Leonard the Human Jukebox: Not A Memorial

At least I hope it isn’t, not in the traditional sense. But it is, of course, since it’s about loss, and memory, and honoring the bond between them.

It’s for Leonard.

I met him on October 28, 2004, down by the banks of the Mississippi, in New Orleans. It was a sunny afternoon, softly warm and languid, and my friend and I were sitting on the steps, watching the houseboats and the beaded tourists and the hucksters of various stripes. This was either before or after beignets and café’ au lait (of course it was -- I don’t remember a moment that wasn’t).

He introduced himself and said, “My name is Leonard and I am known as the human jukebox.” He gave us his spiel then, how he could sound like anybody from Nat King Cole to Marvin Gaye. I don’t remember the specifics, and it didn’t matter. I already knew him from my friend’s stories, had already seen his picture, in fact, that morning, a snapshot from almost a decade before, with the same blue sky and rolling muddy water behind him. He said he was seventy-eight and had lived in the city all his life.

“A song for the lovely lady?” he said. Or something like that, some charming irresistible cliché, and I smiled up at him.

My friend cocked his head at Leonard. “Can you do the one you did for me the last time I was here, the one you wrote? It’s called ‘If You Can’t Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean.'”

“That’s a popular one,” Leonard said. He took the folded bill my friend slipped him, coughed into his handkerchief. It was a harsh, worrisome cough, the rattle of something entrenched. He seemed used to it, though, and when he tucked the scrap of cloth away, he was ready for business.

“My wife had a lot of gentlemen calling our house,” he said. “And this is the song I wrote one day after I picked up the telephone and talked to one of them.”

It started with Leonard saying “Hello?” as if speaking into a phone. He held an empty fist to his ear, pantomimed holding a receiver. During the performance, I think we were lost to him, as replaceable as the next couple who would sit in that spot, the couple who had been there yesterday. Only we weren’t a couple. But that hardly mattered. Leonard was the constant. We were the flux and motion, always different, and in that difference, always the same. We were transient, three day butterflies. Probably already blurring in his eyes

When he was done, we applauded and he bowed and said thank you, almost before we’d started clapping. He said we got two songs for the price of one. I don’t remember the second. I just remember the slow deep river behind him and the powdered sugar in my friend’s hair and the glaze of sun on the grass. Leonard finished with us, then walked over to a family clustered around a park bench. I heard him begin the routine again, heard other voices blending into ambient noise. I remember how we sat without talking, my friend and I, side by side on the steps. We sat there for a long time, until the sun on my shoulders grew too strong for comfort.

I do not know if Leonard survived the horror that his city became. As is true for all disasters, the weak took the worst blows, but when I hear of the drowning and shooting and starving and bleeding, I can’t see the thousands. I can’t see the whole of it. I can only see Leonard. This is so self-absorbed of me, to think of that enormous loss this way, as a personal tragedy. As if I knew anything about it.

I wish I could know where he is, how he is. I wish I could make him a person again and not this metaphor. I wish I could think of him and not feel loss, so many kinds of loss, some concrete, some strange, some utterly unnamable.

I hope this isn’t a memorial. I hope it’s just a memory put into words. I hope that someday soon, a couple will hear that song and slip him a folded bill. It won’t be my friend and I, but I hope it will be someone. And I hope they will take his picture.