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Mad At Miles A lot of people say I treat women shamelessly. I'm an arrogant S.O.B., use my wealth and fame, good looks and boyish charm to get my pecker wet. They say I can't love anyone. I am too struck on myself, too in love with the music to commit to any woman, let alone be family-focused, a good husband to one wife. They want to boycott my music, make bonfires of my records cos I call my women bitches and they come onto me. They say I slap them silly, am possessive, moody, mean. They highlight my bad behavior, discount all of my good deeds. They want a bad black man to be their live evil prince, their fallen hipster angel, their badass addict pimp. They point to the stable of whores that kept me off the street, count the holes in my arms for punctures in my soul. Think I'm a man deflated by appetites and jealous rage. And it is true: I have been mean, I have been a pimp, an addict, have done a lot of things I cannot say I'm proud of. I've hit women, been buried to the balls in wall-to-wall booty and cooze. I've been a boozer, four-time loser. Have stuck things in my arm, up my ass. Have had more finger-lickin' chicken than any blues-soaked singer ever sang of, got it whenever, however I could. Liked it too. And smacked my lips and put my hips into it the way any romantic Romeo would, if he could. And the women whose labia I prized and pried into loved it too. It wasn't my trumpet they were after. I am a man of appetites. I indulge them, true. But it was the booze and pills, the coke I took to ease the pain of my sickle-cell anemia that drove me to go crazy on Frances and she was the only woman I was jealous of. I did love her. Loved Juliette and Cicely too after the fashion I allowed myself the privilege of. They were all my muses, not just cover art to tattoo on my black ass and soul. And the holes there were plenty of those were never filled. The holes are what I whistled through not just when I was whistling the first three notes of Parker's Mood to appease my jones either. I was rangier than a shithouse rat. I was. A lot. I betrayed my father and my mother. Not one year after my Dad died my mother bit it on account of C I knew she was sick of cancer, but didn't know how badly. Or when sheād make the big exit. And missed it. And, yes, I missed her funeral too but not because I wanted to. At least not consciously. I was superstitious. The plane was in the air, and I was on it. It returned for some mechanical reason or other and I got off. I got on and off a lot of planes. Thatās what this life is. I have no complaints. I wept the night my mother died. Something may have died in me. But she, she's still floating over the smoke in all the rooms I play. I keep her and all my women inside of me regardless of what they say. So listen: that haunting melancholy tone they say defines the essence of loneliness? That's me too. I didn't cop that in no dime bag though it sho' nuff comes from the streets inside of me. I did it all to refine a style. To be free. Unfettered by convention and the strictures of your morality. To get out from behind my horn I poured myself through it like an elixir. Drank long and deep of each test tube note. Screamed before my throat nodes healed and was reduced to a hoarse croak until I upstaged the frog in the prince that made me turn my back on you. I came through too. Gave and gave and gave until my lungs caved in like some unmined seam in the dark cave I became. So, yeah, I did behave shamelessly on occasion, but not because I loved myself too much. I loved you all. Loved the opportunity to play without mugging like some Uncle Tom. (My mother said she'd kill me if I ever stooped to play monkey to the hurdy gurdy.) And I didn't. I never kissed no one's ass I didn't want to. And that hurt me more times than I can count in ways most people can't appreciate. The blues I got I blew my trumpet to. The walls fell as walls will. There's nothin' else to tell. I didn't ask to be born into this society. I didn't invent monogamy or the road or negotiate either one without a few bumps. I didn't know love until I was a Daddy three times and fell for a white woman in Paris who didn't speak my tongue. I tried to get her up in my body with a needle and didn't do right by Irene, was never the man she and my kids deserved me to be. I know this and express my shame in the only language I really know. It's not enough. It never was but music was all I ever learned, the only thing that could take away pain and sustain a life. I made it my wife and all my musicians a family. They contain and sustain the best of me. |