November 4, 1999A few months ago I fell down the steps at a subway station in Chinatown. I hurt my ass and right middle finger and thumb, but were it not for the putrid smell of the station and the way that I nearly fell right down onto the subway tracks I would likely have forgotten the whole thing. Two weeks later I realized that my thumb was hurt worse than I realized. It was nothing terminal, and nothing was broken. It just hurt like hell to bend it too far in one direction or another. One morning while putting my jacket on the thumb twisted all the way backward and I absolutely screamed like hell. It felt like the whole bottom part of my hand had just ripped right off. I enjoy pain to a certain extent. When the pain that morning forced me to drop the jacket my arm felt exhilarated, like it had been electrocuted. I sort of hopped up and down, and through the haze of a 6:00 a.m. hangover I felt wide-eyed and alive for the first time since falling down those steps (at 7:00 a.m.) two weeks earlier. Some days it feels like experiences (or lack of them) have accumulated in my body, and it takes pain or terror to cleanse the palette, to remind me that I am alive.
At summer camp in Tennessee one year a few of us discovered a gutted out building. It was really beautiful in its torn-up condition. An old, vast, southern building with glad, sprawling staircases and massive living rooms. But it was deserted, and it was 11:00 at night; the staircases were festering and the floors were full of gaping holes that led to God knew where. We raced through the building laughing and talking nonsense when a dog appeared barking so loudly and angrily and unexpectedly that I screamed and screamed and screamed and my hands and forearms shook and I would later swear I had left the ground for several consecutive seconds. We started running backwards until we all fell on our asses. We scrambled to our feet and sprinted from the building, laughing so hard at that mad little dog that tears streamed down our faces and our stomachs were sore the next days from laughing and laughing. I talked about this incident for weeks, to the immediate and continued boredom of the rest. For them it was like listening to someone who had just discovered sex or bowel movements. But to this day I occasionally break a smile when some association of thoughts reminds me of the unbelievably powerful charge that filled my body and soul that night. Years later I remember admiring G. Gordon Liddy for his story (truthful or not) about being able to hold a lit cigarette lighter to the palm of his hand for very long stretches of time. He did it as a parlor trick but one night in 1991, while living in a Washington Heights apartment about 20 feet away from the George Washington Bridge, I tried it out my self. To see how long I could handle it. I wish I could tell you how long I went, but I can not. What I do remember is the high, the feral charge I got from it, and lying there on the mattress for hours afterward.
The right thumb, one of 10 fingers used to write these comments, is feeling almost normal again. After the jacket incident I started stretching the whole bottom part of my right hand around as far as comfortable, close to the point where it would have hurt. When I get home from work these days I give it the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C Minor, Op. 23, No. 7 test. While practicing away the last few months I have been in obvious denial about the pain and discomfort (obvious to anybody else, if there ever happened to be anybody else around here). In obvious denial about the way this makes the index-finger-over-thumb passages in that Prelude sound pedestrian. They are sounding less clumsy these days, and tonight I attacked Isaac Albéniz's Málaga like ... well, like I'd been playing piano my whole life. Which I have. Which is not to say that it was a concert-level reading of that piece. It was not. But it felt like I had all the music in hand, and it felt like it should. Like I was sculpting clay. That is how playing the piano is supposed to feel. There is still a little stiffness in the thumb, but the healthy twitching and muscle spasms in there tell me it will finally pass completely.
I played piano for a remarkably long time before learning that some women (and men, I assume) are sexually aroused watching men play the piano. No one has ever come right out and said this, it is just something that in 1993 I felt sheltered for having not realized long before. It has never bothered me -- Why should it? Some people get sexually aroused shopping for towels. I have not given this much thought since then. I don't get off on watching women play piano, but I've known a few men who certainly do.
In high school I was friendly with a janitor at McKay Auditorium in Tampa. According to the oval-shaped patch on his shirt, his name was Al. He was always angry and full of dispirited stories, and something in me wanted to be like him. It's the same part of me that listens to songs like Maggie Mae or Angie and wishes I lived the life of whoever sang such songs, but who has been close enough to that kind of hurt to know that it feels filthy. Al told me he knew people who had gone insane listening to piano music. He said that some folks just couldn't handle the sound of the piano, and that he knew 3 or 4 people who'd ended up in nuthouses for having worked at concert halls and auditoriums like the one he worked in. "All those damn piano concerts," I remember him saying. "Something to do with the hammers."
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