Comments on: The Cardinal and the Blue Jay: An Excerpt of The Son Of Melancholy Jazz

By: Mother May I | The Starting Five

Mother May I | The Starting Five — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:28:45 +0000

[...] Mother was gone but less than two [...]

By: Betty Moon

Betty Moon — Sun, 08 May 2011 18:10:41 +0000

Mike, I lost my mother 3/7/88. Didn’t know we shared that same loss!! Your writing is very inspirational!! As you should know by now, you must let go of the pass to move forward & grow!! The Mike I know has done this!! I’m very proud of you!! Now, for all the beatings I took from you on the LSM as I tried to sleep, I would love an autographed copy of your book!! Keep up the good writings!!
Love ya!!

By: Portable Bar

Portable Bar — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:57:47 +0000

My wife and I are planning of spending a week together and head off the country for some quality time. We’ve been working really hard recently and we thought it would be good for us to have a break once in a while. Thinking about each other and our life in general made us decide to rest even for a brief . I always enjoy going to the mountains and stay there in a cottage for a week to have some time for myself to escape from everything. It always relaxes me and it’s the only situations when I get the opportunity to think about life in general and its importance. We just had our family get-together last month and I recalled something that our grandparents imparted to us during supper about life in general. I find that moment very precious because we were able to spend time together and value the importance of each other.

By: Just Sayin'...There is Another Way to Do This Journalism Thing | The Starting Five

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:25:44 +0000

[...] season…maybe 60% of the home games as opposed to around 85% the last three years because of the book…but the one constant is how Anthony Gilbert, Devon Givens and I interact with whatever [...]

By: mike wilson

mike wilson — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:23:44 +0000

Mike you have made me open up my eyes when it comes to my mother. A person is never to old to learn. I also lost my mother twenty years ago. I thought the experience with my mother wasn’t very good but mother did what she had to do to raise me. As I look back she did a good job.

By: Mizzo

Mizzo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:35:34 +0000

Thanks so much Chevonne. Means a lot coming from you. Buckling down to get this published ASAP. I’ll let you know.

By: Chevonne

Chevonne — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:19:53 +0000

Wow Mike! This struck a chord with me. My sister’s father passed away when we were young and I had to be the strong one for her. I most definately feel you on that. Nothing can prepare you for the loss of a parent.

I can’t wait to read your book. You have a way with words and that’s what you’re a fantastic at what you do!

By: Mizzo

Mizzo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:30:23 +0000

Thanks for the complimentary words Doc.

Also, thanks for sharing your story. Your Mom must be amazing…had to be an incredibly hard time to deal with simply going about everyday life.

This should be a book of its own. Write it. Thanks again Doc.

By: KevDog

KevDog — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:00:29 +0000

Memorial day 1974 began just like most holidays of my childhood. By then we lived in a neighborhood called “The Jungle.” It was named this because of the lush, tropical landscaping that all of the apartment buildings had in their front yards. It had originally been a fairly affluent neighborhood but had become run down as white flight, combined with landlords concerned only with profits and an influx of residents with too many kids and not enough working men became the norm. Still our apartment on Gelber place was a step up for us and we enjoyed a fairly nice apartment and a pool. So we set out to celebrate a holiday and enjoy the coming summer with an apartment wide BBQ. The residents would all pitch in the money for meat and drinks and each household would bring a side dish or a desert. We didn’t have much but on days like that, we felt as fortunate as the rich folks.
Someone with the best sound system would bring it out of doors and we would listen to Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, The Isley Brothers, Stylistics, P-Funk and Stevie Wonder while everyone ate. Later the adults played cards while the kids played hide and seek, or in the case of some of us pre-teens, hide and go get it: A version that involved the first forays into real kissing.
So as the day unfolded, there was little indication that this day was going to turn out unusual in any way except for the festivities. I remember I had spent a considerable portion of the day helping out my mother. Not that I was a mama’s boy or anything, just that on holidays, my mother tended to stress out, wanting to make everything perfect for everyone, so much so that she never had any time for herself. It is only in the past few years that this has abated.
My brothers were in and out all that day. Keith was 18 and Cliff was 16 and, between girls, their friends and just feeling the increasing freedom that impending manhood offered, they didn’t spend much time home.
I remember hoping that Keith would come home around the time we were set to eat. The previous day Cliff had messed with me, and Keith, as was his habit, had taken up for me and layed one on Cliff. I wanted to eat with and spend a few minutes with him. When he did come home, it was straight from the record shop. I remember he rushed to put his new single on the turntable. To this day, I can’t hear the familiar, haunting refrain from Bloodstones song Natural High,
Take me in your arms Thrill me with all of your charms
And I’ll take to the sky on a natural high (I want to take to the sky) Loving you more ’till the day I die (On the natural high)
Take to the sky on a natural high (I want you to be mine) Loving you more.
without tears coming to my eyes. It was the last record my brother ever bought and the last day of his short life.
Keith teased me about some little girl in the building I liked. I pretended that I didn’t like the girl and that I didn’t like the attention. But deep down inside I was glad for his affection and attention and as he was known as somewhat of a ladies man, I wanted to be just like him. So even though there was no truth to the rumors about me and the little girl, Keith thought there was and it made me proud that he did so.
There was a lot of commotion that day at the apartment, people in and out of the building and our apartment all day and into the evening. Cliff was in and out, mostly with his best friend Kevin Murphy: Hours later Kevin would be dead alongside Keith. Keith was mostly with his running buddy Charles Perry. Within days of Keith’s murder, Charles, almost insane with grief would rob a bank and would land in jail for 20 years.
Late in the day, around 5 pm, Keith came back for a second time, this time with an older guy. He looked about 26 years old and he didn’t seem all that friendly. They came into the apartment and quickly left again. Keith seemed to
have a strained look on his face, which I didn’t make much of at the time. I remembered it because it was the last time anyone of us saw Keith alive.
By nightfall on that Memorial Day, Clifton had returned but Keith had not. This was not uncommon, nor surprising. My brothers often spent the night at friend’s houses without calling. It was simply part of the culture. But when the doorbell rang at 2 A. M we knew immediately something was wrong. It is the time parents fear most for no sane person would possibly wake up the entire family for something trivial. So the three of us, my mother, brother Clifton and myself went to greet the police officer who came to tell us that Keith, as well as Cliff’s best friend Kevin Murphy had been murdered.
For the second time in my life I had been awakened by flashlight brandishing police officers in the middle of the night. Both times they had shattered my world. I didn’t know what to do. I simply collapsed on the floor. I cried then. But not like I do now. Then, I cried out of shock, fear and a sense of amazement. Now I cry out of sadness and sorrow that my brother never had a chance to live, to marry, have children, become the man he promised to be.
At the time of his death, Keith was a mere 18 years old. He was little more than a boy, but for me, he was not only my big brother, but my idol and role model. And he was the most constant male figure in my life. His death drove me further into a world of my own, my books, music and my thoughts. And I played Bloodstone a thousand times.
At the door that night, my mother let out a scream the likes of which I had never before heard. Later, in my job as an emergency physician, I learned its characteristics much better. It is the scream of a mother whose child has just died unexpectedly.. It seems so unnatural because the very idea of a mother outliving her child is an unnatural one. And on that night, I heard my mother cry in that way. And no matter how much she loved her own mother, she hadn’t cried like that when she learned that her own mother had died 6 years previously.
For about a week, my mother was near catatonic. Luckily for us, our neighbors quickly took up our care. We had been fortunate in the move. We had found a similar situation to the one we had left on Ridgeley Drive. The people in the building were a similar demographic to our long-time friends in our other building. Those dear people made sure we had food, that we weren’t alone, that we had someone to talk to and someone’s shoulder to cry upon and that the bills got paid. My mother’s friend Laymon Long and his wife Pam, in particular, were rocks for us.
There were others there for us as well. My mother’s friend Jackie and her family stand out. Those people and others rallied around my mother in a way that only people who had experienced their own hard times could.
The person in my family hurt most by Keith’s death was Cliff. His reaction was most tragic and long lasting. He and Keith had been best friends since birth and they knew each other better than they knew anyone else, They laughed like fools together and fought like enemies and absolutely had each other’s back when faced with an assault from an outsider. I remember one time they had let one of their petty squabbles escalate to the point that they were outside, fighting on the balcony. One of the grown neighbors stepped in and told them to knock it off. The next thing I knew, they were about to fight him! Each for hollering at the other’s brother! And since Keith was more charismatic than Cliff, Keith provided Cliff with an inroads to social situations that otherwise might be closed to him. Because of this, Cliff hung close to Keith socially as much as possible. When I lost Keith, I lost my brother and my idol. With his death, my mother lost her firstborn. But when Keith died Cliff lost everything, his brother, much of his social standing, his runnin’ buddy and most importantly, his best friend. So it really isn’t a surprise, when you think about it, that while my mother and I eventually recovered from the trauma of Keith’s death, Cliff never did.
I remember Cliff tried to act cool at first. He would, at first, use gangster slang to describe what happened to Keith. “Yeah, man, did you hear about my brother? He got off-ed the other night.”—As if the whole thing were some bit from a Jimmy Cagney movie.
The sad truth was that, despite his show of bravado, Cliff was hurting more than any of us ever knew.
While unmanageable before Keith’s death, Cliff became impossible afterwards. Before Keith’s death, Cliff attended school on a regular basis; maybe three days a week, and he did some schoolwork. His teachers noted that he was very bright. After Keith died, Cliff stopped going to school and never returned. He was 16.
He had tried drugs before, a little pot here and there, maybe a beer from time to time. But afterwards he increasingly used pot as well as alcohol and PCP-Angel Dust. All of this happened before Crack came along. Crack eventually sealed my brother’s fate.
Cliff had been prone to mood swings before Keith’s death, but soon afterwards he started showing signs of psychosis. He suffered from paranoia, aggressive behavior, possible manic behavior, etc. This was fueled by his general lack of self-esteem and increasingly worsening drug use. His chances of ever recovering from Keith’s death were worsening as time went on. The arrival of crack cocaine to Los Angeles took whatever chances he had and left them in tatters. He quickly became addicted and has been so ever since.
As bad as Cliff responded and as devastating as the events were to his life, Keith’s best friend Charles Perry suffered even more. Although Charles had been with Keith earlier in the day, by the afternoon they had separated. We never knew for sure how they came to be apart but the aftermath of the tragedy of that Memorial Day made clear that Charles might just as well have been with his friend that afternoon. Almost immediately after the murders, in an apparent fit of rage and despair, Charles robbed a bank and then another and then another. Finally caught, he spent the next 20 years in prison.
I spoke to him several times during his incarceration. In those conversations, especially towards the end, he spoke as all prisoners do. He was tired of being a prisoner, he wanted to get his life together, he wasn’t going to go back once he got out, etc. But I knew exactly how high, indeed, how insurmountable the barrier he faced was. He had no education, had spent the majority of his adult life behind bars in a maximum-security prison, had no real idea how to negotiate his way around our complex society, nor did he have any skills that would allow him to support himself. The idea that he was going to walk out of that prison cell and become a productive member of society was absurd on it’s face. The fact that we spend so much money incarcerating people and then let them to go fend for themselves in a society that mistrusts them- most times for good reason- without socialization skills, after making them exist in an environment that promotes continued violent behavior simply in order to survive, speaks to the incredible short- sightedness of our society and in the end, does nothing but harm all of us.
By the time he was released, I had graduated from medical school and was suffering through my internship. He visited my mother about a month after his release. She said that he looked good and had promised to get his life together, to stay out of jail. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. He soon thereafter robbed another bank and was sent back to
prison. The events of memorial day 1974 soon thereafter claimed another victim when Charles Perry, a funny, articulate, charming young teenager, now a hardened life-long prisoner, died in a prison fight.
I wish I could recount the events of Keith’s funeral but I can’t. From the moment I saw Keith in his casket at the funeral parlor until about 6 months later, it is all a complete blank in my memory. I just don’t remember any of it. Not the funeral, not who was there, not anything I did or what happened in that time period. I suppose the healing I needed required the detachment necessary to forget so much.
Because of my age, my mother didn’t allow me to attend the trial of the men who murdered my brother. I remember I wanted to but by the time I awoke from the malaise that engulfed me, I didn’t even have the energy to ask what had happened.
Later, of course, I pursued the entire story of Keith’s last day.
We knew certain things immediately after his death, We knew that two small time criminals named Jesse Pagan and Kurt Washington had been arrested and subsequently convicted of the murders, and we knew Kevin Murphy and Keith had hooked up several hours before the murders.
It was not until 25 years later, after I had graduated medical school and residency and was practicing my profession that I finally conjured up the energy to ask my mother what really happened.
Apparently Keith had been involved in some illegal activities and had come into possession of certain stolen merchandise. Among that merchandise was a gun. It was in preparation for the sale of that merchandise to Pagan and Washington that Keith and Kevin hooked up, that led to Keith being at our apartment with Jesse Pagan that afternoon and ultimately to the two murders.
Soon after leaving our apartment Kevin and Keith were taken to a wooded area near Baldwin Hills where they were beaten, tortured and summarily executed, both by being shot in the head. The area where all this took place was within view of a row of houses, far above but still within view. A citizen in one of those houses witnessed the entire event, and in fact, called the police once he recognized what was happening. Unfortunately the police arrived too late,
Because of the actions of the witness, the murderers were caught within 15 minutes of committing the crime. Periodically, over the years, I asked my mother what had happened to the men and she would tell me they were still in jail. But 25 years later, briefly, Kurt Washington came back into our lives in a completely unexpected fashion.
At church, my mother had befriended a woman whose last name was Washington, Given the commonality of the name, she thought nothing of it at the time. Over the course of several months, they became friends and my mother learned something about the woman’s family.
My mother learned the woman had long since divorced and had a daughter about 25 years old. The girl had a father who had been in prison a long time and she absolutely adored her father. Apparently she longed for the day when her father was released from prison.
One day my mother was talking to the two women and recounted the deaths of Keith and Calvin. She was shocked as she saw the looks on the faces of the women. She later said they looked as if they had seen a ghost.
My mother said that after her revelation, the women had one of their own. My mother’s friend revealed that she had long ago been married to the same Curt Washington who had murdered my brother and the man her daughter adored was the same one my mother had hated for so many years.
At first they just sat and stared at each other, and then they began to cry, then to sob. Big sweeping sobs that spanned the years and the breath of the tragedy that bound them all. Against all odds they remained friends for several years thereafter.
About a month after the conversation, my mother received a letter from Kurt Washington. He said that in prison, he had learned much. He had educated himself and had dedicated himself to Christianity. He told my mother he wished he could take back what he had done and he begged for her forgiveness. He said he knew that he could never re-pay her, and he would understand if she could not find it in her heart to forgive him. He said that he wrote the letter so that she might understand that the man who had taken her son’s life no longer existed and that he would spend the rest of his life trying to make up for what he had done.
It is a testament to my mother’s gigantic heart, strength of character and forgiving spirit that she was able to forgive the man and put the matter to rest. I hope my brother and his friends rest in peace.

By: KevDog

KevDog — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:56:41 +0000

Damn Miz.

Just got to this. Amazing work. I hope you learned a long time ago to shed the guilt. I see a lot of suicidal people in my work and some people simply cannot be saved. Sorry about your mother but it was never your fault.

By: Carmelo vs. LeBron: The Battle of the NBA Planets | The Starting Five

Carmelo vs. LeBron: The Battle of the NBA Planets | The Starting Five — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:06:08 +0000

[...] made the trip out to Cleveland via Amtrak to meet with my book editor with hopes of finally producing The Son of Melancholy Jazz. There is a definite sense [...]

By: Mizzo

Mizzo — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:23:22 +0000

Brenda thanks so much. I’m sorry to hear about your Mom.

I remember that that day at Amoco like it was yesterday. Your smile helped to secure its legacy. I can’t believe that was 19 years ago. Wow.

If you are located in the PA, MD, NJ area, please get your significant other a gift certificate to Brenda’s spa. She’s good peoples and I’m sure she’ll take care of ya lady good.

By: Brenda Goebel Denesowicz

Brenda Goebel Denesowicz — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:11:19 +0000

Mike, My mother passed away also. Although we spent everyday every second with her up to the very end…it does not erase all the “Coulda Woulda Shoulda’s. Your writing is spirit. The spirit of your mother. White lights surround your words. Life throws Life at us. You are embracing it and then giving explanation to help others who are struggling with this disease called “GUILT.” Our thoughts create our reality. I would embrace every happy moment with your mother. Those are the memories she would want you to hold onto. Of course I remember the day we spoke after the ultra sound. It’s funny….what I can not remember is who was with me. I just remember the spirit in your eyes. The joy of life. I felt honored then and I feel honored now. A knowing. You have this. Thank you for putting pen to paper. BRAVO!

By: Mizzo

Mizzo — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:58:57 +0000

Thanks Lisa for reading and also commenting. You either learn in these moments or you don’t. This is for those having difficulty and if one person is positively impacted, I have done my job. Thanks for being a great friend shortly thereafter. You helped me get through a lot even if I never told you

By: Lisa B

Lisa B — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:45:23 +0000

Michael you are so talented and graceful in capturing these deep emotions and complex transitions in life. Cheers to you and God Bless your mother.