Death Interrupted - Part I I

I've only played three good gigs since coming back to Atlanta from Hilton Head Island last August 2008. In October I did a major recording session for Big Boi from OutKast: guitar on Ringtones and gave my pupil-for-life Andre 3000 a few guitar lessons. That album: Son of Chico Dusty is due to drop July 6th 2010.

Maybe it will get me a fourth Grammy. To get my other three from 2004, I have to write the Grammy folks, tell them my name stage name "ZaZa" is in the credits, pay some cheese and they' ll send my statuettes, fully engraved. It's a great source of pride to know your guitar parts and horn arrangements are embodied on a 10,000,000 certified Diamond seller. But I can't eat those awards. The work-made-for-hire studio fees went out as fast as it came in.

Back in Hilton Head I'd averaged at least three dependable gigs a week. The cheese was pretty decent and it kept me indoors and eating regularly, gas in the truck, a car repair escrow, and a movie now and then. It does not take much for me to be content. I am made rich from playing classical guitar and reading, both music and literature,

Tonight as I gaze through the big glass here at The Majestic Diner and watch the homeless march up and down this street of broken dreams, I'm in dread, fearful that I'm due to revisit the streets with them. My pride won't allow me go down to Tuskegee, to my boyhood home in Alabama to live with my step-dad although one of the main reasons I moved back to Atlanta was to be nearby and attend to some of his needs.

He's 90 years- old at this writing. Living alone, Oscar C. Gadson, Jr. is a former Tuskegee Airman and Chief of Bacteriology at the VA but he doesn't want close supervision nor a roommate necessarily but he would welcome me home to regroup and continue those boyhood chores. I would be there with my tail tucked, having not made the mark in my myriad quests. I could perhaps get some work there, save up and call my shadow, Don Quixote to accompany me out into the wide world yet again.

Back in the day, there was Club 29, National Guard Armory, and the Elk's club--gigs, and at age 14, I got some of them, playing with the grown-ups. Now, Tuskegee is no place for me to go with a guitar, though it is a fine town with a noble history where Booker T. Washington established and built Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University.

I am fortunate to have grown up there, raised by a village. Some of my classmates were Lionel Richie and radio czar Tom Joyner. Another honorable mention is due my classmate John Hines who is a scientist at NASA. Author Ralph Ellison alluded to Tuskegee, where he majored in music, in his famous novel: Invisible Man.

I had the privilege of breathing that history-charged air and romping beneath those sagacious oaks. George Washington Carver is deserving of much wider attention. And of course there is the baggage from the infamous Tuskegee Study, which was not the fault of the town--that was federal stuff. Rosa Parks was born there. She helped to change quite a bit of " federal stuff."

My progress as an artist has included feasts and famines. Tupac Shakur's dad said he would shovel s*** to make a living, if he had too. I'm too stubborn. It's play or die, and it appears the latter is trying to manifest itself as I leave the Majestic Diner heading back to what may not be my home next month because I have no means to pay the rent.

When you've reverted to renting a room on the Westside of Atlanta, you know you are getting close to the streets. Between November and January, I'm eating canned food out of the can without cooking it. Having returned to the neighborhood where I grew up for seven years before moving to Alabama, I find it infested with thugs and sluggish losers, young men, old fellows and just a couple of middle aged women who have missed out on good upbringing and perhaps taken hard slams where recovery is improbable, roaming the streets looking for prey or to be preyed upon.

I'm coming up on being 59 years old here in February 2009, and I make a prime target --"Pops," as young blacks refer to their male elders these days, although at their whim, I am not one of them because of my fair complexion. . .then my designation is "White Boy," as it was when kids teased me at Lewis Adams School down in Alabama.

There was however, one real white fella there at the school named Johnny Mack and of course, nobody messed with him. The errant bully and his whole family would have hell to pay in the mid-1950's with all of us still under Jim Crow (Apartheid) laws. But me? I will never forget a guy named Richard who loved hitting me in the stomach as we waited for the school bus.

He was thrice my size having flunked the third grade and was made strong from working in the fields. If I had even protested verbally he would have knocked me out cold. And I must say that even today, fair skinned African-Americans are still shunned by more than just a few pockets of Black American society--that is sort of a dirty little secret that also runs in reverse too. I got the familiar vibe on a recent trip to St. Simon's Island where hardly any of the locals would look up to speak to me at the Georgia Sea Island Festival. I have a friendly demeanor and generally have a ready smile for the same correspondence but I think I need to really work on my tan; I stay inside way too much,

I'm finally transferred to Chambliss Children's House, a private lab school on Tuskegee's campus. Only a couple of girls picked on me there as a way to express crushes and get my attention, That was okay, The bullies. You could not hit a girl, you know. I did not experience the "color struck" syndrome there because there was a greater variety of hues. . .many of them much lighter than mine, albeit still one-drop, "registered" Negroes, as it were.

I will never forget though, a cute young black girl who I will call Andrea Thompson. She was very dark -skinned and some of the boys made fun of her. There was a little caste system even in elementary school. Dorothy never showed any resentment but I felt for her. After she went to high school and filled out, she developed into one fine woman, shaped like an old-school coke bottle, as we use to say.

My grandmother was white (German descent) and technically so was my father (Italian) but I know better. I am a "soul brother," albeit mulatto and I like it. An escaped African slave mated with a Creek - Muskogee Indian maiden to give me this copper tone and that's fine with me. So I am actually race-less. It's fun, though I do have the blood of a Confederate Army Officer named Eugene Sparkman, or so I'm told who was my great-great grand father.

As I was saying, before my daydreaming distracted me. . . .I pass a variety of suspicious street folks when I walk to and from Publix for food here in my old village and I know I'm getting close to joining these sundry losers as it was in Hawaii just a few years ago except those were Samoans, Hawaiians, and a few white, aging hippie-dropouts and shell-shocked Vietnam War veterans roaming Ala Moana Boulevard and traipsing through Waikiki.

And there I am walking the streets all night with my $2,000 Almansa Spanish guitar strapped on my back. No one ever tried to take it. I guess you just don't do that. Being able to open out my chair and practice in the moonlight helped keep me sane.

Living on the street didn't put me in touch with the much touted "inner child;" it awakened an inner animal I didn't know was there. I was not pitiful at all, I bought a tent and lived in a campground with the natives. It was the second most important growth experience in my life. Number one was already brewing in my bone marrow DNA--Acute Myeloid Leukemia just waiting for the right amount of unbearable stress to awaken it from it's long generations of sleep.

The little blue Dodge Colt wagon in the photo was a good home I'd bought at a Veteran's shelter in Kapolei, Hawaii for $400. It lasted almost a year before the fuel pump quit and it got stripped. I was strong throughout the ordeal. That same strength intends to reassert itself in an unimaginable upcoming battle.

So as I walk back from Publix, I detect eyes casing my little shopping bag containing rice, sugar, and a couple of canned goods. It's obvious I have one or two dollars for them to risk asking me for, or taking.

See you in Part I I I. . . .