I Fianally Go To The Doctor

• Uncle Louie Arrested: "Freeze!!"
• Ear Drops And Antibiotics

"Uncle" Louie, used to do his thing by the dock, where the Natchez steamboat landed.

I lived underneath that wharf, so Louie and I became acquainted.
There was always something a bit "guarded" about him, and I wondered at times if he didn't like me.

One such time was upon running into him the second time after having spoken to him once before.
I thought his name was "Melvin," and called him so. Then, when someone else entered and addressed him as "Louie," I corrected myself.

He seemed offended that hadn't remembered his name, but it was probably just that he was uncomfortable with any (especially a white) guy probing him about his name.

If I had mentioned Jacksonville, Florida to him when talking about some of the places that I have lived, then that could have made him uneasy.

As we all learned from the Edgar Allan Poe story: "The Telltale Heart," living with lingering guilt and constantly having to "look over your shoulder" is the onus that even people who "get away" with a crime have to live with.

Louie was arrested a week ago for a murder in Jacksonville that took place in 1974. I guess they always had latent fingerprints, lifted from the crime scene, but it probably took Orleans Parish this long to update their files, or digitize them, or whatever.

There is some wisdom in coming to New Orleans to "disappear" because the police are not likely to mess with you over something petty. Last night, I just about blew pot smoke into the face of a couple cops that walked past me, as I was taking cover from the rain, under a canopy in front of the Radio Shack on Canal Street.

One guy in Massachusetts whom I was in jail with, who was a black man 20 years older than me, who had been to New Orleans, told me that neither one of us would have gone to jail here for what we did.

His analogy: "When you go into a little country store and you eat a strawberry out of a container, the store owner might raise hell and throw you out of the store. But, if you go to the Chicago Mercantile you will see so many strawberries that people will be crushing them under their feet...."

Louie has a "talent" for remaining pretty much motionless while he performed. You can barely see his rearward hand tremble slightly.

He did a lot of this by locking his joints into place, in fact, in the picture to the left, whomever took it had snapped the photo either before he had assumed his pose, or right as he was snapping out of it, because his rear foot is not perpendicular with the front as it is when he "locks in."