Goodbye Without Leaving (3 page)

My hair was neither blond nor brown, although as a child I had the loveliest mop of ringlets, according to my mother's portraits and the seven thousand photographs she and my father took of me. As I got older, my hair got darker—what a slump for my artistic mother! I was five foot four. My legs were neither long nor short. I was not short- or long-waisted. In fact, I was a fairly regular-looking person, easily pretty enough but not enough for my physically snobbish mom, who felt that being beautiful was the Big Thing.

Therefore she was very involved in the way I looked and I am sure that I have repressed the memory of fights we must have had about clothes when I was little. We certainly had them when I was older and confronted with an adolescent's perpetual dilemma: do I please myself or my mother? If I please myself, how much will I hurt her?

It was far easier, I realized, simply to hide. I kept a set of clothes in my bookbag. In the mornings I dressed to my mother's specifications, and changed my clothes in the bathroom at school. I did not reveal that on Friday nights, when she thought I and my little friends sat playing Scrabble or were practicing ballroom dancing, I was listening to rock and roll and necking with the brother of one of my little friends.

I cannot describe the sacred feeling of liberation that saturated my very bones as I got on the airplane to go to college. My first week there, I was picked up by an unsavory-looking person who was said to be a genius. He was a senior and lived in a grotty hovel off campus. He was a major in theoretical physics but I glommed on to him at once because he knew who John Lee Hooker was. We went to his nasty flat and listened to John Lee Hooker records for an hour or so. Then he played me Blind Willie McTell doing “Statesboro Blues.” I fell in love with him that instant and decided that if anyone was going to be my first lover, it would be this person. He seemed to be a little nutty and he certainly was a slob, but he looked so pretty with his clothes off. Besides, I had never been to bed with anyone in my life and I found, after an hour or so, that it was perfect heaven. He told me he thought I was beautiful, which sent me into a kind of erotic rapture.

Several weeks later he passed me on the street and said hello as if he had met me years before at, perhaps, his little sister's sweet sixteen party. My heart was broken but, after all, he had introduced me to Willie McTell, and I was no longer an innocent girl. I knew that I was on my way.

6

My diary, had I ever bothered to keep one, would have been littered with the names of boys (later men) I loved who did not want me. The boys who found me fetching, I found twinky and wimplike. When some unsuitable wild person with a bad reputation actually fell for me, I experienced bliss of short duration followed by desolation. Love was like that, I thought.

Of course, the music of the day did much to back me up. “You Don't Love Me,” “Why Don't You Love Me?” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Wedding Bell Blues” and so forth, including Ruby's monster hit, “You Don't Love Me Like You Used to Do.”

On the tour bus, I liked to let my eyes wander over the unattainable Doo-Wah, who was, he often said, no oil painting. It was his emanation I was after. When I was sad, which was as often as possible, he let me curl up in his arms if we knew we were alone.

“You oughtta quit this tour, girl,” he said. “You been doing it two years now. This is a dead end.”

“I don't care,” I said. “I know it's a dead end. But I love it.”

“Well, baby, the handwriting is on the wall,” he said.

I looked over at the wall, which did in fact have handwriting on it. Most walls of the cheap motels we stayed at did.

“This one says ‘Pat 'n' Bill 4ever,'” I said. “So what?”

“Honey-chile, Vernon has his eye on the
big
big time.”

“Isn't this big time?”

“Shit, no,” said Wah. “They want Vegas. Tahoe. Madison Square Garden. They don't want to mess around in these little shitty towns. And when they hit, baby-love, they will throw you out. You won't see any white faces when Ruby goes big time, unless it's her money manager.”

I considered this.

“You living in a dream world,” Wah said.

“What about you?” I said. “You're on this tour. What are you going to do?”

“I'm a black musician,” Wah said.

“Me too!” I said.

“You better get yourself some nice white husband or go back to college, or you know how you'll end up, don't you?”

“Yes, Wah,” I said. “I will be a hairoyne addict like my predecessor, Pixie Lehar.”

“Exactly,” Wah said. “Now, when I was coaching Little League …”

“Oh, shut up!” I said. “If you're so wholesome, what are you doing here? Why aren't you teaching at Juilliard or coaching some high school band?”

“I am making money,” Wah said. “But
you
are having an experience. When I quit, I will still make money. But people don't pay for people to have experiences, not that Ruby pays all that well. This tour is not for you. You should quit. I would be proud and happy to escort you to your rightful place.”

I looked at Doo-Wah mournfully. I hoped he would soon light a reefer and act more like a normal person.

“You find my rightful place, Wah,” I said, “and I will be happy and proud to let you escort me to it.”

7

I lived to be on stage. At the time there was nothing much else to live for. The food on tour was either wonderful (grits, collards, shoestring potatoes) or horrible (grits, hamburgers, antique fish cakes). Grace and I bought heads of cabbage and chopped them up for salad. We had a knife, a chopping block and a plastic bowl, and we made cabbage salad after the recipe of her sainted grandmother. The plastic bowl had a plastic top so that we could eat our cabbage on the bus. We carried a box of kosher salt and a box of black pepper, and left behind, in various motels around the country, empty bottles of cider vinegar and small vials of olive oil. God only knows what the management thought we had been doing.

Our longing for salad brought Grace and me together, and she confessed to me that she was sending all her money to her fiancé, Graham, and that in a year she would quit the tour. Graham, who worked for an accounting firm, would quit his job, too, and they were going to open a catering business together called Grahamgrace Delectable Foods.

Ivy's boyfriend, Bud, was in the Marines. When he got out he was going into auto-body work with his brother in Hartford, and Ivy was going to get married and have a large squad of kids.

And what was I going to do?

When they asked this question, a kind of whirring emptiness flapped in front of my eyes. Grace and Ivy assumed that if you had a college degree you could do anything. In their eyes it was like having a large inheritance. They couldn't imagine that you might have all the choices in the world but none of the skills.

I said, “I'm going to be a Shakette forever.”

This caused Ivy and Grace to double up. The idea that anyone did this for fun after the first few months (much less two years) totally staggered them.

On Friday afternoons we washed our hair. Then we did our nails, and when they were dry we wrote letters. We sat there like three little schoolgirls using the arms of our chairs or stacks of magazines as writing surfaces. Grace wrote to Graham, Ivy wrote to Bud, and I wrote to Mary Abbott, my constant correspondent: Dear Mary, We are in Memphis for an oldies night. Fats will be on the bill. Next week, James Brown without the Famous Flames. Also Baby Jean and the Jerelles. The saxophonist says that Ruby wants to take this act to Las Vegas and, when she does, I will get the ax. Nothing good lasts, or so they say. I guess I should start thinking of what to do next in some structured way, right? It is hot here and cold where you are. In the meantime, sha la la la la la la la lala. All yours …

When we played Chicago I bunked with Mary, and when she moved to New York I stayed with her there. To wake up in a real bed in an apartment, with real oatmeal cooked on a real stove and drinkable coffee and lots of books and magazines around, made me feel as if I should never set foot out the door.

On the other hand, on stage I felt a way I had never felt before. I was an eagle, an angel. My body was made of some pure liquid substance and would do whatever I asked it to. I danced until I felt as smooth and effortless as an ice skater. I could fixate on one person in the audience and turn him into jelly. The big questions fell away. There were no questions—only answers. I was in the music. It wrapped around me. I was not lost in it, but found. The kind of ecstasy people found in religion, I found in being a Shakette. It was not an out-of-body experience, it was an
in
-body experience.

Grace, Ivy and I could have done our routines in our sleep. We wore little dance dresses with spaghetti straps. The dresses were made of layers of long fringe which shook when we shook. Each of us had three dresses: chartreuse, cerise and electric blue, with shoes to match. Sometimes we wore the same color. Sometimes, if Ruby felt it was the kind of crowd friendly to hallucinogens, we each wore a different color and covered ourselves with black-light makeup, so that when Vernon signaled the switch to black light, the three of us looked like three pairs of lips with polka-dotted arms. Sometimes we actually painted skeletons on ourselves, until one night in Memphis some kid on acid went totally berserk.

Once in a while, if a hall had very bad vibes, Ruby and Vernon and Ruby's brother, Fordyce, insisted on police protection and security guards. Young people were ingesting so many unique substances that it was hard to tell what anyone might do. The cheery ones threw jelly beans, which stung when thrown from the balcony and were banned after Grace suffered a minor eye injury. People were actually searched at the door for them and once a handgun turned up in the back pocket of some harmless-looking nut. It was quite a scene.

On bad days Grace suffered from sinus headaches, Ivy had terrible menstrual cramps, and I had constant hamstring pain. But then there were days when everything was right. Our rehearsals went as smooth as cream, and all of us felt fine. The ions in the air were charged with good things and our heads and hearts were light. There was no bad news, and nothing hurt. When the hall was filled up, we could feel that it was full of bighearted, innocent, friendly, rock-and-roll-hungry spirits who would tear themselves up with joy but never lay a hand on us. This sort of audience tossed us flowers. We tore off the petals and threw them back. Everyone screamed with happiness and Ruby ended these shows with “Jump for Joy,” which made the audience leap to its feet and sing with her. Ivy, Grace and I stood in back in our chartreuse dresses, chanting, JUMP FOR JOY! JUMP FOR JOY! JUMP FOR JOY!

Ruby, like an angel, or a sprite or a devil from hell, took off her high-heeled dance shoes and jumped higher and higher until the final JOY! when she came down and the lights were cut and all was total darkness.

Eventually everyone I knew had given up on me. My parents could barely bring themselves to speak to me. When I called my father at his office, he told me I had broken my mother's heart and that she felt strongly that I was now on drugs.

“But I'm not, Daddy!” I said. “I drink milk all the time and I'm healthy as a horse. Besides, I'm being interviewed by a couple of magazines.”

I heard a kind of gasp from the other end of the phone.

“This will kill her,” he said.

“Kill her?” I said. “She ought to be thrilled! How many of her friends' daughters are interviewed for anything?”

“Priscilla Meyerhoff is a White House Fellow,” my father said sadly.

“Gee, I'm really sorry,” I said. “Okay, tell Ma I'm wallowing in sin.”

“She'll be thrilled to hear it,” said my father bitterly.

It was true my friends were forging ahead in life: getting married, having babies, being promoted, becoming White House Fellows or junior partners in their law firms. Even Mary Abbott had gotten a fellowship at Columbia, and on one of my two-week breaks I flew to New York and moved my things into a tiny room in her new apartment.

My actual home was our giant tour bus. I got into it in order to go somewhere in order to get out and into a motel room where I would put on a dress the size of a corset and get up on a stage to back up Ruby, and then, after losing four pounds in sweat, I would get back into the bus and go somewhere else.

After the Boston show I started noticing a person who sat in the second row wearing a tie and jacket—most uncool. He turned up in Providence, New London, Hartford, then Waterbury. It was hard to tell how old he was. He also had short hair.

He appeared at both the Apollo and Filmore shows, and it occurred to me that he might be some sex nut fixated on Ruby, who was one of the hotter acts around I was glad my parents would never come to see me perform and therefore spare themselves the sight of Ruby wrapping herself around the microphone in numbers such as “Love Me All Night Long.” She liked to break into a throaty monologue that began, “Darling, why don't you slide your big, strong arms around every part of me?” Naturally, creeps were inspired by this sort of thing and sent her dirty letters in care of Crackerjack Records.

It was after the Filmore show that the person with the jacket and tie came backstage. He caught me off guard. I was alone. There was a big party for Ruby uptown, but if I had gone I would have been the only white person there. Instead I sat in my damp dance dress, taking off my false eyelashes. When I looked up, there he was. It occurred to me that he might be dangerous.

“What are you?” I said into the mirror. “Some kind of Boy Scout from Mars?”

“I'm a journalist.”

“Oh, yeah? Are you the guy from
Bop
Magazine?”

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I'm very interested in you as the white Shakette, and also interested in the Shakelys. I've been following them for years. Would you like to go out?”