Even before we started running around together, Shelly and I were two of the most visible people in our high school. Heck, it seemed like everybody in town knew us: we couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. At the time it was a town of about twenty-five thousand people, and we had both been born there. Our dads were highschool teachers, so even when we were young, people knew our families. Both of us were deep into the performing arts and were used to being photographed by the local newspaper for publicity purposes several times a year, starting in junior high school. The fact that nobody would have imagined us as a couple prior to our now very public getting-together made us the subject of much gossip and speculation. As Tom pointed out, everyone figured we would last about three weeks. If “everyone” thinks a thing, there might be a basis for it.
Shelly took it as a challenge.
From the vantage of decades of hindsight, I think three to six weeks would have been appropriate. She would have graduated and headed to Europe for the summer, then to UCLA in the fall. I was preparing to attend the piano master class music camp that summer, with another year of high school after that. The fling would have served as a sweet coming-of-age memory for both of us. You are guessing correctly that it went a different way.
Neither of us minded the public attention our liaison received. We revelled in it. We were both accustomed to the rumor mill, she for being a “slut,” I for being “queer.” The cognitive dissonance that had people marveling over our odd pairing was hilarious to us, not least for the irony of it. From the outside, everyone assumed that Shelly, being a year-and-a-half older and “very experienced” was “robbing the cradle” and corrupting a previously innocent nerd who was painfully awkward with girls. Many were surprised because it was widely assumed I was “gay” — not entirely without reason, of course, since I am bi. She was well-known for her brash and assertive manner, and I was generally quiet, my goofy antics not withstanding. It certainly seemed I would be overmatched and swept away by her passionate intensity.
But as soon as we got to talking it became clear that the reality was quite different than what people thought. About the only part they got right was that I was indeed swept along by her intensity. I would push back, but in any clash of wills or perspectives, she usually won out. But while she had been the one to “make the first move” on me, she quickly hit the limit of how far she could go with it. In an earlier post I described how she was actually “terrified of men,” and she had kind of painted herself into a corner socially. She could never have lived up to her reputation. If she had gotten with an experienced man it would have become immediately apparent that she was sexually walled off. She would have been traumatized by the humiliation of it. She felt safe and comfortable with me, and I never pushed her past her boundaries. I am a sensitive guy with “great hands” and even greater patience. And I had done my homework. Her understanding of sexual matters was what she had learned in health class, wrapped in a thick layer of cultural myth and dirty jokes — cartoonish at best. On the other hand I had studied every bit of written material I could get my hands on, from legitimate to sketchy. I had read “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “The Joy of Sex,” “The Sensuous Woman,” the “Kama Sutra,” and lots of “Penthouse Forum.” From Langenscheidt’s Medical Encyclopedia I had memorized all the diagrams of female anatomy, internal and external — to the point that I could have sketched them out and labeled them correctly from memory. I had even read Freud. She didn’t even really know what she had “down there,” and had never explored it beyond a quick scrub in the shower. Her very large breasts were an annoyance and an encumbrance to her, and not in any way a source of pleasure. As I described in a previous post, I could feel anxiety gather in any part of her body I touched, so I proceded with care. Because of the disparity, the power dynamic was reversed when we became physical: I was the one in control as I spent the next few weeks gradually initiating her into the experiences of intimacy, first clothed, then gradually, not.
This bifurcation between the public and private aspects of our relationship set a tone that persisted the whole time we remained together — a sense that “the world” just didn’t understand us. “They’re wrong about us.” It became a kind of trap. We both cared very much about how we were perceived, both as individuals and as a pair, but we each harbored dark secrets that wouldn’t see the light of day for years to come. In a sense there was a transactional nature to the relationship: we were both ashamed of our inadequacies and “weirdness,” and we hoped each would help the other overcome them. We came to be defiant in our defense of our partnership, and the more people looked askance at the way we began to cling to one another, the more we dug in.
Many years later my dad and I had a conversation about the whole relationship. He was comparing it to his with my mom. He said, “Sometimes when two people find they have complementary neuroses it can lead to a strong bond, deeper than codependence. Very unhealthy, because the mutual adaptation keeps both people stuck in their neuroses.” I had majored in chemistry at UCSB before dropping out, so I made an analogy. “Hemoglobin has an active site where oxygen temporarily attaches to an iron ion to be transported through the bloodstream from the lungs to the cells, where it is released for metabolism. Cyanide kills by attaching to the hemoglobin and never letting go.”
I need to fill you in on what I knew of Shelly before that fateful night when we got together at a cast party. I mentioned that it came out of nowhere. Nothing in my story up to this point foreshadows it, and absolutely no one at the time would have pictured the two of us together. And yet there was a certain kind of inevitability to it, which became apparent to the two of us only gradually.
I first met Shelly when I was in eighth grade when we were in a speech and drama class together. She was in ninth grade, as was the majority of students in that elective. A part of me loved the course because it was so interactive. We did improvisational exercises, script reading, speeches, and so forth. I was painfully shy at that point, although I would have thrived on it in elementary school. Truth is, the abuse from my stepfather had really taken a toll on me socially. My social blossoming in the band room had yet to take place, and I felt a bit intimidated by the older kids in the class. But it was fun. Shelly and I got along just fine. She was very extraverted, joking and laughing all the time. She loved being the center of attention, and she was hilarious. She was five foot four with long blond hair, thick and straight. Her face was pretty enough but her ample Macedonian nose made her brown eyes look smaller. None of that mattered when she talked, because her voice and facial expressions were animated and fascinating. She could easily capture the attention of a room full of people.
One day in class a group of the ninth-grade boys began making jokes about her breasts, which of course everyone knew were the largest in the whole school. It was her claim to fame, and she didn’t seem shy about it. Although she was laughing it off and coming up with snarky retorts, I sensed she was beginning to get uncomfortable. I suddenly found myself telling the guys in a stern voice to knock it the hell off and leave her alone. They were shocked at my sudden intrusion, but they sheepishly complied. She acted like it was no big deal and she had the whole situation under control, but after the guys turned away she threw me a glance. There was a lot of information in that glance: surprise, gratitude, and curiosity all mixed together. One of my older sisters was an early developer (fifth grade) and back in those days men made all sorts of ignorant assumptions on that basis. I remember my sister crying at the way she was treated by boys and men of all ages, including sexual assault. That must be where my sudden courage originated. I felt empathy and indignation.
After that we conversed sometimes in class, and had fun doing improv together. I loved it when she laughed at my jokes. But that was our entire relationship: one semester of middle school getting to know each other a tiny little bit. In high school we would see each other around, but we never talked. She was very wrapped up in choir, drama, and musical theater. She had an amazing singing voice and was the strongest soprano in our high school. She often accompanied the choir on the piano. The two of us had been involved in two musical theater productions prior to that spring, where she now played the part of Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! while I played the piano in the orchestra pit. It was over the course of the many rehearsals where I was providing the musical accompaniment that we began to feel each other’s presence more and more.
Everyone in our school knew who both of us were, since she stood out in voice and stage work, I in music. But she being the extravert and me being the nerd, no one would have imagined us dating, including me. Especially with her being a year-and-a-half older. And when I say she was an extravert, I mean she was a true drama queen: president of the Thespians club, organizer of cast parties, godmother to the cast, locus of attention, and the life of every party. If you wanted to know any gossip, just ask her. If you were wondering where the next party was going to be, ask her. She cared about how everyone was doing, and they went to her for advice. She was also a straight-A student and was ambitious about her future: really a remarkable person, frankly. This is all I knew of her prior to that fateful night, except for one other detail.
I said she was the center of attention and the life of the party. Well she definitely did like to party. By that I mean drink. And make out with boys. Actually, she had a reputation. Maybe it started with the anatomical features that evoked assumptions about her proclivities, especially when she made the most of opportunities for humor with her Mae West impressions and bawdy jokes. She didn’t seem to mind that everyone considered her “the biggest slut at our high school.” She took it in stride, seemed to enjoy the notoriety. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself making out with her that night. My number had come up, I assumed. It was just my turn, perhaps.
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.
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.
I have talked about my frequent sleep disturbances in the form of nightmares, but I should also mention that I often sleepwalked as well. We camped all the way up and down the west coast, as far as British Columbia in the north; as far as Carpinteria to the south. At the far end of one of these adventures we visited my dad’s extended family in Riverside. During that stay my mother remembered me sleepwalking into their room, urinating in the corner, then curling up to sleep in an open suitcase. I also wet the bed until I was seven. Exasperated, my parents decided one time to humiliate me by putting me in a cloth diaper with plastic pants. I vividly remember the embarrassment and discomfort of the tight elastic and the fear of getting poked by the safety pins as they struggled to secure the diaper while I squirmed in resistance. I think it actually worked though: I finally stopped peeing the bed.
A month before my seventh birthday I came home for lunch looking forward to a nice toasted-cheese sandwich and some Campbell’s tomato soup, only to find my mother seated at the big round dining table, sobbing with her tear-stained face in her hands. “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. I had never seen her like this. She looked up at me and said, despairing, “They shot Robert Kennedy! They’re assassinating all of our leaders.” Only two months earlier our family had reeled from the blow of Martin Luther King being killed. He was a hero to us. Now this. At six years old I had no words. I just tried to absorb the horror. It was bad enough seeing the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles on the news every night. It did seem the world was coming apart. I also recall her saying on more than one occasion, “Heaven forbid Ronald Reagan ever be elected president: he will call up the National Guard and end democracy.” This was way back in the 1960s when Reagan was still Governor of California. She knew all about the rightwing conspiracies that were already afoot; the white panic over civil rights and the militarism that permeated our culture. It certainly shaped my worldview and created a fatalistic sense of anxiety about the future. And let’s not even talk about the overarching sense of dread the Cold War induced.
Later that summer we found out that my father had received a Rockefeller fellowship, which meant he would be going to Bellingham, Washington for two years to get his master’s degree. I felt his absence keenly. Long-distance phone calls were very expensive and thus few and far between, but he did mail us tape-recorded messages regularly. We would gather around the reel-to-reel tape recorder in his now empty study to listen, then we each had a turn to record a message of our own to be mailed to him in return. It was fun, but it was a poor substitute for actually hanging out with him.
My mother decided that with my father gone, I might benefit from being enrolled in the Catholic school that my older siblings had been attending. I had been thriving socially at the public elementary school half a block from our house. I was very popular with the kids and teachers alike. I liked it being so close. Now I had to ride my bike half a mile to the Catholic school where I didn’t know anyone. It did not go well. My teacher was the notorious Sister Anne Joachim (pronounced “Joke ’em”), a tiny old Irish nun with a thick accent who was known for brandishing a wooden rod. Everyone but me seemed to know she was no longer allowed to actually strike the kids with it. I’m sure I visibly flinched whenever she slapped a ruler on the corner of my desk. She would yell, “Gawk, you idiot!” whenever I failed to instantly name the capitol of a state. Flash cards were the worst. We were supposed to memorize our multiplication tables up to thirteen. I was trying to learn them, but my brain would freeze whenever I was confronted with a flash card, and whereas I was considered the smartest kid in class at the public school, I now felt like a complete moron and was treated as such. The bullying from the altar boy clique was unbearable. I felt like I had been sentenced to a gulag.
Even boys a year younger learned they could pick on me at recess and get away with it. My mom was a devout Catholic and had taught me to be Christlike, turning the other cheek and choosing non-violence. So I took it, trying to rise above it all. But one day on the playground I hit my limit. This one second-grader (I was in third) just kept after me, endlessly taunting. A switch flipped in my brain. I lost all restraint, deciding it was time to beat his brains in. I tried to grab his jacket, intending to hold him with my left hand and beat his face with my right fist until he was dead. But he slipped out of my grasp and ran away. I went after him. I was always among the three fastest boys at my old school and I was sure I could catch this twerp, but he kept getting away. Round and round the blacktop we went, other kids scurrying to avoid us. I summoned one last sprint to catch him on a curve, but I ended up facedown in a large puddle. Everyone was screaming and laughing at me, and the last thing I remember was looking up to see my eldest sister a few feet away looking at me, then turning away in disgust. I had hit bottom.
A day or two later my mom told me that she was pulling me out of that school and re-enrolling me in my beloved public school! I was confused but elated. After months of silently staring out the window of the classroom, watching the clouds move outside while daydreaming I was on an old wooden sailing vessel on the high seas, I was going to be back in my element with my old friends. (Years later I found out from my eldest sister, who had been thirteen at the time, that she had had a talk with my mom that night, advising her to get me out of there. Bless her!) I will never forget the moment the principal brought me into the third grade classroom. The teacher (who I didn’t know yet) stood before the class and said, “Kids, we have a new student joining our class today, his name is…” Before she could even finish three boys literally jumped over a table and ran towards me yelling, “Kirk!” The king had returned from exile!
Unfortunately, the damage was done. Years later, in psychotherapy at the age of thirteen, the two topics we centered on initially were the pants-down spankings and the Catholic school. But by then there was so much more going on.
kirkwise 