would have been a twenty minute ride from our old place to Fieldston would
now take at least an hour each way and involve switching trains. I had to take the train two hundred and thirty blocks uptown to reach school.
One look around the campus was enough to remind me how expensive the school was. The classroom buildings seemed to be held together with interlocking stones, like medieval castle walls. The
green lawns looked as though they were trimmed with scissors. There was a new gym with glass backboards and room for two full-court games side-by-side. There was also a well-kept quarter-mile oval
track and a manicured football field separated by a fence from a soccer pitch. The stage in the auditorium could handle full-scale productions for five hundred viewers. There was a split-level art
building for painting beneath skylights that always let in a lot of natural light.
Music classes were taught in a cozy tower room you reached by climbing a spiral stone staircase above the auditorium and the student recreation room with its vending machines and ping-pong
tables. There were three pianos in the building: an upright for the theater stage that was available only when there was no class being held, another one in the music room up in the tower, and, in
a separate room next to the auditorium, a beautiful Steinway. It was an absolutely marvelous instrument. And not only was it the best piano around, it was the one that was almost always free and
thoroughly accessible. Unfortunately, it was also the one the music teacher, Mr. Worthman, had established a rule against playing. Since I was the main one playing the kind of music Mr. Worthman
objected to, I felt he might as well have called it “the no Gil rule.”
Mr. Worthman headed the music department and the glee club. He reminded me of one of the villains from the Spiderman comics I read. He had the same hooked beak, the same pale complexion,
and most of all, the same horseshoe of white hair around a light bulb shaped bald spot. We were opposites in appearance and in musical taste. But while I would never have tried to shut down his
choral group, he showed more than mild disapproval of my music. He hated it.
The first time I played the Temptations on the Steinway, when I had just arrived on campus, the wild dancing made enough noise to raise professor Worthman from his crypt. He arrived in the music
room to see it looking like a dance hall. I was just starting into a Stevie Wonder tune when I got busted.
I felt like there was something personal going on between Mr. Worthman and me. Nobody could remember exactly when the “hands off the Steinway” rule had been posted, but I somehow
connected it to something unreasonable and attributed the whole fabrication to Mr. Worthman. Maybe it had something to do with the songs I was writing; maybe it was because I performed around
school with other students but never joined the glee club. If all else failed, I could always play the it’s-’cause-I-come-from-the-ghetto card, though that didn’t seem to apply to
Mr. Worthman—he didn’t seem to care that I was from the ghetto.
You have options when you decide something is unfair. You can say to hell with it and play anytime and anywhere you see fit in open defiance of the rules. You can challenge it legally and carry
it all the way to the Supreme Court—or the high school equivalent. Or you can pick and choose your times, hit and run, try to avoid a showdown. I did that.
I opted for a melodic form of guerilla warfare, floating in and out with stealth and style. I mixed in a little black magic so that my fingers would be quicker than Mr. Worthman’s eyes. I
used clock management, and stopped playing just before and just after lunch, when my classmates had a few minutes to watch me get in trouble. I stopped doing all the flamboyant finger snappers from
the radio. I stopped playing requests for the latest top ten tunes by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, any of
now take at least an hour each way and involve switching trains. I had to take the train two hundred and thirty blocks uptown to reach school.
One look around the campus was enough to remind me how expensive the school was. The classroom buildings seemed to be held together with interlocking stones, like medieval castle walls. The
green lawns looked as though they were trimmed with scissors. There was a new gym with glass backboards and room for two full-court games side-by-side. There was also a well-kept quarter-mile oval
track and a manicured football field separated by a fence from a soccer pitch. The stage in the auditorium could handle full-scale productions for five hundred viewers. There was a split-level art
building for painting beneath skylights that always let in a lot of natural light.
Music classes were taught in a cozy tower room you reached by climbing a spiral stone staircase above the auditorium and the student recreation room with its vending machines and ping-pong
tables. There were three pianos in the building: an upright for the theater stage that was available only when there was no class being held, another one in the music room up in the tower, and, in
a separate room next to the auditorium, a beautiful Steinway. It was an absolutely marvelous instrument. And not only was it the best piano around, it was the one that was almost always free and
thoroughly accessible. Unfortunately, it was also the one the music teacher, Mr. Worthman, had established a rule against playing. Since I was the main one playing the kind of music Mr. Worthman
objected to, I felt he might as well have called it “the no Gil rule.”
Mr. Worthman headed the music department and the glee club. He reminded me of one of the villains from the Spiderman comics I read. He had the same hooked beak, the same pale complexion,
and most of all, the same horseshoe of white hair around a light bulb shaped bald spot. We were opposites in appearance and in musical taste. But while I would never have tried to shut down his
choral group, he showed more than mild disapproval of my music. He hated it.
The first time I played the Temptations on the Steinway, when I had just arrived on campus, the wild dancing made enough noise to raise professor Worthman from his crypt. He arrived in the music
room to see it looking like a dance hall. I was just starting into a Stevie Wonder tune when I got busted.
I felt like there was something personal going on between Mr. Worthman and me. Nobody could remember exactly when the “hands off the Steinway” rule had been posted, but I somehow
connected it to something unreasonable and attributed the whole fabrication to Mr. Worthman. Maybe it had something to do with the songs I was writing; maybe it was because I performed around
school with other students but never joined the glee club. If all else failed, I could always play the it’s-’cause-I-come-from-the-ghetto card, though that didn’t seem to apply to
Mr. Worthman—he didn’t seem to care that I was from the ghetto.
You have options when you decide something is unfair. You can say to hell with it and play anytime and anywhere you see fit in open defiance of the rules. You can challenge it legally and carry
it all the way to the Supreme Court—or the high school equivalent. Or you can pick and choose your times, hit and run, try to avoid a showdown. I did that.
I opted for a melodic form of guerilla warfare, floating in and out with stealth and style. I mixed in a little black magic so that my fingers would be quicker than Mr. Worthman’s eyes. I
used clock management, and stopped playing just before and just after lunch, when my classmates had a few minutes to watch me get in trouble. I stopped doing all the flamboyant finger snappers from
the radio. I stopped playing requests for the latest top ten tunes by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, any of
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