The Saga Of Cajun Johnny-With Johnny Thibodaux In Mind

By Seth Garth

 

Cajun Johnny was a piece of work, a genuine last of the Mohicans as the gang around Zack James’ old Riverdale neighborhood, the Acre, used to say about some of the local mad monk wild boy characters who enflamed their fervent imaginations. If Cajun Johnny had been born and raised in the Acre no question that he would have fit in, maybe been a leader of the corner boy pack that hung around Owen Wilson’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street almost every Friday and Saturday, every Friday and Saturday night they were either date-less or dough-less, or both, which was fairly often so they knew each other’s dreams, desires, and cons inside out. See though Cajun Johnny was not born there, not born and raised in Riverdale in high holy liberal Massachusetts, the home of Presidents and other scoundrels. Johnny was born and raised as his moniker implied down in Southwest Louisiana, down in the bayous, down in Cajun country. Down in Liberty, a small town just outside of Lake Charles, the biggest town nearby.

Hell the Cajun could trace his ancestry all the way back to east of Eden, to the forced expulsion of his people, French people who had come to America back in the day, back in the 1700s from Arcadia up in Nova Scotia when the British had beaten the French in one of their interminable wars. You know the story, the sad tale the guy with three names, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote Evangeline about one aspect of the trail of tears to the swamplands. Yeah, Johnny could trace his people back to the first Thibodaux, old Pierre, who had been run out of Rouen for pig-stealing or something like that just ahead of the hangman. So maybe the Cajun’s wildness was in the blood, in his DNA.

Funny that Zack and the Cajun would have a long, weird relationship with each other since although both men had come up in utter poverty in their respective hometowns Zack had gone to college, had been the first in his family to do so back in the 1960s when that meant something around the Acre where most people including many of his corner boys had barely finished high school, if that. Zack had turned his love of writing into a career by joining that love with an ear for music and had for almost forty years been able to eke out a free-lance livelihood writing reviews for too many publications to mention here.

The Cajun on the other hand had barely finished tenth grade, had run away from home several times, the last time after rifling his father’s strongbox to grab some United States Savings Bonds that Johnny’s father had purchased after a settlement in a youthful car accident in a supermarket had left the Cajun injured. The father, Jean to give him a name, had expected to give the bonds to Johnny when he turned eighteen to do with as he liked. Johnny had cut that idea short and had run away to go west to California and see what that was all about. He had gotten as far as Kansas when the money ran out and he was being held in Topeka for vagrancy when Jean got the call to send money. The old man had refused and Johnny spent fifteen days in the pokey, his first serious brush with the inside of a jail-although not the last. After all that whirlwind experience the Cajun had figured that high school had nothing left to offer him so he just quit. Figured he would earn his way in the world by his smarts, his street smarts.

The Cajun and Zack had met one night in 1988 in Lucky Pierre’s the famous nightclub off of Bourbon Street in New Orleans now gone thanks to Katrina where they had a “Cajun Night” every Thursday night to bring in the Cajun workers who had migrated to jobs around the town from the going nowhere fast Cajun country. At the time the Cajun was working on an oil rig out in the Gulf to earn his cache for a big undertaking he was planning (in the end that plan busted up and Johnny went belly-up since he was working a variation on the old pyramid scheme but had stayed with it too long and somebody, somebody big in size if not in brains had caught up with him and broken a couple of his fingers for him). Zack was down in New Orleans working on a free-lance project for Rolling Stone after the success of the movie The Big Easy had sparked a revived interest in Cajun music. An editor had commissioned him to go down and get a feel for the music and the people who created the music to while away their Saturday nights, or some nights. Zack had been told before he left for New Orleans on the assignment by a gal who had gone to school there at Tulane that Lucky Pierre’s on a Thursday night would give him an idea of what the music was all about. Perhaps an entree into Cajun country if he could meet somebody who could help him with that problem, since she, and others, had warned him not to go deep into Cajun country without some references, without somebody to vouch for him. Not if he expected to get the story he wanted since although a generous and vocal people they did not open up to strangers just because they thought the Cajun music stuff was “cute.”  

Armed with that advice one Thursday night in March of that year Zack found himself sitting at the bar drinking a scotch, his favorite drink of late then, listening to The Lake Charles Boys, an up and coming Cajun band whose roots were from around Lafayette deep in Cajun country. While he was sitting there, notebook and pencil in hand writing a few notes this long, tall, slender good-looking guy with brown hair and browner eyes with a shit-eating grin on his face came up to him and asked him if he wanted to roll the dice for a drink. For whiskey. Zack figured what the hell maybe this would get him the entree he needed to do his article up right. So yes, bet. Bet and lost until five drinks later he called it quits. Told the Cajun that his luck seemed to be running the wrong way that night (he would not know until one night several years later when the Cajun was drunk as a skunk that those dice were loaded, the whole thing had been just another one of his low-level cons).

Still he wanted to talk to the Cajun, sensed that they were at some level kindred despite the Cajun’s rough talk and shifty eyes that would not look at him directly when he was speaking to Zack. (Zack had had his own problems with his own shifting eyes while growing up especially when his overbearing, over-weaning mother was on the warpath about something erratic he had done, Zack’s kinder term for the experience, and he would not look her straight in the face since she was usually right about the incident in question. It had taken him a long time to get over that but he did get over it so he had some sympathy for the Cajun on that score and that trait was not by any means a deal-breaker.) Something about Johnny, about his whole persona, the obvious swagger, the classic bull-shitter-in-residence reminded Zack of his old corner boy Frankie Riley, old map of Ireland Frankie, who was always on the con, was always hustling something, or trying to hustle someone including Zack until they became friends and then it turned into dragging him into some nefarious caper which would not end up well and Zack would wind up shifty-eyed facing his mother on the carpet.

Frankie had in the extreme that “wanting habits” curse that all the corner boys who hung around those long ago bowling alleys in Riverdale, including Zack who took a long time to get over that feeling that the world owned him a living, that because he was born on the wrong side of the tracks somebody, everybody should feel sorry for him, should pay up one way or another to make it right in this wicked old world. But like with the shifting eyes he got over that as well, although it was a close thing, a very close thing. Those wanting habits that gnawed away at utterly poor working class boys like him, Frankie, Jack Callahan, Timmy Riley and a bunch of those who roamed in the midnight shift who saw what the world had to offer and no way to get at it. That was the look Zack saw in the Cajun’s lying bastard eyes.

Maybe too it was the way that Johnny had conned him, a con Zack should have seen coming a mile away and would have in the old corner boy days after he got wise to such stuff hanging around with Frankie. He sighed when he realized that he had gotten “soft” once he got some dough and respect in his pocket. Had had to laugh later that night after the bar closed and he was heading back to his hotel room about Johnny’s con. Made him think of the small ideas guys went through hoops to get dough for, usually some bet that would bring in loot, small change stuff just like the night that Frankie Riley, bless his soul in hell, had conned Zack into betting on how high Tonio the pizza-maker at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor over on Thornton Street could throw the pizza dough in the air. Of course that was before Zack and Frankie were buddies and Frankie had seen Zack as an easy mark. Zack had lost four dollars that night, a lot of money then if not now especially for a working-class kid who had saved the loot for a date with a girl at the high school who Frankie sued his ill-gotten four dollars to take on adding insult to injury. He would not find out until later when Frankie pulled the gag on some other sucker that he had already put the “fix” in with Tonio to go low. Jesus.

So Johnny and Zack talked until closing about this and that. That night, after hours of talking and getting the Cajun’s take on his people, his people’s music which he was exceptionally knowledgeable about since his older brother Lucien had played for the famous old time Cajun Swingers out of Baton Rouge for many years, he decided to “hire” the Cajun to take him down to Lafayette, the latest hot spot for Cajun music. (By the way as an example of what even a classic small change con man can charm himself into Lucien, whom Zack would meet and stay friend with for many years and who provided more information about Cajun music than Johnny could ever dream of, would also provide more than his fair share of bail money to get Johnny out of some latest scrape once old Jean stopped doing so after about the tenth offense, mostly petty larceny and unarmed robberies, conning, kiting checks, stuff like that.) Johnny agreed, they discussed terms, and they were to meet the next day in front of the big black statute of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans in the war of 1812 for those interested, in Jackson Square. He gave Johnny his telephone number at the Hotel Paris where he was staying (also long gone curtesy of Katrina) in case he needed to get in touch with him the next day in order to make additional arrangements.

About four in the morning Zack, having just dozed off to sleep after working over his notes once he got to his room, got the first of what would be many calls from the Cajun. This one from the police station down in the 9^th District where he was being held for car-napping, stealing a car (and “joy-riding,’ a charge later dropped, although at first thought why a forty-something man would engage in such a kid’s stuff prank was beyond Zack’s comprehension except that this was a prime example of  “pure” Cajun as he would find out later when he told Zack he had meant to use the stolen car for an unarmed robbery of an all-night gas station but he got caught doing seventy-five in a thirty mile an hour zone. He would get six months, suspended on that one.) Could Zack bring some bail money down so that they could go the next day down to Lafayette. Zack thought about it for about two minutes and decided to cast his fate to the winds.

So Zack James big-time free-lance reporter for Rolling Stone when that meant something began a whirlwind relationship with one John Thibodaux. They did go to Lafayette, although not until a few days later when Johnny got out of the can due to some other offense problems on his sheet. There Zack met first the very helpful Lucien and a whole host of Cajun musicians, working and retired (some of those “retired” would like the black country blues singers, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and the like from over in the Delta who were “discovered” during the folk revival of the early 1960s and brought up to the Newport Folk Festival to wow the young crowds there would also be “discovered” and brought north to eager crowds). Johnny introduced him to the night life (and a very “hot” Cajun woman whom Zack would live with for a while since he was in between wives, he had had three altogether before he gave up marriage and just lived his with his flames). Introduced him to the culture, to the ways of the Cajun, the poor bedraggled Cajuns whose poverty-stricken lives seemed very much like that up in the Acre, except for the intense humidity when the heat came. He could see why he gravitated toward the Cajun even as knew in his gut that this guy would be trouble, big trouble around his neck.              

Zack would go on to get his story, got paid well for the article, had it up for some award but he would not, could not shake Cajun Johnny despite the constant drain on his wallet and his heart. Wouldn’t that is until last month when they laid the bastard in his grave down in Liberty after he had been shot-up in a back alley by some young punk who took offense when the Cajun tried to con him for drinks with that crooked dice routine he still played when he was down on his luck. Yeah, that Cajun Johnny was a piece of work. RIP, brother, RIP.