True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (40 page)

O
NE AFTERNOON
at my grandfather's house near the Okefenokee Swamp, where I heard the sounds in the night, I was sitting on the front porch, listening to a Ray Charles record that I had played on my grandfather's Sears, Roebuck record player. I was just out of high school and
about to move with my parents from Macon to Memphis. It was summer and I was visiting my grandparents. Their house was set in the shade under two sycamores at a crossroads in the little turpentine camp where the roads from Waycross and Homerville headed, past the shotgun houses of the quarters, toward Pearson and Mexico, Georgia. A black girl from the quarters heard the record and came and sat on the steps of the screened porch. We talked a bit about Ray Charles and Memphis before my grandfather came and chased her away. Neither of us had been to Memphis, but we knew it was the home of the blues.

“Memphis,” Sleepy John Estes said, “has always been the leader of dirty work in the world.” In the years I had lived in Memphis I had found the blues, though it wasn't easy. The first time I went to Beale Street I was thrown out of a Ray Charles concert for sitting at a table with some black classmates from newly integrated Memphis State University. But I had managed to sweep the streets with Furry Lewis, throw up at Elvis Presley's ranch (overdosed on Darvon by Dewey Phillips, the first man to play an Elvis record on the radio), drink Scotch for breakfast with B. B. King, watch Otis Redding teach Steve Cropper “The Dock of the Bay,” and now I was raiding the country with the Rolling Stones.

I flew home from Los Angeles thinking of my grandfather and how he had loved my grandmother, who died last year. I thought, with the contract signed and payment in the offing, that we were very fortunate, Christopher and I, and as I drank as usual too much while thousands of feet in the air, I developed quite a mood, hopeful and elegiac.

Getting home didn't exactly shatter my mood, but it made me grim. Christopher was still waiting, still sick. It seemed that unless I was working in Memphis, the city affected me like a shot of morphine. I intended to get a passport, go to the dentist, do all sorts of things, but I spent the week sitting on the couch, staring into space, waiting.

On Monday, November 24, the Stones would play Detroit, but I wanted to go to New York, see my agent and find out when and how much I would be paid. By the following day the Stones would be at the Plaza, and I figured to meet them there.

My flight was nonstop, and I slept until the safety belt chimes rang and I woke to see muddy water only a few feet, it seemed, below the window as we came in for a landing at Kennedy Airport. I called the agency and talked to the first lieutenant, who said he was going out to lunch and I should call him when I got into town. I rode the crowded, dismal bus past drifts and piles of dirty snow to the East Side Terminal. It was raining.

New York always affects me in the same way—as I came into it I puffed up like a toad for protection against the coldness and lonesomeness of it, the giant apartments you saw coming in from Kennedy, one
great redbrick wasteland of the human spirit over on the right with ancient whitepainted sign
NOW RENTING APARTMENTS
2½-3-4
ROOMS SUITABLE FOR RETIREMENT
and just past there on the same side of the bus a cemetery, white headstones stretching into the distance. Coming into New York I got something like a mescaline rush, because whether you came in through the miasma of industrial corruption in Newark or the misery of little boxes on the Kennedy side, you were reminded of the fragility and shortness of your life, and your blood began to pump faster in order that you should be more alive. At least it was that way with me. The first time I came to New York was in 1963, the year before the Stones came to the United States. I went to see my friend Danny Freeman, who was in Greenwich Village at Saint Vincent's Hospital dying of cancer at twenty-three.

After the approach, Manhattan Island seemed at first almost pastoral—old wooden houses, a bicycle on the stoop, a small supermarket with the specials in the window—and you did not feel the girders pressing in, the skyscrapers meeting over your head, until about 42nd Street. By the time you reached one of the Terminals, any philosophic remove was gone, and you could only confront all of it from your own small height. I got off the bus and called my agent, whose assistant suggested I come over in a couple of hours, leaving me with a moral dilemma. I knew a place on 58th Street, not too far from the agency, where I could knock two hours dead. I called my friend Cynthia.

In 1961, when I met her, Cynthia (she had had three or four other names since then) was fifteen years old. I was nineteen, an intense young karate student and teacher. Cynthia was theater-struck; maybe she thought the karate school (dojo) was an oriental dance class. But she came in with her slightly older friend Jane. The owner of the dojo wound up marrying Jane, who wound up committing suicide, dead by her own hand at the age of twenty-one. When Cynthia was twenty-one—on her birthday—she called me from a hospital, where she had been taken after attempting and failing suicide, though she had made it look good, taking a colossal overdose of sleeping pills. I was working so hard when I first knew her—going to college every day, teaching karate every night and eight hours on Saturdays—that sometimes Cynthia would come up (second-floor dojo with a couch in back) and I would be too tired to do anything but look. Then we both left Memphis and I lost track of her for several years, but she always called me. Six months or a year or two would pass and the phone would ring at 2:00
A.M.
and it was Cynthia, or whatever she was calling herself. I was always,
almost
always, happy to hear from her—she'd be having an abortion in Denver or escaping a narcotics bust in California or being a beach groupie in Hawaii—I was living like a mole all this time trying to become a writer, and it pleased me to hear from her, as
I would tell the telephone company when they'd call me to ask why she never paid the phone bills. She's too busy living, I'd say, Isn't it wonderful the good times these young folks can have.

The name she was using now, so pretentious and phony a stripper couldn't have stayed in business with it, nevertheless, combining the French words for alone, love, cat, and night, told you a lot about Cynthia and made her easy to find in the Manhattan directory. I rang and she answered. I recognized her voice, but just to be sure I asked if she was in, using her current name. She said, This is she. I said, I find that hard to believe. Come on over, she said, we never do anything but talk on the phone.

Oppressive and scary though it was, it was fun to be in New York. For the Rolling Stones and for me this tour, this time, was a test, to see if we could survive on our own terms. When I was nearly twenty-six years old, living in Memphis, unpublished, and fearful of loss, of failure, of a wasted life, I would awaken every morning and look into the mirror that sat facing the bed at the end of the room, see myself a day older and feel my fear and frustration lifting my body. I had the actual physical sensation of being lifted by the force of will and desire toward my life and work. As I rode in a cab up Fifth Avenue, I felt the same mixture of fear and exhilaration.

Cynthia lived on the seventh floor of a big apartment building. I stood in the hall with my suitcase, ringing the bell, but no one came to the door. I knocked, rang again, and finally, as I was about to give up, the door opened slightly. “Who is it?”

“Dewey Phillips,” I said. The door opened a bit more; I looked in and there was Cynthia, wearing a towel. She had never looked so good. She had lost her baby fat, and Cynthia always had lovely white skin—a bit damp now, as she had been taking a bath. Her hair was still black, blacker than God makes it. I suppose Cynthia's hair was dark brown, but as long as I'd known her she had dyed it black. Paint it black, Cynthia.

“Bring your suitcase in,” she said. “Put it down. Now that I've got you, you're staying for a while.”

I dropped the suitcase and followed her through the big living room to the bedroom. Cynthia sat before a dressing table and started taking pins out of her hair, which fell onto her shoulders. Cynthia was from Boston; I'm not sure how she came to Memphis, but her permissive mother and father were divorced, and Cynthia's behavior appeared to be textbook simple, an attack on her absent parent. She had been very promiscuous, putting it mildly, had slept with me and most of my friends and a great many other people. What made Cynthia even more of a textbook case was that she herself never had an orgasm. For her sex was a compulsion that brought no satisfaction. To an idiot like me there was
something appealing about a sexy girl who was frigid. As Cynthia raised her arms, reaching to the hairpins, her bosom rose, the towel dropped, and she was naked to the waist in the mirror, where our eyes met.

Some time later, when Cynthia asked “Did you finish?” I could hardly believe it. What was the meaning of all that screaming?

“Unh hunh,” I said.

“If I could have you all the time, I think I could get over being frigid.”

“You have me,” I said.

“But for how long?”

“Well,” I said, “I do have to see my agent—”

But not before a bath in a deep old enameled iron tub with Cynthia telling how she always knew one day I'd come to her because there I am in her fifth house of marriage, it's all in the stars, she wants to have my baby, that's the way God planned it. As she talked I was taken into her weird world; she'd been in New York for a couple of years, doing auditions. In all the time I'd known her, the only actual stage work that Cynthia had done was at Front Street Theatre in Memphis where in a special children's production of
The Wizard of Oz
she played a munchkin. Now she was ready for me to write her life story, she said as we bathed.

On the wall was a piece of poster paper with the word
REVOLUTION
, the
R
crossed out, and Cynthia wanted me to help her get it copyrighted or patented or whatever you're supposed to do. She didn't want much, just marriage and children and her life story and patents and copyrights and would I mind going out and buying a quart of milk and a hundred-watt light bulb? There's a little grocery right around the corner. . . . I did it, brought back milk and bulbs and said, I've got to go, see you when I get back from the agency.

“When will you be back?” Cynthia asked. “Are you going to take me out tonight?”

“Take you out? Out where?”

“To dinner, and then we could go someplace and dance. Are you going to introduce me to the Stones?”

Oh, Mick would love that, I thought, this is just what he needs. “Well, I'm not sure how long I'll be,” I said. “I'll call you.”

I went down to the street and hailed a cab, whose driver didn't want to go down Fifth Avenue in the four o'clock rush hour traffic, but of course he did, complaining all the way. At the agency I gave my name to the girl at the switchboard, who seemed to recognize it, but I thought she had probably been trained always to give writers that impression. She smiled at me as if she knew some secret I didn't know, and did she ever.

My agent's first lieutenant, a thin pale young man, told me that my book would have to sell thirty thousand hardback and three hundred thousand paperback copies to pay off the advance. If it kept on selling, if dreamy little
shiksas
kept coming out of the woodwork and wriggling down to the drugstore to buy the dark saga of the Rolling Stones, I might make more money. He took out his pencil and paper and worked it out, encouraging me in my delusion. Lessee now, thirty thousand here, three hundred thousand there—shit, boy, you gonna be rich.

I asked when I should meet the publishers and he said, looking at my jeans and leather jacket, Maybe we should get you some money before we let them see what you look like. Who was he protecting? Me, bless his heart. If the publishers had seen how fatheaded and ignorant I was, they wouldn't have given me two cents, would have swept me right out of the office. But there I was, young and dumb, walking out of the agency, looking at the clients' book-jackets displayed on the walls—books by geniuses, Nobel prize winners—and feeling good about it. just like I was supposed to. Step right up, folks, they're alive, they're on the inside.

From a phone booth on Fifth Avenue I called Pete Callaway, who told me to come up. I took a cab up the West Side to 157th Street, then under a motorbridge and up to where Riverside Drive goes off in seven different directions. Pete lived on one of that intersection's many corners in an old redbrick apartment building. He had been there for years, growing balder and wider, waiting in vain for a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University.

Pete and I had been among the very few beatniks in central Georgia. In 1961, when I was living in Memphis, we went to San Francisco together, met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Watts and scored our first grass and had a fine time. In the last five years—except for the Columbia riots—Pete had hardly moved. With his German wife, Edith, we smoked grass and drank Scotch and then went down to Pete's little sister Nicole's apartment in the Village, on Waverly Place.

The last time I had seen Nicole, she and her mother had come to New Orleans to take home Pete and his books. She was coltish and angular, seventeen and suntanned. We had admired each other. That was five years ago. But I remembered Nicole most vividly as an awkward child with funny spaceman glasses and a little starched yellow cotton dress, sitting on the floor at one of her mother's cocktail parties, eating great spoonfuls from a muskmelon filled with pineapple sherbet, one of her mother's friends saying, “Go right ahead, Nicole dear.”

Now waves of chestnut hair spilled onto her shoulders that would, if they could have been seen in a 1930s backless cocktail gown in the smoky air of Café Society Downtown (a place distinguished among other ways by being the only nightclub Eleanor Roosevelt ever visited),
have caused the world to forget the shoulders of Myrna Loy. Nicole was at the Sorbonne when its riots answered Columbia's, but her head was too pretty to crack. She did graduate work at New York University but left without taking a degree and was now working for
Newsweek.
In her rose satin cowboy shirt and Naugahyde jeans she was not boyish—she was tall and shapely, with small breasts, long elegantly tapering fingers, startling iris-blue eyes, and an endearing tendency to get high and mouth-breathe. We went out to dinner, then went back to Nicole's apartment and smoked more grass, drank wine, and listened to records—the Stones, the Burritos, Otis, Aretha—until the cold grey dawn. When we left, I told Nicole I'd see her again before I left town.