“When we first came to New York everyone was so bright and eager,” Irene recalled. “Then suddenly everyone was nodding.” Miles was spending so little time at home, and had so little interest in her sexually, that at first she suspected he was having an affair. Then she found blood on his shirtsleeve and put two and two together. Gregory Davis, just three or four at the time, remembered his mother hiding Miles’s shoes so he wouldn’t be able to go out to score.
In early 1950 he left Queens and moved himself and his young family into the Hotel America on West Forty-seventh Street, one of the few Manhattan hotels south of Harlem designated by The Negro Travelers’ Green Book as hospitable to African Americans, within easy walking distance of Birdland, Bop City, and other Broadway clubs—and closer to sources of drugs. The America was home to a number of jazz musicians, including his old St. Louis friend Clark Terry, and Miles promptly consigned Irene and the kids to the care of another hotel resident, the up-and-coming young singer Betty Carter, who idolized him. Meanwhile he hung out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd, basically a kaffeeklatsch of heroin users who also happened to be great musicians: the teenage altoist Jackie McLean, the pianist Walter Bishops, Jr., the drummers Blakey, Roach, and Art Taylor. Doing drugs with other addicts relieved loneliness; it also made it easier to score. Miles continued to work, even as his addiction dragged him steadily downward.
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