Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  By the time I was seven, I’d become fairly independent. The Zenith black-and-white screen in our apartment had been unofficially designated as my primary guardian. I had a bottomless appetite for grown-up TV. Insomnia kept me up until the wee hours and I’d watch The Late Show and The Late Late Show every night. Since I was always alert and functional during the day, no one was much concerned with the fact that I hadn’t quite figured out how to sleep.

  Most of the people in my life back then may have been constantly high, but they were pretty stylish. Coming home from school, it wasn’t unusual for me to see berets or tams, jackets with elbow patches, ascots, dickeys, turtlenecks, groovy “slacks,” highly designed cigarette holders and cases, hashish and rolling papers from all over the world, sketch pads, record albums, shoebox lids to clean the seeds from marijuana, magazines of all types, books, music manuscript paper, various sets of works and different ligatures to wrap around your arms to make the veins pop up and easier to hit with the needles. This was the paraphernalia of a junkie pad at the twilight of the fifties. Some visitors were famous artists, all were friends, and all were welcome. Once, Thelonius Monk himself came over to buy my mom’s fur coat for his girlfriend. Heroin often turns addicts into gifted salespeople. Some families go to Disneyland for fun; we went to the pawnshop. In most junkies’ wallets, the pockets where you’d expect to find family photos or business cards are instead crammed with pawn tickets.

  WE MOVED AROUND A LOT—Chinatown, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Alphabet City—but our lives first started to change when we lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Greenwich and Bethune streets, sometime in the summer of 1959. This was the last moment in my parents’ lives before junk began dictating everything about how and where they lived. Ironically, this part of New York is now the high-rent West Village, but I still associate it with the sewage-perfumed brine of the Hudson River that used to fill those cobblestoned streets. This was before America learned how to monetize geographical assets by simply renaming them, as my Grandfather Goodman and the soon-to-be-ordained-beautiful blacks in the sixties would surely applaud.

  Bobby had a round-the-clock sarcastic wit. When he was about to move us to Greenwich Street, he told Beverly that he ran a great line on the doorman. “Excuse me. Do any black people live in this building?” he inquired in a highly concerned voice.

  “Absolutely not,” proudly replied the doorman to the new tenant.

  “Well, guess what? There’s some livin’ here now.” Bobby snickered.

  I CAN STILL PICTURE life on Greenwich Street. Our brand-new French Petrol Blue Simca was parked curbside, right out front. It looked like a frowning flat-faced barracuda with its dorsal fins chopped off. It was the most unusual car in town. Our pad was in the first wave of newer buildings in the Village, most named after famous artists like Van Gogh, Cézanne, or Rembrandt. Though my folks weren’t artists, they had the Bohemian style down. Many people in the building often smelled of linseed oil and turpentine; the girls wore their hair up in buns and walked with their toes turned out, radiating grace even when they were dumping the garbage. You could look into the windows of your neighbors and see and hear composers writing show and jazz tunes at their pianos, like something out of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

  From the south corner of our block looking right was the Bell Telephone Laboratory, with an elevated railroad track that ran right through the middle of the building. Today it’s part of the High Line Park, but back then, to my eyes, it was a world within a world, complete with a private transportation system. Standing in the lobby of my building and looking across narrow, Victorian-sized Greenwich Street, I’d see slaughtered livestock being moved onto loading docks, the meat swinging from large hooks. Anyone who’s seen Rocky knows what these huge dangling headless bodies look like, but on celluloid they have no scent. In the winter it wasn’t so bad, but during the summer months, the stench was unbelievable—tons of flesh in a race against rot that the meat workers almost always lost. Today it’s still called the Meatpacking District, but back then it wasn’t an ironic name for a shiny upscale neighborhood, it was a literal description of the foul and bloody business going on. I was seven years old and almost always alone. I would sing as I explored the streets, adding an appropriate underscore to my solitary wandering. I was a boy composer and my strange and exhilarating new hood provided endless melodic and lyrical inspiration.

  I was exceptionally weird-looking back then. Super skinny. Thick glasses. And my mother dressed me like my dapper stepfather, which meant I dressed like a blue-blooded, old-money, prep-school WASP.

  I desperately tried to find friends and companions, but there were no other kids my age in our building. Other than the doorman, who was actually a cool guy, my only friend was a schoolmate named David. David’s mom was white and his father was black, an interracial combination that was a little more common than my parental situation, but still stopped traffic in 1959. David lived on the border of Little Italy, which was less than a mile from my house but seemed as far away as Big Italy. Maybe because I looked so silly, with my Jerry Lewis glasses and Tom Wolfe getups, the Italian kids near David’s place always wanted to beat the shit out of me. “Get da fuck outta ere, you fuckin’ black booger,” they’d shout. Asthma or not, I was a fast runner, and after I got over the fear of getting killed, it became a game for me. Picture me like a playful puppy running from everybody, singing songs like “Old Joe Clark” and “Run Red Run,” with oversized glasses bouncing around on my face. I was impossible to catch. Adults in Little Italy would shout things that were far worse than what the kids said. But visiting David and his family was worth it, so I ran that gauntlet every day.

  THE INTRODUCTION OF A MONKEY into our lives was the first ominous sign that my Village idyll—running from murderous Italian kids, dodging racks of rotting meat, crawling through the legs of nodding junkies—wasn’t going to last. At some point, Bobby met a woman named Daisy. In the scheme of things, Daisy isn’t all that important to this story. I don’t even remember her last name, or what she looked like. What I remember most about her was her primate companion, which was kind of out there, but I’d come to expect strange things.

  Bobby made the mistake of bringing Daisy and her pet monkey to our apartment. While the monkey explored our place, the two humans were up to a little monkey business themselves when Beverly and I unexpectedly walked in. Mom acted as if everything was perfectly normal. “Would you like me to make some dinner?” she said in an almost festive tone. Bobby was visibly unnerved by our sudden entrance, and even more by her nonchalant reaction. I was stunned to hear the normally super smooth Bobby lose his poise.

  “Uh, no thanks, babe,” he mumbled. “We were just talking, and I was about to take Daisy and her monkey downstairs and get her a taxicab. She’s got to make a few runs and then she’s gonna go uptown and do her thing.” The two of them—and the monkey—scrambled out, and when Bobby returned a few minutes later, Beverly was still completely cool, as if nothing strange had happened. “Hey, Bobby, are you ready for dinner now, baby?”

  As you might suspect, this story has a second act: Two days later Bobby came home and found Beverly in a romantic embrace with Ralph, her boss (at the time, my mom was working as an IBM keypunch operator, making a pretty good living). “Dig this shit,” he said in a low voice, pissed off but still keeping his beatnik cool and contemplatively tugging at an imaginary goatee on his clean-shaven face. “Beverly, what the fuck’s going on here?”

  “Oh, Bobby, we were just talking.”

  “Talking?” he said, his voice still a whisper. “My ass.”

  “Yes, talking, ’bout some of the same subjects you and Daisy were discussing the other day!”

  THUS BEGAN THE FIRST of many breakups that followed the monkey incident. Mom loved Bobby, but the Daisy incident really kicked her ass. So Beverly and I split Greenwich Village and moved up to the Bronx with one of her exes, a guy named Graham.

  Two years before marrying
Bobby, Mom had been with Graham, who was the father of my then one-and-a-half-year-old half brother Graham Jr., a.k.a. Bunchy, who was living with Graham’s mother, at 1313 Needham Avenue in the Bronx. Graham was one of many men who were as hooked on my mother as they were on drugs. And like the rest of them, he would do just about anything for Beverly, even after she’d dumped him for Bobby. So when she called him desperate for a place to stay after the monkey incident, he was happy to have her, even if that also meant taking in her skinny, asthmatic, nearsighted, insomniac son.

  Life at Graham’s place, a house in a desolate industrial area of the Bronx, was even lonelier than my life in the Village. Fortunately, after a few awkward weeks, my mom’s brother Freddy Boy phoned us at Graham’s with a better offer. He was the superintendent in a building on East Eighth Street and told her there was a vacancy “and it’s really cheap.”

  Since we’d been living rent-free with Graham, my mother had saved enough to make it work. Not only did Graham let her go, he helped us move in. Meanwhile, Bobby was heartsick without her; he’d been calling her constantly, begging for forgiveness. Bobby and Beverly loved each other madly, so everybody, even Graham, knew they’d eventually get back together, which is exactly what happened. And that’s how my mother, Bobby, and I wound up in Alphabet City, in a railroad flat on East Eighth Street, between Avenues B and C, in Freddy Boy’s tenement building. We were less than two miles east of our groovy pad on the West Side, but we might as well have been light-years away.

  Most of the residents of Alphabet City were Puerto Rican, including Uncle Freddy Boy’s new wife, Bienvenida, whom we called Bambi. Suddenly I had a whole new Puerto Rican family. My new kinfolk spoke Spanglish, especially on the phone. “Hola, Margie, when you go to the store tráigame un paquete de Kools, y un container de leche. Si, para mi. For real, no foolin’. I changed to Kools last week. OK, bye. Muchas gracias.” I only understood half of what they were saying, but I was used to figuring out what adults were talking about. Bambi and her Puerto Rican friends and relatives were sexier than any people I’d ever met. I was eight and obviously didn’t know the full meaning of the word “sexy” yet, but in retrospect, I’m sure that’s what it was. They were exciting and they made me feel funny in a strange way, but it was good funny. I was always happy to be around them. Much later on in life, I’d learn that the sexual atmosphere I’d detected as a kid came from all the actual sex that was going on.

  IT WAS DURING THAT PERIOD when I joined the Cub Scouts, which back then had a strong presence in the hood. I remained a scout until my early teens. After-school programs were the most solid part of my unsteady life. My uniform told the world I belonged to a collective where helping little old ladies and blind people cross the street was a daily duty, a movement that stood for certain values. They used to say, “Scouting is all about the boy you are and the man you will become.” Looking back, it’s hard to say they weren’t right. Almost everything I’ve ever done passionately is a variation on the platoon consciousness of scouting. I liked helping people and my folks were proud of me.

  I was also proud of both my parents. Being in such close proximity to these cool people made me feel cool too, or as close as an eight-year-old Boy Scout can get to it. They exposed me to such disparate things as Shel Silverstein, Gahan Wilson, Lenny Bruce, sexology, Mikhail Botvinnik, Go (a Japanese board game), and the Village Vanguard, which featured the top jazz artists in the world. I knew about all these things and more, and I could discuss them in depth. It was an exciting education in progressive thinking. But it was music I loved in an all-encompassing, obsessive way. One day for elementary school show-and-tell, when other kids brought dolls, model cars, and toys, I brought Nancy Wilson and Billie Holiday records to the class.

  (Illustration credit 1.1)

  I would have been happy to just learn from my parents and their friends. But the law said I had to go to real school too and I vividly remember the day my folks enrolled me in the local public school in Alphabet City. People were pointing at us, and some were even gasping. There was a lot of chatter among the students, but all I could decipher through the din was, “Oh shit, his father is white!” I’d already experienced my share of racial tension, but until then the difference between Bobby and me hadn’t had any negative effect. I’d never for a minute thought there was anything weird, and certainly nothing wrong, with Bobby being white. But that day I realized that other people actually found something shocking about our situation.

  They didn’t know the half of it—and neither did I. Bobby was falling apart. For years he’d managed to stay highly functional, on the surface, at least. He had worked at a preppy clothing store on the northwest corner of Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street, called Casual Aire. It was directly opposite the infamous Women’s House of Detention, New York City’s notorious all-female prison. On any given day outside the House of D, passersby were treated to the taunts and screams of the inmates, but Bobby got nothing but compliments and whistles. The things they promised to do to him when they got out were so graphic my ears still burn when I think about them. To their credit, they were equal-opportunity harassers, and offered the same services to Beverly.

  Bobby’s natural sense of cool gave him a leg up on everybody else, and that extended to the clothing business. He really knew his stuff, and he was so with it that no customer dared disagree with his grooming or fashion recommendations. He scored hefty commissions that kept us in our righteous West Village pad and kept him well supplied with drugs. But it didn’t last. By the time I was enrolled in public school, Bobby had more or less stopped working and was basically just living to get high.

  On Thanksgiving Day 1959, I came home to our place in Alphabet City after a fierce game of tag in Tompkins Square Park, exhausted and ready to feast. As I rounded the corner, I saw a handful of policemen wheeling my stepfather out of our building on a gurney. He looked dead. He was blue. He wasn’t breathing, even though they had an oxygen mask on his face. My mother was crying hysterically; all the people in the neighborhood were on the street or watching from windows. In those days the police did the emergency ambulance work for the city hospitals. So even though the police weren’t there because of a crime, it still looked like a major tactical law enforcement operation.

  And in a way it was. I had been around junkies since I was born, and I’d seen their rituals for some time now that my eighth birthday was a couple months behind me. Heroin was always sold in elaborately decorated packets, making them traceable to a source. If Bobby died from a bag of a Puerto Rican or black dealer’s scag, there would be a serious investigation, because he was white, and being white seemed to make a difference. I could hear everybody talking about it openly, because nobody knew I was the white guy’s stepson. How weird was that? In my eight years of life, a few of the junkies around me had died, but they were all black. “Oh shit, his father’s white.” I finally got it, what the other little kids already knew: So many things in our lives had to do with race. I suddenly realized that when you were talking about anything, if you switched the race of the person, everything looked completely different.

  Over the next few days, I stealthily eavesdropped on my neighbors. Even though Bobby, Beverly, and I knew what our relationship meant to us, it apparently meant something completely different to others, family and friends included. Who was right and who was wrong? I concluded everyone was both—from a certain point of view. I was only eight, but that day marked the birth of my racial consciousness.

  Fortunately, Bobby lived. He came home from the hospital a few days later, and I thought life would get back to normal. Looking back on it, though, the day Bobby came home was the day our lives changed forever.

  SHORTLY AFTER BOBBY’S RETURN, my mother developed an interest in heroin. Up to that point, she’d never done hard drugs, despite being surrounded by addicts, first and foremost Bobby. But these addicts were her lovers and friends, all of whom, like Bobby, were wildly interesting and original people, the kind of people Be
verly needed to surround herself with. And somehow, some way, Beverly, even though she was just a kid herself, had protected us from all these addicts running in and out of our lives.

  But this new interest in heroin was just a ruse on my mother’s part. She thought if she got high with Bobby, she could wean him from the habit. When Bobby overdosed, he was very thin, and Mom thought the problem might be that he was shooting too much for his body weight. So she’d say, “Can I share half of that bag, baby?” whenever Bobby got started on his complex preparatory ritual for shooting up, which culminated in him tying up his arm and shooting up with a syringe. Beverly, on the other hand, would pretend to snort her half in the bathroom, but instead flush the scag down the toilet. This deception worked for quite a while. She’d been around junkies for a long time and could imitate their mannerisms to a tee. So she kept up this charade, vanishing into the bathroom, flushing away half of Bobby’s fix, and then faking a junkie nod for the rest of the day. She was afraid if she didn’t, Bobby would OD again, and this time die for real.

  One day, while preparing his ritual, Bobby barged into the bathroom to ask my mother for a cigarette lighter. When he opened the door, he caught her in the middle of her ritual, flushing his precious junk down the toilet.

  “This is the first time I’ve flushed!” she said when she was busted. Bobby didn’t buy it. But shrewdly testing her story, he said, “Well, don’t worry, you can still get high if you need it. We’ll do it together and I’ll show you how to get higher with less junk. Don’t snort it, shoot it, babe.”

  Bobby assembled the homemade syringe. And this time the nod and slowed speech she’d been affecting were no longer an act. It wasn’t long before they were both getting straight every day.