It didn’t take long to figure out he wasn’t joking. That in itself would have been disgusting enough, but it became even more sickening when it dawned on me that he meant it. He started small – 40% of the students in this school are hopeless, worthless. Trying to reach them is a waste of time. Each time he ran his mouth in front of other teachers- and got their approval in return- he got a little bolder, eventually working his way up to wishing death on these “forty percenters” as he called them. They were beneath him, a waste of space. Most were poor. His solution was to lock the cafeteria from the outside while the students were eating breakfast and gas them, “Auschwitz style.” Most of the kids who ate breakfast at school were from low-income families and therefore worthless. In what will become a common refrain, he wasn’t shy about pinching off his opinions in front of other teachers, and in this and all other instances he got no argument in return.
This was Maestro. Maestro was, on paper at least, a music teacher. Musically, the only interesting thing about him was how bad of a performer he was. I’ve been around a bit since then and I still can’t figure out how dilettantes like him are allowed to stay in positions they aren’t qualified for, how they can pretend to teach kids how to perform without knowing how to do it themselves. This is hindsight speaking, of course. I was just a kid then, and all I heard from other teachers was how “lucky” I was that Maestro had taken an interest in me. Nevermind that everything he “taught” me about performing I had to forget later. I got some incredibly awful advice on how to practice that I had to unlearn. Nothing at all on the mental aspects of preparing for performance (just getting most of the notes right was the goal for him), nothing on how to connect with an audience (because he didn’t know how). He was out of his element and nobody cared.
I think Maestro had enough self awareness to know he couldn’t play. He was open about how he cut corners and left out or simplified passages that were too hard for him. He had to know he didn’t have much to offer in that regard. He got around this by styling himself as a talent scout of sorts. He had none of his own but decided he was somehow qualified to find kids who did and “help” develop it. Again, I’ve been around a little since then. A shit musician claiming to have special insight into what it takes to be creative is a charlatan. They’re hangers-on, leeches, “discovering” something that was already there and taking credit for it. He had ulterior motives, of course, but even on the surface it didn’t make any sense – here’s a kid with exceptional talent and promise, but he can’t be trusted to find his own path in life. Thinking this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the creative process. To take a gifted kid and pigeonhole them, shove them down a narrow path, to knowingly limit their experience is done at the service of only one person, and it isn’t the student.
He was territorial, too. The kids he helped out were “his.” The other music teachers knew to stay away, and we weren’t allowed to hang out with other students outside his circle. Again, he must’ve known he was full of shit, but helping kids was never the goal. Nobody ever called him out. He just happened to get lucky and find himself surrounded by a school and community full of enablers.
Backing up a bit, after a chance meeting when I was 13 or 14, Maestro started sniffing around and eventually got his claws in me. There were many times I should have known something was up:
-One year he handpicked some “lucky” students for an extra curricular music theory class he was teaching, ostensibly to prepare us for music school. After a few weeks it was apparent he was in over his head. He made quizzes for us, but before he could grade them I was drafted into correcting the mistakes in his answer keys. This maestro, who had decided he was qualified to “help” kids make life-altering career decisions, couldn’t work out the difference between a major and minor third.
-When the penis talk started. I think the first time was during one of the nighttime car rides. It was the usual routine. Step one – stop to get ice cream; step two – drive around and get lectured. I’m pretty sure it was during one of his many lectures on the evils of hanging around kids my own age. Friendship could lead to dating, dating could lead to sex, and oh by the way do you masturbate? Have you ever tried on a condom? Are you circumsised? It wasn’t a one time thing. I wasn’t the only one he asked. And, like so many things in this whole fucked story, it was often brazenly done out in the open, within earshot of other teachers.
-When the pornography talk started. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I remember him dropping me off at his house while he went to run an errand. He told me he had a stack of skin mags that I could look at until he got back. I remember it was cold and rainy, dusk, and it was the first time I thought I should maybe mention this to someone else. But again, it was not an isolated incident, and other teachers knew. I always identified more with teachers than fellow students and wanted to fit in with them. Hey, I guess this is just what they do.
-When he started being a creep online. This was just when the internet was starting to take off, in the AOL days. Maestro would go on AOL chat pretending to be a teenage girl and strike up conversations with his male students. Use your imagination to figure out what his goal was. Again, this wasn’t something he tried to hide; I remember him openly bragging about how he had tricked these boys into believing he was a girl and it was met with only laughter. Years later, I found out he went online posing as me, and was in contact with other kids I had met at a music festival. I know because he told me, expecting I would find it as funny as he did. No clue how he pulled it off or what kind of fucked up shit he talked about. Sabotaging my friendships was something of a hobby for him.
Looking back on it, he reminds me of one of those “cool” college professors who lets you call them by their first name but only if you preface it with “doctor.” It allows them to play whatever angle suits them best at the time. They can be your friend to seem relatable, switch over to father figure when they need an ego boost, authoritarian when they need to keep you under heel. Except in Maestro’s case all these shitty qualities were multiplied to the umpteenth degree. There were trips: daytrips, vacations, and everything in between. In private, he said he took me with him because he liked spending time with me. In public, I was a charity case. He would tell others he took me along because I was poor and hadn’t been many places. Of course he made sure I could hear; he had to keep me in line. I felt like such a freak when I heard him say it, and it wasn’t an isolated incident. There were gifts, of course: books and CDs, which were occasionally useful, and tchotchkes, which never were. There were rides to take music lessons from people who didn’t suck. I never asked or even hinted that I wanted a goddamned thing, I thought he was doing it because he liked me. Do you think he held all this stuff over my head to excuse his behavior? Do you think he mentioned it to other teachers to make himself look good? Do you think he mentioned it to other students to keep me even more isolated from my classmates?
And there were the fights over my free time. The first one happened not long after he had (to use a gag-inducing phrase) “taken me under his wing.” (There had been an occasional music lesson before that, some general talk about what I wanted to do after high school, and some “breathing excersices” where he had me lay on the floor of his classroom while he put his hand up my shirt. Once he found out I had some talent and was an easy mark he made sure to find a way to see me just about every day.) Being a normal 14 or 15 year old, I committed the crime of staying over at a friend’s house. He was a year older than me, also in band, but wasn’t one of Maestro’s “kids.” Maestro had the very normal reaction of reaming me out when he heard about what happened. I shouldn’t be wasting my time, I should have been at home practicing, etc. It was pure, sickening jealousy on his part, masked as concern for me. The ironic part is that I received this lecture while he was driving us to go out to eat. That happened a lot, so did going to the movies. Time with him was always ok. He never seemed to worry about my practice schedule when he was taking me to visit his family or prodding me into busywork like making photocopies.
One night I finally got tired of his shit and blew up, storming out of his house. Years of frustration came boiling out of me. I had a lot of stuff to do that night. Actual homework, for one. For another, I had a music festival audition coming up. And third, maybe I’d just had enough of being a gofer for a 50-something year old man. Despite having more important things to do, Maestro tried to guilt trip me into doing some clerical work for him, stuffing envelopes or some bullshit like that (again, his deep concern for how I was spending my time came and went depending on the situation). I don’t remember how long I stayed away, I doubt it was much more than a week. What I do remember is that he told me he was having a rough time without me. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, was losing weight, the whole bit, as if I was responsible for his well being. That’s a hell of a lot to put on a kid. It’s straight up what an abuser would say to get back with his ex. Apparently he even spilled his guts to someone at the school and they were concerned about him, too. I wish I knew who it was. I wish I knew how many people he told. Other teachers? Were they able to infer that he was blaming his despair on a 16-year-old boy who “broke up with him,” or did he say it outright? It didn’t raise any red flags?
Anyway, I fell for it. Things were slightly better after that. I was still under Maestro’s thumb but I could get away with saying no occasionally. It didn’t really end the stalking though. He and others had a habit of driving past their student’s houses late at night to keep tabs on them. He was like a troll, always lurking in the shadows. He and his temper were something to be managed. If you knew how to watch yourself around him you could avoid getting screamed at or threatened.
I went to music school after I graduated, a pretty good one too, and I did well. This is where Maestro would wipe away everything he’d done by saying, “you wouldn’t have been there without me.” That’s true. That’s the whole fucking point. (No matter that my head was filled with the worst ideas and “rules” you could imagine: music, career, money, all of it flat out wrong, just spoonful upon spoonful of bullshit that I had been fed over the years.) Music schools are there to prepare students for certain career paths. If you want to go down one of these paths then there’s no problem; find the one that fits you best and get to it. Otherwise, the investment of time and money is rarely worth it.
If Maestro had known a damn thing about me he would have known I wouldn’t be happy in one of these careers (but knowing me and caring about what was best for me wasn’t the point). I shouldn’t have been there. I met others in my situation, where music school wasn’t a great fit but it was the best option they had at the time. Maybe they had pushed away other interests, hobbies, and relationships, too, and found this was all they had. The system we have- where 17-year-olds are pushed into making life-altering decisions- only makes it worse. Eventually the sunk cost fallacy took hold of me. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you may have wasted years of your life, so I stuck with it far longer than I should have.
There are problems with taking advice from one of these self-appointed talent scouts instead of an actual, working musician. First, their advice often comes from their own self-interest. Second, their advice is limited by their own imagination and experience, both of which are in short supply. What it boils down to is this – don’t let your life be steered by someone who peaked in their early 20s, whether their intentions are pure or not (and in this case they were surely not). Bad advice and habits can be unlearned. Given enough time you can eventually dig yourself out of the hole and move on, at least that’s what I tell myself. Of course, with Maestro, the awful advice is almost beside the point. The mentor thing was just a means to an end for him. On its own, bad career advice doesn’t whittle your confidence down to nothing, doesn’t leave you feeling used and dirty. Accepting the whole experience is out of the question at this point, simply acknowledging it is hard enough. “Regret” isn’t nearly a strong enough word. The worst part, the thing I will never get over, is throwing away the tail end of my adolescence at the beck and call of a fucking creep, wasting my teenage years playing the role of a trained animal.
Whatever, I’m done carrying this around.