Trail of Destruction |
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Over the piano my fingers flew, twirling and glancing like rays of summer sun on a rippling lake, yet it was a moonlit winter evening on a jaded Florida beach. Pianist errantry was afoot, and I was completely submerged in the Chopin I was playing. The keyboard was a map to the canyons of my mind. I shut my eyes and cut acoustic swaths through the ravines and chasms of the instrument. People were around me, yes, I felt them through the warm, wet curtains of sound that howled out of my piano, but where exactly I was did not at the moment matter. The pianist errant cannot be concerned with such things while playing for it is his exclusive obligation to devote every faculty to revealing the glories of the classical piano to those in need, to those who have never heard it, and to those who cannot afford to hear it. The pianist errant is bound by moral and natural law to give himself completely to the music wherever in the world he may be, indoors or out, and so I played on with equal disregard for the caressing breeze and the twittering garble of my surprised and unsuspecting public. I played on, lost in the sweeping sounds of Chopin, absolutely ambivalent to the physical world around me. I played on, absorbed in the glittering energy of the stars, sublimely unaware that behind me my lime green pickup truck had loosed its parking brake and was picking up speed as it rolled down a slight incline towards a shiny convertible. You may think I am making this up but I am not. -- The snappy sports car was not the first windmill tilted by the pianist errant. The peripheral story, the sideshow, the ulterior narrative to the tale of pianist errantry has always been more interesting than the long droning sound of practicing and planning and pondering. The people met on the path, the corners of the world it winds through, and the changes they engender, make for the real tale. A year sailing the world with injured hands, a few months drinking looted whiskey with a Fijian rugby team after a military coup, an hour throwing buckets of water on a flaming piano in the Casbah of Tangier…all were part and parcel of my pursuit of the piano. Exactly what sort of pianist I was going to be only seemed to come into focus through these scratched and cracking lenses. I found classical music at the late age of twenty, only after illness woke me from dreams of professional cycling. As a teenager I had taught myself a little ragtime piano, to amaze my friends and friendly females, but it was just an amusement. I never suspected how much, as my youth ebbed, the music would flow. I was studying architecture without much enthusiasm at Rice University when my hopes for the Tour de France departed and left me with just the piano in my dormitory common room. I gravitated to the instrument within a few days of quitting cycling and began to play a few of the old Scott Joplin rags. Within a week I was playing all day long, not going to classes, not doing anything else aside from the occasional game of pool. Within two weeks a piano performance major from the Shepherd School of Music (Rice‘s conservatory) lent me a score of the Chopin nocturnes – the first classical music I ever read. Within three weeks I was practicing up to ten hours a day and it slowly yet swiftly and maybe immediately dawned on me that I had to be a pianist. My solitary and perfectionist nature, honed over years of national class cycling, told me that I would do it on my own. I bought and borrowed and burned hundreds of CDs of the classical piano repertoire, often with many pianists’ readings of a single piece, and began what would become years of unremitting listening. Within a month my formal university studies, life as I knew it, and the future as I had imagined it were over. I withdrew from school, went out into the world, and began to do whatever I needed to do to support my practicing. The journey towards pianist errantry had begun. A few years later I was reading Don Quixote on the ferry from Spain to Morocco, and an idea of what I would do with my life was planted within me: Indeed, his mind was so tattered and torn that, finally, it produced the strangest notion any madman ever conceived, and then considered it not just appropriate but inevitable…he decided to turn himself into a knight errant, traveling all over the world with his horse and his weapons, seeking adventures and doing everything that, according to his books, earlier knights had done…and in a transport of joy over such pleasant ideas, carried away by their strange delightfulness, he hurried to turn them into reality. Over the course of the next several days, over the next several hundred pages, it came to me with such startling clarity that it almost seemed like I had come up with it myself. I would mount a piano on a frame, and mount the frame onto large wheels that could handle cobblestones, dirt roads, curbs - anything people might reasonably walk across. I would put the frame in a truck or a van and travel the world. I would bring the music --the purest prism into the human soul-- to all those who had lived their lives without knowing such power and beauty existed. I would play outside for people from all walks of life, not to be retained exclusively by the elite, but to share music in the universal spirit in which it was written. Just as Don Quixote was no real knight errant until his books of chivalry convinced his torn and tattered brain otherwise, so had I spent so much time with my recordings and my instrument that the same conviction grew within me as well: I may have been no real concert pianist, but the beauty of my weapons convinced me otherwise and I slowly became one, preparing to travel the world with my horse and my lance, a pianist errant… -- The crash was loud enough (since I am but a novice pianist errant) to shake me from my reverie upon the keyboard and induce me to gaze pensively upon the wreckage as the hysterical screams of the car’s owner began to pierce the gathered crowd. Oh jeez. She was pissed. She was crying. She had owned the car for less than a month. She had saved for years and paid cash. She was calling the cops. I got up and sort of sauntered through the crowd, receiving glances of pity and repulsion and sympathy and confusion, to inspect the damage, which was hidden by the ass end of my truck buried deep into the side of the roadster. I looked at the wound and pulled away, recoiling at the screams a mother would scream if her first child came out an oily, three-headed chipmunk. Oh yes, there would be body work. But what could I do aside from give over my insurance and say I’m sorry? The cops arrived and when they found that neither vehicle had been occupied at the time of the accident --that there were no injuries-- they actually started to laugh. Then everyone else (except the owner of the car, who, it turns out, would have to wait an entire week before it was returned in mint-like condition) started to laugh. I felt awful, really, but a smile came through. My piano still held down the moonlit beach. The pianist errant had work to do. Chopin was needed. |
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