Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  Chris was excited that I’d had a change of heart and decided she could come. We found my band at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Billy Eckstine was also staying and performing in the hotel’s famous lounge. After our concert, the promoter Larry McKinley treated us to dinner at the hotel while we enjoyed Billy’s performance. It turned out that Billy was some kind of godparent to Chris and very close to her folks. He invited us to his suite. We had found some of the best grass and the best cocaine money could buy. We had some pure Sandoz LSD from Switzerland with which we spiked everybody’s Dom Perignon as we partied in Mr. Eckstine’s suite. The guys in the band were all with foxes. Everybody was getting ripped, and feeling no pain.

  At about 2:00 a.m., I came up with a suggestion that had obviously been prompted by the LSD in combination with the cocaine, weed, cognac, and Dom Perignon. “Let’s go down to the Mississippi and check out the river.” All of the revelers agreed, except Billy. “You people are all crazy. I ain’t going to no river at this time in the morning. Ain’t nothin’ happening there. Y’all go ahead. I’m going to bed.”

  In a convoy of about six cars, we got to the river, walked to the edge, and just stared at the magnificent river. The acid was really beginning to kick in.

  “Wow,” I said. “I can actually hear the trumpets of Buddy Bolden and King Oliver playing under the river while a chorus sings ‘When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.’ This is beautiful, man.” Chris was bored stiff.

  “Come on y’all,” she said. “If you really want some excitement, let’s go to the graves. That’s where it’s really at, man. Not this Mississippi River bullshit.” Everybody rushed back to their cars, while I hung back for a minute, still checking out the beautiful voices and trumpets of King Oliver and Buddy Bolden.

  When we reached the graveyard, Chris took my hand and led me through the cemetery, cackling and hissing and moaning and groaning, trying her best to scare me. “Come on, Hughie, I know you’re scared.” We walked deep into the graveyard, while the others stayed at the cars, smoking and snorting. All I could hear was the music from the Mississippi River, and Chris was really disturbing my vibe with all her boring graveyard shit. Suddenly she came upon a partly open grave. “Hey, Hughie, come nearer to this one. This is gonna blow your head off.”

  I stood at the edge of the grave, took out my johnson, and began to pee into the grave. Chris let out a piercing scream. “He’s gone crazy. He’s lost his mind,” she yelled as she ran back to where the others were. I came out of the cemetery still smiling to the music of the Mississippi River.

  Stewart asked, “What happened, Hughie?”

  “Nothin’, man,” I replied. “I just peed on a grave and Chris flipped out.” It was nearing dawn and we all left for the hotel. Before we left New Orleans, Chris asked me to take a last walk with her through the French Quarter. I was still tripping. I listened to her blabbering throughout the walk, but my mind was somewhere else, I don’t know where. On the drive to the airport, I told Chris that I was returning to Los Angeles and hoped to never see her again. I had finally had it. I had reached the end of the line. I recounted all the madness of the past three months. Chris tried to say something to me during our flight to New York, but I wasn’t listening. I was coming off the high and was really beginning to get angry.

  When we got to the apartment, Toma Gero was there without her children. I told the limousine driver to wait for me. I greeted Toma and went to pack my belongings. I could hear Chris and Toma whispering in the kitchen. A few minutes later Toma came into our bedroom and said that I had broken a lot of her things and destroyed some of her antiques. Not wanting any confrontation, I told her I would pay for anything she claimed was damaged. “These things are priceless,” she fumed.

  The doorbell rang. It was Dennis Armstead. Chris huddled with him, and I could see she was trying to pit Toma and Dennis against me. I had finished packing and was making my way toward the front door when Toma pushed me in the chest. She said, “Look here, Hugh. You just can’t walk out of here after taking advantage of my kindness and destroying my house.” I was confused. Nothing had been destroyed. During the short time that Chris and I had lived there, we took care of her place. I figured she was just bitching because I was leaving her friend. I said, “Toma, I told you I would pay for anything you think was destroyed. There’s nothing else I can do. I wish you’d get out of my way and stop pushing me.” Dennis could sense the mounting tension. Chris was smiling, enjoying every minute of the action. “Come on, y’all,” Dennis said. “Let’s talk about this like sensible grown-ups.”

  “Fuck it, Dennis,” Toma said. “This nigger has fucked up my house. Who does Hugh Masekela think he is?” That was it for me. I realized that I was being set up, and I decided that the only way that I was going to get out of there was to call their bluff and show them just how crazy I was. Laying down my bags, I grabbed anything that I could get my hands on—vases, glasses, lamps, and furniture. I was throwing things against the wall, screaming, “Fuuuuuck yoooouu!” as they shattered all over the floor. I overturned dressers, couches, and chairs. Toma was beating and scratching at me while Dennis tried to get between us.

  Chris was standing on top of the living room table, screaming, “Watch out, Toma. Be careful. He’s an African savage. He is a wild man.”

  Toma kept attacking me. “You motherfucking barbarian. You black motherfucking African beast. You fucking asshole.”

  I turned around and smacked Toma hard in the face and watched her fall to the ground. “I’ll kill you,” was the last thing I said. Picking up my horn and luggage, I left the house with my neck and face bleeding. I didn’t give a shit about what I did to the place and Toma. Had Dennis not been there, I had been prepared to do enough even to go to jail. I only got scared when I was outside and realized that I had been psychotic in there.

  When I reached Los Angeles a few days later, I told Peter Davidson, Philemon Hou, and Stewart what had happened. They were agape listening to me describe that scene, but relieved I’d finally been able to cut Chris out of my life. Throughout the next few weeks, Chris would show up at some of the hotels we were staying at on the East Coast. She’d try to gain access to my room, but management had been alerted not to let her in. Once Henry woke me up. Chris was standing outside screaming, “Hughie, let me in. Take me back. I’m your wife.” Hotel security came and led her away.

  I asked my attorney, Albert Geduldig, to file for divorce. Her lawyers demanded alimony. I told Geduldig to tell them that I would stop working and become a beggar before I would give Chris a penny, because I felt she didn’t deserve shit from me. She had tried to destroy my life in every way she could. I really would have had to be very stupid to want to have anything to do with her, or help her in any way. In early August 1968, I went to Juarez, Mexico, for a quickie divorce from Chris Calloway. It took a load off my mind. She later showed up at a concert I was playing in New York, and after getting high backstage, we spent the night together. I guess I wanted to see if she was still insane, but it was no use. The following morning, I let her know that I would never get back together with her.

  I ran into Iris a few weeks later. She vowed she was not going to let me go. Two weeks later, after finishing some East Coast gigs, I flew home to Los Angeles—with Iris. This turned out to be another bad decision.

  I didn’t see Chris again for eleven years. One day Dennis Armstead, who was now managing Miriam Makeba, told me Chris was anxious to see me, that she wanted to bury the hatchet. I invited her to my apartment in Riverdale. I cooked us dinner and then we made love. Later that evening, as Chris was leaving, she said, “Hughie, I really got you, didn’t I?”

  It didn’t matter to me anymore, and as I laughed along with her I said, “Yeah, Chris, you reeeeally got me.”

  She seemed satisfied. I kissed her good-bye at the elevator doors. Before the doors closed, she said once more, “I really got you.” She smiled as the elevator doors closed. From my eighteenth-floor balcony, I watched her drive away int
o the September New York night. That was the last time I saw her.

  12

  I WAS LOSING MY PRIVACY at the Queens Road house, where I was living with Philemon, Peter, and Mabusha. Al Abreu spent every day there with me, mostly working on music arrangements at the piano. The band’s rehearsals also took place at the house. This was all okay by me. The problem was all the baggage that came with it: the women we were dating or sleeping with casually and all their friends and relatives, not to mention the hangers-on and groupies. The traffic was a nightmare. Every, Tom, Dick, and Mary was constantly at my house for one reason or another, from free drugs and booze to just hangin’ with Hughie. I got an apartment for Peter somewhere around Hollywood, and another one for Philemon at the bottom of Laurel Canyon, where Mabusha stayed with him when I was on the road. A real estate woman from Malibu got me an intriguing house just above the sheriff’s station off Pacific Coast Highway. The house was way up on the top of a hill. It had a long living room with glass walls on both sides, which met at the apex of a triangle where the room ended, almost jutting into the ocean, which was visible from both sides of the room, about seven hundred feet below. The only way to get to the house was by a cable car that operated with a special key. I brought all kinds of beautiful women to spend the night with me at my mountaintop haven—sometimes two at a time. A shock wave went through the female community when Iris moved in with me.

  Stewart and I were enjoying our lifestyle with Susie (who was still around), Iris, Philemon, and Peter almost always by our side. We were rolling in money. Stewart and I were reckless; success had given us swollen heads, and nobody detested us more than the Los Angeles Police Department. One evening Iris and I went out to have dinner with Stewart and Susan. Mabusha and Philemon were staying at my place for a few days and watching television. The four of us returned and were sitting out in the garden enjoying the full moon and the roar of the ocean. Shortly after midnight I noticed flashlights around the house. Stewart and I rushed into the house, and when we got to the door, three Los Angeles police detectives were on their way out of the house with a shoe-box top containing a few grams of grass, half a vial of cocaine, a piece of hashish, and some Seconol sleeping pills.

  “Hi, Hugh, look what we found,” one of them said, shoving the box top in my face.

  I replied, “Let me ask you something. Do you have a warrant? How did you get up here, because I don’t remember sending the cable car down for you.”

  They all drew their weapons at the same time. The one in front shouted, “Get in here now and lay on the floor, on your stomach.”

  I screamed, “Iris, Susie, run, go get a lawyer. This is an illegal bust.” The cops had us on the living room floor and handcuffed our hands in the back. Philemon and Mabusha looked on in amazement. They let us stand, but wouldn’t let us use the phone. I went into a cussing rage. One officer was Lebanese. I kept cussing at him and calling him a sellout nigger. He was almost on the verge of tears.

  For the next eighteen hours we were handcuffed in the living room. From time to time we were allowed to go to the bathroom or to check on Mabusha. Finally, by evening of the following day, a lawyer called the house and insisted we be brought to the Malibu sheriff’s department and charged. At the station they wanted to send Mabusha to a children’s home. But I refused. I called friends of mine, Richard Alcala and Carrie White, Beverly Hills hair salon owners, who soon arrived to take Mabusha with them.

  After I knew that Mabusha would be looked after, I went ballistic. The police took us to a cell and locked us up; all the while I kept cussing them out. Stewart pushed me against the wall and said, “Sshhh.” He then pulled a three-gram vial of cocaine from inside the swimming trunks he was wearing under his pants. We washed our faces in the cell’s sink and hurriedly snorted the cocaine, then threw the empty vial through the barred window in the back of the cell and started cussing the cops all over again. By this time I was foaming at the mouth and on the verge of going crazy. Twenty-four hours later, our lawyer came and bailed us out. I found out afterwards that the chief arresting officer was an FBI agent from New York.

  When Stewart and I got back to the mountaintop house, we were shocked to discover how much cocaine and grass the police had failed to uncover—in the refrigerator, the bedroom, the closets and drawers, the bathroom cabinets and kitchen cupboards. It was hilariously embarrassing. I suggested to Iris that she return to New York and lie low for a while. After snorting the cocaine we found in the house, I became extremely paranoid. I could not stop peeping through the curtains. I knew I was hearing police coming up to the mountain house from all sides. I couldn’t sleep. Susan and Stewart suggested I crash at their place. I took some downers and finally went to sleep after three straight days of being up from cocaine, booze, grass, hashish, opium, acid, amphetamines, and lunacy. I woke up the following afternoon and began accusing everybody I could of setting us up.

  We had been scheduled to go on a major college tour, but the promoters canceled nearly the entire concert series after our bust. We were not the only ones busted that night. Sly Stone, Stephen Stills, and Barry McGuire were also busted then. John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix were busted in London. We thought it might have been a concerted Interpol exercise. A few promoters kept us on their schedules. We played Howard University’s Homecoming with a young pianist-singer and Howard University graduate named Roberta Flack, whose “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was a big hit. Roberta had been a lounge pianist at the famous Mr. Henry’s restaurant in Washington, D.C. Al Abreu had gone to see her act there a few times, and had really loved her show. She would always drop by the Bohemian Caverns after her gig and catch our last set. In the Homecoming audience at Howard were Adam Clayton Powell, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond, and many other activists from SNCC and the Black Panthers. We were still reeling from the bust and from a fiasco at Hampton Institute in Virginia, another predominantly black college. After that show I had found Stewart surrounded by some of the members of the school’s football team and their coach. They were accusing him of giving me drugs, and were refusing to give him the money due us for the concert performance. I started yelling at them.

  “You motherfuckers are fixin’ to lynch my friend because he is white, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan is lynching your asses all over the South just for being black. Now y’all are turning into a black Ku Klux Klan. Get the fuck out of my dressing room, you black motherfucking rednecks. Give us our fucking money and let us get the fuck out of here.” We got paid and left Hampton, Virginia.

  By now the U.S. newspapers were reporting my drug arrest and those of the other musicians. Back in South Africa, the government seized the moment, and the white press condemned me mercilessly. I had truly set myself up, and they dutifully went to town on my screw-up. I felt awful for my parents, even though they remained supportive. But I was getting higher than before. By now I was a confirmed drug and alcohol addict, and the fear of the legal consequences my bust would bring led me to try to drown the pain by getting even higher. I was angry with the laws that had led to my arrest, angry at myself for being so careless during the preceding months, ashamed over the bad publicity I was receiving and the loss of many lucrative engagements, and most of all feeling guilty about my reckless ways. All these feelings were powerful catalysts for deeper addiction. The more I drank and took drugs, the more ashamed, angry, and guilty I felt. Because none of the mind-altering substances took away my pain, I reached out for more.

  Stewart and I decided that I should move out of the house on the mountain in Malibu and spend more time in New York City. We had first met Ray Lofaro in the early 1960s back in New York through Richie Druz. Ray was president of PGL films, a company that had won international awards for top-flight television commercials, for a few of which Richie wrote the music. Ray had become a very close friend, and over the years we became almost like family. He was well connected in New York. Through Ray we met a classy real estate woman who found Stewart and me a beautiful penthouse apartment on
82nd Street and Riverside Drive, with a 360-degree wraparound terrace view of Manhattan, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens, the Hudson River, the East River, and the Harlem River. It was breathtaking. We moved right in.

  I went to my first court case before the end of November at the Santa Monica courthouse, where Harry Weiss, my attorney, requested a motion for dismissal because there had not been a warrant for my arrest. The court rejected his motion. “Law and order” was a theme of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign at the time, and his friend Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, had been promising his constituency that he would be cleaning up the state and ridding it of all criminals, drug dealers, and addicts. I didn’t stand much of a chance. Shortly after my first appearance, Harry Weiss was arrested for possession of cocaine. His partner, Peter Knecht, took over. I was in and out of court just about every two weeks. Knecht kept seeking continuances, fishing for a sympathetic judge. Every time I appeared for a hearing, there was a seedy, middle-aged wire service reporter present who I suspected was working for the South African government’s international public relations network. They made sure that every time I made an appearance, this man sent a report back to South Africa. The actor and former football star Jim Brown always seemed to be there too, for a hearing about an assault charge against him by one of his girlfriends. We would stand around the corridors and blame our woes on the racism of the day. This was the time when the Chicago Seven were on trial, as were the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and several other antiwar and antiestablishment activists. Miriam Makeba was now living in Conakry, Guinea, with her husband, Stokely Carmichael. Stokely’s criticism of Israel’s position in the 1967 war brought the couple condemnation from many Western countries and their allies around the world. Her recordings were no longer available in American record stores, and life in America had become unpleasant for her. Of course, I didn’t even realize how ludicrous it was for Jim and me to compare our self-imposed woes with the politically motivated trials of others. I obviously couldn’t see past myself.