The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear Read Free Page A

Governor Armstrong George or Vice President Hilda Smith. In politics we always like to call each election the most important in generations. This time, it might actually be true.
    Faced with this crisis, the delegates and alternates and assorted hangers-on of the Republican convention were handling their responsibility in the time-honored fashion of conventions past: they took to the bars and clubs and partied like death-row inmates paroled for one night.
    But who was I to complain? It was thirty-six hours before the convention opened and I was up onstage with a bunch of Indians stoned out of their minds. Not Native Americans, but the Mardi Gras Indians, one of those New Orleans bands that never broke big nationally but were local gods. The Indians were singing “Voodoo Sex,” and Tyrone Robichoux, the lead, was leaning into me, sweating like a warm waterfall. He had a blank look in his eyes and I assumed that he was high on heroin. He usually was. Great headline: “ J. D. CALLAHAN, CAMPAIGN MANAGER FOR VICE PRESIDENT HILDA SMITH, BUSTED FOR DRUGS AT CONVENTION. ” Now that would be just splendid. “Following his much-publicized personal difficulties surrounding the breakup of his relationship with prominent television journalist Sandra Juarez, J. D. Callahan added to his woes by being caught with the Mardi Gras Indians in a drug bust.” Yes, that would be just perfect. I’d have to claim that I did it as part of a community-outreach campaign tactic, like “Building a bridge to the addicted community.” It might work. This was, after all, New Orleans, where the town’s resident cultural hero was a not-very-reformed heroin addict named Aaron Neville, who, when asked about his heroin addiction, remarked, “It works for me.” And God knows the Indians were a diverse bunch. They probably had French, Spanish, African American, even a little Asian bouncing around in their drug-addled veins. And, yes, some Native American blood as well, the Chickasaw tribe most predominantly.
    Appearing with the Indians at Tip’s the night before the convention opened hadn’t been my idea. Blame it on Ginny Tran, press secretary extraordinaire at twenty-seven. “It’ll be so cool,” she’d insisted. “The vice president’s campaign manager onstage at Tipitina’s. You were almost a rock star once, it’ll be fabulous. Show that we’re confident right before the convention. And anyway, you should get out. You look like crap.” So I’d left our war room down at the Windsor Court Hotel and committed to doing something enjoyable for a couple of hours. It had been so long, I’d forgotten what it was like.
    Ginny was lying, of course. At least that part about me being almost a rock star. I’m sure she wasn’t lying that I looked like crap. I’d grown up in New Orleans and been a journeyman guitar player in a not-so-bad blues/funk band, my major distinction being that I was the only white guy in the group. What was really embarrassing—at least it would have been if anybody had known it—was that I’d made it into the band with the help of my father, Powell Callahan, one of the last white civil rights heroes, or so everyone seemed to believe. Powell Callahan knew everybody in town. The lead singer in the band was the son of a lawyer, once a civil rights lawyer, now a corporate hotshot just off Canal Street, an old friend of my father’s from the “movement days.” J. D. Callahan, the only guitarist who networked his way into a black/funk band. It was silly. They dumped me after a year.
    Of course, I knew that a photo op with the Indians onstage at Tip’s wasn’t going to get us a single delegate, but I had gone along with it. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt, and if it made me look a little hip and cool and confident, that was just great. God knows I sure didn’t feel like any of those things. I hadn’t slept worth a damn in months, I had a woman candidate who was on the verge of becoming unglued at any moment, a force of