In the tradition of damnation, innocent beginnings are eternal, and perditious consequences are the indefinitely reiterated pattern. Until, of course, our extinction, which will mean that Satan’s work has reached its end. At least, so your bible tells me.
The classroom was hot and stuffy on that dreary winter morning when Sister Mary Sheila shushed our class into second grade, seven year old silence. Someone Important was visiting the class, and we were to be on our best behavior, despite our miserably runny nosed November malaise.
Blessed Sacrament was one of the currently much maligned working class Catholic schools of the sixties, but let me tell you that damned as I am, I bless the work of the priests and nuns in their noble and generally successful attempt to inculcate literacy and numeracy in classrooms that usually had between forty and sixty of said runny nosed pests per classroom and teacher.
Those of my classmates who did not end up in jail or the military, became doctors, lawyers, or productive citizens of one kind or another. One notable success became the most crooked mayor in the city’s two hundred year history.
I, of course, was that singularity I will call an accursed musician.
"Remember you have to prove an example to our visitor that we are better than those children across the street at the public school. Be soldiers. Don't sneeze in the classroom. If you must, raise your hand to use the bathroom. Silence, children, and listen well."
Actually of course, anything to escape the drudgery of learning the basics of arithmetic was a delight to me. Despite my early reading capabilities, and precocious artistic and erotic bents, I was at best only slightly ahead of the class in that respect. This was much to the nonplusment of my sainted mother, who was a University mathematics professor, a novelty for both that time, and that neighborhood.
University professors really made no more money (and in her case probably less, due to her femininity) than your average carpenter. This conflicted with her "Boston lace Irish" roots which liked to presume that she and we were somehow better than our surroundings. Especially by virtue of our superior education.
All it meant to me was the tedious jibes and spleen of my peers, who were firmly convinced that my physicist father and mathematician mother were up to no good, and probably building a monster in one of the closets of our modest apartment. Such a monster no doubt would prove to be the hamster that would eat Newark.
But again, Satan like I digress, and distract you from yet another tale of a state of innocence destroyed through my innately damnable handiwork.
The distinguished gentleman who entered the classroom with an imposing looking rectangular briefcase looked old indeed. His face all angles, his hair a gray halo of fuzz around his jug-like ears which had cotton ball tufts of white curls wrestling their way out of them. I remember he had strange and beady eyes that darted all over the room. They made me think of a squirrel.
"Children, I want you to understand that this could very well be the most important day of the rest of your life. This is your opportunity to learn to perform music."
I could almost feel my heart burst open. For two long years I had been badgering my parents for a violin. Beethoven enthralled me. And I got a hell of a kick out of Irish Jigs too. Suddenly the stale drab yellow paint of the classroom took on a luminous rosy glow of opportunity.
"I'm going to hand out a sheet of paper to each and every one of you and I want you to fill it out in complete silence. Remember that how you answer this is going to have a deep effect on the rest of your lives, so think about how you answer it carefully."
My little hand trembled with both sweaty anticipation and a gut wrenching anxiety that whatever I would be asked to put on the sheet, I would get it wrong, and the Ivory gates of opportunity opening before me would turn into heavy brass doors that would slam shut for the rest of recorded time.
It was a bit of an anticlimax to see nothing on the paper but blanks for my name, address, and telephone number. But then, almost overlooked at the bottom of a paragraph explaining the mighty credentials of the Broad Street Professional Music School, was the blank of salvation.
"Please write the instrument you would like to learn."
Well, damn, was I ever ready for this one! I had been practicing writing the word violin for the last six months. My enlightened modern and scientific parents had leant me practical motivations:
"You certainly can't qualify to study as sophisticated and expensive an instrument as the violin if you can't even write the word and get the spelling correct."
I might add that I agree with their logic now as much as I agreed with it then as a child. You need to show commitment, and I, a seven year old, first Holy Communicant, and damn proud of it, was READY!.
My faithful number two Ticonderoga pencil wrote as if it had a will of its own. I was through the first three letters before I realized to my horror that having just survived an arithmetic quiz with my grade intact, the eraser was smudged and down to the nub. There was little or no margin for error in my goal to project a perfected desire to play the perfect instrument for which I had been yearning with all my heart for two long years of my seven on this wandering lunatic planet.
Of course with that moment of self-consciousness, I mishandled the "l" and needed to erase it. The eraser smudge looked like the mark of Cain, sealing my fate to be forever marred and misunderstood.
I handed the paper in nonchalantly, fully confident that my entire musical future had headed straight down the unholy pipes of the cosmic toilet, light years from the pipes of the church organ, whose Bach filled me with an orchestra rich with bittersweet joy and turbulent yearnings.
Like that first mistake in Eden itself, barely comprehending of the consequences, I felt abjection. Handing in the paper as requested by the rigidly postured gentleman, I wondered if I had made a mistake by not asking for the Sister Mary Sheila’s help with the eraser. Her reputation as a nice nun was well deserved. She never hit any of us.
But the dice were cast, and my over-perfectionistic pride had probably done me in once again.
I wish that I could tell you that that one smudge stunted my musical journey, and nipped it in the bud, but unfortunately this story is in three unholy parts, and this is merely sin and perdition, part one. Let me know if you can bear to hear its development.
Well, my pride is delighted you wish to hear more of this, although it is much to the disgust of my sloth. How is something like a pencil eraser a vehicle for sin, perdition and damnation? The slightest of openings can unleash the flood tides of grief. You might ask many an AIDS patient about that one, my dear. Or check with that monstrosity you call a God.
"So leaf falls from leaf, and Eden falls to grief."
It gets better. Right around the time I had wisely abandoned all hope of ever hearing from the school whose application form I had so vitiated, there is a phone call for "either of your parents" which I picked up.
The long and the short of that is that the administrators of the Music school believed that my spelling abilities indicated musical talent which they were willing to cultivate for me, if my parents would submit to a brief interview. I suppose the desperate look on my face and my two years of wheedling had finally paid off because they agreed, and my carriage ride to joy was finally on its way.
Never in my life, except when I used to anticipate meetings with my first love, Gail, had my body felt so electrified with restrained enthusiasm. It was all I could to refrain from skipping instead of walking.
I wanted to dance my way around the house in little pirouettes like the graceful ballerinas in Swan Lake. For five entire days I existed in an ecstasy of long awaited fulfillment. I ate raisins compulsively to relieve the tension and farted silent but deadly miasmas of sulfurous half consumed grape like a veritable Chernobyl of nervous energy. My practical father was the first string to the runaway kite that was my heart.
"Listen kid, if you don't lay off those damn things you're not only going to drive him out when he gets here, you'll practically empty the neighborhood. This from a citizen of one of the capitals of air pollution in the Industrial Northeast.
Finally the doorbell rang. My normally bickering parents were on their best behavior. I galloped to the door and looked up at a lean, tall distinguished white haired gentleman in a dark pin striped suit. He towered head and shoulders over my stocky five foot eight inch dad.
His dapper van dyke beard along with chiseled facial lines etched from nose to lip made him look like God fresh out of a barber shop. I could only imagine what divine musical mysteries lay hidden inside the mammoth rectangular valise of green faux alligator in his right hand.
He marched into our humble second floor apartment living room with measured steps and commanding gaze. He sat down in the best chair and my parents looked huddled together on our second hand couch.
I cringed when I noticed that the slip over was falling off one of the sides and exposed a spring popping out of the upholstery. I looked down at the motheaten rug and felt like we exuded unworthiness.
He had made his way about fifteen minutes into the interview with a symphony of fine words about the dignifying and ennobling results that a course of musical study promised. when I heard a jarring note in the orchestra.
"You see, despite its apparently cumbersome appearance the Accordion is like an I.Q. test of musical talent. It combines rhythmic coordination with the universal musical language of the keyboard. What your son needs to do to determine his aptitude for the violin is to see how well he does with six months of accordion."
"But what about his two fingered left hand?"
"Didn’t you ever hear of Stanislas Weiselschmidt? The world renowned one fingered accordionist? He played Bach in manner the brought tears to the eyes of Belgian royalty.
"In music there are no handicaps. Only greater challenges for greater souls."
He produced as if from nowhere a 24 week contract and a dark expensive looking ball point pen.
I knew right away I was doomed. He had said the magic words to scientifically oriented parents. IQ test. If he had laid that same load on an Italian pipe-fitter from Brooklyn he would have been out on his ear, but as fate would have it, he was a fox in the henhouse.
I realized this only in retrospect, when I saw not a single one of my Catholic School compadres at the soon to be dreaded lessons.
They signed and a week later I was doing show-time with a cyan colored wheezing bellows rented from the school that felt like it could swallow me whole at full expansion.
This red horror that was my first musical instrument was approximately the size of my ribcage at its most dwindled contraction. It felt like it weighed a ton and had a dense mass of the kind that reminded me of when my father put my first .22 rifle in my hand. The "Wow! This sucker has weight on it" feeling.
This story grows into room for improvement beyond my wildest hell borne seven year old speculations. I had all the aptitude for the infernal thing that a fish might have in a bicycle race.
By the third week I was clearly the group laggard, and by the sixth week I had been completely dusted by a class doing the Beer Barrel Polka together while I patiently butchered Popeye the Sailor in the corner, our second lesson. I never once could get the right and left hands to work together. Two fingers or five, I didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.
"Perhaps your son needs a different accordion. He’s a growing boy. However, the rental will cost a little more."
Accordions went from bad to worse. This next monstrosity was an even larger black behemoth of a squeezebox that constantly seemed to be on the verge of knocking me off my stool and swallowing me whole.
When I carried it into the class in its massive gray case, I felt like I was bearing the weight of my own corpse in its coffin.
At this point, the third and final chapter in this sordid tale. I should mention how the lesson fees were being administered. My father would drive me to the school and give me the lesson money in an envelope bearing Broad Street Professional Music School, written in my mother’s meticulous microscopic penmanship.
I was entrusted with handing over said envelope to the teacher. My father left me at the front door and would drive off on the rest of his Saturday errands, picking me up at the conclusion. This took care of the two dollar fee for the lesson and the one dollar rental for the accordion shat from Satan’s colon.
Measly as that may sound today, please bear in mind that the tuition for a half year at my working class catholic school was all of seventeen dollars. For my struggling scientist parents, it was as if the family’s entire financial security had been entrusted to my fateful five fingers.
It has long been said that the pagan divinity Mercury is the god of musicians, scholars and thieves. True to Mercury, I began to wonder if this money might find better investement than in my none too prodigious accordion talents.
Down the street from the Broadway Music School in glamorous Downtown was an Ice Cream Shop. God what a palace that place looked to my second grade eyes.
Full of bright lights, eighth grade grown-ups, and even a jukebox. In little more than a passing moment of daring, my mind and fate were decided. I pocketed the envelope, walked right past the Institute of musical Humiliation and Torture, and headed to the Soda Shop.
I know what you’re asking. What was I thinking? Yes, I knew the consequences would be disastrous. But the impulse to destroy the process of my perceived debasement superseded any inhibitions I might have had.
I hated everything about it. I hated feeling like the stupidest person in the music class because I couldn’t learn music I detested. I hated being marked as some kind of an idiot, and feeling like one because my hands simply did not respond to the logic of the keyboard, the musical IQ test.
I hated the guilt I felt at the notion that this whole thing had turned into a waste of my parents hard earned money, and that I had found no way to communicate to them that their good intentions were going straight down a rathole. I despised the place and everything it stood for. Music as clever artifice. It had all the soul of a Swiss music box. All icing no cake.
Most of all I hated the dreadful, clever but empty virtuoso pieces that the teacher had the school’s star teacher play for us as an example of an ideal to be striven for. Pat supercilious sixty fourth note arpeggios hammered together by harmonic progressions that would have had Bach reaching for a sword.
I may have known nothing of harmonic analysis, but I recognized soulless, grinning exhibitionism immediately.
So, ill gotten lucre in hand, it was time to talk to the Emperor of Ice Cream.
I knew that this would catch up with me from the moment I half climbed my way on the red rotating stool and heard,
"What’ll you have young man?"
The road to hell was paved with
"A vanilla milkshake."
A slight mortification, since I really would have preferred chocolate. Such are the mitigations we use to qualify our descent into that which we know is wrong.
As you fall into the abjection of wrongdoing, the intensity of the present becomes overwhelmingly seductive. The ice cream of today will let the disaster of tomorrow wait for its certain future.
In less time than it takes to swallow the first swallow of the nectar, one has already visualized the denouement: discovery, humiliation, and punishment.
It is not that I dismissed my certain knowledge of my inevitable future as trivial.
On the walk over to the Ice Cream Palace I considered trying to talk it over, but cowardice and passivity ruled the day. Skip the lessons, eat the ice cream, and wait for the inevitable to occur.
Such is the power of the illusions of the damned. And was it really otherwise for the Nazis of Germany after 1943?
Or perhaps Dante was right, and it is a manifestation of Divine Providence and mercy that the foreknowledge of the damned will bless them with painless oblivion and annihilation at the end of time.
Regardless, of course I knew with absolute precision that I had sealed an inevitable set of catastrophic consequences with those fateful words.
But make no mistake about it, I believe that little vanilla compromise damned me more deeply than if I had asked for my heart’s chocolate desire. I was already proving to be adeptly self-hypocritical.
In the large one knows one is tangoing with a micro-Satan. I remembered rationalizing that it was money already being badly spent and I was diverting it. I remember thinking that it was inevitable that I would get caught. I knew that it was wrong, but I knew that everything else seemed to be hopelessly skewed and wrong too.
Here I was starting these lessons with dreams of Beethoven’s d major violin concerto, and they were force feeding me Popeye the Sailor and the Beer Barrel Polka as some sort of arcane IQ test.
How does a dream of Beethoven’s D Major Violin Concerto become alembeced through the adult world into an IQ test built out of Popeye the Sailor and The Beer Barrel Polka?
As a kid I did not understand the inappropriateness of that aspect to the extent that I do now, but my ignorance of the irrational only intensified the turmoil of my feelings about the whole Adult Real World Chimera.
. But microscopic as the act was, the theft provides us with an insight into evil. What was I really thinking at the moment that the envelope went into my pocket and it and I headed into the Soda Shop? What was my motivation?
At the actual moment that the decision crystallized I can distinctly remember that it was absolutely nothing. I can’t equate it with the Zen void, because it had more of a character of an automaton like emptiness that I knew would set in motion a whole cascade of charades. It was the final result of many things that I had chosen not to do.
Most importantly, I had chosen not to talk to my parents about it. They seemed to have too many problems as it was, and the lessons were both a sacrifice and an indulgence on my behalf.
I could already see the rabbit warren of multiplying lies and outright fictions ahead. So, how was the lesson? What did you learn? Do you think things will get better?
And discovery would be certain to happen within a month. I figured this would be good for a moderate beating, and I didn’t mind that. But I dreaded the questions I knew I would never answer for them.
How could you be so stupid? How long did you think you would get away with this nonsense? Why didn’t you confide in us? What were you thinking?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing except that I would have preferred chocolate.
And yet even there was even another internal black hole of voices and judgments. The most terrible Chinese Box inside of boxes. The thought that I’d never had any gift at all. All my yearnings and hopes were the papery nothings of all those who wished they’d gone for the high note.
My final despair was my absolute bewilderment at the keyboard. The feeling that this was something utterly alien and that the violin would only be something worse. Look at the idiots who could play the accordion. I didn’t even qualify for idiot.
At that point there was nothing but a sense of a vanilla ice cream present with a future sealed in catastrophe no matter what else.
And I really would have preferred chocolate. BACK TO THE CONTENTS