I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [9]
Although she was two grades behind Sly, Ria shared choir practice with him, and apparently a certain amount of classroom mischief. Despite their superior voices, they both ended up flunking one semester of choir, having amused themselves by baiting a substitute teacher. As far as Ria knew, Sly got "great grades" otherwise, and was generally a standout among the student body. "He was a star before he ever became a star," she says. "He just glittered when he walked, like Richard Cory," in the poem by Edward Arlington Robinson, which was also a popular folk song.
Ria points to other juvenile harbingers of later Sly Stone behavior, including "his smile, and his ability to put everybody on. And I understood what he was doing, and most people didn't. He always told me I was probably the lamest person he ever knew, but, man, when people would talk to him or ask him things, he'd go off and say the craziest stuff, and I knew he'd be putting them on. And they'd just say, `Oh, thank you, Sylvester!"'
Through all this, Sly began to count on Ria as a good friend in frisky female form. She'd follow him downtown on Saturdays, where daddy K. C. Stewart worked in the Higgins Building, and the friends would ride the elevator, one of the few then in town, for hours. It was during the formation of the future Viscaynes that Ria was shanghaied by Frank and Sly, who'd separately become aware of her musical training and ability. "I was walking across the campus one lunch hour," she says, "and they grabbed my arms on either side and said, `You're coming with us.' And they took me over to Sly's mother's house. It was a nice home on a kind of hill, it wasn't in an extremely dangerous or bad part of town, and they had me sing for'em. And Mama cooked us lunch, and that's when I became a member [of the budding group]."
After about a year, the friendly simmer between Ria and Sly heated up to a romance. "I wouldn't call it `dating,' because that wasn't allowed [between blacks and whites]. I would call it"-she hesitates-"what would you say? I hate to use the word `sneaking,' 'cause that's such a terrible word. But I don't know how many people knew. We tried to keep it under cover, because my father told Sly that he would kill him if he found out we were seeing each other. My mother is a very devout Catholic woman, and she only wanted my safety and [Sly's] safety, especially from my father or anyone else who would cause us problems because of it." In a few years, Sly would be ready and eager to hang out with white women in the open, though society wouldn't be ready to condone such relationships for a while longer.
Sly and Ria's romance built on their friendship. "We could tell each other secrets, you know, kid secrets," she says. "Talk about our dreams, spend hours on the phone together. Get away together whenever we could." In the meantime, they openly dated others with whom they wouldn't be violating any unwritten code. "I was dating the football captain," says Ria, "and [Sly] was dating a darling, tiny little black girl. I don't know how he felt about me going out with other people, 'cause I didn't `share myself' with other boys. And I don't know whether he did, with this girl or any of the other girls I heard he'd seen." She did find out, by asking, that he'd bought his girlfriend a bedroom heater for Christmas, and she pronounced this act "kind."
On the Dick Stewart-inspired junket to Los Angeles, Ria found a legitimate reason to hang on openly and tightly to Sly: it was his first plane trip, and he was scared. She didn't know it at the time, but the hotel on Hollywood Boulevard that put the Viscaynes up was one of the few in the area to accept racially mixed groups at that time. After a late night of relatively tame teen fun, "I was the only one that