PIECES OF A MAN

“The Last Holiday: A Memoir”
By Gil Scott-Heron
Grove Press, $9.99
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Last summer, a couple weeks after the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron died — felled, at age 62, by some combination of crack and HIV, or perhaps by what he called “the spirits” — I found myself on the phone with one of his old high school classmates, trying to verify a rumor I’d started.

I would like to blame my father for starting this rumor, because he was my source for what turned out to be bad information, but my father has no Twitter account. I was the one who’d joined in the online clamor of grief after Scott-Heron’s death, posting: “My dad still talks reverently about watching Jim Carroll (Trinity) & G. S-H (Fieldston) face off as rival high-school quarterbacks.” The trivia had spread from there.

It was a romantic image: Two downtown musician-poet icons (fellow addicts, too), one white, one black, now departed, battling for supremacy as fresh-faced youths on the Elysian Fields of prep-school New York. And I thought it’d make a good story, too — we’d run it a month or two later, once the obituaries had died down, and perhaps include a scanned reproduction of the yellowing box score, no doubt preserved in Trinity’s or Fieldston’s archive, just waiting for an intrepid reporter to find it.

Who had won? And by how much? I queried archivists at both schools, engaged the legendary memory hoards of former Ivy Preparatory School League athletic directors at Spence and Horace Mann. But I found nothing. Scott-Heron’s classmates remembered him playing football. But Carroll, I was informed, never even put on pads.

“Jimmy didn’t like to get hit,” Mark London, who went to school with Carroll, told me. “Your dad should know that — he was on the team!” My father, an undersized defensive end two years behind Carroll at Trinity, allowed that perhaps he had remembered it wrong. He sheepishly pointed me to Carroll’s “The Basketball Diaries” for more reliable information. I apologized to my editors, and moved on.

***

Memory is a funny thing like that. “I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods,” Scott-Heron writes in “The Last Holiday,” his posthumous memoir out tomorrow, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Grove Press, $9.99). “Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long agos while my own past seems only long gone.” But Scott-Heron’s lost history was by design. He was a specialist at rupture, a savant of the broken path. He was a musician who thought of himself as a writer, a poet who resented being known for his most famous song. “When people picked ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ to decide what kind of artists we were,” he writes, “they overlooked what the hell the whole album said.”

That album was “Pieces of a Man,” the 1971 LP that helped give Scott-Heron his late-in-life reputation as “the godfather of rap,” a description he disliked. This was less a matter of taste than of general disposition. Scott-Heron was not much for being a part of things. “The Last Holiday” is a chronicle of repudiation: of Fieldston, where he felt unwanted; of Clive Davis’s Arista, the record label that signed him in 1974; of Brian Jackson, his longtime friend and songwriting partner. The one original song Scott-Heron wrote and recorded in this century was about his adopted home, where he’d lived on and off for most of his life. It was called “New York Is Killing Me.”

Stevie Wonder used to greet him as “Air Reez,” on account of his astrological sign. He was born in Chicago on April Fool’s Day, 1949. In Jackson, Tenn., where his mother sent him to live with his grandmother, he went to black schools and was taught by white women until 1962, when he was one of three students to desegregate a local middle school, Tigrett.

That summer he moved to New York, where he was eventually referred for a scholarship at Fieldston. From Fieldston he went to Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, the alma mater of his hero Thurgood Marshall, and then, in 1971, to the writing program at Johns Hopkins. By that time Scott-Heron had already released a record, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” a book of poetry with the same name, and a novel, “The Vulture,” which he temporarily dropped out of Lincoln to write.

In “The Last Holiday,” Scott-Heron describes taking the bus in 1969 to New York City in order to visit the offices of the publishers of Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” with the hope of interesting them in “The Vulture.” They were not, particularly. After the meeting, wandering through a “thickening wall of April gloom,” near-broke and in a rising panic, Scott-Heron reports running into an old classmate, Fred Baron, and his father, Jerry, in front of the 23rd Street YMCA. The two men invited Scott-Heron back to Peter Cooper Village, where they lived, for  dinner. There, Jerry began reading Scott-Heron’s manuscript, and after Fred briefly excused himself, Scott-Heron writes, the older man “pulled out a fifty dollar bill and handed it to me.” Jerry then smiled and got up, taking the manuscript with him. “I’m going to hand this over to my friends and have them get in touch with you,” he told Scott-Heron.

The money got Scott-Heron back to Lincoln. Ten days later the phone rang. It was the literary agent Lynn Nesbit. A week before, she said, a friend had dropped off Scott-Heron’s manuscript, and asked her to take a look.

And so it turned out that “The Vulture,” when it was issued by World Publishing the following year, was dedicated to my grandfather’s brother: “To Mr. Jerome Baron, without whom the ‘bird’ would never have gotten off the ground.”

***

How to feel about this bit of noblesse oblige by one of my relatives? I’ve never met either of them. An ancient quarrel led to Fred and Jerry, my father’s uncle, now long dead, splitting from the rest of my relatives. Fred still lives in the same Peter Cooper apartment though, and when I called recently, he picked up. He and Scott-Heron, he told me, had remained close. Fred said he’d seen him two weeks before he died. In high school, Fred said, Scott-Heron “used to sleep over two or three nights a week.” Jerry and Scott-Heron would discuss politics. The two teenagers had a band together.

Later, in 2005, when Scott-Heron was sent to prison upstate for violating parole, Fred mailed him a leather-bound book — a journal, I guess — with a picture of Scott-Heron from their high school days secreted in the spine. In the photo, Fred told me, Scott-Heron “looked like an angel. At this point, because he was doing crack, he resembled my grandfather. His hair was all white and wizened and his teeth were bad. I stuffed the picture in the binding of the book so they wouldn’t find it. And when he got out I saw him and he said, ‘Man, you really nailed my ass.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, it was late one night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I had this book and I started flipping through it. And all of a sudden this picture fell right on my chest. And it really hit me, all the places I’ve been, you know?’ ”

I asked Fred if we could have dinner and meet each other in real life. He declined. He’d just had surgery, he said, to remove a freckle on his nose, but the surgeon had been overzealous. “He cut all the skin off,” Fred said. “Now I look like Quasimodo.” He didn’t want to see me until he was healed. Maybe he didn’t want to see me at all.

***

“The Last Holiday” never mentions crack, or prison. “What happened to him after 1981 did not seem relevant to the book that he wanted to write,” Jamie Byng, the editor and publisher of “The Last Holiday” in the U.K., explains in a preface. Byng cobbled the book together out of documents Scott-Heron would mail Byng in a “piecemeal fashion, over a number of years and written on various archaic typewriters and computers.” There is a lot in the memoir about touring with Stevie Wonder, in 1980, and Wonder’s efforts to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday.

There’s less in the book about Scott-Heron’s domestic adult life. The last sentence of the memoir declares matter-of-factly that the mothers of his three children were better off without him. “I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love,” he says. “And I’m not sure why.”

***

My father wasn’t entirely wrong — Scott-Heron and Jim Carroll probably did compete against one another while in high school. But on a basketball court, not a football field. Around Manhattan’s Dyckman Houses, where Scott-Heron first befriended Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “I’d had a decent game as a two guard,” he recalls. “But two years playing forward at Fieldston, at 6-foot-3, did my ballhandling and jump shot no good.” Fred remembered his friend’s game well, or pretended to. “He came from playground ball,” he told me. “So he had a whole different flair to him.”

Fieldston and Trinity would’ve met a couple times in each of the two seasons that Scott-Heron (who graduated in ’67) and Carroll (’68) overlapped. But the scores to those games, whatever they were, are lost to history. “Here’s why nobody will remember,” Marc Blane, a star of the Trinity team in those years, told me. “Nobody took Fieldston seriously. We always won.” Blane could recall a couple of black guys who played, but the vision of a “stork-like,” 6-foot-3 Fieldston forward with an giant Afro rang no bells.

It was that skinny 17-year-old who first played at the Garden, Scott-Heron claims. Fieldston played Collegiate, on the undercard of some Knicks game, and lost badly. Thirteen years later, Scott-Heron performed on the same hardcourt on tour with Stevie Wonder. It was the “Hotter than July” tour, and by New York, they’d developed a routine: Scott-Heron’s band would open, Wonder would perform, and then Scott-Heron would return for the encore. But this particular night was different. Backstage, lingering in the wings, was Michael Jackson.

Jackson came out at the end of the show to “Master Blaster,” Wonder’s slightly goofy, supremely ’80s ode to Bob Marley, who was then in the hospital, dying of cancer. Scott-Heron was onstage, looking over his shoulder.

“Stevie called for the monitor man to pull the rhythm track up and with a wide grin beckoned for his ‘special guest,’ someone who needed no introduction. I looked behind me as he took three steps, paused a beat, and stood straighter and taller, turning solid then as from mist to a man. I don’t see that well. Sometimes.”

“He didn’t just walk onto the stage. He turned solid as he came. A trick of the light. He glided past me into the spotlight.”

zach.baron@thedaily.com

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