I think every musician is in some way addicted to conflict. Why else would we practice? “The search for perfection,” answers the wide-eyed conservatory student. Well, I won’t argue, but I also won’t say there’s any difference. Forget music, ask anyone who’s ever looked for perfection in anything — in a spouse, for instance. Do these searches ever end well? Or rather, do they ever end?
Probably not, but then, there are some of us who just like to fight.
Come on guys. Haven’t you ever come out before? We, of all people, should know that the Tim Tebow blogcircus will do nothing to bring him, or anyone else for that matter, out of the closet; that is, if they in fact live closeted lives in the first place.
Exhibit A: The first 25 years of my life. I talked a certain way, liked certain things, did certain activities, and even as everyone around me whispered, pulled, taunted, and aggressed me to come out, I only denied the fact more fervently, especially to myself, and recoiled deep, deep, deeper into the closet. Celibate for years.
It’s not an unusual story. I had a college friend whose lover, in some flash of anger, out-ed him to his parents. I just watched from the sidelines wishing it had been me. What an easy “out;” he didn’t even have to do anything. Just say Yes. We all waited.
He said No, and we all went back to whispering. It was nearly a decade before he came out, and I’m sure the fever pitch of confirmed and un-confirmed rumors did nothing to help. But he did it when he was ready.
Coming out, for those of us who have gone through it, can represent one of the most important, difficult, liberating, and above all, personal acts of our lives. It’s also a process. Have we forgotten? Pressuring someone, whether it’s over coffee, clenched fist, or national campaign, is not only useless, but also rather tacky. We don’t know him, and this kind of thing makes us look like we don’t really know ourselves.
In other words: Mary, if you think kids need a gay athlete for a role model, go coach the little league team.
I’ve been disappointed by rejection but never once discouraged. Having faced rejection, say, about three to five times a week for the past thirteen years, the common onlooker might suggest I examine the fine line between persistence and insanity, faith and delusion, but I also might suggest that this onlooker simply doesn’t get it. Wait for positive feedback? Who has the time? Plus, with that advice I’d have given up — well — thirteen years ago, the day I received my first conservatory rejection letter. ”Given up on what?” the imaginary onlooker asks. Someone listening. Someone saying Yes.
I played the saxophone for a year when I was ten. I might have been good at it, too, but I already played the piano, and I knew I was better that. As a keyboard player, the issue of “what should I do with the school band?” would haunt me for awhile. In the elementary marching band, my role was that of banner holder, in high school, I played xylophone — piano, xylophone, same thing, right? — and in the state youth orchestra, where another pianist somehow got all of the orchestral piano parts, I stood in the back playing the bass drum.
Anyway, I was ten, and convinced my band teacher to let me incorporate the school’s synthesizer into our band music, mostly doubling the bass parts. So there I was, standing on the sideline with a giant keyboard, a huge amp, and totally drunk with power. It was a terrible scenario for my teacher, actually, because those days my top priority was to entertain, and if not that, to wreak havoc. Just a little. I would play improvisatory outros to all of the band’s mishaps, or create a laughtrack to someone’s joke. As for my teacher, I would accompany his reprimands with a walking bass, or often as he addressed the room with an instruction, I would turn the volume on very low and press the helicopter sound and watch as people’s eyes went to the window in confusion.
Reduced to madness, my teacher would often scream at me from the conductor’s podium, and I’d come away from band rehearsal sort of judging my performance, scanning through whether or not I played the seagull sound, or the machine gun fire, if it was funny, or just annoying, if the disruption was justified or mean-spirited, and so on. What’s amazing, looking back, is that I remember feeling guilty almost every day about my behavior. I’d promise myself that next time I wouldn’t get so carried away, that I would work with my teacher and avoid trying to make everyone laugh, to make everyone like me. And then of course, the next day would come and I’d crumble under the temptation. Atomic bomb sound, comin’ right up!
My teacher actually married the band assistant, who was this awful woman who looked like caricature of a librarian — wire-rimmed glasses and gray hair pulled back into a sad ponytail — and she had a couple sons in the band from a previous marriage. She really hated me, but I figured it was because every time we went on a field trip I’d inadvertently tell my mom the wrong pick-up time and this woman would have to wait with me at the school for an extra hour — what a mess — but one day I learned that there was something else. She really wanted to teach me a lesson, and one day, her wish came true.
It’s all kind of foggy, but I think everyone had been told not to make any noise, and of course I made a sound with the keyboard. Looking more determined than in the past, she barreled over. ”Who do you think you are?” she shrieked as my band teacher watched, defenseless. ”Do you think you’re special? Well, you’re not.” I was stunned. ”YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL. YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL!” Over and over she repeated these words. ”Now you say it!” she demanded. ”I want you to say it! Say ‘I’m not special.’” No one was laughing, and when I looked over her shoulder, I could see one of her sons squirming in his seat. ”Say it! Say that you’re not special!”
And so I did. ”I’m not special,” I said. And I don’t remember much else after that.
(MAY/JUNE, 2006)
When I returned to Vermont, the first thing I did was have surgery on a hernia I gave myself a two Februarys prior after my hospital dispatch and an irresponsible weight lifting regime. Lately it had been more visible than ever on my lower-right pelvis, and if I coughed or laughed, it would pop out like a tumor. Since my health insurance was running out [soon], this was my last chance to get it taken care of, and though it had been described to me as a harmless, virtually pain-free surgery, I came out of the procedure with a long, bloody, pus-oozing gash across my groin, and in excruciating pain. But pain or not, I had a lot of promoting to do. My fiftieth and final concert was less than a month away.
——-
My audience, my family, and most of the Goddard staff, were all gone or on their way to an afterparty at my house when I realized someone had taken my car keys, along with the rest of my books and equipment, back to my house without me. I stood frozen. I was stranded at the venue while my party was going on without me. [My concert manager] was still around, thank God, and I called my house from his cell phone. He left minutes later and I was alone in the parking lot, surrounded by the darkness of the Vermont woods, the moans of swaying trees and the songs of owls and insects. A custodian came outside and joined me. He was tall and grizzled, looking at me through his thick, sideways glasses. “Tonight was a bigger audience than I seen in a long time,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. People who play way out here don’t get nearly half the crowd you got tonight. Why — you thought it shoulda been bigger?” He started laughing.
“Kind of,” I shrugged. “Or maybe the music…”
“I liked the music.”
We stood there, hanging in that moment.
“So when did you start playing the piano?” he asked.
“Six or seven.”
(TEXAS, 4/22/06)
The next morning, instead of taking I-10 west across Texas, I took the less-direct but more scenic Highway 90, stretching from Houston through the southern Texas desert. The terrain was desolate and rocky, sometimes flat, sometimes immense and mountainous, giant hedges of earth colored like brown sugar. Birds that looked like vultures coasted in large, calm circles against a sky darkening with black, churning thunderclouds. Had anyone ever climbed these mountains, I wondered? And who laid those abandoned railroad tracks running alongside the highway, piece by piece? How heroic an act, I thought, and for what?
Every so often I’d pass through a tiny town where people painted their rooftops like the Texas flag and men said “Howdy” when entering a general store. Women had beehive haircuts and painted their faces with bright makeup. Others towns, however, were nothing more than shells, remnants of what seemed like a disturbingly recent past, with hollow modern-looking gas stations that still had their prices posted, closed diners that looked like they could have been open just days before. The houses weren’t crumbling. Just empty. It all eerily betrayed evidence of a recent desertion, as if everyone all left at once.
——-
I stopped in Del Rio , found a cheap motel, and bought a large, five-dollar pizza at Little Caesar’s to consume in my room for dinner. I could hear music coming from a nightclub next door. Having already visited, out of some odd sense of obligation, the rustic but deserted downtown of Del Rio at twilight, halfheartedly studying its derelict and eerie points of interest…
… I wanted now more than ever to join the happy commotion next door and see what else I could make of this border town. I’d been too afraid in the past to leave my room. Now, at the end of the tour, it was finally time. I walked over and stood on the wooden planked porch outside the door, still deciding whether or not to enter. Then I saw a bulky figure running toward me through the dusty parking lot. It was a man with long blonde hair, sweating through his tank top and wearing purple shorts that looked like swimming trunks. He wasn’t slowing down. Then he leapt onto the porch and sat on a bench next to the door with a thud, looking up at me grinning, his hair matted and strewn across his face. “Did I miss anything?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. ”I haven’t been inside yet.”
“I see,” he nodded, gazing ahead now, catching his breath. “I’m Randy.”
He guided me inside and, after a couple pitchers of beer, we became fast friends. He did most of the talking, though, and I mainly watched the couples line dancing to country music. “I used to play pro golf,” Randy confessed. “But now I’ve stopped all that to drink.” He laughed and then paused, studying me. “You look like the kind of guy who likes to smoke a lot of weed. You have any weed?”
“Huh? No.”
“I don’t believe you. You don’t smoke weed?”
“I don’t have weed.”
He leaned forward and started to whisper. “I can show you a place where the trees are so high, man… they’re to the fucking ceiling.” He raised both arms.
“I can’t,” I said. “Besides, my motel is right across the way.” I nodded my head toward the wall.
“You’re really not carrying? Ecstasy? Coke?” I shook my head, but Randy seemed lost in reverie. ”…trees to the fucking ceiling, man,” he repeated. ”Why else would I give up golf?”
“Drinking, I thought.”
He smirked. “You’re in Del Rio, man. It’s basically Mexico. Del Rio is a gray area. People can get away with shit here because there’s no law. It ain’t really the States. It ain’t really Mexico. There are no real rules.” Then he excused himself to the restroom for the second time in fifteen minutes, and as the door closed behind him a young man with slick black hair left his two friends at a nearby table and approached me.
“You better watch your friend,” he said.
“Why?” I tried to sound affable and nonchalant, but was beginning to feel hot.
“You just better watch him is all I’m saying.”
“I’m not from here. I don’t even know hi—”
“I don’t care if you’re not from here esé. Your friend keeps looking over this direction.”
Oh my god, I thought. He just said ‘esé.’ This is really bad. Where the fuck am I? (You’re in Del Rio, man…) Get me out of here. “He’s looking at you?” I asked, trembling.
“No, man. At my wife, man. At my girl.” He was getting more agitated now.
“I’m sorry. Okay, I’ll tell him,” I said, hoping that Randy wasn’t about to come back from the bathroom to interrupt our little pow wow.
“No, no… don’t tell him anything. You guys are gonna’ go, ‘cause I don’t want nothing bad to happen, you feel me?” His eyes were fixed on me as he backed away to his table.
Randy was still in the bathroom. I got up and ran out the door, across the parking lot, and didn’t stop until I was back in my motel room. I left him there. Such was my state of courage at the end of a fifty-state tour.
