by James Rhodes
This relapse into cutting meant that I was no longer allowed to see Jack unsupervised. My rage and frustration at the total breakdown in communication between Jane and me grew and grew and there was nothing I could do about it. There is this one thing. This single ‘trigger’ that makes me angrier than anything else. It is when I feel someone is ignoring me, not hearing me, not seeing me. The irony that I do the same thing all the time by zoning out when I’m around people doesn’t escape me. I can ask someone a question and if they ignore me I automatically react inside my head with thirty years of rage. I ask a girlfriend, ‘Hey, shall we go shopping tomorrow?’ – she’s reading something, doesn’t hear me so doesn’t respond, and I feel like she’s literally just fucked her yoga teacher in front of me while laughing and joking about what a puny turd I am and I just want to die. I’m well aware that this is a recurring, paranoid theme of mine. No doubt it comes from begging the teacher to stop fucking me and him doing the opposite. Or perhaps from begging other teachers or my parents not to send me to gym class and being ignored. Either way, it’s my thing. We all have one, right?
I kept trying to explain to Jane what was going on, that I wasn’t a threat, that we could work things out, that there was no need to enforce supervised access to Jack, but I felt I got nowhere. The irritation and sense of being unheard grew and grew, I could see my son slowly being taken away from me, no one willing to listen to me or understand what was going on in my head. Until I lost it.
And I was off. Right back at square one. Terrified, hurtling down the hole. Convinced I was going to be sectioned. I could not, would not, allow that to happen. I jumped in a cab with my passport and told the cabbie to take me to Heathrow. On the way I booked the first international flight I could find (to New York, as it happened), arrived at Terminal 3, withdrew pretty much my last $5,000 in cash, boarded the plane and fled the country. I had no idea why, what I was going to do, if I would simply spend the cash on hookers and drink and coke and then shoot myself in the head. I just had to run. Somehow all of this seemed easier and made more sense than just sitting calmly with the doctors and trying to find a solution that worked for all of us. Yep. Off I went again, not telling anyone where I was going, no idea for how long, leaving my wife and son alone.
I was away for a week. During that time I spent hours at a kick-boxing gym in Manhattan getting the shit kicked out of me by a 4-foot-wide Puerto Rican black belt (excellent punishment), trying to think straight and sort out what was happening. I emailed my wife and then spoke to her on the phone. I apologised. Tried to explain what was happening in my head and that I didn’t want it to be like this any more. She told me she wanted a divorce. I asked her to think about it for a while, that something like this was a huge decision, and would she at least take a few weeks to consider it. And if she still wanted to go through with it I said I wouldn’t contest anything. There was no need for lawyers – we could do one of those quickie online things if that was what she really wanted and she could have anything she wanted from me as long as I could have access to Jack.
Very soon after I got home from New York there were papers waiting for me from her lawyer. I’d finally pushed her to breaking point.
And I started to unravel again like some broken fucking record. I lost so much weight my doctor told me that within three months my lungs and brain would begin to shut down and that if I didn’t start to consume at least eight hundred calories a day he would section me. I was cutting regularly, sleeping around two to three hours a night, trying so hard to find something about myself that wasn’t toxic and broken.
I had to get my own divorce lawyer but I still didn’t care and just told the guy I’d happily sign whatever. More punishment, more desperate attempts to absolve myself of the guilt of exploding my family.
And just like that, I was on my own. There was something incredibly freeing about having a small, finite amount of money in the bank, a 350-square-foot basement flat rented and paid in advance for 6 months, and no career. I can’t explain it. Almost all of the cash I’d been left with, post separation and divorce, had been spent on paying Bob back, rent and my escape to New York, and things suddenly got very simple. Easier to handle. I’d pick Jack up from school on the Friday and we’d hang out until I dropped him home the next day. Communications with Jane were not good. It was like a switch being flipped. We had become two separate, coldly civil strangers. My only concern was Jack, my shame, remorse and guilt overwhelming.
TRACK THIRTEEN
Chopin Étude in C major, Op. 10/1
Maurizio Pollini, Piano
Chopin. There are so many self-imposed rules about concerts today, perhaps I could add one of my own?
Every piano recital should include at least one piece by Chopin.
He was a music freak from some tiny village outside Warsaw who revolutionised piano playing forever. The only composer I can think of perhaps with the exception of Ravel, about whom one can say that 99 per cent of everything he ever wrote is still in active repertory today.
He wrote almost exclusively for the piano, and despite being rather unlikeable (a social climber, slightly racist, financially reckless) changed the musical landscape so completely and so dramatically that it is simply not possible to talk about piano music without mentioning him. He experimented with and created a new piano sonority that once and for all released the instrument from the past. It’s no wonder he could charge the equivalent of £900 an hour for piano lessons.
One of the first cassettes I bought was of the great Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini playing Chopin’s études. These bastard difficult pieces were designed, as are all studies, to improve technical proficiency. But unlike what had come before him (dull, interminable exercises with little or no musical content via composers like Hanon and Czerny), each of the twenty-seven he wrote is a genuine miniature masterpiece of melody, form, beauty and technical pyrotechnics.
And he doesn’t make you hang around waiting for the good stuff until the third or fourth etude either; straight out of the gate he opens with the hardest of them all, a visceral display of giant, near-impossible-to-stretch arpeggios flying up and down the keyboard like a hand possessed.
There is a perception of Chopin as an effete, slight, fragile man-child, incapable of strength and force. These pieces, like so many others, blow that preconception out of the water.
I KNEW JACK WOULD NEED me more than ever now, even if the time we spent together was only a couple of days a week, and I needed to get in shape for him, even if I couldn’t do it for me. Having moved out of our home, and with little else to do, I started getting more and more involved in the piano again. I had to, or else I’d sink without trace. I started learning new pieces, practising, listening, working properly. Over a few weeks, with the help of a decent shrink, some space, good food, Matthew and a couple of new close friends, my head became if not quieter, then at least more manageable. Some of the old feelings from America came back – good feelings of hope and potential and freedom. I stopped cutting, started eating, was present with my son when I was around him (the opposite of so many fathers I see glued to their smartphones whilst apparently spending quality time with their kids). And, as if some weird karmic debt were finally being repaid in tiny instalments, something wonderful happened. I was broke, alone, uncertain about every area of my life, and one day, in a café, I walked straight into the man who would become my manager and change my life forever.
I like talking to strangers. I read a book about depression once where the protagonist was so lonely she used to join queues simply for the human interaction. And while things weren’t quite that bad yet, I did at times strike up conversations with people. Never on the Tube, of course; certain things are absolute no-nos. But cafés were fair game, and in the queue one morning I got talking to a Canadian guy. He was maybe fifteen years older than me, had a sweet hockey body, a bit of a beard and a kind face. Turns out he was a restaurateur who’d sold his business for a pretty decent wedge and was kicking around
London, his spiritual home of many years, looking for a new project. And boy did he find one.
His name was Denis. And that’s ‘Denis’, rhyming with Lenny but with the stress on the last syllable. It’s French Canadian. It is not Dennis (as in menace). Nor is it Denny (as in Crane, of Crane, Poole & Schmidt). He has asked me specifically to point that out. Which I’ve just done. But do feel free to call him Dennis should you meet him, just to see him wince.
Thing is, this had to be a genuine cosmic coincidence. Denis knew almost nothing about classical music. And of course when he asked me what I did, and I told him I was trying to become a concert pianist, there was that slightly awkward silence where neither of us knew what to say. And then he says to me:
‘I only really know one piece of piano music. A friend of mine was obsessed with it and he used to play it to me all the time. It’s called the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. Do you know it?’
I shit you not. The one piece of music which I had carried around in my heart since the age of seven, that had got me through rocky, desperate, brutal years, and that I had recently brought back to a vaguely decent standard on my little piano in my tiny flat. It felt like the universe saying, ‘Hey man – see what happens now you’ve stopped being a giant dick!’
So of course I squeal like a stuck pig and do a little dance, hopping from foot to foot. And once I realise he hasn’t backed out of the door slowly, I let him know that it’s my favourite piece ever.
‘I should play it to you let’s go down to Steinway fuck I can’t believe you know that piece dude it’s so awesome have you heard Kissin play it oh man they say Russians can’t really do Bach but it’s the shit I swear you know it was originally for violin but boy does it sound better on a piano doesn’t everything I bet if Bach had a modern piano he’d have done it himself have you heard Michelangeli play it oh my GOD . . .’ etc etc.
Shut up. I was excited.
Turns out he’s killing some time and we wander down to Marylebone Lane with me rattling on at fifty miles an hour about the piece, about Bach losing pretty much everyone he loved and most of his kids, about the fact that he missed like 40 per cent of his schooling because of the violence going on both there and at home, and what a fucking legend he was and that this piece was some kind of musical homage to his dead wife, and imagine that, putting into music something that words cannot express and taking us on this journey of grief until the very end when he leaves it up to us the performer to decide if we want to finish on a major chord (yay!) or a minor chord (shoot me now) and on and on and on until we’re right there in the Steinway showroom by one of their 9-foot grand pianos and he sits down and I sit down and I mumble about it being fifteen minutes long and hope that’s OK and that I haven’t warmed up and so on and then I start playing and what feels like fourteen seconds later I bounce up having finished and say ‘Let’s go get some coffee! I’m dying for a smoke. Jesus what a piece, huh? Did you hear all those hidden inner voices? Wonder if they were real voices to him’ (another etc etc, sorry) and we wander (he wanders, I bounce Tiggerlike) down the road to another franchised excuse for a cafe.
And finally when I pause for breath he’s all emotional and shook up and a bit teary and tells me it was beyond amazing, that he had no idea about the stuff I was talking about but it added so much to the piece knowing its history, and where could he buy my albums. And I started laughing because of the whole album thing and the fact that me having an album was as likely as me fucking Alexa Chung. And he says, ‘Well why not put some figures on paper and bring it to me and maybe I can help you make one?’
And everything changed. Kapow.
So I call a guy who calls a guy who knows a guy who calls a guy and I find a guy who can produce an album. He helps me find a sound guy and a studio. I get some rough prices, scribble them down on an envelope and rush round to Denis’ flat. I tell him nothing about my history other than vaguely hinting I’d had a tricky time a while ago, we agree terms and percentages and stuff that means absolutely nothing to me because I’m going to record an album and that’s literally all I can think about, and he draws up a contract and I sign it and then fuck me if two weeks later I’m driving with him down to Suffolk to record my very own CD.
We talk a bit in the car and I tell him about hospital and my head and whatnot. And that I only got out very recently and even though I may have given him the impression I’d had some emotional trouble ‘a few years ago’, I hadn’t been entirely honest about timescales and severity, but all was OK now, I promise, no worries, let’s go make a record, I don’t need more meds, I swear it.
And he says, ‘Do you mind if we pull over so I can have a piss?’
So we do, and I have a long moment where I think, Jesus Christ that’s it, I’m never going to see him again because I’m mental and now he knows I’ve only been out of hospital a few weeks and of course no one in their right minds would take on someone like me, let alone lay out a huge chunk of cash for the privilege, and right now he’s haring back to London as fast as he can while I’m waiting here like a muppet, all excited about making an album.
And then he climbs back in, and somehow, miraculously, we drive on. And maybe out of the corner of my eye I catch a wry grin pass over his kind face.
Glenn Gould, my hero, talked about the sanctity of the recording studio, the ‘womb-like security’ of it. And yes. Me in a giant room. In a barn in a field. Alone. With a jumbo, mega piano. No cars, trains, planes. Plenty of coffee. Kit Kats. Music scores. Cigarettes.
Next door in the control room: sound guy, engineer, producer, manager.
Four days allocated when I know I only need two, but he’s paying and I need extra time to satisfy my crazy.
So we start with Bach. Of course. His Fifth French Suite. And I start to play it through. And the producer starts telling the guys in the booth how weird it sounds, how slow, or romantic or odd. And then he slows down. Then he stops talking completely. And twenty minutes later he’s all pleased and excited and happy and moved and shit. And on we go. Chopin, Beethoven, Moszkowski, and then the Chaconne because it’s my piece and Denis’ piece and it has to be on the first album.
I had rarely in my life been happier or more fulfilled. Cups of tea and smokes interspersed with people helping me create a record of the music that irreversibly changed my entire fucking galaxy forever. And of course there was the added bonus of the safety net of the retake. I could simply disappear, try new things, take stupid risks with tempos and voicing and sound, listen back, decide what worked and what didn’t. I will never, ever forget those few short days where everything on the outside disappeared and all that mattered was the music, the piano, somehow playing notes written two or three hundred years ago by some mad, genius bastard of a composer out of his mind with grief or love or both.
I get home knowing it’s going to be a few weeks before I get to hear the first edit. Who cares? I’m playing, working, dreaming, hanging out with my son, seeing my shrink, going to AA meetings. Back on some kind of road that doesn’t involve destruction and self-hatred.
And I guess the gods were feeling generous around that time because not only did I get a second chance at the career of my dreams, meet the guy who could help make that happen and find some degree of emotional equilibrium, but I met a girl.
She was not so much a girl. More a tall, slender, shiny, blonde übergirl. One sunny morning I’m finishing up a coffee with my pal Luca (a tiny, chiselled, insanely happy and over-enthusiastic Italian man I’d met a year or two before in one of my many therapy groups), and see her walking towards us. Turns out she’s a pal of his and was passing by the cafe when she saw him in the window and came in to say hello. I’ve never seen someone so lit up with such a massive fucking dose of prettiness. And when Luca introduces us she lets rip an enormous smile and pulls up a chair.
It had been six months since the separation and I was in the middle of the divorce process. Imagine for a moment what this must feel like for me. I weigh eight stone. My arms are co
vered with self-inflicted scars. I’m living in a pretty squalid basement flat round the corner from a furious ex-wife. I’ve got weekend-only access to my son, and no money. I’m a few short months out of a psychiatric hospital, and after all of the emotional fuckery of the past few years spend most of my days in some kind of dreamlike, dissociated fugue state. And this girl, Hattie, is smiling at me and seems interested in who I am. I hadn’t been looking for anyone, was pretty sure I was incapable of all but the most basic social skills, was able to focus only on music and looked rancid and wasted and spectral. But I couldn’t stop staring at her. Flawless skin, shiny eyes, stupidly gym-toned lithe body, the most seductive mouth I’ve ever seen, smelling of hope and loveliness. And, much as I hate the phrase, one of the cool kids. You know the kind at parties who draw people to them because they’re just so fucking cool they don’t even know it, and wherever they stand there’s a draught? She was twenty-four, I was thirty-two.
I know.
She was so far out of my league that there was nothing to be scared of. I knew it was never going to happen. So I just smiled, flirted, acted the way I wanted to without ever thinking it would go anywhere. Much the same way as you buy a lottery ticket knowing you’ll never win. It’s fun to dream.
We swap numbers and I head home, hating her slightly just for being the kind of girl that other girls wanted to be and other guys simply wanted. I fire off the obligatory text about how lovely it was to meet her, maybe we could grab a drink, etc etc, and get back to the piano now hating myself slightly for knocking on a door I knew would be slammed in my face but choosing to do it anyway.
