Race Relations In Busking

Blog entry: June 29th. The guy with the drum.

Lately, an older, skinny black guy has been showing up at the Lilly Pad, on a bike with a milk crate basket on it, and carrying a bass drum.
This bass drum, he beats while singing poorly, after making some excuse to me about how he is desperate to make some kind of money, otherwise he wouldn’t be basically setting up right on top of me, making it impossible for me to do any kind of business.
He has the decency? to move about 50 feet down the street in either direction before he starts thumping away.
Last night, I wasn’t letting anything bother me, even him showing up and leaning his bike against a pole nearby me, and informing me that “I’m gonna leave my rig right here,” as if he was entrusting me with keeping an eye on it while he ruins my business.
I let go of any thoughts of anything I might say to him. I, of course thought about saying: “Dude, are you just gonna set up on top of me and ruin my spot?”
I knew that a bass drum wouldn’t be tolerated for very long, either in front of Lafitt’s or in front of any of the residencies further down, some of which I used to play in front of before being informed that even my acoustic guitar and harmonica was loud enough to leak through their walls and disturb their sleep.
I was just going to let the neighborhood run its course.
Either Lilly would hear it and come out and run the guy off, or one of the other residents. And, hopefully the guys at the bar would tell him that he couldn’t stand in front and make a racket that would bleed all the way through the candle-lit lounge to the ears of those sitting around the piano player.
So, I remained calm and tried to give non reaction a chance.
The guy walked to about the mid point between me and the bar and started hammering away.
There were a lot of black people out last night. This usually means there is some kind of event going on that has drawn them here, and they haven’t figured out yet where the black people go to have fun.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be Lafitt’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern with its candle light and piano bar and its drinks which are purposely made expensive to keep the place exclusive.
But, there were soon a group of black people around him as he beat away and tried to make them think that they were being introduced to New Orleans music.
I was able to shuck any anger that I might have had and do what I usually do in such a case, which was to use his drum beat as rhythm to my own stuff. Rather than drowning me out and making me sound garbled, I then had the addition of a bass drum to my ensemble. Little did the guy know that he was playing drums for both his rendition of “Aiko Aiko” and my “Fat Bottomed Girls” at the same time.
Within 15 minutes the guy came walking past me, cussing and saying something like “damned police showing up when a guy has to try to make a living!”
I looked, and at the corner, was parked a non nondescript white van, no police markings at all.
My first thought was that the guy was going to accuse me of having called them, but I guess the van had been there before he walked up on me, just after midnight.
He was returning to his milk crate to retrieve padded mallets to replace the wooden sticks that he had been using, apparently a compromise made between he and the police. It is part of the cops job to inform people like him that he can’t bang a bass drum 20 feet from where someone might be sleeping. He must have laid it on thick. “I’m only gonna be here until I make enough money to get something to eat,” maybe adding how long it has been since he ate, and how he was born “here” and has been doing what he does “for 40 years” and other things that he told me the first night that he showed up.
Having replaced the sticks with the mallets, he went back and soon had a group of young blacks around him. They had become energized by his exchange with the cops, most likely framing it as “police abuse of people of color” and they cheered him on, occasionally glancing over at me, especially after I had stopped playing and was basically waiting for him to leave, one way or another.
I’m sure he had mentioned to them the fact that the police let “white boy over there” play, so why not him? The obnoxious bass drum notwithstanding.
I say that he probably mentioned me because, after that group walked away from him, they walked past me, four young blacks wearing “casual basketball” attire, who began to do kind of a gorilla walk, as they approached.

The one female among them ejaculated “Aha ha ha!”
Which was echoed by one of the guy’s as in: “Ahh ha ha, you’re doing good!”

It was obvious that they thought the black guy had just brute forced his way onto the block and they were just fine with that, as if he, and their entire race by proxy, had triumphed over me and mine.

“You’re doing real good!” one of them said to me. It seemed like he thought that the black guy with the drum, who was drunk and gregarious and aggressively hustling his “authentic New Orleans music, was the victor, and me sitting there with a much quieter instrument and not engaging with people except by playing, represented the whole white race in some way, and so he, ironically became a representative to me of the entire culture of “F*** that white boy; just come in and take that spot from him, just start banging away; we’re with you!”

“Yeah, You’re doing real good...”

I started to play a Dylan song, but with some difficulty, as he had moved even closer to me. I felt an anger threatening to rise up, but, once again just took a deep breath and thought about “the whole picture” and how this situation might fit in.
So, instead of yelling anything to him, I just waited.
Soon, one of the bouncers from the bar came out and said something to him.
Then he had an exchange with one of the pedicab drivers parked across from the bar. Those drivers also like to crank up their pedicab stereos to ostensibly attract customers.

Then, something interesting happened.

A group of Latinos emerged from the bar and were able to pass by him without any money exchanging hands, but they stopped in front of me.
It was three pretty tough looking guys along with a woman who reminded me of my friend Jacob’s mother and who smiled.
I started to play, and, within a few seconds, so did the drummer.

“One of the residents is gonna come out and tell him he can’t do that,” I said to them, adding: “I’m not going to do anything.”
“That’s alright just play.
Their response was interesting and to the effect of; don’t worry about him, he’s just a drunk, we didn’t give him anything, we want to hear you.
I thought about how much I have always liked Latinos; how I am learning Spanish and I shop at the Ideal Market, and how I truly have warm feelings towards them which I think they can sense. It felt like karma coming home to roost.

I played, and they listened. About a minute into my first song, they seemed to determine that I was worth tipping the 4 dollars, which they did -one from each of them- and then the woman asked me to play another song.

I even had the thought flash through my mind that, if I were to tell them that I had been on the spot first and he had encroached, then they seemed like the types who would walk over and tell him in no uncertain terms that he was stepping on my hustle and that it wasn’t cool and that he’d better leave, type of thing.

“Are you gonna give me 20 bucks? I’ll leave here as soon as I make 20 bucks, I need to feed my family” is, I’m sure the kind of response they would get from him.

At around 1 AM, the guy came and got on his bike that I had guarded, and just rode off.

I played for another hour and made the bulk of the 17 dollars that I took home. A typical Friday night during the slow season when frugal tourists arrive here, utilizing all kinds of “off season discounts” on hotels and meals.

Now it is time to go back out on this (Saturday) night.

I slept until about 4 PM, probably having dosed off around 8 in the morning.
I tried to think of what was making me feel lethargic and kind of toxic. It was either the sugar that I had sprinkled on my popcorn the night before, trying to make home made Cracker Jacks by adding walnuts to the mix. (I have been keeping an eye out for the Cracker Jacks people to catch the wave of “variety in everything” that pervades current society and come out with Cracker Jacks with walnuts, cashews, macadamia...12 new varieties of them, with different colors bands across the classic box cover touting “new!” Brazil nut flavor, or something) or it was the popcorn itself -I had stopped eating corn, beginning with corn syrup for almost 2 years, and have just started on popcorn again, since it is such good fiber...

So, I did well with the Latino community last night, but not so much the blacks, but thankfully no race riot broke out over proponents of the drummer vs. the acoustic guitar and harmonica player and singer.

But, I go out tonight with the standard butterflies in my stomach, and a few extra flitting around.
I might text Lilly, who might keep her ear out for thumping in the night, and come out and run him away.

Plus I have the usual regrets of not having added any new songs to my repertoire. I was reminded twice of this.

Once after I knocked off last night and heard the piano guy playing “Wild World,” by Cat Stevens inside the bar...I could have done that song, I know it... and then again when I was in the Goodwill Store buying a couple books and another song came on that I used to do almost nightly but have forgotten about...