by Nile Rodgers
It always worked.
I could tell this story to cops, and it seemed to work even better. Sometimes they would escort me to a Skid Row movie theater. At least once, they even drove me in a cop car! There were no ratings, and anybody could see any film they wanted. For the next two and a half months, I saw almost every movie that was released, many times over.
The trick was, never go to the same theater too soon. This was easy, because there were a seemingly endless number of grind houses on Skid Row. In those days they didn’t turn the theaters over, so you could stay in one all day. It was a common practice to arrive at the theater anytime you wanted. If it was in the middle of a film, you’d simply wait until it came around again to see what you’d missed. With the multi-feature grind-house format, you could sit for six to eight hours before the part you missed cycled back. It was fantastic!
I always went home at the same time I would have had I actually gone to school. This had many advantages. If the truant officer visited and left a letter, good old Ernest or another wino in need of a taste would write and mail back the letter explaining my absence for as little as ten or fifteen cents. In those days you could purchase a small bottle of Thunderbird wine for not much more than that.
ONE DAY GOODIE GOT SICK with the flu, and it was horrible. She had a high fever and was bedridden. I asked her if she wanted me to stay with her to help out, but she said, “I don’t want you to miss school. I’ll be all right.”
I left the house and headed downtown to see The Sword and the Dragon. A character, the Wind Demon, reminded me of my asthma and made me worry about Goodie. I wanted to go home and take care of her, but I couldn’t show up before three-thirty. When I finally got home, I found not only Goodie but Lenora, and judging by the way she glared at me I could tell she wasn’t happy. Also in our living room were a truant officer, a policeman or two, and someone from St. Cecilia. “Excessive truancy,” they called it. Who had written the excuse letters in response to the truant officer’s summonses? They accused Goodie of turning a blind eye. I insisted that I had acted alone. I knew that if I told on Ernest or any of my wino friends, they’d be in deep trouble; they’d be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And I’d seen enough Cagney films to know you didn’t rat.
(Illustration credit 3.1)
Everyone knew I was lying. They agreed that I should be sent back to my mother, a punishment in their eyes. But earlier Lenora had given me a serious whipping with an ironing cord that had left painful welts on my body. My mother would’ve never done that, no matter how mad she got. I couldn’t wait to get back to her.
And I was right. The postpartum depression that turned Beverly into a potential murderer had at long last disappeared. In fact, she felt so well, I would soon find out, that she’d had a third child, Tony—my second half-brother—with yet another man.
So at age seven, I was put on a TWA Super G Constellation to fly, by myself, from L.A. to New York City. We hit a bad storm over St. Louis, and I urinated in my pants. I was cold, frightened, and miserable. I peed on myself again during another encounter with air pockets, and discovered that I momentarily got warm and slightly more comfortable. I realized that I was looking forward to the next time my bladder filled, and to the peace and warmth that accompanied the release. But soon again I was freezing in the air-conditioned pressurized cabin, lonely and ashamed.
When I finally arrived the next morning at La Guardia Airport, my mother was waiting for me. She freaked out when she got her first glimpse of me as the crew walked me off the plane. I was scared stiff, cold, in soaking wet pants, my face tear-stained.
“Oh God, Pud, what happened?” my mother said.
“I don’t know,” I replied in a timid monotone.
That response was becoming my standard explanation for all the idiosyncratic habits I was developing. And it was true.
(Illustration credit 3.2)
four
Like Fathers, Like Sons—Variations on a Mormon Theme
THE MINUTE THE BELL RANG AT P.S. 41 IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, I’D HIT the push-release door without breaking stride and leave school behind like a thoroughbred erupting from the starting gate. It was a warm late spring day in 1960. Summer was almost here. I was seven and a half years old and back in my hometown.
I never slowed down as I stripped off my jacket and rounded the corner from Eleventh Street onto Sixth Avenue, crossing it diagonally. From this vantage point, the Women’s House of Detention was the largest freestanding structure among the countless eateries and novelty shops. As I closed in on Ninth Street, I could hear the constant catcalls and insults flying from the Art Deco prison’s tower. Even at this pace, I would greet the street’s familiar faces. “Hey, Antonio,” I said to my blue-eyed Italian friend who sold me pizza at lunchtime.
Quickening my pace, I waved to my bearded beatnik poet buddy on the corner of Eighth Street and smiled at girls who were in between fashion trends, some still in poodle skirts, the new breed wearing Empire-waist dresses. When I got to Waverly Place, I took a hard left. The pizza and fast-food joints gave way to stately residential brownstones. Once I hit MacDougal Street and the chess tables scattered just inside Washington Square Park, I slowed my pace and scanned the faces for my favorite chess opponent. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but his game is still clear as a bell: He started nearly every match with the Petrov opening, bringing his knights into play before my breath and heart rate slowed down. After an exciting thrashing at the hands of my ever-willing rival, I took the long way home.
I’d kept to this routine every day—but today would be different.
As I walked west down Bleecker Street from La Guardia Place, I noticed a large crowd of people gathered around the Hotel Greenwich, right by the famous Village Gate nightclub. The hotel had recently been converted into an SRO (single-room occupancy) flophouse and was filled with mental patients who had nowhere else to go once New York City’s state hospitals started closing.
The SRO residences gave the Village an edge. I remember feeling comfortable around their eccentric tenants. I was used to irrational behavior. As I drew closer to the crowd, I realized everyone was looking up and pointing. “Is he going to jump?” cried one man. “Think so,” answered another. I craned my head and immediately recognized the naked man raving incoherently and flailing his arms on the fire escape: Nile Rodgers Sr.
IF BIOLOGY IS DESTINY, then I was born to be a musician. Nile Rodgers Sr. was a brilliant percussionist who came of age during the Latin music boom of the late forties. Dances like the mambo, cha-cha-cha, merengue, and rumba had a huge influence on the big bands. My father specialized in Afro-Cuban beats and was considered a virtuoso by the time he was a young man.
Paul Whiteman, “the King of Jazz” and popular big-band leader, was the music director for an ABC show that premiered in 1949 called TV Teen Club, and he occasionally hired my dad. The show featured a young announcer named Dick Clark and would later be renamed American Bandstand. The Whiteman gig was a huge break because Paul’s orchestra was, true to his name, all-white. It’s a well-known fact that Paul wanted to hire more black musicians but his management pressured him not to. My dad was actually working with Paul on the day I was born, September 19, 1952. Unfortunately, Paul couldn’t hire him full-time, and Dad had to supplement his income with a day job in the Garment District, where most of my mother’s family also worked (as well as Bobby, my stepfather-to-be).
Nile charmed everyone who crossed his path. If he didn’t have an instrument with him, he could turn any object into one. He loved music: He lived it, walked it, talked it, and played it all the time. He loved music more than anything—except maybe getting high.
By the time he was sixteen, my father was more or less a daily drinker and a recreational pot smoker. Because of his relatively well-paying job running racks in the Garment District—“flying Jewish airplanes,” they called it—he had extra spending money, just enough cash to develop a taste for a new drug that had recently turned up
in the neighborhood: heroin.
Nile worked with a guy named Freddy Boy, who had a brainy and very beautiful kid sister named Beverly, whom Nile took a liking to. He was sixteen and she was thirteen—and very soon she was pregnant.
For a while Nile loved Beverly even more than music and drugs, so much so that he was nearly killed defending her honor, after a jealous Copian gang member called her a whore. Nile spoke up, and without warning, the Copian plunged a huge knife into his chest. He collapsed in the street, but was rushed to the hospital and somehow recovered. Beverly, on the other hand, liked Nile, a lot, but was absolutely not in love with him. But once she was pregnant with me, Beverly’s father, whom she deathly feared, convinced her she had to get married. And so the wedding was set for June, just three months before I was born. Nile was ecstatic.
In preparation for the big day, they got blood tests and secured a marriage license. But when they reached City Hall, my mother decided she just couldn’t do it—she’d just turned fourteen, after all—and caused a big scene. Crushed, Nile slapped my mother across the face. According to her, that was the only time in his life that he’d ever struck another person.
But once was all it took. Besides, it was a perfect excuse to cancel a wedding she didn’t want. And so it was that Nile Sr.’s fourteen-year-old fiancée humiliated and disappointed him on what was supposed to be the happiest day of his life. That night he did so much dope and booze he almost died. I would hear about the wedding day binge that he blamed on Beverly every time I saw him for the rest of his life.
NOW ON THIS HOT late spring day, at the age of twenty-four, eight years since he’d last played with Paul Whiteman, my father was spotlighted in sunlight, and the ledge of a flophouse was his stage. The gawking crowd would have to do as an audience. That was Dad, all right, but it was hardly the image I’d kept in mind. His handsome features and optimistic smile had been replaced with a maniacal grin beneath a pair of unfocused eyes. He’d already jumped out of the fourth-story window and fallen onto this landing overlooking Bleecker Street. A small brigade of cops and firemen were trying to bring him in. I frantically ran into the hotel and told the desk clerk, “The man on the fire escape is my father. I don’t think he’ll jump if he sees me.” Which is exactly what I believed.
“He is a very nice man,” I added. The clerk brought me over to the policeman in charge, and after a quick chat with the fire chief, they escorted me up to the fourth floor and the window closest to my father.
“Hey, Nile, hey, Nile, it’s Little Splash,” I said to him in a gentle voice.
Splash was my dad’s nickname on the street, because he drank a lot of cheap bathtub gin. He needed to. He was always high and it was a simple matter of economics. Over the past few years, he’d become a full-fledged alcoholic and drug addict, lost his job in the Garment District, and ended up on welfare in an SRO. He was on the city’s methadone program and made extra money by selling “spitback” to addicts. Spitback is resold methadone that junkies literally spit into a hidden receptacle after they swallow just enough to get straight. He liked it when his friends called me Little Splash, and I thought this would get through to him. It did. He recognized me instantly.
I hadn’t realized that he lived so close to us. I hadn’t seen him for about six months. Beverly didn’t allow it because she felt embarrassed for him. But she didn’t understand how much I loved him, and that he and I got along great. On our last get-together, we’d gone shopping and seen the Steve McQueen sci-fi film The Blob in the Bronx. He’d always give me a present, a record or a cool ethnic percussion instrument, or a bag of green plastic army men from Woolworth’s. But now he looked at me with a sorrowful, nearly empty stare: “Pud, Beverly fucked me up. She left me standing on the steps of the chapel. Why did she do that to me? I loved her so much.”
“I know, Pops, come inside now.”
“Hey, son, are you all right? You all right, Pud?”
“Yeah, Pops, I’m fine, but I think you should come inside now.”
“But Bev keeps fucking with me. I saw her standing out here, so I just came over to rap with her for a tick, to tell to her how much I still love her, then she split on me again.”
At that moment I realized he wasn’t trying to commit suicide at all. He was hallucinating, maybe a wee bit schizophrenic and suffering from delirium tremens (the DTs). I’d seen this kind of behavior before and I wasn’t afraid of it. Many of the winos and SRO people had these colorful symptoms regularly. After a little coaxing, my dad was back inside the hotel and we were making our way down the hall to his room. Other than the fact that he was totally naked, everything was solid, maybe even copacetic. And with that, the cops just left. No indecent-exposure booking, no psych ward at Bellevue. The hotel returned to its normal state—i.e., insane, but not on ghoulish suicide alert. The streets cleared.
Just another day in paradise.
AS SOON AS WE REACHED his flat, my dad snapped out of his psychosis, almost as if seeing me had jump-started him back into the regular old Nile. We acted like the fire-escape incident hadn’t happened. My dad’s tiny room reeked of piss and other putrid odors I couldn’t identify, so I waited in the hall, which also stunk, but not as bad. While he washed and dressed, a female SRO resident tried to make a quick buck for a fix.
Although the place was seedy, the Hotel Greenwich still had a certain grandeur. The woman who approached me was backlit by the stairwell lighting and she looked very alluring, although I didn’t know that word yet.
She leaned down and spoke to me: “You got any money, youngblood? You wanna blow job?” That was the first time I ever heard the expression. She looked like a French beatnik in a tight black-and-white-striped blouse and peasant skirt, which she lifted while repeating “Wanna blow job, wanna blow job?” endlessly, almost like a Buddhist chant, pantomiming a blow job. But all I could hear was “Bluto done it, Bluto done it!” It sounded like the refrain from a Popeye cartoon where a bullfrog was fingering Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto.
I’m sure if I’d been just a few years older, her voice would’ve reverberated in that stairwell as sexily as Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” But to Little Splash it just sounded funny. All I could do was laugh as she drifted away.
Suddenly my father appeared, in slightly tattered, hip beatnik clothes bathed in Zizanie cologne, and we left the building—through the front door. We walked to the fast-food joints on Eighth Street. He took his spitback money and bought me a slice of pizza and a large Orange Julius. I was happy. The normal, kind, giving Nile was back. We spent the rest of the day browsing through every record store and music shop in the Village.
HE MAY HAVE BEEN crazy as hell, but my father’s gift to me was his kindness, open-mindedness, and music. Every chance he got, he’d patiently teach me to read rhythm patterns. Because of robust music programs in the public school system, by the time I was fourteen, I could play at least a “tune” on almost any instrument in the symphony orchestra. When I was nineteen, I got my first important professional musical job, but he never saw me turn pro. My father died a few days before that. His life was relatively short. After I die, his bloodline will end with me, as if he never existed. He had no other children and is buried anonymously in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York’s cemetery of the unclaimed dead.*
My dad left no manuscripts, compositions, motifs, or unfinished works. I used to think that was tragic, but not anymore. When I got much older, I traced his DNA back to the Benin tribe of what is now the Edo State in Nigeria. This process started with the National Geographic “Journey of Man” DNA analysis project and ended with the finely focused African Ancestry DNA database. The Benins have a rich artistic heritage that appears to be woven into their bloodline. When I was with my father, I noticed that the musical moments were the happiest of his life. I like to believe that the success I’ve had is a result of his contributions—or maybe it’s just those Benin genes?
* The family had lost contact with him by the time he died, an
d I only found that information during the writing of this book.
(Illustration credit 4.2)
five
Hippie Happenstance
BEVERLY HAD A PLAN. BY MID-1962, BOBBY WAS OVERDOSING REGULARLY and she had become a daily user herself. My mother had no intention of watching Bobby die and wanted badly to shake her own addiction. Thus the plan to head back to California. Since Beverly couldn’t shoot up around my grandparents, if we moved back in with them, she’d have no choice but to clean up. She could even use the long bus trip out West to kick. And so it was that at the age of ten I found myself back on a cross-country bus, returning to Los Angeles.
Like my first trip out to the coast, we went Greyhound. Once again we left from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, still one of the seediest bum-and-junkie-infested corners of a bum-and-junkie-infested city. As we were getting ready to board, my mother was flabbergasted to see that one of the bums lingering on the street was my dad, good old Nile Sr. In a city of ten million, somehow our paths kept crossing, like some kind of genetic magnetism at work. Beverly hadn’t seen Nile in years and was shocked by how badly he’d disintegrated. She didn’t even tell me she’d seen him. She waited till I was thoroughly engrossed in a comic book and went over to him.
“Nile, is that you?”
“Hey, Beverly! How are you?” Nile responded brightly, even though he looked like a street urchin.
“I’m fine. What are you doing over here?”
“Oh, I live around here. What are you doing around here?”
“I’m going to L.A.,” answered Mom.
“How’s Pud?”