Goodbye Without Leaving (15 page)

“I used to manage this act called Homard Roti out of New Orleans, with Huey Moscogne,” said Spider Joe.

I considered this. I remembered Homard Roti, but not Spider Joe.

“Oh,” I said, slapping my forehead. “How could I be so dumb! Spider Joe's Rock and Roll Web! Gosh, I was a teenager then. Is that you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I don't, like, dwell on it. That was, like, television for teens.”

“Well, bless my soul,” I said. “You must be a hundred years old.”

“Spider Joe is a cat, babe. A cat has many lives. But let's roll. We made great music. When you look back, what do you see?”

“Well, I'm one who believes with the Reverend Arthur Willhall, at the Race Music Foundation, that rock and roll co-opted black music. I mean, it
was
great music. In the beginning it gave everybody in it a taste. But then it turned into a kind of corporation of its own. Remember Penny Bones? Her big hits were ‘River of Love' and ‘Middle of the Night.' I read the other day that she used to listen to herself on the oldies stations while she was working as a cleaning lady.”

“That's life, babe,” said Spider Joe.

“It isn't the business I went into,” I said.

“Yeah, well, let's talk about then, okay? You used to sing real good, right? Weren't you on that Shakette single?”

“You mean ‘I'm Not Yours'? That was three studio singers and Ruby got the money.”

“Yeah, but
you
sang. I saw you.”

“I sang solo on ‘Baby Come Home,' ‘You Don't Love Me Like You Used to Do' and ‘Nobody's Out There.'”

These were considered my finest moments. The fact was, I loved to sing, but it was my heart's desire to be a backup, not a singer. I said this to Spider Joe.

“You lie, babe. Everybody wanted to be a star.”

“Actually, everybody did
not
want to be a star.”

“But let's talk about those wonderful days. All of us together. Ruby broke the color line.”

“Doubtless you mean our color-coordinated dresses,” I said.

“I mean integration, babe.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I was a novelty, like those singing chipmunks, or the dogs that bark ‘Jingle Bells.' If it hadn't meant bucks, believe me, there wouldn't have been a white Shakette.”

“Yeah, but Ruby made the statement.”

“Yes, and as soon as she hit the big time, I was out.”

“You bitter about those days?”

“I am not,” I said. “I just don't want to be nostalgic about a time I
didn't
have. By the time we hit the trail, there was no color bar. We all stayed in the same hotels. I loved being a Shakette, but that doesn't mean that we made a lot of money or got treated very well. Ruby and Vernon turned into
business people
.”

Spider Joe switched off his tape. “This is a drag,” he said. “I can't use this. I want some color, action, some groovy memories about how it was. I don't mean to sound like hostile, but this is a disappointment.”

“Well, go interview someone else,” I said. “Go see if you can find that girl Pixie Lehar who danced as Venus Cupid, if she's not dead from being a hairoyne addict.”

“I know her,” said Spider Joe. “She lives around here someplace. Her name is Paulette ‘Pixie' Goldberg. But she got fired before the tour, so I can't use her. Do you mind if I use your phone on my way out?”

This interview left me with a sense of gloom which was dispelled by my cheerful son, who woke up from his nap full of unfocused smiles. He and I had a standing afternoon date with his little friend Amos Potts, and Amos's mother, Ann.

Amos and Little Franklin had met when they were three months old. On my first trips to our local park, the lawn was full of well-turned-out young matrons with their immaculate children in perfect prams and buggies. At the far end of the park I spied a private-looking person sitting alone, wearing leopard-print stretch pants and espadrilles. She was reading a fashion magazine and smoking a cigarette. Her baby lay sleeping on a woven blanket, shielded from the sun by an oversized, battered alligator handbag. “That's a mother for me,” I thought, and I was right. Ann and I were the same age, and so were our boys. We were now fixtures in each other's lives.

Ann was a poet who lived with her husband, Winston, in what had once been a chic white loft.

“Now it's a chic white loft with handprints,” she said.

We spent our afternoon gazing upon our boys with disbelief. From babies wriggling on sheepskin rugs they had grown into rosy-cheeked toddlers who could cruise around the kitchen pulling dangerous implements down.

“Isn't it amazing,” I said to Ann. “So accomplished, and all from two cells. There must be a God.”

“Maybe there are just two amazing little cells,” Ann said.

“Don't these things dog your heels? God, religion and all that?”

Ann blew a smoke ring. “We thought about having Amos baptized until we read the Book of Common Prayer and Winnie said, ‘I am not having someone renounce Satan and all that crap.' I myself think all religion is bad.”

“So does Johnny,” I said. “He says it leads to war. I told him I felt we should join a synagogue, and he said if it meant that much to me I should go and find one.”

Ann said, “Well, there certainly are a bunch of them around.”

I sighed. The greatest minds in history had grappled with this God issue, but it was not a big deal to Johnny. This was his greatness and his flaw.

Amos and Franklin sat on the living room floor engaging in what early childhood experts call “parallel play.” Franklin was placing his extensive collection of plastic elephants in a circle, and Amos was building a flat structure out of blocks.

“A guy came to interview me today,” I said.

“Do tell,” said Ann, who was sitting on the floor drinking coffee.

“About my former life as a backup singer,” I said. “It seemed so odd to be thinking about all that with Little Franklin asleep in his crib. They seem a universe apart. Is Amos interested in sleeping in a bed?”

“Don't change the subject,” said Ann. “What did you say?”

“I didn't get the feeling that what I said was very interesting to him. This guy has his big idea of what it was like and I think he's looking for people who agree with him.”

“What
was
it like?” Ann said. “Singing and all that.”

“It was perfect heaven,” I said, yawning. “It was sort of like life is now—being very tired and singing a lot. Also being on your feet all the time. That's what I should have told him: it's exactly like having a small child.”

37

Although I had nowhere to go and nothing much to do, one afternoon a week a very nice girl from the local design college—a redhead who wore yellow and purple in combination—came to babysit Little Franklin, who also wore yellow and purple in combination. Her name was Mirandy Rubenstein, and when I came back from my outing my dining room table was covered with newspaper, and the newspaper was covered with clay, paint, crayons and glue.

When Johnny asked me what I did on my day out, I said I did errands or went shopping, which was often true, but more often than not I found myself browsing at Huey's O.P. Records, TCB Enterprises, Inc. (TCB stood for Take Care of Business.) It was too far to Fred Wood's, and Huey's was just like Fred Wood's. In fact, every out-of-print record store I had ever been in was like every other. They smelled of cigarettes and cardboard, and the faint, plastic smell of vinyl. The proprietors were either laconic and depressed, or depressed and hyped up.

You never knew what you might find in these places. If you were patient, you might stumble on an old Howlin' Wolf cut, or some old sides by Bobby Blue Bland.

One balmy afternoon I pushed my way over to the always crowded rhythm and blues section. I felt awfully low. That morning I had taken Little Franklin to his play group—a bunch of one- and two-year-olds in a pretty room in a church, where I was the lone biological caregiver in a sea of baby-sitters. All the other mothers had gotten their thing together and gone back to being lawyers or graphic designers. At lunchtime Franklin said, “I have no baby-sitter.”

“You have Mirandy,” I said.

“She isn't,” Little Franklin said.

“But she comes and baby-sits for you,” I said.

He looked at me intently. “She isn't brown,” he said. “She has red hair.”

As I browsed through the records, reflecting on the fact that I had deprived my child of early independence from me by not having a fulltime Jamaican baby-sitter, I felt an arm press against me. I looked up and there was Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks.”

“Wah!” I said. “How amazing!”

“Well, well, well, well,” said Wah. “What brings you into this neighborhood?”

“Huey's,” I said.

“Pee-Wee over at WIS says you have a baby.”

“I have a big, huge boy,” I said.

Doo-Wah looked remarkably fine. He was wearing a white sweatshirt and cowboy boots. His hair was short and he had done away with his sinister shades.

“You look great, Wah,” I said.

“I'm an ugly critter,” he said. “You have always been blinded by love.”

He
was
a sort of ugly critter, blunt and big, but imposing, like a tugboat or a brick wall.

“Let me take you for a drink,” he said. “What's your boy's name?”

“Franklin Ross Miller,” I said. “I call him Little Franklin.”

“Great name,” said Wah. “Has he cut any sides yet?”

“He made up a song he says is called ‘Kitty Roll Over,' but he won't sing it for me.”

I was so used to having Franklin with me that being without him made me feel light and anxious. To be loose around town without a cookie, a box of raisins, a copy of
Curious George Rides a Bike
, an extra T-shirt, a supply of juice and two tiny molded-plastic elephants, made me uneasy. I kept checking my pockets, until Wah asked me why I was wriggling so much.

We walked a few blocks to an old saloon that had a barbecue in the back. It was two in the afternoon and there was almost no one around, except a guy at the bar and another guy fooling around with the jukebox. As we sat down, the entire place was suddenly drenched with the sound of Fats Domino singing “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.”

How I loved that low, growly, mellow bass. At the sound of it, I put my head on Doo-Wah's warm muscular arm.

We were sitting in a dark corner. Wah drank a beer, and I drank a Coke. He would have fed me mine with a spoon if I had asked him.

“Now, tell old Wah what's up your mind,” he said.

“I guess sometimes it makes me sad that I'll never be a Shakette again,” I said, overcome.

“Oh, come
on
,” said Wah. “Don't be sentimental. Aren't you glad? You're a mama! And you don't have to bust your butt or get on that nasty bus again.”

“I'm not my old self anymore.”

“History,” said Wah, sipping his beer. “We are constantly living the history of our own lives, you dig? You used to be your old self, now you're a new self, and someday you'll be some other self and what's now will be your old self. Honey, my kids are almost in
college
. When I started with Ruby, I was paying off
my
college loans. Look at your own kid—what's he, almost two? Where'd the baby go? Vanished! History! Don't sweat it.”

There was no question but that I was in the state of mind that allows people either to lecture or to hector you. This was the same rap I got from Johnny: even Wah came on like a guidance counselor in high school. I told Wah about the Race Music Foundation and how I had run into Grace.

“She's doing great,” Wah said. “Catering a lot of music gigs these days. Got nine people working for her.
She
doesn't look back.”

This pep talk did not cheer me up. I wanted Wah to say to me, “Girl, my crib is around the corner from here. You come with me and we'll finish some unfinished business, and Wah'll make you feel real good.”

But it was not to be, since I was now a respectable wife and mother. That night Johnny noticed that something was up. He knew what it was and he gave me a variant form of the Doo-Wah lecture.

“Oh, leave me alone,” I said. “I have enough trouble trying to pass for normal with all those other mothers in the park.”

“I thought you
liked
those women.”

I was silent.

“You like Ann Potts,” Johnny said.

“Well, look at Ann Potts,” I said. “She wears leopard-skin clothes, and remember when she put that green streak in her hair? That's the kind of mother I like.”

“I don't know what to do with you,” said Johnny. “First you just want to be Little Franklin's mother, then you see Doo-Wah and get all upset because you can't be a Shakette. You say you blew it with Spider Joe Washburn. What do you want?”

“‘We don't understand it better by and by,'” I said, quoting a hymn from my album of Bahamian spirituals.

Johnny looked disturbed. “Are you unhappy being married to me?”

I told him that he was the only person I could have stood being married to, even if he was like a Boy Scout. When he sat transfixed listening to John Lee Hooker and singing along in a strange voice, I knew I had married the right person. Besides, he had known me when I was a Shakette.

“Look,” he said. “You know what I found? Look at this.”

He took the wrapping off an oversized book entitled
The Golden Years: A Rock and Roll History
.

“Look in the index,” Johnny said.

I did, and there I was on page 413.

“It's finished,” I said.

“But it's never over,” said my husband.

38

In what seemed like half a second, Little Franklin turned two, and that fall he entered a program for two-year-olds at the Malcolm Sprague School, an old, venerable progressive school in our neighborhood. Three mornings a week, along with his close personal friend, Amos Potts, Little Franklin and eight children played with clay, blocks, little squares of cloth and water, or they painted with one color on a flat surface so as not to have to cope with drips. These materials, I came to learn, were called “open ended” since they had no fixed purpose and could be used in any number of ways at the child's discretion. I often stood in the doorway wishing that I could go to the Malcolm Sprague School, too.