Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  And me? I was the oldest eight-year-old on earth.

  two

  Nothing to Fear but the

  Fear of Fear Itself

  CHRISTMAS WAS COMING AND IT WAS EXCEPTIONALLY COLD. I WAS depressed because our family was completely disintegrating: Bobby and Beverly were using almost all the time. That was plenty for any kid to contend with, but to fully understand the depths of my depression, and my constant sense of loneliness, we need to briefly turn the clock back a few more years.

  I was born with a number of congenital medical conditions, the worst of which was asthma. Asthma dominates my earliest and worst childhood memories: Every high-pitched breath I took used to sound like I was blowing through the top of a torn balloon; simply breathing made me feel like a carnival strongman was bear-hugging my ribs. My respiratory pathways burned from extreme swelling; the pain was beyond excruciating. Inhaling the smallest amount of dust or car exhaust would send me into a panic: Will this be my last breath? My body would heave and writhe like a tortured house cat trying to cough up a fur ball. When I finally dislodged the blockage by coughing up phlegm, the whole ordeal would start all over again.

  When I was about five and a half, my asthma got so bad that Beverly had no choice but to put me in a hospital oxygen tent, which meant a stay at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, where we lived with her mother.

  The hospital ward bustled, but in my tent there was nothing but silence. The enclosure was about three feet high by three feet wide, and not much longer than my normal bed. I’ll never forget the confining chrome retaining bars, which were always pulled up, even though I was no longer a baby in danger of rolling off. I got fevers all the time, and my caretakers regularly felt my forehead to track whether I was hot or cold, even though the temperature in the tent was kept at subtropical levels.

  Living in the confines of that vinyl keep, I felt contaminated and worthless, an isolated island in an overcrowded sea of staffers, patients, and their visitors. The smell inside was strange, almost like what you’d imagine the inside of an alien spacecraft to smell like. I felt as though I was a human specimen in an experiment sanctioned by my family. I guess the tent was supposed to feel less restrictive than wearing an oxygen mask. That didn’t mean much to me at the time: Sure, I could move, but I was still imprisoned within the perimeter of a clunky Saran-Wrapped bed. I’d sing to myself to survive the loneliness.

  WHEN I FINALLY returned home after a few weeks, I’d developed an unintended side effect: I now sang to comfort myself when I was lonely, and I started to depend less on my family for security. As much as I wanted to be around them, especially my mother, I believed it would never last. For some reason, Mom always seemed to be giving me away. I felt like I wasn’t good enough to keep. I remember improvising tunes and holding on to her leg, riding on it while she walked around. Sometimes it was just a game; other times I was holding on for dear life. I never wanted her to leave me alone—ever.

  Meanwhile, my asthma continued to get worse. I needed medical care often, and much of the time I was tended to by a great man called Dr. Green. Dr. Green’s brother just happened to be the famed composer Adolph Green, who wrote “I Won’t Grow Up,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Just in Time,” and scores of other songs in my personal repertory. Dr. Green was a kind and caring physician whose practice was dedicated to mostly black and poor Jewish patients in the Bronx. There was a link between black and Jewish culture in the city back then; we knew the details of each other’s rituals and idiosyncrasies. Dr. Green felt like part of our family. He tended to the Glanzrocks as well as the Goodmans.

  But even the great Dr. Green couldn’t cure my asthma, and one day, after yet another attack that resulted in convulsions, things descended to a new low.

  “How you doin’ today, Nile?” the doc asked in his comfortingly familiar Bronx Yiddish accent. “We’re gonna fix you up real nice,” he said. “Say ‘Aaaah.’ ” Dr. Green stuck a huge piece of wood in my mouth, the bone-dry tongue depressor depriving me of my already limited air supply. This time, though, his tone had an edge I’d never heard before. He shook his head again and turned to my mother. “His asthma attacks are coming more frequently now,” he said to her, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to send your boy to a convalescent home.”

  AS UNCOMFORTABLE AND FRIGHTENING as this news was, I didn’t freak out. I’d become quite the little stoic. At that point in my life, the injections that made most kids cry didn’t bother me. I was developing a very high threshold for pain.

  And so it was that my bags were packed and I was off yet again. Only this time my destination was a home for convalescent boys.

  The home had a turn-of-the-century feel with a little Dick Van Dyke Show thrown in. You could picture people picnicking on its pastoral grounds, playing croquet. Boys rolling hoops with sticks and men on high-wheeled bicycles would have been right at home, too. Only the gazebo for the barbershop quartet was missing.

  But looks can be deceiving. Once you climbed the series of steep steps and passed through the waiting room doors, it became clear that this was a first-class facility, with cutting-edge technology. To a loving parent, the atmosphere was reassuring. Your child was in the very best of hands.

  When I was dropped off, my stoic’s mask dropped. I didn’t realize my mother wasn’t staying. I was, of course, wildly uneasy about being left alone again. I threw a tantrum. I was hysterical. I cried so violently, it took almost the entire staff to get me under control.

  But once I settled down, I wound up bonding with the kids there more than anyone I’d befriended in my short life. We were almost always laughing when we weren’t coughing from our chronic illnesses. We enjoyed a kind of foxhole camaraderie, far from home, thrown in with strangers, battling for our lives. Playing and fun were our weapons. We had a lot of freedom to roam the expansive grounds, which extended over many acres. Compared to the crowded streets of the Lower East Side or the South Bronx, it was like having our own planet.

  For meals we marched to the mess hall, which looked exactly like the dining room at Hogwarts in Harry Potter films, minus the floating candles. Most of the kids at the home were older than me, but we traveled as one large group. To a five-year-old skinny asthmatic kid, the thirteen-year-olds and the caretakers were like giants with loud, frightening basso voices. The caretakers made us sing while we marched:

  “God is great

  God is good

  And we thank Him for our food

  By His hands

  We all are fed

  Give us this day our daily bread

  Ahhh-men”

  My intellectual development blossomed at the home. I quickly learned how to read like a much older kid, almost at an eighth-grade level, something that would greatly improve my odds for survival when I went back to my nineteen-year-old mother in the South Bronx.

  And beyond reading, the institute’s old rabbit-eared black-and-white television played a huge role in my development. Just like when I was back home with Beverly, the tube molded my concept of the world. There was no such thing as age-appropriate viewing. If you wanted to watch it—Howdy Doody, You Asked for It, Popeye, Burns and Allen, Frankenstein, Dragnet, Charlie Chan—you could watch it. If we didn’t understand something at first, it wasn’t long before we’d figure it out. Soon we were conversant in current events, geography, drama, horror, comedy—even in its subtle forms, like satire. We got almost all the jokes between George and Gracie, as well as the ones Popeye said under his breath. In one episode Olive Oyl was being romanced by a suave dancer who taught her a new Brazilian dance called the samba. When Olive summoned Popeye to the dance floor, he said under his breath, “Uh, I don’t do no Sambo dancing.” It was racial, it was funny, and we got it.

  (Illustration credit 2.1)

  We knew where Brazil was, and that LSMFT stood for “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco!” We knew that what we were seeing was entertainment and information. It was making us smarter, and it made us want more. We were like early cy
berpunks, and even if our process of absorption was considerably slower, the knowledge in the TV box eventually became the knowledge in our heads.

  ON VISITING DAYS they’d bring us kids out to a common meeting area that was decorated like Terrytoon Circus meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse. My mother never missed a visit, but she only saw some of the home. For instance, she never saw the room where I slept. I’m not even sure she ever met our caretaker, a freckled, rotund, and somewhat odd-smelling man whose name I can’t remember. Even if she had met him, I doubt she would have had the slightest idea that this man, so deeply entrusted with our care, was the snake in our Eden.

  At bedtime the caretaker would scream, “Lights out!” in his scratchy voice. All the rooms on our floor would go pitch black. Within a few minutes, the silence would be broken by the sound of a kid coughing, choking, or gagging. First one kid, then another. I couldn’t see anything because they removed my glasses at bedtime, but under the coughing I’d hear the caretaker traveling from one of the small dormitory-like rooms to the next. His hoarse voice would whisper, “This is what you’re supposed to do.” The terrifying darkness hid his whereabouts and kept me from seeing what he was actually doing, but the sounds revealed what my eyes couldn’t perceive: He was putting his penis in a kid’s mouth. The coughing and whispering went on for what felt like an eternity. And then, in an instant, it would stop, and like magic the caretaker would be asleep. We’d know he was asleep because we’d hear him snoring.

  Sometimes he’d wake up and start bothering another kid. As long as the lights were out, I could never relax or fall asleep. I’d stay awake every single night until the dawn light illuminated the room enough for me to see there was no one lurking. Only then would I sleep until “wake-up,” which was about two hours later. During the day, we’d all talk about the bedtime incidents. We were terrified of him. His loud voice could make us cry in the day, but his nocturnal whispering frightened us even more. I don’t remember him ever touching me. I’ve often asked myself, How can I remember the details of these incidents so vividly if it didn’t happen to me, too? I only remember trying to get my mother to understand what was going on. I’d try to paint her a picture. The problem was that at five and a half years old I lacked the vocabulary required to make her understand.

  “I want to leave this place please, Beverly,” I’d say.

  “No, Pud, you have to stay here.”

  “But why?”

  The doctors had told her it was the best thing for me. So life at the home went on.

  Eventually I got as well as I could, and they sent me back to the South Bronx. When I finally returned home, my mother noticed I had developed an unnaturally heightened fear of the dark. Actually, I was terrified. I haven’t slept through the night since.

  BACK IN THE CITY, I found myself again in the daily care of my nineteen-year-old mother. To somewhat understand what Mom was like, it’s instructive to hear a story I’ve heard since my earliest memories, of the albino woman who nearly adopted me. I might well have grown up as “Gregory,” if not for the determination of Beverly Goodman.

  Mom was a junior high school student when she got pregnant with me. Though it wasn’t clear what law she’d broken, the New York City school system shipped her off to a prison ward/reform school on Welfare Island. After she’d delivered the baby, it was understood that she would give it away, which is how I ended up in the care of the albino woman, who for some reason couldn’t have children of her own.

  What no one had counted on was Beverly’s strong maternal instinct. She decided to get a job instead of returning to school. Since she no longer went to school, she didn’t have to abide by their rules. She had to convince her own mother to get me back. Beverly’s mother’s name was Alice Clarice Goodman, but everybody called her Goodie. Her kind and loving nature fit her nickname, but no matter how nice she was, I always felt like I was taking care of her when I was in her company. Mentally, Goodie was not much more than a child herself.

  She was born blind as the result of a serious venereal disease her father had transmitted to her mother. It took some time to gain her eyesight, impairing her early ability to learn. As a young girl, she also contracted rheumatic fever, which resulted in the worst form of Sydenham’s chorea, or St. Vitus’s dance, a neurological disorder characterized by aimless involuntary movements of the arms, legs, trunk, and facial muscles. In Goodie’s case this meant muscular weakness, frequent stumbling and falling, slurred speech, difficulty concentrating, and emotional instability.

  One day she found herself alone with her cousin’s boyfriend, Fredrick Goodman. He raped her and she got pregnant. His family made him do the right thing and insisted he marry her. It was around that time she started to gain control of her muscles and started to learn at a quicker pace. In those days they believed hormonal changes due to pregnancy could positively affect people with SD. We now know it more often reverses itself with aging.

  She was getting brighter and becoming a much better mother, both at a quicker pace. Goodie had a strong sense of right and wrong, and she always leaned toward right. She and Beverly thought it was wrong to give away the baby. It was only a matter of time before Goodie, Beverly, and the authorities were knocking on the albino woman’s door. Back then mothers had very powerful custodial rights. Sadly, the albino woman had already completely accepted me as her son and even named me Gregory. The retrieval was not going to be easy.

  When my mother finally got her hands on me, and was leaving the woman’s house with me firmly in her arms, the woman fell to her hands and knees and started kissing my mother’s feet. “You’re so young and so beautiful … you could have children anytime you wanted,” she reasoned. When that didn’t work, she wrapped her arms around my mother’s legs so she couldn’t walk away. She was crying hysterically, pleading, “Take all of my money. I’ll give you anything you want, but don’t take Gregory. Please, don’t take my son.” Of course, my mother kept moving and never looked back. But from that point on, I was forever to be known as Nile Gregory Rodgers.

  My mom continued to call me Gregory because I seemed to respond to the name. But my paternal grandma, Lenora, never did. She called me Junior. Though Beverly never married her son (and my biological father) Nile, Lenora—or Nora, as she was called by almost everyone—treated her like a daughter. And Nora came into Beverly’s life at a propitious moment. Goodie’s husband suddenly divorced her when she supported Beverly getting her baby back. Nora more than any force on earth is responsible for the turbo-charged development of Bev’s personality and values. She was very different from Goodie.

  Lenora had a classical education, was well versed in Latin and extremely bright. She was like Josephine Baker meets Clarence Darrow, with Pearl Bailey and a little Rosa Parks sprinkled on top. She was a tough cookie and had an unmatched instinct for survival. She took Beverly under her wing as her apprentice. And Beverly was starstruck around Nora—this was no ordinary mother-in-law.

  Nora taught my mother how to use men. She did not censor her feelings or her philosophy. She hated men, and felt they’d earned it. Her father had raped her older sister for years, which resulted in a pregnancy. After Nora’s sister delivered her baby girl, whom she named Naomi, a Hebrew name meaning gratitude, she committed suicide. Baby Naomi lived in foster care until she came of legal age, at which point she went to live with her aunt Lenora, who treated her more like a daughter than the half sister she was. Lenora’s love for her couldn’t save Naomi from whatever god-awful nightmares must have plagued her. She spent most of her life in and out of state hospitals, suffering from extreme depression that required shock treatments. She finally died at a relatively young age in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Lenora couldn’t save Naomi, but she did everything she could to try and save her own sons. As much as she hated men, she loved her boys. More than she loved her sons, she loved me, her one and only grandson, Nile Rodgers Jr. (She overlooked the Gregory part of my name.) She adored me. She gave me everything she possibl
y could. I knew Lenora would lay down her life for me, and do it with a smile on her face.

  Meanwhile, Lenora’s own two sons were already disappointments. Her eldest son, Demetrius, was a musician and wasn’t motivated to do much more than sing, get high, wear cool clothes, and get laid. Her youngest, Nile, also a musician, was also mainly interested in playing drums, getting high (he was a heroin addict with a daily habit), putting on his glad rags, and pursuing females—including Beverly, the mother of his child.

  Now Lenora had one more shot at getting it right: She had me. Maybe I would turn out to be a better man.

  LENORA’S DEVOTION TO ME was trumped only by her devotion to Catholicism. But she was no stiff either. She could drink any man under the table. Her favorite libation was Chivas Regal. She had a rum keg hanging on the wall that was split down the middle. It opened into a bar, complete with Art Deco glasses and a chrome martini-mixing bottle. She would frequently ask me to pour her “a taste,” and I loved playing bartender. She was a missionary who also happened to be a Lindy Hopper. I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and she was equally comfortable wearing either hat. And, brother, let me tell you, be it pillbox or full-on Ascot Races bonnet, she always sported a stylish chapeau. My earliest memory of her was the day she gave me Elvis Presley’s recording of the Otis Blackwell song “Blue Suede Shoes.” She also gave me the shoes to go with it, along with a navy blue suit, both of which I later wore for my First Holy Communion, bringing her passions for music, God, and grandson into a harmonious circle.

  LENORA WAS A HARD-CORE Roman Catholic, but with an Afro-Caribbean slant. She had a closet full of images of black saints, and her apartment had the feeling of a voodoo shrine. We went to church in the Bronx, but she filled in what they had left out when we came back home for our own religious services—and her addenda tended to be a little bit more disturbing than the official version. Until I saw her black saints, I was under the impression that Christian personalities were always white, the way they were in the movies and church. Seeing those black saints—before black got beautiful—was unsettling.