Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood

by A. J. Albany

  About two weeks earlier, Dad had gently coerced me into a telephone conversation regarding sex and what he casually referred to as “natural animal attraction.” He then asked offhandedly if I’d done anything with my “little friend Stanley,” adding quickly that it was “cool” as long as I “played it safe” and other such parental rhetoric. I fell for it, and decided to confess my sins of the flesh. Dad became suddenly silent, cutting the conversation short, and I knew at once I’d been a fool to tell the truth. What would he think, I thought, if he only knew of the others—if he knew of my uncle. I felt my face burning and looked high up through the clouds, concentrating on breathing, an exercise that usually calmed my anxiety. Now, however, it had the opposite effect, and I considered jumping off the roof, but at a mere three stories up, with my luck, I’d probably only break my legs.

  I had to speak to Gram. Surely she’d tell me that I wasn’t all that stupid or bad, and considering the lousy hand I’d been dealt, I was holding my own, wasn’t I? “She’s certainly no academic.” That line would haunt me all my life. I ran downstairs calling for Gram, but she had gone out. On the kitchen table was a note that simply said, “Went to the store.” So that was it. She and Dad were disappointed in me, to say the least. They would now avert their minds, and treat me like an inexplicable, unpleasant odor. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to open a window, but nothing in that dive ever worked right. I decided to put my fist through the window. I needed a diversion, and it was the first thing that popped into my head. After all, I was no academic. When I punched the window with my strong left hand, a three-quarter-inch-long gash opened up sideways along my wrist. It was one of those strange cuts you can look right into, like an anatomy lesson, and watch all the little vessels doing a frantic dance in an attempt to heal the wound. Surprisingly, there wasn’t that much blood, for the cut fell neatly between the two veins that ran parallel to it. I felt sick. Reluctantly, I walked downstairs and knocked on the manager’s door. He opened it, stinking of wine, and looked at me suspiciously.

  “I’ve hurt myself. My grandmother’s out—I slipped.” He took me inside and cleaned and wrapped my wrist. He patted me reassuringly on the thigh. “You should be more careful, chérie—it could have been much worse.” No, I thought, it couldn’t have been. The person I worshipped had just cut out my heart.

  supernova

  I succumbed to some nasty, unrelenting depression toward the end of 1976, and determined, at fourteen, that the time was right to kill myself. As I sat in my makeshift room, flipping through records, carefully selecting the soundtrack for my death scene, I began to feel surprisingly alive. My room was a two-foot-by-five-foot space, between the front room and the bathroom, that had a small built-in vanity and closet. Most old single apartments in Hollywood came with this dressing area, which I’d converted into a place where I could sit with my headphones on, smoking and wondering how to rid myself of the “sick-creeping-empty” feeling that had been dogging me all year. “You need direction,” I’d say aloud, waiting for a light of perfect clarity to appear and lead me to an answer.

  A few months earlier, a teacher’s assistant at school named Mary had expressed a curious interest in my welfare, which initially roused my suspicion, until her persistence and corn-fed smile softened me up and I found myself breaking my self-imposed rule of silence, foolishly spilling out my most personal guts. We would walk in the park while she tried to make me listen to garbage like Loggins and Messina or Judy Collins, which caused me great mental and physical pain. Even in 1976, Mary was sticking to her hippie guns, which was endearing, in a way. She had a sympathetic ear and played the role of big sister quite aptly. One afternoon, she called to ask if I’d like to come over, with the earthy pretense of making candles. An unsettling feeling tugged at me, and I quickly declined her offer. After some awkward silence, she dropped a bomb: “Listen, I just think you’re so sweet and pretty, I’d really like to make it with you.” My first reaction was to laugh at her choice of words. “Make it?” Christ. She was lost. However, as the reality of the proposition dawned on me, my stomach tightened, and I saw red. I hung up, neither intrigued nor titillated, not even flattered, only pissed off that I’d once again been duped by some creep.

  Later that week I bought a baggie of fifty whites from a boy at school, and now in my final hours I chose Humble Pie’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore as my send-off music, for sentimental reasons. I’d had my first blinding orgasm listening to “I Don’t Need No Doctor” earlier in the year, and knew well that it had occurred as a result of the singer’s sexy voice, not the pimply guy I’d been with at the time. I could taste Steve Marriott’s sweat on that album. While my unsuspecting grandmother sat watching the Jerry Lewis telethon in the other room, I began swallowing handfuls of whites, choking down about twenty before I began to feel them coming back up. My head was tingling and light as I started sweating buckets of ice water that smelled of chlorine. Then the sickness came, and came. I was on the bathroom floor with my cheek against the cold tiles, and I lost all sense of time.

  When I was up to it, I dragged myself out of the airless, casket-size room and found Gram sleeping in front of the TV with the telethon still going strong. There was Jerry, and here was me. We were both freaked out on speed.

  For the remainder of the night and through the early hours of morning I stayed up, overwhelmed by the feeling that I’d been both physically and spiritually cleansed. I saw and heard everything around me with an intense clarity. Each subtle change of light and even the most minute sounds were amplified. My skin seemed to be breathing as an independent entity. For a moment, I felt I had transcended the confines of my existence, and thought that my half-assed attempt might have succeeded after all. I wondered if this was how Dad felt, and if I too thought that the sensation justified sacrificing all earthly responsibilities. I decided it didn’t. Perhaps that was the difference between us.

  It had been a half-assed attempt on my part. I’d stupidly decided on speed, not wishing to die in my sleep on a quaalude overdose. I preferred to go out exploding like a supernova. Also, in my pathetic effort at self-parenting, I’d always promised myself that I would never use heroin, though it would have been easier. Somehow I felt that once I chose that path, I’d be forever lost. I still retained some hope, some interest in what might be. The “sick-creeping-empty” didn’t have me beat quite yet.

  tragically unhip

  When I was small, supreme contentment was listening to my grandmother’s Al Jolson album. One evening, as I happily hummed along to “A Quarter to Nine,” my mother, looking mildly embarrassed, commented: “Poor little Amy. She’s hopelessly old-fashioned.” It’s always difficult to live up to your parents’ expectations, and if your parents are the reigning king and queen of all that is hip, it’s impossible. Since I wasn’t listening to Coltrane’s Meditations or smoking pot until the ripe old age of ten, there was fear that I was shaping up to be a real bona fide square.

  The closest I ever came to being part of any scene considered cool was my brief foray into punk rock at the age of fifteen. It had little to do with the music. I was infatuated with a guy who called himself Bruce Barf. I met him one day on Hollywood Boulevard and was fascinated by his shoes, which were held together with silver duct tape. I followed him into an alley off Cherokee Avenue and down a flight of stairs that led to a club called the Masque, where he was a caretaker of sorts. I thought it was a wildly overrated scene, though I might have felt differently had I made some effort to talk to people. I wrote Bruce a long and amorous letter on the alley wall by the club entrance, which must have embarrassed him terribly, though he seemed to take it well. I started showing up at gigs there, keeping to myself usually and lurking quietly in Bruce’s orbit. In the end, he wouldn’t give me the wrong time of day, and I couldn’t blame him.

  My final disenchantment with punk came one night when I met up with four other people to go to a gig. A girl in the group looked at the loud pants I was wearing and remarked dis
gustedly, “Christ—don’t you know that Day-Glo is out now?” I glanced around at the others and saw that they were indeed all in black from head to toe, like a bunch of grim SS officers. Although I still went with them that night, the best part of myself turned on my heels, said farewell, and returned to the sanctity of home.

  Punks, jocks, hippies, beats. The uniforms and the music changed, but the rules and accompanying rhetoric stayed the same. The most careworn hustlers and walking-dead junkies I knew still lived with some hope that the cold world and its diminished beauty would turn itself around someday, but these kids not only lacked hope, they seemed to embrace humanity’s sad state. If I had followed suit and accepted that the world was nothing more than a dried-up cesspool, I would have died. I returned to my old-fashioned universe, a mad, unpopulated place where the possibility of love, above all things, fueled me on.

  danger zones

  Throughout my life one constant, even in the lowest times, was my love of dancing. I thought if the world were to end in some cosmic inferno, I might still be content if I could dance among the debris. Though I enjoyed dancing with Gram or my dad, I was most fond of dancing by myself. Once a week, I danced under the trained eye of my instructor, Miss Lilian LaSalle. My free lessons (we were broke, but she thought I had great promise) took place in a church auditorium on Yucca Street. On one wall hung a sign that read HE IS EVER WATCHFUL, with a huge picture of Jesus beneath it. The eyes in the picture would follow me, no matter how much I attempted to dance out of their view.

  Miss LaSalle had been good pals with Eleanor Powell, the queen of taps, when both were young dancers under contract at Warner Bros. She was an ex–southern belle from a long line of proud slave owners who still in 1977 referred to black people as “those coloreds.” However, one could forgive much of her ignorance after seeing her dance.

  Sixty years old, Miss LaSalle still danced like an electrified gazelle. An unfortunate accident with a bottle of peroxide had ended her career before it had really started. “We all had a platinum bob back then, and I was doing a touch-up—just the roots—for a screen test the next morning, when I got a blob of bleach in my left eye. It turned into this blood red that never went away.” Her eye was a shocking red smear, and I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, to lose your career and looks in the second it took to squeeze a dye bottle. The pursuit of beauty could be a perilous endeavor. Being a woman of faith, however, Miss LaSalle seemed to take it all in stride.

  One day she began our lesson with a ludicrous lecture concerning the female “danger zones.” “Has your grandma talked to you yet about the three off-limit danger zones?” she asked confidentially. What was this now, I thought, anxious to do some dancing. She took my confused silence as her cue to continue: “The biggest danger zone is right here,” she said, placing her hands flatly on her leotarded crotch. A queasy wave passed over me. “You must never let a young man touch you here,” she whispered emphatically, bugging out her blue and bloody eyes at me.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that all my danger zones had been thoroughly plumbed by young men for years now. I tapped my heels nervously on the floor as she continued to illustrate the rest of the Devil’s playground, the “buttocks” and “bosom” areas, and realized sadly I’d lost my zeal to dance for the day. This upset me to no end. I had great dreams of rising out of the ashes of my existence to become the pint-sized Cyd Charisse of my generation, and Miss LaSalle was now hanging me up. I interrupted her, complaining of stomach cramps, looked guiltily at the giant Christ, and ducked out and across the street with toe and tap shoes slung over my shoulders. I headed for home.

  I made my way up to the roof, where I always vented my anger at the ridiculous, disinterested universe. How tired I’d become, trying to please hypocrites and politely listen to the advice of fools. I bit down hard on an abscessed tooth I’d had for months and was keeping secret from the world. The pain in my mouth exploded like a blessed distraction. If I could tolerate this, I could tolerate anything. I spit out a mouthful of infection and prepared to face the scene I knew awaited me downstairs.

  My dad was here for a visit, which should have been a joy, but what should be, it seems, is rarely what is. For all three of us, Dad, Gram, and myself, an abundance of turmoil compressed into too short a time had worn us out. Like shell-shocked veterans, we were left wounded and full of doubt. Dad’s reckless behavior now stayed confined behind closed doors. Gram, ever cautious and vigilant, became even more so. My own overwrought psyche made me increasingly dull and insular. I took my usual place at a kitchenette chair and watched my father nodding out on the sofa from an earlier visit to Lester Hobbs, who was still L.A.’s reigning king of junkiedom. Gram too was on the nod in her sagging green recliner, exhausted from battling the war she waged against old age. I sat watching them in numb silence. Gram suddenly winced. She also suffered with physical pain that she chose to live with silently. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” was her favorite cliché. I suddenly remembered a day some seven years back, when I’d returned home from school in tears, beaten up, with my lunch bag missing. Gram had looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just get along with people?” The memory of it made me laugh out loud.

  old habit

  As the years passed, it became nearly impossible for Dad to maintain his habit. At times, he’d stop using, but it was rarely by choice. He’d get busted or find himself flat broke, forced to quit cold turkey. Once when he was in his fifties, he attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The man who’d lived by the words of Groucho Marx, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member,” found himself in a large group of people half his age.

  His “amazing constitution,” which the doctors had often marveled at, was rapidly falling apart. With advancing age, he could no longer trade on the youthful charm and good looks that had once brought him credit with dealers and permanent loans from lady friends. Work became scarce. Even the hotel lounge circuit dried up, with jobs going to fresh-faced Juilliard grads who weren’t likely to hit up the management for an advance or pull a no-show because they were loaded or their arthritis was crippling them. Dad reached a point where he couldn’t afford to stay high, and the price of being sick was too much for his ravaged body to handle. A doctor sat him down and told him he was living on borrowed time: “Your spleen is shot, your kidneys barely function, and your liver is operating at ten percent. I can’t say it’ll help much if you quit, but you’ll die slower.” Tired of running the game, Dad found himself at an NA meeting filled with kids telling tales of hitting “rock bottom” that was grocery-line patter compared to his own life of pain. He then made an attempt at sharing one of his own stories. “I was busted for narcotics down South and sentenced to time on a chain gang.”

  “You mean like Cool Hand Luke?” someone interrupted.

  “Yeah, sort of. Anyway, I escaped and made it to Tulsa, where I lived in an all-black part of town, passing as an albino, selling asbestos siding so I could make enough money to get home—”

  He stopped, suddenly aware that he was being regarded with uncomprehending eyes. Who was this mad, gray-haired grandpa? What was he talking about? Dad excused himself and walked out. He thought maybe he’d gone to the wrong meeting. After all, they were all over town. No, who the hell was he kidding, what would he do? Be sponsored by some junior junkie who didn’t know, hopefully would never know, what it was like to crawl around in life’s dirty bowels for forty years?

  Dexter Gordon once said that just after World War II, when drug addiction was largely a minority problem (he specified blacks, Italians, Jews, and Mexicans), the authorities didn’t concern themselves with how to stop it, and certainly didn’t care about rehabilitation. It wasn’t until the sixties, when upstanding Anglo-Saxon teens, the children of cops and politicians, started showing up high for Sunday family supper, that the righteously uptight rushed to fight the dark drug demons. Where, in the midst of this sudden awak
ening, did an old, lifetime user like my father find help? The answer was nowhere. I’d seen it in the faces and heard it in the voices of health care workers everywhere. Dad and others like him were banished to the netherworld of methadone maintenance at best. “It’s a young man’s world,” he’d say with a tired smile. I would hug his huge head, cursing my powerlessness and the futility of comforting words that fell flat and died as soon as they hit the air.

  the returning

  Between 1972 and 1977 Dad had found a certain contentment living in Europe. He had cleaned up, recorded an album a year, and, between jazz festivals and nightclubs, worked as much as he wanted to. Like many other American jazz musicians, including his friend Dexter Gordon, he was shown respect as an artist there that he’d rarely come across in the States. However, the pull to return to the U.S. had become strong. Dad had unfinished business to attend to here. He never felt like he’d made it on his home turf, and now that he had his chops, as he’d say, Dad was anxious to try them out in the city he called his dirty, loveable bitch, New York. While still in Europe, Dad received a letter from his old flame Jean Roth, who lived in Manhattan. In it she expressed her interest in seeing him again, and enclosed a photo of herself in a black bikini. It gave Dad the final motivation he’d been looking for, and he came back, moving directly into her apartment on West Fifty-Seventh and Eighth.

  He’d first spotted Jean at the Three Deuces on Fifty-Second street back in the forties and was knocked out by her perfect, elegant profile. She had dark hair pulled back tightly into a twist and long emerald earrings that ran the length of her swan’s neck, and sported the Nefertiti eyes and red lips that were essentials for any hipster chick back then. She was twenty-one, just back from modeling in Paris, and caught up in the excitement of the new jazz—bebop—that was breaking music wide open.