by Nile Rodgers
The James A. Foshay Middle School in South Central, Los Angeles, had a solid music program that was classically based. We had a halfway decent orchestra, with a deep European repertoire. We performed everything from Brahms to Tchaikovsky fairly well, even though outside of school no one dared listen to anything that was not vetted by the tastemakers at KGFJ, the local R&B station. I played clarinet in the orchestra’s woodwind section, and handled it competently. Like my homeboys, I loved James Brown, but, at least in the safety of the orchestra, I could rock out to J. S. Bach, too.
Lenora told everybody she was my mother, which I resented. I particularly disliked it when she told the officials at school. Maybe she had legal reasons for doing so, but she never shared them with me. I wish I had told her how conflicted this fiction made me feel. Instead, I buried my feelings and rebelled passively, especially after I got a taste of hippiedom.
Lenora gave me everything I wanted that she could afford (including a tiny Sony portable TV that kept me company all night), if it didn’t conflict with her religious beliefs and practices—but her religion’s traditions changed arbitrarily. For as long as I could remember, we couldn’t eat meat on Friday, then suddenly one day we could. Mass, the Catholic church service, was always in Latin, then one day it wasn’t. Things like that further alienated me from her devout belief in ceremonies that were obviously man-made. Like my mom, I gravitated more toward science and things that could be proven.
It saddens me now when I think of how happy I could’ve made Lenora. All I would have had to do was pretend to go along with her religiosity and call her Mommy, regardless of what I thought. The trouble was, I never even called my real mother Mommy.
At the time, Lenora had a terrific boyfriend named Emmett, whom she really mistreated. Maybe he tolerated it because he was aware of the painful life Lenora had led. At any rate, I guess he truly loved her, because he put up with the abuse. Emmett was exceptionally nice to me and taught me to drive in his sporty white Chevrolet Corvair Monza with a stick shift. He worked as a maintenance worker at the Van Nuys Airport, the hippest general aviation airport—for private planes and the like—on the planet. He took me to work with him and gave me a portion of his salary. More than that, I got a firsthand glimpse of the high life. The same way my vocabulary expanded after a day with Dr. Timothy Leary’s acid freaks, my word power increased dramatically while working at Van Nuys. Words like thermals, Lockheed JetStar, Learjet, Cessna, Piper Cub, updrafts, and tips became part of my lingo.
Yes, I said tips. That word had an important new meaning. People started giving me tips, not just cash tips, but tips about life.
At the airport many of the faces I’d see were familiar to me from movies and TV. I’d regularly see folks like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Autry, Frank Sinatra, and a host of other A-list celebrities. For the first time, I felt like I was in the presence of genuine aristocrats. Most of them were kind and generous. Some had their own airplanes, and when it was convenient, they or their pilots would take me up and let me see the world from a different angle.
My life as a neo-black hippie jet-set wannabe was quite a contrast to my grandmother Lenora’s world. She worked as a domestic. Translation: She cleaned up small spaces for white people. Her boyfriend Emmett was a maintenance worker. Translation: He cleaned up large spaces for white people. I, on the other hand, was somewhat delusional about my own occupation. It was manual labor, but with some enormous unlisted benefits. It was the early days of the jet age in general aviation, and I cleaned Frank Sinatra’s Learjet, Christina II. It had a tangerine-colored racing stripe, and its tail number, N175FS, resembled my name, if you stood alongside the pilot’s window looking back. All of the people I met there had one thing in common: They were all in a line of work that fell under the general heading of “show business.” This world felt comfortable and familiar to me. After all, I was raised on TV, music, and film.
EMMETT, ALONG WITH some other airport workers, told me one special story that truly put me on a path to overachieving, or at least always trying to do my very best. It went something like this:
One smoggy afternoon, an airport in Southern California had poor visibility and a low ceiling. In spite of those conditions, a private plane pressed on and landed there because its passengers absolutely had to perform a concert that night. The plane was owned by the blind musical genius Ray Charles. Ray Charles was like a god in my house since my childhood, but this flight proved that the beloved blind singer truly had divine powers. As Emmett told me, beaming with pride: “Brother Ray can take the controls and fly the plane himself; he’s absolutely fantastic.”
I knew Emmett well enough to know he wouldn’t tell a big fish story just for dramatic effect. He said that Charles had brought the plane in via radar ILS (instrument landing system) while the pilot called out the instrument panel readings. But the facts didn’t matter. What mattered was the message. In my mind I now saw Ray Charles as the person who saved the plane, the passengers, and the show. It was a complete revelation. Proof that special people can truly bend the rules.
That story flipped some kind of switch inside me. After that I walked into every plane that returned and cleaned it more thoroughly than ever. I increased my duties and doubled back and checked every area that we’d already cleaned. My work ethic permanently expanded. I started to pay closer attention to everything and everybody. It didn’t take long before I started intersecting with various cross sections of Van Nuys Airport people, moving in circles beyond my custodian’s job. The fact is, I committed to propelling myself toward show biz. Service and success—to me they were one and the same. It was what the hippies and show business people had in common: performing, helping, and sharing.
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, Grandmother Lenora was feeling ill and had taken a few days off from work, but she had her own formidable work ethic, and the show must go on even for domestic workers—especially when there are bills to pay. Moreover, Lenora owned the company; her client had to hire a temp to fill her spot. She had to get back on the job. So when she still felt ill after a few days, Lenora called Goodie and asked that she and Emmett accompany her to the hospital. Her intention was to get a doctor to confirm she’d been sick and give her a note explaining her absence to her employer/client, the Franklin Life Insurance Company, which by now had become the only place she was cleaning. It was critical that she remain in their good graces.
After the doctor examined Lenora, he asked Goodie if they could speak in private. The doctor told Goodie that Lenora was in the final stage of ovarian cancer and had a very short time to live. All they could do was make her comfortable and give her the best quality of life for the remaining time she had.
Since the disease had progressed so far and Lenora had never suspected her sickness was cancer, they decided not to tell her she was dying. They also never told me. Goodie and Emmett wanted us both to remain as upbeat as possible during Lenora’s final days. They asked me to leave her alone so she could rest. As a result I only went to the hospital once. I never saw her alive again after that. Her passing came as a complete shock. The grief was too much for me to bear.
Goodie called my mother and Lenora’s other family members. I don’t remember anyone showing up for a funeral, nor do I remember attending one. I have no other memory of the subject except for the day her eldest son, my uncle, showed up at our house to settle Lenora’s affairs. His name was Demetrius Clare, and he was my biological father Nile’s half brother. (Mom dropped the following family bombshell on Thanksgiving Day, 2010: Demetrius was most likely Lenora’s son—and brother. The result of her being raped by her father.)
DEMETRIUS MOVED INTO what used to be Lenora’s and my home. When she was alive, I lived by her rules, but they were nothing like my uncle’s. He was extremely narcissistic, with a touch of no-nonsense arrogance. Despite that, I really liked him, and I’m sure he was just doing the right thing, but it felt like he showed up only to liquidate our assets. And he did so in relatively short order.
Within a few days, Demetrius had hooked up with a pretty girl who was at least six months pregnant. I believe he met her when she answered a classified ad offering our furniture at a very good price. She got it for an even better price. I remember her moving in and having lots of sex with Demetrius. (I peeked a lot, I admit.) I’m pretty sure that was the payment for the furniture. It wound up being a turn-key deal, because she moved in and rented the house.
Demetrius got all of Lenora’s insurance money by masquerading as her sole heir; their surnames matched and she didn’t have a will. We quickly grabbed a familiar Greyhound bus and headed back to New York.
Demetrius lived in the South Bronx. He was balding, dark-skinned, and fairly good-looking, despite his extremely pockmarked face. By the time he was about thirty or so, he also had a complete set of false upper teeth, which he could pop in and out of his mouth using only his tongue. Given the pockmarks, the premature hair loss, and the toothlessness, it was a little surprising to me that there was an endless parade of girls in his world, all of whom to me seemed way out of his league. But he had his own explanation: When we were just sitting around, he’d pop his teeth in and out and tell me how women couldn’t resist his toothless cunnilingus.
Like my dad, Demetrius was a remarkable musician. He was tall, with a huge booming voice, not unlike James Earl Jones’s or Paul Robeson’s, and sang on a few small doo-wop hits with a group called the Popular Five. When Demetrius (everybody pronounced his name “Da-me-tree”) wasn’t preaching Black Power or bragging about his sexual prowess, he was singing. Musical talent was second nature to him, and to my father. I’d developed a knack for picking up many different instruments, as I bounced from school to school, but compared to them, my skills were rudimentary at best.
I’D NEVER EXPERIENCED culture shock like the kind I felt back in the South Bronx. The new hood made South Central look like Beverly Hills. Our street was filthy with litter; we lived in the front and the train thundered directly past our windows on Park Avenue and 161st Street. But it wasn’t totally miserable. In fact, it was partly because of this odd living arrangement that I became a professional musician. We actually lived with one of my uncle’s paramours, who had a son named Butch. Butch played the drums, and had a band. He also had a gorgeous sister. She was completely unattainable, a fly sister who wasn’t digging my fledgling hippie affect. I was dying for her to like me, so when Butch and company needed a guitarist for their band, I lied my way into an audition for their group.
As I said, my time playing in the school orchestra had taught me how to get a tune out of most instruments. I had a false sense of confidence, somehow believing that even though I didn’t know how to play the guitar, a miracle might occur. That I’d get into the band, and into Butch’s sister’s pants. But when I picked it up, it didn’t take long for them to see that I wasn’t anywhere close to a real guitar player. “That’s the worst shit we’ve ever heard,” they told me. Needless to say, I was crushed. But the gauntlet had been thrown down: Now I had something to prove.
AFTER THIS HUMILIATION, I convinced my mother to let me come live with her and Graham. Having kids around cramped Graham’s partying style, but I was fifteen now. He was my brother Bunchy’s dad, which made him sort of like my stepfather. He was a lifelong family friend and still would do anything for Beverly. He lived in the same old house in the industrial neighborhood where we moved when she left Bobby nine years earlier. My mother and Graham were living a druggy, one-dimensional, dysfunctional life.
But I, on the other hand, was focused. I convinced them to buy me a guitar for Christmas. The last orchestral instrument I’d learned to play in school was the clarinet, and I had music books with tons of études.
I went out and bought some guitar books and saw that the guitar had the same written range as the clarinet. Since I could play the clarinet, and knew what the music sounded like, I’d just try to replicate it on guitar. It didn’t work. So I went out and got a Beatles songbook (they were one of my favorite bands) and practiced every day. But it never sounded anything like the song I was trying to play. On the clarinet, if you don’t have the correct embouchure (the positioning of your mouth), the instrument doesn’t sound right. I thought the same concept was true for the guitar. I followed the finger chart perfectly, thinking that I’d soon get the positions right, and then I’d practice my études and master this instrument.
One day Graham came home and heard me trying to play. “Pud, let me help you,” he said. He strummed the guitar once. “Wow, this is way out of tune.” Oh. Graham judiciously turned the pegs while saying, “You got this tuned like a violin or something.”
He finished retuning. He handed it back to me. I looked at the finger chart and put my fingers in the positions that I had been methodically practicing. I strummed, and a perfect G-major chord rang out. I switched to the next position and strummed a D major. Sir Edmond Hillary, reaching the summit of Mount Everest, must have felt something similar to what I felt at that moment. This was more blissful than anything I’d ever experienced. I played the next chord and it sounded like the right chord in the progression. I started the song again. With utter confidence I sang, “I read the news today, oh boy,” then strummed an E minor and dropped to the seventh, “About a lucky man who made the grade.” There are no words to accurately describe what this felt like. What’s the greatest feeling you’ve ever had? I hate to cheapen the moment by likening it to drugs, but the truth is I got a narcotic rush. Not just any rush, but a “first time” rush, the same as acid, dope, glue, booze, orgasm, or any number of things that I’d done at the time, or that I would subsequently overdo. There’s really never been anything like it.
I played all day and all night. I got out my clarinet études. If I went slowly, I could read the music and play it on the guitar. At that moment I decided that I’d stick to just one instrument for the rest of my life.
IT WAS MID-FEBRUARY 1968. Though winter’s end was in sight, I was gloomy. Life with my mother at Graham’s had its considerable downside. There were no other houses nearby, only factories. The memories of how bad it had been to live here washed over me like a huge wave, sucking me into an undertow of depression. This was the house where I’d first wet the bed in ’59 and where I’d developed severe insomnia. This was where I accidentally hit my brother Bunchy near the heart with a dart when we were kids. This was the loneliest house in the world. All of these traumatic memories became more vivid when the lights went out at bedtime.
At the time, I was going to a mostly white high school, Christopher Columbus, one block north of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. So my sense of isolation there was much worse than it had been when I was younger. At fifteen I had a more developed sense of identity, and I didn’t need other teens to tell me that I didn’t belong. So one day I decided to run away.
I grabbed my guitar and retreated to the place where I’d felt safe when I was younger: the subway. I started sneaking out of the house with my guitar strapped to my back and would ride the trains until dawn. For the first time in my life, I’d found an environment that matched my natural sleeping pattern: waking up every two hours—about the length of the longest subway line ride. I slept like a baby. Bums, sexual predators, and other assorted New Yorkers rode the trains with me, but mostly we ignored one another.
IT WAS ON ONE OF THESE RIDES that I met James Irwin, who would, for a time at least, become my dharma-bum hippie guru, and change the course of my life as much as that well-tuned guitar. As I was getting onto a train—an older car—thank God, because for some reason the heat worked better in them—I noticed a tall man, maybe twenty-one years old, about six foot seven, sitting in the corner. He had on a poncho and an Australian digger hat, but to me the most interesting thing about him was that he was a hippie who wasn’t wearing blue jeans.
Our eyes met as I entered subway car number 9521 (I remember that number because it’s the year I was born, if you make the last number first). I sat across from him. The train was el
evated, and every time the doors opened at a station, the temperature dropped thirty degrees because there was a blizzard that night. While waiting to fall asleep, I let my mind wander through scenes of different films that took place in cold climates: Ice Station Zebra, Doctor Zhivago, and The Lion in Winter. At one particularly cold station, tons of snow blew inside the train car when we stopped, and I started laughing.
(Illustration credit 6.1)
“What’s so funny, man?” he said.
“The snow blowing in reminds me of the flick The Fatal Glass of Beer.”
In tandem we recited an impression of W. C. Fields’s classic line: “It’s not a fit night out for man nor beast.” And we each grabbed a handful of snow that had blown inside and threw it on the subway door’s window, as if it were W. C. Fields’s face, mocking the film’s repetitive sight gag (an off-screen stagehand throws fake snow in W.C.’s face whenever he opens any door). We laughed so hard we could barely catch our breath. There was an instant chemistry between us, me and my older hippie brother.
“Man, it’s too cold to stay in the twenty-cents hotel. You wanna go to a crash pad I know?” he asked
“Absolutely, dude, why not.”
“Thing is, we have to give ’em some bread, man.”
“Bummer, I don’t have any,” I said.
“Don’t worry, we can panhandle it up on Eighth Street.”
“Cool. That’d be far out.”
Which is how I started my new career as a professional panhandler.
I’d never live with my mother again, at least not for more than a few days at a time. I was fifteen years old.
“WOODY’S COMMUNE” was on Avenue C and Fifth Street. It was situated just a few blocks from where I’d lived when my stepfather Bobby had his first near-death overdose. It was part commune and part crash pad.