Q by Quincy Jones

Author:Quincy Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385504744
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2002-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Q CHAPTER 25

Going down

Daddy was all I had. I had to keep him in my mind as a myth. If anything real or human started to happen to him, I had to keep it away from me. I knew he was in trouble with his marriage. I knew his health was slipping. I knew that he and Elvera had gotten divorced but still lived in the same house.

I never wanted to see his frailties. He was bigger than life to me in every way: handsome, gregarious, compassionate, intelligent, skilled. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that. I desperately needed Daddy to be invincible. Elvera cut him out. She was sleeping with the mailman or milkman or whomever, and that’s not even the point, because Daddy played the field too. I knew what was going on. When I came home, I talked to Lloyd and he told me everything, but I couldn’t hear it. You don’t want to hear about anything destroying the only bit of precious past you have. “Daddy’s fine,” I told myself. “He’s just fine.”

He never complained to me, but he did reach out to me around 1970, and that’s when I knew he wasn’t doing well. I took Snoopy up there to see him. Snoopy was just a tiny kid. Daddy and I walked over to Garfield High, which was right across the street from our house. A high school baseball game was being played there. We stood and watched the game through the chain-link fence. Daddy’s hernia was down to his knees. He could barely walk because of the pain. He had to lean against the fence to watch the game. I told him, “Daddy, you need to see a doctor.”

He shook his head and said unh-unh. Daddy had never believed in doctors.

I said, “Why don’t you come to LA to live with me.” The dream was always that I’d be independent enough so Daddy could come down and live with me someday, but that “someday” was now, and my life was a mess.

He peered through the chain-link fence at the baseball game, his brown eyes squinting, his beautiful, withered face pressed close against the fence, which pushed back the favorite hat he’d been wearing for thirty years. He said, “Boy, I can’t go to California.”

I said, “Why not?”

“The mailman knows where my house is now.”

“What’s that mean?”

He looked at me and smiled. He said, “Quincy Junior, I’m too old.”

So I left Seattle and let him go. I let him slip away. And as he got sicker, I ran the other way as fast as I could. When he died I was in a CBS studio scoring a Bill Cosby sitcom about a gym teacher named Chet Kincaid. The news dropped on me like a bomb. No one at the studio was aware of the kind of loss I’d suffered and I didn’t say. I simply went up to Seattle and buried him. There was lots of weeping and eulogies said at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.