The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir

Chapter Two: Home Movies and Snapshots

15 C H A P T E R T W O HOME MOVIES AND SNAPSHOTS DAD ALWAYS HAD THE LATEST GADGET—LIKE OUR KODAK BROWNIE Hawkeye box camera and Super-8 movie camera and projector. Family photos and filmstrips found their way into a cardboard box, and I liked to explore its jumbled contents. I mastered the family’s eight-millimeter projector and, darkening our front room on Seville Drive and putting a white sheet over the painting of the Arab and camels (bought in Paris on Mom and Dad’s honeymoon), I’d thread the sprockets and adjust the frame. I’d watch dozens of cartoon reels that Dad brought home—and home movies, lots of home movies that I rescued from the cardboard box. Decades later I had them transferred to DVD, and I watch them still. Reel after reel of these silent home movies show Dad’s clown face, atop his athletic frame, mugging for the camera. On a dock littered with Spanish mackerel, his arms grow ever larger to measure the one that got away. Then a jump cut to Dad lowering the smallest fish, head first, into his clownish maw. In another reel, at the Audubon Zoo, Mom behind the camera, he makes like a chimpanzee—chee-chee, chee-chee—scratching his armpits, then his crotch. The screen goes suddenly dark. Before a thatched chikee hut at Paradise Beach in the Bahamas, joking, he shakes a magnificent palm tree to get coconuts. Then Dad takes his turn behind the camera, following Mom, who glides, cigarette in hand, to the same palm and leans demurely, smiling. HOME MOVIES AND SNAPSHOTS 16 Dad often manned the camera. Always glowing before the lens, Mom tosses her boys in the air, swings us, helps us with our first steps, and displays us in matching, starched outfits. In reel after reel, Mom is beautifully groomed—splashing into the waves toward the camera, target shooting with rifles and revolvers, deep sea fishing or casting from the dock, far and effortlessly. Mom was one of the boys, a diminutive Kate Hepburn, game for anything. And always, always outclassing Dad, his mugging no match for Mom’s thousand-watt smile. A family movie shows Paw-Paw and Grandma Jo’s house in Happy Jack: we are all on the back porch, a cypress cistern to the left, a washing machine with its hand-cranked mangles sheltered on the porch to the right. I am two years old, and the camera follows my project: moving a litter of kittens from the yard, one by one up the steps, across the porch, and through the screen door. The camera pans across as Jerry, age three, follows me from behind and releases the kittens one by one back into the yard. Another: it’s the gentle surf at Grand Isle, Louisiana. Jerry enters the frame at a dead run. He runs right over me—plop!—then walks, triumphant, toward the camera, which shakes with laughter. Another: Mardi Gras season had our complete attention. One home movie shows Dad mugging with me at his side on Grandma Annie’s gallery overlooking Rampart Street. Below us, awaiting the Zulu parade, 2.1 Randy on Seville Drive. HOME MOVIES AND SNAPSHOTS 17 shoulder-to-shoulder, the crowd roils with anticipation of floats full of black men in black face and grass skirts. Everyone wants the hand-painted coconuts they throw from the floats. Louis Armstrong was King of the Zulus once, the proudest day of his life. Another family movie records a costume party that may be Mardi Gras or my fourth birthday. I am a clown with a ruffled collar out to my shoulders. One Mardi Gras, I am on the“neutral ground” on Canal Street, the wide median where the streetcars run. I am behind the stands that line Canal Street, scrambling for some beads on the streetcar tracks. The beads are glass—jewels to a five-year-old—with little tags that declare their origin in Czechoslovakia. A black boy about my age asks to see them. I am five, proud to show hard-won treasure. He grabs them and when I won’t let go, he breaks them. Better broken than that I should possess them. I stand aghast, then run back crying to the stands. Downtown at the Saenger, Dad can watch two or three movies in an...