The Harder They Fall (45 page)

I was a very shy kid, born to a mother who was very young. She got pregnant at thirteen, so, needless to say, she was ill equipped for motherhood. Consequently I had a very nomadic childhood. All my family are substance abusers. My natural father died of cirrhosis of the liver before he was forty,
which is incredible. In his mid-thirties, he had no liver. My stepfather, the guy my mom married, was a heroin addict all of his life, and both of his siblings died of drug abuse when I was quite young. Drug abuse and alcoholism is very, very prevalent in my family. It was everywhere.

Let me put it to you like this—one picture is worth a thousand words. For many, many years, I believed that only children slept lying down, and adults slept standing up, because when I would come home from school, the number of junkies nodding in our living room was amazing. All the adults would be standing up with cigarette ashes dangling, never falling and hitting the ground. They looked like they were asleep standing up. I didn’t know they were heroin addicts. They were just adults—family and friends—just standing up sleeping. Sort of the opposite of vampires!

When you’re a child and you see images like that, it’s just normal to you. So me being a typical rebellious kid, the last thing I wanted to be was like them. So alcohol, heroin, and drugs like that were the furthest thing from my mind. You know, most kids don’t want to be anything like their parents, and I was no different.

I came up in the hippie era of the sixties, when psychedelic drugs were very popular. I started out sniffing glue. That was sort of the rage in my community. We went from sniffing glue to amyl nitrate. In the junior high school I went to, they had amyl nitrate in the athletic department. It was used to revive people who passed out. We’d go in there and raid the medical chest. It wasn’t under lock-and-key in those days. We used to steal the amyl nitrate from the gym. We had a poor man’s teenage speedball. We’d sniff glue and do amyl nitrate. Boy, how deadly was that?

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I met Timothy Leary in Los Angeles. We went to this event called The Teenage Fair, and somehow we ended up in the Hollywood Hills with Tim Leary and a bunch of hippies …

I’m sorry … my family was sort of bicoastal. Most of the time when I’m talking about my family, I’m talking about our life in New York, mainly in Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and the Bronx. My mom was always sort of pawning me off to my grandparents, either my paternal or maternal grandparents, who all lived in Los Angeles by that time. So I was bicoastal. At thirteen, I was doing a stint with my paternal grandmother,
who was a great influence in my life. She named me after my dad. I’m Nile Rodgers Jr. She tried to instill in me stuff that my dad just didn’t get. When I was born, my dad was eighteen or nineteen, but it was already clear that he was not going to make it. He was a musician and hot guy around town, but he just couldn’t overcome his problems. Even though I was thirteen and my dad wasn’t much older than me, I guess she felt like she had a second chance.

I was in L.A. with my grandmother at the time, and I was just doing the glue sniffing and amyl nitrate, and I went to this thing called The Teenage Fair, and somehow wound up meeting Timothy Leary. I didn’t know that he was anything special. He may have been in the news in those days, but it was just starting to happen. He just looked cool and interesting. Leary asked us if we wanted to take a trip, and we thought he meant to go away someplace, so we said yes. I was with my friend who also did the same kind of recreational drug-taking that I did. We used to go to a place in Hollywood to roller-skate. It was in close proximity to the Hollywood Palladium, which is where The Teenage Fair was. So we happened to see those very odd-looking people … In Los Angeles I hung out with only black people. In New York it was a very mixed crowd, because my stepfather is white. My stepfather is Jewish. So they were the sort of heroin addict beatnik hip crew in New York.

My parents were very, very cool. My family, now that I understand addiction, were always doing geographics. We never lived in the same place more than a few weeks at a time. So consequently, I never completed a semester in a school, ever, until I was about fourteen years old, and I was somewhat in control of my own destiny. I was at the mercy of whomever I was staying with. I never checked into a school the day that every other kid checked in, like the first day of school. And I never made it to the last day of school. Ever! I never completed one semester in any school in my life until I was fourteen, which I find extraordinary.

In those days, the American public school system basically had a standardized curriculum. For a kid that had a nomadic existence like I did, it sort of helped, because no matter what city I was in, what school, or what district, I could pretty much walk into a class and they were reading the
same books. I would go to L.A. and be in the hard-core ghetto, and it was still “See Spot run. See Dick go. See Jane run.” Same thing. I’d go back to New York and it was “See Spot run.” That helped me to be somewhat grounded. Intellectually I sort of excelled. I could enter a classroom and, even though the other kids made fun of me ’cause they do that to a new kid, and usually I was the only black kid in an all-white class or something, I just sort of took to reading. That helped me adjust. Even though I would check into a class late, I knew all the lessons or could fake my way through it at least. I felt like an outcast, but I would grab on to any little thing that would masquerade as consistency. Even though I was the new kid and everyone made fun of me, I could pick up the reader and say, “Yes, on page 37 Dick said … whatever.” That would sort of impress the teachers on some level. I was really a people pleaser, who did everything to belong and try to fit, because I never fit. Kids are trendy, and I’d move to a new neighborhood, a new school system, and the kids would have their own little fads that they were into, and of course I wouldn’t know what they were into. I never fit in.

At the time I grew up, roller-skating was a very black kind of thing. There were some white kids there, but it was a real R & B thing. The rinks played R & B music predominately, although every now and then you’d hear The Archies or some pop song. But mainly it was Motown. I lived in south central L.A., and when we got to the skating rink this one day, we saw all of these people who looked very different from the people we hung out with. They were the precursors to hippies. They didn’t call themselves hippies; they called themselves freaks. My family were beatniks, and the freaks followed them. Then they became hippies. At least that’s how I remembered it. So when we went to The Teenage Fair and I saw all these freaks hanging out, we said, “Man, this is great.” We couldn’t understand how they saw through all that hair. I’ll never forget, we saw a bunch of them who said, “Oh wow, spade cats!” I didn’t know what that meant. So when Timothy Leary asked us if we wanted to take a trip, we said, “Yeah, where are we goin’?” We didn’t know that meant LSD. We went up to this house in the Hollywood Hills, and there was this guy that they were all calling a guru. That was the first time I heard that word. Just think about
this … we were kids, maybe thirteen years old. I’ll never forget it.

We took LSD. I think it was on a sugar cube. I don’t recall the amount of time it took us to get high. We had already been smoking pot, so we thought we
were
high. We had no idea what was about to happen. They were playing this record I had never heard before, by The Doors. Over and over again. The song was “The End.” We had never heard anything like that before. We were used to “Don’t Mess with Bill” and “Going to a Go-Go.” After a while, after we achieved LSD highness, we found ourselves watching this television set that had no picture tube inside it. They had Christmas lights with angel hair, flashing off and on, off and on, off and off! There was a bunch of really gorgeous girls and guys hanging out in front of this TV set looking at these light flashes for hours and hours, while The Doors blasted in the background.

So that was my initial experience in that type of drug taking. Before that we had really only sniffed glue and taken amyl nitrate. We’d go to the model shop and buy a bunch of glue. We were connoisseurs. You can only snort Testers, in the orange-and-white tube. I should’ve known I was in trouble ’cause I was a glue connoisseur at ten!

See, I tried to be different from my parents who drank, smoked pot, and did heroin. So after I dropped acid, it was like, “Whoa!” I knew my parents never did this. I felt superior to them on some level: “I’m doing stuff that they couldn’t even fathom.” My mom wouldn’t take acid in a million years ’cause she’s a control freak. So after we took acid, psychedelics became my drug of choice. I only wanted to do acid, smoke pot, and do magic mushrooms. You won’t believe this, but for a very long time, my drug of choice was rat poison. Rat poison had belladonna in it. We were smart kids. Smart enough to know that belladonna was a psychedelic. We would separate the little granules of belladonna from the rat poison. We didn’t know if we could really tell which were the belladonna granules. Imagine, we were taking something that could kill you, and we were taking it to get high.

We knew all the hippie stuff—the
Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
. Remember the thing about if you scraped the inside of a banana peel that would get you high? Going to the plant nursery for morning glory seeds? All that hippie stuff about how to get high.

I remember reading a book by William Burroughs called
The Yage Letters
. It was about the most powerful hallucinogenic. It grew on a vine in South America. Burroughs went down there and did it with the Indians. It was more powerful than LSD or STP. It was unbelievable. And all we wanted to do was go to the jungles of Brazil and do yage with the Indians. That shows you how completely sold I was on this life-style. It came as a complete surprise to me, but at the end of the day, I ended up becoming just your garden-variety alcoholic, because I had such a flair for getting high when I was younger. It should have been very exotic, but what brought me to my knees was just vodka and cocaine.

I could have started just like my parents right away. Cut to the chase. Stopped all the bullshit. “Hey, Mom, give me some vodka. Pass me some of that coke you guys are selling, and I can be there with you right now.” I had no idea that’s how I would wind up.

So after living like that as a teenager, I started to develop my musical skills. My mom, dad, and stepfather loved great music, and it was always playing in our house.

One thing I forgot to mention: Part of the normal school curriculum in those days had art class, gym, and music class; all these interesting things you could learn. Every school had those. For some reason I gravitated towards music. Every school I went to had bands and orchestras, or some reasonable facsimile. So because I always checked in late, I was assigned whatever instrument was left or lacking in the orchestra. A by-product of that existence was that, by the time I was eleven years old, I could sort of play or get something discernable out of every instrument in the symphony orchestra. I knew how the instrument worked, so to speak. Its function in an orchestra. By the time I became sixteen or seventeen years old—and I’ve now chosen my instrument, which is guitar, which was not part of the symphony orchestra—I had all of this inadvertent training in the elementary and junior high school. I knew how all that stuff worked. So when I became a professional musician, I magically knew what to do.

“No, no, no, French horns don’t play that part! You don’t want to give an excessive amount of fourths to these instruments because they can’t play them quickly enough.” I just sort of had it down.

When I was in my sophomore year of high school, I really started studying guitar, and I sort of perfected it by my senior year. At that time the world was very political, and my life was incredibly political. I was really hard-core into the anti-war movement and every kind of liberation struggle. Women’s lib, gay rights, bring home the troops. I joined every organization from the Hari-Krishnas to the Black Panthers. Every trendy little thing. By the time I was sixteen, I could hang with anybody from any religion, all that stuff. My knowledge of music and drugs, which went along with this alternative culture, was very extensive. And in my political background, I started out getting beaten up all the time and wound up a Black Panther. So I ran the gamut of every religion, every movement, every alternative cool thing.

When I turned eighteen, I decided that I was not going to drink or use drugs. Live a completely drug-free life, because I wanted to concentrate on the things that were important, which was saving the world and becoming a great musician. So for a long time, I would not drink or smoke pot or do any drugs. It was of no interest to me. I led this cool quest-for-knowledge life-style from the time I was eighteen until about twenty-three, which doesn’t sound like a long time now, but then it was an eternity. It was a fifth of my whole life. By twenty-three I was a pretty good musician, and things were happening to me. One thing I noticed though. When I became drug and alcohol free, I reverted back to my real personality, which was very shy and introverted and afraid of people. I wasn’t comfortable with people because I didn’t like the way I looked. Everything about my existence reinforced my belief that I wasn’t good enough. The fact that my mother never kept me more than a few months at a time, I felt that no one wanted me. But when I was high, everyone loved me. Everyone wanted me. I lived in communes. It was great.