Dorms, Brahms, and Unconditional Love

College, at last, I immersed myself in music and flourished at the conservatory. I skipped many of my non-music classes, preferring to hang out with like-minded music peers or explore my new surroundings. Mr. Perrini placed me in the conservatory orchestra right away. His large horn studio was full of talented people who still perform across the country in fine orchestras. Forever I will cherish the memory of playing my first orchestra concert. I had listened to recordings, I had attended concerts, but engaging with it live to create it was like nothing else. From my chair in the horn section (I played assistant principal), I felt part of something bigger than myself, something beautifully wonderful.

Guest soloist Eugene List performed Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the conservatory orchestra at that concert. His commanding artistic presence in the performance moved me to tears. Most professional musicians cringe at this piece for its overly dramatic – and overplayed – presentation, but in that first time hearing it from my chair in the horn section, I engaged with an expressive power so palpable that I felt it touch my soul. The collaboration between List and orchestra hummed with an energy just as steadfast as the trees singing back home. All of its connectedness opened before me, and I was in the middle of it.

I longed to live forever atop that wave of musical ecstasy. But my drinking, combined with sexual violence the final week of my first term of college, crashed into that dream.

Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room

Soon after the start of the term, I had found a group of guys who drank at my level of excess. They all lived on the same floor of the men’s dorm, and I made buddies with runt of the pack. I sensed a mean streak in the others, but managed to ignore their stupid jokes when I was drinking with them.

Finals week seemed a great time for staying drunk. I figured that if I hadn’t learned the materials of my courses to begin with, then it was pointless to cram in knowledge at the last minute. I went looking for, and found, my buddy in the men’s dorm for a study break during finals.

I’ll never know if he slipped something into his beer before giving it to me, but as soon as he stepped out of his room, my head began to spin. An unfamiliar boy entered the room, pinned me onto the bed, smiling. And then the whole gang of my drinking buddies crowded in, yelling “surprise!”

Blessed for once to have blacked out, whether due to alcohol, drug, or the trauma – my memory has never cleared enough to recall the details of what exactly happened.

A few days later, my mother arrived on campus to take me home for Christmas break. I felt oddly out of sorts. An unfamiliar, lingering effect of something odd was in my system. We stopped for lunch near campus and she noticed my quietude.

“What’s wrong with you, are you sick?” Mother peered over her reading glasses.

“Um, Mom, I think maybe something bad happened.”

“What? Did you fail an exam? Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, not that. There were some guys in the dorm, and I was in Otis’ room and things got really fuzzy, and he left but Ritchie came in, then everyone did, and…I can’t remember…but I’m not sure…”

My voice trailed off and I felt lightheaded as Mother’s hardening voice went farther away. She was peppering me with questions I couldn’t answer. My memory from that evening in the men’s dorm and the ensuing days afterward were full of blank holes.

What I can recall clearly is the way my mother’s face transformed before me at the restaurant. An unforgettable and familiar expression, from long ago, came over her. My mind could not pinpoint when or where I’d seen it, only that it meant trouble.

I felt an old fear of something very bad about to happen. A chaos of jarring sounds filled my head, and I heard a distant howl rumbling underneath. Then I remember nothing more until New Year’s Day, still pleasantly buzzed from a gig the night before.

Understandably angry about what had happened to her daughter, my mother’s fury left no emotional room for me to participate in the process. She raged to friends and various university administrators about the abjectly evil nature of men, while I was relegated to merely listening about my situation. My passerby status to my own life felt all too familiar.

My father, offering his experienced legal perspective, advised me of the risks bringing a rape accusation to court. It was 1980, and girls who were in the men’s dorm as I had been would be profiled as asking for it. My personal drinking and sexual habits would be made public. Then there was the problem of not being able to remember what exactly happened. It seemed best to drop the matter and heed the cautionary words of the dean of students to select my friends more carefully.

I withdrew into my inner world with a bottle to accompany the music. Friends became scarce as I pushed them away. Only Denise, a chic and artsy friend who lived a floor above in the women’s dorm, stuck around. She wisely understood the shallow depth of college social life, and she shared my reluctance to rely on such networks for support. To this day, Denise remains a close friend.

Solace: Brahms 3rd Symphony

So it was that I found myself alone in the dorm one Saturday evening while everyone else went out. I set myself to the task of cleaning my horn. All the tubes were pulled out and on the floor as I launched myself into the time-consuming ritual of greasing all the tuning slides and oiling the valve rotors. The stereo FM receiver was tuned to National Public Radio for inspiration; the broadcast was clearly the middle of a symphony. Smearing grease onto the ends of the first valve slides, I stopped abruptly when the next movement began.

A mournful, haunting melody in c-minor wafted out of the stereo speakers. I held my breath and closed my eyes, listening to the low strings gently pulse the downbeat of a slow triple meter. Gorgeously sad, I thought, following the melody as it passed to the winds and then modulate to a new section. A moment’s pause, an unstable chord, held expectantly; then a single French horn emerged from the silence with the melody. Singing the melody on its own, the feeling wept directly into my wounded soul.

My hands shaking, I shoved the slides into my horn stuck in my mouthpiece. I managed to play along with the final statement of the melodic theme, emerging with its physicality. I shut off the radio when the music changed to an upbeat movement. The melody was now inside my head, playing over and over, demanding voice.

Rummaging through my desk drawer for music staff paper and finding none, I grabbed a piece of scrap paper. I mapped out the melody’s pitches by letter name. I set them in the contour or shape of the intervals.

The pitch durations were trickier to draw; tied triplets or maybe dotted eighth notes; then a mess of stuff at the end that sounded like one too many sixteenth notes. But I had enough of it down on paper to claim its manifest reality in my outer world. I would play it for Mr. Perrini at my next lesson and ask him the name of this tune.

My next lesson was on a Friday, a whole week away. I arrived without saying hello, sat down, plopped the crudely transcribed melody onto the stand, and played exactly what I had heard.

“So, um, what is the name of this song?”

“That’s from the Brahms Third Symphony,” he replied, picking up the paper. “Where did you get this?”

“I heard this on the radio last Saturday when I was cleaning my horn. I wrote it down. But I couldn’t get the ending of its rhythm because there was a whole bunch of fast stuff.”

“Well, it’s the slow movement of the symphony. You know there is actual written music for the whole thing, I have the music. But here, the ending is a quintuplet.” He drew the notation on my paper.

“Do you think that I could play this in an orchestra someday?”

“Well, my dear,” realizing a teachable moment for his troubled student, “if you work very, very hard, you might one day get a chance to play it.”

I looked from Mr. Perrini’s eyes to the crude drawing of my new favorite piece, calculating the path forward. I vowed to become a musician despite what had happened in the men’s dorm. I resolved to take better control of my drinking. Of course, the second one didn’t happen.

I suppressed, for many more years, the stewing anger of things unresolved. But my father paid for psychotherapy treatment about the rape, and he monitored his liquor cabinet when I was home. My mother assumed expertise status in assessing substance abuse based on her personal experience with an alcoholic father. She deemed that father’s drinking didn’t interfere with his livelihood as it had her father, therefore he was fine. My father did not succumb to the drunken rages and insanity she had withstood in her father. Mother decreed that I was a problem drinker because she had indulged me too much, that I had simply been given too many choices in life.

My parents believed in the virtue of willpower and moral strength to overcome bad habits like drinking. Alcoholics were peppered throughout my father’s genealogy, as evidenced in my Aunt Betty’s humorous anecdotes about them in her book. Making it all funny through her prose, though evaded any serious discussion about whether alcoholism could be passed down through genes (or whether moral condemnation effectively cured it).

No one hopes alcohol will rule their lives, nor can they claim a single catalyst as responsible for their decision to start drinking. I refused to acknowledge the building volcano of angry, unprocessed feelings inside me. Yet I cannot draw a direct line between tragedies and my choices to use substances. I drank because I am an alcoholic. The stuff of my unhealed trauma, my arrested emotional development, were my convenient parlances to justify an insatiable desire to drink. Though related, the two are not entirely causal.

Gabor Mate, a doctor who specializes in treating addiction, penned a self-study of his work with addicts, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He could have been describing my college years, when attempts to change proved futile:

What a wonderful world it would be if the simplistic view were accurate: that human beings need only negative consequences to teach them hard lessons. Fast Food would be out of business. TV rooms would be a deserted spot in our homes.

Mate rightly notes an underpinning system of avoidance mechanisms within addicted people. It drives them toward refuge from any “alone time” with their own minds.

No mere quest for pleasure, drugs and alcohol became my tranquilizers against a creeping ugliness polluting the landscape of my inner sonic world. Boundaries violated in childhood were again invaded a young adult. I felt little sensation of fear at a physical death. My fear was of my nightmares and phobias, that they were linked to actual events.

Gifts of Kindness

As one fellow recovering drunk put it, “Alcohol gave me wings to fly, and then it took away the sky.” A clean and sober life required a level of honesty that, frankly, I wasn’t seeking. Negotiating with the truth, whether through music or through substance-based oblivion, I contorted my singing soul to its breaking point. In order to truly commit myself to heal from everything that ailed me, I needed resources that simply were not available at the height of my addiction.

Only one of those resources was available: Unconditional love. Fortunately, it was poised on a near horizon. A cancelled dentist appointment led me to it, surprisingly clear and non-negotiable: The man I would one day marry.

My absences from college classes were not solely due to alcoholism. I had dentist appointments to fix Dr. Kramer’s work. The experimental veneers he had concocted at Children’s Hospital were a temporary fix. By the time I reached college, some were wearing thin or discoloring. It was time to begin the long process of having permanent crowns placed over all my teeth. The kindly Dr. Tootle became my new dentist.

For a brass player, dental work of this intensity can wreak havoc on their chops. When Dr. Tootle promised to create a new mouth of perfectly shaped teeth, I countered with a request that he preserve the general contour of my tooth line. It had taken years to develop a flexible, finely tuned embouchure based on the particular alignment of my teeth and jaw.  So too, I had to schedule appointments in consideration of performances, mindful of the time needed for lip tissue to recover from being stretched taut, and for the swelling to recede from needles and drilling wounds.

Both the duration (at least two hours) and pain of these procedures with Dr. Tootle rendered me incapable of driving myself to and from these appointments. At least he administered Novocaine! But their numbing effects wore off by the end of my appointments, and the intensity of the pain sent me out of my mind. The dentist’s clinic was easily a twenty-minute drive on the metro outer belt from the university.

Initially, Mother drove into the city to shuttle me back and forth from appointments. But there was nowhere for her to sit and talk with the dentist while he worked on me. Also, she had returned to teaching full-time at back in our town’s high school. Denise couldn’t give me a ride, and I felt embarrassed asking for help from others. The metro bus system would have to suffice for me.

Using the metro transit system took up an entire day’s worth of time to get to and from appointments, and I needed to skip a day of classes only for drinking (yes, that seemed logical to me at the time). I didn’t want to seem needy or divulge my dental issues. But I had to stuff my pride. After rehearsal one day at the conservatory, I looked around at everyone milling about and drew upon my courage.

“Does anyone here have a car?”

A classmate responded: “If you fill up the tank you can borrow my truck. It’s a stick shift, though.”

“I can drive stick, but I need someone to pick me up on Thursday morning. From an appointment. I’ll pay you.”

Another classmate asked: “You’re skipping theory class? Again?”

“Yeah, so what? It’s just ear training.”

 “Why can’t you just take the bus?”

“I’m gonna take the bus to it. But then I need someone to get me because I’ll be messed up. It’s in Worthington.”

 Yet Another Classmate chimed in: “Worthington? That’s across the city, man!”

“Yeah I know. It’s an appointment that will take two hours. The numbing medication will wear off by the time I’m on the bus and I don’t want to look like all the other nut cases.”

“What the hell is wrong with you, why two hours?”

“Never mind, forget it…”

 Finally, a percussion major named Dave spoke up: “Hey, I can do that, I don’t have theory that morning.”

Dave, a fellow music major and a year ahead of me, offered to help. That surprised me, since I thought he didn’t much care for me. Dave was to me Mister Perfect Student who attended all his classes and even studied for his sight singing tests. Indeed, he graduated summa cum laude. I, on the other hand, was Drunk Loud Lazy Student who skipped classes and yet aced graduated cum laude and aced all the hearing/singing tests without ever studying (thank you, inner world of music!).

Dave was a model of self-discipline and manners. He had a gracefully irreverent streak in his humor. I seemed the polar opposite of such a model student. But he offered to help, and I accepted. I left detailed directions to the dental clinic on Dave’s answering machine, with the time he should arrive.

My morning bus ride to Dr. Tootle’s clinic took about thirty minutes, with a five-minute walk from the bus stop. When I arrived, the receptionist informed me that my appointment had been cancelled. With no answering machine in my dorm room (and this was long before cell phones), she had no way of contacting me. I used the receptionist’s phone to leave a message on Dave’s answering machine. Then I took another bus back to campus, mightily annoyed at the inconvenience.

Dave had been at the conservatory practicing all morning. He didn’t return to his apartment to check his answering machine before heading out to get me. If he had, he would have heard my expletive-laden message about the appointment’s cancellation.  Moreover, it turned out that Dave has a terrible sense of direction. He drove around the city for well over an hour before finally arriving at the clinic, only to find out that I was long gone.

I felt so guilty about wasting Dave’s time, that I offered to take him out for a drink. He countered with the suggestion that we go out for dinner. Our fabulous date began forming a counterweight of compassion to my ongoing dental woes.

Dr. Tootle performed substantial restorative work to my teeth, but the gruesome recovery after those appointments fell to Dave, who valiantly chauffeured me back to campus and waited out the pain with me afterward. We had started dating, and I felt puzzled by his solicitous manner toward my suffering. He was…nice to me.

I didn’t understand his attraction to me at my seeming worst: Curled up and whimpering at the stabbing sensations in my wounded mouth, drooling at times from the swelling, wearing no makeup, sporting clothes two sizes too big for me. Hardly the vision of loveliness I wished to present to a handsome young man who had captured my heart on our very first date. Yet Dave remained close by, offering his hand to hold, ears to listen, and an empathetic gaze that mirrored the sadness of my hurting.

No one had ever regarded my ugliness with such steady, honest kindness.

The Sound of a Soulmate

There was a lingering sadness about Dave. His father had died from cancer a year before. He felt – and sounded – acutely separate from the sounds of classmates whose parents were still alive. In me he found acceptance of his own feelings of difference. He liked that I, too, didn’t quite fit in. To my surprise, he felt neither threatened by my intelligence nor by my musical abilities. My quirkiness charmed him. We delighted in each other’s sense of humor.

Both of us were grieving old souls. We found respite in each other’s compassionate company. From the outset, we were equals.

Dave and I shared a similar penchant for finding humor in the absurdities of life. We had arrived at a similar distrust of things that seemed too good to be true. And so we made fun of platitudes, shallow optimism, and even ourselves in self-effacing humor. Laughing even at the ridiculous pressures of the career path in music, we became partners in facing our daunting futures as professional musicians.

I had never shared with anyone that I “saw” music in my mind’s eye. When I finally did, to Dave, he completely believed me. He had witnessed my perfect pitch skills in music theory class as well as rehearsals. His honed experience of rhythm as a jazz drummer and percussionist was commensurate with my visceral experience of pitch. What relief I felt at last, to stop playing dumb like I had done with all my other boyfriends.

It frightened me that I loved Dave so immediately and deeply. Such a beautiful soul, how could he possibly love a broken mess like me? I could not bring myself to tell him that I would not live to see age twenty-five.

Many years later, still alive and still crazy in love with this beloved man, I heard Sadie McLachlan’s whimsical tune “Chocolate” over the radio and delighted in its apt sentiment about my feelings for Dave. Her album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy contained several songs that bore an uncanny resonance with many of my struggles at the time. A tune on the album, “Chocolate,” playfully cooed that even ice cream and chocolate were no match for the love she was in. The refrain “It’s a long way down from the place where we started from” really fit me. Dave was better than anything else that I’d tried. But I would have to fight earnestly against my self-destructive tendencies if I wanted to stay with him.

EXTRA: For a short supplemental anecdote with musical excerpts related to this chapter, click this link: Join the Orchestra (Find Your Feelings)