Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
The best I can do for you is a before and after. The before was the first show. Me on stage with my band, working hard, enjoying myself and the crowd. Immediately before, I was standing in the
center of the stage introducing and pointing to the members of the band over the closing coda of “The Bottle.” Everybody was smiling, huge to the point of laughter, lights coming up,
crowd screaming, me raising both of my arms to embrace the applause.
And then . . . hot, real hot, but not sweating. Something happened—the stroke—on the way down those few steps at the front of the stage, before you took a right turn and headed
toward the dressing room. An instant or so before is me starting down those steps, head down, some kind of cap on, not a baseball cap, my face in shadows, still smiling and happy because the band
sounded good. Everybody was playing well and we sounded
energy
loud but not
volume
loud. The energy and adrenaline had not pushed tempos up and over the point where my smile was
remembered rather than genuine. And I was already assembling and arranging the order of tunes we would do in the second show. This was a useless process, to be sure, because I would not decide more
than the first two or three songs with certainty.
The after begins on the stairs with someone holding my arm and guiding me sightless past murmuring fans who had swallowed their cheers and perhaps even forgotten them, as I had.
I was totally blind. And I remember what I could not see. Maybe I mean I remember not being able to see.
No, this was not a reach for any closer relationship with Stevie. The blindness that I experienced struck me like lightning but without the electrical burns or the flash of light.
I was there—but-not-there, and treated that way by the time my guide and I reached the dressing room and I was led to a chair. I collapsed into it and sat up as though posture was
important. I heard myself being spoken about. Actually, around and about, because I was referred to in the third person as if I wasn’t there.
The voice I most remember after, in the dressing room, was Vernard Dixon, the road manager the band members called Swee’ Pea, because he like to wear a Swee’ Pea–type sailors
hat. The dressing room filled and emptied a couple of times, with band members and the curious drifting about until someone closed the door to the hallway. I didn’t know where I was sitting
in the room, but from time to time people briefly took the chairs around me, next to me. No one talked to me.
Band members were collecting their gear. Discussing how they were going to get back to the hotel. I felt as though I was sitting in a corner facing the wall.
Vernard opened the door to leave, to collect the money—minus the tickets that were refunded—from the producer. When he opened the door, my ex-wife Brenda came in. It was good to hear
her voice. She sounded kind and solicitous, her voice as soft as ever. I was no longer alone.
I was comforted by her being there. She was organizing my things, packing my bag, asking questions, collecting the key to my hotel room from Vernard. I had not gone by the hotel before the show.
I was suddenly aware that no one had been talking to me because no one really had known what to say.
I was tempted to try a reassuring smile but I still felt like I was facing a wall, and I really didn’t have any idea what was happening to me, why I was blind, why I didn’t otherwise
feel bad—just sort of stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, and the more important question, I imagine, was how long my condition was going to last. But as I said, I was
stunned, feeling extremely naked and exposed. Because I was at a loss for words and because the most important questions had not occurred to me.
Brenda said she was going to get her car and pull up to the door nearest the dressing room in about ten minutes. Vernard came back in talking to someone else about the money. He told me that the
gate receipts were not straight yet, so it was going to take a few more minutes before he could collect everyone and pay them. I reminded him again, uselessly, to write everything down and to get a
receipt. And to apologize for me.
I was kind of vague about what the apology should consist of because I didn’t know what the hell was wrong.
Band members who hadn’t left yet were drifting back in, still speaking about me as though I was somewhere else.
Like, “How is he?”
I ignored questions not put directly to me.
Vernard led me out the door and into Brenda’s car. She and I had been formally divorced in 1987. Oddly enough, I received the documents, which had been filed by her brother, at Blues
Alley. But she and I had been separated long before that, and she and Gia moved back to Don Miguel Drive—her mother’s place—at the end of 1984.
Of all the locations in Los Angeles I enjoyed myself most of all there, on Don Miguel Drive. What’s more, of all the people I met and got to know in Southern California, my favorite was
Mrs. Elvira Sykes, Brenda’s mother. There was no complicated reason. She was simply one of the most sympathetic, pleasant, and direct women I’d ever met. And perhaps I met her at a time
when those qualities were so thoroughly lacking from my life. Maybe it had to do with my impression of Los Angeles. But I didn’t think that made it wrong. Impressions in Los Angeles were not
to be equated with wrong.
As a rule, I found first impressions to be without merit. Maybe that’s because of who I am, and the way scattered rumors and a sprinkling of my attempts at art had created a persona that
did not inspire initial honesty of an unguarded introduction, free of pretentions. But that’s not so in L.A., or at least was not so in the L.A. of the 1970s and 1980s. There I found that a
first impression was valid because it was all there was to most people until they found the role they should play to maximize their association with someone after, “How do you do?”
There was nothing until this stranger decided whether you could be used and for what.
If the reputation I had amassed was acknowledged at all, it was only in passing, a blink and a slight shift in their focus like the faint echo of a ring made by pressing the
plus
key on a
cash register. Everybody in L.A. was an actress, an actor, a singer whose megastardom was assured by the demo tape they’d just recorded, the screen test they were up for, the commercial they
were auditioning for. Only established players, large or small stars, could afford to have a personality or genuine interest in anybody else.
Mrs. Elvira Sykes was the second member I met of a previous generation of Brenda’s family. I met her grandmother first, her father’s mother, from Shreveport, Louisiana. I met her on
the weekend while I was playing at the Roxy and Kareem first brought Brenda over and introduced us. If her grandmother had still been at Brenda’s apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard, I might have
asked to go there from Club Lingerie. I believe Mama Sykes might have helped me. Instead, the Spirits helped me.
The second show had been cancelled. Not good. I calculated the lost income in my head accompanied by clip-clopping; it sounded like someone on horseback was trapped inside my skull and
couldn’t find an exit. Shod hooves clip-clopping in cadence around the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. And the blind guy sitting there on a bench.
I only remember one question that Brenda asked during that short ride to the Franklin Hotel. She asked me where I had gotten the sweat suit I was wearing. That’s how I remembered the
Porsche. Gia’s godfather, Dr. Stevie Rosenthal, had provided the means for me to get to Lingerie on time. His brand new Porsche was still parked on Sunset, across the street from the
club.
I was only awake for a few minutes in my hotel room before I collapsed face down on the bed and was out like a light. Before my exit, I gave the keys to the car to Brenda. She retrieved the car
and returned it.
I often credit the Spirits with things I cannot righteously credit any other way. On the morning after the Lingerie show, the Spirits returned my sight. That probably sounds and reads as
scattered as anything I’ve written here. Why? Because people might ask, “If these Spirits returned your sight, why did they take it in the first place?” That seems like another
road to “the Lord works in mysterious ways . . .” But I’m not trying to go there. (Although I’m sure he does.) I believe I know what blew me out on those stairs. No sweat.
Wearing a sweat suit onstage that I had put on for an entirely different purpose that had nothing to do with working and building up the necessary sweat. I had spent the ninety minutes leading up
to my stroke inside a hot place, working hard enough to be drenched on a normal night. I allowed myself to become dehydrated and I now equate my stroke coming off stage to some kind of heatstroke
episode, a short circuit that could have inflicted more lasting evidence of its influence than it did.
It took my sight. My sight was restored. But it left its signature, a long-range reminder of its potential and my mortality. It marked me in a place where I could not forget the circumstances
that created it. On the right side of my face, it marked the cheek with a wrinkling, folding effect that takes hold of my expression at times like someone prematurely yanking down a venetian blind
at an awkward angle. It also warned me because it occasionally slurred my speech, and as it adjusted aspects of me it left me unaware.
I heard about it before I heard it.
I don’t particularly know why I sat blind, feeling as though I had disrupted a kindergarten class and been sentenced to face the wall. Responding more or less mechanically with my voice
sounding like it carried a new echo that attached itself randomly to words. But it was a Sunday night sliding toward midnight, and there was nowhere to go that sounded better than the hotel.
It was New York City, 1999, and I was finally “being permitted” into the apartment I had shared with my mother at the time of her death. The first time I was
allowed to enter, months after her funeral, I got lost at the threshold of my mother’s deserted, dust-choked apartment.
I ignored the young brown-skinned security guard assigned to me by the manager of the complex. We walked down the hallway to the living room where he sat with a magazine as I returned and
settled stiffly on her unmade bed in the bedroom nearest the front door. I got up without any defined place to start a review of our belongings in this place filled with her absence.
I felt like a burglar rummaging through her dresser drawers, full of her underclothes, stockings and pantyhose, thin spring blouses and sweaters, and a top drawer assortment of small unnamed
lotions, hair clips and pens, hair nets and rollers, a small plastic bag with extra eyeglasses of varied prescriptions. This carry-all of glass and plastic came to represent the fierce indignity of
death, which leaves even a dedicated fixture of the Sunday services on Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street without defense against any stranger’s avaricious exploration. Before I could reason
against it, I felt ugly drops of salt and rage twisting their way down my cheeks, away from my red eyes. I wondered, without the strength to generate anger, whether the young brother in our living
room had heard me crying as I wiped my face with a Kleenex. On legs locked at the hips without knees, I was a metal man with no more flexibility from forehead to foot than the tin man frozen
rust-rigid in a pose speaking of unfulfilled intentions.
In the empty attic that was my mother’s son’s head, I saw that her direct moments of criticism protected me from more flaws than the obvious “selfish” one that she once
handed me so plainly that I was aggravated by her clarity. I had always enjoyed and even taken a vicarious pride in her understated handling of all-comers through our lives together. And I was not
spared entirely. I was reminded of how her jabs carried more hurt than the telegraphed roundhouse rights from celebrated bigwigs of the entertainment world. Their cotton candy excursions into
colloquialisms showed more evidence of the harm my sorties against their character and integrity had done than they could respond to in kind. Her observations, delivered without elevated volume or
aura of discovery, brought a lasting sharpness that left no visible bruise on me but smuggled a bone-deep ache past my skin with a package of detonations that would fracture my facade of unaffected
nonchalance. And delivered without malice.
The pain of the truth was not “permanent” when it spoke to a fault we did not or could not correct. When I chose “did not,” I arrogantly proclaimed that it was because
the Spirits supplied me with what I needed and pointed out a debilitating generosity that belied or balanced “selfish.” When I chose “could not,” I admitted that I
didn’t know how and told myself I was raised by Lily Scott. But so was my mother.
I am a refugee from the college of clowns who was too impatient to wait for graduation day, which would have included a speech by a previous inmate who was released with honors at the top of his
class. Had I waited, I would have heard his warning. So I just
thought
I was funny and that funny would fix everything, change every flat tire, arguably without even stopping; no time on the
side of the road. There were no clown escape hatches that occurred to me now, paralyzed and immobile in my mother’s room.
I was repulsed by my lifelong insistence on fucking isolation. Some of it has been justified by a real fear of the consequences awaiting those who befriended me and drew close, tried to settle
within an umbrella’s ceiling of cover. When I was younger, everything in life was an experiment and a new thrill. On a rainy day, you could find the high-end joy of another body, another
soul, squeezing shoulder to shoulder, giggling, sharing warmth deliberately, two midgets who gallop on marionette legs, now jammed in a space that posed a challenge for one. I loved that kind of
silliness, but life has taught me that I have to avoid that kind of close.
There was no one I could be close to now.
Real grief had overwhelmed my body’s working parts. All of these little parts of my mother and her day-to-day stability were rising up from where they were left for the night months ago.
They had been expecting
her
and I am not her. But they know me because I had been around fretting when they came for her before, the ones with the IVs and the stretchers. It was obviously my
fault that she wasn’t here to resume whatever they were doing that was left to be continued. When I walked around without purpose and then stopped to cry, they became annoyed and started to
move on their own. When I saw them move, I called for the guard and told him it was time to go.