Gene had a compelling love of music, an obsession that was both infectious and impenetrable. The walls of his living room were decorated with the wooden forms of stringed instruments. They hung on little pegs by their narrow necks: dulcimers, guitars, a banjo, mandolin, and balalaika. He could, and would, pull any one of them down on a whim, tune it almost instantly, and launch off in song. He would play the whole song through and sometimes start another, leaving me wondering when we would get back to my music lesson.
"Didn't he attack you?" Susan asks. We're inching out of the parking lot at Wolftrap, where we just saw Nanci Griffith.
That was later. Initially, Gene was just teaching me to play the Appalachian dulcimer. I cut my teeth on Scotland the Brave and The Grandfather Clock, songs that could be played easily using the handheld fret to pass a melody on the first string. The remaining strings are drones, giving the dulcimer a faintly discordant and haunting tone. My dulcimer is smooth and curved with little heart-shaped holes on the cherry-wood sounding board. I loved the way it made music with almost no effort on my part. Some sort of natural beauty lay in it that was entirely separate from my amateur strums and frets.
Gene wanted me to move on to finger-picking and chording, techniques that presented more of a challenge but would open up a whole new range of songs and sounds for me. I struggled to master them. The songs I could play using the techniques that I knew were so beautiful, and the slow groan of new sounds made using these new methods fell so far short of music. It felt like I was forcing the instrument to act on my will, instead of allowing it to unfold its own rhythm. Gene invited me to play with him at craft fairs and other small venues, trying to stoke my interest in developing my skills. When we played together, he would take off at a joyous pace, tumbling over and under the music like he was happily wrestling with a childhood friend, and I would vainly try to keep up with him.
As I struggled to force my fingers into the patterns he taught me, an idea began to ferment in Gene's head, distracting him from his love of music. An invention appeared before him in his dreams every night for a week. It lay in a quiet nightscape and did nothing but wait for him to reach out and grasp it. Two sealed transparent disks filled with colored fluids, mounted on circular frames rotating in opposite directions over a light source, which shines through the disks and projects on to any nearby surface using two adjustable mirrors. A kaleidoscope fused with a movie projector, casting an ever-changing multicolored spectrum onto a wall or ceiling. He saw in it a perfection that was as inexplicable as music. The images it would project would be infinite, a glimpse of the slide of time itself.
The projection kaleidoscope began to replace music, as if the multi-hued light it cast from his mind left the instruments on the walls in deepening shadow. He spent an entire lesson telling me about his invention and how much money he would make off it. I watched the one working model and agreed that I'd never seen anything like it before. At the end of the session, I reluctantly put my dulcimer away untouched. Gene kept talking, unaware of the time, inviting me to help him with this massive project. The kaleidoscopes were going to sell. A great deal of money was going to be made. He talked for another fifteen minutes before I could finally signal him that I had to go. He asked me to think about what I wanted to do in the new business.
The dulcimer felt strange to my fingertips when I practiced that week. It was like some residue of his mania had rubbed off on it. I was tired of the songs I knew and too restless to learn more. For my next lesson, Gene showed me the expensive video equipment he'd bought to make commercials and generate interest in the projection kaleidoscope. That would be my job, learning to use the video equipment and making ads that would capture the minds of young people. Also, it was important that I document the whole process of the creation of this invention, because it would be extremely important someday. People would want to know how we had made our millions, he told me, and it was absolutely vital that we produce a historical record of the founding of our partnership. He asked if I had any other friends who might be able to help out the company, because things were going to get big very, very soon.
I think it was the next lesson when he jumped me. He was talking on and on and then I was eating carpet before I even knew what happened.
Susan and I crawl out of the parking areas and eventually settle back on to the highway toward DC. Cars whisk by us at ludicrous speeds. "So what happened?" I know she's heard this story before, but I cull out some new impressions to add to the old score.
He made a joke out of it -- you have to keep your guard up in this business. And I asked him to get his knee out of my back. Although I had already been feeling wary of Gene, I had brought my friend Ian to the house, because I thought Gene was such a character that I wanted one of my friends to see he was for real. Ian did nothing when he jumped me, as far as I can remember -- nothing I could see from where my face was being mashed into the floor. He was probably as surprised as I was. The funny thing is that we stayed on after that, stayed and listened to the now-monotonous recitation of the greatness of this invention and the inevitability of it bringing us millions of dollars, examined of the burgeoning supply of video equipment, watched the feverish demonstration of the single prototype. We left amidst a hailstorm of grandiose promises.
Sometime in the next week someone caught wise to the fact that Gene was off his medication and in a manic phase of his bipolar disorder. The system kicked in. I did not hear from him again for several weeks.
After this period of silence, Gene called me and asked if I'd like to resume our music lessons. I told him I wanted to see him for one session and then I'd decide. I drove slowly through a new neighborhood looking for his house -- he was no longer living at his old place for reasons he didn't explain. He was dressed as always, with an untucked, wide-lapelled button-down shirt covering baggy khaki shorts. He was his old self, his medicated self. He pulled the guitar and the mandolin off the walls and played them in utter rapture. He took my dulcimer out of my hands and tuned it almost instantly, played a line in feverish determination to show me the musical light he saw. In every movement of his hands and body I saw the seeds of something much more furious, a force barely contained. It was as if this man was just a shadow of the manic self I had recently come to know. I realized I did not want another lesson, and never went back.
The dulcimer, the beautiful smooth curved form, sat in its black case in my closet for several years. The strings went slack. When I pulled it out again recently, it took a painful time to tune it. I was surprised to find my hands still had in them a reasonable rendition of The Grandfather Clock.