I looked at Jane. She was stunned. And I was 100 percent certain in that moment, no matter what else was going on in the rest of her life, she loved me. And it felt good for both of us.
“Again please, Turf” was all she said. I happily obliged. This time playing the frisky notes a little friskier, the sad parts with more pathos, and the powerful parts with greater emphasis. This time, when I was finished, she rose from her seated position, walked to where I was seated on the piano bench, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me hard … on the cheek. I took it, gladly, but all fantasies of true love ever existing between us dissipated in that instant. I knew what I was to her. I was someone very special, but I was not Dick the Skateboard Champion.
She returned to her seat on the couch and said, “Could you play it for me one more time, Turf; this time with a little feeling?” I laughed. I thought I had put about everything I had into my first two renditions. In fact, I felt like Van Clybourn playing a concert for his special lady. Somehow, there was more translated from my being through my fingertips to those keys the third time I played that song. When I was finished, I was exhausted. I think Jane was, too. She had been completely imbued not merely with the story the notes of the song conveyed to her, but the depth of feelings I had for her.
In a moment, her mother was home.
“You’ve got to hear this, Mom. Turf wrote it for me.” Jane’s mother sat her purse down on a chair and sat on the couch next to Jane. Together they looked like older and younger sisters, two gorgeous women, the same size, the same hauntingly blue eyes. I played the song one final time that day. When it was finished, Jane’s mother sat there shaking her head with her mouth open slightly. She appeared to be stunned that a boy of seventeen had such deep feelings for her daughter that he could write into a song like that for her.
Over the past two years I had written about ten songs. None of them as complicated or multimooded as for Jane, but each of them depicting some feeling I’d had about a thing, person, or event.
Now I was playing through the songs one by one, pouring out my feelings over having hurt Kathy. I was hoping that by playing, my own sorrows would leave my body through my fingertips.
When I finished the ten songs, I was nearly exhausted. I had played them with all the passion I could muster. I finally paused for more than merely a moment as I had when I was between playing the songs. I stretched my arms over my head, twisted my back to the left and the right to relieve the tension that had built up there since Kathy’s announcements. When I stretched to the right, I realized that there were seven people in the piano room—five women and two men, all college students. There were two couples and three girls sitting in three separate flowery print chairs. Christine, the girl who had driven me back to the dorm the night before, was in their midst.
When I finished with stretching and as it looked as if I might have completed my playing, the seven listeners clapped for me. It was the largest group I had ever played for. For a moment I lost my breath. I had never been applauded by that many people and I was a little embarrassed, but I caught my breath almost immediately and was filled with a very different kind of pride, knowing that my music had positively impacted seven total strangers.
Slowly, the group began to break up, all the individuals heading to wherever they had been going before the music had distracted them. Christine stayed, waiting for everyone else to leave before she spoke to me.
“How are you feeling today, Turf?”
“Believe it or not, I had an odd hangover for about an hour when I first got up, but it’s gone now.”
“Do you do that kind of thing often?” she asked (with extreme curiosity).
“Christine, last night was the first time in my life that I had ever drank. I stopped at a lonely friend of mine’s room and had a few drinks of rum and Coke, but I must have overdone it because I really did myself in.”
“When I saw you in the snow I was really worried about you, Turf.”
I could see genuine concern in her eyes.
“I’m okay today, thanks to you, Christine. God knows what might have happened to me had I slept the night out there. I could have had frost bite.”
“You could have died, just another drunk Evanston student dying in the snow.”
“Thank you, again.”
“I think you sort of repaid me with that beautiful music. I could never have imagined when I helped you to my car that you could create something that lovely.”
“How did you know that those songs were mine?”
“They were like nothing I have ever heard before. In fact, they were like tone poems, little stories, each one.”
I was stunned and flattered. She had nailed it. Each time I sat down to write a song, that was exactly my goal … to be able to tell a musical tale. I wanted to create the imagery of whatever I was thinking and feeling at the time. I simply wanted to create a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. There needn’t be any words. I never knew how a song would start or where it would go. I would begin searching. When I found something that sounded like what I was feeling, I put it into the song. Each song took weeks to create. There were thousands of wrong notes, renegade notes that had no business trying to force their way into my very specific story. And yet, after many weeks of struggle and alien notes and many spiteful moments between me and the piano, each song would come to an end. And when that happened, it seemed as if every solitary note in its final sequential position had been destined to be in exactly that place for all eternity. I told you that once before. But I’ve thought about that fact hundreds of times.
“You missed the first four or five songs, Christine. Would you like me to play them?”
“I would.”
I turned back around and started playing the songs, beginning with “For Jane” and in the sequence that I always played them. I never turned around the whole time I played. There was no clapping, no commenting at the complexities of any song. When I finished with the five songs I thought that she had missed, I turned around to see Christine crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, getting up from the piano bench and sitting in the flowery print chair next to hers.
“When I heard some of your music, it made me feel things from my past that I haven’t felt as deeply about in a long time … things that have happened to me when I was a little girl, a childhood friend of mine drowning when I was nine, my grandmother dying last year. Then one of your songs almost made me laugh. It wasn’t that it was funny, it was fun. And that song made me feel a whole lot of other different kinds of feelings. That song brought me back all over the place—to tea parties I had with my mom for years as a girl, summer vacations, riding on my first Ferris wheel when I was ten, sock hops, fun stuff. But it was that all the songs cumulatively were so evocative of my emotions. I never have been to a concert before today. But now I honestly feel that I have been to one.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Do you have to be somewhere?” I asked.
“I need to study in the library for about three or four hours.”
I wanted to be near her so badly. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Where’re your books?”
“Back at Kendal. I can go get them.”
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t I give you a ride to get your books and we can study in Kendal’s library?”
“One-half of that idea would be wonderful, telling me to get my books. But the library is locked up tight as a drum. There is only a skeleton staff of security guards working on the premises. I’d have to go to your library.”
“That’ll work.”
“I have one more idea and a couple of quick questions. Do you have Sunday night dinner on your meal plan?”
“No I don’t.”
“May I take you for pizza when you are finished studying?”
“That’ll wor
k too, Turf,” she said with a girlish smile inhabiting her face.
So that’s what we did. We studied for four hours then drove through a dark frosty Evanston to the restaurant then shared a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. By the end of our first study date and meal together, we had developed a genuine fondness and respect for one another.
CHAPTER 4
I WAS HAVING another recurring dream. In it, the devil was lifting me off the bed, tormenting me with a powerful magnetic force over which I had no power. Then merely by willing it, he threw me against the ceiling then slammed me into all four walls—all the while tormenting me with insidious laughter emanating from his hideous face.
What had I done in my life that I had been so bad that I deserved this brutal punishment while I was still alive? If I was going to hell when I died, couldn’t he at least wait until I got there and then torment me for all eternity? Why now and why so often?
I’ve always enjoyed probing into my deepest self and into the deepest selves of others. After all, I did become a psychologist because I cared about people and wanted to help ease their deepest pains. But as I probed my own self now, even during my nightmare, I couldn’t figure out why the devil was torturing me and why he had so often, especially recently in this relatively similar recurring sleep horror. Could it have been something as simple as that I had been raised Catholic by strict parents, priests, and nuns whose stories about the devil had always scared the crap out of me? And the names they used for the devil—Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness. Could there be other words or phrases that could terrify a six-, seven-, or eight-year-old boy than these? And then there was the concept of eternal hell—that the devil could torture you forever and ever and ever ad infinitum—with relentless blazing fire. You didn’t even have to do too much to get there. You could make it for disobeying your parents, which my friends and I did all the time when we were little. Then some zealous nun, “hooded warriors” my buddies and I would call them, would tell you that if you had disobeyed your parents and you hadn’t confessed that sin (those sins in my case), to a priest and you got killed in a car crash, you were going straight to Lucifer’s inferno. Looking back, we kids played so many games in the street where we were darting constantly around moving cars. I can quickly remember how the “hooded warriors” threats even affected my fun games when I was a little tyke. In the middle of Union Avenue, darting to grab an errant baseball toss, I would wonder whether the future split second would be the one when I was going to hell.
The devil had been firmly implanted in my psyche. But I thought I was past all that. I should be past all that. I had worked hard in my conscious life to eradicate all belief that the devil could ever hurt me, that there even was such a salacious being.
Yet here I was, a grown man, well adjusted, I thought, and I was dreaming about the devil throwing me around the room, tormenting me, torturing me. The dream was so real and I was hysterically frightened. When I’d awake from these recurring nightmares, the pain and fear would linger for hours. Even days after they happened, I’d be pondering exactly what it was that had happened and why it had occurred at all. During this point of my life, it was happening every few weeks so that I was never so far away from it that I couldn’t always be pondering it like I did the myriad other complex things that were occurring in the life of a simple psychologist.
Here I was right in this instant, in the middle of this horrific dream. I was in hell, and it was my bedroom and the devil and I were fist fighting. I’d get one punch in that barely grazed him and he’d get five punches into my face and body that felt as if each blow was a jackhammer causing excruciating pain.
I would not give up. Somehow I would right myself and punch him hard in his red evil face. Then he’d get this glorified sadistic look on his face and unleash another devastating flurry of blows upon my head, torso, kidneys, and groin. He knew how to punch and cause pain. Even the devil needed to catch his breath, and when he paused for an instant in his brutality, I’d gather the wherewithal to slug the bastard a time or two only to be pummeled again by his next onslaught.
Over and over this happened. A series of similarities that seemed unending and hopeless against him, I had no chance to defeat him.
Then suddenly, in the midst of my assault from the Prince of Evil, I heard it again. Knock, knock. It terrified me beyond the misery I was already enduring. All I could think of was that it was some of Lucifer’s legends trying to get into the bedroom to help him hurt me. But no one came into the bedroom. I thought that if it were part of his minions they would have no problem breaking my bedroom door down or seeping in through the walls like spirits do.
On top of my continuing beating and my conjecturing about the spirits that might be joining Satan at any moment, I also thought that someone might be in trouble at my front door. It was that thought that must have trumped everything else that was happening because it was enough to wake me. I yelled, “Hold on a minute, I’ll be right there,” as I awakened, frightened from my dream. I hustled to the front door, this time not peering through the peephole figuring I had just been battling with Satan. I wasn’t afraid of any human being at this moment.
I threw open the door and, for the second time in two weeks, both times after two loud knocks. There was no one at the front door. Suddenly, I was more frightened than I had been moments before. Were the knocks from allies of the devil trying to get into my dream bedroom trying to help him? Or was it a totally different demon from a different dimension entirely wanting to get into my house to torment me? But with the courtesy of knocking? Or lastly was it a person who hated me for some reason and who wanted to annoy me by knocking on the door only twice then racing away before I could rouse myself and get to the front door? I didn’t know and that bothered me.
Here I was, a man who’d spent much of his life trying to figure out what made other people tick inadequately, and I couldn’t even figure myself out with the devil dreams and the Two-Knock Ghost. I went to the fridge and mixed myself a glass of Publix soy vanilla and soy chocolate milk and watched about twenty minutes of news and weather on Bay News 9 before I felt calm enough to turn out the light and try to fall back asleep.
CHAPTER 5
ALCOHOLISM HAD SNUCK up on me. Before I was twenty-four, I had drunk only once—that night I had the rum and Coke with Robert Workman. I didn’t have a single drink after that. I had no need for alcohol, not even to think about it. I had a great life. I married Christine three months after I got my BA. She was working as a nurse at St. Joseph’s on Lakeshore Drive. I had a fantastic relationship with my mom and dad and all four of my grandparents. Christine and I were planning a family whenever nature ordained it. We didn’t want to try to manipulate anything. We wanted to meet life as it arrived, no fears. We both loved Chicago and the lake front, the wonderful hotels, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planitarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Buckingham Fountain, the shopping. We loved the Wild Cats and the Bulls and the Black Hawks, the Bears, Maxwell Street, Pizzeria Uno and Duo, and believe it or not, both the Cubs and the White Sox. We’d pull for each team in their respective league, except in later years when interleague began and when they played each other. It may became the best team win on any given day and because we loved both teams we couldn’t lose.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, Christine arranged a party for me—nothing fancy, just a get-together of my parents, her parents, both sets of my grandparents and about six of our mutual friends. Our modest three-story house in Bridgeport easily accommodated the total sixteen people that hung out in the house that night. We had my favorite then, black forest cake and chocolate milk. Of course, Christine knew what everyone she had invited liked to drink so there was every kind of beverage on the table from beer to wine, coffee to tea, lemonade to ice water, chocolate milk and apple juice, which was my second favorite drink at the time. It was the late sixties and my party was a lovefest of sorts with people who all got along well
.
There were no political debates or silly arguments about meaningless things. There was just a bunch of giggles and talk about everybody’s favorite novel—To Kill a Mockingbird, Dr. Zhivago, Catch Twenty-two, of Mice and Men. Everybody was intelligent, kind, respectful of each other’s feelings. It was one of my best birthdays ever.
It was a Friday night. No one had to go to work the next day. No one had to rush out of there to get home to catch a good night of rest. The party was mellow and lingered till a bit past midnight when the first yawns occurred, and shortly thereafter the conversation shifted to dialogue as to whether it might be time for people to start leaving. It took about forty-five minutes till about 1:00 a.m. for everyone to say their good-byes and share hugs and kisses. My mom, dad, and grandparents were the last to leave, each of them lending a hand to help Christine and me clean the party mess.
I couldn’t help but reflect on what wonderful people they each were—my mom and dad, Kathy and Bob, and my maternal grandparents Phil and Lena, my paternal grandparents Sid and Dorothy. Several years before my twenty-fourth birthday party, my mom and dad decided to downsize now that their kids were grown and move out of the house from Wheeling to Glenview. They wanted to be closer to Lena and Phil, who had a slew of medical issues in their early seventies. They found a house one block from my parents’ house. Kathy could walk there, which she and Bob had done hundreds of times in the past four years. Bob and Kathy’s plan was to help out Lena and Phil as much as they could in order to keep Lena and Phil in their home as long as possible. My grandparents knew they weren’t healthy, and they knew the sands of time were slipping through their hourglass. They had sincerely expressed their disdain for ever living in a nursing home and my mom had figured that being close by to be able to help them if she or Bob were needed was a perfect solution.
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