Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  “Brian asked about you,” I said at last, thinking this news would cheer him. Brian was a pianist Sam had championed. He’d recommended him to accompany my debut recital and also to take over during Sam’s illness, at Sam’s chamber music festival and his Juilliard teaching studio. Earlier, he had mentioned that Brian hadn’t visited him.

  Samuel Sanders in the 1990s. (Christian Steiner. Courtesy of the Juilliard School archives.)

  “You stay away from Brian, he’s evil!” Sam rasped, eyes ablaze. A nurse entered the room to adjust a catheter leading to Sam’s urine reservoir under the bed.

  “No! Get out of here! I don’t want you here!” he spat at the nurse, pulling at the tubes and punching blindly. I slid off the bed. “Please, please, please can I just have a little water?” Sam wasn’t allowed any liquids. The nurse, looking frightened, quickly retreated.

  “Cunt!”

  Sam scrabbled at my wrist with skeletal fingers. “The doctors,” he whispered, his eyes imploring, “are doing experiments on me. Do something.” Sam and his enormous hospital bill were now an investment for the hospital. I saw his point, however deliriously it was conveyed.

  Sam had called me here, apparently as a last resort to reverse his decline. I felt as helpless as I had the day I found him catatonic and alone after the first transplant. I was trying to wrestle my anger into compassion. I held a grudge against a dying man. I wasn’t proud of myself; it was just wrong, and I struggled to change my attitude.

  “It would mean everything to me if you recovered,” I said, wondering if I sounded insincere. I took a deep breath and made sure to speak more emphatically. I could see in Sam’s fiery eyes that he realized many of the people he’d considered friends had used him. “Everybody loves you. Can’t you try hard—?”

  “Why,” interrupted Sam, “would you want a man like me?” He stared at me intensely and with the innocence of a child. It had been thirteen years since we’d been lovers. The years of unspoken words between us had created outsized hurt. I had lived alone with a feeling of betrayal and disrespect. All this time Sam had been wounded by my rejection of him as a lover, yet he put on a friendly face.

  I remembered seeing a pad in Sam’s apartment one day. He had scrawled Am I ugly? on it in his looping script. Sam had gone through life secretly feeling like a freak. We had both affected each other more than we knew, and now it was too late to make it right. Was he reading my mind?

  He looked down suddenly and spoke quietly. “I don’t know where I stand with anyone except Sophie,” Sam said of his daughter. He moved his head as close to me as he could, as if he wanted to tell me a secret.” Sue is crazy,” whispered Sam.

  So this was all that remained of his distinguished career, that one old friend was offered money to stand by his deathbed.

  “Everyone’s forgotten me,” he whispered again. I said no, it was summer and everyone was away, playing at festivals. In the twenty-four-hour glare of hospital lights, life was suddenly revealed as ugly, and all the Mahler in the world couldn’t gild the truth.

  By the time I got to the hospital a couple of days later, it was dusk. The George Washington Bridge twinkled in the distance behind Sam’s wires and monitors. Pings and gurgles echoed through the cardiac intensive care unit, and a dozen patients lay in their cubicles around a central desk.

  Flat on his back now, Sam looked like a cadaver. His lips curled back to expose blood-caked teeth behind a crop of whiskers. Tubes sprouted from his chest. His ankles were swollen to the size of my thigh and his shoulder blades stuck out like wings. An aide came by and emptied his bag of urine. He’d contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion. The only thing working in him was someone else’s heart.

  He’d had a massive seizure, the nurse said. Right before it happened, he said the pain was off the charts, so Sue went to get him morphine. She’d already arranged the cremation.

  I left New York in the morning to play the opera Barber of Seville near Tanglewood, which Sam’s friend Joel was conducting. The musicians were housed in a ski resort for the week, where I worked on my Wall Street Journal piece. In the daytime my apartment mates, Pauline and Sarah, gave me input on the story, which concerned the first post-bankruptcy concert of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. Late at night I set up the fax machine and printer I’d brought along. I sent the story to one of my future Stanford professors, who had said he’d advise me before I sent the final version to the Journal. As it turned out, his help was essential because I knew nothing of the most basic newspaper rules of style. The sunny condo felt like a halfway house to a better life.

  When I checked my answering machine by remote on Saturday morning, my recital manager, Lee Walter from East Hampton, had left a message. Lee was also Sam’s publicity agent and had become something of a friend to him. “He’s gone,” said Lee, leaving a message about sitting shiva at Sam’s brother Martin’s home on Sunday. I knew Joel would go. I knew Brian and everyone at Itzhak’s party would be there. I decided to stay at the ski resort. I had said goodbye.

  When I returned to New York I tried saying farewell to Sydney, too, before leaving for California. I couldn’t get her attention. Her schedule was crammed, and she spent her one night off, every Sunday, at a weekly dinner with friends of Frank’s that she didn’t like. I was sad when she missed the bon voyage party that one of my friends had arranged so beautifully. I had a sense I wouldn’t see her again unless I dropped by her new home in the Village.

  Sydney was consumed by helping Frank plan his co-op’s renovation. She showed me the plans for their kitchen, and the Sub-Zero and Miele appliances that would make it a showplace. It would be a far cry from the Allendale, I agreed. Sydney’s opulent surroundings contrasted with her mood, which was more negative, downcast, and uncommunicative than I’d ever seen her. She took me down the spiral staircase to an area that was designated as her own private space for practicing.

  The basement, which had been gutted, overflowed with Sydney’s boxes. Piles of faded Sarah Arizona sweaters bought at sample sales for $18 were toppling onto more boxes. I saw where she’d dug through a box of silk scarves in enough colors to match her collection of outfits. In the bathroom, hundreds of hotel shampoo bottles spilled from baskets and shelves, and her papers, bank statements, and bills lay in towering piles on every surface. There was no place to stand. She mentioned that her diamond ring, the one her bassoonist boyfriend of the 1980s had given her, was missing. “Workmen in the house, you know,” she said. She couldn’t pin-point the day her ring disappeared, or her huge Nordic Track either. Months ago, maybe.

  I was growing more alarmed. This should be a happy time in Sydney’s life, especially since she had escaped the Allendale for such a beautiful home. Her eyes were rheumy. She rarely spoke an entire sentence. As we walked to a café, she stumbled along looking at the pavement, one of her shoe soles flopping unglued, and she dangled an expensive ceramic tile nonchalantly from her fingers. It was a choice for Frank’s renovation that she wanted to show me over lunch.

  We sat down in the café near Seventh Avenue, ordering Caesar salads and the ubiquitous bottle of wine. I wondered if I should say something.

  “Are you certain you want to live together?” I asked at last. She had her own money, some $115,000 ten years ago and probably much more now. She had spent little, outside of hair and skin care and clothing. Her current yearly income nearly reached $100,000, which was enough to rent or buy something decent.

  “But where ... would I go?” she said. I knew how she felt. We had both felt trapped inside the Allendale, which was nothing if not a symbol for the entire music business on which we were dependent. With such cheap rent, it would be crazy to leave. We’d be crazy to leave the music business too, since outsiders viewed our lives as so glamorous.

  In that moment, I gave up on Sydney; we were splitting off in different directions. I knew my path would lead to growth and more personal fulfillment. I hoped Sydney’s path would too, but I feared she would remain as miserable as e
ver. I made small talk until we finished eating and asked for the check.

  “Look, I gotta go,” I said to Sydney, crumpling a twenty on the table next to the forgotten tile lying there. I headed out the door to get home and finish packing for my move. I looked back as the waitress topped off Sydney’s glass. She sipped her wine, holding herself just so. She jutted her chin and shook her beautiful hair, staring mysteriously into the distance. I still could not see what was there.

  A few weeks had passed since late June, when I shoved my resignation from the show into Rieling’s hand. He suddenly turned sweet, offering me a nine-month leave. I turned it down.

  I was leaving an $82,000 salary, health insurance, pension contributions, and a flexible schedule for a year of school with little income and a future of low-paying journalism work. I felt weightless. My colleagues’ responses varied. Some couldn’t believe I’d quit the security of a long-running show. Others were incredulous that I was willing to leave New York. Others drew me aside to ask how I “got out.”

  Ironically, my final night in New York was spent playing principal oboe at the New York City Opera, sight-reading Mozart’s Don Giovanni in performance because the regular oboist, my long-ago lover Randy, had called in sick at the last minute. Since I hadn’t ever played the opera and didn’t have a chance to attend the rehearsals, the pressure was extreme. For once I had a terrific reed. The music came out of me naturally and expressively, and all the other woodwind players responded. It was a passionate elegy for the death of my musical career.

  A violinist approached me afterward in the State Theater’s locker room. “That was some of the most beautiful playing I’ve ever heard,” he said. I thanked him and turned to pick up my oboe bag. Musicians were always complimenting one another in order to schmooze, and I was tempted to tell him I’d be of no use to him after tonight. He lingered. “No, really, I mean it,” he insisted, making certain that I understood he was sincere. “All these years. Why didn’t we know you played so well?”

  I could have told him that my romantic disasters with oboists had shut me out of the best gigs early on or relegated me to second chair. I could have pointed out that no one claimed the limelight for long anyway. I might have confessed that I preferred the financial security of Broadway, that from depression I sometimes drank too much and no longer practiced enough. Five years ago I would have felt intense anxiety over his compliment, feeling that this one concert was a positive turning point for my musical career; that’s what Sydney would have said. But I knew that the night had just been a lovely isolated gift, one perfect plum from a tree that bore little fruit. I thanked the violinist warmly and took the 1 train home.

  The night would be long. I had to finish packing before the movers came in the morning to load the Ryder truck I’d rented. I planned to drive myself to North Carolina, back to the house on Burlage Circle where my parents had brought me home as an infant in 1960. I’d spend three weeks with them before driving to California. They were seventy-eight years old now, and I hadn’t seen them for more than a few days at a time in twenty-five years.

  I could faintly hear a violinist downstairs playing scales with a practice mute clamped on her violin bridge to muffle the sound. It was A.M. The sound of a car alarm’s siren suddenly boomed in the emptied bedroom. I looked across West End to the darkened window where I once watched the couple having sex. The mother and her two high school sons must be sleeping. The father had disappeared last year; I guessed they had divorced. I turned back to my closet and removed an armload of clothes.

  Thinking again about the violinist’s compliment, I folded up the sequined gowns I’d worn to play the occasional solo concerts. My future was unknown but would satisfy me in small ways during every hour of the day, as a child’s fairy-princess fantasy could not. I tucked the midnight-blue chiffon of the magic dress from my debut recital inside the cardboard box and taped it securely shut.

  Encore

  The Lark Ascending

  As I DROVE west to California, memories of New York quickly faded. I traveled through states I’d never visited, stopping to hike in the Grand Canyon and watch the sunset turn its walls a flaming orange. Listening to conversations of the other tourists admiring the view, I was struck by the irrelevance of classical music to these people’s rich and varied lives. How could I have allowed such an insular, incestuous business to rule me for a quarter century? Renewed, I felt like a pioneer driving on across the Mojave, up Highway 5, and finally to Stanford University, which lies thirty miles south of San Francisco.

  After a few days on campus, I relaxed and stopped wondering when someone would discover me to be an imposter. Unlike the music business, there was room here in the real world for everyone to learn, work, and enjoy life. Starved for natural beauty after years in the noisy city, I soaked up the Stanford environment. A lemon tree and purple trumpet flowers grew outside my dormitory window. It was so quiet I could hear crickets in the evening, and the air was clean and cool. I ran six miles every morning in the Stanford hills before the sun rose on another day of blue skies. I was in heaven. I was also scared to death.

  My brain moved slowly from years of boozy nights in the Broadway pits. I was the oldest journalism student at Stanford by thirteen years. I had no experience arguing points in class or organizing complex ideas. I wasn’t used to speaking at all; I had been blowing into an oboe for thirty years. Other students in my Internet journalism class easily published the Web site that was a required assignment, but I could barely type. I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer and spent hundreds on hightech tutors. With so much to do and learn, my interest in drinking quickly disappeared along with my chronic boredom.

  Working a local newspaper internship at the Palo Alto Weekly for $15 a week humbled me. I entered police statistics into an ancient computer, attended my first city council meeting, and navigated local politics. I wrote stories about solar energy, dot-com start-ups, philanthropy, cycling activists, and Silicon Valley real estate. My subjects included an eighty-year-old librarian who grew psychotropic cacti, the dedicatee of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and an old hippie named Perusha who got me stoned at the commune Joan Baez had started in 1969.

  The work was compelling, but I felt lonely. Although the age difference between me and my classmates didn’t bother me, the cultural divide did. I felt like a nineteenth-century cartoon character with my classical music background; I couldn’t follow the impassioned discussions carried on by students who were starting their own dot-corns from dorm rooms.

  One day, though, the San Francisco Symphony called me to substitute. When I walked onto the Davies Symphony Hall stage, I knew at least one third of the musicians, and the standard rehearsal protocol was comforting. I began a schizophrenic life, driving between classes, my reporting internship, and the various Bay Area performing groups that paid for my living expenses.

  I turned forty in the dorm, three thousand miles from the Allendale. I celebrated the milestone with my 1979 Allendale roommate Kathleen Reynolds, who now played principal flute with the part-time Santa Rosa Symphony and taught elementary school in the daytime. We shared dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

  I had worked hard, and now things were going well. My masters thesis and photographs about a Vietnamese newspaper were accepted for publication in Harvard’s Nieman Reports. I landed a $2,500 feature assignment for Sierra magazine. The San Francisco Examiner offered me a staff business reporter job, so I scheduled my classes on one marathon weekday and worked the other four. At age forty, I had my first office job ever.

  At school, my magazine-class professor asked us to write about a situation that affected us emotionally. When I read my story of Sam’s death aloud in class, there was a long silence. “You have to write a book,” the professor urged at last, describing my portrayal of the classical music business as “devastating.” I waved off his suggestion, afraid to alienate people in the only business where I was sure I could earn a full-time living. Like many classical music
ians, I still didn’t believe I could be good enough at anything else to be paid for it. People had always acted as if music was my only real talent.

  After graduation I used savings from my Broadway salary to buy my first home, a sunny Oakland condominium whose balcony overlooked a swimming pool. I still clung to music jobs, since newspaper journalism didn’t pay very well, and drove between Bay Area orchestras in a routine jokingly called the “Freeway Philharmonic.” I left the Examiner for an art critic’s job at a suburban newspaper, and also taught journalism at Stanford and oboe at the University of California-Berkeley. I thought more seriously about a book but was not yet ready to let go of my old life.

  At one concert with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, I performed a solo piece by the Mexican composer Mario Lavista that was accompanied by eight crystal water glasses. Between the glasses’ eerie ringing sounds, some dramatic stage lighting, and the unusual oboe multiphonic chords (producing more than one note simultaneously on a wind instrument by using alternate fingerings), I felt an unusual electricity from the audience.

  Something strange was happening with my music-making, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. I loved my new writing life, which included reviewing art exhibitions and driving up the California coast to cover tidepools and nature walks for Sierra. At the same time, I was starting to look forward to playing the oboe as well, since I didn’t have to be a musician anymore. I was finding journalism positions through want ads and employment interviews; unlike music, there were plenty of jobs where sleeping with the boss was definitely not a prerequisite. On the other hand, landing the scarce and competitive music work still required a humiliating degree of self-abnegation. It would take a reminder from my former life to make me see the difference clearly and to recognize my own evolution and new self-esteem as well.