The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  I wanted to give people permission to tell their own truth and to live in it, and to let those deep wounds in us be healed and shred and cleansed out instead of just sealed over with more scar tissue.

  The last five books I’ve written, the work of a sober writer, are just huge gifts of my sobriety. I had a gift, a certain gift, not a huge gift, but a good gift, and it was just being poisoned by alcohol and self-loathing and narcissism. I still have all those things, except I don’t have the alcohol, so I can use the narcissism and all the mistakes I make and self-doubt. I either use it as creativity or to help other people stay sober. It’s like alchemy. It goes from dross to gold.

  Call it iron discipline. But for months

  I never took my first drink

  before eleven P.M. Not so bad,

  considering. This was in the beginning

  phase of things. I knew a man

  whose drink of choice was Listerine.

  He was coming down off Scotch.

  He bought Listerine by the case,

  and drank it by the case. The back seat

  of his car was piled high with dead soldiers.

  Those empty bottles of Listerine

  gleaming in his scalding back seat!

  The sight of it sent me home soul-searching.

  I did that once or twice. Everybody does.

  Go way down inside and look around.

  I spent hours there, but

  didn’t meet anyone, or see anything

  of interest. I came back to the here and now,

  and put on my slippers. Fixed

  myself a nice glass of NyQuil.

  Dragged a chair over to the window.

  Where I watched a pale moon struggle to rise

  over Cupertino, California.

  I waited through hours of darkness with NyQuil.

  And then, sweet Jesus! The first sliver

  of light.

  —Raymond Carver, “NyQuil”

  Give me my whisky, when I be frisky

  Give me my rye, when I be dry

  Give me my reefer, when I be sickly

  Give me my heaven, my heroin, before I die

  —“Junko Partner—Traditional”

  Mac (Dr. John) Rebennack

  (musician)

  * * *

  DR. JOHN, THE “NIGHT TRIPPER,” sashayed into my life at an after-hours party in Los Angeles sometime in the late sixties. Musical wizardry is what we were told to expect, and the good doctor didn’t disappoint.

  The club was packed with music-industry insiders, all filled with great expectations, when all of a sudden bells, whistles, and sundry other rhythm noisemakers joyously announced the band’s arrival. Its magical leader was decked out in a floor-length black velvet robe adorned with small bones and other odd trinkets. On his head he sported an enormous multicolored feather headdress. His face was eerily sprinkled with patches of sparkling glitter. Light up a joint and let this party begin!

  Fronting a group of New Orleans exiles, Dr. John performed a rich gumbo of blues, cajun, funk, and dance hall, seasoned with Caribbean rhythms; music based on voodoo myths of the Crescent City. Gris-gris they called it. Weird, spooky songs with psycho-voodoo chanting that created images of imaginary places. Dr. John, strutting and in command, appeared like some kind of hip, exotic medicine man.

  They call me Dr. John

  I’m known as the Night Tripper

  Got a satchel of gris-gris in my hand,

  Got many clients that come from miles around

  Runnin’ down my prescriptions

  I got medicines, cure all y’alls ills,

  I got remedies of every description

  —“Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya”

  Dr. John’s arrival in the psychedelic sixties was right on time. Unfortunately, heroin addiction was his closest companion and refused to leave the party.

  A decade or so later, I met up with Dr. John (the “Night Tripper” name had been abandoned some time earlier) at a recording studio in New York. I had recently been hired to handle his public relations, so I thought I’d drop by and see how he was doing. One thing led to another, and when the conversation turned to drugs, as it always did in those days, I informed Mac that I was newly clean and sober. He mentioned that he too was trying to clean up, and I told him that he could call me if he ever wanted some help or just to talk about it.

  Over the next couple of years, we spoke a few times about sobriety, and I heard rumors about his attempts at getting clean. It was very good news to one day learn that he had finally had enough.

  According to Joel Dorn, my friend, “Mac is the most complete musician I know, a student and teacher of New Orleans tradition. He’s one of a kind. Our generation’s Louis Armstrong.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to imagine that his musical gift almost died from drug addiction.

  I interviewed Mac at his remote log cabin home, located up a long and winding dirt road overlooking a beautifully placid lake near Woodstock, New York. It reminded me faintly of bayou country. An old hound dog greeted my knock at the door with half-interested howling, but no one answered. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes, Mac stumbled to the door, mumbling apologies for having overslept. It was just past two in the afternoon!

  He finally got his bearings, fixed a pot of coffee, and we went outside. Surveying the panoramic view of the lush countryside, we pulled up a couple of rocking chairs on his front porch and began the interview.

  I’ve never heard anyone speak as Mac does. He has a unique vocabulary and speech pattern, and similar to Mark Twain, is known for his creative use of language … “Mississloppy River.” He says things like “edjamacation.” You always have to be aware of his underlying humor. “Tigerette syndrome,” for instance, is a play on Tourette’s syndrome, and “bisexual polar bear” is Mac’s way of saying bipolar. I once reminded him of something he told me on the telephone, to which he responded, “I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t awake the last time we spoke.”

  During the course of the interview, I tried to stay out of his way as much as possible, as he had such a great rhythm going. Regarding his references to treatment, Mac is very vague about time. He doesn’t delineate chronology. For some reason, I enjoy this interview more with each reading, as I pick up new insight into his wondrous psyche. I hope you will find it as compelling.

  Hey Gary, it’s good to see you. I’m sorry I don’t see you better, but that’s another story. Shot eyeballs, you know what I mean?

  So, you want my story, huh? Well, let’s see what we got here. My father, he taught me good stuff and he hated people who was activated [drug users]. When he was around people, sometimes he drank, but he never got drunk. He got straight. He was never, in any kind of way, drunk. That was not true of most of the people around him though.

  When I was a kid, my dad owned a little record shop. He sold what they used to call “race records.” Gospel records, jazz records, rhythm and blues records. The shop was right by Dillard University, which is a black university in New Orleans. My dad had all these 78 records that were stocked into small jukeboxes and we delivered to hotels and stuff. Even as a little kid, he would let me play them. As long as I didn’t break one. The A-side was always scratched, so I would listen to all the B-sides. My daddy had a whole collection of dirty records that were stashed in a liquor cabinet. I would get into them and play ’em for all my friends. He would sell them records in brown bags in his record shop. They weren’t really the dirty songs. They were the risqué songs.

  Anyway, I remember as a little kid, my Aunt Andre taught me how to play boogie-woogie on a piano. My Uncle Joe showed me a little stuff too, and for years I was learnin’, but my hands was too little to play the left-hand part. Finally they was big enough, and I started learnin’ stuff on my own. My aunt said I had a gift. I never really studied piano. I studied guitar, because early on, I decided that there was so many killer piano players around. Everybody in my neighborhood played.

  My daddy also fixe
d PA systems, and I’d go with him and listen and everyone I heard was killer. And so I wanted to be a piano player. When I was young, I heard Pete Johnson playin’ some stuff with Big Joe Turner, and I wanted to be Pete Johnson. I didn’t care nothing about the singer. Just wanted to play piano, but I thought I’d never get a job, so I studied guitar. I studied with three guys. Al Guma and two guys, Papoose and Ron Montrell, who both played in Fats Domino’s band. It’s funny. My pa knew everybody. Just from his little record store and from fixin’ PAs and amplifiers and everything electronical. He knew stuff.

  My daddy also knew a lot of prominent New Orleans musicians. He knew Al Hirt. He used to fix Louis Prima’s TV set. Everybody knew my daddy. He knew the prizefighters. We used to get free tickets to the prizefights ’cause my daddy fixed the PA system at the Coliseum. The wrestling matches was there too. We’d get a lot of fringe benefits.

  So after I studied guitar a little while, somebody told my daddy, “This kid can’t read music. He just memorizes stuff. All he really wants to do is play the blues.” I’d go home and I’d learn Lightning Hopkins or something. So that’s when my dad got me to Papoose, and Papoose told me, “You’ll never get a job playing the outta-meter, foot-beater crap. You got to learn to play something like T-Bone Walker.” I loved T-Bone Walker, but I couldn’t figure out how to do any of that shit, from what I was studying with my guitar lessons. So Papoose started me on that, ’cause he was my teacher and he was also a damn good studio musician.

  At this time, I was already smoking a little weed, popping some goofballs. I don’t remember exactly when I started. There was always a lot of weed floating around. There was guys who actually shot dope in our basement when I was a kid. It was easy to get in ’cause it wasn’t locked. Guys from the neighborhood would go down there and I’d see them and think, “These guys is stupid to do that shit.” But somewhere down the line I asked somebody if I could try it.

  The first time I did it I got beat. Somebody gave me a water shot, and I didn’t get nothing out of it. I’m sure the guy did it to keep me from doing dope, but I was on a mission to get some real shit. I remember going into the high school, the first time I really got loaded, and I walked up these stairs and puked all over this trophy case, and I thought, “This is what being high is all about.” I felt so good. And that was the high I chased all of my life.

  Sometime later, I met this girl, who was married to my bass player at the time, and I really dug her. Both of us was chipping. We wasn’t really strung out yet, but we progressed from being chippy dope users to getting a real habit.

  My daddy found my works one time. I told him it must belong to somebody else. I was, by this time, becoming a lying dope fiend. My girl and I was trying to support our dope habit. Sometime before my pa passed away, he started busting me. He was finding works all over the place. My poor mama had like eighty cajillion heart attacks behind the fact that I was using dope. Me and this tenor sax player—he’s doing three hundred years at Angola right now for narcotics—we was selling peyote buttons. They was legal, but nobody knew that, and so we was getting grand-theft money selling this crap. My mama didn’t know what the hell we was doing, but then the narcotics squad came to our house looking for somebody. It was me, the bass player, and the tenor player. We panicked and was flushing these peyote buttons down the turlet, clogging the damn thing up. My mom completely freaked out, the poor thing.

  So anyway, the tenor player escaped to Baton Rouge. The tenor player got a gig in a pharmacy and got popped working there, ’cause they had an APB [all points bulletin] out on his ass. The bass player went to another state to get away from the police.

  Dope was a real inconvenience to my music. The police was always picking us up on seventy-two-hour investigations. It was all we ever talked about. When we were high, we said we got to get out of this fucking game. This shit sucks. It just became a big trap. Go make the gigs, the recording sessions. I was doing good with my music on one side, supporting a don’t -quit-dope habit on the other side.

  I was even trying to run a whorehouse on the side. Me and my first wife. A little bitty operation. It wasn’t shit. Chump change. A friend of mine gave me a book of tricks, and we found some girls and put ’em to work. It was just another way to support our habit. I also started a little abortion business. Back then, in the fifties, abortion was illegal. I knew a guy who was in a concentration camp in Poland. He knew how to do something beside coat-hanger abortions. I had friends in the church down in New Orleans that took in girls that was pregnant and tried to save them. It was a bad time though, because of the abortion laws. Everything was a bust. It was a losing battle. We’d get picked up on a seventy-two-hour investigation. We’d have a good lawyer, who’d get us bonded, but we’d get picked up by the police as we was walking out and they’d put us right back in. We’d have to go through the same shit all over again, and get really dope sick. It’s amazing. We’d go through all that, but we’d forget how much shit we just went through and that we were that close to being past it all [dope sick], and the first thing I’d do was get some codeine cough syrup till we could cop. Then we’d get loaded and it was the same ol’ shit. “Man, we got to get outta this game.” Over and over and over.

  Guys told me this, old-timers said, “You fuck with dope and all you’re going to do is just chase your sick off.” And that’s what I did. Just trying to feel like normal, whatever the fuck that is.

  Dope made me feel like there was this big wall. I used to play in these bucket-of-blood clubs, where you didn’t feel exactly safe. I’d be playing guitar in places where I’d always try to stand by a slot machine. All these clubs had slot machines, even on the bandstand, and I’d always try to play next to one, so that when they started popping caps in the joint, I could duck behind one. I knew a bullet ain’t going to go through all them slugs and money in those machines. I was always high in these clubs, but I had to pay attention. All of a sudden you’d hear pop, pop, pop. These were mostly clubs on the west bank of New Orleans, Algiers, Jefferson Parish, all the way down through south Louisiana. They had a few on the east bank. When you first crossed the Mississloppy River, you were still in New Orleans in Algiers. These were dangerous clubs I’m talking about, just plain dangerous. The club owners made sure the bands were safe, but there were some of them where the club owner was crazy as the customers. There was a guy out at the Weego Inn on the hill in West Weego, and this fucking guy, he’d shoot up his own damn club. Empty it out, then blame us for the joint having no business. The guy was dangerous.

  At a lot of those gigs, I shot dope and took goofballs on top of it. Red Devils, any kind of sleeping pills. I got into fights under the influence of sleeping pills. That’s what made me stop taking them. I’d get into fights and get my ass kicked. I even hit some pedestrians with my car, and I started thinking, “What if I hit a little kid?” So I quit taking those fucking things.

  During this time, no matter what I did, I would still shoot dope. I had to go to various institutions with the hope of cleaning up, but when I got out, I always did the same thing. I’d get a bottle of codeine cough syrup to get balanced. Codeine to me wasn’t like heroin or any of the opiates that I really liked. I also didn’t know that one of anything is too many. I didn’t understand that it was the first one that gets you started. I thought I was just doing this to take the edge off. It went on and on, till at some point in the game I felt like I’m never going to get out.

  When I first heard that there were ways out, some old-timer told me that if you’re going to be a bullshit artist, you have to believe your own bullshit. And when I first started trying to regroup my life, I couldn’t tell you where the bullshit ended and the truth began. It was all fucked up in my head. And that was a problem.

  The first time I was getting detoxified from methadone. I’d been on that crap a long time. I hated methadone. It was a fucking nightmare. Somewhere in the eighties I went into my first rehab, or I should say, rehabs. All of them around the same time. I got de
toxified offa methadone and went back to shooting dope, which was better than drinking methadone. My mother made novenas all the time, my sister constantly worried, and my daughter would panic every time I went to the bathroom.

  After that, I started getting some heat on me ’cause I was dealing a little in New York. I didn’t want to take a fall, and I talked to this friend of mine. The motherfucker had regrouped his life [gotten clean] in New Orleans and he said to me, “I’ll tell you, Mac, you’re too old for the game. Your crippled old ass ain’t goin’ to outrun one of these young kids with a Mac 10 or an Uzi or a sawed-off shotgun. You’re too old for the game.” So I went to another rehab, and this time, some counselor said to me, “You can’t smoke here.” And I said, “What are you telling me? I’m outside! I’m a nicotine fanatical! You telling me I can’t smoke? Outside?” So I ended up flipping out a few times there. And the next thing I know, I’m in a cardiac ward, laying in a bed next to a guy on a morphine drip. A nurse walked in. I hadn’t held nothing in my stomach. The only thing I could hold down was Gatorade, and I hate Gatorade. So this nurse says, “Here, try some of these tangerines.” After she talked to me, they shipped me back to rehab and I met her old man. He was a sweet guy. He’d take me outside in the desert there and prop me up against a cactus or some shit, and then he’d make these nice sand paintings. Then he’d start playing this little homemade flute, and while he played, the wind came up and blew the painting away. I said, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” One day, I watched him kill a snake with this nice stick. I looked at him and said, “I’m gonna beat you for that stick.” He said, “You don’t have to commit no felony for this stick, I’m gonna give you the motherfucker.” I still got it.