yellow teeth

i get a baby grand from my parents when i turn 9, big and black and calling out to me like a harpie on a crag. 'play me, baby, but watch out, i'm a scary motherfucker.' it's shiny and seems to ask a lot with all those 88's extending from one horizon to another. they make me nervous. i stay near the center, near middle C. the sound of a single note, held down and reverberating sings in my chest like an ejaculation (the one i was yet to have). driven to lessons by my stubborn sneak-a-shot-o'-likker Granny in her dark blue Ford, a line of honking cars stretching out behind us on the mountain road, 'fuck 'em' in her set jaw, i tremble. i hate these lessons. i hate the music paper. i fog out on the precisely inked notes. my struggle to transmit them to fingers makes no sense. at my first recital, a child's song, i freeze. i run out the door, fighting tears. months later i return to the keyboard and i 'experiment', in the dark, tentative notes resounding from the hulking whale, amounting to little, but mesmerizing my pre-teen brain. and later i strike up an 'original composition' at a talent show at Prout's Neck, our summer vacation spot in Maine. i got a big ovation. i am 14, showing off my Twist-N-Shout moves on the dance floor and i'm covered with acne. i compare thigh muscles with a boy from Rhode Island. 'boys are better,' he says. i am silent, but i remember him as a part of that summer when i made friends with the piano. after we move to Philly we give the lessons another try. this time it's some quack-invented 'system' to fire up a left hand accompaniment to whatever-the-fuck horrible pop song takes me into a refusenik orbit. 'all you need is a melody', he promises. i think, 'you are so full of shit'. i quit 2 weeks in, hating lessons all over again. meanwhile, across the street in Wayne, procrastinating homework, our friends the Voorhees and a future Oberlin organ student, Henry Pemberton and i play 'guess who this is?' - a crush clue on the keys that is supposed to identify someone we all know and an early warning of what eventually became song 'portraiture'. the summer following my last year in high school i become a counselor at Camp Munsee, in the Poconos. in a barn sits a lonely, scabby, out of tune upright. after the boys are asleep i sneak down and improvise. the sound echos into the night. at Yale, same story, but with a drug caveat. in a college tower, i lock the door, drop acid, play with my eyes shut and hallucinate psychedelic film clips as they un-spool, fingers hammering with faux Stravinsky cluster up and down the nicotine ivories. i keep it on the down low. it's awful, i'm sure, but i keep going back, transported by the thrill of this Mississippi river of sound. 2 years later, back in New Haven, living a house full of nutty artists and musicians i crank the motor up all over again. we snitch an upright from a church and for the first time, inspired by musician friends Francesca Reitano and Ed Askew, i begin to crunch improvisations into songs like a blind man in a junk store, just trying to tell the truth and to hit my compatriots in the heart. maybe it never gets better than that. maybe it gets worse.