The Last Holiday (29 page)

Malcolm Cecil always had stories about incidents that took place when he was recording Stevie. Like a game they used to play in the hallways at the Record Plant in L.A. The hallway was about
ten-feet-wide, and Stevie would stand in the middle of the floor with about four feet of space on either side. The object of the game was to get by Stevie on one side or the other without him
catching you. According to Malcolm it couldn’t be done. I would have suspected that Malcolm, practitioner of Tai Chi, would certainly have perfected a silent step among the pirouettes and
paces I’d seen him go through, but no matter. Evidently Stevie was a master of a superior art. Ears like an eagle.

When you spent time with Stevie, the extraordinary became commonplace, the unusual was unremarkable and the previously overwhelming could be overlooked. The things that made him seem
extraordinary to me were not confined to the stage. In fact, they had nothing to do with this stage presence. But I’d also been going out more and more to catch earlier parts of his show,
well before he called out for me to join him.

I liked the opening. I liked the strength of it, the sudden flashes of light and color and movement. I’m sure I got as big a kick as anyone else when he was captured by the spotlight
rocking like a pendulum with dreads from side to side and cranking “Wonderlove” into “Sir Duke.” I was also pulled from the reverie of my dressing room to catch the
transition that took place in the middle of the set, when the band members seemed to evaporate like mist and Stevie was left alone at the keyboards. There was something unbelievably poignant about
the isolation. The darkness of the giant arena was filled with silent memories and “Lately” became a magic carpet he rolled out for us to ride.

I still wanted to believe I was a better lyricist but there was mounting evidence to the contrary on an album of surgical sensitivity called
Hotter than July
. I left my dressing room
during the solo section of Stevie’s set to listen to lyrics that were more than something to say while playing piano. If you happened to notice a man leaning at an awkward angle in the
shadows of the tunnel connecting us to privacy, it was only me eavesdropping on the chill and lonely certainty of “Lately.”

Different dates on the tour were memorable for different reasons. Some days I took notes, though most of those notes seem to have been done as a joke, some kind of acrobatic
way of pulling my own leg. There were either a few lines written before the show along with whatever expenses I needed to note, or, after the concert, in the early a.m., there was a separate page
or two that described something that happened or that I felt during the day or evening. There was rarely both, rarely an occasion when I wrote something before and after a show. December 8, 1980 in
Oakland was a before-and-after day. I still remember the after feelings now.

I rarely missed things Stevie said to me. But when I saw him at the bottom of the backstage stairs at the arena in Oakland, I thought I must have misheard him. Maybe it was the shock at what he
had said. Maybe I hadn’t missed what he said and just thought I did. It was something I didn’t want to hear.

But no, I must have mistaken Stevie for sure.

“What did you say?” I asked him, trying to get above the noise.

“I said some psycho, some crazy person, shot John Lennon!” Stevie said. “And I’m wondering how to handle it.”

I am not so silly or naive as to suspect that there is an ultimate evil. But the death of a good man, so rare as to be nearly extinct, is a thorough tragedy. And what do you say about it to
seventeen thousand people who have come out to see you and enjoy themselves?

I got that same feeling I’d felt when I heard that Dr. King or someone else was killed; that sense of a certain part of you being drained away, a loss of self. There were certain events in
your life that had such historical significance that you were supposed to remember the circumstances under which you received the news for the rest of your life. That was probably what some section
of humanity used to illustrate man’s superiority over other animals: “memories of miseries that memorialize.”

Having those memories was like turning down the corner of a page in your life’s book. But maybe animals turned down corners of pages, too. They might not choose the date of the death of
John Lennon to see as a date of loss and mourning, they would be more likely to remember the date the Ringling Brothers died or the day the woman from
Born Free
was born.

I was sure they talked about important things. I didn’t have the dialogue down pat, but I could picture a conversation between two lions on a late-night walk across the savannah.

“Yeah, that’s where it was, man,” one of them says. “Right over there by the watering hole. A big mean-looking thing with sharp teeth and the strongest grip you ever
heard of. The gorilla called it an animal trap. Man, that thing grabbed Freddy Leopard and held him for hours. The gorilla got Freddy loose but his leg was all fucked up and he’s still
walking with a limp.”

Just exactly what did those recollections, those dog-eared pages, prove? That you were connected to the human race? It couldn’t be. Because if so, people born since then, who weren’t
around then, couldn’t be connected. That’s why there were history books and parents and other folks to tell you what happened before you got here.

And why did you need to remember those things? Most of them were about someone being killed or assassinated. You could almost feel as though you needed an alibi: “Where were you the day
that such-and-such a person was murdered?” They were pages in history books, however. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it proved. That you were connected to the human race?
They were usually the least human things you could imagine. Unnatural disasters.

I always knew where I’d been. I was in last period history class at DeWitt Clinton High School when the principal announced from the bottom of an empty barrel: “Ladies and gentlemen,
I regret to inform you that your president is dead.” He was talking about John Kennedy, shot to death by someone in Dallas.

I was in the little theatre at Lincoln when a guy everyone called “the Beast” had thrown open a rear door and shouted, “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King has been shot and
killed in Memphis, Tennessee.”

I was in my bedroom on West 17th Street when man first reached the moon and I had written a poem called “Whitey on the Moon” that very night (for which my mother had come up with the
punch line: “We’re gonnna send these doctor bills air mail special to Whitey on the moon”).

I was drawn back to a conversation with my grandmother as she reenacted the national shock that shook America when the news came down that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead: “It was just
incredible,” she said with her eyes getting wide. “Nobody seemed to think that he would ever really die.”

And now I would always remember the night John Lennon died. Yeah, because of who told me and where, but also because of the effect the news had on the crowd. It proved we had been right, Stevie
and I, when we hastily decided that it would serve no purpose to make that announcement before he played.

“No, just wait until the end, before we play them songs,” I told him. “Hell, ain’t nothin’ they can do about it.”

And that had been soon enough. The effect of Stevie’s somber announcement on the crowd was like a punch in the diaphragm, causing them to let out a spontaneous “Whaaaa!” Then
there was a second of silence, a missing sound, as if someone had covered their mouths with plastic, so tight not even their breathing could be detected. I was standing at the back of the stage
outside of the cylinder of light that surrounded Stevie, next to Carlos Santana and Rodney Franklin, who were joining us for the closing tunes.

Stevie had more to say than just the mere announcement that John Lennon had been shot and killed. For the next five minutes he spoke spontaneously about his friendship with John Lennon: how
they’d met, when and where, what they had enjoyed together, and what kind of a man he’d felt Lennon was. That last one was the key, because it drew a line between what had happened in
New York that day and what had happened on that motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, a dozen years before. And it drew a circle around the kind of men who stood up for both peace and change. That
circle looked suspiciously like a fucking bull’s-eye to me. It underlined the risks that such men took because of what all too often happened to them.

Stevie said it made the rally five weeks in the future just that much more significant. All I was thinking about was that it made security more significant. That was for damn sure.

But it was another stunning moment in an evening of already notable cold-water slaps, a raw reminder of how the world occasionally reached inside the cocoon that tours and studios and offices on
West 57th Street provide. It stopped your heart for a beat and froze your lungs for a gasp; showing you how fragile your grip on life was and how many enemies you didn’t know you had.

It also gave Stevie Wonder’s tour and his quest for a national holiday for a man of peace more substance, more fundamental legitimacy. Not just to me. Everyone seemed to understand a
little better where Stevie was coming from and what this campaign was all about:

Stevie took his heart with him onstage some nights. Both parts of his heart. The warm part and the part that sat in fear. It showed his feelings. In the whole arena that night in Oakland there
could not have been a legitimate doubt about his sincerity. His respect for Dr. King and his friendship for John Lennon took shape and gained dimension as he left the campaign trail and gave
seventeen thousand that could have been seventeen million or just seventeen a look at what most men will deny they have: an inside where all the insanity and madness of this world really hurt and
enraged you.

I had felt a little of that from Stevie before. It was simmering there on
20/20
when he was creating a song for Barbara Walters. It was in his voice in Boston, Massachusetts, when he
stopped a show to review that city’s record of racism. It was a grasp of an essence of things about life that far exceeded whether Stevie could hold a note or play a scale or write his name,
much less a tune. This was a man whose humanity and compassion was real, as visible and as certain as the tears that seeped from beneath his dark glasses and flowed freely down his face onto his
clothes. Tears he never bothered to wipe away.

Stevie’s talking was like a jazz solo, spontaneous and immediate, an expression so honest as to be almost embarrassing. I was trying to find things to look for around my shoes as tears
took a front-row seat in my eyes.

Later, I could not remember us playing those last two songs, though I was sure we had. I could only bring back three solid images of that night, two of Stevie: the first one was of the brother
standing there waiting for me at the bottom of those stairs. The second was of him standing alone in that spotlight, crying. And the third was of me standing there next to Santana with our eyes
sweeping the floor as though there was really something to look for.

I carried one other memory out of Oakland with me. It was about an article in the paper the next morning, a review of the show that slammed both me and Stevie to the floor, starting with the
first paragraph: How dare I be called the Minister of Information, it said, and how dare Stevie be called the Ambassador of Love to the world, when neither of us had the decency to mention that a
friend or a fraternal brother had been killed.

The implication of this was racist in its nature. It implied that because I was Black and Stevie was Black and John Lennon was white and therefore not a “Soul Brother,” that there
had been no mention from the stage about the murder.

Keg Leg was outraged: “What the hell he talkin’ ’bout, boss? Stevie standing up there all that time talking!”

“It’s about the deadline, Keg,” I tried to explain. “In order to get that article in the paper this morning the reporter had to leave by 11:00. And Stevie didn’t
start talking until 11:30.”

What that meant was that seventeen thousand people knew what happened, but three hundred thousand read in the paper the next morning that both Stevie and I were far less than we ever intended to
be.

January 15, 1981

What’s amazing about people who are supposed to “think of everything” is how many things have
never crossed their minds
. It’s obvious that what
that expression is meant to indicate focuses on a specific subject, like whatever is going on in your life or what you’re involved with at the time. By the middle of January 1981, I should
have known a whole lot more than I did about what I was involved in and what was going on in my life.

That was never more clear to me than when I saw how things looked from the back of the outdoor stage set up on the Washington D.C. monument grounds as Stevie’s rally for Dr. King got under
way. I can’t even explain to you how little I knew, but I will try to explain it to you the way it occurred to me.

I would never claim to be the smartest son of a gun on the planet. If I had claimed that, all of you readers would know by now that I was lying. But by the same token, by then I had been in this
business for ten years and had to feel as though I knew more than when I started. And also, by then, I had been working on the
Hotter than July
tour for ten weeks, and had some new
information crossing my mind as I climbed the back stairs onto the temporary stage and looked out at perhaps fifty thousand people standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the expanse of the Mall
chanting, “Martin Luther King Day, we took a holiday!”