The Beat of My Own Drum (30 page)

My life was far less frenetic than in previous years, but still I looked around me and realized that I didn’t know very many happy people. Instead we all seemed to be growing older and unhappier. I began to wonder, What the heck are we doing with our lives?

This sense of general weariness didn’t come to me in a flashbulb moment; it was more of a gradual realization. I had been physically and emotionally exhausted for several years in close succession, and there came a point when my mind and spirit broke.

After years of punishing beats, by the time I was promoting
Sex Cymbal
my wrists throbbed in pain, and I needed frequent deep-tissue massages. But even the best therapists couldn’t release the tendons or stretch my tightened muscles. The stiffness in my neck and shoulders caused me to seek out a rigorous course of acupuncture—with sometimes up to fifty needles at a time.

I’d usually manage to play a couple of songs before I’d be crying in pain. After a while, my hands started to tingle, and almost every part of my body began to ache—my calves, arms, ankles, wrists, shoulders, elbows, and neck. I was a wreck.

I didn’t want anyone to know how sick I felt (least of all Prince), but I didn’t know how much longer I could contain it all. I was so used to being able to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and now I was feeling unbearably vulnerable. I had known myself as a fearless Gardere, a proud Escovedo, a woman who could do anything men could do—only better and in six-inch heels. But now I was falling apart.

I kept trying to work, walk, and mix my latest record. But a voice inside kept warning me,
Something’s wrong. It shouldn’t be so hard to breathe.
A few times I felt like I was going to pass out. Then one day I turned around to sneeze and my back went out. My legs gave out and I fell to the ground. I was paralyzed for two weeks. Gilbert had to carry me around like a child.

I was in Minneapolis, so I flew in a trusted doctor from LA who carried out a series of tests, trying to figure out the source of all my physical ailments. His X-rays revealed how twisted my body had become from playing drums the way I did—sitting down, legs spread apart playing two individual kick drums in heels—as if I was driving a car. Every time I hit a hi-hat, I twisted my pelvis. I’d played like that for years, all of it in my trademark six-inch stilettos, so that in addition to skewing my spine, pelvis, and hips, I’d actually shortened my calf muscles. I was twisted and raw from the inside out.

“Your body can only take so much, Sheila,” my doctor warned me. “You need complete rest.”

I had to face the reality. I wasn’t Wonder Woman, and I wasn’t a machine. I had pushed myself to the extreme for too long and was suffering the consequences. I didn’t know how to relate to myself anymore. Was I really that fragile, damaged, worn-out woman staring back at me in the mirror? Who was I if I couldn’t pound away on a drum set? What was I now?

I’d heard of the connection between mind and body, but I’d never before understood how deep that went. Finally, in the solace of my home, my body could reveal all it had endured. And my mind could finally pay attention. Every part of me hurt after too many years of playing so hard without good warm-ups or restorative rest.

I barely had enough breath to walk to the bathroom. It hurt just to sneeze. I would have terrifying spasms and my entire body would seize up for hours. Eventually, a friend whose sister was a nurse advised me to go to the hospital, where the doctors discovered that my left lung was 80 percent collapsed from an acupuncturist’s poorly placed needle.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” they told me. “You could have died.” I stayed in the hospital about a week and pretty much shut down. My body had been trying to tell me for a long time that I wasn’t invincible. It took me thirty-two years for that whisper to turn into a deafening scream. When I got home, I was sick from all the medication. I couldn’t eat and got horribly thin—dropping from 120 to 85 pounds.

My cousin Ia came to live with me and spoon-fed me like a baby. Because I had so little energy, it sometimes took me fifteen minutes just to get down a spoonful of mashed potatoes. I thought I was going to die in that house. Besides Ia, I didn’t want my family or Prince to know anything. I told her to promise not to tell Moms
and Pops. They would be too worried, and I felt compelled to heal on my own. I longed for the day when it could all be just a story to tell, but I was worried it might never be a part of my past.

I lay in my bed crying and praying to God for another chance: “Please, Father God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” I asked a friend in Israel to send me some holy water. I read my Bible every day and night, looking for a cure in the Scriptures, looking for healing in His Word. And when I slept, I laid my Bible on my chest.

When my body eventually began to recover, I hoped that my mind would, too. But I’d been an invalid for so long that I was now terrified of going outside. My home was my comfort zone, and the thought of going anywhere else totally freaked me out. My faith in myself was wavering. And my faith in the outside world as a safe place was no longer.

Then one day Ia made me get up and told me I had to try and go outside. Somehow I felt the need to do what scared me most. I got in the elevator, and slowly I walked outside. I hadn’t felt fresh air in over a month. As soon as I stepped out into the sunny brightness of the day, I dropped to my knees in gratitude and kissed a crack in the pavement. Even that pavement was beautiful.

I never realized how many colors there were in my surroundings—the green of the grass, the rich brown of the tree bark, the white of the clouds, the deep blue of the sky. I ran my fingers through the grass as if it was the first time I’d ever seen or touched it. I walked to a tree and I hugged it like it was a long-lost friend.

The words of the poet E. E. Cummings sprang to mind:
I thank you God, I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
.

Lying back on the grass, I cast my eyes to heaven. God had given all of this to me. And it took nearly losing myself to truly see
it. I had taken so much for granted. I thought I needed money and belongings and applause, but all I needed was this.

Soon enough, my strength and health returned. It was time to start over. I had a second chance, and I needed another beginning. I missed my music. I needed to make some noise, this time on my own terms and at my own—slower—pace.

No job, no relationship, no
nothin’
was worth sacrificing my well-being for ever again.

There was still some heartache to come, though. In the middle of the next major tour with Prince, my Nanny died. Pops’s crazy mother with the lewd sense of humor would never make us laugh again. When I heard the news, I told my parents I’d fly home for the funeral. But when I told Prince, he just looked at me blankly and said, “No.”

That was the beginning of the end with Prince. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t allow me to leave for a few days. He didn’t seem to understand how important this was to me, how much I needed my family right then, and how much they needed me. Prince claimed he couldn’t possibly get anyone to replace me, even for just a few days. He was my boss, he reminded me. He signed the paychecks.

I screamed and yelled at him for a while, and then I stormed off. I thought about jumping on a plane and flying home to the East Bay right then and there. But for some reason I couldn’t let myself go.

There was one thing I could do, though. I told Prince, “Don’t even pay me anymore. I don’t want your money.” Every week for the rest of the tour when the accounts guy came by with my check, I refused to take it.

“You have to!” he’d say, but I’d just tear it up in front of him.

“You have to take your check,” Prince would tell me later.

“I don’t need your money,” I’d reply. “That ain’t why I’m here. I’m here to play music and I’m here because I love you, and when
people love each other money doesn’t matter.” We went on like that for weeks.

My heart was hurting. I knew that once the tour was over I’d have to walk away. Leaving the man I loved would be hard. He was my best friend, but if I couldn’t get along with my best friend, why would I stay near him just because he was paying me?

When the tour ended, I quietly slipped away to my place in Minneapolis. I took a few months to recover, to savor the silence and space. I still saw Prince from time to time, not yet able to make the final break. But we weren’t getting along that well. He was busier than ever and he was seeing other women.

I needed something else to believe in. And then came along a woman who became my dearest friend, Lynn Mabry. Peter Michael got to know her first when they were both on George Michael’s tour, and he encouraged the two of us to meet up, sensing we’d get along well.

Lynn and I quickly realized we’d actually met years before, as teenagers, since she sang backup for my uncle Coke. I was sixteen when I went with Pops to a club called King Richard’s by our house in Oakland to see Uncle Coke perform. I vaguely remember meeting her then, and she remembered meeting Pops and me. It is incredible that years later we’d become friends, she’d end up being my manager, and we’d compose and create a foundation together.

Lynn had spent the intervening years on the same kind of crazy roller coaster ride that I’d been on. She’d worked with George Clinton, Talking Heads, George Michael, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac. Sly Stone was her cousin, and she was the co-lead singer of the seventies duo the Brides of Funkenstein. A single mom, she had raised her daughter and somehow managed to hold her life together and glow with inner happiness in spite of all the touring and the noise.

After I reconnected with Lynn, we decided to go into partnership
to run my new company, Heaven Productions Music. In the midst of that, she was hired to sing for Bette Midler, but she was also ready to try something different. I wanted a new business manager—I kept firing mine. We got along so well, and she was so great at her job, that she ended up becoming my manager for fifteen years. She was someone I could trust.

Thanks to Lynn, I found work in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a session musician with the likes of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Gloria Estefan, as well as various television appearances and national commercials. She also helped me launch my next two solo projects,
Writes of Passage
and
Heaven
, on Concord Records with my new band, the E Train, playing a mix of Latin, soul, funk, and jazz and touring Europe and the States.

The more I got to know Lynn, the more I liked her. She had a quiet calm about her that I’d seen and envied in a few people I’d met along my path. It wasn’t a surprise to learn that she was a Christian. When she saw the way I lived my life and how I treated people sometimes, she gently encouraged me to go to church with her. Although I wasn’t interested at the time, she never stopped asking. I said no to her time and time again, but it was Easter Sunday 1992 when I was so unhappy that I thought,
Why not?

Lynn attended the Bible Enrichment Fellowship International Church, pastored by Bam Crawford, who had a very intense way of doing things. She’d written books and preached worldwide. She ran her church like a boot camp and didn’t mess around.

A few minutes into the service, Pastor Bam invited those in the congregation who wanted a new beginning to come to the pulpit and join her.

Something inside me stirred.

“We all make mistakes and sin every day,” she cried. “Don’t carry it with you. Come up, leave it all here, and give your heart to the Lord.”

I felt a tugging at my heart, and I was strangely drawn to go up with the others around me who clearly felt it too. I heard a voice inside me say,
You can let go. You don’t have to carry this around with you anymore. You can be free.

I was scared, though—I didn’t want to go up there on my own. Lynn could see I was struggling as she gently encouraged me, but I kept saying no.

With all of us standing, my body started shaking—my hands and knees went weak. I thought, What is happening to me? I wondered if I was having some sort of relapse, which scared me even more. But the more scared I became, the more I felt the need to make my way to the front of the church.

In the end, I couldn’t stop myself.

I couldn’t fight it anymore.

The seed of hope from my physical and mental collapse was ready to flower.

By the time I made it to the front of the church, I had purged it all and openly declared my love for Jesus Christ. I sat on the steps of the pulpit and cried like a baby. My life had been out of control for many long years, and I realized it there and then. I wanted to do better and be better. Before I knew it, I had fully redirected my life to surrender to God.

That Easter Sunday in Los Angeles was an intense and personal experience. In the following weeks and months, it became even more so. Once I gave my heart to Christ, it felt to me like all hell broke loose. I felt a negative pull on my life. It was dark—it was the enemy, Satan. The moment I said yes to the Lord, I felt attacked from everywhere.

Strange things started to happen—a series of events and misfortunes that seemed too coincidental to be happening to me and to those I loved all at once. I became increasingly paranoid and felt like something was trying to get to me, and then—if it couldn’t
reach me—it would try to hurt my friends and family. That really scared me.

Afraid of what I may have triggered by declaring my love for God, I stayed away from church for a year. I slipped back into being my old self and saw Lynn’s concern and sadness for me. She shared later how disheartening it was to see me so unhappy and disrespectful to people, including her.

It took a long time for me to appreciate what she was telling me and to accept that I really wanted Christ back in the forefront of my life. Little by little, as I began to read the Bible again, I started to see everything differently. This time, the words of the Scriptures really seemed to jump out at me.