JANUARY 2003
For sheer self-indulgent narcissistic excess you can't beat Natalie Cole's book, Angel on My Shoulder. (Warner Books, copyright 2000.) While there is an inherent arrogance in all prayers of thanksgiving (thank you, God, for taking care of me and the hell with all those other losers) Natalie took it to new heights in her autobiography. Poor thing, her life has been one long series of misfortunes, each requiring the intervention of her numerous Guardian Angels. For starters she was born to one of the all-time greats in music, Nat King Cole; so she was always known as "the-daughter-of" and that troubled her deeply. Awww, poor thing.
Natalie Cole's childhood was filled with wealth, celebrities and the best private schools, so when she was in college she naturally got into the drug scene, Big Time, squandering her privileged chance at an excellent education. Why drugs? Because her father had been thoughtless enough to die of cancer when she was only fifteen. It took two decades for her to finally learn to forgive him for it. Yes, she said forgive. What a selfish beast her father had been for dying and upsetting Natalie so! People were so cruel to this little girl.
After tossing education aside, Natalie wanted a singing career, but she only got her first opportunities to establish herself as a singer because she was "the-daughter-of" and that really steamed her clams and wounded her delicate pride. Awww. So she increased her drug use. On an LSD trip she decided that flying would be easy if she just flapped her arms and so she started climbing out a 20-story window to test her aeronautical skills. That's when it happened. God's grace kicked in and he sent her a couple of Guardian Angels—fellow stoners who were slightly less wasted than she was. They pulled her back inside, saving her life. Aren't Guardian Angels wonderful?
Our heroine next moved on to heroin, and before long she couldn't pay her rent because of her habit, so she settled in with some fellow users at their place. After injecting herself with some powerful brown heroin, she slipped into unconsciousness and was on the verge of death. Natalie: "By the grace of God that didn't happen. Tim and his wife intervened by injecting me with salt and water. They saved my life. They may have been unlikely Angels, but they were Angels just the same." Unlikely? Well, yes, I think so. They were dope-dealing, heroin-injecting, pill-popping stoner Angels. But God works in mysterious ways….
The money Natalie made singing couldn't begin to cover her habit, so she sought other means of support, mainly forging checks and being a "lure" to attract customers for prostitutes. In Harlem she hung out with pimps, pushers and hookers, but she had singing gigs all the way up New England to Springfield. While she was there a cop took her "downtown" for a talk and kindly invited her to get the hell out of town. He could easily have arrested her and charged her with a plethora or crimes; but he did not. The detective, Big Al, let her go. "Big Al was another one of my unlikely Angels." Uh, yeah.
In Toronto on tour Natalie got busted for drugs. In Canada they don't take kindly to drugs. In the slammer with a bunch of other losers, Natalie awaited her cell assignment with dread when all of a sudden (The Lone Ranger's theme music here) it happened again! The guys in her band had scrounged bail money and she was free! "God had delivered me." She got probation. "Between God and a great attorney" the story never got back to the States. When she was finally allowed to leave the country, she was afraid to drive back to Chicago alone but God gave her "spiritual eyes for that trip" and all was well. Don't you have goosebumps?
Natalie's first husband, Marvin, was a druggie like she was. Thing is, he was also Reverend Marvin Yancy, Baptist minister. Seem odd? Not according to Natalie: "God's preachers are His when they are in the pulpit. But once they step down—they are only men." (The Catholic Church buys into this concept wholeheartedly.) So it's sing some hymns, whip a little religion on the flock, then step down and freebase some cocaine. Hallelujah!
On a routine cocaine buy in Compton Natalie left the dope factory just seconds before the L.A. SWAT unit busted the place. She escaped arrest by mere minutes. How? Guess. No, I'll let her tell you. "How did I manage such a narrow escape? There's that Angel again."
I am not making this up. Read the book.
On beer and Quaaludes Natalie flipped her Datsun 240Z but escaped the jaws of death. How? Angels. We're told these Angels were working double duty but we're not told if they were paid overtime. After her first marriage crumbled she was lonely so she wrote a letter to God asking for a second husband and put the letter in her Bible, promising to fast for three Sundays. Sure enough, on that third Sunday she met a man, fell in love and married him. God had sent her a husband. Unfortunately he was a wife-beater, but she didn't want to divorce him because he had been sent by God, even though on one occasion he split Natalie's lip and blackened her eye by flinging a Bible at her face. I think there's an irony in there somewhere.
This sordid story presents a question that begs for an answer: What is wrong with this picture? The obvious answer is everything, but the repeated coupling of Angels with drugs and God's mercy with suffering is not only jolting but absurd. Why didn't God's grace and his busy little Angels keep Natalie off drugs in the first place? Wouldn't that have made a hell of a lot more sense? Children were starving and being abused all over the world, but did God intervene to help? Nah. He was too busy sending Guardian Angels to keep an acid head from trying to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Such is God's infinite mercy.
The tremendous popularity of the TV show, Touched by an Angel, is due mostly to this streak of narcissism that exists in all of us to one degree or another. It's I, I, I and me, me, me. And God's lookin' out for Yours Truly, thank you very much, and why shouldn't he? I'm important! This is perhaps one of the ugliest aspects of religions—the constant focus on Self. The lip service paid to "loving your fellow humans" pales into nothingness compared to the major themes: I'm going to heaven. I'm loved by God. I'm going to be forgiven for my sins. I'm going to be watched over by Guardian Angels. I'm so freaking special!
This self-centered view of the world is odiously apparent whenever people like Jerry Falwell speak about their imminent journey to heaven. They patiently explain why all Jews, Muslims, atheists, Mormons, etc., will burn in hell for all eternity unless they are correctly "washed in the blood of Christ"—and the sneers on the faces of these self-righteous explainers are nothing short of vile. If that represents God's grace, you can have it.
While I do feel sympathy for anyone in the grip of any addiction, there is no need to invoke mysticism to explain either how it started or how it stopped. I smoked for years and stopping was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But no Devil got me started and no Angel made me stop. I get credit for both ends of that stupid addiction. And if Natalie Cole is still clean then good for her—not for any invisible Angels. It's a shame she went through such misery, and put others through it with her, but that's part of being human. The constant references to deities and their various minions are part of trying to deny that humanity. If only we could accept ourselves, and others, as human beings, no more and no less, what a world this might be. We are all born, we all need to eat, drink, sleep and have sex, and we are all going to die. We are all subject to illness and candidates for addictions and we should try to help each other when it happens to any of us. Is this too much to ask of our gregarious, intelligent species? Apparently it is, and it saddens me. Our egos rule, so we create Demons to curse us with addictions and Guardian Angels to cure us. If it weren't so tragic and self-defeating, it would be just plain silly as hell.
© 2003 Judith Hayes
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