The Last Holiday

by Gil Scott-Heron

  The Ossie and Ruby show was action-packed and we could thank PBS for that. Before there was cable TV and umpteen hundred channels, PBS stations were primarily broadcast on VHF and their programs were on one of the four or five lines in your daily TV guide in the paper. That way, even though their prime time programs were sometimes buried under an avalanche of promotion that the networks gave their shows, there was more of a possibility to notice what they were offering. One of the shows I religiously tried to catch was Ossie and Ruby! because there would be certain sections of the show featuring the cohosts doing a reading or comic skit that showed real versatility and talent.

  The day before we taped the show, I checked into our hotel about midday and arrived at the studio in plenty of time for the round table production meeting where I found out what we were doing. I knew the band would enjoy it. There were songs we played on most shows, like “Winter in America” and “Storm Music,” along with a couple of songs we had never performed on a show: most notably “Jose Campos Torres” and Vernon James’ composition “Morning Thoughts.” I felt as though the staff had done a great job because they had packed twenty-eight minutes of our songs and poems to put into a thirty minute show. I didn’t raise one objection or have anything to add. I sat through the meeting nodding at them like a bobble-head doll.

  The biggest rush was that I felt as if I was sitting with royalty. It was like the feeling I had when I met Quincy Jones or Sidney Poitier. I knew there would be excerpts from the show that people would see, but I wished folks could see me just sitting there, having a meeting with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee like I belonged there. It was terrific.

  Everybody appreciates movie stars and music icons, even people who share their profession. We are all fans, marveling at their mastery over their medium and fascinated by their fame. By the time I went to Houston, I had met Clive Davis, Miles Davis, and Ossie Davis, and was knocked out for a minute by each one.

  By the time I got back to the hotel, I felt ready for half of a Texas meal. I understood that a whole Texas meal was an entire steer and that I would probably have to cook it myself; while I didn’t see a sign in the room that said “no hot plates or bonfires allowed,” I had no one in mind who might want to eat the other half of a steer, so I started considering alternatives. Besides, there’s always somebody in those hotels assigned to “watch the band” and I just knew someone would rat me out when I tried to drag my steer up to the fourth floor. I called room service.

  The lady who answered when I called the room service number on the phone had either just started working there minutes before I called, or had perfected a “deniability” telephone process that even a recording of our conversation could not challenge. By the time I hung up, I had no idea if or when anything was coming and was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude for having been allowed to thank her. I had been reading specific orders from the menu, but may as well have been reading the Yellow Pages backward in Latin. The one thing I remembered her saying quite often was, “Y’all shore tawk funny, huh?”

  She offered to read my order back to me, but I told her I was in my thirties and didn’t think I had that long to live.

  There was a slight possibility that the band had arrived while I’d been at the TV studio, but I doubted it. My brother Denis, who was road manager by that time, had been a passenger in one of the two vehicles that were rented that morning to transport the band while I flew down. There had been a four-door Chevy and a station wagon, eight musicians, and a road manager leaving Jefferson City, Missouri, for six or seven hours with a meal and under the speed limit.

  I had a room list from the desk clerk and dialed my brother’s room but didn’t get him. I put a ball game on my hotel room TV set.

  Room service arrived. I have no way of confirming or denying if it was either what I ordered or what I wanted, but by the time it got there I was hungry enough to eat the tray the brother brought it in on. I do remember giving the brother a lot of money, possibly all I had in my pocket, thanking him for bringing whatever it was and saw that it was a plate from Wal-Mart and a plastic knife and fork.

  People in Texas seem to have tremendous egos, no matter what part of the state they’re in or what part they play in it. Their partisan perspective toward their state was probably appropriate when they were what they hadn’t yet been told they were not anymore. The thing I enjoyed more than anything else about Texans was their absolute certainty about how glad everyone should be to be there, where one could be treated to a grand tour of the myths and misinformation all Texans have at their fingertips and recite without provocation like children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  I remember a brother in a bar asking me where I was from, and when I answered New York he told me that Texas had become New York because that was where the biggest and the most of everything was—in Texas. It had been in New York before Texas “got ‘holt of it.” The “it” Texas had “got ‘holt of” was the part of the conversation I had missed. Fortunately this almost-a-conversation was taking place after a show, back when I was still drinking, and I wasn’t unhappy about someone else using me to talk to himself.

  “It” mighta been the Astrodome. I seemed to have remembered that when they opened the stadium it was called the eighth wonder of the world. Probably by a Texan, I decided. But, hell, it coulda been oil, which they had mostly run out of, or DFW, the Dallas airport, where every airline had its own terminal. Or space, as in land, which it had more of than anywhere in the States except Alaska, but who the hell wanted to run around shouting, “We’re number two!”

  The brother who’d begun this attack of the similes was continuing unabated, not making any progress toward the point, so I’d waved for another drink and continued in my own meticulous way to think of things his point might be, feeling that when I thought of it I would know it and have no more need of his confirmation than he seemed to need of me to listen. And then it hit me: the question must have been “how do you pronounce H-O-U-S-T-O-N?” That was the only New York/Houston conflict there’s been since the Houston Astros and New York Mets were added to the National League together. The Mets won in ’69. And New Yorkers still called it “House-ton.” The way it was spelled.

  In my hotel room, the ball game on TV was over. I had not been involved enough to know who had won or even who played. I vaguely remembered taking the tray and what I’d been given for dishes outside my door as though someone might want them back. I should’ve put them in the middle of the hall with a sign that said, “Beware! Toxic Waste!” I could just imagine some brother zipped up in a foam rubber space suit and a ten gallon hat moonwalking that bullshit down the back stairs, holding it out front of him with some Texas-sized prongs.

  I called my brother’s room again. No reply.

  Usually I could imagine, but now I was drawing a blank. I hadn’t actually seen them leave Jefferson City, but I’d seen everybody that morning, which meant that no one had fallen in love and couldn’t be located. No one was from Texas or Missouri, so no one had been stricken with homesickness within driving distance. In fact, everybody had been kind of anxious to get to Houston because of the TV show and all the good things I had said about Mr. Davis and Miss Dee without having to make anything up. Hell, even if they’d all quit they would have called so they could laugh in my ear. And my brother would have needed a new face and an assignment from the Witness Protection Program. And they knew me. Hell, I’d do the fucking TV show anyway. I’d just have to tell the producers I’d been a-band-doned.

  There was a western on TV now. I couldn’t believe it. It would be sort of like seeing a bunch of Chinese people coming out of a Chinese restaurant in Harlem with doggie bags and getting back on the tour bus. What else was I waiting for? Must have been a western in Houston.

  It actually might have been good. I didn’t see enough of it to even complain about it. I suppose it played through or played out like the ball game I couldn’t recall. I can’t recall the movie for an entirely different reason. During the
game I had been thinking about nothing. During the movie I couldn’t seem to find the nothing channel I’d been thinking about all through the game.

  I got stuck with a short loop that played over and over, then over and under, then over passed under, like Malcolm’s loop of the vocals on the last three minutes of “B Movie.” Something new was added but the way back to the beginning was still there. It was never over.

  The band members are congregating near the ticket counter. My brother is road managing, passing out tickets that will get us to Missouri. There is foolishness between the usual suspects about the usual subjects: their women or girls, their wives and girlfriends, their Mrs. and Miseries, and the Misses they missed. Then there’s your all of the above. Brady and Gordon. Sheffield and Larry Mac. Vernon James wears a brief smile and says nothing. Bags and suitcases are sliding through to a lady who is about half the size of some of the luggage. Someone slides through to help. Probably “Astro,” flirting.

  And the harshest part of the loop, the over that washes over me and runs over me, the part that takes its time and then takes my time and gets closer as the images get closer, changing to a sharp, like shards of glass, stark, like a scene I can’t get passed, that won’t pass, even when I close my eyes.

  It’s Kenny Powell, the young drummer with his reluctant, almost a smile. Neat, clean, without hurry. And a couple. Adults. With him. No doubt that it’s his folks. His parents. Cordial. Comfortable. Ready to acknowledge the usuals, the guys they know, who know them: Brady and Gordon. Astro. Then turning to me. They know me. I sort of hear Kenny’s soft voice just above the clamor.

  “Gil, these are my folks.”

  And I hear them clearer each time.

  “Yes, how are you. We’ve just come to see Ken off and to ask you to please take care of our son . . .”

  And it ran again. And I saw . . . that the movie was over. The western was over. The airport scene in my mind started over. And I opened my eyes to look around the hotel room, where . . . the phone was ringing.

  It was my brother. And the details of his explanation were not lost, but were just words to me. There had been a blowout. Kenny was driving. They had spun across the median and across the highway between spurts of traffic headed in the opposite direction. They came to rest, to a stop past the shoulder on the other side, through a break in the restraints that ran thigh-high to a point only a few feet from a drop down into a ravine. They had gotten out of the car, undamaged but immobile, leaning like a drunk on the wheel where the tire was ripped. They sat there until Sheffield arrived on the scene. They got in, cramped and happy to be cramped. And came to Houston.

  32

  I had played in Houston at a place called Rockefeller’s, where the guys who ran the club walked around with sidearms, sho’ nuff, forty-fives in holsters. Like Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke. On first glance, I thought having the folks who hired me provide their own armed security seemed a mite melodramatic; a little bit too Texas and Wild West for me. But knowing about an after show robbery at the Beacon Theater on Broadway, where a producer was actually shot for the gate, gave me cause to reconsider and say to myself, Hell, maybe I should be wearing a gun up in this camp, too. At the very least, I couldn’t say what these folks should not do.

  On October 31, 1980, back in Houston to start the Hotter than July tour, I was tired already, sweaty and exhausted from a five-minute trudge uphill, learning as I trudged why this block-sized enclosure was called “the Summit.” A place called the Summit would be at the top of a fucking hill, right?

  I had just found a stage entrance for a venue I had never played. The places I had played in Texas on prior trips could fit into this sprawling hothouse about ten times and still leave room for the Rockets to play their games without me getting in their way.

  Finally, holding a four-letter filled conversation with myself about the hundred-degree temperature in this desert in fucking November, I pushed through the door marked PERFORMER’S ENTRANCE and found myself being eyed suspiciously by a six-gun-packing guard before I heard a buzzer and was waved on through. An inner glass door with a cardboard placard taped on it saying TO PERFORMER‘S DRESSING ROOM provided further direction. I had made it. I was inside the Summit.

  I wasn’t interested in a dressing room right then. At an ill-lit fork in the hallway, another handwritten message said, TO THE MAIN STAGE, so I made my way vaguely on through the maze of dimly lit corridors. I dragged on cautiously, following signs that indicated I was headed toward the arena floor. Suddenly, after feeling that I might have been better off calling AAA for a suggested route, I turned into the lights of the vast arena, as busy as a small town. Men and women in work clothes were pulling metal folding chairs off of racks that might have once carried station wagons cross-country. The men had developed a style of flipping the seats open from their rigid straight backed status to a position where behinds built with uniquely flexible angles could survive for three or four hours.

  I had on my rose-colored prescription lenses and was scanning all the rows of fabric-covered fold-ups bolted to the floor in ascending stages that merged in a design of discomfort. I put my personal attaché case down for a minute.

  It was an impressive sight. Choreographed chaos on a Roman scale. But suddenly somebody called my name. Well, not exactly my name, but somebody’s name for me, the name he always used, my astrological sign. So I knew who it was. It was somebody who shouldn’t have seen me come in. Howzat?

  The call for me rang out again, echoing around in the cavernous hall: “Air-rees!”

  I scanned the upper reaches of the place, looking for Stevie Wonder.

  And there he was, in a seat near the top row in the bowl-shaped theater. He was leaning forward in my direction from the sound booth. Alone. There was no mistaking him. His corn rows were surrounded with a soft suede cover. Large, dark sunglasses hid most of the top half of his face, and a huge, joker’s grin furnished the lower half. He had a wireless mike in his hand and, again with the grin, was saying, “Come on up here, Air-rees!”

  I started for the stairs, still scanning. Now I could see there was an engineer-type person in the booth, but his back was turned to Stevie and I didn’t believe I knew the man anyway. Or that he had identified me.

  He hadn’t. But since I hadn’t figured it out yet and Stevie was having such a good time messing with my head . . .

  “How you been, man,” I said as I climbed. “If you saw me get outta that cab from the airport, you shoulda helped me pay for it.”

  “We felt your vibes, Air-rees,” Stevie said, and he laughed out loud, shook his head, and held his hundred-watt smile.

  I was close enough now to see that the headset Stevie was wearing was not yesterday’s setup. This one had an almost invisible wire around his head with a tiny mic attached to the ear phones. It was supposed to be for communication with other sound and light stations around the bowl, but this one was modified and made Stevie look like a switchboard operator from outer space. No matter what Stevie said, I knew his brother Calvin was in here somewhere with the same type of headset. If there was anybody as likely as Stevie to joke around in a billion-dollar arena with a million dollars’ worth of sound equipment, it was Calvin. Wherever Calvin was, a good time and a lot of laughs were always near.

  I sat in the same row with Stevie, a couple of seats away, and watched the workmen and women constructing the stage set and aligning the floor seats on the canvas that covered the basketball court. They were roping off the first five rows, which would probably be reserved for the VIP guests and press. There were also men in blue coveralls stacking speakers three-deep in front of the stage, tying up the massive maroon curtain, bolting it to fasteners on the apron constructed for just that purpose.

  A complete sound team was now onstage, clearing space for the drum risers, Stevie’s band members were appearing here and there. The work area was filling up: electricians, light technicians, security personnel, supplementary sound amplifiers, monitors, speakers and cables, s
ide fills, multicolored gels directed at points along the stage floor where band members would stand and sit during their performances were being placed according to stage diagrams on clipboards.

  I saw Malcolm Cecil wander in from backstage, opening sound crates and jotting down the contents on a thick pad. Malcolm would be handling the audience sound for me on the first few nights while my regular engineer, Dave McLean, handled my onstage monitors for the band.

  I was thinking that most audience members would be glad they hadn’t seen any of this preparation. It was too much like the work they wanted to leave behind when they bought tickets for a night of relaxation.

  Several of the sound crew wore jumpsuits with Britannia Row stenciled on the back. There had been a rumor that Stevie had hired the UK’s biggest road production company to handle this tour. They had just completed the Pink Floyd tour for that group’s hit album The Wall, which meant that not only could they supervise and coordinate sound and light support for this show, the crew could also construct a wall between the onstage performers and their audience over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour show. Great. If I found out I needed a wall.

  “How you been, Aries?” Stevie asked.

  He and I had an astrologer in common, a D.C. lady named Amali, who sent me a monthly lunar return reading when I was not in the city. She had told me about Stevie’s interest in the stars and his own production company was called Black Bull. I was used to him hailing me with Air-rees, though I did not call him “Tau-russss!”

  About five years before, Amali had ignited my interest in astrology. She had been doing a reading for Norris Little, also known as Brute, and I had wandered to the threshold of a back room they had commandeered at a party. All I’d wanted to know was whether or not Brute still needed a ride home before I made my exit. Without even looking up or really acknowledging my presence, Amali had said, “You don’t know anything about this, do you Aries?”