"I've tried them all. I never did like marijuana or hashish. I have acrophobia and claustrophobia, and grass does funny things to me."
--Johnny Mathis, as told to Rolling Stone magazine's Robert Meyers in a 1971 interview
I couldn't believe my eyes. And yet, deep down it really wasn't that big a surprise. There's always been something about celebrity and drugs and youth that just kind of go hand-in-hand. Still, I was deeply disappointed. I mean, it's not like I hadn't heard Mathis make some brief reference to it somewhere, it may have even been on TV, and I still blew it off, thinking "oh, sure..Johnny Mathis on drugs. Probably took a BC powder the wrong way." Then I read the first six paragraphs of the Rolling Stone article. Well. Here I was holding the truth, straight from the horse's mouth, right in my hands. This here was no story for faint-hearted fawners. Mathis pulled no punches; he was raw, brutally honest, and definitely human, graphically detailing the cocaine use and the pills and the "vitamin shots" in the hip that Mathis used to partake of in his youth. My own brain was fried after the third paragraph. It was far more upsetting to me than any homosexual experiences he may have had; it was as if this really big bubble had burst! Classy, handsome Johnny Mathis came from a good family who did NOT approve of drug use! Hello, reality check. Some time later, I found in Australia a copy of the "authorised" biography, published long after this article came to pass, in which author Tony Jasper tells the story of how one Christmas morning found Mathis on the floor seizing and his younger brother having to take hold of his tongue to keep him from gagging. Game, set, match.
Now, I'm probably in the minority among people my age when it comes to drugs. I wouldn't know cocaine from powdered sugar. I've never seen a marijuana plant except for pictures of it in a magazine. The only grass I've ever been in contact with is the stuff I had to mow in Mother's backyard when I was a kid. However, I have smelled reefer in the halls of my high school, and once I saw a kid passed out in the back of my Physics class. Seeing syringes around is no big news to a nurse's kid, but knowing they were used for something besides delivering immunization was a curious bit of news. Who in the world enjoys shots so much that they do it willingly?! The closest I've ever come to using drugs is as a young kid 8 or 9 years old, waiting until Mother was either asleep or was otherwise gone, then going around to the ashtrays and trying to smoke still-warm cigarette butts to see what it tasted like. (If the reader doesn't believe nicotine is a drug, the reader is delusional.) Those butts were NASTY, too. I never did figure out what the attraction was, nor did I ever develop a real desire to smoke. I think people get in trouble not only from smoking the tobacco, but from smoking the pesticides they spray the tobacco with! I personally don't think it's worth it.
On the other hand, my older brother has been smoking cigarettes since he was about thirteen. He says he got into it because of having to walk three miles to school in the District of Columbia's harsh winter cold, and he claims the cigarettes actually seemed to keep him warm. Mother never really said anything to him about it, either. I think she enjoyed having a smoking buddy in the house, and back in those days a kid could go into a grocery store and buy cigarettes for their parents. So, I basically grew up envelopped in second-hand smoke!
I think we all know people who have one vice or another. But I've wondered many times about why people even get into things like drug use? Is it purely a social thing? I don't have any good answers to that, I'm afraid. I, myself, am a good example of how a kid can grow up in a whole family of users and never really get into it themselves, so I'm a firm believer of the power of the individual. After all, just because you are AROUND the stuff doesn't mean you have to be OF the stuff or even IN the stuff! Now, this may be a totally naïve and simplistic view on my part, but there it is.
I called up my brother one night, and while we chatted he mentioned his company's inability to find qualified help who could pass the drug test, to the point where they actually had to abandon it. I was stunned! We're talking about appliance repairmen--hard-working people who make service calls in white shirts and ties, who have to handle delicate electronic equipment, who went through hours if not years of extensive training to be able to service the increasingly computerized modern-day household appliance, EDUCATED PEOPLE, and they can't pass a drug test?!
I found this very hard to believe, and I said so, thus revealing my naïvete to God and everybody. I told him I would have expected that sort of thing from the "unskilled labor" or the folks who graduate high school without knowing how to read, but surely not among the people he works with? Brother then offered some insights in an attempt to educate his little sister:
"Now, wait a minute. You associate drug use with a certain class of people," he said. "The kids out on the corner, in the not-so-well-kept neighborhoods, paying more for their car than for their rent, and these are the same people the police like to target when they do their little round-ups. But these are not the majority drug users. You've got what you call your casual drug user. These are your middle class, your upper-middle class, majority white people, people with degrees long as my arm who live in the so-called "good" neighborhoods and pay more for their car than they do for THEIR house, EDUCATED PEOPLE, and these are the people you're not going to see on the news every night."
He continued, "I used to complain to my boss all the time about the health hazard, because I'd have to make calls to these houses, and they'd have their potpourri and their incense burning 'cause they'd be back in their bedrooms smoking their wacky weed [i.e., marijuana] while I'm trying to fix their washing machines, and I'd get real bad headaches from that stuff."
"It's widespread. And it's worse now then back in the 60's. People you wouldn't associate with drug use are users. School teachers, lawyers, cops, housewives. Clean-shaven, clean-cut people with no wild-eyed look and no marks on their arms. It's the main reason I had to quit socializing."
"Don't be surprised, when you go to another one of your friend's parties, if after a while someone pulls out a wacky-weed cigarette. I'm not saying it'll happen. I'm just saying don't be SURPRISED. You might even see a little sandwich bag looks like catnip in it, and nobody's got a cat -- that'll tip you off, too! And you've got to be careful because if you don't want to join in, they'll figure you for a drug enforcement agent!"
I suppose that's a key to my disbelief about Mathis' excesses. Maybe I am too quick to judge people by where and how they live. I associate drug use with class, and as my brother says, that's wrong. I did think that you grow up in a good family, then maybe you smoke and maybe you drink but you don't mess with the hard stuff. The illegal stuff. And Mathis wasn't a movie star or a rock star...he was supposed to have come from a time when you had classy, well-dressed people like Nat Cole and Billy Eckstine and Ella Fitzgerald and you never heard about those people entering rehab for drugs. (Nat Cole did pay the ultimate price for his love of nicotine, but unfortunately this is a legal substance.) Maybe that was all a lie, too. Oh, well.
I don't suppose it's ever too late to learn about these things, I guess. If it's as prevalent as my brother suggests, I guess I didn't know what I was looking at when I was looking at it. And I certainly never noticed this at any of MY friends' houses, but then I do have to admit I don't socialize all that much.
I do know one thing. It's extremely hard for people, regardless of their economic and social background, to escape the grip of drugs once they get into it. I've seen this myself among several of my relatives, usually male relatives at that, although whether their being male has anything to do with it is anybody's argument. A few of my cousins have been in and out of rehab so much the people who work there learn their names. They seem to have a terrible time breaking the cycle and staying clean. Singer Boz Scaggs lost his son Oscar on New Year's Day 1999 because he took one last hit of heroin after being in and out of treatment programs for several years. Sometimes, even when people say they're clean, all it takes is that one last hit to get them started again.
And this is where Mathis can consider himself very lucky, indeed. There comes a point when you've got to let your own common sense kick in and say "this won't do for me at all," if you live through the experience, that is, and I believe Mathis told himself this one day. Also, to his credit, he had the will of steel and the determination to make sure that he wasn't going to be somebody that the rehab workers would be on a first-name basis with. And I don't know for sure, having never been in the throes of an addiction, Thank Jesus, but it probably helps to allow others to help you through it, and to have relatives and friends who aren't afraid to kick your ass, too. Like Mathis did.
Thanks to that article, it had finally dawned on me what may have been behind the odd behavior I had seen in concert a few years ago. Surely Mathis wasn't using the hard stuff again. But on the other hand, Mathis is a senior citizen now, and medications such as pain killers and blood pressure medicine and other "controlled substances" are a fact of life for that particular age group. What I had witnessed could easily have been a reaction to medication, or it could just as easily have been fatigue. I suppose I never will know what in the world was going on.
At any rate, I needed the reassurance of a healthy Mathis on stage, the Mathis in perfect vocal and physical form that I admire so well. The Mathis I know he's capable of being. So I went to the show this year with a fairly open mind, although I really didn't know what to expect. He had just recovered from surgery, and I was going to see for myself whether he was healthy again. [Hospitals are yet another source of drugs, morphine in particular. In fact, I saw a rather graphic episode of Little House on the Prairie many years ago that touched on the subject of morphine addiction.]
What a relief to see a vibrant, healthy Mathis who was on time, didn't drop things, seem disoriented, or slur his speech. A person can't look as good, or move as well, and perform as well as Mathis did that night and be under the influence of anything stronger than aspirin. No way. And from what I've heard about his behavior in concert since then, through the wonderful, honest, and thorough reports from the visitors to the Mathis Chronicles, I'm satisfied this is the case. He's clean, he's healthy. Thank God.
I wonder about the toll his youthful experimentation had to have taken, though. Who's to say what else those "shots in the hip" ultimately had done to him, given his recent surgeries. He told Robert Meyers 28 years ago he didn't do those things anymore, that he enjoyed the clarity of life without drugs or medication. I'm hoping and praying, so many years later, that it was the truth then and still is now. They say you never really get over an addiction, at least that's what the alcoholics say. They say you're always on the brink, and that you just have to take it one day at a time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Mathis. But I think he's OK. The fact that he's now 64 and hopefully has got another 20 years left in him is proof of that.
He's a survivor! He's certainly got the battle scars to prove it. I believe that, ultimately, the key to his survival was that Mathis just finally grew up, perhaps quit going to parties, and learned from his mistakes before those mistakes killed him. By telling Mr. Meyers what he had done, and thus telling those of us lucky enough to have found that old article, we too can learn from his gullibility. We can also learn another, more difficult lesson. People can grow up in a house full of love and support and have every advantage in the world, and these people can fall just like everybody else. Even people we look up to. It was difficult for me to read the rawness of the language Mathis used to describe the experience. But, that's the danger in putting people on pedestals; they can fall! And when they fall, it hurts.
I knew better than to do that, too. I thought, or maybe naïvely hoped, that because I saw Mathis as someone special, because he has this Mr. Clean, Mr. Class image, he would have been above all that. Wasn't that stupid? Really, why should I have considered him to be anything other than a man? That's certainly not fair to him.
Mathis is still my hero. I still want to be just like him when I grow up, namely rich, independent, loved. He's also a very strong and brave man. The conquering of his demons proves this. But there are things that I've read that he has done that I am just not going to do! I feel it's OK to look up to him, admire him for his talent, and even for the beautiful human being he seems to be. But it's wrong to make him more than what he is.
I occasionally meet folks on the web, who have made Mathis some kind of golden idol to worship, this model of perfection who is incapable of doing wrong. I feel for these people, partly because I've been there. I also know that this is a very stupid way to live. After all, you've basically formulated an ideal personality based on about three hours of concert time, five minutes of air time, and whatever selective information the public relations people choose to hand out. Besides, it is written in a very important book that making gods out of men is definitely a no-no.
One must keep things in perspective. I think it is because of something important missing in our lives that leads us to do these things. Mathis is only human, with all the usual human frailties. I can accept this now. I can accept who he is. If the music is truly what's important, I have no choice but to accept the other things.
It's like Vincent Van Gogh, who was a schizophrenic maniac who happened to do wonderful work on canvas. Sometimes people do go to far, though, just because it strikes a nerve for me, morally. To this day I will not listen to a Johnny Rivers record because of the fact that he is a convicted wife-beater. Sometimes, it's difficult to separate the man from his art.
I don't have an answer as to how to resolve that particular conflict. But I know this much. There's not a person on Earth who doesn't have some type of vice. I know now that even "Mr. Class" can fall, he can make dumb mistakes, like so many people tend to do when young, and he was extremely lucky. Mathis fell, but PRAISE GOD, he picked himself back up again, didn't he? I hope and pray that's all behind him.
Somebody with a head on their shoulders once said: "Don't worry about who you were; worry about who you are." Mathis has escaped that awful grip, and has lived to be considered a legend, which is, of course, a cute euphemism for "old". And rather than being the man with the golden arm, he continues to be the man with the golden voice. Oscar Scaggs wasn't that lucky. Countless people who are not celebrities, or the sons and daughters and cousins of celebrities: your schoolteachers, lawyers, mail carriers, college professors, weren't that lucky. Mathis, and those of us who still love and admire him in spite of his shortcomings, are.
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