Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James

“Didn’t know you could play jazz so good,” Miles says to me.

“Didn’t know you could sing so funky,” I say to him.

The music is so beautiful I start crying through Miles’s horn.

Someone says, “The hospitals are clearing out. The patients are healed.”

Someone else says, “The churches are clearing. The congregations are in the streets.”

“I told you,” says Miles. “I told you we could do it.”

When I put the trumpet to my lips again, the horn turns into a megaphone. When I start to speak, I hear the voice of my mother.

“My son has the answer,” she says. “Miles gave him the answer. Listen to my son.”

I turn to Miles, who rarely smiles, and see that he is smiling.

When I wake up from this dream, I am smiling.

But I’m still in jail.

This long stay in jail is the first time I’m remembering my dreams. I’m not even sure I had dreams before they put my ass behind bars. My mind was clogged up with cocaine—not just any cocaine, but cocaine strong enough to fuel jet engines. I was a jet engine that got dislodged from the plane of my brain. I crashed to the ground and broke into a million pieces. When the pieces magically came back together, the engine could work again. But the fuel was no longer cocaine. The fuel was something I hadn’t used since I was a little boy. I’d call it natural energy and natural drive. It’s a natural restlessness to see and explore and learn. Couldn’t do any of that exploring when I was ripping and running through the world of intoxicants. Didn’t wanna explore. Just wanted to stay high.

So ain’t this a bitch? My highs are my dreams. My dreams are my escape. And my imagination is my way out of prison. If you break down the word “imagination,” I guess it means manufacturing images. Dreaming is the purest form of that process—so, for as long as I’m locked up, I’m gonna write down my dreams.

I’m also gonna write down my life.

I’ve always wanted to write my own life story. But outside of prison I could never sit down and be quiet. My energy was scattered. I was always going in a dozen different directions at once. But now I got no choice. Got nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’m forced to read. And in reading—especially about the lives of people I relate to—I get excited. I read about Charlie Parker, Nat King Cole, Bob Marley, and Malcolm X, and I understand exactly why their lives went the way they did. I see their fuckups as my fuckups; I see their talents as my talents. Sometimes talent is so big it takes you to places that you don’t understand. Super talent doesn’t take you to the Land of Peace; it takes you to Crazyland. And if you ain’t emotionally grounded in something rock-solid, you gonna get annihilated.

I got annihilated. Now I’m getting healed. And part of the healing is dreaming, remembering, and writing.

I can write in peace because I don’t have access to my lethal vices. Being a celebrity in jail also means I have protectors who keep the bad cats away from me. They see I’m serious about writing and form a shield around me.

In prison, I’ve gravitated toward the bookish brothas. I’ve met Muslims who have taken me deep into the Koran. I love and respect Islam. I was raised Catholic but never really studied the Bible till late in life. The Christian brothas in prison have given me a new way to look at the Word. A Jewish man has been talking about Kabbalah, mysticism with wisdom of its own.

Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna shove no religion down your throat. I’m not using this book to win converts. I’m just using the book to manufacture images from my past. I just wanna look at old pictures, lay ’em out there, and, like a jigsaw puzzle, see if I can make the pieces fit. See if I can make sense of a life of nonsense and understand how I got to be caged up like an animal.

I am an animal, a fuckin’ wild animal. I lost my human soul. I lost my human mind. But in this animal cage, my intention is to win back my humanity. Animals can’t write.

I can.

I will.

Here goes . . .

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