Anyway, according to Stevie, B. More was even more memorable for either his agility or his disregard for his own life. The two of them had left campus one night during the summer program on Stevie’s motorbike, headed for the liquor store three miles away in Oxford. They had squeezed in just under the 9 p.m. closing wire, and purchased a gallon of some brand of wine they should have been paid to remove from the premises. On the way back, B. More was on the back of the bike toting the jug. Suddenly, going too fast down a hill, they hit a pothole that sent them airborne. Not only were they disengaged from the seat and each other, but B. More “dropped” the wine.
Dropped is in quotation marks because it is questionable whether something has been dropped if it goes up instead of down. And if it never touches the ground. Because there, going thirty miles per hour with oncoming traffic, B. More let go of Stevie, caught the wine in one hand, and, miraculously, regained his balance back on the motorbike seat. Stevie described this with all the enthusiasm of Russ Hodges screaming, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
Everything had been fine on that freshman year trip at first. B. More had taken the Jack I offered him lovingly, caressing it and rocking it like a baby, going through a dozen do-you-know-how-longs. He was really funny.
Stevie was pleased. I never was much of a drinker at all. A little wine if I was showing off, acting suave, but no bourbon or scotch. I just stole it because the Maryland liquor warehouses were easy. And we kept the money we were paid for picking up bottles for other students. That is, unless we wanted more than I could steal. Stevie often did; he was an alcoholic.
B. More might have been an alcoholic, too. Although he claimed he was broke and had been for a while—and as a result hadn’t had a drink since the last time he’d had some money. But drinking, he added, was not the reason he was broke. He said he didn’t drink “that much.” Maybe not. But he liked to talk about how much he didn’t drink. And then he and Stevie got into a deep discussion about how much “that much” consisted of. Then they changed the subject. To wine. They talked about new wines and old wines. Then it was red wines and white wines. Then Italian wines and French wines. They were all labels I’d never heard of; I knew Scuppernong.
I went around a corner to a luncheonette full of Hopkins people with armloads of books and serious looks on their faces. Two were talking about the school, saying there were one thousand undergraduates and eight thousand graduate students.
I got two grilled-cheese sandwiches, French fries, and two Dr Peppers. All they wanted were clean glasses and ice. They had that and were laughing when I left.
When I returned to B. More’s room, the subject had turned to writing and half the Black Jack had blackjacked them. They were discussing the merits of Ron Wellburn’s serious scholarship as opposed to Everett Hoagland’s erotica. Too deep for me.
As I finished my lunch, B. More said to Stevie, “Wellburn wrote me about this scrawny, Afro-wearin’ chump,” pointing at me with the bottle.
Stevie giggled and his braces showed. “What’d he say?”
“That Spiderman is a better writer than he is or than Hoagland is. That he’s better than you are, too.”
Stevie was nonplussed. He hoisted his glass.
“He is,” Stevie said. “He practices all the time.”
“None a that bothered me,” said B. More. “But he said Spiderman was better than I am.”
For some reason I felt the conversation had turned a corner that was leading down a dead-end street.
“Tell me something,” he said, still not looking my way. “Is he better’n me? A fucking prep?”
Stevie turned his glass up and drained it.
“Yep,” he said, reaching for the bottle of Jack and pouring himself another couple ounces. “He’s better’n all of us because he don’t drink. But that means he ain’t a real writer yet. When he starts to drink . . .”
B. More got up, picked up the whisky bottle that was about two-thirds gone, and, holding it by the neck, walked into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. I didn’t see him again for three years.
I knew another Lincoln student who was at Hopkins at the time I decided to drop off my application. Edward “Rocky” Collins was a year ahead of me when I arrived, class of 1970. He went to Hopkins a year ahead of me, too. But though Brian Jackson and I both knew him, neither of us knew his address in Baltimore. So I went straight to the building that housed the writing seminars.
I arrived in the department office about 1 p.m. and found an almost vacant reception area, manned only by a woman who was obviously busy. Her chair was in a front hall that led to a series of doors facing a desk and a cluster of phone connections. She was clearly the do-it-all who controlled the hall and access to all the professors. I stopped and gave her my kindest smile.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said with my smile on full force, “my name is Gil Scott-Heron and I’m here to file an application for the fall seminars.”
“Well, I’m just so sorry,” she said, deflecting the brute force of my grin. “But unfortunately all of our positions in the group are taken.”
I don’t know what I expected her to say after “I’m so sorry,” except maybe, “You’re in the wrong department.”
There was no way there were no more positions, no how. I knew she hadn’t said “no.” And if she had, I couldn’t possibly know why.
No positions?
I didn’t say that out loud. I just dimmed the enamel glare a little bit. What I was thinking was that back in my room I had a calendar on my wall that was all fucked up; I had a calendar that was at least a month behind the rest of the world, because I had a brochure that I was sure said to get applications in by March 1. No positions? Right!
“I know what you’re thinking,” the lady said, and then she went on to prove it. “Ordinarily we accept those applications until March 1, but this year we just had so many applications that we have no more positions. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said, sitting down opposite her.
She looked at me sympathetically. I sat down like I was sitting in an electric chair. It was a situation that just didn’t sit well. What I wanted to do was scream at myself: Hey! Don’t just do something, sit there! So I did. There is actually an ology called sitology, which I would like to have applied to the situation at hand, but I couldn’t. It should at least have been an excuse for what I was doing, but it wasn’t. I knew I was going to have to say something to this little lady shortly. I was wishing I had something scientific to say, but I had already eliminated sitology.
“Sir . . .”
She didn’t really want to dog someone who had just received bad news.
“Sir . . .”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said softly. “I heard you, ma’am. I was just thinking it was a shame to have come all this way and not even have a word with the great man himself. D’you think I could?”
I took a furtive glance down the hall.
“Ohhhh,” she said like someone who bought three of the same vowels from that blonde on Wheel of Fortune. I could see that we agreed on something. I was still nearly knocked out over the way she had said “we” have no more positions. But we agreed on something now. The “Great Man.” Now there was a genuine look of sympathy instead of that other one.
“He’s at lunch now,” she said, “and . . .”
And he probably had been, more than likely. Except that just at that moment he wheeled around a corner and into the reception area. There was no doubt. Going about no miles per hour was the poet Elliott Coleman.
I wasn’t really joking or exaggerating when I had called Elliott Coleman a great man, because for people who knew poetry and knew him, he was a great man, a great poet in terms of his honors and awards, and an extremely nice man as I learned. Here’s a rub that relates to appreciation, particularly my appreciation of artists and people. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room available sometimes for me to express appreciation or friendship or an especial
fondness for people who are not Black. No, that’s not exactly true. The person doesn’t have to be Black, he or she just can’t be white. My occasional reference to a Mark Twain or a Harper Lee or an Elliott Coleman or a Robert De Niro or who the fuck ever, if they’re not Black it seems at times that I’m not supposed to enjoy them or appreciate their art. I’m sorry. Get over it! ’Scuse me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that part of what we were fighting against for years: the fact that no matter how good a brother or sister was, white people would not appreciate them. Wasn’t it bass-ackwards (a Black reverse) when we were so thoroughly annoyed by the number of white people who would line up to see Miles Davis or any number of Black artists that we didn’t support and didn’t seem to claim until it was mentioned that a lot of white people went to their shows? Well, which is it? Or which was it? Yes? No? Maybe? Answer me this: if you’re in an accident, God forbid, and you need a blood transfusion, and they bring in five pints of type whatever-you-are, do you seriously give a fuck who gave up the blood or what color the contributor was as long as it is the right color blood? Do you seriously care whether it was a Black man, a white woman, or a purple midget? Type O was what you needed and what you got. Elliott Coleman was not my favorite poet. But Elliott Coleman was a poet emeritus with a long list of awards and honors that people did not give him because there was nobody else available. If you think there’s no point to this, take off the George Wallace mask you’re wearing; or is that really you pretending to be all the kinds of expressions we claimed we were trying to get rid of or away from? That’s carrying nostalgia too far, buddy. Otherwise keep up the good work.
I picked up my little bag of things with my life in it and walked slowly into Dr. Coleman’s office as he was crouching into the seat behind his desk. He had obviously heard me coming, so I did not surprise him. The fact that it was me, someone he did not know, might have surprised him. At about six-foot-two plus three inches of Afro, I could have surprised him.
He assumed I was supposed to be there, standing in front of him, because I had gotten past the part of the royal “we” sitting between him and “not we.” The fact that he did not know me, that we had not met, scampered across his expression with the speed of an adverb on amphetamines.
He said, “Mister, uh . . .”
“I’m Gil Scott-Heron, sir,” I said, extending my hand. “And it’s really nice to meet you.”
He was either too polite or too tired to follow his first word with another one, so he asked me with his eyes: And what do you want?
“Sir, I’ve been told by your lady out there that you have handed out all of your fellowships, but I need a minute of your time.”
I put my two books and an LP in front of him without saying anything right away. He reached for the books first, slowly rubbing a pale, bony finger across the laminated cover of the book on top. He stopped, sat back in the chair a bit, and then pulled a pair of reading half-glasses from his jacket’s breast pocket and slowly put them on. He did everything slowly, but was obviously used to it that way, with no irritation or frustration. His fingers looked arthritic, a couple on the right hand permanently bent at the knuckle. He picked up the poetry book, obviously attracted to its unusual shape. He picked up the album briefly and then sat back and looked up at me again speculatively.
“Sir,” I said, keeping the respect there in my voice and in my eyes, “I heard the fellowships are gone. All twenty-seven. But I’d like to make a proposal: if any of the twenty-seven you’ve awarded has done as much work as I have, maybe I don’t deserve one like I think I do.”
He looked over the glasses at me and reached for the phone, still not giving me a long look or a lot of words.
“This is the first time we’ve had so many applications,” he was saying as he dialed. “The program has become really popular . . . Hello, Stevie? Elliott. I’ve got a little problem with my numbers. Yes, I do need one I can assure. Well, yes, I’m looking at an extraordinary situation I will explain later. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Stevie.”
And he nodded. Like Uncle Buddy.
22
After Spring semester, 1971, I got a place in Chester, Pennsylvania, until I started at Hopkins in the fall. I finished my second novel, The Nigger Factory, there. I got a real kick out of dealing with the New York white folks about the title. It was a goof to hear these oh-so-modern people, who were so articulate, have marbles in their mouths when there was no way to avoid saying the title.
When Pieces of a Man came out that summer, FM stations once again got behind our music. The number-one station in Philadelphia, WDAS-FM, had a guy named Dan Henderson working prime time. The station had switched formats early in 1971, and the programming and the style was like a whole new radio thing. Dan used long, interconnecting segues that made his shows like sets. It became the industry standard, but at the time it was brand new to me, and it was perfect for my kind of music. I got a big boost from that station.
Howard University began broadcasting around the same time, and they adopted the same kind of format on their station, but without commercials. It was beautiful: Howard’s WHUR-FM was on in every house in D.C. and WDAS was on throughout the Delaware Valley.
That summer, 1971, word reached me that Dan Henderson wanted to speak to me. It was arranged that I would go to the station and do an interview and all. A friend of Dan’s picked me up, and he had some herb he called “The One.” And it was the One. I smoked a joint and when I sat down on the couch in the lobby at the radio station, I could not get up again. I was not asleep or comatose, I was smoked.
I was petrified and ossified
I felt good, but lay out on the couch like a piece of wood
Engaged in several detailed conversations,
I could do anything except change my location.
Answered some questions
Heard some damn good suggestions
I simply could not move for about two hours. I think it must have been hash oil. When we smoked it we were laughing and having a great time, but I should have never laid down on the One.
Dan passed on some phone numbers because he knew some people who wanted to get in touch with me about gigs; I immediately thought he was a good guy at that first meeting. Not long afterward, he became our manager.
Bob Thiele at Flying Dutchman was anxious to follow up Pieces of a Man because it had been another success. For Free Will, the next album, we did the songs that we had left and the poems that we hadn’t had room for on Small Talk. We knew that we were leaving the label; that was the end of my contract. I had signed a three record deal and that’s all I had planned to do.
By that time I had a pretty good idea of Bob’s focus and what kind of a man he was. Despite our age difference and different lifestyles, we had one major thing in common that made it cool to hang out with him: we both really loved music. He was probably the biggest jazz fan on the planet; he was out there in the middle of things almost every night, doing a session, out at a club catching a set. Still, the single most impressive thing about Bob was how he was able to be comfortable as a celebrity. I don’t know how valuable that sounds, but to be honest it was an incredibly important thing to learn, because it became “how to be a celebrity and still be yourself.” It was an area of the world I knew little about and looked at with most trepidation. Bob did not allow what people believed his fame deserved. Somehow he stayed within an orbit where he could continue to be himself: a calm, comfortable person who enjoyed himself and enjoyed music. His vibrations defied disruption. I never saw his ego lead him around or elbow his family or friends out of the way.
After Esther Phillips’s cover of “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” made the charts, other artists covered more of our songs: Penny Goodwin did “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” the Intruders did “Save the Children,” LaBelle did “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Brian wanted to be a recording artist, make a career of it. But I still wanted to be a novelist. Until the stuff got produced, it hadn’t even been important to defin
e myself as this or that. I had a job washing dishes once, but nobody asked me if I was a dishwasher-poet. Until the lyrics were published as songs, nobody ever asked me anything about it. It was just something I liked to do. That hadn’t changed. I wanted to continue to write songs, but I didn’t see myself as a recording artist.
By the time I received my masters from Hopkins in 1972, my plans as far as where I would go with that MA were sketchy. I knew I wanted to teach, and on the college level. I didn’t see myself as a successful or happy person teaching at a lesser level; I had neither the patience nor the disciplinary training to work in classrooms full of high school or junior high students. And I had enjoyed the composition course I ran for undergraduates at Hopkins.
Then one morning I got onto a crowded Amtrak train in Baltimore, bound for New York City to have a conference with Grace Shaw, the lovely woman I had worked with at World Publications on The Vulture and at Dial Press on The Nigger Factory. I appreciated Grace a great deal as an editor. She had scolded me about the original way I attempted to resolve things in the second novel and I went back to what I had projected as the conclusion in the first place.
It was a midmorning express, and it was too full, oversold with standing room only. I found a spot next to a neatly dressed, well-groomed brother whose face looked familiar. His profile was distinct and, though it took me a second or three, I realized I knew it from the cover of a book called The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro: An Autobiography, that had been published the year before. I was standing next to Leslie Lacy.
He had gotten on in D.C., and was going to New York to visit his publisher. Leslie was Assistant Professor Lacy at Washington’s Federal City College. What he described to me as we rode on was close to an ideal situation. Federal City College had been started in 1968 and was still building toward accreditation. There was a clear need in the English department for instructors and particularly instructors with letters, papers, and books that had been published. He was confident that I would be approved for the FCC English department. I agreed to submit a job application.
The Last Holiday Page 14
