Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [83]
I don’t want to preach to nobody. I never have and I don’t want to begin now. But I do hope some kids will read this book and not miss the point of it. Maybe because I have no kids of my own—not yet—I still think you can help kids by talking straight to them.
If nobody can learn from the past, then there’s no point in raking it up. I’ve raked up my past so I could bury it. It’s worth it if just one youngster can learn one thing from it.
On a recent Sunday, Judge Jonah Goldstein talked about the narcotics problem on TV from New York. He told the people the same thing I’ve been trying to tell them; that narcotics has to be taken out of the hands of the police and turned over to the doctors. He said that in all his years on the bench he’d never seen anybody but poor people brought before him for violation of the dope laws.
He also said a man had come to him for advice recently because his twenty-year-old son had been hooked on dope. What did the judge advise him to do? Send the boy to England to school where doctors could treat him legally, cure him if they could, and if not, give him treatment legally just as if he had diabetes or something, so he could live a useful normal life.
That’s a hell of a recommendation for a judge to have to make in a civilized country; to admit that the only help a sick person hooked on drugs can get is outside this country; to admit that the only civilized way of handling the problem is to go somewhere else—if you’re lucky enough to have the loot. It’s sad but it’s true.
When I got hooked I was unlucky all round. In the first place, I didn’t know there was any such way of getting help. I didn’t know the civilized way they handled this thing in England and in most of Europe. Even if I did know, there was a war on and no damn way for me to get to England except to swim or join the WACs.
But maybe some of the kids who wouldn’t be caught taking advice from a judge will listen to me. I sure hope so. Dope never helped anybody sing better, or play music better, or do anything better. Take it from Lady Day. She took enough of it to know. If anybody ever tries to tell you that, you ask them if they think they know something about dope that Lady Day don’t know.
I think that my getting hooked on dope killed my own mother. It sure helped, anyway. And I think if a child of mine got hooked it would kill me. I don’t have the strength to watch anybody else go through the torture I went through to get clean and stay clean.
All dope can do for you is kill you—and kill you the long slow hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you. And that’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
The night of my big concert in London was the biggest thrill of my life and the biggest place I ever worked. A thirty-four-piece band to back me. Wow! And the audience? They don’t get them like that at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. After I was introduced you could have heard a pin drop in that huge place. You could hear my heels clicking on the floor as I walked to the center of the stage.
And when I was through, there was beautiful applause like you never heard in your life.
Another thing they do over there that made sense; you do three concerts in one night. One for an audience of youngsters; the second a big one for a regular mixed audience. And then the concert promoter has a night club where you work afterwards. This gives you a chance to dig everybody—kids, high hats, and people that drink—all in one night.
Then we did shows in small towns just a few minutes’ run on the train outside of London.
Only one thing gave me trouble in London, that was the food. I got so tired of fancy hotel food, one night I took out a little can of red beans that I’d carried all the way over there with me. I got me some garlic, some hamburger meat. I took out a can of Sterno and started cooking up a batch of red beans the way I like them. About enough for three people.
I thought I was going to get thrown out of the place for making a stink, but before