Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,25

the neighborhood. And he and Mom saw “Cloverdale,” as a perfect party house. Their parties back on Eighty-Second Street had been intimate and intense. But the Cloverdale parties were like scenes out of a movie. Late at night, with the lights of the city ablaze, my parents took pride in sharing their new home. There was Aunt Diahann in the living room laughing at something Flip Wilson had just said. Out by the pool, Godmother Cicely would be chatting with Robert Guillaume.

I had picked up my parents’ gift for socializing. Accommodating people was their way of life; it also became mine. It wasn’t calculated; it came naturally. Show curiosity about others, make them feel welcome, make them feel loved—that was Mom’s way. And on party nights, Dad was easily the most charming man in the room.

I was a highly social teenager, but I had my issues. I was restless and excitable. I resisted all discipline other than the household chores Mom prescribed. I wasn’t about to go against my mother. She reminded me that I had my own bathroom, which meant it was my job to scrub the toilet. It was also my job to clean the kitchen sink, my job to take out the garbage and do my own laundry. Come to think of it, I had to clean the whole house. Carpets had to be vacuumed. I had to wash my parents’ cars before I could go out on weekends. If my friends were outside waiting for me, they were invited to help out, but I wasn’t going anywhere until my chores were completed.

One night, Mom and Dad didn’t get home from a party until 3 a.m. I was fast asleep. Mom didn’t care; she shook me awake. I woke completely disoriented. She was furious because I hadn’t done what she’d asked me to do. I said I had. I had cleaned the kitchen. I had washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. She pulled me out of bed, marched me down the corridor into the kitchen, and stood in front of the sink and the cabinets. Nothing was in the sink! I had clearly done the job. But then my mother pointed to a cabinet whose door was barely ajar. She said, “Close the cabinet.” I pushed it closed, and she said, “Now the job is done.”

At the time, I thought she was totally insane. She’d actually woken me up in the middle of the night because a cabinet door had been cracked open half an inch. But that’s how meticulous my mother was when it came to completing a task. Later in life, when I was deep into music projects, I kept going back to that incident and hearing her words, “If you do something, do it right.”

I didn’t have a problem with Mom’s discipline. Maybe because her sternness was tempered with love, while Dad’s was laced with anger, not to mention control. Dad seemed hell-bent on controlling me. At the same time, I had lots of freedom. That’s because my parents were always off working. During the day, I had the run of the house. Friends came up to swim in the pool. Jam sessions went down in the living room and on the patio. I never stopped playing, never stopping trying to work up my chops on guitar, bass, drums, and keys. I also never stopped making music with my buddies in the Crenshaw District, a neighborhood called the Jungle, where the focus was on funk.

The upside to Cloverdale, its beautiful location high above the city, was also its downside. I was still enrolled at John Adams Junior High, and the ride from Santa Monica to Baldwin Vista took hours. I’d ride the Pico bus halfway across the city until I got to the corner of La Brea and Pico where I switched to the southbound 212. L.A. buses were nothing like New York buses. They didn’t run as often.

I stood around. I paced. The air was thick with smog. The traffic was fierce. I smelled food from Lucy’s Drive In, a burrito and burger joint. I wanted to eat, but had no money. I hated being hungry, hated waiting on that damn bus. When it finally pulled up, I jumped on, stared out the window, and started making music inside my head. I heard melodies without words. My hands beat out rhythms on the back of the seat in front of me. As the bus stalled in traffic, I fit the