There’s a particular kind of recognition that happens when I realize the person I’m talking with was a band kid in high school. We suddenly seem to know an uncomfortable amount about each other. We can’t help this; each of our existences confronts the other with a pre-NYC world of starkly lit Saturday evenings, funnel cakes, timed sight-reading, fight songs, group prayers, piercing metronomes, endless rides on charter buses where Rob said Danielle gave Lukas a handjob through his pants but no one’s sure if it’s true. Even if they didn’t grow up anywhere near the Southeast, we know we’re exiles from the same regime, and not necessarily eager to talk about it in this new context with its nearly opposite set of values.
I was on a Hinge date recently where this discovery happened, and the woman I was talking to invited me to guess what instrument she’d played. After less than an hour of knowing her, I looked inside myself and knew it was the clarinet. It felt nothing like a guess. And I was right. It actually marked a weird turning point in an overall enjoyable conversation—she seemed pleased to have been read correctly by me, to have located a shared experience, whereas I was secretly thinking I have no interest in dating a clarinet player. I don’t know where this thought came from or what it meant or if it’s even true. Only that in some way, the pattern of “clarinet player” pulled together the stray threads of our conversation in such a way that my sense of our incompatibility felt suddenly resolved, settled, named.
We also talked briefly about our band directors, which is where my mind is wanting to turn now. A strange fact is that everyone I’ve ever talked to about marching band has described their band director as a petty tyrant. There must be something structural about this, some combination of the kind of person the job attracts and the kind of person it creates. There’s the superficial explanation, which might be the truest: band directors tend to be people who studied music seriously but for whatever reason didn’t get to play it for a living, and there’s a classic bitterness that can develop around that, around having the job of training people for a kind of high-status play that you had to grow out of and trade in for regular-ass work. Even aside from that, the job seems specially designed to be maddening and impossible. Imagine trying to direct one or two hundred high school kids through choreographies designed to convey the strictest sense of order, doing this on an inflexible timeline, year after year, and everyone in your community will see the result. Imagine managing all this without losing your temper, without using threats or coming off as sort of a jerk.
At the high school I went to in rural-suburban Georgia, the band program was so popular that the usual coolness hierarchy never quite fit. Band couldn’t be lame when a third of the student body were in it, when a girl who was in the band was named homecoming queen every year because the band voted as a bloc. Our football team was an embarrassment—people blamed the coach—but the band program regularly killed at state competitions, so a lot of local pride flowed through the band and the band director, who happened to be the father of a boy who had been one of my closest friends since elementary school. The band director was short and balding, but weirdly muscular, though I doubt he ever lifted a weight. He had a sly charisma about him and could be extremely funny when he was in a good mood. He drove a red Jeep convertible that always looked freshly washed, wore polarized sunglasses on a gump strap, had a thick mustache that we made more jokes about than any of us could have explained. When my friend wanted to mock his dad—he did a lot of this, it was a hard job differentiating himself enough to avoid all our resentment—he would drape his finger over his upper lip and say, “Well, Band, it is what it is.”
No one has ever terrified me as much as the band director, and I expect and hope that no one else ever will. I played the drums in the after-school jazz band—I was a drummer, technically a percussionist, but really just a drummer—and I remember times during rehearsals when I would get so flustered, so afraid that he would turn his ever-lurking sense of grievance and outrage toward me, so intent on managing my limbs into the patterns that would keep him peaceable, that at some point I would feel my face turning a bright red and I would know that once again I’d forgotten to fill my lungs with air. And he would yell at me, even though I had a slightly privileged status as his son’s friend, maybe sometimes because of that status, to nullify it. If I close my eyes I can still hear my name in his mouth, shouted over a loudspeaker for everyone on the practice field to hear, singling me out for my failure to stand perfectly still when sweat rolled into my eyes.
Band was the first institution I ever freely chose to give myself to, and it was the first I ever quit. I think this is the reason it’s been on my mind lately, now that I’m on the verge, it’s certainly seeming like, of leaving a different institution. (More on this soon probably, not trying to be coy but it’s a whole can of worms.) Quitting band was a big deal, a bigger deal even than I predicted when I slid my carefully worded letter of resignation, cosigned by my dad, beneath the door of the band director’s office. I didn’t know how many people at the school knew my name until they started coming up to me between classes, saying they’d heard about it and asking me my reasons. Some girls from the color guard told me the band director had made a whole speech to them basically just venting about me, particularly lingering on the part of the letter where I said I was quitting band to “focus on my academics,” which apparently he found absurd. I’d never been the subject of this sort of drama before and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. It was a small community and my quitting, as a non-fuckup who the band director “liked,” meant something to people. Some other members used it as an occasion to consider getting out too, and a few of them did; people who had never joined or already quit seemed to enjoy the way it affirmed their decision.
That day or the next, as we were warming up—I still had to wait out the rest of the semester, which was partly why the choice felt so fraught—the band director beckoned me into the instrument room during rehearsal and, in a very intense tone, told me that normally when people quit band he would never consider taking them back, but that in my case he would make an exception and give me a chance to rethink my decision. He said: “You have the best hands in the drumline. A player like you is money in the bank.” He strongly implied that if I stayed I’d be made center snare the next year, which would functionally put me in charge of the entire drumline. And then he repeated the “money in the bank” bit, as he repeated so many things in his dramatic and metaphorically laden way of talking, and left the room without waiting for a response.
The offer disgusted me. It settled whatever doubts I still had. I had heard him give a hundred speeches about this, drawing a hard moral line between those who were in band and those who weren’t, always reserving his greatest vitriol for those who had quit, a downfall from which, he was clear, there was no clawing one’s way back. He viewed the students outside the band room as leprous troglodytes and the band as the lone bastion of discipline, excellence, and class (a favorite word) in an institution otherwise characterized by brutal (redneck) mediocrity. When we had a field day or some scheduled diversion from normal class time, he pointed to it as evidence of creeping moral decay. He spent a lot of time painting lurid pictures of what went on behind the dumpster next to the band room, where evidently he was constantly tasked with detaching pairs of teens who “had their tongues halfway down each other’s throats, swapping spit.” He emphasized that last phrase with a kind of hateful relish, as I listened and longed for precisely that experience, for exactly that kind of life.
The thing is, he wasn’t entirely wrong. The band was the only really challenging thing going on at that school, the only thing that developed something like real strength, or commitment, or collaboration toward a larger goal, and the only place where anything like excellence was happening or even suggested as something that could happen. I spent most of the year after I quit playing video games after school and slumping through classes while my friends in band talked about how jealous they were. I wound up getting so bored that I decided to go to college a year early, a move I later regretted, mainly because it removed me so completely from my peers at the precise moment they all became intent on getting laid.
Even so, at the time quitting band felt like a victory, like I’d reclaimed my individuality from the sort of violently pointless authoritarianism I saw indicted in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, two books I read in English the year before my decision and the first to make me seriously envision being a writer. My parents corroborated this framing, an attitude I feel I can explain to you by saying they’re enormous fans of Bob Dylan. I think we all sort of saw me as hitching a railroad car out from a lot of bullshit, the moral vapidity of football and patriotism and imperialism, out toward the lonely but honest life of an artist.
It really wasn’t until years later that I started to see quitting band as maybe fitting a somewhat different and less noble template, one that had been established much earlier, when I’d been labeled “gifted” in elementary school and put into a separate class with other “gifted” kids. That foundational ordering function implied a script that went something like, If you’re smarter than the people around you, the thing to do is leave. I got out of band, the closest thing I had to a community, to focus on academics, my ticket to college and scholarships, because getting out of the community was what smart people did, was in fact the way to demonstrate my smartness, was the only way to make sure I’d be money in my own bank and not someone else’s. I wonder now if this implication, this subtle claim to superiority, was part of what made the band director so angry, so seemingly threatened by my decision to leave.
Naturally, both templates, both versions of this story are true, and both are distortions. It’s also true that I was fed up with getting yelled at and made to feel ashamed.
When I drop my predigested narratives and feel back into that zone of my life, what I get is a warm sense of belonging, of having a tribe, of knowing the proper rites, of knowing and being known, of a kind of holding I’ve never experienced to the same degree since. And I also get a sense of terror, the fear and simmering rage of the pecking order, friends whose houses I’d hung out at hissing “get in fucking set position” through gritted teeth, standing lost in thought behind a timpani and jolting to attention when the band director mocked the way I scratched my armpit. I remember a summer day toward the end of band camp when a storm came upon us suddenly on the practice field, and we rushed to the band room, and all two hundred of us sat dripping in the windowless space while one by one, every section leader gave their own impromptu version of a speech about how the band this year was lazy and decadent and everyone was clearly trying to “ride the reputation” of last year’s brilliant, award-winning show. I remember that was the day not a single section was deemed worthy to receive the Moon-Chicken, a rubber chicken with its feet encased in a concrete slab for some reason lost to time, whose name we would chant in collective anticipation of the award. I remember thinking this was all really strange, even as I committed internally to working and trying harder, because I wanted the drumline to win the Moon-Chicken so bad it hurt.
Funny wrinkle to this story: Five or six years ago, the band director retired, and in his honor a new auditorium that was being built at another local high school was named after him. I heard from his son that there was a big ceremony about it with music and speeches, that his dad had a ball. Around that time I saw someone’s post about the announcement during one of my rare dips into Facebook, and I read the comments. I was shocked to see how gratefully and glowingly my old classmates talked about the man I’d loathed and feared, a man I still had nightmares about, nightmares that I’d returned to the band during a rehearsal and had to make some accounting to him about why I’d left and why I’d come back now. They all remembered him as a brilliant educator and leader, as one of the only people in their childhoods who had really cared, who had held them to a standard, who had believed in their capacity to do difficult things. Many people said he had taught them how to work, period, and that they wouldn’t have succeeded so well at their jobs, at supporting their families (they almost all had families now), without that lesson. I had no way of knowing how much of this was hyperbole or the filling of a social form, but it sounded mostly genuine, and I would never have said such things even for the sake of politeness. These were familiar names, familiar if older faces, people I remembered commiserating with, suffering with, hating it all with. It was one of those moments when I felt how efficiently and decisively I’d been sorted from the people I used to know, filtered and differentiated by forces outside our choosing, such that even our memories of the same person, the same time were difficult to compare. Or was this an artifact of the medium I encountered them through, of the weird fact that I had these scraps of social signaling to hold my past against?
At this point in my life, I find myself thinking about finding and/or building genuine community a lot of the time, and feel most attracted to and inspired by people who share that interest, who share a perhaps growing realization (maybe it’s growing or maybe that’s just my Twitter distortion field or maybe it’s because my friends are starting to have kids) that it’s something we’ll have to do ourselves if we ever want it to happen again. Something I’ve often thought about in reference to our culture’s lurid fascination with cults and their excesses—that they’re the Jungian shadow of the family and the community we all yearn for—is also true, I’m realizing, of the way I’ve narrated my time in band, casting it as a hell realm that it only intermittently was. I would like to forgive the experience, to whatever extent I still haven’t—not in order to repeat it but in order to make sure I’m not going through life flinching from what was beautiful and even noble in it. I’d like to forgive this guy who was not that much older than I am now, whose gnawing fears got mixed up briefly with my own, who also taught me a not small part of what I know about performing.
That feels like it’s already started, which is good timing. His son got engaged to be married earlier this year—I’ve met her, seems like an all-around great match—and I’d like to be carrying nothing when I see the old man at the wedding.