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Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Leonard Earl Johnson (photo credit Frank Parsley) covered Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (2005), and the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for ConsumerAffairs.com. He is a contributor to Gambit Weekly, New Orleans Magazine, SCAT, Baton Rouge Advocate, Advocate Magazine, The Times-Picayune, Country Roads Magazine, Palm Springs Newswire and the anthologies: FRENCH QUARTER FICTION (Light of New Orleans Publishing), LOUISIANA IN WORDS (Pelican Publishing), LIFE IN THE WAKE (NOLAfuges.com), and more. Johnson is a former Merchant Seaman, and columnist at Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans; and African-American Village. Attended Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship at Piney Point, Maryland. Winner of the Press Club of New Orleans Award for Excellence, 1991, and given the Key to The City and a Certificate of Appreciation from the New Orleans City Council for a Gambit Weekly story on murder in the French Quarter.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Alberto Navarro Memorial, April 23, 2011


Alberto Navarro

Memorial

New York City

April 23, 2011
by Leonard Earl Johnson






www.LEJ.org




Starting right front:
Victor Campbell, last secretary/companion to Tennessee Williams.
Josh Clark, Publisher.
Leonard Earl Johnson, Bloviator.
Alberto Navarro, Fallen.
Melanie Plesh, Katrina escape-artist.
L. A. Norma, Fictional literary character.
Lee Grue, writer.
Karisa Kerry, World traveler.
Margarita Bergen, Impresario


* * *


Alberto, we know you and love you.
You came from Bogota, Columbia to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, to finish high school. We met as S. I. U. freshmen, at the beginning of The Fabled Sixties. From there, for the next fifty years we untethered our youth.

With an enormous number of friends and fellow travelers around the World, you cut swaths across the midlands of America and beyond.

Much happened in The Fabled Sixties. But nothing more elegant than Alberto's launching of a new language.

Is there one among us who does not speak some "ALBERTO-ise?"

Because of Alberto you likely know that "Ester-berry jo-gurt" means, in English, "strawberry yogurt." He taught us this and we still know it and say it. And the universal favorite: "Chess!" In your heart, if not on your lips, you know "chess" is "yes" in Alberto's native tongue.

When Alberto died, I wickedly recalled how often recovering in morning's glare Alberto's hand would flutter over his heart and he would announce yet again that this debauchery of youth would attack his "hair-it." In the end his heart did fail. But not till after a long joyous journey.

One last recollection
Once we sent a telegram, with Alberto and John Harty (whose heart also attacked him early) to a friend imprisoned in the United States for draft resistance. It read: "Ignore instructions from Moscow."

It is a wonder any one survives their youth. Yet here we are far down the path. The next miles will be shallower without you, my Friend.

Join Us in Song
Scroll down to Meet Me in New Orleans, by Sam Rey and the Totem 2 ________________
Copr. Leonard Earl Johnson, 2011

Friday, April 01, 2011

April 2011 / Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are


Yours Truly in a Swamp

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Frank Parsley

April 2011

* * *

Be a New Orleanian Where Ever You Are!

"Where were you," asked the bartender, "when the levees broke?"



The bar he tended was the art deco Sazerac, at the Hotel Roosevelt. "In historic downtown New Orleans," as we heard WWL radio announcers say when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education, in the 1950's. They spoke as Prophets over the "fifty-thousand-watt voice of New Orleans," when New Orleans was a dream yet to come true.



"Where was I when the levees broke in New Orleans?


"Hammond. We left late, after the mayor's mandatory evacuation. Most everyone I knew had gone. And I don't drive. I got a ride out that Sunday evening, as the storm was moving in. The winds licked at our wheels as we drove across the bridges down near the Rigolets."


"The Rigolets?" He set a fresh bottle on the bar, then refilled my glass. "Not a good place to be when a hurricane's coming."



"No," L. A. Norma said, walking up to the bar. She was returning from her cigarette break out on Baronne Street, "Swapping lies with the doorman," she smiled at the bartender.



Norma said, "I left at the television's first rumblings of a hurricane. Even then I had the good sense to go west."



"When we left all the roads out were closed," I said, "except those going east. A friendly policeman told us we could turn west later, after we got out of Town. We were among the last to leave -- over bridges that washed out soon after.


"You know, we traveled the very path the storm took. But didn't know it, of course, at the time."



"So, I was in Hammond, Louisiana the next morning when the levees broke. Hammond took a bad hit, too. No flooding, but for days we had no news. No papers, no phones, no electricity. For a week, maybe more.



"It was stunning, the world changing, I mean. But at the time it was hard to see just where it was going.


"Tell you the truth, nothing I felt during those days jibed with what I later learned was happening."



"It's been five years," the bartender observed, "and every day I think of something about that time. How the world changed."



"That's post-traumatic-stress," L. A. Norma said, from atop her self-confidence. She noted her credentials. She had been an appointment secretary at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles.


"I worked for a bunch of doctors," she smiled. He polished a glass.


"When things happening are so huge you only realize them later, when it comes to you in bits and pieces, that's post-trauma!" Norma flipped her new cell phone open. The bartender set his shiny glass on the bar.



"Yes, I guess so," I said. "I didn't get scared about being on the Rigolets bridge till a year later.



"The first I knew something ultra-big was happening was when the Pentecostals opened a charity storefront in Hammond. I ate their hot dogs and beans without thinking I was 'needy.' A barefooted lady came in while I was there and asked for shoes. They gave her flip-flops. 'Gee,' I thought, 'what am I doing here?'



"When the levees broke," I motioned for two new glasses, "Norma was in L. A., and I was safe at the hearth of a fallen monk who taught English in Hammond. He was friends with an English teacher I met the year before at the Tennessee Williams Festival. She had a red truck and two psychotic cats. She was the last person I knew in Town with wheels."



"Buses, trains, airplanes?" a stranger sitting to our left asked.



"They had all stopped days before. The streets were deserted. Remember Amtrak's celebrated story about not being able to reach Mayor Nagin to offer a train out for evacuees? I was at Union Station knocking on their boarded up doors and they couldn't reach me either.



"From Hammond, old Illinois colleagues living in Lafayette took me in for six months. They saved me from the dreaded FEMA!"



"Think of that three-day-fish story," Norma said.



"Eventually I rented a small apartment in an old railroad hotel renovated earlier by New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff. Elvis Presley once stayed where now I lived.



"Five years later, I divide my time between New Orleans and Acadiana. I still see New Orleans as a religion, but less as 'The Universe' and more as part of the congregation of the Gulf. Do you know half our tourists are Gulf Coast locals? Many is the Cajun dreaming tonight of that 'playhouse' in New Orleans, 'On The Banks of The Old Pontchartrain,' as Governor Jimmie Davis sang it."



"A great way to think of The City," Norma said, laying her phone on the bar next to the glass, and punching up Vince Vance's music video, I Am New Orleans, on U-Tube.

______________________________

Copyright, Leonard Earl Johnson, 2011
(This story first appeared in altered form September 2010.)
* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator. Magnet size: 2 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches "It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!" ~ L. A. Norma




Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope

along with $5 for each magnet.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

302 Jefferson St., Box 202


Lafayette, LA 70501