The Last Holiday (27 page)

Rod Steiger might have had it written into his contract that he be supplied with a dictionary or an interpreter.
Our
Rod Steiger had neither. And holding Malcolm’s driver’s
license limply in his hand, he wobbled back to his cruiser. He returned with a bit more confidence.

“I’m sorry ’bout all y’all’s problems,” he said respectfully to Malcolm. “If y’all can jus’ pull in behind me we’ll get you to the
Centroplex.”

With lights flashing and sirens wailing we made it on time.

Later that night we found out that Bob Marley wasn’t just resting up from his roadwork with the Commodores. He was sick and had entered the Sloan-Kettering clinic. I knew what that meant.
Cancer. Bob Marley had cancer. Or, to be honest, cancer had Bob Marley.

I talked about it with Stevie; he was worried and upset. I was told to keep the news a secret. But naturally there were too many people on the inside of the circle, and the rumor mill was going
full blast. The promotion was being handled by Dick Griffey Productions, and they had to have some information about who they were supposed to be producing. That, plus there was pressure being
applied by Stevie’s record company, Motown. If Bob wasn’t going to do the tour, what about one of their new rock and rollers? They would give the tour more support. Buy more spots for
radio and more space in newspapers.

I had been totally honest when I spoke with Stevie on the question of doing the whole tour. Yes, I was interested. No, I didn’t think I would have much trouble rearranging my dates. And
yes, my new album,
Real Eyes,
was due out around Thanksgiving. But no, my label could not be counted on to do a lot of advertising before it was released. If Stevie was worried about the
promotion money that would have been contributed to pump up Bob and the Wailers, well, maybe he’d better go with the rockers.

Stevie disagreed.

He confirmed in Dallas on November 2, 1980, that we would continue for the duration of
Hotter than July,
through the rally in D.C. and on into February 1981. And now my staff were busy in
New York and D.C. trying to rearrange the appearances I was canceling in order to do Stevie’s entire tour.

There were a couple of places that were cool to play because they were hotels and your room was next door or upstairs. On Peachtree Street in Atlanta I was right upstairs, but
by the time I got there after two shows at the Agora—previously scheduled, without Stevie—on November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan was the president.

It was not supposed to raise an eyebrow. Living in the D.C. area, I’d read the papers and listened to radio and TV quoting polls that all predicted his victory. But the reality of it was
still something of a shock, like a brief contact with an open circuit.

It was an occasion to stay up a little when, after being hoisted to my room by a creaking elevator, I found myself watching the president of the United States of America playing second banana to
a monkey. Ted Turner’s Atlanta superstation was doing all-night monkey shines, playing one of Reagan’s movies with the monkey, Bonzo.
Bonzo Goes to College,
I think it was.
Anyway, one of the flicks where the monkey had all the best lines and all the laughs. There was something unsettling about watching the president of the United States holding hands with and talking
to a monkey.

It was nearly 1 a.m., but I called Virginia and spoke to my wife. Baby Gia was asleep, gaining pounds and inches daily. Brenda was sleepy and on her way to bed. Everything was good there. We
would see each other in two days and they were going with me to Montreal on Saturday. We decided to discuss the details when we were both awake.

But before she hung up, she read my mind and said, “Oh yeah, isn’t it a scream? He really won.”

It was a scream all right. Some people were screaming now and the rest would probably have to take a number because we’d all be screaming sooner or later. I was rolling a joint and being
relieved that he had not won by one vote because I had made no arrangements for an absentee ballot.

It was Iran, of course, more than anything else that I felt defeated Jimmy Carter. The fact that Americans had basically been taken prisoner, held as hostages in the embassy in Tehran for
months, and President Carter had been unable to get them out either by negotiation or helicopter invasion. Evidently, when Carter had vainly ordered military helicopters across the desert, he
forgot to tell the siroccos and other sandmen to lay down on their jobs and the furious winds caused a collision between the American air vehicles, which canceled the raid.

The whole fucking situation had been bizarre, starting with Carter’s campaign promises to stop the supply of military support to certain world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, but he
found out after the election that the deal was set in concrete and couldn’t be stopped, at least until the Iranians insisted on the departure of the Shah and the arrival of the venerable
Ayatollah from France. The pictures from Iran of his arrival, with what looked like a million people marching and whipping themselves, was something I’d not likely soon forget.

The Shah had been accepted in Egypt and aside from his bank accounts, he was carrying a clear message from the new leader of his country: “Do not go to the United States.” Some
twenty-five years past, in 1954, the Shah’s father had been chased out of Iran and went to the United States. Eight months later there had been a countercoup that put the elder Pahlavi back
in the castle. The Ayatollah had not forgotten 1954, and when his directions were ignored and the Shah arrived in the States, allegedly for cancer treatment, the U.S. embassy was surrounded and the
fifty people inside became virtual prisoners, to be held there until the new government was stabilized. Later that same week, the Blacks inside the embassy were released and told they were free to
come home. All except one, the radio operator, accepted the offer. So I imagined four dozen people sitting around in there listening to the radio.

The seizure of the embassy started a slide in Jimmy Carter’s popularity, forcing a man who would rather not be threatening to okay the plan hatched by the people whose job it was to hatch
crazy shit.

Another movie with Ronnie and the monkey came on. Americans had a thing about animals relating to people on a human level. There was a talking mule,
Mr. Ed,
and a TV show with a dog who
was smarter than its owners. There was less than hidden meaning in the choice of Reagan movies being shown. “Message” movies. An idea whose time had just shown up.

What I was thinking was that America had just voted to make Stevie’s job harder than a long shot.

Most presidents were good for two terms. Unless some disaster took place during their first term. What happened at the embassy in Iran was essentially not Jimmy Carter’s fault. And as far
as one could see there was nothing that Reagan could do about it. The failed rescue attempt was not Carter’s fault, either, but was seen as his failure. His only hope had been for the workers
there to be released before the election. Otherwise he could have been running against a man with one leg and he would still have looked like a jackass in the Kentucky Derby. So the voters elected
another jackass instead. Great.

I had to take the Republican victory as another obstacle for Stevie. And since I was now signing up for the remainder of the tour, forty-odd dates that would last another four months, I was set
back, too.

I would have liked to be down the hall with the band talking about the show. We had sounded pretty good in the club that night. I always felt better in smaller venues where we were closer to the
crowd. But I was going out first thing in the morning, so I couldn’t afford any monkey business. You dig?

I was scheduled for a solo performance of poetry and music on the campus of Kent State University on November 5. I was in rare form, telling a mixed audience of students, faculty members,
administrators, and noncampus residents of the town that Ronald Reagan had been a political cast member since the 1960s. (In fact there had been several Californians from places like Santa Rita who
had wanted him cast aside.)

It was unbelievable to me that the country as a whole had a hole in its head. Even with a good director, Reagan had never been anything other than nondescript. Nothing he had done in Hollywood
recommended him for a position that at times called for the best actor in the world.

I could claim my objection to Reagan was out of concern for the man’s personal well-being. Aside from his age, I thought the man might be suffering from an inner-ear problem. There was
often a connection between the cochlea and one’s balance. And Reagan seemed to be tilting to the right.

It was apparently a problem that started in the 1950s, when Reagan had been a Democrat and considered something of a liberal during the McCarthy era. As the president of the Screen Actors Guild,
he was called on to defend fellow artists like David Susskind and Dalton Trumbo from the mail-monitoring senator from Wisconsin and his crony, Roy Cohn. As the years passed, the governor started
tilting.

First he changed parties and became a Republican. Then his ideas brought him a reputation as a conservative. Finally, by the time students were locked up in a compound overnight in Santa Rita,
he was labeled an ultraconservative. That might have been an illness he contracted because of his state’s proximity to Arizona, where the old guard Barry Goldwater was guarding the
conservative doctrine. Turning conservative might have been considered a regional revamping of political posture or just a role adjustment. Whatever. By the 1970s there was very little difference
between himself and Attila the Hun. The problem now, as I saw it, was how far was too far to the right.

And as unfamiliar as East Coast voters were with the specifics of a West Coast governor’s political positions, there should have been enough ex-hippies in America to render Ron’s run
null and void. But it was not his Hollywood that fanned my flames. It was that as president he would choose justices for the Supreme Court.

The audience at Kent State that November night was the kind I enjoyed: folks who were aware of current events, were quick to pick up on my use of the California state-guard language, my facility
for phrasing, my dissection of diction, even my most outrageous puns were taken in fun. Politics was not my favorite topic on poetry stops—or in life. As a rule, heaping helpings of political
opinions were a quick way to either bore people to death or become their least favorite poet.

But if you were alive on the planet earth and Black, particularly a Black American, in the most awkward and uncomfortable position imaginable, that of a certified, tax-paying citizen, with roots
in the land around you that went back three hundred years, you still got the short end of every stick except the nightstick, and there was damn near no way you could not have political pressure on
you and therefore have political opinions.

You were the odd man out.

I told my laughing group that I felt another poem coming on, and skewered the political past of the ex-head of the Screen Actors Guild, the ex-ambassador, ex-governor, et cetera, claiming that
the man had more Xs than a Black Muslim mosque.

Somehow I had developed an extra sense, “social forethought.” And so many of the people, places, and things I mentioned, even my throwaway lines, became significant later. Ronald
Reagan was a good example. Back in 1974, in “H2Ogate Blues,” I’d identified Reagan, then an ex-governor of California, as part of America’s new wave of leaders.

I told the Kent State audience I was “half and half” about the Republican victory. Personally, as a citizen, I was sorry as hell. But as far as my career was concerned, it was great.
I didn’t want to constantly be caught trying to make a fool out of the president. I wanted a man who could do that for himself. A man like Nixon. A man like Gerald Ford, whom I’d dubbed
“oatmeal man” in 1975 in “We Beg Your Pardon,” off
The First Minute of a New Day
. (“Anybody who could spend twenty-five years in Congress and nobody ever heard
of him has got to be oatmeal man.”) Of course, I’d heard of Ford. And had not thought the career congressman from Michigan would provide any good material. The man had never given
anyone a clue that he might even have a personality.

But he did have a knack for inadvertent physical comedy. There were pictures of him as a college football player in the era of leather helmets. He once tripped and tumbled all the way down the
stairs of the presidential plane, Air Force One. That inspired the song called “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There.” And he was good for the occasional malapropism. Like when he
was asked during an interview with a sports announcer at the baseball all-star game whether he stayed current with the game, and he replied, “Oh, I manage to see a few games on the
radio.”

And now I had Reagan. Write on!

By the end of February 1981, I had completed 80 percent of “B Movie,” my most seriously hilarious political tirade.

Leaving Kent State that night, though, I had to admit that my full attention hadn’t been on the crowd. I was doing a concert on the very spot where the peace movement had been shifted into
overdrive by the shooting of four demonstrators by the National Guard. What a bitch of a year that had been. And now I was off to rejoin my band to continue to support Stevie on the
Hotter than
July
tour.

Montreal, November, 7, 1980