Lost In Place (18 page)

“Mr. Salzman,” he boomed after asking me to join him in the faculty lounge, “I get the sense that you are losing interest in your studies. What’s the deal?”

I told him about jazz and he rolled his eyes melodramatically and shook his head in mock dismay. “You’re doing
what
? No wonder you’re always wearing that kooky shirt. Give me a break, Mr. Salzman, that’s a very nice hobby, I’m sure”—he rolled his eyes again—“but holy Toledo, pal, don’t ruin your shot at getting a good education now, when it counts! You’re a junior in high school this year, and your grades are important. You can play jazz all you want next year when you’re a senior. Hell, everybody else will be either necking in the backseats of their cars or killing brain cells with beer anyway, so why shouldn’t you play jazz
cello
? Just put it off for one year, that’s all I ask. What can I say to you to get you back to work?”

I promised him I would try not to forget academics altogether, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to waste any more time in school. I’d been the man overboard long enough! I’d already put in eleven and a half years learning things that didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted to live my own life, I wanted to play jazz all day, I wanted to cut my own swath through life, blaze my own trail, use my own conscience as a compass—like Daniel Boone, or Bruce Lee, for that matter. All of my heroes took risks in order to follow their own muse; I had to get moving before it was too late and I got sucked into the rat race.

“Dad, I’m sixteen now and pretty serious about music, and you know, I’ve been sort of playing the cello since I was seven, so it’s not like this is all
that
sudden or impulsive—in fact, in a way you could say that my whole life led to this. So I’ve been thinking that maybe I should do
music full-time now. What do you think about my dropping out of school just for a few years to give it a try? I could always go back and finish if it didn’t work out.”

Dad sighed, pushed his coffee cup to one side, folded his hands in front of him at the kitchen table and looked at me with all the self-control and weighty reasonableness he could muster. Still, I did notice a tiny, throbbing vein in his forehead where I hadn’t seen one before. “Mark,” he said in an eerily calm voice, “I have only seventeen years to go before I can retire. I’d love to survive that long, even just to get up that first Monday morning and realize, I can go back to sleep! Don’t give me a heart attack, OK? Just let me live until then. What do you say?”

That was the end of that. There had to be a way, though, and as I passed the guidance office on my way to French class one morning I got an idea: What if I could get accepted by a college a year early, making my senior year unnecessary? Instead of actually going to the college, I could postpone matriculation indefinitely while I made my stab at a musical career. If I made it, I wouldn’t ever have to actually go to school again, but if my musical career didn’t work out, I would still have an education waiting for me and that vein on my dad’s face would stay down in the meantime.

I stepped into the office and asked one of the counselors if I could have a few college applications. I was thinking primarily of the University of Arizona in Tucson, because my dad’s oldest brother lived out there and I had always liked him, his wife and the desert.

“It’s kind of early for applications,” she said, “I don’t have many of the forms in yet. How about MIT? No? Georgia Tech? No? Let’s see—liberal arts, I have one here for Yale. They send theirs way early.”

Why not? I took it home and spent a weekend filling it out, but the more I worked on it, the more unrealistic it seemed. I sent it off on Monday morning, asked Mr. Leighton and Mr. Friedman to write recommendations for me, and promptly dismissed the idea as harebrained. A month later the counselor stopped me in the hall and informed me that more application forms had come in, but I had decided by then not to bother filling out any more.

A month or so later I got a call from Yale asking when I could come in for an interview with an admissions officer, a standard part of the application process. Feeling like someone who had carried a prank too far, I chose a date and, when it came, drove with my father on a rainy Saturday morning to New Haven. We stopped first at the Yale Art Gallery to see
The Night Café
, a disturbing painting by Van Gogh that Dad had always loved. After admiring this and other gloomy paintings for a while, we returned to our car to find a soggy parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper. “But there’s still two hours left on the meter!” my dad yelled.

“Yeah, but it’s a two-hour meter, and we’ve been here an hour and a half already. It must be broken.”

“What! But that’s bullshit, how are we supposed to know that? They can’t …! Goddamn those … Oh, let’s get out of here.”

Everything was going pretty much the way I’d expected it to.

We found the admissions building and Dad offered to wait in the car. “I don’t want to get another ticket in this shithole city,” he fumed. He hated cities.

I walked in and gave my name at the reception desk. A young woman who seemed not much older than me stuck
her head out of a door and invited me to join her in a tiny room decorated with a poster from an exhibit of Chinese antiquities. When she asked if I would like some coffee I realized she was the secretary for the professor who would interview me. When she returned with the coffee, we chatted and it turned out that she had been a Chinese-studies major. She was enthusiastic about Chinese art, and before long we were really getting into it. I couldn’t help wondering, though, when the fun was going to end and I was going to have to leave this delightful secretary and move on to a dark, wood-paneled room to face a glum, rheumatic professor wearing a robe and a black mortarboard hat who would ask me, “So, young man, why don’t you tell us what you think a person—such as
yourself
—could do for Yale?”

After half an hour the young woman looked at her watch and said, “Oops! I have an eleven-thirty who’s probably in the hall waiting. Well, I don’t mind saying that I enjoyed our interview a lot. I think you’d love this place. Good luck!” And that was it—that was my interview.

When I went out to the car, Dad was still angry about the ticket, and I could see he was preparing himself for the bad news that my interview had been a disaster.

“How did it go?” he asked stoically.

I didn’t know quite how to describe it. I just started giggling.

“Well?”

“I think it went pretty well,” I said.

“Mm. That’s good. Well, they’d better accept you,” he said, pointing to the ticket on the dashboard, “or I’m gonna come back here and stick this up some dean’s ass.”

12
 

O
ver the winter I saved two hundred and fifty dollars from the restaurant job and decided it was about time I had my own car. I knew nothing about automobiles except that I wanted something sleeker than our VW bus, so when I saw an ad in the paper for a 1969 Triumph Spitfire for two hundred dollars, I went right over to the fellow’s apartment complex, took what I thought was a careful look at the car and handed him my money. After I’d paid for it and signed the papers he advised me not to drive it very far because it burned oil
real
fast, but hastened to remind me that the Michelin tires on it alone were worth the two hundred dollars, and anyway it shouldn’t take much to get it running again, probably just a gasket somewhere. I drove the thing home in a cloud of black smoke and called up Lenny, a guy I’d met through Michael who knew everything about cars.

Lenny, who had dropped out of school the year before
and worked at both a gas station and an auto-parts shop, came over and after about five minutes said, “You’d better take this car back. It needs a whole new engine.” I tried calling the guy who’d sold it to me but he didn’t answer the phone. “So what do I do?” I asked Lenny.

“Well, you could try to rebuild it. I rebuilt an engine once; it’s not so bad. It’s a small engine—we could pull it out ourselves if you want.” He fetched some tools out of his car and we undid the bolts that held the engine to the frame. We disconnected the clutch, pulled the engine out and, since my parents didn’t have a garage and it was already winter, carried it into the basement next to the harpsichord. After we set it down on a sheet of newspaper, Lenny had to get to his shift at the gas station.

I went upstairs and checked our tool cabinet to see what we had. Three regular screwdrivers, one Phillips head screwdriver, two pairs of needlenose pliers, an adjustable wrench, a ruler, a wad of rubber bands, a dried-up tube of Super Glue and some old sandpaper. My dad wasn’t the handy type. It would have to do.

I went out to the car and pulled out the owner’s manual, which had an exploded-view diagram of the engine. I figured that I would take the engine apart, see if anything looked drastically wrong, replace any obviously worn parts, then put it back together again. I decided to remove the oil pan first. I undid the bolts and pulled off the pan, then watched in numb horror as five quarts of filthy oil gushed out onto my sheet of newspaper, covered it instantly and spread out all over the basement carpet. Fortunately my mother had put little cups under each leg of her harpsichord in case the basement flooded during heavy rains, so at least the oil didn’t ruin the instrument.

An inauspicious beginning, to be sure. I dismantled the
engine completely but saw nothing wrong with it. In fact, the parts looked great to me; I had no idea how precise the fittings were. Hoping that maybe just putting it together again would cure whatever its problem was, I set to work with my flimsy tools. According to the manual, several of the major bolts were supposed to be tightened to exact pressures with something called a “torque wrench.” Not having one of those, I just tried to guess. When the manual said, “Tighten head bolts to 35 psi,” I found something in the basement that weighed about thirty-five pounds (I checked by using our bathroom scale), held it in my hand for a while and then tried to approximate that pressure when I turned the adjustable wrench. Several gaskets were supposed to be replaced, but I figured with all that pressure the old ones would hold just fine.

When it was done I called Lenny up and we put the engine back in. When I told Lenny how I had “rebuilt” the engine, he didn’t make any comment, but just grinned. When the time came for me to start the engine, though, I noticed that he stood well back from the car.

“What, did I do something wrong?” I asked, beginning to worry.

He shrugged innocently, but didn’t step any closer.

I turned the key in the ignition, and—it started. It sounded beautiful! I revved it up a few times and glanced at Lenny, looking forward to the expression of astonishment on his face. Instead I saw an even bigger grin where the astonishment should have been. I looked behind me and saw, through the yellowed and cracked plastic convertible-top window, a cloud of black-and-blue smoke that threatened to block out the sun for our whole neighborhood. Apparently, I hadn’t fixed the oil-leak problem.

When Lenny told me what was really involved in rebuilding
an engine, I calculated that it would take five hundred dollars in parts, a thousand dollars in tools and about two years’ worth of auto-shop courses before I could actually drive the car. Before he left that day, Lenny helped me push it into the weeds at the end of our driveway. “If you’re not going to be using them or anything,” he asked, “could I have those tires?”

The fifty bucks I hadn’t wasted on the Triumph I spent on jazz records, and through Lenny I met someone who played the synthesizer and who had been looking for a bass player for some time. His name was Scott and, besides jazz, he was pretty seriously involved in Zen, Taoism, cabalistic theosophy, Carlos Castaneda and something called Magick, which involved warlocks, incantations and elves. We got together, improvised for a few hours and decided to meet a couple of times a week to practice. After each session we ended up talking about philosophy and religion, and before long the subject of drugs came up. I confessed that I’d never even smoked pot, and to my surprise he thought that was cool—I’d been into “a purity thing” with the kung fu, he observed, and purity was definitely powerful—but now that I’d been through that, he thought I might consider trying pot, but not as entertainment. He said it was amazing how it helped meditation, and how it made philosophical texts that had previously made no sense at all suddenly as transparent as spring water. Pot didn’t have to be just something to do on a Saturday night; it could be a powerful psychological tool.

I was interested but hesitant. Frankly, I was afraid. My dad had told me that when he was in the air force he saw a guy smoke a joint and lose his mind, and the thought of losing mine and then having to explain to my dad that it
was because I had done exactly what that foolish soldier had done was too awful to even think about. I told all of this to Scott, and he said, “That’s cool. But listen, if you ever change your mind, do me a favor, will you? Don’t decide to give it a try when you’re at a party and somebody passes you a joint. That would spoil it for you; it would be so lowlife that I guarantee you’d be disappointed. If you want to try it sometime, call me up and we’ll go out to one of the lakes and do it right. If you’re out in a relaxing place with somebody who’s into the kind of thinking you’re into, you’ll be fine. After all, you don’t have to be high to freak out in the army—I’d freak out stone-cold sober if I had to march around all day with a crew cut and call people ‘sir,’ wouldn’t you?” He had a point.