I had three choices of weapons, it seemed, and I weighed each option.
Okay. I knew I wasn’t going to shoot anyone. So the derringer was out.
The Mace! That’s the ticket! I thought.
Then I realized that if I sprayed inside the car, I’d get an eyeful too and wouldn’t be able to drive.
Hmm…which one of these…But I had paused too long, and that made the Shadowy Figure nervous.
“Fuckin’ hit it, kid, let’s go!” he erupted, his words hitting me just before his nasty breath arrived.
I had to act quickly, and I opted for the knife, which I pulled out calmly in a show of confidence, as adrenaline shot through my wiry frame. Then I heard myself speak.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my car.”
I remained completely deadpan. I established full eye contact as I gripped the knife handle, the way a toddler might a fork. We were both still, and quiet. The motor was running. The turn signal was tocking away. It seemed like a long time, though I’m sure it wasn’t. Just long enough to forget how I was dressed.
The stinky man looked me up and down, laughed, and tried to open the car door, but of course I had locked the doors when I got in. A pause. I fumbled around the panel of the driver’s door with my left hand, my eyes fixed on the Shadowy Figure and my right hand still clutching the knife. The amount of time I was taking was making him even more nervous. Maybe as the Shadowy Figure had left home that night, his dad had warned him of nerd weirdo Bavarian serial killers.
They lock you in their Chevy Suburbans and cut your nuts off!
Who knows what he thought, but as soon as my left hand managed to clumsily locate the UNLOCK button, he slid out of the car in a hurry. He said I was lucky he didn’t take that knife right out of my skinny hand and stick it up my ass, as he slammed the door with all the energy he would have beaten me to a pulp with. He returned to the shadows, Shadowy Figure that he was, perhaps having second thoughts about this midnight mugging career. I put my wooden shoe to the metal pedal and sped down Peters Creek Parkway with a giant knife pressed to the steering wheel, my skinny, hairy legs quaking beneath it.
AN ACCIDENTAL MENTOR
AS THE SUMMER OF 1985 drew to an end, so did my electronic-polka-music gig, and I enrolled for fall semester in music school at the nearby and eminently affordable University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I don’t know what got into me the day I took the placement tests for UNC–G’s music school. I could have breezed through a good year or two of my basic music subjects and entered at an appropriate level, probably at about fourth semester. But I decided to answer just enough of the test to manipulate my placement as a second-semester music major, at the 102 levels. I just left the rest of the test blank and turned it in, even though I knew the answers. Unsurprisingly, finding myself in courses that were too easy, I became bored and started skipping class. I got a D-minus in ear training because, although I could sight-sing every note, I got stubborn and refused to learn an antiquated method called “solfège.” You may know it, even if you’ve never studied music: “do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do.” Like Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music.
Doe, a deer. A female deer.
That’s actually all I know of that song.
Solfège was, I thought, for students who couldn’t remember the pitches and intervals and needed the associative phonetics. It’s actually quite useful for classical musicians communicating scale degrees in certain situations, but to me it was like training wheels that I didn’t need. I was sight-singing the pitches anyway, and isn’t that the point?
My most curious abdication during my UNC–G placement tests was the piano test. During that audition, I sat on my hands and pretended I’d never touched the instrument. I can’t tell you exactly what was going through my mind. Maybe I was just ashamed to demonstrate how awful my sight-reading really was. Maybe I hoped that by starting over, I’d be forced to improve my reading, catching up on any bits of technique that I missed as a child. I guess we never fully understand the little self-destructive quirks that present themselves along the way. In any event, I was placed in first-semester class piano, in a roomful of non-music students who couldn’t tell you which note was middle C.
The group piano class was conducted in a large semicircle of Wurlitzer electric pianos, all connected to one group mix of headphones. Every student’s piano came through everyone else’s headphones simultaneously, so you couldn’t tell who was playing what. The bored instructor was tethered to his own wires and piano at the mouth of the semicircle, to demonstrate how to do things like pressing a key down and letting it up when you wanted it to stop. It was a one-finger-at-a-time affair, the way my father types an email. It was a fine opportunity for a keyboard-proficient class clown.
I tormented the poor grad-student teacher, whose job it was to teach us how the fingers are numbered and where to place our hands. When he wasn’t looking my way, I’d throw in some kind of crazy jazz lick, or I’d re-harmonize the one-note melody we were learning, and I kept a pretty good poker face. When he realized he wasn’t going to catch the joker, he begged for it to please stop. It was an interesting challenge to try and lay my hands on the keys as if it were a foreign language.
After a couple of weeks, the usual grad-student teacher took a day off, and in his place stood a disheveled old man. This is really going to be fun, I thought. I screwed around with the old fellow for the full fifty minutes, but he seemed utterly oblivious. What an idiot, I thought, throwing in a few extra ridiculous mocking riffs, with audible chuckles from the rest of the class.
As class let out, he stopped me at the door.
“What’s your name, might I ask?” he said, very gently. In fact, the kindness he’d maintained throughout the whole class had begun to make me feel like a dick. I figured I deserved the smackdown he was about to deliver. Instead, he only asked if I would be so kind as to make a little time at 3 P.M. that day to drop by his office. Ah, I saw how this guy was. He was going to give me the afternoon to get nervous and then break me down in his office, alone, away from my peers.
* * *
—
At 3 P.M. sharp, he answered the door of his top-floor corner office, which housed a gorgeous mid-twentieth-century Steinway D concert piano, a library of beautiful scores arranged in floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves, and wonderful old photographs. Well lived in and loved, the office spoke volumes about this man’s personality and life. Plus, it had great art deco windows with a view of Tate Street that almost made me like the school. It seemed he was big stuff at UNC–G. Who’d have known?
He introduced himself as Robert Darnell. He’d been in this office at UNC–G, he said, for forty years. His manner was bright and easy, if a little weary. He was the oldest member of the music staff, probably in his upper seventies. He led me straight to the piano.