CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In which I build the foundation for my future career

 

While my spare time at home—all of which was spare—was constructively occupied with experiments involving marijuana-induced delirium, songwriting, and an ever-widening vista of non-experience, I got on fairly well at piano tuning school, although we were forced to spend an hour a day practicing our tuning.  I can think of worse reasons to be locked up in a teeny little room with a beat-up little out-of-tune piano, but not much worse.

For example, to console myself there was always the thought of how much worse it would be to spend the rest of my life as a prisoner in some backward country where criminals are starved and tortured to death over a period of many years, or how much worse it would be to be an accountant, or a ditch-digger, as I cranked away and banged away on those beat-up little pianos, listening for sounds I wasn't convinced should really exist, and then hearing so many sounds that I'd never heard before that I couldn't tell the difference between the sounds I was supposed to listen to and the sounds I was supposed to ignore.  To simplify matters, the textbook we were using decried listening to these little sounds—known as "harmonics"—as a dreadful mistake.  But all the other textbooks that had ever been written on piano tuning identified harmonics as being somewhat important to the process.  Mr. Wilburbottom and Mr. Lumpford resolved the controversy in the name of scientific objectivity by forbidding us to look at any books other than the piece of shit book we had been forced to purchase for $36—which was my monthly income in 1974—so I spent all my time for the next two weeks reading the forbidden old classics in the school library instead of going to class.  But exactly what the role of harmonics in piano tuning was, the books didn't come right out and say, and if not for my classmates Billy Bullocks and Frank Suremellow, I may never have learned enough about tuning theory to launch into my ill-fated pseudo career as a piano tuner, or as we were supposed to refer to ourselves in the New World of Over-inflated Image, “piano tuner-technician.”

While I was the youngest student in the class, Frank Suremellow was the oldest.  He was the retired conductor of the US Navy Band, and in that capacity had arranged the music for Tricia Nixon’s wedding.  Frank Suremellow was from back East, of Italian descent, and while he was one of the friendliest people in the class, he had little time for socializing since he was also one of the hardest working.  Unlike some of us, he had something to practice in those little rooms: he had already studied piano tuning from a number of Master Craftsmen, so he actually knew what to try, but in his humble way of minding his own business, he never made it a point to publicly denounce Mr. Wilburbottom’s lack of knowledge or experience.  After Mr. Wilburbottom gave up his teaching position a year or two later, Frank took the job for a few years in order to give the school time to look around for another qualified person.

Billy Bullocks was one of my favorite classmates because he was one of the class clowns.  At that time I had no idea that he would have any part in my future as a so-called piano tuner, both sooner and later, nor did I know the difference, back in those early days, between a comedian and someone with a sense of humor.  His sarcastic comments during lectures entertained me when there was nothing else about the lecture to hold my attention, and that was all it took to earn my respect.

One day as I was wandering around looking for some kind of time-wasting activity to pursue, Billy Bullocks passed me and excitedly announced, apparently because I was the first person he saw to pass on his good news, that Frank Suremellow had just given him a piano tuning lesson, and now he understood what it was about harmonics that made their role in piano tuning not only important, but absolutely the key to everything.

So I assuaged my growing consternation and curiosity by writing my first-ever bad check, to get one of those newfangled mini-calculators, which still cost $20 or more in 1974.  At home with my new toy, and based on the information I gleaned from a brief synopsis given me by Billy Bullocks, I picked the piano tuning theory apart until I discovered, and then proved mathematically, that the mysterious phenomena commonly called "beats," which we were definitely and undisputedly supposed to be listening to, were one and the same event as the harmonics we were supposed to be trying to ignore.  Having the crucial evidence in hand, I was ready to try listening to the little sounds at last; I finally knew what they were, and what invisible physical phenomena the sounds made manifest.

This might have been the first clue that I should have been going to a real college studying engineering and mathematics, but since I still thought that an engineer is someone who drives a choo-choo train, the thought of changing to an area of study such as engineering that might have interested me never crossed my teeny-tiny little mind; I thought all scientists studied bugs, and I assumed that the field of mechanics was limited to fixing cars, so I had no idea at this time that I was interested in designing exotic and revolutionary machinery.

So it was that I set my new calculator aside and returned to the piano tuning practice rooms with a dozen sheets of calculations and charts, a watch with a second hand that I tried to use to count the vibrational rates of the beats, and no more interest in piano tuning than a monkey on a banana boat.

And there I sat, festering in my boredom and discontent, half-heartedly trying to stop thinking about pizza, candy corn, the unfortunate lack of marijuana trees in my apartment, and female anatomy.  It never occurred to me that my Daddy had pushed me into a corner where I didn't belong; being away from his worried gaze was all it took to make me assume that I was in the right place, and it was many years before I fully realized that I had everything it took to be a professional piano tuner except the interest and the ability.

As the year dragged on, the cloud of wanting to give up but not knowing that giving up was an option settled deeper and deeper into my marijuana-saturated brain, and by the time the end of the year came along, I had given up without quite realizing it, because I had no confidence that I could tune well enough to satisfy a customer or myself, and the process of tuning a piano badly still took me two or three times longer than it should.

Mr. Lumpford didn't stick around very long, and in his place the school fathers hired a skinny little red-haired, half-blind, would-be playboy from Canada to head up our department.  He was elated to get the job, since he couldn't tune pianos and didn't want to, and as head of our department he was assured a steady paycheck so that he could keep a roof over his blind wife's head while he ran around and hung out at lounges and, if his boasts can be believed, got his pee-pee wet all over town.  We affectionately called him "Fisheye," named after a pesky blemish in piano lacquer that plagued our attempts to get our Lemon-Pledge-polluted piano refinishing jobs to come out smooth.  When Fisheye looked at you, he turned his head to the side and squinted out of the corner of his eye, and you were never sure exactly where he was looking.  That would have been excusable enough, since it probably wasn’t his fault he couldn’t see very well, but the problem with him was that he was so stupid and weird that nobody was willing to forgive him for being half blind, no matter whose fault it was.

Fisheye gave one lecture in the months that he was our chief instructor.  It was on marketing, and the only suggestion I remember was that when we advertised our piano tuning services, we should make sure that the ad included a picture of a woman in a bra.  I wouldn't have remembered this all these years if he had been kidding; Fisheye's only charm was that he took himself seriously.  His time was spent wandering from workbench to workbench filling some of us in—not including me—on his nighttime activities.  The only time he would go into a tuning practice room was if he needed a private place to pass gas, or just to shoot off his mouth.  Same difference.  One time the school fathers and some visiting bigwigs invaded our workshop for a surprise tour.  When Fisheye saw the suits coming down the corridor like a tsunami, he ran over to the nearest piano and, while the students who had just finished fine-sanding the piano looked on in awe, he grabbed a piece of coarse sandpaper and started rubbing their piano with it.  By the time the bigwigs left, he had worn a hole clear through the veneer.

Because of the incredible intensity and fast pace of our technical education, some of us were forced to take long breaks in empty classrooms where we would meet secretly as a committee calling itself "The Fisheye Conspiracy."  It was our selfless aim to document the excellence of the education we were receiving at Western Iowa Tech by composing a 20-page letter singing the praises of our proud mentors and their fatherly bosses.  One of the members of The Fisheye Conspiracy was engaged to the daughter of an Iowa state legislator who generously agreed to write a cover letter for our document before we sent it anonymously to the Board of Education and other parties who we thought would be interested in helping us reward our school for the level of its integrity and for the quality of its commitment to our educational process.  The chief aim and purpose of the Fisheye Conspiracy was to see justice done.

Sorry as I was that I had to miss valuable class time to work on the Fisheye Conspiracy’s 20-page letter to the Board of Education, it seemed the appropriate sacrifice for me to make under the circumstances—anyway, I needed a place to hide because some of my fellow students were not being friendly to me anymore; maybe they had me mentally linked up in their minds with that tool thief Hugh Leary, the Master Craftsman, the Perpetual Scream.  But most of the time there was no need for me to worry about how to get out of learning how to fix pianos, because my new friend since Hugh Leary had left was a true California pothead, a guitar player and singer, a rich kid about my age with no worries, who liked my company and kept me from getting too involved with whatever was happening at school, beyond the absolute minimum.

The reason that Grandy Flack—heir to the world’s largest accounting firm—was chosen to be my friend by the powers that determine the course of my misery is that he was destined to become an LA yuppie, and this was my only chance to ever have an LA yuppie as a friend: before he became one.  But back then he just wanted to smoke pot before school, walk into class late with a big grin, and get me out of there before lunch so we could go meet some girls before his girlfriend got off work.  He was not interested in anybody’s opinion of him and did not consider the art of piano tuning to be difficult enough to dwell on.  I could only admire his cocky self-assurance, and I earned the disrespect I needed from my fellow classmates by following Grandy Flack everywhere the whole summer, the way I had followed Hugh Leary around the first three-quarters of the 48-week school year.

The truth is, Grandy Flack and I actually had something in common: he was the next to the youngest, and I was the youngest student in the class.  Now there’s a thought: maybe that’s why my Daddy had pushed so hard to get me into this school: he didn’t want to take the risk that I might confront  my first experience with taking responsibility for my day-to-day life, anywhere within 300 miles of him, and especially not while living in his basement.  Better that I go off and do something—anything—anywhere—anywhere but where he would have to watch or participate, feeling angrier and angrier, and guiltier and guiltier.  A fellow can only afford so much therapy because of his kids.  Better turn over the character-building part to those boys up at that college.

The bright point of the summer was a week-long visit from Batanwa Jim.  He had just graduated from high school and needed some help learning how to waste the precious first moments of finding himself outside of any educational institution, like where I had wanted to be since the first day of kindergarten, and where I already had been, until my Daddy had the big idea of sending me off to wander aimlessly into a career—piano tuning—at the cost of losing my taste for pianos, and thereby losing a hobby and gaining a thorn in the side that got mistaken for a career opportunity off-and-on for many years.

Batanwa Jim and I had a goal for the week: to do as many things as possible that we had never done before, but we were so stoned most of the time that we forgot to think up new things to do; all we really got around to was:

1.      going to our first porno movie

2.      trying to manufacture our first hashish

3.      that’s all I remember.

Anyhow, it was a fun visit and we probably enjoyed it.

My marijuana-induced probings into the dark side of awareness during the 9-month Sioux City winter left me shaken and disoriented between binges—that is, between bags—and it was during some of these times without pot that I read a book called Sybil, about a horrifyingly traumatized child who grew up incredibly, systematically insane.  I found it so fascinatingly frightening that I became morbidly hopeful that I might be having a total mental breakdown, so I might be let out of the obligation to establish a career.  I wrote letters to my Mama and my Daddy, squeezing them for details about my childhood, my play therapy sessions at age seven, and anything truly bizarre they might have left out of the official set of family memories.  Anything from my childhood that could explain why I was such a complete zero as a member of a species.

They came up for my graduation, and after watching me accept a diploma “with honors”—which was the school’s way of flattering itself—they drove me home to Hazing and it was on that trip that I first learned of the happy life we had led during my first few years 20 miles from Grandma Wrathburn’s town, of her contempt for my Daddy, of the big 45-minute eruption over whether I could watch my baby brother get a bath, my sustained regression to age-three behavior during the play therapy at age seven, the sudden loss of speech and social development at the age of 22 months which crippled me socially 100% till age three—now remember, this data is all being divulged to me for the first time—of how my Grandma Wrathburn hated my guts and nit-picked everything I did, and how she was then anguished because I wouldn’t acknowledge her existence.

The icing on the cake came after my Mama fell asleep in the back seat.  After checking two or three times to make sure she was really asleep, my Daddy chose this fine and splendid moment to dump on me his experience as an eighteen-year-old working for his molester, his music teacher, as his molester’s “farmboy.”

I enjoyed absorbing all these revelations with every fiber of my being.  How long I had waited to be told the truth about my own life!  Suddenly at least some of my extremes of mood and behavior, past and present, seemed to start to make a little bit of sense.

That night I fell asleep in my own bed at home in my Mama and Daddy’s basement.  Another night that week I lay there again, mulling over an offer that my parents had just made me: in my own way of saying it, this is sort of like what they said to me: Sonny boy, listen here now, we know you aren’t very happy or comfortable out there in those shark-infested waters, and we realize we didn’t know how to help you with your problems, whatever they are, and we have come up with a Plan A and a Plan B for you to choose between.  Plan A was that I would go through life pretending to be a piano tuner and commit suicide or get addicted to drugs or die of syphilis because I couldn’t admit to myself or my parents that I hated tuning pianos and would never be good at it, compared to the people who are.  At best—and of course that is what happened, since I am such a lucky fellow—I would dabble in piano tuning only when it suited me, and struggle like a minimum wage serf most of the time, because the concepts of self-employment, motivation, marketing, professional development, networking, etc., were entirely foreign to me and to everybody in my whole entire nuclear family, so there was no one to know what kind of help I needed, so every time I refused to go to work or to get a job or whatever, it would end up becoming some kind of psychiatric issue of some kind.  That was Plan A, in my own words.  Plan B was that my Daddy’s government health insurance, which he had spent his allowance on every month for as long as he’d been in his distinguished career, would send me to the very best nuthouse in the whole wide world, the Menninger Foundation, which was just down the road in Topeka.  There I would become happily occupied, leading the poor doctors in circles trying to get a diagnosis, because I bear noticeable traces of borderline personality, sociopathy, manic-depression, paranoid schizophrenia, grandiose delusion, agoraphobia, passive-aggression, and on and on. After years of diagnosis, I would write a book about myself, which I couldn’t get it published, and commit suicide because it seemed like the romantic thing to do.  Those again are my own words, and I might have fluffed up a little what my Mama and my Daddy themselves would have said.

My Mama and my Daddy had been thoughtful enough to point me the way forward upon my so-called graduation from so-called childhood: Either become the family nutcase—someone we write letters to, perpetually cared for by the best medical insurance money could buy, who gets to visit on holidays—it’s either that or go out into the world all alone and flounder and fail and suffer like everybody else, and do it away from the watchful eye of keepers.

Since I was a naive young man and did not know what was waiting for me out there, I naturally chose to be my own keeper, foregoing the golden opportunity to spend the rest of my life in a cushy, air-conditioned, high class institution, being probed by famous doctors and their students, with no responsibilities, no need to strive and thrash around out there in that terrifying world that I had always known was going to become my ruination.

My Mama and my Daddy’s keen insight into the hidden causes of the severity of my case was so refreshing and welcome, along with the promise of my own room in Topeka, Kansas, expenses paid for life, that I was mighty tempted to take them up on it.  I let them take me to Topeka.  We had some sort of potential entrance interview.  I sort of figured I’d go ahead with it.  I could always change my mind.  But there would always be that stigma.  I would always know.  I would feel different.  But who could turn down the opportunity to avoid working indefinitely?

As it turned out, I inwardly preferred Plan A, but went ahead and limped through the years making half-hearted stabs at Plan B.  I made the next several years and portions of the Western United States my personal nuthouse.  I just stayed away from that particular snob loony bin; I had in mind a funkier, more down-to-earth snake pit like the ones you see in the movies.  It was just a fantasy though; who would ever consider me a candidate for the freak show?

Who but my Mama and my Daddy.