“The dead are dying of thirst.” My friend Norman Mailer wrote that years ago in his book about the heavyweight championship fight in Zaire, Africa, between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
I once asked him what he meant by those words, and he described something drawn from Egyptian mythology about an afterlife where the dead roamed seeking solace and understanding, if not forgiveness.
I have since taken these words as my own in the interpretation Henry Miller might have given them, that the living (whom Miller considered “the dead”) long for fulfillment.
• • •
In 1985, I was among the dead dying of thirst. After a long career in journalism, which had taken me from the sports department of the largest newspaper in New Jersey to the Village Voice, where I had been the first black senior editor, I had ventured into filmmaking to produce a film about Miller, before I was lured back to publishing by a call to meet with Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine.
In a surreally memorable afternoon in his East Side townhouse, Guccione told me that he was giving his son a magazine, to be called Spin—a magazine, he said, that he “wanted to be like Rolling Stone.” Surrounded by one of the greatest private art collections in the world, opposite a postmodern cultural Nero, dressed in a long brown terry cloth robe and adorned in gold chains and a bouffant that rose atop a classically handsome face, in the capital of an empire that was Camelot to anyone tired of the Hefnerian kingdom, I heard myself say, “Well, I’m not the guy for that job.”
To Guccione’s puzzled look, I explained—“Rolling Stone exists and has grown old. I would want to create a magazine that Rolling Stone would want to be like. I’m that guy.”
I was younger then, and taking a lot of risks. So, I waited for Guccione’s response, which came quickly. “I want you to take this job.”
The job was to help launch a new magazine to give Rolling Stone a run. I was also that guy, someone who liked doing things for the sheer competition.
So, we opened our doors and immediately began competing.
Everyone remembers things his or her own way, and repetition inevitably affects recollection. If failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers, then I am one of the fathers to a wonderful memory and achievement. Spin, true to my youthful boast to Bob Guccione, became the magazine that Rolling Stone wanted to be like. Month after month, stories that we published beat them into the public imagination—always followed by a trailing attempt at the story in the Stone.
One story, however, was singularly different from all the others we were doing, and it could not be followed or imitated.
• • •
Quincy Troupe was an Upper West Side legend when I was introduced to him by one of my writers at the Voice. I remember a few things on first sighting—he had flowing dreadlocks, a massive head, an elegant Asian-meets-African sartorial style. And he had the most famous bachelor pad uptown.
It wasn’t hard to see why extraordinary women flocked to Quincy. He was a beautiful man, a gloriously talented poet, and an All-American basketball player. What god gifts one man with so many talents?
We first met because I heard that Quincy was moving “back” to Harlem—from that epic apartment in a doorman building on what I considered the most beautiful street in New York, West End Avenue, to a Harlem drenched in poverty and murder and about to welcome the scourge of crack. Quincy was moving right into the middle of it with Margaret Porter, the woman who was to become his wife and mother to his two children, coming to live with him for the first time.
I asked him to write that story for me—of moving from the luxury of the West Side to the Dantean hell of that Harlem—with a new family. I was deeply moved by his description in our conversations of the feeling that was drawing him to Harlem, a place where he had never lived, coming from St. Louis, but to which he felt he was being called.
The story he wrote for the Voice, “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” accompanied by the wondrous photography of the great Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee, depicting blacks in their most elegant dress on Harlem’s great boulevards, was poetry—the savage poetry of Algren and Camus; the complex poetry of Faulkner and Baldwin and Ellison; the musical poetry of Ellington and Coltrane, Bird and Miles; the poetry of Quincy Troupe.
• • •
Miles Davis haunted my Upper West Side neighborhood in the mid-’80s. He had had homes in the area and frequently played—or just stalked—the landmark club Mikell’s, a jazz-art bar tucked into a kind of country house on Columbus Avenue at Ninety-Seventh Street. As yin to the yang of the elegant “player’s bar” just down the street, the Cellar, where the hustlers, sharps, dealers of all Manhattan’s darkest charms congregated, Mikell’s was a place for poets, writers, dancers, musicians, intellectuals. The bartender was David Baldwin, and his brother, the great novelist, “Jimmy,” often held court there among New York’s uptown cultural elite. At Mikell’s, you could hear Basie, Dizzy, Marsalis, Monk, all swinging. It was cozy and stimulating, unpretentious but demanding that everyone bring “something” to the room—talk, ideas, musicianship, style.
Miles was known for possessing at least three of those talents. However, he only talked to who he wanted to talk to. With Baldwin, the talk flowed as it does between two friends in a deep bond. To strangers, Miles was known to be savagely dismissive.
By the mid-’80s, he was also pretty fucked up a lot of the time.
Many mornings on my way to the Spin offices, I would see him in withering shape. Asleep in his Lamborghini on 101st Street, emerging from apartment buildings known to house crack dens, drunk at a neighborhood restaurant, starting a fistfight in a bar. Scheduled to play at Mikell’s, he would often arrive, take the stand, play a few notes, glare at the crowd, and then leave. Some nights, he just didn’t show.
Convinced Davis was on some streak that would end in self-destruction, I decided to try to get “the last interview” and approached him on one of those Mikell’s nights when he didn’t play. I introduced myself as the editor of a new magazine he had surely never heard of—and for some reason I will never understand, he gave me his phone number.
After the beautiful work Quincy had done at the Voice, I was determined to convince him to come and write for me at Spin. I gave him carte blanche—what do you want to write about? Who do you want to write about? He presented a list—Michael Jackson and Miles were on the list. But when I called him to assign the interview with Miles, I found that his mood had changed. He angrily refused the assignment, with an expletive-laced verbal rejection letter that shocked me for its sheer violence.
I responded with fury of my own. I just sent him the contract with a message that I left on his answering machine, “It’s fifteen hundred words. You have a three-month deadline. Here’s Miles’s number. I don’t care if you do it or not.”
Then I put it out of my mind, until the deadline was nearing and now I needed to know if I had a story or not.
That’s when Quincy stopped taking my calls altogether. For four months, five months, six months.
My mother used to have an expression, “If you pray to the Lord and you don’t get a response, the answer was ‘no.’”
He had rejected the assignment, I concluded, and moved on. At the same time, I stopped seeing Miles in the neighborhood.
Then one day, Quincy walked in unannounced and dropped what seemed like a ream of typewriter paper on my desk. It was, he announced, “the Miles Davis story.” The heft of the box alone told me that it wasn’t 1,500 words. In fact it was ten times that—150,000 words.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I fumed.
“Why don’t you try reading it,” the poet challenged.
So I did. In one afternoon, out of the office so as not to be distracted, sitting on a bench in Central Park, I read it all. And sat still for some time afterward.
He had done it. He had “found” Miles—a Miles we didn’t know existed, a Miles vastly different from the laconic, angry, brutal, beautiful monster of the trumpet that we knew, hardly knew.
The piece was poetry and music. And it was pure Miles—and pure Quincy.
We had never had a story of that length in the magazine, not even close. And we never would again.
It demanded to be published in its entirety—and we did, giving it two issues of the magazine, with gorgeous photography.
The story caused a sensation in New York. One day, the Rolling Stones walked in off the street asking for copies of the magazine. Standing at a nearby bar one night, the great Ruben Blades asked if I could get him the first issue, having stumbled across the second. Sting’s office called for copies for him.
I remember that story as if it were yesterday. If you’re lucky as an editor, there are a handful of stories that manage to bring you joy years after their publication. “Miles Davis” by Quincy Troupe was one of those. It was the best of what we were about at Spin. It was the best of what I had ever wanted to be as an editor.
It was beautiful.
—Los Angeles, January 2018