The Dangerous Animals Club Read online

  The other kids around me were looking over, staring, wondering what I was doing. The concert began. Bobby Caldwell played a featured solo with the band backing him. Everyone applauded. I figured maybe I would be doing “This Old Man.” I started to go through my piece, mentally. The band launched into the second number and the third—still no indication from Mr. Graham that I was needed. Mark Wright looked over at me and shook his head. Roy Scott turned around and asked what I was doing with the clarinet. I told him that I would be playing soon. “No, you won’t,” he said.

  He was right. The concert concluded. I saw Claire Richards looking at me as I disassembled my clarinet. “Mr. Graham never called on me. I guess he forgot,” I said. Claire nodded. That was the end of my clarinet adventure. I continued the piano with a renewed passion.

  I studied with Miss Hamby from ages eight to fourteen. I was now playing beginning classical works by Clementi and Mozart and some simple preludes by Chopin. In the same period of time, Claire became one of the better young pianists in Dallas. She played major concert works in competition.

  Despite my longing for greatness, I couldn’t jump the high bar at the piano. I would never approach the breadth of talent of someone like Claire. She could transport an audience and transform music into some higher form of spiritual matter. I had the ability to sound like I could play but not much more.

  That’s what I thought. Then magic struck at my final recital for Miss Hamby. Recitals were performed onstage at an old mansion in our area. There were always about twenty nervous performers and forty or so equally nervous parents at these events. The little ones played “Big Chief Wahoo” and “Piccolo Pete” like I did so long ago. Over the years as I became more advanced, I was moved further and further into the program. Jack Nunn was the closer. He was actually good. I had moved into the honored semifinal slot.

  I played Valse in E-flat by Auguste Durand. It was a fast piece, flashy, with lots of familiar parts you’ve heard a thousand times before even though you never knew it came from this piece. In the first section there are three ascending arpeggios with dramatic chords that set up the light, delightful waltz section that follows. I played these arpeggios with such passion and such flair and so perfectly (for once), I was feeling so good—I decided to add a fourth arpeggio, one that ascended even higher, even more dramatically. As I played, I ran out of piano keys and fell off the end of the bench onto the floor.

  The audience gasped. I sprung to my feet. I called out to the crowd, “No need to be alarmed. It’s all part of the piece.” The audience laughed. I grabbed the music and showed them the page of notes and pointed. “See. Right here it says, ‘Pianist falls.’” They laughed harder. I bowed and they all applauded. I sat back down at the piano and continued playing. And at that moment magic descended. The audience was transformed. I had done it. I filled them with terror and within a moment changed it to delight. I had talent. I was just in the wrong field. Right after that I auditioned for my first school play. A comedy.

  IT SHOULD BE mentioned that I believe in love at first sight. It is not a good thing or a nice thing, but it is a real thing. It was the beginning of my sophomore year in college, the day the new students arrived. The green room at the theater department at Southern Methodist University filled with all sorts of new faces. There were lots of pale, angst-ridden young women with stringy hair wearing black leotard tops. There were young gay men wearing powder-blue sweaters and corduroy pants. They were all away from home for the first time.

  The energy in the room was too much for me. I climbed the spiral staircases to the dark, empty theaters upstairs. To the left was the large proscenium theater, the Bob Hope, and to the right was the experimental theater, the Margo Jones. I went to the right. The Margo Jones was considered experimental not because of the plays performed there, but because the seats were on rollers and could be arranged in different configurations—which they never configured. So it remained an “experiment-waiting-to-happen” theater.

  I climbed to the back of one of the banks of seats and sat and looked at the stage, which was lit by what they call a ghost light, a single bulb on a movable stand in the middle of the stage. I sat in the darkness wondering what my future would be. Would I get cast in a play this year? Would the gods smile on me? Would I gain favor?

  A stage door opening and closing interrupted my reverie. I heard footsteps backstage. A girl, looking uncertain, peered around one of the curtains at the empty space. She stood there taking in the room. She never saw me in the dark.

  She crept around the curtain and stood alone onstage. I imagined she was like me, wondering what her future would be, and if this empty space would be a starting point for something extraordinary. But then, unlike me, she took a pose as if she were a tightrope walker—arms extended—tottering as if she were losing her balance. She acted like she regained her composure on the high wire and started to make her way across the stage, step by step. I watched her focus on moving from one point of imaginary safety to another. And as I watched, I fell in love.

  I can’t explain how or why, but I did. I remained silent—the perfect audience—involved and transformed. I found out her name was Beth. She was from Jackson, Mississippi. That was odd. I never expected to meet anyone from Mississippi, let alone fall in love with someone from there.

  I became aware of several practical difficulties with love at first sight. First of all, almost by definition, you are already in the deep end of the pool and the other person doesn’t even know your name. That’s always tough on a relationship. Another problem is that it’s hard to start an introductory conversation without sounding creepy. “Hello, Beth, I got your name from a teacher. You didn’t know it, but I was sitting in the dark, watching you in the empty theater the other day.” Creepy.

  I ended up trying to find a way to drop in and meet her “at work.” Everyone in the theater department worked after classes doing some form of manual labor related to the theater: building sets, making costumes, hanging lights. Beth worked on sets that semester. The previous year I had worked on sets. I knew the head of the shop, R.B. Hill. R.B. was a loud, funny, gregarious man who was never shy about giving his opinions. I remember when I was on his crew the previous year he told me that he had worked with a lot of five-thumbed idiots before, but I was the first six-thumbed idiot he had ever met.

  R.B. was surprised to see me back in the shop. I introduced myself to Beth as one of R.B.’s right-hand men. R.B. grumbled that I didn’t even qualify as a foot. I managed to tag along with Beth to the cafeteria for dinner that night. We ate peanut butter sandwiches. She told me she was an orphan, information I didn’t know how to process. I later found out she wasn’t. Her father was a state senator, and she enjoyed spinning yarns as a somewhat dangerous recreational activity, like waterskiing.

  I think she could sense I liked her. It flattered her. But she wanted nothing to do with me. She told me I was not her type. I was crushed, but I kept smiling as if the whole conversation were still some sort of joke. I asked why. What was her type? She said the man she would fall in love with had to have four characteristics. “He has to be a genius, he has to be either radically liberal or radically conservative, he has to have a beard or a mustache, and he has to have acne scars.”

  In other words, Edward James Olmos. But we didn’t know him, so I still had a shot.

  I would ask her about her life. Growing up. I would get indecipherable pieces of a puzzle. She said she lived in a closet. She cut out pictures of people in love from magazines so she would know what it looked like when she saw it. She swore the only man she ever loved was Chico Bambico. She kept his picture in a locket she wore on her heart.

  I was jealous of this Bambico person, whoever he was. I kept asking her questions about him. Beth whispered that he was the only real man she knew. I finally got her to open the locket one day. Chico Bambico was a hound dog.

  She said she loved snow. She hated telephones. Her eyes would flash joy and then I would see her fall into
a hole of despair. I never could get a handle on who she was. And I don’t think I was being dense. I just think she was hard to get.

  I kept seeing her. I kept showing up. Just like with the clarinet, I didn’t know the notes, but I knew how it would sound if I did. I just kept moving my hands over the stops like someone who could play, hoping at the end of the process I would have a tune of some kind, even if it was only “This Old Man.”

  I visited Beth at her dorm. I would have dinner with her. I would walk her to class. I never touched her. I never held her hand. It all meant too much to me. If I did something that made her say once and for all, “Go away. I don’t want you,” I didn’t know what I would do.

  Love can be a hopeless thing. And love without expression can be a killing thing. One day I was walking through the green room of the theater department after class. I knew Beth was in the cafeteria having lunch. Instead of following my usual instinct to run to meet her, I took a turn down a different hallway and ended up in another part of the building.

  I wandered down a strange dark corridor with row upon row of wooden cubicles. Then I heard piano music. I was in the music wing and these were practice rooms. I walked down another narrow hallway and saw an open door. Inside the tiny, dark room was a piano and a chair. I went inside, turned on the light, and closed the door. I sat down and started to play. I played some of the old recital songs I learned at Miss Hamby’s. Then I regressed and played the kinds of make-believe tunes that used to drive audiences out of the room at Uncle Hymie’s. And out of that mess I heard a chord and a pattern that I liked. I repeated it. I added to it. A couple of hours later I had a song. I called it “Snow Song.” It was an inconsiderable thing, but “’twas mine own.”

  That evening I went over to Beth’s dorm. I called up to her room and asked if she would come down to the lobby. The lobby of Boaz Hall was a cozy open room with a few odd couches and chairs. Boys and girls could talk freely in a highly supervised, armed-guard environment.

  Beth came down. She was upset that I didn’t have lunch with her. She thought maybe I was mad at her. I told her I wasn’t. I was busy and had something to show her. I led her over to the old grand piano in the middle of the lobby. I asked her to sit on the bench. I sat beside her. My hands moved trembling to the keys. I played “Snow Song.” I told her I wrote it for her because she loved snow. It was her song. Her eyes flashed joy. She told me no one had ever written a song for her. I told her, “Now they have.” She looked at me for a long moment and smiled and said, “You are a genius.”

  We moved our conversation over to one of the couches in the lobby. We weren’t talking about anything significant. We weren’t even looking at each other. But at one moment, my finger touched her hand. She didn’t move away. I was on fire. I moved my finger on top of hers. She moved her hand closer. I gently moved my fingers on top of hers. Her eyes filled with tears. Neither of us said a thing. We sat in silence, holding hands for an hour.

  It was a love story that occurred in geologic time, at glacial pace. Imperceptible to the naked eye, it shook us both with metamorphic power. We were now an item. As I said, love at first sight is not necessarily a good thing or a nice thing, but it is a true thing. I had been honored to enter the heart of Miss Hard to Get. A place I shared with no one—except Chico Bambico.

  We never had much money. For dates we went on walks. Or we improvised. One night we walked through the quad past McFarlin Auditorium, the big two-thousand-seat venue for shows on campus. We saw a couple hundred people milling around outside the doors. We wondered what all the excitement was about. It was a concert. We arrived at intermission. We thought, “Why not? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Beth and I grabbed a couple of programs on the ground and walked in not knowing what the show was. We ran up to the second balcony where we figured we would be safe from sitting in someone else’s seats and getting thrown out by the ushers.

  Onstage there was a single grand piano. My heart started beating hard. The curtains opened, revealing an orchestra. The lights dimmed. A tall, thin man walked onto the stage. I looked at the program. It was Van Cliburn. He was going to play a piece by Rachmaninoff. The Third Piano Concerto. I had never heard it. I had never heard him play it. He adjusted the bench. Looked at the keys. Flexed his gigantic hands and nodded to the conductor. The music started. Within seconds I was transported, so moved I couldn’t breathe. Neither could Beth. I held her hand tightly to steady myself, unsure as to whether the real Miss Hard to Get was sitting beside me or was as untouchable as the beauty in the air around us.

  13.

  CHAOS THEORY

  I ALWAYS WANTED to be in love. As long as I could remember I wanted to be married and have a family. I don’t know why. I don’t think it was because we had an ideal homelife growing up. I think it more likely that I was born a traditionalist. Either that, or I saw too many Jimmy Stewart movies when I was little.

  I remember my first marriage proposal. I was five. I climbed up the mimosa tree in our front yard and picked some mimosa blossoms and ran over to Alice Nell Allen’s house. She was a pretty girl who lived down the street. She was also five. She had long brown hair. On occasion she wore a yellow flannel shirt with wildflowers on it.

  I actually had misunderstood her name the entire time I knew her. Instead of Alice Nell I thought her mother was calling her Alice Snail. I loved snails. I ran over to her house with the mimosa flowers. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I kissed her on the cheek. I still remember how warm and soft that cheek was.

  I knew from the movies that kissing a girl would be an important skill for me to learn. At night I would practice on my pillow. It didn’t feel anything like Alice Snail’s cheek. I needed to move up to something more girl-like. I switched to the stuffed rabbit I had in my bed. It was missing an eye and an ear. But it did have a mouth of sorts so it was a step up from the pillow.

  This was about all the preparation I had for the world of women. I was lucky that the person I fell in love with in college was Beth. She seemed to have as little preparation for a relationship as I did.

  Years of kissing bunnies and pillows could not have prepared me for Beth. Perhaps a conversation with Stephen Hawking on the nature and behavior of unstable atomic particles could have helped. Beth was nothing like Grace Kelly or Donna Reed.

  Beth’s physical appearance to the world at large conveyed a mismatch of several different mythologies. She wore blue jeans with a miniskirt over them. She wore long underwear to class as a sort of fashion statement. She was modest but would model nude for art classes. She was shy and small, but on occasion, without warning, would beat me with her purse and throw me into a hedge.

  She was a force of chaos, which could be destructive or inspirational, depending. As I said, I was a traditionalist. My life had always been structured. I was in bed by eight when I was a child. I always did my homework. I always had good grades. I always went to Sunday school and later Saturday school and later Saturday and Sunday schools, and I believed it all. Beth was a different animal altogether.

  I remember once when she and I were sitting in the lobby of her dorm, after I had played “Snow Song,” a song I had written for her and that was a constant request. She asked what I wanted in life. I said, “A home.”

  She looked at me as if I just said something in Arabic. She shook her head and said, “What’s that?”

  “It’s having a wife and children and four walls and maybe even a fireplace. It can be anywhere. But it’s warm and safe.”

  She looked away. Her eyes became dark. She stared at some invisible specter in the corner of the room. Then she said, “That doesn’t exist. There is no place like that. No place that’s safe.”

  “You don’t think a place can be safe if two people love each other?” I said.

  “No. Because how do you know if you are in love? How do you know you just won’t wake up one morning and want to pack up and leave? That’s why I’ll never marry you. I want us to be free to leave each other whenever
we want.”

  There it was. The unimaginable distance between two people. I was too young to know it then, but I have since learned that some chasms can never be bridged, even with good intentions.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson once said something to the effect that, “What you are thunders so loud I cannot hear what you say.” When you date various people you tend to be defined by the things you say. But when you cross the line and start a relationship, you are defined by the things you do. And what you do is often determined by what you value. What you hold to be the center of your life.

  I may have been clinging on to a vision of life I gleaned from Broadway musicals and the Dick and Jane series we read in first grade. As safe as that sounds, it had inherent dangers. The person who fashions his life after something he has seen runs the risk of worshipping form at the expense of content. But Beth held on to an equally dangerous model. She embraced the storm, or worse, the eye of the storm: the appearance of calm with the promise of disaster.

  Chaos, as an inspiration, led Beth to suggest she “wanted to get away. Get away from it all.” As long as it wasn’t planned. That wish became a series of weekend trips I could have turned into a coffee table book entitled Insignificant Texas: A Tour of the Townships Within a Three-Hundred-Mile Radius of Dallas.

  We would go to the Greyhound station on a Saturday and pick a town at random. We would buy bus tickets on the spot and go there for a day. There is an expression in Texas about “going nowhere fast.” Not us. We went nowhere at fifty-five miles per hour. We would go to a town we’d never heard of, walk around, eat at a diner, talk to people, spend a night in a motel, and then return the following day.