One of my mother’s colleagues was a music composition teacher, a tall man defined by the angles of his elbows and knees, high bald forehead, and a degree of tweediness that struck me as a little overmuch. At some point the conversation meandered its way to music, and the group found a pleasant consensus about Mozart—how wonderful, how cheering, that lovely weightlessness, that effortlessness fluidity. How prodigious a talent.
I was as surprised as anyone when Erik, piping up from his crouch on an ottoman, offered the opinion that Mozart was sometimes “self-plagiarizing” and that his lifetime oeuvre had suffered from it. Erik believed he recycled too many of his own ideas, which no doubt helped get some of those commissions done on schedule and maybe explained the time he famously completed a symphony while bouncing around in a stagecoach racing toward the work’s premier. And didn’t he supposedly write one while bowling?
The music teacher was aghast. Erik had blasphemed. He could only assume, he said in a kindly but patronizing tone, that Erik, being his age and of his generation, could not be expected to understand or enjoy Mozart.
“No, no, I totally love Mozart!” Erik insisted.
“You just provided a pretty withering critique! Which is it?”
“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Erik said, stiffening.
Growing impatient with such a puerile discussion with an uppity juvenile, the music professor took Erik’s tone personally and returned it as such: “And, might one ask, who are you to have an opinion about Mozart? You’re what, fifteen? Do you know anything about classical music?”
Erik was taken aback. He couldn’t comprehend how anyone could fail to understand his viewpoint or get so worked up about something so obvious. He hadn’t meant to roil the social waters, just wanted to join the conversation at an adult level. Not yet in possession of his later bravado, he was intimidated by this circle of adults, gone silent now to listen to the exchange.
“Not much,” Erik admitted.
“Have you studied composition, or harmony? Or any music at all?”
“No.”
The music teacher flung his hands out to each side and dropped them onto his thighs, his argument sealed, Erik dismissed.
But Erik had a legalistic mind. He detested prejudice, especially in the form of underestimation, and he never backed down from anything. “That’s like … like, I mean, what would you say if I asked you if you’re for or against nuclear power?”
“Nukes? I was part of the Clamshell Alliance! You’re too young to even remember that, of course. We protested the Seabrook plant, laid siege to it, did our best to shut it down. And I’m damn well proud of it. What does that have to do with Mozart?”
“So … are you an atomic physicist? A nuclear engineer? What expertise entitles you to have any opinion at all about nuclear power?”
The music professor opened and shut his mouth, frustrated at having his ad hominem bounced back at him, his logic dismantled, and flummoxed by the continuing effrontery of this upstart kid.
“I’m just saying …”
“Honey,” our mother cautioned.
“I’m just saying,” Erik continued, not without a tinge of malice, “I think Mozart’s Fortieth and the Requiem—especially the “Lacrimosa”?—have gotta be among mankind’s greatest achievements. Totally. And I think he self-plagiarized too much of his own stuff.”
At that moment, my father stood and picked up the pitcher of martinis. “Who’s for a refresher?” he asked brightly.
All that came back to me as we got to know Erik that day. His tattoo, his philosophical complexity: Ah, yes, right. My brother. His knowledge of Mozart had not been due to his being a scholarly type, an intellectual—anything but. He detested all things academic. For all I know, that argument with Ichabod Crane was one of the catalysts for his determination to graduate early, to “get the hell out before the bullshit gets any deeper.” He was just really smart and broadly curious, could pursue a subject with fanatical intensity if it interested him.
Jim Brassard broke our silence after learning about Elk Ridge State Penitentiary, our reluctance to ask, What were you in for?
“What were you in for?” he asked.
He put his glasses back on, the better to see Erik with, the black plastic arm of his glasses hiding once again his scarred ear even as the reflection on the lenses hid his eyes.
“For farming.”
“Huh! Why not?” Brassard asked rhetorically, gloomily. “Next thing for us, I wouldn’t wonder.”
Erik told us: Since I last saw him, he’d gotten into raising marijuana in Northern California. He and his partners grew about twenty acres of a “dynamite” strain for a few years. Erik, among his other duties, kept watch: You lived right there in the patch to water, fertilize, and prune during the day and to keep watch for other growers who might “interfere with productivity” at night. Too many structures on the land would have attracted the interest of the DEA or state police conducting aerial surveillance, so he and his compatriots slept outside, kept their visible footprint small, and scattered their crop among small trees and bushes.
They had a pretty good business plan. They grew, harvested, hybridized, and maintained their own seed stock; they shrink-wrapped their product, transported it, and sold it in the Bay Area to local distributors they trusted, and had a pretty good sideline, even mail-order, in handmade pipes they whittled while the plants matured. Made good money for three years, except that so much was in cash and they had limited laundering capacity. For the most part, the only ways
