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 was early summer, three years ago, when the filmmaker sat down with the clown. Rick Delaup had seen Perri the Hobo in Jackson Square, making animal balloons at St. Peter and Chartres streets. It was the hobo's corner. He had been there for nearly two decades, and Delaup was fascinated by his act.
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 think he thought that. I don't think he had any choice."
He was convicted for possession of marijuana in April 1985 and again in March 1990. Each time, he received probation or short jail time. However, in March 1992, facing a distribution of marijuana charge, Rickman ran out of second chances. He pleaded guilty and a judge sentenced him to serve five years.
"To the Honorable Judge Dennis Waldron," Rickman began in a letter that fall as part of his motion for a reduced sentence. In it, to win favor, Rickman relied upon the usual lies: the mechanical engineering degree from Wayne State University that he didn't have; the three Purple Hearts, Presidential Unit Citation and Naval Cross of Gallantry that he never earned; and the marijuana habit he had picked up in Vietnam where he had never been.
"As you can see," he wrote, "my life has been very fulfilling. My only problem was my involvement with marijuana . . . But now since my incarceration I've come to realize that without drugs in my life I'm able to grow as a person. I now realize that I don't need drugs to cope with the obstacles that life has to offer. I'm now enjoying life to its fullest, looking forward to being a part of our society once again . . .
"On the 12th of November, 1992, I will be present in your courtroom. I hope and pray that you will allow me to be released soon. If you see fit that I deserve another chance, I promise that I'll take advantage of your kindness by living a drug free and law abiding life.
"Until then, may God be with you."
The judge denied his motion, and Rickman served more than two years in Orleans Parish prison before returning to his spot on Jackson Square. There, he resumed his act and his habit. But this time, he was selling something different: the date rape drug.
. . . . . . .
Fry always saw the clown as part of his New Orleans experience, "part of the madness," he said. Rickman drank too much -- it was true. And despite what he may have written to judges, he never saw anything wrong with smoking marijuana. But Fry made sense of it the way so many other people had before: It was just Perri being Perri.
"It's one big party and he didn't want to miss out on it," he explained. "This is just my opinion. I can't say for sure. But this is a certainty: Perri wanted to be popular, and especially with the marijuana, back in the days when the guy who brought the reefer to the party was the most popular guy at the party . . .
"I think that was part of it -- living that lifestyle that he was part of at the time. The pills? I couldn't tell you what led to that. That seems like a dead-end trail there."
It didn't take long. Just months after his release from prison, someone Rickman knew told police that the clown on the corner was selling rohypnol from his top hat. The drug, which makes its victim sleepy and unable to resist sexual advances, was selling at $5 for one, $12 for three and $35 for 10. And on April 10, 1995, an undercover detective bought the most he could get.
He placed $35 in the clown's hat. In return, he received a blister pack of white pills, and a free tip from the clown: Rickman said he could get Xanax, too. The officer walked off, police moved in for the arrest, and this time there would be no use asking for reduced sentences. Authorities stamped "career criminal" on the arrest register. Rickman pleaded guilty and went away for five more years.
While he was gone, his mother died, and friends and family cut him off. Some stopped accepting his collect calls. Those who did got more stories about why he was back behind bars; few, if anyone, got the truth. Fewer still cared to know. But a handful stuck by him, and Fry let his old friend stay at his home in Kenner when authorities finally released him on April 8, 2000.
"I think when he first got back," Fry recalled, "what he wanted to do was get back to making the Hobo famous. I think that was the way he said it. He wanted to make himself famous. If he had to do it by shaking everybody in the world's hand, that's what he would do. He was really focused on that: getting something back that he lost."
And so, Rickman packed his bags and drifted again, this time north, to the arms of a woman in Boston.
. . . . . . .
She was 36, in New Orleans for a job, and he was standing on his corner in Jackson Square, calling out to the crowd.
It was spring 1991. Janet Boris, a registered nurse from Boston, was getting to know the city she'd call home for the next few months. She didn't plan what happened next.
Boris started talking to the clown on the corner and the clown took a liking to her. "He just followed me around town," Boris recalled, and she kept coming back to him day after day because he was a landmark in a strange city and she knew the clown would smile when he saw her.
They dated. She returned to Boston. He called her from prison and she tried to ignore him. Later Boris explained, "He just got obsessed with you . . . You'd be nice to him and he'd pursue you. You'd be nasty to him and he'd pursue you."
She stopped taking his calls. But when Rickman came to Boston in the summer of 2000, shortly after being released from prison, Boris helped him set up a life. And while they didn't date for long this time, she remembered once again why she had fallen for him in New Orleans: his tender heart, his generosity, his good intentions.
"He was just one of those guys who gets under your skin. And once he's under your skin, that was it," she said. "I found him adorable. I mean, who doesn't love a clown?"
Initially, at the places where Rickman performed in and around Boston, people felt the same. In time, he became a fixture in Harvard Square and a regular at a nearby diner, Leo's Place. People came to expect his incessant whistling. But when Rickman returned the next year in the summer of 2001, more than a few people in nearby Provincetown had tired of his act.
The police denied him a license. Rickman called a lawyer and challenged it. Reporters wrote stories about the angry clown and the resort town. He made television news, prevailed, and returned to the streets, a hero in his own mind.
Back in New Orleans, Rickman's problems didn't disappear as easily. That year, he was charged with the usual: obstructing a public passage, public intoxication, begging without a license. "Solicits by shoving his hat at tourists and whistling loudly, blocking their way until they put money in the hat," an officer wrote in April 2001.
The charges were dropped in that case, but others followed. In November, Rickman was arrested at Cafe Pontalba, a restaurant he had been banned from entering, after he walked in, drunk and violent, telling customers they would get food poisoning if they ate there. "Mr. Rlickman threatened all parties with harm and lawsuits," a report said.
Again the charges were dropped and Rickman returned to his corner. There, a month later, he was cited again, this time for violating a police warning and continuing to block the sidewalk. He was scheduled for a court date in June. But before that, on April 14, 2002, Rickman was arrested for pulling a knife on a man.
He pleaded guilty and spent 30 days in jail. Then he left New Orleans for Boston, where 10 months later his landlord found him face down in his apartment with a syringe at his side and heroin in his veins. It was said, by those who saw him, that he was still wearing his face paint and dressed as a clown.
. . . . . . .
Checkers set the ashes of the man down on the square and repaired to the bar for a drink. Slowly, the people were arriving for the funeral. Magicians and artists, musicians and merchants.
They were all milling around, then marching behind a brass band, as tourists stared, and Checkers hoisted the black box of gray ashes into the air and said: "His name was Perri the Hobo."
Up in Boston that same afternoon, people were gathering at Leo's Place to remember the clown as well. He had spent the last months of his life there, lingering at the counter, craving Creole cooking and talking to other customers.
Bob Richards, a retired school teacher, looked forward to seeing the clown there. They were diner pals, two men talking over breakfast. Rickman told Richards to read all about him on Delaup's eccentric New Orleans Web site. Richards did, as did most everyone else at Leo's Place, and they accepted his story as fact.
They had no reason to doubt him. Raffi and Richie Bezjian, the diner's owners, liked the clown. He was local color, but more than that he was a friend waiting for them when they opened up in the morning. They hung his picture on the wall, prepared grits just for him and changed out his singles after long days of clowning.
In the months before he died, though, Rickman came around less often. He was sick, in the hospital, and spending time with a woman he had met in Harvard Square. When he did show up for breakfast on days last winter, Richards noticed a difference in his typically cheerful friend.
"I felt he was getting very sad," he explained. "I was on my way down to Florida for a few months and he was talking about how sad he was up here. He didn't like the cold. He talked about going back to New Orleans or going somewhere else. He wanted to go back for the Jazzfest."
"I think he would have left if he could," Richards added. But Rickman stayed in Boston. He missed his court date in New Orleans and authorities issued an attachment for his arrest. He stayed through January and February, and there he was that Friday evening in late March. Winter had broken, at least temporarily. The clown had had a good day, as Bezjian recalls, and he was talking about showing up first thing the next morning.
But he wasn't there as Bezjian expected to find him, whistling outside the diner that Saturday. He didn't show all weekend, in fact, and two days later on Monday, March 24, his landlord walked into his apartment and discovered the reason why.
"I believe it was suicide," his brother Sam Rickman said recently. The two had been talking again in recent months. His younger brother started calling him again, he said, and they caught up, chatting about the family and his health.
At one point, Sam Rickman remembers his brother mentioning that when he died he wanted to be buried in the cemetery atop the hill behind their home in Hensley. He didn't ask why. Getting older now, and riddled with illness, Sam Rickman had been thinking about the end in recent months as well, and he too had considered the cemetery on the hill. "That's where I started from," Sam's reasoning went. "Why not end up there?"
Now Sam Rickman and other people who knew Perri think differently about the conversations they had with him near the end. Some call his death senseless. Some call his life a waste. Many saw it coming long ago and a few, who never cared for the clown while he was alive, don't care much about him now that he is ashes, sitting in another clown's apartment.
But those who do care think about it: how sad he must have been at the end, far away from his corner in Jackson Square, and farther still from the man he longed to be. Delaup, the filmmaker who recorded Perri's story, heard it in his voice last fall when the clown called and left a message for him. As happened too often, he sounded drunk and desperate. It was as though Rickman knew he couldn't return to New Orleans, that those days were done, and he was drifting all over again.
"This is Perri the Hobo," he said in the message. "I'm traveling . . . I'm looking for something. New Orleans is bad. They can make us or break us . . . I need to talk to you. Call me back . . . I don't want to come back to New Orleans. I don't want to go to jail. You go to jail when you go to New Orleans. Put that on the Web site . . . Put me in your prayers . . . Love y'all."
]]>
