The Exchange Student

Back in 1992, I was an exchange student in Guanjuato, Mexico. It was a great experience, but I doubt the Ballesteros family, (the family that hosted me), so much as remembers my name. Let's just say that I really didn't make much of a splash: never had sex with anyone in their house nor in their country. I showed up promptly for siesta and was even polite to their door-to-door bible teacher. He came by to visit with the family every Thursday with a guitar in hand. I believe he "invited" me to have a look or basically test drive the New Testament. I told him that I still had not taken the shrink wrap off of my Old Testament, but that never deters the New Testy folks. It seems to be a standing invitation that I know I'll always have....and I'm thankful.

But, today, I am choosing to write about an exchange student that my family hosted during one of the most pivotal summers in the history of my family - The Summer of 1987. His name was Christophe and he hailed from Beaune, France. Like most things in my family, the decision to get an exchange student was brash and sudden. In fact, I didn't even know about him until I came back from my summer program at Wellesley College. Apparently, my parents got a hankering for an exchange student while both of their children were off enriching themselves. As I mentioned before, I was participating in a college program for kids in high school and Augie was off in Mexico, living aboard the S.S. Kiki.*
*For those of you who haven't read The Family Gun, go ahead - this way you'll understand about the Kiki and the role she played in our lives.

So, Augie was off in Cancun, getting deflowered and tanned. He came home with an earring - need I say more? A little farther up the Gulf Coast, a group of exchange students showed up in New Orleans, and arrangements were made for them to stay with families from my school, Isidore Newman. I don't know what happened with Christophe's arrangement, but my parents received a phone call about a homeless French boy, and the rest is history.
I got back from Wellesley to find this Christophe character completely integrated into the household. Lots had changed while I was away. He had Zulie (also known as my mom) wearing heavy metal t-shirts. In fact, she was wearing an Iron Maiden one when I arrived home. Cokes lined the shelves of our fridge, a beverage banned a decade earlier in our house. Our VCR was getting plenty of use because we now had a membership at the brand new Blockbuster on Veterans Blvd. Christophe was hooked on horror movies, and his habit had my parents making daily stops there. The three of them actually watched the Freddy Kruger movie together. It was a summer full of horror movies, caffeine and heavy metal. On the other side of the coin, my summers typically were filled with summer reading, rations on TV and subtle encouragement to lose weight.

My parents were getting the biggest kick out of this kid; so much that they began pimping him out to everyone with a daughter or anyone who had ever been a daughter. It had come to their attention that Christophe had arrived in New Orleans a virgin. I don't know if they made a conscious decision to send him back to his homeland with "experience," but it's safe to call them "the enablers." He dated a plethora of neighbors, teenage friends of mine and Augie's, as well as some of my mom's horniest single ne'er-do-well friends.
One was our interior designer, Cindy. She was pretty long in the tooth, but willing to show him the way...I guess. I specifically remember Zulie picking up condoms for his dates with Cindy at the drugstore. Then there was this friend, Susan C., a drinking buddy of Zulie's from her days as a return-student at U.N.O. Susan was one of the first "fag-hags" I had ever met. It made sense, since she managed a hair salon called Busta's. She was pretty much fried from alcohol, bleach and a lifetime in Metairie, LA. This might give some of you the willies, but she also diddled Augie at some point in history. I think my mom orchestrated that one, too.

Christophe's summer in the Crescent City, which began innocently enough, became a non-stop sex fest. At one point, my dad was supervising a swim date that Christophe had with this chick, Rachel Ogg. She was ogg-ling Christophe at the airport on the day she was picking up her family's exchange student. My folks made sure to get her number. It's like they had a plan or something! The date was at the next-door-neighbor's pool. They were never home and we had free reign of the pool at all times. So the story goes: Dad was lying on a lounger, reading a business weekly. Zulie was off in her car somewhere. He happened to glance at the kids in the pool, who were huddled together in a corner bobbing rhythmically. You know what I'm saying. Dad clumsily ran next door in a panic, looking for Zulie, anyone. I don't know what he expected - for them to play Marco Polo? He was out of luck. She split. So, he called up one of their friends, Adam, an alcoholic who married into New Orleans drugstore royalty. Adam couldn't do a lot from his mansion on St.Charles Avenue. So, I guess it hit Dad that being responsible for someone else's son in a foreign country might, just might, entail some limits.

They had turned Christophe into a porn-star in less than eight weeks! I was pretty grossed out by him at the time. He sort of tried hitting on me right when I got back from Wellesley, but I gave him the cold shoulder. I didn't like French guys. They smelled musky and wore really bad jeans with white canvas Keds. He laid some line on me about my green eyes which are, in fact, blue. It's no wonder that I remained a virgin for several more years. It was a good thing, because I really did not need to be included in the line-up with Cindy, Susan C., and Ogg.

Things cooled down considerably once Christophe left. Not surprisingly, he wrote us letters begging to return. They were written in felt-tip ink on what looked like tracing paper. Unfortunately for Christophe, there had been shifts in our family situation which prevented his return. You know how you can never really go back, right? I went back to Guanajuato to see the Ballesteros about a year after the exchange program. The parents had divorced, and there were a couple of new toilets in the house. Interestingly, the summer after Christophe's visit, my parents divorced after 18 years of marriage. No hypothesis here...just noting a coincidence or phenomenon.

Honk If You're An Armchair Activist

I've had my nose in a book that perhaps I should not be reading. Have any of you (besides Blake) read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins? Maybe I'm totally behind the times - this book was published in 2004. Either way, it's taking me to a very dark place, even though it's certainly worthwhile to learn the truth about the three-way that goes on between the government, mega-corporations and the World Bank. Read it for yourselves...or stay blissfully ignorant. I won't fault you for whatever decision you make.

So, I'm giving you the background for my trip to the mall yesterday. It helps not to think too much when you're shopping. Otherwise, you'd have to come to terms with the fact that all of the crap that's sold in these giant chain stores is made in sweatshops. Also, look at all of the people buying dumb shit that they can't afford. Yeah, it's best to leave me at home when you want to get your shop on.
But please don't mistake me for one of those people with actual principles. You won't find me strapped to a redwood tree or even participating in a single organized protest. Instead, I know how to walk around like I'm having a bad acid trip: sad and paralyzed to do anything except hope that the feeling passes. I've signed a few online petitions in my day, but I had to ditch moveon.org because I couldn't handle the daily e-mails in my in-box. Sadly, the only thing you can count on from me at this stage is a honk of the horn. Recently, at the junction of Hollywood and Sunset, Bisq issued a peace-loving honk, on request, for a sign that read "Honk if you think the U.S should leave Iraq" or something like that. We didn't even have to slow down in order to get the job done. That's the kind of activism for which we can be counted on.

God, we're wimps. I was just watching interviews with the 2 veterans of the Iraq war who are in danger of having their honorable discharges revoked for staging peaceful protests while wearing their uniforms. If you knew that you'd lose your health care benefits for speaking out, would you still go through with it? Therein lies the problem. This is how armchair protesters such as myself came into existence. I remember being afraid to put a bumper sticker on my car a few years ago that said something like "Save the Troops, Impeach Bush." In my neighborhood in Chamblee, GA, it wouldn't have earned me any bless-your-heart's. Why was I worried about offending these people and their yellow ribbons? The answer is simple: what if one of us needed a jump-start one morning? Or needed some help with our lawn-mower? Therefore, the 2 bumper-stickers intended for our cars were tacked onto the bulletin board.

It seems to be our way, I guess. Bisq jokes that he can't believe that his horn-honking didn't get Kerry elected in 2004. It's never too late to get some principles and become a protester, it's just too inconvenient and expensive for me right now. In the meantime, forget you heard me talking like this.
Honk if you like chicks who write blogs who'd like to someday drive a hybrid.

In Search Of Larry James Hamilton

Due to the fact that he has a lot to say about our old buddy L.J. Hamilton, I’m handing this one over to guest blogger Biscuit:

The wife and I have made a few artistic discoveries in our day. I’m not saying we’ve had any sort of impact on the artists’ careers, but we’ve at least hipped a handful of friends to them. That’s gotta count for something. Sometimes it’s hard for even our most twasted of peeps to see the light. I guess we have some very particular perversions. I mean, any old honky can laugh at a televangelist, but when you make it a point to attend Wieuca Road Baptist Church’s musical review twice a year (because your not-out-to-the-congregation gay neighbor is starring as both Mr. Rogers and Elton John), well…that’s commitment.

One of our most prized discoveries is/was an R&B singer named Larry James Hamilton. I can’t decide on the verb tense because I don’t really know if L.J. is still alive. We lost track of him about 4 years ago, and Katrina didn’t help. Now we can't find him. True New Orleanians are virtually immune to Google searches.

I found L.J. back in 1996. Val was still living in Austin and I was spending a lot of my free time hanging out with Zulie. At the time, “hanging out with Zulie” meant getting stoned, going on power-walks around the Lakefront, drinking steadily and going to bars. While investigating a “Free Crawfish during Happy Hour” banner, Zulie and I found ourselves inside what was essentially a big white tent with Astroturf on the ground. The crawfish were decent, the drinks were dirt-cheap and there was L.J., at the piano, playing the funkiest version of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” you ever heard, accompanied by a drum machine playing through a crappy guitar amplifier. He followed up with lots of Earth, Wind & Fire, solo Lionel, Marvin Gaye and Al Green (this was before Al’s hits had been played to death, at least to me). Since Zulie talks to everybody, we of course cozied right up to L.J. during his first break. I don’t think he understood the conversation (neither did I), which consisted mostly of Zulie’s clouded memories of the songs he’d just done. Either way, now we were friends and fans. Give me a soul singer with a drum machine in an empty bar any day.

Everyone should have his or her own private R&B star, if only for a day. That’s what I was going for when I hired L.J. to play at my 23rd birthday party a couple months after the discovery. Zulie hosted and provided the piano (and probably all of the food and alcohol for my broke ass; maybe I brought the weed?). Zulie made red beans, I rolled lots of joints and L.J. showed up in a blue velvet blazer. It took all my too-cool-for-school rock’n’roll friends a while to warm up to L.J., but this being New Orleans, soon enough everyone was drunk and dancing (and making-out sloppily). I decided to take a little nap around 11:00pm and woke up the next day at noon. Happy birthday.

We kept up with L.J. and went to see him play regularly until we moved away at the end of ’97. He had a little buzz going on for a minute – he recorded an album with Allen Toussaint producing which, for us at least, was an instant classic. Alan released it on his NYNO record label and L.J. did some classy gigs to support it, but I guess the world wasn’t ready for hits like "Back Rub" and "Love Is A Two Way Thing."

He moved on and started playing with a backup band called Blue Horizon (probably the best backing band name you could ever want). We went to see them at a club deep in the Ninth Ward. Being the only whiteys in the room, we were more than a little uncomfortable when L.J. introduced us from the stage as “my good friends from Metairie” (at the time, Metairie was still a racist stronghold [David Duke ring a bell?]; plus, we didn’t actually live there). L.J. played guitar at that gig, which just added a whole new layer to my obsession with him.

Our last time seeing L.J. was when he played at our wedding in 2002. We had a pretty amazing “meeting” with him about 3 months prior, the intention being to go over the set list & specifics of the event. L.J. showed up looking a lot worse for the wear. He looked pretty thin, his hair was in bad need of some activator and he was eating a little box of ‘Nilla Wafers. I suspected some, oh, let’s just call it rock cocaine, was involved, but who knows; we all have bad days. We gave him our detailed, computer-printed list of song requests. We tried not to be too difficult, staying in his style and even requesting lots of his own tunes. He agreed to everything, gave us a copy of his new self-produced album Love Is and gave us a final piece of marital advice: “There’s 2 people you never listen to – ‘I Heard’ and ‘They Say’”

So, it was in the spirit of not letting meddlesome neighbors and street corner ho’s break-up our relationship that we were married under the eyes of God and a cantor named Seth. L.J. did a great job at the reception, though he completely ignored our song requests. He didn’t even do his own songs that we’d asked for. He did do "Mustang Sally" at least 3 times and let my drunk cousin G-Dogg do his own ramshackle instrumental version of "Great Balls Of Fire." It should be noted that L.J. was performing on a Radio Shack keyboard and that his guitar player was a Japanese dude with red hair.

And that was the last we saw of him. Not surprisingly, I’ve since become obsessed with Love Is (the self-produced cd). I’d love to link to somewhere that people could buy the thing, but L.J. wasn’t exactly hooked up with CDBaby when he ‘released’ it back in 2002. I just think it’s the perfect basement R&B-electro record (if you know of another, hip me to it). L.J. plays all of the instruments, meaning all of the instrument sounds on his Radio Shack keyboard. The drums are from the keyboard’s drum machine, but he plays them live instead of programming them, so the rhythm and timing are all over the place. It sounds like it could fall apart at any moment, but somehow it’s funky. There are some keyboard-sax solos and lots of cheesy bass sounds. The overall sound of the album is dark and metallic, much more like Joy Division than, say, Otis Redding. Ya gotta love an R&B record that’s inadvertently Goth. I kind of wonder if anybody but me will ever love this record like I do. I know that I dig it in a way that L.J. surely never intended.

I really hope that L.J. made it out from Katrina in one piece. I hope he made it back to Brazil or somewhere his talent isn’t taken for granted. And I have to keep hoping that, in spite of the fact that I don’t drink, another happy hour freebie will lead me to my next discovery.

Update:
As we go to press here at Just Yoking, L.J. has suddenly turned up, now going by the name Larry Love Hamilton, complete with his very own ghetto website. I guess this news renders a lot of this post moot, but at least you can all go and buy Love Is from CDBaby immediately.

A Name-Dropping Legacy

I come from a family of name-droppers. Maybe we're always looking to catch a glow off of someone, even if it's someone who served on the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yep, that was my great-grandfather, former city councilman of Knoxville, TN. Look, we'll take what we can get.
My late grandfather, Joe, had ties with many politicians. He was the campaign manager for Estes Kefauver back in the 1930s. He married into a political family, and the rest is history.

I remember going over to my grandparents' house one afternoon to find a group of New Orleans' finest huddled around the new big screen TV, watching a boxing match. I was only allowed to walk across the room during a commercial. Rules is rules.
Seated on the couch was Dutch Morial, then mayor of New Orleans. I used to think that Memorial Day was in honor of him (hence, Mayor Morial Day). Somehow, I knew that celeb spottings such as this were meant to be cherished and not squandered. I took this opportunity to get Dutch to brush my hair for me. There I was, in the middle of a bunch of yelling guys in their 60s, getting bounced around from famous paunch to famous paunch.

In 1999 , I went to Albuquerque to see Rick Springfield. Seeing Rick in his 50s was no less titillating. When he came back the next year to play the New Mexico State Fair, I decided that I was going to get backstage. Actually, the story about how I got back there is a much better blog than this one (I must pace myself). Anywho, Rick and I spoke briefly about how he manages to stay so young-looking. Maybe it's smacking his wife after she throws jars of olives at his head, but more likely it's his avoidance of sunlight.
But really what I am most proud of is that I've laid hands on Don Meridith, Ludacris and Andre Benjamin. I hassled Magic Johnson in Florence, Italy, back in 1995. And, I most recently hassled Whitney Houston in front of the door at Houston's in Century City. I was trying to make conversation with her, and she looked a little frazzled. I was lucky that I didn't get slapped. Bobbie Brown was circling, and it seemed they had had an intense dinner. Everything those two do is intense.

I must get my name-dropping bug from my Dad. To sum up his celebrity/politico run-ins...he shot hoops with Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul Jabar) and he dated Carol Klein (later known as Carol King) who lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn. My late Uncle Beast claimed to have dated her in one of his blogs. I tend to believe him over my Dad. What I really cannot believe is that she would go out with both of them.
According to my Dad, he also dated some actresses that none of you have ever heard of - though one of them appeared on an episode of Taxi. I remember when my whole family was gathered around the tube for that one. My Dad's first cousin was on several commercials for Sears and had a cameo appearance on one of my favorite episodes of Threes Company. Remember when Jack had to take a bunch of tranquilizers so he could fly on a tiny plane to attend a party on Catalina Island? He wound up acting a fool for my Dad's cousin who was a hot blonde in a red sequined gown.
Over the years, Dad's met the likes of Alexander Haig and, two Thanksgivings ago, found George McGovern asleep in a car in his next-door neighbor's driveway. It turns out, George was locked out of the neighbor's house which belongs to the widow of WWII historian Steven Ambrose. The most recent reason to brag is that he supposedly had lunch with Brad and Angelina, who were eating breakfast at one of his favorite hang-outs. When he told me the news, I asked him to define "having breakfast with." Others might just say that they happened to have breakfast at the same restaurant where there had been a Brad and Angelina sighting.

My brother, Augie, has had an on-again-off-again thing with Jesse Jackson. Working in and around the Democratic Party, Augie has rubbed elbows with loads of politicos. About five years ago, Jesse singled Augie out, told him he looked different, and pondered aloud that it must be his new beard. "A Hymie looks nice with a black beard!" No, he didn't really say that...but you know it was on the tip of his tongue.

My mom, also a notorious name-dropper, has an impressive resume - well, depending on your standards. She dated an NBA basketball legend, Rick Barry, during her short stint at University of Miami. My brother, being a serious sports fan, used to always say that he wished that things would have worked out between the two of them, so that he would be the son of NBA royalty instead of a wacky sports-hating art-collector. Mom also went out with a former Saints player, Steve Stonebreaker, back in the late 90s. Augie was only mildly impressed. We had grown weary of Zulie's dating escapades. All I can remember about him was that he was really tall with a bad mustache. I hope she never had to kiss him. I say that, but I can't be mean about him. I think he committed suicide not too long ago. When she worked at Circle Gallery, she had the opportunity to meet Charlie Watts, along with a few other big deal peeps.

Oh, top this - while my parents were still married, they partied on a yacht with Jimmy Buffet!

And the list goes on. Anyone else care to post their own run-ins with semi-celebs in my comments section? Feel free.