We had arrived back in Tokyo, and the first night in his hotel, he got up in the middle of the night and headed for the bathroom. Still half asleep, he accidentally went out the door into the hall instead. The next thing he knew, he was standing in the hall in his underwear, locked out. Somehow he found his way down the hall to my room and knocked on the door, calling, “Let me in!”
Awakened from a sound sleep, I yelled, “Dad? What are you doing?”
He said, “It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, just open the door! If you don’t open the door, I’m going to go down to the lobby like this.”
I staggered out of bed and opened the door. There stood my father in his underwear. He told me what had happened, and I got him back to his room. My father was irritated, but I thought it was hilarious.
We didn’t talk about father-son stuff for two weeks. We just laughed and had a good time together. We talked about music as we always had. We went out to dinner, which is something he rarely did. He was extremely self-conscious about eating. We went out together with the promoter. We had never done that before. During this fleeting moment on the road with my father, the past was lifted.
My favorite part of the tour by far was helping to prepare him for a concert. He had a preparation ritual that he always followed precisely. We would go through his clothes together, and he would ask me to identify every piece by color and style. I would put everything together, from the tie to the socks and shoes, and lay them out in the dressing room. The band leader, Clifford Solomon, would come into his dressing room and get the numbers of the music for the night. All the songs were numbered, and my father would call them off to Clifford. A few minutes after Clifford left, the band would go onstage. My dad would have a white towel in front of his chair, and he’d sit there with his shoes off and his feet on the towel, sometimes smoking a cigarette, and listen to the band through the speakers. When the band hit a certain point in the music, he would say, “Okay, let’s go.”
He would start his ritual. Then he would tell me what to bring first, asking me to hand him each piece one at a time until he was completely dressed. I would straighten his tie. I always had to tell him to brush his hair. The entire time he was dressing, he was listening to the band. As he sat there, I could see him begin to transform. He would start patting his leg and bobbing his head, then throw his head back and say, “Listen to Clifford!” It was like watching the music being injected into the core of his soul. By the time we left the dressing room, he was bobbing and patting his leg in time to the music. He would jerk me back and forth as he danced and I’d say, “Man, this is wild, Dad!” “Listen, that’s my band!” he’d say. While I guided my father to the stage, he would be infused with energy. I, too, would feel the music. The connection and the experience was simply electric as the current of his music ran through my body.
We would stand in the wings waiting for the announcer’s voice to come booming out: “Ladies and gentlemen, the genius of Ray Charles!” I would lead him onstage, still bobbing and jumping, and feel a shot of sunshine as we walked into the stage lights. He could feel the warmth of the lights and hear the crowd roaring and I could feel the electricity of the crowd, too. I would guide him to the piano, making sure that the mike was set, and that the seat was in its proper position. Once everything was in place, I would leave the stage. As I was walking off, he would stand there with his hand up in the air for a moment, and then he would jump up and start patting his leg, and it was on. He would sit down and plunge into his musical journey once more. I would stand in the wings and watch. It was magic watching him perform. The air was filled with applause as the audience embraced him. And he would embrace them back with his music, giving them what they had come to see. For the duration of the concert, my father and the audience and the music were one—a love affair.
After being on the road with him that December, I understood why my father said he would never retire. He always told me that he wouldn’t know what to do in retirement. Watching him for those weeks, I understood why retirement was out of the question. The music was a part of him from the beginning, and it would be part of him until his last curtain call. Everything about it—the dressing room, the lights, the energy, the crowd, and most of all, the music—was the heart and soul of my father’s existence. It was his lifeblood, and he would never leave it until he heard God’s call.
As much as I loved touring with my father, I couldn’t stay out on the road. I didn’t want to repeat my father’s pattern by being away from my family most of the year. I would miss them too much. But I wanted to prove to my father that I could be an asset to his business, so I decided on a venture of my own. My friend Eugene Rhea and I decided to use his production company, Underdog Productions, and invested our money in putting together a concert featuring my father at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. We were going to promote a Ray Charles concert. We used Eugene’s production company name in dealing with Ray Charles Enterprises because I didn’t want my father to know I was involved. The only one who knew was Warren Stevens, the booking agent at the time, and he kept our secret. I believe Mr. Adams also knew, but my father did not know that I was promoting his concert. My involvement was confidential.
On the night of the concert, I was very excited. I knew that it was part of my father’s contract that he must be paid before he went onstage. The promoter would have to give a cashier’s check to either my father or Mr. Adams before his performance. I walked into his dressing room and said, “Hello, Dad.” He was surprised to hear my voice. He said, “Hmm. I didn’t expect you to be here tonight. What are you doing here?”
And I replied, “Well, I have your check.”
A strange frown came on his face, and he started moving his head from side to side. He said, “What are you doing with my check?”
I said, “Well, you’re working for me tonight, Dad.”
He said, “What do you mean? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
I told him, “You are working for me tonight. Eugene and I are promoting this concert. I told them not to tell you.”
He slapped himself on the knee and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” And he looked down and said, “Well, you have a lot of nerve, ’cause I wouldn’t have put my money up like that.”
I asked him, “What are you saying? That you’re a risk?”
“I’m not a risk. I always play. Concerts are risky.”
So I said, “Well, then go out and do a good job, so we can sell out the next show.”
For a minute he just sat there, taking it in, and then he said, “Damn. Yeah. I like that.”
I didn’t make a fortune that night. We sold enough tickets to make some profit. But it was a learning experience. I had never promoted a concert before, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it went well anyway. I had achieved my main objective, which was to prove something to my father. I wanted to demonstrate my business acumen. In less than four months, I had put together a successful concert for him. It felt great handing him that check.
I felt that I had proven my point, but I knew I would need more work experience and a successful track record before I tried to join my father again. So I took a job as a financial adviser for New York Life, and we moved out of Southridge to Culver City.
When Duana announced that she was pregnant with our second child, I was thrilled. This time we chose a birthing room at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Los Angeles, and this time our mothers were able to join us and share the experience. My mother would coach and encourage Duana during delivery. I brought a video camera to record the birth. On January 8, 1985, Blair Alayne was born. For the second time, I was having the most remarkable experience of my life. Afterward I brought the videotape home and shared the experience with Erin, showing and explaining her sister’s birth to her. I wanted her to be a part of her sister’s birth, even though she wasn’t old enough to be in the delivery room. Later I took Erin to the hospital, and she was able to visit and hold Blair. She looked at her
tiny sister with tenderness and wonder. That was the beginning of a long, close relationship between them. My daughters are still very close. I taught them that no one and nothing should ever come between them, not even Duana and me.
I called Blair “Binky.” That was her nickname. My girls were Tink and Binky to me. My anxiety about SIDS surfaced again with Blair’s birth. I wasn’t comfortable putting her in another room, even with a baby monitor. So I would turn on my side and sleep with her in the curve of my body. I slept with her for months that way until my wife finally said, “Okay, that’s enough. She can sleep on her own.” Blair was four months old, and having her in our bed continually had begun to create problems in our marriage. Duana put Blair in her crib, and from that night on, Blair slept in her own bed. I understood Duana’s frustration with me, but my fear was real. I was serious about watching over my children. Having Erin and Blair close to me during their infancy relieved my anxiety and fears.
I had a wonderful family that I loved. I should have been counting my blessings, but I wasn’t. I became self-absorbed, struggling with my career direction and trying to figure out which direction my life was headed, trying to establish a more sound foundation. In the midst of all this I decided to do the worst thing I could have done: I had an affair with a mutual friend’s sister. Inevitably, my wife found out, and it destroyed all the trust in our relationship. The tension in our relationship continued to build until it became unbearable. I apologized, but I could not take back what I’d done. It was wrong and irresponsible. All my life I had been angry with my father about his infidelities while married to my mother. Now here I was, less than five years into my marriage, and I had already begun to follow the same pattern. I wasn’t unhappy and I had no logical reason for doing it. Ultimately, Duana and I separated and I bear the responsibility for the sadness my actions brought into my children’s lives. Our separation and divorce was an extremely negative experience.
All of our lives became more complicated after that. The girls were back and forth between us, but eventually I would get custody and move back into Southridge with the girls. Southridge was a safe and sound environment to raise the girls in, just as it had been for me. The grounds of Southridge became a great shelter of love and security for my children, where they could grow up with their grandmother to nurture them when I was working, as she had nurtured and protected me. Their grandmother’s cooking became the standard by which they judge all good cooks. To this day they both swear that my mother could make Malt-O-Meal taste like cake and ice cream. She cooked for them, mothered them, and when necessary, reminded them that she still had the switches on reserve.
My mother was a huge help, but for several years the girls spent most of their time with me. It took me a while to figure out how to manage my personal life and my business life. I had to divide my days like most parents. It was a challenge being in sales and balancing my workday going back and forth in the middle of the day to pick Erin up from preschool, take her to day care, and then come back and pick both girls up by six o’clock. Eventually, I got the hang of it.
I cherished my time with my daughters. I wanted to be the kind of father to them that I had always needed for myself. I wanted to be there for them physically and emotionally, to be the kind of hands-on parent that my mother was. I learned to braid their hair. I made it a point to know their teachers and monitor what the girls were learning in school. When Erin started kindergarten, I worked diligently with her at home. I wanted her a step ahead of her class. I always made her do more than what was required. She hated it at the time, of course, but in the long run she appreciated it. Her grades were proof of her hard work.
I belonged to the PTA for Windsor Hills Magnet School in View Park. The school was starting to look a little run-down. Some of us parents volunteered to take time off from work and paint some of the school’s worst classrooms over the summer so the teachers and students would come back to fresh-looking classrooms. We bought the paint ourselves. We raised money for the school whether it was raining or the sun was shining. My mother had done the same thing for me.
I was always particular about the girls’ appearance. I chose their outfits to make sure everything went together perfectly. Eventually Blair got so tired of it that she threw a tantrum and refused to get dressed unless I began to allow her to pick out her own clothes. She promptly put on half the things in her closet. Her color coordination was something to be desired. But she was very pleased with herself.
The girls’ favorite thing to do at Southridge when they were small was to get into my Grandmother’s bathroom and closet. She had every product imaginable, and Erin and Blair would sample her powder, lotion, and perfume. Her closet was like Disneyland to two small girls. It was big enough to run through, and the girls would dive into her clothes and try on her hats. My mother had an amazing collection of beautiful hats and shoes. A Southern girl at heart, she never lost her love of a striking hat.
It was the little things that created the happiness in our lives during those years. Our house was always filled with music. We didn’t watch a lot of television, but I played jazz, R & B, and, of course, some of their grandfather’s music. It was the closeness that defined us during the girls’ early years. I loved waking up with them climbing in the bed and playing with me. I remember spending most of one summer inside with both girls because they had chicken pox. And I was proud of my skills as the tooth fairy. I kept a big bag of change handy, and when one of them lost a tooth, I would dump the change by her pillow. It wasn’t until years later that I found out they heard me. I tried to tiptoe, but the clanking of the coin bag was a dead giveaway. They pretended to be asleep so I wouldn’t feel bad, but they knew early on that the tooth fairy was Daddy.
I even enjoyed their mischief. It reminded me of my own at the same age. I would go into their room and find sandwiches and other food wrapped in napkins under their beds. There would be ants everywhere. I would find out that they had collected a considerable amount of food that I thought they had eaten. I had to laugh since I did it myself as a kid, stuffing Spam and vegetables under the red seat of my chair in our kitchen on Hepburn. Erin played violin in the school band, and one day I went into Erin’s bedroom when I heard her practicing the violin—at least I thought she was practicing the violin. She was actually sitting cross-legged on the bed reading a book. It turned out she had taped her violin lesson and was playing it while she read. When I walked in on her, she had that deer-in-the-headlights look. I had to turn around and walk right out again because I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. I had to admit, it was pretty good. It’s amazing what children can come up with.
I enjoyed answering their questions. I explained to them how birds fly, and all of the endless whys and why nots. When we went to the beach, I explained the motion of the waves and told them why sand crabs dig their way into the sand after the wave retreats. Eventually there were a few questions that caught me off guard. On one occasion, after the girls would take a bath, they asked me why hair grows on certain parts of the body. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Every now and then I would have to tell them, “Okay, I have to call your grandmother and let her answer that question for you.” And I would.
Being with the girls was the joy of my life, my favorite thing. When they would crawl over me and run their hands across my face, it reminded me of the way my father would run his hands across my face. I would touch their faces in return. Our lives were a cycle of home, school, homework, and recreation, creating balance in their lives like so many parents do. Their smiles were my world.
My photos of my children during those years remind me of how beautiful life was and how blessed I was. A picture of little Erin, with her fat cheeks and beautiful almond eyes, smiling. A goofy shot with both girls holding their pigtails up in the air. Me sitting at a baseball game with Erin on one knee and Blair on the other, all of us watching the game. Blair dressed as a bumblebee and Erin in a pink princess dress for Halloween. Me bent down with their arms a
round my neck at the Los Angeles Zoo. Sitting on my lap at Easter in their fluffy new dresses. Erin sound asleep in my arms on the couch. These are the images that still live in my memory and my heart. In every photo they were happy and the love we shared shines through.
When my father was in town, I would take the girls to visit with him. He still came back to the house now and then, and when he did, they would see him at Southridge. When we visited with my father at the studio, I often took them with me. Once we were inside the studio, my father would greet them with the ritual I knew so well from my childhood. He would stand Blair and Erin in front of him one at a time and feel their faces, their arms, their waists, to see how much they had grown. Then he would have them sit down next to him at the console while he worked. I wanted them to sit still while Grandpa was working, but it was too intriguing. They were as fascinated as I was by his ability to work the soundboard. His hands would move confidently over the complicated dials and jacks, making adjustments, marking the tape for editing. Like most people, they had no idea how he could perform so many tasks while being blind.
When my father stopped working we would go to his office to talk for a while, and the girls would explore his office. His office was large, filled with gifts from fans—flowers, toys, candy, and stuffed animals. His office had a big closet filled with his personal and performance clothes. The girls would go in there to play like they did in their grandmother’s closet, except they didn’t try his things on. Blair was fascinated by the sequins, bright colors, and loud prints he wore onstage. One day my father had some of his stage tuxedos hanging on the door, and she asked her grandpa if he knew how loud and flashy his clothes were. He didn’t seem surprised. He told her his clothes were supposed to stand out so he would be the center of attention onstage, and he guessed that they did that all right.
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