On bad days Grace suffered from sinus headaches, Ivy had terrible menstrual cramps, and I had constant hamstring pain. But then there were days when everything was right. Our rehearsals went as smooth as cream, and all of us felt fine. The ions in the air were charged with good things and our heads and hearts were light. There was no bad news, and nothing hurt. When the hall was filled up, we could feel that it was full of bighearted, innocent, friendly, rock-and-roll-hungry spirits who would tear themselves up with joy but never lay a hand on us. This sort of audience tossed us flowers. We tore off the petals and threw them back. Everyone screamed with happiness and Ruby ended these shows with “Jump for Joy,” which made the audience leap to its feet and sing with her. Ivy, Grace and I stood in back in our chartreuse dresses, chanting, JUMP FOR JOY! JUMP FOR JOY! JUMP FOR JOY!
Ruby, like an angel, or a sprite or a devil from hell, took off her high-heeled dance shoes and jumped higher and higher until the final JOY! when she came down and the lights were cut and all was total darkness.
Eventually everyone I knew had given up on me. My parents could barely bring themselves to speak to me. When I called my father at his office, he told me I had broken my mother’s heart and that she felt strongly that I was now on drugs.
“But I’m not, Daddy!” I said. “I drink milk all the time and I’m healthy as a horse. Besides, I’m being interviewed by a couple of magazines.”
I heard a kind of gasp from the other end of the phone.
“This will kill her,” he said.
“Kill her?” I said. “She ought to be thrilled! How many of her friends’ daughters are interviewed for anything?”
“Priscilla Meyerhoff is a White House Fellow,” my father said sadly.
“Gee, I’m really sorry,” I said. “Okay, tell Ma I’m wallowing in sin.”
“She’ll be thrilled to hear it,” said my father bitterly.
It was true my friends were forging ahead in life: getting married, having babies, being promoted, becoming White House Fellows or junior partners in their law firms. Even Mary Abbott had gotten a fellowship at Columbia, and on one of my two-week breaks I flew to New York and moved my things into a tiny room in her new apartment.
My actual home was our giant tour bus. I got into it in order to go somewhere in order to get out and into a motel room where I would put on a dress the size of a corset and get up on a stage to back up Ruby, and then, after losing four pounds in sweat, I would get back into the bus and go somewhere else.
After the Boston show I started noticing a person who sat in the second row wearing a tie and jacket—most uncool. He turned up in Providence, New London, Hartford, then Waterbury. It was hard to tell how old he was. He also had short hair.
He appeared at both the Apollo and Filmore shows, and it occurred to me that he might be some sex nut fixated on Ruby, who was one of the hotter acts around I was glad my parents would never come to see me perform and therefore spare themselves the sight of Ruby wrapping herself around the microphone in numbers such as “Love Me All Night Long.” She liked to break into a throaty monologue that began, “Darling, why don’t you slide your big, strong arms around every part of me?” Naturally, creeps were inspired by this sort of thing and sent her dirty letters in care of Crackerjack Records.
It was after the Filmore show that the person with the jacket and tie came backstage. He caught me off guard. I was alone. There was a big party for Ruby uptown, but if I had gone I would have been the only white person there. Instead I sat in my damp dance dress, taking off my false eyelashes. When I looked up, there he was. It occurred to me that he might be dangerous.
“What are you?” I said into the mirror. “Some kind of Boy Scout from Mars?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Oh, yeah? Are you the guy from Bop Magazine?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I’m very interested in you as the white Shakette, and also interested in the Shakelys. I’ve been following them for years. Would you like to go out?”
“Are you kidding?” I said.
“No.”
“Well, out where?” I said.
“Well, how about out to dinner?”
Up close this person seemed sort of cute, about my age or maybe older. He had blue eyes and curly brown hair, and nice white teeth. I hadn’t been out with anyone for longer than I could remember.
“I guess I ought to change my clothes,” I said. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Johnny Miller,” he said. “I’m a lawyer.”
“No kidding!” I said, trying to keep all this straight. “But I thought you said you were from Bop Magazine.”
“No, you said you thought I was from Bop Magazine. I’m not a journalist. I lied to get backstage. I just wanted to meet you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m Geraldine Coleshares.”
“I’m well aware,” said Johnny Miller. “I know lots about you. I especially dig it when Ruby lets you have a little solo. You have a wonderful voice.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I just did a show. What’s your story, anyway?”
“I love rock and roll with all my heart,” he said solemnly. “I have every single record Ruby ever made, including the original pressings of ‘Sugar Doll Man’ and ‘Boy Oh Bad’ from when she was Ruby Martin and the Vonelles.”
I took this in. Only a hard-core fan would know about Ruby Martin and the Vonelles, whose two records never went anywhere in particular. Then an idea struck me.
“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You’re one of those music industry lawyers.” Around Ruby and Vernon, the term “music industry lawyer” was said as one might say “psychotic ax murderer who eats live babies.”
“I am not,” Johnny said. “I work for what you would call a prestige firm. I work very long hours and I feel entitled to a little entertainment once in a while. I’ve been watching you since you first started. What’s your story, anyway?”
“I’m a failed graduate student and a successful Shakette. That’s all there is.”
“Why don’t you get dressed,” Johnny said. “You look like you’re starving.”
8
It turned out I was starving for everything. Lately we had eaten at some pretty terrible places. Most nights we were so tired that we didn’t even have the energy to make our motel-room cabbage salad. Johnny took me to an expensive steak house and talked to me while I consumed a steak with pommes soufflées, buttered embryonic string beans and delicious bread. With this we had a bottle of red wine from California. The wine I was used to seeing was the mint-flavored kind that in many states can be bought in drugstores and is favored by young girls and skid row alcoholics.
I devoured everything with single-minded ravenousness. By the end of the meal, I wanted to devour Johnny, too. He was undeniably attractive and he knew more about rock and roll than most people.
He knew the B side of every record ever made, it seemed, including “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide,” the flip side of Jackie Lee’s immortal “The Duck,” and “Can’t Stay Away” by Don Covay and the Goodtimers, the flip side of “Mercy, Mercy,” a song that had caused some of my old friends to leave the room.
I looked into Johnny’s nice blue eyes and saw myself married to him. It was clear I was what he was looking for. I sighed inwardly and thought to myself that here, doubtless, was one of my “own people,” and that I ought to give up and surrender to my fate. But then what would happen to me? Being married to a lawyer and being a Shakette were mutually exclusive, as they say in college.
For dessert we had cherry tart. Johnny said, “Will you eventually go back to graduate school?”
“Never. I will always be a Shakette.”
“Oh, yeah, really?” said Johnny. “Even when you’re fifty?”
“I don’t like to think about the future,” I said. “I’m happy in my present.”
“Yes, but soon your present will be your past, and your unused present is your future.” I stared at him.
This was the way people usually talked when they were stoned. I felt my heart open slightly, as when you play a weak note on an accordion. “But,” he continued, “how about thinking about the next couple of hours? What would you like to do after dinner?”
Most of the time after a show there was no dinner. We flopped our exhausted selves into bed and lay like stones or zombies until the next morning. Curiously, with Johnny, I felt amazingly energetic, due, perhaps, to all that steak. I thought it was unwise to say to this person, whom I had just met, “I’d like to go to your house and take all our clothes off.” I said nothing.
“Where do you stay in New York?” Johnny said. He looked as if he were paying a good deal of attention to tallying up the bill.
“I share an apartment with my old college roommate,” I said. “Actually, last night was the first night I’ve spent in it in nearly a year.”
“Is she expecting you?” Johnny said.
“Well, she’s in Connecticut this weekend,” I said. “So she’s not expecting anything in that way.”
“I have a very nice apartment,” Johnny said. “Surprisingly enough for a straight guy who wears a suit, it’s in this neighborhood. Shall we go there and hang out?”
I suddenly felt drunk and giddy. I felt I was losing my balance. “Let’s go for a little walk,” I said. “I need some air.”
It was a wet spring night. The streets of Johnny’s neighborhood were glazed with mist. We walked past shops full of Ukrainian blouses and Russian jam, and shops that sold books about nutrition and peace. Girls with long, flowing hair ambled next to skinny boys who wore blue jeans and patchouli oil. The air was full of the smell of exhaust, of rain, of that salty smell of the river that reminds you that Manhattan is an island.
“I believe I have to kiss you,” Johnny said. He walked me over to a doorway, held me by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips.
I hadn’t kissed anyone in years. I was mesmerized. My knees felt like syrup.
“Let’s go to my house and take our clothes off,” Johnny said.
“Then you won’t have any respect for me,” I said.
“To hell with that,” Johnny said. “I’m going to marry you.”
9
He followed me to Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. He booked us into a nice hotel in each place, stayed the night with me and insisted on my having a proper breakfast with hot cereal and an egg. He wrote letters and sent flowers. Ivy and Grace suggested that I marry him at once.
“You lucky duck,” Ivy said. “Cute, good job.”
I hung my head in shame. How could I be so ungrateful? Why did I not see that I was a lucky duck? Ivy and Grace waited for the day when their savings accounts hit a magic number and they could quit the tour, marry their boyfriends and begin their lives. I dreaded the day when I would have to leave Ruby and end mine. What was wrong with me?
Then it was summer. Ruby and Vernon went home to New Orleans—they did not tour in the summer. I flopped down in the tiny bedroom of the apartment I shared with Mary Abbott and did nothing. I was so tired my bones hurt. I tried to think of something to do but the only thing I could come up with was to introduce Johnny to my parents. After all, it was a done thing. The trap had been set and I was in it. It was only a question of time.
When they saw Johnny, all was forgiven. It no longer mattered that I had almost killed my mother by almost giving to a journalist from a national magazine an interview about traveling with an all-black act. It no longer mattered that I had left graduate school to run around the United States of America with a bunch of colored people for two years. Of course, the final ignominy was that nothing I did made it better. It was simply Johnny who set things straight. My parents were delighted with him and, in the months to follow, did everything they could, short of tying me up with string and delivering me to a justice of the peace, to get me to marry him.
Everyone wanted me to get married, even Doo-Wah, whom I ran into at a dingy secondhand record store.
“You marry that guy,” Wah said. “He’s real smart. If I ever get into trouble, I’ll hire him as my attorney.”
“If you ever get in trouble, Wah, little fish will fall from the sky as rain.”
“You listen to your old friend,” Wah said. “Do it to it.”
But I did not want to be in love with Johnny. I figured that when you fall in love with a lawyer, you end up marrying him. And is not being a Shakette an unseemly profession for a lawyer’s wife? At the end of the summer Johnny proposed. I turned him down.
“Get realistic,” he said. “You can’t be a Shakette forever.”
“You love me because I’m a Shakette,” I said. “And I love me because I’m a Shakette.”
There was nothing he could say to this. While not entirely true, it was not entirely untrue. Furthermore, I had not yet had enough.
I went back on tour in the autumn and Johnny pestered me by letter and telephone. There was no doubt about it: being with him was so much nicer than being a Shakette. We had spent the whole summer in each other’s company and our weekends in bed. We ambled and strolled and ate dinner at ethnic restaurants. Late at night we listened to the sounds waft up from the street below: that evocative blend of arguing, Puerto Rican music, dogs, the occasional rooster. We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.
It was hard to give that up and go back on tour, but I was driven. Doo-Wah was sincerely disgusted to see me. He felt that I had been on the verge of a mature, adult decision. Also, he had bad news. Ivy and Grace were quitting and being replaced by two girls who were learning the routines—LaVonda and Denise. I burst into tears.
“Oh, poor you,” Grace said. “We thought you were going to quit. It’s the right time. If you have any sense, you’ll get out, too. Ruby’s going for a Vegas contract, girl, and you won’t have a job.”
LaVonda and Denise were highly polished. I was suddenly too short and too funky for Ruby’s act. I knew the end was near but I could not give up.
I loved being on stage. I especially loved it when Ruby did an oldies show. I loved to hang out backstage sharing a reefer or a soda and shooting the breeze with the other acts. I watched Muddy Waters sing “Can’t Be Satisfied.” I watched Fats Domino push a piano across the stage with his stomach. What was married life compared to this?
Besides, an audience was more potent than any drug. It was pure thrill: the chance to make a large number of people feel something. What would I be without it?
Then Ruby cut her monster album Joyjuice. Instead of our one tour bus there were two, and a van for costumes. One bus was for the band and backups, and one bus for Ruby, Vernon, their astrologer, hairdresser and nutritionist. A designer from Hollywood was hired to do the costumes and Ruby was suddenly on the cover of every major magazine.
It was okay to have a white Shakette when you were playing Huntsville, Alabama, but not when you did Vegas, Lake Tahoe, the Palestra. The end had come. I would have to get my thing together, as one of Ruby’s songs advised. I quit before I got fired.
I did not even tell Johnny. I crept home with my suitcase in my hand and lay down on the bed in the little bedroom at Mary Abbott’s. I had a key to the apartment, a respectable amount of savings, a substantial past, and no future. The two people I had spent most of my time with—Ivy and Grace—had disappeared. Probably they had gotten married. The waters of their own lives had closed above their heads. For a week I was too depressed to do a thing. Finally, Mary called Johnny and one evening he burst into the apartment.
“You stupid little jerk!” he said. “I was worried sick about you.”
“Oh, shove off,” I said, and burst into tears. “I have nothing.”
“You have me,” he said.
I gave him a look. How wonderful to have that kind of confidence!
“Come on,
” he said. “Let’s get married. I’ll push a piano across the room with my stomach. We’ll have fun.”
I said I did not want to have fun. Johnny tried to wear me down. I said I needed a job. Johnny suggested I go to law school.
“You could be a lawyer in the music business.”
I looked at him sadly. It was clear he didn’t get it, but then he had never met a lawyer in the music business, of whom Vernon often said, “There is the scum of the earth, and what lives under the scum of the earth, and under this we have music lawyers.”
I said I wanted a job that made me feel like a Shakette: marginal, hard-edged, and as if I hadn’t given in. Obviously this was going to take quite a long time to find, as there certainly didn’t seem to be much of that particular kind around.
10
Now that I was no longer a Shakette, my parents reappeared in my life as if nothing had happened. My two and a half years on the tour were like a tidily annulled marriage to some unsuitable lout. My mother’s contempt for my past gave off a whiff, like expensive perfume, if the subject even threatened to come up.
She wondered, since I did not have a job and was not going back to graduate school, if I was sick, and she felt I ought to go see her doctor. She had changed her tack, by and large. She treaded around such issues as my awful wardrobe, my lack of ambition, my strange taste in occupations. She knew that within her grasp was the Big Picture: her daughter, married to John Franklin Miller.
My mother adored Johnny and set about to do a kind of genealogical number on him. She was passionately interested in people’s forebears.
Johnny’s paternal grandfather had been a federal court judge in Savannah, Georgia. Both his parents had been reared in the South, in the gentle, downplayed traditions, if they can so be called, of Reform Judaism. Johnny’s father had come north to law school, where he met Johnny’s mother, who had gone to Smith. They brought Johnny up in Philadelphia, amidst numerous relatives. When Johnny was six, they began to summer in Connecticut and, in a sweet rural town called Wickham, they built a house. What a lovely family!
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 3
