That night I had one last crazy fling with coke, booze, smoke, and sex. Early the next afternoon I telephoned Mama Johannah and asked her to start packing my suitcase. I could sense over the telephone that she was quietly shedding tears of joy. Later that afternoon, Peter Tladi and Mabusha drove me to Johannesburg International Airport. I called Johny Stirling from the departure lounge and told him I was on my way to London. Johny could not stop repeating on the phone, “You have made me the happiest person in the world, Hughie. God bless you, my dear friend.” Dawn Zain, my friend from way back during the King Kong days and one of the investors in the defunct Hugh Masekela’s J&B Joint, pulled together her frequent-flyer miles and gave me a round-trip business class ticket.
I was exhausted when I boarded the airplane. I had dinner and passed out until the flight attendant woke me up to the announcement that we were landing at Heathrow Airport. I took the express train to Paddington Station and a taxi to the Covent Gardens flat of my childhood friend Sanza Loate. Sanza was now singing with the Manhattan Brothers, who had been living in London since King Kong closed on the West End in 1962. That night they were to perform at the South African embassy as part of the entertainment that would precede the premiere of a documentary about the vocal quartet. I was also featured in an interview in the film. After spending a very enjoyable day with Sanza and his wife Joy-Njabula, we repaired to the embassy for the premiere with many other South African friends. A party followed and later moved to Sanza’s house. That afternoon, Johny had taken me to the Clouds House processing center in London’s Chelsea suburb for the brief formalities of screening and filling in forms. When he dropped me back at Sanza’s, Johny Stirling said, “Enjoy your last drink tonight, Hughie. Make sure you have a good blast, because tomorrow you begin a new life and a future full of miracles.” I did just that. I had my last bottle of cognac that night.
The next morning, Johny picked me up in his Land Cruiser for the three-hour, winding, hilly drive to Shaftesbury. We had a hilarious time, laughing about my past and telling outrageous jokes all the way to Clouds House.
When we arrived at noon on December 18, 1997, I gaped at this 150-year-old, three-story English manor, some two thousand feet above sea level, spread over several wooded acres. They told me the estate had been used as the governmental residence for Winston Churchill during World War II. That I had recorded thirty-seven albums, sold more than five million of them, and squandered millions of dollars didn’t mean a thing. All the residents were equals. We were all addicts trying to get well. After registering, seeing the doctor, and settling into my five-man dorm, I sat on my small bed and reflected with a relieved smile about my forty years of sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction. It was a cold, rainy winter day, and looking out of the dormitory windows, I began to count the forming snowflakes and estimated the money I had spent on drugs, parties, lawsuits, legal fees, tax penalties, divorces, and women. With the canceled engagements and royalty losses from a string of terminated recording contracts, luxury airplane junkets, hotel suite and telephone charges, expensive cars and abandoned houses around the world, the money squandered easily amounted to at least $50 million.
After my orientation, I was given my first house chores as the assistant kitchen cleaner, waiter, and chief dishwasher for the thirty residents. Our dormitory was warm on this cold English night. I glanced out the window at the full moon that illuminated the frost gathered outside our bedroom window. I was assigned to a room with four other men. No privacy. No queen-size bed, but a single bunk with a not-so-soft mattress. No curvaceous beauties sleeping peacefully at my side, just the occasional moans, groans, and farts of my roommates. I felt like I was starting over.
Some of the patients were going through very painful recoveries, especially those who were in their first day or two coming down from heroin or heavy drinking. They were going through cold sweats, shivers, convulsive shakes, fevers, vomiting, and nightmares. Some were desperate to leave the sanitarium immediately and return to their lives of addiction. A few such people left every week. The night nurses were kept very busy. There were endless trips to the bathroom from every dorm.
When I arrived at Clouds House, unlike many patients, I didn’t need to go through detox. By the third day of treatment I knew I was going to be well forever. After a week I called Mabusha and told him to go through the house and get rid of whatever drugs he found. We had daily writing assignments, which we had to submit at the end of the evening, and the mornings began with a short reflective prayer, meditation, breakfast, then group therapy sessions that involved intense and helpful truth-seeking exchanges but were sometimes very confrontational, with the entire group scolding you if they felt that you were lying, secretive, isolating, or in denial. Everybody broke down in tears at one time or another. We had to write our life stories, critique each other, and have regular one-on-one sessions with our individual counselors. On Saturday mornings the entire group of inmates sat in a large circle in the main lounge, and each one spoke about how the week had gone. More crying. More confrontations. All these sessions forced me to share my demons and look where the debris lay, deep inside my soul. We were allowed to call out or accept incoming calls after a week in the joint. Trips to the town of Shaftesbury were arranged for Saturday afternoons, when a bus would pick us up and bring us back in time for supper. The same buses would take us out one night a week to the town of Salisbury for Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous sessions with the local addicts, at a community center. On Thursdays we were taken to the local health club for a swim. Daily walks through the village were allowed for groups of four. Permission for these had to be obtained from the administrative offices, where everyone was required to sign for an exit permit of no more than one hour. There were no free moments; one exercise or the other occupied every single minute. By lights-out at eleven, we were totally exhausted. I lay in bed at night and thanked my ancestors for being at Clouds House, before fading into a deep, tranquil sleep. We were allowed to play our instruments over the weekends, and when I played my trumpet at the end of my first week, it was the first time I had played it sober since I was sixteen years old. I had so much power in my lungs. It felt awesome, effortless. Exercising really helped. I would do stretches every morning and walk around the sprawling grounds or through the village in the afternoons, sometimes twice a day. In that freezing weather, I could feel my body moving toward a healthier state. A few weeks before my departure, I wrote in my journal: I know the rest of the journey is not going to be easy, but painful. But I have hope that when I face the outside world after I leave Clouds, I will be ready to say to myself, I have found Hugh.
21
DURING MY MEDITATION TIME, I wrote letters to just about everyone I could think of whom I had offended over the years. I hadn’t written a letter in twenty-five years. I asked for their forgiveness. In my deep, private thoughts and in accordance with my upbringing, I released my spirit. I prayed to my ancestors to intercede on my behalf and beseech the Creator to help me be restored to sanity and health in order for me to lead a better life.
Having come seven thousand miles, I often contemplated and got lost in thinking about Witbank, Johanna Bowers, my first years on this earth, Springs, my first piano lesson, Alexandra, the township carnival weekends, St. Peter’s, Huddleston, the Huddleston band, the Merry Makers, African Jazz & Variety, King Kong, the Jazz Epistles, America, West Africa, Botswana, Zaire, my late friends, my family, my wives, and many women. I had come a long way and was very lucky to be alive. By the end of my stay at Clouds House, I had been house head for two weeks, and at my departure, everybody came out of the building to bid me a hearty good-bye.
I was released on January 29, 1998. During my stay, I had called Stewart, Johny, Peter Tladi, Dawn Zain, Sibongile, and my sister Barbara quite regularly, thanking all of them for helping me make the best decision of my life. Barbara insisted that I come to Paris and spend two weeks with her before going back to South Africa.
One day I was on my way
to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when my cousin Mfundi Vundla came by. Mfundi has the top television show in South Africa, a soap opera called Generations. I told him that I wanted to form a foundation in South Africa to promote substance-abuse awareness and recovery. He said he would help. True to his word, the Musicians and Artists Assistance Program of South Africa (MAAPSA) has assisted scores of artists and other individuals toward recovery. The organization holds all its board meetings at Morula Pictures, Mfundi’s business offices. In existence now for four years, it has assisted more than fifty South African artists and others in their quest to kick their addictions.
When I returned to South Africa, Peter Tladi arranged a reception for me at Miriam Makeba’s home. I made a thank-you speech in which I apologized for my past misdeeds and went public about my addiction and recovery. I was glad to see my many friends. A few months later I was visiting Peter and Jean Davidson at their farm in Tarlton, a rural hamlet about sixty-five miles west of Johannesburg. I had roomed with Peter shortly after my divorce from Miriam, and we’d spent wonderful years together. When I’d hit with “Grazing in the Grass,” I invited him to come out to Los Angeles, where he unintentionally became our tour manager. Peter told me about a fifty-four-acre farm that was for sale about a half-mile from his place. The minute I saw it, I fell in love with it. He helped me make a deal with the sellers, and I purchased the property.
With my life turned around, I felt that I might now be good enough to live with Elinam without reverting to my old, crazy ways. At first she was curt with me because I hadn’t called or kept in touch as I promised. I was returning from an American tour in July of 1998 when Barbara invited Mabusha and me to visit her in Paris. From her residence, I called Elinam in Ghana and said, “When can you come and visit me in South Africa?” She was shocked because she had not heard from me since I wrote her the note I had Edward Akufo-Addo pass on to her, in which I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me.
“I am really angry with you for disappearing like that. What happened to you, anyway?” she asked.
“I came to Ghana and you were not there, so I thought you had canceled me out of your thoughts,” I replied.
“Well, when I didn’t hear from you, I figured you had lost interest in me. Anyway, I can’t remain angry with you too long. Where are you?”
I told her about my rehabilitation and explained that in my former state of mind, “I would have been bad for you, but now I know that we could be very happy together if you will still have me. When can you come?” I asked anxiously.
“As soon as you can write me a visa request to your embassy here,” she said.
I was so happy I wrote the visa request right away and instructed my travel agency in Johannesburg to send her a ticket. A couple of weeks after my return to South Africa, Elinam arrived. After she’d washed and changed into fresh clothes and Mama Johannah prepared breakfast for us, I drove Elinam to the Tarlton farmhouse. I had not begun to furnish the house, and the only person living in the worker’s quarters was Alfred Hlatshwayo, the groundskeeper who had stayed on after the old owners left. He welcomed us heartily. The only thing I had in the house were the samples Barbara’s curtain maker had given me to look through. Before we entered the house, I asked Elinam, “What do you think of this place?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said, not sure what the hell was going on.
“Well,” I said, “I just bought this place. I was hoping that you might like it. If you come and live with me, this will be our home.”
We spent the rest of the morning in the empty house. We lay down on the bedroom carpet and began choosing curtains for the many windows and planning how the place should be furnished, then walked all around the farm grounds and spoke to the eight cows we had inherited with the property. Everybody fell in love with Elinam. Mama Johannah and Pula couldn’t stop marveling over her.
I was not letting Elinam go out of my life.
AIDS has become South Africa’s most dreaded plague since smallpox, tuberculosis, and polio took the lives of millions of rural and township dwellers during the 1950s, when my father was a health inspector and spent almost every waking hour of his life inoculating people. There has been no preventive administrative strategy to deal with AIDS. On the contrary, almost a decade has gone by while an internal debate has raged about the causes of AIDS, with the president and the minister of health, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, claiming that the disease was not caused by HIV but by poverty, malnutrition, and so on. On the other side, international and domestic AIDS relief organizations have been urging the roll-out of antiretroviral drugs. The country’s populace, meanwhile, has gone through a long period of denial, during which time millions of people have died from the pandemic. Relatives have actually shunned, rejected, or even evicted family members who turned out to have full-blown AIDS. Many artists and political and business leaders and ordinary people have gone to their graves denying that they suffered from the disease and calling it everything but AIDS, while their relatives, their government, and their employers colluded with them right up until they were lowered into their graves and thereafter. Those spouses who were infected suffered quietly and awaited their own deaths without admitting the truth. It is a dismal era of head-in-the sand, turn-a-blind-eye folly.
My sister Sybil concealed her HIV-positive status from us for four years, eventually hiding from us after abandoning a lucrative position at Sun City as a head chef. It was only after Barbara and I sought her out and coaxed the truth out of her that she surfaced. By then she had developed full-blown AIDS. For the next year she attended group sessions, moved to a shelter, and eventually entered a hospice not far from my house on Honey Street. We ensured that she received the best medical treatment that was available, and tried our best to keep her spirits up. The staff at the hospice and the numerous doctors we had caring for her were very supportive and extremely forthcoming in their efforts to help her and us to cope calmly and honestly with the situation. It was too late. Mama Johannah and I visited her every day, and so did Elaine. I had Mama Johannah take her food at lunchtime and dinner. Johannah was truly a pillar of strength for us during this difficult period. It was daunting for Barbara, who was calling the doctors and me regularly from Paris, trying to keep abreast of the situation. I took Elinam to meet Sybil. They bonded as though they had known each other for years. Elinam cried. I cried. Sybil tried her best to console us. It was one of the saddest moments in my life. Elinam returned to Ghana, and on September 18, Sybil died, ten days before her forty-fifth birthday. I blew my trumpet at her graveside.
Five years later, I mentioned Sybil’s misfortune in a newspaper feature interview about AIDS. Most of my maternal relatives came down on me like a ton of bricks. How could I shame the family like that? What about her children? The newspaper had sensationalized my interview tabloid-style. MY SISTER WAS KILLED BY AIDS, read the front page of the City Press, the nation’s largest weekend paper. When the furor finally died down, many AIDS organizations and people who had been through the same misfortune in their families commended me for going public. I thought that under the circumstances it had been the sensible thing to do. I was unaware that almost all my young nephews and nieces had been told that Sybil had died of pneumonia. Happily, the government has changed its stance on AIDS and is now rolling out antiretroviral drugs, having finally decided to confront the pandemic head-on. Unfortunately, one of Sybil’s daughters has turned out to be HIV positive, too.
On the upside, we have entered a new era when many prominent people are talking about their HIV status, and the public’s attitude toward the ailment is moving away from denial. We are supporting my niece in her dilemma and being as helpful as we can to ensure that she receives proper care. We hope a cure will soon be found for the dreaded monster.
In 1998 my old friend Bishop Trevor Huddleston passed away after a long illness. He had excitedly returned to South Africa in 1996 to settle, but was immediately disgusted with what he observed to be the blatantly r
acist continuation of apartheid in the attitudes of most white people. Aside from the fact that the old civil service was still in place, the social system had hardly been dented, he said, and the new administration refused to give him an audience. He was being snubbed. Huddleston was not happy about the reconciliation process; he thought that the perpetrators of past apartheid atrocities should be prosecuted and imprisoned. He went back to England reluctantly but utterly disgusted. I spent time with him while he was in South Africa. I was invited to Westminster Abbey in London for a national memorial service in his honor. There I blew my trumpet for him from the pulpit, just as I had for my sister Sybil, my father, my cousin Collins Ramusi, my niece Bontle Modise, and my childhood friend Aggrey Mbere. I never got a chance to blow the trumpet for my mother at her funeral. However, it was the first thing I did when I visited her grave in Ennerdale, a few days after I landed back in South Africa following an absence of thirty years.
At the beginning of 1999, I brought Elinam and her sons, Adam and Patrick, to South Africa. On February 10 we were married in a civil ceremony witnessed by Peter and Jean Davidson. I enrolled the boys in St. Peter’s, my alma mater (which is now called St. Martin’s). At the end of 2002, Adam graduated from St. Martin’s and is now attending Santa Monica College in Los Angeles, living with his aunt Yealla and about to enroll at the University of Southern California as a film major. Patrick graduated from St. Martin’s at the end of 2003, and intends on following the same course. They’ll be able to hang out with Selema, who shares a house in West Los Angeles with Stewart Levine’s composer/producer son, Sunny Levine. Yeah, life does repeat itself sometimes. It warms my heart to know that they will not raise as much hell as Stewart and I did when we were their age. These are neither jazz hippies nor flower children. They are seriously focused young explorers who already know what they want, with no time for the madness we swam in. When we tell them about our youth, they look at us as if to say, “What a couple of nuts you were.” I also wonder if I will ever meet my Swedish daughter. I certainly hope that happens one day.
Still Grazing Page 50