Read Online Lost In Place by Mark Salzman - Free Book Online

harpsichord, the new regulation was that I had to take my kung fu outdoors.
    The new harpsichord arrived a month later and, along with my clothes dresser and coffee-table shrine, almost filled the basement. To save space, I left my bed upstairs and slept on an old feather couch cushion (a very old cushion, in fact—my father had been born on it) with my head just under the harpsichord. My mother’s fierce eagerness to practice, set against my tendency to sleep late on the weekends, led to a morning ritual that I complained about at the time but now think back on with fondness. She would tiptoe down the stairs, presumably so as not to wake me up, sit down as quietly as possible at the harpsichord and then start playing Bach. While it is true that the harpsichord is quieter than the piano, it isn’t much quieter, particularly if it is a seven-foot-long French double manual and you are sleeping with your head directly underneath it.
    Unbeknownst to my mother, I taped what I considered to be an essential quote from one of my Zen books to the bottom of her instrument so it would be the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw before going to sleep. The quote read:
“The attainment of enlightenment brings a feeling of unshakable interior peace as well as unequalled security and liberty. The tensions with regard to becoming are absent, and the peace of Being alone remains.”
    This message was supposed to inspire me, but after my false-alarm experience with enlightenment, it only served to remind me at least twice a day of my failure. Disgusted with myself, I saw how deeply I was still mired in
becoming.
It would not have been so bad if I was at least
becoming
more popular at school or more self-confident, but the opposite was true. I was no longer “just like a little brother” to my female classmates; I was now “kind of like a weird little brother” to them. It may be hard for people who have grown up listening to bands like Talking Heads and Boy George to imagine a time when weirdness was an obstacle to popularity, but 1974 was just such a time. You could be wild, like Ted Nugent or Ozzy Osbourne, but not weird. If you drank and smoked pot until you passed out, drove a Camaro with slicks on the back wheels and primer sprayed all over the body, set something on fire inside the school building or made noises loud enough to cause adults to have fits, you were wild, but if you cut the soles out of the bottoms of your shoes, read books on your own and meditated in the outdoor smoking lounge, you were weird and pretty much undatable.
    In spite of my apprenticeship to a man who referred to himself as an Ass-Kicking Motherfucker, I commanded little respect from the boys in my class. Who cared if I could break bricks or kick three feet higher than my head if I never even argued with anybody? Status among the boys in my school was determined by action, not potential. In any case, athletic prowess held little sway among the members of my class; the few jocks we had were considered out of touch. Success in academics, needless to say, was also a liability, and playing a musical instrument like the cello was hardly something to brag about. Conventional ambitions were looked upon with suspicion. During a school assembly one brave soul dared to get up onstage and sing “The Candy Man” with a few girls dancing around him dressed like dolls and holding giant lollipops. You had to admire him; he really belted it out,gesturing with his hands, doing complicated dance steps and singing with lots of vibrato but no irony. He paid a price for it, however. The whole song was accompanied by a chorus of snickers and guffaws from the audience that became deafening near the end when one boy yelled out, “Show us your candy cane, man!” I don’t remember ever seeing the poor candy-man singer again after that morning.
    Although I was not by any means the class valedictorian, my interest in Chinese culture indicated an enthusiasm