Good Things Happen Slowly Page 2

  Looking back, I wish Jeanne had pushed me harder. She could have kicked my ass to make me better than I was, and I think that she should have. She should have explained why learning scales and arpeggios would be of service to me later on. But she held back, partly in deference to my mother, who had heard horror stories of overzealous, shrewlike parents pushing their kids too hard. She didn’t want to turn into a stage mother. She told my teacher, “I know he’s a talented kid, but he should enjoy himself. I don’t want his piano lessons to be drudgery.” So Jeanne didn’t push me that hard. Under the cover of my best interests, I think that my mom was more concerned with what she might become than she was with what I could grow up to be.

  I enjoyed my piano lessons but avoided pieces that would challenge me technically—I favored slower, lyrical pieces over flashy and more difficult ones. I derived a lot more satisfaction from sitting at the piano at home making up music of my own. By early elementary school I was starting to create music—improvised pieces in the vein of the classical works I was playing for my lessons. I would follow my intuition, and the music would come out in the style of Bach or Mozart or Schumann, because that’s what I had been playing and listening to. My mother would hear me, and for a moment or two she would think I was playing a piece from the classical canon, but she knew well enough what the written pieces sounded like and soon realized that I was inventing the music myself. She would yell out from the kitchen, “You’re not practicing!” But making things up was a lot more fun, and she couldn’t have conceived that what I was doing was practicing at a way of making music that neither one of us knew much about. I had not yet learned that anything like jazz existed.

  But my parents must have seen my persistence in creating my own music and realized that it might be enhanced by systematic nurturing. When I was eight, on Jeanne’s recommendation they set me up with a private theory and composition teacher in Cincinnati, Walter Mays. It was the single best thing they ever did for me.

  Mays was a doctoral composition student at the local conservatory. A lanky Texan in his late twenties, he was very friendly and kind, and lived with his wife in an old gloomy brownstone apartment in the student neighborhood near the school. He had never taught a child before—let alone one hour every week or two. Unlike Jeanne, he didn’t need my mother’s consent to push me because I applied myself ardently to the material he was teaching me. It involved the creation of original music, rather than the techniques necessary to reproduce music someone else had composed long ago. From third grade through seventh grade, I received an advanced musical education. I learned music notation (with an Osmiroid pen and India ink), how to compose in different styles, four-part writing, counterpoint, and score analysis. By the time I got to sixth grade I had done everything a first-year student would have done at a conservatory. He gave me the musical tool kit that I use to this day every time I pick up a pencil. (And, yes, I write only with a pencil and staff paper—my favorite pencil is the legendary Palomino Blackwing. I have never used any computer notation programs.) Mays’s lessons had an indelible impact on me. They taught me how to channel the creative impulses that I had been applying intuitively in the service of composition.

  When I wasn’t making music, I felt a little lost. I was small for my age and not particularly athletic. I liked swimming and diving, sports that didn’t rely on physical heft and aggression, but couldn’t really compete and wasn’t interested in the rough-and-tumble team sports. I felt alone in the world in some ways that are common to young life—being a little lost is normal for kids, part of the process of taking form as a person and finding your place in the world. At the same time, I felt different in ways that I could not yet identify, much less overcome.

  My parents, whose communication with each other was severely strained, were not always attuned to my needs. After kindergarten at North Avondale Elementary, I was pulled out of the public school and enrolled in a private school, Lotspeich. I enjoyed the new school and would have liked to stay there, but I was taken out after two years and put back in North Avondale. I’ve never understood the reasons for this upheaval. And that year, third grade, my mom got me my first pair of glasses. They had little sheriff’s stars on the front corners—totally embarrassing.

  I know only that I felt like it was all somehow my fault. I came home from elementary school one day and I told my mother that on the playground all the kids were touching their toes but that I couldn’t do it. She said, matter-of-factly, “Your arms are too short.” Though she didn’t remember saying it when I asked her about it many years later, this was one of the many things that she said off the top of her head that had a huge impact on me. She may have believed the statement in the moment, but I don’t think she ever took the time to question whether it was actually true.

  I know now that she meant no harm, but “Your arms are too short” defined me going forward. For years after that, those words would echo within me whenever I faced a daunting challenge. I’m just not built for this. I’m innately inadequate. Could I learn to play that long, complex piano piece? Could I master recording technology? Could I attempt to learn computer music notation? I would think, No—I’m too limited. My arms are too short. Why try? Without quite acknowledging it, I began to set only the most modest goals for myself. I believed that I inherently lacked self-discipline, and outside of music I didn’t have good role models so there was no one to boost me up when I needed it most.

  On top of my piano lessons and the composition and theory sessions with Walter Mays, I played the violin at school for five years, from fifth grade to tenth. I’ve always liked stringed instruments, and I wanted to play the ’cello. But my grandfather was a violinist, so I played the violin, to honor him. I was given an old family violin and a cheap violin case. It was truly hideous—rectangular and covered in gaudy fake-alligator plastic. I was embarrassed to be seen with it. I was a scrawny, nerdy little kid with glasses to begin with, and carrying this ridiculous violin case along with my books didn’t help matters. A bully shoved me down a flight of stairs at high school one day. After that, to my horror and shame, I began to develop a crush on him—even though he was a tough, straight kid who was totally unavailable to me and probably would’ve treated me far worse if he’d known.

  I played the violin in the high school orchestra but never practiced. Just to make it sound decent was hard work, and holding it properly was uncomfortable. It didn’t come naturally to me as the piano did, so I felt that I wasn’t cut out for it—my heart just wasn’t in it. I kept the instrument in its awful case in my locker, and pretty much only pulled it out to play in the orchestra. The only benefit of playing the instrument was, for me, the satisfaction in playing with other musicians, making my own intonation, following a conductor, and being a part of a musical whole that was larger than each individual participant. I also got a lot out of being a member of an a cappella vocal ensemble, accompanying the choir and both singing onstage and playing in the pit for the musicals. This kind of group music making started in elementary school when I joined the Cincinnati All-City Boys Choir.

  As the choir was organized, two fifth- and sixth-grade boys from each public school were accepted, based on auditions, and I was one of the two from North Avondale. We met on Saturday mornings at the Washburn School downtown and sang for three hours. There was a conductor and a piano accompanist. Among the pieces in our repertoire was a buoyant little sea chanty called “Away to Rio.” I remember that as the accompanist played it, I knew that I could play it, just from having heard it a few times. And so not long after I joined the choir, when I was ten years old, I walked up after choir practice and said to the adult accompanist, with complete confidence, “I could play that piece.”

  He chuckled and said, “Really? Okay—go ahead.”

  I had never seen the music, but didn’t need to. I sat down and played the accompaniment I had heard him playing, note for note. It felt as natural as breathing. After that, I was named the assistant accompanist, and for the next s
everal years I alternated between singing and accompanying the choir.

  The age of ten was a breakthrough time for me as a young musician. It was the period when I first entered the public sphere in Cincinnati and began to be known as one of the city’s home-grown musical prodigies. There was an instrumental competition for young people sponsored by the Cincinnati Music Scholarship Association, and I entered it, performing Bach, Mozart, and a composition of my own titled “A Windy Night.” I won first prize. When I played my piece at the winner’s concert, it looked as if I was playing it from memory—but I was making parts of it up as I went along, hoping no one would notice and that I would get away with winging it once again. It was thrilling.

  The same year, I was invited to appear on a local Sunday-morning program for kids on WKRC-TV, the CBS affiliate, called The Skipper Ryle Show. (The station has a companion radio station that was the inspiration for the seventies sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.) The titular Skipper was a jovial sea captain played by a local broadcaster with a cartoonish hound-dog face and an appropriately bushy mustache. He was a superstar on the playgrounds of Cincinnati, and my appearance on his show, playing “A Windy Night,” boosted my standing at school, though I’m not sure my brother and his friends, not into classical music, were particularly impressed.

  It was a blessing—or perhaps inevitable—that Hank and I would grow up with very different personalities and strengths. He was a model student and got top grades in every subject. I did well on standardized tests but excelled in the classroom only when I was interested in the subject. I didn’t have the discipline to push myself to master things that bored me, such as trigonometry. Hank also had the perfect personality for team sports, such as basketball, which he played passionately even though he wasn’t that tall. He tried hard, and he could get along with everybody, even the biggest asshole on the team. I was more socially awkward.

  Both of us were competitive at what interested us, but not terribly so with each other. We found our own areas early in life and sped along on separate but roughly parallel paths. We both ended up making a living in the arts—me in jazz and he as a gifted writer who became the assistant managing editor of Sports Illustrated. I know Hank thought that I was self-absorbed when we were young—I could have been a better big brother. In my defense, all I can say is that I thought a great deal about myself because I was still an enigma to myself. Though I knew I was talented, I didn’t have the framework to understand how I was able to do what I did musically, and I was attracted to boys, but had no idea of what the ramifications would be. My parents didn’t relate to me as me. But neither did I.

  Television became a large part of my life—it provided an escape from the subconscious pain of my family dynamic, and it opened my world to music beyond classical. Cincinnati was one of the last bastions of live TV, and I watched talk shows such as The Bob Braun Show and Ruth Lyons’s 50-50 Club and—believe it or not, a Sunday night square dance show called Midwestern Hayride, featuring yodeler Miss Bonnie Lou, a caller named Estil McNew, and a live band, the Midwesterners. There were only three TV channels in those days, and jazz-inflected singers such as Dean Martin, Andy Williams, and Perry Como—in addition to the must-watch Ed Sullivan Show—introduced me to the mainstream pop music of the sixties as well as to such artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.

  Through TV I also got my first visual exposure to nonclassical piano playing. On The Lawrence Welk Show there was a honky-tonk pianist, Jo Ann Castle, who would smile and look at the camera while she pumped her arms. I was also aware of a fourteen-year-old jazz piano prodigy, Craig Hundley, who appeared with a teenage bassist and drummer on national TV shows; he was also a child actor, and I remember seeing him in an episode of Star Trek—super cool. In junior high and high school, TV became more and more of a compulsion for me—instead of practicing or doing my homework, I zoned out on Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and other early (and fairly terrible) sitcoms. I was also glued to The Rifleman and The Wild, Wild West, both shows featuring good-looking cowboys. I would watch anything, really. But my brother could sit and half-watch while doing his homework and get straight As, while my grades began to get shaky.

  When I was ten, our fifth-grade class put on a production of Peter Pan, and I asked the music teacher if I could work up a score of background and incidental music to set up the scenes, like I’d seen in TV. I used some fellow students to create a small ensemble: piano, flute, violin, and ’cello. The teacher was impressed but wanted to change some of what I’d written. I said no on the spot. Didn’t even need to think about it. It was the first moment in which I felt protective of something I’d written.

  “I wrote what I wrote,” I told her. They could use it as I wrote it or not use it at all. I gave them the choice. In the end, they used what I wrote. My parents didn’t take me to task for this insubordination, though they certainly would have been justified.

  Musically advanced but still a kid, I exhibited a combination of youthful bravura and ill-defined feelings of insecurity. As a result, for many years as an adult I have vacillated between grandiosity and low self-esteem. My parents—especially my mother, since my father, like many family men at the time, was not present in his own household—nurtured my musical development to the extent that doing so would be recognized as praiseworthy parenting by their friends. Neither of them seemed to fully understand—or know how to handle—this curious creature in their midst. I was precociously talented and somewhat of a social misfit—not your normal kid. So they reasoned that they should try to make me more “normal.”

  For six years I was sent to a summer camp in Maine for an eight-week program of outdoor normalization. My mom had gone to camp in Maine for eight weeks a summer when she was a child, and my father had gone, too. It was written in the Torah that you go to Maine in the summer—that’s what good Reform Jewish kids do. So there I was, a nonathletic musician, at a jock boys’ camp with a bunch of rich Jewish kids from the East Coast, so I could go hiking and canoeing and play tennis and do all that normal, healthy stuff. I would have fit in much better at a music or arts camp, but nobody asked my opinion. Naturally, I ended up focusing on the camp shows, playing piano and also performing. Given that it was an all-boys camp, the kids dressed in drag for the camp productions. I did this on occasion, but I don’t remember getting any charge out of it—I was not a “campy” camper and did my best to fit in. In that bucolic setting I discovered a love of nature that has stayed with me all my life.

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  As I entered adolescence, I experienced the awakening of sexual impulses appropriate to my age, and I found that it was boys I was attracted to. By the time I was thirteen, I knew I was gay, though nobody in my world was using that term. Summer camp was a totally male environment, with lots of nudity—naked early-morning laps in the freezing lake, mature counselors who were very attractive—and as I began to become fully sexual, I was highly stimulated. These feelings were the most exciting thing in my life, and yet I knew instinctively that I had to keep them secret, although I did have some furtive, never-again-discussed encounters with other campers.

  I was alone with my feelings, and there were no healthy gay role models to look to. When I was young and beginning to come to terms with my sexual identity, it was a very different time. There was very little understanding of homosexuality in America. People were still throwing around hoary slurs such as “fairy” and “fag” with impunity. There were no gay role models for young people—no celebrities or actors or politicians who were out. There were no gay-straight alliances at high schools as there are today. I couldn’t have imagined that we would come to a time when declaring oneself as gay, in most places in America, would be received as about as interesting as whether or not one wears glasses—in other words, a nonissue.

  The predominant image of male homosexuality at the time was a demeaning caricature of mincing, preening, flustery queenishness, as embodied by Paul Lynde. On rare occasions I would overhear adults
saying something serious about someone being gay, and what I heard was just as off-putting as the flouncy comic stereotype. I’d hear whispers about such-and-such being caught doing “something with boys” at the bus station or so-and-so being arrested in the park at night. Everything I picked up from the world I occupied in the 1960s associated homosexuality with clownishness, pedophilia, or criminality. It was not an easy time for a young person to be thinking, Well, I guess I’m attracted to boys. Now what?

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  My father became more prominent in Cincinnati Jewish society and a partner in his law firm. By the mid-sixties, he was the president of our temple, Rockdale, and a leader of several organizations, including the Jewish Welfare Fund Drive and the Jewish Family Service. For us, religion was a social, not a spiritual, matter. My father had a strong sense of charitable responsibility to his community, which overlapped conveniently with his desire to get out of the house most evenings. We subscribed to the American Israelite, the well-known Jewish newspaper published in Cincinnati—we called it “Jews in the News”—and it seemed as if my father’s name and photo were in it every week. My parents needed a home to suit their standing, and so during the summer of 1965 they bought an elegant three-story brick house with room enough to accommodate large parties; we had a housekeeper four or five days a week.