• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 312 0

the Viscaynes. Charlene Imhoff Davidson, now a successful banker in nearby Napa, had told me, "I'd love to just sit down and talk with him ... because l knew him when, that young man who was very caring and lovely and talented." Maria Boldway Douglas, living with her husband and granddaughter in Arizona, envisioned a get-together where "we'd probably just hug each other, and he'd give me that crazy, wicked smile, and we'd just start laughing."

"I'm finding person after person who has lots of love for you," I tell Sly, "like Charlene and Maria-"

"Ria Boldway!" Sly exclaimed, recalling her maiden name. "Where's she now?"

"She's in Arizona, married for the second time, still singing."

"Yeah!" Sly sighed warmly. "They're good people. I gotta get their numbers from you."

"What would you want to give to those folks?"

"Just new stuff. That's all I have."

The old but proud Packard pulled into the car wash of Sly's choice.

"Did it feel like a big change, moving up here from L.A.?"

"Yeah, but I welcomed the change. I get to make my own schedule, pretty much."

"Why couldn't you do that in L.A.?" Of course, I'd heard and read plenty of reports about the various levels of distraction in those years down there.

"'Cause everybody had something to do with what time I was supposed to be wherever," Sly responded, with an elusive chuckle. "Up here it's pretty fair, pretty even."

"And you don't get too lonely?"

"I can stimulate excitement," Sly assured, "or I can just kick back and watch other things go."

"And when you're kicking back," I persisted, "what are you paying attention to, what turns you on?"

He gazed out the window at some of the car wash customers hanging around the facility. "Like those girls waiting over there," Sly chortled. "Wait, I'm gonna go inside, I'll be back."

He ambled off in the general direction of the local ladies. I'd been alerted to Sly's tendency to disappear and reappear on whim, so I wasn't surprised when he didn't return. Using his cell phone, he'd secured a separate ride home from Rikki Gordon, leaving Neal and me to pilot the Packard back to the mansion. After another wait there, I got to continue the chat across the kitchen table, with Rikki witnessing. Sly's departed parents, K. C. and Alpha Stewart, also looked on, smiling from a color photograph placed under a luxuriant vase of flowers nearby.

"If you go back to stuff like `Life,' it sounds like you were writing about yourself. Is that true nowadays? Is it about what you're learning and feeling?"

"Or what I'm imagining. It's all the time about myself. Basically, I don't care what nobody says or nothin'. If I didn't get the most out of something, I wouldn't do it."

What I've seen of Sly performing live and on YouTube over the past year hasn't convinced me that he's been getting the most out of his music. "It seems to me that I haven't been hearing enough of you playing your keyboard," I tell him.

"They couldn't afford to take roadies and get the right equipment, and do a lot of the things required for me to be ready to play. I don't mind workin' but I ain't gonna work like that again."

"So you'll be doing more singing and playing during your sets?"

"Yeah, I will, I will, it's just a matter of money, and at the same time letting everybody know that I don't mind showing up on time every night, if necessary. You know what I mean?"

"Your health is good?"

"I feel good, I feel much better."

"If you had to choose, what do you think is your best album?"

Sly chuckled. "The next one. And that's what I really think."

"What kind of songs are we gonna hear on it?"

"The latest one goes, let's see ... I'm the real model /And I ain't the role model / I got a dog named Duck with a stroll-waddle / If I see you in the desert, I got the cold bottle / 'cause I'm the real model /I ain't the role model." He smiled, hoping his self-appreciation was being shared. "I like to not have people try to make me a role model. I don't like that, 'cause I don't think anybody should have that burden. Everybody's gotta be a role model, either everybody or nobody.