instruments

You asked if I ever played a musical instrument.

When I was a young boy, and my family still lived together, my two older sisters and my parents, all in one big house just outside Wilmington, Delaware. My mother made sure there was a piano in the house. Neither my mother nor father grew up with music - their houses were quiet. My mother thought that having a piano in the house would add class, would add sophistication, would add value to our lives. She was right. I was 7 years old. My sisters and I took piano lessons from the old woman around the corner. We would walk to her house and sit at her piano, with her metronome. I played Hot Cross Buns and Mary Had A Little Lamb. My teacher gave me stickers to put in my practice book when I played well. My sisters learned to play Chopsticks. I thought it was so cool when they sat next to each other on the piano bench and played together in unison, that was real music. So much better than my burnt buns. And when my sister learned to play Beethoven's Fur Elise, well, that was the third time I fell in love with a woman.

Then we moved to New Haven. At first there was still room for the piano, but we no longer could afford piano lessons. My mother still made me practice, but motivation did not come easily, especially since there were no stickers for reward when I played well. I would rather watch TV after school than practice, and eventually I stopped.

But New Haven meant Yale, and Yale meant Yale Bowl, and that meant football games on Saturday afternoons. My sisters and I found all the holes in the fences and would sneak into the games. Or we would hang around the entrance gates and bum tickets off the people who were leaving early. Or my sisters would flirt with the boys outside the gates and get in for free - and then I had to find the fence holes by myself. We could almost always get in by half time, when the marching bands came onto the fields to play. That was my favorite part of the game - watching them march and listening to the pounding drums. Sometimes, after winning a big game, the band would play and march around outside the stadium in celebration. I would always follow them around, wishing I could join in.

I was ten years old, and Yale beat Harvard 24-20, and it was a very big deal. The crowd went wild and poured onto the field. The bands wouldn't stop playing. They marched and played inside the stadium and outside the stadium, and I followed them everywhere they went. Instead of getting on their buses for a ride back to town, they decided to march all the way back to campus. I fell in line alongside the drummers - rows of snare drums, rows of tom-toms, rows of big bass drums. All playing in syncopation - chaka chaka BOOM BOOM, chaka chaka BOOM BOOM, chaka chaka chaka chaka chaka chaka BOOM BOOM! I marched alongside. I marched in the middle of them and marched inside their column. All the way from the stadium, from the edge of the city back to the center of town. The drums were like thunder and magic. When we passed the hospital, they quieted their voices but kept the beat, clicking their sticks on the edges of the drums to soften the thunder - clika clika chick chick, clika clika chick chick, chaka chaka BOOM BOOM! And then the parade ended. They had reached their dorms. They had reached the tents for their party into the night. They took off their drums and their hats and their uniforms and began the night's festivities. I looked around and I had no idea where I was. I was ten years old and alone - my sisters hadn't wanted to march with the band like I did. So I walked home, following the bread crumbs back the way we came, through New Haven on a Saturday night in 1967.

Then we moved to Philadelphia, and I never saw Yale Bowl again. It was 1968, just past the Summer of Love. Folk Music and Rock and Roll and hippies and girls with long hair and no bras and the girls in my 6th grade class who so desperately wanted to wear their first bra. I tried to take saxophone lessons - I have no idea why - but I never got past a SQUONK! and my parents made me return the sax before the 30 days were up. My middle sister, Linda, began taking guitar lessons from an older boy with long hair, a hippie still in high school. Linda lusted after that boy so much, she never missed a lesson. She learned how to pluck and strum with a Folk style - like Joan Baez, like Joni Mitchell. I wanted to play Rock and Roll. I took lessons as well, but I never practiced enough. My parents wouldn't buy me an electric guitar, so my sister and I shared a used acoustic guitar. The guitar was big, and my fingers were small and it hurt to hold the strings down. I couldn't wrap my thumb around the neck to hold the bass strings down while my index and middle fingers were supposed to hold down the high notes. I tried. I listened to the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Guess Who and Santana and The Temptations, and I wanted to play like that. My music teacher taught me three chords and then said "improvise" and I had no idea how to make up music when I could barely play 3 simple chords.

In 7th grade, my best friends were Eric Charry and Amnon Hershkowitz. It was Eric's older brother that taught my sister and me to play guitar, but it was Eric who was the better guitarist. He was a rock and roll god with long hair, a real musician, and all the girls loved him. It was 1969, The Chicago 7 trial was on tv every night. The Vietnam War was on tv every night. I went to a Be-In in Fairmont Park, but I knew that in San Francisco they had more than that - they had a Love-In. Eric and Amnon and I would get in trouble in school. I don't remember why or how. Maybe we got caught smoking cigarettes with the cool kids behind the school. Maybe we talked back to my beautiful 7th grade teacher (who I was desperately in love with). We got sent to detention, a bunch of times. So we decided to become a rock and roll band. We practiced during detention and we planned that our first gig would be at the 7th grade talent show. We practiced playing songs from Abbey Road, but the song we decided to play was Satisfaction by the Stones. We all played guitar, Eric played lead, Amnon played bass and I played rhythm. We practiced, but we didn't practice enough. We spent most of our time playing tag and arguing about who would sing which verse. "Traveling 'round the world, trying to get some girl" - Eric was the best and he got to sing that. "He can't be a man, 'cause he doesn't smoke, the same cigarettes as me" - Amnon played better than me so he got to sing that line. I got "The Man comes on the radio, he's telling me more and more, about some useless information". But something happened on that stage at the Talent Show and I never understood what it was. I was in a Rock and Roll band and it felt great. I was singing like Mick Jagger and I was famous. But when it was over, my classmates came up to ask what went wrong. The girls asked me why I didn't sing. The teacher asked what was wrong with the guitar. Apparently, I sang without a voice - or at least one that anyone could hear. And when I strummed my borrowed electric guitar, my pick never touched the strings. And that was the end of my life as a rock and roll star. I never played again.

And then I was an old man, riding my bike through the city, through Arlington and Cambridge and Somerville and Boston. Drinking in the night. Stopping to listen to music, at the Lily Pad and at The Burren, or stopping to listen to musicians playing on the street. Riding to Flat Top Johnnies to shoot pool with my son. Riding to Sally O'Brien's to drink Jameson and listen to the blues, to meet a woman and see if she would kiss a man riding a bicycle. I went to the movies, and saw The Visitor - a story of an old man, alone, who befriends a musician, a drummer. The old man learns to play the drums and learns how to live again.

And then one night, when I was riding through the streets, I rode through Somerville, past a performance space where sometimes jazz and noise bands played. The doors were closed, but the lights were on and I heard drumming coming from inside. I got off my bike and poked my head through the door, looking for that magic. And I found it that night in Union Square. It was a samba troupe at rehearsal, Samba Tremeterra, full of thundering drums playing in syncopation, and full of musicians filling in the melody, and full of beautiful women dancing and gyrating and popping to the beat of the drums. I stayed for hours, with my eyes closed tight to feel the drums, with my eyes wide open to watch the dancers, with my mind wide open to feel the joy. During a break, one of the musicians came over to ask my name. She told me to come back the following Monday night, before the samba troupe's rehearsal, when the band leader gave drumming lessons. And I fell in love again.