The Jamie Show

Marylyn Manson aside, it was strange to see a tall lanky kid with black hair dressed in a sequin dress, army boots and make-up tending bar. Jamie was a Goth of New Orleans.


Jamie came from Texas and could not consider if he were heterosexual, homosexual, or bi-sexual. He just knew he was sexual in his own way. He lived on his crazy check and went to see his psychiatrist when the voices and madness got to be too much. It was hard for him to keep a job because his madness could often drive him over the top when he worked at local bars getting paid under the table. Most of the time, the Jamie show was amusing if a bit more manic than one could stand if one did not have at least a couple of drinks under one’s belt.

Jamie adored my son Jimmy and looked up to him as an older brother, family and mentor. Madness mentoring madness! Only in New Orleans - well only in the French Quarter.


Many a morning I would wake up to see Jamie passed out on the floor and waking him up was impossible so I learned to step over him as I went about my day.


Jamie was first institutionalized at the age of fifteen for psychiatric treatment and at 18 was recognized as mentally disabled and released from the hospital armed with delusions, a monthly check and a prescription for anti-psychotics. His mother, always loving but unable to cope with his madness had come to peace with his illness, and maintained a toll-free telephone number so he could check in with her so she knew he was alive and so he could talk to her when the madness became to much for him to handle.


Jamie was intelligent and creative. Many years of prescription meds and self-medication had not damaged his will to express himself. In many ways Jamie, like many of the Goths, I met in the Quarter was a living performance art. Their lives are their art. They express their pain in ways that others can see and often fear. The self-mutilation, tattoos, and piercings, dressing in ways that no one expects except that there will usually be black painted nails and torn and worn clothes.


I remember one time he was sitting on the floor talking with me, when he brought out his portfolio. Jamie created cartoons and made a monthly magazine that he printed at Kinko’s. It was a black and white chronicle of his pain and observations. Visions of madness and the irony of life perceived by a mad man that had the soul of that fifteen year old boy that first entered the institution painted a story of the suffering of many of his contemporaries. His joy in creating his comics could not be denied but more important than the creating was his distribution of his art. Like all creatives Jamie felt the drive to be recognized and to appear bigger than life… Jamie’s life was the Jamie show.


The last time I saw Jamie he was wearing smeared bright red lipstick, torn red fishnet stockings with his army boots, and black shorts and black torn t-shirt. He was hanging at Jackson Square with some other Goths trying to scam some money for something to eat or at least a drink. He was now living in an abandoned house with his friends. He was homeless. He was intensely and passionately manic. He was still deeply into hope. He was still the Jamie Show.