Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
In my hotel room, the ball game on TV was over. I had not been involved enough to know who had won or even who played. I vaguely remembered taking the tray and what I’d been given for
dishes outside my door as though someone might want them back. I should’ve put them in the middle of the hall with a sign that said, “Beware! Toxic Waste!” I could just imagine
some brother zipped up in a foam rubber space suit and a ten gallon hat moonwalking that bullshit down the back stairs, holding it out front of him with some Texas-sized prongs.
I called my brother’s room again. No reply.
Usually I could imagine, but now I was drawing a blank. I hadn’t actually seen them leave Jefferson City, but I’d seen everybody that morning, which meant that no one had fallen in
love and couldn’t be located. No one was from Texas or Missouri, so no one had been stricken with homesickness within driving distance. In fact, everybody had been kind of anxious to get to
Houston because of the TV show and all the good things I had said about Mr. Davis and Miss Dee without having to make anything up. Hell, even if they’d all quit they would have called so they
could laugh in my ear. And my brother would have needed a new face and an assignment from the Witness Protection Program. And they knew me. Hell, I’d do the fucking TV show anyway. I’d
just have to tell the producers I’d been a-band-doned.
There was a western on TV now. I couldn’t believe it. It would be sort of like seeing a bunch of Chinese people coming out of a Chinese restaurant in Harlem with doggie bags and getting
back on the tour bus. What else was I waiting for? Must have been a western in Houston.
It actually might have been good. I didn’t see enough of it to even complain about it. I suppose it played through or played out like the ball game I couldn’t recall. I can’t
recall the movie for an entirely different reason. During the game I had been thinking about nothing. During the movie I couldn’t seem to find the nothing channel I’d been thinking
about all through the game.
I got stuck with a short loop that played over and over, then over and under, then over passed under, like Malcolm’s loop of the vocals on the last three minutes of “B Movie.”
Something new was added but the way back to the beginning was still there. It was never over.
The band members are congregating near the ticket counter. My brother is road managing, passing out tickets that will get us to Missouri. There is foolishness between the usual suspects about
the usual subjects: their women or girls, their wives and girlfriends, their Mrs. and Miseries, and the Misses they missed. Then there’s your all of the above. Brady and Gordon. Sheffield and
Larry Mac. Vernon James wears a brief smile and says nothing. Bags and suitcases are sliding through to a lady who is about half the size of some of the luggage. Someone slides through to help.
Probably “Astro,” flirting.
And the harshest part of the loop, the over that washes over me and runs over me, the part that takes its time and then takes my time and gets closer as the images get closer, changing to a
sharp, like shards of glass, stark, like a scene I can’t get passed, that won’t pass, even when I close my eyes.
It’s Kenny Powell, the young drummer with his reluctant, almost a smile. Neat, clean, without hurry. And a couple. Adults. With him. No doubt that it’s his folks. His parents.
Cordial. Comfortable. Ready to acknowledge the usuals, the guys they know, who know them: Brady and Gordon. Astro. Then turning to me. They know me. I sort of hear Kenny’s soft voice just
above the clamor.
“Gil, these are my folks.”
And I hear them clearer each time.
“Yes, how are you. We’ve just come to see Ken off and to ask you to please take care of our son . . .”
And it ran again. And I saw . . . that the movie was over. The western was over. The airport scene in my mind started over. And I opened my eyes to look around the hotel room, where . . . the
phone was ringing.
It was my brother. And the details of his explanation were not lost, but were just words to me. There had been a blowout. Kenny was driving. They had spun across the median and across the
highway between spurts of traffic headed in the opposite direction. They came to rest, to a stop past the shoulder on the other side, through a break in the restraints that ran thigh-high to a
point only a few feet from a drop down into a ravine. They had gotten out of the car, undamaged but immobile, leaning like a drunk on the wheel where the tire was ripped. They sat there until
Sheffield arrived on the scene. They got in, cramped and happy to be cramped. And came to Houston.
I had played in Houston at a place called Rockefeller’s, where the guys who ran the club walked around with sidearms, sho’ nuff, forty-fives in holsters. Like Matt
Dillon from
Gunsmoke
. On first glance, I thought having the folks who hired me provide their own armed security seemed a mite melodramatic; a little bit too Texas and Wild West for me. But
knowing about an after show robbery at the Beacon Theater on Broadway, where a producer was actually shot for the gate, gave me cause to reconsider and say to myself,
Hell, maybe I should be
wearing a gun up in this camp, too
. At the very least, I couldn’t say what these folks should
not
do.
On October 31, 1980, back in Houston to start the
Hotter than July
tour, I was tired already, sweaty and exhausted from a five-minute trudge uphill, learning as I trudged why this
block-sized enclosure was called “the Summit.” A place called the Summit would be at the top of a fucking hill, right?
I had just found a stage entrance for a venue I had never played. The places I had played in Texas on prior trips could fit into this sprawling hothouse about ten times and still leave room for
the Rockets to play their games without me getting in their way.
Finally, holding a four-letter filled conversation with myself about the hundred-degree temperature in this desert in fucking November, I pushed through the door marked
PERFORMER
’
S ENTRANCE
and found myself being eyed suspiciously by a six-gun-packing guard before I heard a buzzer and was waved on through. An inner glass
door with a cardboard placard taped on it saying
TO PERFORMER
‘
S DRESSING ROOM
provided further direction. I had made it. I was inside the
Summit.
I wasn’t interested in a dressing room right then. At an ill-lit fork in the hallway, another handwritten message said,
TO THE MAIN STAGE
, so I made my way vaguely
on through the maze of dimly lit corridors. I dragged on cautiously, following signs that indicated I was headed toward the arena floor. Suddenly, after feeling that I might have been better off
calling AAA for a suggested route, I turned into the lights of the vast arena, as busy as a small town. Men and women in work clothes were pulling metal folding chairs off of racks that might have
once carried station wagons cross-country. The men had developed a style of flipping the seats open from their rigid straight backed status to a position where behinds built with uniquely flexible
angles could survive for three or four hours.
I had on my rose-colored prescription lenses and was scanning all the rows of fabric-covered fold-ups bolted to the floor in ascending stages that merged in a design of discomfort. I put my
personal attaché case down for a minute.
It was an impressive sight. Choreographed chaos on a Roman scale. But suddenly somebody called my name. Well, not exactly my name, but somebody’s name for me, the name he always used, my
astrological sign. So I knew who it was. It was somebody who shouldn’t have seen me come in. Howzat?
The call for me rang out again, echoing around in the cavernous hall: “Air-rees!”
I scanned the upper reaches of the place, looking for Stevie Wonder.
And there he was, in a seat near the top row in the bowl-shaped theater. He was leaning forward in my direction from the sound booth. Alone. There was no mistaking him. His corn rows were
surrounded with a soft suede cover. Large, dark sunglasses hid most of the top half of his face, and a huge, joker’s grin furnished the lower half. He had a wireless mike in his hand and,
again with the grin, was saying, “Come on up here, Air-rees!”
I started for the stairs, still scanning. Now I could see there was an engineer-type person in the booth, but his back was turned to Stevie and I didn’t believe I knew the man anyway. Or
that he had identified me.
He hadn’t. But since I hadn’t figured it out yet and Stevie was having such a good time messing with my head . . .
“How you been, man,” I said as I climbed. “If you saw me get outta that cab from the airport, you shoulda helped me pay for it.”
“We felt your vibes, Air-rees,” Stevie said, and he laughed out loud, shook his head, and held his hundred-watt smile.
I was close enough now to see that the headset Stevie was wearing was not yesterday’s setup. This one had an almost invisible wire around his head with a tiny mic attached to the ear
phones. It was supposed to be for communication with other sound and light stations around the bowl, but this one was modified and made Stevie look like a switchboard operator from outer space. No
matter what Stevie said, I knew his brother Calvin was in here somewhere with the same type of headset. If there was anybody as likely as Stevie to joke around in a billion-dollar arena with a
million dollars’ worth of sound equipment, it was Calvin. Wherever Calvin was, a good time and a lot of laughs were always near.
I sat in the same row with Stevie, a couple of seats away, and watched the workmen and women constructing the stage set and aligning the floor seats on the canvas that covered the basketball
court. They were roping off the first five rows, which would probably be reserved for the VIP guests and press. There were also men in blue coveralls stacking speakers three-deep in front of the
stage, tying up the massive maroon curtain, bolting it to fasteners on the apron constructed for just that purpose.
A complete sound team was now onstage, clearing space for the drum risers, Stevie’s band members were appearing here and there. The work area was filling up: electricians, light
technicians, security personnel, supplementary sound amplifiers, monitors, speakers and cables, side fills, multicolored gels directed at points along the stage floor where band members would stand
and sit during their performances were being placed according to stage diagrams on clipboards.
I saw Malcolm Cecil wander in from backstage, opening sound crates and jotting down the contents on a thick pad. Malcolm would be handling the audience sound for me on the first few nights while
my regular engineer, Dave McLean, handled my onstage monitors for the band.
I was thinking that most audience members would be glad they hadn’t seen any of this preparation. It was too much like the work they wanted to leave behind when they bought tickets for a
night of relaxation.
Several of the sound crew wore jumpsuits with Britannia Row stenciled on the back. There had been a rumor that Stevie had hired the UK’s biggest road production company to handle this
tour. They had just completed the Pink Floyd tour for that group’s hit album
The Wall,
which meant that not only could they supervise and coordinate sound and light support for this
show, the crew could also construct a wall between the onstage performers and their audience over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour show. Great. If I found out I needed a wall.
“How you been, Aries?” Stevie asked.
He and I had an astrologer in common, a D.C. lady named Amali, who sent me a monthly lunar return reading when I was not in the city. She had told me about Stevie’s interest in the stars
and his own production company was called Black Bull. I was used to him hailing me with Air-rees, though I did not call him “Tau-russss!”
About five years before, Amali had ignited my interest in astrology. She had been doing a reading for Norris Little, also known as Brute, and I had wandered to the threshold of a back room they
had commandeered at a party. All I’d wanted to know was whether or not Brute still needed a ride home before I made my exit. Without even looking up or really acknowledging my presence, Amali
had said, “You don’t know anything about this, do you Aries?”
I had to admit I didn’t know Sydney Omarr from Sydney, Australia.
“Well, you just wait right there until I finish this, and I’ll get to you,” she said.
She went on with her talk to Brute. I was still trying to figure out how she knew I was an Aries and how she’d known I was standing in the carpeted doorway without turning around. I was
still looking for the mirror on the opposite wall that had given me away when she got up from her seat, leaving a befuddled Brute contemplating his life.
When she turned and walked over to me, I was more impressed and even less inclined to think zodiac. She was short and petite, light caramel with huge liquid eyes. There was a hint of mischief
lurking just behind her attempt to be all business. She picked up a little notebook and pen.
“My name is G . . .”
“I know what your name is,” she said. “What I need to know is your place of birth, day of birth, and time of birth.”
“I can give you all that,” I agreed slowly. “But I’m not tryin’ . . .”
“Look,” she indicated impatiently, “I ordinarily charge fifty dollars apiece for these work-ups, but what I’ll do for you is a birth chart and a lunar return chart and it
will mention specific days and events. If none of these things come about, you owe me nothing.”
I hate it when people call me out like that, when you’re put in such a position that you really look like a jackass if you don’t go along with it. How can you refuse a hundred
dollars’ worth of service for free? Hell! You don’t believe it, right? Okay, fine. You’re in a win-win situation. If you’re right, you win. If she’s right, you win
because you learn something.
I told her: born in Chicago, April 1, 1949, at 11:20 a.m. No matter, there was no way she resembled a shriveled gypsy with a crystal ball.