yellow teeth
i got a baby grand from my parents when i turned 9, big and black and calling out to me like a harpie on a crag: ‘try me if ya can, kid, but watch it, i’m a tough motherfucker.’ it was shiny and seemed to ask too much — all those 88’s extending from one horizon to another. they made me nervous. i stayed near the center, near middle C. the sound of a single note, held down and reverberating sang in my chest like a money shot (the one i was yet to have). driven to lessons by my stubborn sneak-a-shot-o’-likker Granny in her dark blue Ford, a line of honking cars stretched out behind us on the mountain road, ‘fuck ‘em’ in her set jaw, i trembled. i hated those lessons. i hated the music paper. i fogged out on the precisely inked notes. my struggle to transmit them to fingers made no sense. at my first recital, a child’s song, i froze. i ran out the door, fighting tears. months later i returned to the beast and experimented, in the dark, tentative notes resounding from the hulking whale, amounting to zip, but mesmerizing my pre-teen brain. later on i improvised an ‘original composition’ at a talent show at Prout’s Neck, our summer vacation spot in Maine. got a big ovation. i was 14, showing off my Twist-‘N-Shout moves on the dance floor and covered with zits. i compared thigh muscles with a kid from Rhode Island. ‘boys are better,’ he said. i was silent, but i remembered him as a part of that summer when i made friends with the piano. after we moved to Philly we gave the lessons another try. this time with some quack-invented system to fire up a left hand accompaniment to whatever horrible pop song was on the radio. it launched me once more into the refusenik orbit. ‘all you need is a melody’, he promised. i thought, ‘you are so full of shit’. i quit 2 weeks in. meanwhile, across the street in Wayne, procrastinating homework, our friends the Voorhees and a future Oberlin organ student, Henry Pemberton and i played ‘guess who this is?’ — a crush clue on the keys that was supposed to identify someone we all knew — an early warning of what eventually became song ‘portraiture’ — wordless snapshot. the summer of my last year in high school i was a counselor at Camp Munsee, in the Poconos. in a barn slept a lonely, scabby, out of tune upright. after the boys were asleep i snuck down and played and was transfixed. not by anything i was doing, but by the sound, the awesome celestial echo. the notes bouncing off pin point stars. at Yale, same thing, but with drugs. in a college tower, i locked the door, dropped acid, played with eyes shut and hallucinated psychedelic film clips as they un-spooled, fingers hammering with faux Stravinsky cluster up and down the nicotine ivories. i kept it on the down low.
it was awful, i’m sure, but i kept going back, transported by the thrill of this surging Hudson river of sound. 2 years later, back in New Haven, living a house full of nutty artists and musicians i cranked the motor up all over again. we snitched an upright from a church and for the first time, inspired by musician friends Francesca Reitano and Ed Askew, i began to crunch improvisations into songs like a blind man in a junk store, just trying to tell the truth and to hit my compatriots in the heart. maybe it never gets better than that. maybe it gets worse.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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