A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  Maestros, rockers, rappers, pickers, and grinners—where would all us dumbheads be without the right teacher at the right time? If you were lucky enough to have experiences like mine, go substitute-teach for one day and get your ass kicked. Then let schools know how much you appreciate their music programs and teachers. Tell your representatives while you’re at it. Nobody ever did it alone.

  CHEAP LESSONS

  DURING MY SENIOR YEAR OF high school, I worked two shitty jobs on the other side of town into the wee hours of the morning. I created constant drama with my girlfriend and wasted the rest of the time obsessively installing and reinstalling crappy car stereos or being kicked out of class for being a clown. My studies dwindled to nothing. Each afternoon when the final bell rang, I’d run to my car, hoping to hit all the green lights for my afternoon gig at Hertz Truck Rental. My title was “rental representative,” and my desk was empty other than the phone with a typed script in case anyone called: “Hello. Hertz-Penske Truck Rental. How may I help you?” About once a week someone would rent or return a truck and I would fill out the paperwork, put gas in the tank, and back it into its parking space. I was a sixteen-year-old who looked twelve, sitting alone at a desk on display at the center of a ten-by-ten-foot Plexiglas cube, in the middle of a parking lot, in a truly dangerous neighborhood.

  My 360-degree view at Hertz Trucks provided an important supplement to my high school education. I had front-row seats to crazy stuff, like pairs of shady characters frantically shuffling through the parking lot, each holding the end of a broomstick, from which a row of stolen portable TV sets dangled by their handles. This was back when TVs were big heavy boxes with handles. These vagrants were always gone too quickly to call 911. I just kept the door locked.

  An arguing couple once parked themselves just outside, and I could hear every word of their domestic squabble through their closed car and my glass box. “I’ll kill you, bitch!” Stuff like that. They could clearly see me and vice versa. I felt like a third wheel on a bad date. I saw ground-shitters, pants-wetters, and out-passers from the safety of my cube. There was one fellow who would have stumbled right into my desk but for the Plexiglas between us. His eyes rolling around spastically in his head, he pissed himself while pressed up to the glass and passed out practically at my feet, dozing there for a couple hours before hobbling away. I’m not sure why I needed to lock the door for that one.

  At Hardee’s (a sort of Southern junior-league McDonald’s), I learned when not to call the police. While taking out the trash during my 6-P.M.-to-2-A.M. shift, I spotted a pair of legs poking lifelessly out of the mess in the dumpster. I, of course, called the cops. The whole affair ended with this man throwing up in the squad car. I thought the police were going to beat me with a stick for the inconvenience. The lesson seemed to be that if you see what you think is a corpse in the trash, never mind.

  From then on, I would save 911 for real emergencies. For instance, when a family feud broke out in the dining area, sending the employees crouching behind the counter. Screaming hillbillies with baseball bats, a lot of shirts being ripped off, and shit breaking. The mother from one of the families was the meanest of the bunch and had the other mother on the floor, elbowing her face to a bloody pulp, ripping hair out, and squealing like an animal.

  I should take a moment to explain that these Hardee’s and Hertz scenes did not have to be part of my upbringing. This was self-inflicted. This was volunteer tourism. My own doing. Had I not been famous at school for being the class clown, maybe I could have gotten work in my own neighborhood, like everyone else. But when managers of local businesses asked their student employees what this Ben Folds character was like, I got a thumbs-up for being HI-larious! I was known for stunts like crawling out a window in the middle of a class or faking a speech impediment in another. Not the kinds of talents most employers are looking for.

  But to be fair, I was a different person at work. I was a fine employee, possibly even an overachiever. The lifers at places like Hardee’s recognize kids like me as well-to-do transient—here today, gone tomorrow to live the dream. And so, relative to these lifers, I was the fancy fortunate one. Perceived as eloquently spoken. A snowflake before snowflakes. Quite the contrast to how I was seen at youth-orchestra rehearsal, where I felt more like an underprivileged pine knot amongst the more refined.

  * * *

  —

  At school I was part-time overachiever and part-time loser. I took all the advanced-placement college-credit classes. But by twelfth grade I was flunking most classes for not showing up. I was a hard worker, a class clown, an accelerated student, the token poor kid, the token rich kid. A jackass of all trades.

  I was making some pretty awful choices, as kids often do. My father, understanding that his advice was falling on deaf ears, said I would have to just learn the important life lessons on my own. And he could only hope that they would be “cheap lessons”—that is, he hoped I would suffer severe-enough consequences for my actions that I might learn something but not so severe that I would end up losing a limb. I found the God of Cheap Lessons both an angry and a merciful God. He dealt all I could stand and left my limbs intact.

  As young men are wont to do, I begged for trouble, though I never wanted to cause anyone harm. I wasn’t roaming the streets looking for a fight (ha, can you imagine?), but unsupervised teenagers in adult’s clothing can get in over their heads quickly. And unsupervised teenage couples removing their adult clothing in the back seats of cars in dimly lit parking lots get in over their heads even faster.

  And so my senior year was spent living a teenage nightmare with my first girlfriend. That nightmare—our abortion—became the subject of the song “Brick,” and much of what happened played out just as the song states. I sold some early Christmas gifts to pay for everything and I took my girlfriend to the clinic the day after Christmas. It’s all laid out quite literally in the verses. What wasn’t in the song were all the stressful un-singable details that plagued our lives while finishing high school. She and I both missed quite a bit of school that year, and nobody could figure out exactly why. But she had gotten pregnant early in the autumn and she was having an awful time of it all, pre- and post-abortion. I would try to help where I could. While I didn’t manage my own homework, I did as much of hers as I could. We had kept the whole thing secret because we didn’t think adults would understand or help. I would try and keep her from cutting her face with razor blades, which she did anyway a few horrible times. I was always worried that she might kill herself while I was at work. I was painfully aware that she was the one walking the hardest yards, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Over senior year I had recurring strep throat and mononucleosis and, along with the absences due to our situation, I ultimately didn’t meet the attendance requirement for graduation. I had missed as many days of school as I’d attended. One morning, a few weeks after the abortion, I met my girlfriend in a church parking lot to give her homework I’d done so she wouldn’t flunk too. It was pouring rain and she jumped into my car as I handed her a stack of notebooks. She lost it right there, screaming uncontrollably and shaking. I suddenly realized how very in over our heads we really were. We needed help. I was worried she was going to die, so I drove her to the hospital. A counselor took her in and alerted my mother, who happened to work next door. It was all a relief, even my parents finding out. A great weight was lifted. Once the secret was out, we were children again.

  Our parents were more understanding than we could have imagined. They were mostly just concerned. I picked my girlfriend up from the hospital and she already seemed much better. She was talking, at least, and that was an improvement. I took her back to the church parking lot, where she got in her car to follow me to a Subway for lunch. As I stopped at a light, I looked in the rearview and saw she wasn’t stopping. Her car continued full speed ahead, plowing into the rear end of mine. Both cars were totaled, though neither
of us was injured. They were huge old cars. Cheap lessons.

  My mother loaned me her Honda Civic to get to school for the next week, since the insurance company would not loan a car to a teenager. It was the first and only new car my parents ever bought. When I came out of class, the car was gone. It had been stolen. I made the dreaded call to Mama from school and she picked me up. She was unbelievably understanding.

  That midnight, the cops located the stolen Honda, and Papa and I went together to claim it. It was wrecked. The windows were shattered, and human shit was rubbed all over the back seat. The whole car had been dusted for fingerprints and was unrecognizable. While filling out the police report, my father sought to inflate the value of the stolen contents, claiming there were valuable items in the car, which he and I both knew weren’t there.

  “Benjamin, you had probably five hundred dollars of cassettes in here, didn’t you?” he said for show so the police might take note.

  I looked down at my feet. “No. It was just one cassette.”

  “No, but of course it was a whole case, Benjamin! Probably worth hundreds! Tell the officer now, because he’s making a record of it.”

  “No. It was one. That one with all the black powder on it—Madness, The Rise and Fall.” I still have that cassette, stained with fingerprint dust.

  Papa tried to get me to fib, to exaggerate, like everyone does for insurance claims. But I simply couldn’t lie anymore, for any reason. I’d done it for too long and I never wanted to again.

  She broke down

  And I broke down

  ’Cause I was tired

  Of lying

  I saw my first girlfriend years later, while on tour in San Francisco. She’s awesome and wise. I had spoken to her only once since high school, calling her in 1997 to make sure she was okay with the promotion of the song “Brick.” She said she felt better knowing something positive could come from it all. I could breathe easier about its release. She implied her parents didn’t feel the same about it. They felt I was profiting from everyone’s tragedy. To them, I can only apologize. I write songs about what I feel. And I feel there could not be a more expensive cheap lesson than this episode.

  PLAN A FROM OUTER SPACE

  I WASN’T EXPECTING TO GRADUATE high school. I was flunking my classes and had missed too many days. So I was mulling over my Plan B options—summer school, community college, a job, maybe the Army—when out of nowhere I received an incredible, beautiful lifeline in the mailbox. It was a full-tuition scholarship to study music at the University of Miami. I had all but forgotten about Plan A, my application to music school, and the life I’d wanted to pursue. I read the letter over and over. I showed it to my parents to confirm I wasn’t misinterpreting it. Maybe I could study music and be a percussionist in a fine symphony orchestra. I just needed to convince my high school to let me graduate.

  * * *

  —

  Way back at the beginning of the school year, before my girlfriend and I had gotten into all our trouble, before I worked two jobs while flunking school, I had auditioned for University of Miami, having read that the Dixie Dregs, Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, and a host of other brilliant jazz musicians had either studied or taught there. Who’d ever thought of going to a university that taught jazz? And who had ever considered that making a living in music was possible? When you went to your guidance counselor in those days, they pulled out a few catalogs of schools and majors, and nothing about music ever came up, aside from teaching. Learning to perform music—original music—for a living? That just wasn’t on offer. Therefore, it didn’t exist.

  But my jazz-band teacher, Mr. Burns, knew better, and he collected all the information I would need to audition to be a jazz performance major at U of M. The audition requirements were a few solo percussion pieces, like snare-drum études. Yes, there is such a thing as a snare-drum étude, and I crushed those. Some orchestral mallet percussion. Easy. But one that left me scratching my head was performing three jazz standards of different grooves at the drums, with a rhythm section. I didn’t know any local pianist or bassist who could play jazz very well, if at all. And I really wasn’t familiar with jazz standards myself. So, I went to an 8-track multitrack studio in the basement of Duncan Music, a local musical-instrument retailer, and I made up three jazz “standards,” performing them at the piano, bass, and the drums. I sent the cassette tape to the University of Miami along with my bundles of awards and certificates and forgot about it.

  Practicing piano in high school, 1984. In background, Scotty Folds’s original painting of piano player.

  And now I found myself in the kitchen, holding an acceptance letter. And not only had they let me in, they’d given me a full-tuition scholarship. One of two full scholarships in the whole music school! I had all but given up the notion of pursuing music before that letter arrived. And now I had a beacon to follow. I knew I had to act on this gift.

  I got to work convincing my teachers to give me another chance. I volunteered essays on the importance of my scholarship and about what I wanted to do with my life. I had come to appreciate their classes too late, I explained, but was willing to make up the work. I had a doctor’s note for the strep throat. But I was still coming up a little short of convincing all my teachers to let me pass. So, I thought, I’d go to a therapist and convince them I had some emotional issues to further make my case. That sort of soft fraud was always persuasive with teacher types. I’d just act anxious for the shrink and he would excuse the rest of my absences. I chose the same therapist who’d seen my girlfriend.

  During the session, which began as a stunt to allow me to graduate, my whole year came flooding back. As I heard myself recount the awful experience, I realized I had actually been through a lot. And by the end of the session, I was a puddle on the floor. He gave me the note, and much more. I was allowed to graduate, barely.

  * * *

  —

  My parents dropped me off at the airport at the end of the summer and I boarded the first plane of my life. My mother later told me that my father cried as the plane took off. I didn’t believe that, of course. Real men don’t do that (or so I thought at the time). I made my way to my first baggage claim, picked up my 1950s’ suitcases, which came from my grandmother’s attic, and took my first ride in a taxi. I was too shy to question the cabdriver as he dropped me a mile away from the university, somewhere on U.S. Highway 1, but I managed to make my way to the campus. This was it. Plan A. It felt like I’d been delivered in a spaceship. I passed strange palm trees and heard people speaking in Spanish.

  I took the second cab ride of my life a week later, to the Greyhound station, to retrieve a large cardboard box containing my drums, which, although I’d packed them myself, were now mysteriously accompanied by some of my mother’s Rice Krispies Treats wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed between the Styrofoam packing.

  The parcel, in order of its value:

  Shipping cost > Rice Krispies Treats > cardboard > old shitty drum set.

  For now, for the first time in my life, I could actually imagine a path to becoming a musician. A real working musician who performs and records music, not just teaches it. An artist who puts food on the table—something that I’d never witnessed outside of the radio and TV. I shuffled what happened in high school under the rug and promised myself to never speak of it again. I was now in the company of some of the best young jazz students in the country. These were my people, I thought, unlike the kids back home, who ranged from broke rednecks to aspiring law students from old-money families. Maybe I’d found home at last. I felt relief, a sense of pride, and the overwhelming sensation of butterflies that a kid gets when he’s far from home for the first time. I set about establishing my new life, shaking hands with my new roommate and gearing up to learn as much as possible.

  DROPPED AT EXAMS IN A COP CAR

  FINAL PERFORMANCE EXAMS IN MUSIC school are refe
rred to as “the juries.” The test itself is called “the jury,” and it’s adjudicated by the staff, but you don’t call them the jury—you call them the staff. It’s like the way we call the main course “the entrée” in America. Make sense? Anyway, the University of Miami, renowned for its jazz program, took this jury thing up a notch by providing a jazz ensemble with a full horn section to accompany the student as he/she performed prepared pieces, exercises, and some sight-reading. The band did not stop or slow down for the student if he/she stumbled. It was keep up or perish. I understood that I would need to ace my jury each semester or risk losing my scholarship. No problem, I thought. After a semester of stellar grades, an accidental suntan, and a few pounds back on my bones, I was feeling pretty good about this one last hoop I’d need to jump through before heading home for Christmas break.

  On the morning of juries, anxious freshman performance majors trickled in to wait their turn in the foyer of the old Foster Building, glancing one last time at their music, while the provided combo, made up of grad students, casually talked amongst themselves. A small team of disheveled professors seated themselves in a row behind a folding table, organizing their notes. Back then, the front of the Foster Building was mostly glass and the students and jury had a clear view of everyone who approached the building. My approach was particularly conspicuous. I was dropped off in a Miami Dade police car.

  * * *

  —

  I looked like I’d shown up for Walking Dead auditions thirty years too early, plastered with an assortment of bandages, patches of blood showing through. My head felt swollen and my nose and bottom lip were full of stitches. My right hand, in a splint, hurt even worse. I had what they call a “boxer’s break.” I tried to rustle up some dignity with a casual goodbye to the police officer, as if we were old buds or something, as I sensed the tilting heads and widening eyes of peers and professors from the other side of the glass. I shrugged in the direction of the music building. No book bag, no music, no sticks or mallets. Just a blurry hangover, of equal parts beer and adrenaline from the previous ten humiliating hours.