Brahms was a badass. The composer, I mean. Yeah, him. You saw him on a poster when you were in fourth grade: white beard, brown moustache, tiny eyes. You may not have known the badness of his ass because your music teacher only told you that Brahms died in 1897 in Vienna. And you did not think nineteenth-century Viennese dead people knew that life is like a drag race in which there are both fast cars and people in drag, hence the possibility of one’s becoming a “badass” if one wants it badly enough.
I freaking love music.
I took piano lessons from first through twelfth grade, in the attic of a music school a few blocks from my parents’ home. I was not alone. Forty percent of American children take music lessons. Most of them sit on wooden benches as they move the bowels of three-or-four-legged beasts—something their parents thought would make them more sensitive to the stuff of privilege, or more likely to succeed at higher algebra.
On my first day of piano lessons, my teacher—a woman in her sixties who wore an onyx medallion with a bas relief of a snake around her neck—played Brahms’ Rhapsody in B Minor (Opus 79, no. 1). Her hands were thin and quick, like daddy longlegs. Daddy longlegs that could, if they wanted, pop every key off the piano and build a new piano with those keys right next to the one she’d broken.
Daddy Longlegs told me to practice. An hour a day, starting with these boring-as-table-water things called “scales.” A scale is a flap of fish skin, a piece of glass on which you stand when you want to feed your self-consciousness, and it’s also a walk with your hands up and down a piano, pressing nearly every key. As if before writing something you had to recite the alphabet backwards and forwards five times fast.
Did I practice scales? Nay, of course not! They were auditory coloring books. They were handjobs to convention. They were freeze-dried nothings. They were all the boring parts of my life laid out in a line for me to hit, one by one, as the seasons changed and my pets died and my birthday stopped meaning so much to me, or anyone else.
I cried once. I had not practiced, and I was eight, and I walked into my lesson and stared into the eye of Daddy Longlegs’ black stone snake. I moved my hands onto the keys, but my hands were stiff, as if each artery contained bumper-to-bumper traffic—Lincoln Tunnel traffic at twilight. And what came out was a jerky jitterbug, some notes fast and others slow. My fingers hit the spaces between keys rather than the keys themselves. The snake hissed, and the keys were bowie knives, and if I cut my fingers I didn’t care, because I was eight and I was getting older, and if this world contained scales then I did not want to exist in this world. I would go somewhere else, anywhere else—I would swim leagues, I would climb bedsheets, I would go train hopping to get away from these scales.
And I love music.
Daddy Longlegs put her hand on my shoulder. She was not paid to watch me cry. She said that it was just scales, that it was just music—that, yes, I should practice, but I was only a boy, and this was only music, and these were only scales.
We are all of us scale-players, said Daddy, and we hardly even know it. We don’t want to, she said, but we’re playing them all the time—even now! Tap-tapping the keys of whatever we’re tapping on, bored out of our minds. We may keep tapping them until we die. But someone told us to play scales once, and we trusted them, and we did.
I saw her every Saturday. Now and then, after she’d watched me enter and leave puberty, I drove her home in my parents’ Ford Explorer. She lived on a dead end street, in a carriage house with a broken Steinway in the driveway. God knows Daddy, with her killer legs, can break a grand piano.
Ten years later, scales got me again. I was better at playing them. I was much better, I was eighteen, and I’d just stood in the doorway of the attic of the music school as Daddy Longlegs said, “I don’t do goodbyes.” She’d given me a card with a Japanese woodblock print on the cover. It was a picture of a tsunami. I’d walked all the way down five flights of stairs to the Explorer, come home, dropped my music on the floor, and played scales. The biggest, scaliest scales there ever were. There was a tsunami in my pocket, and I was playing scales—crying like an eight-year-old as my hands did the most boring things they could ever do, or have ever done, ever.
