Joe’s

Every city has its dive bars. Sometimes those bars have a reputation for being a bit dangerous, a bit of a risk. We all know these places; we’ve all been to them. The vague sense of edginess is part of the appeal.

Back when we lived in New Orleans, we had quite a number of such bars to choose from. One of the most interesting was Joe’s Cozy Corner. It certainly felt like an authentic dive bar — a place where you wouldn’t end up surrounded by tourists.

On our most recent trip to New Orleans, in late November/early December, I swung by to take a look at Joe’s. I did so even though I already knew it wasn’t really there anymore.

Joe’s Cozy Corner closed a while back, and Joe himself is dead. I’d been told that more recently they’d peeled away the outer walls and uncovered the evidence that before it was Joe’s Cozy Corner, it was Ruth’s Cozy Corner. See picture above.

But I had to take a look, because Joe’s was a bit of a New Orleans landmark for me, not least because it has a certain connection to Letters from New Orleans. I have a couple of things to say about Joe’s, and there’s no short way to say them, so the rest is after the jump.

Given the context I’m writing in — a blog focused mostly on “St. James Infirmary” — I may as well note that this particular old Joe’s barroom, while on a corner, wasn’t really by a square. Well, Congo Square, arguably the most storied piece of ground in the history of jazz, is a (brisk) five-minute walk away, but still. This Joe’s isn’t that Joe’s.

Joe’s Cozy Corner was in Treme, traditionally a mostly black neighborhood, and still a mostly black neighborhood. The place has music from time to time, but Joe’s — like the Spellcaster, which I wrote about the other day — was another venue that never seemed to be in the listings. (And like that Spellcaster writeup, some of this entry is adapted from a bit that I wrote for the second issue of the Letters From New Orleans zine.)

Our first visit to Joe’s came as the result of hearing a rumor of live music: E, and our friend Amy, and I stopped by in the late afternoon, when I’d heard the music would start. Well, there was no sign of a band. Instead there were five or six people in the bar, mostly middle-aged black men from the neighborhood. They were all friendly, and this one guy was buying us Budweisers. It was a little awkward, because there was no reason to be there, getting drunk, at 4:30 in the afternoon. The juke box was old-school soul and R&B, and it was blaring.

The man in charge — Papa Joe — was kind of grooving behind the bar. There was another guy back there with him, who at one point seemed to slip him some small package, which I pretended not to notice.

Subsequent visits did involve music: We saw Leroy Jones there once, and Kermit Ruffins. The thing to do was order a small bottle of Bacardi, which came with two plastic cups and a bowl of ice, so you could drink it at your own pace without going back to the bar over and over.

* *

I treated Joe’s a little differently than I treat most dive bars. For instance, I took another out-of-town visitor, a friend from New York, there one night — in what turned out to be a second instance of a bum tip on music. Again there was no band, but this time it was very crowded, and I didn’t like the energy of the room, and the fact that every single patron was studiously looking right through us. Before we could even get to the bar itself, I said to my New York friend, “Let’s go somewhere else,” and we did. (We went to K-Doe’s and had an absolute blast, but that’s another story.)

A couple of years later, we had left New Orleans, and we were living in Jersey City, and I did a reading from Letters from New Orleans at a place in the East Village. Afterward some of us went to a bar nearby — including that same friend from New York who I’d taken to Joe’s, and then taken out of Joe’s. He asked me about that. “Why did we have to leave? Sure the vibe seemed a little weird, but so what?”

I understood the question, because part of the reason dive bar is appealing is that the best ones always feel a little weird — but you get over your own uptightness and everything works out and the guy who looked scary ends up buying you a Bud and all of that. But I told my friend a couple of stories about Joe’s.

In early 2003, on a night when a band was playing, a guy with a gun walked in, directly up to another man, shot him dead, and walked out. Obviously there were dozens of witnesses, but not one cooperated with the police, and so far as I know the crime was never solved.

Okay, so people get killed in bars. But later I met a man who had lived in Treme for decades, and he told me that, yes, in fact, “everyone” knew who did it — he even explained to me the revenge-oriented plot and details, with names (or rather nicknames) in some cases, much of which I couldn’t really follow. The upshot was that the deceased was a bad man, and had it coming. So no one really objected to how things had worked out.

I also told my friend about Papa Joe, the owner — the rather charming guy, in his way, that we had chatted with in the past, a man name-checked by Kermit Ruffins in at least one song — and what happened with him after we’d left New Orleans. In early 2004, Papa Joe got into a dispute with a man who was trying to sell beer outside his bar. He shot the man, and the man died.

Basically my New York friend seemed to see where I was coming from, and why I’d decided we should go somewhere else that night.

But there was one last detail about Joe’s that connected it back to that New York reading.

* *

Papa Joe — Joseph Glasper was his given name — died in April of 2005. He was in Orleans Parish Prison at the time, awaiting sentencing. A brief news item in the Times Picayune said that he was 64, and “had heart disease, emphysema, hypertension and a small tumor of the adrenal gland” and “was being treated for numerous medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, lung disease, kidney insufficiency and blood clot.” Questions were raised about why exactly a man in such condition was not in a hospital. At the time the coroner said: “I just think his heart played out.”

That is an unsatisfying explanation — but also a very New Orleans explanation. Joe’s had long been on my list of possible topics for inclusion in the online series of essays I was writing when we lived in the city, but I never got around to it. I’m sure that if we’d stayed, I would have written about it, and would know more about and have more to say about Papa Joe, and his passing.

We didn’t stay, though. And the last time I was at Joe’s Cozy Corner was not long after the shooting incident that put Papa Joe in jail. We had moved by then but I was back for a brief visit — and the most important item on my agenda was to meet Mr. G.K. Darby, of the Garrett County Press. He had suggested that we meet at Joe’s, and this gave me a very good feeling about him.

I arrived rather late, due to traffic (I was coming from Baton Rouge). But he didn’t seem to mind, or concealed it gracefully if he did. The scene was much like it was the first time I’d been there, except for the absence of Joe.

So we had a couple of beers, and talked about my online series of essays about N.O.

And there at Joe’s, we made the handshake deal that led to the publication of Letters From New Orleans, which is one of the happiest things that’s ever happened to me. And that’s why I had to go take a look at the former Joe’s Cozy Corner.