When Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991, in Santa Monica, California, of heart failure brought on by diabetes and pneumonia, he died in Jo Gelbard’s arms. Jo’s mother, Iris Kaplan, also a painter, told me this when Margaret and I had dinner with her and her husband, Lenny, a few months after Miles’ death. Iris told me that Jo had sensed he was going and just climbed into bed with him right before the end.
Just like that, he was gone. All that fierce energy, all that light and all that darkness. Gone. Just like that. A stroke paralyzed him, put him in the hospital. Then a second stroke killed him. (His father had died of a sudden stroke, and in the summer of 1996, his oldest sister, Dorothy, would die of stroke, too, so they seem to run in the family.) The official cause of death was given as pneumonia and, I think, heart failure.
Margaret told me that Miles had had a stroke when she met me at the San Diego airport in the first or second week of September. Dorothy, Miles’ sister, had just called to let me know and had asked her to have me call when I arrived. I had just talked to Miles on the phone earlier that week from Minneapolis, where I was spending a month as writer in residence at The Loft. We had talked about meeting the following week to begin outlining plans to collaborate on a musical we had been discussing. So when Margaret told me the bad news, I was shocked. I called Dorothy right away and she told me it wasn’t looking good for Miles, that he was paralyzed on his right side, that he was hooked up to all kinds of tubes, and that he was unconscious. “Are you coming up to see him?” she wanted to know. If I was, she would arrange a pass for me to get into the hospital.
I thought about it for a while and told her, “No, I’m not coming. I want to remember him like he was the last time I saw him.” I told her I didn’t want to see him lying up there helpless, with tubes running all up into him, up his nose. Told her I wanted to remember him—selfish as this might sound—alive, full of great energy, with that fierce attitude about him, told her I couldn’t bear seeing him helpless. I told her that I just couldn’t take that, that I was sorry, which I was. (A few years later, Ricky Wellman, Miles’ last drummer, told me he had gone to see Miles right before he passed and was shocked by the image of him lying there inert, seemingly waiting for death. Ricky said he found himself wishing sometimes he hadn’t seen Miles in this way, because this image seemed to dominate all the rest of the remembrances he had of Miles.)
Dorothy said she understood, that the family was there and that Clark Terry, Miles’ boyhood idol and old friend, was calling every day. She said that although he was unconscious, he would move his left hand ever so slightly every time he heard Clark Terry’s voice. I thought it was wonderful that Clark was calling Miles. It seemed that Miles had come full circle and was depending on his old friend again for emotional sustenance.
I was in Statesboro, Georgia, when Miles passed. I had gone there as the last stop on a ten-city poetry tour of the state. I found out about Miles’ death from the television when I came back to my hotel room in Statesboro. I saw his face flash on CNN and started to realize that he was gone. Although after talking to Dorothy I had known that he probably wouldn’t make it, his death still stunned me and left a hole in my heart. I loved the man, no matter what.
Miles’ death was peaceful and, considering the condition he was in, probably for the best. Had he survived, he would have been paralyzed and most likely bedridden for life. He would have been unable to play ever again and probably would have gone crazy in that condition. It would have been pure torture. Yes, I think under the circumstances, it’s best that he died and did not have to live as an invalid. He would have hated that.
After his death, I began to think that he knew he was dying, and perhaps that was why he got so angry with me when I reminded him that he had said he would rather die before he “played that old-time music again.” If he felt himself dying, maybe he thought that I had peeped his hold card. I don’t know. I do know that the last time I saw him he seemed weaker than he had ever seemed before.
Miles never talked about death; he even hated the subject being brought up. He hated going to funerals, too. In 1987, when I told him that James Baldwin had died, he hadn’t heard the news yet and couldn’t seem to get it together in his head that Jimmy was gone. They had been long-time friends, and Jimmy’s place in St. Paul de Vence in southern France was the only friend’s home I knew about that Miles stayed at when he was traveling.
After hearing of Jimmy’s death, Miles kept saying that he had just seen him earlier in the year when he had played France. He had known that Jimmy was sick but was convinced that of all his friends, Jimmy would outlive him. I thought I saw tears in his eyes, but if there were, Miles covered them up well by excusing himself and going into the bathroom. One thing was certain: Miles Davis wasn’t going to let me or anyone else see him cry. But I think on that cold December day in 1987 Miles Davis did cry for his great friend. He stayed in the bathroom for quite a while and when he came out there was no sign of tears, though his eyes were red and he was sniffing and blowing his nose into a handkerchief. “Man,” I remember thinking to myself, “Miles is one tough, thick-skinned motherfucka.”
After I asked him if he was going to attend Baldwin’s funeral, he said, “I ain’t going to no funeral. I don’t like no goddamn funerals, even if it is Jimmy Baldwin’s. I want to remember him in life, in the flesh, when he was livin’ and was a bad motherfucka and not some ghost of himself layin’ up in no coffin. That ain’t Jimmy,” he said in his hoarse whisper of a voice, “but just a pile of lifeless flesh and bones. Naw, man, I want to remember him how he was: a bad motherfucka. That’s all.” (That’s why I didn’t visit Miles in the hospital or go to his funeral; I wanted to remember him as the “bad motherfucka” he was.)
Throughout that day he talked about many of his friends who had died—Monk, Bird, Coltrane, Fats Navarro, Freddie Webster, Bud Powell, Red Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Clifford Brown, and many, many others. But he talked about his old drummer, Philly Joe Jones, the most, shaking his head and chuckling to himself every time he mentioned Philly Joe’s name. Miles didn’t laugh; he kind of chuckled, sometimes emitting a raspy, throaty shaking. It was clear that Miles had loved Philly Joe, and that day it was also clear that Miles had loved James Baldwin deeply.
That conversation was one of the rare times I heard Miles talk about death. That day I realized that Miles had lost many great friends; that with the exception of Dizzy Gillespie (who would die soon after Miles), Max Roach, Clark Terry, and a few others, Miles was almost the last of the beboppers.
Miles believed in the spirit, in life after death, and the last time I saw him—at his new Central Park West address, in the summer of 1991—he was talking about death. Maybe he knew that his time was coming, felt it in his body, or maybe his doctors had told him he didn’t have long. Miles talked about how he missed his father, Gil, and Coltrane. With his raspy voice and knowing chuckle he said that he would see them all soon enough and that he and Gil and Trane would play some great music again, together.