Months after my mother came home from the hospital, Myrtle began to feel sick herself. When she went to the doctor, he told her there was nothing wrong with her. She had nothing to worry about. But she kept feeling worse. Finally she went to see Dr. Foster. By the time she saw him, it was too late. Dr. Foster diagnosed Myrtle with terminal cancer. My mother told us that Myrtle was sick and had to go into the hospital. She took us to see Myrtle one time. It was the last time we would see her. A few weeks later Myrtle passed away.
I was stunned. Why wasn’t Myrtle coming home from the hospital like Mommy did? In those days, cancer was kept secret. No one talked about it. And no one talked to children about death. My mother tried to explain to us what had happened, but I couldn’t understand. Why had Myrtle died? David and I were confused and heartbroken. We begged my mother to take us to see Myrtle. Finally she agreed to take us to the mortuary to say good-bye. Myrtle was so still in the casket. We were too young to understand what death meant, only that Myrtle was not with us anymore. We didn’t want to leave Myrtle all alone there. We wanted her to come home with us where we could take care of her and make her better. My brothers and I cried inconsolably as my mother forced us to leave. For weeks afterward I kept asking my mother when Myrtle was coming home.
Myrtle was the first person I loved who passed away. It was a bitter irony. Our mother had lived to come home to us, but Myrtle had been taken from us forever. Losing Myrtle hurt me deeply. It was my first glimpse of what my father must have gone through when his mother passed away.
A YEAR LATER, President Kennedy was assassinated. Like millions of other Americans, I sat with my mother in the den and watched his funeral on television as his coffin was borne to its final resting place. Caroline Kennedy, only a year younger than I was, stood with her mother and her small brother, John. Like the rest of America, we cried at the senseless death of our president. Like most African Americans, we mourned the passing of a man who believed in equality for all Americans. We wanted change, and it was difficult for me to understand the complexity of President Kennedy’s assassination. If the president wasn’t safe, no one was. We had seen him killed in front of our own eyes.
Hepburn Avenue, once a haven of innocence, seemed permeated with death. Darkness had seeped into every corner of our home. I didn’t feel safe there anymore.
ONLY ONE BLESSING emerged from all that pain: my grandmother. A year after coming home from the hospital, my mother had to return for what would be the second of ten surgeries, all resulting from her original illness. Although she had survived, she was left with scar tissue throughout her torso, and over the years she suffered repeated intestinal blockages as a result. She wasn’t certain she would be able to continue taking care of us. Her worry was made worse because my father was gone most of the time and her family was still in Texas. Every year since I could remember, we had gone to Houston for a visit, and one of the purposes of those visits was to check on my grandmother. Her drinking had worsened, deepening into increasingly serious alcoholism, though I was too young to understand what was wrong with her. My mother could not rest easy until she saw for herself that Grams was all right. So a year and a half after she was first hospitalized, Mother convinced Grams to move to California. With Grams nearby, my mother could check on her more easily. More important, we would be able to see her more often, and Grams would be able to step in if my mother’s illness worsened.
Grams was reluctant to leave Houston, but once she settled into an apartment in Los Angeles, she adjusted quickly. Grams was a free-spirited woman with the most beautiful smile. She loved life and us dearly. Within a short time, she had surrounded herself with a new group of friends and was back to enjoying herself in the evening and playing cards with her new friends on the weekends. When our next-door neighbors, the Kimballs, needed someone to clean their house and help care for their two young children, Grams went to work for them. If my brothers and I wanted to see her, she was next door. The next year Uncle James moved his family to California and became an important part of our lives as well. My mother was relieved to know that she didn’t have to worry about David, Bobby, and me being alone, even with our father on the road much of the time. For his part, my father welcomed his in-laws. He had lost his brother and mother at such a young age, and in Grams and Uncle James, he found another mother and brother to help fill the void. He loved them as his own.
A FEW MONTHS after my ninth birthday, my father took us all for a flight in his Cessna. Tommy McGarrity was piloting the plane as we flew over Baldwin Hills and View Park.
Pointing down below, my father said, “You see down there?”
Tommy banked the plane, and we all looked. We saw tracks of houses, and in the middle of them, on three large dirt lots, our new house was being built.
“See where the construction is going on?” my dad asked. “That’s where we are going to live.”
We circled for several minutes before Tommy leveled off and headed back toward the airport. It was thrilling. Even though a new house meant leaving Anthony Anderson and all my other friends behind, it also meant a new beginning. I was ready to leave behind Hepburn and the pain that lingered there.
CHAPTER 8
In the Heat of the Night
Seems like a cold sweat
Creeping cross my brow.
—QUINCY JONES
BY THE TIME I WAS NINE, I KNEW MY FATHER WAS AN ADDICT, though I didn’t really understand what that meant. We never talked about it in the family. My mother always explained away my father’s strange behavior as nerves or “just the way Daddy is.” But I knew from reading Jet and other gossip magazines I found around the house. I knew what people were saying about him, and I had put together most of the pieces. The year we left Hepburn for View Park, a series of events forced our family to face the problem together. Years of addiction finally caught up to my dad.
My father had started using heroin in his teens, and as his success grew, so did his heroin use. Heroin was expensive, and in the early years, he couldn’t afford to use very often. Poverty had limited his access to heroin. Once his records started hitting the top of the charts, though, he could have all the drugs he wanted.
Most of the time when my dad was around, he would be in withdrawal—twitching, jumping, and sweating. It was a cycle. When the drug was first administered, he would be violently agitated, but then he would gradually mellow out. Band members joked that if you wanted a raise from my father, the time to ask him was when he was mellow. The mellow mood didn’t last long, however. Soon he would be craving another hit. Sometimes I would see him standing in the hall at home, sweating, barely aware of his surroundings. It was frightening because I didn’t know what was wrong with him. When I was older and my friends would see him that way, it was embarrassing. I didn’t want people to know. Sometimes he reacted violently, and when that happened, I was terrified.
My mother dealt with the situation as best she could. She and my father had talked about his addiction many times, and since it was clear he wasn’t going to quit using heroin, she did what she could to protect us from it. When we asked her, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” she would give us various explanations and change the subject. Sometimes she would say he was hyper, other times that it was his nerves. Whatever she said, the message was always the same: Daddy’s just like that. If he started jumping and sweating, my mother would tell him, “Stop it, Ray! Stop it! Go upstairs. The kids are down here.” As my mother later told me, it was the only way she could prevent him from going completely out of control. Part of the agreement he made with my mother before they married was that the family was never to see any drugs or paraphernalia. I never witnessed him getting high, nor did I ever see his “works”—he was supposed to keep them where we couldn’t find them. If Bobby, David, or I had ever stumbled across his works, I think my mother would have lost her patience and respect for him. She did everything in her power to protect us from the effects of my father’s addiction, and coping with it every day took a
tremendous toll on her. She saw the magazine articles, too, and she knew the neighbors talked about my father when she wasn’t around. Her reaction was to withdraw into our family and socialize less and less. Always a woman who lived quietly, she became increasingly isolated in our home on Hepburn.
My father never believed heroin was harming him. He continued to make music and deal with the demands of the road more successfully, so it was easy for him to convince himself that there was no real problem. But he respected those close to him who did not use drugs. He kept the drugs away from my mother as much as he could, and he did not ask friends to carry the stuff or shoot him up if they didn’t use it themselves. My father’s drug use was a normal part of life for everyone around him, and they accepted it. There was nothing they could do about it. Every once in a while, though, something would go very wrong.
Occasionally, he would overdose. After he would receive his daily bread, he sometimes used more if he thought he wouldn’t be able to use for a couple of days while he was on the road. Then he would insist on a second hit to carry him over. This often meant having too much in his system at once. When he ingested too much, he would become violent at first and would have to be restrained until he calmed down. Once the initial agitation passed, he would start to slip into unconsciousness. When this happened, his friends would have to get him up and keep him moving until the drug began to work its way out of his system. They would put him in a cold shower and then walk him around. They couldn’t let him sit down, for if the drug stopped moving through his system and went to his heart, it would kill him. One of his friends would tell him, “Put your arm around my neck. Don’t let go. Put your arm around my neck.” Another friend would put an arm around my father’s waist on the other side, and together they would keep him moving. Sometimes they would have to keep him walking for hours, until he finally started to come down. Herbert Miller had to do this more than once. He said it was terrifying. He was always afraid that this time my father wouldn’t make it.
Another time, on a Pan Am flight to Hong Kong, my father overdosed in the restroom. He tried to use all of the drugs before he went through customs. When Dad came out of the bathroom and started down the aisle, thrashing violently, unaware of where he was, the other passengers were terrified. When the plane landed in Hong Kong, the entire band was detained and interrogated at length. By that time the effects of the drug were wearing off, and since no one was carrying any heroin, the authorities finally let them go. Another time my mother found my dad on the upstairs landing at Hepburn, thrashing so violently that he kicked out the stair railing. My mother had to have it rebuilt.
I learned that the biggest danger came from other addicts who were on the road with him. The dealers were careful not to overdose him, but other guys who used would get so anxious to shoot up themselves that they’d give my father as much as he wanted. In their eagerness to get the drugs into their own bodies, they would inject my father too quickly and accidentally butcher him. He would have blood streaming down his arm, and they wouldn’t even notice. Neither would my father. Afterward his friends would find him high and bleeding heavily. They would have to put a tourniquet on his arm and hold a cold compress on the wound until he stopped bleeding. I don’t think my father ever realized how many times the people who loved him saved his life.
By the time I was six, I knew the danger as well as any of the adults, for I had witnessed it firsthand. If I hadn’t found my father bleeding in his office, he would have died. After that night my mother and I shared a terrible secret and the fear that went with it. We worried constantly that he would overdose again. I cannot remember a time in my childhood after that when I wasn’t afraid my father was going to die.
And then there were the arrests. I didn’t know until I was an adult how often my father was arrested on drug charges. Even now, I’m not sure I know about all the incidents. I know he was picked up in Philadelphia the year I was born. Jeff Brown bailed him out and found a lawyer who got the charges dropped. Even then the arrest made the papers. The Associated Negro Press (ANP) ran some articles, and there was a mention of it in Jet. In those days, though, my father was first striking out on his own, so he wasn’t well-known enough for the arrest to be picked up on the major national wires.
Four months after I found him bleeding to death at home, he was arrested in Chicago. Once again, the charges were dropped. Drug use was so widespread in the music industry that musicians often got by with little more than a slap on the hand as long as they weren’t selling or carrying large amounts. This time, though, the arrest was reported far beyond the ANP. My father was hugely successful by then, and the news found its way into papers nationwide. There were photos of him looking frightened and depressed, and graphic descriptions of the needle tracks on his arms. One police officer said the tracks were the worst he had ever seen. My father was still in denial, but it was clear to everyone else that the situation was spiraling out of control. Magazine articles described his addiction and speculated that my father was on the brink of a terrible fall.
Within months he was arrested again. This time my mother was on the road with him. In November 1961 my parents had just checked into a hotel in Indianapolis with the band when my mother decided she wanted to go back to Chicago. She had seen something there she wanted to buy for my father, and when she mentioned it, my father told her to go on back and finish her shopping if she wanted to. Jeff Brown made a reservation for her, and she went to the airport. She remembers noticing something odd as she walked through the hotel lobby on her way out. Two men in dark suits were sitting in the lobby, holding newspapers open and watching people walk by from behind the cover of the paper. She remembers thinking that they looked like detectives from an old movie, doing surveillance at a hotel. It didn’t occur to her until later that the detectives were watching my father.
Not long after she left, two men knocked on the door of my father’s hotel room, claiming to be from Western Union. When my father opened it, still half asleep, the detectives rushed in and confiscated his drug paraphernalia. The detectives later reported that when they arrested him, he began to weep and told them that he used heroin because “a blind man has to have something.” During questioning at police headquarters, he told the officers that he was very worried about what the arrests were doing to his wife and kids. My mother didn’t find out about the arrest until she got back to the hotel in Indianapolis. Jeff called to tell her what was going on, and she spent a long night in the hotel room wondering what to do next, whether to stay in Indianapolis and wait for my father to get out or to come home to us.
News of the arrest raced through the city and around the country. The next morning fans mobbed the courthouse as my father’s attorney led him in. The paper described the scene as “pure bedlam.” My father refused all questions. The judge set an arraignment date for January 8, 1962, and released my father on bail. Jeff called my mother to let her know that Dad was being released. Exhausted and silent, my dad was brought back to the hotel room. Neither of my parents talked about what had happened. My mother was confused and upset, angry with my father but afraid for him as well, knowing that things were becoming increasingly serious. More than anything, though, my mother was worried about us. So was my father. What would happen to us if our father went to prison? How would we get by if he couldn’t make a living?
Newspapers and gossip magazines had a field day with the arrest. Time magazine ran an article about my father’s drug addiction and personal problems. Some radio stations began banning his records. His appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, scheduled for one week after the Indianapolis arrest, was abruptly canceled. His image as “the great blind musician” was gradually being overshadowed by the publicity surrounding his drug use.
My father’s luck held for one last time. The search of the hotel room turned out to be illegal, so the charges were dropped once again. If the arraignment on January 8 had proceeded as scheduled, my father might have been in custody in Indiana while my moth
er was in the hospital with a burst appendix, hovering near death. It wasn’t until years later that I found out how close my brothers and I came to losing both of our parents in the same week. I don’t want to think about what might have happened to us if we had. By God’s grace, my mother survived and my father was released to his family once again. But it was only a matter of time until the long legal trail caught up to him. I was nine years old when it finally happened.
It was late 1964, and my father had just finished a tour of Canada. He flew with the band on his private plane from Montreal, landing in Boston. His pilot, Tom McGarrity, needed to do some maintenance on the plane, so the band was going to take a couple of days off while the airplane was serviced. My dad and the band went through customs and then drove to White Castle for burgers. Afterward they all went to the hotel. Everyone was relaxing, drifting back and forth across the hallway from room to room, talking and laughing. The radio was on in the background. No one paid much attention to the broadcast until someone heard the announcer mentioning my father’s name. A few seconds later the phone rang, and Herbert Miller answered. It was Jeff Brown.
Jeff said, “Herb, did you go somewhere with Ray? Did he want you to go with him someplace tonight?”
Herbert replied, “No.”
Jeff said, “Then how did he leave the hotel?”
“Is he gone?” Herbert asked. For a minute his mind went blank. Then it suddenly dawned on him that he hadn’t seen my father for a while. He had assumed my dad was in one of the other rooms. The first inkling of panic started to set in. When Herbert asked the other guys, it quickly became apparent that nobody knew where my father was.
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