In the evenings, after dinner, my parents retired to the den. There they would recline in their matching brown naugahyde barca-loungers; my mother, to read her romance novels and my father to listen to his jazz music. He had a Roberts reel-to-reel stereo tape deck that he was hooked up to by headphones. He would put on tapes of his favorite artist, Dave Brubeck. Then he would pull out his pen and a legal pad and start writing. He was grading each track and jotting down his impressions. Us boys liked to spend time in the den, which was also my father's home office. We would sneak in there when "the folks" weren't around and look at naked ladies in my dad's medical books; not too exciting. More exciting was finding the file where my dad kept materials for the speeches he sometimes gave to the Honolulu medical community. My dad always started with a few jokes and he kept a joke file. The main items in this file were Playboy magazine party jokes. You may remember (I know the guys do...) that on the back of the Playboy playmate of the month fold-out was a compilation of slightly naughty party jokes. My dad had carefully pulled out each of these fold outs so that he had a reservoir of humorous material to break the ice with his audience. Tom and I could care less about the jokes. These naked women were far more enticing than the ones in the medical books. I suspect our father enjoyed both sides of the fold-out too...
He would occasionally let me sit in the "Papa bear" recliner, put on the headphones and listen to "The Dave Brubeck Quartet". Strange and wonderful new music was pouring into my ears through these headphones in "STEREO-PHONIC SOUND!" Dad explained that one of the things that distinguished this jazz music was that Brubeck liked to dabble in unconventional time signatures. "Time signatures?" I thought a signature was signing your name. My father, who had a rudimentary understanding of music theory, explained to me about 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 time, which had to do with the rhythm of the song. My first taste of this new type of rhythm was a song written in 5/4 time. It was called "Take Five". I immediately fell in love with the song and its beautiful saxophone melody. The song was composed by the quartet's superb sax player, Paul Desmond, who once said he tried to make his horn sound like a dry martini. As I listened, something seemed different about the song but I was too musically naive to put my finger on it. "Mike, try counting out the beats and see if you can hear how many beats are in each measure". So I started counting from the first down-beat of piano chord and base note. Sure enough, it went "one two three four five, one two three four five". It was composed so elegantly that a neophyte like me couldn't tell the rhythm was "kinky" unless I counted it out. Whoa, music is taking on a whole new dimension. Now I've got to be aware of the lyrics, the melody and the beat.
During this time, after several heartbreaking miscarriages, our stepmother had finally given birth to a son. Now she and our father had their own child to raise. The relationship between stepmother and stepsons had soured some by then and, in order to raise their new son without our bothersome presence and reminder of that other woman who had been our father's first wife, we were packed off to a boy's boarding school on the island of Hawaii. Hawaii Preparatory Academy was a small school, grades seven through twelve, perched high on a wind-swept cow pasture, near the village of Waimea, the headquarters of Parker Ranch. All of the area for miles around was cattle country and the ocean was ten miles away. This was surely a bold new adventure for us; part excitement; part trepidation.
My roommate, that first eighth grade year, was a local boy from a little sugar cane plantation town called Hawi, about twenty-six miles away. Ian's father was the assistant manager of the plantation and when I first had a weekend visit to the house, I marveled at the fact that sugar cane fields surrounded the house on three sides. The Banks' people were originally from Edinburgh and the father spoke with a delightful Scottish accent. Ernie (nickname) was a tall pale fellow. He had a large troublesome nose that he was constantly blowing. (he must have been allergic to sugar cane or cows...). He kept his "snot rag", as he called it, under his pillow when we retired to the ringing of the "lights out" bell each night. I was occasionally wakened to the sound of his nocturnal honking.
My attitude towards Ernie changed dramatically one day when he reached under his bed and pulled out a guitar case. His guitar was a Harmony arch top acoustic jazz-style guitar. Ernie played with a pick and his current favorite music was instrumentals by "The Ventures". He started playing their current hit "Walk Don't Run", and I sat there on my bed, no doubt with my mouth agape, and fell in love; not with Ernie, although his stock shot up in my eyes seeing this wonderful new talent that he had, but with the idea of playing the guitar. "If I could do that, I wouldn't want for anything more!", I thought to myself. I asked him if he would teach me to play and I was soon learning how to play guitar chords. The strings on this old arch top were about a half inch above the fret board and it took quite a bit of strength to play the chords cleanly, especially the bar chords. After a few minutes my soft finger tips were hurting from the exertion but Ernie said not to worry; if I kept at it I would develop callouses and the pain would lessen. I started learning about minor and major and seventh chords and how I could also play solo notes. My newly calloused fingers began exploring the rest of the fretboard, finding out what was musical and what wasn't. I had found a new passion and couldn't wait to write to my parents and tell them what I so desperately wanted for Christmas; my own guitar. More on that, perhaps tomorrow. Mickey da Mayor
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