Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  Scott told a few of my closest friends that they could visit me, and David Hajdu came on my second day at Rivington House. He checked in at the front desk, got my room number, went to the room, saw me, and went back to the desk to report that he had been given the wrong room number. “There’s an old man in the room you sent me to,” he said. “I would like to see Fred Hersch.”

  Told that the man he saw was Fred Hersch, David went back to my room, took another look, and bolted out of the rehab center before I could see how shocked and distressed he was. He didn’t muster the strength to come back till the next day, and never told me about the aborted visit until we were working on this book together.

  Hank, as always busy with his job and family, made time to see me almost every day, even if just for a short visit, boosting my spirits with his kind demeanor. And Scott sat with me all day at Rivington House, helping me in every way possible, doing oral care, massaging my swollen hands and fingers. Over time, he explained—in broad terms, still sparing some of the details—what I had gone through during the past few months. I still had no idea how long I had been in the hospital. This came out a few weeks later, when Scott asked me if I wanted to watch some TV and, being a tennis fan, I suggested putting on Wimbledon, which had concluded more than a month earlier. That’s when Scott laid out the whole timeline for me.

  After I had been at Rivington House a couple of weeks, I asked Scott to wheel me down to the first floor, because I knew there was a piano in the chapel there. Scott tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted. Sitting in the wheelchair at the piano, I tried to play “Body and Soul,” a tune I had played hundreds of times over the years. My fingers could barely move, and I couldn’t remember the chords to the bridge. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was shattered to confront the vast distance between my entire history as a person and the reality of what I had become.

  I was profoundly shaken, deeply vulnerable, in desperate need of Scott and despondent when he wasn’t there. When I thought about how radically everything I knew had changed, I would burst into tears. At the same time I realized ever more clearly how close I had come to death and how lucky I was to be alive.

  To say that is a cliché, I know. Yes, yes, of course—a confrontation with death brings home the preciousness of life. Everybody knows that. But there was nothing the least bit hackneyed in how I felt. It was the newest, brightest, shining, most surprising, most uplifting feeling I had ever had. I was alive, and I felt the gift of life in a way I had never conceived of before. When I was suffering from dementia the previous year, I had wanted to die. Now I was determined to get my life back as it had been before.

  I could not eat or drink. I could barely move. But I was alive. It was a gift, for sure—and perhaps even one I didn’t deserve. But I was not about to give it up now.

  CHAPTER 17

  BETTER

  I’m not going to retrace every step of my recovery here, and I don’t want to give myself too much credit for what turned out over time to be an extraordinary recovery. It was more daunting and more taxing than anything I had ever attempted. I had superb medical care, expert physical therapy, and a partner whose devotion to my well-being was and remains unsurpassed. I also worked my fucking ass off, obsessed with getting better. All that came together, and as the weeks and months passed, my condition improved dramatically. In fact, in certain ways I ended up better than ever. The experience of living in a coma and coming out of it was absolutely transformative to me. The coma was the B.C./A.D. point of delineation in my history as a man and as a musician.

  Like many patients at inpatient rehab facilities, I was pushed out of Rivington House too early. Scott fought doggedly to keep me under the facility’s care for as long as possible, and he bought me a precious week by escalating my case to the state insurance board. Still, by the insurance company’s standards, I qualified as healthy enough to be discharged when I could walk thirty feet. So I was shooed out of Rivington House on Friday, September 5, 2008. At that point, I had successfully walked for thirty feet—but only with a person on each side of me, guiding me, braced to support me if I wobbled or catch me if I fell.

  Unfortunately, Scott’s summer reprieve from professional responsibilities was now over. Since earning his graduate degree at NYU, he had been hired to be the deputy director, the second in command, of TAG (Treatment Action Group), an important not-for-profit organization dedicated to globally expanding access to treatment and providing advocacy for those dealing with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C. It was a big job, managing the daily operations of a non-profit with global reach. He was scheduled to start work the week I came home from rehab. I would be on my own when he was at work, with help during the day from Marie, a sweet and attentive private nurse’s aide we hired to stay with me during my first two weeks back in the loft. She was there mostly to be sure that I didn’t fall—I was so fragile I could have easily broken a hip—and to accompany me to my physical therapy appointments.

  I was still on the feeding tube, virtually unable to speak, and I wouldn’t come off of the G-tube until February 2009, when, after exhaustive swallow therapy three times a week, I was deemed ready to take in liquids and soft food orally for the first time since June 2008. Swallow therapy was one of the most difficult and frustrating of all the rehab challenges I faced. It involved months of tedious oral contortions, often with tongue depressors, trying to build small muscles in my mouth and throat that I had never been aware of and couldn’t even begin to feel. I wasn’t able to sit down for a meal until well into the following year, but I longed for food constantly. Not only did I miss tasting food; I realized how important mealtimes and coffee or drinks with friends are in shaping our days.

  When I came home from Rivington House, I was walking with a cane—I flat-out refused to use a walker. I didn’t even like the cane, but I wasn’t able to stand upright without it yet. After the first week home, I wouldn’t touch it. I was determined to walk on my own.

  During the first days of my rehab at Rivington House, I had been in a wheelchair, and it was a sign of progress at that point to be able to stand upright at all. My first day in the rehab facility’s exercise room, I caught a glimpse of a stick-thin, decrepit, slope-backed old patient with a wild mane of hair, also using a walker, on the other side of the room. When I turned my head and noticed that he turned his head at the same time, I realized the wall of the room was mirrored. I vowed then and there that no one would see me the way I had just seen myself.

  Once home, I received physical therapy five days a week at an outpatient facility just up the street from our home in SoHo. The superb therapist, Vinita, did hands-on work with me, and I would also do exercises on my own to strengthen my gait and improve my balance. My left side was so badly compromised that I could barely hold my left arm above my waist.

  After my demoralizing experience trying to play the piano at Rivington House, I was wary for at least a week before attempting it again at home. I did better than I had at the rehab center, but I was no Fred Hersch.

  Before long, I was able to use my hands to a limited extent, tap-tapping a few words on my computer keyboard. But then, in October, just about a month after I had come home, I came down with pneumonia again. I had to be hospitalized once more and was given five units of blood. Fortunately, I was put on a breathing mask (called CPAP, for “continuous positive airway pressure”) instead of being intubated again. St. Vincent’s, as ever putting the welfare of its patients above its bottom line, hired a twenty-four-hour “sitter” to keep me from pulling off the mask. I was in for less than a week. This time I couldn’t believe how lucky I was not to be in septic shock.

  Though I still had only one working vocal cord, I was able to talk in a hoarse and weak whisper. I could communicate with anyone leaning very close to me. But I was unable to use the phone with any reliability—forget verbal menu-tree prompts—and would have to write my destination on a slip of paper to give to taxi drivers on the way to my swallow therapy,
since they couldn’t hear me through the partition.

  On the Saturday after my release from St. Vincent’s following the second pneumonia, I was feeling strangely energetic. Scott and I went for a little walk around the Village. It was a clear, warm autumn day. When we got back to the loft, Scott took a catnap and I sat down at my computer. I looked up the calendar at Smalls, a cozy little fifty-seat basement club a few blocks south of the Village Vanguard, and I saw that there was a blank spot on the schedule for the seven-thirty set the following Monday, October 13. Nervously, I tapped out a quick e-mail to one of the club’s owners, Spike Wilner, to see if I could have that slot. Spike presumed I wouldn’t be asking if I weren’t up to playing, and gave me the date. I e-mailed John Hébert and Richie Barshay, inviting them to join me; both got right back to me and said they could. Neither of them asked anything about my ability to play the set. I wasn’t sure how I would do myself, but I wanted to try—in a low-key and supportive atmosphere such as Smalls.

  When Scott woke up from his nap, he came over, gave me a kiss, and asked me how I was doing. I whispered, “Honey, I just booked myself a trio gig at Smalls on Monday night.”

  Scott looked more than a little concerned. But all he said was “Oh…well…okay!”

  My mother was still in town after my bout in the ICU, and I think both she and Scott were more nervous about my return to playing than I was. They were worried that if my performance was unsuccessful, it would be too big a blow to me. I did feel pretty lousy that Monday, apprehensive about playing in public again. But I was eager to do it and get the first time over with. My mom was recovering from a partial knee-replacement surgery, and I successfully distracted myself from my anxiety by worrying about how she would get down the narrow steps of the club.

  As I’ve mentioned, I am a longtime tennis fan. I love the reactive, improvisatory nature of the sport. And like a jazz solo or set, it’s not over until the last point is played. You can have a bad patch and still win the match, just as Joe Henderson could slog his way through a tune and wind up at a point of deep inventiveness. As I struggled to recover from the coma, I thought about Monica Seles, the great Hungarian-Yugoslavian tennis champion, who was the top player in the world when she was stabbed between the shoulders on the tennis court by a crazed fan of her chief rival, the German champ Steffi Graf, in the early nineties. The wound from the stabbing healed within a few weeks. But Seles was so shaken psychologically that she didn’t return to the game for two years. She became depressed and suffered from both isolation and food addiction. When she finally played again, her renowned killer instinct was gone, and she would never really recover it.

  I knew I was limited physically, and my memory was shaky. I could play with only a fraction of the dexterity, force, and speed that I had had before the coma. I didn’t have the piano technique I had before.

  I was not terribly concerned about that, though, because I have never thought of music primarily in technical terms. I’ve always valued feeling and sound over raw chops, and the one thing I could still do—in fact, do better than ever now—was feel. I had just come home from a long, rough trip to the brink of the Other Side. I had a perspective on living that I could never have imagined before, and I was feeling everything more deeply than I had ever felt.

  At 7:20 P.M. I made my way gingerly down the steps of Smalls, holding tight to the railing, with Scott, who was nervous about getting both me and my mom safely downstairs. Word had gotten around quickly that I would be playing, and the club was stocked to capacity with musicians, friends from our building, some colleagues from my various artist residencies, a few music-business people. At 7:30 I walked slowly and cautiously from the back of the room to the piano, determined not to use a cane, and the house burst into warm applause. I silently nodded thanks and pointed to acknowledge my bandmates. As I sat on the bench and looked down at the keyboard, I could see the bulge from my feeding tube protruding under my shirt. For the first time, my fondness for loose-fitting, untucked vintage sport shirts was serving a practical purpose, covering the tube like a hospital gown.

  I started with “Days Gone By,” a medium-tempo original tune I feel very comfortable with. As always, I found myself in my own musical world, eyes shut, playing, connecting, listening, reacting. The feeling was utterly familiar and at the same time much different from anything I had experienced before—or since. Some things were working surprisingly well, other things were just outside my reach. But I felt strangely serene about it all, playing as if I had nothing to lose.

  The set was recorded for the Smalls archive, and I listened to it for the first time in years while I was writing this book. I can hear that the playing is a bit unfocused, tenuous at points, and the tempo of this first tune (and, for that matter, most of the songs in the set) is awfully slow. But I sound like me. When I finish the first tune, I announce to the audience what I will play next—and when I heard this again, it brought me back with a shiver to the reality of what I was like at that time. My voice is a fragile, raw, barely audible whisper, and I am struggling palpably to get each word out. The second tune, also an original, was “Still Here,” my dedication to saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who is still creating amazing music, even now in his eighties. The title seemed to encapsulate the moment.

  The set is a surprisingly long seventy-five minutes—four originals; Jimmy Rowles’s ballad “The Peacocks”; “Work” by Monk; and, as the finale, a slow, bluesy version of Sonny Rollins’s “Doxy.” John Hébert had yet to become part of my working trio, and the rhythmic hookup between him and Richie was iffy; they had never played together. Still, putting aside a few flubs and some ambiguous sections, the music is creative, fresh, and deeply felt, as if I were playing these pieces for the first time. In a real sense, that is exactly what was happening, because I was a different person now. The new me was, in fact, playing this music for the first time.

  After a terrific standing ovation, I played my short solo ballad “Valentine,” a song of romantic yearning that always makes me think of Scott. As I played it, I felt connected to each person in the room. The performance of that song was my thank-you to everyone who had helped me get to that point in one piece.

  After “Valentine,” everyone rose to give me another standing ovation, and I took a bow and nodded in thanks. I was visibly choked up, and I knew the audience could tell, but I didn’t care. I had gotten my share of standing ovations before, and I have gotten plenty of them since. But I’ve never gotten one with the pure and raw emotional energy of the ovation that night. It couldn’t have been clearer that people who cared about me were thrilled to see me and to hear me making music again. It was obvious from the applause I received when I walked in that people were simply happy to find me alive and alert. In the end, though, it had to have been the music that brought them to their feet. Leaving behind every consideration of technique, I made no effort to impress anybody. I just wanted to make music for my friends and for myself, show that I could do it again in a meaningful way. Playing from my heart, I hardly needed my fingers.

  Over the years since then, nearly all the people who were there have told me that the show was unique in their musical experience. Charlie Hamlen recalled, a couple of years later, “The music that night was the most moving music I had ever heard in my life.” Several others used almost the same words. There was indisputably something profound about the performance. You can almost hear my musical spirit fighting to rise above my body.

  At home, the battle with my body was ongoing. I was still on a liquid diet, fed through a machine into the tube embedded in my stomach. In the night, I would have to urinate into a bottle, since I couldn’t get myself out of bed, sometimes filling three containers due to all the liquid I was taking in.

  For long stretches during this period, and for a good year or more after I would begin eating again, I couldn’t always control my bladder or my bowels, and Scott would have to help clean me and the mess. I was humiliated and felt terrible for Scott. (Once I
began going out of the apartment, I was always fearful that I would have an accident, and I did, many times.) I don’t know how Scott handled it. When he was in the loft with me, he was always on nurse duty. One of his jobs was to clean and disinfect the area of my stomach where the feeding tube entered my body. It was a disgusting mess of pus and liquid. Scott, who had always been more than a little squeamish, had to breathe deeply to stay calm every time he did it. He was heroic.

  Scott’s hardest task was surely putting up with my impatience and my stubbornness. I wanted so badly to get better fast. The feeding machine was mounted on a rolling IV pole and pumped a set amount of canned liquid food into my stomach per minute. I kept turning it up to take in more. Scott would catch me, turn it down, and scold me, saying that I was exceeding the recommended amount. Then I would turn it back up as soon as he was not around. But both Scott and I wanted to condition my stomach to get used to real food again—and I wanted to gain weight as fast as possible—so we started buying cans of high-calorie Campbell’s Chunky soup, pureeing it in the blender, and then forcing it into my stomach several times a day. (I had, unbeknownst to Scott, been sneak-eating chocolate pudding and canned peaches even before I was officially cleared to swallow. I just had to taste something.)

  About a week after the Smalls gig, on my fifty-third birthday, I was given my second swallow test and had high hopes of being ready to have the feeding tube removed. In a swallow test, you drink a barium preparation with the consistency of a milk shake that enables the technicians to watch it go down your throat on an X-ray device. If that goes well, you try to swallow a thicker liquid. If that is successful, they watch you eat a cookie—in real time. If you can do that successfully, you’re cleared to eat.