Words Without Music: A Memoir (2 page)

My father was very physical and muscular: about five foot ten and 180 pounds. A dark-haired, rough-cut handsome man, he had several different sides to him: a gentle side, a tough side, a self-made businessman side. His gentle side showed in the way he looked after children—not just his own, but other people’s children, too. If the fathers were absent, he would go over and spend time with the kids in the family, so much so that for a long time my cousin Ira Glass thought that Ben was his grandfather, because when Ira’s grandfather wasn’t around Ben would go over and play grandfather. To many of the children in our extended family, he was Uncle Bennie.

His tough side came out in the way he could run a record store in a low-rent area of downtown Baltimore, a part of the city near the waterfront that was home to both Jewish delicatessens and burlesque joints. Even though this was a rough area, he did not have any problems. He could take care of anybody who threatened him or the store, and he could pulverize them. And he would.

Ben had been in the Marines twice, once in Santo Domingo in the 1920s (U.S. troops were in the Dominican Republic for eight years, in a military occupation now mostly forgotten), and then in the Second World War, when, at the age of thirty-six—almost at the upper age limit for service, thirty-nine—he reenlisted and went off again to boot camp. He had had tough Marine training and he wanted to teach Marty and me how to take care of ourselves in extreme situations. Once he told us about the time muggers had set up a trip wire on South Howard Street near the store.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Ben began. “I was coming out of the store one night after closing, about nine thirty. I hit this trip wire and fell on the ground, and I knew exactly what it was.”

“What did you do?” we asked.

“I waited for them.”

When they got close enough, he grabbed hold of them and beat the crap out of them.

The way he said, “I waited for them,” we just thought, Yeah, he was ready.

Indeed, Ben was ready for anything. There are always shoplifters in bookstores and these kinds of record stores. You’d be amazed what kinds of things they can put into their pants and under their shirts. This was in the days of LPs, but even so they were still putting them under their shirts. Marty and I were supposed to tell him if we saw anybody doing that.

“If you see anybody shoplifting,” Ben instructed us, “picking up something and putting it under their clothes, just call me.”

Well, we didn’t call him, because of what would happen when he would catch one of the shoplifters. He would take the guy outside and beat him until he was senseless. Our dad had no interest in calling the cops. He wasn’t interested in teaching any kind of civic lessons. He just wanted to make sure they never came back to the store, and they didn’t. But once you, as his kid, had witnessed that, you didn’t want to see it again. I distinctly remember seeing one young fellow taking a record and putting it into his pants, and I just let him go. It would have been too upsetting to see what would have happened.

Ben the businessman would work from nine in the morning until nine at night. One time when I was still very young, I asked, “Daddy, what keeps you going here at the store?”

“All I have is this store,” he said. “And what I want to do is to use this one store to be as successful as I possibly can.”

“What does that mean?”

“I want to see how much money I can make. My satisfaction is in making this thing work.” He really meant it. He worked tirelessly and he ended up with a fairly good business.

Ben was typical of the generation that didn’t have a higher education. I don’t even know if he finished high school. He was one of those young men who just went to work at a certain point. His two older brothers became doctors, but he didn’t. When he was young, he and his brothers would stand on the street corners of Baltimore selling newspapers, I guess it would have been when they were twelve or thirteen. While they stood there, they played mental chess. They also played mental checkers, which is harder, by the way. At least with mental chess you know what the pieces are. With mental checkers, it’s harder to visualize the board because the pieces, apart from their red or black color, are all the same.

My father taught me to play mental chess, too. I would be with him in the car and he would say, “Pawn to King 4” and I’d say, “Pawn to King 4.” He’d say, “Knight to King’s Bishop 3” and I’d say, “Pawn to Queen 3.” We went through a game together and I learned to visualize chess. I was probably seven or eight years old and I could already do that. Years later when I was learning to do exercises in visualization, I discovered I had developed this aptitude when I was very young. In some of the esoteric traditions that I have engaged with, working with visualizations is a routine exercise. Part of the exercise is to develop a terrific clarity, so that you can actually see everything. I discovered that many people couldn’t see anything, but I could see right away, and that was a big help. For instance, if I were looking at a Tibetan Buddhist meditational figure, I could see the eyes, I could see the hands, I could see what the hands were holding, I could see the whole thing. I had a number of friends who said they were having trouble visualizing and I realized that I didn’t have any trouble. When I wondered why I didn’t, I remembered those chess games that Ben and I used to play.

During the Second World War, every eligible male member of our family was in the armed forces. I was about to turn five years old when America went to war, and there were no men in the family living in Baltimore at that time. My mother had to go off to work all day at school, so Maud, the woman who was helping raise us and to whom we were very close because she spent a long time with us, would dress us in the morning. My mother would come back in time to cook dinner, and then she would go downtown and work in the store until nine o’clock at night. Ida ran the store all the years my father was away. During the day there were employees, but she was there at night and on weekends to take the money out of the cash register, examine the accounts, and order new records. She didn’t know what Ben knew, but she knew what needed to be done. She wasn’t the only woman doing that. If you think back, the women’s liberation movement could well have come out of the Second World War, when women, given the labor shortage, took over many jobs formerly done by men. When the men came back from the war, their wives were working, and a lot of those women did not want to give up their jobs.

After the war, when the first televisions were made and sold, Ben sent away for a build-it-yourself television set. He built it and from that moment on he began repairing televisions. Marty and I were supposed to learn that, too, and to a degree we did, but I don’t think we ever got really good at it. We didn’t have the motivation that he had.

The only television signal we got in those early days was from Washington, D.C. It was a test pattern. There was a lot of snow, as we used to say. After a while, professional football games started being shown on Sunday afternoon. By 1947 or ’48, more programming was needed, so an early version of what came to be known as television producers would go into the schools and get the kids to play music. They would often do live broadcasts directly from the schools, so when I was ten and eleven years old, I was on television playing the flute.

SHEPPIE, MARTY, AND I ALL BEGAN
with music when we were quite young. Shep and Marty had weekly piano lessons from a piano teacher, who traveled from home to home giving children lessons, but I had chosen to study the flute. Beginning at age six, I had taken some violin lessons given as group classes at the Park School, my first elementary school. For some reason the violin didn’t “take,” which is odd to imagine, given that I’ve written so much string music—solo, quartets, sonatas, symphonies—since then.

I do recall, though, that there was a boy a year older than me at my school who had a flute. I thought it was the most beautiful instrument I had ever seen or heard, and I wanted to do nothing more than to play the flute. I wound up playing it until I was thirty. In fact, even in my first professional concerts, I was playing the flute as well as keyboards.

I soon learned that when I took my flute with me to school, I would sometimes have to fight my way home. Back then the joke was “Hey, how would you like to play the skin flute?” That was considered very witty. The skin flute, haw-haw-haw. In the semidetached houses of northwest Baltimore, the young boys were experimenting with being macho. They were terrified of being considered gay. Anything that seemed effeminate to them was horrible, and the flute to them was a feminine instrument. Why? Because it was a long thing that you blew on? It’s a vulgarization of a stupid idea.

My brother would set up the fights. He said, “Okay, we’re going to meet over here and you’re going to fight this kid.”

In a funny way, I was supposed to be the sissy. When I think about it now, I think Marty was doing me a favor. He said, “Why don’t you just have a fight with this kid? Just show him who you are.”

So we went to the park, and that kid didn’t particularly want to fight with me, either. I was a little smaller than him, but I knew I was going to stomp him. I don’t know how I did it, because I didn’t know anything about fighting. I just put my fists up and beat the crap out of the kid. They finally pulled me away. I was maybe nine or ten. I wasn’t especially brave, and I didn’t like fights, but I felt that I had been corralled into it. The kid could have been six feet tall and I still would have beaten him, it didn’t matter. After that, no one bothered me about the flute.

When my dad came home from the Marines in 1945 the family moved from the center of town to a neighborhood of semidetached and duplex homes out on Liberty Road where the old #22 streetcar line ran. The #22 streetcar would play an important part in my life until I left for the University of Chicago in 1952. I had been permitted to have flute lessons but there was no teacher in the neighborhood. But the #22 streetcar ran all the way downtown to Mount Vernon Place, home to Baltimore’s Washington Monument, which faced the Peabody Conservatory. The streetcar had yellow wicker seats that were dirty most of the time. Its metal wheels ran on tracks, and it got its electricity from overhead cables. There was one man in the front who was the driver, and there was another man, a conductor, who took the money, ten or twelve cents. I don’t even know if I paid at all for the first few years, since I was under twelve years old.

The fourth floor of Peabody had a long corridor with practice rooms on either side, with benches where I waited for my teacher. There was no flute teacher in the Preparatory Division of the Peabody, so I was admitted to the conservatory and had my lessons from Britton Johnson, then first chair flutist with the Baltimore Symphony. He was a wonderful teacher and had been himself a student of William Kincaid, the first chair flutist at the Philadelphia Orchestra, who was widely considered one of the great flutists of all time. So I had blue-blood lineage when it came to flute playing.

Mr. Johnson, who now has a memorial prize named after him, was round, two hundred pounds for sure, but not tall, maybe forty or fifty years old, and still, when I began my studies, at the height of his playing. He liked me a lot. He complimented me, saying that I had a great embrasure—which meant my lips were built for the flute. But, at the same time, he knew that I wasn’t going to be a flutist. I don’t know how he knew that, but I think he figured I was a kid coming from a kind of struggling middle-class family that was never going to allow their son to become a musician, and that whatever talent I had was not going to come to fruition.

Mr. Johnson would look at me, and he would sigh and shake his head, at least a few times after my lessons. Not because I was a bad flutist, but because he believed I could become a really good one. And he was right, I had the potential but it was never fully realized. I don’t know if Mr. Johnson ever found out what happened to me. I doubt it. He might have known, but he would have been surprised. Mr. Johnson was quite right about the family pressure, in that everyone was constantly pushing me in quite a different direction. But ultimately he was wrong, because I was not going to let myself get pushed around that way.

In fact, I really wanted both piano and flute lessons. Though they were opposed to the idea of music as a profession, Ida and Ben both considered music education basic to a fully rounded educational program. But my parents were far from well off. On her schoolteacher’s salary, my mother actually earned more than my father. Still, with whatever money they earned, we were given music lessons. However, the economy of our family could allow for only one lesson per child, and the flute became my instrument.

Not to be deterred, I would sit quietly in the living room during my brother’s piano lessons and follow his lessons with absolute attention. The moment the lesson was over and the teacher out of the house, I would dash over to the piano, which had miraculously appeared in our new home shortly after we arrived there, and play my brother’s lesson. Of course this upset Marty no end. He was convinced I was “stealing” his lessons. At the very least I was pestering him by playing better. He was half right. Though I
was
a first-class pesky younger brother, I was simply there to “steal” the lesson—no more, no less. Marty would chase me off the piano and around the living room and give me a few good knocks along the way. For me, this price of admission was cheap and easy.

In retrospect, what was quite remarkable was that I would, at the age of eight, take an afternoon streetcar ride to downtown Baltimore alone, and, after my one-hour weekly lesson, take the same #22 streetcar back home. In the dark, I would alight from the streetcar at Hillsdale Road and run the six blocks to our house as fast as I could. I was truly terrified of the dark. Though ghosts and dead people were the images that pursued me, it never occurred to me, my parents, or my teachers that I had anything to fear from living, real-life monsters. But in 1945 Baltimore they wouldn’t be encountered anyway. Besides, all the streetcar conductors soon knew me, and I was made to sit near them at the front of the streetcar.