Goodbye Without Leaving (2 page)

In the tour bus, on which we all spent a lot of time, Vernon and Ruby sat up front with their accountant or Ike Miles, their musical director. We sat in the back of the bus, blowing reefer and playing cards.

We liked reefer and the band liked speed. Vernon himself took a very hard line against heroin, which he pronounced “hair-oyne,” but he did not mind reefer or bennies, without which no one would have set foot on his bus. His hatred of smack and alcohol was made clear to me when I was hired. Vernon said he treated his people like family and encouraged us all to drink iced tea and ginger ale, which he called “Virginia ale.”

Our end of the bus—mine and Ivy's and Grace's—was a haze of cigarette and reefer smoke and nail polish remover. My thrall to rock and roll made it possible for me to endure the sort of tedium that might otherwise have driven me insane.

We practiced our routines over and over and over, and then we learned new ones. We rubbed each other's feet, or soaked them in portable bidets on the bus. We read fashion and romance magazines which featured such articles as “Color: What Speaks for You?” or “What I Found in My Husband's Pocket Made Our Marriage a Nightmare.” Every now and again, to entertain Grace and Ivy, I would read one of these features in the voice of Dame Edith Sitwell. This was a big hit and proved to them, as nothing else, how wiggy college girls could be.

My university years had taught me nothing whatsoever about manicuring but, because of the fabulous shock absorbers on Ruby's bus, it was possible to gloss one's nails with sparkling Merry Berry or Poison Grape. Oh, the hours of boredom! The inferior reefer!

A backup singer's life was not an easy one, what with trying to find entertaining and not terribly toxic ways of passing the time on that humid bus. We spent hours listening to Vernon on the issues of the day, and there were certainly a lot of these. For example, civil rights. Ruby's husband opined, “It is my civil right to make a lot of bread and I intend to.” And of the war in Vietnam he said, “The white honky devil is practicing on them before starting on us.” Vernon was no friend of the white man, but I was so marginal a person that I hardly counted and was the white Shakette in the way of, say, an odd purple sock. Besides, I felt he was right.

However, no one gave these things all that much thought. Our destination was not some town or city but always “the Auditorium.”

Being on stage made up for everything: the exhaustion, the greasy food, the boredom. It was an addiction. I loved it. I loved our dance dresses and our luminescent shoes. I loved to shake and sweat in front of those gigantic speakers. At concerts the audiences—black, white and mixed—threw us flowers, beads, gumdrops. When Ruby sang “Let Us Be Joined,” which was taken for a song about integration when it was in fact a song about sex, the audience screamed, cheered and threw confetti made out of their shredded Ruby Shakely Souvenir Programs. It is hard to recapture the hokey fervor of those times.

It seemed to me like a fever dream, or even better, one of those sweet dreams from which you wake up and find that it was real. After years of being a sullen, uncooperative ballet student, of not truly understanding deconstructionist criticism, of living with the constant suspicion that I was not in fact a graduate student but an indeterminate person walking around a university campus
dressed
as a graduate student, I was suddenly an authentic thing.

To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

Yes, I was myself. I was not black, I was not from the South, I was not funky and I was not engaged to my high school boyfriend, who was now in the Marine Corps. I was not a Ph.D. candidate and I didn't care. I was a Shakette, and I knew my time had come.

4

Every week, in order to perform my imitation of a good daughter, I wrote my parents a respectful, generally untruthful letter from wherever we happened to be: Demopolis, Alabama. Dear Mother and Daddy. What an
interesting
part of the world this is. Last night the band was invited to an authentic barbecue. I noticed squirrel on the menu of the local restaurant, with eggs and grits. A journalist from some national magazine is traveling with us, but don't worry—he did not bring a photographer. I am very happy and very well. I do love traveling and I do miss you.

In reality, traveling involved looking out the window at a thruway, and these are all the same, probably the world over. I was happy and well, and a guy from a magazine had been on the bus one day but it was unclear if he was going to write about Ruby or go off with Martha and the Vandellas, who were enjoying a string of hits. I did not miss my parents one whit.

Once a month I called my father at his office to check in. A normal person would do this, I felt.

“Hi, Daddy! I'm in Lansing, Michigan.”

“Your mother is very worried about you.”

“I'm fine, Daddy, I'm having a lovely time.”

“She worries about drugs.”

“Oh, drugs,” I said. “There's nothing to worry about. Vernon doesn't allow them. Besides, these people are straight as arrows. They go to church every Sunday.”

Strangely enough, this was not a lie. Every Sunday morning Ruby, Vernon, Grace, Ivy and some of the band went to the local Baptist church, wherever that happened to be. Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks, the band's saxophonist, was an Episcopalian, and said his mother was very High Church—she was from Trinidad and liked a good deal of incense in her service.

Once in a while out of sheer loneliness I went along, and in many of these places I was the only white face. It never failed but that hymn singing brought tears to my eyes.

My parents were relentlessly secular. They believed that to be American was quite enough. Ethnic identity was slightly vulgar in my mother's eyes, or, at best, a kind of colorful peasant tradition.

I had no church to go to. My father's mother had been a Jew from an old family that had intermarried until there was nothing much of anything left except a tree at Christmas time. We had some aunts on my mother's side—this side was of a Judaism so reformed that it was indistinguishable from, say, the Girl Scouts—who held the traditional Passover meal, but no one in living memory celebrated anything silly like Hanukkah. On the High Holy Days my mother dragged my father off to the local reformed synagogue, where the rabbi had a phony English accent and repeatedly intoned in his sermons that Jews were really nothing more than good Americans.

I was sent to Sunday school at this place, where I learned to shoot spitballs and crack gum. I also learned how to make the bus transfer machine go berserk and spew transfers out all over the place. The real purpose of my attending Sunday school was that it made me eligible to attend the Inter-Suburban Dance Society, to which all really nice girls and boys from cultivated Jewish families belonged. Here we were taught the ballroom dancing thought to be useful for our future, since, it was believed, we would attend thousands of weddings, tea dances, and balls when we grew up. At these dances the boys went out and planted cherry bombs in mailboxes and the girls talked about what animals the boys were. As for me, I was usually in love with some gangly misfit or other with whom I discussed such works as
No
Exit
by Jean Paul Sartre. There were a few girls who really liked to kiss boys. I was one of them, although I only kissed those boys who agreed with Jean Paul Sartre that hell was other people.

The first time I heard “Amazing Grace,” in a sweaty little chapel outside of Gainesville, Florida, I began to cry. I found I could not stop crying, on and off, all day.

“Poor little white girl has flipped out,” said Vernon.

I had a healthy, upright hatred for Vernon. Everyone did. He was the sort of person who, it would not have surprised you to learn, had sex with lizards and embezzled funds from handicapped widows. Ruby may have hated him too, but he was her engine; he was everyone's engine. He had come up from the most dire poverty in which ten children slept in a shack and were probably molested by their relatives. He had discovered Ruby and, by dint of being able to pluck the strings of a secondhand guitar and possessing an ambition that made forest fires look like birthday candles, he claimed Ruby—who could sing—and went out to set the world on fire. He had come a long way. At home in New Orleans, he and Ruby lived in a big pink house with a pink piano in the living room and a pink piano in the music room. He drove an elongated black Cadillac and had a collection of Civil War pistols. Ruby had her own masseuse, her own hairdresser and, when she finally hit the big big time (by which time I was long gone, as the song says), she even had her own designer and nutritionist.

Ruby was not interested in the private lives of her staff. The people who worked for her—musicians and dancers—were just so many crabs or spiders. She did not like the sight of anyone having trouble. The only reason she and Vernon saw me crying was because I burst into tears inside the church.

“Today is the anniversary of my grandmother's death,” I lied. This made them all feel better.

I was taken for a little walk by Doo-Wah Banks, on whom I had a useless crush. Doo-Wah was a dense, middle-sized man with short hair and the kind of eyes that take in everything—like a cop's. He had actually graduated from Juilliard—I alone knew this—and he was having himself a little fun by traveling with Ruby. Since he was divorced and had to send money to his wife and two boys, being on the road prevented him from running up expenses. He had big shoulders and was shiny black. His affect was an irresistible combination of fatherly and sexual.

“Now, now, now, little chicken,” he said as he walked me into the countryside. “Now, stop crying, you poor little thing. Are you lonely for your own people?”

“I don't have any own people,” I said. “I think I'd feel a lot better if I could get in bed with you, Wah.”

“Oh, no, honey-babe. We'd get lynched for it. Besides, I don't sleep with colleagues, that's my rule.”

“Well, listen,” I said. “How about just letting me put my arms around you.”

He led me behind a large tree and allowed me to hug him. He was an excellent person, a truly good man, kind to girls and women, a teacher and friend to children, and he kept his mouth shut when it was wise to. A person could learn a lot from a guy like Wah. I held him tight. He smelled of spicy aftershave. I really believed that if I could just curl up with him everything would be fine. He put his arms around me and I began to cry again.

“Poor lonely girl,” he said. “Why don't you get a boyfriend?”

“I have no faith,” I sobbed.

Doo-Wah, who believed in self-improvement, thought I meant that I lacked faith in myself. While that may have been true, it was not what I meant.

“I mean religious faith,” I said. “I'm nothing. I'm a lapsed Jew from an assimilated family. I don't belong anywhere. I'm alone in the middle of the universe.”

This caused Doo-Wah actually to kiss my nose.

“Oh, come
on
, little girl,” he said consolingly. “We
all
that.”

5

My earliest memories were musical. My mother, for whom music was background noise, painted on Saturday afternoons while listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio. I hung out in the kitchen, where whatever housekeeper we had, kept the kitchen radio on. The first time I heard Chuck Berry sing “Roll Over Beethoven” I was dazzled. I stood in the kitchen in a perfectly rapt state. I took money out of my piggy bank to get this record. I played it on a child-size phonograph in my own room every minute that I was alone.

This room was done after my mother's style. On the wall were framed watercolors of me at various stages: in a straw hat eating a watermelon, playing with someone else's Persian cat (we did not have pets), at the piano, and so forth. My bedspread was a pink and yellow quilt. My curtains were a faded rose-infested chintz, and on the floor I had an old Persian rug.

Eventually I dismantled this room. The watercolors came down and were stacked in my closet. The quilt, which had always daunted me by its being old and expensive, was changed to an Indian print bedspread. The children's books were banished to the cellar and my teenage books were settled on the shelves. And while I sought to keep my mother out, she got in anyway and edited me. I found certain books vanished—my mother thought they were seditious or too sex-soaked for a young thing like myself. Gradually, I learned what every upright teen with a snooping mother learns: to hide everything, and I was good at it. I could hardly wait for the wonderful day when I would graduate from high school and go away to embrace my own destiny with no one around to tell me what to do.

At college I passionately wished I were either very tall or quite short, extremely beautiful or terribly ugly. I wished I had a long funny nose, pierced ears and lots of shiny black curly hair. Or that I were oversized, like an equestrian statue, or had some odd quirk in my background, like having grown up in Cambodia or Hong Kong or on a sheep ranch in Montana. Of course, my mother was a portrait painter, but that did not seem as glamorous as having a father who had been blacklisted or a mother who studied primitive tribes in Africa and South America.

As I learned from the thousands of women's magazines I read on the road with Ruby, people, especially women, never see what is actually in the mirror. Once in a while, lifted on a pleasant little cloud of marijuana, I liked to lean back in my extra-padded Strat-o-cruiser seat, look out the window and wonder: can you see what is in the mirror? How much does a mirror distort? Was it not a terrible ironic joke that, of all the people in the world you need to see clearly, the one person you can never clearly see is your own self? Was this not in fact a tragedy? Then as I began slowly to come down and was left with that unpleasant little buzz you get from inferior reefer, the plain truth would emerge: people never like themselves anyway. Was that not the truth? Were there actually people who looked in the mirror and broke into a contented smile of acceptance?