BACK TO THE FOREST PRIMEVAL—PART TWO

Cured by electrocution, the arrhythmia was over with and I regretted not having done this ten years before, instead of living a decade of uncertainty in which one day, I would feel just fine and the next I was tired and weak, with my heart hammering out of time and in wild syncopation.

Now I was good as new and took advantage of my renewed health to improve the quality of my hikes along the mountain road leading up to our rustic neighborhood from the highway. I was back up to a couple of miles nearly every afternoon and was feeling great. I was also ready to start hiking in the forest again.

When I speak of the forest, I’m not talking about the bucolic rural woodlots that I hiked and hunted with my grandfather when I was a boy, back in Ohio. Those were what my Grandpa Vern referred to as “clean woods”, meaning that most of the underbrush had been cleared and that a lot of the trees were second-stand timber, although there were indeed, I recall, some really impressive Ohio hardwoods—oak, pin oak, elm, hickory, sugar maple, and star gum, among others. And they grew on the largely flat surface of the west-central Ohio landscape, which made for relatively easy hiking.

This piece of natural native Patagonia forest for which I am the private warden is as different as night and day from those woodlots back home. It features towering trees and dense underbrush that, even where it permits you passage, snatches at your clothes and skin, and in places, completely blocks your path—unless you take the precaution of carrying along a machete—with impossible tangles of dog rose, blackberry, Spanish broom and thorny scrub surrounding wall-like islands of canebrake. It is also topographically challenging, with steep slopes, deep ravines and soaring crags. It was wonderful to be back there again, although, for the moment, when I first returned, I stuck to the logging trails that my assistant and I have kept open throughout the years in order to gather and truck out firewood.

But then, less than five months after my arrhythmia had become nothing more than an unpleasant memory, I had a really stupid accident. I slipped on the ice and free-fell six feet into our patio, landing on a rock, breaking a rib and puncturing a lung. I won’t go into detail. I talked about the experience thoroughly here at the time:http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2018/08/brush.html  

Suffice it to say, however, that I didn’t realize I was having massive internal bleeding until too late and nearly bled out. It had reached the point that when I was in the ambulance slipping from consciousness for the umpteenth time in several hours, and just after I overheard the rescue worker who was with me in the back of the vehicle tell the driver to step on it because he couldn’t find my pulse anymore, I remember thinking, “This is way easier than I always thought. You just close your eyes, go to sleep and don’t wake up anymore.”

Recovery from this really idiotic mishap has turned out to be quite prolonged, and I’m still not a hundred percent cured. But I’m doing about a thousand percent better than I was at first when fluid in my atrophied right lung made me feel like I was drowning whenever I had to climb an even moderately steep incline. Since then, I’ve gotten back, little by little, to taking my afternoon walks with my wife the two and a half miles down to the highway and back up to our home. At first she had to patiently wait while I gasped for breath every hundred yards or so on the inclines. But lately I’ve had to stop less and less and have been breathing ever freer.

So much so that, in recent weeks, I’ve finally returned to tasks that I’d had to suspend and delegate, like gathering, sawing and splitting firewood, a job I’ve always enjoyed and that has helped keep me in shape, since we need about eight or nine cords of wood a year to survive the cold season. As such, I’ve also returned to “the forest primeval”.

At first it was like sneaking into a place where I didn’t seem to belong any longer. Everything looked strange and overgrown. But little by little, the familiarity of it came back. For all intents and purposes, as its warden, it’s as if the property belongs to me. And that made my return a little like in certain of my dreams when I’ll walk through a door into a vast and amazing landscape and suddenly come to the realization that it was there all the time and mine to explore and enjoy.

This seventy-odd-acre forest is wild and uninhabited, but I know it from top to bottom and from side to side, so many years have I been walking and protecting it. Except for the occasional intruder or my assistant Daniel and his son Matías, I’m usually all alone here. And this is why, as much as a place like this can, it feels like mine, or at least like I’m borrowing it for as long as I can, or for as long as I live.

I feel a pang of sadness for this year that I’ve lost. I love this forest and have, literally, fought for it on occasion. But then I tell myself that I’m lucky to be coming back at all—lucky, in fact, to be alive. So I start walking my old rounds again, checking for intruders’ tracks, trying to detect places where standing timber might have been cut, looking for holes in the perimetric fencing, while making mental notes of where fallen deadwood is down so as to come back later with my truck and chainsaw to cut it up and haul it home for fuel.

There’s more of an excuse than ever to linger here, since, right now, I’m in charge of a new fencing project. This involves nearly six hundred sixty yards of new chain-link and barbed-wire fence in a place where it was never necessary before. It’s the boundary between “my” forest and the property of the late former Nazi SS Captain Eric Priebke.

Priebke had lived a quiet life in Patagonia after escaping to exile in Argentina following World War II and was a respected community leader in Bariloche, the ski town located twelve miles from my home. He had never tried to hide his identity and it wasn’t until he was already elderly that new interest in him was raised when US newsman Sam Donaldson did an exposé on him, identifying him as the officer in charge of the Ardeatine Massacre in Italy during World War II.

Donaldson even traveled to Bariloche, looked up the former SS officer and interviewed him. As he had been all his life, Priebke proved open and unrepentant—except regarding the two people he himself had executed to show how it was done and who he said still haunted him. He had been following orders, he indicated, and, in his memory, the 335 people he and his men had slaughtered were “terrorists”, not innocents. He ended up being arrested by Interpol, fifty years after the fact, and extradited to Italy, where, after a four-year process of appeals and trial, he was eventually convicted of war crimes. He died in captivity, in Italy, aged one hundred, in 2013.

Anyway, after Priebke’s arrest, we very seldom saw his family out this way anymore, so the visible face of the property was Don Pedro, the caretaker, with whom I became friends. Late last year, however, someone evidently leased the land from the Priebkes to open a nautical club, since, both their land and the land I administrate open onto a broad strip of lake front. The internal roads on the Priebkes’ property were broadened and a lot of brush cleared. This left the southeast boundary of “my forest” vulnerable, and we started to see cross-border paths being hacked open in the dense thicket.

I decided to nip the problem in the bud before there began to be unauthorized camping and campfires and furtive pilfering of green trees for posts and fallen trees for firewood. I have an excellent relationship with the Buenos Aires investment firm that owns the land, so I contacted them requesting funds, and within a week, we were clearing a work-path along the property line and I had called in a surveyor to properly mark the fence-line.

There are only two ways to get to that boundary line—from the highest point on the land and from the lowest. Entering from the highest means plunging immediately into dense thicket and woodland. It’s a place that lives in almost constant twilight and where your perspective is short-range and intimately in contact with soaring hardwoods from which you often can’t get back far enough to see their tops.

The native forest is interspersed with compact patches of exotic Douglas fir—known locally as Oregon pine—that thrives in this mountain soil. It has been seeded in parts of the woods by the wind and birds that have carried it from the property that borders on the other side of this one, and that houses a now defunct hotel, built in the late nineteen-forties when this was all still part of Argentina’s first and largest national park. Back then, not nearly as much was known about preserving native species and the European descendants who created the hotel grounds catered to their Alpine and American nostalgia by planting pine, and sequoia among other types of exotic trees, with no clear knowledge of or regard for how they would propagate. There are now some magnificent specimens of these trees, and anyplace that any native trees are cleared, the firs seem to be just waiting to take over.

Argentine preservation purists detest these non-native species and see them as a plague. But I take them without prejudice and consider myself fortunate to be able to enjoy both the native woodland and the groves of Douglas fir that remind me of visits to the pine forests of Michigan when I was a boy and those of Germany when I was in the Army.

Approaching the southeast boundary line from the lowest part of the forest is a completely different experience. In this case, I enter by the main gate. There is an internal road, covered in grass and leaves,  that plunges headlong into the woods, rises and curves to the west, and then descends sharply parallel to the lake, which is on the other side of a wooded ridge, hidden from view. The road snakes east, then west, then almost straight south through pine and beech forest, and, finally, further downward to the lowest point on the property. This is a marshy area known locally as a mallín—grassy, spongy lowlands that are pleasant, flowered meadows in the spring and summer, and that turn to boggy swamps in late fall and winter when the rains come.

Entering the mallín after almost a year of not getting back this far into the forest, I recall the first time I came to this sector so many years ago. You emerge suddenly from one of the darkest parts of the woods, into an immense clearing. The feeling then and now is like standing in the nave of a roofless cathedral, the tall spires of towering hardwoods on high-rising hills all around. These are southern beeches, a live species that, despite the snow that often blankets the area in winter, never loses its leaves. There’s another species, often called the Patagonian beech, that grows higher up in the mountains (elevations of above two thousand seven hundred feet), and that loses its leaves in winter after treating spectators to a color show of brilliant reds.

Standing here now, it has only been a few days since the iconic Notre Dame de Paris burned, destroying a millennium of architectural splendor. In one of the newscasts about the fire, I heard experts say that there were no longer trees large enough in France to reproduce the beech-wood beams that had held up the structure of that great cathedral for centuries. I scan the wide circle of tall beeches surrounding me now on every side. It is a veritable and breathtaking natural cathedral, and for the time being at least, I have the privilege of being it’s grateful congregation of one.                                                                                                                                                           

BACK TO THE FOREST PRIMEVAL

For over a year, the forest and I gazed at each other from afar. To be fair, I live in the forest, but a relatively civilized part of it. I am, however, the administrator of a little over seventy acres of original— not second-stand—native forest land in Patagonia that are adjacent to my own little piece of woodland. The thing is, for a time, I was in no shape for its rigors.

First, back in February of last year, it was my heart. An arrhythmia, which I’d been nursing on my own and with a little help from a homeopath for a decade, without it’s interfering much with my activities, suddenly went rogue. It gave way to a cardiac insufficiency that didn’t let me walk to my own gate without having to stand there panting for breath, let alone go hiking in the forest like I had for a couple of decades before that. That responsibility I handed over to my neighbor and assistant, Daniel, for the time being.

I went to a bright young cardiologist who first got my heart calmed down with drugs and then got me to submit to something called cardioversion. The process consists, in layman’s terms—and rather in the manner of a grandfather clock—of stopping the pendulum that’s ticking out of balance and restarting is at a steady rhythm. They do this with electricity. When I balked and asked if I couldn’t maybe just control it with drugs, the cardiologist told me that electric shock was safer and more effective than drugs...when it worked. And it usually worked, even in somebody like me who had simply been taking bouts of arrhythmia in stride for a decade.

So I eventually agreed. “You know how long you’ll be in the hospital?” the doc asked. I shook my head. “Two hours tops.”

The day of the procedure, I left Virginia, my wife, sitting on a bench in the waiting room and told her I’d see her in a couple of hours.

When the doctor ushered me into the Intensive Care Unit, he pointed to a half-dozen white-coated and color-coded-smocked people standing around an empty bed by the window with a view to the lake and mountains. “See all those people?” he asked. “They’re there for you.”

I almost turned tail and ran, but valor won out and I advanced on the bed with a view.

By the bed was an ominous-looking machine with cables attached to shackle-sized, upholstered alligator clips sprouting from it as well as an array of monitoring equipment attached to electrodes that were obviously going to be attached to me. I had catered to my natural shyness and penchant for dignity by taking the precaution of bringing along some pajama bottoms to wear during the procedure. The jolly nurse who was getting me set up pointed to the garment and said, “Uh, those are going to have to come off.”

“Why?” I asked defiantly.

She smiled and said, “Because with the electricity, let’s just say it’s not convenient for you to be wearing them.”

I suddenly had an electric-chair image of the current surging through my body and my pants bursting into flames. Again, I was tempted to make a run for it, but I was already wired up to the point that escape would have proven unwieldy. So I submitted.

I turned to humor to help mitigate my panic. Turning to the cardiologist I pointed to the machine by my bed and said, “So was this designed by the Coordinación Federal?”

“Say again?” he said with a quizzical look on his face, and I realized my error. Forty-odd years earlier during the era of military rule in Argentina, the Coordinación Federal had been the nexus between Army and Federal Police counterterrorism operations, and as such was often involved in numerous clandestine kidnappings and torture, the preferred method for which was electric shock. But my doctor had either been a toddler back then, or perhaps just a glint in his daddy’s eye and an enigmatic smile on his momma’s lips.

“Never mind,” I said with a nervous laugh.

Meanwhile, a pretty young hematologist was putting an IV in my arm while the jolly nurse was attaching electrodes to my chest and head. My doctor’s colleague was snapping the shackle-like alligator clips onto my ankles.

Again I tried a bit of humor. “So, this thing looks a little like those machines they use to charge up your car battery,” I said with a laugh.

This time both cardiologists laughed with me, glanced at each other, and then one of them said, “That’s exactly what it’s like!”

I’m thinking, “These people are nuts! Get me the hell outa here!”

But just then a big guy with curly red hair and a gentle smile comes up and says, “Hi, I’m the anesthetist. If you’re ready, I’m going to put this mask on you so you’ll be able to breathe easier, and then we’ll get started.”

He puts the mask on me and injects something into my IV. I want to tell him the mask is too tight. I also want to tell them all not to start the procedure until I’m fully under because I have...uh...a high...um...a high...resistance...to...anesthe...anes...oh, hell, I’m going to sleep.

Suddenly, I snap wide awake. My immediate thought is that I feel great! The jolly nurse stops by just then and says, “Oh, you’re back! How do you feel?”
“Great,” I say, “When can I get out of here?” Then I try to sit up straight and am stopped by a pulled muscle in my groin.

“Feeling a little dizzy?” she asks.

“No. Just like I’ve been working out all day. And what’s this?” I ask daubing with my fingers at something greasy on my chest.

“Just a little ointment,” she says.

“Ointment?”

She ignores me and goes to fetch the doctor. When she does, I take and end of the sheet and start trying to wipe the ointment off, because I want to get dressed and get out of here as soon as possible. It’s only then that I realize I’ve got burns on my chest. They start to sting when I begin wiping off the ointment.

Just then the anesthetist drops by, gives me a look somewhere between concerned and quizzical and asks, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Never better,” I say. “When can I get out of here?”

He holds up a staying hand that seems to say, hold your horses, then he says, “I’ll go get the cardiologist.”

My cardiologist’s colleague shows up then and says, “Well! Good to see you awake and alert! How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Great! Why’s everybody keep asking me that? I’m fine, when can I leave?” Now, he also gestures for me to slow down and says my cardiologist will be in to release me soon. “Just rest easy there in the meantime, okay?”

I have no idea what time it is. I figure things must have gone swimmingly, because it seems to me like next to no time has passed since they put me under. My watch is in the pocket of my jeans and my clothes have been put away for safe-keeping in some unknown place. When the jolly nurse shows up again to take notes from the monitors, I ask her what time it is. She says it’s nearly noon and I’ve been here the better part of four hours.

Just then, my cardiologist arrives. “Doc,” I say, “could you please have somebody go tell Virginia I’m fine. You told me I’d only be here a couple of hours and that’s what I told her. She must be worried sick!”

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“I feel great except for these burns and a few pulled muscles.” I look at him like, what the hell’s that all about, but he ignores me. “When can I get out of here?” He checks my vital signs and says he’ll get me signed out right away, but says that, for the moment I should just take it easy.

He leaves, comes back leading Virginia, and leaves again.

“What happened?” she wants to know. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I feel great. I want to get out of here.”

She wants to drive me home once the doctor signs me out, but I insist on driving myself and getting some breakfast before we leave town. I feel great, I say, stimulated and arrhythmia-free. And I’m starved!

The doc says he wants to see me in a few days and I go.

“So how are you feeling?” he asks.

“Great!” I say. “I’m back to hiking a few kilometers and feel good doing it.”

“I ask because you gave us some trouble.”

“What do you mean, trouble?”

“We hit you with the usual voltage and your heart didn’t respond. Then we hit you with the maximum, and you still didn’t respond. Finally, my colleague and I got you turned on your side and got one paddle on your back and another one on the front and hit you with everything, and that’s when it finally worked.”

I walked out of the clinic feeling like I had a new lease on life and that a lot of things that had seemed of monumental concern the day before no longer were.

(To be continued)

TWO VERY SHORT STORIES

Jim, my little brother, was a hyperactive kid. It was hard for our mother, Reba Mae, to keep track of him even when he was only four years old because he was always running off somewhere on his own in the neighborhood to play. And he would sit at the dinner table “side-saddle”, as Reba Mae used to say, with one foot under the table and the other doing a little jig to calm his nerves until he could wolf down his food and get out of the house again.

Brothers

He grew a real personality from the time he was old enough to talk, and when he didn’t get his way, he would throw the most horrifying tantrums. These included prolonged and sustained, bloodcurdling screams and he would lie on his belly on the floor and pound the parquet with his fists and feet while simultaneously banging his forehead again and again on the hardwood.

As an adult Jim always said that if he’d been a kid today instead of back then, the doctors would have made a Ritalin addict out of him by the time he was ten to keep his hyperactivity in check. But back in those days, Reba Mae went to our family physician, Dr. Berry, desperate for a solution to the problem, and was told she should simply ignore him when he was like that. Dr. Berry was Old School, a former colonel in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Let’s just say he’d seen things there was no cure for. Anything else he tended to think of as a hangnail.

“But he bangs his head on the floor!” Reba Mae protested.

“He won’t do it hard enough to really hurt himself,” Dr. Berry said.

“But he makes knots on his forehead!”

“That’s because you’re giving him an audience. You’re spoiling him. Just let him be when he’s like that. He’ll get tired of doing it on his own if he knows nobody cares.”

But he kept right on, even though Reba Mae did her best to follow the doctor’s orders. And she worried that he might really injure himself, get a concussion, fracture his skull, for pity sake. Besides, what would the neighbors think when they heard the kid screaming bloody murder?

On top of that, it drove you nuts to be in the same house with him when he threw one of these fits. It was so loud! So strident! So shrill! So, one day, a nice warm sunny day, when Reba Mae told little Jimmy he wasn’t allowed to do something he wanted to do, and, not taking “no” for an answer, he went into full-throttle hysteria, our mother jerked him off the floor by one arm and escorted him out onto our screened-in back porch.

“Scream all you want!” Reba Mae told the white-headed little tyke. “The answer is still ‘no’! “And then she went back inside and closed the back door.

As ordered, Jim persistently screamed his lungs out while hammering the hollow wooden porch floor with hands and feet and making a really satisfying pumpkin-like sound by walloping his forehead against it. This went on for a very long time. And it was so loud that a man in a delivery truck who heard it as he was driving by, quickly pulled to the curb and came running up our driveway and up the steps to the hooked door of our screened-in porch.

Jim hadn’t noticed the man and went right on screaming and pounding unabated, until the man knocked frantically on the frame of the screen door shouting, “Are you hurt, sonny? Are you hurt?” To which my little brother stopped screaming as abruptly as he had started, sat up cross-legged on the floor, looked with abashed surprise at the man’s worried face and shouted, “No!”

The baffled delivery man climbed back down the steps and left. Jim got up off the floor, went inside, and never again threw that sort of fit.

***

When my dad, Whitie, said he had a packrat in his restaurant, the Teddy Bear, I thought he was talking about a sticky-fingered employee. But he wasn’t. He was talking about an actual rodent. Packrat—until then, I never knew that was a real thing.

Anyway, this rodent played cat and mouse with Whitie for a long time. It purloined the oddest things: little cellophane-wrapped packages of crackers for soup, bright-colored matchbooks, tinfoil-wrapped peppermint patties from the candy rack, a set of plastic-pearl pop-beads from the lost and found box, just about anything shiny and attractive.

Whitie at the Teddy Bear

Whitie searched and searched to try and find out where the little animal was getting in and where it hung out. But to no avail. So he went across the back alley to the hardware store and bought traps. A number of them. And he started baiting and setting them in a variety of places at night. He tried to think like a rat, like, “If I were a rat, where would I go, what would I do, what path would I take?”

For a while, Whitie knew that he’d failed to catch this nemesis, this elusive rodent. He knew it because he was obsessively well-ordered, and he would find things messed up and out of place wherever the packrat had been rifling through the merchandise.

But then, suddenly, the thievery stopped. Whitie waited awhile, thinking it might just be a lull. Maybe it would start up again. He realized he maybe subconsciously wished it would. He realized that he admired the packrat, its ingenuity and survival skills, how, until now, it had been smart enough to pilfer him blind while managing to find its way around his traps.

But no. The packrat was definitely gone. So Whitie went back to check all of his traps. Eventually, he found the one that had snapped the packrat’s neck. And right nearby, he found the packrat’s stash, with all of the little objects it had stolen neatly tucked away.

I wasn’t very old when all this happened. I only overheard him telling my mother about it. The day he caught the packrat, he told her about it with no glee. When he got to the part about “finding the little bastard” and seeing its stash, his voice cracked and I heard him sniff.

That was the first time I realized Whitie had a heart like mine.  

MUSIC DAYS—THE VILLAGE OF LANDECK

The Landeck Tavern was my second gig.

The first one had been a dream-like stroke of luck. A fortuitous fluke. A drummer had backed out at the last minute and, desperate, the band leader had drafted me. I worked with him at a music store in downtown Lima, Ohio, and it was like a drowning man latching onto the lifeguard come to save him. He was in his tiny studio waiting for a student and fretting about his drummer’s defection. He saw me going by his door toward mine carrying my drumsticks and was like a lightbulb had come on in his head. “Hey kid!” he said. “You working for New Year’s Eve?”

“No,” I answered.

“Yes you are! You’re playing with me at The Milano.”

I was beside myself with pride and joy. I told myself he’d chosen me for my talent. But he hadn’t. He’d chosen me because I was there. Truth be told, it was an almost foolishly audacious move to book an inexperienced kid for a gig in the biggest club in the area, but when a union sideman backed out on you at the last minute for New Year’s Eve, you were pretty much screwed. Everybody made sure they were booked for that night, because it paid at least double the rate for any other night of the year.

“Thank you so much!” I gushed. “You won’t regret it!”

I headed on toward my studio to keep my appointment with a private percussion student, but the guy stepped out of his own cubbyhole into the hall and barked behind me, “Don’t you want to know what you’re gonna make, kid?”

“Oh yeah, right,” I said blushing as I turned to face him, since I would have played for free, if he’d asked. But not talking money was, I realized, so unprofessional! And these old union guys were really serious about professionalism.

“How’s fifty bucks for four hours sound?”

“Great!”

“Tough negotiator, I see,” he said, then added, “It’s a four-hour gig, ten to two. Give yourself time to set up. Don’t be late.”

As I say, The Milano Club was the premier nightclub in the area. They could have used it as a shooting location for a typical fifties mob club in a movie—plush but not stylish, heavy on the ornaments, lots of luxurious dark red and glitz, with patriarchal portraits near the entrance as a finishing touch. It was known for its Italian cuisine, but also for its steaks. Mostly, however, it was known as the playground of local high society—or of those who were spending what they didn’t have pretending to be.

Fifty dollars for four hours was a lot of money back then. In fact, I used that fifty bucks to buy my first car, a rust-laced ’57 Dodge Royal. But the night of the gig at The Milano, I didn’t even have a license yet. I was a high school sophomore and still riding the fifteen miles up to Lima from my hometown of Wapakoneta to my job at the music store with my high school band director who gave lessons there, and then driving back home on my learner’s permit with my ol’ man as my compulsory passenger when he’d come pick me up after work.

This was a big deal in itself. Whitie, my dad, had never been anything like supportive of much of anything I’d ever done. I guess, in this case, it wasn’t my music he was supporting but my willingness to work and make money in my chosen field. He respected work and money. He had no hobbies and couldn’t figure out, for the life of him, why anybody would do something for free. He considered work and money a sort of ground-cable for life, with everything else being acts of wishful thinking. So his willingness to pick me up from work was a pleasant surprise. And the ride home with him, with me driving, during those few weeks until I could get my permanent license I remember as one of the few times he and I really bonded while I was growing up. Usually back then, he didn’t get me and I didn’t get him, so we just sort of lived our separate realities. This, then, was a real treat for me, something we actually did together.

The Milano Club was run by Big Joe. Joe was a tough guy and looked the part. But I reflected that he really wasn’t all that big. When a guy was called “Big Whatever”, you half-expected him to be impressively, imposingly large. Joe wasn’t. But I would later meet and also work for Big Joe’s cousin, Little Joe, who ran another Italian club called The Alpine Village. If Big Joe wasn’t really all that big, Little Joe was indeed quite little, so suddenly the Milano Joe’s moniker made sense to me.

But anyway, after that stunning debut at The Milano, I wanted to go right on playing. I wanted to join a jazz band, but they all were well established, or they got together for specific gigs with the band leaders choosing from among guys they already knew. But musicians got sick, went on vacation, had to go out of town and died just like people in any other human group, so there must be some call for relief drummers, right? And somebody must know how to get me in.

So I asked my high school band director, who was president of Local 320 of the American Federation of Musicians. He’d already gotten me into the union, despite my still being a minor, when I excitedly told him about the Milano gig.

I think he probably gave me a hand more out of dogged loyalty to union labor than because of any personal feelings for me. I mean, he wouldn’t have tolerated a non-union musician playing in a major club, which would have meant sanctioning the band leader who hired me and banning union musicians from playing The Milano by way of punishment. And he was a regular at The Milano. It was just easier for him to call up the union secretary-treasurer and get me signed up. Which meant that on my first gig I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, but I was already a card-carrying member of the AFM union.

Anyhow, I asked him if he knew of any groups that were looking for a drummer. He said he didn’t but that he’d keep his ear to the ground. So then I asked if the union got requests for relief drummers. He said they did, but that the person to ask about that was Lippy. Lippy managed the piano and organ department at the store. But he was also the local business agent for the musicians’ union. He’d liked me from the outset and was always very nice to me.

If Lippy didn’t like you, you knew it right away. He was a stocky little red-faced man with a nice head of neatly combed silver hair. He had a hilarious sense of humor, a real bad-boy reputation, and a temper that was even quicker than his mordant wit. But me, he liked.

So I went to him and asked if he ever got calls for relief drummers.

“All the time,” he said.

“Think I could maybe get a gig now and then?”

“I’ll get you gigs all the time if you want, kid.”

“Great!” I said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

“No sweat. What do you want to play?”

“Uh...drums?” Although I was rather accomplished at it, that was all I knew how to play and he knew it.

Lippy laughed and said, “No, kid, I mean what kind of music do you want to play?”

“Any!” I answered quickly. It sounded presumptuous, I realized, but I meant it.

“You’re on, pal,” Lippy said. “Any calls I get for relief drummers, you’re the first one I’ll call.”

I thought he was kidding, but as it turned out, he wasn’t. And in my first year as a union musician, between the ages of sixteen and seventeen, I ended up playing with a score of different bands in just about every bar, club and lodge hall in the area that hired live music.

The first gig I got after The Milano, Lippy fixed up for me directly over the phone. He was back in the office at the store talking on the telephone when I came in to work. By this time I was driving my own car—my rusted out, two-tone, gold and black Dodge—up to work after school and was getting a lot of driving experience by taking all of the different alternative routes: I-75N, the North Dixie, State Route 501, and the so-called “back way”. All roads led to Rome, or Lima, as it were, and I wanted to get as much driving expertise under my belt as I could. And I wanted to get it as quickly as possible.

I had parked in the music store’s parking lot out the back door and across the street and was coming in from the loading dock past the office when I heard Lippy say to the person he was talking to on the phone, “Ah, here he is now, just a sec.” Covering the mouthpiece on the phone, he said, “Hey kid, wanna play this Saturday?”

“Sure!”

“Great!” he said, and then went on talking to the person on the phone. “Bob? Yeah, he’s free.”

I went on along the corridor onto the sales floor, said hi to everybody and then took up my normal place behind the small goods counter. It wasn’t long before Lippy came out of the office and brought me one of his business cards with the job information on the back.

“The Landeck Tavern,” I read. “Where’s that?”

“Landeck,” Lippy said.

“Never heard of it.”

“You going from Wapak?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, it’s maybe twenty-five miles. Take One-Ninety-Eight to where it merges with Ohio Sixty-Six. Take Sixty-Six to Landeck Road. Turn left on Landeck and it takes you right into town. Tavern’s on your right. If you pass a big church on your left, you went too far. Turn around and go back. But don’t worry, you can’t miss it. It’s the only club in town. Careful not to blink when you drive in, though, or you might miss Landeck altogether.”

It took about half an hour or a little over to get to Landeck on two-lane roads, the last one a narrow country road named for the village that had grown up there around the Lutheran Church. It served the surrounding rural community as a place to get supplies and visit the post office as well as to send their kids to school. It also served as a watering-hole and source of entertainment. I was headed to the watering-hole and I was part of the entertainment.

Now, half an hour or so seems like a short trip, especially along bucolic country roads. But for me it was a real adventure. I had never driven anywhere but to Lima and back, so Landeck might as well have been Timbuktu.

The job was three hours, from nine to one. I left myself plenty of time to get there and get set up. And I’d put my bass drum, snare and ride tom in the trunk of the Dodge and my floor tom, cymbals and stands in the back seat by five in the afternoon, so as to be sure not to have any last-minute rush to contend with before the trip up. Then, I shined my black wingtips, and later bathed, shaved, slapped on Russian Leather, and dressed up in my blue blazer, my grey wool dress pants, a starchy white shirt and a red and blue striped tie. It was winter and freezing cold out, so I also put on my hound’s tooth topcoat, my brand new Mallory of Fifth Avenue snap-brimmed hat and black leather gloves. I looked a little too serious for my age, like I might want to sell you a life insurance policy or something, but I was ready to go.

I refused the supper my mother, Reba Mae, offered me. I only accepted coffee. I was way too nervous to eat. I couldn’t wait to get into my car and out on the road where I could have a smoke. I wasn’t smoking at home yet then, but my pretending not to smoke and Reba Mae’s pretending not to know I smoked was, by that time, merely an unspoken formality that we both maintained. By a little later that year, the cat would be out of the bag.

It was winter-dark already when I left home. As my headlights scoped out the terrain on my way to Route One-Ninety-Eight, everything in my home town looked different, new, alien. But I was what was new. I was no longer a high school kid. I was a professional musician. One with his own car, and a license to drive it.

The trip would have been exhilarating if I hadn’t been so nervous about the job. But I tried to enjoy it anyway, rolling down the driver’s side window part way to let in the fresh, cold air, tuning the radio to the coolest music I could find, and smoking my sophisticated Salem menthols.

I navigated my way along One-Ninety-Eight past Spencerville to Sixty-Six and then northeast to Landeck Road. No problem. And my travel nerves were allayed. I sailed along the narrow darkness of Landeck Road, my punctured muffler lending the Chrysler eight-cylinder a satisfying roar, with empty fields and woodlots unfolding on either side until, up ahead, I could see the lights of the village.

I arrived way early at the tavern. I felt strange walking in there and, at first, the bored bartender and regulars at the bar looked at me like as if I were a Martian.

“Uh, hi,” I said. “I’m the drummer with the band tonight. Where do I set up?”

The bartender pointed with a shot-glass he was drying. “Over there on the bandstand, chief,” he said. And I went back out to my car and started hauling in my drum kit and setting it up at the back of a large-ish wooden platform, next to a worse-for-wear upright piano that already stood there.

In his celebrated Piano Man, Billy Joel sings:

It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday
And the manager gives me a smile
'Cause he knows that it's me they've been comin' to see
To forget about life for a while
And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, "Man, what are you doin' here?"

That’s the kind of place the tavern in Landeck was. Friendly, unsophisticated, a gathering place for folks wanting “to forget about life for a while.” And Bob Reed and his raucous band of senior musicians helped them do just that on Saturday nights.

Reed showed up just as I was finishing setting up. He introduced himself and said, “Welcome aboard.” He was a wiry, nervous sort of guy in his fifties, a trumpet player brought up on Dixie and swing.

“You all set up?” he asked.

When I said I was, he said, “Want to give me a hand with the chairs and stands?” and I realized that he and his guys had had to tear down after their last gig so their regular drummer could get his set off the stage and I could get mine on. He and I quickly got the music stands and chairs out of the corner where they’d been stashed and set them up on stage just as the rest of the guys straggled in. In the meantime, more regulars and out-of-towners had started filling the place up, and my feeling of invading a private party from when I first walked in quickly melted away.

Reed and his guys had a huge, fat “fakebook” full of every swing, Dixie and polka tune imaginable. And Reed was the youngest among the band members. The others ranged from sixty-some to late seventies. It was a blast playing with those guys because they were long past being up-tight about their music. They were relaxed with themselves and their instruments and that’s how the sound—a decidedly Dixieland sound—came out. The people in the tavern loved it. It was a pretty big band for those times when most jazz gigs had been scaled down to trios and quartets or just a piano man. This one had piano, bass, trumpet, sax, trombone and drums. It was a big, blasty, raucous sound and I was in heaven.

The piano player was the only one I knew by sight and reputation. Jimmy Ell—a tottering man in his seventies with a pencil-thin moustache and dark-dyed hair, whom you never saw that he wasn’t at least slightly drunk. And when he got really snockered he was always good for a riotous story.

For instance, the day job of another bandleader, Haydn Snyder, was piano tuner. Whenever a bar called and asked him to tune their piano, Haydn would always ask, “Did Jimmy Ell ever play it?” If they said yes, Haydn would politely decline to take the job. Why? Because Jimmy Ell always had a mouthful of snuff while he played and whenever he felt the need to spit, he would stand up, open the top of the upright piano and let fly on the action and strings of the instrument. It didn’t make a lot of difference to the sound on those battle-weary eighty-eights, but it sure played hell with the work of the piano tuner.

And then there was the time he was playing a wedding at the upscale Shawnee Country Club. The father of the bride invited the band to partake of the wonderful hot buffet when they took their break. Jimmy Ell and another member of the band were blown away by the homemade beef and noodles with mashed potatoes. They ate a big plateful each and washed it down with beer, which Jimmy reinforced with the lip-wash he carried in his hip flask. When they’d finished, Jimmy Ell says, “I think I’ll get seconds.”

“Forget it, Jim,” the other guy says. “We’ve gotta get back up on that stage.”

“No sweat,” says Jimmy, “I’ll get it to go.” And with that, he walks over to the buffet table, grabs a big handful of mashed potatoes and stuffs it into one side-pocket of his dinner jacket, and then he grabs an equally big handful of beef and noodles and stuffs it into his other side pocket.

Wiping his hands clean with a linen napkin, he turns to his astonished fellow band member and says, “Okay, Jack, I’m ready. Let’s swing, Daddy.”

He was a wailing piano man when he wasn’t playing in the cracks between the keys, and that’s why he kept getting union gigs. But this night, like others, he got more and more inebriated as the evening went on. At one point, during a solo, he played right off the high end of the keyboard and fell off the bench onto the floor. The people on the dance floor thought it was part of the show and laughed and applauded. The rest of us just went right on playing until Jimmy picked himself up, climbed back onto his bench and caught up to us at the bridge.

Later on, he was playing The Beer Barrel Polka in one key while the rest of the band was playing it in another.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” Reed hissed, but oblivious and apparently deaf, Jimmy Ell played on like nobody’s business in a key of his own. Then I was astonished to see Bob Reed pull a small, black revolver out of a mute bag under his seat and aim it at the piano-player. Apparently, no one else was surprised to see this, because I was the only one who seemed alarmed.

Then Reed cocked the revolver and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang even as we kept right on playing. Only then did Jimmy Ell turn toward the bandleader who was still training the smoking starting-gun on him and Reed hollered over the polka music, “You’re in the wrong goddamn key, Jimmy!”

But it hadn’t made a lick of difference to all the red-faced farmers and their dates out on the dance floor. They were literally polka-ing to beat the band and couldn’t have given a tinker’s damn whether we were in tune or not.

Out of the hundreds of gigs I would play from then on, this was one of the most fun and most memorable, and I was truly sorry when the three hours were up and Reed handed me a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Hey, ya done good, kid!”

Outside, as I was loading my drums back into the Dodge, it was starting to snow. On the way back home I stopped at a lonesome truckstop and had cherry pie and coffee to celebrate. I’d driven myself to my first real professional gig. I was on my way. I sat there smoking a cigarette and drinking the strong black refill the waitress had brought me, watching the snow coming down, blanketing the roofs of the tractor trailers parked beneath orange lights outside. Finally, with trepidation because of the snow, but with joy at being my own free agent, I headed back out to my car and into the night, along country roads back home.

I lit another cigarette and tuned the radio to a jazz station. I was excited. I couldn’t have guessed then just how busy a musician I was about to be. All I knew was that my music days had begun. And I never wanted them to end.