The Last Holiday (33 page)

I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I’m not sure why. The older I get, the more I tend to question the elements of emotion and intimacy as genetic parallels with height
and hair color. I truly believe that I love my mother and grandmother, but beyond them I have lived in a circle of small values that have a startlingly limited reach. And a stunted amount of
emotion is attached to it. This is not an evaluation that builds a wall around my family, closing out other people. It reflects the fact that I am closer to people I know, but no closer to cousins
and aunts and uncles than to good friends.

I have been blessed with three children. They have been blessed with beautiful mothers and touched with brushes of eccentricity donated by a father who could have done more for them and with
them, but could not have loved them more. Because he did not have enough practice.

I am sure I was loved by the Scotts. I am sure I was loved by Lily Scott and Bobbie Scott. And probably by my precise and proper uncle, William Scott. And to a lesser extent by Sammy and Gloria
Scott, my spinster aunts, who slipped into their spinsterhood from the north and south poles of that status. The key to the Scotts was understanding and what you didn’t understand you had to
trust.

Love was not an active verb in my family or in my life. There were few demonstrations, few hugs and embraces, and few declarations among us about love. I was a full-grown adult who had been
married, a father, and divorced before I consciously put “I love you” into conversations with my mother, before I made sure I got a hug from her and gave her a big hug each time we met.
I can’t remember ever hearing “I love you” pass between the generations of Scotts that preceded me. Or recall with any clarity hearing those words from them to me or being
inspired to say those words to them. Yet I can’t imagine there being more warmth and laughter shared with genuine empathy and respect and consideration and . . . but not affection.

Our codes and slang terms that slip easily in and out of vogue go from addition to meaningful exchanges of emptiness and impotence rather quickly as people and music and movies and
what-means-what to us and each other goes in and out of style in the blink of an eye. Right now everybody is using the ill-suited “be there for you” or “be there for me.”
That expression was perfect for the Scotts, because if there was one thing you could count on, it was the fact that we would be there for each other. A hundred times more likely to “be
there,” wherever “there” was, than to say “I love you” and share a genuine hug. And I say that as someone who wished for a hug and a word of encouragement on a
thousand nights when tired and beat up by the world. I would have traded a hundred be-there’s for one heartfelt hug.

And it may be that I never get another chance to say this to those children, as well as I know I have never taught them by example so that they can turn to each other for this when they need it.
I hope there is no doubt that I loved them and their mothers as best I could. And if that was inevitably inadequate, I hope it was supplemented by their mothers, who were all better off without
me.

Publishing a book posthumously inevitably creates a number of challenges, and
The Last Holiday
has been no exception. The words that make up the final, printed version
of Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir were written over many years, starting in the 1990s and all the way up to 2010, and during this period the book has undergone some significant transformations.
Even calling it a memoir may be misleading, because it is certainly not a memoir in the conventional sense of the word.

The first pages that I read were given to me by Gil when he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1990s. They included his account of the night that John Lennon was murdered
(entitled “Deadline”) and chapters on growing up in Jackson, Tennessee, and on Stevie Wonder (entitled “Makes Me Wonder”). These original chapters were recounted in the
third person, by a narrator called The Artist, as Gil felt that this allowed him to write more freely and objectively about the events he needed to describe.

In 2004, at my prompting, Gil began rewriting the book as a first-person narrative, after recognising that the device of using an Everyman narrator for a memoir created more problems than it
solved. Although, as he wrote in a letter on 29 September 2005, “I am adjusting to the first person as these things will show, but I find it totally unnerving and self-serving at times
because I have to describe shit from the ‘Watergate’ point of view: what I knew and when I knew it.” The “Interlude” chapter in this book is the only remnant of the
original draft that has made it into the final version.

One of the reasons Gil had been drawn to the third-person narrator was because his primary motivation in writing
The Last Holiday
was to tell the story of the Hotter than July tour. He
felt that Stevie Wonder had never received the recognition that he deserved for the key role he played in bringing about the legislation that made Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a
national holiday (this eventually happened in 1986). Gil believed that
The Last Holiday
could be an objective account by a firsthand witness to this historic tour. He wanted to ensure that
people could not forget what had really happened. And it is for this reason that there is so little in
The Last Holiday
that recounts what took place after the rally in Washington in January
1981. What happened to him after 1981 did not seem relevant to the book that he wanted to write.

However, it was clear to Gil that in order to tell Stevie Wonder’s story, he would have to tell his own story, and that “in writing about yourself, you write about your parents and
their parents automatically because you are all of those people.” It was only by opening up his own past that he felt he could properly explain why he had ended up on the tour with Stevie
Wonder.

Gil’s death in May 2011 has made it impossible to ask him questions that we would dearly love to know the answers to. The manuscript he left had been sent to me in a very piecemeal
fashion, over a number of years and written on various archaic typewriters and computers. From countless conversations we had and from certain notes he left, it was clear that his original vision
for the book was not as a straight chronological narrative. But as time went by, Gil leaned towards a simpler approach and dispensed with the more complex structure. He also decided to write about
some very personal events from the later part of his life, including the death of his mother, the stroke he suffered in 1990 and his estranged relationships with his three children. These were
never part of the original plan and they add real poignancy to the concluding chapters of the book.

We are greatly indebted to Tim Mohr, whose editing skills and commitment to the project have resulted in
The Last Holiday
reading as smoothly as it does. Gil was a very appreciative man
and I know how grateful he would have been for all the hard work that Tim, Dan Franklin, Amy Hundley at Grove/Atlantic and Rafi Romaya, Norah Perkins and Nick Davies at Canongate have put into
The Last Holiday
. And I like to think that he would have loved Oscar Wilson’s stunning jacket artwork.

As Gil so memorably sang,

“Peace Go With You, Brother”

Jamie Byng, Publisher, Canongate Books