Simple as Pie

Suzanne Birrell (I called her "Sudsy Barrel) lived six blocks away on Haskell Avenue. Our mothers took turns driving us everywhere--to school, to junior high band practice, to friends' homes--so often that we were considered siblings. We had the absurdly easy friendship common among young musicians who belonged to our tribe of gifted kids with delight and runaway dreams.

My best pal Matt and I would orchestrate shenanigans that took Suzanne and Maryanne Hoobs by storm: we kidnapped them in their pajamas before dawn and spirited them to breakfast at the pancake house. We flocked the trees and eaves of their homes with rolls of toilet paper.

Matt and I gleaned most of our ideas from Mack Sennett comedies. Our favorite character actor, James Finlayson, appeared in more than 200 films--including the Laurel and Hardy features--as the master of the double-take and glare. He'd wink and yell "Doh", an expression later stolen for Homer in the cartoon series The Simpsons.

Matt and I would catch each others eye across the band room and shout "Doh", grimacing as if we'd been smacked with a plank. And we'd lug paper plates and shaving cream in a grocery bag when driving around to our friends' homes, ringing the front doorbell and slapping a pie into Suzanne's face or Russ' jolly mug, and then make a run for the safety of the road. By the time we were in high school, Matt owned a Falcon wagon, our corporate office for mischief, and we drove around the San Fernando Valley, slapping pies on people.

Wednesday was cruise night on Van Nuys Boulevard and we'd drive from Victory all the way to Ventura Boulevard, hang a u-turn in the Lucky Market parking lot, and head north again among the spiffy jacked-up Fords and Chevys, watching girls as they strolled the sidewalks in their headbands, vinyl boots, and miniskirts, leaning on the horn and speeding between the red lights. If we had more than three of us, we'd screech to a stop at the light and conduct what we called a "Chinese Fire Drill". The idea was to exit from the closest door, run around the car like madmen until the light turned green, then race back into the car and lurch off for the next street along the way, Jim Morrison's voice belting out "People are strange...", or the stereo booming out the Vanilla Fudge version of "Ticket to Ride"... or Jagger's "Ruby Tuesday".

One time Matt, hobbled by a broken leg, lumbered around the Falcon with his leg in a cast, the cops just behind us on Reseda Boulevard. Good old Matt. He had a spare steering wheel, which he held up as he screamed hysterically from the driver's seat while one of us wrangled the car surreptitiously.

When we tired of the slapstick, we sat in Bob's Big Boy, spooning down thick chocolate milkshakes, or we took a carload of chums over to Farrell's Ice Cream on Reseda where the waiters threw your own gluttony parade with horns and bass drum if you powered down a two-person serving of sundae, appropriately known as "The Trough".

In 1969, we graduated high school and went into the diaspora of pie-tossing expats. Today, Matt works among the musical elite in the San Diego symphony scene and Suzanne still makes music, playing bass guitar professionally. I sit looking out at the pond, down into the San Joaquin Valley where the Sutter Buttes rise into the smokey air, and cannot find the thread inside that leads to the unbridled glee of those days. Have I failed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs? I am recovered from hopelessness and I'm reasonably happy. But what I'd give for a belly laugh so fierce I'd have to struggle to hold consciousness, bursting into a million motes of delight--like the spray from an Independence Day sparkler--fizzing, jangling down to the marrow at the idiocy, blind, brutal idiocy of taking myself so damn seriously.

The High Register

If there is anything potentially more embarrassing than, say, the admission of a amorous proclivity for farm animals, it's the confession that I play the clarinet. In the early 1960s, it seems, the clarinet, easily portable and more abundant than tympani or sousaphone, was the instrument of choice for families who had children in Los Angeles County schools. There were three sections of clarinets in band--adding up to more than 20 musicians--compared with the random bassoonist or trio of euphonium players. For a boy who measured his entire life on being mentally and bodily different from his fellows, the clarinet promised little more than anonymity and an opportunity to create screeching sounds that would scare off all sentient creatures with ears.

To wit: in my last year of elementary school, I was issued an silvery clarinet--save for its wooden mouthpiece--that was forged from a single piece of metal. It went whole into its carrying case. I'm sure it was crafted from surplus World War II aircraft parts, soldered and shaped, then had nine holes punched into it for the keys. We stored our instruments in lockers in the music room where other students had a chance to blow into them during the day.

By the time I entered Porter Junior High in Granada Hills, I had graduated to a wooden clarinet, which broke apart into two main sections, along with a barrel, bell, and mouthpiece that you sorted into proper slots in the velvet-lined storage case. It took months to learn how to play it without hitting one of those bone-chattering screeches. The instrument was powered by a slender bamboo reed that you soaked in your mouth for five minutes before assembling the clarinet. Once moistened, the reed vibrated evenly and if you built up an embouchure (training the muscles of your face to clench securely about the mouthpiece), you could avoid unwanted notes that diverted highway traffic for miles.

My father used to ask if I took requests, to which he'd add, "Can you play "far, far, away?"

Whenever relatives came for a visit, my mother (who had been a successful child violinist) trundled me out to abuse them with squeaks and screeches. I was proud--and horrified.

Day by day, semester after semester, I rose to the challenge. With 25 clarinetists in Mr. Schackne's band, it always came down to Howard Goldberg and I. We fought like dogs for the first chair of the section. One semester he'd sit at the top, the following semester I wrested the honors away. We played musical leap-frog for several years, rising to Schackne's challenge to play complicated parts from Ralph Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite or Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor --a death battle of woodwinds while our band-mates looked on.

In our last year of junior high school, I joined the Porter Polka Dots as principal clarinetist. Russ and Bruce played trumpet and Matt played tuba. We wore white dress shirts onto which we carefully pinned red polka dots cut from construction paper--and green-felt tyrolian hats with feathers. Proud then, I can only look back with horror. We sawed our way through "The Beer Barrel Polka" and other delights.

Following graduation, mom and dad took me on a visit to relatives in New York City. It was an astonishing trip for a 12 year old. We visited Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, Chock Full of Nuts, Coney Island, and the Empire State Building. But the highlight of the trip was a visit to the crowded district in Manhattan where merchants sold musical instruments. In one store, the clerk showed us a new Buffet clarinet. It was made of rich, brown pearwood and the quick action of the silver keys took your breath away. I nearly died when we walked out, the black leather carrying case in my hand.

But the following fall I entered high school and all would change. I improved my playing, but at the same time, it was clear that the clarinet was decidedly not a sexy instrument. We were listening to "Eight Days a Week" and "White Rabbit" on our .45 rpm records. Moving to saxophone was an option, but really, anyone who was "boss", "bitchin'", or "cool" was studying guitar.

I had a brief flirtation with bass clarinet, a horn more than twice the size of a clarinet with low notes that shook your whole body when you played. Since bands and orchestras only had a single bass clarinet, it was my only chance for distinction, and for a while I played for the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic, rumbling out bass clarinet parts written by Shubert, Mahler, and Brahams. But in a world that orbited about the blazing sun of rock and roll, it simply would not do.

In the marching band, I turned to bass drum, since there was only one of those, and I could wear a kilt at half-time shows. Then, when I graduated and went off to college, I became the drum major, leading the band on to fields at Stanford, Cal, and the Rose Bowl. I twirled a five-foot long mace and high stepped in front of more than 50,000 drunken fans, which made more sense than playing that squeaky clarinet. But it still was not the same as mastering the guitar cords to Disraeli Gears.

For the better part of a half-century, the Buffet Crampon languished in its case, toted about the globe through my many professional incarnations. It found a home under my bed in towns like Fairbanks, Norfolk, Champaign-Urbana, and Tuscaloosa. It hid in the closet up in the Olympic Mountains and near the bustling airport in San Jose. I held onto it through times where selling it would have helped pay a month's rent, or when I thought it would finance a road trip.

I held to the notion that someday it would make sense to take it out and play something. And I was plagued by guilt whenever I recalled the day my mother and father walked me out of that store in Manhattan.

Recently I borrowed a guitar with the idea that I would finally learn the cords to Thunder Road. But my fingers hurt and I could barely eke out a note. I boxed up the guitar and reached beneath my bed for the clarinet case. The cork that lined the barrel and bell had curled off in decay and the pads that secured the tone holes were dry and cracked. It cost $150 to have it tuned up to playing condition, and I brought it home, tapping the case on the seat beside me as I drove.

Reeds are made of plastic or bamboo composites now, but you still have to lay them on your tongue and soak them before playing. I fitted the reed into the mouthpiece and tightened the ligature. My fingers knew exactly where to go, and I started in on Rhapsody in Blue, with that long glissando that rolls way up into the high register as if I was born for it.

I played for a good fifteen minutes before my embouchure collapsed. And I'm proud to say that I didn't squeak, even once.

The Hearts of Soul

“If you ain’t got no money, ain’t nobody calls you honey,” Bo Diddley.

Granada Hills High School still stands at the north end of Zelzah Avenue, the same street where the first oil well in the San Fernando Valley was drilled in 1916. Granada Hills had been home to the Sunshine Ranch, where farmers tended well-manicured orange groves and grew apricots, walnuts and beans. In 1959, the same year my family moved to California, that Soviet shoe-thumping demon Nikita Khrushchev visited Granada Hills. He had wanted to go to Disneyland, but U.S. security forces were concerned for his welfare, so they chauffeured him instead to witness suburban splendor on Sophia Drive.

You'd hardly find a whiter place to live. Driving up and down our block on Gaviota Avenue, you'd see tidy lawns, each dotted with an orange tree spared when the orchards were paved for subdivisions. A Japanese-American family lived across the street. But other than the Kotas, every family resembled characters from 1950s situation comedy shows--in other words, bland beings of varying shades of white.

Over on Zelzah, we had two Blacks in our high school class. The boy ran track and the girl was a cheerleader. Among our massively huge graduating class of nearly 1,000, there were many Hispanics, reflecting the bussed-in students from neighboring Latino communities of San Fernando and Sylmar, but just our two Blacks. It would have been insane then--one year following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.-- to even think that America would ever elect a Black President.

Raised in a progressive Jewish family--my mother loved Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Jackie Robinson--I had great love for Black players on the Dodgers and Rams, and loved Elgin Baylor. But we were frightened of "Negros"--or as my father called them in unbridled Yiddish racism, "shvartzers". During the Watts Riots in the mid-60s, ash from the burning Los Angeles neighborhoods wafted over the hills and dropped like heavy snowflakes on our lawn. It snowed hatred for weeks. My parents locked the doors at night and worried that the burning would come to Granada Hills.

I had a sense of excitement for it, hoping something grim or powerful might explode into the vanilla calm of my staid adolescence. In my senior year, I took serious action: I joined Rinn and the Hearts of Soul.

Rinn wasn't very Black at all. In fact, she was Armenian. With her kinky Afro cut and wide nose, she may have passed for Black if you closed your eyes when she sang. Her two brothers played guitar and drums. But if they wanted to complete their soul band, they needed brass. So they recruited me to play tenor sax and heavily nordic Bruce Classpill to blow trumpet.

At first, we sounded like disparate parts of a rusted farm implement. But Rinn could belt out the standards. What we needed was rehearsing--and rehearsal space. Rinn said she'd look into it, and we were stoked when she picked us up at the high school band room and drove us to a house off of Chatsworth Street. It was a swell house for the neighborhood, on a large lot, with a cast-iron gate where we entered the yard. Rinn led us to a small studio that stood just beyond a wide, glistening swimming pool.

I was amazed to find myself inside a recording studio with sound-baffles in the walls and ceiling, an array of tape-to-tape equipment, microphones, mixing boards, and a genuine wonderland of guitars, saxophones, drum kits, and amplifiers. Rinn said we had the run of the place, but we had to take loving care of the instruments.

We'd work for hours on our set list: Knock on Wood, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Tracks of My Tears, My Guy, Chain Gang, In the Midnight Hour. Rinn had worked out choreography, too, so when we were playing, Bruce and I would kick our legs in a Slauson rhythm or Mashed Potato, raise our horns, and end with a two-step shuffle. We were Black as ignorant whites could be.

There was a baritone sax in the studio and I found a way to work it into the repertoire, especially during Do You Love Me and Come See About Me. The bari took all the wind you had, and when you played the low notes, your entire body vibrated with the pitch. You were part of the instrument.

When we broke, we usually went out through the iron gate, but once we went through the house, having been invited inside for lemonade. The owner was a tall, strikingly handsome Black man with gigantic hands that wrapped all the way around when he shook mine. His name was Bo Diddley.

I had no idea he lived in the Valley. In fact, he kept the house for two more years before moving to Florida, where he passed away in June 2008.

Sadly, Rinn and the Hearts of Soul never performed a live gig. We played to friends at Bo Diddley's backyard studio, but eventually fell apart.

During that senior year, our student newspaper was invited to interview members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers. But no campus organization would host them, and the principal forbade a visit on school grounds. I'm not sure I asked their permission before volunteering my home, but my parents were great sports about it, and one evening toward the end of the semester, four Panthers drove out from Watts and held forth in our living room before a group of students and teachers.

I can't remember the details, but one of the Panthers said something that terrified my parents. My father left the room and disappeared into the den. He later said I shouldn't "try a stunt" like that again. My mother said something about their suggestion that my parents give them our television and jewelry, but I wonder.

During my first semester at college in San Jose, I was asked by the Spartan Daily to cover a meeting of the Panthers on the east side of town. It was held in a small house, packed with Panthers and revolutionaries. The speaker was Angela Davis, and when she spotted me in the crowd--which must have been easy for her--she pointed to two bodyguards and they ushered me outside. They were polite and insistent.

I am certain today that if those misguided men had only known that I had blown bari for Rinn and the Hearts of Soul they would have let me stay.

How Myoko Sakatani Saved My Life

It was the summer of 1969. On August 15, thousands of the Woodstock nation gathered at Max Yasgur's farm for the greatest music festival of the modern era. A month earlier, on July 16, the Apollo 11 spacecraft carrying astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins blasted off for the moon. That same day, I had visited a friend's house in Granada Hills. We had graduated high school just weeks before and we opened a few cans of Old English 800. I got drunk for the first time.

I went home to sleep, the world swirling at a nauseating clip around the bed. Around three in the morning I woke to a blistering headache, took some aspirin, and went back to sleep. The following morning, the 17th, I felt woozy, and still nursed a powerful headache. It was lawn-mowing day, and I was in the backyard with the push mower, running even rows across the grass in the hot sun while listening to updates of the Apollo flight on my transistor radio.

That night I went to sleep with an unabated headache and an odd twinge in my left arm. No matter how I turned in bed, it wouldn't go away. And around dawn, I woke to a suffocating chest pain. My mother woke and telephoned the doctor, who recommended in customary fashion that I take some aspirin and go back to sleep.

But I couldn't sleep, and the pain grew worse. My peripheral vision was flagging too, and I felt like I was descending down an ever narrowing crevasse. My mother got me up and into the Rambler, then we drove for the emergency room.

The doctors took one look at me, wheeled me into the coronary care wing, fitted anti-embolism stockings on my legs, and injected my stomach with a blood thinning agent that burned like a wasp sting. I spent the rest of the day in a blackout.

In the morning, the Apollo astronauts had begun orbiting the moon, and I was far from Earth as well. I woke as a cloud, floating on the ceiling of my hospital room, washed in a purple cloud, gazing from what seemed miles away at my inert shape in the coronary care bed, wires and tubes running out of my body to a bank of machines. Considering the brutality of the pain of the previous day, I felt wonderful. Peaceful. Joyous.

But moments later my mother walked in, the doctor behind her. She sat on the bed and wept. The doctor was talking to her. And at once, I felt as if I were tumbling, sucked down into a whirlpool of graying light, spinning deep into darkness.

The next time I woke, I was back in bed, listening to the beep of the heart monitor, gazing at the dull morning light streaming through the window. The Eagle had landed, and Neil Armstrong was taking humankind's first steps into moondust. I didn't know about that. What I knew was that my chest ached, my head spun, and that I felt very alone in a small room where nurses watched through a plate glass window.

One of them was Myoko Sakatani. She spent hours at my side over the following week, talking softly, reassuring me that all would be well. I was surely the only 18 year-old to ever have occupied center stage at the coronary care unit.

Edwin Zalis, head of the UCLA heart team, was brought in to diagnose the trouble. He said I had myocarditis, an infection of the heart lining. Usually fatal. Cause uncertain. I would need plenty of undisturbed rest. I was lucky, he said, to have been an athlete on the high school track team my senior year, running the hills above campus and strengthening my heart.

Myoko came in and out of the care unit in her white uniform. She held my hand. And when I asked to see my girlfriend she said that there were orders that only my immediate family could have access. I asked again, and she shook her head. The days and eves were a long blur of intravenous meals, bedpan interventions, and powerful drugs. There were other patients in the room now. I recall a man dying in the bed adjacent to mine and his monitor alarm ringing with sharp insistence until the nurses turned it off.

A week later, I had been wheeled out of the coronary care unit into the regular population. Even so, Myoko came to visit. And one evening, after everyone had gone and the halls were dark, Myoko opened the door to my room and led my girlfriend over to the bed.

* * *

I had been released at the end of the month. My father collected news magazines of the Apollo triumph and brought them to my bed at home. As I learned to walk again and build strength, I toured the neighborhood, hand-in-hand with my sweetheart. We watched the throngs at Woodstock on the television.

That year America sank further yet into the mire of Vietnam and my draft number had been called for the lottery. I was chosen 19 out of 365, destined for active duty. But Dr. Zalis said I was in no condition to serve; he wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was excused from military duty. I would go to college in the fall to study journalism at the end of the summer of 1969 when Myoko Sakatani saved my life.

Years later I contacted the hospital to try and find her. But the personnel department reported that she had left the hospital and there was no way to track her. Since then, the hospital itself has closed. But I found my own way. When I look at the moon and think of men walking there, I think of my longest summer and say a prayer of thanks.

Going Under

The Granada Hills High School "Highlanders" chose the McLean tartan. Only a few members of the marching band were allowed to wear kilts, sporrans, and flashes. I took great pride in it, although I was a Russian Jew and the closest I had come to the highlands was the corner of Chatsworth Street and Zelzah Avenue, where palm trees and burger joints dotted the landscape.

I wore the kilt around town just to call attention to myself. I wore it to the store, the dentist, on cruise nights on the Sunset Strip, and to the pancake house. If I could, I would have worn it to synagogue.

I was certain it underscored my manhood. Matt Garbutt had a Falcon station wagon and after football games, I'd ride in the back deck, my naked legs hanging out the open window toward following cars. There were jokes about what we wore underneath, but none of us would tell.

In the fall of my senior year I wore the kilt to Dr. Abraham's office. The doc was a fully paid member of one of the twelve tribes of Israel and, like myself, had no prior experience in man skirts. At the end of the appointment it was decided that I had a lazy eye that would require surgery. The procedure was scheduled and off I went to parade my uniform about Ventura Boulevard.

The operation required a mild sedative. In those days, strabismus surgery had to be performed without anesthesia so the patient, gazing consciously at spots on the ceiling, could let the physician know if the adjustment to the muscle was on target. Only then would the anesthesiologist deliver the knock-out drug.

To begin, the anesthesiologist injected my eye socket with a numbing solution, making six or eight insertions around the orbit. They burned like iodine. When the doctor had successfully moved my eye out from its setting to reach the muscles beneath it, the pain was absolutely intolerable. It felt like he was pushing a screwdriver into my eye. Worse, I could see everything through my good eye, reflected in the mirror the surgeon wore on his forehead.

"Just a little longer, " he said. I was wriggling in my restraints and the nurse put her hand on my shoulder. The dots on the ceiling seemed close and in focus through my tears. "A little more," he said, "you're doing great."

The pain shot back into my skull and down my neck, and I cried out. At that second, Dr. Abraham lifted up his mirror and peered at me.

"What do you wear under that thing, anyway?" he asked.

For a moment we were laughing. And just after that, the full anesthesia hit like a sledge and I passed into the heather.