Once in a while out of sheer loneliness I went along, and in many of these places I was the only white face. It never failed but that hymn singing brought tears to my eyes.
My parents were relentlessly secular. They believed that to be American was quite enough. Ethnic identity was slightly vulgar in my mother’s eyes, or, at best, a kind of colorful peasant tradition.
I had no church to go to. My father’s mother had been a Jew from an old family that had intermarried until there was nothing much of anything left except a tree at Christmas time. We had some aunts on my mother’s side—this side was of a Judaism so reformed that it was indistinguishable from, say, the Girl Scouts—who held the traditional Passover meal, but no one in living memory celebrated anything silly like Hanukkah. On the High Holy Days my mother dragged my father off to the local reformed synagogue, where the rabbi had a phony English accent and repeatedly intoned in his sermons that Jews were really nothing more than good Americans.
I was sent to Sunday school at this place, where I learned to shoot spitballs and crack gum. I also learned how to make the bus transfer machine go berserk and spew transfers out all over the place. The real purpose of my attending Sunday school was that it made me eligible to attend the Inter-Suburban Dance Society, to which all really nice girls and boys from cultivated Jewish families belonged. Here we were taught the ballroom dancing thought to be useful for our future, since, it was believed, we would attend thousands of weddings, tea dances, and balls when we grew up. At these dances the boys went out and planted cherry bombs in mailboxes and the girls talked about what animals the boys were. As for me, I was usually in love with some gangly misfit or other with whom I discussed such works as No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre. There were a few girls who really liked to kiss boys. I was one of them, although I only kissed those boys who agreed with Jean Paul Sartre that hell was other people.
The first time I heard “Amazing Grace,” in a sweaty little chapel outside of Gainesville, Florida, I began to cry. I found I could not stop crying, on and off, all day.
“Poor little white girl has flipped out,” said Vernon.
I had a healthy, upright hatred for Vernon. Everyone did. He was the sort of person who, it would not have surprised you to learn, had sex with lizards and embezzled funds from handicapped widows. Ruby may have hated him too, but he was her engine; he was everyone’s engine. He had come up from the most dire poverty in which ten children slept in a shack and were probably molested by their relatives. He had discovered Ruby and, by dint of being able to pluck the strings of a secondhand guitar and possessing an ambition that made forest fires look like birthday candles, he claimed Ruby—who could sing—and went out to set the world on fire. He had come a long way. At home in New Orleans, he and Ruby lived in a big pink house with a pink piano in the living room and a pink piano in the music room. He drove an elongated black Cadillac and had a collection of Civil War pistols. Ruby had her own masseuse, her own hairdresser and, when she finally hit the big big time (by which time I was long gone, as the song says), she even had her own designer and nutritionist.
Ruby was not interested in the private lives of her staff. The people who worked for her—musicians and dancers—were just so many crabs or spiders. She did not like the sight of anyone having trouble. The only reason she and Vernon saw me crying was because I burst into tears inside the church.
“Today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death,” I lied. This made them all feel better.
I was taken for a little walk by Doo-Wah Banks, on whom I had a useless crush. Doo-Wah was a dense, middle-sized man with short hair and the kind of eyes that take in everything—like a cop’s. He had actually graduated from Juilliard—I alone knew this—and he was having himself a little fun by traveling with Ruby. Since he was divorced and had to send money to his wife and two boys, being on the road prevented him from running up expenses. He had big shoulders and was shiny black. His affect was an irresistible combination of fatherly and sexual.
“Now, now, now, little chicken,” he said as he walked me into the countryside. “Now, stop crying, you poor little thing. Are you lonely for your own people?”
“I don’t have any own people,” I said. “I think I’d feel a lot better if I could get in bed with you, Wah.”
“Oh, no, honey-babe. We’d get lynched for it. Besides, I don’t sleep with colleagues, that’s my rule.”
“Well, listen,” I said. “How about just letting me put my arms around you.”
He led me behind a large tree and allowed me to hug him. He was an excellent person, a truly good man, kind to girls and women, a teacher and friend to children, and he kept his mouth shut when it was wise to. A person could learn a lot from a guy like Wah. I held him tight. He smelled of spicy aftershave. I really believed that if I could just curl up with him everything would be fine. He put his arms around me and I began to cry again.
“Poor lonely girl,” he said. “Why don’t you get a boyfriend?”
“I have no faith,” I sobbed.
Doo-Wah, who believed in self-improvement, thought I meant that I lacked faith in myself. While that may have been true, it was not what I meant.
“I mean religious faith,” I said. “I’m nothing. I’m a lapsed Jew from an assimilated family. I don’t belong anywhere. I’m alone in the middle of the universe.”
This caused Doo-Wah actually to kiss my nose.
“Oh, come on, little girl,” he said consolingly. “We all that.”
5
My earliest memories were musical. My mother, for whom music was background noise, painted on Saturday afternoons while listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio. I hung out in the kitchen, where whatever housekeeper we had, kept the kitchen radio on. The first time I heard Chuck Berry sing “Roll Over Beethoven” I was dazzled. I stood in the kitchen in a perfectly rapt state. I took money out of my piggy bank to get this record. I played it on a child-size phonograph in my own room every minute that I was alone.
This room was done after my mother’s style. On the wall were framed watercolors of me at various stages: in a straw hat eating a watermelon, playing with someone else’s Persian cat (we did not have pets), at the piano, and so forth. My bedspread was a pink and yellow quilt. My curtains were a faded rose-infested chintz, and on the floor I had an old Persian rug.
Eventually I dismantled this room. The watercolors came down and were stacked in my closet. The quilt, which had always daunted me by its being old and expensive, was changed to an Indian print bedspread. The children’s books were banished to the cellar and my teenage books were settled on the shelves. And while I sought to keep my mother out, she got in anyway and edited me. I found certain books vanished—my mother thought they were seditious or too sex-soaked for a young thing like myself. Gradually, I learned what every upright teen with a snooping mother learns: to hide everything, and I was good at it. I could hardly wait for the wonderful day when I would graduate from high school and go away to embrace my own destiny with no one around to tell me what to do.
At college I passionately wished I were either very tall or quite short, extremely beautiful or terribly ugly. I wished I had a long funny nose, pierced ears and lots of shiny black curly hair. Or that I were oversized, like an equestrian statue, or had some odd quirk in my background, like having grown up in Cambodia or Hong Kong or on a sheep ranch in Montana. Of course, my mother was a portrait painter, but that did not seem as glamorous as having a father who had been blacklisted or a mother who studied primitive tribes in Africa and South America.
As I learned from the thousands of women’s magazines I read on the road with Ruby, people, especially women, never see what is actually in the mirror. Once in a while, lifted on a pleasant little cloud of marijuana, I liked to lean back in my extra-padded Strat-o-cruiser seat, look out the window and wonder: can you see what is in the mirror? How much does a mirror distort? Was it not a terrible ironic joke that, of all the people in the world you need to
see clearly, the one person you can never clearly see is your own self? Was this not in fact a tragedy? Then as I began slowly to come down and was left with that unpleasant little buzz you get from inferior reefer, the plain truth would emerge: people never like themselves anyway. Was that not the truth? Were there actually people who looked in the mirror and broke into a contented smile of acceptance?
My hair was neither blond nor brown, although as a child I had the loveliest mop of ringlets, according to my mother’s portraits and the seven thousand photographs she and my father took of me. As I got older, my hair got darker—what a slump for my artistic mother! I was five foot four. My legs were neither long nor short. I was not short- or long-waisted. In fact, I was a fairly regular-looking person, easily pretty enough but not enough for my physically snobbish mom, who felt that being beautiful was the Big Thing.
Therefore she was very involved in the way I looked and I am sure that I have repressed the memory of fights we must have had about clothes when I was little. We certainly had them when I was older and confronted with an adolescent’s perpetual dilemma: do I please myself or my mother? If I please myself, how much will I hurt her?
It was far easier, I realized, simply to hide. I kept a set of clothes in my bookbag. In the mornings I dressed to my mother’s specifications, and changed my clothes in the bathroom at school. I did not reveal that on Friday nights, when she thought I and my little friends sat playing Scrabble or were practicing ballroom dancing, I was listening to rock and roll and necking with the brother of one of my little friends.
I cannot describe the sacred feeling of liberation that saturated my very bones as I got on the airplane to go to college. My first week there, I was picked up by an unsavory-looking person who was said to be a genius. He was a senior and lived in a grotty hovel off campus. He was a major in theoretical physics but I glommed on to him at once because he knew who John Lee Hooker was. We went to his nasty flat and listened to John Lee Hooker records for an hour or so. Then he played me Blind Willie McTell doing “Statesboro Blues.” I fell in love with him that instant and decided that if anyone was going to be my first lover, it would be this person. He seemed to be a little nutty and he certainly was a slob, but he looked so pretty with his clothes off. Besides, I had never been to bed with anyone in my life and I found, after an hour or so, that it was perfect heaven. He told me he thought I was beautiful, which sent me into a kind of erotic rapture.
Several weeks later he passed me on the street and said hello as if he had met me years before at, perhaps, his little sister’s sweet sixteen party. My heart was broken but, after all, he had introduced me to Willie McTell, and I was no longer an innocent girl. I knew that I was on my way.
6
My diary, had I ever bothered to keep one, would have been littered with the names of boys (later men) I loved who did not want me. The boys who found me fetching, I found twinky and wimplike. When some unsuitable wild person with a bad reputation actually fell for me, I experienced bliss of short duration followed by desolation. Love was like that, I thought.
Of course, the music of the day did much to back me up. “You Don’t Love Me,” “Why Don’t You Love Me?” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Wedding Bell Blues” and so forth, including Ruby’s monster hit, “You Don’t Love Me Like You Used to Do.”
On the tour bus, I liked to let my eyes wander over the unattainable Doo-Wah, who was, he often said, no oil painting. It was his emanation I was after. When I was sad, which was as often as possible, he let me curl up in his arms if we knew we were alone.
“You oughtta quit this tour, girl,” he said. “You been doing it two years now. This is a dead end.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I know it’s a dead end. But I love it.”
“Well, baby, the handwriting is on the wall,” he said.
I looked over at the wall, which did in fact have handwriting on it. Most walls of the cheap motels we stayed at did.
“This one says ‘Pat ’n’ Bill 4ever,’” I said. “So what?”
“Honey-chile, Vernon has his eye on the big big time.”
“Isn’t this big time?”
“Shit, no,” said Wah. “They want Vegas. Tahoe. Madison Square Garden. They don’t want to mess around in these little shitty towns. And when they hit, baby-love, they will throw you out. You won’t see any white faces when Ruby goes big time, unless it’s her money manager.”
I considered this.
“You living in a dream world,” Wah said.
“What about you?” I said. “You’re on this tour. What are you going to do?”
“I’m a black musician,” Wah said.
“Me too!” I said.
“You better get yourself some nice white husband or go back to college, or you know how you’ll end up, don’t you?”
“Yes, Wah,” I said. “I will be a hairoyne addict like my predecessor, Pixie Lehar.”
“Exactly,” Wah said. “Now, when I was coaching Little League …”
“Oh, shut up!” I said. “If you’re so wholesome, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you teaching at Juilliard or coaching some high school band?”
“I am making money,” Wah said. “But you are having an experience. When I quit, I will still make money. But people don’t pay for people to have experiences, not that Ruby pays all that well. This tour is not for you. You should quit. I would be proud and happy to escort you to your rightful place.”
I looked at Doo-Wah mournfully. I hoped he would soon light a reefer and act more like a normal person.
“You find my rightful place, Wah,” I said, “and I will be happy and proud to let you escort me to it.”
7
I lived to be on stage. At the time there was nothing much else to live for. The food on tour was either wonderful (grits, collards, shoestring potatoes) or horrible (grits, hamburgers, antique fish cakes). Grace and I bought heads of cabbage and chopped them up for salad. We had a knife, a chopping block and a plastic bowl, and we made cabbage salad after the recipe of her sainted grandmother. The plastic bowl had a plastic top so that we could eat our cabbage on the bus. We carried a box of kosher salt and a box of black pepper, and left behind, in various motels around the country, empty bottles of cider vinegar and small vials of olive oil. God only knows what the management thought we had been doing.
Our longing for salad brought Grace and me together, and she confessed to me that she was sending all her money to her fiancé, Graham, and that in a year she would quit the tour. Graham, who worked for an accounting firm, would quit his job, too, and they were going to open a catering business together called Grahamgrace Delectable Foods.
Ivy’s boyfriend, Bud, was in the Marines. When he got out he was going into auto-body work with his brother in Hartford, and Ivy was going to get married and have a large squad of kids.
And what was I going to do?
When they asked this question, a kind of whirring emptiness flapped in front of my eyes. Grace and Ivy assumed that if you had a college degree you could do anything. In their eyes it was like having a large inheritance. They couldn’t imagine that you might have all the choices in the world but none of the skills.
I said, “I’m going to be a Shakette forever.”
This caused Ivy and Grace to double up. The idea that anyone did this for fun after the first few months (much less two years) totally staggered them.
On Friday afternoons we washed our hair. Then we did our nails, and when they were dry we wrote letters. We sat there like three little schoolgirls using the arms of our chairs or stacks of magazines as writing surfaces. Grace wrote to Graham, Ivy wrote to Bud, and I wrote to Mary Abbott, my constant correspondent: Dear Mary, We are in Memphis for an oldies night. Fats will be on the bill. Next week, James Brown without the Famous Flames. Also Baby Jean and the Jerelles. The saxophonist says that Ruby wants to take this act to Las Vegas and, when she does, I will get the ax. Nothing good lasts, or so they say. I guess I should start
thinking of what to do next in some structured way, right? It is hot here and cold where you are. In the meantime, sha la la la la la la la lala. All yours …
When we played Chicago I bunked with Mary, and when she moved to New York I stayed with her there. To wake up in a real bed in an apartment, with real oatmeal cooked on a real stove and drinkable coffee and lots of books and magazines around, made me feel as if I should never set foot out the door.
On the other hand, on stage I felt a way I had never felt before. I was an eagle, an angel. My body was made of some pure liquid substance and would do whatever I asked it to. I danced until I felt as smooth and effortless as an ice skater. I could fixate on one person in the audience and turn him into jelly. The big questions fell away. There were no questions—only answers. I was in the music. It wrapped around me. I was not lost in it, but found. The kind of ecstasy people found in religion, I found in being a Shakette. It was not an out-of-body experience, it was an in-body experience.
Grace, Ivy and I could have done our routines in our sleep. We wore little dance dresses with spaghetti straps. The dresses were made of layers of long fringe which shook when we shook. Each of us had three dresses: chartreuse, cerise and electric blue, with shoes to match. Sometimes we wore the same color. Sometimes, if Ruby felt it was the kind of crowd friendly to hallucinogens, we each wore a different color and covered ourselves with black-light makeup, so that when Vernon signaled the switch to black light, the three of us looked like three pairs of lips with polka-dotted arms. Sometimes we actually painted skeletons on ourselves, until one night in Memphis some kid on acid went totally berserk.
Once in a while, if a hall had very bad vibes, Ruby and Vernon and Ruby’s brother, Fordyce, insisted on police protection and security guards. Young people were ingesting so many unique substances that it was hard to tell what anyone might do. The cheery ones threw jelly beans, which stung when thrown from the balcony and were banned after Grace suffered a minor eye injury. People were actually searched at the door for them and once a handgun turned up in the back pocket of some harmless-looking nut. It was quite a scene.
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 2
