Three Chords
One Song
Beatrice M. Hogg
Genesis Press, Inc.
Indigo Love Spectrum
An imprint of Genesis Press, Inc.
Publishing Company
Genesis Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 101
Columbus, MS 39703
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, not known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission of the publisher, Genesis Press, Inc. For information write Genesis Press, Inc., P.O. Box 101, Columbus, MS 39703.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidents are pure invention.
Copyright© 2012 Beatrice M. Hogg
ISBN-13: 978-1-58571-643-2
ISBN-10: 1-58571-643-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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Prologue: The Lost Chord
Even before she received the call, Mariah knew he was dead. After loving a man for over thirty years, you knew when his heart stopped. She felt the moment he left.
She mechanically got out of bed and walked downstairs. She had a Moscato chilling in the refrigerator for tonight’s dinner. She grabbed the bottle, searched through the drawer for an opener, and pulled out the cork.
The curtains were open in the living room and she could see the faint waves of the Pacific. She sat down at the piano and put the bottle next to the bench on the polished wood floor. She began to play, letting her fingers feel the keys, letting the spirits guide the melody.
* * *
Music. For as long as she could remember, music had ruled her life. She remembered playing the organ at church, long ago in Birmingham. The sisters and brothers in Christ nodded their heads in time to the notes, praising God’s word. It would be sweltering during afternoon service, but Mariah had been pressed, curled, lotioned and deodorized to an inch of her life. Everyone thought she would become a great gospel singer or an accompanist to one of the mass choirs, but she had other ideas.
She wanted to be an Ikette, wearing a short, shiny dress and performing for thousands of fans. She wanted to be a Supreme, wearing false eyelashes and bouffant wigs. As much as she loved the Lord, she wanted to sing and play secular songs. And she knew she could not do that as long as she remained in Alabama. She hated Alabama, with its defined roles and prejudices. Her mother told her that prejudice was everywhere, but she couldn’t believe it was as blatant everywhere as it was in her hometown. It was in Birmingham that four little girls had been killed when a bomb exploded at their church, a church just like hers, on the other side of town. The girls had only been a few years older than her. The killers were men she had probably passed on the street. “Don’t look white people in the eye,” her mother said. “Know your place,” she’d warned. Mariah knew her place, and it wasn’t here.
But she had been a good girl, getting a secretarial certificate like her mother—a library assistant—wanted. Wearing sensible dresses when she wanted to wear a miniskirt. She straightened her hair and didn’t wear rouge, like her steel worker father demanded. She was the middle child of three daughters. Once her older sister Agnes married, Mariah knew she was supposed to be next. But most of the boys thought she was stuck up. It got to the point where even Mama and Daddy thought she spent too much time in the basement at the piano.
“Why don’t you teach piano, instead of sitting down here by yourself all of the time?” her little sister Bernice asked. So Mariah got an associates degree in music from the local community college, two more years of putting her life on hold. But instead of being ready to teach, she was ready to go.
“California? Honey, you don’t know anyone in California. Why do you want to go there?” Mama frowned as they put away the dishes after Sunday dinner, the smell of greens and fried chicken still hovering in the air.
“I want to be a singer. There are a lot of recording studios in Los Angeles. I could get work as a backup singer.” She felt it was best not to mention the nightclubs.
“There are recording studios in Memphis. There’s even one in Muscle Shoals, isn’t there? Why don’t you go there instead?”
She sighed. “I want to live somewhere else, Mama. There are lots of opportunities in Los Angeles. Now that I’m twenty-one, I want to see the world.”
She didn’t mention the California music she was falling in love with—Sly and the Family Stone, the Grateful Dead, and especially Janis Joplin. She had discovered rock and roll, what everyone in her family considered “white folks’ ” music. She listened to the new rock stations, but did not have the nerve to buy a record. A Negro girl from a good family did not buy rock and roll records.
“It’s dangerous out there. We would be too far away to help you if something happened.” Mariah looked at the few strands of gray running through her mother’s tight curls. The gray was a product of being a black mother in a white, Southern world.
“I can always come back if it doesn’t work out. But I have to try.”
Her mother sucked her teeth. “You know Daddy won’t let you go.”
“As much as I love Daddy, I don’t need his permission.”
Mama put her hand on her shoulder. “But you do need his blessing.”
But Mariah left home without her father’s blessing. He never gave it to her. Sometimes she wondered if his broken heart had been a precursor to his heart attack years later. She stopped playing and took a slug of the Moscato. She didn’t even like to drink. She had seen what drinking had done to her friends, her idols. Where would Janis be today if she had never discovered Southern Comfort? Maybe Mik would still be with her today if it wasn’t for alcohol and drugs. But she knew that was a lie. Drugs weren’t the reason he left. Drugs had just been a catalyst.
* * *
Los Angeles. Once she got off the plane, she knew she would never go back to Birmingham. Her typing skills came in handy in California. Every week she looked through the ads in the music magazines and checked the notices tacked to the boards at the clubs she could barely afford to go to. She went to a few auditions, but soon learned that LA was about image, and she didn’t have one. Her straightened hair pulled back in a ponytail and her “good-Negro-girl” clothes didn’t cut it in California. She needed to transform herself. One night, she went to hear Betty Davis sing at a local club.
Mariah started playing the bass line to “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up,” a song from sexy Betty Mabry Davis’s first album. She remembered seeing her perform in a local club, with her mile-high Afro and legs that went on for miles. Betty had presence. She reminded Mariah of some of the great singers she used to see at church. When they walked up to the front of the choir, everyone leaned forward, waiting for the sound. That is what audiences did at Betty’s shows. After seeing Betty perform, Mariah knew what was missing from her look. She took the next pay from her typing job and went to the hippest boutique in town. She stopped straightening her hair and shaped it into a fly natural. She tried out her new style when she went to see a band needing backup singers, a band called Sheffield Steel. And this time, she did get picked up.
When she walked into the rehearsal studio, the first person she saw was a tall, blond guy on the phone in the back of the space. Even though the room was dark and dingy, he seemed to g
low. She looked at the chiseled face, the strong hands, and the tight butt encased in well-worn jeans. But her gaze kept returning to the hair. It was golden blond and wavy, in the style of Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey. When he bent down, strands fell across his face, and he would absently push them back. Mariah found herself raising her hand in response, as if her fingers were in his hair. She didn’t believe in love at first sight, but she knew about lust. She had to shake her head to get rid of the sensation of that long hair against her skin. She knew it felt just like silk. In Alabama, she never looked at the white boys. Back home, she would probably have been lynched for the thoughts running through her head.
He saw her staring. “I’ll call you back later, the singer is here.” He slammed the phone down and turned towards her. “You here for the audition?”
His eyes were bright blue. They reminded her of marbles she’d played with as a child. She nodded her head. “Yeah. I’m Mariah Williams.” Damn, her accent was deeper than usual, a sign of her nervousness.
He extended his hand. “I’m Mik DeSalle. I play guitar and sing lead.”
She took his hand. She could feel the hard calluses on his fingers. His grip was strong, as if he wanted her to be aware of his strength. But there was something else, too, something she felt pass between them, in spite of the wedding band on his left hand.
Mariah picked up the Moscato again. She could remember the first time she saw him like it was yesterday. She aced the audition, channeling the heat between her legs into the sound coming out of her mouth. Even though the rest of the group was there, Mariah sang only to him. And he knew it, too. He ran his fingers through his hair, a nervous affectation he’d passed on to their daughter. Their eyes locked as if magnetized. She sang three songs a cappella, and then he accompanied her on acoustic guitar. She gave him her phone number and her address, leaving the studio with an extra strut in her walk. Her heart was beating faster. Blood was rushing to her head, making her dizzy. She did not turn back to look at him, but she knew he was watching her leave. The audition had only taken an hour, but in that hour, her whole life changed. The good little church girl from Birmingham was going to hell.
Mariah smiled at the memory and started to play her favorite Roberta Flack song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
It was two days later when she heard a knock on her door at 3 a.m. She got out of bed and opened the door without hesitation, wearing only a tee shirt. Mik stood there, in a blue shirt and jeans, reeking of the cigarette smoke from the gig he had just finished. “I came by to tell you that you are in the group.”
“Couldn’t you have just called me in the morning?” She smiled, but her lower lip was trembling.
“No.” He stepped into her tiny living room and closed the door behind him. He looked at her hair, braided in cornrows for the night. He touched the sides of her face and leaned down to kiss her.
She met his lips, tasted the alcohol he had been drinking. He wasn’t drunk, but she was quickly becoming intoxicated. She put her arms around his waist, feeling the hollow of his back through the cotton shirt. He put his arms around her, touching the bare skin under her tee shirt. His touch was electrifying. As musicians, they knew how to play notes, how to bring out the melodies on their instruments. Mariah knew how to crescendo, matching the singers in the church when they were filled with the Holy Spirit. She used that same skill now as her fingers explored Mik’s mane. He knew how to bend a note, too. He knew how to make it his own with just the right touch. He started to unbraid her hair, but his lips never left hers.
During that first time with Mik, the presence entered her heart. She didn’t believe in soul mates, but she felt a connection being made, and not just with their bodies. Mariah lost her temp job that day, as they never got out of bed. She forgot about her job, forgot about everything except the man who was playing her body like a Stratocaster. She lost herself in his hair, his scent, his touch. There was nothing that they didn’t do, no taboos or inhibitions between them. They laughed and moaned, sighed and cried, sang and screamed, as they brought each other to climax over and over again.
Hours later they lay side-by-side and talked about their lives. Mariah listened as he talked about how Richard Michael Shelton, a boy who married his high school sweetheart, Deidre, became Mik DeSalle, the man who left a wife and two children behind in Pittsburgh to follow his rock and roll dream.
In the company of like-minded musicians, other young men who had also felt the seductive lure of the City of Angels, he formed his dream band, Sheffield Steel. He had wanted a name to reflect his steel mill background, but also something to connect him to the popular British hard rock bands of the day. Sheffield, a mill town from across the pond, and the hometown of one of his favorite singers, Joe Cocker, fit perfectly.
She told him about Birmingham, the “Pittsburgh of the South”—what it was like to grow up with segregation, grow up as a second-class citizen, but with first-class parents. She told him how rock and roll made her feel. And she knew he understood.
They ate the cold pizza she had in the refrigerator, and then they made love again. And again. Reluctantly, he got dressed to go to band practice. He told her that once the band had hired two more singers, they would be starting rehearsals. As he was leaving, he turned around to look at her. “I love you,” he said. His lower lip trembled.
So did hers.
* * *
Mariah took another swig of the sweet wine. Mariah, along with Gina Malloy and Olivia Stevenson, was a back-up singer for Sheffield Steel for ten years. She never let her relationship with Mik affect her work with the band. She didn’t tell her parents about him, even when she became pregnant, as they would not have approved of her being with a white man. But after Lucille was born, Mik contacted them. He invited her mother out to LA to see her grandchild and take care of Mariah after a difficult labor. Mama couldn’t hide the disappointment in her eyes when she saw Mik for the first time. Mariah knew that no matter what happened in her life, she could never go back to Birmingham.
But Mariah loved her baby girl instantly. Mik had insisted the baby be named Lucille, after B.B. King’s guitar. She was given the Biblical name Esther as her middle name as a way to appease her mother, who was also named Esther. But it didn’t work. Lucille was beautiful, like her father, with medium-brown skin and curly hair. She had her father’s smile and sense of adventure. During the band years, the three of them traveled the road together. It didn’t matter to her that they weren’t married. Love was all they needed, not a piece of paper.
But the band couldn’t stay on top forever. Mik and some of the other members turned to drugs to give them the high that sold-out concert halls had once provided. After drugs broke up the group, Mariah was a session singer for another ten years. But no band could ever compare to Sheffield Steel at their peak. He became restless. She knew he would eventually leave. There were other women, other substances, and other distractions. But he always came back to her.
She quit the music business, went back to school, and got degrees. She used her session money to buy property, as her parents had instilled in her the importance of owning land. After years of living in apartments, she bought this beach house, the culmination of a lifelong dream to live near the ocean. She tried to raise Lucille the best way she could. Lucy loved her wayward father, treating each visit, however sporadic, as a gift. In spite of the years of missed birthdays and graduations, she would always be her father’s daughter.
Mariah sighed and picked up the bottle. It was empty, but she wasn’t drunk. Lucy would be devastated at the loss of her father. She never gave up hope that one day he would once again become the perfect father she had adored as a little girl.
She started to play “Ten Years Gone.” She thought about one of the last times she had seen Mik. It was a few months ago. They had gone to his private studio, a cottage behind the home he shared with his fourth wife, an actress who was out of town on location. They sang some songs together, and he talked ab
out getting Sheffield Steel back together. They talked about the good old days when the band was at its apex.
The music stopped and they both broke out in embarrassed giggles. He had asked her to get married, taking her hand and gazing into her eyes. His were still blue, not as bright as they were when they met, but still a vivid blue.
She had gasped as he took her in his arms. He held her tightly, as if he were drowning. He had fine lines around his eyes and mouth, but he still was as beautiful as the day they met. She could smell the shampoo in his still-blond hair. There were strands of gray and the length was a little shorter, but he was still her Samson. She held her breath and closed her eyes, running her fingers through his hair. She kissed his forehead, his nose, and brushed his lips. She tried to get him to return to the music, but he was insistent. He gave her a platinum ring etched with tiny hearts and inset with diamonds. Even though she had never cared about marriage when they were together, she could feel tears itching behind her eyes.
Mariah could feel those tears again as she remembered what he had said. “Keep the ring until you change your mind. You know I still love you. It’s never too late until we’re dead.”
* * *
The phone rang. She hit the keys hard, one last chord. She stopped playing and waited for the disembodied voice on the answering machine. It was Toby Reynolds, Mik’s manager. “Mariah? Mari, I guess you are still asleep, but I wanted to let you know that Mik died tonight. He died of a drug overdose. I wanted to call you before you heard it somewhere else. I’m sorry.”
The silence in the room was stifling. Her hands were trembling. The emptiness was returning. She stepped outside to watch the waves breaking as the early morning sunlight rose through the clouds and smog. She could feel the sea spray on her skin, reminding her of his sweat. She could taste one tear, which had rolled down unto her lips, like one last kiss.
Chapter One
Summer 2006
Three Chords, One Song Page 1