetable man parked on Carrolton?

Nowadays, food trucks, pop-ups and side of the road pickup trucks with fresh produce can be seen and registered in people’s minds who know such things exist; the rest who stroll with purpose, drive with abandon or just are apprehensive about paying too much attention to their surroundings miss this heartbeat of the city. They side step beggars, drunks, hustlers and the homeless with a blind eye hoping that by not seeing, they won’t be seen in return (S.E.P.); I don’t blame them, the city can be a scary place.

Mister Okra was an anomaly, animatingly dissimilar, you almost didn’t think that he was real; I mean, who goes around through neighborhoods selling produce from the back of a garishly painted truck (with an a-frame roof no less)? It must be some kind of joke or stunt, Candid Camera, right? Wrong.

Mister Okra picked up his produce from a produce company. Years ago this was not singularly the case. Pre-Katrina, ladies in the neighborhoods would grow stuff in their back yards; one might be growing greens or tomatoes, okra, herbs etc and the produce sellers crisscrossing the city would also barter with them, trading goods for goods and selling any excesses to others. Also savvy produce companies would sell, for cheap, cosmetically imperfect, near ripe or sometimes over ripe items to these journeyman entrepreneurs; tomatoes, bananas, onions, potatoes and other vegetables that wouldn’t last over time at a brick and mortar retail market.

Mister Okra’s father sold in the street, he was known as ‘Okra Man’. Mister Okra has passed and his daughter now has taken over the business; Lady Okra.

The question is: are we getting too civilized for such shenanigans? I think not,  almost thirty percent of our population here lives below the poverty level and it seems like the time for real people selling real food to real people at reasonable prices is more than ripe; convenience stores are just that, a convenience, and they actually raise their prices almost twice that of super markets; however, there are those folks that don’t have the means to get to those larger outlets and besides there are still large areas that still don’t have larger markets (since Katrina!). Farmer’s markets are trying to pick up the slack; but, where is the new generation of street peddlers (we need them) or are we too good for that?

What we want to do now is what, as citizens, we do best: support our local street vendors, ice cream trucks, grilled oysters, food trucks , lemonade stands, and of course, Lady okra when she passes by. Look into your neighborhood for the grandma that still makes and sells huck-a-bucks (ice cups) to the kids after school or the family having a supper, barbecue or fish fry right up the street. Learn who your people are and help yourself by helping them; after all, what is a second line without a hot off the grill pork chop sandwich and a cold one from the back of somebody’s pickup?