"You're Lookin' Good"

"You're lookin' good," Max says to me,
and sticks two C-notes into my pocket.
And I know I ain't lookin' good at all
standin' there all raggedy-assed, on the nod.

And Max grinnin', cleaner than a motherfucker 
It got to me, the way he knew it would,
so I didn't run off to buy more crank;
I sank down into myself and phoned home.

I told my old man I was coming back
to try to kick again. This'd be 1953.
And I did. Left my perch at Birdland
and caught the next bus back to St. Louis.

Only I got to runnin' with my girlfriend,
Alice, so pretty soon I was bored out of my brain
and back on the stuff again. Not a lot,
but enough to make me worry, think shit.

Then Max phones and says he and Mingus
are headin' to Los Angeles. So they come out.
I've got 'em in silk pajamas out on the farm
and they're wowed by the old man's spread.

He's got cooks, 'n maids, 'n prize pigs
and cows, 'n horses, 'n shit and they're
city slickers who ain't seen a nigger
live like this. And we talk music all night.

When Max 'n Mingus are ready to leave,
I decide to go with 'em. That's when Mingus
started layin' his WASPs is animals rap on us,
sayin' some white folks'd run over a cat like that.

The analogy is between a cat in traffic
and we shit-hot niggers, see. How a white man
would as soon squash a cat as get a flat
or wreck his car trying to avoid the cat.

Then when we're in the City of Angels
what does Mingus do but wreck a wheel
headin' for a hydrant to avoid a cat 
a real black cat no less. And we laughed.

See, it ain't all white folks. But a lot of 'em
treated us like animals in those days,
and they wouldn't even give Mingus sandwiches
for us at one restaurant and he's pale too.

So that had set him off. We had to
slap 'im down or he'd have landed us
in some hoosegow with his big mouth.
He's a talkative nigger and uppity, see.

Some of the shit Mingus said was heavy;
some was lighter than a mosquito's peter.
Still, when I threatened to bust him
upside the head with a bottle, he stopped.

A good thing too, cos Mingus could break my ass
like I was a match stick, if he took a notion.
Thing is Max was pissed. It was his Cadillac
Mingus racked up on the hydrant.

Just drove that friggin' analogy off the road.
The cat got off without a scratch.
Not me though. I had to run my own car
off the righteous road crankin' more smack.

It happened at the Lighthouse after I'd
sat in with Chet Baker, a cool white cat
who'd gleaned the top trumpet spot for '53.
It was Max's birthday and I was raggin' him.

Said I wouldn't pick up the bar tab.
It was his toot and he could pay,
only the bartender wasn't about to wait
for Max to come off his set to get paid.

So we had words and the motherfucker
says he's gonna lay a beatin' on me after,
and I said he didn't have to wait
and we got to bustin' up the furniture.

The heat comes down and Max and I
are the only two niggers in the place.
Blacks couldn't even come to the Lighthouse then,
so the police take me down to the station.

I had a knife in my pocket at the time.
Figured if they frisked me I was fucked,
so I started screamin' about my uncle in the NAACP
and how this cat had called me a motherfuckin' nigger

and thrown the first punch. Max had come down
to pick me up and was laughin' his head off.
That was the start of it and it got worse
out there in the city of no black hip angels.


I called home again, after some more shit.
Said I was ready to stare down my demons.
And this time I went back to Millstadt
to the pigs and cows and my big stallion H.

My father and sister, down from Chicago,
walked me around the grounds
and the rage inside me kind of quieted down.
Enough that I could stop lyin' to myself.

And my father says, "Miles, if it was
a woman that was torturing you,
I could tell you to get another woman
or leave that one alone. But this drug thing 

I can't do nothin' for you, son,
but give you my love and support.
The rest of it you got to do for yourself.
Well, I thought about Mingus's cat.

I thought about runnin' my demons to ground,
findin' that hydrant where I could bust off a wheel
and I locked myself into the guest house,
stayed until I kicked the habit cold turkey.

Man, I puked my guts out and writhed and moaned
and I had more bones that ached I couldn't touch
than I knew existed. Didn't eat for eight days,
and when Alice came to fuck my brains out, that hurt too.

I had blue balls from all I'd kept locked up in me
and I wanted to scream but didn't dare
with my father prowlin' around and listenin' in.
And then one day it was over, just like that.

I walked out into the clean sweet country air
and met my father's stare and smiled.
We fell into each other's arms and wept.
He knew and I knew I'd finally beat my jones.

And I was home and sat down to a fine spread
and ate like a motherfucker that night.
I don't believe I've eaten as heartily since
and a black cat crossed my path prim as a ballerina.