New Orleans Bob at Tower Records
We walked toward a man,
mid-forties maybe,
waving bills at passersby.
His words blurred,
his intention precise:
a jazz journal.
Not a record or CD,
but something denser,
a quarterly thick with modal theory,
footnotes marching down the page.
“I’m Bob”, he said,
from a wheelchair.
Needing nimble feet
to cross 4-lane Decatur
to Tower Records.
My wife and I agreed.
The clerk lit up. “Sure, Bob!”
She smiled like we were in on something rare.
We carried back a slim newsprint zine,
smelling of ink and midnight vinyl,
his money untouched.
He thanked us longer than necessary.
We chatted awhile, strangers orbiting
a shared minor key.
Then back to cheap beer,
and zydeco thick in the streets.
I did not ask:
What called you to jazz?
Who gets your heart racing,
Coltrane? Mingus? Sun Ra?
But I had the urgency
of tourist wonder,
the appetite for noise.
The next night on Jackson Square
outside St. Louis Cathedral,
Bob asleep in his chair,
under the hum of streetlamps
and a thumping bass
from somewhere unseen.
We left New Orleans the next morning.
A year later, Katrina came.
And I thought of Bob.
No address, no number, no last name.
Just jazz and that chair.
Did he make it out?
Did he have kin,
a safe place to land,
with a turntable spinning
“The Sidewinder” into dawn?
I’ve been back since.
No sign of Bob.
Tower Records gone,
like so much that once seemed fixed.
Still I think of him somewhere safe,
tapping time,
Café DuMonde coffee, black,
with Chet Baker riffing
from a radio in the corner.
Greg Clary is a retired college professor who was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and a resident of the northwestern Pennsylvania Wilds.
His photographs have appeared in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Rattle, Hole in the Head Review, Pine Mt Sand & Gravel, Tiny Seed Journal, Watershed Journal, About Place, Change Seven, Appalachian Lit, and many more.
His writing has been published in Rye Whiskey Review, The Bridge, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Waccamaw Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Trailer Park Quarterly, Rust Belt Review, Tobeco, and The Literacy Underground
He is the author of The Vandalia in Me: A Photo-Poetry Collection from Appalachia (2024), from Meraki Press.
