The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  When I saw alcoholics who looked like me and had jobs like me, it was an eye-opener! So I introduced myself to the group and said, “I’m not sure if I’m an alcoholic,” and everybody laughed. An old lady sitting in the row in front of me said, “Then why are you here?” And I said, “Because I just don’t want to drink tonight.” I sat down and somebody else talked. Then about a half-hour later I stood up again and said, “My name is Glenn, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  My recovery has been a miraculous, edge-of-your-seat ride. It’s funny—I did some self-examination before I got sober. I’m not the brightest guy in the world but I’m not a dummy, so I was thinking, “What do I need to do to be able to stop drinking?” So I started working the program. Doing the Steps, making an inventory of all my bad actions. For instance, I knew I had to go and apologize to that guy I had fired for the pen. All the things that had been piling up. So regarding the Steps I thought to myself, “This stuff is so self-evident.” What I didn’t see at first was service. I didn’t understand how important service is.

  A friend of mine who’s an alcoholic called me one day and told me, “When you least expect it, expect it. One day you will be presented with a very logical reason why you should have a drink just this once.” The best piece of advice I ever got. He said, “Watch for it. Know it’s coming.”

  It has to come—several times. My first two years of sobriety were extraordinarily tough. I was doing my inventory and going through all the things I had done, and I became tired—tired of all the self-examination, dredging up all the horrible things. You know, when you are drinking for a reason, it’s scary. To say to yourself “I’m going to look at everything” is scary. At this period of my life, even though I had a profound belief in God, I became an atheist. I realized that I believed in God because somebody told me to believe in God, ever since I was a child.

  Now I question everything. I took everything off the board and only put it back on the board if I found the reason. It was the same with politics as with religion. I’d only been following the patterns others set for me. So I cleaned the slate and it was terrifying, but the result was only taking in what I felt was proved or true.

  I had a dream that I remember vividly. In the middle of the night, I woke up and sat straight up in my bed. I’m also a painter, so I went straight for my paints and canvas. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was painting. I pushed the paintbrush into the canvas as hard as I could. I kept dabbing it into the black, as if I couldn’t get the black to be black enough. Here’s the dream: I stood on a road either side of which were cornstalks, bent over and dead. Everything was dead. The cornstalks were lying flat, smelly and dirty. There was one long straight road where I stood looking at the horizon, and there was the darkest, blackest, deadliest cloud right at the end of the road. The whole sky was stormy, and everything below it lay dead. Then a man came up next to me and he had a gray, dingy, dirty, nicotine-stained beard. He wore tattered brown and yellow clothes. The guy came over and stood beside me. And he said, “Walk through it.” And I said, “What? Are you nuts? Look at that thing!” And he said, “Walk through it. There’s nothing to it. Go on, walk through it.”

  And I stood and planted my feet and said, “I am not going through that. That would kill me. I don’t know where I’m going, but not there.” And he said, “Trust me.” And he grabbed my hand, and somehow or other I found myself flying through the cloud, and I came out the other side. And there was the road again, but everything was the most vivid Technicolor. Blues and greens, and everything was beautiful. And I looked at him and his clothes were all white. His hair and beard were pure white, too. And he said, “You have nothing to fear. Walk through the cloud.”

  I got up and tried to paint that scene because I didn’t want ever to forget it. I can still see every detail from the dream. It was that dream that prompted me to never stop aspiring to the good. It’s so profoundly true that there is nothing but warmth in the sunshine and there is nothing to that cloud. There is no one that is going to point their finger and say, “You, you bad person, you did these awful things.” And if there are these people that disparage you, it doesn’t matter anyway. If that’s the way they feel, well, they’re nothing to you and they’re not going to bring you down. In my position, many reject me as a person—they don’t just disagree. But it doesn’t have import, because I’m only made by me. Praise or blame doesn’t affect me because I’m more built by the inner spirit. The watch or the car or what somebody said about me didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t carrying my ego with me anymore, knowing it led to emptiness.

  If you just drop your fear of something that you think you can’t face, then it isn’t real anymore. It may look real but it’s not. You’ll come through the fear, and it’s beautiful. Just like that guy’s hair and beard changed, every bit of you can change. If you shed self-loathing and hatred, everything else in your life changes.

  After I quit drinking, I remember I was on the radio one day and my producer said to me, “Glenn, you’ve got to cut the people off sooner. Dump the phone calls!” What became apparent to me when he said that was that I was taking these calls because I was actually interested in listening to them, in place of staying frozen in my world of ego. Now I was actually interested in their lives; it was fascinating.

  Soon after, I left radio and decided to go back to school to study theology, science, and philosophy. My head was about to explode with new questions and anticipation. My father said to me, “What are you going to do with a theology degree?” and I said, “I’m not sure.” And he said, “Maybe you ought to figure that out before you throw away a career you have been working on since you were thirteen. You are gifted. Don’t just throw that away. Find a way to do something that has meaning for you.”

  At that time I was doing a Top 40 morning show, you know, stupid phony phone calls, that kind of stuff, and it was meaningless to me. But then, once you sober up, everything can seem to be meaningless alongside your new consciousness.

  So I was about to throw my career away. This was three years after I got sober, and somebody asked me a question on the air. This was one of the biggest markers in my sobriety. Somebody called and said, “Oh, Mister Perfect, like you’ve never gotten high before.” Everybody in the room expected me to blast the guy but instead I said, “Let me tell you a story …” And I shared with him the darkest part of my life, and when I finished and turned off the microphones, I turned to my producer and said, “Mark this day down on your calendar. Today I ended my career.”… Just the opposite happened! This was in the days before e-mail. Subsequent to that show I got more postal mail than I ever had received. People would stop me in the streets and say, “I thought it was just me!” And what I realized was that we are all protecting something inside of us that we are ashamed of, and we think it’s going to kill us.

  We’re all alike in hiding something. It goes like this: “If they knew they’d hate me and realize I’m inferior.” However, since everyone is hiding or embarrassed about something, or has made a huge mistake, that makes us not imperfect but human. If you are comfortable saying “I regret and learned from my mistake,” you have a deeper and richer experience with like-minded people on the journey toward being better. You unite with those people and enrich the experience of your fellow journeymen.

  In my field it’s clear: if you protect something you hide out of fear, someone will use that card against you. If you have a proper respect for honesty and wisdom, your fear will go away. You can say, “I’ve already addressed that years ago!” Your past has no negative power unless you give it power.

  If we just don’t care that other people are judging us, we can be who we are. If we just don’t care and are willing to help one another, we throw each other lifelines … You become free. No one and no thing can destroy you—because you already played that card.

  A trumpet like a sharp plow

  tills the night: how long

  till sunlight breaks the ground?

  —
Bei Dao

  Hugh Masekela

  (world music pioneer)

  * * *

  HUGH MASEKELA ENTERED my world in the mid-1960s. I was a fledgling trainee at a big-time Hollywood public relations firm, and this fast-rising star musician was sent to my office to discuss how we were going to work together. Hugh and his producer, friend, and record company partner Stew Levine had just started Chisa Records and had been directed to my company for help getting established in La-La Land.

  I immediately noticed that Masekela smile, which seemed to dwarf the rest of his face. And the voice … Where the hell did that smooth, African-accented bass come from? And when I heard his words “Do you want to get high?” I knew that a new “best friend” had arrived.

  Hughie, Stewie, and Jewie, as I came to be designated, would become fast friends over the next several years. We were three young guys trying to make names for ourselves, chasing girls, having too much fun, and mostly getting high as often as we could. We spent many nights at recording studios where Hugh and his assortment of spaced-out musicians, under the less-than-coherent direction of producer Levine, made music that ignited sparks in my head and set my feet to dancing. And the girls … lordy, lordy, did the ladies love Masekela. Just being in the entourage was assurance that I’d meet more beauties then I could have ever dreamed of traveling on my own.

  Here’s a favorite memory: In the early 1970s, Hugh returned from Ghana with an African band he found there called Hedzoleh Sounds. Stewart and I had made arrangements to manage the band and take them on a tour of the United States. In the dead of winter, Hugh and the group took a flight from Accra, Ghana, directly to Washington, D.C., to begin the tour. Stewart and I decided to meet them at the airport, but first we stopped at an Army-Navy store and procured about a dozen military overcoats and a like number of GI boots. Hedzoleh had never been out of Africa before and surely wouldn’t possess the kind of clothing necessary to survive an arctic winter here on the East Coast. At the airport, Stewart suggested that we also greet them with the most American of delicacies. So there we stood at the arrival gate passing out overcoats, combat boots, and hot dogs to our new charges, who arrived wearing the skimpiest of native attire and sandals. “Welcome to America, boys!” we shouted.

  After I got sober in the early 1980s and moved to Connecticut, I lost contact with Hugh. I occasionally heard of his accomplishments and appearances but didn’t meet him again until 2001. That summer, I saw he was appearing at an outdoor jazz festival in New Haven. I decided this would be a good opportunity for my son David, who was then around thirteen, to see this extraordinary musician and perhaps get a chance to meet him. After the fine concert, we made our way backstage by pushing past some not-so-secure security people and greeted my long-lost friend with warm hugs and affection.

  I’ve come to understand that you can judge people pretty well by the way they speak about you to your children, and I watched as Hugh told David how lucky he was to have me as his father, and how much Hugh loved and respected me. David listened intently to the praise, clearly impressed by what this musical icon had to say about his dad.

  When I found out that Hugh was clean and sober, I knew that his story belonged in this book. His generosity and openness are evident on these pages.

  I come from probably one of the most addicted societies in the world, South Africa. Africans have been battered, much like the Native Americans were.

  Africans who didn’t want to work for white people started whatever enterprises they could, which they were allowed to. Africans weren’t allowed to enterprise in many things except those that kept the native population functioning. Grocery stores, small trading, and things like that.

  In my youth, children stayed with their grandparents until they were old enough to function on their own. Now they call them latchkey kids. The parents went to the big city to work. My grandmother ran a speakeasy. It’s called a shabeen. Africans were not allowed to drink. It was illegal. So prohibition became a business. It became part of the culture.

  Drinking was also a sign of defiance, especially if you owned a shabeen. If a guy was drunk they would say, “That guy can really drink.” He was idolized. They’d say, “That motherfucker can really drink. You won’t be able to drink with that guy.” People respected a person for that.

  You never knew what was going on around the shabeens. Outside of them people most likely were fucking, you know. So you would always see the effects of liquor. You’d see the drunks arguing and fighting a lot. Some of them were very funny. So, for some people, drinking became the world. Just like in the Ozark Mountains, the Appalachians, like for the poor black folks that live there, the sharecroppers—drinking becomes a way of life.

  We were facing major oppression and racial discrimination. We were suffering like people did in the American South. We were lucky, though, because in South Africa there was no lynching. Of course black people were killed, run over by buses, buried alive by cave-ins at mines, and so forth. Because they were mostly laborers, some died from violence and booze-related diseases. There were lots of widows, like in Zorba the Greek: very sad women.

  The friends of my parents would come over at Christmas and Easter. There would be a lot of food and drinking, and the men would get into fights. My mother’s family all died from booze. All except for my grandmother and my mother. So I really detested booze. I couldn’t even stand the smell of it. My aunts would try to kiss me, and I hated their smell. My sister Barbara and I used to work in the shabeen. We would serve people on the weekends. We’d go together to buy the malt and yeast to make beer.

  So we grew up in that culture. Our family made sorghum beer that was concocted up to other levels. Drinking it would make your face all scrunched up. From drinking too much liquor some of the people had feet in so much pain that they couldn’t walk. A glass of one of the other kinds of drink from our still, kumbamba, could kill you. And the smell …

  When I was in high school, I sang soprano solo. This was in the boys’ choir at boarding school. My friends and I were beginning to look at girls around this time. My friends would say, “Man, you’re singing soprano! That’s a setback for us. You’re singing the girls’ part. You should be singing solo, man. You got a good voice. The teacher likes it. The girls like it. How are you going to get chicks if you are singing like a girl? You can’t hang with us if you are singing soprano.”

  “Well, what should I do?

  “Smoke! Smoke some cigarettes. And then you must drink. Fuck up your voice.”

  So after six months of smoking and drinking my voice breaks. But the chicks didn’t give a shit! They’d say, “Why are you singing bass? You used to sound so nice.”

  My choral teacher was disappointed. “What happened? Can you undo it?”

  So then we moved on to other things. Some guys were smoking pot, but I wasn’t interested in pot.

  During those days there were lots of murders in South Africa. Most people didn’t even have electric lights and there were gangs everywhere. You’d wake up some mornings and there would be a body at your front door. Someone was killed on your porch. Every weekend there would be people who were dead. They were mugged at night. It was a way of life …

  Enough of that, I have a funny story … One of my aunts, her face had turned to charcoal because of the booze, from bad booze. But she really loved me. But she didn’t have an ass. When you were growing up, the women would put you on their backs. It was sort of like a jump seat. Most of my aunts, and my mother, they all had these beautiful behinds, but this aunt … She loved me so much. She would come in drunk to my grandmother’s and shout, “Where is he?” She’d be all fucked up and I’d be trying to hide. My grandmother and my aunts would say, “She loves you so much, and she wants to put you on her back.”

  Now, when a woman has a nice ass, you have a comfortable place to sit. Sometimes you don’t even need the blanket. But with this woman, she’d put me on her back and tie me to her and I’d be crying, “I don’t want to.” But
she’d take me to her drinking place and I’d be on her back. And by the time she’d bring me home, the blanket would be around my neck and I’d be choking to death. She’d be singing, and I’d be hanging on crying.

  Years later my drug counselor asked me one day, “Of all the traumatic things that have happened to you, what do you think fucked you up the most?” And I told him this story and he said, “Yes, that sounds like major trauma, and you were so young.” He said, “How old were you?” And I said, “I was two or three years old.” He told me, “What really hurt you was that when you were hiding everyone was looking for you. That they pulled you from under the bed and handed you over to this woman every weekend really messed you up.”

  So anyway, my school was eventually closed. Apartheid closed one of the greatest British schools in South Africa. Bishop Trevor Huddleston, the head of the school, actually bought me my first trumpet. He was the Queen of England’s first cousin. That’s how British the school was. But they decided to discontinue education for Africans. You know, apartheid started in 1948 when I was nine. We grew up knowing we would eventually end it, but we didn’t know when. Our generation didn’t think it would be during our lifetime. We grew up with great police violence. There was a law that required us to carry IDs. Violations were called “failure to produce.” So that if they caught you outdoors, and your passbook was in your room across the street, they wouldn’t give you a chance to go and get it. There were also massacres of people by the police. We grew up in a very bitter atmosphere.

  In those days all schools were missionary schools. I was in my last year at St. Peter’s, which was like the Eaton School of South Africa. One hell of a school. A great many activists went to school there. At this time, though, I was getting into music. We all had gramophones. We all sang. My parents saw that I was really fascinated by music. They would send me to the store to get milk, and if I passed a club that was playing a record, I would stop in. I would ask them to play it again. By then I would have forgotten what my parents sent me to the store for, so I’d go home and get my ass kicked!