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 — 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 poor teacher would scream from the podium, and I’d come away from band rehearsal sort of judging my performance, scanning through it all.  Did I play the seagull sound, or was it machine gun fire?  Was 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.

We arrived at a jazz club, Snug Harbor, where a gospel choir was finishing their ecstatic set in the back room.  Ernesto pulled up to the bar alone, speaking to no one and immediately nursing a glass of Chartreuse.  I ran into the bathroom and let a surge of bloody, fibrous diarrhea blast across what had been snow white porcelain.  There were pieces of lentils from that afternoon’s lunch with Matilda, each lentil now encased in what could looked like guts and little pieces of flesh, what very well could have been the lining of my colon.  This was my fourteenth trip to the bathroom that day.  I came out, out-of-breath and weak, but still determined to make the best of the night, the achievement of having actually driven through New Orleans to find this jazz club in the French Quarter, even finding a great parking spot right outside.  Matilda appeared with a glass of whiskey.  “Here.  Drink this slowly.  It will help your stomach.  And in a few minutes you can go up and play.  Ernesto talked to the owner.”

“What?”

“You’ll go up and play,” Ernesto answered for her, turning from the bar and motioning to the stage in the back room.

“Play?  Play here?”

“Yeah.  Play whatever.  I don’t know…”  He looked at me, suddenly puzzled.  “You don’t want to?  This is Snug Harbor, man!  The people who have played here…”

“Okay,” I sighed, feeling faint.

“They just finished, actually,” said the owner from behind the bar, pointing to the back room.  He looked big and intimidating, but also warm, with a white beard like Santa Claus.  “Go on up.” 

Not unlike one of the girls in the piano lab back in Augusta, Georgia, I followed his command automatically, nudging through the dispersing crowd and climbing onto the stage, sitting before a shiny but smudged Yamaha grand.  I emptied my pockets and adjusted the bench, and had only played the first note of the first movement of Copland’s Four Piano Blues when an arm shot across my line of sight, startling me and sending my hands off the keyboard like it was a hot stove.  “Sorry,” said the pianist from the last act, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.  “Just let me clear up my shit.”  He grabbed his music — I hadn’t even noticed it — and jumped offstage.

Of all of the pianos I had played in America 88x50, this piano in Snug Harbor, with just a slightly lighter action and just a slightly brighter sound, worked more perfectly for my music than any other instrument yet.  The accents I played sounded just bright enough, the runs unhurried, the phrases perfectly shaped.  I was immersed totally in this piano.  First Copland, then some Griffes, then Ginastera, then Adams, then the Barber Nocturne I’d recently committed to memory, and then I made it up as I went along, improvising, and after about an hour I stepped down.  No one clapped, but there were people scattered throughout the room who had been listening.

“Sounded wonderful!” said Matilda.

The owner handed me a stack of CDs — “on the house” — and we started talking like old friends.  Suddenly his face distorted into something a bit horrified, a bit disappointed.  I wound around to find Ernesto on all fours behind me, his back arched like a cat, heaving milky white vomit laced with brown strands of food onto the floor that poured from his mouth like a faucet and splattered in all directions.  He was gasping for air, but when he tried to exhale only more vomit came out.

“All right.  It’s okay,” said the owner calmly. “It’s my fault.  I fucked him up.” 

I was on my feet, backing away, nodding numbly at what the owner said as a man knocked against me from behind, rushing to Ernesto and handing Matilda a plastic water cup.  “Go to the bathroom and finish up,” the man said, kneeling.  Matilda handed the cup to Ernesto.  He promptly spat in it before throwing up again.  ”Go to the bathroom and finish up,” repeated the man.

“I can’t fucking move, man!” he howled. 

Here was one of New Orleans’s most respected classical musicians at his worst, and there I was, like a child, almost completely unable to process the sight.  He had been so intense behind the organ at that morning’s Easter service, so bewildering, and now he seemed — well — only human.  “I’m fucking puking on the fucking floor, man,” he cried.  “Leave me the fuck alone!”  A bartender tossed a paper bag from behind the bar in Ernesto’s direction and it landed just in front of his face on top of the steaming puddle of vomit.

Matilda and I propped him on his feet and dragged him across the floor toward the door.  “Great meeting you!” I called to the owner.  ”Thank you!  It was amazing!”  We hoisted Ernesto into the car, Matilda squeezed again into the backseat, and I tore away from Snug Harbor, begging for the fastest directions back to their apartment.  I had to go to the bathroom again. 

The streets were barely wide enough for my car and was traffic ahead.  ”Oh, they’re shooting a movie!” said Matilda from the backseat.  I felt a spasm in my bowels, my stomach gurgling, pushing downward.  I was sweating.  This could get much, much worse.  Then it did.

“I’m gonna’ puke again,” moaned Ernesto, leaning against his door.

“NO!”  On impulse, I reached across his body and swung the door open and he went tumbling sideways before I caught him.

“Nevermind.  I’m okay,” he said breathlessly.  My heart was convulsing.  I could not let this man throw up in my car, which already smelled like gasoline, medicine, and beer [a six pack of bottles had exploded in the heat].  The pressure building in my colon, it felt like I might let it go right here in the traffic.  I bit the insides of my cheeks, closing Ernesto’s door as traffic began moving again.  Oblivious, Matilda admired the movie shoot and continued explaining points of interest.  “Oh God!” Ernesto interrupted again.

“It’s happening now?!” I shouted in a panic.

“Yes!

I screeched the car again on the cobblestones and once more flung the door open, reaching across his body.  Cars skidded and squealed behind us, nearly piling up against my back bumper, and horns began honking as I hurled his body outward and suspended it over the pavement, holding him up by the back of his suit jacket.  But again, nothing happened.  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he repeated.  I could have killed him.  “There’s not much left to come up now, anyway.”   

Back to careening through the city, I thought maybe I could distract everyone, including myself, with some small talk.  “Did the French Quarter see much damage from Katrina?”  We bounced recklessly through a bustling Bourbon Street crosswalk.

“No, of course not,” drawled Ernesto, his head steaming up the passenger window he was leaning on.  “This all stayed safe.  They flooded out the people they wanted to, flooded them right out of the city.  Turned off the levee pumps at the places they wanted…” he slurred.  “Everyone knows it, just no one says it.” 

I pulled in front of their apartment and began our goodbyes.  Just then, two boys appeared — we all saw them — looking sort of like fraternity brothers, piling into the cab of a black truck across the street.  Both of them were laughing, drunk, and pushing each other, and then one of their pants fell down to his legs, exposing a tiny penis in the middle of a brown bush of pubic hair, and then they disappeared into the truck, punching and grabbing each other playfully as they went.  

The scene was anything but romantic, and yet still Ernesto was incensed enough by it to be threatening once more to throw up again.  “Fuck, man!  Jesus fuck!  See what I’m talking about?  The city’s going to fucking shit!  Why the fuck did I have to see that fucking sh—” 

I opened the door and pushed him out of the car, for real this time.

——

“We’re going to start tonight’s circle with a group Om!” shouts a voice.  We’re all — hundreds of us — in a circle, but I can’t see the speaker.  There’s silence, and then a low, long drone of voices that fills the room, all of us joining in a deafening but unifying Om like monks.  When it subsides, the voice rings out again.  “Now we will go around the circle and introduce ourselves, bringing up any concerns we have about our community.”

For over an hour, each person stands, stating their name and then saying something about the camp, praising it, or occasionally giving a suggestions of how to improve it.  Almost every testimony ends with “I love you,” and a few voices call back, “I love you!”  It’s my first day, but even when I introduce myself and thank the community for welcoming me, several people shout out that they love me.  “I love you, too,” I answer.

(BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI, early-April 2006)

While working in the houses of the dead and displaced, we met those neighbors who survived, and furthermore, who chose to stay, living in campers and FEMA trailers, and often they would come out and tell us their stories — stories about bodies in the streets and people drowned in attics.  One day they decided prepare us a crawfish boil as a gesture of gratitude.  So with Massenet’s opera Manon playing on the public radio station, crackling from a small portable radio, we volunteers took a break from mold removal and ate crawfish in our bodysuits, listening less to the Massenet and more to the family. 

They didn’t call Katrina a storm, by the way.  They called it a flood, explaining that a giant wave swept north from the Gulf over the little finger of land on which Biloxi sits, demolishing nearly everything and everyone in its path, and emptying into the bay directly north of that little finger of land.  But like any wave, big or small, it had to return to sea.  “So we got it twice,” finished our cook, stirring the crawfish pot, his face dripping with sweat as he smiled and shook his head in disbelief. 

“I tell you,” added his wife.  ”I can still see the places that aren’t here anymore.  I pass by the spot where an old friend’s house was, but I still see it.  I still see their house.  I still see them.”

——-

Even eight months after the storm — the “flood,” I mean — the city was still in ruins, looking like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, much worse than what I saw in Mobile a few days earlier.  

All industry that once occupied the beachfront had been reclaimed by the sea with nothing but bare bones parking lots remaining on its twisted metal banks, demolished signs still standing guard over the empty foundations of fast food chains. 

Cemeteries were overturned, headstones cracked in half, tombs collapsed. 

Highway 90 had once been a shady, tree-lined boulevard of mansions on the seashore.  Now, only a few trees survived, their skeletal limbs raped and ravaged, some trunks completely ripped from the ground and displaced upon roofs, folding the houses inward, so vulgar it was almost funny. 

The houses that remained were barely standing, many torn open and exposing to passersby like myself a glimpse inside at the life that once was — a decaying corpse of a living room that still retained its carpeted staircase leading upstairs to what might have once been a bedroom. 

Another house bears a message scrawled in white spray paint:  WE ARE HOME!! WILL SHOOT  NO LOOTING!

——-

“Three in the front row,” Sister Mary whispered to me, not moving her mouth, as a small class of first and second graders filed into the classroom.  “Four there in the second row.  Four in the third.  And all but one in the back row.  All three teachers standing in the back of the room, too.  Lost everything.  I mean, everything.  In the morning, there are pillows and sleeping bags lining the hallways here.  These are middle and upper class families, sleeping on the floor of a Catholic elementary school.” 

The room fell silent as the children waited for Sister Mary to reveal who I was and why I’d come to their school.  She shifted to a cheerier tone, turning from me to the group.  “Mr. Adam is here from Vermont, and has spent the whole year traveling all fifty states to play the piano…” 

I played “The Night Winds” by Griffes, something I usually played for kids because it was fast and evocative, but here it felt different, and indeed the reaction was different, starting with the first student who shouted, “It sounds like Katrina!”  And so began a crossfire of stories from children who had been at the frontlines of a hurricane, all outshouting each other, each story more fantastically surreal than the next, and of course I had no doubt all of them were true.  Sister Mary had no visible reaction.  Surely she’d heard these stories before.  

Afterward, the room was jammed with students leaving, and a little girl close to me seemed trapped and upset by the commotion.  I crouched down and whispered to her, “You know, my mom’s a teacher and she doesn’t like it either when polite girls like you have to wait for other kids to calm down.  It isn’t fair, is it?” 

She looked at me, the two pink ties in her hair a perfect foil to the two dark circles under her eyes.  “Life isn’t fair,” she answered plainly, automatically, as if she’d heard those words many times before and, in a way, was just repeating them.

(AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, 3/23/06)

…at a visual and performing arts high school, [in] a concrete room with blue walls and bright fluorescent lights, a young girl was playing Bach’s Minuet in G on a Baldwin grand piano in the corner.  When she got up, another girl took her place and began Bach’s c minor prelude from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the same prelude I once used for my conservatory auditions.  Everyone else, almost all of them black and female, had headphones on, plugged into their own individual synthesizers.  I watched their fingers tapping away, their concentrating eyes, and couldn’t determine if I was impressed by the uniform display of discipline and focus in this room, or disturbed by the strange, utopian pointlessness of it all — everyone playing but no one listening.  

The teacher, a tall man with glasses, approached.  “This group isn’t the best of the bunch,” he announced — I scanned the lab to see if anyone besides the performer of the Bach had heard him — “but they’re okay.  Level two.  Next period you’ll play for the fours and fives.  They’re the best in the school.”

“But these are all first year students?” I asked, surveying the rows of girls and keyboards.  “That’s great!”

“Yeah…” he answered reluctantly.  “They’ve done well.  But like I said, they’re not our best.”  He stopped and looked at one of the girls.  “Ayeesha!”  She looked up.  “Go play our guest something.”  Like a machine, Ayeesha rose, made her way to the piano, and replaced the other girl, still playing her Bach, and began into a children’s piece I didn’t recognize.  “Okay, that’s good,” her teacher barked a minute or so into it.  ”Go back to your seat.”  Just as mechanically, Ayeesha stopped and returned to her seat, resuming her practice.  The click-clack of her classmates’ fingers continued; no one had noticed her performance. 

Then the bell rang and everyone stood at once, making way for the Level Fours and Fives.  I hadn’t touched the piano in two days, so my guess was that I was probably playing at a level one.  But I would not be intimidated; the teacher introduced me and I started talking a little about America 88x50, eventually readying myself to play my Ives.  “As I play this, I want you to think about what it means to you, what you think it’s about…”  And when I finished the Three-Page Sonata with crossed hands on the final C Major chord [per Ives’s directions,] a girl with long fake nails pointed at me and said to her neighbor, “I gotta’ do that!  Cross my hands like that!”  

(“FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE,” KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN, 3/20/06)

“I was in touch with some residents who will have dinner with you,” said Corrine, my concert organizer, “if that’s okay with you.”

“Sounds great.”

“They’re eating at four forty-five, which is,” she looked at her watch, “now.”

“That’ll work.”

Corrine led me to a table in the cafeteria where three older women sat.  They all had white hair and wore robes, and one of them had a walker that doubled somehow as a chair.  She shouted at me from across the table.  “You think you can handle three women?”

“I’ll try.”

During dinner the ladies, all born and raised in or around Kalamazoo, enlightened me on life in a retirement community.  When one of them mentioned that women far outnumbered the men at Friendship Village, the lady next to me nudged my side and smirked.  “The men die sooner.” 

“But that means they have more of us to choose from!” one lady said. 

“I think their days of choosing are long gone,” her neighbor answered.

“There are some couples,” the woman next to me argued.  ”More than before.”

“Are there any troublemakers?” I asked.

“Besides us?” someone joked.

“No, not really,” one of them said.  “Friendship Village is pretty selective of who lives here.  We had one woman who started acting… erratically.”  Everyone at the table nodded in acknowledgment.

“Like how?” I asked.

“Just aggressive.”

“To the other residents, or the staff?’

“To everybody.  Anyway, they had her removed.  That’s what they do if someone starts acting out.”  My eyes widened.  “No, it’s no big deal.  They just put her in the psych ward.”           

I excused myself and started to get up when the most soft-spoken of the group asked quietly, “Are you not getting anything from the dessert bar?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.  ”I should really practice for tonight.”

“But I only ordered my sugar-free vanilla ice cream because I thought you were having dessert, too,” she said.  I sat down and promptly ordered some ice cream, and as I did, she confided to the lady beside her, trying to conceal her words from me, “I just thought he was going to stay.  He really didn’t need to order the sugar-free vanilla ice cream.”