I went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a schmuck.
Doesn’t matter that he died nine years before I was born. We all went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald—a confused, disenfranchised little schmuck who would grow up to be mad at the world and not amount to much at all. But every schmuck has his day. Lee Harvey’s just happened to be Nov. 22, 1963.
As the fortieth anniversary of the act that turned Lee Harvey the Loser into Lee Harvey the Icon approaches, I find myself in New Orleans, the birthplace of both the assassin and the jumbled ideas for a whacked-out conspiracy that has made a mockery of the judicial system.
But while Dallas has turned the explosion of a President’s head into a cottage industry, New Orleans has run away from its ties to its unfortunate son and his subsequent investigation. That still didn’t stop me from looking for any trace of the shmuck. In junior high, I had read every book I could find on Lee Harvey Oswald. And when you add that to a city with a major connection to that crime, times a city that allows you to carry open containers of alcohol on the street, something in me had to give a damn.
The first place I hit is 640 Magazine St. and the William B. Reilly coffee company, where Oswald worked for three months in the summer of 1963, his last job before the Texas School Book Depository gig. While not expecting to find Lee Harvey smiling down on me from the 1963 row of employee of the month plaques, when I mention the name Oswald to the receptionist, I’m met with a stare that could start a conspiracy of its own. Oswald was fired from Riley’s on July 19, 1963: “He was supposed to clean the roasters each night,” said his supervisor, Emmett Barbe, in 1993. “He would tend the front row and not even do the backrow, then stand and wait for the elevator. When I tried to talk with him, he gave me a lot of bullshit, so I fired him.”
If there is one thing I learned in How to Avoid Being an Assassin 101 (it was a survey course), it’s you have to clean the back row of the roasters. If Oswald cleans the back row of the roasters, he doesn’t get fired, doesn’t kill Kennedy, and goes on to launch a coffee empire out of Dallas, supplanting Seattle’s world domination in the process. I’m running this all through my head when I snap back and notice the receptionist is still staring at me. I try to break the ice by offering her a sip from my open container. No go.
I stumble next door to the Crescent City Garage and knock on the door to the office where Oswald used to bum around on his lunch break, reading gun magazines with the garage’s owner.
A large bald man with a goatee opens the door and lets me into a greasy room that looks like it hasn’t changed much since the summer of 1963. I spy an ancient Pepsi machine in the corner, which immediately makes me think of Oswald, calmly sipping sugar water in front of a Coke machine as police ran up the School Book Depository in Dallas. I unleash the name Lee Harvey, and am quickly shown the door.
“I can’t do any interviews,” the man says in a Cajun drawl. “There’s constantly people coming down here and that’s what I’m supposed to tell them.”
“Supposed to tell them?” I ask with one eyebrow raised. “By who?”
“The big boss.”
“Oh,” I whisper, nodding my head with a knowing smile. “You mean Big Brother. The government.”
“No,” he barks back, annoyed. “My boss.”
Undeterred to find Oswald, I go across the street and pass out.
But when I wake up, I head one block North to the one address every Kennedy assassination buff knows by heart: 544 Camp St. This was the address stamped on the back of the Fair Play for Cuba leaflets Oswald the Commie was passing out in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, three months before Dallas.
When I reach the address, I’m met only with a giant piece of a twisted black metal sculpture aptly-titled “Out of There.” At Oswald’s boyhood home, 126 Exchange Alley (he lived above a bar in the French Quarter), there’s no plaque heralding Oswald’s days of hanging out at the local pool hall. I take the bus the length of Magazine street to the apartment he shared with Marina and their newborn daughter in their summer stay. No sign of Lee either.
After passing out that night, I wake up the next morning, get an open container and switch gears, this time trying to find Oswald through Jim Garrison, the only man to bring a criminal trial concerning the assassination when he tried Clay Shaw with conspiracy to murder President Kennedy.
Garrison—fresh off his investigation into why when women lift their shirts on Bourbon street, they get trinkets, yet when men do it they go home empty handed (“You see the beads go back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.” )—was sure that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was “a homosexual thrill-killing.” He alleged that all those involved in the crime were gay: Jack Ruby, whose nickname in gay circles was “Pinkie,” the hairless, defrocked priest David Ferrie, Oswald: “a switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife,” and most importantly, Clay Shaw, who Garrison was sure was the mysterious gay underworld figure Clay Bertrand, mentioned in the Warren Commission. Garrison had gotten shoddy information that Shaw was Bertrand, but in his quest to solve the assassination, even he wavered in the importance of his role. Garrison told the first incarnation of the Long Island Press in May 1968, that Bertrand’s “real name is Clay Shaw. But I don’t think he’s too important.”
It took a jury 45 minutes to come back with a not guilty verdict. Garrison was torn apart in the press for dragging an honest man through his smoke, mirrors and mud and by conspiracy theorists for making a joke of their cause. Oliver Stone resurrected his career in the film JFK, but from the Courthouse to the Bayou, Garrison, like his patsy, is nowhere to be found.
I grab an other open container and walk down Royal Street in the French Quarter, window shopping with money I don’t have. I’m about to give up on my Oswald quest, when, in between antique watches and mediocre local art, I’m face to face with a smiling Jack Kennedy. In the window of an autograph shop is a Life magazine, featuring Jack and Jacquie with the headline “The Victorious Young Kennedys.”
Inside the store, it seems as if all the points of JFK’s life are intersected somewhere in the tiny room. A signed copy of his book PT-109 sits on a shelf a few feet away inches away from the July 1957 issue of Screen Stories signed by Marilyn Monroe. Teddy, Bobby, Frank Sinatra. Gerald Ford (who sat on the Warren Commission). A signed check by Jack Ruby. A poster for the movie for JFK, signed by Stone and Costner, was half off.
But right in the center of the room was the man I was looking for. The signature was a nice fluid stroke, Lee H. Oswald.
I had finally found Lee Harvey. The prodigal son had come home in the form of a $15,000 souvenir. Fifteen grand for the autograph of a schmuck.
I walk out of the store, pick up my open container and look for a place to pass out.
This story was originally published in the Long Island Press in 2003. It is unchanged except for the spelling of the word “Schmuck,” which was originally spelled “Shmuck.”
