Lost In Place (17 page)

“You’re cradding
lessons
?” he asked, in a strange, thin voice. “Cradder” was a word he had made up to describe the sort of person who takes karate for a few months, practices on weekends and then quits when it gets tough. Here he had turned the word into a verb.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” I held my breath waiting to see what his second reaction was going to be, and when it came it was pretty much what I would have predicted. His expression turned to one of sheer disgust.

“Sure, I’ll give him the letter, cradder.” He put it in his pocket, climbed into his car, slammed the door and drove away, leaving me to wonder how to spend my first Thursday night in nearly three years away from him.

11
 

O
nce I had cradded lessons, and without Michael to practice with or compete against, my commitment to martial arts began to weaken. Neither Annette nor my family, nor her family nor anyone else, for that matter, seemed disappointed that I was no longer training to become an ass-kicking motherfucker. That made me wonder if the whole thing hadn’t been a mistake to begin with. I told my dad one evening as we tried to find the planet Neptune that I had doubts I would ever become a black belt.

“You mean you’re not going to be able to break flaming concrete slabs after all? I was counting on that, you know.”

“It’s not funny! I just wasted three years for nothing.”

“What do you mean? You had a good time with that kung fu stuff, didn’t you? You can’t expect everything you try to lead to a finish line somewhere. You have to
take a few wrong turns, hit a few dead ends, get mad and turn around. Everybody does—we’re all the same that way.”

“Oh, yeah? What about you? You liked astronomy and painting as a kid, and here we are looking for a planet through the telescope and you paint every night. You don’t seem to have hit any dead ends.”

“Hold on, I think I see something. You want to go get the nine-millimeter eyepiece?”

Got him. He was stalling for time to think. I went to the car to fetch the eyepiece, but this time, instead of walking the way a cat walks, free and easy, I was shuffling. It was an all-too-familiar teenage situation: I was arguing a point with my dad and felt driven to try to win the argument, but if I did, it meant that I was right about something depressing—in this case that three years of my life had been a sham.

He put the eyepiece in and looked for a while. “Here, see if you can see anything.”

I looked, but couldn’t tell if the dim object in view was a planet or just a star made to appear slightly fuzzy by our unstable atmosphere.

“I think if it was Neptune, we’d know it, Dad.”

“Yeah. If we had just a few more inches of mirror.… Oh, well.” He backed up and looked upward, presumably deciding what to look for next.

“So you think I haven’t hit any dead ends, eh?” he asked abruptly.

“I never saw any pictures of you wearing baldhead wigs or trying to eat peas with sticks.”

“Well, OK. You have more … panache than I ever did, I’ll grant you that. And yes, I was lucky to find two things that I’ve stayed interested in all my life. But what about
this: I chose social work as a career because I thought I could save people or solve their problems. I had big ideas; I was full of compassion. By the time I realized how hopeless the situation is—or at least how hopeless I think it is—and saw that it was a dead end, I’d driven so far down the road I couldn’t afford to back out. So be glad you wore your wig and ate peas with sticks early and didn’t make kung fu your college major. Now you know you won’t have to do it for a living.”

“Dad, you’re talking about college. What were you like when you were my age? Come to think of it, I don’t know anything about you before I was born! You’ve never told me anything about what you were like as a kid. I don’t know any stories about your childhood at all.”

He kept looking for Neptune.

“Well?”

“Well what? There’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Yeah, it is. I was moody and shy and not very interesting. Just like now. What else do you want me to say?”

At first I tried to keep in shape on my own, but instead of being a challenge, as in the old days, kung fu had become tedious. Every punch and kick felt sloppy and slow, as if I had weights strapped to my limbs, and I felt winded all the time. It was a dead end. Once the kung fu practice stopped, everything else followed. I stopped brush painting (all of a sudden I wondered, Why the hell am I painting little guys with robes and topknots staring at waterfalls? I’ve never even seen a waterfall, let alone a guy with a topknot), put the Chinese history and philosophy books into the crawl space and suddenly found it ludicrous to think that while even Stone Age tribesmen wore
moccasins, I was going barefoot. I kept up with the Chinese lessons, but only because I liked Mr. Friedman so much and felt guilty about having already let one teacher down.

Every once in a while I would see Michael in the hall, the cafeteria or outdoors. I would nod at him or try to start up a conversation, but he wouldn’t acknowledge me: I had ceased to exist. Sometimes I could see him stretching or practicing kung fu out on the football field, and I wanted to join him, but it was clearly impossible. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any other friends; whenever I saw him, he was always alone. I often thought about calling him up, but then I could hear the litany of abuse he would heap on me, how I was a loser, a cradder, a candy-ass and so on, and decided I’d had enough of that crap.

As the fall turned to winter, I started to feel blue and tired and yet strangely anxious all the time. For the first time in several years I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t feel interested in anything, hated getting up in the morning, hated going to bed at night and watched lots of television. Dad understood perfectly; when he saw me stretched out on the couch he would pull out the Green Blanket, whip up some cinnamon toast and Constant Comment tea with milk and sugar and join me to watch old movies. My mother was less sympathetic. She’d been willing to let me burn incense in the basement, she’d driven me for years to kung fu and cello lessons, she’d even helped me powder my baldhead wig—but she could not stand seeing me mope. She hated it when I complained that there was nothing to do because there was so much to do! So much to read, so much to learn, so many instruments to play, so many rooms to clean! Whenever I passed her in the house—I on my way to make more toast
or find
TV Guide
, she on her way to make oboe reeds for her students, tune her harpsichord, wash our whole family’s laundry or start dinner—I felt myself slouch a bit, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs after having destroyed a sofa. The more I slouched, the straighter she stood, until the two of us looked like cartoon characters named Good Girl and Bad Boy.

My only relief came on the afternoons when I visited Annette and we took walks together in the kind of idyllic fall scenery that you see on postcards advertising New England. When we returned to her house, there was always something homemade to eat waiting for us on the table, and someone with unusual ideas or an unusual accent to talk to. She and her parents all seemed to think that I should return to the cello, which I hadn’t played much during my enrollment at the Boxing Institute. Dr. Guillaume in particular seemed eager for me to give music another try. He played with an amateur chamber orchestra that could always use another string player; besides, he pointed out, with my cello, his violin and Annette’s flute we could form a trio.

I decided it couldn’t hurt to try, so I pulled the cello out from under the piano one weekend, blew the dust off it and tried to play some Bach. Awful! This wasn’t the answer. I put it back under the piano and turned on the television. Intending to watch
The Six Million Dollar Man
, I inadvertently stumbled on a program in which the violinist Yehudi Menuhin was playing a concert with the Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who sat on the ground playing a sitar. Something about the unusual music appealed to me, so I kept it on and then listened with interest to the brief explanation of how ragas worked. To me the extraordinary thing was that though each raga, or song, had a fixed
basic melody, every time they played it they improvised on it and played it differently. I don’t think I had ever heard real improvisation before. My experience had been that all music was played from notes written down by some Immortal hundreds of years ago who was unappreciated in his time and died in poverty.

At the end of the program I went back down to the basement and took out the cello again, but this time sat on the floor and laid it across my lap like a sitar and tried to improvise. With my typical flair for immediate fixation, I didn’t emerge from the basement until late that night, having decided to become an Indian musician.

My mother was overjoyed when I told her that I was serious about the cello again, but less enthusiastic when I showed her
how
I was playing the instrument. “Better that than shooting drugs, I suppose,” Dad thought aloud, and she had to agree with that. Erich’s only comment was “Leave it to Mark. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Only Rachel approved of my new hobby. By then she was disappearing into her bedroom for weeks at a time to paint watercolors and listen to Beatles records, so she no longer found me strange at all.

Once again Dad helped out by scouring libraries, only this time not for kung fu manuals or brush-painting textbooks but for records of classical Indian music. In the meantime I took the cello over to the Guillaumes’ place to show them my new interest.

“Eh? Non!”
Dr. Guillaume protested, waving his pipe in front of him as if to ward off danger.

“Ach, ja!”
Mrs. Guillaume countered, grinning from ear to ear. The weirder I got, the more she seemed to like me. But Annette liked it best of all. She went out to a fabric store the next day, bought a few yards of Indian-print
cloth and a pattern called “Nehrudelic” and sewed me a shirt that made me look like Siddhartha before he gave up the comfortable life.

Gradually my depression vanished, but with the memory of existential angst still fresh in my mind, and the fact that I was improvising every day, it was inevitable that I would soon discover jazz. When I did I was even more excited than when I’d heard Ravi Shankar’s performance. Before long I was listening and playing along to recordings of Chick Corea, Weather Report, Jan Hammer, Stanley Clarke, Jaco Pastorius and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I set up the record player in the living room and tried giving my parents a demonstration, but their reaction was subdued. My mother looked at my dad and said, “That’s really pretty interesting, I guess, isn’t it, Joe?” My dad hesitated for a moment. Then he raised that eyebrow of his and asked me, “Has anyone invented an electric cello yet?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He nodded, obviously relieved. “Then yes, I’d say it’s interesting for now.”

My new problem became money. I needed records—lots of them—to play along to, and the ones from the library were invariably scratched or warped. Also, as I spent more time with Annette, I could see it was getting on my parents’ nerves that I was always having to ask for cash for gas. Even worse was when my dad would trudge out to the car in the morning, start it up to go to work, then see the needle below E and the
TANK EMPTY
light glaring at him. On more than one occasion I peered out the basement window nervously and could see his face in the predawn darkness, illuminated by the orange glow of the
TANK EMPTY
light, and by lip-reading I was able to
appreciate just how much he did control himself when he was aggravated but not by himself in the car.

I scoured the papers for job listings, but couldn’t find anything for an unskilled sixteen-year-old. I tried driving around the nearby towns and asking storeowners if they needed a hand, but nothing panned out. Finally one man said, “Try in Danbury. That’s almost a city, so you might find something there.”

I spent days driving around Danbury, passing by all of the former sites of the Chinese Boxing Institute. All of those spaces were still vacant, just as we had left them years before. One even had our heavy bag still hanging from the ceiling. Danbury was a depressed area indeed. At last, in an alley, I found the entrance to a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant called the Royal Embassy of Ooh-Aah. It was run by followers of the popular guru Sri Chinmoy, so there were pictures of him all over the place with offerings of plastic flowers, and fruit and incense burning in front of each loving portrait. The Royal Embassy staff took me on as a dishwasher, then trained me to wait on the five or six tables, and before long had me cooking, too. They were nice enough people, but they insisted on my joining them for their Sunday-morning staff meeting, which involved hand-holding, humming and lots of positive reinforcement. That was the worst part of the job, as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t even get paid for it.

Obsessed with music now, I began to spend less and less time on schoolwork, and Mr. Leighton, the charismatic history teacher with the big voice, got worried.