Saturn's rings rolled into a stogie

Saturn's rings rolled into a stogie

    Puff the magic con artist clowns around Magazine Street. He wears pantaloons and tips his stovepipe hat for jelly roll dollars in the New Orleans blues night.
     He grabs a flask of whiskey. Then he shysters a couple of tourists with a rendition of Cole Porter’s  “Night and Day.”  His voice gets gravelly from forty years of smokes. A snowbird lays a ten-dollar bill in his cardboard cache. He tips his hat like a true southern gentleman.
     He strolls to St. Charles Avenue for a streetcar ride to Carrollton, where pork bellies and red beans and rice wait. Mama’s kitchen is now a ninth ward casualty along with Mama and Daddy from that crazy bitch Katrina.
     But he’s just goofing along tonight feeling like a gambler at Harrah’s casino. He’s not so young and foolish to try that scene. He’s digging the boogie night on the verge of a lucky streak. But there are too many zombies haunting his head in the post-apocalyptic sodium light.
     He rides the trolley like an electric dream. The sodium light shadows from the live oaks spook him like a hex from Marie Laveau on a night when his heart beats slow like the drums in a melancholy blues or the hum of an electric guitar played by Jimi on his last set. He passes through the evening quiet as a whisper and cool as the shades he wears like a bluesman who don’t need no devil to put the fire in his guitar strings.
     But the juice man’s fingers are wrapped like grapevines around his piece. He ain’t looking for action but sure is ready. He walks into the club called palace like a king. The hyperactive chatter of a woman bounces in sound waves on his ear tambourine. But he isn’t looking for that kind of action either.
     He walks up to the manager with his harmonica in hand and asks if they need a singer tonight. But they already have a line up for the night. Then he does a few bars to show his stuff. The headman says he can sing if he wants but the only cash he can net is what the audience puts in his box. So juice man pulls out the harmonica he’d pocketed when the deal looked cold. The steel feels icy on his fingers. Suddenly a pistol fires and blood veils his gaze.  He listens to the women gasp but pays them no heed.
He stays silent as a statue not to draw any more bullets. The bouncer aims for forgiveness with the jive talk that he thought juice man’s harmonica was a gun.
     With his hair bloody, he says, “Just a flesh wound. Just dress me up and let me show you what I’m made of.”
     The lady they call the nurse dresses his wound and admonishes him not to go brandishing his mouth harp anymore. “You looked like you were carrying,” she says with a mouth full of bubble gum.
     It takes only a few stitches to mend his wound. All is forgiven and juice man blows the crowd into pandemonium so wild the boss man picks up the phone for the police but puts it on the hook when the bartender waves a grand in his face from the drink sales. Juice man is just getting his groove on.