The Harder They Fall (14 page)

Hey Gary, it’s good to see you. I’m sorry I don’t see you better, but that’s another story. Shot eyeballs, you know what I mean?

So, you want my story, huh? Well, let’s see what we got here. My father, he taught me good stuff and he hated people who was activated [drug users]. When he was around people, sometimes he drank, but he never got drunk. He got straight. He was never, in any kind of way, drunk. That was not true of most of the people around him though.

When I was a kid, my dad owned a little record shop. He sold what they used to call “race records.” Gospel records, jazz records, rhythm and blues records. The shop was right by Dillard University, which is a black university in New Orleans. My dad had all these 78 records that were stocked into small jukeboxes and we delivered to hotels and stuff. Even as a little kid, he would let me play them. As long as I didn’t break one. The
A-side was always scratched, so I would listen to all the B-sides. My daddy had a whole collection of dirty records that were stashed in a liquor cabinet. I would get into them and play ’em for all my friends. He would sell them records in brown bags in his record shop. They weren’t really the dirty songs. They were the risqué songs.

Anyway, I remember as a little kid, my Aunt Andre taught me how to play boogie-woogie on a piano. My Uncle Joe showed me a little stuff too, and for years I was learnin’, but my hands was too little to play the left-hand part. Finally they was big enough, and I started learnin’ stuff on my own. My aunt said I had a gift. I never really studied piano. I studied guitar, because early on, I decided that there was so many killer piano players around. Everybody in my neighborhood played.

My daddy also fixed PA systems, and I’d go with him and listen and everyone I heard was killer. And so I wanted to be a piano player. When I was young, I heard Pete Johnson playin’ some stuff with Big Joe Turner, and I wanted to be Pete Johnson. I didn’t care nothing about the singer. Just wanted to play piano, but I thought I’d never get a job, so I studied guitar. I studied with three guys. Al Guma and two guys, Papoose and Ron Montrell, who both played in Fats Domino’s band. It’s funny. My pa knew everybody. Just from his little record store and from fixin’ PAs and amplifiers and everything electronical. He knew stuff.

My daddy also knew a lot of prominent New Orleans musicians. He knew Al Hirt. He used to fix Louis Prima’s TV set. Everybody knew my daddy. He knew the prizefighters. We used to get free tickets to the prizefights ’cause my daddy fixed the PA system at the Coliseum. The wrestling matches was there too. We’d get a lot of fringe benefits.

So after I studied guitar a little while, somebody told my daddy, “This kid can’t read music. He just memorizes stuff. All he really wants to do is play the blues.” I’d go home and I’d learn Lightning Hopkins or something. So that’s when my dad got me to Papoose, and Papoose told me, “You’ll never get a job playing the outta-meter, foot-beater crap. You got to learn to play something like T-Bone Walker.” I loved T-Bone Walker, but I couldn’t figure out how to do any of that shit, from what I was studying with my guitar lessons. So Papoose started me on that, ’cause he was my teacher and
he was also a damn good studio musician.

At this time, I was already smoking a little weed, popping some goofballs. I don’t remember exactly when I started. There was always a lot of weed floating around. There was guys who actually shot dope in our basement when I was a kid. It was easy to get in ’cause it wasn’t locked. Guys from the neighborhood would go down there and I’d see them and think, “These guys is stupid to do that shit.” But somewhere down the line I asked somebody if I could try it.

The first time I did it I got beat. Somebody gave me a water shot, and I didn’t get nothing out of it. I’m sure the guy did it to keep me from doing dope, but I was on a mission to get some real shit. I remember going into the high school, the first time I really got loaded, and I walked up these stairs and puked all over this trophy case, and I thought, “This is what being high is all about.” I felt so good. And that was the high I chased all of my life.

Sometime later, I met this girl, who was married to my bass player at the time, and I really dug her. Both of us was chipping. We wasn’t really strung out yet, but we progressed from being chippy dope users to getting a real habit.

My daddy found my works one time. I told him it must belong to somebody else. I was, by this time, becoming a lying dope fiend. My girl and I was trying to support our dope habit. Sometime before my pa passed away, he started busting me. He was finding works all over the place. My poor mama had like eighty cajillion heart attacks behind the fact that I was using dope. Me and this tenor sax player—he’s doing three hundred years at Angola right now for narcotics—we was selling peyote buttons. They was legal, but nobody knew that, and so we was getting grand-theft money selling this crap. My mama didn’t know what the hell we was doing, but then the narcotics squad came to our house looking for somebody. It was me, the bass player, and the tenor player. We panicked and was flushing these peyote buttons down the turlet, clogging the damn thing up. My mom completely freaked out, the poor thing.

So anyway, the tenor player escaped to Baton Rouge. The tenor player got a gig in a pharmacy and got popped working there, ’cause they had an
APB [all points bulletin] out on his ass. The bass player went to another state to get away from the police.

Dope was a real inconvenience to my music. The police was always picking us up on seventy-two-hour investigations. It was all we ever talked about. When we were high, we said we got to get out of this fucking game. This shit sucks. It just became a big trap. Go make the gigs, the recording sessions. I was doing good with my music on one side, supporting a don’t -quit-dope habit on the other side.

I was even trying to run a whorehouse on the side. Me and my first wife. A little bitty operation. It wasn’t shit. Chump change. A friend of mine gave me a book of tricks, and we found some girls and put ’em to work. It was just another way to support our habit. I also started a little abortion business. Back then, in the fifties, abortion was illegal. I knew a guy who was in a concentration camp in Poland. He knew how to do something beside coat-hanger abortions. I had friends in the church down in New Orleans that took in girls that was pregnant and tried to save them. It was a bad time though, because of the abortion laws. Everything was a bust. It was a losing battle. We’d get picked up on a seventy-two-hour investigation. We’d have a good lawyer, who’d get us bonded, but we’d get picked up by the police as we was walking out and they’d put us right back in. We’d have to go through the same shit all over again, and get really dope sick. It’s amazing. We’d go through all that, but we’d forget how much shit we just went through and that we were that close to being past it all [dope sick], and the first thing I’d do was get some codeine cough syrup till we could cop. Then we’d get loaded and it was the same ol’ shit. “Man, we got to get outta this game.” Over and over and over.

Guys told me this, old-timers said, “You fuck with dope and all you’re going to do is just chase your sick off.” And that’s what I did. Just trying to feel like normal, whatever the fuck that is.

Dope made me feel like there was this big wall. I used to play in these bucket-of-blood clubs, where you didn’t feel exactly safe. I’d be playing guitar in places where I’d always try to stand by a slot machine. All these clubs had slot machines, even on the bandstand, and I’d always try to play next to one, so that when they started popping caps in the joint, I could
duck behind one. I knew a bullet ain’t going to go through all them slugs and money in those machines. I was always high in these clubs, but I had to pay attention. All of a sudden you’d hear
pop
,
pop
,
pop
. These were mostly clubs on the west bank of New Orleans, Algiers, Jefferson Parish, all the way down through south Louisiana. They had a few on the east bank. When you first crossed the Mississloppy River, you were still in New Orleans in Algiers. These were dangerous clubs I’m talking about, just plain dangerous. The club owners made sure the bands were safe, but there were some of them where the club owner was crazy as the customers. There was a guy out at the Weego Inn on the hill in West Weego, and this fucking guy, he’d shoot up his own damn club. Empty it out, then blame us for the joint having no business. The guy was dangerous.

At a lot of those gigs, I shot dope and took goofballs on top of it. Red Devils, any kind of sleeping pills. I got into fights under the influence of sleeping pills. That’s what made me stop taking them. I’d get into fights and get my ass kicked. I even hit some pedestrians with my car, and I started thinking, “What if I hit a little kid?” So I quit taking those fucking things.

During this time, no matter what I did, I would still shoot dope. I had to go to various institutions with the hope of cleaning up, but when I got out, I always did the same thing. I’d get a bottle of codeine cough syrup to get balanced. Codeine to me wasn’t like heroin or any of the opiates that I really liked. I also didn’t know that one of anything is too many. I didn’t understand that it was the first one that gets you started. I thought I was just doing this to take the edge off. It went on and on, till at some point in the game I felt like I’m never going to get out.

When I first heard that there were ways out, some old-timer told me that if you’re going to be a bullshit artist, you have to believe your own bullshit. And when I first started trying to regroup my life, I couldn’t tell you where the bullshit ended and the truth began. It was all fucked up in my head. And that was a problem.

The first time I was getting detoxified from methadone. I’d been on that crap a long time. I hated methadone. It was a fucking nightmare. Somewhere in the eighties I went into my first rehab, or I should say, rehabs. All of them around the same time. I got detoxified offa methadone
and went back to shooting dope, which was better than drinking methadone. My mother made novenas all the time, my sister constantly worried, and my daughter would panic every time I went to the bathroom.

After that, I started getting some heat on me ’cause I was dealing a little in New York. I didn’t want to take a fall, and I talked to this friend of mine. The motherfucker had regrouped his life [gotten clean] in New Orleans and he said to me, “I’ll tell you, Mac, you’re too old for the game. Your crippled old ass ain’t goin’ to outrun one of these young kids with a Mac 10 or an Uzi or a sawed-off shotgun. You’re too old for the game.” So I went to another rehab, and this time, some counselor said to me, “You can’t smoke here.” And I said, “What are you telling me? I’m outside! I’m a nicotine fanatical! You telling me I can’t smoke? Outside?” So I ended up flipping out a few times there. And the next thing I know, I’m in a cardiac ward, laying in a bed next to a guy on a morphine drip. A nurse walked in. I hadn’t held nothing in my stomach. The only thing I could hold down was Gatorade, and I hate Gatorade. So this nurse says, “Here, try some of these tangerines.” After she talked to me, they shipped me back to rehab and I met her old man. He was a sweet guy. He’d take me outside in the desert there and prop me up against a cactus or some shit, and then he’d make these nice sand paintings. Then he’d start playing this little homemade flute, and while he played, the wind came up and blew the painting away. I said, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” One day, I watched him kill a snake with this nice stick. I looked at him and said, “I’m gonna beat you for that stick.” He said, “You don’t have to commit no felony for this stick, I’m gonna give you the motherfucker.” I still got it.

Anyway, them people really helped me. It was a nice place, if you like deserts, but I’m not a desert kind of people.

So this is where I got clean. Period. I made a decision in my head that I wasn’t gonna get caught up in this shit anymore. … That was in December 1989. From there, I was put in a psych ward, still pretty flipped out. While I was there, three croakers [doctors] decided to put me on psych meds. Each one thought the other ones was monitoring me. I was slowly being poisoned. Lithium poison. It’s called diabetes insipid. This was in California, where a lot of people were trying to help me. So eventually I get back to New York and end up seeing some psych-pharmacologist. This guy
tells me I’m being poisoned from lithium and he wants to get me off of it. So now I’m off psych meds and I’m starting to flip out again. All this shit keeps piling up on me.

I’m also with this woman that’s driving me crazy, so I try to throw her out of my pad, but she has extra keys, and when I come home off the road, she’s back in my pad and I’m getting crazier by the minute. Now I’m ready to kill this bitch, but I don’t go back to dope.

I hang on to praying and doing things these people in rehab taught me to do. I moved into the Carlyle Hotel in New York, so I didn’t have to go to my pad, ’cause I knew I’d kill this woman. I was really getting crazier. I had herbs hanging everywhere and candles burning. The maids wouldn’t clean the room. I had incense burning and all kinds of weird shit. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Even the people that worked for me stayed away because I was so out there.