by Nile Rodgers
It took me a long time to realize that the things my parents did were not exactly normal. I was about 7 years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were . . . well, let’s just say they were different. For instance: my friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.
Most of my friends’ parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.
And then there was the matter of how they talked. My parents and their friends spoke this exotic language very slowly. There were other odd things. For instance, they often slept standing up, and this group narcolepsy could strike right in the middle of the most dynamic conversation. Someone would start a sentence: “Those ofay cats bopping out on the stoop are blowin’ like Birrr . . . ” and suddenly the words would begin to come out slower. And. Slower. Soon they wouldn’t be speaking at all. Eventually our living room would be filled with black and white hipsters suspended in time and space, while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. My favorite game was waiting to see if the ashes from their cigarettes would ever drop. Somehow they almost never did.
I can still remember the day when I finally realized that there was a name for this unusual lifestyle. My parents were junkies! And their slow-motion thing was called nodding out.
Oh well — it was nice to be able to name the thing. This was my life, and as far as I was concerned, there was nothing uncommon or uncomfortable about it at all. In fact, for a while, at least, it was a carefree Shangri-La.
My mother, Beverly, was a beautiful, brilliant black girl whose family descended from southern sharecroppers. She got pregnant with me when she was 13, the very first time she had sex. Bobby, my stepfather, was white, Jewish and central-casting handsome. They were an unusual progressive pair: they smoked pipes, dressed impeccably and read Playboy for the articles. Even in beat-generation Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1959, interracial couples weren’t exactly commonplace.
Mom’s maiden name was Goodman. Technically, it was Gooden, but her father, Fredrick, appropriated the name from a huge Goodman’s Egg Noodles billboard that hung outside of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side. The family story is that Fredrick had been forced to flee the cotton fields of Georgia after he used a tree branch to beat a white man he’d caught raping his sister. Grandpa Fredrick (never one to let a good story go to waste) told me that he saw the sign just after his car exited the tunnel. He thought the name would help people up north think of him as a “good” man. In the end, I guess it sort of worked. Twenty long years later, after the Woolworth C.E.O. he chauffeured passed away, Grandpa got the Cadillac as thanks for his service.
By the time Beverly Goodman was 12, she was already what they used to call a fast girl. She was also hip. She knew things that most civilians didn’t. She listened to Nina (Simone) and Monk (Thelonious) and TB (Tony Bennett) and Ahmad Jamal on a regular basis, and was so down she called them by a single name (except Jamal, maybe out of respect for the fact that he’d gone through the trouble of changing his name from Freddy Jones). She spoke with confidence, just a peg down from arrogance, which only big-city intellectuals could get away with, even if they were only 12. She had art, literature and music all around her.
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It took me a long time to realize that the things my parents did were not exactly normal. I was about 7 years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were . . . well, let’s just say they were different. For instance: my friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.
Most of my friends’ parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.And then there was the matter of how they talked. My parents and their friends spoke this exotic language very slowly. There were other odd things. For instance, they often slept standing up, and this group narcolepsy could strike right in the middle of the most dynamic conversation. Someone would start a sentence: “Those ofay cats bopping out on the stoop are blowin’ like Birrr . . . ” and suddenly the words would begin to come out slower. And. Slower. Soon they wouldn’t be speaking at all. Eventually our living room would be filled with black and white hipsters suspended in time and space, while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. My favorite game was waiting to see if the ashes from their cigarettes would ever drop. Somehow they almost never did.
I can still remember the day when I finally realized that there was a name for this unusual lifestyle. My parents were junkies! And their slow-motion thing was called nodding out.
Oh well — it was nice to be able to name the thing. This was my life, and as far as I was concerned, there was nothing uncommon or uncomfortable about it at all. In fact, for a while, at least, it was a carefree Shangri-La.
My mother, Beverly, was a beautiful, brilliant black girl whose family descended from southern sharecroppers. She got pregnant with me when she was 13, the very first time she had sex. Bobby, my stepfather, was white, Jewish and central-casting handsome. They were an unusual progressive pair: they smoked pipes, dressed impeccably and read Playboy for the articles. Even in beat-generation Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1959, interracial couples weren’t exactly commonplace.
Mom’s maiden name was Goodman. Technically, it was Gooden, but her father, Fredrick, appropriated the name from a huge Goodman’s Egg Noodles billboard that hung outside of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side. The family story is that Fredrick had been forced to flee the cotton fields of Georgia after he used a tree branch to beat a white man he’d caught raping his sister. Grandpa Fredrick (never one to let a good story go to waste) told me that he saw the sign just after his car exited the tunnel. He thought the name would help people up north think of him as a “good” man. In the end, I guess it sort of worked. Twenty long years later, after the Woolworth C.E.O. he chauffeured passed away, Grandpa got the Cadillac as thanks for his service.
By the time Beverly Goodman was 12, she was already what they used to call a fast girl. She was also hip. She knew things that most civilians didn’t. She listened to Nina (Simone) and Monk (Thelonious) and TB (Tony Bennett) and Ahmad Jamal on a regular basis, and was so down she called them by a single name (except Jamal, maybe out of respect for the fact that he’d gone through the trouble of changing his name from Freddy Jones). She spoke with confidence, just a peg down from arrogance, which only big-city intellectuals could get away with, even if they were only 12. She had art, literature and music all around her.
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