Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  He flew to New York, leaving the band to drive the equipment from Atlanta in a van. I considered driving with them, but I didn’t feel like sitting in a van for twelve hours, so I stayed home. I spoke to him by phone before the concert, and he sounded in high spirits. Promoters expected a big turnout at the show. Weathermen predicted a bad storm, but Dad didn’t pay it much attention. If they had to cancel because of rain, the band still got paid.

  Before we hung up, I said, “How’s the weather?” Hazy, overcast, hot, he said. “You think it’s going to rain?” No, he said. “You know if it does rain you still get your money?” I know, he said. My father had performed in concert thousands of times—he wasn’t scared of a little bad weather.

  Besides, he always felt safest on stage.

  13

  Never Say You Can’t Survive

  “A terrible blow, but that’s how it go.”

  —“FREDDIE’S DEAD”

  Wingate Field, Brooklyn, August 13, 1990—A heavy storm slithered across the Empire State, menacing Senator Markowitz. He didn’t want to cancel the show—ten thousand people had already shuffled into the park and taken seats or splayed on blankets in the grass. They came to see Curtis Mayfield, and Markowitz felt it his duty to ensure that happened. He hounded his weather contacts, hungry for updates. As showtime approached, he got word that grim weather rumbled an hour away. He decided to put my father on early, thinking even if they had to cancel, Curtis might at least get off one song.

  Hanging out in his trailer, Dad heard about the early start time from his road manager Vince and agreed to it. Markowitz remained antsy. He approached the opening act, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, with the storm in mind. “Listen, you get on stage to get everyone ready to go,” he said, “and then I’m going to bring Curtis Mayfield up, because most people are here for him.” Markowitz cut the Blue Notes’ set in half, down to twenty minutes, which they performed dutifully. No rain yet. So far, so good. Ice-9 hustled on stage and exploded into the opening strains of “Superfly,” drums thump-thump-thumping, bass pulse-pulse-pulsing.

  Markowitz ascended the stairs on back of the stage, pausing to give a quick greeting to Curtis, who hung out waiting for his cue. It was the first and last time they would ever speak. Markowitz stepped to the microphone, front and center. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve decided that we’re going to bring up Curtis Mayfield,” he said. “I’m thrilled …” and as soon as he hit the word “thrilled,” something wrenched the first two rows of spectators from their seats and dumped them on the ground like several hundred discarded dolls.

  Markowitz stood confused. Then he felt it—a hurricane-force blast of wind. Stacks of speakers on the front of the stage—big mothers, heavy and stout—fell off like they were committing suicide. Trees thrashed above the panicking crowd. Markowitz didn’t know what to do. He was in the middle of an introduction. The band was playing. Composing himself, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Curtis Mayfield,” and turned to hand over the microphone. My father strode toward Markowitz, axe slung across his body. Halfway there, Hell paid him a visit.

  It happened in a matter of seconds, starting with the wind that had thrown the first two rows from their seats and razed the speakers. The gust also toppled the cymbals on the drum riser. Lee Goodness leaned back and caught them with his left arm, keeping the beat with his right. As Markowitz turned with the microphone, another gust heaved the front lighting truss off the ground and sent it tumbling, knocking the back truss off the stage as it fell. Markowitz collapsed in fear, lying on his stomach. The front truss plunged down, down, down, like a freight train dropped from the sky. As it plummeted, stage lights fell from it like raindrops.

  One of those falling raindrop lights cracked Curtis on the back of the neck and crumpled him to the ground. Then the falling truss pulverized the tom drums with a mighty crash. If Lee hadn’t leaned back to catch the cymbals, it would have severed his arms, maybe worse. His bass drum stopped the truss before it could squash my father like a bug.

  Dad blacked out, came to, and discovered neither his hands nor arms were where he thought they were. He lay splattered on the stage, helpless as an infant. People screamed and cried and hollered, everyone in frantic motion, running for their lives.

  Then it rained. Big drops. Torrents poured from the sky; thunder exploded like shrapnel. Lee rushed over to his bandleader. “Are you all right?” he yelled into the rain. “I think so, but I can’t move,” my father groaned, sodden in the squall, powerless to take cover. He kept his eyes open, afraid that if he closed them he’d die. Someone covered him with a plastic sheet, and everyone waited without breath until an ambulance arrived. “I knew what had happened right away,” my father told an interviewer later. “The first thing I told myself was just to stay alive.”

  Nothing was assured beneath the plastic sheet. The ambulance rushed him to Kings County Hospital. In the only stroke of luck that day, the hospital stood right next to the field. Paramedics saved his life, but not his body. After stabilizing him in traction, doctors told him the brutal truth—the stage light had crushed several vertebrae. Paralyzed from the neck down, he would never walk, let alone play guitar, again.

  He was forty-eight years old.

  The road manager, Vince, called me. It felt surreal—Dad and I had just discussed the weather on the phone. I reminded him he’d get paid even if he didn’t perform. Worse still, I was supposed to drive up with the band. Had I been there, who knows what might have happened differently. I felt unimaginable guilt. More than that, I feared for his life.

  Altheida made arrangements to fly to New York the next day. I stayed with the kids, who were too young to go and too young to stay home alone. Uncle Kenny and his wife came to relieve me, and I left the next day. Already media requests for interviews came pouring in. Tragedy had us all scrambling.

  When I arrived, my father’s body was wracked with pneumonia. His system couldn’t fight the sickness after enduring such trauma. Seeing him hooked to a ventilator, in traction, I almost broke down and had to step out of the room. Gathering myself, I walked back in and stood over his bed. Tears welled in his eyes. I’d never seen him cry before. He couldn’t speak, but he mouthed the words, “Take care of the finances.”

  In the hardest of circumstances, we show our true selves. Even at death’s door, my father’s first thought ran to finances. It was never money he cared about. It was always what money represented—the ability to take care of his family and ensure his children would never suffer the way he had. Without a working body, he couldn’t guarantee that anymore.

  On some level, he knew he’d lost more than just control of his body. He’d lost his guitar, his other self, the love of his life. With it, he lost the magic that gave him control of his life—music. Music broke him out of the ghetto; music bought his mother new furniture and a refrigerator full of food; music granted him the power to raise his friends from poverty; music eased his insecurities; music made him a messenger and a hero; music inspired the movement; music brought money, fame, and an incredible lifestyle; music gave his brother and sister and sons jobs when they needed work. Because he could control music, he could control his world. With cruel irony, fate snatched that control from him in the exact place where he had earned it—the stage.

  Soon after I arrived at the hospital, Tracy, Sharon, and Curtis III did too. Sharon recalls, “When I got there, he had that halo on. He was lying on his back. I was so devastated to hear what happened and to see him in this way. I asked for people to leave because I wanted to pray. I laid my hands on him, and I prayed over his body. He had tears coming out of his eyes. I remember that, because I rarely saw my father be emotional in a way that he had tears. It was really, really, really tough. There were lots of times when I just couldn’t see him that way.”

  Tracy recalls sitting at Dad’s bedside, reading messages that came in, not knowing how else to help. “I remember reading a telegram from Eric Clapton,” he says. “Some other famous people sent him a t
elegram, so he had people caring about him all over the country, sending him all these flowers and telegrams. It was not a lot of interaction at that point. We were just there day and night just to be around him.”

  The show of love from peers in the music world boosted my father’s spirits, but there wasn’t much any of us could do to make his situation better. I’d often try to get his mind off it, maybe get some laughs going, but no one could ignore the heartbreaking truth. The man who once controlled everything now couldn’t even go to the bathroom without help.

  Politics set in immediately, making everything more difficult. My father served as the linchpin of a complex social structure—three often-separate families, three mothers of ten children (“I wouldn’t do that to one woman,” he used to joke), and a bevy of business connections. Then, of course, there was Marv—ever the opportunist, he reinserted himself into the mix after a long absence. No one but Curtis could keep all those factions together.

  When the press came calling, I handled their inquiries. I didn’t look for that role; it fell on me, with my father’s approval, because I had just taken charge of Curtom. Curtis III felt slighted, saying it was his duty as oldest son. That created a wedge, but we quickly settled the issue. Still, as my responsibilities grew after the accident, it seemed everyone wanted to shove wedges between my father and me.

  It took years for these wedges to become major problems, though. In the hospital, the only thing we all cared about was the man trapped in traction. After a week or so, the pneumonia subsided and the doctors deemed him safe for transport to Atlanta. He flew on a Medevac plane with Altheida to Atlanta’s world-class Shepherd Center, where he received extensive therapy. He still had bone fragments in his spinal cord, and they surgically extracted them. They also fused his spine together and supported it with metal plates and screws so he could hold his head up.

  Dad began rehab, training with various pieces of equipment including a giant motorized wheel chair he could operate by mouth. He never learned to use it. His attitude was, “Fuck it, just push me.” For the rest of his life, that lumbering, heavy contraption sat unused in his room while we pushed him around in a regular wheelchair.

  He also received counseling at the hospital. He learned, barring a miracle of modern science, he’d never move his limbs again. As the reality of his situation dawned on him, he tried to make sense of what had happened, saying:

  We arrived [at the venue] at about eight-thirty or nine. It was bigger than I thought. We pulled up behind the stage. I met a few people, shook a few hands, got my money—my balance in advance. All the normal things. I’m in the safest place in my life, doing my work. I was to close the show, but it was running a little late, and I was asked to go on stage a little early so people who were there to see me wouldn’t be disappointed. No problem. I was happy to do that. I tuned my guitar and jumped into my stage clothes … I had my guitar on and I’m walking up these sort of ladder steps, a little bit steep but not so steep you couldn’t walk up them. I get to the top of the back of the stage, I take two or three steps, and … I don’t remember anything. I don’t even remember falling. Next thing I know, I was on the floor with no guitar, no shoes on my feet, no glasses on, and I was totally paralyzed. One moment I was smiling, going toward the stage, and the next moment my eyes were looking straight up to the sky. The only thing I could move was my neck. I looked about me, and I was completely sprawled like a rag doll all over the floor.

  Even as he told the story, he couldn’t quite believe it. It was the type of freak accident that makes no sense no matter how many times one goes over it. The best he could say was, “It happened, and it happened fast. I never even saw it coming.” His recollection that the show ran late is interesting—perhaps no one told him the real reason Markowitz asked him to go on early. Maybe, had he known about the weather, he would have refused. Maybe, had I been there, I could have played bad cop and refused for him. As with any tragedy, there were a million maybes.

  After more than two months at Shepherd, Dad grew tired of life in a hospital bed. There was only so much rehab he could do, and even that wouldn’t bring his body back. He began lobbying for release, and when his doctors finally assented, he called me to pick him up immediately. I said I’d have to arrange for a van to help transport him, but he shot back, “No, come get me now.” I raced over in my two-door Mazda, and the staff helped me use a lift to get him into the front seat. They gave me a huge strap, which I wrapped across his chest, under his arms, and around the back of the car seat to secure him. Slowly, cautiously, I drove him home. It was close to Thanksgiving.

  Returning home from the hospital, he faced the greatest challenge of his life—learning to live without a body. It forced him to give up all control. He thought he wouldn’t experience much physical pain as a result of the paralysis. He was wrong. “Aches come and go,” he said. “I have a lot of complications, the effect of low blood pressure, chronic pain, things no one really could see or would even know unless you were around people with spinal cord injuries. I’m trying to maintain the status quo, but the hardships are many as are the complications. Sometimes you don’t have answers.”

  He couldn’t regulate his body temperature, and the Hawk he left behind in Chicago now seemed to live inside him. We piled blankets on him, struggling to keep him warm, but other symptoms we could do nothing about. He suffered from phantom hands—an agonizing sensation he compared to thrusting his arms in a bucket of writhing snakes. Atrophy set upon his muscles, and his feet began to curve downward from lack of use. Diabetes became a serious problem too, and the fingers that once effused elegant guitar licks now served solely as pincushions, caked in dried blood and wrapped in bandages from constant blood-sugar tests. On top of that, he suffered perennial urinary-tract infections as a result of his ever-present catheter.

  His life crashed to a halt. No more performing, no more traveling, no more writing. At home, he stayed stuck in bed all day and night with the TV on. The first-floor library became his bedroom, and he sat there passively observing life go on around him. Interview requests flooded in, which gave him something to think about, and he did have days when the darkness lifted a bit, but just as often, his mood turned despondent. Always a man of capricious mood swings, he struggled to maintain a sense of hope and happiness while adjusting to a living nightmare.

  Dad never succumbed to self-pity, though. As Marv recalls, “He never said, ‘Why me?’ He’d say, ‘Why not me? It could happen to anyone.’” Still, he suffered mightily. Every night, he lay trapped as the snakes slithered around his arms and a simple itch could drive him to insanity. He’d call out in the darkness, begging for someone to come ease his pain. Sharon recalls, “When I would go to visit, I would hear him in the middle of the night calling out for Altheida. And I just felt such hopelessness. He would just call for her, and call for her, and call for her incessantly through the night.”

  Home healthcare workers came to ease Altheida’s burden, but she still worked herself to the bone. One night, exhausted, she put a candle near the wall and forgot it. The wallpaper ignited. Soon, flames engulfed the second floor of the house. They had to evacuate fast, wheeling Dad beneath billows of black smoke and deadly fire. He watched his home burn, knowing if no one had been there to save him, he would’ve burned with it.

  More bad news followed. Dad kept his old master tapes in the basement, and when the fire-hoses extinguished the blaze, they also doused some of the most famous recordings in soul music history. I went back and salvaged everything I could. Some tapes survived, and I began the process of digitally remastering them, culminating in more than fifteen reissues from the Curtom catalog on compact disc. Many tapes, however, we lost forever.

  For Dad, life had become apocalyptic. In a matter of weeks, he lost the use of his body and much of his life’s work, and he had to evacuate his home. We kept trying to take his mind off of his trouble. I’d go over and watch basketball games with him, and Sharon resumed one of her favorite father-daugh
ter activities. “When I was a little girl in the old house on Austin Road, sometimes he would be in bed, and he would lay on his stomach and watch nature shows,” she says.

  He always loved nature shows. I would sit on his back and get a comb and a brush. He had a little bald spot. I would just play in his hair, and rub the oil on his bald spot. I would take the comb and run it through his beard, and I would touch his face. And I would kiss his face. He would just smile. He would eat it up. So I remember after the accident, sometimes if I were in the room with him, I would scratch his beard and kiss him and touch his head. Just things like that. And he would smile. He liked it.

  Tracy delved into researching spinal cord injuries, looking for a miracle. Soon, the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis contacted us. Ray Chambers—former owner of the New Jersey Nets, founder of the philanthropic Amelior Foundation, and board member of the Miami Project—sent his own private jet to pick us up and fly us to South Florida. We stayed two days in Miami, where Dad received some more hard news—the longest living quadriplegic on record survived ten years. In the end, Dad would live just over nine.

  In a bizarre way, some issues improved after the accident. Because he couldn’t move, he couldn’t retreat from the world anymore. He couldn’t stay in his room, lost in a haze of drugs. He became Dad again. Tracy says,

  At this point, there was no more locking yourself up in a room for months. There was no more didn’t answer phones. All that changed. Now he answered the phone, he did talk to you. He couldn’t hide in the room and lock up. So, the relationship as far as just sitting there and talking with him got better, because you were actually able to sit down, and he couldn’t move. I spent a lot of time talking with him. He would always talk when he was feeling pain. That’s one of the things that he would voluntarily always talk about: “I just wish this pain would go away.” And he would describe what it was. He said it felt like worms was eating his flesh.