Traveling Soul (52 page)

Just as my father gained some momentum, though, bad luck came calling again, this time wrapped in tragedy. After coming off the road with the Impressions, he learned Neil Bogart had died of cancer, sending Boardwalk into a freefall. Within days, he embarked on another European tour. The audience Dad had attracted on his trips there in the early '70s with Craig, Master Henry, Lucky, and Tyrone, created a surge in popularity that had only grown despite his declining fortunes in America. As one reviewer noted, “Curtis delivers sixty magical minutes, backed by a group, including his son Tracy on bass, that steams through the set—top musicians each one, they have come straight off an American tour on which Curtis and Jerry Butler together celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Impressions. Mayfield is visibly amused when mention of them draws a puzzled silence from the young crowd.”

When he returned to America, Boardwalk stood on the verge of collapse. With the help of Epic Records, they eked out the release of
Honesty
, which didn't sell well, and then Curtis found himself without a label again. It was a trio of hard blows—an old friend dead, a record deal defunct, and an album failed.

He dealt with it by retreating further into the confines of his room. “After touring, Dad shut down,” Tracy recalls. “You wouldn't hear from
him for months. And it'd be many times we'd go over his house, and you would have to talk to him through the door. He would not come out the room. He wouldn't take phone calls. He wouldn't return phone calls.”

Dad had a nice setup in the basement with a big screen TV, and we'd often play chess or shoot pool down there, but he seemed to prefer the solitude of his room. I never knew exactly what he did in there, but many people around us believed Dad was sinking further into drugs, possibly cocaine. I never saw him do it, but it seems plausible. Regardless of what he was doing, when I'd knock on his bedroom door and say, “Dad, I'm hungry, come make me something to eat,” and he'd talk through the door instead of opening it, I knew something was amiss.

During that period he became more unpredictable, lending credence to the possibility of a growing drug habit. We never knew which promises he'd keep. Sharon says, “I felt like I couldn't rely on him to do things. I remember [when I visited him in Atlanta] he often wouldn't pick me up from the airport. I'd call him and say, ‘Dad? I'm here.' He'd say, ‘Oh yeah, I'll be right there,' or, ‘Oh, Robert, he will send someone out.' And I didn't like that. I didn't like someone else picking me up. I wanted him to pick me up.”

Tracy experienced similar feelings. “We've all been disappointed a lot by his personality,” he says. “I mean, just promising us something, just spending time with us and he wouldn't show up. [He was] always making promises. I was trying to get a record contract at one point for myself, he'd just have me record all these tracks and make promises that he wouldn't deliver. Then, you know, I'd bust out more tracks, and he'd make more promises, and he wouldn't deliver on those.”

He also continued his spotted history of physical abuse toward women, now with Altheida. I remember seeing her with a black eye and asking what happened. She made an excuse for it, but we knew what was going on. In his personal life as well as his creative one, my father had sunk to a low point.

His Gemini duality made him strive to be a family man despite his shortcomings as a partner, and in quick succession, he and Altheida had six children, leaving him with ten children spread across three separate
families. He wanted us all to get along and made an effort to include everyone in trips and activities. We also spent a good amount of time with Curtis III and Helen. “Helen was extremely nice to us,” Tracy recalls. “Never once did I feel any negativity from her.” Sharon, however, noticed tension between Dad and Helen when he'd drop us off.

Perhaps naturally, tensions also simmered among ten children vying for one man's time and attention, and three women wanting to make sure he allocated that time and attention fairly. As usual, Dad could see the big picture—having a lot of children and remaining close to each of them—but he struggled with the day-to-day reality of making it happen. “You have to create the conditions for that to happen,” Sharon says. “You have to nurture that type of environment, because it does not just happen. One of my first memories, I remember my dad introducing me to Curtis III and saying, ‘This is your brother.' I was confused about who are these people I don't know?”

Dad kept his mother and grandmother close. I remember my great-grandma Sadie vividly—she'd smoke cigarettes all day, perched by the window in the third-floor apartment where my grandmother lived. Even in her eighties, she was feisty and funny. For her part, my grandmother still followed her son's career closer than any fan. She proudly kept a box of newspaper and magazine clippings, adding to it every time a new story appeared. We'd even see Mannish every now and again—my father never fostered a relationship with his father, but he still welcomed the old man into his house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.

Despite the hardships of the past few years,
Honesty
proved my father could write a great song when he stayed true to himself. Songs like “If You Need Me” and “What You Gawn Do?” lived up to his best standards. The latter featured another Caribbean arrangement and lyrics about the islands, perhaps as a tribute to his recently departed protégé Bob Marley, who had died of cancer at age thirty-six in 1981. Dad hadn't lost his social or political edge in the Reagan era, either, as he showed in the song “Dirty Laundry.” He sings, “Dirty laundry in the country /
Can't trust Uncle Sam / Broken link / Future sinking / And no one gives a damn.” But he was not the man to comment on the Reagan years. That job fell to a new era of musicians who had learned from his work. Several months before
Honesty
came out, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their seminal single, “The Message.” The song set the tone for artists like N.W.A, KRS-One, Public Enemy, and others who would define hip-hop in the next few years. In many ways, “The Message” was
Super Fly
set to a new form of music. It's hard to miss my father's imprint on the song's lyrics and point of view.

In fact, Dad's music played a huge role in the development of hiphop, even as he faded from the public eye. While artists like James Brown and Stevie Wonder remained cultural icons—and Bob Marley's fame reached the stratosphere with the posthumous best-of compilation,
Legend
—Dad seemed resigned to his status. “I don't feel that I'm a great success,” he said.

It takes a lot of ego and playing a role that I'm not. I like the idea of having money. I'm very happy that I'm in an area that people turn their heads and listen, that I've got respect and naturally, I feel proud of myself. And then, every couple of years, when you get the money in, you wonder if you're winning or losing. I cherish the time I can get away from it all.

At the same time, he remained hopeful. “These are not easy times, yet they are not hopeless times,” he said. He just needed a break.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote:

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about,
than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Those words could sum up my father's career. In a span of twenty years, he put his instrument on the grindstone again, and again, and again, more than almost any artist of his generation. He crafted an immortal legacy from it. He dulled and blunted it and still demanded more of it. Now, for the first time, he rested it.

He spent much of the mid-'80s away from music, learning to be a father first and world-famous musician second. Gray crept into his beard. He put on weight. Life changed, as it must. He spent some time in the Curtom Atlanta studio tinkering with new sounds, but he didn't have a clear direction or a record deal. He filled most of his time with ordinary things—cooking, going to the store, tooling around town in his brown Jeep. In 1983, I began college at Morehouse in Atlanta, and I'd visit the house on weekends, where the Rolls Royce sat in the garage dusty, unused, battery dead, tires low. I'd clean it up, charge it, and take it out for an occasional spin. Sometimes I'd even ask to drive his new Corvette. He was always good about it—he'd just give me the keys and I'd take off.

Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Kenny visited him in Atlanta often, and they found that as much as life had changed, Curtis remained in many ways the same frustrating man. “He enjoyed people, he enjoyed family,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “But he would enjoy you for a while, and the next thing you know, he would disappear in his room. You went home. Or, you just enjoyed the rest of your day and knew that was him; that was part of his personality. I think everybody you talk to can tell you another side of him. That's a Gemini. Everybody you talk to, they know a different side.”

Uncle Kenny developed his own way to deal with my father's capricious nature. He says, “I wouldn't go out there all the time, but I could always tell when my brother wanted to be bothered, because he'd send somebody looking for me, so that meant Curtis want to be bothered. Curtis was a Gemini, you know. Wishy-washy. I remember one time I
was out there, and Curtis told Altheida, ‘Get all the kids together, we're going to go to the other house and swim.' So, she's up there getting all these rug rats together, and she comes down and says, ‘We're ready.' Curtis was laying up on the couch asleep, and he gets up and says, ‘Ready for what?'”

A few years prior, he'd finally divorced Helen, but he didn't marry Altheida, causing trouble with Aunt Carolyn. “Me and Theida, we got in the biggest thing,” Aunt Carolyn says. “I said, ‘You got all these babies and you ain't married? Every man I ever had, he married me.' She obviously would go up and tell Curtis about it, and he'd tell her—he wouldn't tell me—he'd tell her, and I know he told her because the next day, the conversation would come back around, and she would tell me what he said. One time he told her that she was his ‘spiritual wife.' I said, ‘Ain't no such thing!'”

Still, my father loved being with his family, and he always tried to include all his children in his life. Years ago, he'd become a photography fanatic, and now he enjoyed taking hundreds of pictures, developing them in his own darkroom and documenting his life during the first significant break he'd taken since 1958.

At the same time, Dad also spent more time in his bedroom hidden from the outside world. His life continued taking on the detritus of addiction, which only fed the rumors of cocaine use. His career floundered. The house in Atlanta sat unkempt and dirty. His relationships deteriorated. “No one was taking care of the house,” Sharon remembers.