True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (44 page)

Now it was almost dark. Michael and I went again to Jon Jaymes' suite. Jaymes told us that we were taking a bus to Baltimore because the Stones were going in a seven-seat Learjet. We went down to the street and there was the bus. In it were the driver and some of Jaymes' federal narcotics agents and off-duty New York City detectives, big short-haired men in golf jackets and Hush Puppies. They had nice faces with sad wise expressions, sorrowful like very old priests or midwives, as if they had seen all the bloody consequences of man's folly. Also aboard were two greying Jewish boys, the film-making Maysles brothers, David and Albert. We introduced ourselves, and looking around in the failing winter light at the plastic seatcovers and metal walls, I asked, shivering, “Is there any dope on this bus?” The heavies looked at me, their mild pleasant eyes unblinking.

“Is it cool to smoke?” Michael asked.

“Sure it is,” I said, loud enough to carry to the back of the bus.

“Is it?” Michael asked, turning to the cops. “Yeah, all right,” one of them said. “Less go get some,” Michael said to me. He was clearly
delighted at the prospect of getting high with police protection. We went and ransacked the hotel but didn't find anybody who could help. When we got back and sat down, though by no means all of the Stones tour party were present, the bus pulled out. The Maysles brothers and I tried to work up a chat, but the bus was so grim—no food, nothing to drink—that we made the driver pull over by a delicatessen. David Maysles and some of the heavies went in and came back with beer and sandwich materials. We tore into them with picnic fervor. Then as we were about to leave Manhattan—approaching the exit ramp—I asked the driver how far it was to Baltimore. Too far. Michael and I said fuck it and got off the bus. We wandered through the streets, eating sandwiches, drinking long swigs of beer.

Michael was talking about women, his favorite subject. He was sad that his wife had left him and taken their daughter, but—taking a drink—this girl he was staying with in New York was really nice. I told him that I had a wife who cheered me up and never bored me and that all I wanted was to live through this fucking tour so we could settle down and enjoy what was left of our youth, our lives, together. I was going, though I didn't know it yet, to do extensive research on pain.

We went down the stairs to the subway, the Horrors lurking in the shadows, and boarded an uptown train. Michael collapsed on a seat and I stood reading the map. “Let's not figure out where we're going or when we'll be there, let's just relax for a minute,” Michael said, but I already knew where we were going.

On Riverside Drive, its great stone lions staring west across the Hudson, stands Gore House, a grey stone cottage of thirty-two rooms. Built in the nineteenth century by a mideastern potentate, the place had been after his death an Episcopal nunnery (hence the haunted dormitory bathrooms). Now it belonged to someone named Gore, whose caretaker, a student at Union Theological Seminary, had usurped the name. Gore had been until a couple of months before an employee of the agency where I was a client. He had sold my work and told me the truth and always seemed to imply that there was more to be told. Now that he was away from the agency, I thought he might be willing to tell it.

Thin and blond, with tortoise-shell glasses, Gore opened the big iron doors, draped with ropes of garlic, to let us enter. In the dry precise tones of a grand aunt he directed us past the mosaic tiles of the entrance hall and up the dark staircase to an inner sanctum. There we sat and consumed great quantities of red wine and hashish as Gore, kneeling before his record collection on a cheap cotton rug made in the likeness of Leonardo's
The Last Supper
, played excellent music—Burritos, Ronettes, Crickets—disappearing now and then downstairs to the kitchen in whose refrigerator the Methedrine was kept.

Some friends Michael had telephoned came over, another writer and his wife, both so ugly they looked like a dog act. They talked to Michael
while Gore and I made war plans. I had the Stones' letter of consent, I had a publishing contract, but I wanted to know—still thought I could know—what else could go wrong. I told Gore that the Stones' letter gave me their “exclusive cooperation.”

“Then you have the authorized biography.”

“I don't want that,” I said, knowing that “authorized” often meant “censored by the subject.”

“Well, you have whatever you want, then.”

I could feel the muscles relax in my shoulders and the back of my neck. Michael's writer friend and wife were talking about their recent trip to Peru, showing us a souvenir keychain figure of a little Indian with a giant upstanding phallus. Meanwhile the Stones were in Baltimore, the Maysles brothers and the heavies were on the highway. Hearing about the Baltimore show later, I was sorry (till I remembered the cold grim bus) I hadn't gone along. The audience, for the only time on the tour, were more black than white. “Spades always cause trouble,” the state man who'd come for the admissions tax told Jo. The show was in the Baltimore Civic Center, whose orchestra pit on this evening contained cops, against whom Mick protected the audience by saying, If everyone wants to get up and dance, no one should hurt them or bother them. The audience loved the show, cheering “You Got to Move,” and Mick, for the first time since San Diego, sang “I'm Free” after “Under My Thumb.” The white mayor of Baltimore sat in the front row with his fingers in his ears, his blond wife beside him rocking to and fro with the music.

At Gore House we drank and smoked, and Gore told me some things I didn't know about my agent. Born in the Bronx, he had at thirteen years of age started writing science fiction for pulp magazines and at nineteen, deciding to rise in the world, had started his own literary agency. Disliking his plainly Jewish name, he had taken the last name of an English novelist and the (Anglo-sounding) first name of his own little brother. Now the little brother, having proved unable to support himself, worked at the agency under the original first name of his older brother. My agent was, then, a man who'd lifted his own brother's name. “Tell him you want photocopies of all the original checks,” Gore said darkly.

I filed the knowledge, but in the end it wouldn't help. Years later, when the book came to be published, I would sign a contract paying me exactly what I owed the original agent and publisher. I would leave the girl in New York in the sunlight with snow coming down all around us. The other girl would read my notes, and that ended that. All I got was the story and, as they say, I got to hear the band play.

Finally Michael's friends left and we said goodnight to Gore. Michael and I caught a cab and went to Max's Kansas City, where he was going to meet his girl. On the back of the front seat a sticker read
YOUR
FINGERS ARE IMPORTANT SAFETY FIRST DON'T CLOSE THE DOOR ON
THEM
! above a drawing of an open hand with a stub where there should have been an index finger.

Max's, with what Michael called “the young elite of the communications industry,” was dark and noisy. I ate a hamburger and watched people yell and wave beer mugs. Outside the front window a drunk older man, who'd been thrown out for shoving people at the bar, stood making faces, a lit cigarette in his ear—until up wheeled a young man in a wheelchair, and a drunk with a fag in his ear is not as heavy as a man in a wheelchair and everybody including the drunk knew it and finally he wandered away. So did I.

When I opened my eyes the November sky outside the tall windows was colorless and timeless—twilight morning or midday, impossible to tell. My watch, stuck to my wrist like a clam, said eleven-thirty. Afraid I would be late for Thanksgiving dinner, I called the Wexlers.

“Jello,” a woman said.

I said who I was and asked for Mr. Wexler.

“He ees esleeping. Yo no se cuando sé levante.”

“Oh. All right. I'll call back.”

“Sí. Goo-bye.”

If they're having Thanksgiving dinner, I wondered, why is he asleep? Where I was brought up, Thanksgiving dinner came in the early afternoon, the siesta came afterwards. They order this matter better in the South, I thought, going back to sleep. I woke up again, ten past one by my watch, and again called the Wexlers. Shirley, Jerry's wife then, answered.

“Jerry's asleep still,” she said. “Come see us. The one fifty-four Long Island train gets into Great Neck at two twenty-seven.”

“But it's after one now. I don't know if I can make it.”

There was a short pause. “Honey, it's only about ten o'clock.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Damn this watch. Sorry. That'll be fine.”

I tried to sleep more but couldn't, and got up feeling as you can feel only on a cold day with a white sky when you are a little drunk and drugged and lost in time. I showered in the high-ceilinged bathroom amid clouds of purifying steam, shaved, dressed, and went down four floors to Jon Jaymes' suite. There Jo Bergman and Ronnie Schneider were planning Thanksgiving dinner at Ronnie's Manhattan apartment for the crew and cast (if any of them should care to attend) before the Stones' show tonight at Madison Square Garden. I told them to make sure I could get into the show, because I would come back from Long Island to Penn Station, directly under the Garden, just before it started. Jon gave me a button, yet another badge, this one for the Garden shows, with the stars and stripes bordered by the words
GOD BLESS AMERICA—THE FLAG I LOVE.

I went downstairs, passing Mick Taylor in the hall; he seemed as fog-bound as I was, a sweet-tempered English boy staying blasted on grass and coke.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Mick.”

“Thank you. My first Thanksgiving.”

“How do you like it?”

“Don't know yet.”

The doorman summoned a cab, and away we went. Times Square was crowded with traffic because the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade had just ended. The driver hated everyone who'd come into town for it. “Bunch of stupid motherfuckers shouldn't be allowed out of Jersey,” he said, trying to run over an old black man tapping with a white cane across Broadway. At a red light we stopped beside a car with a mama and papa and two little girls in white organdy dresses, white bows in their hair, white gloves, holding white patent leather purses.

“Mommy, where's the parade?” one of the little girls asked, and the cab driver, leaning out his window, said, “Forget the parade. The parade's over.”

The girl threw down her purse and both of them began to cry, little mouths opening wide, tears starting to flow down contorted cheeks as we pulled away from the light and zipped on to Penn Station.

I stood in line, bought a ticket, boarded a train. Before it left the station its lights went out. All the Thanksgiving travellers sat silent, Muzak filling the darkness. Slowly the train rolled out to where the sunlight was starting to burn away the mist. Across the aisle a whitehaired man was telling his two grandsons, who looked about nine and twelve, that for years their father worked for Western Union and had a free pass on the railroad, never had to pay. The boys rolled their eyes, bad actors expressing boredom. The grandfather went on talking, trying to get them to look at the scenery, to live life, to see, to care, but the boys ignored him, thinking they would live forever. To my right were two girls in miniskirts, one wearing black tights and the other red. In front of me a belligerent black woman in gold-rimmed spectacles was demanding that a small Chinese girl put her large suitcase out of the way on the overhead rack. I lifted it for her and when we got to Great Neck carried it off the train, partly because I had never carried a Chinese girl's suitcase.

At Great Neck I couldn't find Wexler, but as the crowd thinned I saw him, looking like Edward G. Robinson in shades, suntan, trim white beard. “Hey, mee-an,” he said in his classic Washington Heights accent, “couldn't you push ahead of these Noo Yorkers?”

Where I come from, if you push people they are liable to kill you, but I didn't mention it. In Wexler's white Mercedes coupé (secure
thunk
of expensive doors closing) we drove through snowy Great Neck streets.

I had met Wexler the day after Otis Redding died, in 1967, less than two years ago, but we had become friends almost at once. If Wexler had known what madness I would bring into his life, he might have kept his distance, but I doubt it. At heart, we loved the same things. Wexler had published fiction as a young man, had studied journalism at Kansas State, had worked for
Billboard
(where he may have invented the term
rhythm & blues),
and was an aficionado of good writing. Before I was a teenager I had memorized Atlantic records Wexler and the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, made with such artists as Ray Charles, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, Chuck Willis, Ivory Joe Hunter, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charles Mingus, Phineas Newborn. Among his generation of American record producers—a number of whom, like the Erteguns and John Hammond, were from families with money—Wexler was the only one who had washed windows (as Sam and Judd Phillips were the only undertakers).
Blues from the Gutter,
a Champion Jack Dupree album produced by Wexler, was Brian Jones' introduction to the blues.

Wexler asked how business was, and I told him, including the contract-in-the-bushes story and the things Gore said last night. Wexler was interested but preoccupied. He and his family were going to spend the year-end holidays in Miami, and his older daughter Anita, nineteen, wanted to take her black boyfriend along. Wexler asked my opinion as a professional Southerner.

“Miami ain't the South,” I said, but he was still uneasy. It was ironic, because if anybody brought black boyfriends into white girls' hearts it was Wexler, with all the great black artists he had recorded.

The Wexlers' house was not so big you got lost in it, and the sitting room had soft chairs and Magrittes on the walls. Shirley, blond and tanned, brought out Bloody Marys and little ham and cheese sandwiches, and we made small talk—though Wexler's talk was never small; as he spoke careers grew and crumbled, empires stretched and shrank. The last time I'd seen Wexler, he'd said, “The Stones sent me a tape of this song, ‘Sympathy for the Devil.' They wanted Aretha to record it. The only artists on Atlantic who could record those lyrics are Sonny Bono and Burl Ives.” Now I mentioned that the Stones were looking for a label or someone to distribute their label, and he said, “I'd love to have them, but I don't want to deal with Klein.”