When I got back to this country in the summer of 1949 it was just like Kenny Clarke had told me—nothing had changed.
I don't know why I thought it would be any different than it was; I think I thought it would be different because of the way things had happened for me in Paris. I was still up into the illusion of what had happened to me there. But I knew deep down things hadn't changed in the United States. It had only been a couple of weeks. But I was living in an illusion of possibility, maybe a miracle had happened.
Paris was where I understood that all white people weren't the same, that some weren't prejudiced and others were. I had kind of known this after I met Gil Evans and some other people, but I really came to know it in Paris. It was an important thing for me to know and it made me conscious of what was happening around me politically. I started noticing things that I hadn't noticed before, political stuff—what was really happening to black people. I knew about that stuff before on account of growing up around my father. But I was so much into music that I didn't really pay any attention to it. Only when it hit me right in my face did I do something about it.
Around this time Adam Clayton Poweil from Harlem and William Dawson from Chicago were the two most powerful black politicians —I used to see Adam in Harlem because he really liked music. Ralph Bunche had just won the Nobel prize. Joe Louis had been heavyweight champion of the world for a long time by then, and he was every black person's hero—and a lot of white people's, too. Sugar Ray Robinson wasn't far behind him in popularity. Both of them used to hang out up in Harlem. Ray had a club up on Seventh Avenue. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby were playing baseball in the major leagues. Things were beginning to happen for black people in this country.
I had never been too political, but I knew how white people treated black people and it was hard for me to come back to the bullshit white people put a black person through in this country. To realize you don't have any power to make things different is a bitch.
In Paris—shit, whatever we played over there, right or wrong, was cheered, was accepted. That ain't good either, but that's the way it was and we came back over here and couldn't even find no work. International stars and couldn't get jobs. White musicians who were copying my Birth of the Cool thing were getting the jobs. Man, that shit hurt me to the quick. We got a few gigs here and there and I think we rehearsed an eighteen-piece band that summer, but that was it. I was only twenty-three years old in 1949 and I guess I expected more. I lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift. It wasn't like I didn't know what was happening to me. I did, but I didn't care anymore. I had such confidence in myself that even when I was losing control I really felt I had everything under control.
But your mind can play tricks on you. I guess when I started to hang like I did, it surprised a lot of people who thought I had it all together. It also surprised me how fast I eventually lost control.
I remember starting to fuck around a lot uptown in Harlem after I got back from Paris. There was a lot of dope around the music scene and a lot of musicians were deep into drugs, especially heroin. People—musicians—were considered hip in some circles if they shot smack. Some of the younger guys like Dexter Gordon, Tadd Dameron, Art Blakey, J. J.
Johnson, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, and myself—all of us—started to get heavily into heroin around the same time.
Despite the fact that Freddie Webster had died from some bad stuff. Besides Bird, Sonny Stitt, Bud Poweil, Fats Navarro, Gene Ammons were all using heroin, not to mention Joe Guy and Billie Holiday, too. They were shooting up all the time.
There were a lot of white musicians—Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, and Chet Baker—who were also heavy into shooting drugs. But the press back then used to try and make out like it was only black musicians who were doing it.
I wasn't never into that trip that if you shot heroin you might be able to play like Bird. I knew a lot of musicians who were into that, and Gene Ammons was one of them. That ain't what got me into heroin. What got me strung out was the depression I felt when I got back to America. That and missing Juliette.
And then there was cocaine, which was a real big Latin thing. Guys like Chano Pozo were heavy into cocaine. Chano was a percussionist in Dizzy's band. He was a black Cuban and the baddest conga player on the scene then. But he was a bully. He used to take drugs from people and wouldn't pay them. People were scared of him because he was a hell of a street fighter and would kick a motherfucker's ass in a minute. He was a big man and mean and used to carry this big
knife. He would terrorize people uptown. He got killed in 1948 after he slapped some Latin coke dealer upside his head up in Harlem in the Rio Cafe, on Lenox Avenue around 112th or 113th. The guy asked Chano for some money that he owed him and Chano just slapped the guy's face. The dealer got his gun and shot Chano to death. Man, him dying like that shook everybody up. This happened before I went to Paris, but it was a big part of what the whole drug scene was about.
Searching for dope uptown kept me away from my family even more. I had moved them into an apartment in Jamaica, Queens, then to St. Albans. So I was driving back and forth in my 1948 Dodge convertible—Sonny Rollins used to call it the "Blue Demon."
Irene and I didn't have any kind of family life anyway. We didn't have a whole lot of money to do things with, with the two kids and ourselves to feed and all. We didn't never go anywhere. Sometimes I used to stare into space for two hours just thinking about music. Irene would imagine that I was thinking about another woman. She'd find hair on my suit coat or my overcoat and she would swear that I had been out fucking with somebody. One reason Irene accused me of having other women was that I bought clothes off Coleman Hawk-ins, who was a notorious ladies' man with all kinds of hair on his clothes. But I wasn't into women at that time. So we would just get into these arguments over nothing. It used to piss me off. I really liked Irene and everything. She was a very nice person, a good woman, but for someone else. She was a real classy lady and fine. It was me who wanted something different. It was me, not her, who started fucking up royally.
After I met Juliette Greco, I kind of knew what I wanted in a woman. If it wasn't going to be Juliette, then it was going to be someone with her way of looking at life and her style, both in and out of bed. She was independent, her own thinker, and I liked that.
I basically left Irene sitting at home with the kids because I didn't want to be there. One of the reasons why I stopped coming home was that I felt so bad that I couldn't hardly face my family. Irene had had such confidence and faith in me.
Gregory and Cheryl, the kids, were still young and didn't know exactly what was going on. But Irene knew. It was all there in her eyes.
I left her in the care of Betty Carter, the singer. If it hadn't been for Betty Carter I don't know what Irene would have done. Because of the way I treated Irene back in those days, I think Betty Carter, even today, don't like me much. I can't blame her, because I was a no-count motherfucker in those days as far as providing for my family went. I didn't mean to leave Irene stranded the way I did, but I was sick with a heroin habit and my dreams of the woman I wanted, and that's all I could think about.
When you're doing heroin all the time, you really lose your desire to have sex with a woman, at least I did. But people like Bird seemed to want to have sex whether they were off heroin or shooting every day. It didn't seem to make a difference to them. I enjoyed having sex with Irene—like I enjoyed having Juliette. But after I got my habit, I didn't even think about having sex, and I didn't enjoy it when I did. The only thing I could think about was how I was going to cop me some more heroin.
I wasn't shooting it in my veins yet, but I was snorting as much as I could get my hands on. One day I was standing on this corner in Queens with my nose running and shit. I felt like I had a fever or a cold. This hustler friend of mine who called himself "Matinee" came up and asked what I had been doing. I told him I had been snorting heroin and coke and that I had been doing it every day and on this particular day I hadn't gone into Manhattan where I used to cop the shit.
Matinee looked at me like I was a fool and told me that I had a habit.
"What do you mean, a habit?" I said.
Matinee told me, "Your nose is running, you got chills, you weak. You got a motherfucking habit, nigger." Then he bought me some heroin in Queens. I had never bought heroin in Queens. I snorted the stuff Matinee copped for me and I felt just fine. My chills went away, my nose stopped running, and I didn't feel weak no more. I continued my snorting but when I saw Matinee again he said. "Miles, don't waste that little money on getting some to snort, because you still gonna be sick. Go on and shoot it, then you'll feel much better." That was the beginning of a four-year horror show.
After a while, I was driven to getting dope, because I knew if I didn't get it I was going to be sick. And when you got sick it was like having the flu. Your nose would run, your joints would ache real bad, and if you didn't shoot some heroin into your veins, pretty soon you would start to vomit. That shit was terrible. So I avoided being in that situation at all costs.
When I first started shooting heroin, I shot up by myself. Then I started hanging out. Me, a tap dancer named Leroy, and a guy we called Laffy was copping up on 110th, lllth, and 116th streets up in Harlem. We were hanging in bars like the Rio, the Diamond, Sterling's, LaVant's pool hall, places like that. We were snorting coke along with heroin, all day long.
When I wasn't with Leroy, I was with either Sonny Rollins or Walter Bishop—and a little later on, with Jackie McLean or maybe Philly Joe Jones, who was around then, too.
We'd buy $3 caps of heroin and shoot it up. We'd do four or five caps a day, according to how much money we had.
We'd go over to Fat Girl's apartment in the Cambridge Hotel, on 110th Street between Seventh and Lenox; or sometimes to Walter Bishop's house to shoot up. We'd have to go to Bishop's house to get our "works"— our needles and whatever we was using to tie our arms up with so we could "pop" or "hit," make the veins we were going to be shooting the dope into stand up so we could see them. Sometimes we'd get so high that we'd leave our works at Bishop's house. Then we'd go hang around Minton's and watch the tap dancers dueling each other.
I loved to look at and listen to tap dancers. They are so close to music in the way they make their taps sound. They are almost like drummers and you can learn a lot from just listening to the rhythms they get from their taps. In the daytime, outside Minton's next to the Cecil Hotel, tap dancers used to come up there and challenge each other on the sidewalk. I especially remember duels between the dancers Baby Laurence and a real tall, skinny dude named Ground Hog. Baby and Ground Hog were junkies, and so they used to dance a lot in front of Minton's for their drugs, because the dealers liked to watch them. They gave them shit for free if they got down. There'd be a crowd all around and they would be dancing like motherfuckers. Baby Laurence was so bad, man, it's hard to describe how great he was. But Ground Hog didn't take no backseat to Baby, now. He was real hip and cleaner than a broke-dick dog, you know, his clothes and everything. Buddy Briggs was another great tap dancer, and so was a guy named L. D., and Fred and Sledge, and the Step Brothers. Most of these guys were dope addicts, though I don't know about the Step Brothers. Anyway, if you weren't in the "in" crowd you didn't know nothing about the dancing in front of Minton's. Those tap dancers used to talk about Fred Astaire and all of them other white dancers like they were nothing, and they weren't nothing compared to how these guys could dance. But they were black and couldn't ever hope to get no break dancing for real money and fame.
By this time I was getting really famous and a whole lot of musicians were starting to kiss my ass like I was somebody important. I was into whether I should stand like this or that, should I hold my trumpet this way or that way when I played. Should I do this or that, speak to the audience, tap my right foot or left foot. Should I tap my foot inside of my shoe so nobody would see me doing it? I was into that kind of shit when I got to be twenty-four. Plus, while in Paris, I had found out that I wasn't as bad a player as a lot of them old-time motherfuckers had said I was. My ego was bigger than it had been before I left. I changed from a real shy person into someone confident.
1950 Trapped
By 1950 I had moved back to Manhattan and was staying in the Hotel America down on 48th Street. A lot of musicians were living there, like dark Terry, who had finally come up to New York. dark was playing in Count Basic's band then, I think, and so he'd be out on the road a lot. Baby Laurence used to hang out there at the hotel, too. A lot of junkies were living there also.
I was really heavy into heroin and also began to hang out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd. This group included, besides Sonny, the pianist Gil Coggins, Jackie McLean, Walter Bishop, Art Blakey (who was actually from Pittsburgh, but who hung out a lot up in Harlem), Art Taylor, and Max Roach, who was from Brooklyn. I also think I met John Coltrane for the first time during this period while he was playing in one of Dizzy's bands. I think I first heard him play at a club up in Harlem.
Anyway, Sonny had a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem. People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else. He was a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians. Some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of Bird. I know one thing—he was close. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas. I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off. (But 1 think later Coltrane's playing affected him and made him change his style. If he had kept doing what he was doing w hen I first heard him, I think he would have been an even greater player than what he is now, today—and he's still a very great player.)
Sonny had just got back from playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked Sonny, or "Newk" as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn Dodgers' pitcher, Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonnv was in a cab coming from buying some dope. when the white cahdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, "Damn, you're Don Newcomhe!" Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put
that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonnv started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening. So Sonny was feeling mischievous on this day and tells the cabdriver that he would leave tickets in his name at the gate. After that, the cabdriver treated us like gods.
I had a job at the Audubon Ballroom and so I asked Sonny to join the band, and he did. Coltrane was in that band, as was Art Blakey on drums. All of them—Sonny, Art, and Coltrane—were using a lot of heroin at the time, so being around them a lot like I was just got me into it deeper.
By this time, Fats Navarro was a real bad junkie, pitiful. Fat Girl's wife, Lena, was worried about him all the time. She was white. They had a little girl named Linda. He was a jolly kind of person, short and fat before the drugs got to him.
But by now, he was skin and bones, walking around with this terrible cough wracking through his body all the time. He would literally shake all over every time he coughed. It was sad to see him like that. He was such a beautiful cat. man.
and a great trumpet player. I really loved him. I would hang with him sometimes and shoot up with him. too. Me and Fat Girl and Ben Harris, another trumpet player. Fat Girl hated him. I knew it. but I thought Benny w as all right. After we'd get off, we'd sit around and talk about music, about the old days up at Minton's when Fat Girl would be blowing away everybody that came through the door. I would tell him shit—technical shit—about the trumpet, because, see, Fat Girl
and a great trumpet player. I really loved him. I would hang with him sometimes and shoot up with him. too. Me and Fat Girl and Ben Harris, another trumpet player. Fat Girl hated him. I knew it. but I thought Benny w as all right. After we'd get off, we'd sit around and talk about music, about the old days up at Minton's when Fat Girl would be blowing away everybody that came through the door. I would tell him shit—technical shit—about the trumpet, because, see, Fat Girl