Читать книгу Mama Law and the Moonbeam Racer - Fred Yorg - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

‘I fought against the bottle but I had to do it drunk.’

Leonard Cohen

My father was Barksdale Law, the famed and celebrated attorney from Bayou Cane, Louisiana. Any story that I may have to tell invariably starts with him. As a young man, he didn’t start out to be a big time flamboyant attorney. I’m quite sure his aspirations were far more modest, but when fate stepped in and dealt him the hand, he played it to the max.

He started his quest in the early 1950’s on a scholarship at Louisiana State University that was orchestrated by his father, an ornery old Cajun by the name of Micah Law. Micah, the lone son of illiterate dirt farmers from the southern bayou, had his own story to tell. A hard man, he struck out for Texas in his early teens, finding work as an oil rigger and roustabout. Nobody knew for sure why he abruptly left Texas and returned to the bayou. Some speculated that he had killed a man and needed to lay low. Ironically, through the help of a friend from the River Parish, he somehow made his way onto the New Orleans Police Department. Cops back in those days worked for low wages, and most of them on the NOPD supplemented their income by going on the pad. What that meant was looking the other way for important people. At the end of the month, there would be an envelope; that’s how the system worked. Nobody questioned it and everybody accepted it. Powerful people lived by their own set of rules; you do me a favor and I’ll take care of you, the biggest fringe benefit a crooked cop had. That’s how my father ended up at Louisiana State University on scholarship. Being an ordinary student, I’m sure my father knew the circumstances of his good fortune, but, nonetheless, I always gave him credit for taking full advantage of the opportunity. After graduation he worked in an after hours gaming club on Jefferson Street and paid his way through law school, graduating in 1956 in the lower third of his class. Not a very promising start for a man who was soon to be cast as a legend. When you end up in the lower third of your class and come from poor stock, you’re not exactly a hot ticket item, not even in Louisiana. But, once again, my grandfather reached out and called in a favor. He landed him a job with an ambulance chaser from New Orleans by the name of Lazarus Thibodeaux. From pictures that I’ve seen in old family photo albums, Lazurus was in his late fifties by the time my father started working for him. He was a thin-boned man with delicate features and a thin moustache that looked like it was painted on with a grease pencil. As best as I can recall from the pictures, he always sported a zoot suit, two-tone alligator shoes and an ever-present porkpie hat. Lazarus was a hard-drinking man and womanizer whose clientele consisted of penny ante thieves, drug pushers, whores and small time con men. He picked up most of his clients in late night juke joints down on Bourbon and Jefferson Street in the early morning hours. A juke joint back then was really a blues club and you could find the best blues men of the day down in the French Quarter. Men like John Lee Hooker, Otis Rush, Howling Wolf, Lightning Hopkins and the legendary Muddy Waters, just to name a few. It was in one of these clubs in early 1957 where Lady Luck handed Lazarus the case of a lifetime. I’m not certain that Lazarus even knew what he had and, as luck would have it, he never got a chance to find out. After taking the case, Lazurus’ hand turned cold. Lady Luck turned her back on him when he was shot three times coming out of ‘Jakes Blues House’ in the early hours of the morning by a jealous husband. Unlike his namesake, Lazarus stayed in his grave and my father, being the only other lawyer in the firm inherited the case, a class action law suit against the Standard Oil Company.

Unprepared and ill-equipped for trial, my father was smart enough to get a couple of continuances. While doing research at Tulane’s law library, fate stepped in and introduced him to Cordelia Bancroft, a young, promising attorney from the north, fresh out of law school. They hit it off from the start and after a short courtship married. By early 1958, the Standard Oil Company forced my father’s hand. After four continuances, he was forced to go to trial and the case was assigned to the Fifth Appellate Court of Appeals, down on St. Charles Street. I’m not fully aware of the legal intricacies of the case, but somehow my father ended up winning a major landmark case. The judgement awarded to his clients was for fifty million dollars, the highest ever handed down up to that time. Barksdale Law had just walked through the door; he had made his bones and every prominent law firm in Baton Rouge was after him. In this day and age it’s hard to imagine the press and hoopla the case created. The largest paper in Louisiana, The Times-Picayunne, played up the story for all it was worth. They ran all types of attention getting headlines: ‘Bark Worse Than Bite’, ‘Laying Down The Law,’ and many more that have escaped my memory. One of the newspaper writers, a man by the name of Henry Louis LeTrenne, had been the one responsible for shortening my father’s name to Barky Law. From then on his life and destiny was forever changed. He was now a genuine legend. People of the south and especially Louisianians love their legends to be bold, bigger than life characters. The more outrageous the better. They love them even more when they have a colorful nickname. From the time my father won that case and became ‘Barky’ he was southern royalty, right up there on a pedestal with Huey Long Sr., “Stonewall” Jackson and “Race Horse” Haines. That’s a lofty position that comes with a heavy price.

While my father basked in the spotlight of his success, my mother chose a different road. Being from a small town in Illinois, she wanted no part of the limelight, nicknames or big time law firms from Baton Rouge. She was content to set up a small local practice, consisting of wills, estates, real estate deals and a lot of pro-bono work for locals who had problems, but not the money for a good attorney. In my hometown of Bayou Cane, Mama was well respected; her reputation took a backseat to no one, not even the great Barksdale Law.

After the big settlement from Standard Oil, the old man had more money than he could count and bought an old sugar cane plantation nestled on 200 acres in the little town of Bayou Cane. The plantation dated back to the late 1700s and was in pretty bad repair when he purchased it. He spent the next two years and a small fortune refurbishing it back to its original glory. It was the castle of the county and my parents reigned as its king and queen. The only thing missing was a prince to the kingdom and that’s where I came in. On August 25, 1965, I was born and christened Calvert William Law. Mama loved the name Calvert, but it wasn’t destined to last very long. My father never liked the name and saw to that. Down south in the bayou they have a snake that comes out at night that you can see slithering about in the moonlight; the Cajuns call it a moonbeam racer. When I was young, the old man said I reminded him of the snake and nicknamed me ‘Moonbeam Racer’.

As a young child the old man always called me Moonbeam. Over the years, Moonbeam became shortened to Mooney and I had a colorful nickname that was destined to stick. Growing up in Bayou Cane on the plantation was a good childhood; from the age of seven I had my own horse and everything else that a young boy could hope for. It was like a fairytale. Those early years growing up to this day remain as my most treasured memories. After high school, I followed dad’s footsteps and went to Louisiana State University on a football scholarship. My mother was never fond of football, but the old man surely was. He made a point of attending every game that I played in, no matter how busy his schedule was.

My first year at LSU, I made the varsity team and started every game at fullback. That was an impressive accomplishment for a freshman and my father was as proud as a peacock. I was content, but in truth wanted more. There’s not much glory in being a fullback in an I-Formation. I was lucky to run the ball three, four times a game. That’s when fate stepped in. It was during the second game of my sophomore season; the starting tailback went down with an injury and the coach gave me a chance at tailback. I ran for over 100 yards and scored four touchdowns that day and never looked back. I was, after all, a favorite son of the south, had a legendary father, and a catchy nickname. This was my destiny.

By my senior year, I had rewritten the record book for the southeast conference, been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and been mentioned as the pre-season favorite to win the Heisman Trophy. For me, it couldn’t get much better. But then fate turned her back on me in the cruelest of manner and took it all away. It was during homecoming weekend, the fourth game of the season. The coach called time out with 12 seconds left on the clock, most unusual since we had a commanding lead over our archrival Ole Miss by a score of 20 to 7. He called me over to the sidelines and the crowd gave me an ovation. I figured he just wanted to give me one last curtain call before the homecoming crowd. I was wrong. Seems I needed one more touchdown to set a new conference scoring record. The coach wanted me to get the record before the homecoming crowd, said it would help the fund raising effort with the alumni. We were on Ole Miss’s seven-yard line and my ego got in the way, like all legends I wanted the glory. The coach called a power sweep around right end and sent me back in. The play had been working all day for us, no reason it shouldn’t work again. Or so I thought. We broke the huddle and lined up. The quarterback barked the signals and then took the snap. He pitched me the ball as I circled right, the hole opening up, a clear path to the end zone. Then fate and the Ole Miss tackle, Virgil Stapes, came out of nowhere and hit me high, then a linebacker came off a block and caught me low. To this day I can still hear the sound of my right ankle snapping, shattering in three places as Virgil Stapes stood over me laughing and grinning like a Halloween jack o lantern.

There would be no glory for me that day, just a lifetime sentence of pain and suffering. Twelve seconds doesn’t sound like a long time in a man’s life, but it was enough time for me to lose everything: the Heisman, a pro career, my identity, my family.

After graduating in 1985, I tried my hand at law school. Never a remarkable student, I had to apply myself for the first time in my life. When I was a football star, I always got the break, the benefit of the doubt when it came to grades. Professors spit out grades that I’d never really deserved. Not anymore, I had to earn them. I was no longer a favorite son of the south just a broken down has been with a nickname. Almost everyone I met or came into contact with started their conversation by offering me condolences for my injury. You’d have thought I’d lost a loved one. The pity was hard to swallow and by my second year in law school I was deep into a valley of depression and self-pity. My way of coping was by hitting the bottle hard. It got so bad that I had to take the first semester of my last year off, so I could dry out at a clinic. Somehow I made it through rehab and scraped by, graduating near the bottom of my class. I joined my father’s law firm in the summer of 1989. Rather than working with him in Baton Rouge, he sent me over to their branch office in New Orleans down in the French Quarter. The old man said he sent me over there so I could apply myself: reasoned that there would be less pressure and I could spend more time getting ready for the bar exam. In truth, it was little more than a no show job. Maybe he was trying to help me, but I never bought his line. I thought he was embarrassed by my very presence, trying to hide me from his partners like you would a crazy aunt. Looking back, it was probably just my own insecurity and paranoia. Counselors told me years later that the low esteem I felt was what probably led me back to the bottle. Of course, working in the French Quarter wasn’t the best spot for a man with a drinking problem and money in his pockets. More times than not I’d spend my lunch hour down at the Ugly Dog Saloon. It served up the best Po’boys and gumbo in the ‘Quarter’. It also served up healthy shots of Jack Daniels backed up with cold beer chasers. When you’re around other drunks, it’s easy to find a fight and, to my regret and shame I found myself in the middle of more than a few barroom brawls. The only reputation that I was cultivating was that of a drunk and one of the best barroom brawlers in the French Quarter. Not helpful for an attorney. Needless to say, my time spent at the Ugly Dog didn’t prepare me for the bar exam and I came up short the first two times. Finally, the third time was a charm and I passed. But by then, it was too late, my father was barely even talking to me. Around that time, I also noticed that my parents started to drift apart. I always assumed my aberrant behavior had gotten between then and was the cause of their problems. What was once a storybook family had now been torn apart and I felt responsible.

Over the Thanksgiving Day weekend of 1990, I came home for the holidays in an upbeat mood. I hadn’t taken a drink in a little over six weeks. Things were starting to work out; I was actually handling some real cases and not doing badly. I was in high spirits when I got home that Wednesday night. My mood quickly changed forever that evening when I noticed the tenseness in the house between my parents. Later that night after I’d turned in, I overheard an ugly argument between them. I couldn’t make out the words from where my room was, but it was loud and from the tone, bitter. For the rest of the weekend they remained at each other’s throats. I felt at blame, they deserved better. It was time for me to go.

Next morning, I packed my bags and headed to Chicago hoping for a chance at a new start; blindly searching to somehow find a way to once and for all exorcise my demons. By years end, I had joined the Chicago police department, got in a twelve-step program and cleaned up my act. In early 1991, I was looking forward to going back home for the Easter weekend to show my parents how their boy had changed. I was looking for redemption in their eyes; somehow I thought that would make everything all right. But I never got the chance. Mama called just before I left for the airport to tell me that my father had been killed in a car accident.

The plane ride back home for the funeral was the worst three hours of my life. Together we made it through the ordeal, but I sensed her sorrow and anger at loosing him. The car accident that took his life was just a freak occurrence, nothing more than hitting a telephone pole at forty miles per hour. He was out that night running a few errands for Mama, picking up a few last minute items for Easter dinner. She never said anything, but I sensed that she blamed me for his death. Maybe if I was at home and hadn’t been a drunk, it never would have happened. I handled it poorly and for the next two years went back to the bottle and the demons that only a hopeless drunk knows.

My job suffered, but nobody on the force took the time to notice that I was out of control. Most of the men I worked with were drunks and worse. Frankly, I’d never had much use for the other detectives in my department; as a class, I found most of them to be dumb, pompous, self serving and crabbed of disposition, except for my partner, Miles Bowman. Miles was smart, modest, generous to a fault and kind of heart. He and his wife, Abbe, were the ones responsible for getting me back into the program. That was eight years ago and I’d been clean and sober ever since.

Since I got back on track, I’ve been going back home every Christmas for the holidays. Mama always cooks a big dinner and we say all the right words, but they’re devoid of any true, honest emotions. Once a year Mama flies up to Chicago to visit me and her cousins and we routinely spend a couple of days together. Our visits are always the same: cordial, cool, and antiseptic. That’s about it, not much to show for a decade of living in a cop shop.