CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In which I surprise myself by being made friends of instantly

 

The first thing I learned as the newest and youngest member of an already overcrowded piano tuning and repair course in a brand new school building was that our instructor, Mr. Wilburbottom, didn’t really have 30 years of experience as the brochure had suggested, and there was an element amongst my classmates that was concerned with making something of it.  This element consisted of a very outspoken 25-year-old man from Miami named Hugh Leary, who had taught the second grade for a year after graduating from college, then had lived in Nashville for two years learning honky-tonk ragtime piano from his idol, a Grand Ole Opry star, and then had come to Sioux City to learn a trade.

Our instructor, Mr. Wilburbottom, had graduated from this same piano tech course at Western Iowa Tech six years earlier, and had agreed to try teaching the course when the last teacher walked out suddenly just before the new building opened up.  His 30 years of experience had been with the railroad.

After the lecture and practice session on my first day, we adjourned to a different room for a meeting to plan a class picnic that we were going to have—”no teachers allowed.”  As soon as we got in there and got the door shut, it became apparent that the meeting was secretly about how we were going to get satisfaction from the school.  Hugh was adamant that we should expect a teacher who not only was an experienced piano technician, but an experienced teacher; after all, tuition at Western Iowa Tech was not free.  Through the course of the meeting, it became apparent that there were several factions in the class:  those who had decided to make the best of the situation and take responsibility for their own learning process while at WIT; those who had nothing to say or were undecided; those who felt sorry for Mr. Wilburbottom because he was such a sweet man with such good intentions, even though he didn’t talk so good; a few who agreed with Hugh and wanted to make a big deal out of it; and those who considered Hugh Leary a repulsive, narcissistic, loudmouth Mama’s boy and would have sooner castrated themselves than agree with anything he said.

Since it was my first day, I had no opinion; I was just glad we had something to do besides work on pianos.

It turned out that there was another faction at the meeting that no one had expected:  Mr. Wilburbottom.  He had been listening outside the door, and had heard the whole thing.  Shortly after the various factions had proven to be irreconcilable and several students were threatening to walk out of the meeting so they could get to work on what they’d come to school for, Mr. Wilburbottom walked in.

He was angry that we had not invited him to our meeting or come to him personally with our worries.  He threatened to quit.  He was just there as a favor to us anyway, because the school hadn’t run onto anyone else who was willing to teach the course.  He never said he was the greatest teacher or the smartest man or even that good of a tuner.  But if we thought we could do a better job of learning piano tuning and repair without him, then more power to us.  He could make a better living on the outside anyway, in his own business, being his own boss.

The tide had turned against Hugh Leary, and many of the students became quite vocal in support of the viewpoint that we weren’t there to be spoon-fed, that we had knowingly chosen the lowest-priced piano tech course in the entire country, and that any whiner who didn’t want to be there was free to quit and get his money back, which would be just fine, because the class was overcrowded anyway.  And Mr. Wilburbottom reminded us that the school had hired him an assistant, Mr. Lumpford (spelled “Lunsford”), a Master Craftsman member of the Piano Technician’s Guild with 30 years of actual experience in the field, and it would only be a couple of days before Mr. Lumpford would be getting to town to take over as head instructor and to teach us the more exotic aspects of piano tuning and repair—such as tuning—which Mr. Wilburbottom could do OK but had a hard time explaining about.

The outcome of the meeting was that no one wanted Mr. Wilburbottom to quit, and we were sorry he had gotten his feelings hurt.  To everyone’s great relief, it was time for lunch.

At lunch I sat with the friend I had met first thing after lecture, when I had joined another student like myself who didn’t care to be jostled by the crowd around the table where Mr. Wilburbottom had set up the repair demonstration for the day’s practice session.  The name of my new friend was Hugh Leary.

It wasn’t long before Hugh invited me to join a honky-tonk band he was forming, “The Merry Meadow Muffin Mushers.”  The purpose of this project was to give him experience playing ragtime piano for an audience, and our performances would mostly take place in nursing homes and grade schools.  He already had a fiddler lined up, a skinny 20-year-old girl with short blonde hair who he had met at Briarcliff College where he had rented a dormitory room.  She was a music major and the adopted daughter of a professional bandleader who had adopted Lisa and then proceeded to father several real children.  She idolized Olivia Newton-John.  She was a nice girl.  A very nice girl.  Very, very nice.

Hugh had set up a steak-and-lobster dinner to take place at Lisa’s Grandma’s house, since she didn’t get along with her parents, before our first big public performance, which was to be in a gymnasium at Briarcliff College.  The three of us went shopping for the steak and lobster and accessories earlier in the day, and every time Hugh said something, Lisa threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug.  He responded a little stiffly, though he seemed pleased enough that someone appreciated his cosmopolitan sophistication and his outrageously sarcastic comments about Sioux City, the site of the largest feedlot in the world.

After the performance, Hugh and I were hanging around by the sign that said “EXIT” while Lisa mixed with her fellow Briarcliff students, and I mentioned to him that I had developed a sudden urge to smoke a little marijuana.  He said he didn’t know I smoked, and went looking for Lisa.  When he’d gotten her rounded up, we all got in the front seat of Hugh’s car and he drove to a park and stopped.

It just so happened that he had a bong under the front seat of his car, and the bowl was already loaded.  He proceeded to instruct us on how to smoke out of a bong properly, and we all took a couple puffs and got wasted.  Then he started to drive me home.

Finding myself outside of my usual frame of reference, I grabbed Lisa and started kissing her.  It felt funny.  I couldn’t tell where her face ended and mine began.  We were like one rubbery face, munching itself.  It was such an interesting sensation, I was sorry when we got to my house and it was time for me to get out.

Hugh had been unusually quiet on the way there.  When he got to the house, he told Lisa she had to get out too.  She started to cry, and I was just confused.  I didn’t know what was going on.  He said, You can’t burn your candle at both ends.  She gave him a big hug and said she was sorry, and this time he stiffened up and reared away from her.

I wondered if possibly I had intruded on my friend’s territory.

So Lisa got out and we snuck into Mrs. Dunker’s house together, and I called her a cab and passed out in my bed.

The next day was a Sunday, and Lisa and I met because she had promised to explain to me what had happened the night before.  Somehow I got her upstairs in broad daylight, and we sat on my bed and she told me that she had something to tell me about Hugh that was going to shock me, and I was not to tell him that she was sharing this information with me, because she was under strict orders to keep it to herself.  She told me that Hugh was gay, and that he had wanted to have an experimental heterosexual relationship with her, but he didn’t want anyone to know about it, which is why I hadn’t known about it.  Why it had to be a secret, I don’t know, but I was relieved to find out that it wasn’t just my own thick head that had caused the blunder.  She had tried to talk to him on the phone already that morning, and he had told her that their relationship was over; from now on she was just a member of his band.

And then I proceeded to lose my virginity.

Lisa was an eager teacher.  A very eager teacher.  A very, very eager teacher.

And she was nice:  she worshipped and adored me, and thought I was the cleverest, handsomest, most intelligent and talented man in the whole world, and she never brought up the fact that she was older and more sophisticated than me.  All I had to do to earn her Hopeless Devotion was to follow her around from lounge to lounge, drink Pink Squirrels with her, listen to her talk about herself, take her home and sneak her into my room, give her a good screwing, and call her a cab.  It was, for me, a simple relationship.  Maybe too simple.  Maybe way too simple.

Meanwhile, Hugh explained that he had quickly forgiven me for taking Lisa away from him, and chalked it up to my lack of experience with marijuana.  He told me that the object for the sophisticated pot smoker should be to get as stoned as possible, then to behave as normally as possible.

The first part of the prescription was getting easier for me.

He also explained that he knew that Lisa had told me that he was gay, because every time he walked into the room we started acting too casual.

Anyhow, Hugh Leary still wanted The Meadow Muffin Mushers to play together, including “that sleazy nymphomaniac half-wit psychopathic bitch” that I was sleeping with, may God protect me from her, and he had no hard feelings toward me at all.  So we kept playing our honky-tonk music in nursing homes and grade schools, and we kept practicing every week at Briarcliff College.  Every time Hugh would leave the room, Lisa would grab my ass, and when he returned he would make some outrageously gay comment and she would howl with laughter, and he would ignore her, and everything was peachy-keen, except that Hugh—who had a Bachelor Degree in Psychology—explained to me, whenever we were at school pretending to work on pianos, that Lisa was:

1.  The school nymphomaniac at Briarcliff College;

2.  A violin player, not a fiddler, and a bad one at that;

3. A psychopathic chameleon who would distort her own self-image to whatever extent required to get someone, anyone, to like her.

I respected Hugh’s right to have an opinion and to spout it constantly, and as a matter of fact, by christmas I had grown so bored with my relationship with Lisa that I drove her out of my life.  It was one of those situations that wouldn’t resolve itself, because she was so nice, and the meaner I got, the more Hopelessly Devoted to me she got, and the more miserable her devotion, the meaner my response, until I finally had to take my key back, make her sleep on the floor if she showed up at my apartment anyway, and when that didn’t work, I wrote her a letter explaining Points 1, 2, and 3 above, and demanded that she never come around again.

It worked.  When I got back from christmas vacation, she had a new freshman chump tagging along with her, and last time I saw her she was as happy as a lark.

I hope she still is.

One day I got home from school and Mrs. Dunker met me at the door, her eyes practically swollen shut.  She wanted to know why I was burning incense in my room, and told me she had allergies and wouldn’t tolerate it.  I said OK, and that should have been the end of that.  But she hadn’t finished with me; she had already caught me bringing a girl into the house—”But we were just playing cards”—and now this.  I overheard her talking to one of her old biddy friends about that boy up there desecrating her husband’s deathbed:  “And I hear they burn that incense to cover up marijuana smoke!”

On the advice of my friend Hugh, who was using all his gas driving me home to my end of town whenever we got through rehearsing or performing or hanging out somewhere, I called my Mama and my Daddy and talked them into putting me into an apartment of my own.  In 1974 you could get a studio apartment at the Ida Apartments—which Hugh Leary called the “Geriatric Home”—for $99 a month, and instead of eating fast food every night and vending machine sandwiches at school—since I never set foot in Mrs. Dunker’s “kitchen privileges” trap, knowing she just wanted someone to talk to—I would have my own kitchen.  The additional $55 per month they would have to spend on rent could be saved by eating store-bought food instead of restaurant food, like Hamburger Helper, Jell-O brand cheesecake mix, and other culinary delights that could not be prepared in Mrs. Dunker’s late husband’s room.  My Mama and my Daddy could but agree, and now, thanks to them, I had a little breathing room, I felt like a human being for the first time since leaving Hazing, and best of all, me and Hugh had a place to hang out and smoke as much marijuana as we wanted.

I should say, as much as he wanted, because I was always more than satisfied when he was only about halfway as stoned as he wanted to get, and the bowl on the water pipe I’d made out of a half-gallon picnic jug was so large that he definitely needed my help keeping it lit.  It was only when he hauled out his cigarettes—he only smoked them when he was stoned—that I began getting nauseous, and when he finally left, nothing could have kept me awake a minute longer short of a slap in the face with a wet cat.

But I enjoyed listening to him talk about himself, although he didn’t believe me when I tried to get out of smoking just one more bowl by claiming that marijuana made me hallucinate.  Actually I enjoyed the hallucinating; it was the sensation of being forced further out of phase with physical reality every time I took another hit that put me on the verge of panic.  But I learned to like it; compared to the world I’d inherited from my grandparents, it was exciting, interesting, unpredictable, and best of all, Forbidden.

There was the time Hugh Leary and I got stoned and sat in the parking lot at the Dairy King trying to eat our banana splits, but we couldn’t stop laughing—and no one told us to stop!

There was the time that Hugh and I, along with Biscuits and Kim from school, got stoned one dark winter night and tobogganed down a suicidally steep hill at Briarcliff College that we couldn’t see the bottom of, and since I was in front, I had to steer us into a crash roll when I realized we were headed straight into a chain-link fence.  The only casualty was my glasses, and when we got back to the dorm, Biscuits puked his brains out from smoking too much marijuana, and never smoked again.

Imagine that.  What a wimp.  But at the age of 19 he already had a bachelor’s degree from some snooty music school in Texas where he was from, and was married to his childhood sweetheart, and had his own car, and was a professional baker, and when he and Kim decided that Hugh Leary was a repulsive, narcissistic loudmouth, and that I was a psychopathic chameleon who would distort my own self-image to whatever extent required to get someone, anyone, to like me, they refused to give me any more rides to school, and I had to go to and from school in a car full of the Truly Male students from my class, who couldn’t stop making extra loud comments about ”Hugh Leary, Master Craftsman,” just because they were jealous that he’d somehow managed to get a visiting lecturer from the Piano Technician’s Guild to give him the Master Craftsman test and certify him as a Master Craftsman Member of the Piano Technician’s Guild before any of them even thought to attempt taking the test.  I understand why he was in a hurry, because he was leaving Sioux City early to spend the fourth quarter of the year-long course doing on-the-job training under a blind piano tuner he knew in Nashville.

That summer, after Hugh Leary was gone, Mr. Wilburbottom caught me with some of the school’s tools in my toolbox, and I conveniently blamed Hugh for putting them in there, knowing that all you had to do to get on Mr. Wilburbottom’s right side was to say something nasty about Hugh Leary.  I confessed that I had picked the wrong person to hang out with, and Mr. Wilburbottom let me off the hook, confiding in me that the school had quietly expelled him from the course when they discovered that his blind piano tuner friend in Nashville who was supposedly providing on-the-job training “hadn’t seen him all summer.”

I only just now got the joke.  Poor Hugh.  I hope he is still alive.

You see, Hugh’s favorite topic of monologue was what it was like to be gay in the big city, and most of the things he told me about were the sorts of things that get people dead in the age of AIDS.  So I must say that I truly hope my friend is alive, and to hell with all those boring assholes who didn’t like him.

I also must say that Hugh Leary never tried to touch my pee-pee.