Music fascinated Gentle, any music. He knew a group in Harlem, the Furious Five, who were experimenting with two turntables, hopping back and forth.
“And that’s it?” I couldn’t stop laughing. I thought I’d stump him, so I brought up “scratching.” But he knew about that as well. “It was an accident, like penicillin. The turntable was jiggled and you got a needle that’s slipping and sliding all over the place. But it kind of added to the mood. The trick is to do it in rhythm. Anyway, there’s a real craze for it.”
One of Jim’s weirder stories was about a guy, very talented, but he had a bad drug habit. “Well, this one night he turns up dead. Overdosed. So they take him to the morgue, go through the whole routine, stick the body in one of those pull-out metal drawers. They’re just putting the tag on his big toe when he lets out a hoot and sits up. That experience straightened him out for good. Today he writes for some of the biggest cats in the business.”
Jim wanted me to laugh at this, but I didn’t. I shivered. I was afraid of drugs. They were endemic in the music world, I knew that. But I stayed clear. I tried to explain this to him. “It’s like a horror film where they transplant another person’s eyes into your eye sockets. You see—but not through your eyes. Then they give you his brain. You think—but not with your mind.”
He fell in with this. “Yeah, like the zombies in the Caribbean, who have no soul.”
I decided Jim Gentle was one of the most interesting men I’d met in years.
After that first dinner there were more, and I found myself telling him about me, as far back as Skayo Little Bird sitting on the porch of Elk Woman’s government-built house and smoking. “She sang me the cries and chants of the Cree. She said they nourished the soul.” I broke off because he was staring at me.
“I understand now! You have Indian blood somewhere in your background.”
“My mother was three-quarters Cree.”
“The eyes, of course, deep-rimmed, black on black. Why didn’t I see it before?”
“I don’t know anything about First Nation people except for Elk Woman and my grandfather when I was little.”
“I was never little,” the gentle giant said, “but I was young. I wasn’t Indian, but I was part of the Indian movement. I was a kid just out of college when seventy-eight Indians from a dozen tribes claimed a disused crumbling prison and the rock it stood on as Indian territory. They backed this up by an ancient treaty—just one in the long trail of broken treaties. This one, signed at Fort Laramie in 1868 between the Sioux Nation and the United States government, ceded all surplus and abandoned federal property to the tribe.”
“Alcatraz?” I breathed, vaguely recalling newspaper accounts.
“Alcatraz…sitting on seven acres in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz…flashing by, segmented by the frame of a car window, an Indian car in need of body work and a paint job, plastered with decals from a dozen nearby states featuring national parks and monuments…. This glimpse from the Golden Gate Bridge of the lowering penal institution, brooding choppy waters, ignited a dream. Like a lit match to gunpowder—a flame exploded in hearts and minds. It was discussed in psychedelic cafes along the Haight. Wine and drugs and idealism united students from Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Crow and Sioux formed a crazy sort of alliance that included Osage, Creek, Ponca, Mohawk, Comanche, Rincon, Chippewa, Lakota, Paiute, and Navajo.”
“And you,” I supplied as he drew breath.
“Me. For sure. That’s where the action was. I bummed a ride to the West Coast, and when I hit San Francisco, made for Pier 39. It was Thanksgiving and the Indians on the Rock were hosting a big party. The press was there; so were the celebs. Hollywood turned out big-time. Jane Fonda. Dick Gregory came later and Marlon Brando. The cast of Hair passed the hat at intermission to raise money for the action.
“The climax, though, was the Proclamation they posted:
“‘We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.
We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty:
We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth…’”
“Why twenty-four dollars?”
“That’s three dollars and thirty cents an acre more than we paid for Louisiana.” And he went on reading.
“‘We will give to the white inhabitants a portion of the land for their own to be held in trust by the American Indian Government in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state.’”
I was laughing too hard to comment.
“That’s more or less the gist of it,” he said. “No one knew whether it was guerrilla theater or history. But it made a hell of an impression on me, reoriented my life, started me off. I muscled in on a Buffy Sainte-Marie fundraiser, and I’ve been doing pretty much the same sort of thing ever since.” He grinned broadly. “It made me what I am today.”
I couldn’t get the occupation of Alcatraz out of my mind. “How long did they stay?”
“Nineteen months.”
“Almost two years. I don’t suppose they left of their own accord?”
“Most did. The new term started and the college kids left. It was no picnic, you know. There was no electricity, no telephone, no heat, no running water, the kitchen was locked away behind iron bars and they had to cook over an open fire. The toilets were flushed with seawater. It was cold and it was grim. And once the spotlight was off them, they went hungry a good part of the time.
“Still they held on. The government at first attempted to ameliorate the situation by suggesting the area be turned into a park. The occupiers were incensed. Were they to be zoo-like creatures for tourists to stare at and feed peanuts? It was the government’s turn to be incensed. Their best offer, which they were ready to fund and maintain as a cultural center, had been dismissed out of hand. Their reply was thirty agents who descended on the island, backed by a Coast Guard cutter and a helicopter. The Indians had dwindled to a mere fifteen. They were arrested on charges of trespass, interfering with navigation, and destruction of federal property.”
I considered this. “It was so quixotic. Did they really think they could move in, establish squatter’s rights, and be allowed to keep the island?”
“Alcatraz was a statement. Symbolism. The world was reminded that by treaty it was Indian. The first land sighted by ships entering San Francisco Bay was Indian land. The sit-in was a defiant shout to the white man that they were a nation that had never surrendered.”
“Indians can be rather wonderful. They admit they’re people of dreams. They’re proud of it. Like my friend Elk Woman. She was my Mum’s friend really, but I considered her mine. She kept me centered.”
“Centered?”
“She didn’t let me go off the deep end. She was there when Mum died. She was the one who taught me to sing people.”
We went to his apartment. I didn’t know whether it was to sing or make love. I wanted to do both.
It had been a long time since I’d loved or been loved in a meaningful way. I wanted it to happen, and I wanted it to be with this gentle giant who felt a brotherhood with the entire universe, and who lived and breathed music.
His apartment was in the Village, ground floor. It had a green door. He took my coat and I looked around. Neat, spare, definitely a male bastion. Nothing had been tacked to the walls, no pictures, nothing. It was as impersonal as the day he moved in.
I sat on the futon and he dropped down beside me. “I’m going to tell you about Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.”
“Why?”
“It may be important. It may
be very important. His name was Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, and as you will see, a good deal of his music, and his life, were tied into Billy Strayhorn. Billy was just a kid when the Duke found him performing in some West Side dive. The Duke heard the exceptional quality of the music he made and knew that he wanted this talent near him.
“So then and there he offers Billy a job with him, and he writes out the directions to his apartment on one of those little drink napkins—take the commuter train to Grand Central Station, shuttle over to Times Square, then the A train to the Bronx, get off in Harlem at the second stop. Billy Strayhorn takes down these directions. Next thing you know he turns them into what becomes a hit single.”
“Of course…” I joined in, excited, “‘Take the ‘A’ Train.’”
Gentle nodded approvingly. “Billy was a hell of a lyricist, and tops as a composer. He and the Duke collaborated on everything. When Ellington was asked who wrote what, he’d reply, ‘One of us must have.’ They were inseparable in their musical life and their personal life. No one knew for sure whether they were lovers. They were in the truest sense one person.” He paused, then started talking about Mac.
He didn’t think Mac was right for me. “He’s too limiting. For instance, the country you’re into so heavily. Haven’t you noticed that sooner or later everything ends up being about death? Dead mothers, dead fathers, dead babies, dead dogs. And what you want to sing about is life.”
I couldn’t help smiling at his characterization, and admitted I would like to edge a bit more into pop. “But we’re doing so great, and Mac tells me not to rock the boat.”
“That’s what he would say. I’d like to see you experiment. Keep the country sound as a base, but venture into other modalities.”
“You mean right now—make a move into pop? Are you saying that?”
He shrugged. “Not to wind up there; pop is essentially a three-chord affair. I could hear your sound in R&B. The way you move suggests that to me. So what do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Me being Strayhorn. Writing for you. Writing with you.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’d move you in the right direction. Think about it.”
“I couldn’t do it, Jim. Mac’s been with me from the beginning. It’s been his game plan that’s got us this far.”
“Right,” Jim said. “I wasn’t trying to muscle in on Mac. I don’t want to be your manager. Just help you grow as an artist. Make it possible for you to sing the music you should be singing. It’s kind of too bad that you’re not just any girl singer starting out. Then when I say something like that it wouldn’t sound as though I was trying to ingratiate myself.”
“I never thought that for a minute.”
“But let’s examine the situation. If you were just any girl, we’d have kissed and hugged and gone to bed before this.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” He was a funny guy, one of the few men who could talk sex in the abstract, without acting on it. Instead of moving on me, he poured us each a glass of wine.
“So you sing people?”
“Well, I sing the way they look and I sing the way they are.”
“Show me how you would sing me.”
I stood up, threw my head back, pretended I was six-four, and began a column of notes, going up in good order, then a riff, because something had happened to him somewhere along the way to make him feel so strongly, to make him reach out. For my ending I simulated pulling the world in on top of me.
He finished his wine in silence. It seemed to me he was struggling with himself. Then he broke out, “Kathy, how does it happen in such a short time you know all of me, theme and variations?” He wanted to leave it at that. He didn’t want to say more, but suddenly he was talking about himself, no longer hiding behind his stories. “’Nam changed me.” His voice was hoarse, rasping, I’d never heard it like that. “Yeah, I was there, stoned most of the time so I wouldn’t have to ask myself questions. But eventually you’ve got to ask, and answer them too.” He spoke close to my ear, but far away. “I try to make up for what I did over there. I can’t. It’s never enough.” He was shaking as though with fever.
I held him, and stroked and kissed him. That seemed the best answer. He’d been badly hurt, they’d damaged his soul. I let my kisses do what they could, say the things one doesn’t know how to say.
The next moment I was gathered into him. I lay back, accepting his broken words, accepting his touch. He brought out the longing that had lain in me so long. Sweetest chords and wild discordant ones played over me, creating a pitch of frenzy that catapulted us beyond ourselves.
Sharing a ground-zero experience can do that for you.
Chapter Eleven
WEEKS followed during which we were scarcely out of one another’s sight. Gentle attended my rehearsals, recording sessions, club and show appearances. This, over Mac’s protests, as I turned more and more to Jim. His opinion was important to me. If Mac knew the workings of show biz, Jim Gentle understood its soul. For it does have one. Vulnerable and in constant flight, it comes up now and again with brave ideas.
Was my idea for Cree songs one? I broached it once more in a tentative way to Mac, and got another put-down. So far I hadn’t brought it up with Jim in any serious way. I’d held back because if he rejected my music, he rejected me. But I didn’t think he’d do that. Jim would understand where no one else seemed to, that this music was part of me and lay behind everything I did.
I found it impossible to avoid comparisons. Mac hadn’t an artistic bone in his body and was known as a “no-talent guy.” Still, he had an uncanny knack for touching the pulse of the public, a sixth sense of what it wanted, what it would go for and what it wouldn’t.
Jim, on the other hand, was open to new ideas, took them seriously, explored them. That, and the special relationship that had developed between us, gave me courage. I decided to put my career in his hands. Without preparation or explanation I plunged in. “Jim,” I said, uncurling on the futon and unwinding my legs from his long ones, “I want you to imagine an old Indian woman muttering between her teeth, not bothering to remove her pipe, but lifting her voice to the Creator as she plants a patch of garden behind her house. Or a shaman, tall, lean, even older, white hair straggling to his shoulders, eyes burning fierce as embers, who breathes with the breath of the universe.”
“Can these things be sung?” Jim asked.
“Jonathan Forquet was old then; he must be dead many years. But he is a shaman, a Grandfather who touches both sides. Listen…” It was time to let loose. I sang my grandfather, introducing Gentle to him through the Wind Song with its stirring of trees and lifting of boughs. I closed my eyes and sang the Shadow Song, and the girl who hung around and took it all in.
I didn’t stop. I sang my grandfather’s invisible gift. I revealed it with all its tender unseeable glory to Gentle.
I finished and he sat shaking his head. When at last he spoke, it was to respond as he always did when something touched him deeply, “Yeah.”
FROM then on we were one person, like the Duke and Strayhorn, in love with music and each other. He understood my struggle with musical notation and showed me how to get on with it. He was a master teacher. He made a drawing of the circle of fifths depicting the relationship between keys. With this to navigate by I was able to transpose. He kept me at it, and soon, in spite of my hectic schedule, I had a full notebook.
He was in no hurry for me to sever my ties with Mac. On the contrary, he didn’t even want it. Instead of losing Mac, he thought of ways to add himself to the team. One idea we developed jointly—when he felt I was ready he would arrange a benefit concert where I could perform—yes—Cree songs.
I heard him say the very things I’d thought. “It’s a different audience, youthful, daring. They want the new, the innovative. I have a gut feeling that the stuff you want to do would go over big-time.”
Teacher, mentor, l
over—Gentle laid traps for me to see how much I studied, to see how much I loved, to see how much I lived. Loving though they were, they were nonetheless traps. He would confront me suddenly and ask, “Why do you love me?” And I would have to come up with a reasoned answer that he found acceptable. One day I stopped at a little Jewish deli and brought him strudel. I heated coffee and we munched. It was a great way to kill an hour before rehearsal. He leaned over to wipe a crumb from my chin and asked another of those Delphic questions.
“Tell me,” he demanded, “why do you want to sing First Nation music? What does it mean to you? Can you tell me? Do you even know?”
“Of course I know. I already told you. Can I help it if you aren’t satisfied with the answer? I picked it up when I was a kid and it’s always stayed with me.”
“Go on,” he urged. “You’re on the right track.”
I hunted in my mind. “I guess I want everyone to know it and feel about it the way I do, that it’s mystic and holy. First music, sung by first people.”
“Ahhh,” he said, “that’s what I thought. But look how I had to drag it out of you.”
“That’s because everyone is so unreceptive, even hostile. Yes, actively hostile about my singing it, or even writing it.”
“By everyone you mean Mac?”
“I guess so—and audiences.”
He didn’t pursue this but said, “You’ll need program notes. You can’t just spring this kind of stuff on people. It can’t be out of the blue. They have to be prepared, told about it, its antecedents, what it means, that it’s sacred. And at the same time wild and not to be tamed. Keep working, you’re closing in on it.”
“And then? Eventually? It will be part of my repertoire?”
Jim backed off a bit. “Go slow, it’s a successful career we’d be tampering with. All I’m suggesting is that you try them out in a benefit situation, see how they’re received.”