Traveling Soul (55 page)

Returning home from the hospital, he faced the greatest challenge of his life—learning to live without a body. It forced him to give up all control. He thought he wouldn't experience much physical pain as a result of the paralysis. He was wrong. “Aches come and go,” he said. “I have a lot of complications, the effect of low blood pressure, chronic pain, things no one really could see or would even know unless you were around people with spinal cord injuries. I'm trying to maintain the status quo, but the hardships are many as are the complications. Sometimes you don't have answers.”

He couldn't regulate his body temperature, and the Hawk he left behind in Chicago now seemed to live inside him. We piled blankets on him, struggling to keep him warm, but other symptoms we could do nothing about. He suffered from phantom hands—an agonizing sensation he compared to thrusting his arms in a bucket of writhing snakes. Atrophy set upon his muscles, and his feet began to curve downward from lack of use. Diabetes became a serious problem too, and the fingers that once effused elegant guitar licks now served solely as pincushions, caked in dried blood and wrapped in bandages from constant blood-sugar tests. On top of that, he suffered perennial urinary-tract infections as a result of his ever-present catheter.

His life crashed to a halt. No more performing, no more traveling, no more writing. At home, he stayed stuck in bed all day and night with the TV on. The first-floor library became his bedroom, and he sat there passively observing life go on around him. Interview requests flooded in, which gave him something to think about, and he did have days when the darkness lifted a bit, but just as often, his mood turned despondent. Always a man of capricious mood swings, he struggled to maintain a sense of hope and happiness while adjusting to a living nightmare.

Dad never succumbed to self-pity, though. As Marv recalls, “He never said, ‘Why me?' He'd say, ‘Why not me? It could happen to anyone.'” Still, he suffered mightily. Every night, he lay trapped as the snakes slithered around his arms and a simple itch could drive him to insanity. He'd call out in the darkness, begging for someone to come ease his pain. Sharon recalls, “When I would go to visit, I would hear him in the middle of the night calling out for Altheida. And I just felt such hopelessness. He would just call for her, and call for her, and call for her incessantly through the night.”

Home healthcare workers came to ease Altheida's burden, but she still worked herself to the bone. One night, exhausted, she put a candle near the wall and forgot it. The wallpaper ignited. Soon, flames engulfed the second floor of the house. They had to evacuate fast, wheeling Dad beneath billows of black smoke and deadly fire. He watched his home burn, knowing if no one had been there to save him, he would've burned with it.

More bad news followed. Dad kept his old master tapes in the basement, and when the fire-hoses extinguished the blaze, they also doused some of the most famous recordings in soul music history. I went back and salvaged everything I could. Some tapes survived, and I began the process of digitally remastering them, culminating in more than fifteen reissues from the Curtom catalog on compact disc. Many tapes, however, we lost forever.

For Dad, life had become apocalyptic. In a matter of weeks, he lost the use of his body and much of his life's work, and he had to evacuate his home. We kept trying to take his mind off of his trouble. I'd go over and watch basketball games with him, and Sharon resumed one of her favorite father-daughter activities. “When I was a little girl in the old house on Austin Road, sometimes he would be in bed, and he would lay on his stomach and watch nature shows,” she says.

He always loved nature shows. I would sit on his back and get a comb and a brush. He had a little bald spot. I would just play in
his hair, and rub the oil on his bald spot. I would take the comb and run it through his beard, and I would touch his face. And I would kiss his face. He would just smile. He would eat it up. So I remember after the accident, sometimes if I were in the room with him, I would scratch his beard and kiss him and touch his head. Just things like that. And he would smile. He liked it.

Tracy delved into researching spinal cord injuries, looking for a miracle. Soon, the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis contacted us. Ray Chambers—former owner of the New Jersey Nets, founder of the philanthropic Amelior Foundation, and board member of the Miami Project—sent his own private jet to pick us up and fly us to South Florida. We stayed two days in Miami, where Dad received some more hard news—the longest living quadriplegic on record survived ten years. In the end, Dad would live just over nine.

In a bizarre way, some issues improved after the accident. Because he couldn't move, he couldn't retreat from the world anymore. He couldn't stay in his room, lost in a haze of drugs. He became Dad again. Tracy says,

At this point, there was no more locking yourself up in a room for months. There was no more didn't answer phones. All that changed. Now he answered the phone, he did talk to you. He couldn't hide in the room and lock up. So, the relationship as far as just sitting there and talking with him got better, because you were actually able to sit down, and he couldn't move. I spent a lot of time talking with him. He would always talk when he was feeling pain. That's one of the things that he would voluntarily always talk about: “I just wish this pain would go away.” And he would describe what it was. He said it felt like worms was eating his flesh.

Some things about Dad didn't change at all. “He got mad from that bed, too,” Tracy says. “He didn't play around, even though he was bound in that bed, can't move. You'd hear that voice that you've heard since you were a little kid. So, it commands you, it draws you in. The same person is still there.”

Though he struggled to maintain his spirit, my father's life became an endless combination of medications and physical hardships. At one point he had some fifteen prescriptions for various ailments. “I think overall I'm dealing with it pretty good,” he said to an inquiring interviewer, “but you can't help but wake up every once in a while with a tear in your eye.” To another, he expressed cautious hope:

Some good doctor somewhere may have come up with that magical way of bringing back to life what is paralyzed. Until that happens, I fear I will probably be this way until my death. The character, they say, is in the head. It's not what's below my neck, it's what's above. So I hope to stay in good care and carry on. I have no pity on myself, nor do I look for it. You can understand sometimes when I wake with tears; sometimes you just feel like you're bound in a mummy wrapping, and you just can't get out.

The next few years were a battle against atrophy—both of his spirit and body. Sometimes his sense of humor shined through. “I'm a fifty-four-year-old quadriplegic, and there's not too much demand for that these days,” he said wryly. But no amount of humor could mask the intense physical and spiritual pain he confronted all day, every day.

The outside world gave him few reasons for hope. Race relations in America seemed worse than at any point since King's death. Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, presided over a deeply conservative country and a new generation that had little sympathy for civil rights. A study concluded nearly half of African American children lived in poverty, and a national poll showed only 15 percent of white men (and 16 percent of white women) felt the government was obligated to do anything about it. In 1991, Los Angeles police beat Rodney King, an African American man, within inches of his life. Even though there was gruesome video evidence of the crime, the following year the jury acquitted all officers involved.

The resulting L.A. riots painted a heartbreaking, frustrating picture of how little had changed since a similar police incident had set off the Watts riots almost thirty years before. This time, after six days of looting, shooting, smashing, and burning, the damage totaled more than one billion dollars, with more than fifty deaths, two thousand injuries, and seventeen thousand arrests.

Meanwhile, in early 1993, three white men in Valrico, Florida, doused an African American man with gasoline and set him on fire. Around the same time, another African American man moved to Vidor, Texas, after a federal court ordered the town desegregated, which meant almost four decades after the movement began, pockets of complete segregation still existed within America.

Dad was keenly aware of these events. He couldn't avoid them as he sat stuck in front of the TV all day and night. He didn't want to avoid them, either—one of his favorite programs was the nightly national news. It frustrated him that he couldn't counter these issues with music anymore, but that didn't mean his music career was over. In 1991, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Impressions, and late the next year an all-star cast of musicians recorded a tribute album featuring selections from Dad's entire body of work. Around the same time, the City of Chicago renamed Hudson Avenue “Honorary Curtis Mayfield Avenue,” and even today, the street sign stands outside the Cabrini row house where he once lived. These events flattered and revitalized him. Then, he learned the Grammys would honor him with a Legend Award. It felt good after the
Super Fly
snub twenty years before. At the Grammy ceremony, Jerry, Fred, and Sam wheeled him onstage where he gave a short speech. They ended with a chorus of “Amen.” It was the last time my father sang in front of an audience.

As he struggled to face each day, I stayed busy working on remasters and licensing the Curtom back catalog. The added attention after the accident pushed my father's music to a peak it hadn't seen in almost two
decades. This led to a legion of samples in hip-hop and R&B songs, as well as TV and film licenses.

It also had unintended consequences for our relationship. I saw his insecurities surface again—sometimes it seemed he felt jealous of me because I did all the things he no longer could. After I bought the house on Austin Road in Atlanta from him, I formed my own independent label—Conquest—of which Dad owned a share. At the same time, outsiders intent on regaining control of my father's affairs began undermining our relationship, saying that I focused on too many other things and not solely on his business. My father and I discussed being wary of anyone who would try to undermine the relationship between a father and son, and for the time being he continued to support me. As outsiders took their shots, there also appeared to be a growing perception with some in the family that I was somehow Dad's favorite, the one getting special considerations others didn't get. The truth was, nobody else in the family was prepared to run Curtom, and most of the money I made came from the producers and artists I managed at Conquest, not from my father or Curtom.

Regardless, the misperception persisted. Then, for reasons obvious to me, Marv began driving a wedge. Because Dad couldn't hold a phone, he conducted all his calls on speakerphone, which meant I overheard many one-sided conversations where Marv tried to make me look inept and self-interested. If I scored a deal to place one of Dad's songs in a film, Marv felt he could've wheedled more money out of it. If I licensed a song to a commercial, Marv thought I didn't drive a hard enough bargain.