Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman

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Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman Page 14

by Galadrielle Allman


  “Donna, where have you been? Have you been smoking? There is a curfew! You should have called! Do you have any idea what you have put us through?”

  Her father boomed louder, “While you live in my house, you will live by my rules!”

  “Then maybe I shouldn’t live here!” she answered, so quickly and firmly she surprised herself.

  Just like that, Donna turned on her heel and left the dark house with nothing but a little purse over her shoulder. She walked down the hill past all the silent, shadowed houses, their lawns damp from sprinklers. She was so angry, she felt like screaming. As she turned back to look toward home, her mother’s car rolled slowly toward her, Tommie Jean’s face peering through the windshield. Donna stepped quickly behind a neighbor’s thick hedge and crouched down until the car rounded the corner.

  She ran in her high-heeled sandals straight down to the gas station at the foot of the hill, swearing she would never go back again. She called Dennis from a pay phone but he didn’t answer. She knew she had to stay off the street because of the curfew, so she hid in the Shell station ladies’ restroom. She leaned against the wall by the towel dispenser, then sat balanced on the dirty ledge next to the sink with her legs crossed and waited, looking slowly at each item in her purse, counting out meager change in her palm. She thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., and tried to remember something he had said, some part of a speech she had heard on the radio, but nothing would come. It seemed even more outrageous that her parents were being so unfeeling, on this night of all nights.

  A couple of hours later, Dennis finally picked up the phone in the boardinghouse hallway, sounding dreamy and odd, and agreed to pick her up. He swung his big car around the gas pumps and stopped right in front of the restroom door, and Donna jumped in and slid close to him on the bench seat. They drove back to Gaslight Square slowly and carefully with headlights off, rolling through the locked-down city like a shadow.

  Donna stayed with Dennis for almost a month. Dennis took her to school in the mornings, and after classes, she took a bus to her job as a cashier and stock girl at Pier 1 Imports. Her mother visited her at work a couple of times and tried to convince her to come home, but she wouldn’t. When Donna went home to pick up some of her things, she didn’t say a word to anyone. She felt like a thief in her own closet.

  Dennis’s room had a high ceiling and scant furniture, just a narrow bed, dusty dresser, and wooden chair that looked decades old. He owned nothing but a couple of shirts and some jeans, art supplies he kept in a dented toolbox, and a few canvases leaning against the wall. The room’s air was stale. One weak bulb lit the room. The single window looked out over a row of the old gas streetlights the neighborhood was named for, shining on the sidewalks where hip kids walked back and forth all night long. Donna felt time slow down and open up, unfurling empty hours belonging only to them. She wanted to walk outside into the tumult of the street and stay there until the morning, just to feel the truth that no one was watching or waiting for her.

  Donna and Dennis slept side by side in the little bed, which she had never done with a boy before. Lying there in their cotton underwear, kissing slowly, she somehow felt he was out of reach. This was the problem with Dennis: Donna couldn’t get close to him. She couldn’t catch and keep his eye. Sex wasn’t even a thought between them; she wasn’t ready and he wasn’t asking. He had other interests. Dennis was a drug addict.

  He and his friends shot paregoric, a tincture of opium. You could get it at drugstores, although they limited the number of bottles you could buy at one time. You were supposed to sip it in small doses for upset stomachs. Donna sat with Dennis in a stranger’s dim kitchen and watched him cook down dark liquid in a little saucepan to concentrate the opium and burn off the camphor. Then he wrapped a rubber tube around his arm and slid a needle smoothly into his vein. She watched his expression slip down, then his body follow in a slump. He was more gone than he’d be if he walked out the door; his eyes were unseeing, his back bent low. Donna was alone and could only look at him and wonder what he felt like inside.

  When Tommie Jean leaned over the counter at Pier 1 and told Donna she had to be careful, Donna worried for a minute that she had intuited something about the drugs. Then Donna realized with horror that her mom thought she was having sex. She had never talked to her mother about such intimate things, and under the fluorescent store lights with a counter between them, she was mortified by her mother’s intensity. It was awful to imagine what her father must think, and in a strange way, her desire to stay with Dennis ended right then. The fragile shell around her new life broke and the fear she pushed away flooded in. This wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted music and dancing and the sun on her face—she wanted her freedom—but she wasn’t going to lose herself to get it. So, she went home. If Dennis noticed and minded, she couldn’t tell. He just let her go without a word.

  Months later, on the day Donna graduated from high school, Dennis finally called her. She was out with her friends and missed the call. She guessed it was sort of a big deal that he called, but she felt different now. She was really over him. She did keep one of his paintings hanging in her room, a portrait of a man in a red velvet cloak, the shadows of the soft folds of fabric rendered in the most amazing way.

  In the summer of 1968, Donna’s father gave her his VW Beetle. She really got her look together. She bought a pair of knee-high boots and a peach satin minidress and round wire-rimmed sunglasses.

  And then she met Duane.

  (photo credit 11.1)

  Donna went to see the Jefferson Airplane at Kiel Auditorium on July 23, 1968, with her friend Joey Marshall, a musician who played guitar in a band called the Truth. She was hoping it was a date, but it was hard to tell; he was so friendly to everyone. The show was fun, all trippy lights and swaying dancers in the crowd, and it was cool to see Grace Slick, a girl singer for a change, and hear her bold voice thundering out of that tiny body.

  As they stepped through the crowd outside, a guy with long red hair leaned out of a car window and called out, “Joey!” He was riding shotgun through the parking lot with Jack Davis, a disc jockey from KSHE. Donna stood back and watched Joey walk up to the car. Joey was so damn cute with bright blue eyes and big white teeth. He came back to her just beaming, saying Duane had invited them to a gathering at Jack’s house. A gathering: It sounded very sophisticated.

  “Who is Duane?” Donna asked.

  “He’s a great guy, and a great guitar player. You’ll love him,” Joey said.

  Jack served them cold champagne as they sat around his living room and talked.

  She could see the effect Duane had on the men in the room. He had a passionate way of expressing himself, but he was very calm, too, and they listened to him and responded with smiles and silent nods. Duane told road tales about his band in his warm southern accent. He was lively and funny, chain-smoking, relaxing with his arm across the back of the sofa, and then he’d talk solemnly about the commitment musicians make to one another. Donna had never seen anyone captivate a room the way Duane did.

  She went to use the bathroom toward the end of the night, when the champagne had run dry. She wiped away the dark shadows of mascara under her eyes and ran a comb through her hair. When she opened the door, Duane was standing right there. They were toe to toe and eye to eye. Had he been waiting for her?

  “Hey,” he said, and smiled. She smiled back but she couldn’t find her voice.

  “We’re going to Forest Park. Can you come?” His eyes were so keen, she felt like he was touching her. She nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  “Well, okay!” he said.

  They all walked together, Jack and a girl in a little sack dress, Duane and Joey talking with their heads down, Donna close behind in her high-heeled sandals. As soon as they hit the grass, Duane ran over to a giant red oak tree with a few low branches and climbed into its arms like a monkey, the heels of his boots just visible beneath a curtain of leaves. Donna sat on the damp grass and watched
his feet swinging there, smoke from his cigarette floating out between his boots, and she thought she heard him whistle a little. She smiled to herself and watched the sky pinkening up with the coming sun.

  When she ran into him in Gaslight Square a few days later, he smiled so big it made her blush. They had an easy companionability right away. He pointed out the clubs where he had played and said he’d take her to hear some live music soon, if she’d like. She told him she would love that and smiled. He took her hand. His warm palm was hard with calluses.

  “Do you know the song ‘Classical Gas’? The other day I watched my little sister Laura riding a horse at the stable, and that song came on the radio. She had sun in her hair and the horse was stepping so beautifully, it was just beautiful …,” Donna said.

  “Sorry, ma’am. No requests,” he joked.

  Joey came bounding across the street toward them and Donna dropped Duane’s hand when she saw him, then felt bad for doing it. She gave Duane a ride back to the apartment downtown where he was staying with his band. He invited her in, but she said, “Next time.”

  Next time, they lay on a bed and kissed in an apartment where Duane was staying with his cousin Jo Jane. He told her she would meet his brother soon, and she might decide she liked him better because he was a real looker. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. When she did meet Gregg, there was no question in her mind that Duane was the one for her, and it touched her that he had worried.

  Hour Glass played at Kiel Auditorium, opening for Iron Butterfly and Janis Joplin. The gig ran long and the promoter ended the show before Janis’s set was over, so she announced that they would play for free in Forest Park the next day. Duane called Donna and invited her. Janis’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, set up their gear under the archways of the World’s Fair Pavilion and a small crowd began to gather. It felt like a secret show for those in the know, and Donna was impressed that Duane knew the band and was greeted so warmly.

  The members of Hour Glass started calling her “the girl.” They couldn’t remember her name, but soon she was always by Duane’s side. Duane asked Jo Jane what she thought of Donna. “She seems different,” she said, and he replied, “She is.”

  Jo Jane was renting an apartment in St. Louis because she had fallen in love with a man who was working in town. She planned to be there for the next few months, so her cousins and their friends made themselves comfortable. Jo Jane’s roommate wasn’t crazy about all the guys crashing with them, but Jo Jane simply proclaimed, “Love me, love my band!” Waking up to find the boys sprawled out everywhere felt like home. She made them hot dogs and Kool-Aid for lunch and it was like being a kid again.

  Gregg had brought his girlfriend Stacey with him from Los Angeles, and they fought all the time. Jo Jane and Duane sat on a vinyl couch under the window and heard grumbling and whining through the closed bedroom door. Then Stacey would march out the front door, clomp down the stairs, and head out into the street. Gregg would trail behind, slipping a leg into his blue jeans with a big sigh, careful not to meet his brother’s eye. Duane and Jo Jane flipped around to lean on the windowsill, trying to see the couple below them on the sidewalk through the branches of the trees. Soon they’d hear Stacey’s little heels on the stairs, marching back up. She’d push open the door with her hip, her arms busily entangled with Gregg’s, and they’d head unsteadily back into the bedroom, where Gregg would kick the door shut with a bare foot.

  Duane smirked at Jo Jane and she rolled her eyes at him. “Poor Greggie,” she sighed.

  “It’s his own damn fault,” Duane answered.

  After Hour Glass played that night at Pepe’s, Stacey made soulful eyes at Gregg and said, “When Gregg is singing onstage, I know he is singing just for me.”

  Duane fixed her with a piercing look and growled, “He sings for himself.”

  Duane took Donna to East St. Louis to see Albert King play in a club that seemed to have once been an old movie theater. He wanted her to hear King play “The Sky Is Crying.” She had never been to this rough part of the city before, but Duane navigated the terrain like it was his own neighborhood. She watched Duane’s face as he watched King play. His huge dark hands tenderly fluttered over the neck of his V-shaped guitar, sweat beading on his forehead as he followed each phrase he sang with a keening run that seemed to second his emotions. Duane’s face was wide-open and winsome. He looked like he was falling in love with every note.

  Duane took her to Pepe’s during the day when it was empty and the owner nodded to him when they walked in. Duane took his guitar case up on the stage and sat on a stool. He played her Tim Buckley’s beautiful song “Once I Was,” raising his eyes to her as he sang out into the open room.

  Once I was a lover

  And I searched behind your eyes for you

  Soon there’ll be another

  To tell you I was just a lie

  And sometimes I wonder

  Just for a while

  Will you remember me?

  His voice was strong and full of feeling, drifting in and out of key in moments, earnest and pure. He was blowing her mind.

  Standing beside her Volkswagen Bug, he said, “You’re a good sidekick.” He kissed her forehead and gave her a harmonica in a little box marked “Key of G.” Then he was gone, on to another town and another gig. Letters began to arrive, marking the months they were apart. In neat, even handwriting on motel stationery, Duane joked that he should marry the heir to the Holiday Inn chain to secure his band a permanent discount. He told Donna of his travels and said he really missed her, and she began to open her heart.

  Duane had asked her to come see his band play in Nashville. Donna had a job proofreading checks at a printing plant. When she told her boss she needed time off, he made an off-color joke about coming back to work pregnant. It made her mad, but she knew she would share Duane’s bed for the first time, and she did want to be careful. She made an appointment to see her family doctor, a pediatrician she had seen all her life. When she told him she needed birth control pills, he asked, “Are you getting married, Donna?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you discussed this with your parents?”

  “No,” she answered, more quietly.

  With two questions, he denied her birth control pills and ended the discussion. She left his office with hot cheeks. Sitting in her parked car, she cried in frustration.

  Duane sent her a ticket for the first plane trip she had ever taken. Her life was expanding around her, opening up like the red rose on the front of the greeting card he had sent her on Valentine’s Day. He picked her up in the band’s van at the airport and took her back to a friend’s cabin where the band was staying. As soon as they were with everyone, his attention was drawn away from her. She sat quietly and watched him laughing and playing his acoustic guitar. Donna felt herself an observer fading into the background.

  Everyone rode to their gig in the van, focused on the show ahead. At the Briar Patch, she sat alone by the stage and waited for the music to start. They played so late, she could barely keep her eyes open. She rested her head on her folded arms on the little cocktail table beside the stage and the club’s owner himself tapped her gently on the shoulder. “Miss, you need to sit up, please. There is no sleeping in the club.”

  They made love for the first time that night, awkwardly fumbling while the guys in the band slept in the next room. She wasn’t exactly disappointed, just confused. She wanted it to happen. She wanted to feel close to him and she did, but she wasn’t sure what would happen between them now. She wondered if he had realized it was her first time. She only bled a little.

  She went back to St. Louis feeling uneasy and Duane continued down the road traveling and playing music.

  My mother gives me little moments in soft focus and I can’t get them any clearer in my mind. I want to know what they talked about. I want to watch her dark eyes change when she sees him coming toward her with his swaggering gait. I want to see him sitting at the li
ttle booth in my grandmother’s kitchen and hear him call Tommie “ma’am” and make her smile. I want to hear his laugh and see her blushing, but I know Donna wants to keep something for herself. She closes the subject coyly, saying she will tell me anything, I just have to ask. There are no words to ask her for what I want. I simply want more.

  I never realized how quickly it all happened. My parents met and changed the paths of their lives in a matter of months. I thought there must be many stories about their time together before I was conceived, but I had heard them all. It occurred to me with a shock: They were really strangers. When I suggest this to my mother, she bristles and says, “Why does everyone always want to count the days we spent together? Haven’t you been in love? Don’t you know how important every moment is? How infinite that time feels?”

  Duane and Gregg went back to Florida to regroup and figure out their next move. Paul and Johnny returned to their homes in Alabama, ready to settle into the comfort of steady studio work and family life. All the songs they played together, all the exciting possibilities the last two years had brought had come to nothing. It was a very low moment, captured vividly in a letter Jerry wrote to Jo Jane.

  Daytona Beach, Fla.

  Sept. 25, 1968

  Dear Jo Jane,

  Thank you for your letters. I always appreciate them. I have tried to find the time, energy and solitude to write, and now I have the time and solitude, but out of energy.

  I will fill you in briefly on what’s happening and I do apologize if I repeat what has already been said.

  Your mother’s vacation here ended on a Sat. and Erskine and family arrived to help escort her to the airport. Erskine and family left about 9 or 10PM Sunday nite and Duane, Gregg, Bob and Pete arrived 3AM Monday.

  They were really down. Had just completed worst gigs ever and were on the outs with Paul. So the first few days Paul was let out, Johnny was asked to stay, but declined and in less than a week Mr. and Mrs. Carr had Pete re-enrolled in school—Daytona Adult Classes. The only true thing that came out of that shuffle is that Pete is tired of playing bass. Pete’s a good guitar lead and has one ambition, to play better than Duane and maybe he will; but Duane has been a very good teacher to him with no regrets—Johnny and Paul were no surprise—Pete was—to them and me. Of course I got it first from the old lady in an off hand way. I figure Pete will go to school until he finds a good tight group to split with doing lead.

 

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