Short Jazz Fiction Today

If I was going to construct a piece out of sampled bits, I would capture all the "empty" spaces between the solos on all the Miles Davis Quintet records and arrange them in random order. Remember randomness? The resulting sound collage of treble time and bass space would be like one of Joyce's thunderwords: Phillijojimmicobbpolchamberstonywillyumsroncrater!

The Clown Raid

The Clown Raid

     It was a beautiful spring day at the K-12 school where I worked. The Middle School Drama class wanted to play a theatre game outside, which we did occasionally when the weather was just too good to resist and I knew they couldn’t concentrate. We stood out on the back lawn under the electrical towers.  We played the game of passing strange movements and sounds from one person to another, transforming them in a sort of “dance circle.” A couple of pranksters slipped out of the circle and tapped me on the shoulder.

     Lisa, a seventh grader of boundless energy and wit asked “Can we do something special for April Fool’s Day? It’s tomorrow.”  Her request was echoed by Ben, whose father, a black actor, played a butler on a current television sitcom.
      I thought for a moment and said, matter-of-factly but without forethought, “We can dress up as clowns and visit classrooms. We’ll use stuff from the Prop room.”
Ben and Lisa jumped up at the idea and I knew I was in trouble. “Yes!” Ben shouted, and ran off to talk to his buddies about the idea.

     The Clown Raid (as it became known in oral tradition at the school) would not have happened if all of the various elements had not been aligned: the boisterous creativity of the students, the day in question, and what was undeniably the peak of a hypomania I was experiencing. Mania gave me the feeling of certainty I didn’t have most of the time. It was like a magic blessing that gives you the confidence that your instinctive impulses are exactly right, that each decision and action are just what is called for. So during lunch I ran to an arts and crafts store and picked up two dozen clown noses. We had spirit gum in the prop room.  I figured we would put clown noses on some of the non-clowns as part of our visit.

     When the kids came to class that day we immediately began cannibalizing the remnants of previous shows: costumes, puppets, wigs and make-up, shoes, and a variety of props to carry just to be weird. My own costume consisted of the “Harpo” coat with all the pockets that we had used in Waiting for Godot; on my  head was the fireman’s helmet from the Bald Soprano, complete with whirring lights and siren on top; and in addition to some extra-large boots I was carrying a whip and a megaphone,  through which I whispered commands.  I don’t remember what show the whip was from.  Probably Shakespeare. I was too amped up to notice there was contraband in the student’s backpacks. It wasn’t drugs, it was much worse. It was a few cans of pressurized silly string, and two or three of the clowns were packing.

     We got in the customary circle before performances and I distributed the red foam rubber balls, slit in back, ready to make instant clowns out of anyone whose nose was within reach. We broke, and with what I remember as a rush of dangerous ecstasy, began to file out of the Prop Room, outside the boundaries of the theatre and our sanctioned, safe space for make-believe.  This was real. I should have remembered the overtones of the term “guerilla theatre” at this point, but at the time I thought this was the best idea I had ever had.

     Imagine me in the aforementioned costume leading a group of colorfully disguised Middle-Schoolers in “mock-sneaking” single-file across the bright green quad. I don’t remember all the costumes, but I will always remember that Ben was wearing the March Hare’s left ear and had a black star painted around one of his eyes. I was always amazed at how diabolically resourceful those kids were. This was the same class that had put together a haunted house for Halloween in two days, all on their own. I should have been remembering how it scared the kindergartners so much that we had to visit their class and show them we were just people pretending to be scary. Instead, I was sure everyone would love a visit from rowdy, boisterous, slightly armed and scary-looking clowns. Colin was late to class, or perhaps unwilling to go all in on this nonsense, so he carried the Giant Goldfish puppet from one of our fable plays. The six foot fish swam calmly above the fray, over the colander used as a hat and the open umbrella with no fabric and the bobbing rainbow of wigs. 

       We visited the classroom of my ex-wife who was teaching third grade at the same school where I worked. My memory of that visit is a blur that includes her giving me a look I had seen before, probably in a previous manic episode. It involved headshaking and tongue-clicking. We put noses on a few kids and the clowns followed me out chanting “Happy April Fool’s Day!”
     No one seemed afraid or annoyed by us as we paraded past the windows of the other elementary school classrooms. The kids waved and pointed and laughed, and so did a couple of the teachers. Then one of the kids, probably Lisa or Ben, ran up to the front of the parade and whispered to me, “We should go to the high school!” For the first time I felt some reluctance with my euphoria, but I decided I would visit the science classroom of a teacher I felt would enjoy such an interruption. I don’t know why I thought this now. We were friendly but just work acquaintances. I didn’t know enough about her to know if she tolerated interruptions much less wild clowns.

     The door of the lab burst open to my boot and through the megaphone my amplified whisper announced, “CLOWN RAID.”  This was when the silly string came out. I started to “come to” when I saw that and felt that the performance was getting chaotic and out of hand.  I started to put a nose on the teacher and then saw her face with a clear “No” on it. I didn’t realize that it was a “NOOOOO!” to the whole thing and not just that she didn’t want a red clown nose.

     We were all breathless when we returned to the Prop Room and took off our costumes and makeup. I remember Ben sitting next to me at the mirror, removing the black star around his left eye, the right ear of Alice’s March Hare flopping as he turned to say, “Thank you C.B.” At that moment I felt it was all worth it. I told the class to pretend nothing had happened and say things like “What clowns? Oh I missed them! I wonder where they came from.”

     The bell rang and before my next class I saw the door of the Multi-Purpose Room darkened with the tall backlit silhouette of my nemesis, Nancy the Lower School Principal. She stood stone-faced in the doorway and said, “You are wanted in Dr. Nicholson’s office. “.

     I had butterflies waiting to see the Headmaster, but I still thought they were just going to tell me I should have asked permission.  Dr. N’s door was closed and I could hear the distressed voice of Mrs. Gordon, the high school science teacher we had visited. The door opened, and the headmaster’s voice called me in. Mrs. Gordon was in tears, angry, looking at me in disbelief. I think I cried too and said I was sorry. I don’t remember much about it except that by the end of the meeting I was suspended for a day. It was Thursday and so I had an enforced three-day weekend to think about what I had done.

     On April 2^nd, the day I had been suspended, I sat all day at a sidewalk table of my local coffee place, wondering if I was going to be fired.While I was sipping my espresso, one of several friends named John approached me to say, “I heard you were the Lord of Misrule.”

     "Yes. I got suspended for being a clown on April fool’s Day. So I’m here being punished.”

     My friend frowned with a pursed-lip smile and asked, “Wasn’t it because you led your kids in a chaotic attack on a classroom?”

     “Yes, but……It was April fool’s!”

     He didn't chastise me, but he shook his head and clicked his tongue just like my ex. A year or so later, this particular friend named John married her.

     I later found out that on Friday all the students who had been involved were called on the carpet one-by-one to recant being clowns. “It was like the students being grilled in the Dead Poet’s Society” was one student’s nutshell explanation to me of what happened.  Colin said “All I told them was that all I did was carry the giant fish.” The students who smuggled in the silly string admitted to the Headmaster that I didn’t know anything about it until it was too late. So, the kids "covered" for me, and I was glad of it.

     When I returned to school the next Monday I went directly to the Headmaster’s Office. My attempts at getting sent to the principal’s office in middle and high school had always failed, but here I was, in my 3os and called to the office. Dr. Nicholson sighed and said, “You have a great reservoir of good will built up at this school, C.B., so you won’t be fired over this. A note will go in your file about it.”

     Even after being punished I was in denial that I had done anything wrong. I justified it by thinking that Mrs. Gordon had an irrational fear of clowns. But it was not outright denial, it was really ignorance.  After diagnosis it was clear. The Clown Raid became a story I would tell each new psychiatrist when they asked for an example of a manic episode. It was a valuable experience, offering many lessons in retrospect about the nature of my manias and the boundaries society has built around our  need for the occasional chaos of the carnivalesque. But the most important thing that happened that day was "reaching" a student I had not been able to reach before. He thanked me sincerely for the opportunity to creatively break through some boundaries.

The Small Print Conspiracy

Getting older means adapting to the changing world with fewer and fewer advantages, both for you and because of you. At first I thought I was getting senile and paranoid that things were changing just to make life harder for older people. Then I had the following experience:

I noticed that the print on everything is getting smaller and smaller. This is because no one reads anymore. But this is also a way of sneaking in changes so that no one who can read will notice. I decided to test my theory with a magnifying glass after the labels on apples shrunk the print considerably. My favorite apples are Braeburns. They are one of the few varieties that I can still smell and taste. I noticed that they too, were starting to lose their flavor. I looked at the label with my magnifying glass. It read “Brainburn” instead of Braeburn, and “New Zeroland” instead of New Zealand.  I looked around for someone to show it to, but I had become invisible. 

The First Episode: “Would you like to go to the Principal’s Office?”

The First Episode: “Would you like to go to the Principal’s Office?”

I know when my first real depression happened. Before diagnosis I remembered the summer before high school as a singularly weird experience, not realizing it was only the first of many depressive periods I would have for the rest of my life. Since diagnosis I had always assumed that my first depression was the beginning of the cycles, but I recently realized that I must have had a manic episode before that, while I was still attending eighth grade. Before diagnosis I told this story as “The Day I Realized I Didn’t Have to Do What They Told Me.” That was how it felt at the time. This is how I remember it.

I had always been a relatively well-behaved, polite and studious boy until the spring of 8^th grade. I was absent-minded, obsessive and self-conscious but I was a good kid who stayed out of trouble. One day I was sitting at my desk in Mrs. Hodgkins’ English class, feeling restless and wondering if there really was such a thing as “spring fever.’ My thoughts were probably racing, but before diagnosis I didn’t know I had racing thoughts. I wanted to walk, to go outside. I wanted to talk but the class was engaged in silent reading. I wondered, what was the least I could do to get sent to the Principal’s Office? I got up without asking permission and walked to the big dictionary on the podium at the back of the classroom. I turned a few pages as if looking for a word, read for a while, and then decided to turn the page and keep reading the dictionary until Mrs. Hodgkins said something.

“Take your seat once you have looked up your word.”

I held up the appropriate finger to quietly signal that I needed another minute. Mrs. Hodgkins frowned but gently said, “That’s a long definition.”  I continued to read for a minute and then turned the page again. By now some of the other students were looking back at me. They seemed curious, perhaps because I had never “acted up” in class before. “Take your seat Mr. Davis.”

“This book is so well written!”

“Sit down please.”

I started to pick up the dictionary, which was very heavy, as if to take it with me to my seat. At that point Mrs. Hodgkins sternly commanded me to “put down the dictionary.”

      “I can’t put it down! It’s a real page-turner.”

A few of the students chuckled, and Theresa with the bright green eyes looked right at me, smiling. That’s how I remember it. Mrs. Hodgkins said “Would you like to go to the Principal’s Office?”

“Yes! I have always wanted to.  I’ve never been.” I said out loud.

Looking puzzled and at the end of her cool, Mrs. Hodgkins pointed to the door and said, “Go!” The other students laughed and I ran out the door and walked briskly to the office.

When I approached the desk of the woman I called “The Secretary” she wearily asked me what I wanted.

“I got in trouble” I said, smiling. “Mrs. Hodgkins sent me here because I was disrupting class. I’ve never been to the Principal’s Office before.”

“What did you do?” asked the Secretary from behind a chest high partition.

“I was reading the dictionary for too long.” She looked at me askance and pointed to a row of chairs where three other kids were sitting, also waiting to see the principal, I assumed.  Two of the kids looked as if they had been in a fight. A third kid sat between them. Within minutes all three were asked into a room to talk with someone, I think it was the Vice Principle. I sat thinking about the word “Vice” and wondering what the sullen boys had done, until the bell rang for the next period. The Secretary pointed at me and said, “First offender, get to class.”

I was surprised. “Don’t I get to see the Principal?”

“Don’t get smart or you will.” She said and went back to dealing with the chaos of a big public Junior High School.

            The next day I decided to do something that would make sure I got in to see the Principal or at least his Vice. The classroom we were in had a water fountain and sink in the back. I asked Mrs. Hodgkins if I could get a drink.  She said, “Yes” with a sigh, as if anticipating the need for patience. The water fountain was on the sink in the back of the room. I got up and walked back to the sink, dragging my knuckles in my best impression of an ape. I was interested in apes and had just read several Tarzan books, (I was 13) otherwise I don’t know why I chose to do this.  Normally I would have been embarrassed to do such a thing in front of everyone, at least outside of a Drama class.  I tried to drink like an ape from the fountain and when I made a bit of a mess and everyone was watching me and laughing, Mrs. Hodgkins pointed to the door and said, “Go to the office. I’ll call it in this time.”

“I can go?” I asked, dropping the ape impression.

“Please do. I’ll call it in this time.” She looked a little worried about me, I thought, as I skipped out of the room.

Here is another clue that I was having a manic (technically hypomanic) episode. When not manic I would have noticed Mrs. Hodgkins’ expression of disappointment with me. But my memory of it was all fun and games.  So it was the mania that made me suddenly confident and mischievous, not that “I realized I didn’t have to do what they told me.” The laughs I got in the classroom were probably nervous chuckles, but my subjective memory tells me that I was “killing.” I didn’t question why I was so obsessed with seeing the principal and kept trying. All the manic symptoms were there, including the poor judgement that made me ask Mrs. Hodgkins, upon entering her class the next day, “Can I go to the office? I’m going to disrupt class again.”

             I remember that spring as bright and green and happy, so the hypomania must have lasted a couple of months. This takes me up to the summer before entering high school and my first depression, which before diagnosis I thought of as my early existential angst. I was only 14 and had to wait until I read Camus and Sartre to find a description of what I had experienced.  I only told myself this story, which I used to call, to myself, “Something’s Wrong.”

Trying to Write, or How I got my PHD and a Tenure Track Job Despite Being Bi-Polar

 Trying to Write

    Until now I have hidden how difficult it has been for me to write. All writing is difficult, but during manic or hypomanic periods it was more difficult.  Before diagnosis I didn’t know I had rushing thoughts. I thought that I was just mentally undisciplined. After diagnosis I realized that you can’t really “have” rushing thoughts because they are moving too fast to hold on to, like viewing new scenery from a speeding car. When my ideas were freely associating in a rush of non-linear leaps and sprints, it could be an intensely creative time, but I was unable to work on one thing for more than fifteen minutes or so, sometimes less. I didn’t know I read faster than normal until I was in Grad School and a classmate asked me, “ Did you take speed reading or just speed?” In my teens, when I started writing, poetry attracted me because fussing over every syllable of a poem was a way of being obsessive but productive in short spurts. I was intrigued by the possibility that like a jazz improvisation, a short poem could take shape in fifteen minutes, whether a first draft or a throwaway. It takes much, much longer to write even a “throwaway” play or novel.

     Switching from trying to write to trying to play the piano is how I usually work to this day, although since diagnosis and medication I can work longer at either activity. Since I was first learning I never set myself goals on piano; I couldn’t do that without getting hopelessly obsessive. For example, if I made a mistake on a series of Hanon exercises I would have to start over at the beginning of the book. Once I realized the mistake of trying not to make mistakes, I learned to refresh my brain every fifteen minutes by walking around a little. I would then pretend to be just starting my practice session by working on a different song, or by playing scales instead of arpeggios, or working on rhythms after having worked on harmony or melody. Without realizing it, I learned to channel my manic restlessness into a fragmented series of ostensibly “non-sequitur” activities between which I could move, instead of flitting between less productive habits such as pacing, talking fast, pulling my hair, chewing on pencils or fingers or walking out the door at 3 in the morning with no destination. Now that I am drawing again I have a third creative activity that relieves my brain with a non-verbal, non-musical mode of consciousness.  I have found this to be a great relief, because even on medication I still have more or less hypomanic periods, just as before diagnosis I had more or less manic episodes. Drawing slows down rushing thoughts by quieting them. Like piano, drawing is something very physical that helps get me out of my head when I’m experiencing depression, too. Over time I have learned to pick up the thread of writing again after playing piano or walking or drawing, whatever physical activity broke up the intensity of sitting and trying to keep up with my thoughts on paper. Sitting has often been a problem. It becomes physically and mentally painful for me to stay in the seat at a certain point.  I get excruciatingly restless legs if I try to force myself to remain seated. This has been a problem for me on airplanes, in theatres, and when working on a deadline.

 One of the most excruciating experiences of my life was the first time I set out to finish a paper worth publishing in a major journal. I came late to graduate school . I was almost forty. By the early 90’s getting a publication or two while still in school had become rite of passage for almost all postgrad students in the Humanities; part of the premature professionalization caused by running schools like corporations in a free market.  I decided to enter it in the Student Essay Contest of the prestigious journal, TDR (The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies). Unlike my dissertation, there was a definite deadline for my entry into the contest.  My memory of writing my entry is a blurred image of me forcing myself to return to an uncomfortable seat over and over and over again, like I was caught in a whirlpool between the compulsion to walk way and the gravity of my essay.  This was after I  went to the Computer Center, where there was nothing to do but stare at earthe screen or write. Every time I stood up to walk away there, I painfully forced myself to sit down again. I told myself that I didn’t have to write, but I had to stay with the work.  I had to sit in front of it, keep it company, as if biding my time with an enemy that held me captive. If I did that long enough I would start writing again. I knew that if I was able to keep turning around and sitting back down, I would greatly compress and increase the amount of time I spent per day on actually writing. I was able to move forward once I got back into reading what I had written, alternating between fixing details and sifting through the whole of it, straightening out the ideas into a linear flow. But writing that way was excruciatingly more difficult for me than breaking a habit or installing a new one, it was a matter of fighting almost instinctive urges. It is hard not to develop a resentment toward something that causes so much stress, and it is hard to finish a project when you hate it.

  A few weeks after my completed entry was mailed off or e-mailed (this was in the 90s, so it could have been either) I received word that I had indeed won the TDR Student Essay Contest with my article, “Reading the Ventriloquists’s Lips: The Performance Genre Behind the Metaphor.” My professors and fellow graduate students seemed genuinely excited for me but somewhat surprised. I was not surprised, and not out of manic grandiosity or run-of-the-mill egotism but because I WORKED SO DAMN HARD ON IT! Later that year I learned that the article had been submitted by TDR for the Gerald Kahan Prize for the Best Essay in Theatre Studies by a younger scholar. This was an even more prestigious award, administered by the American Society for Theatre Research. I won that too. The essay ended up being the last chapter in my dissertation, although it was the first I was able to finish.

The article and its two awards were why I was able to get two interviews for a tenure track job after sending out thirty or so applications  (nation-wide)  in the two-year period I was at Stanford doing a Post-Doctoral Fellowship, (which meant I was a slightly glorified Teaching Assistant.) About that time I received a shock. Oxford was publishing a book on the same topic by a much more well-known scholar.This was a major reason that I didn't get a book contract in time for tenure and lost my dream job. That is another, longer story.