When does it dawn on you that you want to play the piano? When your mother keeps dragging you off to see her best friend, Dame Myra Hess? When the toy piano you got for your fourth birthday is the only thing you managed to save from the earthquake? Or is it when you pass a musical instruments store, suddenly begin trembling, go inside, sit down at the first bench, and, without knowing how, spin off what the astounded salesman identifies as Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue?
None of these things happened, and yet I wanted to play the piano. More precisely, I wanted to play jazz piano. There were three problems with this. The first was I was so unmusical that even in elementary school I always belonged to that half of the class briskly defined by the music teacher Mrs. Fleming as "non-singers," meaning I drew a lot of scales while the hearty of tone were practicing "Amazing Grace." The second problem was that the closest I'd ever come to a piano was my record collection. And third, this desire for the keyboard didn't come over me at some Mozartian five or Lisztian nine, but at 17, when most prodigies were already washed up and most teenagers had other kinds of boogies and blues distracting them.
On the other hand, there were encouragements to my ambition. One, I wanted to play jazz piano. Two, I wanted to play jazz piano. Three, I wanted to play jazz piano. And then there was Andrew Kobel, the neighborhood piano instructor. For years I had been looking across the street at the sign in his first-floor apartment window --- ANDREW KOBEL, PIANO TEACHER, TRADITIONAL, JAZZ, MODERN --- without feeling any personal tug. More than that, Kobel himself had made sure his public appearances were exercises in antipathy: When he wasn't leaning out the window to chase ball-playing kids away from the entrance to his apartment building, he was stomping down to the candy store or the deli with visions of the tone-deaf he might trap underfoot. This was no minor specter since his left foot was on an elevated stand, as though a leg deformity had left him with little choice but to act like the display case of a shoe store. Needless to say, this accessory branded him on some tongues as The Crip, while others saw more than a passing resemblance in his gait and that of Bela Lugosi's Igor in the Frankenstein movies. For me, though, Kobel's real eeriness had been in some apparently divine ability to listen to the same hammer blows on his piano morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, few of them producing anything as complex as "Three Blind Mice." Where had he gotten so much patience? Or, the baleful version of the same question, what made him satisfied with so little?
Instead of coming up with an answer to those questions, I crossed the street to provide another reason for asking them. Sitting in his dark, over-furnished living room, Kobel heard out my aspirations as though they weren't the most preposterous thing he had ever heard. In the meantime we exchanged pledges of good faith --- $25 for a half-hour of learning what the ivory and ebony things were supposed to do. It seemed reassuring to think that Thelonius Monk had started this way, too.
Kobel never asked why jazz, in particular. I attributed this to several things. First, there was his total lack of interest. I was 7-8 Tuesday evenings and 11-12 alternate Saturday mornings, over and out. If I wanted to squeeze in a few hours of practice on his spare piano during the week, that was free and fine, but omit the unnecessary details. Then there was his conviction, more than visible after a few lessons, that it didn't matter if I wanted to play bebop jazz or Javanese folk songs, I was never going to get there, that both of us would have already accomplished a great deal if I managed to remember after a few years that Every Good Boy Does Fine. No question, both these attitudes were discouraging, did nothing at all to exemplify that positive reinforcement we like to discern in inspiring teachers. But --- and this was another reason he didn't care about jazz ambitions --- Kobel had never longed to be inspiring. On the contrary, his few remarks not having to do with half-notes and quarter-notes had to do with the foul fates that had given him synovitis at an early age ("and made me The Crip, as they say around here") and forced him to make a living teaching six- and seven-year-olds. Putting aside the niceties, he simply didn't like his pupils, resenting their usurption of time he had once planned to devote to the concert hall.
So I labored on without understanding, sympathy --- or much of a taste for practice between Tuesday lessons. This, of course, was hardly conducive to mastering my instrument. On the other hand, not showing up at Jack's luncheonette or Marty's drug store wouldn't have been conducive to getting weekend dates, pool hall partners, or lines on temporary jobs, so the dilemma was acute. It also became more gnarled when the person showing up at Jack's and M