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Back of the Bus. Mingus is an angry man, sensitive about his color, and the fact that his skin is "high yellow" only makes him more intense about being a Negro. He broods, he gulps red wine by the gallon, he brawls in bars. He has been twice divorced, three times married, has fathered six children. His present wife, Judy Starkey, is white. Perpetually bitter, usually unkempt, he rants against racial discrimination and society in general. "Don't call me a jazz musician. The word jazz means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the back-of-the-bus bit!" he shouts.
He has written out his frustrations in a 1,500-page manuscript. Beneath the Underdog, as the book is tentatively titled, deals with racial discrimination, God, yoga, the jazz life, government subsidies, gangsters, sex, Charlie Parker, extrasensory perception, personal hardships and crises when, as Mingus puts it, "everything turns white for me." A former mental patient at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, Mingus tells anyone willing to listen: "They say I'm crazy, and I really am."