"They were chronically short of money, and had one disaster after another in their print shop: It flooded; the roof caved in. They would move from city to city with all this heavy equipment; they made life very hard on themselves," said John Martin, founder of Black Sparrow Press and Bukowski's publisher after he left the Webbs. "They didn't disappear because they weren't doing good work. They finally collapsed under the strain of it." And their books and journals - most typeset and bound by hand - have become cult classics. Their final works involved extravagant publications of Henry Miller's "Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel" and "Insomnia, or the Devil at Large," in 1970-71 "At the time, it was all mimeographed presses and here comes someone who does letter press and charges three bucks for the thing," said Edwin Blair, a friend of the Webbs and book collector. "The problem with Jon was that he got carried away. The last book he did was so over the top that it's a tour de force." Printing books, though, was only half the story. The other half was about making money.
For about 19 years, Gypsy Lou sold watercolors and other items to support her husband's passion for publishing. As one of the best loved characters in the Quarter, Noel Rockmore, the artist known for his haunting jazz paintings, made her a larger-than-life muse in his 1970 work, "Homage to the French Quarter." The painting depicts dozens of the Quarter's most colorful people. The painting is a portal into this Bohemia on the Mississippi, a constant source of nostalgia for New Orleanians who despair at the state of today's tacky, gentrified Quarter. It was a place where Ruthie the Duck Lady - the cigarette-puffing woman on roller skates - led ducks on leashes. And there was Mike Stark, the red-bearded muumuu-draped Baptist minister-turned-hippie-turned-mask maker. And Larry Borenstein, the art dealer who founded Preservation Hall, the jazz club. For her part, Lou Webb was the queen of this Bohemia. Dressed in billowing skirts, berets and yellow cowboy boots, one journalist said she looked like a gypsy. So, she started calling herself "Gypsy Lou." "Everyday. Never took a vacation. Rain, cold, hot, sweating, everything, out there. I used to bring my dog out, Big Gypsy - big collie dog. I loved her," she says. She had a natural talent for street sales. At her stand, she posted a list of celebrities - presidents, musicians, actors - who owned a Gypsy Lou watercolor. Sure enough, the "normal people, stupid people" would want one, too. Gimmicks worked. Her outlandish clothes were one. And she grabbed passers-by with a plywood board she hung up. It read: "If you're lost or want to get lost tack what you wish on this board." Of course, she added her own notes to get things started. Once, she bartered with a well-dressed man on the price for clowns she'd strung up on the wall. The man eventually got his way, getting the price for two clowns down by a dollar. When she went next door to the Coffee Pot, the owner was beside himself. "He said, 'Gypsy! Boy, you talked terrible to that man that bought those clowns,"' she recalls. "I said, 'Yeah, what's the matter? He was well dressed and everything. He had the $5. He gave me $4.' He said, 'But do you know who he was?' I said, 'I don't give a damn who he was. He was a cheap skate if you ask me.'
"Guess who it was? The president of Mexico with his two body guards!" She cracks up. Even stooped from age, Lou cannot sit still. She moves to and fro, her hands, stiff like paddles. She pats her dress, adjusts her beret, touches the arm of a companion. Her face, too, is never still. It's a series of expressions: She feigns mock astonishment by throwing her shoulders back; narrows her eyes to slits to express suspicion; sets her face in a cold intelligent stare and the hundreds of lines and indentations of her jowls and brow remind you she is, despite her playfulness and verve, a very old woman. --- She turns the watercolor of Jon in her hands toward the light. "Oh, you rascal you," she says. "He was a con man. Man, was he good. He knew how to manipulate." In his boyhood in the 1920s, she recalls, he hitch hiked from Cleveland to Wyoming dressed in a Boy Scout's uniform and knocked at farm houses along the way. "First, he'd find out what religion they were; and if they were Baptists, he'd say he was a Baptist; and they'd take him in, feed him, even give him money; if people would say they were Seventh-day Adventists, he would say he was a Seventh-day Adventist."
"I've got this picture now hanging up, facing me in the bed. I see him a lot now," she says, her thoughts lingering on Jon - the man she literally ate out of raw, unconventional love. When he was cremated, she wore his ashes around her neck and, occasionally, ate the ashes and bits of bone. "People would say, 'What are you doing?' 'I'm putting him in my body,"' she says. "It's out of my body now, a long time. I have no more ashes. What am I going to do? Well, anyway."
