I start taking piano lessons in the third grade. My mother insists both my sister and I learn an instrument. Maria, since she is older, starts learning first. Then I follow three years later. Maria takes to it right away. She practices every afternoon and advances steadily. Forced to entertain company on holidays with a concert of Bach or Beethoven on our upright.
I take lessons on Wednesday afternoons at The Church on the Hill. (I went to Catholic school. We only had a half day of school on Wednesdays so the kids who went to public school could come on Wednesday afternoons to take religion classes. To this day it feels weird to do any work past noon on a Wednesday.) The Church on the Hill was a Protestant church in the neighborhood where my piano teacher had his office and gave lessons. The Church on the Hill was a no-frills, nondescript building. (If you’re going to build a church, take a page from the Catholics and fucking build it. The Catholics are the RuPaul’s Drag Race of religions. We put on a show, honey.) The Church on the Hill was the kind of place where they had AA meetings on Tuesday nights. St. Mel’s did not have AA meetings. That was some kind of liberal bullshit. In the ’70s Catholics didn’t even use the word alcoholic, we just said Irish.
My piano teacher, Mr. Anderson, was the first adult male that I knew who rode a bicycle. This was, no doubt, another sign of the freewheeling Protestant lifestyle. Each Wednesday I might as well have been going to Woodstock. My first music book was titled Teaching Little Fingers How to Play, after that, things would get increasingly more challenging. And if little fingers don’t practice, little fingers don’t learn how to play. I was able to muddle my way through the first year on my scant charm and the simplicity of the early material. Much like learning another language, it’s from year two on where you’re really fucked. Any idiot can memorize a few vocabulary words, but I still don’t know what the past imperfect is, nor do I ever wish to find out. I’ve made it this far.
Mr. Anderson insisted I practice every day after school in order to improve. He actually could get pretty pissy for a Protestant youth minister or whatever else he did outside of teaching piano and adult bike riding. By the time I had been taking lessons for about two years or so my sister had already advanced beyond what Mr. Anderson was capable of teaching her and had been sent to study on Saturdays at the Manhattan School of Music. (Her concerts for company now accompanied with a prologue from my mother about her advanced studies. I was often entreated to be her opening act, but, darling, even at ten, I was nobody’s opening act, “no thank you, I’ll just sit here listening for mistakes.”)
I, on the other hand, still apparently had years more to learn from Mr. Anderson. It’s not that I didn’t want to practice, it’s more that I never got around to it. My TV watching schedule was intense and allowed little room for flexibility. Plus you don’t have to practice on Wednesday, that’s the day you have the lesson. And Thursday is super close to Wednesday, you still have an eternity before your next lesson. Friday is the best day of the week, so don’t waste it on practicing. Saturday, see Friday. Sunday is spent in a crippling depression. How can any human being focus on scales when the horrors of a fresh week are ticking down? By Monday, well, I really do have to practice. But then realize how far behind I am, and it’s all suddenly too much. Tuesday is better spent plotting excuses than actually practicing, which by this time is way too late anyway. As if school wasn’t a torture enough, I now also had this once-weekly added terror to contend with. It was like being told by a doctor that you had cancer and your cancer also had cancer. The drive to The Church on the Hill Wednesday afternoons became its own mini-torment. There was one traffic light on the way to that church, and I swear to God for the ten years I took lessons it was always green. I would pray for the light to turn red as we were approaching it, if only to buy myself a few more moments of freedom before the inevitable. But it was like we were in the Indy 500 when we were going to that fucking church. It was a straight shot to hell.
My excuses for not practicing would vary from: the books fell behind the piano and I couldn’t find them, to the garden variety of children’s illnesses, to the stubborn insistence that I did practice and I have no idea what’s happening now. “I did it right at home!” But to fuck things up even further, some rare weeks I would practice, and on those weeks my lesson went well. Mr. Anderson now coming to life. Maybe I will play for the company next time, Maria. You can sit this one out, dear. Also, I liked keeping Mr. Anderson off-balance. Just when you’ve written me off … here comes little Liberace. (Even as a closeted gay boy I instinctively knew that keeping people off-balance was a tool that would come in handy in life. This must also be part of the DNA makeup that determines sexuality.)
At any given time, I usually had one exercise book (hated), two classical books (hated), and after a few years of lessons, a Broadway sheet music book (LOVED). These I would practice. Learning the score to West Side Story and Brigadoon and Cabaret. I’ll pass on the Bach concertos, Mr. Anderson, and take a double helping of “A Boy Like That.” After I finished learning the score to one Broadway musical, I would immediately start another. When I’m twelve years old the next book I get is for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and I’m obsessed with everything in it. Now, at the time it didn’t seem unusual to me that my piano teacher, who was also a Protestant youth minister (I think), would assign me the sheet music to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And my mother certainly didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual with me belting out “Texas has a whorehouse in it / Lord have mercy on our souls!” for a half hour each night.
“Sounding good!” she’d call from upstairs while preparing dinner. (If the cat ran across the keyboard, she’d still say “sounding good,” so I took her compliments with a grain of salt.) But my favorite song was “Hard Candy Christmas” and I’d play it over and over. In this song the hookers have to leave the whorehouse because it’s closing and they dream about their life outside the whorehouse walls. And I sang it constantly. (For full effect please Google the Original Broadway Cast recording of this song and listen to it now.)
Hey, maybe I’ll learn to sew / Maybe I’ll just lie low / Maybe I’ll hit the bars / Maybe I’ll count the stars until the dawn / Me, I will go on.
Now typically a song about women who had been sexually exploited by dozens of men and faced an uncertain future after a lifetime of abuse wouldn’t be the obvious choice for a twelve-year-old boy. But what can I say? Their pain was my pain.
I continue my piano lessons a few years longer. But my heart’s no longer in it (was it ever?).
(My sister, on the other hand, by this time is a piano performance major at NYU. And she actually has a part-time job playing at a French restaurant on Long Island. We go see her one night at La Bibliothèque, my parents and I. Have dinner as she plays in the cocktail lounge. Me scraping the gloppy sauce off of the entrée I hate. (Italians only like Italian restaurants, I learn this at a very young age. This was the first time I think my parents had ever taken me to a French restaurant. The countries are right next door to each other, I have no idea why French food seemed so much more frighteningly sophisticated. Like you needed to go to college to eat it.) Maria was all of eighteen years old, if she had been performing at Carnegie Hall it couldn’t have been more thrilling.)
I finally tell my mother I want to stop my lessons. And she says that I can. But if I do stop I have to take up another activity, sport, or instrument, or basically any fucking thing. She’s clever my mother, I’ll give her that. Since I have never done one extracurricular activity, I certainly don’t plan to start now. So I continue with my lessons at The Church on the Hill. Every Wednesday afternoon praying for the one traffic light to turn red that never does. And by now Mr. Anderson and I are like an old married couple. He knows all my tricks and we don’t have to pretend any longer. What did I practice, let’s just work on that, cut to the chase. His bicycle still in the room. A comfort at this point. If this is my only option then I will come up this hill until I die. (Which is even a Protestant-sized hill. Not too large or too small, nothing that would offend.)
Now I don’t want to say I have no friends in high school, but they are few and far between. They’re not even friends, more acquaintances, really. Like people who work on another floor of your office building that you ride the elevator with each day. “Morning,” then back to staring at the buttons.
I spend most of my time avoiding people. Trying to blend in. Hoping not to be noticed. But there is this one boy, Jim. And he is tall and handsome and straight and has the effortless confidence of all boys who are tall and handsome and straight. I think we are in a class together, maybe. And he is friendly to me. And that’s enough for me to fixate on him, enough for me to imagine us as friends. No, there is no part of me that thinks he is gay, or in any way wants anything from him other than friendship (I think). But this is not a skill that I have acquired. Making friends. I observe other boys talking to each other with the same kind of bemused detachment I would two monkeys at the zoo. Fascinating, but no takeaways that would apply to my actual life. Spending all your time avoiding subjects—sports, girls, cars—gives you scant conversational solid ground. I was always scrambling for any overlapping topics whenever Jim and I were thrown together. Once a teacher died, so that was super helpful. I dined out on that for a few weeks. What kid doesn’t want to talk about a dead teacher?
I think Jim is a stoner, which would explain his constant dopey, affable demeanor. Big white teeth, easy smile, good hair. We now say “hi” maybe three days a week and it’s the most intense friendship in my life. I nurture it delicately like a sickly plant with one tiny flower. We are both sophomores at St. Francis Prep. Both fifteen. And I’m trying to figure out how we can further cement our friendship. Conversation has dried up as of late, and short of killing another teacher I’m going to have to do something radical to help take our relationship to the next level. Winter break is approaching and I ask Jim for his phone number. Ask him maybe if he wants to do something over break. He says “sure.” I have never done anything like this before in my life. It feels momentous. Like buying a house. He rips off a piece of notebook paper, scribbles his number, and that’s that. I am aware of where that paper is every second of the day.
And shortly thereafter, winter break comes and I go into my father’s office in our basement. It is in the back, unfinished part with the washer and dryer and Ping-Pong table. The only place in our house that can be considered private, and I take out that piece of paper and I try to summon the courage to call him. Calling a friend in the ’80s was a fucking nightmare. Of course today you would be able to text each other and the whole thing wouldn’t have taken on the dramatic heft of, say, the Nuremberg trials. And not only did you have to deal with the stress of talking to the person you were calling, but you also had the added stress of dealing with whoever answered the fucking phone. A sibling, mother, or God forbid, a father (this was rare). First, you’d identify yourself. “Hi, Mrs. blank, is blank home, this is Gary from school.” Then you’d have to wait while said child is called for and then you’d have to hear the child’s bewilderment when he finds out who is on the other end of the phone. “What? Who?” The whole thing is a sickening smorgasbord of humiliations that thankfully this generation has been spared.
And then I do something so strange that it haunts me to this day. My stomach still churning at the memory.
“Hi, is Jim home, this is Gary from school.”
“Hold on please. Jim!” Moments later.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jim, I was wondering if you wanted to go to the half-price ticket booth with me tomorrow to get tickets to the matinee of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
“Uh, no, thanks.”
“Okay, well bye.”
And I hang up the phone and sit there at my father’s desk (littered with cruise brochures for his job with Cunard Line) frozen. I don’t know exactly why what I did was so wrong, but from his response I instantly know that this is not something that fifteen-year-old boys normally do together (wishing myself into the photo facing me of a happy honeymoon couple playing shuffleboard).
I see Jim in school the following week. He is as friendly as he always has been. But I can’t look at him. All I can do is imagine what he said to his mother after he hung up the phone and she asked what did he want, and Jim has to then say to his mother, “He asked if I wanted to go to a matinee of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” “What?” she’d ask. “You heard me,” he’d respond. (Today, of course, there are millions of young boys, little Dear Evan Hansens everywhere, who would die to go to a Broadway matinee. Not then. There were no chat rooms. No social media. No way to find my people. Then there was just me. The only boy at St. Francis Prep who spent the Wednesday of his winter break freezing in line for one discount ticket to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.) The sickly plant that I’d been nurturing already dead. I feel stupid. Imagining a friendship that never was. Will never be. He’s just a nice kid saying hello to someone in his class, nothing more. And I grabbed on to something as simple as that until I strangled the life out of it.
I finally do stop taking piano lessons. I think at the end of my junior year. It’s clear nothing is going to change at this point. I have never stayed once at school even five minutes past the final bell. I have never gone to anyone’s house to watch TV. Gone out on the weekend to a party. Joined a club. Thrown a ball. When I say again I want to stop lessons, this time my mother just says “okay.” No bargains left to be made. I’m seventeen, probably. Mr. Anderson and I mostly talk during my last lesson. He tells me about a bicycle trip he will be going on. I think I play one or two pieces before we say goodbye. My mother comes to pick me up. She doesn’t ask me what I will do now. What I will join, what sport I will play. Nothing. We drive home in silence. I have both won something and lost.
I’ll be fine and dandy / Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas / I’m barely getting through tomorrow / But still I won’t let / Sorrow bring me way down.