Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  “Oh, he’s all right. I’m taking him with me.”

  “Bev, can I see him? I’d really love to see him.”

  “Nile, I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to see you like this.”

  He was clearly strung out on dope and using every ounce of his energy not to fall off into a nod. He pleaded with Beverly to let him see me. He said it was really important to him because he was all alone. The woman he was living with had just died from acute alcohol poisoning—he’d awakened a few days before to find her lying next to him, cold and dead. This story and his disheveled condition broke Mom’s heart, so she agreed to bring me around to his flophouse room before we left. But as soon as he shuffled off, she changed her mind. Nile went back to his hotel room, and we boarded the bus.

  TO KICK HER HEROIN HABIT, Beverly had packed a bottle of methadone pills, which, as you can imagine, made for a more eventful trip than my first three-thousand-mile journey with my grandma Goodie, two and a half years earlier. We strategically sat directly across from the bathroom. If Mom got sick because the methadone was ineffective, the bathroom assured her privacy. One time she got so unruly (hoarding bathroom time and arguing with the driver) that they threatened to throw us off the bus somewhere in the Midwest. After that she played it a little cooler.

  A few thousand miles into the journey, I got it in my head that it would be interesting to meet the driver, even though the sign above him said “Speaking with the Driver Is Forbidden.” He made occasional announcements with a thick country accent, using as few words as possible. And those words left out letters and syllables that were apparently unimportant to him. I sidled up to the front of the bus and started chatting.

  “Hey, Mr. Driver. What’s that?”

  “Joshwa trees, son.”

  “Why do they look so weird?”

  “First time I saw ’em, thought the same too.”

  “I have never seen trees like that. Does Joshua own them all?”

  The driver laughed at that. He said, “No, son, Joshwa don’t own ’em, just named after ’em. You heard the song ‘Joshwa Fit the Battle a Jericho’?”

  “Think so.” I was trying to imitate his speech pattern.

  “Mormons named ’em.”

  “Those singers on TV named Joshua’s trees? Wow, you’re really smart. What are their names, do you know ’em all?”

  “When them Mormons come here, thought those trees looked like Joshwa’s arms raised up.”

  “Joshua must look pretty funny.”

  “When I see them trees, I sing the song to myself. Tells me we gettin’ near L.A.”

  He got quiet. Then started to hum, very gently. I knew the tune right away.

  “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,

  Jericho, Jericho-o-o-o.

  Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,

  And the walls come a tumblin’ down.”

  I never really understood what the hell he was talking about, but we chatted all the way till we pulled into the bus depot of my beloved Skid Row. Seeing those familiar landmarks brought to mind all the trouble I had gotten into, cutting school and going to grind houses. Like General Douglas McArthur coming back to the Philippines, I had returned to finish the job. Only this time I was going to get it right. This time I was with my mother, a cool beatnik chick who loved movies herself. I looked south down Broadway when we stopped at the traffic light.

  Downtown L.A. hadn’t changed much in two and a half years. Everything was still there, just more of it. The cable cars, which were called Angels Flight, were still ferrying crowds of people up and down a steep hill. Funky Broadway was more clouded with car exhaust and smog. The hookers, pimps, and the bums on Skid Row had grown in numbers. Movie posters and billboards were everywhere. Multicolored lights on dozens of theater marquees reflected off my glasses like disco balls.

  Grandma Goodie had recently gotten remarried and there wasn’t enough room for us at her place, so I moved in with Grandma Lenora on St. Andrews Place, and my mother moved in with my depressed aunt Naomi in a different part of town. Mom’s moving in with Naomi brought her out of a funk. This young woman had just barely survived an abusive relationship herself. She was thrilled to be rid of her husband, and to have free-spirited Beverly as a roommate. It was a moment of genuine happiness in her short life. The two of them soon became the dynamic duo of nightclubbing at the black hip L.A. hot spots.

  Meanwhile, my life with Lenora wasn’t quite so glamorous. Our place was a back house that bordered an alley. Across the alley was a junkyard that mainly housed discarded large appliances. We kids called it Stove Land, and I loved playing there. We ran and jumped over, under, on, or through any and everything, like prehistoric parkour.

  The neighborhood may have had a zoning identity crisis, but I wasn’t totally unhappy living there. I had a new dog named Tiger and we were devoted to each other. He was a German shepherd crossed with a wolf. “He’s been waiting for you,” said Lenora’s boyfriend Bill, when I first arrived. “He’s your dog.” Bill was right. Tiger was my dog and he had been waiting for me and vice versa. Tiger and I had many incredible adventures, real Lassie and Timmy material, but the one that pops to mind is the day he rescued me from certain death at the hands of a street gang.

  One day a group of Mexican kids happened upon me on my way home. “What set you from, punk?” they asked me.

  “Slauson,” I said. (Insert buzzer beep sound here.)

  “Wrong, punk.”

  Before they could kick my ass, I took off running, doing my best Jesse Owens impersonation. I ran down the alley. It was deserted and the worst place to be if they caught me, but it was the most direct route to my house. I was almost home, but my frail lungs were succumbing to the L.A. smog and heat. I was starting to slow down, and the gang was closing in for the kill.

  With all the air I had left, I yelled, “Tiger!” as loud as I could. Somehow he heard me and must’ve sensed my desperation. Our fence was three times higher than Tiger, but he got a running start and jumped from the steps of our back door and cleared the fence with one leap. He shook off the hard landing and bore down on the gang in full attack mode, like a lion targeting a wildebeest in the Serengeti. The kids scattered in every direction as soon as they spotted the charging canine. They climbed telephone poles, jumped onto cars, and scaled the fence into Stove Land, hoping not to get caught. Tiger heeled on command when he reached me, but remained vigilant. He jumped over my head, his best trick, and then we casually walked home. I was happy for them to know exactly where Tiger and I lived.

  BEVERLY HAD MOVED in with Naomi because there wasn’t enough space at her mother’s, but I thought she just wanted to get away from me again—which made me feel like an abandoned piece of shit again. A feeling further compounded by the unexpected news that she was moving back to New York to be with Bobby—and that she wasn’t taking me with her.

  I soon found relief for my latest bouts of self-loathing and abandonment: glue. “I’m gonna show you a cool way to get high,” a kid my age named Ralph told me. We walked down the palm-tree-lined street to the Laundromat to get the perfect-sized paper bags for glue sniffing from the popcorn vending machine. After we stole a few—they looked like regular beer-can-sized bags but were thinner than lunch bags—and ran back to my house, Ralph trickled the glue evenly around the bottom of one, then closed his fist around it. He blew into the bag, filling it with air. Then he took his left hand and rubbed the bottom of the bulbous bag against the bottom of his clenched right hand. This would ensure the glue spread evenly inside. This was my first up-close experience with the full, mesmerizing performance of a pre-drug ritual.

  Ralph started to inhale and exhale into the bag. After a few huffs, he gave me the bag and watched me imitate his every move. After the lesson was over, he said, “OK, here’s the only thing you have to remember. When you can’t feel the bag on your face, you gotta stop.”

  My last thought before I passed out was, I haven’t been able to feel the bag on m
y face for about five minutes. Bam. My face slammed onto the kitchen table, like the spaghetti-eating scene in A Clockwork Orange.

  When I came to, I had a bloody nose, a headache, and glue stuck all over me. I slurred, “Wow. What happened?”

  “You should’ve stopped when you couldn’t feel the bag no more,” Ralph said.

  “I thought that was the high-gettin’ part.”

  When the cobwebs cleared, I felt the way I did after surviving my first roller-coaster ride: “Let’s go again.” It was fun. And fun, even reckless fun, is the birthright of youth. I was hooked.

  Hailing as I did from the Bobby and Beverly school of upscale addiction, I quickly became a connoisseur of glue. I knew the potency of all the different brands, and that Testors was the cream of the crop. By the time I was eleven years old, I was doing glue every chance I got.

  By age thirteen Ralph and I had moved on to sniffing other stuff too, like amyl nitrate that we stole from school. We’d break in after hours. I was super skinny, so I could crawl through the Automat-sized windows of the cafeteria, open the door, and let Ralph in. We made our way to the gym and stole the amyl nitrate—they kept a supply on hand just in case a kid passed out during a workout. It was hotter in L.A. than New York, so I guess that made sense. A few sniffs later, we learned that glue was a sedative, and that amyl nitrate was a stimulant. Speedballing 101: At my school it was a self-taught elective.

  I’d spend the next five years becoming a full-blown alternative drug addict. I wanted to rebel against my parents, but since they were already pretty cool, I had to find drugs even they wouldn’t.

  ONE SATURDAY, RALPH and I were hitching to the Sunset Skating Rink in Hollywood from Grandma’s place in South Central, Los Angeles. We showed up about an hour late for our intended session, so we needed to kill some time until the next one. We noticed a crowd of white people with hair that covered their eyes, like shaggy dogs, across the street from the rink. They looked … interesting, totally different than the few white kids in our school, so we decided to investigate. We were pretty high on glue, and we had an exaggerated sense of how close we were in age to this odd-looking crew coming out of “the Teenage Fair” at the Hollywood Palladium.

  We introduced ourselves, and in retrospect, we must’ve appeared just as strange to them as they did to us. At thirteen, we dressed like miniature pimps: sharkskin suits, ruffled shirts, wrap-around cufflinks over our French cuffs, and of course the obligatory white Italians (pronounced “I-tal-yuns”) on our feet. We idolized the Temptations and imitated them in our dress.

  We asked the longhairs who they were, and they cheerfully replied that they were “freaks.”

  “Hey, I know that movie,” I said, thinking of the crazy old horror movie about carnival freaks. I’d seen it many times in my grind-house tour. “We accept them, we accept them, one of us, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, one of us, one of us.”

  They all laughed, and asked us if we wanted to take a trip.

  (Illustration credit 5.1)

  “Sure,” we said.

  We had time to kill, and we thought that we’d just go joyriding. They invited us to their pad, and as I explained what a pad was to Ralph, we hopped into one of their cars and drove up into the Hollywood Hills. We arrived at a fantastic glass mansion, where we came upon beautiful people in every whacked-out situation you could think of. Coolest of all was that a lot of people were “balling,” one of our hosts informed us—a new word to both of us, which meant having sex.

  A guy rose out of a pile of women and looked us over.

  “Wow, spade cats.” He asked us if we wanted to take a trip again. Even though we thought we’d just taken a trip, we said sure, thinking if the next trip was as good as the first, it was going to be amazing. I don’t remember how we actually ingested the LSD, because we fearlessly smoked, drank, and dropped everything they offered us.

  The next thing I remember, I was sitting in a room in the glass mansion, staring into the shell of an old cathode-ray TV set filled with branches strung with common Christmas ornaments: blinking lights, decorated balls, and glass hair (or “angel hair” as we called it in New York). Somewhere a stereo was playing “The End” by the Doors and other psychedelic songs over and over again. This went on for about a day and a half. During that thirty-six-hour experience, Dr. Timothy Leary and a bunch of other Hollywood heavies came in and out. The crib must surely have belonged to a famous personality, but the name would have meant nothing to us young soul brothers from South Central L.A. at that time.

  Twenty years later, Dr. Leary and I met at another house party, in the Beverly Hills home of Hollywood mover and shaker Wendy Stark. It was in the early eighties, and Leary proceeded to tell the entire room—with crystal clarity—the story of two young spade cats dressed in suits who’d taken their first acid trip with him.

  I was floored. Here was an example of what I’ve called “hippie happenstance” to explain the unexplainable in my life. I’ve been pushing this term on myself since the sixties and my first encounter with the Freaks. For instance: How did I wind up at a party with this guy after all these years? It felt as if I was meant to go to the Teenage Fair, though I’d never heard of it. That I was meant to drop acid, though I had no idea what it was. And that I was meant to do it with Timothy Leary, though I hadn’t a clue who the hell he was. I believe I was meant to travel an exact road to get to where I came to be. But I chose the road. This is why I’ve added the word “hippie” to “happenstance.” It reminds me that I walked across the street to meet the Freaks, and that choice affected the seemingly random events that followed.

  I RETURNED HOME to find my poor grandmother Lenora sobbing in her living room with a handful of cops who’d spent the past twenty-four hours looking for a missing child.

  “Hey, Lenora what’s going on?” I asked as I strolled in.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The old monotonic response still seemed to work as an explanation for my irrational behavior. I’d left the day before a glue-sniffing pimp-in-training and had returned an unwashed, exhausted freak, speaking a new tongue—balling, dropping, mamas, bikers, heads, Diggers, the clap, tripping, crabs, hassle, speed, peyote, acid, yage, surfers, LSD, Woodrose seeds, belladonna, pigs, and MDMA. The Temps were replaced by Them, the Troggs, the Doors, Love, the Beatles, and, oh yes, even the Monkees.

  SINCE BOTH MY GRANDMOTHERS were now living in Los Angeles, I sometimes moved back and forth. During the summer of ’64, I lived with Goodie in Watts. It was two blocks away from the Compton border, which began on a street called Imperial Highway. This may have been one of the hardest-core blocks in the toughest ghetto of Los Angeles, but it was clean and appealing compared to its New York equivalent. Even in Watts, the hedges were trimmed and the lawns were cut, edged, and well kept.

  But that didn’t mean it was fun. By the midsixties, life with Goodie and her new husband, Dan, was up and down, but the ride was fairly predictable. Dan was from Georgia, a black good ole boy and a heavy drinker. When he got drunk, he became abusive, but luckily he only got drunk on the weekends. His abuse was mostly verbal. And while Goodie wasn’t fond of Dan’s weekend rants, she’d learned to put up with them. Sometimes, however, he’d take out his shotgun and threaten to shoot her. It wouldn’t have been a stretch for him. He had done hard time for shooting and killing a man in Chicago. They say the second time is easier. We hoped we’d never find out.

  Life at Goodie and Dan’s wasn’t always bad. He had a cool dog called Champ, whom I liked almost as much as my dog Tiger. Dan also owned a guitar, which would be the first real guitar I’d ever touch. He rarely let me handle it, but I knew once he started drinking (and before he started threatening Goodie with his shotgun), he’d say, “Boy, get me my guitar, so I can pick.” That was my chance to feel those appealing contours in my hand.

  I’d always played music—or played around with it—when I was in school. But now it was
summertime and school wasn’t in session, so the few minutes it took to get the guitar and carry it over to Dan were almost sacred. I wasn’t allowed to play it, which, as every kid knows, made me want to more than anything. That said, it wasn’t worth a blast of rock salt in the backside—which he threatened me with occasionally.

  AT THE END of the summer of ’65, my mother and Bobby came by car out to L.A. and took an apartment on Pico Boulevard, in a building called the Westchester Arms. Bobby wanted the entire family to reunite under one roof because Beverly was expecting.

  Unfortunately, this plan was also another scheme for kicking—Mom had gone back to being a full-blown addict. They brought my brother Bunchy along, and I moved in, too.

  I wanted to live with Beverly and Bobby more than anything, and would accept any living conditions, and so I left my dogs behind and settled into the bizarre Westchester Arms. The building had the feel of a New York City apartment building. It was at least six stories high, a veritable skyscraper for that section of L.A.

  We felt right at home. The building was full of our kind of people, a haven for low-level law-breaking entrepreneurs. The residents were mainly drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, bookies, and robbers. I loved living there. I no longer had to worry about the gangbangers who plagued me in Watts. Other than the ones who lived in our building, there weren’t many kids around at all. And of those, all of us were friends—and all my new friends were girls.

  My new young female friends were extremely savvy and couldn’t wait to tutor me in the ways of their world. Their leader was Stephanie, a physically overdeveloped thirteen-year-old. Stephanie, who must’ve grown her huge breasts and five-foot-eight-inch frame when she was around eleven or twelve, was the ghetto version of Anna Nicole Smith.

  Next in the chain of command was thirteen-year-old Deborah. She was breathtakingly desirable, but was the physical opposite of Stephanie. Stephanie was extremely fair, because her mother was white and her father—who was not in her life—was probably a light-skinned black man, while Deborah was the color and smoothness of the underside of a Hershey chocolate bar. Her skin was perfect. Not a single flaw or blemish.