Brenda said she was going to get her car and pull up to the door nearest the dressing room in about ten minutes. Vernard came back in talking to someone else about the money. He told me that the gate receipts were not straight yet, so it was going to take a few more minutes before he could collect everyone and pay them. I reminded him again, uselessly, to write everything down and to get a receipt. And to apologize for me.
I was kind of vague about what the apology should consist of because I didn’t know what the hell was wrong.
Band members who hadn’t left yet were drifting back in, still speaking about me as though I was somewhere else.
Like, “How is he?”
I ignored questions not put directly to me.
Vernard led me out the door and into Brenda’s car. She and I had been formally divorced in 1987. Oddly enough, I received the documents, which had been filed by her brother, at Blues Alley. But she and I had been separated long before that, and she and Gia moved back to Don Miguel Drive—her mother’s place—at the end of 1984.
Of all the locations in Los Angeles I enjoyed myself most of all there, on Don Miguel Drive. What’s more, of all the people I met and got to know in Southern California, my favorite was Mrs. Elvira Sykes, Brenda’s mother. There was no complicated reason. She was simply one of the most sympathetic, pleasant, and direct women I’d ever met. And perhaps I met her at a time when those qualities were so thoroughly lacking from my life. Maybe it had to do with my impression of Los Angeles. But I didn’t think that made it wrong. Impressions in Los Angeles were not to be equated with wrong.
As a rule, I found first impressions to be without merit. Maybe that’s because of who I am, and the way scattered rumors and a sprinkling of my attempts at art had created a persona that did not inspire initial honesty of an unguarded introduction, free of pretentions. But that’s not so in L.A., or at least was not so in the L.A. of the 1970s and 1980s. There I found that a first impression was valid because it was all there was to most people until they found the role they should play to maximize their association with someone after, “How do you do?” There was nothing until this stranger decided whether you could be used and for what.
If the reputation I had amassed was acknowledged at all, it was only in passing, a blink and a slight shift in their focus like the faint echo of a ring made by pressing the plus key on a cash register. Everybody in L.A. was an actress, an actor, a singer whose megastardom was assured by the demo tape they’d just recorded, the screen test they were up for, the commercial they were auditioning for. Only established players, large or small stars, could afford to have a personality or genuine interest in anybody else.
Mrs. Elvira Sykes was the second member I met of a previous generation of Brenda’s family. I met her grandmother first, her father’s mother, from Shreveport, Louisiana. I met her on the weekend while I was playing at the Roxy and Kareem first brought Brenda over and introduced us. If her grandmother had still been at Brenda’s apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard, I might have asked to go there from Club Lingerie. I believe Mama Sykes might have helped me. Instead, the Spirits helped me.
The second show had been cancelled. Not good. I calculated the lost income in my head accompanied by clip-clopping; it sounded like someone on horseback was trapped inside my skull and couldn’t find an exit. Shod hooves clip-clopping in cadence around the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. And the blind guy sitting there on a bench.
I only remember one question that Brenda asked during that short ride to the Franklin Hotel. She asked me where I had gotten the sweat suit I was wearing. That’s how I remembered the Porsche. Gia’s godfather, Dr. Stevie Rosenthal, had provided the means for me to get to Lingerie on time. His brand new Porsche was still parked on Sunset, across the street from the club.
I was only awake for a few minutes in my hotel room before I collapsed face down on the bed and was out like a light. Before my exit, I gave the keys to the car to Brenda. She retrieved the car and returned it.
I often credit the Spirits with things I cannot righteously credit any other way. On the morning after the Lingerie show, the Spirits returned my sight. That probably sounds and reads as scattered as anything I’ve written here. Why? Because people might ask, “If these Spirits returned your sight, why did they take it in the first place?” That seems like another road to “the Lord works in mysterious ways . . .” But I’m not trying to go there. (Although I’m sure he does.) I believe I know what blew me out on those stairs. No sweat. Wearing a sweat suit onstage that I had put on for an entirely different purpose that had nothing to do with working and building up the necessary sweat. I had spent the ninety minutes leading up to my stroke inside a hot place, working hard enough to be drenched on a normal night. I allowed myself to become dehydrated and I now equate my stroke coming off stage to some kind of heatstroke episode, a short circuit that could have inflicted more lasting evidence of its influence than it did.
It took my sight. My sight was restored. But it left its signature, a long-range reminder of its potential and my mortality. It marked me in a place where I could not forget the circumstances that created it. On the right side of my face, it marked the cheek with a wrinkling, folding effect that takes hold of my expression at times like someone prematurely yanking down a venetian blind at an awkward angle. It also warned me because it occasionally slurred my speech, and as it adjusted aspects of me it left me unaware.
I heard about it before I heard it.
I don’t particularly know why I sat blind, feeling as though I had disrupted a kindergarten class and been sentenced to face the wall. Responding more or less mechanically with my voice sounding like it carried a new echo that attached itself randomly to words. But it was a Sunday night sliding toward midnight, and there was nowhere to go that sounded better than the hotel.
43
It was New York City, 1999, and I was finally “being permitted” into the apartment I had shared with my mother at the time of her death. The first time I was allowed to enter, months after her funeral, I got lost at the threshold of my mother’s deserted, dust-choked apartment.
I ignored the young brown-skinned security guard assigned to me by the manager of the complex. We walked down the hallway to the living room where he sat with a magazine as I returned and settled stiffly on her unmade bed in the bedroom nearest the front door. I got up without any defined place to start a review of our belongings in this place filled with her absence.
I felt like a burglar rummaging through her dresser drawers, full of her underclothes, stockings and pantyhose, thin spring blouses and sweaters, and a top drawer assortment of small unnamed lotions, hair clips and pens, hair nets and rollers, a small plastic bag with extra eyeglasses of varied prescriptions. This carry-all of glass and plastic came to represent the fierce indignity of death, which leaves even a dedicated fixture of the Sunday services on Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street without defense against any stranger’s avaricious exploration. Before I could reason against it, I felt ugly drops of salt and rage twisting their way down my cheeks, away from my red eyes. I wondered, without the strength to generate anger, whether the young brother in our living room had heard me crying as I wiped my face with a Kleenex. On legs locked at the hips without knees, I was a metal man with no more flexibility from forehead to foot than the tin man frozen rust-rigid in a pose speaking of unfulfilled intentions.
In the empty attic that was my mother’s son’s head, I saw that her direct moments of criticism protected me from more flaws than the obvious “selfish” one that she once handed me so plainly that I was aggravated by her clarity. I had always enjoyed and even taken a vicarious pride in her understated handling of all-comers through our lives together. And I was not spared entirely. I was reminded of how her jabs carried more hurt than the telegraphed roundhouse rights from celebrated bigwigs of the entertainment world. Their cotton candy excursions into colloquialisms showed more evidence of the harm my sorties against their character and integrity had done than
they could respond to in kind. Her observations, delivered without elevated volume or aura of discovery, brought a lasting sharpness that left no visible bruise on me but smuggled a bone-deep ache past my skin with a package of detonations that would fracture my facade of unaffected nonchalance. And delivered without malice.
The pain of the truth was not “permanent” when it spoke to a fault we did not or could not correct. When I chose “did not,” I arrogantly proclaimed that it was because the Spirits supplied me with what I needed and pointed out a debilitating generosity that belied or balanced “selfish.” When I chose “could not,” I admitted that I didn’t know how and told myself I was raised by Lily Scott. But so was my mother.
I am a refugee from the college of clowns who was too impatient to wait for graduation day, which would have included a speech by a previous inmate who was released with honors at the top of his class. Had I waited, I would have heard his warning. So I just thought I was funny and that funny would fix everything, change every flat tire, arguably without even stopping; no time on the side of the road. There were no clown escape hatches that occurred to me now, paralyzed and immobile in my mother’s room.
I was repulsed by my lifelong insistence on fucking isolation. Some of it has been justified by a real fear of the consequences awaiting those who befriended me and drew close, tried to settle within an umbrella’s ceiling of cover. When I was younger, everything in life was an experiment and a new thrill. On a rainy day, you could find the high-end joy of another body, another soul, squeezing shoulder to shoulder, giggling, sharing warmth deliberately, two midgets who gallop on marionette legs, now jammed in a space that posed a challenge for one. I loved that kind of silliness, but life has taught me that I have to avoid that kind of close.
There was no one I could be close to now.
Real grief had overwhelmed my body’s working parts. All of these little parts of my mother and her day-to-day stability were rising up from where they were left for the night months ago. They had been expecting her and I am not her. But they know me because I had been around fretting when they came for her before, the ones with the IVs and the stretchers. It was obviously my fault that she wasn’t here to resume whatever they were doing that was left to be continued. When I walked around without purpose and then stopped to cry, they became annoyed and started to move on their own. When I saw them move, I called for the guard and told him it was time to go.
I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I’m not sure why. The older I get, the more I tend to question the elements of emotion and intimacy as genetic parallels with height and hair color. I truly believe that I love my mother and grandmother, but beyond them I have lived in a circle of small values that have a startlingly limited reach. And a stunted amount of emotion is attached to it. This is not an evaluation that builds a wall around my family, closing out other people. It reflects the fact that I am closer to people I know, but no closer to cousins and aunts and uncles than to good friends.
I have been blessed with three children. They have been blessed with beautiful mothers and touched with brushes of eccentricity donated by a father who could have done more for them and with them, but could not have loved them more. Because he did not have enough practice.
I am sure I was loved by the Scotts. I am sure I was loved by Lily Scott and Bobbie Scott. And probably by my precise and proper uncle, William Scott. And to a lesser extent by Sammy and Gloria Scott, my spinster aunts, who slipped into their spinsterhood from the north and south poles of that status. The key to the Scotts was understanding and what you didn’t understand you had to trust.
Love was not an active verb in my family or in my life. There were few demonstrations, few hugs and embraces, and few declarations among us about love. I was a full-grown adult who had been married, a father, and divorced before I consciously put “I love you” into conversations with my mother, before I made sure I got a hug from her and gave her a big hug each time we met. I can’t remember ever hearing “I love you” pass between the generations of Scotts that preceded me. Or recall with any clarity hearing those words from them to me or being inspired to say those words to them. Yet I can’t imagine there being more warmth and laughter shared with genuine empathy and respect and consideration and . . . but not affection.
Our codes and slang terms that slip easily in and out of vogue go from addition to meaningful exchanges of emptiness and impotence rather quickly as people and music and movies and what-means-what to us and each other goes in and out of style in the blink of an eye. Right now everybody is using the ill-suited “be there for you” or “be there for me.” That expression was perfect for the Scotts, because if there was one thing you could count on, it was the fact that we would be there for each other. A hundred times more likely to “be there,” wherever “there” was, than to say “I love you” and share a genuine hug. And I say that as someone who wished for a hug and a word of encouragement on a thousand nights when tired and beat up by the world. I would have traded a hundred be-there’s for one heartfelt hug.
And it may be that I never get another chance to say this to those children, as well as I know I have never taught them by example so that they can turn to each other for this when they need it. I hope there is no doubt that I loved them and their mothers as best I could. And if that was inevitably inadequate, I hope it was supplemented by their mothers, who were all better off without me.
Publisher’s Note
Publishing a book posthumously inevitably creates a number of challenges, and The Last Holiday has been no exception. The words that make up the final, printed version of Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir were written over many years, starting in the 1990s and all the way up to 2010, and during this period the book has undergone some significant transformations. Even calling it a memoir may be misleading, because it is certainly not a memoir in the conventional sense of the word.
The first pages that I read were given to me by Gil when he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1990s. They included his account of the night that John Lennon was murdered (entitled “Deadline”) and chapters on growing up in Jackson, Tennessee, and on Stevie Wonder (entitled “Makes Me Wonder”). These original chapters were recounted in the third person, by a narrator called The Artist, as Gil felt that this allowed him to write more freely and objectively about the events he needed to describe.
In 2004, at my prompting, Gil began rewriting the book as a first-person narrative, after recognising that the device of using an Everyman narrator for a memoir created more problems than it solved. Although, as he wrote in a letter on 29 September 2005, “I am adjusting to the first person as these things will show, but I find it totally unnerving and self-serving at times because I have to describe shit from the ‘Watergate’ point of view: what I knew and when I knew it.” The “Interlude” chapter in this book is the only remnant of the original draft that has made it into the final version.
One of the reasons Gil had been drawn to the third-person narrator was because his primary motivation in writing The Last Holiday was to tell the story of the Hotter than July tour. He felt that Stevie Wonder had never received the recognition that he deserved for the key role he played in bringing about the legislation that made Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday (this eventually happened in 1986). Gil believed that The Last Holiday could be an objective account by a firsthand witness to this historic tour. He wanted to ensure that people could not forget what had really happened. And it is for this reason that there is so little in The Last Holiday that recounts what took place after the rally in Washington in January 1981. What happened to him after 1981 did not seem relevant to the book that he wanted to write.
However, it was clear to Gil that in order to tell Stevie Wonder’s story, he would have to tell his own story, and that “in writing about yourself, you write about your parents and their parents automatically because you are all of those people.” It was only by opening up his own past that he felt h
e could properly explain why he had ended up on the tour with Stevie Wonder.
Gil’s death in May 2011 has made it impossible to ask him questions that we would dearly love to know the answers to. The manuscript he left had been sent to me in a very piecemeal fashion, over a number of years and written on various archaic typewriters and computers. From countless conversations we had and from certain notes he left, it was clear that his original vision for the book was not as a straight chronological narrative. But as time went by, Gil leaned towards a simpler approach and dispensed with the more complex structure. He also decided to write about some very personal events from the later part of his life, including the death of his mother, the stroke he suffered in 1990 and his estranged relationships with his three children. These were never part of the original plan and they add real poignancy to the concluding chapters of the book.
We are greatly indebted to Tim Mohr, whose editing skills and commitment to the project have resulted in The Last Holiday reading as smoothly as it does. Gil was a very appreciative man and I know how grateful he would have been for all the hard work that Tim, Dan Franklin, Amy Hundley at Grove/Atlantic and Rafi Romaya, Norah Perkins and Nick Davies at Canongate have put into The Last Holiday. And I like to think that he would have loved Oscar Wilson’s stunning jacket artwork.
As Gil so memorably sang,
“Peace Go With You, Brother”
Jamie Byng, Publisher, Canongate Books
The Last Holiday Page 25
