That was the part that most impressed me and everyone else upon hearing about the save Gia made, that a five-year-old, just visiting New York, knew what street she was on (East 106th) and what apartment number they were in (19A). Not only did that take a good memory, it took a good set of nerves not to panic—at five or fifty-five. Since they had the right angle on what and where, the EMTs were able to beam in with the glucose and said it was “too close” to black out and urged mama to sack out for the rest of the evening before the next session of 911 roulette.
The incident proved how smart the daughter Brenda and I had produced was. She was intelligent, and turning out to be a nice person. The parents could not dictate or direct the intellect; they couldn’t make a lick of difference in terms of whether their offspring had one of their IQ scores or the other’s, one minus the other’s, or both of their IQ scores added together. But they did have a lot to do with what kind of person or how kind a person their child became.
Sociology and every other inexact approximate science of odds and oddly negative prognostication be damned. Those sciences of vague, uneven basis and potential seemed to have been discovered to generalize and generally discourage humankind from being the kind of humans they could really be. That reminded me of that old Brook Benton tune about “the odds against goin’ to heaven, six to one.” Well, you had to figure that was absolute bullshit! I knew that odds-maker Danny Sheridan covered a bunch of subjects out there in Vegas, and that the British had odds on damn near everything, but I still doubted if numbers had or would ever be posted on heaven or hell, aside from the sure bet that you’d eventually have to get the hell out of here.
A few years later, I called my mother from London on her birthday, June 6. We had a few laughs before she reminded me that it was a real long distance call; we agreed we’d pick it up again when I got back to the USA. I told her I’d try to call her from Newark airport in New Jersey, where I was heading next before getting a late shuttle from there back to Washington.
Providing it took the usual amount of time to locate my bags, roll them through customs, and find my next boarding area, I’d have a tiny window to make a quick call—if everything worked.
It didn’t. My big Continental jet from Heathrow landed an hour and a half late because of a storm. The last flight to D.C. was in thirty minutes, and was overbooked by too many seats for me to dream of catching, even if I stood on the wing. What do do?
I decided to go to Newark’s Union Station and try to catch the last southbound Amtrak train of the night. While waiting for a cab, I called my mother. I couldn’t reach her because the line was busy. I shrugged it off and got a taxi ride from a hassled and harassed brother complaining about the weather.
I missed the last train south by ten minutes, arriving at Newark station shortly before ten o’clock. The next train wasn’t until three in the morning, a red-eye that arrived in Washington at six or seven in the morning. I could wait for that, the ticket agent informed me.
I looked unhappily around the dismal accommodations provided by Amtrak for Newark train riders. Obviously this station was for catching trains, not waiting for them. There wasn’t even a newsstand or a soft-drink machine. Nothing to make you feel like you’d be waiting for anything but a robbery.
I made another call to my mother, to cry on her shoulder. But the line was still busy.
There was a 9:55 to New York’s Penn Station.
I went back to the ticket agent, who was closing up for the evening, putting away his money and tickets.
“I’m going north,” I said.
Suddenly I could almost locate my lopsided grin. I brightened considerably. Hell, in New York I could eat and get a magazine. There were people and signs of life. It would beat the hell out of waiting for God only knew what in the gloom of Newark’s near morgue.
I heard the whistle of the arriving train and had just enough time to grab my bags and struggle down a flight of stairs before it shushed to a stop.
Two phrases came to mind right away when I arrived in New York City. It never failed. The first one was from Stevie’s song “Just Enough for the City,” when during the opening you hear his brother Calvin saying almost reverently, “New York! Just like I pictured it!” That was the perfect phrase with perfectly paced awe at the wonder of it all. The second phrase was, “New York, New York—so nice they named it twice.” This was doubtless a contribution from a self-employed New York poet whose artistry was unrewarded by the city jaycees, whose perspective ran more to Frank Sinatra than to a frank description. Which also meant there might not have been many kudos available for the person who coined the term “the Big Apple,” which was rotting to the core just then.
There was another saying that fit New York like a pimp fit in Times Square: 24/7. That was street folks’ description of something open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. New York was that, and several institutions of legitimacy were counted on for day and night service, 365 days a year. No down times, just shift changes.
Penn Station was one of them. With trains bound for somewhere, everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere, there was an ongoing chaos that could remind you of the world’s steady spin regardless of terrestrial complications, or involve you in how the madness of thousands of destinations could be coordinated in the brain of a human being.
At that moment, I was being impressed by the system of coordination that got the cheeseburger I was eating from wherever the hell it had been just in time to save me from starvation. I took a minute before I decided on dessert and called my mother again. It was a little late, but hell, she was the one doing the yakking on the line. It was busy again, so at slightly past eleven I ordered a milkshake to help me contemplate.
I didn’t like what my contemplating was indicating.
Maybe you had to know my mother or know the Scotts in general, as she was a good representative of them. They were not loud, talkative, gregarious, flamboyant folks. They were not great users of telephones. The three hours I’d been unable to get past a busy signal would have been three months’ worth of her talking. There might have been a talk once in a while with Mrs. Cox, her good buddy from Jackson. And there were one or two other ladies and a male friend who called. But I could hardly remember a phone conversation of hers that lasted more than fifteen minutes. And a conversation this late? I wouldn’t call her after ten o’clock without a life or death situation.
At midnight I tried again. Busy. I just knew the line wasn’t “engaged.” And there was no reported trouble on the line. When the line had been busy at 8:30 and 9, it was unusual enough, but now it was into the realm of unbelievable. My name would not be the first name to come to mind if the question was bravery, but I was not one to panic. And I wasn’t going to panic now.
Still, I made up my mind quickly. I thanked the phone operator, found a locker for my luggage, and hailed a cab in front of Penn Station. I headed for 106th Street.
Soon I was banging—no, make that BANGING—beating with both fists on the door of apartment 19A in the presence of a startled woman from the Housing Authority Police who was determined not to show she was startled. Beating in flurries of five that rang out like cannon shots without room to echo in the closet-sized hallway. Until even the barricaded, blasé, mind-your-own-business New Yorkers were disrupted. Until the lady in her neatly pressed uniform touched my arm lightly to say . . .
“Who is it?” came a squeak of a shaking voice from behind the door.
And then again, “Who is it?”
I was shouting, “It’s your son! Open the door!”
“My son doesn’t live here anymore,” I heard.
Then the door opened as far as the chain restraint would allow, revealing my mother—or at least as much as I needed to see.
There was a gash across her cheek, with dried blood and drying blood like a halo around it as it turned shades of blue. Recognizing me, she let us in; her son and the lady in uniform who was now speaking into her radio.
I helped m
y mother back to the kitchen and safety while we waited for the ambulance.
41
In late February 1989, I was playing a weekend at Blues Alley in D.C. and noticed Lurma—the mother of my son Rumal—in the audience. It had been a long time since I’d seen her, though I had never stopped wondering why she had forbidden me to say anything about Rumal and therefore forbidden me from saying anything to him. I wondered who he thought his father was. Maybe the man rumor had connected to Lurma from time to time. I remained mystified until that night.
I went over and sat down, spoke to her, even took a picture with her. She told me she needed to talk with me, so I invited her to my hotel after the show.
I literally had no idea what we would talk about, but I knew it must have something to do with the boy. That was obvious.
Starting very slowly, she said, “I think it’s time you had a talk with your son. He’s beginning to ask me questions I can’t answer.”
“Birds and bees questions?” I asked with a crooked smile. “And does that mean it’s all right for me to tell people he’s my son?”
I wish I could describe all of the expressions I saw flash, focus, and fade from her face. About three seconds stretched out between us as we looked into each other’s eyes. Both of us were looking for things we were surprised not to find. I was looking for the honesty I could always count on from her the quick reply or retort that she would lay in front of your shallowness or bounce off your arrogance. She was looking first for an indication of snide, then fake, a pretense of misdirection, then an attempted stab at some joke in poor taste. And finally, her judgment collapsed on shock and recognition.
“You’ve never mentioned him, I mean Rumal,” she started, stopped, started.
It was my turn to be assertive.
“Never,” I said. “To anyone. You told me not to tell anyone he was my son, and I haven’t. Not even my mother.”
“Your mother,” she repeated.
“You didn’t point out any exceptions,” I told her, looking away. “So I couldn’t make any. I haven’t told my brother or sister or, hell, anyone. Does this visit mean I can tell them?”
As we talked further, she took me back as far as her visit to my house. She was trying to buy a house for her and Rumal in Alexandria. She felt as though she needed to have a fiancé with her when she showed up to see the house. That it was better to take a colleague from the Washington Post with her who could help represent stability and didn’t want word circulating through the negotiations that her child was actually the son of a married man on Martha’s Road.
She got the house. It was a three-story brick row house on Pine Lake Court. And as soon as the deal was complete and the papers signed, the brief charade with her coworker was abandoned. But no one had ever told me anything.
It had been obvious that some of Lurma’s buddies at the Post and the Washington Star had not been sworn to secrecy. Unless they could only fuck with me about what they knew. And if they reported back to Lurma about my vague, evasive, and vacuous responses when they asked about my son, what had she thought? And what had she expected me to say? Yes, quite right, I’m a thorough shithead. Of course I know about the boy. Lurma brought him over to my house. Matter of fact, when she calls I hang up. When she writes I throw the letters away. So now that she’s resorted to messing with me by messenger I’m mortified.
None of the above. She was standing in the middle of my hotel room while I sat down opposite her. She was talking to herself more than to me, about people knowing things.
“Yeah,” I agreed, telling her the names of some of the people who had asked me questions over the years. “But they all came up slidin’ and hidin’, like they were back in junior high, like ‘psst! Hey, Gil!’”
“And you said . . .”
“Nothing real! Or nothing at all. I gave them all of the information I could: None.”
I ran out of words around then. Because I had run out and run down. And sort of felt run over.
I knew what I was being told within all she was not saying. But there was nothing I could do.
Lurma came out of it first and sat down. I asked if she wanted something to drink, some juice or something.
“How is he doing? Hell, how are you doing?” I tried to laugh.
“I’m fine,” she said. “He’s doing well.”
She was a little brighter as we moved on to her favorite subject. Our son.
A month later I had been in a cab on my way to JFK Airport to catch a plane to Brussels when I suddenly directed the driver to go to Laguardia Airport instead, to the terminal where the shuttle to D.C. flew.
An hour and a half later I was knocking on the door on Pine Lake Court. And then Lurma was at the door with a little smile.
It was good to see her. I was at the right place.
I became very fond of Rumal Rackley, and I’ve been amazed at the similarities in our lives despite the distance we started with between us. He has the disadvantage of looking a great deal like me, with the same wide smile that he flashes on occasion and the same offbeat sense of humor. He was also a fairly good student, and our lives ran parallel all the way to graduate school. We both had beautiful mothers from Southern states who were college graduates. We both went to private high schools—in his case Sidwell Friends in Washington. We both went to Black colleges—he graduated from Hampton University. And he went on to grad school—at Tuskegee’s medical school.
My third child, a girl named Ché, was born in England. She is a real trip, thoroughly full of near atomic energy, and allegedly possessing an IQ that equals her mother and father’s combined.
She’s a curious, furious, hurricane of movement with more questions than Jeopardy. Her specialty is hotel rooms. She finds them fascinating, with altogether too many things to explore.
How I became a father again at nearly fifty years old is a story I will save for another time.
42
On a typically warm Los Angeles evening in 1990, we were scheduled for two shows at Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard. The producers, the folks who ran the club, had to return some money when the second show was cancelled. I take 100 percent of the blame for the fans’ disappointment that night. As I was leaving the stage between the two shows, I suffered a stroke.
I wish I had been more aware of my responsibilities as an observing artist. It would have been quite a coup for me to be able to describe to you exactly what happened to my body as I stepped with my usual stork-like grace. But I can’t for the life of me remember the process, the actual changes that my body went through. I suppose it would read like those two-page centerfold stories in the National Enquirer: “I Died and Came Back to Life,” by Jesus Christ or something.
The best I can do for you is a before and after. The before was the first show. Me on stage with my band, working hard, enjoying myself and the crowd. Immediately before, I was standing in the center of the stage introducing and pointing to the members of the band over the closing coda of “The Bottle.” Everybody was smiling, huge to the point of laughter, lights coming up, crowd screaming, me raising both of my arms to embrace the applause.
And then . . . hot, real hot, but not sweating. Something happened—the stroke—on the way down those few steps at the front of the stage, before you took a right turn and headed toward the dressing room. An instant or so before is me starting down those steps, head down, some kind of cap on, not a baseball cap, my face in shadows, still smiling and happy because the band sounded good. Everybody was playing well and we sounded energy loud but not volume loud. The energy and adrenaline had not pushed tempos up and over the point where my smile was remembered rather than genuine. And I was already assembling and arranging the order of tunes we would do in the second show. This was a useless process, to be sure, because I would not decide more than the first two or three songs with certainty.
The after begins on the stairs with someone holding my arm and guiding me sightless past murmuring fans who had swallowed their cheers and
perhaps even forgotten them, as I had.
I was totally blind. And I remember what I could not see. Maybe I mean I remember not being able to see.
No, this was not a reach for any closer relationship with Stevie. The blindness that I experienced struck me like lightning but without the electrical burns or the flash of light.
I was there—but-not-there, and treated that way by the time my guide and I reached the dressing room and I was led to a chair. I collapsed into it and sat up as though posture was important. I heard myself being spoken about. Actually, around and about, because I was referred to in the third person as if I wasn’t there.
The voice I most remember after, in the dressing room, was Vernard Dixon, the road manager the band members called Swee’ Pea, because he like to wear a Swee’ Pea–type sailors hat. The dressing room filled and emptied a couple of times, with band members and the curious drifting about until someone closed the door to the hallway. I didn’t know where I was sitting in the room, but from time to time people briefly took the chairs around me, next to me. No one talked to me.
Band members were collecting their gear. Discussing how they were going to get back to the hotel. I felt as though I was sitting in a corner facing the wall.
Vernard opened the door to leave, to collect the money—minus the tickets that were refunded—from the producer. When he opened the door, my ex-wife Brenda came in. It was good to hear her voice. She sounded kind and solicitous, her voice as soft as ever. I was no longer alone.
I was comforted by her being there. She was organizing my things, packing my bag, asking questions, collecting the key to my hotel room from Vernard. I had not gone by the hotel before the show. I was suddenly aware that no one had been talking to me because no one really had known what to say.
I was tempted to try a reassuring smile but I still felt like I was facing a wall, and I really didn’t have any idea what was happening to me, why I was blind, why I didn’t otherwise feel bad—just sort of stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, and the more important question, I imagine, was how long my condition was going to last. But as I said, I was stunned, feeling extremely naked and exposed. Because I was at a loss for words and because the most important questions had not occurred to me.
The Last Holiday Page 24
