I started before I started, the melodies were in my head. I’d sit on the bench and create things, fleshing out directions and combinations of notes, musical wobbles that made sense just to me. Then I’d enlist my sisters. We’d sit in a row, three of us on the bench (the oldest couldn’t be bothered) and make interpretive pieces of fury, dramatic rollouts of modern noise, pounding and slapping at the keys like banshees. We’d put the family dog up on the keyboard sometimes and marvel at the results, letting her walk around, stomping out a cacophony. We’d climb up there ourselves, two or three at a time, walking up and down the scales in our socks. We’d open the top of the piano and pluck at the strings with wooden spoons and pencils, we’d engage the pedals and pound on the low notes for hours.
My father had gone to Notre Dame, a college in Indiana and at one point my mother taught me his school’s anthem. I was 5. I played the learned piece in the basement of the church for a talent show. I wore a cape. It got an unexpected laugh and I realized I’d been kind of a monkey or a pawn in some sort of football rivalry amongst my parents and their friends who had gone to another university. Damien Pascale won the contest with a performance on an accordion.
At my insistence I started lessons with a teacher who came to our home. Her name was Mrs. Rhodes and she wore two pieced suits, monochrome polyester with brass buttons, sometimes a hat. She had a prosthetic leg and a cane and read a little bit like Willy Wonka. It was our game that I’d scare her when she arrived at the house, I’d wait behind a shutter on the front porch and jump out as she rang the bell. We’d laugh and start our lesson. In a spiraled book she’s write down my weekly exercises. Scales to rehearse, a list of the pieces I’d work on and notes on what we’d talked about that day. After every lesson she’d write ‘Good Lesson’ or sometimes ‘Excellent Lesson.’ After 10 ‘Excellents’ I’d get a plastic statuette of a composer of my choosing. She was gentle and sweet and maternal and as another reward she’d find sheet music for me; songs I’d heard and wanted to learn. ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ and ‘Morning After,’ the song from The Poseidon Adventure. I’d spend a lot of time with the actual sheet music, poring over the artwork and the fonts. This was before I’d learned about records and record covers. Mrs. Rhodes understood me and we became close.
There was a boy in the neighborhood that was flashy and better than me. His name was Walter Witt and he lived in a big house on a corner. I didn’t know him but I knew him. At my mother’s encouragement we sought out who his teacher was and we bid a sad adieu to Mrs. Rhodes. My mother kept insisting I’d outgrown her and maybe I had. The new teacher and I did not get along. She was reserved and polite in front of my mother but a tyrant and a bully when we were alone. Full transparency, I was a problem. I’d take the bus to her house up in the Hollywood Hills, such a tedious trek for a young boy. I’d been harassed by a group of friends who’d recently turned on me and my days at school were long, the travel to piano lesson a sad and lonely journey. My face pressed against the inside window of the RTD bus that went up Western, the longest straightest street in the world, from near South Central up into Hollywood. I walked up through her backyard once and carved FUCK MUSIC into her freshly paved patio. I was a monster and she brought it back.
We’d fight to the point of physicality, it’s hard to believe she never hit me. I always wanted to hit her. We hated each other that much and our passion found its way into my playing. She had two pianos side by side, two grand pianos, and I remember her imitating the way I played. She sat at her piano, next to mine, flopping her hands upside down, making noise all willy nilly, insinuating my disrespect and inferiority, she was so mean. I cried on that piano bench so many times and I remember her doing a ‘boo hoo’ kind of thing with her fists, squinting her eyes like she was crying, mocking me. There was a harpsichord next to my piano, her crown jewel and musical relic she treasured. She let me play it just once. It had very very thin strings, it was from the 1800’s, she’d insisted I play it only ever so gently. Like barely touch the strings, it was so fragile and quiet. I was too heavy handed, she pointed out, another of her cruel criticisms; I lacked the sensitivity. Once when she went to answer the phone in the other room I leaned over and with my thumb pushed down on the high note of the harpsichord as forcibly as I could until the string broke and went TWANG.
My standing up to her got worse and worse, I really can’t believe we never hit each other. She took a sadistic turn, I’d see it in her eye, in her squint when I arrived for the lesson, no hint of compassion or shared sense of musicality or leadership. We both began to look forward to the vitriol. The energy was unbridled and furious. Her eyes would narrow as she ate her sandwich from a plate on her lap and waited for me to finish a piece so she could make fun of me. I was good. I knew this. I was very good and it became a game for me to try and force her to acknowledge my talent but her acknowledgement never came.
One day after a lesson I went to her study to use her phone to call my mother to pick me up and saw a book, a green book, a paperback in the shape of a music book, big and long, about Saturday Night Live. I flipped through it as I called home and stuck it in my pants, stole it from her home. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with this, she was an older woman, in her sixties. It turned out it was her sons’ book, she called my home later that day to ask if perhaps I’d ‘seen it’ in her study when I was there. I of course denied it.
The book I stole became a theme of our lessons, she’d bring it up constantly. My insistence that I didn’t know what she was talking about enraged her. She brought it up again and again and I’d play dumb. Eventually our fights got so bad that I quit.
A girl had moved in across the street from us who was very serious about her piano. She had a strict mother who made her practice over three hours a day. At that point I was practicing an hour before school and an hour after but I would constantly cheat the timer that we’d set. I was smoking pot and shoplifting with my derelict friends at that point and it was taking up much of my time. Still, the girl across the street was very good. She raised the bar of what a child could do. I watched her at a recital her family hosted. She was sitting on the stairwell by herself with her eyes closed, lost in the passion of what she was hearing as another child performed a piece. She winced a bit, I noticed, at a sour note, but her commitment and attention to the craft and the musicality was extraordinary. I wanted what she had. We sought out her teacher and started taking lessons with him.
He smelled like tuna fish, a larger doughy man who was skeptical of me from the start. I played him a boogie woogie piece I was proud of, mostly knowing that he’d hate it. It seemed like a feasible place to begin, to take him to a place of discomfort. Politely, he played a piece for me. Chopin. Beautifully executed and sensitive, fluorishes a little over the top for my taste, but beautiful. My piano improved with him but I wasn’t as serious as he wanted me to be. My stealing and cigarette smoking and plights of teenage had taken precedence and I was nowhere near a place where I could take him seriously.
Before one of our final lessons I found myself on his front porch as he finished with the student before me. Bored, I’d gone through his mailbox and found a Times magazine that laid out in detail the story of the Jonestown Massacre. The bodies. They’d all been encouraged to drink kool aid and killed themselves, a mass suicide in Guyana that wasn’t only a horrible and high number of deaths but after the initial bodies had been moved it was found that there was a whole other layer underneath them, making the grand total twice as much as was initially calculated. This detail. The bodies under the bodies. And then the willingness to take their lives. The haunted realm of sacrifice in another country, hot and humid and oppressive. I quit piano soon after reading this.
I get better at smoking and stealing and moved to San Francisco where I flourished as a derelict. All of my lessons were disregarded and I bought a synthesizer and relied on the simplicity of a single finger. It was easier and way more effective but without the lessons of the complicated scales and navigating of the human condition I would have been a different kind of artist. Music is effective in wartimes, inspiration is taut and feverish under duress, beauty comes from horror more often than not. We will get through these times and we will blossom into a different kind of flower. Bless us all.
Love this piece, Roddy! And the ending: “we will get through these times and blossom into a different kind of flower.” I’m going to hold that phrase close.
Beautiful journey -socks on the scales thankyou for the lift :)