The Times-Picayune
February 23, 2002

He never had a prayer, of course. But that didn't stop actor-slash-grocery store clerk Manny 'Chevrolet' Bruno from his quixotic campaign to persuade New Orleans voters that 'A Troubled Man for Troubled Times' was exactly what the mayor's office needed.

"As a Christian," the man said, "I can't support that."

Six of the seven candidates assembled gave the anti-gay answer the man wanted to hear or they simply dodged the question altogether. Then there was Manny "Chevrolet" Bruno, No. 25 on the ballot in the race for mayor of New Orleans.

He needed a smoke. He needed an answer. He needed a punch line. That's what people expected from him, this candidate that had no chance, this candidate that people considered a joke. When he took the microphone, they expected him to say something funny, something whimsical, because that's what he does best. But when faced with the question about same-sex benefits, Bruno dodged the laughter, turned to the congregation and gave them his answer.

"If I were to become mayor," he said, "I'd have no problem with it. C'mon. We're all God's children. We all have to live together as one."

The audience hissed.

"Hissed!" Bruno told his girlfriend, Marian Herbert, outside the church after the forum had ended. "I got killed on that gay question."

"You lost on that one," she admitted. "But you know what? I'm proud of you."

Bruno considered her words and took a drag off his cigarette. Inside, voters were still circling around the front-runners, shaking their hands, stroking their egos under the white lights of the church. Outside, Bruno stood on the pavement, only his girlfriend beside him, the tip of his cigarette burning orange in the chilly darkness and his answer to that question playing over and over again inside his head.

"Who cares?" he said finally. "It's where I stand."

. . . . . . .

Fifteen people ran for mayor in the Feb. 2 primary. Only some of them -- Councilmen Troy Carter and Jim Singleton, state Sen. Paulette Irons, Police Superintendent Richard Pennington and Cox Communications executive Ray Nagin, among others -- had a viable shot at winning.

They had a shot because they had connections. They had convincing, well-crafted speeches and savvy, well-known political consultants. They had leadership experience, the voters' attention, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, in the end, a collective 94 percent of the vote.

The remaining 6 percent went to 10 other candidates. Some went to a gardener, Quentin Brown Jr., who got 422 votes, and a 21-year-old student, Timothy Hill, who got 308. Votes went to two self-employed lawyers, a plumber who prefers to be called "Superman" and a grocery store produce clerk who goes by the name "Chevrolet." Some of them were "true lunatics," said Ed Cerrone, himself a long shot candidate who got 135 votes and came in 14th place.

"Some had insane ideas," he said. "Some had no grasp of the issues or what they were suggesting."

But most of the long shots knew what they were doing. They had a message and they needed to -- they had to -- deliver it to the public. And so, night after night, they went to voter forums in churches and community centers just hoping that someone out there, maybe just one person, would hear what they had to say, be moved by it, and spread the word.

They kept running even though they had no money, even though Carter nearly spent more on a make-up artist ($550) than some of them spent during the whole campaign. Even though Pennington spent nearly as much producing television commercials last fall ($22,779.20) than some of them make in a year.

"I took it as seriously as I could, knowing I could not win," said Thomas Delahay Dunn Jr., who finished 10th with 333 votes. "I was told by a respected political analyst that I could spend a half million to a million dollars and still be a long shot to make the runoff."

But even though they knew the reality, they continued to believe. They had to believe to keep going out there night after night, speaking before voters who had already decided to vote for another candidate. They believed even when the voters laughed or hissed or didn't show up at all.

"You've got to believe in it," Cerrone said. "It almost sounds hokey. But you've got to believe in it. You've got to know why you're going out there."

In the beginning, Manny "Chevrolet" Bruno didn't know why, exactly. Maybe the actor turned grocery store clerk got a little too carried away with a "mockumentary" film he had been making about a long-shot candidate running for mayor. Or maybe he had entered because it was time for a change -- personally and publicly.

"I need this gig," he told himself and anyone who would listen. He needed it because here he was, a 38-year-old man who lives in a one-room apartment above a bar, bums rides off of people because he doesn't own a car and sleeps on a flimsy futon at night. He knew that had to end.

So he ran for mayor, called himself "A Troubled Man for Troubled Times," made a banner at Kinko's for $183.12 and hung it up outside his apartment above the Circle Bar. He went to the forums, got interviewed and got some laughs. It was all right, he thought. It was something to do and it made for good footage in his mockumentary. Then, one morning in early January, he woke up, got ready to go to work, and he saw his name, his words in quotes, in the newspaper.

Right then, he said, it hit him.

Maybe I can stir something up, Bruno thought. Maybe this is my shot. Maybe this is my real calling.

He couldn't win, he knew that.

But he was starting to believe he could make a difference.

. . . . . . .

Bruno was late for the forum. He said it was supposed to go from 10 a.m. to noon. He said it was some kind of forum to raise awareness about the mayoral candidates and the minimum wage increase on the ballot. But when he and his girlfriend arrived at about 11 a.m., no one seemed to know what was going on.

"Where's Grace?" Bruno asked.

"Who's Grace?" Herbert replied.

"The woman who called me," he said. "Are you Grace? I've got to find Grace. Grace? Where's Grace?"

After several minutes of wandering, Bruno finally found Grace, who informed him that he had missed the forum and now they were going to parade through the St. Bernard public housing complex. Bruno shrugged and paced. He thought there would be a chance to speak, maybe pick up a few votes. He thought there would be more cute women here. Now they were getting in their cars and honking their horns at voters, who seemed to have no idea what was happening. He shouted out the window, anyway, as the parade began to roll.

"I'm giving it to the people! I'm giving it to the people! Manny Chevrolet! Whatever you want, I'll give it to you! You want higher wages? I'll give it to you. You want season tickets to the Hornets? I'll give it to you. You want a margarita with salt? I'll give it to you.

"People! I'm begging you! Please!"

He has used this line before and not just on the campaign trail. Because before Bruno was a candidate, before he left Los Angeles a few years ago and moved to New Orleans, he was an actor and entertainer. He made short films, such as "Free O.J.!," in which Bruno yells, "People! I'm begging you!" as he tries to convince gawkers outside the O.J. Simpson trial that the former football star is innocent.

It's his shtick, this maniacal, man-gone-mad act. It's what he does when he gets a crowd before him. On this particular Saturday, however, the people on the parade route didn't seem to find the act interesting. Bruno kept shouting anyway.

"Better living wages for living people! No raises for the walking dead! (Pause.) I don't know what that means! I don't know what that means!"

It might have continued all afternoon, this yelling. But after awhile, Bruno lost interest and began looking at the scene outside the car windows -- the trash stacked up, the people walking in flip-flops next to crumbling walls of sagging homes. He began to get serious, talking about all those politicians who have promised all these people so much for so long. And yet, he said, here they were, still living in poverty.

He looked out at the parade. None of the front-runners was there.

"This is grass-roots, kid," Bruno said. "You don't see Pennington or Singleton out here doing this stuff. You don't see Carter out here. You don't see -- what's her name? -- Irons out here."

Then, he turned and waved out the window.

"How you doing kids? Yeah!"

. . . . . . .

Carlo Lizardo, a wannabe Mafia kingpin, meets his old pal, Manny Chevrolet, in a bar in New Orleans and makes his pitch.

Manny must run for mayor, Lizardo tells him. Manny must run if he wants Lizardo to forget about the $40,000 that he owes him for all the bad bets he made back in their wild Las Vegas days. The idea is, Manny wins, Lizardo gets a lackey in the mayor's office, and Manny gets to keep his thumbs.

This is the way it all begins -- not Bruno's campaign for mayor, but his movie about his campaign for mayor. The Lizardo scene will be the beginning of a film Bruno has titled, "Giving it to the People" -- a mockumentary about one man's misadventure in local politics. It will include such colorful characters as Ms. Tilly, a foul-mouthed campaign manager, and Jackson Square, a skeptical reporter. The film will even include footage from Bruno's actual mayoral run.

But Bruno said he didn't run to make a film. He started making it a year ago and then decided that he wanted to run for real, he said. The company that Herbert works for, Zehno Cross Media Communications, put up the money to qualify him for the race.

Bruno held one fund-raiser, then another. He crafted a platform, telling people that, if elected, he would put more police officers on the street and propose an economic aid package like the Marshall Plan that revived Europe after World War II. He said he would free up police by telling them to stop pursuing victimless crimes such as prostitution and possession of marijuana. And he talked about bringing "radical revolutionary change" to the city.

"New Orleans has problems," he told voters. "I've got problems. We've all got problems. Who better to run for mayor than me?"

People laughed. Bruno said he was serious. Reporters called, he got his face on TV and he started getting noticed for his name and for his slogan -- "A Troubled Man for Troubled Times" -- even as fact and fiction began to blur into a combination of the two.

Was Lizardo coming tonight? No, Lizardo was an actor. What about Ms. Tilly and her foul-mouthed ways? No, she was just an actor, too. On the campaign trail, for the most part, it was just Bruno with his "VOTE for ME" button on his lapel. It was just him shaking hands and walking up to people who, half the time, thought he was joking when he said was running for mayor.

"No, you're not!" Ashley Gessner said after he shook her hand one afternoon on Magazine Street.

"Yes, I am," Bruno replied. "I'm definitely running for mayor."

"Wait! You're right," she said. "I've heard of you."

Bruno looked at her, saw his opening and took it. He told her to vote for him, because he's giving it to the people, because the other candidates don't want change and it's about time for some revolutionary radical change in this city.

She giggled.

"Basically," he said, "I really need the job."

She laughed again. But Bruno stood there watching her. He could see it happening. She was starting to believe.

"We really need you to have the job," Gessner told him as he walked away. "Good luck," she said, then waved.

. . . . . . .

When the polls closed on election night, Bruno was sitting in a bar surrounded by his girlfriend, a man dressed as a jester, his half-brother's ex-wife, her two former roommates and Tony, an ex-felon with a head wound.

Tony, who was drunk and slurring his sentences, had tripped and fallen outside on the street. Now, people were trying to stop the bleeding above his eye while Tony explained to Bruno that he would have voted for him, if Tony wasn't an ex-felon and all that. Bruno eyed him, thanked him and ordered up another Stoli with a lemon and a splash of cranberry. It had been that kind of day.

In the morning, Bruno had voted. Then he had climbed into a yellow convertible with zebra stripes, perched himself on the seat backs with a megaphone and crisscrossed the city. The shouting began.

"Slow down, people," he said. "Slow down and vote. Manny Chevrolet for mayor! Manny! Manny! Manny Chevrolet for mayor!"

And:

"Forget people like Pennington and Irons and Carter . . . My name's Manny Chevrolet. I want to be the next mayor of New Orleans . . . Hi, doggie! Hi, doggie! Hi, doggie!"

And:

"I'm giving you kids what you want and I know what you want. You want progress. You want jobs. You want to be able to get high every once in a while without somebody breathing down your neck."

They stopped for cocktails and later Bruno pulled a shift at the grocery store. Now he was sitting back in another bar, his bar, the Circle Bar, ordering up his Stoli and waiting for the election returns to appear on the television in the corner.

His film still doesn't have an ending. Maybe, Bruno said, it will be an uplifting ending, maybe his character will be like the Rocky Balboa of mayoral candidates, the know-nothing nobody that comes out of nowhere to shock the world. Or maybe, he said, he will shoot several endings and let the viewer choose which one they want to believe. He's not sure which would be best.

In real life, however, he didn't have much choice in the matter. He only had one vote in the election and he knew that he didn't have a chance. But Bruno still believed he could crack the top 10 and he was guaranteeing that he would get at least 1 percent of the vote, if not 2. That would make it all worthwhile, he said. That would prove that he wasn't a joke, that people had heard him.

And so, when the returns started appearing on the television, he cheered as his vote count jumped quickly from two to 20, then 46 and 63. He was on his third Stoli now and flying. But as it became clear that it would be Nagin and Pennington in the runoff, the networks abandoned him. Many stopped showing his returns and the returns of other long shots. Bruno yelled and swore and flipped the channels, searching for something about him.

"Show my picture, man!" he cried. "Show my picture! Oh, c'mon!"

They didn't. And in the end, they stopped mentioning him altogether. Bruno had gotten 274 votes, enough to finish 13th out of 15 candidates, enough to finish ahead of Cerrone and the plumber known as "Superman." Nearly 133,000 people voted for someone else.

But as the night dwindled and the news coverage ended and the mayor's race, once a crowded field of 15, shrunk to two, Bruno didn't let it bother him. He didn't make a concession speech. He didn't concede anything. He only said one thing:

"I'll endorse Nagin -- if he'll fix my cable."

The Times-Picayune
February 9, 2003

Rene Brunet Jr. has been running movie theaters for most of his life, and he built a mountain of debt doing it. Now, at 81, Brunet is down to just one, the Prytania, his last labor of love. And the landlords are coming after him. Again.

He hadn't expected it to be this hard. But that last week at the Joy Theatre on Canal Street, he found meaning in everything he saw. A film splicer reminded him of old projectionists, now dead and gone. A popcorn machine, of the nights he had spent there with the ghost of his father, the original showman, or his wife, the concession girl he loved, or his five children.

The kids had grown up there, working in the box office or at the concession counter. He had grown old and watched the movie palaces he had once owned disappear one by one. They were tired victims of progress: the suburbs, shopping malls, multiplexes with sprawling parking lots and banked walls of stadium seating. And he was their tireless crusader, one of the few who cared enough to stay and fight long after the fight appeared lost.

This is why he took control of the Joy in 1978 as his contemporaries were building futures in concrete dreamscapes. This is why he poured himself into the single-screen Prytania Theatre in 1997 after others had abandoned the red-brick building for shiny boxes of glass and steel. He wanted these places to last. Not another year or two. But forever.

Now at 81 years old, Rene J. Brunet Jr., the New Orleans movie theater icon, faced what appeared to be a final struggle between the time he longed for and the time he had come to live in. He wasn't just in danger of losing his two movie theaters. Both landlords wanted him out.

The Joy was closing after 56 years. This much Brunet knew for sure. He couldn't pay the rent anymore and business had been declining for longer than he cared to admit. Perhaps most important, the Ecuyer family, which owns the Joy building, had been trying to evict Brunet for months because of what Marion Ecuyer called "non-payment of rent over a long period of time."

Brunet had lost this fight. But as he sat down in an empty room of the Joy to say goodbye, he knew there would be at least one more. He knew there was still the Prytania, that 88-year-old survivor of fires and closings and time, the last of the old movie houses still operating in the city, his last picture show.

. . . . . . .

Weeks after the Joy shut down, neither Brunet nor his son Robert plan to give up their fight over the Prytania. It doesn't matter that the Prytania's owner, Poseidon, LLC, is preparing to take them to court on Wednesday to evict them. It doesn't matter that Poseidon's attorney claims that they have violated their lease by failing to pay rent and insurance and taxes.

The Brunets' other problems in recent months don't matter either. Not the $31,000 they owed to the state in sales taxes. Not the $23,000 they owed to Whitney Bank for a loan they took out and still need to pay back. Not the $9,000 they owed in property taxes to the city.

Brunet struck deals or calculated ways to pay back these debts -- anything to keep his theaters running. Because for him it has never been about making money. If it had, he would have closed the Joy years ago. What it's been about, what it's always been about, is the show.

And so, he hung on, and hangs on, often losing money in the process, because to him the theaters represent another time, when movie houses were palaces filled with beauty and pageantry and he was the host of the party, there at the door in a suit and tie to take your ticket and shake your hand and welcome you to his show.

If the Prytania closes, Rene Brunet believes all of this will come to an end. Robert Brunet, 38, believes that, too. And he worries that the end of the Prytania might also bring about the end of his father, who lives for the theaters and taught him everything he knows about running them.

Treat the customers like guests, the father told the son. Treat them with respect. Put on a great presentation and remember, above all, no matter what happens, no matter what goes wrong or what you have to do to make it right, the show must always go on.

. . . . . . .

Fifty-eight theaters were showing movies the day his father died in October 1946. The Fox had a Bing Crosby film, the Isis a double feature. "Jesse James" was at the Carrollton, the Poplar, the Prytania and the Tivoli. "State Fair" was at the Imperial, and the show would go on without the man who started it.

"Heart Attack Fatal to Movie Pioneer," the newspaper headline read the next day above the obituary of Rene J. Brunet Sr., which proceeded to tick off his accomplishments: the opening of a Baronne Street nickelodeon in 1907, the Harlequin Theatre five years later and finally the Imperial, his last, in 1921.

His middle child, blind in one eye, had sat in that theater years earlier listening to the sounds of its great organ. It was the organ that he loved first, this cacophony of sound that raged in the dark as silent pictures danced across the screen.

Almost all the theaters had them back then. They provided the sound -- the battles, the chases, the clatter, the polkas -- for the silent film rolling on stand-up reels. By the mid-1940s, however, the organs the boy loved so much were disappearing, replaced by magnetized sound strips embedded in the film, and so was his father, the movie man who could not be replaced. The son, 25 and living with his mother, went off to run the father's business.

"Rene Brunet Inc." reads the sign today. It's not big, not even visible from the street. But it's there in black letters on the white door across the gravel parking lot and behind the uniform supply shop on a gray stretch of the Earhart Expressway. Up the stairs, and through a locked door, there is from time to time the smell of popcorn butter lingering in the hallway that leads to the offices of Rene and his son Robert. They were talking on this day about show times at the Prytania that weekend.

"Can you remember?" the father asked.

The son read him the times and left him. He never wanted to get involved in the Prytania in the first place. He was sure it was a bad idea when Chris Riley, the latest owner of the 88-year-old movie house, offered Brunet a chance to run it in 1997. They already had two theaters to operate -- the State Palace for live shows and the Joy for movies -- and he saw no reason for another one.

But his father couldn't resist the idea of operating a neighborhood movie house like the ones he used to have decades ago: the Carver, the Clabon, the Gallo, the Famous, the Circle and, of course, the Imperial.

He called the Imperial his "doll house," this grand, old theater with the terrazzo floors and raised concession stand. He knew everyone there and everyone knew him, and if he could have done anything to save the place from the fire that ravaged it in March 1957, he would have done it.

But all he could do was stand across the street with his mother and watch it burn, he explained. "The show's on fire," he remembers telling her. Then it was gone, years before the others would fall, and there was nothing he could do about those, either.

"Look," he said. "The Arcade is gone. The Algy is gone. The Beacon is a Whitney Bank out on Harrison Avenue. The Carrollton is a wedding reception hall. The Dreamland is gone. The Escorial is gone . . . The Folly is a church. The Granada is gone. The Grand is a day care center for kids. The Happyland is a roofing warehouse. The Mecca is gone . . ."

The list went on and on.

. . . . . . .

Forty-nine theaters were showing movies the day he married the concession girl in August 1960. Seven of them were drive-ins. One of them featured Tony Curtis, another John Wayne. "Bells Are Ringing" was in its fourth week at the Loew's State and Rene Brunet was in love with a woman he plainly described as a "raving beauty."

She didn't like him at first. He was tough, consumed by details and quick to criticize those who didn't understand the importance of little things. That popcorn kernels have to go in the kettle before the oil. That the perfect soda starts with a cup, three-fourths filled with ice. That hot dog buns have to be heated just so. Just think, he used to say, what I could see if I had two eyes.

The girl didn't care. She had wanted the job at the Famous Theatre on Claiborne and Marigny because it sounded like fun. She had little interest in perfect sodas and popcorn kernels. She called the man Mr. Brunet and he barely noticed her for years.

Then one night, closing up after a show, Rene and Muriel kissed inside the empty theater. By then, the girl cared. She saw that toughness was just another word for passion and that his passion for theaters had no end. They got married, lost themselves in movies and theaters and life and raised five children who would work for them in the theaters.

But by the 1970s, all that was changing. Old showmen who had started off in neighborhood theaters -- people like T.G. "Teddy" Solomon -- were moving from the cities to the suburbs. They would make millions building boxes in parking lots and naming them after the malls nearby, calling them Lakeside I, II, III, IV, and V, instead of calling them the Rivoli, the Tivoli, or the Peacock.

Back in the city, Brunet shut down the Famous and the Circle, the Gallo and the Carver. They would become a parking lot and a Rally's, a pawn shop and a medical clinic in the years ahead. But the Joy would stay open just as people were beginning to worry it would become a fried chicken stand. Brunet saved it just as Chris Riley had kept open the Prytania in 1997.

Riley, then 29, was declared a hero. But not even five years after he and Brunet reopened the shuttered Prytania, the building is for sale, the owners want Brunet out and Riley is dead. The former Navy SEAL turned a gun on his estranged girlfriend and then on himself in 1999. His mother took ownership of the theater and Evangeline Vavrick, her attorney, said Brunet has caused nothing but problems ever since.

"He won't move out unless we put him out on the street with an eviction notice," she said. "He thinks he's right. Thinks he's the movie industry in New Orleans. He's not. He's a tenant."

He's a tenant, she explained, who doesn't pay rent, taxes or insurance on time. A tenant who violated the lease and should be evicted. This is what Vavrick has argued and will continue to argue as the tenant in question defends himself, saying he is current on his payments, that he is not in default on the lease, that he should not be evicted.

Brunet, the man so particular about the amount of ice in a cup, admits that he doesn't "get into the nitty-gritty" when it comes to the day-to-day finances of the theater. "I guess I should," he said. But he dismissed Vavrick's lawsuit as a ploy to get rid of him because she wants to sell the building to a buyer and that buyer doesn't want the building to come with him and the 15 years of options left on his lease.

"My attorneys tell me, 'Don't have the slightest concern about it,' " Brunet said. But he does, of course. He can't help it, and neither can his son, who sits in the office next to his father's using "craftsmanship" and "wizardry" to pay for the pictures that play every night. The bills keep coming.

"Is Rene in position to pay for this? I don't believe," said Vavrick. "I don't know what his finances are, but they are obviously shaky. If you can't pay the rent to the building that's providing your livelihood, you're having problems. This is apparently his livelihood."

. . . . . . .

Nine theaters were showing movies the night Brunet sat down in an empty room last month with a piece of paper, a pencil and a telephone. Seven of the theaters were multiplexes. Six of them were owned by national corporations. Only two of them had been built before 1948, and one of them was closing.

Brunet looked at the phone. In recent weeks, the employees at the Joy had used it to call him at home to ask if they should play the late show. There was no one there to see it, they told him, and Brunet let them close up. Other times, over the years, it was Brunet calling them to see how long it would take them to answer. He hates voice mail, hates answering machines. He likes the personal touch.

But tonight he needed voice mail. How else could he say goodbye to everyone at once? How else could he let everyone know that the Joy was closing after all these years? He wrote down his message, picked up the phone and began to speak in a voice that crackled with time.

Sometimes he and his son talk about what it would have been like if they had moved to the suburbs like Solomon, who made a fortune building shopping mall theaters and the chain of Palaces with stadium seats. They talk about what kind of money they would have made opening multiplexes like Solomon did, near interstate exits.

"He was very smart," Rene Brunet likes to say. "He saw the future of the business. Let me tell you, single-screen theaters is the past. It's the long past. I may enjoy running this. But it's the past and I know it. I'd be sticking my head in the sand if I said, 'Just you wait, there are going to be single-screen theaters all over the city.' We'd be waiting a very long time."

Still, back into the past he goes again and again, waiting out the future, escaping the present. Sometimes, he escapes to the Saenger Theatre, which opened in 1927 as one of downtown's finest movie houses. There, like everywhere, much has changed over the years. But the theater still has the original organ from the days of silent pictures and sometimes Brunet goes there alone, after hours, to play it.

More times than he can count, E. P. Miller, the theater's operations manager, has come back to lock up late at night and found Brunet still there: shoes kicked off, playing the organ in front of 2,800 empty seats until he sweated through his shirt and stripped down to his waist. Other times, Brunet locks the place up on his own and peers through the peephole of the stage door onto Basin Street before stepping outside into the night.

More often, though, he is at the Prytania in a suit and tie and he is talking to his guests who are coming to his theater to see the show. Recently, at 7 o'clock on a Friday night, weeks after the closing of the Joy, Brunet was there for the opening of "Chicago," the acclaimed remake of the old musical.

"What are people saying about 'Chicago'?" he asked his assistant manager. He couldn't stop talking about "Chicago." How entertaining it is. How much it's like the old movies in which people sang and danced and you could forget your troubles for a spell. "It's entertainment," he clarified, as if all movies didn't qualify as such. Then he rattled off examples that fit his definition: "It's a Wonderful Life," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Casablanca."

He loves these movies. They had a formula, he explained. There was a character, a hero. His or her life was good. But as the movie rolled everything began to crash, problems loomed and grew larger and you worried that things weren't going to work out. Then in the end, always in the end, just when it seemed that all was lost, there was that uplifting moment, that certain something, that saved the hero.

An angel named Clarence.

A pair of ruby slippers.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

These are the endings Brunet likes, happy endings. This is what he wants to bring to the people, who were arriving now at the door for "Chicago" and smiling at the old man in the suit who was smiling back at them.

"Hello . . . How are you? . . . Enjoying this cold weather? . . . I'm not either . . . I've been running theaters all my life . . . Come on in from the cold . . . Come on in . . ."

He held out his arms to show them the way and they followed him inside, talking to him about the theater, how they loved it, how they hoped it would last forever.

"How's the future looking?" asked one.

"Looking pretty good," Brunet replied.

Light flickered on a white screen. Pictures danced and moved in the dark. Previews rolled. The show began and the people settled into their seats.

They laughed. They winced. They lost themselves in the story on the screen, oblivious for the moment to the character standing outside the theater in the cold, rubbing his hands together to stay warm, hoping he wouldn't have to say goodbye to the picture show one more time.

"Thank you for calling the Joy Theatre," he had said in that final voice mail message. "We thank you for your confidence and patronage for the last 56 years. We hope you have enjoyed the Joy Theatre as much as we have enjoyed serving you. This is the last telephone message you will hear from the Joy Theatre. The Joy is closed. . . .

"This is Rene Brunet signing off."

The Times-Picayune
November 17, 2002

Jack Hatty's dreams of spending his senior year playing under the lights for his beloved Rummel Raiders died one terrible night in a crush of twisted steel and glass. But his coach kept a promise, and Hatty spent this, his senior season, with his teammates, on the roster and on the field.

It was chilly. It was April. It was Jack Hatty at the wheel and it was just as he had expected. He knew he, his mother and grandmother wouldn't just drive to Hattiesburg from their modest home in Metairie on that Thursday night for the final concert of his sister Lauren's freshman year of college.

They would sit near the back of the auditorium and listen for the sweet sounds of her clarinet. Then they would hug her, drive to a nearby pancake house, pile into a booth, and eat like a family until it was late and Lauren begged them to stay.

Lauren missed her younger brother, a 5-foot-7, 150-pound defensive back for Archbishop Rummel High School. He was changing so fast these days, she thought, and he was proud of those changes. Always strong for being so small, Hatty was bulging now. His legs were thick, his biceps ripped, and he liked to think that maybe this fall, the fall of his senior year, he would star in Raider red beneath the white lights of the football field he had come to love.

In the lights, even when he didn't play, Hatty felt as if the world was spinning around him, spinning just for him and his teammates as they scampered between the sidelines, making tackles and catches before thousands of people who sat in the bleachers just to be near them. In these moments, he stripped away his problems -- the math tests and pop quizzes, the childish soap operas and high school dramas, the father he had watched waste away in a wheelchair in their living room -- until it was just him and a team and a purpose: win.

So he ate to get stronger. Two eggs, two strips of bacon, two sausage links, and two buttermilk pancakes -- "It's two delicious!" the menu said -- that night in the pancake house in Hattiesburg. He washed it all down with two glasses of milk, said goodbye to his sister, and left his mother and grandmother behind.

They can't remember now why they took two cars in the first place. His mother tells him it was just in case her car broke down. The boy, sitting in a wheelchair in their home just like his father once did, admits he just wanted to be alone on the road. And so he motored down Interstate 59, an hour and a half to home, between the shadows of the hills.

It was about 10:30 p.m. It was the end of a long day. It was Jack Hatty at the wheel of his Mitsubishi Montero Sport and it wasn't long before he could feel it creeping up on him. Sleep. He wanted to sleep.

Hatty rolled down the windows, then rolled them up. He turned up the stereo, then turned it up louder. He focused on the music, on the road, on the headlights stabbing into the night until, just outside of Picayune about 50 miles from home, the heaviness overcame him and the lines of the interstate began to blur.

His head nodded. His eyes fluttered and closed.

The boy drifted off into darkness.

. . . . . . .

When he was 2 years old, Jack Hatty disappeared. He was playing in his back yard. His mother was watching him, moving in and out of their ranch-style home as he clambered about the patio. And then he was gone.

Susan Hatty, a young mother of two, tried not to panic when she couldn't find her son. But she couldn't figure out where he might have run off to in such a short amount of time. She spun around, called his name and heard the boy's answer from above her head.

To this day, the family can't explain how Jack, a mere toddler, found the strength in his arms to shimmy up a patio support to the aluminum rooftop suspended above the ground and his mother's head. It doesn't matter anymore, really. It has become family lore now, one of those stories told, retold and polished into prophecy as if it says something about the future of the boy named after his father.

Jack Hatty Sr. used to embarrass the kids when they went out to eat at restaurants. It kills Lauren to think about that now. But at the end, when multiple sclerosis left him unable to eat his own food without coughing it up at the table, she worried what others were thinking about them. By then, their father had lost everything to the progressive disease that picked apart his central nervous system. He couldn't stand, couldn't walk and couldn't hold a job anymore.

His son, 9 at the time, remembers coming home from school those last years of his father's life and finding him sitting in a wheelchair in the living room just as he had left him that morning, watching television or listening to music. It was all the father could do before he died in 1995 at age 40. He certainly couldn't throw a football with his son, who appeared in the newspaper just two weeks after his father's obituary, standing in a picture with his football team on Mike Miley playground in Metairie, a champion.

He was smaller than most kids, it was true. But Jack Hatty loved the game, the adrenaline, the smell of grass stains on cotton, and he had something to prove to everyone who thought he was too small to play.

Years later, Rummel head football coach Jay Roth noticed the same intensity in the player who came out for the Raiders. He wasn't a varsity starter -- Roth had too many good defensive backs on his roster -- but Hatty played hard when he got his chances and could lift as much as some of the linemen, guys who outweighed him by 70 pounds.

During one weight-room session at Rummel last spring, coaches watched him bench-press 260 pounds, at least 100 pounds more than his body weight. It was the most Hatty had ever lifted for them and it confirmed what Roth had already suspected about the boy who wore No. 19: Pound for pound, he was the strongest Raider on the field.

. . . . . . .

Out of the darkness came the sound of skittering car wheels. Hatty awoke to it in a panic. He didn't know where he was or how he got there. He braked and turned the wheel. He tried to get control. But the car was already gone now, careening off the road, over an embankment before an overpass and down into a grove of pine trees.

The car hit one tree, maybe more, in mid-air before rolling over on its end and slamming into the earth upside down, maybe 30 feet below the road, in a screaming moment of spinning tires and snapping tree limbs and shattering glass. The impact flattened the roof of the car like pizza dough. The rear axle and hatchback cracked and broke away.

Later, the towing service would need two trips to gather what was left of Hatty's car near the overpass just south of Picayune. For the moment, however, the engine was still running, the music still playing. Hatty passed out.

When he awoke, hazy, disoriented and pinned upside down in his seat, he somehow found a way to unbuckle his seat belt and crawl through the glass and crumpled metal to the grass on the side of the car. There he passed out again. He doesn't know how long it was exactly before he saw a man, another motorist whom Picayune Police never identified, and heard him say these words: "Son, are you all right?"

Hatty wasn't sure. He was breathing. He was thinking. He could see and hear the man who lifted him up and pulled him away from the wreckage for fear that leaking gasoline might ignite and explode. Hatty remembers moaning in pain. He was hurt, but he didn't know where. He was numb, but he didn't know why. He couldn't feel his legs, and for the longest time he refused to look down at them. He was worried what he might see. He was afraid they were gone.

. . . . . . .

On the ninth floor of the hospital, where the spinal cord injury patients come for rehabilitation, it's the doctor's job to tell them the difference between truth and miracles.

The truth, according to Dr. Gary Glynn, is this: If a patient who has suffered a spinal cord injury has no sensation or motor functions within 24 hours of the injury, the chance of getting something back is almost zero. The miracle, he tells his patients, would be movement -- any movement whatsoever.

"My saying that doesn't change the reality," he likes to add after breaking this news to the patients. "You're either going to get better or you're not. But from my perspective, at least for what we're doing here, we have to assume you're not going to get better."

Then, sometimes, the patients scream at Glynn, the medical director of the Touro rehabilitation center. They are angry at him, at the world, at the car accident or gunshot or fluke tragedy that left them here on the ninth floor surrounded by 26 other patients, most of them recovering from strokes or similar accidents. Other times, the patients glare at Glynn in silence, their eyes seemingly asking him: "Who are you, man? How do you know?"

Glynn, 54, remembers Hatty's silent stare.

The boy, then a 17-year-old junior at Rummel, came to Touro six days after he flipped his car into a grove of trees on April 18. He had fractured his third thoracic vertebrae near his shoulder blades and managed to knock the vertebrae above it out of alignment. Doctors in Hattiesburg, where Hatty was flown after the crash, had performed surgery to bring the vertebrae back together: like two fists one on top of the other. But the impact of Hatty's car slamming into the ground had already damaged his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the chest down, able to move his arms and hands, but not his legs.

At Rummel on the morning of the accident, rumors about Hatty spread from homeroom to homeroom. Some students, his closest friends, wanted to drive to see him. Senior guidance counselor Bob Whitman urged them to stay. They didn't know where they were going, he told them, and they didn't even know for sure what had happened. They decided to wait for more news. But Jay Roth, a 1981 Rummel graduate, knew there was something wrong. Hatty had missed "roll."

"Roll" is a football term that Roth borrowed from a coach while he was playing ball at Nicholls State University. If you messed up, if you broke team or school rules, you rolled. From one end of the field to the other. End over end. A hundred yards of rolling on your side. At 6:30 a.m. When the grass is still thick with dew. To Roth, who sees football as a metaphor for life, "roll" proves a point: You can't be successful, either on or off the field, without discipline.

Hatty had violated that corollary -- he had been late one day -- and that Friday morning he was scheduled to roll for the coach before school. When he didn't show, and Roth began hearing that Hatty may have been paralyzed in a crash, the coach cringed.

More than a decade earlier, then coaching at Archbishop Shaw High School, Roth was standing on the sideline when Nat Adams, a promising freshman running back and defensive back, snapped his neck making a tackle and wound up paralyzed. Roth remembered the look in the boy's eyes on the field that day. "I think he knew and I knew what had happened," Roth said. Frightened at the thought of it, he considered giving up coaching.

But in the weeks and months that followed, Roth said he learned what the team meant to Adams, what the game meant to him, and when he heard about Hatty's crash on that Friday years later he made a promise to himself and to the boy that the team would be there for Hatty, whatever he needed.

Roth brought him a Rummel helmet signed by all the players. He made sure his name appeared in the program this fall -- 19 ... Hatty, Jack ... SR ... CB ... 5'7" ... 150 -- even as the boy lost 20 pounds over the summer. Meanwhile, his friends visited him on the ninth floor.

"Hey, babe," the cards said.

"How ya doin'?"

"Jack, we are all thinking about you."

Glynn had seen it before, of course. After treating hundreds of spinal cord injury patients at Touro over the last 20 years, he has had his share of paralyzed high school kids. For a while, Glynn explained, they'll get visitors.

"It's a bad injury and that's your own vulnerability," he said. "At 17, 18, you're bulletproof, invincible, and you start off visiting that guy in there as if he has pneumonia. 'Get well soon, Jack.' But when the reality sinks in that their friend is paralyzed, they tend to fade away."

That didn't happen with Hatty, though. Roth and his teammates wouldn't let it happen. The Raiders had a season to play this fall. Hatty was on the roster and he had missed "roll."

"Remember," Roth began telling him, "you owe me."

. . . . . . .

The cars began to fill the high school parking lot. Beige minivans, driven by mothers, packed with girls. Beat-up two-doors, driven by boys, throbbing with hip-hop. One by one, they pulled up, stepped out into the cold November night and then disappeared into the gymnasium where the cheerleaders would soon be singing:

Rummel fans let's hear you shout!

Come on Raiders and spell it out!

It was homecoming. The next night, beneath the lights of Joe Yenni Stadium, Rummel would play Holy Cross, undefeated at the time, in a game that would help determine the district championship. Roth wanted everyone there for the Friday night pep rally, including, if he could make it, Hatty.

"There he is," said Brad Allen, a senior on the team, as Hatty pulled up in his mother's hatchback wagon, a "Raider Pride" license plate on the front bumper.

Hatty smiled at his teammates as he climbed from the passenger seat of the car into his wheelchair using the same arms that had once helped propel his 2-year-old body up the family's back patio. They waited for him, rubbed his head and walked with him as he rolled away from his mother, another teenage boy in a football jersey.

"Somebody want to escort me up there?" Hatty asked a minute later, nodding toward the steps that lead up to Rummel's second-floor gymnasium where the pep rally was about to start.

"I got you," said Nick Galliano, another senior.

In the dreams he has had since last April, it doesn't happen this way. He doesn't need help getting up stairs. He is always walking or running. Even the dreams that begin with him paralyzed and in a wheelchair end with him standing up and telling those around him: "Look what I can do."

This is the miracle and sometimes he clings to it. He tells himself that it's all a test, this accident, and he can pass the test if he's the best person he can be. He tells himself that he could turn out like Christopher Reeve, the quadriplegic actor who has recently gained some movement in his hands and feet. He tells his mother about the phantom feelings he gets from time to time in his legs, an itch maybe, or a twinge of pain.

"What does that mean?" he asked her one night recently, sitting in his wheelchair in their living room. Susan Hatty, who was miles behind her son that night in April and never saw that he had crashed, shook her head.

"Hope?" she wondered.

The truth is, sometimes he doesn't tell anyone anything and he sits in the bathtub for hours, staring at the wall, dwelling on the why, thinking too much. In the seven weeks he spent on the ninth floor at Touro, learning how to live life in a wheelchair from a flurry of therapists and doctors and nurses, Hatty thought a lot about his father. He worried that maybe he would end up like him: a man wasting away in a living room in front of the television unable to escape his own body.

"Don't my legs look like Dad's?" he asked his sister one day in the hospital, staring down at the pale, hairy flesh of the legs that once squatted 325 pounds of iron in the Rummel weight room. It haunted him, this thought, and his mother did what she could to persuade him that his father was only going to get worse, while he can only get better. Her explanation helped him make sense of his new reality. Football helped him more. On game day there's never time to think.

He has to put on his jersey and go to the team Mass. He has to follow the buses in his mother's hatchback and roll himself across yards of mud and grass to be next to the coaches on the sideline who are shouting at the players to beat Jesuit or Shaw or Holy Cross. And he has to shout, too, because these are his friends and this is his team, co-district champions at 9-1, playing beneath the lights in front of thousands.

"Where's Jack? Where's Jack?" asked Donald Williams, a senior wide receiver, in the gymnasium the night of the pep rally just before Hatty rolled off the lift to the second floor with Galliano behind him.

The boys rubbed his head. Roth gave a speech. The cheerleaders cheered -- "Yell R-A-I-D-E-R-S!" -- and then led the team outside to light a fire in the parking lot in anticipation of victory. The crowd didn't linger long around it.

It was cold. It was growing late. It was Jack Hatty rolling down the sidewalk with his mother in a wind that reeked of gasoline and it was the coach who stopped him to say it was all right if he couldn't make it to the game the next night.

Hatty eyed the man. The mother eyed her son. In the parking lot, boys and girls were leaving together, driving off into the night in cars that thumped and bumped across the road toward destinations unknown. The boy shook his head, looked up at his coach and smiled.

"I wouldn't miss the game," he said.

For one more time, maybe the last time, Dan Rather just wanted to report from the center of the storm. But when he came to town last week chasing Hurricane Lili, the 70-year-old CBS broadcasting legend discovered that the reporter he once was could not occupy the same space as the star he had become.

". . . DEADLY . . ." the latest hurricane advisory said.

". . . EXTREMELY DANGEROUS . . ."

". . . FLOODING . . ."

". . . TORNADOES . . ."

"WINDS . . . 145 MPH."

Rather looked at the map of Louisiana laid out before him on the table and, with his index finger, circled a swath of highway and marsh between Morgan City and New Iberia. He had to be down there when Hurricane Lili hit shore in that area the next day. The CBS News anchor couldn't stay anchored at the hotel in New Orleans all night.

Everyone around him -- the camera crews, the sound guys, the producers, and editors -- knew it. Because this is what Rather does. This is what makes Rather Rather. He barrels headlong into the storm with a satellite truck and a microphone, stands up to the squalls, swallows the rain, squints his eyes against the wind and turns his face toward the camera because this is good television, this is TV News.

"We're going to dare to be great," Rather told the "CBS Evening News" crew earlier that night as they waited to see where Lili, a powerful Category 4 hurricane, would turn. "That means we're going to take a real good look and not be afraid to go where we really think we ought to be."

Now it was time to make that decision and Rather's executive producer, Jim Murphy, was having his latest personal crisis. Murphy has worked with the 70-year-old anchorman long enough to know that Rather would want to be in the eye of the storm.

But he also knew the reality: If they went down to New Iberia and a 20-foot storm surge buried the city, the satellite truck could flood, and the generator could sputter, which could keep them off the air, which would be a total embarrassment to him and the network, which would ruin Murphy's week. Or month. Or life.

"Everybody go to bed," Murphy decided. "We're staying here."

Rather asked why. Murphy explained the risks. Rather countered by saying that, more than likely, they would be able to broadcast from somewhere: a hill, a bridge, someplace dry. He had been through enough storms -- more than he could count -- to know. Murphy had never before seen a hurricane and admitted: "I'm guessing everything."

"That's very obvious to me," Rather replied.

Still, Murphy told him, "We're not moving."

"Why is that?" Rather asked again.

Murphy sighed. He paced. He grabbed a cigarette and left the crowded room to talk some more with Rather, who was making his arguments and pointing at the dots on the map that would soon be under water and asking Murphy to explain his decision just one more time.

Murphy put his hands on his head and opened his mouth as if he was going to scream.

"Help . . . me," he whispered.

. . . . . . .

It begins on an island in a storm in 1961. The man is 29 years old, a young husband and father who works for KHOU-TV in Houston. It is the dawn of the television age. But the young man doesn't think of himself as a TV guy.

He is a newsman reared on rattling typewriters at the Associated Press, United Press International and the Houston Chronicle. More than anything, he wants to tell a good story, and Hurricane Carla is about to give him that chance.

Carla was a monster storm, a swirling, twirling, menacing hurricane harboring 150 mph winds. By the time it took aim at the Texas coast in early September, it filled the entire Gulf of Mexico and sent people scattering for high ground. But Dan Rather stayed.

He had grown up in Wharton, Texas, about 100 miles west of Galveston, where, he explained, "Boys and girls were raised to fear only two things: God and hurricanes." His grandparents lived nearby when the great Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed more than 6,000 people. He knew enough to be afraid.

Yet Rather found himself drawn to these powerful storms, which he remembers his grandmother describing to him in magical, mystical tales of winds and rains and native peoples destroyed by both. They were mysteries, these storms. Unpredictable forces of nature, bigger than him, bigger than anything. "They make you dig deeper than yourself, and think," Rather said, and he learned early, listening to his grandmother, that hurricanes made for good stories.

And so, when Carla approached the Texas coast, Rather stood before a camera in the wind and rain on Galveston Island among the copperheads and rattlesnakes that slithered for the ridge, and broadcast for some 70 hours, locally and nationally.

It is a cliche now, the TV correspondent throwing caution and hairspray to the wind to report from the heart of an approaching storm. But in 1961 viewers had never seen anything like it. When the storm had passed, 46 people were dead, a smaller number than the experts had expected -- partly due, they concluded, to the TV coverage. Rather was on his way to becoming a star. CBS hired him the following year.

"Legendary," gasped Susan Bean, a producer for the "CBS Evening News," reflecting on the story that launched Rather's network television career.

But Rather, who replaced Walter Cronkite as "CBS Evening News" anchor in 1981, refused to be tethered to a New York City studio as his predecessor had been -- especially if there was a big hurricane brewing in the Atlantic or the Gulf.

Critics dubbed him "Hurricane Dan," a storm stalking a storm, a disaster-seeking, destruction-chasing lunatic "determined," as one writer put it, "to be the first anchor washed away by the sea or swallowed up by an earth fissure on live television."

Rather didn't care. He sat inside the eye of Georges in 1998 and pursued the angry winds of Floyd up the east coast a year later, moving his crew around, as one producer put it, like a "circus train." He was there for Andrew as it crashed into Florida and then ricocheted into Louisiana in 1992. Then, three years later, he was back, standing up to Opal's 130 mph winds in Panama City, Fla., as he wrapped one arm around a pole and had a producer hold his legs to keep him from blowing away.

Critics called it showboating. Rather called it news.

"You can't pretend to know what you're talking about," Rather said, "if you spend all your time in a windowless office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. . . . The goal is to cover news. A big hurricane, coming in at daylight, a chance to show people what it's like, that's news."

For this, his crew members love him. He is a legend, they say, but not too big to help them carry their camera equipment. He is a TV news genius, they say, but always willing to chat with a cab driver or waitress. He may be an international star, instantly recognized in New Orleans or Jerusalem, but in his mind he is just a reporter chasing a story, a reporter who got lucky, a reporter, sound man Jim Mohan said, with cojones.

"His job is to push us to be brave, to be journalists, to be the best storm chasers we can be," Bean explained. "Our job is to get him on the air. We have to be the practical ones. He has to be the maniac."

. . . . . . .

Rather leaned over the map of Louisiana, now marked with circles and boxes and lines drawn by a ball-point pen, inside the Hilton New Orleans Riverside hotel.

He had just finished a live remote of the 5:30 p.m. Wednesday evening newscast. Now he and his crew were waiting to see if Lili would turn east toward the city or continue on the north-northwesterly track that forecasters were predicting.

They would have new information at 10 p.m. But Rather was already making predictions.

"We may roll at 10:15," Rather announced to everyone as the room spun around him, gaining speed, feeding on its own energy as producers called New York and camera operators broke down gear and an assistant ran off to see if Rather was right when he said the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in North America was 26.35 inches. He was. It was 1935, a hurricane, in the Florida Keys.

"Let's get a drink," Murphy suggested.

"Yeah," Rather replied, unexpectedly.

Everyone laughed. They were in a good mood, happy with the broadcast that had just aired and ready for the hurricane gaining strength off shore.

"Tonight, from New Orleans," Rather had said to lead off the broadcast that night, "an especially powerful and dangerous storm is headed to strike the Gulf Coast in a matter of hours. As Lili closes in, residents are boarding up and heading out. A massive evacuation is underway tonight. Could we see the worst case scenario? Why New Orleans is just about the worst place a hurricane can hit."

Now everything was coming to pass. On the televisions above them in the hotel bar, Rather and the others watched as local meteorologists tiptoed toward hysteria. He ordered a glass of Wild Turkey -- 101 proof, straight up, no rocks, no water -- and said: "It would be cruel to call them and say: 'It's only your career.' "

There was more laughing, then more jokes as one local forecaster predicted "some very serious weather," and Rather said: "Love the euphemism: 'Could be some very serious weather.' Sounds like something Noah might have said: 'Better board the ark, honey. Looks like there's going to be some very serious weather.' "

Meanwhile, the storm was wobbling. To the east, they thought. Now maybe west. They weren't sure. Bean called some experts, then told everyone that at least one thought the storm might be jogging toward New Orleans and, if that happened, it could be "the worst hurricane nightmare ever."

Rather said it was time to move correspondents, like Bob McNamara, into place.

"I'm worried it's too dangerous," Murphy said.

"Jim, it's one of those times," Rather countered. "Danger is our business."

Murphy looked at Rather. Rather looked at Murphy. "OK," the 42-year-old producer said finally and sarcastically. "Bob's old. He's expendable."

Rather didn't laugh this time. He was thinking about the news now. He was thinking about what he calls "the swinging gate." On a big story like a hurricane or a war, he said, there is a gate that opens, then begins to swing closed. And if you don't move fast enough, you get shut out and someone else gets the story. He didn't want that to happen here, Rather reiterated as they gathered for the 10 p.m. advisory and a conference call with the producers in New York.

"Fact is, we can see this sonofabitch, if it comes in at the right place," he said as he stared at the map. But when the conference call ended, Murphy was having none of it. He told everyone to go to bed.

Everyone heard him, yet they stayed. They lingered and listened a safe distance away from Rather and Murphy as they debated the storm's intentions, and their own plans, until finally Murphy sighed, grabbed a pen and paper and wrote: COVER THE STORM. DON'T BE COVERED BY IT.

Rather looked at the note, then at Murphy. "Well, to cover the storm," he said, "you might need to be covered by it."

"Maybe," Murphy answered.

But the decision had been made.

Everyone wandered off to bed and Rather got on the phone to the correspondents out in the field to ask them, in his softest voice, his teacher's voice, to go toward the storm, not away from it. He told them they might have to take risks for this story. He said, "This is a chance to be great. I urge you not to take the most conservative approach. This is a time to bet a few."

But he wondered if they were listening.

"Who is this guy?" Rather asked about one of them who wanted to hang back rather than head to New Iberia.

"He's a smart, young guy," Bean replied.

"He's a smart guy," Rather said. "But he's got no balls."

"Cojones," Rather added as he told Bean that this guy, whoever he was, would be covering storms when Rather was an old man "drinking a fifth a day and fishing the pilings." That's what concerned him, Rather told her.

Then he, too, wandered off to bed as the storm raged into the night.

. . . . . . .

Bean awoke the next morning with one mission in mind: Get Dan as close as possible to wind and rain as soon as she possibly can.

It wasn't that she thought Murphy had been wrong the night before. Bean, a veteran news producer, had agreed with him. They couldn't risk sending Rather out into the storm, she said, because he's not just a reporter anymore. He's the show, the brand name. It's not just "The CBS Evening News." It's "The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather." And if they couldn't get him on the air, it wouldn't matter if Rather had held onto a pole or leaned into Lili's 145 mph gusts and turned toward the camera as corrugated tin soared through the air like flying razor blades.

"We can risk our lives," Bean explained. "We can take that risk because, if we die, no one can blame you for not being on the air. But if you live, and you're not on the air, there's no excuse for that. None."

Rather knows that, of course. But that didn't mean he had to be happy about the circumstances, and plenty of people were worried as they waited for him before 7 a.m. on Thursday morning.

"He's gonna be one pissed off hombre when he gets in here. That's my prediction," said one cameraman before Rather showed up and taped a live two-minute piece for the CBS "Early Show."

The problem: Lili had weakened.

Overnight, as the crew slept, the storm stalled out, stunning the forecasters as it dropped from a fast-moving Category 4 to a confused Category 2. By 4 a.m., the winds had dropped to 120 mph. Two hours later, they had dropped again to 100 mph, where they remained as Lili made landfall and Rather finished taping his morning segment and Bean picked up a ringing telephone in the hotel meeting room.

It was Murphy on the line. He was talking. Bean was listening. Finally, she spoke up: "You're not going to be fired. Don't be ridiculous. Nobody can control a hurricane."

Murphy wasn't so sure. He asked about Rather.

"He's fine. Everything's good," Bean said. Then she paused, considered the storm and added, "Except that it's weakened considerably."

Rather, meanwhile, was pacing. To the satellite images on the television. To the bank of laptop computers on the wall. Back to the satellite images. "Inside me there is this feeling of the caged cat," Rather once wrote, describing how he feels when a big story begins to build. Now he was pacing the cage, scratching at the bars.

"We need to move our asses. Like now," Rather said to Bean, who was still on the phone with Murphy. "It doesn't matter what happened last night. We've got to move now," the anchor told her again. Bean eyed him as he walked away, then said into the phone: "Jim, I think you should get down here."

Murphy, tired and feeling miserable because he had been wrong and Rather had been right -- after all, they could have been in New Iberia that morning -- appeared a few minutes later and announced, "I'm internally pulling out every last hair on my head."

Someone ran off to find him cigarettes. Someone else had hotel employees deliver carry-out boxes stuffed with bacon strips and sausage patties and blueberry muffins. People gathered. People ate. And at 8:30 a.m., as the eye of the storm was making landfall, they decided to head west toward the damage, whatever damage they could find.

"We'll get Dan up to his chest in water and he'll be good," Bean had assured the others the night before. Now they set out to do just that with camera crews and U-Haul trucks, TelePrompTers and a satellite dish strong enough to beam images back to New York where, presumably, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings were just getting into the office.

Bean was looking for shattered glass and scattered rooftops, rising water and washed out roads. Rather wouldn't be happy, she said, until he was out there in the middle of it. And soon they were there, pointing cameras at him in front of downed awnings, before toppled power lines and on a flooded portion of Louisiana 83 south of New Iberia.

It was just Rather, Bean and a camera crew now. The others were off searching for a place to broadcast the show, scheduled to go on the air in two hours. Murphy was in New Iberia, then Franklin. He was lost, then found. He was on his cell phone to Bean and Bean was shouting, "It wasn't a big f------ hurricane. What do you want me to do? Cut down a tree?"

Rather didn't look at her. He was driving now, quiet at the wheel of their rented sports utility vehicle. He was surrounded now by fields of flattened sugar cane and a cemetery swallowed by muck and mud. He was driving on a road buried in surging flood waters, past a stern-faced state trooper, who asked him to turn around next to a grove of cottonwood trees rustling in 50 mph winds. He rolled down the window and stopped the car.

"Listen," Rather said, "to the sound of the wind in the trees."

. . . . . . .

The CBS trumpets blared. The "Evening News" headlines rolled. The broadcast aired. And it was, Rather, Murphy, and Bean decided, a good one.

They led with the hurricane package. Several minutes of street signs rattling in high winds, trees falling into doomed homes, and people wading into dirt-brown flood waters. They had correspondents reporting from towns across the state. And then: Dan Rather, standing among it all, on Main Street in downtown Franklin, La.

"Good evening. This the heart of a hurricane strike zone," Rather said as the tape rolled and befuddled residents drove past, staring at the man bathed in white lights.

Rather had been here before. In 1992, he had visited Franklin while covering Hurricane Andrew, a monster storm that killed 23 people in Florida and Louisiana and racked up $25 billion in damages.

"I didn't expect to be back, to tell you the truth," Rather said when he saw Mayor Sam Jones.

"I didn't expect to be mayor still," Jones replied, waddling in rubber boots.

It's funny, Jones said. Ten years earlier, after an interview with Rather, he recalled the anchorman asking him how long he expected the clean-up to take. Sixty days, Jones remembers answering, and he invited Rather to come back with his news crew to record the resolve of his people. In fact, in the aftermath of Andrew, Jones remembers asking most everyone to come back: CNN, ABC, NBC. No one came, though. Not until now.

"Depth," Rather had said the night before in New Orleans. This, he admitted, was television's greatest limitation. But the medium also has its strengths, he said. "We take people there," he explained. "Hurricanes, Super Bowls, elections . . . we take you there."

"The magic of television, dude," Murphy cried, giddy now, as he watched the broadcast on a tiny square television screen inside the satellite truck. "There are like 400 cameras out there," he added.

Then, one by one, they packed up the cameras, broke down the tripods, boarded the U-Haul trucks and rental cars and drove south on a deserted road toward a helicopter waiting to ferry Rather back to New Orleans.

"Let's fly," Rather told the pilot, and the chopper eased into the air, wobbled on the wind, and motored into the clouds over flooded neighborhoods and swollen bayous, damaged cane fields and long, empty miles of lush green nothingness. It's going to get bumpy, the pilot warned. Up ahead, to the east, lingering rain squalls and strong winds were still spinning in the sky, skittering north as a broken storm, the storm that got away.

Dan Rather looked out the window and nodded his head. He was flying right into it.

The Times-Picayune
April 25, 2004

Violent rodeos where dogs attack wild hogs pit rural pastime against animal rights activists

At that moment, the pit bulls will be biting down so hard on the hogs -- sometimes tearing at their flesh -- that it will take five men and what's known as a breakstick to pry back the jaws and pull the dogs away.

But for now, all is quiet on this lonesome patch of gravel where Chuck Harris holds his hog-dog rodeos in East Feliciana Parish. Harris, 48, walks alone with his pit bull, Baby Girl, talking to her in a honeyed voice as he makes last-minute preparations for the evening's event.

"That's my Baby Girl," he says to the dog. "That's my Baby Girl. She's as tender as can be, aren't you?" He pauses and adds, "But she's hell on a hog."

That's what it's all about at a hog-dog rodeo. The question isn't how tender is your dog, but rather how fast can he or she catch a wild hog by the ear or leg or throat, and hold it there in the pen for at least three seconds while it squeals.

The dogs are timed. The fastest can catch a hog in a matter of seconds. And that dog wins its owner money -- hundreds, even thousands of dollars per fight. A good catch dog, which is the term owners use for pit bulls who can catch hogs, might be worth $500; its picture may appear in Catch Dog Journal, published out of Pearl River. The feral hog, by contrast, is worth very little in rural Louisiana.

It's nothing but a nuisance, people say. Some argue a hog will otherwise die in a field, shot in the head by an angry farmer. And so these folks feel no remorse about removing the hogs' tusks with bolt cutters and sending them out through a chute to face the charging dogs. At least here, they say, the hogs survive most of the time.

Local authorities haven't seen anything wrong with it, either. In both Washington Parish, where there are at least three hog-dog rodeos every month, and East Feliciana, where Harris started his event last year, sheriff's deputies have pronounced them legal.

But now a bill working its way through the Legislature threatens to ban the contests, and hog-dog enthusiasts and animal rights advocates -- once separated by both culture and distance -- are poised to face off over an issue that many are hearing about for the first time.

On the one side, there are critics who call the practice barbaric, torturous and tormenting, no better than dog fighting, which is illegal, or cockfighting, which is legal in Louisiana but also at issue during this legislative session.

Critics use words such as "spectacle" and "bloodbath" to describe the shows, but those who come to the hog-dog events shake their heads at city folks who, they say, just don't understand. As the proponents see it, hog hunting is part of the culture. Just last year, the Legislature declared "Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials" in Winnfield as the state's official hog-dog event. And changes have been made to the bill in Baton Rouge to make sure the Winnfield trials can go on.

At Uncle Earl's, dogs keep hogs at bay, cornering them without actually touching them, and the hogs still have their tusks. It's a significant distinction, but it doesn't impress those who participate in rodeos. Pit bulls, they argue, are also used on hog hunts. They are part of the same culture. They attack the hog after the bay dogs have cornered it. And so, they say, the rodeos, or "catches" as they call them, are practice.

Ban this, and the state will have to outlaw cow roping, bull riding, deer hunting and, some say, even the boiling of live crawfish. "What limits are you going to set on cruelty?" asks Sam D'Aquilla, district attorney for East and West Feliciana parishes.

The question is a real one for D'Aquilla and, now, for lawmakers as well. In the meantime, people will keep coming to Harris' tin-roofed, steel-beamed, open-air arena 10 miles outside of Clinton and just west of the Amite River on Louisiana 63.

They follow the signs, spray-painted on scrap tin and posted on the side of the road. "Hog Dog Show," the signs say. "Tonight. 6 p.m." When they arrive, Marty King, a longtime friend of Harris', will be there to take their $6 entrance fee and point them in the right direction.

Spectators to the left. Dog owners to the right. King passes the time doodling on the tabletop near the cash drawer. He sketches a rather accurate picture of a pig on the run, and writes a brief message beneath it.

"Come get some of this."

No place to hide

The door to the chute rattles open. The hog hesitates. Eighty feet away, across the dusty pen, a pit bull stands on its hind legs, held back by its owner. It sees the hog. Its teeth are bared. It has been here before and it knows what it has to do. But so does the hog. It has no intention of going into the pen.

Hugh Sims, 18, notices this and hits the hog in the side with a cattle prod. He stands next to the caged chute. He'll hit the hog again if he has to, and others -- age 20, 15 and 11 -- stand on top of the chute, herding the other hogs with shovels and broom sticks.

A moment passes. The hog darts out. It crosses the orange line at its end of the pen, and the game is on. The dog comes running. "Go get 'em! Go get 'em!" the owner yells again and again, and the hog knows it's in trouble.

Instead of racing headlong into the dog at the center of the pen, or scampering to a far corner, it turns right back around and bangs its snout against the door of the exit chute. It knows how to get out. But the door is closed, and the dog pounces.

Its teeth grab the hog's ear, and the hog, skittering to the wall, goes down squealing. The "catch" took five seconds, maybe 10. But it will take closer to a minute, and the work of a few men, to pull the dog away.

One man kneels on the hog's chest. A second places a boot on the hog's snout. A third takes the breakstick -- a thin, dull, knife-like instrument -- and begins to pry the dog's jaws loose. Two more men hover in the dust until the job is done.

At that point, one of them sprays the hog down with apple vinegar. The organizers say it helps heal the wounds. "In two days," Sims says, "it'll be scabbed up. It'll be clean. Ready to go." But for now, it's back through the chute into a smaller, caged pen where the wounded animal mingles with a dozen other hogs. It piles on top of them. When cornered, Harris says, hogs "stack up like chickens."

Still, he explains, they're dangerous, vicious animals. A hog took off the top of his index finger once, he says, brandishing the medically salvaged digit. He turned his back on it for just a second, and it attacked him. "I should have known better," he says.

Others have similar stories and the scars to go with them. But they keep coming back with dogs named Trixie or Honey, Boudreaux or Nitro. Most enter their dogs for a fee -- at Harris' event the fees range from $15 to $35 -- which the winner recovers many times over. Others are just there to watch. A few seem to enjoy being in the pen, prying the dogs off the hogs, while Harris kicks back on a raised platform above it all, watching the show he created.

'Family fun'

It's not an original idea. For 15 to 20 years, the United States Humane Society has condemned hog-dog rodeos. Popular in the South, the rodeos have popped up from the Florida Panhandle to the deserted prairies of west Texas, spawning fans, merchandise, Web sites and finally legal discussions.

The Florida attorney general addressed them a decade ago, saying the events clearly violated the anti-cruelty laws already on the books. Texas did the same. And a couple of months ago, Alabama authorities arrested one hog-dog rodeo organizer after NBC secretly taped the event and aired it on the local news.

But Henry Cabbage, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said cruelty, like obscenity, remains a matter of interpretation. What might be considered cruelty in downtown Miami, Cabbage explained, might be considered tradition in a more remote part of Florida. Local authorities get to decide. Other states are wrangling with similar issues.

In Mississippi last month, Attorney General Jim Hood decided that "if the animals are fought, maimed, wounded, injured, tormented or tortured, then the practice would be illegal." But that would be something for courts to decide, Hood concluded.

Meanwhile, as Louisiana deliberates, the sport -- that's what organizers call it -- has spread. Harris got the idea of starting his own hog-dog event after he paid a visit to a rodeo in Washington Parish last year. It was exciting, he thought. His son Jason Harris, 19, compared it to watching a football game. They bought Baby Girl that day and brought the puppy home.

That's where the training began. Chuck Harris caught wild hogs in small cages, removed their tusks and then put them in a ring with Baby Girl. She did well, Harris says, and soon people were coming to test their own dogs against hogs.

A dozen people became 100, then more. Harris had to start signing people in at a table at the end of the long, winding driveway that leads back into the woods to his original pen. Earlier this year, Harris and his partner at the time, Kenny Miley, decided to move the show out by the highway.

Miley had some land down the road. There, it was decided, they could build a real arena and a concession stand and take the event to the next level. Fliers went up. Word got around. And the place took the name "Head-On Arena," because the hogs and the dogs would meet there, head on.

Harris hoped it would be a success. "Bring the family and come enjoy the fun!!!" it says on the fliers. And people did just that: Kids 10 and younger get in for free.

It all seemed to be going well until the neighbors got involved, and what started as a complaint at a meeting in a small town emerged as part of a statewide debate about animal cruelty.

The smell, the noise

The problem, at first, had less to do with cruelty than it did with more familiar complaints. R.P. Holley and David Booker, who own property adjacent to the arena, didn't like what the new residents had brought to the quiet country neighborhood.

The hogs smell, they told the members of the East Feliciana Police Jury in March. The events are noisy. Sometimes they drag on late into the night. Holley says he and his wife have had to start living with the windows closed and the air-conditioner running just to drown out the sound. And then there was the matter of the dead hogs.

"I've seen that myself -- from my yard," Holley said. "I saw them bury three pigs. They had a hole dug over yonder and they carried the three dead pigs over there, put them in a hole, and covered them up.

"I saw one more dead a couple of weeks ago. They put it on a little flatbed utility trailer, an 8-by-10 trailer, left and went down the road. Went south with it. What he's done with it now, I couldn't tell you."

He asked the police jurors to stop it. The jurors said they couldn't.

Lacking zoning laws, the parish doesn't have the authority to shut down the event for noise violations, explained jury President James Hunt. So informed, the neighbors hoped Harris might get shut down for health violations. He did not. And local authorities, who visited the event along with State Police Sgt. Dennis Stewart, said they couldn't do anything, either.

"I tried to find some wrongdoing," said East Feliciana Sheriff Talmadge Bunch. But there wasn't any, he explained. First of all, Bunch said, "There was no blood, no guts, nothing like that." Second of all, he said, he didn't see anything wrong with using bolt cutters to remove the hogs' tusks because, if given the chance, hogs will "eat a dog, plumb down to the quick."

"I think it's a matter of perception," said Stewart, who visited the rodeo with Bunch. "Would an animal rights activist perceive that as cruelty to animals? Probably. Would someone raised in the country, someone who grew up branding and roping cows, and hunting hogs, think so? Probably not."

So the rodeo continued and the locals in Clinton got to talking about this hog-dog thing down the road in Bluff Creek. Some liked it. Some didn't. Many came to see it out of curiosity, and many more decided they would rather not see it at all.

Hunt, the police jury president, counted himself in the latter group, and Dwight Hill, a police juror, did as well, figuring the animal rights folks would show up and start picketing soon enough.

Instead, they called Rep. Warren Triche, D-Thibodaux, and got him to sponsor a bill that would ban hog-dog rodeos. Last week it passed out of the House criminal justice committee by a vote of 8-3, and Triche said every animal activist group in the state was united in support.

But by the time the Legislature shut down for the weekend, a couple of rural lawmakers were already trying to derail the bill, using a procedural maneuver, and they are likely to try again.

Hooked on hogs

"Are we ready to get started or what?" Jason Harris asks his father outside the arena.

"Yeah. We're ready."

"Let's go."

The announcer, Mike Wilson, climbs the steps to the platform above the pen and welcomes the crowd of about 100 people, and maybe 25 dogs. It's small compared with past shows, Chuck Harris says. But he expected as much tonight -- the first night he has held the rodeo on a Friday instead of a Saturday.

He made the move so that his events won't conflict with the popular rodeos in Washington Parish, and he thinks it will be a good move long-term. Still, he wishes more people would have shown up as he settles into a chair and the announcer kicks off the evening's action with a reading of the rules.

Some are venerable: no dog fighting, no drugs, no profanity and no cameras of any kind. Banning cameras, Harris says, is something all the local hog-dog organizers have agreed upon, because if an animal really gets hurt and someone takes a picture of it, "it will make you look bad."

Other rules are new.

"We will no longer tolerate attitude problems in or outside the arena," says Wilson, reading a rule that is also posted in the arena in large letters. There have been arguments over whose dog was fastest to catch a hog, concedes Amy Wilson, the announcer's wife, who also works the event. It's timed, of course, but disputes can arise nonetheless, especially when money is on the line. And there have been other problems as well.

Specifically, some owners haven't acted fast enough to pry their dogs off the hogs, Wilson says, which has allowed some pit bulls to "tear the hog up." Now that sort of thing has also been added to the list of taboos, the crowd is informed. And anyone who breaks the rule will "buy the hog."

The announcer pauses for effect. A man in the pen says, "Are we ready to dance?" A hog slides into the caged chute. A dog named Trixie rears up on her hind legs. They are 80 feet apart, and then they are right on top of each other.

One dog after the next, one hog after another, they keep coming, their owners paying $10 a pop for untimed "practice" runs. It's a chance to see what a dog's got before the competition begins. And the crowd, once scattered across the parking lot drinking beers, gathers up close around the pen to watch and wait their turn.

Once you've seen it, they say, you want to get a dog and try it. And once you try it, you don't want to stop. Don Crawford, a 36-year-old tree trimmer, knows that firsthand. "I've found my drug, if you will. Right here," he says, nodding toward the pen with his 9-year-old daughter, Amber, and his 2-year-old pit bull, Belle, at his feet.

"Yes!" Amber shouts, thrusting her tiny fists into the air a few moments later when Belle goes back into the pen and takes down her second hog of the night. The dog holds on tight. The hog squeals. And the little girl, understanding what's at stake, has just one question on her mind: "Is this still practice?"

It is, but Crawford thinks his dog has "got a taste" for the hog now, and the night is just beginning. Soon they are taping a small hog's snout closed and letting the children chase it. Then they are singing "Freebird," drinking more beer and complaining about all those people who want to interfere with their lives.

"It's just a bunch of rednecks, you know?" says Blue Allen, 33, of Greensburg, who like many here considers the term "redneck" a badge of honor. "It's just a competition, man. A sport. It's just something to do. Just something to do on weekends to stay out of trouble."

They argue that it's not as cruel as some people make it out to be. They say the hogs are tough, and this is good clean fun. And they make plans for the next day, when many of them will gather elsewhere to do it all over again.

Corey Domingue couldn’t shake the family curse.

The family had a history of alcoholism. The Domingue kids knew that. Certainly, Corey did. He was the gifted one, the first in the family to go to college, the oldest child who wanted to break out and avoid the struggles his parents had endured.

He must have been listening when Kirk and Tammy Domingue sat the children down and told them that hard drinking seemed almost genetic in their family. Kirk Domingue, a 48-year-old disabled welder, had learned the hard way, and he wasn’t shy about telling the kids about his problem: how one drink was too much for him, and a thousand never enough.

He told the kids about his own father’s problem with liquor and how one day they might start drinking and never be able to stop. It worried him and his wife.

But Corey, he was different. Always had been. He was tall and strong, a football player and an honor roll student. He had a plan: Go to Louisiana State University, excel like he always had, and use his chemical engineering degree to get a good job. Then maybe build a house and find a wife and raise a family. He wanted perfection, even demanded it.

And so, Corey, 19, had a talk with his 17-year-old sister that evening in the pickup. He couldn’t have Cherie drinking so much that she hit their father like she had done, and then run away, refusing to come back. He didn’t want a sister of his drinking until she lost control.

"Kick that, Cherie," he told her, as they made their way to Wal-Mart from their home in Franklin. "You’re too pretty for that."

Cherie remembers listening as he drove the truck. She idolized her brother. She wanted to be like him in every way. "Be perfect just like him," she thought. So she agreed to stop drinking. But she kept a secret tucked deep inside -- one she wouldn’t tell her parents until after they placed Corey inside the concrete tomb in the green field near the sugar mill.

Corey drank, too. She just didn’t know how much.

Friends forever

Joe Breaux came home last Thursday evening to find his buddy getting ready for the night. People were coming over, a handful of students, and Breaux had known Domingue long enough to know he would want to look good.

They had gone to school together for years. First, at Berwick Junior High, then at Berwick High. They shared more than just a two-story, off-campus apartment in Baton Rouge. They shared a history. They had played on the high school football team together. They had taken some of the same classes and followed the same path. To graduation day. To LSU. And now they were sophomores together.

Domingue’s parents had never been to college. His father hadn’t even made it through high school. But they were always huge LSU fans, and their son was raised on Tiger purple and gold, and the idea that he could do better.

He had the smarts. Hadn’t the second-grade teacher told his mother that? That he could go across St. Mary Parish to the gifted program in Berwick, if he wanted a challenge?

His parents didn’t want to make him go. But from a young age their son had wanted to be the best. And so they weren’t surprised when he accepted the challenge. He’d go to the bus stop and get onto the bus, sometimes sleeping through the 45-minute ride, sometimes laughing with a new friend, Grant Hoppe.

Years later, Hoppe would be his first roommate at LSU. They lived in a dormitory together freshman year: the two gifted kids from Berwick High School. But Hoppe, also 19, dropped out after one semester. Just packed up and left one day, depressed and lonely and ready to make money instead of taking classes.

It upset the Domingues. But then Breaux took Hoppe’s place, and when the two students took an off-campus apartment this year, Kirk Domingue couldn’t have been happier. The two kids were level-headed, he thought, even brilliant. He wouldn’t have let his son move off campus if it hadn’t been for Breaux, and he doesn’t blame his son’s friend for what happened last Thursday night.

The idea, said LSU student Kerry Michel, was to have a few drinks and just hang out at the apartment. They left and bought liquor at a Winn-Dixie. They used Domingue’s fake identification to get it. Vodka, bourbon, a bottle of rum. Castillo Gold, Breaux remembered, "some real cheap rum."

Just one or two

Cherie Domingue remembers the first time Corey owned up to it: that he didn’t do what his father had urged him to, that he sometimes took a drink.

It was July 16, her 17th birthday, and she and her brother had gone bowling and then to the movies. Now they were headed to a friend’s house. Some people might be drinking, Corey knew, and he didn’t want his kid sister blabbing to their parents. He added, Cherie recalled, that she could talk to him about drinking, if she ever got into that, and Cherie rolled the thought over in her mind.

She wasn’t drinking, not then, and she was surprised that her brother was. He was particular about what he put into his body, consumed with health and strength and getting stronger. At times, he made himself drink a gallon of water a day and eat nothing but protein bars, protein shakes, egg whites and tuna.

"I thought it was nasty," Cherie Domingue said, and she told him so. But, yes, she would keep his secret. That’s what they did: He protected her and she protected him. And anyway, Corey was Cherie’s idol.

It wasn’t just that he was smart. He was giving and caring. He was a great athlete, too, and there was something special about his skills. Scott Tregle, the former head football coach of the Berwick Panthers, noticed it right away: Domingue worked harder than most kids.

At first, he had to. He wasn’t 6-foot-2, like he would grow to be, and his body hadn’t yet developed. He was chunky and a little slow, Tregle thought. He needed better footwork if he wanted to play offensive line, and he needed to work out more.

Domingue did. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. As the only student from the gifted program on the football team, he knew all about work in the classroom, and he brought the same determination to practice. He knew what he had to do: Get stronger. Block better. Be faster. And the coaches noticed.

Howard Hartley, the team’s offensive coordinator at the time, decided to start him in the middle of the line. Hartley needed an intelligent center, someone who could call blocking schemes one moment and then knock a nose tackle on his rear. "The play starts with him," Hartley said, and Domingue became a star, all-district, all-parish.

In December 2001, months before his high school graduation, Domingue played in the tri-parish all-star game and received a certificate that his mother would keep. It irked her that they had spelled his name wrong. But he didn’t care. He told his mother that people knew who he was, no matter how they spelled his name, and his father was proud.

Kirk Domingue had told Corey from the start: "If you don’t want to struggle like we do, you’re going to have to make it on your own."

Now, he was doing just that, and the problems of the past seemed to be slipping away, like water down the bayou. His father was clean and sober, after bottoming out in 1994, hooked on painkillers and beer, he said. The family -- Kirk and Tammy’s four children, and another child from Kirk’s first marriage -- was coming together. They bought a large, two-room tent and camped on the weekends, fishing and hunting as the sun went down over the water.

"It was a new world," Kirk Domingue said. "I could hear the birds singing. I could enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the rain."

And his son was going to be a chemical engineer.

Rum and Coke

Sometime after midnight, Breaux and Michel helped Domingue to the bathroom inside the apartment. The rum was all but gone. Domingue liked rum and Cokes. That was his drink, and Breaux had watched him drink them that Thursday night during study breaks. For the most part, Breaux said, he was upstairs reading. The 19-year-old computer science major had a physics test coming up.

But when Domingue seemed like he was going to get sick, Breaux came out and helped him to the bathroom. There, he passed out on the toilet, then the floor. His friends decided they would check on him through the night and let Domingue, as Breaux said, "sleep it off."

It had happened before, Hoppe, his former roommate, would learn -- the passing out, the drinking too much. To some students, it was no big deal. This was college. But it surprised Hoppe. After all, Domingue didn’t drink in high school and the only time Hoppe saw Domingue drinking in college had ended uneventfully. That night last fall, he recalled, Domingue drank vodka and tequila at a club in Lafayette with a few other friends.

He thought it was Domingue’s first time, and soon, Hoppe said, he was drinking more. After he dropped out of school, Hoppe heard his friend was drinking to get drunk -- and that took time. "If he wanted to get drunk, he had to drink a lot," Breaux had noticed, "because he had a really high tolerance."

Hoppe had tried to talk to his friend. "Man, you’ve got to lay off that stuff. You really do," he said. But Domingue apparently didn’t listen and his parents didn’t know. He appeared to be doing well in school, tutoring other students in calculus, traveling to Franklin on weekends to coach his little brother’s pee-wee football team, calling home most every day.

Last Thursday was no exception. Domingue studied, then he cooked a roast and a pot of white beans -- something he loved to do -- and called his folks. Everyone talked to him: his mom, his little brother, his two sisters and his dad. He was excited about the Florida game on the LSU schedule for Saturday, pumped up and predicting a national championship for his beloved purple and gold.

That was why he had come home the weekend before, why he wouldn’t be there for his mother’s birthday two days later, and why he had been in the pickup truck with Cherie that night, driving to the Wal-Mart and telling his sister to straighten up. He didn’t want to miss game day.

And this was why they couldn’t believe it when they got word: that Breaux and Michel had found him gurgling at 4:30 a.m., that they had called 911 afraid he couldn’t breathe, and then called back, frantic, because he was dying right there on the bathroom floor.

They started CPR. Paramedics arrived and took him to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. Medical workers tried to revive him. They failed. His blood-alcohol content was found to be .43, enough to reduce brain function to the point where he wasn’t breathing.

Police carried the news in person to the tiny home on Main Street in Franklin. They walked to the door. Cherie saw them. She thought they were coming for her, and she hid in her bed, listening as her father went out to meet the people on the porch. At the door, she heard him scream, "No."

What could be said?

Doug Hebert was the deacon at the church across the street and the Domingues were family. Hebert had married Kirk’s mother’s niece. It was a distant connection, but real, and now the 61-year-old, bespectacled man had to figure out how to say good-bye to the student who, the television kept saying, "drank himself to death."

Cherie didn’t like the way that sounded, like all Corey ever did happened in that bathroom, in that apartment, on that one night. She wanted to find another way to say it, but she couldn’t. Like the deacon, she had thoughts weighing heavy on her mind.

She had Corey’s secret.

"Maybe if I had said something," she thought. But what could she have said? Only once had she seen her brother drink, and that was just a couple sips of cheap wine, she remembered. How could she know he would die for the bottle? Wasn’t he the one who had warned her to stop drinking?

It was confusing. There were people coming and going, and flowers piling up in the kitchen next to buckets of fried chicken and bags of corn chips: "From the Desotos . . . ," the cards said. "From the gang in the meat department of Franklin Supermarket . . ."

Corey’s mother counted 600 names in the book at the funeral home. Old coaches and young students, family and friends -- they all came. At one point, the entire offensive line from Domingue’s playing days seemed to walk in the door at once. They came for their center, the middle of that Panther line.

Deacon Hebert sat the Domingues down in an office. He wanted to know what they wanted, if they wanted him to avoid the whole drinking thing, or if they wanted him to teach, to use Corey as an example, to help others by talking about what happened.

"If it can help one kid . . . ," they said.

And so the deacon told the story of the boy, and his mistake, in hopes that someone would hear. Some liked what he had to say, others didn’t. Cherie liked to think about her memories of Corey, and so she kept her silence. The memories were easier to take than the deacon’s story.

For days, she told no one what she knew. Not when grief overcame her and she collapsed on the kitchen floor. Not when she shook with tears before the concrete tomb in the green field near the sugar mill. It was only later, only after the deacon had left them and the crowd had gone home, that Cherie decided to tell her father, confess her secret fear that she had somehow killed her brother.

"Baby," he told her, "Corey made his choice. Not you."

It’s how they feel now that they know everything, now that their son is dead, and purple and gold flowers are blowing in a cool breeze at a cemetery called Perpetual Park. It’s just down Main Street, around the bend, to the right, near the pizza place and the Chinese restaurant.

The Domingues will be able to walk here, if they wish, and Cherie will be able to stop by and think about her brother and how she found the courage to touch him one last time before they closed his casket. There was something she needed to do. She had to fix his hair.

She wanted it to be perfect.

The Times-Picayune
June 29, 2003

Perry Rickman, like many street performers who help give New Orleans its unique character, had his charms as Perri the Hobo, a street-corner clown and balloon artist. But Rickman was also haunted by demons that included drugs, alcohol and fits of rage. After a lifelong struggle, the demons won.

It could be lewd, even rude. He watched in part because he never knew what the hobo would say next, if there would be a confrontation, or a visit from the police, or a tender moment shared between a child and the clown built like a wire and whistling in striped suspenders and a dented top hat.

All of it had happened over the years. But Delaup noticed something else in his act. He thought the clown had a way of pulling people in. He considered it and decided to record the clown's story on his Web site dedicated to the city's eccentric personalities.

Perri couldn't have been more excited. All his life, going back to his days growing up as the son of a West Virginia coal miner, he wanted to belong. They were poor -- one of his sisters said they went to school in the winter time "just to get warm" -- but Perri could be funny. He was uneducated -- he dropped out of high school to join the military -- but he could be the center of attention. He could be loud.

At Welch High School back in the 1960s, it was just an act, just Perri being Perri. In New Orleans for 20 years, it was a career. The boy born as Perry David Rickman in the mountains of Appalachia just before Christmas in 1951 became Perri the Hobo on the streets of the Quarter, a clown who longed to be famous, yet sabotaged his own dreams at every turn.

Now he had another shot. He was on camera, talking about himself for a Web site including him in the pantheon of New Orleans characters. In the few years he had left, Perri would tell most everyone he met to read about him on the site: how he had been raised by Jewish refugees on a 20-acre farm, named most likely to succeed in his high school year book, fought in Vietnam, became an engineer, and then a clown once arrested with 17 pounds of marijuana.

Only later, after he was found dead in March, would it become apparent that the clown who wanted to be famous more than anything else had done much more than hide behind the smile painted upon his face. He had created a comfortable myth to replace a painful reality that even years of hard drinking and smoking pot couldn't erase.

It was based on half-truths and grand embellishments. He altered his military record, faked a family history, and even changed the spelling of his name to Perri Rlickman. But in the end, the myth wasn't enough to save Perri from the one truth he could never change: himself.

. . . . . . .

"What did he overdose with?" the man in the Uptown costume store asked.

It was a Wednesday morning in mid-April. The clown had been dead for almost three weeks, but local street performers were just getting around to memorializing him.

Checkers the clown was organizing. He was looking for red clown noses, like Rickman used to wear, and rubber chickens, like Rickman used to carry. He was worried that no one was going to show up at the jazz funeral in Jackson Square that afternoon and he kept answering questions about Rickman and how he had died.

"Heroin," Checkers replied.

"Ah," the man answered.

It was about all anyone could say. They knew the clown did drugs and they speculated about much more. In the Quarter over the years, rumors about Rickman appeared and disappeared like Mardi Gras beads in the gutters. Stories had him selling cocaine and smoking crack. An arrest for simple possession of marijuana grew into a grand tale about 17 pounds of pot and pistols stashed in rubber chickens. A prison sentence turned into stories about hard time served at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola -- the toughest of the state's prisons -- where Rickman never spent a day. And the clown did nothing to dissuade people from their beliefs.

"The general rule on the street I've found is: Believe everything, believe nothing," said Stuart Buchwald, a magician known as Stuartini the Magnificent. "It works," he explained, adding that he always gave Rickman the benefit of the doubt.

Others did, too. Renette Fry, the wife of one of Rickman's oldest friends in New Orleans, said it was as though he had this special skill to find people to look out for him. These people tolerated his drinking, his rants, and his wandering phone calls. They bailed him out of jail, gave him a bed to sleep in, and in some cases fell in love with him for the gentle soul they discovered behind the red nose and white makeup.

He brought smiles to their faces and to the faces of their children who found something magical in his mania. He got noticed, got laughs and became a character in a city that celebrates its characters. He was color and charm, madness and comedy on the fringe of society.

In New Orleans, perhaps more than most places, there is a tendency to romanticize such a life: the life of a character on the streets. But it is often less charming than it seems. It is a life filled with the usual problems -- broken dreams, derailed ambitions and insecurities -- in addition to unforgiving demons that linger among those who have lost their way.

For better or worse, and perhaps because he had no other choice, it was a life Perry Rickman chose for himself, and for a time it may have made him and others happy.

But over the years, the line between Perry the man and Perri the clown smudged, like the face paint he sometimes slept in, and Rickman increasingly became the Hobo. The drinker. The fighter. The whistler on the corner dealing drugs from his top hat.

Elliot Shushan, a Jackson Square merchant, sold the clown the same model year after year. It was one of his best hats, collapsible silk and about $250, the kind people wear with tuxedos. Shushan found them gorgeous. However, a few days after each purchase, there was Rickman's hat: beat up, bent, and caked in dirt. It was a hobo's hat, and he was proud of it. "That was his calling card," Shushan said.

But when Rickman started using it for drug sales, Shushan stopped returning Rickman's phone calls, and others were glad to see him go, first to prison for five years and then to Boston these past few summers.

The heat was tolerable there, the money good, and he would return to New Orleans in the fall. But last year, Rickman, then 50, didn't come back. He was sick. He was running from New Orleans, the life he had created here and the problem he had left behind.

He called his brother, talked about dying and where he wanted to be buried. He called Delaup and left messages, speaking in a voice that sounded drunk, or lost, or both. He said he wasn't coming back, and he didn't, not until his body arrived as ashes inside a small black box and Checkers carried it to the Quarter for his funeral.

"Perri's right here," he said to a street musician outside Cafe Du Monde, tapping the top of the box. Rasheed Akbar looked at Checkers and cocked his head.

"You got Perri in there?"

"Yup."

"Cool," Akbar answered as Checkers joined the people gathering on the square to remember the life of a man they knew well, and hardly knew at all.

. . . . . . .

It began in the hills where the water ran black. They had one of the best houses in town: two stories with a coal-burning furnace in the basement. The kids were warm, the living room large, the rent cheap and the coal even cheaper. But it hadn't come easy.

Little if anything did in West Virginia's coal mining country in the 1940s and '50s. Often times men, and even boys, had no other choice but to follow their fathers down into the hot, black holes carved into the earth. And so it was with Frederick Rickman.

He had tried to escape. He got an education and became a teacher. But soon, like his father before him, Rickman was working in the mines. He had married Annabelle Belton, a widow and mother of one, and together they had six more kids. He needed to support the family and he became a company man to do it.

That's what put them in that house in Springton, a company town down the road from the mine, and that's also what put him in the ground that night in the summer of 1953 when the black earth collapsed around him and the children lost their father.

Perry David, the sixth of seven children, wasn't even 2 at the time. He didn't remember his dad, and then, like later, he didn't answer to his given name. Zacky, they called him, after Zaccheus, the man in the Bible who climbed into a tree to catch sight of Jesus. And the nickname stuck as the family moved into a tiny, two-bedroom house in Hensley, about 50 miles from Springton near the banks of the Tug Fork River.

There, the river was black, polluted by the mines, and the Rickmans did their best to survive on Annabelle's nurse's salary. One by one, the girls got married and the boys joined the military -- anything to get out -- and Perry grew up, fishing for catfish in the dirty river. Even then, there was something different about him.

"Perry was Perry -- just kind of crazy," recalled Rick Murensky, a classmate of his at Welch High School. There was the time he tried out for the football team wearing cowboy boots. There was his stint as manager of the basketball team, how he hitchhiked to games because he couldn't get there any other way. It was like he was already living the life of a hobo, one cousin recalled. And there were all those fights that landed him in the principal's office.

"He was one that would run his mouth until you were so mad that you'd want to beat him to death," said childhood friend James Hall. He could be loud and abrasive. He embellished and he lied. But for as many times as Hall fought with Perry for the stupid things he did or said, he stood up for him, too, and Perry stood up for himself.

"In all seriousness, Perry was a worker," Murensky said. "Perry really worked hard. If you listened to Perry, you would think he washed every window in town. But Perry did wash a lot of windows in town for a lot of the merchants. He really did . . . He had to work hard because, you know, they really didn't have any money."

And so, in the fall of 1969, Perry did what his brothers Frederick and Samuel had done before him: He enlisted in the military. He dropped out of high school, joined the U.S. Marines and got out. He became a supply clerk and a rifleman, and in July 1970 he shipped out to Europe.

In the months ahead, he sailed to Spain, France, Sardinia and Italy. Back to Sardinia, then to Turkey, and Greece. During these trips, Rickman was most likely below deck in cramped quarters, keeping inventory of everything from food to uniforms -- the duties of a supply clerk.

But once he arrived in Naples, Italy, in March 1971, he was court-martialed, apparently for an unauthorized absence, and placed on a military plane back to America. A week later, on April 9, he was discharged and his military career was over.

In the years ahead, he would say he had been a point man in Vietnam, a patrol soldier dispatched to seek out the enemy. Some believed him and came to at least partially attribute his problems -- his never-ending bouts with drinking and drugs -- to whatever terrible scenes he had witnessed in southeast Asia long ago.

The truth he kept from most everyone was this: He never fired a shot in combat. He was not a decorated soldier. And he was never in Vietnam.

. . . . . . .

She was 18, in Florida for the holidays, and he was standing in a carnival booth on the boardwalk in Daytona Beach, calling out to the crowd.

It was December 1971. Cheryl Ann Dupuis, the Catholic daughter of a Detroit steel worker, had come down from Michigan to visit her father. She didn't plan what happened next.

She only remembers thinking the boy was cute. That was enough to get her talking to him as he panhandled and whistled and spun stories about his rich mother back in West Virginia. She liked talking to him, and a month later, on Jan. 28, 1972, Perry Rickman, 20, married her in front of a judge in Detroit.

He listed "booth attendant" as his occupation on the marriage license. She listed nothing, and that's exactly what they did. For a spell, they drifted. They hitchhiked and panhandled. They made their way back to Hensley, W.Va., and along the way Perry confessed to his young bride: He wasn't rich, as he had told her. Cheryl had suspected as much, yet the lies didn't stop there. Over the years, it got to the point where she didn't believe anything he said.

"He had a hard time dealing with what was real and what wasn't real," recalled Cheryl Pumarejo, now remarried and living in Eustis, Fla. But he always seemed to weave enough truth into the lie to make people believe. And the couple stayed together as the lies continued and his drinking grew worse.

He held jobs as a machinist in Michigan and a maintenance worker at Disney World. "I think if they had let him be a character, he never would have left," his ex-wife said. But he never got that chance, and they moved to South Carolina and Texas, following what work Perry could get to help them raise their two boys.

Then in the spring of 1980, Houston police issued a warrant to arrest him for running up $4,700 worth of bills on credit cards belonging to a man named Alfred E. Marsh. He was booked and sentenced to six years' probation. If Rickman stayed clean, the conviction would be cleared from his record.

But his wife left. Perry could be mean when he drank. It wasn't how she wanted to raise her boys, she said, and they moved back to Florida. Her husband, meanwhile, stopped paying his court-ordered restitution and didn't show up at scheduled meetings with his probation officer in the spring of 1981.

When the authorities finally caught up to him, a judge sentenced him to three years in prison, where he stayed until his parole on June 14, 1982. By then, Rickman must have had no reason to stay in Texas, and he started drifting again, this time to New Orleans, where he showed up on the books for the first time on Aug. 28.

He was calling himself Perri Rlickman now and he had been cited for an offense that would dog him for the next two decades: obstructing a public passage.

. . . . . . .

The bartender could tell the clown was talented. He made good money outside Houlihan's, whistling and making animal balloons on Bourbon Street. Then he came inside to change out his singles for larger bills, and that's when David Fry realized their connection.

They were both from West Virginia. Fry from Huntington, Rickman from Hensley. They swapped childhood stories, became friends and soon Rickman was showing up at Houlihan's more and more.

He was welcome there as far as Gary Wollerman, the restaurant's general manager, was concerned. The customers seemed to enjoy his show and they tipped him well. During the world's fair here in 1984, Fry estimated, the clown made up to $500 a day. And soon he had other jobs: Wollerman asked him to work his daughter's third birthday.

"She was this little blonde with these ringlets and Perri was over there with the kids, and he was just perfect," he recalled. "The greatest thing about Perri was you could see he was a genuinely nice guy, somebody I could tell I'd be comfortable with around my daughter and the kids, which isn't always the case with the entertainers on the street. But you just got this sense that he was a good guy. You could trust him."

Down in Jackson Square, Rickman was earning a different reputation as a hard-working, in-your-face performer who said the craziest things. Street magician Stuart Buchwald came to call it "the school of Perri the Hobo."

"He was very aggressive," the magician said. "He would go up to people and hand them his hat. Now they've got his hat. The only way they can get rid of it is if they drop it on the ground. They're not going to do that. So at that point he'd make them a balloon. Then he'd take his hat back and hold it open like this," Buchwald explained, taking his own hat from his head, holding it before him and assuming a pathetic look. "He'd make a joke, blow a whistle, anything until they gave him some money."

It drove some people -- namely nearby artists and tarot card readers -- absolutely mad. They tired of his lines: how he yelled "Ma! Can I come home with you?" to elderly women; how he taunted bald men. They tired of his tricks, too, such as the "bra gag," when he appeared to remove a woman's undergarment. Renette Fry, David's wife and then a waitress at Houlihan's, said "Perri and waitresses got along like mongooses and cobras." He was always getting in their way. But he made money, and a name for himself.

In the late 1980s, he got financing to make a how-to video about animal balloons. It would have been the first of its kind, his lawyer John-Michael Lawrence explained, and Perri was thrilled about the possibility. But the video had a hard time getting distributed, and Perri was stuck pushing copies on people in the Quarter.

Richard Mark Peche was one of those people. He was dressed like a cowboy and standing like a statue in the Quarter, but what he really wanted to be was a clown. He hung around. He watched Perri. He asked for advice and finally Perri taught him what he knew: Be confident. Be silly. Look good in your makeup. Never pre-make balloons. Let people see the show.

Peche listened, learned, and soon left Perri's side. He called himself Checkers and got his own spot on the Square while Perri stayed right where he was for years, leaving now and then to perform at festivals across the country.

Once, one of those trips took him to Orlando, where he performed at a hotel and stayed with family. "Honey, it took him two or three hours to dress up into his costume," said Millie Craig, an aunt, who remembered how Perri showed off his paycheck that weekend. But it was nowhere near how proud he must have been the time he returned to West Virginia to perform his act at Bridge Day, the state's largest one-day festival on a bridge over the New River Gorge.

His sister Dovie Chaffins remembers a huge crowd that day. "You couldn't even hardly walk from one end of the bridge to the other," she said. But his sister and mother had no problem picking out their Zacky even with his red nose, baggy pants, top hat and rubber chicken. He whistled when he saw them and smiled at them through the crowd.

. . . . . . .

Back in New Orleans, Rickman's problems were mounting. His arrests and citations piled up.

Public intimidation, public intoxication, disturbing the peace in April 1983. Battery and resisting an officer in May. Battery, disturbing the peace and criminal damage to property in December.

The days are different, the charges vary, but year after year he followed a similar pattern. The problem, as his friends saw it, was simple: He drank too much, got in trouble and found himself back in court and back before his probation officer Patricia Miller.

Over the years, Miller had met her share of criminals and heard just about every excuse they could mutter. She expected the same from the clown. Instead, Rickman surprised her with his honesty.

"To me, he was a humble guy," she said. "That was just the way he presented himself. He was just humbled. I never saw him perform . . . I never saw his act. I don't know if he up and changed the way he presented himself. But when we were one on one, as we always were, he was always very shy."

Week after week, they talked. She wanted to help him with his drinking problem and Perri seemed to try. At least a couple of times, he went to a support group for alcoholics, Miller recalled. But it never took, and soon Rickman was drinking again and admitting it to her, saying, "Miss Miller, I'm drunk."

"Perri was sick," she decided. "All alcoholics have a sickness and that was the thing with him. I don't think Perri ever went out thinking: I'm going to show her. I'm going to go out and get drunk. I don't