Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [82]
The stuff they wrote about me in Europe made me feel alive. Over here some damn body is always trying to embalm me. I’m always making a comeback, but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.
Anybody who knows anything about singing says I’m for sure singing better than I ever have in my life. If you don’t think so, just listen to some of my old sides like “Lover Come Back” or “Yesterdays,” and then listen to the same tunes as I have recorded them again in recent years. Listen and trust your own ears. For God’s sake don’t listen to the tired old columnists who are still writing about the good old days twenty years ago.
After a press conference in London I went out in the morning to pick up the shoes I’d left in the hall to be polished, and there was my picture on the front page, and what I told them they printed. They even got it straight and it made sense.
In London they were tops. But, as usual, it only takes one guy to put people on edge. In London it was a photographer who couldn’t wait to ask me about dope. No matter what the other cats were asking me about, this one would try to get us all back on dope.
Max stepped in and said, “Listen, man, Miss Holiday didn’t come all the way to Britain to give lectures on narcotics. We’re interested in music here, not dope. Even if she’s on it, Britain is a civilized country where she can get to a private physician and get it legit.”
This was something I hadn’t known. You just take for granted sometimes that if things are mixed up and crazy in America they got to be that way everywhere. But not in Britain, or most of Europe either. Sick people who are on stuff over there are treated like sick people. They go to their own doctor and he gives them what they need. If he can help them get off, he does, by gradually lowering the dose. If he can’t he keeps them in shape by giving them what they need to go on working and living a normal life. Nobody has to risk his life by going to the black market and paying a hundred bucks for something worth four cents—and then getting stuff that’s so bad it’s liable to kill you. There’s little if any black-marketing or profiteering. People don’t have to go out shoplifting, mugging, or robbing one another to get money to buy stuff this way!
Americans used to make fun of the British health system, where sick people could go to doctors and hospitals for free and the government picked up the tab. We laughed about them handing out false teeth and wooden legs for free. We hollered about this being government interference with the practice of medicine.
Well, let me tell you, in America if they haven’t got government interference in medicine I don’t know what it is. If you’re on and you get a doctor for help, he can’t help you because the government has passed out regulations saying, in effect, that if he does he will go to jail along with you. If you go to the doctor, he’s liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops.
Most countries in Europe are civilized about it and they have no “narcotics problem” at all. One day America is going to smarten up and do the same thing.
It may not even happen in my lifetime. Whether it does or not is no skin off mine, because I can’t possibly be hurt any more than I have been. But for the sake of other people who’ve got to suffer until the country wakes up, for the sake of young kids whose whole life will be ruined because they are sent to jail instead of a hospital, I pray to God that we wake up soon over here.
All you have to do is look at the story of my life. If there’s any moral at all in it, it’s this:
If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.
The only thing that can happen to you is sooner or later you’ll get busted, and once