I’m not sure at what point it became clear to my mother that my biological father (father #1) was not going to make good family material but a clear indicator might have been the occasion of my birth.

As my mother tells it, he was around briefly for the actual birth but sort of dropped the ball after that point. Why wouldn’t he? By this time, even though I was my mother’s one and only child, my father had already cranked out 3 others in a prior marriage, so I guess you might say that the novelty had worn off. You know; you’re in, you’re out and then chance lays a kid on you or not.

To prove to us that he didn’t have the ‘right stuff’, he left the hospital not long after I was hatched, with the words: “I’ll be back tomorrow”, and then, of course, he never showed up again and my mother was unable to get him on the phone for the next 3 days or so. In the meantime, she needed clothes for me and herself that were back at their house and and would be necessary when she was discharged from the hospital.

So, she did the only thing she could do and that was to enlist the aid of one of her brothers to perform a little B&E and crawl in through their bedroom window, get the clothes and bring them back to the hospital, which my uncle did.

‘Where is this guy?’, she’s thinking, and I’m just hanging around in my diapers thinking the same thing…’I've just about had enough of this hospital and I’m ready for my new digs’. Wherever he was, it was apparent that he wouldn’t be answering the phone. Distraught and befuddled that her newborn’s father went AWOL, she eventually transitioned from worried to pissed and on the day of her discharge, much to the consternation of the nurse on duty, she called a cab.

As hospital staff escorted us out of the hospital and into the waiting cab, ‘husband of the year’ appeared. Somehow, without ever communicating to my mother, he had found out the discharge date and worked us into his schedule.

By the time she opened the front door of our house it was clear what the problem was, since there were wall to wall musicians and their instruments to navigate over and around. My father had gone ahead and scheduled a jam session with his bandmates, effectively driving me and my mother straight into the bedroom for the evening.

As we slipped past the horn players and my dad’s drum set, my mother gave him the stare from hell, the guys in the band were looking at each other uncomfortably, and even I mumbled something like “asshole” as we passed by on the way to my new crib, although I hadn’t quite mastered the English language yet and perhaps it was just angry gibberish.

To add insult to insensitivity, while most of the musicians would finally leave, one of them, eighty-sixed from his own house, took over the guest room for the next month until my mother forced him out.

From then on, for the next couple of weeks, on those rare occasions when my dad was in line to change my diapers, I made sure there was a little extra chef’s surprise in the gift wrapping. None of it mattered though because, in his disengaged head, he was already planning the escape route and looking forward to the next conquest and knock-up.

He was just a guy who liked to make the babies but didn’t want to have much to do with any of the rest of it. You could sort of understand it if I was, say, a Bassett Hound or a goldfish, but seeing that he had no intention of caring for a small human like myself, well, it was pretty pathetic.

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Barb moved in about a block and a half from our house when I was 16 and, because she was new to the neighborhood, slowly and shyly melded into our group of pals that included several other houses on our block.

We mostly hung out around my house because I had a yard big enough to play softball in or we just sat around and talked. Barb’s shyness didn’t stop her from having fun with us but she always seemed to be playing it a little on the guarded side.

She was very pretty, very sweet and also, seemingly, very fragile. Early on I didn’t know what it was that caused that fragility but I would eventually find out. We were friends at the start but, by the time my high school graduation rolled around, we started dating.

Somewhere in my head, I knew that our ‘all too young’ relationship would have a time limit since she would still be in high school when I would be going off to college in the fall. Whether we would progress beyond those months apart was speculation but I figured we would eventually drift away to our separate paths, and that’s pretty much what happened.

That summer leading up to my departure, however, we spent lots of time hanging out and she soon invited me over to her house and I met her mother who was as sweet and gracious as Barb but with that same odd fragility about her. That ‘fragility’ was really a profound sadness, but I didn’t get the full impact of it until I went to her house.

From the very first visit, there was something in that house that made me extremely uncomfortable, something unnatural and oppressive that made the very air feel confining. If I was there too long, getting out and walking home was a relief.

As far as I could detect, that ’something’ turned out to be her father, whose only discernible interests seemed to be The Jackie Gleason Show, booze, and a police scanner that was on all the time. I’m probably missing a few of his other interests due to faulty memory or lack of discovery but, suffice it to say, booze and the police scanner were two of his principal passions.

When I say that the scanner was on all the time, I’m not exaggerating because he, apparently, had a need to know where and what might be happening in the world of crime and law enforcement at any given time. Even if it was a Saturday night and Gleason was on, so was the scanner and if there was something better on the scanner than the TV, then it was in the car and off to the scene of the crime.

In and of itself that didn’t account for what I was sensing in Barb and what I felt in the house, so I asked Barb about her father. She was reticent to say much because it was embarrassing for her, but what little she told me said a lot about why I always felt strange around her dad. Of course, I would see her dad in the early evening and by the time I left to go home there was still plenty of ‘family’ time left at her house.

According to Barb, her father often drank to exhaustion and, in the process, morphed from tracking police violence to creating his own homegrown variety. While her mother was the primary target, Barb was occasionally in the path of a kick to the shins as well, and then it all began to fall into place; the sadness that permeated the rooms of her house was fueled by the unpredictability of her environment.

It was a troubled home that smothered her gentle spirit and it pained me to leave her there with a mother who, at least when I knew her, appeared resigned to tolerating the disorder. Having gone through some of this with my own family, I had a good idea of what she was up against. Still, my mother had been more proactive in eradicating the offending party, leaving me with some breathing room, whereas Barb had no real peace.

Barb and her mother had each other but that hardly guaranteed their safety unless they were suddenly moved to pick up that scanner and fireball it across his sleeping cranium. Short of that, they were sitting ducks who went about their days with as much normalcy as they could find.

By the end of summer I was gone to college across the state and our dating was essentially over with the exception of a couple of visits back to the neighborhood. A new phase of my life was taking me out of my childhood for good and, consequently, away from Barb. I thought of her from time to time and just hoped her survival skills would keep her going until she could leave home and find her own way.

Maybe it was the culmination of an insecure home life or maybe just bad luck that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time but, less than a year later, my mother called me at school and asked me about Barb and “what was her last name” and so on. Then she read to me from the local paper a story about a young woman who left a bowling alley late one night and took a shot gun blast to the face from close range.

It was all unclear as to who did the shooting or why, but it appeared deliberate and Barb did not survive.

Had she latched onto something eerily similar to the situation she was raised in? Was she bred to be a victim, eventually slain by some horrible, irrational act? My heart sank after my mother finished the story because I knew what conditions had paved the way for her demise and it was a sad ending to a sad life.

Barb was too young and too vulnerable to have been left to such a twisted fate and, if there is some sort of an afterlife, may she have the comfort and care she deserved all along.

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I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for good…but don’t bet on it.

My basic distaste for cliques started in grade school where the seeds are sown, junior high school where these divisions normally germinate, before coming to full bloom in high school. Everyone receives a random category and is expected to act accordingly, except that didn’t feel right to me and I crossed boundaries whenever and wherever, which likely caused some confusion among the various cliques as what to do with me.

The fact that I was as easily a friend to one of the nerdy kids as to one of the jocks or one of the popular kids, left my standing with all the groups a little murky, which is just the way I wanted it.

If I liked somebody, I never stopped to consider their status, only whether or not I liked them. Pretty simple, eh? Well, not so much when you’re a kid facing the judgment of a pecking order in school. But the kids who were comfortable with my approach were the kids that I ended up befriending.

I just didn’t give a shit about these various factions and so, ignored all of it. If it couldn’t be ignored and I was being required to be exclusionary by one group, I resisted.

In grade school I took the unpopular step of playing marbles with Cathy out on the playground. This was 2nd grade and Cathy was taller and probably stronger than all the boys, had a mouth like a longshoreman and was coming from the poorest of circumstances. Nobody much liked her but I wanted to play marbles with her because she was uncharacteristically bawdy for a 2nd grader and I got a charge out of her shtick. I even took it one step further and, God forbid, deliberately sat next to her in class! By doing this, of course, I got myself inadvertently pigeon holed by some of the popular kids but, at the time, I didn’t consider the social consequences.

I was like fucking Switzerland, lodged between partisans, having no compelling attachment to any of them.

In junior high I was an athlete but even though I had friends in that group, I avoided the social pack as a whole. I’m convinced that some kids got into athletics because it put them in a more elite class among their peers, especially if they were good at their sport, but I ran track and played football because I had lots of energy to burn off and was somewhat of a masochist.

At the same time I ran with the athletes, I was pals with the guys in the audio-visual room and AV guys were some of the most renown nerds in the entire school but I thought all that tech stuff was fun so I hung around those who knew it best. Ah, the sweet smell of mimeograph paper!

My random allegiances continued on into high school and eventually college, where I again played utility fielder with my relationships. By then, I was playing music professionally and when my music partner and I got together with friends for partytime and the inevitable ‘joint passing circle’, I always passed the joint to the next person, declining to partake.

What? You were a musician, in college, hair down to your shoulders, idle time galore, no reason to go to geology class, taking a 1 credit course in golf and you refused to get high with your buddies?

Yes, because they made it a ritualistic clique and if I passed on the joint I was no longer part of that inner circle and not properly partying and, I always felt, not trusted to even be in the circle. That pissed me off because these were my ‘friends’, so then I went from disinterested to radically committed to never smoking that joint with them.

You see the mental quandary here? Well, maybe you don’t and you just think I was a big weirdo and maybe you’re right but that’s how it played out in my personal code so I had to see it through.

About the same time, one of the sorority girls asked me to be her date at a formal dinner with another fraternity. I was a scruffy hippie/musician with a mustache in training, so it was not immediately apparent why she asked me, except that I knew her through other friends and she thought I was funny. Uncharacteristically, I accepted an invitation to the ‘clique of all cliques’ because, I’m afraid to say, she was kind of quirky cute, and I was terribly curious as to what this was all about, even though I was going to be pathetically under-dressed for the occasion.

When I went to pick her up, one of the first things she asked was if I had brought my guitar and then it dawned on me that this was the catch and it was hoped that I might literally be singing for my supper at the post-dinner party. Unfortunately for her, there was no guitar in her future as I was there for the food (musicians are like that) and to be her date and nothing else. Even though I was seriously out of my element with the frat scene, we still had a relatively good time, drank a lot, ‘made out’ in front of her apartment after the ride home and, as a night capper, she puked just outside my car door. Priceless.

I always understood, to some degree, why cliques naturally occurred in school settings. Young people are a little unsteady on their feet at that point and there’s comfort in something that walks and talks more like you, but it also denies you the chance to learn things outside your sphere of knowledge and, at its extreme, takes on that exclusionary role that can be a harbinger of social misunderstandings to come.

I don’t think I rebelled against cliques for any reasons that were particularly noble. I just didn’t like them and refused to, as Groucho Marx once said, join any club that would have me as a member.

If I had a child, I’d tell them the same thing: don’t get hemmed in by your own insecurities…it’s a big world.

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At 16, when I started working at Jack’s music store, I didn’t really know Jack all that well other than to note that he was a divorced, forty-something, musician friend of my mother’s who owned a couple of stores in the area.

A professional organist himself, Jack set up a brisk business selling organs to churches, supper clubs, lounges and private homes. This was the ’60’s and it wasn’t all that unusual to find a Wurlitzer, Lowery or Hammond sitting in someone’s living room, although it was a bit unusual to actually see someone playing it.

It was as if putting this musical furniture in one’s home gave the illusion that its owner had talent.

Although this was Jack’s primary money maker, he also sold every other variety of instrument or music technology of the day. I spent a decent amount of my ‘in-store’ time playing the guitars and keyboards and, somehow, this lack of actual work never seemed to bother Jack all that much. Maybe he saw me as the music store shill, creating ambiance for all who would be interested in buying an instrument. Maybe he just appreciated my interest in music, who knows?

One of my early duties was going out on organ deliveries with Jack. We’d strap the organ onto a rolling dolly and wrestle it into the van and stabilize it with wheel chocks. Then we’d head off to some unknown physical challenge down the road. I learned something about Jack by going on these runs because a good many of his character quirks came out while driving.

Jack had the demeanor of a ferret, with little or no patience for anything that got in his way. Even when he wasn’t in a hurry, he looked to be; an illusion of motion that was probably his inner anxiety so desperate to get out that it became visible. Jack was purpose driven, talked fast and seemed, at all times, on the verge of a nervous explosion. So hopping in the van with him was like going on the roller coaster at Six Flags.

With the native frustrations that are a part of the driving experience, Jack was an intense madman behind the wheel and, as far as I could figure, everybody in his line of sight was a potential roadblock needing to be outmaneuvered. He yelled at other drivers, talked to himself about other drivers and wherever he was going it was never going to be fast enough.

Get the hell out of the way, asshole, people are waiting for this organ!

I just sat there in the passenger seat, using my inner-calming voice to weather the Jack storm until we arrived at our destination and then he would jump out of the van, whip open the doors and have the organ halfway out of the truck before I even had one foot on the ground. He reacted like a paramedic at an accident scene, and all of this just to make sure that somebody got their organ 5 minutes faster than originally estimated.

I wasn’t a slacker, I just looked like one standing next to the whirling dervish named Jack. I would have loved to be in the doctor’s office when the nurse read his blood pressure: “Oh Lord, 166 over 100! Everybody clear the building, he’s gonna blow!”

Even when he’d move the organs, I felt like he was one false step away from a massive coronary. Once, delivering to a home on a hill in an affluent neighborhood, we had to move an organ up an unbelievable number of steps to get to the front door. Parking at the bottom of the steep, winding ascent was like staring up at the most treacherous ski run in Vail, Colorado. It took 4 of us to pull it off and by the time we’d finally reached the top, Jack was wheezing and his face was beet red. “Look out, he’s gonna blow!!”

He was manic, intense and, to all his friends, a very sweet person.

My mother had every intention of pushing me away from my interest in music, based simply upon her own experiences with marrying two musicians and dating another, but it was Jack who talked her out of it with a little bit of logic.

He had listened to me playing his store instruments long enough to realize that I had a natural ability and, to him, it would be musical blasphemy to blunt that talent. Besides, he explained, I would find a way despite her efforts. Of course, he was right and she relaxed her objections and began to help me.

But back to the damned organs, as I often thought of them. Jack began to sell so many of them that he had me, the newly licensed teenager, doing some of the deliveries on my own. There were times when he had a gig or another delivery and I had to get the thing there myself.

Those organs and I did not get along and I could never quite get the wheel chocks situated properly so danger was always lurking behind my back. If I had to stop short, there was a decent chance that the organ was going to move. If it merely moved and smacked into the back of the driver’s seat, that was acceptable. But the other possibility was that the thing would come crashing over sideways and I’d have a Hammond shipwreck on my hands, searching for survivors, hoping that there was no permanent damage.

There were times when, BOOM, that organ would land sideways on the truck bed and the only solace I gained from that was at least it was now stable. Jack just had no efficient way of locking the beast down to the floor of the van so that wouldn’t happen and so every trip by myself was an anxious trek, wondering when the wrong turn would send it careening into the back of my head. My real fear was that it wouldn’t play when I got to the delivery point but they must have made those things tough because only once did I show up with an organ that was DOA and was forced to admit to Jack that it had taken a slight tumble in transit.

Even when I knew he was angry about it, he always had a gentle hand with me and never once chained me to the back of a Wurlitzer like he might have dreamed of doing. He was a friend to me and a friend to my mother, the likes of which I don’t believe she ever had again in non-husband form.

He was there for you if you had a problem or needed help, and it was the ultimate irony that he died because he didn’t ask for any himself.

Nobody had really seen him for a week or two and all that friends knew was that he was lying low in his apartment trying to recover from a nasty cold. Sadly, the ‘cold’ was pneumonia, and by deciding to ‘ride it out’ on his own rather than seeking help, he ended up succumbing to something that was eminently survivable with the right medical attention.

I believe he was 49 when he died, and it was the loss of a sincerely good human being.

It’s not much of a consolation for his early exit but I have personally memorialized Jack by carrying on some of his traditions: I’ve worked as a professional musician all my life, I’ve got a temperamental back from lifting loads of equipment for all these years, I’m kind to animals and children, sometimes I’m an impatient banshee behind the steering wheel and I’ve had pneumonia…twice.

So, here’s to you Jack. We hardly knew ye.

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