So strong in our desire to be free. The definitions of his statement colors the skyline. He wa that one last feeling of logic before the needle punctured the vein. He was the music the morning after the resurrection of pain and prayers in the twisted honor and slight applause of demons and folk heroes stabbing us in the back.
He was a love Supreme.
He was a love Supreme.
-
EAST ORANGE, NEW JERSEY, SEPTEMBER 2001
Recollections of Grand Mixer DXT, Greenpoint Studio, Brooklyn, 1991
‘There was an abattoir next door to the studio. Every morning, really early, a truck full of chickens drove up, and when the tailgate opened you heard their screeching and wailing. “I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go.” Like they knew where they were headed. That high-pitched wail. It always woke me up. And the stench, weekends. On Sunday you smelled the bitter, rancid odor of chicken shit and clotted blood. But we got used to it, right? Once I met the guy who did the slaughtering. Huge guy. He had a sharp knife, and he chopped those chickens’ heads off, one by one, and hung them up on hooks. He was merciless. He didn’t say a prayer or anything. Just wham, head off, that’s it, next. Sometimes I miss the studio—don’t you, Umar? We were family: you, me, Anton the drummer, and Lane—remember Lane? Young guy. Wonder whatever happened to him. I had lost my house in Los Angeles to the earthquake. Bill Laswell said I could come live above his studio. How’d I know you’d be sleeping there too. Remember the Chinese place across the street? That was really good, the restaurant next door to McDonald’s. We didn’t have a kitchen. Only a sink and cold water. A shower on the third floor. And a huge wooden table where we sat talking at night. In the winter you had to let the water run or it’d freeze. Later I found an apartment in Harlem, but actually I’d have preferred to stay in Greenpoint. I rode my mountain bike from 132nd St. all the way back to Brooklyn. That studio had something. You know what I mean? You once said I wasted too much time on a beat. Came downstairs at night, muttering that I’d woken you up. But I was totally absorbed in that beat. The rest happened by itself, the sounds, the colors, the dialogues, the chord progressions. I converted it to music. We all had our own rituals. You too. Sometimes you’d vanish all of a sudden, and show up again three days later. Was Bill pissed! You remember? “Go upstairs, go sleep it off.” And then you’d start writing again … ’
-
AKRON, OHIO, 1958
Geronimo
‘Can you see it?’
Carla Wilson’s shrill voice echoed down Howard Street.
Jerome Huling did not budge. He was invisible. The night made him invisible. He thrust his fists deeper into his jacket pockets and saw how the red-to-yellow flicker of the neon lights reflected off Carla’s bare thighs. She sat on the low wall behind Roxy’s Café. The red turned her thighs gold, yellow turned them silver. With silver you could see her goose bumps. Tiny black dots on the glistening skin.
‘C’mere.’
He still didn’t realize Carla was talking to him. The longer he looked at her, the less himself he felt, his frozen feet in the canvas sneakers.
‘You deaf or what?’ She hopped off the wall where she had been sitting in vain for more than half an hour. It was too cold tonight. She tugged her black dress down over her thighs and pulled her thin leather jacket tighter. Then she blew a white cloud into the night.
‘It’s freezing,’ she said in a monotone.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ The words spontaneously escaped from Jerome’s thoughts.
‘So you do have a voice.’ Carla Wilson laughed. Her high cheekbones went up and her eyes became slits. ‘Come over here already. Or are you scared?’
Someone opened the door to Roxy’s. The gentle, smoky music—until now no more than a muffled background noise—blared down Howard Street. Stridently high saxophone notes, like a scream. An agitated drumbeat. The music descended on them like a warm vapor. Jerome and Carla caught each other’s eyes for a moment, then the door closed again.
‘You seen Charlie?’ Carla asked.
‘No,’ Jerome lied. A couple of hours earlier Charlie Brown had driven off in his white Pontiac, raising a hand to Jerome, winking. Two women, white women, were in the back seat.
‘The bastard,’ Carla hissed, as though she read Jerome’s mind. ‘He was supposed to pick me up. I could just as well have stayed home. What’s going on here? Doesn’t anybody want to fuck me?’
Jerome looked at Carla’s enormous thighs, packed into her tight-fitting, rippled dress. He felt bad for her, the way she stood there waiting, blowing on her hands to warm them up. But he liked Charlie. Charlie was the only pimp in the neighborhood who treated Jerome like a grown-up. Sometimes he took him for rides in his Pontiac and told him things no one else would say. That you shouldn’t have sex with white women. ‘Let me tell you something, son,’ he said. ‘You go to bed with a white woman, she’ll become your world. But respect her and stay out of her bed, and she’ll show you the world.’ Charlie Brown wore fancy white suits and silk shirts. His skin glistened with oil and his hair smelled like coconut. Even if Jerome didn’t send any johns his way, Charlie would sometimes give him a few dollars.
‘Maybe he’ll still come,’ Jerome said.
‘Who?’
‘Charlie.’
Carla guffawed. Her laugh sounded hollow and ugly in the darkness. ‘Who you kidding? How old are you anyway?’
‘Twelve,’ Jerome Huling lied.
‘Twelve,’ Carla Wilson said. ‘Twelve my ass.’
The music from Roxy’s hummed softly and invitingly down the street. It was the only bar that was still open.
‘Why don’t you go inside?’ Jerome asked.
‘In that stink hole?’
Jerome knew he should have gone home. He should have gone home hours ago. But as long as Roxy’s was open, he had the feeling something might happen. It always went like that. He would hang around long enough to muster up the courage to pick up his shoeshine kit and go inside. Roxy’s was a pirate’s den. There were men with an eye patch. Jerome once saw a woman without any hair or teeth; she staggered through the bar on matchstick legs. And once, in a corner, there was a man on the floor, bleeding; he had a knife sticking into his belly but nobody paid him any notice. The light in Roxy’s was red and smoky. It smelled like liquor and sweet perfume. The music was deafening. Roxy’s was like a magnet; he was drawn to it against his will. And never afraid. On the contrary: it was like he was invincible in Roxy’s. Like he was flying. And he always earned a few dollars. The later you went, the more work there was. Sometimes the men didn’t even seem to realize their shoes were being polished under the table.
‘What you standing there like that for?’
She had hoisted herself back up on the wall. She immediately looked prettier in the flickering neon lights.
‘Say, what’s your name?’
‘Geronimo,’ answered Jerome.
‘Geronimo? What kinda name’s that?’
‘Just Geronimo.’ If she was out to hassle him, she had another thing coming. He was part Indian. The owner of a bar on Exchange Street had given him that name. At first those hillbillies in the bar had just cursed him out: ‘You ain’t coming in here, nigger.’ They spat at him and hit him, but he kept on going there, doing his work. And one night the owner took him aside and asked his name. ‘Your name’s not Jerome,’ he said. ‘You’re a black Indian. From now on you’re Geronimo.’ Carla was the first person he told his new name to.
‘I’m going in,’ Jerome said.
‘C’mere