Ken Nordine Follow

If you do something long enough, even something that you don't like, that you might even hate, you could begin to do it well enough to make everyone else think you love it. You could even fool yourself if you're not careful, I know. I'm very good at fooling myself.

When I was around sixteen I decided that I was going to become a great concert violinist. See, I was given the violin at the age of five as a present for taking castor oil and I made the best of a bad situation but at sixteen I decided that I was going to really try. Take four or five lessons a week, practice seven or eight hours a day from this tremendous teacher who had just come over from Germany. I say "I decided". That's a lie. Roger decided...

Maybe you know someone like Rog? I use to think he was the greatest thing that had happened to the piano since Walter Gieseking. He wasn't but I thought so. But there was one thing about him, a tragic character flaw. Something in his smile.

His teeth...

I told him about it. He didn't know what to say. Oh, he had a game, by the way, that he played with me. He had me go to the piano and strike a chord. And then with his back turned on the other side of the room he'd name all the notes. I'd start with simple chords like a C chord or an F chord, and then I'd get a distended eleventh chord or an augmented seventh or

a perverted twenty-seventh ... Still he'd name all the notes until I wanted to lean on the piano. He had me on my bloody knees in front of his superiority.And I hated him for having absolute pitch...

But then, knowing that he'd gone too far, he became kindly.There are certain kinds of kindness that are like fish hooks. He said, "You know, you could become the Swedish Jascha Heifetz." I loved that kind of talk. It transported me from that living room. I was carried by his flattery to some huge stage, something that would make Carnegie Hall seem tres entime...

And there, in what was larger than Death Valley, I was playing the closing measures of some impossibly difficult concerto, as if it were nothing at all. Thousands upon thousands of people, listening like so many hushed cabbage heads. As the last few notes sang out with incredible purity and died away...

Then there was a silence after, very much like the quiet that must have followed the Gettysburg Address, and then the audience went mad: "Bravo! Encore!" and the applause sweeping across the stage and I there bowing in the warmth of the footlights, turning every now and then toward Roger, who accompanied me, just to let a little bit of the applause glance off to show him that I could be magnanimous with power.

And then after a half hour of this "Bravo!" and "Encore!" I broke my rule against playing encores which I made at the age of eight and played "The Old Folks at Home" just to make my mother happy...

I'll never forget the way it was there in Roger's living room. I'll never forget the bay window and the sunshine and the potted fern that his mother loved so well and Roger, the way he slithered past me, past the potted Adder's tongue that his mother loved so well, through the undulating sunshine with its dust climbing like a Brownian movement towards madness, over to the upright piano.

And as he played his favorite composition there in the twilight "The Moonlight Sonata" I saw, as if for the first time, his teeth...

And something inside of me sagged. I said, "See ya' Rog" and I put my violin in its case, I slammed the front door, I walked the long sidewalk home not stepping on cracks, and I told F. Darucci, cement contractor 1927, "I'm through with music!"

I've often wondered if F. Darucci, cement contractor 1927 wanted to lay cement sidewalk like -- crazy.