Original Body
pstrongA Former Cocaine Addict’s journey back to life and jazz/strong/p
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pby Gordon Hilgers/Endless Choices PNN (Dallas Affiliate)/p
pFrom all appearances, it’s the sheer, unmitigated sway of jazz. The way it soothes the heart like a mother’s touch and stills the soul which defines, rules and embellishes Victor Cager’s life. It’s an irremediable situation, he says, but at least it feels good. Real good. /p
pIf you believe what Victor says, in fact, jazz literally swims in his blood. He claims he’d be nothing without it. It’s indescribable and odd, this feel, like noodling trout around your toes in an ice-cold mountain brook. It’s both ticklish and scary. Some of those staggering fish apparently just can’t stop dancing, wiggling, and cavorting, the sum of which, he says, transports him to a place where nobody does anyone any harm./p
pYes, he’s played and sang with many of Dallas’ most precious musical legends: pianist Cornelius "Red King" drummer Saul Samuels, singer James Belk, and even Willie McDuff and the Jive Five. At the age of six, he began playing saxophone. Now forty, he unequivocally states, "I was a child prodigy." He’s probably right./p
pIt’s Thursday night, here in the small universe of Dallas Jazz, and Victor is about to sing to both the knowing and the innocent. A murmuring crowd of some of Dallas’ most well-heeled socialites and avid jazz fans gathers to listen closely, as many of them do each week, as the Dallas Museum of Art’s "Jazz in the Atrium" gets underway./p
pThe sound of wineglasses tinkles under the atrium’s high ceilings as the band pauses between tunes, waiting for Victor to reach the stage for another of many guest appearances. Yellow sunlight can’t help but streambr /
through Dave Chihuly’s window installation, hugely delicate glass blossomsbr /
that mirror flowers on a lake’s glassy surface. One woman hushes her table. It seems she’s heard Victor sing before. As the group strikes up another tune, it’s probably the last thing on anyone’s mind that this man, vocalizing the parameters that make jazz an exquisitely arcane experience only a few can truly fathom, spent the better part of a decade living on the streets of downtown./p
p"Sometimes when I’m up there on stage, I’m thinking, God, look at how far you’ve brought me. Man, sometimes I just can’t believe it. All these people with diamonds on their fingers. They’ll probably never know I was a homeless crack-head. Whenever I sing, people come up to talk to me, and congratulate me," Victor says. "Yet, back then, when I was using crack, I remember when I didn’t bathe for a week. The contrast is really interesting."/p
pVictor Cager’s tale of a journey from the sickening circumstances of an addict’s lifestyle to singing in prestigious nightspots like the Crescent Hotel’s Beau Nash may be an unusual one in the Dallas homeless community, but through Victor’s eyes, it doesn’t seem so strange. He wants people to know where he’s coming from. He wants his friends on the streets to know if he can make it off the streets, they can too. Also, he wants strangers to know that you really can’t make the measure of a man by his circumstances./p
p"I don’t really go over my life that much, you know," Victor says.br /
"But, I’ll tell you, I’ve really been blessed. I go around all day long, knowing that I’ve been given God’s extreme grace and favor. God’s grace would have to be extreme to free me from that ditch."/p
pVictor knows he isn’t alone. In fact, it’s a small secret that Dallas’ homeless community is "home" to several present and former jazz musicians. Victor’s one of a much smaller group that has made if off the streets alive. /p
pBy every measure, Victor knows he’s been on a long, difficult journey through the hardest circumstances. He’s known times when his voice wouldn’t work because of the effect crack cocaine had on his vocal chords. He’s seen things that he says numbed him to the spirit of jazz. He remembers moments when he smoked crack rather than eat. Even now, he says, there is always temptation to go back to that life. But, he says he remembers the gift he’s been given and his childhood, a blessed time./p
pAlthough Victor is currently a jazz vocalist, singing to growing audiences in a number of clubs and lounges around Dallas, as a musician he actually started out as a saxophonist. He started early: He was already playing in churches at six years old./p
pVictor credits his musical family for fostering his childhood abilities.br /
"My grandmother was a vocal teacher. Although she was already dead before I was born, she left a musical legacy in our home. People still talk about her, about how great a vocalist she was."/p
pAside from leaving behind a spiritual legacy, Victor’s grandmother also left one relic that really whet his appetite and his feel for jazz: the piano in the living room./p
p"That piano got lots of use. All the big cats in the Dallas jazz scene in the 1960’s practiced at my house. My parents had opened their door to these guys. Through my dad was a barber, he owned a saxophone. Those cats would borrow his sax, the first sax I ever touched./p
p"Listening to these great jazzmen was like being in Heaven," Victor says. "The way those guys would create jazz was something you can’t describe. I was listening to the masters. These cats loved what they did. It was also obvious many of them were involved with drugs."/p
pVictor’s mother and stepfather, a man he came to call Uncle Jim, were deeply involved in a burgeoning, and relatively underground, West Dallas social scene. A vibrant confluence of neighbors that, while it didn’t make the social pages, left an impression on people, especially the children.br /
Live music at every party./p
p"I had to be only about four. I clung to those jazzmen. They were my heroes. Roger Boykins, Claude Johnson. Still living, and still my heroes. When they wasn’t playing, they’d tell stories about the real jazz giants. When those guys would get up from the keyboards, the keys were still warm from their fingers. I’d put my hands where theirs had been and play what they’d just played. It never worked."/p
p"Music was already inside me," Victor says. "Like any kid, I wanted to play foot ball. I’ll never forget my old man coming up to the school and whipping me because I’d quit the band and joined the football team."/p
pVictor’s Uncle Jim also left a musical mark on him. "He listened to the big bands: Jimmy Dorsey, and Woody Herman. He also knew the lyrics to every standard jazz tune. His singing was my first inspiration. Back then we listened to KFJZ, a big band station back in the Sixties, so even when I was a teenager I was steeped in jazz."/p
pAnd so was the neighborhood. "There were some bootleg houses, but we were’t used to being prisoners in our own homes like people in some West Dallas neighborhoods are these days. In fact, back then, people used to sleep with their doors wide open. When I was playing in the street, I could hear music coming from those houses, mostly blues stuff: Lightning Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. The neighborhood might have been poor in some ways, but we weren’t poor."/p
pLike many musicians who were born in South Dallas, Oak Cliff and West Dallas, Victor credits the church for much of his early training and inspiration. "Oh, yes. I remember the church," he says. "Sweet Home Baptist./p
p"Reverend S.A. Armstrong. He was crippled in one leg, but man! He could really sing. He could tear a church up. I don’t know how many programs they had me playing in."/p
pVictor remembers school, he skipped plenty of class, but for unique reasons. "Us guys who really loved music all skipped class to listen to Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery, Stan Kenton. We’d sit around the record player and commune with the really great ones." Even after his Uncle Jim transferred him from Pinkston to Thomas Jefferson, thinking the boy needed discipline, Victor continued playing jazz. "On weekends, I played with James Belk, a vocalist who imitated Nat King Cole, and with Willie McDuff and the Jive Five, the hottest RB outfit in the city. I also had a soul band, The Power House of Soul."/p
pHe was smoking pot, too. "All the guys in the Pinkston band did it. I was 14 when I started smoking it. I didn’t know it would escalate into something serious." /p
pAfter a brief stint in the Navy, Victor returned to Dallas and to jazz.br /
"I played with Benois King at the Judge’s Chamber, a spot in Wynnewood Shopping Center. I also played The Main Event. I played at The Sunday Jam Session, too, at Tim Ballard’s club at Lemmon and Inwood. That’s where I hit my first home run. I was playing baritone sax at the time. I played ‘Misty’- Ion barry sax, man/i! I don’t think that crowd had ever heard something like ‘Misty’ on a baritone sax. They went crazy."/p
pVictor tells us that anyone could see he had a rising star in the 1970’s. He was playing lots of the big clubs around town. But then, an incident he believes shot down that rising star turned all the good times around./p
p"In 1985, the most traumatic thing that ever happened in my life happened. My mother had a stroke. Today I cringe whenever I think about it. Over the next eight months, I watched her deteriorate right before my eyes. She was the family matriarch. To see her completely depleted was devastating. She lost her mind right before she died. The family was just never the same. We stopped having gatherings at the house. People stopped visiting. Most important was the money I got after she died: with it, I bought and used my first crack cocaine./p
pEven as late as 1985, Victor claims, very few in Dallas had learned the devastating consequences of crack use. Crack, he says, doesn’t just destroy an individual, it destroys entire communities. And when the cloud of cocaine rolled over West Dallas, not only neighborhoods were destroyed and turned into the haunts of criminals, an entire way of life vanished with them./p
p"Initially," he says, "there was no crack in West Dallas. We had to go to South Dallas to score crack. There were these two streets down there: Myers and Jefferies. Down there was the first time I ever saw people stand right there on the street, selling dope. It was also the first time I saw someone carrying something called an Uzi. That was when the Jamaican drug possies were running the dope show down there. Those folks were treacherous. A lot of people fell victim to the crack they were selling. God always seemed to have a hedge around me because I’ve never been busted for drugs. But I did see people get shot and beat up. I saw young girls, not even out of junior high, going into prostitution. I have seen a lot of terrible things because of crack."/p
pAnyone who has been involved in hard drugs like crack cocaine will tell you that, for awhile, it’s not all that difficult to maintain the pretense of a normal life. Before the compulsion to smoke the glass pipe gets so strong that you’ll do anything to keep your ears ringing, things seem relatively normal. In his fall from a life of relative happiness, Victor’s story isn’t all that unlike the stories of many men and women who have been reduced to homelessness because of crack cocaine. "Before I hit the streets, I was bingeing regularly, spending all my money. The biggest binge I ever had was a $1000 binge. When you’re smoking crack cocaine, you just keep on spending until you don’t have any money. It wasn’t uncommon to be in the dope house, smoking crack right alongside professional businesspeople. Some of the guys I got high with were lawyers, engineers and one of them was a minister. A minister, free-basing cocaine!"/p
pAt one point during this slide down the dusty trail, I did get married," he says. "I even had two children. But because of crack, it just didn’t work out. When things got bad, my wife saw that it was obvious I wasn’t going to be the breadwinner she’d hoped I’d become. I was still in West Dallas, living with my wife’s family spending all my money on crack. But there’s one side to crack that I can’t forget: Crack teaches you who loves you and who doesn’t."/p
pAs Victor sees it, the determining factor in love is need. He doesn’t refer to this observation as wisdom, possibly because he’s still so close to the realization that having a very real, tangible need tends to alter your relationships in odd ways. Once you’re in need, the fair weather friends simply vanish. If people can’t get anything from you, he adds, if they’re still for you, ready to go to bat for you, willing to do anything for you, then you can rest assured that they love you. "Like my father," he says. "My father never gave up on me. Some people might say my real father was crazy. But because he hung in there with me, I’m a better person for it."/p
p"But, you know, my wife walked out. Other family members walked out. Friends walked out. I couldn’t even go back to the family house, either. My brother lived there, and he didn’t want me there. I remember I came downtown one day. Where else? I found the Stewpot. There was this guy named Big John. He was a police officer. He was one of the nicest people I ever met. He would always talk nice to people. He didn’t ever down you. When he laughed, you could see he didn’t have any teeth."/p
pFrom there, the details of Victor’s life are all too familiar to those who really know the streets of Dallas. Like many men and women strung-up and strangled by addiction to crack, he rode the merry-go-round of moving from one emergency shelter to another. He lived in The Dallas Life Foundation. He livced in Union Gospel Mission. Even during this period of almost complete and utter poverty, Victor says he used crack cocaine./p
p"I used, but it was off and on. I really didn’t have a lot of money passing through my hands. I wasn’t going on the $200 binges that put me on the streets. Still, many times, the dope house was the closest thing I had to a home. You ever hear the term ‘den of iniquity?’ You see a lot of lost souls in a crack house. You see every kind of immorality. You see people being beaten. People getting robbed. People selling their shoes. One cold day, I sold my own shoes so I could get a piece of rock, man. You see people selling the coats off their backs. You see prostitution, by both men and women. I’ve seen people whose skin turns to a pasty gray or a real dark black, and it tears women down faster than anything. It’s really sick. It’s not a glamour trip. Believe me."/p
pOnce, Victor says, he was looking out the window of the Newland Hotel, a fleabag motel on South Akard, when he noticed a man running. "Suddenly, I heard gunshots. I mean, I’d seed guns. Anybody who uses crack sees guns. But I’d never seen them being used to try and kill someone. I don’t know what the guy had done, but he was really running hard. Thank God, he got away."/p
pSlowly, surely Victor wound down to the very bottom of the barrel. Even if the only direction to go from there was up, he says, he wasn’t all that sure which way ‘up’ was. He was pretty turned around. /p
p "Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me," Victor says , referring of course, to his slow approach to what addicts and alcoholicsbr /
call hitting "bottom" Even old friends didn’t want to have their possessionsbr /
stolen. "I had already been reduced to being broke most of the time. even when I was working." Victor decribes that, just as the most experienced "low bottom" alcoholics and addict will attest. At the bottom, he had a single, lucidbr /
moment of utter clarity. Sometimes, he says, he wonders if that moment was a miracle. /p
p I was at the Burger King on MockingBird Lane. I’d gotten my paycheck for the umpteenth time. I was on veteran’s disability because I fell off an aircraft carrier in the Navy., " he laughs, " and I’d already spent it all on crack. I was sitting outside when I was when I started crying. I started crying out to God, " If I’m going to have to go on living like this, go on and take me. Just take me" Then I got an answer. It seems like God was talking to me. He said, "No, I’m not going to take you" Then something really weird happened./p
p"This guy walked up. He was an older guy. He sat down and when he saw me crying, he asked, "Hey. You got a quarter I can get?" All I had was a dollar. "Here. Take it" I said. He said, " Thanks, Victor" Man, I’d never even met him in my life. I still can’t figure out how he knew my name./p
p "That really woke me up. I stopped crying. In fact, I started laughing. I slept that night at the Mockingbird train station. I never did crack again. Of course, that wasn’t an easy ride. There were a lot of hard times."/p
p"When I got my disability check, I used it to rent an apartment. I slept on the floor for the longest time. My sister sent me a little food now and then. But once I got clean, I just sort of started to prosper" /p
pAbout that time, Victor heard about the Dallas Museum’s "Jazz in the Atrium" programs. Feeling steadier than he had in a long time, he got a change of nice clothes from his sister, and simply walked into the museum’s atrium. Doubtless, after everything he’d been through, simply walking through that door took a lot of guts./p
p" I heard about Roger Boykin playing there. Once the show got started, Roger saw me in the audience and invited me on stage to sit in with the band. Isn’t that weird? It all seems so easy. Since that Thursday evening about a year ago, I’ve been off and running"/p
pVictor Cager, a really fine jazz singer, isn’t all that shy. When I asked him to put on an impromptu performance Victor began to sing what could easily be a signature song. "I’m just a lucky so and so" , he roars out, "The birds in the trees …they seem so neighborly…they sing to me wherever I go.." Jazz, he says, is his personal anti-drug. It’s a kind of feel inside the beat that keeps you alive.br /
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