by Mark Salzman
Every once in a while I would see Michael in the hall, the cafeteria or outdoors. I would nod at him or try to start up a conversation, but he wouldn’t acknowledge me: I had ceased to exist. Sometimes I could see him stretching or practicing kung fu out on the football field, and I wanted to join him, but it was clearly impossible. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any other friends; whenever I saw him, he was always alone. I often thought about calling him up, but then I could hear the litany of abuse he would heap on me, how I was a loser, a cradder, a candy-ass and so on, and decided I’d had enough of that crap.
As the fall turned to winter, I started to feel blue and tired and yet strangely anxious all the time. For the first time in several years I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t feel interested in anything, hated getting up in the morning, hated going to bed at night and watched lots of television. Dad understood perfectly; when he saw me stretched out on the couch he would pull out the Green Blanket, whip up some cinnamon toast and Constant Comment tea with milk and sugar and join me to watch old movies. My mother was less sympathetic. She’d been willing to let me burn incense in the basement, she’d driven me for years to kung fu and cello lessons, she’d even helped me powder my baldhead wig—but she could not stand seeing me mope. She hated it when I complained that there was nothing to do because there was so much to do! So much to read, so much to learn, so many instruments to play, so many rooms to clean! Whenever I passed her in the house—I on my way to make more toast or find TV Guide, she on her way to make oboe reeds for her students, tune her harpsichord, wash our whole family’s laundry or start dinner—I felt myself slouch a bit, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs after having destroyed a sofa. The more I slouched, the straighter she stood, until the two of us looked like cartoon characters named Good Girl and Bad Boy.
My only relief came on the afternoons when I visited Annette and we took walks together in the kind of idyllic fall scenery that you see on postcards advertising New England. When we returned to her house, there was always something homemade to eat waiting for us on the table, and someone with unusual ideas or an unusual accent to talk to. She and her parents all seemed to think that I should return to the cello, which I hadn’t played much during my enrollment at the Boxing Institute. Dr. Guillaume in particular seemed eager for me to give music another try. He played with an amateur chamber orchestra that could always use another string player; besides, he pointed out, with my cello, his violin and Annette’s flute we could form a trio.
I decided it couldn’t hurt to try, so I pulled the cello out from under the piano one weekend, blew the dust off it and tried to play some Bach. Awful! This wasn’t the answer. I put it back under the piano and turned on the television. Intending to watch The Six Million Dollar Man, I inadvertently stumbled on a program in which the violinist Yehudi Menuhin was playing a concert with the Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who sat on the ground playing a sitar. Something about the unusual music appealed to me, so I kept it on and then listened with interest to the brief explanation of how ragas worked. To me the extraordinary thing was that though each raga, or song, had a fixed basic melody, every time they played it they improvised on it and played it differently. I don’t think I had ever heard real improvisation before. My experience had been that all music was played from notes written down by some Immortal hundreds of years ago who was unappreciated in his time and died in poverty.
At the end of the program I went back down to the basement and took out the cello again, but this time sat on the floor and laid it across my lap like a sitar and tried to improvise. With my typical flair for immediate fixation, I didn’t emerge from the basement until late that night, having decided to become an Indian musician.
My mother was overjoyed when I told her that I was serious about the cello again, but less enthusiastic when I showed her how I was playing the instrument. “Better that than shooting drugs, I suppose,” Dad thought aloud, and she had to agree with that. Erich’s only comment was “Leave it to Mark. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Only Rachel approved of my new hobby. By then she was disappearing into her bedroom for weeks at a time to paint watercolors and listen to Beatles records, so she no longer found me strange at all.
Once again Dad helped out by scouring libraries, only this time not for kung fu manuals or brush-painting textbooks but for records of classical Indian music. In the meantime I took the cello over to the Guillaumes’ place to show them my new interest.
“Eh? Non!” Dr. Guillaume protested, waving his pipe in front of him as if to ward off danger.
“Ach, ja!” Mrs. Guillaume countered, grinning from ear to ear. The weirder I got, the more she seemed to like me. But Annette liked it best of all. She went out to a fabric store the next day, bought a few yards of Indian-print cloth and a pattern called “Nehrudelic” and sewed me a shirt that made me look like Siddhartha before he gave up the comfortable life.
Gradually my depression vanished, but with the memory of existential angst still fresh in my mind, and the fact that I was improvising every day, it was inevitable that I would soon discover jazz. When I did I was even more excited than when I’d heard Ravi Shankar’s performance. Before long I was listening and playing along to recordings of Chick Corea, Weather Report, Jan Hammer, Stanley Clarke, Jaco Pastorius and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I set up the record player in the living room and tried giving my parents a demonstration, but their reaction was subdued. My mother looked at my dad and said, “That’s really pretty interesting, I guess, isn’t it, Joe?” My dad hesitated for a moment. Then he raised that eyebrow of his and asked me, “Has anyone invented an electric cello yet?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He nodded, obviously relieved. “Then yes, I’d say it’s interesting for now.”
My new problem became money. I needed records—lots of them—to play along to, and the ones from the library were invariably scratched or warped. Also, as I spent more time with Annette, I could see it was getting on my parents’ nerves that I was always having to ask for cash for gas. Even worse was when my dad would trudge out to the car in the morning, start it up to go to work, then see the needle below E and the TANK EMPTY light glaring at him. On more than one occasion I peered out the basement window nervously and could see his face in the predawn darkness, illuminated by the orange glow of the TANK EMPTY light, and by lip-reading I was able to appreciate just how much he did control himself when he was aggravated but not by himself in the car.
I scoured the papers for job listings, but couldn’t find anything for an unskilled sixteen-year-old. I tried driving around the nearby towns and asking storeowners if they needed a hand, but nothing panned out. Finally one man said, “Try in Danbury. That’s almost a city, so you might find something there.”
I spent days driving around Danbury, passing by all of the former sites of the Chinese Boxing Institute. All of those spaces were still vacant, just as we had left them years before. One even had our heavy bag still hanging from the ceiling. Danbury was a depressed area indeed. At last, in an alley, I found the entrance to a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant called the Royal Embassy of Ooh-Aah. It was run by followers of the popular guru Sri Chinmoy, so there were pictures of him all over the place with offerings of plastic flowers, and fruit and incense burning in front of each loving portrait. The Royal Embassy staff took me on as a dishwasher, then trained me to wait on the five or six tables, and before long had me cooking, too. They were nice enough people, but they insisted on my joining them for their Sunday-morning staff meeting, which involved hand-holding, humming and lots of positive reinforcement. That was the worst part of the job, as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t even get paid for it.
Obsessed with music now, I began to spend less and less time on schoolwork, and Mr. Leighton, the charismatic history teacher with the big voice, got worried.
“Mr. Salzman,” he boomed after asking me to join him in the faculty lounge, “I get the sense that you are losing inte
rest in your studies. What’s the deal?”
I told him about jazz and he rolled his eyes melodramatically and shook his head in mock dismay. “You’re doing what? No wonder you’re always wearing that kooky shirt. Give me a break, Mr. Salzman, that’s a very nice hobby, I’m sure”—he rolled his eyes again—“but holy Toledo, pal, don’t ruin your shot at getting a good education now, when it counts! You’re a junior in high school this year, and your grades are important. You can play jazz all you want next year when you’re a senior. Hell, everybody else will be either necking in the backseats of their cars or killing brain cells with beer anyway, so why shouldn’t you play jazz cello? Just put it off for one year, that’s all I ask. What can I say to you to get you back to work?”
I promised him I would try not to forget academics altogether, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to waste any more time in school. I’d been the man overboard long enough! I’d already put in eleven and a half years learning things that didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted to live my own life, I wanted to play jazz all day, I wanted to cut my own swath through life, blaze my own trail, use my own conscience as a compass—like Daniel Boone, or Bruce Lee, for that matter. All of my heroes took risks in order to follow their own muse; I had to get moving before it was too late and I got sucked into the rat race.
“Dad, I’m sixteen now and pretty serious about music, and you know, I’ve been sort of playing the cello since I was seven, so it’s not like this is all that sudden or impulsive—in fact, in a way you could say that my whole life led to this. So I’ve been thinking that maybe I should do music full-time now. What do you think about my dropping out of school just for a few years to give it a try? I could always go back and finish if it didn’t work out.”
Dad sighed, pushed his coffee cup to one side, folded his hands in front of him at the kitchen table and looked at me with all the self-control and weighty reasonableness he could muster. Still, I did notice a tiny, throbbing vein in his forehead where I hadn’t seen one before. “Mark,” he said in an eerily calm voice, “I have only seventeen years to go before I can retire. I’d love to survive that long, even just to get up that first Monday morning and realize, I can go back to sleep! Don’t give me a heart attack, OK? Just let me live until then. What do you say?”
That was the end of that. There had to be a way, though, and as I passed the guidance office on my way to French class one morning I got an idea: What if I could get accepted by a college a year early, making my senior year unnecessary? Instead of actually going to the college, I could postpone matriculation indefinitely while I made my stab at a musical career. If I made it, I wouldn’t ever have to actually go to school again, but if my musical career didn’t work out, I would still have an education waiting for me and that vein on my dad’s face would stay down in the meantime.
I stepped into the office and asked one of the counselors if I could have a few college applications. I was thinking primarily of the University of Arizona in Tucson, because my dad’s oldest brother lived out there and I had always liked him, his wife and the desert.
“It’s kind of early for applications,” she said, “I don’t have many of the forms in yet. How about MIT? No? Georgia Tech? No? Let’s see—liberal arts, I have one here for Yale. They send theirs way early.”
Why not? I took it home and spent a weekend filling it out, but the more I worked on it, the more unrealistic it seemed. I sent it off on Monday morning, asked Mr. Leighton and Mr. Friedman to write recommendations for me, and promptly dismissed the idea as harebrained. A month later the counselor stopped me in the hall and informed me that more application forms had come in, but I had decided by then not to bother filling out any more.
A month or so later I got a call from Yale asking when I could come in for an interview with an admissions officer, a standard part of the application process. Feeling like someone who had carried a prank too far, I chose a date and, when it came, drove with my father on a rainy Saturday morning to New Haven. We stopped first at the Yale Art Gallery to see The Night Café, a disturbing painting by Van Gogh that Dad had always loved. After admiring this and other gloomy paintings for a while, we returned to our car to find a soggy parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper. “But there’s still two hours left on the meter!” my dad yelled.
“Yeah, but it’s a two-hour meter, and we’ve been here an hour and a half already. It must be broken.”
“What! But that’s bullshit, how are we supposed to know that? They can’t …! Goddamn those … Oh, let’s get out of here.”
Everything was going pretty much the way I’d expected it to.
We found the admissions building and Dad offered to wait in the car. “I don’t want to get another ticket in this shithole city,” he fumed. He hated cities.
I walked in and gave my name at the reception desk. A young woman who seemed not much older than me stuck her head out of a door and invited me to join her in a tiny room decorated with a poster from an exhibit of Chinese antiquities. When she asked if I would like some coffee I realized she was the secretary for the professor who would interview me. When she returned with the coffee, we chatted and it turned out that she had been a Chinese-studies major. She was enthusiastic about Chinese art, and before long we were really getting into it. I couldn’t help wondering, though, when the fun was going to end and I was going to have to leave this delightful secretary and move on to a dark, wood-paneled room to face a glum, rheumatic professor wearing a robe and a black mortarboard hat who would ask me, “So, young man, why don’t you tell us what you think a person—such as yourself—could do for Yale?”
After half an hour the young woman looked at her watch and said, “Oops! I have an eleven-thirty who’s probably in the hall waiting. Well, I don’t mind saying that I enjoyed our interview a lot. I think you’d love this place. Good luck!” And that was it—that was my interview.
When I went out to the car, Dad was still angry about the ticket, and I could see he was preparing himself for the bad news that my interview had been a disaster.
“How did it go?” he asked stoically.
I didn’t know quite how to describe it. I just started giggling.
“Well?”
“I think it went pretty well,” I said.
“Mm. That’s good. Well, they’d better accept you,” he said, pointing to the ticket on the dashboard, “or I’m gonna come back here and stick this up some dean’s ass.”
12
Over the winter I saved two hundred and fifty dollars from the restaurant job and decided it was about time I had my own car. I knew nothing about automobiles except that I wanted something sleeker than our VW bus, so when I saw an ad in the paper for a 1969 Triumph Spitfire for two hundred dollars, I went right over to the fellow’s apartment complex, took what I thought was a careful look at the car and handed him my money. After I’d paid for it and signed the papers he advised me not to drive it very far because it burned oil real fast, but hastened to remind me that the Michelin tires on it alone were worth the two hundred dollars, and anyway it shouldn’t take much to get it running again, probably just a gasket somewhere. I drove the thing home in a cloud of black smoke and called up Lenny, a guy I’d met through Michael who knew everything about cars.
Lenny, who had dropped out of school the year before and worked at both a gas station and an auto-parts shop, came over and after about five minutes said, “You’d better take this car back. It needs a whole new engine.” I tried calling the guy who’d sold it to me but he didn’t answer the phone. “So what do I do?” I asked Lenny.
“Well, you could try to rebuild it. I rebuilt an engine once; it’s not so bad. It’s a small engine—we could pull it out ourselves if you want.” He fetched some tools out of his car and we undid the bolts that held the engine to the frame. We disconnected the clutch, pulled the engine out and, since my parents didn’t have a garage and it was already winter, carried it into the basement next to the har
psichord. After we set it down on a sheet of newspaper, Lenny had to get to his shift at the gas station.
I went upstairs and checked our tool cabinet to see what we had. Three regular screwdrivers, one Phillips head screwdriver, two pairs of needlenose pliers, an adjustable wrench, a ruler, a wad of rubber bands, a dried-up tube of Super Glue and some old sandpaper. My dad wasn’t the handy type. It would have to do.
I went out to the car and pulled out the owner’s manual, which had an exploded-view diagram of the engine. I figured that I would take the engine apart, see if anything looked drastically wrong, replace any obviously worn parts, then put it back together again. I decided to remove the oil pan first. I undid the bolts and pulled off the pan, then watched in numb horror as five quarts of filthy oil gushed out onto my sheet of newspaper, covered it instantly and spread out all over the basement carpet. Fortunately my mother had put little cups under each leg of her harpsichord in case the basement flooded during heavy rains, so at least the oil didn’t ruin the instrument.
An inauspicious beginning, to be sure. I dismantled the engine completely but saw nothing wrong with it. In fact, the parts looked great to me; I had no idea how precise the fittings were. Hoping that maybe just putting it together again would cure whatever its problem was, I set to work with my flimsy tools. According to the manual, several of the major bolts were supposed to be tightened to exact pressures with something called a “torque wrench.” Not having one of those, I just tried to guess. When the manual said, “Tighten head bolts to 35 psi,” I found something in the basement that weighed about thirty-five pounds (I checked by using our bathroom scale), held it in my hand for a while and then tried to approximate that pressure when I turned the adjustable wrench. Several gaskets were supposed to be replaced, but I figured with all that pressure the old ones would hold just fine.
