A guy picked me up in a VW. Something was wrong—it was making a terrible racket. He got off at the wrong exit. We were going to some remote place out in the country. As soon as he stopped, I flung the door open, got out, legged it and waved down another car. I was shaking. Welcome back, stupid.
It seemed like years since I’d seen the likes of the Brick Cottage, a windowless bar with a stage surrounded by Deer Hunter–type pill heads drinking beer. I didn’t care about anything except seeing a band play to steady my jangled nerves, getting a couple of shots of tequila and finding someone with a joint. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.
The band was a sturdy R&B outfit, old school; not a Keith Richards lookalike in sight. And they could play. Duane looked exactly the same, in fact quite exotic, after the French rockers I’d been hanging out with. From one time warp to another.
Oh, how I loved guys in bands. When a band played, time stood still. In between sets Duane introduced me to a couple of his friends who lived in a typical Cleveland apartment building (a dump) just across from the gig. They took me back and let me sleep in the hallway. No problem for me at all; I was fine with the floor. I was like a stray dog let in from the cold. I just wanted to be quiet and not get thrown out. I’d do anything.
Micky “Meadows” and Dot, Duane’s friends, didn’t mind me being there because I took up no space and they both went out to work during the day. They said I could stay. I loved it when life opened its arms like that and said, “Yes.”
I painted the hallway to look like an English pub—glossy red walls with gold trim on the coving sort of thing—and divided the ceiling with a yin-yang symbol. I got a sleeping bag and a candle and some good news: Duane’s band, the Mr. Stress Blues Band, was having problems. Their singer, Bill Miller, was in the hospital with throat problems, and they needed a singer to fill in while he was gone. Well, bad news for Miller—but good news for me. I guess I was a glass-half-full person after all.
Duane lent me a bunch of records to study and I was back in action. I would wait until Meadows and Dot, my benefactors, saviors and now best friends, had gone to work, then shut myself in a closet and try to belt out “Precious, Precious,” the Jackie Moore classic, and “Sweet Feeling” by the silver-throated Candi Staton.
The conundrum: I knew I wanted to be in a band and sing, but I didn’t actually know what I sounded like. I wasn’t even sure if I could sing or not. It was a case of “Where there’s a will, please, God, let there be a way.” So I sang in the closet and hoped for the best.
I went to a rehearsal and tried my voice on a few songs, including those I’d practiced behind closed doors and “Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers and “Slippery When Wet” by the Commodores. The band seemed nonplussed, but I was just temping so no protests were made. They just wanted to fulfill their commitments and get paid.
Then an astonishing thing happened. Donnie Baker—a guitar hero who I’d seen play in The Case of E. T. Hooley, one of the great Cleveland bands from the late sixties—was back. He’d moved to Florida after Hooley split, but here he was, driving into town in his black-and-white ’57 Chevy, just like a guitar hero should. Duane asked him if he wanted to join us and he agreed. It was like a miracle. He named the band Jack Rabbit. I never thought to ask why; anything he wanted was good by me. Jack Rabbit? Why not?
Baker had tousled dark-blond hair and muscular guitar-player forearms like Popeye. For me to share a stage with Duane and Donnie was my idea of heaven. Never mind the beautiful idyll of Montparnasse that I’d left for a place barely a step up from a slum, I was in a band. Glory, hallelujah!
We rehearsed in the basement at Mike Maudlin’s, the keyboard player, and got some gigs at the Cellar Door, a subterranean venue in typical subterranean venue mode.
I wore my SCUM Manifesto T-shirt and fringed miniskirt that I’d bought from Malcolm’s shop. For once in my life I was the best-dressed person in town. We did a couple of reggae songs, “Pressure Drop” and “Johnny Too Bad,” which Duane loved, although no one else in Cleveland had even heard of reggae. Who cared? They had now.
I discovered how much I loved to play tambourine while dancing and singing. It was real funfair stuff, more like a Detroit Wheels band than anything I’d tried in Paris, so I guessed I was on the right path.
—
I thought about Sasha and Sabrina, and our life together, a lot. This was an extreme change that even I, with my lust for change, was finding tough. Not to mention the fact that nobody in Cleveland smoked hash with tobacco like they did in Europe, and I couldn’t get used to smoking straight pot anymore. And to think how much I’d hated mixing it with tobacco the first time. Well, people change.
Then one day a package arrived: some photos from Sasha. “Oh, cool,” I thought as I unwrapped them. I was a little surprised, though; it was an unusual package to get from her. I put all the photos against the wall in the hall and sat back and looked at them: random photos of street scenes. Hmmm…
I looked again at the elaborate way she’d packaged them, so carefully, and precisely, the way she did everything. There was a lot of tape on the wrapping, and then, when I investigated further…she had rolled out a huge block of hash, paper thin, wrapped it in foil and hidden it between the cardboard! I was surprised I’d even found it, so cleverly was it concealed.
There was enough to smoke for months. Now that we were all smoking European-style spliffs in Cleveland I had become a bit of a cultural ambassador.
Well, you do your bit.
—
A letter arrived out of the blue from Malcolm. He was putting a band together. He’d been to New York, met some guys—I think it was Richard Hell or Tom Verlaine, maybe both—and got an idea. He said he would send me a plane ticket if I was interested in coming back to London. I can’t remember his exact plan, but I think the idea was to have me just play guitar.
I was still sleeping in Meadow’s hallway, happy now that I had something to smoke. But more than that, I was actually learning something, singing in a real band. Granted, it was a covers band in Cleveland, but I was committed to it. We had gigs, and I was an integral part of it. In my heart of hearts I knew this wasn’t the band, but it’s the same with all love stories—you can tell the one you’re in isn’t going to be there in a year or two, but you have to see it through to its conclusion, so I declined the offer. Malcolm McLaren would have better things to attend to soon anyway.
Cleveland was a city in decline. The steel industry was failing and the downtown was, like Akron’s, unloved and unlived in, but, unlike Akron’s, very heavy and very dangerous. (If you don’t know what Cleveland looked like around that time, watch The Deer Hunter again—it was set in Pittsburgh but filmed in Cleveland.)
The national homicide-by-pistol rate saw Cleveland in the top five. Ditto death by fire. So you had an above-the-odds chance of getting shot or burnt to death just by being there. However, it did have soul. Despite the dilapidated inner city, the outskirts were important cultural centers. The Cleveland Orchestra was one of the nation’s finest, and there was a hub of universities and medical centers, in sharp contrast to the ghetto within.
As with all American cities, there was a distinct black-and-white divide. Black Cleveland and White Cleveland were like separate cities. There was a criminal undercurrent just below the surface that you couldn’t see, but you could reach down and touch it if you were so inclined. The Mafia had big interests in Cleveland, but nobody talked about stuff like that. No one wanted to put themselves in harm’s way.
I didn’t make any money out of my one-day-a-week residency with Jack Rabbit—I was just hoping to pay for my own mic—but there were no expenses to speak of in our ramshackle Cleveland apartment building. Whoever the landlord was, he wasn’t bothered about upkeep. The plumbing was shot and the bathtub out of commission, so I would fill the sink, climb up into it and squat. One morning I was ankle-deep in water when I stood up and banged my back on what turned out to be a live cord dangling from the ceilin
g. The force of the shock knocked me out of the sink and across the room.
In other words, Micky and Dot’s place was a dive, but I couldn’t complain. You get what you pay for.
One day, I arrived home after band practice to discover that a freak storm had blown the corner of the building clean off. The winds off Lake Erie could be fierce and we all grew up with tornado warnings where families would regularly go into their basements, listen to the radio and wait till it was over. This wasn’t a tornado but something akin to one, and now there was a big hole in the ceiling where we could see straight up into the sky. It would be possible to get by with it like that for the summer, but winter was going to be a problem. Well, we were practically in Canada. Still, that was a few months away—no point overreacting.
—
I’m not proud to say I was back to drinking MD 20/20, but it was so cheap and easy to get that it was hard to resist.
I knocked on the window of a car stopped at a red light. I could see some Cleveland State University books on the seat, so I thought it was a safe bet to blag a ride from a student. I asked the guy to drop me at the next drugstore, but he came in with me while I bought the bottle of Mad Dog and then invited me to go for a ride along the shore. Having no previous engagements in my social calendar for the afternoon, I agreed. We drove around, passing the bottle, and he asked if I’d tried any of the blue mescaline going around. I said no, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention as he slipped a dose in. I didn’t notice I was tripping until I saw the black-and-white floor tiles shrinking and expanding in the foyer of the Hotel Sterling, a flophouse in the heart of no man’s—or at least no white man’s—land in Cleveland’s most depressed inner-city neighborhood.
Next I found myself walking around in circles, looking for a door in a room which appeared not to have one. Oh, there it was—behind the wardrobe with which he’d blocked it off. I was naked, my shoes dangling from two fingers, circling the room and now starting to be pretty sure I was tripping my brains out. Something happened in the shower, both of us now naked, followed by something in the bed, all of it about as coherent as the scene in Point Blank where the band is playing while someone’s getting wasted under the stage. Tripping was disorienting even in the most controlled conditions, when externals were prepared in advance. On this occasion, I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon. It was grim but, still, it was my own damn fault: what kind of idiot jumps into a car with a stranger in Cleveland? This kind.
He talked about the Watts riots in LA that he’d been in. I asked him if he’d ever been in love (I was tripping, after all) and he said, “She’s dead. Dead. Dead.”
At that point I really wanted to leave, but he said if I tried to, he’d do something to me with the lamp cord (involving an electric shock and death, if I remember correctly), and throw me into the alley outside the window. I can only guess that he was tripping too. After a blurry length of time he said, “C’mon, I’ll give you a ride home.” I wasn’t overly keen on him knowing where I lived, but I knew, even in my reduced state, that if I went out on the street in that neighborhood on my own there was a 99.9 percent chance I’d meet up with something much worse, so I accepted the ride. Better the devil you know.
He made me go through my pockets and give him whatever money I had. I handed him a five-dollar bill, saying, “Ah, c’mon—that’s all I’ve got in the world,” to which he replied, “Well, you can always get more.” And you know what? He was right. Just one of the many perks of being white.
Two days later, I was sitting on my own in the apartment, looking at the sky through the ceiling, when I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was the guy. He wanted to give me my five dollars back.
In retrospect, I think he must have been going to college and trying to better himself, but when I got in his car and he dosed us up with mescaline he must have had a “ghetto” relapse. I never wanted to see him again, that’s for sure, but I got the impression that the night we spent together freaked him out as much as it did me. Cleveland and I were not hitting it off.
—
We were just adjusting to the new open-plan arrangement when the building started to burn. I heard our neighbor, David P. Green, calling over from his balcony next door, “Micky—you’d better get out. Your house is on fire.”
David P. Green was black, but not in the mode of most black men in Cleveland. For starters, he rode a bicycle to the factory where he worked, something his fellow workers regarded as a very strange thing to do indeed. Jokes like Q: “What do you call a black man on a bicycle?” A: “Stop, thief!” were about as close as you got to a black man on a bicycle in Cleveland circa 1975.
Green also made bread and would bring over a loaf of his famous herb-and-onion once a week. We occasionally walked up to the corner of East 55th and Euclid of a hot summer’s night to lean on a wall and watch the pimp cars slowly cruise by. We had a few theories but never quite figured out what the pillows on the back shelves of those low-riding Lincolns and Cadillacs were for.
We were both fascinated by the pimp culture, stylistically more than anything. What they actually did wasn’t what interested us, but how they looked—they had an aesthetic unlike anyone else. We’d observe in silence for a while, and finally Green would say, “Why pillows?” Then we’d walk back up Euclid to Mayfair.
Cleveland pimps must have got their suits straight out of the Eleganza catalogue. They all dressed like James Brown. David P. Green wore dungarees. The rest of black America had left those back in the cotton fields.
As for the fire, it looked like a landlord scam, insurance and all that. It would have been nice if we hadn’t all been in the building at the time, but now that it was going up in flames, better to leave, not speculate. I ran out and stood in my underpants and shirt on the street as Micky lowered his paintings and worldly possessions down from the balcony with Dot, Green and I shouting at him to get out as smoke billowed up into the purple and orange Cleveland sky, adding a punctuation mark to the already well-established pollution.
Fire trucks arrived and a crowd gathered to watch; I wished I’d grabbed some jeans or a towel, as I was still bare-legged.
When the fire was finally out we went in to collect our things. There was no way we could stay now with a big hole in the roof and the timbers smoldering. I sat on the floor and thumbed through the “for rent” section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Once a place has been on fire you can never get the smell out.
—
There was an apartment going just up the road. Not being from Cleveland, I didn’t realize the implications of moving into Little Italy. It was a mistake but I didn’t know it yet, so I walked up the six or seven blocks to have a look. There was a pizza parlor, Presti’s, at the top of the street the apartment was on. You could buy a single slice, New York style, out of a big square pie. I tried one—great pizza. I thought that was all I needed to know.
I called Annie, my old co-conspirator. I hadn’t seen her since I’d been back, but it was worth a shot to find out if she was still in town. She was, and agreed to move in—fantastic! Annie was one of those rare people I actually wanted to share a place with. She had a “Don’t fuck with me, fellas” personality and was fun.
One of the reasons living in Murray Hill was a mistake was that some of Jack Rabbit couldn’t come to pick me up for band practice. Our drummer, Bobby Hinton, was black. Not being a Cleveland native and not being Italian-American, I was unaware of how totally racist the I’ties could be; in Murray Hill, being black was a guarantee you’d get shot at.
My own landlord had done time for that very thing, as someone pointed out after we’d settled in. I’d love to tell you his name—David Chase could write a whole episode around it—but I don’t mess with those guys anymore. Not after living there.
One day, I had to have my charming landlord come over to fix a light fitting, and once he was up the top of a ladder I blasted him with Parliament’s masterpiece “Chocolate City.” The song describes the black takeover of A
merica, all the way to the White House. “God bless Chocolate City and its Vanilla suburbs”; it was one of the musical highlights of the seventies.
The guy next door had a tattoo on his arm that said “Cook,” but his wife’s name was Cookie. I asked him, “Why Cook and not Cookie?” and he told me, “So’s in case we split up I can say I was a cook in the navy.” Those guys in Murray Hill were a laugh a minute.
I’d walk up 117th Street to Presti’s singing “Time Won’t Let Me,” the Outsiders hit whose singer, Sonny Geraci, was from the neighborhood. I’d always been a fan of Italian guys as, being Catholic and all, not many of them went to my school. They were fine guys to us, with their Italian shoes and clothes and greaser hair, and were good dancers, too, who could do the “dirty dog” better than any guys we knew could.
But living in their exclusive neighborhood was an eye-opener. If you weren’t white you stayed out of Murray Hill. There might as well have been police tape cordoning off the whole area, with signs that said, “If you’re black, don’t hurry back,” or, “Dark skin—Don’t come in.” It made me extra-keen on shoplifting provisions, as all the locals were racist to the hilt so I didn’t mind ripping them off. Of course, you didn’t want to get caught shoplifting there, either. So I didn’t.
The high point of living in Little Italy was that I found a cheap coffee-maker and you could get great coffee in those shops, and having time with Annie, that was great too. But the clock on the wall was talking.
I found it particularly disturbing to witness the unseemly behavior during the celebration of the Holy Assumption in which a plaster cast of the Blessed Virgin was tied down in the back of a pickup truck, her robes fixed with flypaper creating streamers that floated behind her as the truck rolled her along the street. (I personally found that a little on the distasteful side and I’m not even Catholic. Flypaper—really!)
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 16
