Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1987:

I loved the synthesizer, and found it easy to read the manuals, to fiddle with the sounds.

Playing the keyboard was something else.

I took two lessons, to learn how to move my hands on the fretboard. I began learning to read, but it was slow.

Then I happily discovered that composition is easy.

First, chords. Staying in the key of C, you just play all the white keys. If you play four notes, skipping every other white key, you get some kind of a seventh chord. If your lowest note is on the C or F note then you’ll get a major chord, which sounds very rich. If your lowest note is on the D, E, or A note you’ll get a minor chord which sounds haunted. If your lowest note is on the G or B note, you get a real sour chord.

So, for starters, you just plunk around with these seven chords, and find a series of them that sounds good. This is pretty simple. The next step is even easier.

Fire up the drum machine. Set its speed and the rhythm pattern.

Play these chords on top of the rhythm. Find the way that sounds good. Now just play it over and over again.

While you’re playing imagine that some melody is already there, and just listen for it. It is already there. If you listen, you’ll hear it. Maybe bit by bit, or maybe all at once, but you will hear it.

Sing or hum this melody. Go around a few times. Now start working out how to play that melody with your right hand. I wasn’t a good enough player to do that at the same time as playing the left-hand chords, so I’d just record the left-hand chords and let the machine play them.

After you’ve worked out how to play the melody, you can write it down. This was very slow for me, but note by note, it can be done. Now with the chord symbols and the melody written down, you have a written piece of music.

Learn to play it with both hands.

Nothing to it.

Want to hear one? Go to the musician’s gallery at my Traktor website and click on my stage name Traktor Topaz, then scroll down to find the blue shockwave music player. Select a song — I recommend Maggie’s Song and Fly Like Summer Love — then press the triangular ‘Play’ button.

Composition is easy.

Dallas, Texas, 1967: When my stepfather showed up, it was unexpected. He was one of the two town doctors back in Henrietta, Texas. The other was my uncle, Dr. Hurn, whom I and all my cousins called Uncle Doc.

When I was thirteen, George S. had moved to Henrietta with two children, set up a practice, courted my mother, and lured her away from her job as nurse with Uncle Doc. My mother and I then lived in our green-siding little house near the cemetary. I didn’t like him much, didn’t want to move, and felt uncomfortable with the children, just toddlers really.

But, as families do, with silence, blunders, armistices, tacit agreements, and slow familiarity, we got along. We lived on the upper floors above his office, and later built a fancy house on the south end of town. From there I moved to college, dropped out, and later worked in Dallas at the Cabana Hotel.

His practice was busier than ever. He’d also bought the Schwend house just north of his office, and was renovating it for a rent house. A beautiful five-legged dining table from that house sat now in my Dallas apartment, and he was at the door.

“Don’t you have to be in the office?” I asked.

“Probably I should be,” he smiled, “But I can take off now and then. I just felt like visiting.”

I was flattered, but it was odd. We talked and talked; he was full of new projects, the rent house, some antiques. That evening he took us to Cattlemen’s steakhouse. Afterward, he wanted to see the movie Irma la Douce, which was a sweet-hearted romantic comedy about a hooker.

Now it was getting late, and he’d always been early to bed. A country doctor might be called from sleep in the middle of the night, so sleep was husbanded as a precious resource. But not tonight. He wanted coffee. He wanted to talk, more talkative than I’ve ever seen him. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Finally I had to sleep. I gave him my bed, and sacked out on the old sofa from my grandmother’s farm. It seemed I’d just dozed off when Clang- bang! Already it was early morning, and he was clattering in the kitchen.

Breakfast. More coffee, more animated talk. As it happened, it was my days off, so I was free. But he seemed behaving oddly to me, so I slipped away to call my mother. She was on edge.

“Ohmigod!” she said. “He’d just vanished. Something’s wrong. He’s been acting strange, and he just took off!” We talked. She thought. She decided. She asked me whether I could keep him for a couple of days. “It’s serious,” she said. “He’s destroying his practice.” She wanted to talk it over with Uncle Doc, and please call her back tomorrow.

I said OK.

By the next afternoon, I was bedraggled, exhausted. He was running on some nervous energy I didn’t understand. We’d driven the Morgan all over town, looking at apartments and scenery. I called my mother, and confessed I couldn’t keep this up. He didn’t seem to sleep; it was difficult to keep him from wandering off.

She told me to take him to X. Hospital, for psychiatric examination.

“Are you serious?” I said.

She was.

I had no other bright ideas, and I was already starting to get mad at him. I agreed.

At first it was easy, driving around in the Morgan. I just headed out toward the place; I knew where it was. He did, too. Along the way he became suspicious, glancing at me sharply.

“Where are we going?” he demanded.

I told him. He looked off into the distance. I wondered whether he’d start wrestling with the wheel. He leaned back.

“You know,” he said, “Your mother and I have been very worried about you.” He went on in this vein. It now seemed that he was taking me to the hospital.

I had no trouble getting him to go in; he led the way. At the desk he said, “I’m here to commit my son.” And I said “I’m here to commit my stepfather.” The nurse looked from him to me and back again.

“Please have a seat,” she said.

We sat. My nerves were rattling like a tamborine. They called my stepfather into an office. I waited. I spotted a payphone and wrangled quarters. I called our house. My Uncle Doc answered. “Where are you?” he demanded.

“I’m at X. Hospital,” I said. “I told them I was here to commit him, and he told them he was here to commit me, and they don’t know who to believe.” I wanted Uncle Doc to call them and speak to them, but he was too quick.

“Keep him there!” he ordered, “We’re on our way!” The line went dead; he’d hung up.

The nurse came to escort me into the office. An ancient psychiatrist, a contemporary of Freud and Jung perhaps, sat behind a wide desk, writing notes using a lovely fountain pen, with a hand that trembled and shook uncontrollably. With a kindly grandfather air, he looked over his glasses at me.

“Just how long have you been taking this L.S.D.?” he asked me. The rest of our little chat persisted along these same lines.

For about a hundred years of silence in the waiting room, I stewed while my mother and Uncle Doc were driving to Dallas. In a flurry, they arrived. Within a few minutes I was given leave to depart. Depart I did.

Soon after, I moved from Dallas. I abandoned the lovely table and my grandmother’s beautiful sofa. My haste to leave was strong. I was in St. Louis when my stepfather left the hospital and returned to Henrietta, to resume his troubled practice.

In St. Louis, I worked at the railroad, and in a hotel. It was there that I received a phone call. My stepfather had died.

I didn’t go to the funeral. It was just too much.

Henrietta, Texas, 1959: All my buddies were agog with Peter Gunn on CBS television. How could one guy be so cool?

With a Henry Mancini themesong featuring a jazzed-up boogie and a horn section, Mr. Gunn looked much like a skinhead of today except for the suit, tie, and wingtip shoes. He was always listening to jazz and smoking cigarettes, with his super-short hair, quiet manner, and the relentless interest of sultry women. Mr. Cool.

Later, he appeared in a movie that prominently featured his high-tech telephone answering machine, which was a reel-to-reel tape deck mounted in the wall. He was just too cool to have an old-fashioned answering service with a switchboard. This tape deck looked really neat in the middle of the wall of his living room.

And so, fifteen years later, this is probably why I bought the answering machine.

In the 70’s, when answering machines first came out — huge, bulky black boxes — they were regarded with suspicion. It’s mostly forgotten today that, at the time, reaching a machine instead of a human might be considered a kind of insult. Dehumanizing. Rude.

But I had seen Peter Gunn, so I knew how cool they were. I installed one for my Simple Simon Bookkeeping business, and it proved useful for the Thumbtack Bugle, too.

Not long after, Thanksgiving came around, and my mother and two brothers decided to give me a call. I came home and found the message.

My mother, clearly startled, is saying, “Hello? This is your mother. I’m just calling to wish you a …” here she paused, and sang the rest, “Happy Thanksgiving Day!“

As she fumbled to hang up her phone, I could hear my two young brothers in the background, puzzled because she’d begun talking, and then suddenly was hanging up; they were saying What? What is it? And just before the connection closed, I heard her voice.

“G**damned machine,” she said.

Huh? But it was so cool on Peter Gunn!

The Brazos River, Texas, 1952. Texas is flat and hot, and the river runs lazily through thousands of acres, trailing a forest of oak, hickory, mimosa, and spruce. Mesquite, too, out on the scorching plainlands.

On the banks, and beneath the trees, Camp Crucis. Although we were Methodists, I attended this Episcopalian Camp due to Father Herron, who gave the Episcopal services in a one-room stone chapel just inside the gateway of Henrietta’s graveyard. Every service a real Memento Mori.

He had a picture of Van Gogh’s “The Shriek” on his wall; he said he liked it. One time, coming to dinner with my mom and me, he brought a cucumber. Scouring its skin with a fork, slicing quickly, a dash of vinegar. Voila! Salad!

The man knew everything. He taught me a sentence in Spanish when we went to visit an old Mexican man who lived in a shack, with a vineyard, arrowheads in cases, and a vast comic book collection. Tengo mucho gusto en conocerle. I’m very happy to meet you.

Father Herron it probably was who told my mom about Camp Crucis. And off I went.

Bunkhouses separated the four tribes, as did our ages. My mother had marked everything with my name. I still have an odd pair of scissors, from Uncle Doc’s surgery, with my name scratched upon the blade. Those scissors went to camp, too.

But I was afraid and unhappy. I became sick to heart, and soon sick at stomach. The priests were baffled. Father Herron suggested beer. “It calms the stomach,” he said. So while the others finished lunch with rousing renditions of John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith, and the Worms song, I drank my beer.

Of course, then I was drunk. Father Herron took me on a walk, till it wore off. Along the path we came upon a buzzing, and a vast bee tree. He showed me how we could slowly walk right up to the buzzing hive upon the tree. All around us they flew, but no harm came to us.

He watched carefully, then suddenly reached out and snatched one. I was frightened. “Won’t it sting?”

He shook his head. “It’s a drone,” he said. I held the bee in my hand. A drone cannot sting; it has no stinger. He’d known it for a drone because it buzzed differently. I felt the bee walking around inside my closed fist; then I let it go.

That was fun, but the next day I was sick again. I was home-sick. They called my mother. She wasn’t happy, picking me up. She’d had unusual and elaborate plans with Pete, a boyfriend in Bowie. In our green 1951 Chevrolet, she took me to lunch in a town. I had chicken-fried steak, and we had “a good talk.” By the end of lunch, I felt better and had been successfully pep-talked to give it another go.

I was a flop at baseball, and felt scorched during the hike, but I stuck it out, met a friend named Pinky during the swimming, and saw Father Herron kill a rattlesnake.

About two o’clock in the afternoon, several boys called out in fright. They’d startled the snake during its siesta.

Untreated rattlesnake bite is only 3% fatal in adults, but severe danger to small boys. Father Herron followed carefully through the grasses, and then pounced!, grabbing it near the rattles. Quickly, faster than the snake could turn to bite, Father Herron lifted the snake and cracked it like a bull-whip.

The snake was dead.

We boys gaped in wonder. And now, fifty years later, I wonder, where is Father Herron today? Intoning Latin in a dim cathedral? Resting agog in the Old Priests Home? I’d rather think of him running the bulls in Paloma, or perhaps working undercover in a Chicago dive, or maybe wrestling alligators in the Everglades. Why not? He was a mighty man. Snakes couldn’t bite him, and bees didn’t sting him.

San Francisco, April 1976: I can count on one hand the times I saw my father, Jack.

I was seven, and my mother was a nurse, working for her brother, Doctor Hurn, whom all the cousins and myself called Uncle Doc. We lived in a tiny apartment behind his office on a street lined with Bois d’Arc trees. In our kitchen, of an afternoon, sometimes my Mom, Uncle Doc, and Doctor Pickett would drink coffee, on the formica table by the back door, where, in those days, an iceman brought a block of ice with iron tongs, and a milkman brought cool milk in bottles. So that was a long time ago.

Images of 1940’s screen sirens still haunted the atmosphere, because when my father came for an unheard-of visit, my mother is dressed to the nines, and holding her lipsticked mouth in a dour pout, in unhappy emulation of non-smiling movie stars. It was a poor job, bless her heart. Photos captured this sorry moment. I can see that she wanted to impress him, and I’m sure it failed.

It is summer. I’m wearing cut-off jeans, no shoes, no shirt, a skinny kid with a blond burr haircut. This sorry meeting, at the time, was a big highlight for me. My mother must have expected him, but it surprised me, interrupting a marble game with Ricky Moyer. My father took me to dinner than night at the TexMex Cafe in nearby Wichita Falls, and I ate enchiladas for the first time. I liked them.

At age eleven, I was scheduled to visit my father in Galveston. He phoned a day before, and called it off, speaking only with my mother. She was very angry. She told me I was unhappy, and perhaps I was. But at twelve, I did visit, flying on an airplane with a note pinned to my shirt.

In high school, he came through town, picking me up in a souped-up Mercury, with a vacuum gauge, which monitored gas mileage. Kind of a contradiction, that gauge. We spent the night at some farm, where I wasted the morning attempting to shoot an air rifle with a bent sight, while the grown-ups talked and talked and talked.

In college years, my mother and brothers visited him for an afternoon. He and I chatted in a roadside park. And the summer that I worked in Huntsville prision, I visited to show off my prison-guard uniform. He was building a garage, and had smashed his hand, and I was very little help.

Five visits. One, two, three, four, five. Count them on one hand.

In 1974, now thirty, I thought it time to get into communication. I called him up. He answered, surprised. We chatted. Another time I called again. We chatted. Then one time he called me. We chatted. And then one time I called him and we chatted. That doesn’t sound very interesting, now, does it? That’s because it wasn’t. It wasn’t very interesting at all.

For these conversations were one-sided. If I asked him a question, he answered at length, very forthcoming with lots of details and side issues. If he asked me a question, he’d interrupt within the first two sentences, and then carry on at length, full of details and side issues. Kind of a pattern. Not much fun.

We sent a couple of letters back and forth. He didn’t interrupt me when I was writing a letter; but his incoming letters were the same monologues. I’d been cast as an extra who’d wandered by accident onto the soundstage of the Jack Show.

One more phone call, just to check. Yup, that’s how it was.

After these calls, did I feel good? I did not. Were they beneficial? They were not. Was there any reason to continue? There was not.

Thus the last communications I had with my worthless father. Some years later, he died, leaving a shack of a house filled with stuff he’d collected. Heaps, and boxes, and bins, like a third-world second-hand store. I found seventeen pocket-knives in one compartment. Some were OK, some were broken, some rusted, but none in use. None … living, you might say.

And that was his life: an absence of memories, and a collection of random objects, of no utility, no sense, no beauty. A fellow I missed a lot, yearned to love, and never knew.

So long. I’m sorry I didn’t know you. I’m sure there was some good in there, that I just failed to see.