by Rick James
“I can understand how you feel,” he said. “You’re a young buck and you got fight in you. But fighting would have gained us nothing.”
“How about our dignity?” I asked.
“Dignity don’t come from winning fights. It comes from respecting yourself.”
“How we gonna respect ourselves if we run from a fight?” I asked.
“The key is not to respect the fight. Animals fight. The one with the sharper teeth wins. What does that prove?”
I didn’t have an answer—but I didn’t need an answer. I just knew that my disposition didn’t go with nonviolence. After the bus incident, I stayed away from Malcolm and the Afro Center. That’s when I started getting deeper into dope.
A month after the picnic, I was on the streets and happened to see Malcolm in his Dodge Dart. He was waiting for a light on the corner of Jefferson and Genesee when he spotted me.
“Brother James! Get in. I’m buying you lunch.”
I didn’t really want to talk to Malcolm. I felt guilty that I’d abandoned the Afro Center. At the same time, I couldn’t refuse his invitation. He’d never done anything but try to help me.
“You in the mood for Wings and Things?” he asked.
“Always.”
The spicy chicken wing was invented in Buffalo. This joint made them super-hot with something they called Mambo Sauce. We sat in the back and started munching.
“Ain’t been around much, have you?” asked Malcolm.
“Been busy.”
“At what?”
“This and that.”
“I see. Look, I know how you feel about what happened at the picnic. But I hate for that to get in the way of your cultural education. I hate to see you give up the books for the streets.”
“I haven’t,” I lied.
“I say that because you have a glow.”
“A glow?”
“Yes, sir. You have an inner glow. A light that comes from within. Everyone has a light but yours is bright, James. Yours is special. You have a mind that connects to people and ideas. You have a brain that catches on instantly to what’s being said. You have sensitivity to what others are feeling. When people see your glow, they want to follow it. Your glow can illuminate others.”
Malcolm Erni was a beautiful cat with a beautiful heart. At that point, though, my heart was closed. I didn’t wanna know about no glow. I wanted to keep running the streets with my boys—Danny, Moses, Truly, and Bubbles. They were daredevils; they were slick; they had the hottest chicks and the best times. They were also into smack.
Heroin was said to be the king of drugs, the highest of all highs. I wasn’t about to mainline the shit—I was too cautious for that—but I wasn’t against chipping. I wasn’t against skin-poppin’. Wasn’t long before I had a scab and found myself hooked as a motherfucker.
Smack takes money. We needed funds to feed our habit and didn’t think twice about having our girlfriends break into houses, where they would steal shit to pawn. Our girlfriends bought our fixes. When one chick got caught, though, the others got scared and stopped. That meant we had to do the dirty work ourselves. That’s when I got popped by the police when a home robbery went bad. I couldn’t call Mom for the bail money. I knew that would anger her, so I called Malcolm. True Christian that he was, he stood up for me and got me out.
“You’re on that dope, aren’t you, James?”
I couldn’t lie to the brother. I confessed that I had a scag jones.
“You got to go cold turkey,” he said, “or you’re back to stealing and thieving. Go cold turkey now before it’s too late.”
I knew I had to heed Malcolm’s advice. I told Mom I was going to New York to visit Aunt Louella, her older sister, who lived in the Bronx. Louella lived with a trombone player and was hip to the world of drugs. Turned out she had the same approach as Malcolm.
“You strung out, James,” she said. “I see it in your eyes. If you came to me for help, I’m willing, but you ain’t gonna like the treatment.”
“Can’t I get off gradually?”
“There ain’t no ‘gradually’ when it comes to H. You either on or off. If you want off, I’m putting you in the back bedroom and locking the door for a week.”
“I’ll starve to death,” I said.
“I’ll bring you water and soup and enough bread to keep you going, but that’s it. I ain’t fucking around with you, boy. I don’t got the time. Only reason I’m doing this is ’cause you’re my sister’s son. You hear me?”
“Yes, Aunt Lou. But you won’t tell Mom, will you?”
“All I’m telling your mother is that you’re in New York to hear some music. She knows how much you love music.”
“Thank you.”
“When I lock the door to that back bedroom, you ain’t gonna be thanking me no more.”
Aunt Lou was right. Before long, I was cursing her and her cold-turkey cure tactics. I was going out of my head. The withdrawals were worse than I had ever imagined. Never knew pain could be so extreme. But God bless Louella, ’cause she knew what to do. Water, soup, and bread—that was it. She didn’t hold my hand and she didn’t wipe my brow.
“It’ll pass,” she said, “and then you’ll be all right.”
Five days of hell did pass. Aunt Lou was true to her word and didn’t tell Mom what I’d been through. I took the bus back to Buffalo. I felt like a new man. The good feeling, though, didn’t last long.
MICKEY MOUSE
I’m glad you went to New York,” said Malcolm. “Glad you got clean. You look a million times better.”
“I feel better.”
“You been reading about this war in Vietnam?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“They sending over poor people. They sending over blacks. You don’t wanna be sent over. You wanna do everything you can to keep from going. Ain’t no place for a black man. Ain’t our war. There’s no reason to die for something we don’t even understand.”
“How do I get out of it?”
“Navy Reserve. That lets you finish high school, get paid, stay home, and stay outta Vietnam. It’s the smart thing to do.”
“Is that what you told Danny and my boys? Is that what they’re doing?”
“Danny’s strung out on smack so heavy until he ain’t doing nothing. And Moses, well, he’s even worse. He’s both selling it and shooting it. Those boys ain’t long for this world. Is that what you want, James? You gonna let your glow fade out like that?”
“Don’t feel like I’m ready to die.”
“Then don’t. Play the game but avoid the war. Do the minimum and get Uncle Sam off your back.”
Malcolm’s advice about kicking heroin had been right on time. The man saved my life. So I had no reason to doubt the wisdom of this new course of action. A week later, I signed up for the reserve. I exaggerated my age. I said I was eighteen when I don’t think I was even fifteen.
I thought I had it all together. I always thought I had it all together.
The cats who really had it all together, though, were the singing groups, the Chimes and the Chi-Lites, the Delfonics and the Dells. In Buffalo I joined the Duprees and, believe me, we had us a bad blend. We covered all the great doo-wop hits of the fifties—“Earth Angel” and “Ten Commandments of Love”—in addition to whatever the Impressions were doing in Chicago and the Contours were doing in Detroit. Beyond helping the Duprees spin out sweet harmonies, I was also an in-demand drummer for the small jazz groups popping up on the local scene. I had an Elvin Jones/Max Roach/Art Blakey attitude that gave the boppers the fiery push they needed. Doo-wop and hard bop were my twin passions.
Those passions were so all-consuming that I sometimes forgot to attend the twice-monthly reserve training sessions. The first time I went was a disaster. I was scolded because I’d sewed my stripe upside down on my uniform. I didn’t give a shit. That scolding made me not want to come back—and so I didn’t. Until I had to.
“You got another letter from the navy,” said
Mom. “I’ve prayed to God that it’s not telling you to go to Vietnam.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “They can’t make me go to no Vietnam.”
What they could make me do, though, was report for active duty at the Great Lakes naval base. In punishment for missing so many reserve training sessions, I had to spend forty-five days away from home. Didn’t see it as any big deal. Except that it was.
Great Lakes was no-nonsense discipline, and I hated it. I hated getting my hair shaved off. My Afro was my pride and to have the fuckin’ navy cut it down was humiliating. I hated the calisthenics, the marching, the loading and unloading the M1s and M16s, the whole military attitude that said the officer was God and you were a piece of shit.
I had my own attitude. When I was instructed to do sentry duty, which meant watching the barracks all night with an empty gun, I said fuck it. After an hour of whistling in the dark, I fell asleep. In the morning the commanding officer woke me up with a swift kick and ordered me into the brig they called Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse was where I had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. They had me mopping floors, washing windows, and scraping bird shit off the roof. I did this for a week. At the end of my sentence, the commanding officer came to see me.
“You understand now?” he asked.
“Understand what, sir?”
“Understand the importance of sentry duty.”
“I understand the importance of not getting caught sleeping on sentry duty.”
“The job itself is vital.”
“If it’s so vital,” I said, slipping into my street attitude, “why was I holding an empty gun?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Exactly, sir. That’s my point—that there is no point.”
“Maybe you’ll get the point after another week in Mickey Mouse.”
After my second week, I knew there was no point to any of this military crap. The only point was to keep my mouth shut. And I did. Miraculously, I got out of Great Lakes in one piece.
Buffalo never looked so good. I looked for my boys Danny and Moses. Danny had been busted and was serving time in Attica. Moses had been shot to death on a dope deal gone bad. It was Malcolm who told me the news.
“They were good cats,” said Malcolm. “They had brains and a future until smack made them stupid. In those forty-five days you were gone, they lost everything—Danny lost his freedom and Moses lost his life. What are you gonna do, James? You gonna go back on that smack and get stupid like them?”
“I’m staying straight,” I promised Malcolm. I could feel fear moving up and down my spine. What happened to Danny and Moses could have easily happened to me.
“Stay with your music,” said Malcolm. “Your music is your protection. Let music surround you and you’ll be all right.”
I hooked back up with the Duprees. I played drums for practically every jazz trio and quartet in the city. I even entered a talent contest at WUFO radio and won first place singing Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” Malcolm was right. Long as I stayed with music, music would keep me from harm.
As the cats returned from Vietnam, I could see the harm that the war had done to them. Many returned junkies. It looked like they’d lost their souls. Their eyes were blank. I witnessed a couple of robberies and holdups pulled off by Vietnam vets who acted like killing machines. I didn’t blame them. I blamed the fucked-up war and how it turned them into monsters. I didn’t want that happening to me.
The more I thought about the military, the more I stayed away from the reserve. I couldn’t get myself to go to any more training sessions. Even twice a month was too much for me. I no longer gave a shit. The pro-war government of Lyndon fuckin’ Johnson, the racist policies of a country where discrimination ran rampant, a fighting force where blacks, too poor to buy their way out of service, were the first to go and first to die—the hell with it all.
I’d sing, I’d play drums, I’d make my music all night long, but I’d be damned if I was going to show up for the reserve.
“Be careful,” said Malcolm. “You might not show up for the navy, but the navy is sure going to show up for you.”
Once again, Malcolm was right on the money.
After a night of sitting in with the great Thelonious Monk at the Royal Arms, a night when I thought I had died and gone to jazz heaven, a night when all my skills as a drummer had been validated by a simple nod from Monk, I woke up late the next day. I wanted to tell Mom all about how I kept up with the ultra-modern Monk, whose riffing and sense of rhythm were completely his own. Amazingly, I was able to read him right. It was one thing to be able to sing like Ben E. King; it was another, at least for fifteen or twenty minutes, to play “Round Midnight” and “Ruby, My Dear” with Thelonious Monk.
“Here’s another one of those letters from the navy,” she said. “It came yesterday but I was too scared to open it for you.”
She handed it to me with a terrible look in her eyes. Remember—Mom was a warrior and it took a lot to make her scared. When I tore open the envelope and read it, I saw she was right to be scared.
“They calling you over to Vietnam this time, ain’t they?” she said. “They calling you for real.”
The letter was for real—I was to report to the naval base in Rochester and wait for the Enterprise aircraft carrier to take me to Vietnam.
Mom started crying. For all my macho posturing, I started crying too. She took me in her arms and we cried together.
“Cried last night,” the bluesman sang on the record Mom played the night before I left for Rochester, “and cried the night before. Cried so hard I don’t know what I’m crying for.”
That was my song and my story. I was crying on the outside and hurting on the inside. I was numb with worry and fear. I had me some blues I had never known before. I felt like I was walking through motions without any real notion of what I was doing. I felt like I was walking to my death.
Walking to the Greyhound station where once upon a time I’d run off to New York to hear Sonny Rollins and Junior Walker. Now I was headed to Rochester and the end of my life.
Walking from the Rochester bus station to a scuzzy hotel near the base.
With my sea bag over my shoulder, walking from the hotel to the base.
Walking down the hotel hallway to a little nasty room with a single bed.
Walking through my dreams of sinking ships and falling bombs, dreams of my own destruction.
Waking up late and walking to the commander’s office at the base.
“You were due at six A.M.! It’s now ten!”
Walking through my lame excuse that the commander didn’t buy. Instead he had me chipping paint off the walls of the bathroom shower for hours on end. He told me if I was late again, he’d have me chipping paint for the next five days until the ship arrived that would take me to Vietnam.
Walking to a pay phone and calling Mom.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Fine,” I lied.
“What do you need, son?”
“Just a little money till my ship arrives.”
Walking back to the hotel, where, exhausted, I fell asleep.
Walking through some nightmares where men were slitting my throat and piercing my heart with bayonets.
Waking to see the clock, which said eleven A.M. Overslept again. Five hours later. This time the commanding officer would have my ass. The commanding officer would make my life hell until it was time to sail to my death.
Walking to the bathroom to take a shower.
Walking to the closet to put on my uniform.
Seeing something being slipped under my door.
A money order from Mom.
Fifty bucks.
Thank you, Jesus.
Walking out the door.
Walking to get the money order cashed.
Walking back to the bus station.
“Where to?” asked the clerk behind the counter.
“Toronto.”
> “Round trip or one-way?”
“One-way.”
Walking on the bus.
Walking out of one world into another.
RICKY JAMES MATTHEWS, A.K.A. LITTLE RICKY
Malcolm had planted the seed some months before. He had taken me to lunch at a little Chinese restaurant just over the Peace Bridge in Fort Erie, Canada.
“Canada’s different,” Malcolm told me. “Canada doesn’t have the heavy racist history of America. Canada doesn’t have the military ambition or arrogance of America. Canada’s laid-back.”
“Canada’s dull,” I said. I’d been going over to Canada for years, sometimes to play music, sometimes to score dope. When the Canadians want action, they come over here.
“That’s changing. Montreal’s gotten hip. So has Toronto. If push comes to shove, don’t overlook Canada. You can go to Canada and be cool.”
The thought of ducking out of the navy had been on my mind ever since I went to the base in the Great Lakes. I knew, though, that would turn me into a criminal and have the law on my tail. I also knew that if I became a deserter it might break my mother’s heart. Once it became clear that I was being shipped overseas, I figured I’d just grin and bear it—except I couldn’t. Everything in me screamed in protest. I was not going off to this fuckin’ stupid war.
So Canada became the escape and close-by Toronto, a mere twenty-five-dollar bus ride from Rochester, became the destination. For the umpteenth time, Brother Malcolm pushed me in the right direction.
During the three-hour bus ride, paranoia started to build. I started imagining that the navy had already sent their police force after me. I knew they had no jurisdiction in Canada, but what if there was some new treaty that let them pick AWOL cats off the street anywhere in the world? I was getting myself crazy. I had to calm the fuck down or I’d have a nervous breakdown.
By the time the bus arrived in Toronto, I had talked myself into a reasonable state of mind. It was the spring of 1964, I was sixteen years old, and even though the city stood only a hundred miles from Buffalo, it might have been a million. I felt like I was on another planet. Canada was way more chilled out than the uptight USA. Folks were friendlier. Whites seemed less leery of blacks. My shoulders and neck, shot through with tension during the ride north, began to relax. I took a deep breath and sighed. No one was looking for me. I didn’t need to stress. I wasn’t totally broke. I did have a little money in my pocket. I passed by a newsstand that displayed a paper that said the World’s Fair was opening in New York.