Kathy Little Bird (20 page)

Now I knew what Freddy meant when he said he was in with the wrong people. “The do-gooders,” Mac scoffingly called them. Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Stevie Wonder, Crosby, Stills and Nash had sung for peace and given voice to civil rights.

“We thought the world would be different.” Jim laughed in an unhappy way. “But something
did
come of it: the idea of singing for causes. The benefit as a forum definitely caught on.” Jim looked at me speculatively. “Were you ever part of that scene?”

“Me? Good heavens, no. I was just getting started.” But—a thought occurred to me. Maybe, just maybe…it might be an opportunity to sing the songs I wanted to sing. The well-heeled habitues of clubs in Manhattan were no different than the old-timers and barflies I had sung for in the past. No one knew what to make of them. Perhaps this was my dream audience, young people searching for answers. It could be they were the ones the earth breathed for, the ones
who could hear the song the wind carried. I was dizzy at the possibility.

Sensing the confusion he had created in me, Jim apologized. “I get carried away, it’s not for everybody.”

“No, no,” I said, “it’s a magnificent idea.” Now that I was beginning to know him, I would sing Jim Gentle differently. I’d sing him reaching out in great chords in many directions. Not only was he a big man, his concepts were big. When he suggested dinner, I said yes.

That night, sitting in a basement, candlelit Italian restaurant over scallopini and a bottle of chianti, he continued the conversation. “Pop music has done more for world peace than all the churches, the UN, and political leaders put together.”

I sat there trying to figure him out. I thought maybe he was someone who would understand and sympathize with what I wanted to do. But, while open and forthcoming, he was at the same time hard to know. One moment in pursuit of the holy grail, the next he was telling me wild stories. Like Brian Wilson, who once put a sandbox in his living room, got into it when record people came to talk business, and built sand castles as they discussed million-dollar deals.

Or Skip Spence, who was locked up in Bellevue when he wrote
Oar.
“He was stoned out of his gourd on Quaaludes and cut through a hotel door with that fire axe they have behind glass. So they carted him off to the funny farm and there in a padded cell he went crazy all over again, this time because of the music in his head. When they let him out he
recorded the album in his garage, laying down the tracks and playing all the instruments himself. As you know, today
Oar
is a collector’s item.”

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:

“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.