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anything, he merely opened the door to his study one day and proclaimed—“My sons. What disappointments.”
    I decided to become one. That is, I did this to the best of my ability, but as things turned out, I was a failure even at becoming a major disappointment. I took my accordion, my trumpet, my English horn and my violin to a pawnshop andtraded them in for an electric organ, one of those whiny little Farfisas that sound like a systematic arrangement of bee farts. I also purchased a small amplifier, one with a cracked speaker (so that squawking and howling was the best one could hope for), and I set up in the basement and began the most ungodly sort of racket.
    The father was down in the basement within minutes, his face ashen. The composer of “Vivian in Velvet” was aghast. “Where’s the schnooze?” he demanded.
    “There is no schnooze!” I hollered above the music.
    “You’ll break your mother’s heart!”
    “Not likely!”
    “You’ll break my heart!”
    “Now we’re getting somewhere!”
    “I got one son who’s a criminal and another who’s a musical maniac!”
    I liked the description. I laughed ghoulishly, stabbed at an eleventh chord that I knew would sting the father right between the ears, make him feel like throwing up. “Stop!” he screamed.
    “Do you want to hear the lyrics, Daddy?”
    “Lyrics?” His hair was standing on end.
    “Absolutely!”
    “How could such a thing have lyrics?”
    “Bam-diddle-oom-pow, she’s my little pom-pom girl!”
    “Aaagh!” The father covered his ears, doubled over.
    “She’s got big pom-poms, she knows how to bam-diddle-oom-pow!”
    “Desmond, stop this!”
    “I’m going to take her pom-poms, throw them all over this football field!”
    Unnecessary cruelty? Perhaps. The father fled the basement, locked himself in his study. I didn’t keep up the music for much longer, because I didn’t care for it myself. I turned the volume down low, so that the father couldn’t hear it upstairs, and began to play some soothing major seventh chords.
    The father, the father, the great unruly man. He should have existed in a rainforest, before the recording of time. He could have gobbled up lizards, spilled his seed willy-nilly, covered the earth with dull-witted progeny. And they would have ruled the world, kings and queens all.
    Danny came home after a year in reform school, and it made me sad because we had grown very far apart. He had taken to wearing T-shirts and bluejeans, his feet decked out in shiny pointed shoes. In a desperate attempt to make friends at high school I was wearing Pendletons, clam diggers and Hush Puppies. I was working hard at my music—at least, that’s all I ever did. Danny was still obsessed with speed and machines,
cars
to put it simply, and his hobby was rebuilding old wrecks even though he wasn’t old enough to legally drive them. He’d spend hours on their engines and bodies, and then he’d cruise them stealthily onto an old dirt track near our house, and he’d bomb around until the cars either gave up the ghost or were driven into trees.
    One day when I came home from school I saw Danny out in the driveway underneath one of his old coupés. Danny was always preceding me home from school, which leads me to believe that he was not in fact attending. Anyway, he couldn’t see me as he worked on the chassis, and I was surprised to hear him singing. He was singing a popular song of the time, I think it was “Teen Angel,” and his recently changed voice was a very sweet and pretty one. Without thinking I joined in, adding a high harmony, and Danny scooted out from underneath the car with a big grin on his face. We finished the song, even locked our arms around each other’s shoulders to add pathos. Then Danny laughed, gave me a little punch to the belly.
    “Do you want to come down into the basement?” I asked. “We could sing some more songs.”
    Danny thought about it, but finally he shook his grease-spotted head,