from Metairie. He saw the girl in the Marie Laveau shirt looking at him like
he was Tom Cruise or Christian Hosol. Vance knew his name would spread
around the city and every skater would look in awe at him as he flew by.
$50
I AM
NOT
God
TICKER
TO STEAL
FROM THIS
SHOP IS
SOME FREINDS
CAN DO WITH
NO
REFUNDS
BILIT
НАРИСКИ
The Chicken-Man's House of Voodoo was everything you'd expect a House
of Voodoo to look like. They were having a sale on mojo that day. Mojo is the
leg of a black cat that's been killed in a cemetery at midnight. Of course there
were the usual items that would be kind of hard to pick up at your local super-
market. Neatly arranged on shelves were bottles of Boss-Fix Powder, Lodestone,
Mad Luck Drops, Goofer Dust. On the back wall were large hand-lettered signs:
"I AM NOT GOD, "NO REFUNDS SHIT HAPPENS sorry" and "TO STEAL
FROM THIS SHOP IS BAD LUCK."
What took Vance's breath away was a large woman in a blue-spotted dress.
She had long black hair and glasses and wore a blue Thrasher hat exactly like
the one he had on.
"Mon cheri," she said, "so you wants to be the baddest ripper in New Orleans?
Is that what you desire, my dear? You want to dominate Sukki deBrassier?"
Vance remembered when he tried to do a 360° shove-it on a street filled
with traffic, miscalculated, and saw an armored car veering toward him, the
eyes of the driver like a Nazi Panzer Commander
"Cat's got your tongue, boy?" Sister Liz said. "Well, boy. Speak up. Tells
me what's you want."
But Vance, who always prided himself for being a wise guy, could not speak.
Sister Liz smiled. Her tongue was coiled in her toothless mouth like a frog's
waiting for a big, fat fly.
Johnny the Conqueror' is what you want. Big John, he make you the best
skater in New Orleans. In the world, boy. The whole world.
Mark Gonzales, Jeff Phillips, Chris Miller, all them, they be
like posers compared to you."
"I won't sell my soul to the devil, if that's what you want."
"Devil," Sister Liz laughed. "Who's talkin' about that?
Who talking about soul selling? We don't do none of that
here. We approved by the New Orleans Chamber of Com-
merce. Chicken-Man, he Secretary of the Rotary. You been
reading too much, boy. That Stephen Vincent Benet story.
'The Devil and Daniel Webster' that's all you high school
boys know about. Why don't you'll read some good literature
like 'The Odyssey' or Goethe's 'Faust"?"
Still, Vance was leery, but he pictured the promo contracts,
a board named after him and girls even beter than the one
in pink tights staring at him with awe and lust.
"What do I have to do?" he asked.
"It's all natural," she said. "No artificial preservatives, 100% pure. Just put
it in that pouch at your waist. When you go up against Sukki deBrassier, pat
the pouch and say three times, 'Johnny, do your stuff.""
"Is that all? Is it that easy?"
"Yeah," Sister Liz gave her frog-like smile. "But one other thing."
He knew there had to be a catch. It was all too easy.
"You stay out of cemeteries when you compete with Sukki. You stay far
away from dead folks. You understand that?"
Her voice seemed far away. Vance remembered when he gave blood and
stood up too fast. A white fog gouged into his eyes and mouth, he had stumbled
toward the bed. From a thousand miles away came a nurse's voice asking if
he was all right. That's the place from where Sister Liz spoke.
"I understand, Vance said. A piece of cake, he thought.
Sister Liz charged him $2.98 plus nine percent sales tax. The computerized
register recorded the sale without a sound.
As Vance left, Chicken-Man was leaning against the doorway. "No dead folks."
he repeated. "You got that, boy?"
Across the street stood Sukki deBrassier. A tall, lean young black man with
dreadlocks down to his shoulders.
a
"The ramp of the Superdome," he said. "Next Sunday, at twelve o'clock."
DAT
Then he did a 180° and skated toward Back O Town. Even Vance could not
help admiring deBrassier's grace as he olied over a fire hydrant and wove through
group of tourists led by a United States Park Service guide on an historical tour.
Vance, of course, could not hear the guide telling her group about various
plagues and epidemics that had struck New Orleans during the 18th and 19th
centuries and how torches of pitch were used to keep away the pestilences.
He did not hear her say how quickly the bodies had to be buried, how the
cemeteries filled, and new ones were erected then forgotten
as the city expanded into the swamps and forests that once
surrounded this town built between a great river and a
wilderness.
17
"You mean buy." Sister Liz said. "One Genuine Johnny the Conqueror Root,
that's all."
"How much?" Vance expected her to ask a thousand dollars-or ten per-
cent off the top share of all his tour earnings.
"We has an excellent specimen here for only $2.98. Marked down from $5.98.
A St. John's Day special." Sister Liz reached into a dusty jar and took out
a twisted root with a prong-like formation at the end.
42
In school, of course, his history teachers had mentioned
this. But history had nothing to do with real life.
III
Vance waited for his friends at the plaza on the Poydras
side of the Superdome. Eli and Sam Cure, Bryan Archee,
Heath Moss, Mike Carambat, Doug Daussin, and Bill Shea
were late as usual.
In this plaza, unknown to most tourists and most people
from New Orleans, was perhaps the saddest statue in the
world. It commemorated Louisiana's Vietnam veterans. Three
soldiers carrying a wounded comrade. Each held a weapon with their free hand,
ready for attack. Even for the wounded there was no mercy.
On the base of the statue was written: "IN HONOR OF THE SERVICE AND
SACRIFICE OF LOUISIANA'S VIETNAM VETERANS WHO LIKE THEIR
FOREFATHERS ANSWERED THE NATION'S CALL TO DUTY."
Wasting time, Vance did a grind onto the statue. To be quite frank, the boy
had thought it was another Civil War monument, the glorious Confederate dead
and all that. Vance had paid no attention to it, even though his father's brother
had been struck by a rocket-propelled grenade and died before his knees hit
in the ground in the La Sha Valley, in a country ten thousand miles away from
the Big Easy and from boys who paid no mind to anything but their pride and
their boards.
"You beat me, boy," deBrassier smiled all gold, "you be the best skater
in this world-and the world beyond this one. You follow me, man?""
Vance, of course, didn't know what Sukki meant, but he nodded anyway.
"We skate the ramps," deBrassier turned downhill toward one of the ramps
As Vance did a 360° shove-it, a black man's voice said: "Don't come here that led to the levels of the Superdome, then did a wallride-to-railslide. Vance
on Sunday, boy. Throw that goddamn root away."
Vance screeched to a halt. He knew the voice came from the soldier with
the M-16. Then another voice: "You heard my main man. Get out of here."
Though it was the middle of July, Vance shivered as the grunt with the grenade
launcher said: "Vance. Vance. You look so much like your father at fifteen.
Don't waste yourself. Don't compete. You are the son I could never have. Please
let this go."
The voice, of course, belonged to his Uncle Rick, though Vance had never
heard it because he was born seven years after his uncle's chest had been
blown apart at the age of eighteen.
Vance stared defiantly at the statue. No one was going to tell him what to
do. After all, what was so bad about wanting to be the best in anything? He
wasn't selling his soul, was he? He even paid for the root, plus the sales tax.
It was his. And what did these guys know anyway? They had probably never
even seen a skateboard.
"I'll do what I want," Vance said,
The sun was going down. Along Bourbon Street the bars and strip joints
amused the tourists who had slipped dollar bills into Rosie's purse, their children
left in hotels with babysitters. All over the city people were busy with their
lives while the Vietnam vets stared silently beyond Vance into the darkness
he would soon enter
IV
"So, man, you want to beat me? Is that right? Is that what you're after?
To win? Be the best? No matter what?" Sukki deBrassier smiled, His gold front
teeth mirrored the noon sun. Dreadlocks touched his shoulders. He was at
least a head taller than Vance. Black mesh shirt already dark with sweat. Lean,
muscular arms bronze like a statue, like a gladiator. He had come alone, skating
alone as always, from the Back O Town, the ghetto behind Ramparts Street,
where he had shown up six months before, from Jamaica or Haiti or someplace
like that.
"Yeah," Vance heard himself say not so much for himself but for his seven
friends from Metairie standing behind him. "I'm gonna beat your ass. I'm
gonna be the best damn skater in New Orleans."
had never seen anyone so graceful. The boy, the board, the walls were one.
Remembering what Sister Liz had told him, he patted his hip pouch and
said three times, "Johnny, do you stuff."
The moment Vance's fingers left the pouch, the strangest sensation filled
his body. It was as if he no longer had arms and legs. Without thinking, without
worry, without pondering failure, he took off down the ramp, even faster than
deBrassier. His execution of the wallride-to-railslide was the smoothest the world
had ever seen.
Vance had gone beyond thought and fear. As he spun around at the end
of the run he could only recall seeing his cat leap from a six-foot wall to pounce
on a pigeon, tearing it to shreds. Vance saw himself as that cat, at ease in
the physical world.
"That was child's play, what we do. Now I make it more difficult. Now we
see what you are made of."
DeBrassier skated up the ramp, swirled around the boys from Metairie and
tore downwards. He did a 720° shove-it, a no-comply, then a somersault, his
board racing ahead, with deBrassier landing on his hands, skating upside down.
Vance simply smiled, feeling more alive than he had ever been. Before he
took off, while still conscious, he remembered what Sister Liz and Chicken-
Man said about cemeteries. But the only dead people he had seen around
here were the Broncos fans after their team lost to the 49ers.
Aware of certain victory, his body fluid with unconscious grace, down the
ramp he flew, doing the 720° shove-it, no-comply, then the somersault, lan-
ding his hands on the speeding board, then flipping over backwards and
landing on his feet on the board, without even wavering or losing the
least of his balance.
"My congratulations, mon cheri," Sukki deBrassier said, all sweat and
muscle. "Très bien. Very good. Eh? You do well. Now you follow me into
the garage where your friends cannot cheer you. We see how you do
alone. Like me. We see how it is without a cheering section. Eh?"
Turning, he darted past the light poles, tic-tacking between slender trees.
Vance followed until deBrassier stood by a ramp that led into an underground
garage. On the level above, the statue of the Vietnam veterans glowed like a
halo in the Louisiana sunlight.
Looking down into the darkness, Vance didn't recall this ramp, and he had
skated the Superdome for years. But he was too caught up with the possibility
of winning to think any further.
"You follow me. You do this, you win." With that, deBrassier descended
into darkness. Vance saw him doing one 360° after another, flawlessly, like
a black cat on a board.
Vance took off after him. Down the ramp, faster than he had ever gone.
Down he flew. The ramp didn't seem to end. Even further (continued on page 90)
43