Every year it’s the same thing in the USA: we receive a bunch of tax documents like 1099s, W-2s, etc. and all of them say “a copy has been provided to the IRS.” Oh really? Then why can’t I log into the IRS website by January 31 and see all of the documents. Why, at that point, can’t I already be provided an estimate of what the IRS already thinks my tax liability will be? And if everything were already there, why couldn’t I just click “OK” and be done? Or if I need to provide more information such as my own business income, why couldn’t I do it right there on the site?
The reason is what I call the “incumbency problem.” We’ve reached the point in this country where we can’t actually address, much less solve, any of our societal problems because it would be bad for some sector of the economy. That sector will lobby against any public policy changes that would affect them negatively. Thus, we can’t solve the tax complexity problem without destroying the accounting, tax preparation, and tax law industries. A universal vaccine against cancer would gut wide swaths of the medical sector. The “drug war” employs tens of thousands of people including the DEA, FBI, prisons, police forces, and Coast Guard — not to mention plenty of lawyers. I could go on.
I hear from people in Europe that they just get a tax bill every year and pay it, like our property taxes here.
I realize that the last two posts made me look pretty gay. While I proudly claim the label “queer” for myself, I have sometimes been told that bisexuals don’t really exist. Contrary to popular opinion and some very flawed studies, bisexuals are real. I have debated about telling the following stories, but I feel that it is necessary to set the stage for the following post (A Dark Winter). Alcoholism involves a physical addiction but is often fueled by emotional and spiritual deficits. To recover I had to come to recognize that I was “soul sick.” My soul sickness began before my addiction developed. Even after I knew it was bad for me I continued to drink because it was the only medicine I had that assuaged the deep anguish I felt. Now I will place myself on the autopsy table for a forensic investigation into some of the underlying conditions that amplified my disease. I hope my honesty makes up for the bad impressions you will get from my behavior.
When I was in sixth grade I was pretty uninhibited, often playing the role of clown in class, and very active on the playground. I teased and flirted with the most popular girls in class because I didn’t see why not: I was a boss. I remember hanging out with Lisa and Katie at Lisa’s house on a few afternoons. There was quite a bit of off-color humor, as you would expect with eleven-year-olds. That year for Halloween our town put on a haunted house. There was this old mansion on the edge of town that was in the process of being restored by the historical society. It was made available for the purpose and I suppose a lot of work was put into it. These days it’s not unusual for organizations to put together such things, but at the time it was very new. Everyone was excited to go, and a group of us including some of my siblings went together. I clearly remember going through the first two rooms, the horror displays, the jump scares, the arms reaching out from hidden places to grab at you as you passed. At a certain point something weird happened in my brain. I remember feeling disoriented and dissociated. Suddenly my legs were moving in a new direction without any accompanying thought. I suppose my prefrontal cortex switched off and the animal parts of my brain took over. I somehow got past the workers who were shouting, “Hey, kid, you can’t go that way!” and evaded capture. In serpentine fashion I darted across three rooms and found an exit. Once out in the safety of the cool night air I took a deep breath, relishing my return to consciousness. When my group came out a few minutes later they were saying, “Where were you? We lost track of you and didn’t know what happened.” I was ashamed of the fact that I had panicked, but was also a little bit proud of my daring escape. Their security was weak. Perhaps they didn’t anticipate any of their victims making a break for it.
Over the summer leading into seventh grade I got a girlfriend, Kelly. It began with playground flirtation. I remember being at my dad’s house for a couple weeks after that and thinking of her obsessively. I was lost in fantasy and imagined her thinking of me too. I sensed the potential of — what? I didn’t even know. But when I got back in town, saw her again, and learned that indeed she had been thinking of me the whole time I was gone it was pure elation. This was my first experience of someone I really liked liking me back. That Fall we were “boyfriend and girlfriend,” which really meant that we continued to spend time goofing off on the playground at her condominium complex and talking a lot. I believe we spoke on the phone as well. One day in October she said to me, “Come over here, there is something I want to give you.” We went away from the playground to another courtyard in the complex. “What?” I asked. “Come over here,” she said, leading me into a recessed doorway. I stood with my back against someone’s door as she turned. Smiling, she placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Close your eyes.” I did, still clueless. All at once I was awash in the sweetest sensation: her soft lips planting one careful kiss on mine. I was overwhelmed. I did not reciprocate, but I could think of very little else for the next few days. But I guess with what was going on at home I somehow couldn’t go any further with her and I cut things off suddenly. For decades I regretted the hurt and confusion she must have felt at me breaking up with her for no apparent reason, but it was a bit like my escape from the haunted house. I couldn’t have told you why I did it. After that I became increasingly shy and inhibited about my crushes.
One of the themes of this blog, a main theme actually, is the dangerous destructive potential of low self-esteem. I think my parents were misguided on this subject. Perhaps as a mix of Catholicism and Twelve-step ideas, I was taught that pride was a sin, humility a virtue, and that “ego deflation at depth” was good spiritual medicine. Whenever my parents perceived that I was getting “too full of myself” they would tear me down verbally. Of course, with Walt it was physical too. Today I understand that self-esteem is different than pride. “Pride” exists as a poor substitute for self-esteem, often activated in response to accusations or insults. It’s natural. Being called “queer” in a derogatory context made me militant in my denials. I finally developed some real self-esteem in my fifties, thanks to going back and finishing my undergraduate degree, and also meeting the love of my life during that time. Her humorous yet loving acceptance of my foibles has helped me to accept that, while utterly unique and weird, I am just like everybody else in that I deserve love and happiness just by virtue of the fact that I exist. I don’t have to “earn” it — it’s a birthright. That, my friends, is self-esteem. My parents weren’t given anything approaching unconditional love growing up. They worked hard to prove that they were of value in the world, but somehow never seemed to really believe they had succeeded. As a result they were very good people, but deeply insecure nevertheless. In my teen years I was plagued by the same sense of inadequacy and it permeated my awkward attempts to gain notoriety through my musical activities.
On with the next story! I met Tana when I was in tenth grade (she was a year older). I sat next to her in marching band class as she played tenor sax and I played baritone sax. Tana was very intelligent and we joked around a lot. She was unusually close to her mom and was active in her church. She was tall and thin, and to be honest, I didn’t find her physically attractive at all. But I loved our friendly banter and I relished how our friendship grew over that year. Enter Trisha. The first Star Wars movie was released over the following summer and made quite an impact. The fact that the music stood out enough to make the album a hit made it all the more popular with us band nerds. That Fall (now I was in eleventh grade) a new girl showed up in band playing French horn. She had recently moved up from L.A., had tacky dyed blonde hair, a curvy body and a cute face. Most sensationally, she had a bubbly-yet-nerdy personality that made her the focus of attention for me and my male friends. We couldn’t get enough of her! I had seen Star Wars in the theater once or twice. She told us she had seen it a dozen times and she knew people in L.A. who had over a hundred viewings under their belts. She talked a lot about how amazing L.A. was, and hungrily soaked up all the attention she was getting. In a small town she was suddenly a big fish.
After seventh grade my “romantic life” had devolved into fantasy-driven, super-secret, excruciating crushes from a distance. With the girls I was friends with I could joke around easily, but when I developed a crush on someone I became quite shy. Trish was a little different because we were part of a friend group (comprised of her and a bunch of guys who lusted after her), so while my crush was secret (barely, I guess), I was able to be my usual boisterous self. We all had a lot of fun that fall. The marching band had been fundraising for a year to make a trip to the Mother Goose Day Parade in El Cajon, down in San Diego County. That meant travelling by air, which I had never done. The parade was scheduled for the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We were playing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz, and the band director’s concept was for us to come to attention, play about eight bars of “Over the Rainbow” while standing still, then start marching to the upbeat popular song from The Wiz. Cool! But we didn’t have an arrangement of Over the Rainbow. The director asked me if I could take this piano arrangement by George Shearing and score it for marching band, writing out all the parts. I could do that! I gained even more notoriety from that accomplishment, as not too many high school juniors could have done it without help. My “ego” was growing.
I hadn’t had anything to drink since the infamous champagne incident before ninth grade, but some of the guys I knew from Jazz Ensemble were partiers. They invited me to go for a drive with them one evening and we cruised Main Street, drank beer, and smoked a joint. I was not used to this form of male companionship. They asked me if I liked any girls (no doubt they had heard the rumors about me liking boys). I said, “Yeah, I think Trisha is really hot.” They started shouting things like, “Yeah! You should bone her!” I was pretty uncomfortable with that attitude, as I already knew her well enough to know she was not that type, appearances perhaps to the contrary. She had quietly admitted to me that she had no sexual experience. But I felt the peer pressure to make some kind of move in her direction. As the trip to San Diego neared, I somehow mustered the courage to call her. I told her I really liked her, thought we would be good together, and asked her if she wanted to hang out with me at the San Diego Zoo, which was planned as part of the trip. She said yes! I was euphoric for about three days as I kept our arrangement secret from the rest of the guys. I was lost in a world of fantasy that included walking around holding hands, maybe sneaking a kiss in front of the giraffes. The night before we were to leave on the trip I received a phone call. She said she was worried that maybe I wanted to go off alone with her, which would probably alienate the other guys and mess up the friend group dynamic. I learned she had actually been a chubby misfit in L.A., had lost weight and dyed her hair over the summer, and was making a new start of things. She told me she had worked hard to develop an outgoing personality and to build up a social circle and didn’t want to ruin it. It really felt like she was confiding in me, which I should have appreciated more than I did.
If I could travel back in time as my sixty-two-year-old self and talk to sixteen-year-old me I would say, “Dude, you got this. She likes you. She wants to go out with you, but she doesn’t want to ruin the trip for the other guys and destroy what she has built. She’s opening up to you. Just play it cool on the trip knowing that you are going to start dating afterwards. Make a plan to go see a movie with her.” But I was an insecure dork, and I felt myself spiraling into despair. I told her I understood, but once on the airplane I couldn’t bring myself to try to sit near her or speak to her, even. I sulked the whole way. She seemed hurt and confused. My mom would have derisively told me to get off my pity pot. Ugh. The trip turned out to be very fun anyway, but I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I was not good enough for her. On the flight back I sat next to Tana. We had been good friends for over a year but she knew nothing about my failed attempt to get something started with Trisha. After take-off I suddenly, without really thinking about it, put my arm around her. She accepted it, and we sort of cuddled the whole way back. I was weirdly gratified when I saw that Trisha had noticed us before quickly turning away. Revenge? What a dick, though. Arriving back in town, Tana took me aside and said that us being a thing was probably a bad idea. She was right, but it was a second blow to my pride.
I never apologized to either of them. The common denominator in all of these stories is that under certain stressful circumstances I would act or react in ways I couldn’t control or even explain. Apologizing or salvaging the situation in some graceful way was simply not within my capabilities at the time. Not long after that weekend Tana’s mother died suddenly. I’m sure it turned her whole world upside down. The following semester she was like a different person: she had ditched the horn-rimmed glasses for contacts, lightened and styled her hair, wore make-up, and now had a stylish wardrobe. Soon she was dating one of the most popular guys in the senior class and became part of the “in” crowd, partying a lot. We never really spoke again.
As for Trisha, our friendship was rekindled when I helped her rehearse a number to audition for the Spring musical. Judging from what she wrote in my yearbook the following year we must have become good friends by the time I graduated, but I am sure the San Diego incident was never mentioned again.
The champagne incident, where I ended up grounded for a month, happened right before the start of ninth grade. The truancy crisis happened midway through, while I was still fourteen. After nearly losing custody of me my mom knew she had to monitor me more closely, but it was hard to do working fourteen hour days. She sat me down and explained that now that I was sitting on the bubble of one more unexcused absence leading to foster care, I was going to have to take full responsibility for my decisions as much as possible. She would help me whenever I asked (I remember her helping me type a paper), but most importantly, I needed to be honest with her. “I understand that you are a teenage boy and you will do things you don’t want me to know about. But if you do get into trouble, it will be much worse for you if you lie to me about it than if you tell me the truth.” From that time forward I decided to just open up to her about a lot of things, and we became much closer. I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to music camp that summer if we hadn’t made such strides in developing trust and mutual respect. It turned out that having your mom as an ally and support made life much easier!
The music and theater programs at our high school were among the best in the state, but just down the road ten miles was a university town that rivaled or eclipsed us. We hated them, of course, and there was even a big football rivalry between the two high schools. But my mom worked at the university, and had friends and associates in that community. Perhaps even then she was thinking of relocating there. When I returned from my triumphant experience at music camp the summer musical at our high school was midway through rehearsals. Since it was summer school, it was more like a community theater production, with adult members of the community performing on stage and in the orchestra. The lady that had been functioning as the rehearsal pianist was a “fan,” and she invited me to take over for her, since she preferred to play the cello anyway. It was a breakthrough moment, as even though I had only been playing for three years my skills were approaching a professional level. It turned out to be a pretty creditable production of The Sound of Music, and I loved performing in the orchestra. My mom tried to do me a huge favor, but I didn’t see it that way. A doctor and his family who lived in the nearby university town had a bedroom available as one of their several children was leaving for college. I think they still had three teenagers at home, all of them heavily involved in music. She brought me over to visit them, and I got a chance to play their piano and see the bedroom where I could spend the rest of my high school years, if I chose. It was a great opportunity. They were attractive and kind people, and were offering to take me in for the sake of my talent. But it would mean betraying my high school and leaving behind my “Chompain Bunch.” I couldn’t do it! Still, I can’t help wondering how much better my life would have turned out if I had taken that fork.
During Spring Break of my sophomore year in high school (I was fifteen) my mom decided she would take a drive down to UC Santa Barbara to visit my eldest sister, Stephanie. She would have been twenty then. She was majoring in Religious Studies and Library Science. The Religious Studies department at Santa Barbara was one of the best in the world. It was secular and was more like “the history, literature, traditions, sociology, and psychology of world religions.” My sister was a lesbian and radical feminist. Decades later she joked that she was considered a “paleo-lesbian” by the younger crowd, steeped in feminist history, philosophy and literature. I found her fascinating. My mom invited me to go with her, six hours driving each way. I hadn’t learned to drive yet, so I couldn’t help in that way, but I kept her awake. We talked the whole time, there and back. It was really good for us. In Santa Barbara I was bewitched by the beauty and sunshine. We went to the beach, visited campus, spent time at the Mission and botanical gardens, and stayed with my sister and her [housemate, lover, friend?]. A highlight of the trip for me was getting to sit in a meeting of the gay/lesbian alliance. I knew I was bisexual, maybe even gay, but was hoping to get more of a sense of that world. The meeting was stimulating: they talked about issues of gay rights, politics, identity. But I was very disappointed with the gay men. The lesbians all seemed to be very deep and intellectual, with a full-flowering culture that was deeply grounded. The men just seemed to me to be shallow and hedonistic. Perhaps it’s not fair, it was just one meeting, but I remember feeling a little crestfallen. But nevertheless, that visit to UCSB planted the seeds that resulted in my decision to go there for college a few years later.
The relationship my mom and I forged during that time lasted throughout the rest of her life, not counting the last two years of my drinking, where I mostly avoided her. But once I got sober at twenty-three we established a pattern of talking on the phone every two or three weeks for two or three hours at a time. Eventually I got to a point where I was hesitant to make any major decision without discussing it with her first. My siblings sometimes resented how I seemed to have become her “favorite,” but I think it was really just that I was kind of “special needs” and had opened up to her in ways my siblings could not. I only have my experience to go by: I know they struggled with her hyper-critical tendencies. She and I would really go at it sometimes. I stood my ground many times, but she was always a font of wisdom and insight. And we laughed a lot! She was diagnosed with frontal-temporal dementia (FTD) in her late seventies. It was quite progressed by then, probably developing since her sixties. I will have more to say about that later, but for now I can only mention that as it gradually became apparent to me that she and I would not be able to have the deep conversations we were accustomed to much longer, an aching grief came over me that was like heartbreak in slow motion.
Me and my mom, with my little brother Drew and our family dog, Gizzard.
When I was in sixth grade I had a posse. I was the chief instigator and center of attention for a group of about six guys that I had known since kindergarten. Our desks were pressed together right next to the teacher so he could keep an eye on us and redirect our attention whenever necessary. It was often necessary. When the constant giggling at my little quips escalated to raucous laughter, it would be time once again to send me out to the hallway so that things could cool down. This went on all year, and I loved it. Poor teacher. But he was great, the only male teacher I had in elementary school but a true classic, from Boston. We California boys loved his accent. But in seventh grade it was just me and Chuck, both lonely misfits who constantly bickered with each other, resentful of our plight. I will have a lot to say about my relationship with Chuck in another post. I mentioned him when I told the story of how we entered beginning band together in eighth grade, and how we were made fun of by the more inveterate members of the advanced bands.
One day in eighth grade between classes, I sat down at the piano in the band room and played some ragtime, rolled out some improvisations as well. One of the kids from Symphonic band, Robert, heard me and got very excited. As his friends began to arrive he told them, “Hey, listen to this guy play: he’s really great!” A crowd gathered and I became a somebody. The beginning band wasn’t good enough to perform anywhere, and I still felt like a guest in the band room, but Robert invited me to hear the Symphonic band perform their winter concert. Robert was a percussionist, the good kind. He could read music very well and played the glockenspiel, xylophone, and timpani in addition to all the drums. I arrived at the concert that evening feeling like I was crashing a party or something, out of place but eager to hear the music. I sat near the back of the auditorium, but when Robert looked up from tuning the timpani and saw me he…smiled. Just a simple smile, notable for its lack of self-conscious reservation. No hedging or goofiness. Just, “Hey, you made it! Glad to see you.” I felt welcomed, and confused. Guys didn’t just smile at other guys, I had discovered in seventh grade. You don’t want people to think you’re gay or something, I had learned. But, no, he just threw me an easy smile and I think it may have changed my life. After that I felt like I belonged in the band and the band room. By the end of the year I began to be the center of a new circle of friends, and I liked it.
In summer school Robert taught me to play timpani and encouraged me to fool around on the other percussion equipment, showing me how to interpret drum notation. I was learning tuba and bassoon on top of baritone sax. It was a fun summer during which my friendship with Robert grew. I mentioned in a previous post that there were several boys who vied for status of “best friend,” and I wouldn’t ever grant any of them that title. But forty years later I looked back and realized that Robert really was the best friend I had in those years, even though I had never really noticed. I took him for granted because I could: he was so loyal and patient with my awkward social convulsions. Near the end of that summer, when we were fourteen, his sister got married. I should say something about Robert’s unusual family. Robert’s parents were members of a social club near my house, notable for the swimming pool enclosed by a fiberglass fence, with a clubhouse that was basically a private bar. His dad and dad’s best friend were gym teachers, I think, and the two couples had long taken family vacations together, camping at the beach and such. I think they liked to party because they had a full wet bar in their house. Anyway, some years before I met Robert, his parents and their best friends decided that they were married to the wrong people. They all divorced and remarried — each other’s spouse. The two families continued to get on great with each other, and the numerous children of the two marriages mixed freely and were allowed to live in whichever house suited them. I had never heard of such a thing! But they were all very nice people. His sister’s wedding reception was going to be held at the social club, and Robert told me he might be able to sneak a bottle of champagne out, so I should be ready. That Saturday afternoon Robert quietly arrived at my house with not one, but two bottles, still cold since the club was a block from my house. We snuck out to the detached garage about sixty feet behind the house and locked ourselves in. All I remember is how good it tasted. We laughed and joked around as the effect grew. I had never been drunk before, but by the time my bottle was empty I sure was. What I didn’t know was that Robert had already consumed a whole bottle on his own before arriving at my house. After finishing what turned out to be his second bottle, he threw up. Then passed out. I tried to get him back to the house, but he threw up again and collapsed in his own vomit. I couldn’t rouse him.
My mom and brothers and sisters were sitting watching TV together as the clock neared 10PM. They were startled as they heard the back door slam open, loud footsteps coming through the laundry room, kitchen, then dining room. As I entered the middle living room (still one room away) they had a clear view of me by now, and they knew it was me because I was yelling, “Mom! Mom!” the whole time) I suddenly tripped, did a shoulder roll and popped back up, still running. That’s when they noticed the blood running down my forehead. They assumed I had been in some accident or been beaten up. What had happened is that I fell on the back steps (without feeling a thing) in my haste to get some help for my possibly deceased friend. I told them that Robert had passed out and I couldn’t wake him. My mom jumped up and headed to the back door while my older sister Karen, now eighteen, laughed her head off. She knew immediately what was going on, and thought it was hilarious. Robert was fine. My mom called his parents and they laughed the whole thing off, saying, “Well, you know, boys.” My mom was mortified. I was grounded for a month.
When school started we told the story to the other boys in the band (I was now in Symphonic!) and they got a great laugh out of it. We gained a lot of status, as none of them had ever done anything so outrageous. The group of us adopted the name “The Chompain Bunch,” pronounced with a bad impression of a Mexican accent. I had a new posse.
One day after school, not long thereafter, I heard a commotion in the hallway outside the band room. When I came out to see what was going on I found Eric the trumpet player holding a very tiny, very wet kitten. “Someone just tried to flush this kitten down the toilet!” We didn’t believe him at first, but he said he heard the voices and the toilet flush before some boys ran laughing out of the building. He had gone into the restroom and found the kitten still in the bowl. We all formed a circle to look. He was adorable, a tabby, and happy to be held in someone’s arms. “What do we do with him?” everyone wondered. I sensed that Robert was about to say something, but I blurted, “I’ll take him. I’ll keep him.” And Eric, who had found the cat and was still holding him, said, “OK, but you have to name him John, since that’s where we found him.” And that is how I came to possess my very own cat.
John was the best thing that had ever happened to me. He was sweet and playful, no trouble at all. He slept with me every night. I remember one night having a dream where I was being attacked by a rattlesnake. I struggled with it, but it kept trying to bite me. Finally, in desperation, I attempted to stick my finger down its throat, and it stopped. I snapped awake and saw John sitting there nonplussed, shaking his head and opening and closing his mouth. My finger was wet. I remember when we took him to get “fixed,” how he wobbled around the house as the drugs wore off. He was always a good sport about anything like that. During the time I was skipping school, later that year, Robert was the one who would drop by on his way home and hang out with me, just to make sure I was all right. One day he skipped too, and we hung out all day. He played with John, whom he loved, while I played the piano. Even after I started going to school again six weeks later Robert continued to come by often. We spent many hours together, talking about music, life, people, stuff. He loved Rachmaninoff as much as I did, and I loved the way Robert smiled whenever I played ragtime. He let me borrow an old set of bongos and taught me to play them. Robert was great. One Friday in high school we stayed after school and he taught me the “timp-tom” part of the cadences we used in marching band, which he normally handled. The timp-tom is a set of three tuned drums you wear in a harness. The next Monday during Marching band rehearsal I played the timp-toms while Robert marched with the bell lyra. We had fun, but the director said I couldn’t do that again: I was needed on tuba.
Back to ninth grade: one Saturday Robert was over and I was practicing bassoon. I recall my mom and several family members were there. I glanced over and noticed that John had fallen asleep in the empty bassoon case! Robert laughed when I pointed it out. I put down my bassoon and quietly crept over to where John was snoozing and gently closed the lid. Even full grown, John was always a petite cat. I latched the case. No sound from within. Laughing, I gently picked it up by the handle and walked all the way through the house with the bassoon case hanging at my side. As I passed by my sister Jenny she asked, “Where are you going?” When I told her what was up she followed me. When I got to the dining room I set the case on the table with care, popped the latches, and opened it up delicately. There was John, now awake, totally chill. I went and grabbed my mom’s instamatic camera and snapped a picture, which is the only one I have of him.
In the Fall of 1977 the nation was riveted by the airing of the mini-series, Roots. I think it was the first time White Americans focused their collective attention on the history of Black people in our country, and it was a shock. My whole family watched. It would be difficult for me to over-state the impact that show had. I was instantly in love with LeVar Burton, of course. Everybody at school was talking about it, too. It pained me to have to miss two episodes due to evening marching band practice. That Thursday I returned home from practice at around ten, sad to have missed the show, which my family was still talking about. I looked around. “Where’s John?” I asked. My siblings’s faces dropped. “Oh,” they threw glances at each other. My brother, Dan, said, “John got hit by a car. He died.” I demanded to see him, disbelieving. Dan explained that a neighbor who lived around the corner had seen it happen and recognized him, calling our house. Dan, Jenny, and Drew raced out to see him, but apparently he was so badly injured they didn’t even want to go near the body. They had called Animal Control to come pick him up. So I never saw him again.
Something changed inside me. It was as if giant steel doors were slamming shut, one after the other, like on the beginning of the show “Get Smart.” I loved John the way only a child can: without reservation, without limits, without thought of self. He was the perfect cat. He had been my constant companion for two years. He kept the nightmares away. Now he was gone. I somehow knew I could never love anyone or anything the same way again. Now I would always have to guard my heart a little against the possibility of loss. Ten years later I “inherited” a female tabby named Cygnus, who had been in the family for about eight years. I loved her very much, but it was never with the same abandon with which I loved my little John. That night I was numb. But when Robert came over and found out that John was dead, he cried. How I envied that.
[Me on the piano, Robert on the timpani, and Eric (who originally rescued John) on the flugelhorn, photo for a newspaper promo for a high school concert.]
Perhaps the characters in a story about a violent struggle for control of a galactic empire who rely on martial arts, subterfuge, treachery, and manipulation are not the most ideal role models for a thirteen-year-old junior high school student, but then again. After Walt left I was a hot mess. I had always allowed my emotions to flow outward on clear display and it had gotten me into a lot of trouble. In class I tended to blurt out whatever came into my head, which meant a lot of quality time spent in the hallway on time-out. While I craved the attention these antics brought, it was doubtless slowing me down academically. Adults found me alternately delightful and threatening. Walt had attempted to break my spirit by literally beating the gay out of me. I struggled spiritually, having read the Bible from cover to cover when I was twelve and finding it utterly horrifying. I never told anyone about it at the time, but I will write about it in a separate post. The fact that Walt was supposedly a man of God, an ordained Methodist minister who was as bad an example as I can imagine, left me deeply conflicted. Once I started reading philosophy I quickly became an atheist and turned to science fiction and fantasy literature for usable myths. Dune really hit the spot with its deeply humanistic material. The character Paul Atreides, fifteen years old at the start of the story, was a role model for me. The product of centuries of selective breeding, he was also in the process of receiving deep training in mind control techniques, martial arts, and politics. I found the litany against fear to be incredibly useful in helping me control my own hysteria, the product of post-traumatic stress. It was the perfect formula to encapsulate the lesson of the story of The Mummy Box:
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I committed this to memory and recited it to myself whenever I felt anxiety. Inspired by the references to gestalt in Dune, I read “Awareness: Exploring, Experimenting, Experiencing” by John O. Stevens, a collection of exercises based on the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls. I began training myself. Paul had trusted teachers guiding his training to prepare him for his future role as Duke. I had Steve (my therapist), my band directors and my piano teachers who I came to see as mentors. I embraced the idea of human potential and became committed to the idea of training myself to the highest possible degree. I became cagey about my true intentions and motives.
I began to observe myself, imagining a hidden camera in a high corner of the room. How did I appear to people, how did this scene “play?” So while outwardly I was still open, honest, emotionally present, behind the scenes there was another me, a director orchestrating secret plans. After Walt I was a person with many dark secrets. I managed those secrets in layers. I cultivated friendships based on trust earned through layers of self-disclosure, carefully listening to the revelations I would receive in turn, reflecting and offering insight where I could. Several young men wanted to be considered my “best friend,” the person to whom they could tell anything and have the confidence protected. They were jealous of each other, competing for my attention. All of them felt they knew me better than anyone else, but none of them ever achieved the security clearance of “above top secret.” There were things I would never tell. Eventually, through reprogramming my own mind using the principles of Psycho-Cybernetics, my deepest secrets were hidden even from myself. My true self and my true history became buried under layers of artifice, and I lost my core. But I had become very adept indeed.
Dune was teaching me how to be a gifted youth in a world of adults. I was learning how to play them, telling them just enough to win them over, but always holding something back. I remember one particular interaction that has stuck with me. I had a friend named Alan, a year older than me and not part of my school friend group. We had met when I was in fifth grade (my fifth grade class was combined fifth and sixth graders). Alan was a real nerd, obsessed with airplanes and also with the book, Airport by Arthur Hailey. Alan’s mom was the librarian at my seventh grade junior high school. Alan had an older brother who alternated living with his father and his mother, who were divorced. When I was still twelve I had a sleep-over at Alan’s house. As is customary in pre-teen sleep-overs we stayed up late. Somehow the conversation turned to time travel. Alan’s brother Jeff, who was a genius but also mildly schizophrenic and probably autistic, took an interest. As the conversation went down the rabbit hole of time-travel paradoxes, Alan lost interest and went to sleep. Jeff and I continued the conversation until dawn. I was trying to convey the idea that if sometime in the future you were able to travel to the past, then whatever you do/did in the past is already part of the history of the present, so it is impossible to “change” the past, even in principle. He insisted I draw up a flow chart, which I had never heard of. So we spent a lot of time trying to get me up to speed on flow charts. By the time he fully understood what I was trying to say, the sun was coming up. Satisfied, he retired to bed, but I was wide awake: it was the first time I had ever stayed up all night!
Their mom came out to brew coffee and start breakfast, surprised to find me at the kitchen table with a paper and pencil in front of me. We got into a conversation that meandered through several subjects, but landed in the realm of philosophy, which I had been exploring recently. At one point she asked me if this map of the universe I was building in my mind had any room in it for the possibility of God. “That’s complicated,” I replied. For the next hour I unrolled my view of the subject, which was agnostic, but probably close to Spinoza’s views of a rational core knitting the universe together. Alan eventually woke up and came out to inquire about breakfast, so we had to wind things down. But how she closed the conversation has stuck with me. “Well,” she said, “I can’t believe I have learned so much from a twelve-year-old. When you become an adult, if you ever decide to start a religion, I would like to become a member.”
That night and morning of deep and stimulating conversations with older brilliant minds left me with a quiet sense of awe and caution. I was awakening to the possibility of the influence I could have on people and I knew this would bring with it certain ethical responsibilities. I remembered the story of the temptation of Jesus on the mountain top. Such powers can easily lead to evil. I resolved to be humble in my goals even as my ego swelled. I came to see my potential as a world-maker and a leader, but it scared me. So through high school I made sure that my growing influence as a trend-setter and social locus was always directed towards good ends. At least, that was my intention.
All through my childhood I enjoyed prowling around my parents’ tall bookcase where the encyclopedias were kept, along with a wide variety of books old and new. I was fascinated by the old books particularly, which my mom had inherited from her favorite aunt after whom she was named. Aunt Carolyn had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband for many years and had collected Indian pottery and rugs, which we also had. The dusty old books were typical of the 1930s, with philosophy, poetry, mythology, fiction and non-fiction titles. I couldn’t actually read these books, but I would flip through them looking at pictures, savoring the old bindings and the musty smell. I was infatuated. One day when I was twelve I picked out one with an intriguing title: The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I opened it to the first page and began reading. I’ve mentioned that I was dyslexic. Reading was a real chore for me, and I had never actually read any book all the way through except Hardy Boys mysteries. I had read every one of them in my elementary school library, beginning in third grade. But I had never been able to tough it out through any adult books. Until now. I was strangely able not only to follow the stories about the old philosophers, but was somehow able to comprehend the ideas they grappled with. My mind lit up like a Christmas tree and I was hooked. I just kept reading and reading as a sense of euphoria came over me. My mind was unlocked. In fact, I was puzzled why they seemed to think these philosophical ideas were so difficult. It seemed to me there was a lot of unnecessary struggle over rather easy problems. I had already contemplated the nature of reality and “truth”, the limitations of logic, the importance of symbols and semantics — I just hadn’t realized there was a discipline that had given names to these things and grappled with them. I had found my people.
Book in hand I marched into the kitchen to see my mom. “Mom! I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I’m going to be a philosopher!” Her smile faded and her face took on a look of chagrined pity. “Oh, Honey, there aren’t any philosophers anymore.” I guess I knew what she meant: nobody is walking around in a toga with a laurel wreath on their head, whiling away the hours engaging in Socratic dialogue about the meaning of the word “Justice”. Now we only have career choices like Physicist, Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer. I was crestfallen. The wind had come completely out of my sails, and I made one of the biggest mistakes of my entire life.
I believed her.
I still haven’t forgiven myself for this blunder, even though I know I should. I was only twelve. My mom had a degree from Berkeley. I took what she said on authority. I didn’t know then that taking things on authority was what kept Europe in the Dark Ages for centuries. If only I had asked one of my teachers about it. They would surely have told me that every university offers courses in philosophy, often as a requirement for graduation. Who do you suppose teaches those courses? You can major in it. The world is full of philosophers, some who embrace the label, some who avoid it. At that time I surrendered to the impossibility of doing the one thing that really inspired me, but resolved that whatever I found myself doing after that, I would do it philosophically. I would be a philosopher in secret.
When I turned thirteen my step-mother gave me a book I had never heard of. No one else I knew had ever heard of it either, perhaps because it had only been published nine years earlier. Everyone knows it now: Dune, by Frank Herbert. As I held it and looked at the intriguing cover graphics I felt the weight of it in my hand. I flipped through it: no pictures, only small print. And it was thick. What on earth? She couldn’t possibly think I could read such a tome. She said, “I think you might like it: the main character is your age.” So I began the slog–dictionary at my side. It was slow going, but she was right. I very much saw myself in the character Paul Atreides. I quickly became obsessed with the story, which dealt with topics like arid land ecology, power politics, and deep philosophies regarding artificial intelligence and selective breeding (of humans!). It became my new bible. I had, I just now remember, already managed to read The Bible cover to cover: perhaps in another thread I will explain how and why, and what I really thought of it. This was so much better though, because it was intellectually stimulating and coherent. On the cover of the book were quotes from book reviews, one of which compared it to The Lord of the Rings. That sounded intriguing, so after I finished Dune (it took the better part of a year), I began reading Tolkein. Oh my. By the time I got through high school I had managed to read both trilogies about eight times. I could only read a dozen or two pages at a time, mostly at bed time, with classical music playing on my cassette recorder. Then I would fall asleep.
In my earlier thread (Boom to Bust) I talked about discovering that I could easily get top grades just by showing up to class and paying attention. I wasn’t good at finishing homework, but I would do enough of it to convince myself that I understood the subject. In high school all the cool kids were taking college prep courses, so I followed suit. I was a top student in just about every class. So when my schedule became completely full of music, including before and after school and during lunch as well, I found myself making a cup of instant coffee at ten-thirty or eleven at night to begin working on my chemistry or physics homework. I would finish at midnight or one AM, set the alarm for five-thirty, and do it all again. During my senior year I got sick with walking pneumonia, as one might expect, but it wasn’t diagnosed until after I graduated. But I had no trouble with motivation because my brain was on fire. Even with the grueling schedule, I continued reading on my own in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, and history. I always had a book with me, which I would pull out whenever there was a pause in a rehearsal or before the start of class. In algebra and geometry there was usually time in class for working on the homework assignment. I would would finish it very quickly, then pull out my book! I remember at a musical theater rehearsal (I was the pianist) whenever we stopped for the director to re-block a scene, I pulled out a book on calculus. Calculus was not offered at our high school, but some of the more advanced kids commuted to the university to take it. Someone saw what I was reading and asked what it was for. I said, “It’s interesting, I want to learn it.” They gave me a weird look and said, “Okay.” Looking back, I think I might have been compensating for a sense of inferiority because I had gotten a late start in taking academics seriously. I wasn’t able to actually take a calculus class until my first year of college, but I did well because I had already familiarized myself with the subject during rehearsals for “Gypsy.”
This all left little time for philosophical reading, but I found time during breaks from school. I liked Descartes, Spinoza, Plato, and Emerson. But I was particularly enamored of two books that I found on the bookshelf at home. One was Out of My Later Years, a collection of essays by Albert Einstein, and the other was Pragmatism by William James. Both sat well with me, raised very few objections. I had finally found a way to harness the madness inside of me and make peace with my weirdness.
I am embarrassed to say that I am not a famous musician. Why is that embarrassing, you ask, most people aren’t famous musicians. Most musicians aren’t famous. Heck, this city is full of amazingly talented professional musicians who haven’t even heard of each other! So, why would I be embarrassed not to be famous? Because I was told over and over and over — by people who would know — that I should be. I can’t even go back to visit my home town, because someone would recognize me and I would have to explain why I never got famous. Or I could just point them to this blog, which will explain all the complicated reasons why I have always felt like a failure.
I started out life with no self-esteem, frankly. My parents didn’t have two-nickels-worth of self-esteem between them, so how could they impart any to me? Let’s just blame their parents. Over the course of this blog you will come to learn why I consider my grandparents to have been terrible people, although I have no doubt that they did better raising their kids than my great-grandparents did. I guess we are all trying to learn to do better than our own parents, it’s the human condition. But whatever, in this post I want to talk about how I discovered my musical gift, or curse, depending on how I choose to look at it.
In my previous posts I have tried to describe the experience of having a “special” brain: the kaleidoscope at the center of my mind that constantly dishes up psychedelic imagery in multiple dimensions, the painful oversensitivity of my nervous system, and my difficulties balancing the two realities, inner and outer. It can be a good thing. If I am playing the piano or giving a massage, I can just close my eyes and surf the roiling, colorful model of reality that’s automatically generated within. For me, music has color, taste, texture, geometry, and impetus. I first became aware of this when I was five or six and my parents bought a stereo console. My dad put on Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite and I was mesmerized. While everyone else in the room continued to talk or whatever, I plopped down next to one of the speakers, pressed my ear against it and got lost in the sound. Every instrument had it’s own texture and color. My mind followed one melodic line, then another. The various harmonies tasted sweet or sour, hard and soft. Every sensory center within my brain was activated at once, and the rest of the world was shut out. I didn’t understand why everybody wasn’t as affected as I was. I fell in love with music, but didn’t reflect on it that much. I remember sitting in church listening to the organ play, I was maybe five or six. I was moving my feet and fingers as if to play along. Did my mother notice? I remember when it was my turn to load the dishwasher, I was maybe nine, and I found this sharp metal rod with a ring at the end (for holding a roast together?) and I used it as a baton while I imagined conducting a symphony orchestra performing music I was creating in my head. I could hear it! It was for a movie. Again, I never thought it was anything particularly important, just one of the many ways I amused myself with my imagination.
The little town I grew up in had a music program far better than most, for whatever reason. It was customary for kids to start learning their instruments in school in fourth grade. I remember these two music teachers came to our school to give everyone what I thought was a hearing test. They had a device that would generate pitches, controlled with knobs. They made a high pitch and then a low pitch, explaining what they meant by “high” and “low.” Then they would proceed to play two pitches in sequence, and I was supposed to indicate with my hand if the second pitch was higher or lower than the first. This went on for quite a while, and they began to throw glances at one another. Finally they were done, and thanked me. A day or two later my mom got a phone call. She told me it was the music teachers and they had tested my ear. They said they had never seen a kid with such a keen ability to distinguish pitches so close together so reliably, and therefore I should really learn an instrument. They said, given my musical ear and my nice teeth (?) maybe I should learn trombone. For some reason I said no. I think I was intimidated. So I missed out on starting a band instrument when the other kids were beginning to learn.
What I did agree to do was sing in the chorus that was being started at our elementary school. There were kids from fourth through sixth participating, and I thought it was fun. I had always enjoyed singing along with my dad, the Beatles, and to records of Broadway shows. I had a sweet, pure voice. I especially enjoyed singing harmony, which always gave me gooseflesh. Things came to a head when I was in sixth grade. My little sister, now in fourth, had joined the choir with me, and we practiced together a lot, especially when traveling in the car. We sang a lot of rounds. When she didn’t feel like singing, I would close one ear with a finger and harmonize with the drone of the engine. I remember exploring intervals this way, although I didn’t know that intervals have names, or what consonance and dissonance are. But I explored the qualities of all the intervals, even some that don’t have names in the European music system. Anyway, by now the choral program was maturing, and we were preparing for a mass choir performance where the choruses from all the elementary schools in town were to join together in a theater with risers and everything. As the day approached, our director invited the piano accompanist, a professional, to come rehearse with us a few times. That did it. The feeling of euphoria was addicting. The experience of singing on stage with a hundred girls and boys flipped a switch inside of me.
That same year our sixth grade teacher handed out “Tonettes” to the class — a simple musical instrument like an ocarina or pennywhistle, and began to teach us simple tunes using numbers to represent the notes. I learned everything almost instantly. Within minutes I was able to play any tune I could think of. I got looks from people. I didn’t realize it was weird. One day I saw my sister’s clarinet lying on the bed on top of her music book for band. I was curious, so I picked it up and read the instructions. Soon (like, within an hour) I was playing all the songs in the book. She went to my mom, crying, saying “It’s not fair that I’ve been working all year and he can instantly play better than me!” I felt chagrined. My mom had also been working with her for several months from a beginner piano book. One rainy Saturday I was bored, so I sat down at the piano and opened the book to the first page. I read the instructions. Three hours later I came to my mom and said, “Can we get another piano book? I already got through this one.” She looked surprised, but said, “Sure.” So we went from the Primer to the First Grade book of the piano method my mom had learned from as a child. About halfway through that book (a week later) I went to her with a question about some musical notation that I couldn’t understand from the explanation (broken chords). She didn’t remember what that symbol meant, so she said, “Maybe I should find you a piano teacher.”
Turns out there was this wonderful woman who lived on the other side of our block who taught piano. She was a magnificent woman: beautiful, tall, glamorous and graceful. I will never forget that first lesson. She asked me to play for her what I had been learning. She quickly explained the question my mom couldn’t answer, and now I was playing that piece easily. She started to show me different things on the keyboard, and whatever she showed me, I just did it. This was fun! After the lesson I made my way home through the alleyways that divided our city block into four sections. It wasn’t far, but as I came into the house, excited to tell my mom about how much fun I had had and how nice the lady was, I had to wait. She was on the phone, blushing, saying, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh! OK.” etcetera. When she hung up she said, “Well, that was [name of piano teacher], and she said to me, ‘Carolyn, some day that son of yours will be playing in Carnegie Hall!'” I looked at her. “What’s Carnegie Hall?” I asked. She explained that it meant the teacher thought I was really talented. In fact, she said she had never had a student take to everything so quickly. She couldn’t believe I had been playing only a week or two. During a lesson a year later, a couple of former students walked in, friends of the teacher’s daughter, now in high school. She said, “Wait, you guys, come in here, I want him to play something for you.” She asked me to play the piece I was working on, which I did, with gusto. They just kind of stared, then one of them said, “I remember learning that piece. How come it never sounded so good when I played it?” The teacher said, “I know, right? He’s amazing. I just gave him this piece last week.”
Our town had been growing rapidly and had just constructed a new high school. So the rather unique configuration was now as follows: the high school had 10th through 12th, there was a junior high school that was 8th and 9th grades, and every 7th grade kid went to another junior high school. It was a pretty good system, because seventh-graders wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else, given the awkwardness of puberty. My friend Chuck and I continued in choir in seventh grade, but we soon learned that the “jocks” were not down with that, and we got teased. So we decided that when we got to eighth grade we would sign up for beginning band. Little did we realize that we would now be mocked and laughed at by the kids who had been in band since fourth grade. I understand. Anyone walking into the band room during beginning band would be assailed by a cacophony of horrible honking and squeaking — we were not good. I was learning baritone sax because it meant we wouldn’t have to purchase an instrument, I could use a school-issued one. Chuck wanted to play flute at first, because it would be easy to carry. He switched to trumpet when he realized that those “jocks” whose opinions mattered to him so much thought it was “gay” for a guy to play flute. I found sax very easy to learn: it was just a big fat Tonette with extra levers for sharps and flats. Chuck let me borrow his trumpet one weekend, and I learned to play it pretty quickly too. Later that year I found out that tuba uses the same fingerings as trumpet, but you had to translate it from bass clef. No worries, I could read and write music by this time thanks to piano. After one semester of beginning band I was accepted into the “Varsity” band, the second-tier band. The first tier band at our junior high school was called “Symphonic,” and was one of the best junior high school bands in the region. Both bands were combined into the Marching Band when we went to parades. At the end of eighth grade the band director said, “Hey, if you want to learn bassoon over the summer, you can be in Symphonic Band next year.” So I enrolled in summer school and he taught me bassoon. Bassoon sucks because there are thirteen thumb keys and the double-reed requires a lot of work to master the embouchure. Nevertheless, by fall I was playing in the symphonic band! I had also practiced tuba over the summer, so I no longer had to march with a baritone sax.
In my previous thread I talked about winning the High Achievement in Music award at the end of ninth grade, and how much music I was doing in high school. The gist of it was I had started late but learned incredibly fast. I got my first paid piano gig three years after my first piano lesson. The most common compliment I received was from women who would say, “I could sit and listen to you play all day.” I have small hands for a guy and have always struggled with the more advanced classical literature. But there is something in the way I play, a higher dimension to the sound, that people find amazing. I can’t explain it, but I think it comes from trying to infuse into the music all of the kaleidoscopic wonder that is going on inside my brain. I remember asking my mom early on in my piano lessons why do people do music? She said something about “expressing their feelings and emotions.” I thought, “Oh,” and realized that the beginner-level music I was learning at that point didn’t have much emotional content. So I sat down at the piano and began making stuff up, improvising, in an effort to get some of my many intense emotions out. It was pretty crude at first, but within a couple of years I could improvise for hours and could almost fit my emotions into the “orchestral” fabric of sound I was weaving in real time. That first gig I mentioned: I was asked to play background music for a Rotary Club reception. I improvised the whole set!
By this point music was providing me with an outlet for my emotions, giving me a sense of belonging, and garnering lots of attention and praise. It did wonders for my self-esteem and helped me learn to focus. My mind was beginning to wake up.
Happy to have finished that long thread about my childhood, I think I will celebrate by writing some really crazy shit today. I’m going to go full Shirley MacLaine and tell the story of the three dreams I had when I was about fifteen years old. While I recognize the risk I am taking in revealing such embarrassing details — the risk that you’ll think I’m nuts — it’s probably good to do this from time to time so that my readers will know to take everything I say with a little grain of salt. I don’t know that these are past life memories. It’s just the best explanation I could come up with at the time. And I have yet to come up with a better one.
Most of my dreams are like acid trips: I feel disembodied, everything flows continuously, people morph into other people, scenes mix and change frequently, and it’s hard to form a coherent narrative. But these dreams stood out because they were solid. I could feel my body, including the clothes I was wearing. I knew things about myself and my surroundings, and the flow of time was contiguous, like a single scene clipped from a movie. Each time when I awoke I was still awash in the memory of it, since they were brief enough to remember every detail. And each left me shook.
First let me tell you about my bedroom. After my parents’ divorce, what used to be my dad’s study was taken over by my older sister Karen. It was in the front corner of the house with two windows facing the front yard and one looking into the side yard, which we called the jungle because it was so overgrown. Being on the opposite end of the house from the rooms of the other children, it was relatively quiet. I took Karen’s room after she moved out. I moved the piano and all my sheet music into it, but other than that it was neat and uncluttered. The ceilings in the older parts of the house were fourteen feet high and the windows were tall and narrow. The walls of the room were covered in long strips of brown burlap, which made it even quieter. There was a double bed, quite cozy, and I think for the first time in my life I was able to sleep really soundly. I felt safe in my solitude. Perhaps this is why I was open to having these dreams. Being in my mid teens I was past puberty, above five foot nine, skinny, and becoming aware of myself as a young adult. In each dream I was struck by the differences in my physical form.
In the first dream I was twenty years old and only about five two, but well-muscled. I was wearing some kind of leather helmet and breastplate, like a warrior. I could feel my feet were bound into leather sandals and I remember glancing down at them, seeing and feeling the leather straps binding them to my calves. I was wearing some kind of skirt, canvas maybe, no undergarments. I could feel my whole body, the dry breeze on my legs and butt. It was hot, there were no trees. A large group of us were milling about on the top of this rocky hill, checking our weapons and armor. I remember feeling for the hilt of my sword, giving it a little tug to make sure it was loose in the scabbard strapped tightly at my waist. I remember being pretty confused about exactly what was going on, but I sensed we were preparing for battle, and I knew it would be my first. Suddenly there was a loud shout and everyone started moving at once, heading down the hill. As the people in front of me were now below me, the view opened up as I ran and I could see to the bottom of the hill and up the next hill in front of us. My scrotum contracted in fear as I saw what we were facing: a large force of horsemen in black robes and turbans with long spears and other weapons, now charging down the opposite hill towards us. I pulled out my sword, which was short and wide, and remembered that I was supposed to get close enough to a horse to cut its hamstring as it ran by. I could hope to do little else in this scenario. My senses heightened as the horsemen drew near. There must have been a hundred of them. Suddenly we were in contact and all hell broke loose, total chaos and clouds of dust. I remember dodging and striking at my first horse, spinning. Slightly off balance I turned back to engage another one only to see, too late, that a tall dark-skinned horseman was leaning toward me swinging what looked like a long stick with something round on the end. He sneered and looked straight into my eyes as he struck me on the side of the head. I knew I died instantly in the dream and woke up. Thinking about it, I decided that I must have been Greek, it was sometime BC, and probably in Turkey or Persia. Maybe I was in Alexander’s army?
The second dream was very different. I was tall, at least six feet. It was cold and dark as I meandered through the narrow streets of a medieval city, either Portugal or Spain, from the looks of it. I remember the feeling of leather boots on my feet. The streets were wet from a recent rain. I was wearing long pants, no zipper or fly, a thick wool coat with buttons, and some kind of wool hat. It was late, the street was quiet. I came upon a narrow wooden doorway and went up the creaky staircase to another door. I had a big metal key in my pocket which I used to open the latch at the top door, then I pushed it open with my shoulder. The room was tiny, like a studio. There was a desk in the corner. I lit a lamp, adjusted it, probably oil fueled. It was the only light in the room, but it was on the desk. In the light of the lamp I could see the desk was strewn with papers, not the 8 1/2 x 11 papers we’re used to, but big thick parchment sheets. I took off my coat and boots, left them next to the door, sat down, spread a sheet of parchment, grabbed a quill, dipped it in the inkwell, and began writing in Latin. When I woke up I concluded that I must have been some kind of philosopher, maybe five hundred years ago.
The final dream, which occurred within two months of the first, took place in a mountainous region of Central America, which country I am not sure: probably southern Mexico or Guatemala, and within the past couple hundred years. There was no electricity. I was a woman, around fifty years old, maybe five three or four, and corpulent. I lived alone in a small house with clay walls, very comfortable, with lots of colorful rugs and wall hangings, wooden furniture, and piles of herbs strewn about the kitchen. I had just warmed the water in the wooden tub from a pot I had heated over the cast iron stove, so I disrobed and got in. I vividly remember looking down at my rich brown skin and ample curves as I soaped my body. I remember what it felt like. It was delicious. Next thing I remember I was dry and dressed again. I opened the front door to enjoy the sunset. As I stood on my little porch a group of campesinos came walking by in their brown hats. As the last man in the group was passing by me a few feet away he paused, turned toward me with a look of pure hate, and snarled, “Bruja!” I felt a self-satisfied laugh well up within me and woke up. It seemed like I must have been a curandera but had moved beyond traditional remedies to develop my own innovative practice. I was a very proud, arrogant woman.
I can still close my eyes and picture these dreams perfectly clearly. I remember how I felt at the time, a bit terrified and awestruck–sure that they represented something real, something personal about me. They were so random! Whatever the case, the net effect of the dreams was to give me a sense of life extending beyond the narrow scope of this one incarnation. The physical impression of possessing very distinct forms has affected my self-awareness. When I move I feel that this is just one possible form I could have, and I am not bound to it. Who and what we are is in great part random and accidental, and it’s best not to identify too strongly with any of our particulars.
This thread was only supposed to be a handful of posts but it turns out my life has been pretty complicated. As we get into my high school years the cans of worms that open up are too numerous for this thread, so I will unpack them in future threads. There will be a thread describing the awakening of my mind through reading philosophy, sci/fi and fantasy, which led to readings in mathematics and science, social psychology, and military history. There will be a thread on my involvement with music, how it saved my life and gave me an identity leading to endless opportunities. There will be yet another thread on how my alcoholism developed over a ten year period leading to a very hard bottom at the young age of twenty-three. Another thread will deal with my misbegotten relationship with an eighteen-year-old schoolmate that began when I was still sixteen, and how it contributed to my utterly disastrous early adulthood. And there will be a deep dive into my psychological problems, a many-headed hydra that still horrifies me. But for now, let me just tell a couple more stories and sketch out the logistics of how I emerged from childhood a member of Generation-X.
As the winner of the High Achievement music award I was given a scholarship to go to music camp. This was not a mountain retreat. It was held on the campus of a private university, hosted by the conservatory of music there. Kids came from all over the country. It was amazing. There was a junior music camp comprised of a pair of two-week sessions through the month of July, and a senior music camp that lasted the whole month, for older high school students. There was some kind of mix-up which, by the time the dust settled, resulted in my attending the month-long senior camp as a bassoonist. Many of my friends from junior high school were attending the junior camp, and I turned out to be the youngest student in the senior camp. There were sections for choir, band, orchestra, and a piano master class. As a budding pianist I was particularly in awe of the musicians in the piano master class who all seemed to be leagues ahead of me. One day I managed to find — unlocked — one of the practice rooms with a grand piano. I had recently purchased a copy of the Brahms piano sonata in F minor, so I settled down for a first run-through, sight reading, never having even heard it before. While I was still midway through the first movement there was a loud knock on the door. Oh no! I was not supposed to be using that piano as it was reserved for the master class students, and I was a mere bassoonist who had just turned fifteen. I sheepishly opened the door to see two of the guys from the master class. One had just finished high school and was going to attend UC Berkeley the following year. The other was from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who was about to start his senior year of high school. I had heard them both play: they were the best in the class. They together shouted, “Who are you?” I told them I was sorry to be using the room as I was just a lowly young bassoon player, and they replied, “Oh, no, you go ahead and keep playing. We were just wondering who it could be who had the chops to play the Brahms sonata so well. We know no one in the master class is playing it.” I told them I had just bought it and was trying to sight-read it. They were amazed to hear that, and told me I was going to have to hang out with them. After that they took me under their wings and at lunch they introduced me to the master class instructor, a world-famous concert pianist. I was euphoric. I ended up paling around with them all month, walking on a cloud. They told me, “Next year you have to sign up for the master class.” It turns out I did attend the master class two years later, but those details will have to wait for the music thread.
I was also embraced by some older orchestra musicians, one a brilliant violinist and pianist who later became a professional, another a clarinetist who was pretty obviously gay. One of their friends, an alumnus of the music camp who was now in college and also pretty queer, came to visit one day and the next thing I knew I was whizzing along in a car with them to go to a music store. It was strictly forbidden to leave campus except on supervised activities, so I was risking being sent home in shame if it were discovered, but I was too jazzed up by all the attention they were lavishing on me, telling me how talented I was and treating me like a king. The visitor and I got to talking about Rachmaninoff and being bisexual — it seemed a natural blend of subjects at the time. At the music store he bought me the score of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and said, “You better know this by the next time I see you.” I have never quite mastered it, frankly. Perhaps I wasn’t as good as they thought, but my self-esteem was rocketing upward at the time. And yes, even then I understood that this was grooming behavior, but I didn’t care. They treated me respectfully and I didn’t feel in any danger. I don’t think there was any.
My high school years were dominated by music. I had jazz combo (on piano) before school, symphonic band (bassoon) and marching band (tuba) during school. At lunch time the jazz big band rehearsed (baritone sax). Last period I had music theory. After school I went to the voice teacher’s studio to accompany piano lessons (paid), and on Saturdays I taught piano lessons at the local music store. In the evenings in the fall we had marching band practice for the Friday night football games, and in the spring time we had musical theater orchestra for the big spring musical production. I was busy. But my brain having awakened, I was also taking all the college prep courses, including chemistry, physics, Spanish, psychology, creative writing, rhetoric, etc. I was one of the top students by now. One day my creative writing instructor, a hip/cool veteran of the Vietnam conflict, asked me to stay after class. He inquired about what I planned to do for a living after high school. I said, “I’m kind of thinking composition.” I meant becoming a composer of music. I dreamed of writing movie scores while I improvised on the piano for hours at a time. But he thought I meant English composition and said, “Hmm, I wouldn’t recommend that path for most people, but I think you could actually succeed at it.” He entered my name in a national creative writing competition, but I freaked out and never submitted anything. Awkward! Then my chemistry teacher took me aside and said, “You know, this is a thankless profession and I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy, but you have a special gift. That presentation you did in class reminded me of your father. You could be a great high school chemistry teacher!” The next year my physics instructor took me aside and said basically the same thing, but for physics: “That presentation you did on diodes had everyone hanging on every word!” Finally, my band director asked me to sit down in his office during my senior year (I had never even set foot in his office before!). He asked me about my plans for the future, and by then I was planning on attending the University of California at Santa Barbara for chemical engineering (long story, see girlfriend thread coming soon). He said, “Oh, I thought for sure it would be music. And I would say, don’t even waste time going to college for it. You should head straight down to LA and start doing studio sessions. You’re already better than half of those guys. You know everything you need to know to get started.” Man! I was flummoxed. Too many choices for this neuro-divergent to possibly process. So I went to UCSB because I wanted to learn to surf.
When my older brother, Dan, graduated, he went to live with my Dad. That left just three of us at home. I enjoyed having my little sister in band with me my senior year — she played clarinet. My little brother learned the drum set and played in a punk metal band when he got to high school. As my own graduation approached my mom decided it was time to sell the old Victorian house I had lived in since birth and move ten miles away to the university town where she worked. The escrow closed before the end of the school year and I had to commute the ten miles to finish the last two weeks before graduation. It’s all a blur, but it pretty much ruined the end of my senior year for me. I wasn’t able to celebrate with my friends properly. I never even picked up my diploma. The graduation ceremony was pretty cool, though. There were nearly five hundred students in my senior class. Normally the entire symphonic band would sit on the football field endlessly playing Pomp and Circumstance while the students filed through to get their diplomas. This was a bummer for the dozens of seniors in band who would have preferred to be with family and friends. This year the jazz combo volunteered to play instead. There were only six of us — piano, bass, drums, guitar, saxophone and trumpet — so that freed everyone else up. We played it straight: pomp and circumstance in all it’s regal solemnity. But after a few choruses we mixed it up, doing a blues version, then back to straight. We did a country version, a rock version, and a jazz version too. The crowd loved it!
By the time I was in college my younger brother and sister alternated years living with my dad and I was starting to lose track of where everyone was at any given time. The childhood home was a thing of the past and we were scattering into our adult lives. My older three siblings are all classic Baby-Boomers in their general outlook on life. But I became much closer to my younger siblings who came to define for me the attitudes of Gen-X. We were essentially latch-key kids, on our own for the most part through high school. We each had to carve out a life for ourselves with very little parental guidance or support entering adulthood. All six of us meandered through our twenties, working hard just to survive. We all turned out very different, but we all made it. The older we get, the more we appreciate each other.
My mom was a powerful woman. She was very intelligent, hardworking, and had a strong will. Her biggest failing, in my opinion, was that she was groomed from an early age to serve the patriarchy. She deeply believed that men should take the lead in things and that her role should be supportive. Yet she held the greater power in her relationship with Walt. It was her house. He needed her to help him write his sermons. She made the important decisions behind the scenes, and he must have resented his dependency. Although I never saw him hit her, she was cowed by his temper. He would call her “woman” in a derisive tone. I one time saw him grip her upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. There was a time she brought him toast that wasn’t burnt enough for his taste, and he tossed the whole plate back at her. But in the end she sent him packing. His sudden transformation to meekness and his apology to me, after two years of tyrannical domination, left me shell-shocked and confused. At least he was gone. We all felt a sense of relief and liberation in the aftermath.
Content Warning: discussions of suicide and dark insinuations.
My mom made some big mistakes raising us, but now she did something very right. She hauled the six of us into family counseling. Steve was a PhD psychologist and licensed family therapist, and he was great. I remember all of us sitting in a big circle in his office for several sessions, and as I recall it was a lot of fun. He had a calm and cheerful manner that got us all to loosen up and talk about our feelings. I remember there were these oblong pillow things with handles like swords that we could fence with. It was good times, and it wasn’t long before he said, “I think you all are doing quite well and you don’t need to keep coming back at this point. Except I want to continue to see Kirk.” Wow, I felt so special! I mean that in a positive way — I wanted to keep coming, and never thought about why I might be singled out in a negative sense.
So every week it seemed, for the next three or four years I went to see him. In 1974 most kids didn’t have a therapist, and I thought it made me cool. A year into it I bragged about it to my friends at school and they thought it made me a dark and complicated badass. They already thought I was a musical genius. When they asked me if it meant I was crazy, I said I would ask the therapist. He said, “No, you’re not ‘crazy!’ You’re not a raving basket case. I would would describe you as emotionally disturbed.” That satisfied my friends and me. Steve and I talked about my life history up to that point, trying to identify the turning points. I talked about the pants-down spankings, the way I felt singled-out by my father for extra punishments. I decided I must remind my dad too much of himself and so I got on his nerves. I talked about the Catholic school, the bullying. I talked about how Walt seemed to be a cross between Adolph Hitler and Barney Fife: an insecure loser who overcompensated by being a dictatorial douche. But mostly we talked about the bullying that was ongoing: the jocks at school who were always calling me “faggot,” “queer,” and “fairy,” pushing me in the hallways and punching me in the stomach. “What do they think they know about me?” I asked. “Are you gay?” he replied. And that started a long series of conversations about my sexual orientation. He was a good therapist. I never felt judged or in any way unsafe. I could have told him everything, but I withheld a lot. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the desperate need to convince myself that the bullies were wrong about me. I think if I believed that everyone could see who I really was and what had happened to me, if I thought I had failed in my attempts to keep the truth veiled, I would actually have killed myself. So eventually we succeeded in getting me through high school in one piece, but the deepest darkest stuff remained buried.
My sister, Karen, started working as a waitress in a small family-owned Mexican restaurant when she was sixteen. She spent a lot of time at work because she loved it. The other reason was because, due to her good looks and outgoing personality, her two best friends happened to be the richest in town. We were dirt poor, and she needed her own money to fit in, at least in a fashion sense. The owners of the restaurant were wonderful people, very kind, and she was a gifted waitress. One day, a few weeks after Walt left, I came home from school hungry. I looked in the pantry for something to eat and we were out of everything but pancake mix and such. I said, “Mom, there’s nothing to eat!” She was sitting at the kitchen table and, for only the second time in my life, I saw her bury her face in her palms and sob. “I’m so sorry, we don’t have any money. We may have to go on Welfare.” That very moment my sister walked in, home from work, and said, “What’s going on?” My mom seemed so ashamed as she explained the situation. Karen said, “Mom, I’ll loan you $75 so you can get some groceries, and I’ll ask at work to see if we can get you a job.” So for a while my mom bussed tables while my sister waitressed. It must have been a hoot. It wasn’t long before my mom got a part-time job lecturing at the university, and a year later she landed a great position at a community health research clinic as “Director of Intervention” in a multi-year, nationwide study. Like I said, my mom was a powerful woman! Her boss was an internationally-renowned epidemiologist, a Persian MD who got all the credit while she worked herself to the bone cleaning up the messes he created with his imperious arrogance. He was not good with people, but she was. She spent the rest of her career there, working fourteen-hour days to make that place a success. He eventually lost a class action lawsuit for harassment brought by all the other employees. She was probably his chief enabler. But at least we had enough money to get a stereo system, a microwave oven, a new car, and a color TV with cable. We were finally middle class.
Halfway through my ninth-grade year the bullying was getting to be too much. My last period of the day was Physical Education. Whenever PE ended, school was out, and I often found myself face to face with my tormentors. Billy, in particular, was not the scariest, but he was the most persistent. The scion of a very wealthy family, he seemed to take special delight in saying things like, “Kirk, you’re a ‘fairy’ nice guy!” One day he said to me, “You’re such a queer,” and I replied without missing a beat, “You wish!” There did always seem to be a sense of yearning in his pretty blue eyes, so I was calling him out! He responded by physically assaulting me with punches and kicks. I managed to escape and headed toward the band room — a standalone building not far away where my friends and I met up every day after school. That was the very last time I attended PE in junior high! After that I skipped PE and meandered my way over to the band room during seventh period. The band director was a sweet man and never questioned my presence there. I would greet my friends when they arrived after school as if nothing irregular was going on. My sister Karen was off at college now, and I had moved into her old room at the front of the house. My siblings were relieved when I moved the piano into it. They were annoyed at how much I practiced, and this made it less intrusive.
Since my mom was working so much, we younger four were pretty much on our own most of the time. My older brother, Dan, had a motorcycle and a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant on the edge of town. He was gone hanging out with his druggie friends much of the time, and that left me with my sister, Jenifer (two years younger) and my brother, Drew (four years younger). We took turns making dinner, which we would warm up for my mom when she dragged herself in at eight or nine o-clock. She would eat and then promptly fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. By ten someone would run her bath water, then we would herd her off to the tub. We took turns waking her up, helping her out of the tub, drying her off and getting her moving towards bed. This is how we lived. After a few weeks of skipping PE, I started skipping school entirely. I would get up as normal, make my lunch and load it into my backpack with my books, then head out towards school. I found if I walked halfway to school before turning around to go back home it allowed just the right amount of time for my mom to leave for work. I would sneak back into the house and play the piano all day, talking to the composer Beethoven, whose spirit I imagined sitting at my side, coaching me and discussing his music. He was as weird as me, and we vibed together as I developed a special affinity for his piano sonatas. These were the happiest weeks of my life up to then. It was so nice not to have to deal with school anymore.
One Saturday afternoon my mom was reading the mail and she said, “What is this?” I looked at the letter she handed me. It was from the Department of Juvenile Justice. It said something to the effect of “Your son, Kirk, has been declared a habitual truant and will be made a ward of the court if you don’t respond by” such and such a date. Ooops. She looked at me in pained confusion. “But I see you leave for school every morning before I go to work!” Well, actually. I asked what “ward of the court” meant. She said, “They’ll take you away and put you in foster care, probably a group home somewhere.” What, no more private room with a piano?! This was a crisis indeed. “I’ll call Steve,” she said. I still can’t believe how people rallied on my behalf. I’m so lucky. Steve said he was willing to sign a release to get me out of PE for the rest of the year, and the school counselor told me the principal said they would only accept it because Steve was a doctor of psychology. The only caveat was that I would have to take one more semester of PE before I could graduate from high school in three years. Whew! And the band director said he was perfectly happy to have me as a student aide last period for the rest of the year. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting everything I wanted. But they said I had to sign a written contract, which I was to draft myself. So I wrote up a contract saying I would attend every class until the end of the year on the condition that I didn’t have to set foot in the gym again, and if I had even so much as one unexcused absence I would immediately be made a ward of the court. “Wow, that’s pretty draconian,” Steve commented, “Don’t you want to give yourself three strikes or something?” I straightened my back and said, “I don’t see any reason why I would have any unexcused absences.” So we both signed it. I discovered that merely by showing up to all my classes every day I could easily get straight A’s, and at the end of the year I was even presented the “High Achievement in Music” award in front of the whole school. To this day I still believe that if I had gone into foster care I would have died of a heroin overdose or suicide before the age of twenty. Thank you, Steve, you are still a hero to me!
kirkwise 