Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir Read Free Page B

his sticks away twenty-five years earlier when we kids came along. Making the kind of living it takes to support a family was an honor that distinguished the very few when it came to music. But wherever he found a band, he always managed to charm his way onto the stage to sit in for a few numbers.
    My mom told me it was no different at the Tamiment, with Dad getting up on stage each night and doing these crowd-awing drum solos. On that final night he had the house on its feet as he moved the drumsticks like magic wands in his hands until the ultimate note. Near the finale his stick hit the cymbal in the sweetest of tones, and then . . . suddenly he was on the ground. According to my mom and the coroner’s report, he was dead before he hit the floor, victim of a massive coronary.
    When I opened up this chapter about my childhood, referring to the tolling bell, a phrase used by poet John Donne and the title of Hemingway’s masterpiece novel, I was thinking of the sound that Dad’s final slam on the cymbal must’ve made. I can still hear it. Although I wasn’t there, I imagine this echo of his very last reverberation rippling out like a widening circle, the kind made by a stone thrown in a pond, until the very essence of his last harmonic act is still rippling endlessly across the galaxy.
    It was the saddest story I ever heard my mother tell, yet, even at age nineteen, I was struck by how his death was the most poetically perfect thing that could ever have happened to him. Poetic because if you could name the thing that you wanted to do when you died and your death occurred when you were doing the thing you loved most, then my father went out big! There was no pain, no lingering, but instead he died in that last moment of glory with the sound of the drumbeats and cymbals ringing in his ears.
    Jews bury their dead quickly, and within an hour of arriving home I went to the viewing where my dad was laid out. It was an open coffin and the first time I had actually seen anybody dead. My father looked so at peace and still so young, as if I could shout, “Cut!” and the scene would be over and he’d step out of the box as if nothing had happened. But it wasn’t a movie; it was real. And my dad was gone. For good.
    Neither Dad nor I, then or now, had ever been too enamored with many of the Jewish traditions or dogma, but what we did find useful were gestures that were truly humane and helped move people through tough times in ways that were helpful, instructive, cathartic. Such was the traditional weeklong Shiva that Jews “sit” after a death. For one week the family stays home, the doors remain open for all to come pay respects, the food and booze are flowing, and a life is celebrated. All the people my dad knew—relatives, neighbors, coworkers—came to the apartment. You go through scrapbooks, you reminisce about what had been happening behind the scenes of old photos and snapshots, you tell stories and anecdotes, you hear things you never might have heard before. Because death provides a kind of perspective that life can never offer: it’s a way to make sense of a person’s life.
    For me, I was seeing clearly the cloth from which I’d been cut. Performers must use even the cruelest and saddest emotional experiences as their source of inspiration. That’s what brings authenticity and raises the level of a performance from being “staged,” or fake, into one that transcends and becomes real. Sitting next to my aunt, I looked at a photo of me in my dad’s arms when I was born. Then in another black-and-white snapshot, there I was riding my first bike, Dad steadying the back fender.
    I wish I could’ve told that kid as he sat there in this deep grief and loss, even if he appeared pleasant, polite, and strong for his mom in front of the visitors, that understanding and coming to peace with his youth would be so important. He would have to come to own it all. By owning I mean that each of the memories from our