Editor's note: This is the third of three installments from Bill's memoir-in-progress, "The Inherited Heart."
When the fierce Michigan summer storms came, my Southern father still headed for the southwest corner of the basement, but I, because he'd taken up my practice turf there, chose to crawl beneath the "desk in the hall," alone. I'm not certain why, in my teens, during this time of what was shaping up as overt rebellion, I chose that spot. It was ill adapted to my knees and slowly expanding height. Ours was a house of few antiques. Ours was a house of one antique: the desk in the hall. The object was my parents' pride and joy and I, by this time, was not. Maybe that's why I went there.
This desk had been given us by my mother's Aunt Emily, who lived in Detroit in a spacious place that had an elevator my brother and I loved to go up and down on, endlessly, whenever we visited there — a stately dwelling in which, on a huge mahogany radio I can still see vividly, we first heard the bombing of Pearl Harbor announced.
By 1950, my brother, Lance, during storms, remained in his (or our) room on the second floor. There, imprisoned by puberty, he smoked cigarettes, rain pelting the windows, lightning crackling as he counted and recounted by flashlight (my father demanded that we keep the lights out) the names on his neatly typed list of sexual conquests.
My sister Emily, nine years younger than him, six years younger than me, less obsessed than either of us (in any direction), did manage, should it be late at night when a storm arrived, to make it to the first floor, where she crawled beneath the dining room table with her pillow, blanket, Babar and Uncle Wiggly books, and once again quickly fell asleep.
My mother, loyal to my father, would head toward the basement with him, but only as far as the base of the stairs, not to the southwest corner. She refused to sit, as he did, listening to the radio and drinking Early Times, awaiting the "all clear" signal. She — being a person who seriously believed that, under more propitious circumstances and in a more enlightened nation or age than ours, prohibition might possibly have worked — was reluctant to encourage or take part in the emergency measures my father adopted there.
My storm home became, as I said, the desk in the hall: the sanctuary I'd found beneath this object which seemed to have such great value to my family. It was one of the ugliest pieces of furniture I have ever seen. Corpulent where it should have been trim, immoderate where it might have observed silence, the desk was an ode to bad taste and confused, inopportune style. It was anything but "jazz," believe me! You might have called it Colonial, and then again you might not. It had a tambour roll-top of mahogany veneer and satinwood inlaid strippings, but the rest seemed constructed of prehistoric plywood or mud.
The upper portion contained a large drawer that resembled a steamer trunk and pigeon holes that looked as if pigeons once found a suitable use for them. The desk was supported by six immensely swollen trumpet legs with bun feet. The whole (if you could call it that) was afflicted as if by scars of some childhood disease or hasty tattoos and oval medallions enclosing the female form, ladies outlandishly classical if a bit too fully clothed for my brother's taste. The desk was a monster yet, feeling that way myself lately and for no good reason outside of adolescence, I was drawn to this outrage — I who had once been, at age seven, a precocious clown, entertaining the family at dinner nightly with material I stole from the "Milton Berle Joke Book" and imitations of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny (the latter munching on a carrot).
Now, too cowardly, too asthmatic to stick to my room and smoke, too honest to draw up a list of sexual conquests I'd never made, I cowered in some way station of the mind and glands — that is, beneath that ugly desk in the hall. This was adolescent limbo time for me. Or so I felt. Yet looking back now, I can see that I was making all sorts of wondrous discoveries — such as love for women, or girls (even though I hadn't yet had any, or much, success or luck with them), but especially jazz, which I enjoyed immensely, both listening to it and attempting to play it.
I no longer kissed — an old Southern custom — my father goodnight. No longer willing to suffer sallies with friends who were far more important to her than mere groceries, I'd stopped going shopping with my mom at A&P. I no longer took baths with my sister, dressing up in washcloths, pretending we were Tarzan and Jane (a practice my brother Lance had put an abrupt stop to some time ago, bursting into the bathroom during this cinematically-inspired ritual, shouting, "He's too old for this now!"). I'd even stopped hating my brother, mostly because I no longer listened when his friends, addressing me, still used the diminutive I considered a pejorative: "Little Minor."
Perhaps, aside from jazz and my seemingly endless happy jam sessions in the basement, this was a sad, slow, sloppy, limbo time for me, so I welcomed the storms, as my father did, and the privilege (the necessity, as I'd come to think of it) of hiding beneath that desk in the hall. Let my father head for the southwest corner of the basement. Let my mother almost arrive there. Let my brother smoke on, and count up. Let my sister lie snugly asleep with Babar and Uncle Wiggly. I no longer felt as if I needed them — my family. I had my place beneath the desk, my 33 1/3 phono attachment (plugged into a jack in the back of a small plastic radio) and my latest discovery: my new surrogate family of jazz piano greats.
Stormy evenings now found me hovering, content there, sweet Teddy Wilson riffs lit by occasional flashes of lightning, the more stringent Art Tatum magical meanderings offset by rim shots of thunder. Acknowledging my father's command to keep the lights out, I'd even become adept in the dark at placing the needle just where I wished it to go, smack on "I Cover the Waterfront," "Poor Butterfly" or "Am I Blue?" Our old, blind, faithful family dog, Tobey, sat beside me. You could no longer count on him to control or monitor flatulence and he had, I think, by this time even lost his sense of smell (but not me, unfortunately). But Tobey could still hear and he seemed to enjoy the music.
Even though I still loved playing drums, I began to take piano lessons. Each Thursday an elderly ragtime and stride pianist (not in much better shape than Tobey) came to the house. His name was Dean Yokum, and he'd been a popular DJ with his own jazz radio show in Pontiac. He'd lost a leg when, intoxicated (he liked to drink), he'd stepped off a curb, or fallen, in front of a bus. But he was an excellent, sensitive teacher, who taught me swing bass, stride piano — octave, chord, octave, chord — right from the start.
I found the concept, and practice, lovely and it took hold. He gave me intricate Tatum and Fats Waller charts, but he highlighted the basic accessible chords, and let me make whatever sense I could of the rest. With him, I never learned to sight read properly (I was fine with the "upper" clef but not the bass or "lower" clef), but he gave me a solid sense, right from the start, of the "fun" of actually being able to play tunes. I must have had a fair ear, for I also, from the start, could improvise.
When Dean arrived at our house, he first gave my brother a lesson for an hour (to this day Lance can only play "Twelfth Street Rag," hideously!), retired to the kitchen with my father and Early Times (they both liked to drink), and by the time I got him for an hour he was ripe! I had, right from the start, as I said, a pretty good sense of how to play jazz piano, so in spite of what may well have been a sad, slow, sloppy, limbo time for me, life beneath that way station for the mind and glands — that monster desk in the hall — was not intolerable. I had the finest jazz pianists in the world — and Tobey — for company.
And when the storms passed, I would return to the basement to accompany those pianists who, now that I was taking piano lessons myself and could truly hear what they were capable of, I admired and respected and loved even more. Someday, I hoped, I might be able to play just half as well — well, maybe one-tenth as well — as them.
That desk in the hall of our house served well as a temporary sanctuary for me: a symbol of my own isolation at the time — an emblem of the sort of solitary confinement I had imposed upon myself. But the basement was more than a symbol. It was 100% real, there for me whenever I needed it (which was often), something I could count on always — my very own space. Playing my homemade set of drums or my new wooden snare there in time to the music, I knew that basement had become my home — a source of endless joy and what began to feel like honest accomplishment.
|
