[A note to the reader: Yesterday's opening shot was supposed, as you might suspect, to provide a gloss on the name of the blog. However, like most narratives, this one has taken on a bit of a life of its own, wandering down back streets and making promises to strangers.While I only intended to say that keeping one's weight on one's elbows has become to me, over the years, a metaphor for how one might go through life, this tale has asserted its own imperatives. I'll let it have its head for just a while longer.]

The Shreve’s Landing Club was really nice, considering the location. The Bottoms hadn’t been gentrified, though there were some attempts to make it into a place for night-life. But it could be dangerous down there. Just four years earlier, when I was working as an orderly at the local charity hospital in the summer before my senior year in high school, I had a patient who had been beaten and knifed on the same block where the Shreve’s Landing Club stood. The victim was a black man (the hospital was segregated and I was the only white orderly on the “colored orthopedic and cancer ward”) I can only recall as Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Armstrong was being kept in an elaborate head clamp traction device to hold his spinal cord immobile; a weight, at the end of a cord which ran over a pulley and was attached to an eyelet at the fulcrum end of what looked very much like a pair of thin ice tongs the business end of each arm of which grasped either side of his forehead, pulled his head back and prevented him from moving at all. As a consequence, he could not do for himself and so,  with me emptying his bedpans and giving him a sponge bath every day and feeding him his liquid diet, we would chat from time to time. He didn’t like being in the hospital and kept making plans to leave, traction or no. I asked him if he planned to go back to the Bottoms and confront his nemesis, known to me only as Napoleon, who, I had learned , was responsible for Mr. Armstrong’s condition. I had every reason to believe that Mr. Armstrong was not only experienced with violence but reasonably courageous. My evidence was the visible map of knife scars all over his chest and arms. That being so, I was surprised when he said no, he was going to leave town. You’re not afraid to meet Napoleon are you, I asked. Not afraid, he said, just realistic. “As tough and as old as I am, I can’t beat him. That nigger is made of iron," he paused. "And other other hard materials. I’m done.” True to his word, Mr. Armstrong left. In the middle of the night the very next week he released himself from the head brace and went out the back door, never to be seen again. At least, not in the Bottoms.

When you entered the Shreve’s Landing Club, a small foyer gave way to a long bar along the wall to your left and a considerable dining area in front of you and to your right. Straight ahead of you, once past the diners, was a small dance floor and a stage. Orlando was on the door and there was a girl to take your coat. Unlike other classy places in town, the Club did not employ black waiters or bus boys; the entire staff was Filipino; I never knew why that was. Orlando was waiting for me with word from my folks that they’d be home around noon tomorrow and I was to have dinner there at the Club. Then Orlando introduced me to his wife, whom I knew of but had never met. I can’t remember her name but Orlando had met her in Oklahoma. She was a prostitute then, which must have been slim pickings in those small towns we lived in. I gathered she didn't socialize much with the wives from the factory in those days, not that it would have bothered folks had she done so. Except for the odd instances of Baptist-like rectitude, like my dad's annoyance with Aunt Juanita's pierced ears, our people weren't too quick to judge those who did what they could to make a way in the world. After all, one of Dad's uncles had done time for armed robbery and his own father had made beer and bathtub gin during Prohibition. Once Clyde Barrow came by my grandfather's house to buy beer; Mom claimed, in fact, that she and Dad had seen Clyde and Bonnie Parker at a dance marathon in Bossier City the very night they were ambushed by the law and killed. Anyway, Orlando and Mrs. Hawkins (Virginia?) had been together for all that time and she worked there at the Club, in some formal capacity, I mean. Mrs. Hawkins made sure I found the bar and told me that I should have a drink and as soon as she had a table cleared for me on the patio, I could go right on out there and order something good for myself.

I passed a few minutes at the bar, waiting and watching a number of very pretty young women, not girls but really women, a couple of years older than me, at least. They were dressed quite nicely but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere or even waiting for anyone. They seemed to be---relaxing, talking, smoking, drinking. It was like watching gorgeous bank tellers on break. I wanted to say something, start a conversation, say I was a college man (it was the early 60s, remember), but I had no idea what to say. Just as I was about to blurt out in desperation that I was home for the summer, to no one in particular, Mrs. Hawkins appeared. My table was ready.

People in Shreveport loved patios because they wanted to live in New Orleans and didn’t. Shreveport was actually Louisiana’s second largest city in those days, but it was in red dirt redneck country on the timber-clogged Red River, not cradled in the soft marshy, creole-ized curves of the inexorable Mississippi; instead of jazz we had the Louisiana Hayride; instead of jambalaya we had moon pies and RC cola. The patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club was a tribute to every cliché of genteel New Orleans, right down to the moss, harvested by little black kids from oaks along some back road over in Bossier and sold to Orlando so his Filipinos could drape it gracefully down the walls. The tables and chairs were openwork cast iron painted green and the floor was old brick. The patio was new, to tell the truth; whatever the building had been, this had not been a patio. The space was originally part of a sort of alley or half of a lot between the restaurant and the building next door. I knew this because just a couple of summers ago there had been a theater in the next door space where we, my dad and mom and some of their friends and a couple of us high school kids and Carole Gua had put on a kind of dinner theater, offering 19^th-century melodramas to an audience who came to eat and drink and boo the villains. The Club catered the meals and we used the space between the two buildings as our “green room,” prop room, what have you. (I mention Carole Gua by name because…well, more about that later.)

In any case, the patio was new, the night was warm and a little misty, and I was 20 and on my own.