"Can You Make A Living Doing That?"

• 41 Dollar Friday
• Sugar Blues
• Worried 'Cause Mom Hasn't Written

I was certainly ticked off, as I stood waiting for a trolley.

I had just missed one, as I stepped onto the platform a little after 10 PM, thinking that I could be at the Lilly Pad by 10:45 PM.

Instead, I wasn't on board one until almost 11 PM, and didn't pluck my first note until about 11:35 PM.

When I knocked off the final time and went to the Quartermaster, their clock read 2:24 AM.
$14.90/Hr...
So, I gather that I played about 2 and a half hours and made 41 bucks, with nothing larger than the three five dollar bills that were in my stash at the end of the night, meaning that around 20 people threw me tips, which bodes well for the current season that we are in.

Out of 20 people throwing tips, I stood a 50-50 chance of any one of them throwing a 20 or higher.
So, it could easily have been a 60 dollar night, which was kind of the goal I had in the back of my mind.

I had been determined to play for 4 hours, come what may. My fingers were tired after 165 minutes, and I would have had to rest them for 10 minutes before continuing. I will definitely need to consider a nylon string guitar, like Dorise Blackman played, if I ever want to partner with Tanya Huang...

This is kind of a "reality check," in the sense that; busking for 4 hours on a Friday night, when there are a good amount of tourists in town, is a pretty good yardstick for measuring how things are "going," and answering the recurrent question of: "Do you make good money doing that?" or, more pointedly: "Can you make a living doing that?"

Just how lucrative busking is at a particular spot needs to be gauged using at least a 3 hour time sample. You can't just sit down and play for 20 minutes; and make a determination. Some of my best nights started out with myself making nothing the first 20 minutes, and then ended with 50+ dollars after, say, 2 and a half hours.

It kind of feels like it either takes the tourists that long to determine that I can actually play, and am not just skeezing, using a guitar as a prop; or it takes them that long to determine that I am there for the long haul, putting in the hours (which is respectable to some) not just there intent upon running the first tip I get directly to the beer store; giving it the appearance of being a more serious "profession."


It might take about a half hour for some of them to see me there a second time, on their way to and from the Quartermaster, or Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern. A lot of times it is as if they are consumed by their quest for whatever they want from the Quartermaster, hoping they can find it, that it will be open, and that they make a sandwich that they will like, etc.

And, they will likely be carrying loose change after having broken a 50 dollar bill in purchasing a couple sandwiches, a bag of chips and a soda.

It might even shade their perception of my music towards being of a quality commensurate with the best sandwiches (Quartermaster or Verti-Mart), po-boys (Nola Po-Boys) hamburgers (The Clover Grill) in the French Quarter, along with the best powdered cocaine (the skinny black kid with the red sneakers) weed (the older black guy who sits on Lilly's other stoop) and other things on the block.
"This is just world-class everything," they might think while deciding that a 20 dollar bill is  appropriate for the Bob Dylan guy under the spotlight.

I used to look at things more "cosmically," and think that I was being put to a test of some sort, by the Great Music Spirit, by having to play a whole 20 minutes without getting a single dollar, to see if I can put aside my material aspirations and continue to play "for the right reasons."

Along with imagining that there is, perhaps, a young lady in a third floor room, laying back on her bed with her window open, and my music drifting in, and myself just happening to be playing a song that has some meaning to her, perhaps one that she had just been humming to herself on her way home, or something...

"Name It And Claim It"

Along with that (which satisfies the need to be playing "for someone," even while being ignored by everyone in sight) I also often imagine that someone has just thrown a tip in my otherwise empty basket. That is a prime example of the "name it and claim it" type of mindset that some organized religions extol.

Some "think and grow rich" type of books also promote this mechanism, telling people to think about their car, for example, as already being the Porsche 944 that they are dreaming about owning; "when you are washing it, repeat 'I'm shining up my Porsche now'" as you do it.

Soon, reality will align itself to your model of the universe, and you will attract the 944 and conjure it into your garage. I suppose if you don't have a garage, you could repeat: "There, I just put my Porsche in my garage," after you've parked the Kia on your packed dirt driveway.

There is some overlap between the two, because most of the people who attend those kind of churches seem to be "praying" for expensive cars and the like.

"I gave my heart to Jesus, and one week later, I got 50 thousand dollars in the mail! That's my testimony..."

So, that too, helps me to play with the right attitude -picturing someone throwing a tip before it actually happens.

This is only an issue during the first half hour or so, when the first dollar thrown is going to mean being able to buy a can of cat food and then walk the 2 and a half miles home; the second dollar, being able to ride the trolley (and get Harold his food more quickly) and the third dollar, maybe a cheap cigar that I can break open and roll into cigarettes to get through the night, etc.

There is a certain dollar value at which I stop worrying about money. This is right around 12 or 13 dollars, after I scoop about 10 out and safeguard it in my back pocket, leaving 3 or 4 in there that I don't have to stress over some punk grabbing and running off with.

So, I was pretty angry over not having made it to the Lilly Pad until about 11:35 PM; especially after having knocked off my blogging around 9:30 PM, and having "made a beeline" to the spot.
Right now, it is 9:22 PM, on this Saturday night.

In order to not repeat the same mistake as last night, I will be shooting for the trolley that comes around 10:15, so that I can play for 3 hours and knock off a little before 2 AM.

I have a small bud of potent weed that I know better than to smoke any time before my arrival and tuning up at the Lilly Pad.

My strings are old. I think that any one of the dollar tips last night could have become a twenty dollar bill had I had that little bit of extra glimmer from a new set of strings.

I'm still recovering from "the month of Travis," and won't be up to speed with new strings and a new harmonica until at least next weekend.

I broke the "d" string last night, but continued to play on Canal Street, after having encountered David the Water Jug Player, who sold me the 5 dollar bud, the second half of which I have ready to go for tonight; and the first half of which, I rolled and smoked with him.

This led to me taking the guitar out and inventing "music for guitar minus d string," alongside David until just about 4 in the morning.

Pretty soon, they'll be starting to talk about you-know-what, only a few months away, now

I ate too much sugar when I got home and learned a lesson about it, after having woken at my normal time of about 1:30 PM, and then having gone back to sleep because of feeling dead tired.

I had just enough time to drink a cup of coffee, throw this laptop in my bag, and make it to the Uxi Duxi 20 minutes before they closed at 8 PM. I am sipping a double shot of "green bali," and have been at this post for, I guess, almost 2 hours now.

The 41 dollar night will be followed by whatever tonight brings; and there is a Saints game at the Superdome tomorrow (Sunday) and I hope to grab my little spot under the little stairwell outside one of the entrances to the place.

The Superdome was built to the same dimensions as the Pantheon in Greece, David the Water Jug Player told me last night; giving a good example of the kind of things you talk about after you take a few tokes of potent weed.

Humankind has evolved since the days when thousands of people would watch a man being killed and devoured by lions for entertainment, I thought, as I sat there talking to David the Water Jug Player; glad that Travis wasn't there to present a lecture on Ancient Greece at the time.

"Now they suspend an NFL player and put him in jail if he stages fights between bulldogs," I mused, thinking that this denoted some kind of progress, in the way of civilization.

"I guess the Pantheon must have seated about the same 70,000 as the dome, David..."