Piano Lessons

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After class one day, as I was headed to the bus, my third grade teacher, Mrs. Cannon stopped me, handed me a sealed envelope, and asked me to give it to my parents.  Her tone was friendly; still my stomach got knotted up with anxiety wondering what was in the letter.

My father was home and stood there as my mother read the letter.  She started talking immediately to my father, and I was not sent away because they forgot I was there. Otherwise I probably never would have heard what was in the letter.

Miss Cannon had written that she believed I had some musical abilities and that I might benefit from piano lessons.  Some parents might have been made happy by such a letter and thinking that their child might have some talent.  Not mine.  My mother immediately became upset.  Lessons cost money.  And how would they get me to the lessons.  My father had work, and my mother didn’t drive.  And surely I would have to practice.  That would require a piano, an upright of course, and they could not afford one of those.  But they could rent, she imagined, but where she wonder could they put a piano in that tiny house; the front room—well, there was no room there either.

My mother became such a wreck thinking about all the reasons I couldn’t have piano lessons that I wished I hadn’t shown a talent in the area.  Later, she asked if I would miss having piano lessons, and what with her pathetic whining tone and what I had heard before, the only answer to that was “no.”  She said I was wise because musicians lead horrible lives, never make any money, and become alcoholics.

So it’s just as sociologists have said.  The musical instrument of the middle class is the piano.  Some educator, in an article about struggles over homework, mentions how his mother sat and listened to him encouragingly while he played and how he was doing the same thing for his own son.  What!  The idea of my mother sitting and listening to me work on my scales fills me with terror.

 I have a guitar now—just a 300 buck one–; that’s the instrument of the working class.

 Someday before I die I will buy a Martin.

The Prisoner’s Diet

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I believe that the psychological metabolism of a person is pretty well established by the time he is two.  Basic set points have been installed about such things as one’s ability to love or to accept love, to trust or to accept trust, to idealize and to accept idealization.  The thermostat tolerance levels for anxiety, fear, and rage are also established.  I developed the metabolism of a starving person; or at least a person on very short rations.  I learned to get the minimum daily requirement of nutrition out of the poison I was fed.

I have a hard time finding an answer when I look around in amazement and ask myself why I am not already dead and buried or locked up in a loony bin.  One answer might be nature; I was brought up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, and bushes and birds, and I was able to spend a lot of time outdoors.  One of my brothers describes our stay in South Carolina as idyllic.  I don’t think so, but whatever of the idyllic there might have been perhaps helped to sustain me.

But most important—I am now convinced—was my Aunt Addie.  She lived those days 100 yards away in her mother’s house.  During my first five years in SC, she was a teenager, and a mother in training.  She spent time with me; read to me; and talked with me.  I won’t say it was love at first sight.  But she was a decent young woman who liked me. I was always smiling, she said, polite, and endlessly curious; and I was happy to see a person who looked at me welcomingly and called out my name with excitement.

 The misery of this for me is that I don’t remember a damn bit of it.  I feel sad that I can’t remember if she held my hand while she read or ruffled my hair or hugged me goodbye.  But anxiety is a memory killer and I was in a perpetual state of inward anxiety.  Still, when I returned to SC after having been away for 35 years, as soon as I saw Aunt Addie, I knew I knew this person and that I liked her.  So while I can’t remember, I am certain she played a central part in keeping me on the sane side of the sanity-insanity spectrum.  This point was hammered home for me when I happened to look and see that my wife and my Aunt were two peas in a pod in height and weight.  So, I thought, I married my Aunt and not my Mother, and that was a good thing.

I think people want to grow and to change.  Some souls are so stomped into submission that they are fated to endure life only or to give up entirely.  We are all sort of like potatoes forgotten in a dark drawer, sending out pale sprouts, looking for light.  The lucky have light aplenty; the unfortunately very little.  But even a little, at the right time, can mean a great deal.  My Aunt was for me this little light.

I must have taken it in as a kind of promise that I would not always be lost in the dark.

Corn Rows

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The old man built a concrete block house with four rooms, and, as I have indicated, no bathroom facilities.  We were located, through a line of trees and across an empty field, about 100 yards from Grandma Tingle’s house.  I spent 10 years right next door to her out in the middle of nowhere and I never really got to know her.  Certainly I was not fond of her.  She was not exactly a font of warmth and affection.

She was tiny, about five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds, and mean.  She smoked cigarettes but pretended not to.  Proper ladies don’t smoke; if somebody came to the door, she would stick her cigarette in the oven of her wood burning stove.  She was also a mean chicken killer.  She would grab the bird by the neck; hold the struggling bird at arm’s length, stick its head in this little noose she had hanging from a tree and give the bird a twirl.  Then she’d dip the thing in some hot water and go at plucking the bird with a will, digging out handfuls of feathers with each pull.

 I think she’d pretty much had it with children.  She’d been pregnant, I have heard tell, at least 10 times in her adult life.  Seven lived.  How that little woman ever carried a child, I don’t know.  But she was wiry.  Her family had lived once in a place down in Georgia where she had to carry water a mile in a bucket each day from the spring to the house.  But kids, by the time I showed up, she’d had her fill of kids.

One day I was half way across the open field to my house and she took into yelling at me from her porch.  She was going at me up and down about running through the corn rows.  I don’t remember what she said and to this day I don’t know what’s so bad about running through the corn rows.  Put a boy in front of a corn row and what do you expect he is going to do.

 She was giving me a good tongue lashing and I was upset.  As I stood there in that field knee high in the grass, a bee landed on my hand.  And for some reason, unknown to me I did not shake it off, and—what do you know—but it stung me.  I let out a howl and turned and ran home.

Was I already a masochist in training—finding novel ways to punish myself?

Or could be I was becoming a sadist.  Granny didn’t know a bee had stung me; and given the howl I let—instead of my usual polite, yes’em Grandma–out she might have had second thoughts about tongue lashing a child as sensitive as I was.

My Aim Is True

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“Authorities report that Jeffry Trent Bit killed his mother, his father, and his brothers while they slept.  Each was killed with a single arrow in the heart.  Neighbors expressed surprised.  “He was such a good boy,” one neighbor said “He was a model student,” said another.  Bit was a straight A student, an Eagle Scout, the leader of his Church Youth Group, a semi-finalist in the state wide spelling bee, an all league player in football, and an Olympic Quality Archer.   Although injured in several places, Bit’s attempts to kill himself with a bow and arrow proved futile.”

 When I come across a story like that I, depending upon the morbidity of my mood, either turn quickly to another page or read all the lurid details.  I passed a good deal of time in my sophomore and junior years in high school having fanaticizes about killing my parents.  Actually, it was pretty much the same fantasy.  For some reason, unknown to me, the massacre always happened in the kitchen.  My parents would be bound and gagged.  The fantasy did not include how I bound and gagged them; they came in fantasy land prepackaged for massacre.

 First I would cut mother’s throat.  She would bleed out, as it were, while slumped against our pea green refrigerator.  The idea was that the old man might suffer even more if he saw his wife dying.  So then I would cut his throat, and he would slump up against the cabinets under the kitchen sink.

 While entertaining these fantasies, my blood pressure would go up; I would begin to sweat.  Sometimes though I would get all hung up and the fantasy would go bad because I couldn’t figure out which of them I wanted to suffer more and thus I couldn’t figure out which one to kill first so that the other one would have to suffer the death of the other.  My reason with its attempt to calculate pain would get in the way and the fantasy would pop like a worn balloon.

 I don’t know why I didn’t carry out the fantasy.  Thank goodness we had no guns in the house.  And I didn’t have a bow and arrow either.  I didn’t fit the profile.  I wasn’t a straight A student; I was an atheist; I spelled poorly; I played varsity basketball but was not all league, and I wasn’t an Eagle Scout.  I was a “Life” Scout; that’s the one before Eagle, but I never got Eagle because I couldn’t swim well enough to get the “Life Saver” merit badge.

 I was imperfect.

Dead Dogs

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I had dogs before a boy could properly be said to have a dog.  My parents said it was my dog because I was supposed to feed it.  The dog didn’t come in the house; really it was a yard dog, a good thing to have around as a form of protection.  My Uncle down in Georgia had a raging pack of such dogs living under his house.  These were fearsome snarling creatures.

One of “my” dogs ran off, and another became a chicken killer.  That was the end of him; once a dog gets the taste of chicken blood, it can’t stop.  So somebody shot him.  Then, I got a dog that was more properly my dog.  I was old enough to really have a dog, and he was short, compact, and hairy, unlike the boney tall dogs that were mine before.  I knew him from a pup.  I would go outside and he would come up wagging his tail and he would follow me wherever I went.

I made a little of my own money; I would regularly make a sweep of the gullies up and down the road for about a mile either way looking for pop bottles that people tossed out of their cars.  I could get 3 cents a piece for them.  I didn’t get what people called an “allowance,” so whatever money I had that was my money came from those pop bottles.

One day I was out picking up those bottles and I look around I see that my dog is crossing the road to get to me.  I couldn’t do a fucking thing as a car ran right over him.  I felt awful and came home crying.

I lay face down on my bed and cried and cried, and all my mother could do was to yell at me because she had told me, over and over and over, hadn’t she?, not to go near the road with the dog.  What did it take to make me listen?  A dead dog apparently.  And she hoped I realized that if I had listened to her that the dog would not be dead.  But for some perverse reason I had insisted on taking the dog down to the road and now it was dead just as she had predicted.

She went on and on in that manner and all I could do was cry harder and harder.  I was almost sick with crying.  Sure I remembered what she said, and her idea of comforting me was to rub it in further.  Once again she was right and I was a perverse and stubborn child.

I must ask because I really don’t understand and I have tried so hard to understand, but what could possess a person to taunt (I told you so! I told you so!), humiliate, shame and bury with guilt an eight year old boy who was lamenting the death of his dog and his role in that death.  It is not enough apparently to kick a person when he is down; having done it once one must do it repeatedly.

Within the bosum of our families we learn our capacity for inhumanity from each other.

A Flying Dog

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In addition to not being able to afford it, we didn’t have air-conditioning as a point of pride.  True, we lived 40 miles inland, and it could get hot but it was dry heat, as we would say over and over, and not that wet stuff like back in SC where you never stopped feeling damp and you’d get heat rashes in odd places.

But we were sitting around in the front room sort of suffering through the heat together on a dreary Sunday afternoon.  The old lady was flopped on the sofa per usual reading the newspaper and the old man was sitting on this sitting place he had made that jutted out from around the fireplace firebox. The family dog, sitting right next to him on the cool brick, began to yip.  This unfortunate dog was a mix of Chihuahua and rat terrier; it was short haired and had a huge dick.

The old man told the fucking dog to shut up.  But it kept yipping at something out in the front yard or maybe up on the street.  That dog made us insane with its high pitched yipping.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the old man, looking straight ahead, take out his cigarette lighter, flip it open and ignite it right next to the yipping dog’s asshole.  There was a sort of pregnant pause as the nerves sent their messages to the dog’s brain.

Man, did that dog jump.  Arching out over the living room floor, it landed more on its chest than its front legs, slid on the hardwood floor and banged into the wall.

 Nobody said a word or blinked an eye.  The old lady looked over her newspaper, shook it out, and went back to reading.  The old man was dead pan.

“Man,” I said, “did you see that.  Did you see that arch!  I thought the damn thing was going to fly.”

 The old southern attitude towards animals is somewhat different than that of the civilized Californian.  My uncle likes to joke, “Want to see something funny?  Tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over a clothesline.  But if you want to see something really funny tie two cats tails together and throw them over a goat.”  And in Huck Finn, Twain records the bored town folk on a hot afternoon pouring gas on dogs and setting the afire.

 There’s was no TV back then so you had to make do with whatever entertainment material was at hand.

In Black and White

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 My mother sometimes gave me more information than I needed.  Or maybe it was my fault; my curiosity especially about my self is endless.  But, as I was informed, in April of 1944, my mother went to meet my father back in South Carolina so she could meet his parents.  They had not been married long and Granny’s house having but four rooms, the two sought privacy in the piney woods directly behind the house.

According to the author of Southern Ladies and Gentleman, young men and women in the South have long sought the privacy of the woods.  A true gentleman brings a coat, for the lady’s posteriors, and also a warm Coke, as a prophylactic douche.  I have long thought Coke would kill anything.  But that evening apparently my father brought the coat but no coke for I was conceived in those piney woods.

Those were happening times.  Peace was declared in May of 1945; the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as I gestated in my mother’s womb.  In embryonic form, I could not say that was there yet but it bothers me to think that I may have been if only potentially on this earth while Adolph Hitler was still alive.  He killed himself on April 30, 1945.

Not that I believe there is any karmic connection between me and Hitler; but those times seem so long ago and to think there’s any connection between me and them is disconcerting.

Why back then everything was in black and white.

Gopher Ball

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The opening day in my Little League featured each team in the league playing an inning.  So all the players from all the teams were there; a lot of parents showed up, and there was bunting and such stuck in the chain link.  My second year with the Rams my coach said I would pitch the first half of the first inning against some team.  I was a bit PO-ed because I figured that meant his son would start our first real game.  He had started grooming his son for the job, so that we would have 3 strong pitchers rather than the 2 we had the year before (me and another guy).

I could see the writing on the wall; less starts for me.  That meant I would be sitting more on my butt on the pine because I was a rare thing for Little League.  I was a pure pitcher; i.e. I couldn’t do anything else.  Usually guys who pitch in Little League are good athletes and play some other position when they don’t pitch.  But not me.  I pitched and I batted ninth.

I was a little pissed off and didn’t feel entirely honored to get the job of pitching the first inning of an exhibition game.  So I decided I would have some fun with it and take the opportunity to practice my gopher ball; this involved a long stretch towards home, and I would swing my arm so low that my knuckles would sometimes graze the ground.  With the proper spin the ball would go straight up, curve down, and drop right on home plate or right behind it.  It was a pure junk pitch and slow as molasses.  You could light up your cigarette and take a drag in the time it took that thing to get from me to home plate.

So I pitched a gopher to the first guy and he swung and missed.  I struck the guy out, and then I started out on the next guy with a gopher and adults in the stands began to boo.  I was amazed; they were actually booing.  I was stoked.  Fuck the fuckers, I thought.  I was pitching a legal pitch; I wasn’t pitching underhand.  I was breaking my wrist and the umpire could see that.  So if they thought I was throwing a pansy pitch, let their little Johnny prove it by knocking it out of the park.

I struck out the next little fucker too on a straight diet of gophers; and the last one hit a one bouncer that even I could handle.  Three up.  Three down.  And nobody was booing when I walked off.

Hell, I was the most fun they had all day.

I laughed about that one inside all the way home on my bike.

The Scissors Incident

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 While the old man gave up whacking me with coat hangers and broom handles when I was in Junior High, he did not entirely give up all forms of physical harassment and/or intimidation.  He developed what I call the bull rush; he would lower his head like a bull and rush me.  No hands were involved, just his shoulder.  He would lower it and slam into my chest knocking me backwards, sometimes into the wall.

On one occasion, I must have said something—it was always a matter of my saying something, not doing something like burning down the house—and as he rushed me my mother, in a rather calm voice actually, said clearly so my father was sure to hear, “Look out, Bill.  He has a pair of scissors.”

 The old man drew up abruptly because, sure enough, I had a pair of scissors in my hand.  I clicked the scissors together a couple of times, looked him in the eye, and headed on down the corridor.  I felt sort of cold inside.

What had my mother been getting at with her warning?  I thought a great deal at that time about killing both of my parents, so perhaps, I reasoned, she was alerting Bill to the fact that I was holding a potential weapon that under the duress of the moment I might wield in an intentional manner.  Or perhaps she was just warning Bill that some accident might occur because I had a pair of scissors in my hand.

I have wondered about this incident and still feel a bit cold when I think of it because, I believe, of its Oedipal Implications.  She, the mother whom the male child wishes to possess as his own, had not warned me, her suitor, as it were, but him, Bill, her husband.  I had apparently failed to conquer the father in her affections in spite of all the efforts I had made to win her over to my side.  I had tried hard in this direction because of her apparently universal misery and also because she was the stick that stirred the drink.  She was the one who usually incited my father against me; she was, as it were, his co-conspirator in my increasingly paranoid universe.

 Penis equals scissors.

Scissors cut off penis.

 I can’t figure it out; it’s too complicated.  I know years later, when I asked a young woman had she really ever felt the urge to murder someone and she said yes, I thought I had found my soul mate.

Pitching Solitary

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Pitching Solitare

 One day, after we got to CA, I was wandering around the neighborhood and came upon a baseball field.  Kids were playing with adults and I saw that the following week Little Leagure tryouts would be held.  As part of my never ending attempt to get out of the house, I tried out and got on a team mostly because they took everybody.

 I had never played the game before and quickly learned a) that I could not hit the ball, and b) if I accidently did, it didn’t go anywhere, and c) I was afraid of being hit by the ball, and d) I couldn’t catch a fly ball, and e) I could hardly throw from third to first.  But I was undeterred;  I was reading baseball fictions for kids and even some histories of baseball teams, and I watched parts of games on Saturday with Dizzy Dean as the announcer.

 Because I knew my limitations and faced them squarely, I decided that the only way I would play on a team would be to become a pitcher.  I had observed that pitchers lost when they could not get the ball across the plate and walked everybody.  So in the backyard, I drew a square on the block wall about shoulder high for a little leaguer and went out back and threw the ball over and over again in the direction of that square.  Over and over again, until I had the control problem under control.

 I had also observed that most Little League batters, about 75%, were in fact just as afraid of the ball as I was.  They were really afraid of big guys or short compact guys who threw the ball fast and hard.  Unfortunately, I was not short and compact or big; I was skinny and gangly.  In my readings, I had become fascinated with the spitball pitcher and generally with pitchers who threw junk.  I decided I would throw junk and further to scare the batters I would throw side arm.  I perfected the motion so that for an instant the poor batter would feel I was throwing the ball directly at him but then it would zip across the plate at the knees and sometimes I got it to drop directly on home plate.

 Something else I think was going on.  Perhaps I had settled on pitching because one could practice at it with nobody else present.  Dizzy Dean threw rocks at a barn door.  Usually one throws a ball to somebody else; but to do that one needs somebody else to throw it to.  I played pickup games of course, but I never recruited anybody to pitch to.  Instead in deciding to be a pitcher, I was beginning to show in late childhood that I was an insipient outsider or solitary.  Moreover, by deciding to become a pitcher—something at which I could practice alone—I was learning how to manage as a solitary.

 Baseball is a game for people who love people (are the luckiest people in the world).  I always loved that walk to the mound.  Alone.  And while I don’t watch baseball much anymore, I hate those commercials that keep us from watching the reliever walk causually in from the bullpen.  Out of nowhere.

optimists