CHAPTER SIX

On Halloween night in 1964 my friend Larry Willis and I headed to the Village Gate, where the trumpeter Hugh Masekela was performing. Hugh was a friend of ours, but seeing him wasn’t the only reason we were going. On the way to the club I said to Larry, “Let’s pick up some girls.”

I was twenty-four years old, playing in Miles Davis’s band, and had a hot car and my own apartment now, so picking up girls was the name of the game. Since moving to New York, I’d had a few girlfriends, but mostly I was having fun and sowing my wild oats. I was making up for lost time, really, because in high school and college I wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man.

Although I’d dated a couple of girls in high school, I was still a virgin when I got to college. At Grinnell I went out with a few women, but the dating pool at a school of twelve hundred students in the middle of Iowa was a whole lot smaller than in New York City, which was filled with beautiful, interesting women. Now I was having way too much fun to settle down with anybody.

So that Halloween night we were looking for some pretty girls to “talk to.” But Hughey came over to our table after his last set, and we got into a conversation and lost track of time. When we finally wrapped things up with him, the waiters were sweeping the floor and putting the chairs upside down on the tables, and all the women who’d been in the club were gone.

“Oh, shit,” I said. And we started to walk out of the club.

Except . . . there was one group of people left. A guy I knew named Bobby Packer, who was actually a waiter at the club but had taken the night off, was sitting at a table with three women. “Come on, Larry,” I said. “Bobby doesn’t need all three for himself. Let’s get over there.”

As we walked up to the table I could see that two of the girls were pretty but one of them was really fine. She had jet-black hair, pale blue eyes, and an amazing figure. And there was something about the way she carried herself, a self-confidence, that was really sexy. Her name was Gigi, and I knew right away she was somebody I’d like to get to know.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the same feeling about me. I thought I was looking pretty sharp that night, in a gray silk suit and a leather jacket, but I also had a brand-new Nikon camera hanging on a strap around my neck. That summer I’d toured Japan with the quintet, and I guess I was still in tourist mode. As Gigi told me later, she looked at me and thought, That one’s kind of cute, but what a square!

The six of us left the Village Gate and went to a bar called the Red Garter, where we had drinks and played cards. And even though Gigi wasn’t all that interested in me, one of the other girls, Effie, said, “Gigi’s having a dinner party at her place on Monday, and you’re all invited.” I said I’d go, mainly because I wanted to see Gigi again.

What was it about Gigi? She was different from other women I’d met, so much more intriguing. She was gorgeous, but it wasn’t just her looks. She seemed feisty and strong, like my mother. She was brutally honest, no matter who she was talking to, and so full of energy and life that I couldn’t imagine there would ever be a dull moment with her around.

Gigi had grown up in East Germany, and she didn’t know anything about jazz, a fact I liked. That first night, when I told her I was a musician, she said, “Ah, that’s nice. But what do you do for a living?”

“That,” I said.

“You play in a band?”

“Yes, with Miles Davis.”

“Who’s he?” she asked. She had never heard of Miles—and in fact, that night was the only time she’d ever set foot in a jazz club. She obviously wasn’t bowled over by my looks or my job, so I was going to have to find another way to make an impression. But at least I knew that if she did end up liking me, it wasn’t just because she was some kind of jazz groupie.

That Monday I went to Gigi’s apartment for the dinner party. I got there a little late, and Gigi was tied up in conversation with another guy. I kept looking for a moment to approach her, but she always seemed to be talking with someone else. After a while I just gave up and started paying attention to her roommate, a woman named Kristin.

Kristin was nice, but at a certain point, having failed to get Gigi’s attention throughout the party, I’d had enough. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thank you for dinner.” Kristin got up to walk me out, and just as we got to the door I heard Gigi’s voice from inside the apartment: “Kristin! You have a phone call!” Kristin went back inside to take it—and Gigi instantly appeared at my side. She walked me to the elevator, and I knew it was now or never. “I’d like to see you again,” I said. “Do you want to go to the movies sometime?”

“Okay,” she said. “How about Wednesday?” And we made a date.

When I stepped into the elevator, I was floating on air. All right! I said to myself. Thank goodness for the perfect timing of that phone call.

But of course there was no phone call. Gigi had made it up to distract Kristin so she could walk me out herself. Sometime during the evening she had decided I was worth getting to know after all, so she had to act quickly when I started to leave unexpectedly. As I would soon learn, Gigi is not a woman who hesitates when she wants something.

We started dating, and from the very beginning it was unlike any other relationship I’d ever had. Gigi always spoke her mind, and we challenged each other, like sparring partners. On one of our first dates we went to a bar and ended up in a heated disagreement. I don’t even recall what it was about, but I do remember the passion we argued with, and the exhilaration I felt just being with her.

On another of our early dates Gigi invited me to dinner at her apartment. She was preparing coq au vin, but because she didn’t have the right wine, she ended up making “coq au whiskey.” It was delicious, and I thought, Wow—all this, and she can cook, too! But by the third or fourth time she made me dinner, it was still coq au vin, and she finally had to admit that it was the only dish she knew how to make.

Gigi could always make me laugh, but she taught me a lot, too. She ran the film department at the American Federation of Arts, and she was well versed in visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, and photography—none of which I knew anything about. I had always been focused exclusively on music. But she introduced me to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and other Pop artists of the sixties, as well as filmmakers like Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut. In our relationship she was the eyes and I was the ears, and we never got tired of talking about our respective passions.

There was so much I liked about her. We could talk for hours, and I always felt comfortable with her, right from the start. Our budding relationship wasn’t built on just sexual attraction, or on our comfort level together, or even on mutual admiration, though it had all those elements. It was the balance of them all that made me want to keep seeing her. And she made me feel special, too, because women loved her, men loved her—everybody loved her. But she was dating me.

From the time I started playing with Miles, he had one rule when it came to women: “Don’t bring no bitches to the gig,” he said. “Everybody plays different.” We knew what he meant: Whenever a guy brings his girlfriend to a gig, he ends up playing to impress her. Miles wanted us to be completely free in our playing, not worrying about what somebody else might think.

Every once in a while Miles could sense when one of us had a girlfriend in the room. “Where is she?” he’d say. “I know she’s here. Too much sugar in the music.” And he was always right. I wanted Gigi to hear us play, though, so I told her she could come to a gig but that I couldn’t bring her. We’d have to arrive separately, and I wouldn’t acknowledge her while I was playing.

One night a few weeks after we started dating Gigi was supposed to come see us play at the Village Vanguard. I tried not to look for her, but of course I couldn’t help myself—I scanned the crowd throughout the first set and didn’t see her. When I couldn’t find her during the second set, either, I wondered what had happened. So during the break, I went to the club’s pay phone and dialed her number.

She picked up, and her voice sounded husky, as if she’d been crying. “What happened?” I asked. “I thought you were coming tonight.”

“Herbie,” she said, “I have to tell you something. We can’t see each other anymore. I’ve gotten engaged to someone else.”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but that wasn’t even on the list. I had no idea she had been seeing anybody else, but apparently she’d been dating a handsome, wealthy Persian businessman named Hamid, who lived in Paris but also had a place in New York. They would see each other when he came to town, and when he came that weekend, he asked her to marry him—and she said yes. She knew she’d have to tell me tonight that she couldn’t see me anymore, and she’d gotten upset. When I called, she was sitting in the bathtub, trying not to cry.

I didn’t know what to say. Gigi and I had been seeing a lot of each other, but we hadn’t yet slept together or said “I love you.” I had to assume she loved this guy, and although I was really disappointed, I certainly didn’t want to stand in her way. So I just said, “Well, I wish you all the luck.” And I hung up.

As I walked back onstage for the next set, my mind was a jumble. I tried to clear it out so I could play, but one thought kept popping back into my head. Despite feeling upset and disappointed, I realized that I wanted Gigi to be happy, whether that included me or not. If this other guy made her happy, then that’s what I wanted for her, because at that moment her happiness meant more to me than mine did. I had never felt that way about anyone before, and the feeling surprised me.

Somehow I made it through the set. Mercifully, the evening was soon over, but as I walked back to the dressing room someone said, “Herbie, you have a phone call.” I went to the phone, and it was Gigi. She was crying.

“I broke off the engagement,” she said. She told me that as soon as we’d hung up earlier, she had realized her mistake. “I don’t love him,” she said. “I love you.” This was the first time she’d said that to me, and I thought my heart might fly out of my chest. A few weeks later she moved in with me.

That same fall Wayne Shorter joined the quintet. I had met Wayne back in 1961, when Donald Byrd invited us both to play on his record Free Form. Since then Wayne and I had run into each other from time to time. I knew he was a brilliant musician, but I didn’t know him very well personally when he replaced Sam Rivers in September of 1964. Tony Williams and I had been scheming to get him in the band for months because of the way he played.

Wayne was scheduled to join us for a two-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl called “Modern Sounds ’64,” where the quintet was playing as part of a lineup that included the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, João Gilberto, and Nina Simone. Miles flew Wayne out to Los Angeles, and we had just one rehearsal together before playing that first show. But it didn’t matter: From the minute Wayne stepped in, the magic started to flow.

The beauty of Wayne was that he was just out there, as both a composer and a player. His mind works differently than anybody else’s I know, and he has a playfulness and curiosity that shine through in his music. Wayne was never afraid to break the rules and experiment. He’d do it just for fun, to keep things lively, but then he’d hit on something so brilliant you couldn’t imagine how he came up with it.

Once we were all up onstage, just firing away—notes flying everywhere, Tony playing as if he had eight arms. I mean, we were really cooking. We got up to Wayne’s solo, and he was about to do what we called strolling, which meant that all the rest of us would drop out and he’d be playing completely alone, with no accompaniment. And suddenly Wayne started playing these weird, ghostly tones, blowing into the horn so you could hear the air going through with just the faintest suggestion of a note. When he started doing that, Tony and I just looked at each other like, Whoa! Where did that come from? It was strangely beautiful, almost like a whispering. I’d never heard anything like it.

Miles loved it, of course, because he always wanted us to experiment and push the limits of our playing. He expected all of us to continuously create, without having to lean on him or anyone else. The one thing none of us ever wanted to hear was “Oh, that guy’s skating”—when you were playing with Miles, the word “skate” was not in the dictionary. Wayne really responded to that creative autonomy, because the band he’d just left, the Jazz Messengers, was more tightly run. He loved the freedom of being able to push boundaries.

Wayne was a brilliant musician, but he was also just a lot of fun. He didn’t talk a whole lot—as he puts it, “If you’re the one doing all the talking, you can’t learn anything”—but when he did talk, he would crack us up. He’s a great mimic, and like a lot of jazz musicians, he loves playing with words. Getting in a car, he’d pipe up, “You get in the front, and the rest of you get in the black.” Or instead of going to the “restroom,” he’d say primly, “I’m going to the rest of the room.” With Wayne, nothing was predictable in either his speech or his playing.

Wayne is kind of like Yoda. He speaks in this whimsical way, but he’s also very wise. He’s like a Jedi knight! And he loves superheroes—he’s totally into fantasy and comics, and he loves to wear Superman T-shirts. Wayne always saw the quintet as a band of superheroes: Miles Davis and the Justice League. There was a standard of behavior we tried to uphold in the band, dressing sharp, playing well, behaving like professionals. In Wayne’s whimsical mind, playing by these rules wasn’t restrictive or boring; it was merely evidence of our collective superhero qualities.

Wayne is observant about everything, and from that very first rehearsal, or really brainstorming session, with Miles, he liked what he saw:

We rehearsed that one day, and I was noticing the intelligence level of everyone. I saw the high conversational level, the humor that was going on. It was almost like a club; if you didn’t understand what was funny, then you weren’t in the club.

Ron Carter would speak very quickly, and Herbie would laugh at something he’d said—but it would just be one word. These guys were always talking and laughing, and they were very proud of what they were doing. The level of playing was so high, it didn’t feel like work. It looked like they were in heaven.

Miles loved Wayne, because he’d compose these perfect pieces and then just walk up, hand Miles a sheet of paper, and say, “I wrote something.” And Miles never had to touch Wayne’s songs, because they were invariably brilliant platforms for our style of playing.

Miles was also intrigued by Wayne. “What does Wayne do in the daytime?” he would say. “How does he spend his time?” Then again, Miles was kind of nosy about all of us. He always wanted to know what I had in my pockets, because I was always carrying gadgets around. “Where is Herrrrbie going with all that stuff? What is he doing with it?” he’d ask Wayne.

I had never outgrown my boyhood love of electronics and mechanical things; if anything, it kept growing the older I got. In high school I had built an amplifier using a Dynaco kit, and from then on I was always curious about how to use new electronic equipment to enhance music. During my time with the quintet, the latest equipment was the German-made UHER portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, so I became obsessed with using it to record our performances, a habit that sometimes drove Miles crazy.

It wasn’t that Miles didn’t want me to record the music, because he didn’t mind that. In fact, whenever we were in the studio making a record, he always insisted that the machines be rolling all the time, because you never knew when we were going to hit on something interesting. He’d get really annoyed if we played something great and it wasn’t caught on tape.

What drove Miles crazy was that I always needed a few extra minutes at the beginning of each performance to set up my microphones and recorder. And because I was usually late to shows to begin with, I often wasn’t ready when it was time to play. Everybody else would be up onstage prepared to go, and I’d blow in at the last minute and then crawl under the piano to set up my equipment while Miles glared at me.

Once we were starting a set with a song that opened on piano, and I could hear Miles counting off as I was still fumbling around with the recorder. He looked over at the piano, and when my head finally popped up from below, he just said, “Ahhh, shit.” Miles used to say that none of our recordings had piano in the beginning, because I was too busy fiddling with my gear. I’m not sure about that, but it’s fair to say I was pushing the boundaries not only of music but sometimes of Miles’s patience, too.

One night we were all in the dressing room after a performance at the Village Vanguard. Miles knew a lot of Hollywood people, so it wasn’t unusual to have movie stars come see us perform, and that night the actress Mitzi Gaynor was in the audience. Usually the stars would come to the dressing room after the show, but Mitzi hadn’t shown up yet.

“Herbie,” said Miles, “go find Mitzi. Tell her I said to bring her white ass back here.”

“What?” I said. “I can’t tell her that!”

Miles shook his head as if I were a misbehaving child. “Tell her those are my words. Say it exactly like that,” he said. “Go on!”

I walked reluctantly out to the front of the club, and she was standing right there, talking to a couple of people. I went up and introduced myself.

“Hello, Miss Gaynor. I’m Herbie Hancock,” I said. “Miles wanted me to say something to you, but I’m embarrassed to say it.”

Mitzi smiled her thousand-watt smile. “Really? What did he say?”

“He said to tell you, ‘Get your white ass back here to the dressing room.’”

And Mitzi just smiled and said, “Okay,” and then she turned and walked toward the dressing room like this was the most normal invitation she’d ever gotten. It rolled right off her, as Miles must have known it would.

Another time, also at the Village Vanguard, we saw Ava Gardner sitting right up in the front row as we started playing. She was wearing dark glasses, a skirt, and tennis shoes, and Wayne sidled over to me onstage and said, “Hey, Herbie, check out the luggage”—which was what Wayne called a woman’s legs. He liked to be able to talk about them without the woman noticing. “Nice luggage,” he’d say, and we all knew to look around for a woman in a skirt or shorts.

This happened a lot, because there were beautiful women around Miles Davis all the time. Once when we landed at Los Angeles International Airport, we walked to the curb outside arrivals to find a purple Jaguar XKE waiting. The driver stepped out, and it was this gorgeous blond woman, an actress named Laura Devon. And Miles said, “Ah, my chauffeur is here!” He kissed her, and they got into the car and zoomed off. You can bet the rest of us had checked out her luggage—she was so perfect, she looked like somebody had drawn her.

Another time Liz Taylor and Richard Burton came to Birdland, in New York. They were the hottest couple in Hollywood, and they’d come by before going to another event, so they were both dressed to the nines—but Miles didn’t show up that night. That happened occasionally, and it was always a little embarrassing for us, because we knew Miles was the main attraction.

Miles had been struggling with health problems for a while, but that wasn’t necessarily why he didn’t show up for some gigs. My take was, if Miles didn’t feel he could deliver his best on a given night, he just wouldn’t turn up, because he’d rather not play at all than play below his standards. He didn’t usually miss one-night concert venues, but if we had a weeklong gig at a club somewhere, he’d sometimes skip a night.

Miles had well-known problems with drugs, but as far as I knew, he never missed any of our shows due to that. He had kicked his heroin habit by the time I played with him, and he never went back to it. But Miles was doing cocaine, like pretty much everybody else at that time, including me. In New York in the sixties, finding a musician who wasn’t snorting coke was like finding a needle in a haystack. Coke was as easy to get as alcohol; so many people did it socially, it was just around and available. And most people, or at least the ones I knew, didn’t overdo it.

Musicians had to be careful about drugs for more than just the obvious reasons. Up until 1967 New York City required anyone who worked in nightclubs to have a “cabaret card,” which could be revoked if you got arrested. Many people saw this as a subtly racist policy, as many black musicians were addicts. There were rumors that some of the labels even gave their artists extra cash, perhaps fearing that otherwise they might turn to theft, or hock their horns, to get drug money. So even if a musician did drugs, he took extra care to protect his cabaret card, because losing that meant you’d lose your livelihood, too.

I’d tried smoking weed soon after arriving in New York and didn’t like it so much. But the first time I tried cocaine I did like that. While pot made me feel slow and foggy, cocaine gave me energy and sharpened my senses, or so I thought. A lot of musicians felt that coke helped them explore music more deeply, loosen up, not hold anything back, get to the nitty-gritty. I felt that way sometimes, too, but mostly I would do it because it felt good. You couldn’t really do any drugs and play onstage with Miles anyway, because the level of musicianship was so high, you had to be on your game to keep up with what the band was doing. You had to be your pure, unaltered self.

For that same reason I never really drank, either, when I played with Miles, even though I did drink socially. And I was able to drink a lot. In New York in the sixties and into the seventies people consumed cocktails like water, and I got to the point where I could mix all kinds of drinks and not get sick—which I thought was great. I built up enough tolerance that I could drink people under the table, and sometimes I’d have a little fun by proving it.

Once, on a tour of Europe in the seventies, a roadie for the band kept bragging to everyone how he could really hold his liquor. He was going on and on, so I finally challenged him to a drinking contest. We got a bottle of Portuguese grappa, a strong grape brandy, and this roadie and I started doing shots. The first five, he was doing all right. But then we got up to about ten . . . and then we kept going . . . and by thirteen or so, this kid just slid off his chair to the floor. They had to carry him out, but I somehow managed to walk out on my own, so I won! I was really drunk, but not too drunk to remember that victory.

The amazing thing was, Wayne had the ability to play music while being ripped. He drank a lot in those days, mostly cognac. We’d call him Cognac Man, which he twisted into Corny Act Man. Unlike the rest of us, he’d drink leading up to a show. He had a system: He’d drink, then sweat it out playing, then drink some more. I never understood how he could play so brilliantly while being stone drunk.

Talking about all this now makes it seem like we drank and did drugs all the time. We didn’t, but it’s fair to say that a certain level of drug use was pretty much expected among musicians. While I liked coke, I never felt that I was a slave to it. Some guys, if they had a gram at home, they couldn’t get through a day without it. I didn’t do it every day—I got enough of a high playing with Miles and the guys. Doing coke was something I enjoyed rather than craved.

And occasionally I tried things out of pure curiosity. Like the time I first dropped acid, in 1965.

At the Village Vanguard one night I met a Swedish guy named Björn. Björn had spent a lot of time in Millbrook, New York, which was the town where Timothy Leary had been doing his LSD experiments for a few years. At the time there was a lot of curiosity about acid, which was a legal drug used in psychotherapy and for treating alcoholism. But Leary was also a big proponent of using the drug as a spiritual and mystical tool for raising consciousness.

For months after I met him, Björn kept urging me to try LSD. He was convinced it would open up my creativity as a musician, and he offered to help me with my first trip, to make sure it was done right. I put him off for a while, but eventually I decided to see what the fuss was about. I had a weekend coming up with no gigs, so I told Björn I was ready.

Gigi didn’t want me to do it. She wasn’t anti-drug, but the idea of my dropping acid scared her. It was a longer high, more unpredictable, and everybody had heard about “bad trips” that caused hallucinations and paranoia. I was a little nervous, too, but how could I pass up the chance to have such a mind-bending experience? Especially since I’d have Björn there to look after me for the ten or so hours I’d be tripping? I told Gigi I was going to do it, and she stayed out of the apartment for the weekend.

Björn came over, and he set everything up as if he were some kind of psychedelic tour guide. “What records would you like to listen to?” he asked me. “You’re going to be very high, so I will take care of everything.” I picked out about twenty albums, but Björn vetoed a couple of them, including one really far-out record by John Coltrane, who at the time was deep into free jazz. “I think this might be too much for your first trip,” Björn told me. Then he pulled out some records of his own that he’d brought: Indian flute music, which he felt might be more appropriate for this journey.

Björn lined up all the records along the living room wall, and then he went into the kitchen to prepare. The LSD was in liquid form, which was the only way it came in those early psychedelic days, and he mixed the right amount into a glass of orange juice. I took a deep breath, said, “Okay, here we go,” and drank it.

LSD doesn’t hit you right away. It takes a while to get going, but then at some point you realize, “Oh, wait—I’m high!” A couple of hours after drinking the juice, I was really high, much more altered than when I did weed or coke. “Björn,” I said, “I’m pretty high. This is as high as I’ve ever been.”

And Björn said, “Oh, you’re gonna be much higher than this.”

He was right. Soon the walls started moving, and creatures started appearing on the ceiling. Some of them looked like human beings, but then they’d change, and they were colorful and strange, and I wasn’t sure what anything was. And then the apartment somehow became a train, and all the rooms off the hallway were the compartments. But then, when I started walking down the hallway, it suddenly became a jungle. I walked down the hall, cutting my way through the underbrush, and I kept thinking, Wow, how did all this appear in my apartment? Because I somehow still knew I was in my apartment, even though I was apparently in a jungle.

I made my way to the piano in the living room, because I thought it might be a cool, creative thing to play while I was tripping. But the keys were twisted into a U shape, so I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And then I realized I didn’t feel like playing anyway—I just wanted to look around at all the weird creatures and scenes that were morphing on the walls and ceiling.

Björn stayed with me the whole time, just spinning records and sitting quietly for the ten hours or so I was tripping. When it was over, I was glad I’d done it, but it wasn’t like I was desperate to do it again. I’d had the experience, and that felt like enough. But then, about six months later, Björn invited me to come up to Millbrook to drop acid there. And I thought, Well, why not go to the source?

The Millbrook research was taking place in a big, sprawling compound with various barns and houses. As Björn was leading me across the property, we happened to walk by Dr. Leary, so I got to meet him briefly. But he went off to do something else, and Björn took me into a house where three other musicians I knew were already waiting. We were all going to do it together.

This experience was very different from the first one. In my apartment I had been mesmerized by the shapes and colors on the walls. But this time, as the acid kicked in, I looked at my arm and realized to my horror that it was covered with insects. It was as if the hair had morphed into these black, crawling bugs, and I couldn’t wipe them off.

I’d been warned about bad trips, and I knew I had to keep myself from freaking out. There was no stopping a trip once it started, so if I allowed my fear to take over, there would be hours of misery and terror ahead. So I did what I’d done ever since that day back in high school when my parents wouldn’t let me go to a party. Even tripping on acid, I started to take apart my feelings, to mechanically dissect why I felt the way I did.

I know these aren’t really insects, I thought. So why am I seeing them? Why insects? My whole life I’d always been afraid of bees, so I decided this must be connected. I wasn’t allergic to their stings, but for some reason I got really scared when they would buzz around me. I thought, Maybe I need to face that. Maybe that’s what seeing these insects is about.

“Björn,” I said, “I want to go to a place that has a lot of bees.” In my altered state I began getting excited about bonding with the bees. They are creatures of the earth, part of the domain of living species on earth, just like me! I thought. They are my brothers! I shouldn’t fear them!

Björn took me outside and sat me on a patch of grass. And sure enough, a few bees drifted by, but I forced myself not to get up and walk away. This was a real breakthrough, because normally if a bee flew anywhere near me, I’d be off like a shot. I couldn’t be in the same room with one without my heart starting to beat like crazy.

But somehow, in the middle of what could have been a very bad trip, I decided I was being victimized by my fear—just as years earlier, in high school, I’d felt victimized by my anger over missing that party. And I was determined not to be victimized ever again. Even tripping on LSD, I decided to turn my fear from something harmful into something valuable. And strangely enough, from that day at Millbrook on, I’ve never been scared of bees. I still don’t exactly like being near them, but I can sit calmly if one comes buzzing around. It was just another way I learned to control my emotions.