Equilibrium

by

Laura Hinkle

According to the check, it appears that the leg formerly known as mine has been appraised at seventeen thousand dollars.

To be fair, I’m rounding down.  The actual cash value is higher by two hundred dollars and eighteen cents.  It’s the change that really bothers me, like maybe I could have increased the value somehow.  Next time, Miss Wright, might we recommend a pedicure.

Something that was supposed to be a laugh crawls raw and bitter from my throat; the mailman, still attending to our neighbor’s mail box, jumps.  I lean most of my weight on my crutch and wave the envelope at him.

“My leg,” I say brightly.  “They put it in the incinerator.  I asked,” and I laugh again.  It sounds better this time.

He doesn’t return the laugh.  That’s okay.

Nobody appreciates my humor these days.

♦♦♦

My mother spent every day next to my hospital bed, whispering to nurses and pretending to watch TV.  Between the hospital and work at night, I wasn’t sure when she slept, if ever.  Sometimes I would catch her staring, her eyes heavier on my broken shape than the blankets.  When she met my eyes she’d mutter something vague and hurry out of the room for a cigarette.

I waited for these trips to use the bathroom, first in a bedpan and then in clumsy, slow trips to the toilet.  The first attempt to get there left me exhausted and dizzy. I missed the toilet seat completely and fell over instead, a defeated tangle of cotton gown and crushed dignity.

A nurse was there in seconds.  She took one look at the monitors I’d abandoned by the bed and shook her head, already reaching to pick me up.

“You’re not supposed to be doing this yet,” she said.  “I don’t even have to see your chart to know that.”

I leaned into her, letting her lift me like a baby or a drunk.  Pain rocketed up the leg that wasn’t there to hurt anymore.  My teeth ground together.  “I’m eighteen years old,” I said.  “I’m not supposed to be doing this at all.”

She clicked her tongue at me.  I could have grabbed the rail alongside the toilet, but instead I clung to her.

“I missed prom,” I blurted.

The stiffness in her shoulders lessened, letting me glance at her name badge.  Rosemary.  One of those names that predetermines your future as a nurse.  She couldn’t have been much older than me, but already she’d dedicated herself to the career: her scrubs were starched, her posture determined and matronly.  I braced myself for the lecture.

“What color was your dress?” she said.

“Blue,” I said, surprised.  “Satin.”  And as simply as that, I began to cry.

Rosemary put both arms around me, her hands small and cold against my back.  My mother turned the corner from the hallway and stopped, her eyes wide.  Her mouth opened and then closed, eyes darting from one of us to the other like sparrows.

“What -”

“She’s healing,” Rosemary said calmly.  “And it hurts.  Excuse us, ma’am.”

She closed the bathroom door and let me cry.

♦♦♦

My father sent me to Safety City when I was four, just before the divorce, and stayed long enough to watch me maneuver my way through the front seat of the fire truck.  The fireman let me touch the knobs and pedals and lifted me carefully down after.  He leaned very close so I could hear him over the siren.

“Are you having fun?” he said.  The siren was giving me a headache but I nodded anyway.  None of the kids I played with at home had ever been inside a fire truck.

“Just remember everything you learn here.  Always make sure you wear your seatbelt, sweetheart,” he said.

“What if the car crashes?” I said.

“Then it will protect you until we come help you,” he said.  “And so will your daddy.”

He smiled and waved at my dad.  My dad waved back.

Two months later, he was gone and all I had was my seatbelt to protect me from the world.  For years, every time I clicked it into place I thought of the fireman.  It wasn’t his fault.

♦♦♦

Jess and I started dating sophomore year, the year of temporary permits and more lenient curfews.  Jess had perfect grades and long eyelashes.  I had a Polaroid camera and a total lack of focus.  We spent our Saturday afternoons in parking lots, sharing french fries with the seagulls and then chasing them away.  At night we rented old movies and watched them in languages we didn’t speak.

Jess was constantly finding things, picking them up from under bus benches or payphones.  His favorite thing was lottery tickets: he’d run his thumb across the numbers, folding each one carefully into his pocket.  I’d find them months later when looking for a lighter and throw them away, rolling my eyes.

“Why bother?  Who would throw away a winning ticket?”  I said.

He shrugged.  “People lose all kinds of things.”

♦♦♦

What am I supposed to buy with the money? I wonder.  The insurance paid for the medical bills.  What would a normal teenager spend it on?  College, maybe.  But now there are scholarships for people like me.

A car.  I try to imagine driving again, using the wrong foot for the pedals, braking too early at every light.  The strange efforts it will take me to get out, my fingers tight and bloodless wrapped around the door frame.  Hopping to the backseat to get my cane.

What’s easier to imagine is the people staring.

No thank you.

I shove my crutch away from me, a useless temper tantrum that wipes the top of the coffee table clear.  My senior picture topples.  I’m wearing a skirt and heels in the photograph.  I’m standing, smiling.  Of course I am.  I’m intact.

The frame’s glass shatters when it hits the floor.

♦♦♦

The car hit us doing fifty miles an hour in a fifty-five zone.  Its driver wasn’t drunk.  They weren’t distracted.  A glitch in the traffic computers went unnoticed for just a minute too long, turning several intersections in the city into four-way free for alls.  A one in a million chance.

♦♦♦

I can’t get used to my prosthetic.  It hurts when they fit it initially, the skin of what used to be my knee baby soft and uncallused against its foreign, harsh weight.  Something about this seems unfair.  I just got comfortable with the strange hopping gait that counts as walking for me these days.  Now I have to start all over.

Words can’t measure my mother’s relief.  I–she–can avoid people’s eyes immediately now, can have a conversation with cashiers and clerks without their palpable curiosity setting our sleeves on fire.  She buys me half a dozen pairs of designer jeans.

The prom dress still hangs on the back of my door, wearing its plastic bag like a burial shroud.

♦♦♦

The doctors showed me x-ray after x-ray of myself doing impressions of a jigsaw puzzle.  There were specialists for everything: taking apart, putting together, rearranging and reassembling.  The airbag broke my nose and shattered one of my cheekbones.  I had pulled muscles in my arm and back.

And, of course, there was the leg.

I clung to the bed rails and watched my mother watching me.

The driver’s half of the car took the initial impact.  From there, it rolled, folding in on itself like a paper fortune teller.  Somewhere during the process, what had previously been the steering column pinned my leg, crushing or tearing through most of my calf.  I was lucky, they said.  My mother frowned.

I said, “Where’s Jess?”

The doctors looked away.  My mother fumbled for her cigarettes.

Jess wasn’t wearing his seat belt.  While I’d been pinned, he’d been thrown.  Either the windshield or the ground had broken his neck.  They were sorry for my loss, sorry to have to tell me, sorry, sorry, sorry.  The words stuttered their way through the static in my brain.

I was lucky.

♦♦♦

Some days after physical therapy I meet Rosemary in the hospital’s cafeteria for coffee.  The hallway leading there smells like sickness and disinfectant, and some genius painted the walls a garish, glaring shade of yellow, but whoever brews the coffee knows what they’re doing.

She talks about long work shifts and the ongoing battle against her car’s faulty power windows; I grumble about my mother and how I miss wearing heels.  Sometimes I search her face for some betraying sign of pity, but I never find one.  I’m not sure it would matter.  She’s the closest thing I have to a friend.

The little girl with her takes me by surprise.  At first I think she’s a patient, her carroty hair buzzed to a soft, shining halo.  Then I look again and she has Rosemary’s mouth and upturned nose.

“You have a daughter,” I say stupidly.  She’s five years older than me, but the little girl looks seven, maybe eight.  The math makes my head hurt.

“Carolyn,” she says, “This is Allison.  Remember Mommy telling you about Allison?”

Carolyn beams at me.  She’s missing one of her front teeth.

I guess we’re friends after all.

♦♦♦

When they released me from the hospital I went looking for Jess’s grave.  I didn’t ask anyone about the funeral; there was nothing I wanted to know.  I didn’t want to imagine Jess in a suit he would never have worn willingly, didn’t want to wonder how his cheeks looked stuffed with cotton.  I couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, think about someone closing the lid on the casket.

His grave was covered in flowers: lilies, carnations, roses, Easter flowers with their cloying earthy perfume, but all of them wilting.  Dying.  Everything dies.  I still felt guilty.  I hadn’t even brought him flowers.

“I’m sorry, Jess,” I said.  My voice sounded flat, wooden.  What had I even come here for?  Jess wasn’t here.  Jess wasn’t anywhere I could reach out for him.

“I love you,” I said.

I waited, but Jess didn’t say anything.

I laid my crutch across his flowers, and limped back to the land of the living.

♦♦♦

I ask Rosemary and Carolyn to celebrate my last day of physical therapy.  Carolyn draws me picture after picture with a fat green marker.  Rosemary’s face creases, then crumples when she sees the amount of the check.  I have my hands in my pockets again already when she tries to hand it back.

“Allison –“

“It’s not sympathy money,” I say.  “It’s not charity.  It’s for Caro.”

“But –“

“Start her a college fund,” I say.  “Go buy her a bicycle.”

Rosemary keeps staring at me.  There are tears in her eyes, and absurdly, I think of my prom dress.  “Buy her a helmet, too.  You know, just in case.”

Carolyn hands me her latest piece of art, and I watch her curiosity rise when she reaches over my leg.  I realize it’s the first time she’s seen me in shorts.  She runs her pudgy hands over the place where my skin meets the stiff straps of my prosthetic, reads the seam of flesh and brace like Braille..  “Does it hurt?” she says.

Carolyn!” Rosemary says.

I laugh.  Carolyn’s palms are warm and baby perfect.  She has marker on her fingers.  I put my hand over hers and smile.  “No,” I say.  “Not anymore.”

Boxcar to Manhood 

by Toianna Gump

Consciously, I had not thought about Rudyard Kipling since my Dad died, years ago. But If reminds me about the difficulty in remembering Dad without thinking about Kipling or about Kipling without Dad, whose chief aspiration I remember as acquiring the emotional detachment Kipling implies is vital to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”

My father’s Achilles heel was the struggle to keep a lid on his boiling kettle of emotions and, as an older man, trying to outrun his unhappy childhood.

As I reread If, I could hear my father’s gravelly voice from too many cigarettes and too much booze. I could hear his inflection and theatrics the many times throughout my childhood he recited Gunga Din. Easily twice a month.

I was astonished to find that the poem If resonated significantly more with me than Gunga Din. If leaps out of my bloodstream and onto the written page, rather than the other way around.

Looking back, I realize that I failed to make the connection between mental calisthenics my father practiced obsessively and wisdom Kipling’s work embodies, ideals Dad hoped to impart to me, especially those in If, the piece I realize he recited most and that I associate with my father’s own voice.

I see how Dad was drawn to the grit and manly character Kipling implies throughout his works, including the first few lines of If, integral parts in the journey from boyhood to “true manhood.”

Dad was a thinker, a drunk, a pot head, and probably the smartest, most well-read person I have ever known personally. By ”smart,” I don’t mean the spewing and regurgitation back of what others have taught. Dad did not fear facing disagreement and lack of popularity. He took brutish delight in rubbing two sticks together and creating sparks to get to the Truth.

When conversation became too agreeable, he played devil’s advocate, oftentimes defending points of view contrary to his own. Anything to get a rise out of people, elevate blood pressure, inspire a debate, and make everyone rethink his position on a given issue.

I remember him forcing me and Mom to keep him company, sometimes all night, to listen to his childhood stories about growing up during the Great Depression, being the only redhead in a “litter” of five boys, his Irish mother having died when he was six, and his being the only one of the boys to be sent away to live on a farm with an aunt and uncle.

He seemed to have spent most of his life feeling unloved, unwanted, and different.

Dad thought of himself as a kind of fun-loving, adventurous Huckleberry Finn, open to  traveling on a raft in the flow of things.  He told me and Mom that he started smoking cigars at six years old and lay flat on railroad tracks so trains could go over him. By his early teens, he ran away from the farm by hopping boxcars headed anywhere. He joined the merchant Marines and was able to see the world.

He scoffed at being regarded as uncouth and related to Huck’s distrust of morals, as dictated by “civilized” society. He was regarded as an outcast, and, like Huck, preferred hell over “following nonsensical, conventional rules” that powers that be dictated just because.

Strangely, Dad was not only popular, but many younger men regarded him as a kind of guru, which made Dad believe they were fools.

When asked for his opinion, Dad’s response was almost always Socratic, non-committal, and had an air of bemused detachment.

He turned every talk we ever had into a debate and forced me to correct any grammatical mistakes I ever made before listening to anything I had to say. He told me he automatically removed fifty points from my IQ and credibility for being Christian and another fifty for being Catholic.

He did not care much for my referring to his atheistic stance as religion. Touché.

The closest Dad and I came to discussing the fine point of Kipling’s religious stance was through the orphan Kim and Kim’s  trip down the road with the Tibetan lama to find the sacred river and  spiritual enlightenment.

I can hear my father giving a similar answer as Kipling about his religious beliefs. “I am a God-fearing Christian atheist.” Likewise, when cornered about his particular religion, I can hear him say, “All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells.”

Some readers respond to Kipling’s quips with, “whatever that means.” I say a loud “Amen!” to both of Kipling’s sentiments regarding his religious stance.

Although I would certainly not try to speak on behalf of Kipling, I do feel confident about understanding my father’s interpretation. Fiendish smile on his ruddy, freckled face and in his icy-blue eyes, my Dad would delve into questioning the oxymoron in the phrase “God-fearing Christian,” as God supposedly represents love, the polar opposite of fear. Or so I remember Dad and I having concluded.

Dad and I pushed further and discussed what led people to believe they needed to fear God.  Of course, the answer is, as Karl Marx said, that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” My father and I discussed how power mongers manipulate people through their emotions and their sense of what is right.

I would bet money that my father would have said he was a “Christian atheist” just to jar the person asking his religion and to set a fire under his feet, so the person’s complacency was shaken and he was forced to jump around and think.

Dad did not allow disgruntlement of others about his views to make him bitter. He prescribed to church of religious science minister Terry Cole-Whittaker’s “what you think of me is none of my business.”

Dad asked everyone he encountered about the meaning of life. He dragged drunks home from bar stools, and they stayed with us sometimes for a few months. But, like many brilliant people, Dad became bored, impatient, and disillusioned with apathy, clichés and platitudes he received in response.

He described the majority of people whose paths he crossed as clucky, conventional, Puritanical types, resembling characters out of Vanity Fair and The Importance of Being Earnest. Shallow, self-righteous, and hypocritical.

People squirmed uncomfortably or outright ran from interpretations Dad pulled out about the meaning of ethics, sex, politics, religion, and any other subject that would get a rise or start controversy.

My father practiced his own brand of decency, like a moral code among criminals. He reminded me constantly that the worst breach of integrity for me would be to violate my own code of ethics.

My father did suffer from something akin to hubris,  which Kipling warns against. “Don’t look too good nor talk too wise,” which, in my mind, created Dad’s greatest stumbling block in attaining ideal character. If a person did not get that my Dad was brilliant, he would hit them between the eyes by announcing he was so smart that it sometimes scared him.

Although he liked to believe that he was not attached to triumph or defeat, I remember Dad expecting  triumph and clinging hard, as do I.

My husband thought Dad’s sinister voice was reminiscent of actor Peter Lorre and compares Dad’s character most to William Burroughs.

I think more of a cross between young Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when he was in good humor and an older, more cerebral Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs when he was angry.

Kipling and Twain admired each other enormously and became friends. Many parallels can be traced between their actual lives and the male characters they created—Kim traveling on a road and Huck traveling down the river. “Kim and Huck are alike in ‘trying to evade the clamp of civilization,’” notes American literary and social critic, Irving Howe.

Whether travel involves floating down the river like Huck, walking down a road to find the sacred river like Kim, or hopping a boxcar like my Dad, the struggle along the way is maintaining detachment from worldly items, emotions and actions in order to attain Enlightenment.

Most recently, I discovered George Orwell’s 1984,  which led me to become a devout Orwellian, and interestingly, once I scanned If for the first time  in decades, I happened upon Orwell’s critique of Kipling, in which Orwell describes Kipling as having “a definite strain of sadism  in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist; he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined  people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.”

That Kipling was not regarded as highly as Twain probably outraged my Dad, who would write it off as politics.

Regarding Orwell’s assessment of Kipling, I can hear my father’s dark cackle.

By Marvin Rabinovitch

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same…

As a celebrated lover of wisdom and a transient, Milo of Thessaly occupied the couch of honor at the midnight symposium held in the private apartments belonging to the Antonine Emperor of Rome, seventeenth Augustus since the venerable first built the imperial palace after the fall of the Second Triumvirate and the subsequent Duumvirate two centuries back. The present successor to the purple, Marcus Aurelius Imperator, reclined facing the elderly itinerant philosopher. The drinking cup had just reached him and he took a cautious swig of the watered Falernian, the fingers of his free hand absently combing through his trimmed, auburn, gray-shot beard. His brow furrowed in thought, for the emperor was not one to speak idly without weighing his words.

“Let me try to summarize the discussion up to this point,” he said with a smile to the assembled company. He smiled to anticipate the indulgent quirking of the lips among his companions, who were eminently familiar with their master’s habit of temporizing before committing himself to an opinion. “My practical, hardheaded secretary, Aemilius Drago, dismisses all possibility of even the most selfless human being resigning himself philosophically to a disastrous failure when he has devoted all his energies to ensuring success.”

“Succinct and accurate, Caesar,” said the sharp-faced bureaucrat who had risen from trans-Tiberan obscurity to become one of the gray eminences of the imperial government. “It is not in the nature of man to accept defeat with an easy heart, no matter how much he may feign indifference.”

“On the other hand,” Marcus continued, turning to his Prefect of the Imperial Exchequer, “Nauta Pulver here believes in the human facility of accepting any proposition as long as it is made persuasively enough.”

“Correct, Caesar,” said the money man, lazily scratching the sole of one bare foot with the long-nailed big toe of the other.

He disliked being addressed by his nickname, “Sailor”, when strangers were present, tolerating it only when closeted privately with his intimates. For this reason, he delivered his remarks without the customary jest but addressed the issue dryly.

“Though pure logic will never armor a man against demoralization by misfortune, the art of rhetoric may do so, albeit only for a time. In other words, the human being can talk himself into any state of mind with cunning enough arguments, but it will not last. Self-pity will always triumph in the end.”

“Plausible, plausible,” the emperor agreed good-naturedly. “My colleague,Milo, on the other hand, holds that a lifetime of mental self-discipline and rigorous spiritual exercise will enable the naturally upright man to accommodate himself to any fate the gods may choose to send him, something like hardening the body’s muscles to endure the burden of the most grueling labors.”

The philosopher popped a grape into his toothless mouth, gummed it complacently and nodded. “This fruit is sour, Caesar, but the Stoicism I have cultivated in a hundred lands has taught me that the sweetness of life originates only in my own soul. Armed with this training, I enjoy your hospitality for its good intentions rather than reject it as others might for its disagreeable taste.”

“And in fact,” Pulver broke in with a laugh, “You will soon delude yourself that the fare is as sweet as honey, though heartburn will drive you from your bed in the small hours.”

They all laughed, Marcus not the least. “Here is how I differ with all of you. My tolerance for the unpleasant comes naturally to me. It is my contention that a blessed portion of humanity is congenitally capable of rising above the onslaught of good and evil and can subdue the passions so that what moves others to grief or exultation affects us no more than rain on a marble statue. Gentlemen, I am a natural Stoic.”

“Let me ask you, then,” interposed his secretary, “Whether you would maintain your imperturbability if… the gods forbid… leprosy struck you down?”

“I would,” declared the emperor self-confidently, “What, lose my serenity for a mere ailment of the skin? The Marcus Aurelius within would remain integral and whole.”

The imperial treasurer, distinguished for shrewdness and insight into character that almost approached clairvoyance, was closer to the mark. “Let us say a close friend or, even more, a beloved child, betrays you, Caesar. Could your stoic hide turn the point of that dagger?”

“I have often contemplated that possibility,” Marcus replied gravely, cracking a walnut in conjoined hands. He showed the others the crushed shell and its exposed meat where it lay in his palm. “I am as spiritually invulnerable to the hammer blows of the gods as this lightly armored kernel was to the fatal squeeze between my fingers.”

The two civil servants shook their head in wonder, but Milo of Thessaly just laughed. “Only one who shares the emperor’s soul has the power to hurt it. And since no such spiritual partner exists, the only person in the world who can bring him disappointment and grief by conscious wrongdoing is himself. The same holds true for the adulation of the masses. The masks of tragedy and comedy are perceived by the true Stoic as the vanities they are.”

A martial footfall interrupted him. Marcus looked up and caught sight of the Praetorian Guard duty officer quick-marching beneath the colonnade that abutted the far entrance of the room. As required, the man was in full armor and carried his horsehair-crested helmet under one arm.  The clink of metal sounded rhythmically as he drew to a halt and saluted, fist banging against leather breastplate.

“Ho, Publius Cornelius,” the emperor greeted him with a barely concealed yawn, “How goes the night?”

“Not well, sire,” came the answer in tones of grievance, “Another leaper from the top of your triumphal column.”

“Why do suicides find that misbegotten tower so infernally attractive?” Marcus complained to no one in particular. “Why is my magnificent memorial incessantly plagued by the attentions of self-assassins. This is the seventh this year, if I make no mistake.”

“Your Augustan Majesty is never in error,” the young officer said automatically. “However, I make it the eighth.”

“And of course, you had to run and tell me, spoil a perfectly good party.”

“This is news you had to hear immediately, Caesar” the other explained. “The leaper was a Vestal Virgin.”

This would have political ramifications. The keepers of Vesta’s flame came from the most eminent families of the patrician class and served for fifteen years as inviolate priestesses, preserving Roman honor against the pollution of the inchoate world under Roman rule.

“Virgin no more, I fear,” snickered Drago, though in an undertone. There could only be one reason why a Vestal would commit suicide – defloration and the certainty of discovery. Such renegades, and there had been several in the history of the city, were condemned to burial alive.

“Poor girl,” said Milo with a sigh, “A light inculcation of Stoic principles might have saved her from this despair and pointed out other paths of salvation. Although women, of course, have not the resources for the requisite training.” He turned to the Praetorian. “Are you sure it was suicide?”

“People do not mount to the top of the emperor’s column at night and then slip accidently,” the other replied scornfully. “Nor is there room there for a murderer and his victim.”

“How does one get to the top?” Milo mused. “There is no scaffolding, I think.”

“The column is a hollow cylinder with a winding staircase cut into the internal surface,” Marcus explained. “Come with me now, if you wish, and you can see for yourself.”

“Surely the princeps himself will not venture out at this hour of the night,” his secretary protested.

Marcus laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and levered himself erect from the couch of conviviality. “You forget, my friend, that the woman is probably of senatorial and possibly even of consular family. The supreme magistrate must make a speedy decision on how to dispose of the remains so that reputations remain intact.”

“You will need manpower for that,” said the treasurer, practical and canny as always. ”Let us muster a squad of your lictors to bear the burden. Their bundles of rods minus the axe heads will make good stretchers.”

“And a detachment of Praetorians for crowd control,” said Publius Cornelius, not to be outdone. He rubbed his hands gleefully, anticipating a night of fun.

Outside the palace, ten imperial lictors were already waiting, their fasces at the requisite sixty degree angle between fist and shoulder. Pulver selected five for his purpose and directed the remainder to carry away the bronze axe heads that gleamed fitfully in the flickering light of the torches borne by the Praetorian corporal’s guard.

The Campus Martius, where the  triumphal column of Marcus Aurelius stood, lay between the Palatine Hill where the optimates, the patrician class, made their homes and the Aventine, district of the much more numerous and crowded plebeans. As they made their way down the slope of the Palatine, the hollow rumble of thunder drummed in the distance and Pompey’s theatre was momentarily silhouetted against a flash of sheet lightning.

“Ay, the gods are angry,” one elite guard muttered to his mate in their native German. “I had a feeling it was so.”

Marcus understood the dialect from his years of campaigning along the Danube. He turned to the Praetorian commander and said in a loud, hearty voice, “Tell your men that this approaching shower is a good omen, tribune. It means that the city’s troublemakers and riffraff will seek shelter and not interfere with our duty.”

“Too true, sire,” the young officer said, making no attempt to mask his disappointment.

They rounded a corner and the column loomed before them, a shadowy tubular mass receding upward and dimly outlined in the blazing flambeaux set in sconces at its base. On the granite blocks of the shallow steps that encircled the towering monolith, between marble statues representing Dianna nocking an arrow to her bow and Pan examining his syrinx, a crumpled shape lay beneath the black and gray cape of a legionary centurion. A pair of lounging sentries scrambled to their feet and saluted the emperor.

“Report!” barked their commander, incensed at this display of relaxed discipline.

“All well, excellency,” quavered the more veteran of the two in broken Greek. “Some street urchins were nosing around a couple of minutes ago, but we sent ‘em packing.”

“Uncover her.”

The junior sentry stooped and pulled away the coarse, concealing mantle. The pool of blood in which the girl lay had dyed her linen shift a rusty brown. Blood had burst from her body in great gouts, spattering the flagstones a meter or two from its extremities.

“Another benefaction from the approaching rain,” the emperor murmured. “It will wash away the stain left on Rome by the fall of poor Aelia Pertinax.”

It was indeed the granddaughter of the great proconsul. Though her mouth and jaw were crushed by the impact, there was no mistaking the family nose. And protruding from the lower half of her smashed body was the partially expelled grub that would have been the next generation of the proconsul’s ancient line. Marcus felt his gorge rise and, with a supreme effort, choked back the nausea that was threatening to unman him.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and thought, “Oh gods, what will become of Rome when even Vestals hold their purity so cheap?” Not for the first time did he give thanks for the chastity of Faustina, his late empress.

With a suppressed groan, he forced himself to attend to practical matters.

“In the name of decency, veil that thing once more. Bundle her up well and carry her to the temple of Vesta.”

He took the senior lictor aside. “Tell the Vestal Reverend Mother that the corpse must be cremated without delay. Send for Proconsul Pertinax and order him to attend on me at my noon session tomorrow. Your present troop will be retired with honor from the corps of lictors and given farms in the outlying provinces. Warn them that a word out of turn will prove fatal to them and their families. You yourself I value for your discretion. Do not disappoint me.”

The man knelt without a word and made a show of intently supervising the disposal of the corpse. Marcus pulled at his beard. What more was there to be done? The soldiers were foreigners in every sense of the word. They were forbidden to hold converse with any Romans other than their superiors. In any case, they spoke little or no Latin, and it was doubtful whether they understood the true import of what had happened here. Publius Cornelius was a career officer. He could be depended on to hold his tongue and obey the orders of his emperor. The bureaucrats were loyal underlings. It only remained to distract Milo of Thessaly, though, in any event, the philosopher would be gone from Rome very soon in his fitful wanderings from place to place.

“Would you like a closer look at my column of triumph?” he asked the old man.

“Alas, column of disaster as well,” the philosopher said with a rueful chuckle. “But, of course, we Stoics know that there is no distinction between triumph and disaster. They are the same phantasm with a smiling or frowning mask, sent by the Furies to delude man for their sport.”

He approached the monument to within arm’s length and peered myopically at its surface, tracing with blunt fingertips the figures incised into the Carrara marble.  At close quarters, the smoky flames from the bracketed torches illuminated the spiral fluting of the thick Doric pillar modeled on the original erected by the Antonine’s predecessor, Trajan. The shadows of the high relief images seemed to move eerily on their helical paths coiling round the cylindrical face of the memorial.

“The lower scenes are amazingly lifelike, Caesar,” the old Stoic purred unctuously. “One might almost believe that the sculptor of this latter-day Alexander flinging the javelin from the vanguard of his legions in the third panel was actually present when you sowed terror amongst the Sarmatians ten years ago.”

Marcus uttered his characteristic mirthless chuckle. “Your eyes deceive you, my friend, or else modern history is not your forte. What you are looking at is actually my army crossing the River Danube at Carnuntum in our expeditions against the Marcomanni and the Quadi four winters before that.  I still remember how the swirling waters chilled my bones and the yard-long arrows flew thick as swarming hornets about out heads. It was touch and go that day, I assure you, and the legions did not regard my ultimate victory as a smiling phantasm but a solid compact with the gods.”

Milo pointed to a frieze roughly oval in shape and approximately the size of a small breast plate.

“Are these laurel leaves falling on your brow from heaven?” he asked with a mischievous twinkle.

The others squinted closely at the exquisitely sculpted figures wavering dimly in the torchlight. It was just possible to make out a group of soldiers with the emperor in their midst, the wreath of victory crowning him large enough for two men, putting to flight a force of trousered, long-haired barbarians amid the descent of what appeared at first glance to be flower petals.

“That is the ‘Miracle of the Rain’,” said Publius Cornelius, looking disgusted at the old man’s ignorance and frivolous tone.

“Let me see,” muttered the imperial bursar, frowning with the effort of precise recollection for which he was justly renowned, “This happened during the third battle against the Quadi after they had broken the treaty, if I mistake not.”

The Praetorian tribune took up the tale. “I was there with you, Caesar, and I remember the blessed occasion as if it were yesterday. The Twelfth Legion Fulminata was cut off and surrounded by three times their number of howling tribesmen. The legionaries fought bravely but their case seemed hopeless after having gone almost forty-eight hours without water in that dry season.”

“Remember too,” Marcus added, “That despair alone would have caused our annihilation if the gods had not sent rain.”

“Yes, and Jupiter’s lightning bolts which affrighted the enemy and wrought havoc among them. After that, the day was ours.”

“We have the superstition of soldiers to thank for that deliverance,” Marcus said with a soft sigh. He spoke almost as if voicing a thought he was not conscious of sharing.  Surreptitiously, the secretary retrieved a stylus from his sleeve and inscribed his words onto the blank surface of a wood-framed wax tablet.

“The belief that the gods fought shoulder to shoulder with us in our ranks heartened them mightily. A soldier inspired by belief in supernatural assistance fights with the ferocity and strength of a lion. But the best soldiers are those who depend only on their inner virtue, whose spirits are soldierly and who are therefore indifferent to the shifting fortunes of war.”

The Praetorian commander cocked his helmeted head. “Pardon a poor veteran, Caesar, but that is a little too philosophical for the likes of me. I still prefer a triumph to disaster and find it hard to be indifferent as to whether Roman legionary eagles will decorate the mud hut of a beer-swilling barbarian or my general’s celebratory cavalcade.”

Lightning zigzagged across the sky and thunder boomed as if irate Jove himself meant to reprove this insolence. Suddenly the small band of wayfarers was inundated by a cloudburst. The emperor’s glee was unrestrained. He slapped the Praetorian officer lightly on the shoulder and laughed.

“What say you to this, my boy? Are there more enemies we have to rout?”

“The triumphator is pleased to scoff,” the military aide replied, “But you are lightly dressed and perhaps should seek shelter from the weather.”

“Nonsense! This is as good as a bath. At least for the soiled pavement behind us.”

A brisk peppering by hailstones the size of plums put a speedy end to his enthusiasm. The Praetorians raised their rectangular, convex shields above their helmets and the tribune hustled his unprotected imperial master beneath them. The rattle of falling ice resounded loudly against the leather and metal of the makeshift military roof as it lurched off in the classic battlefield tortoise formation, the formidable testudo, a marching tank, toward the closest refuge from the elements, the temple of Hadrian on the Via Flaminia. Upper garments raised to cover their heads, the three subordinate civilians scurried ahead.

The temple was an imposing structure in the classic Greek style. Marcus had visited the place often enough, for it had been a project conceived, planned and executed by his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, and for this reason he felt a sneaking affection for the building. Its forty-eight Corinthian pillars lent the massive pile dignity and grace, from a certain angle even delicacy. In the emperor’s opinion, it was indeed worthy to honor the name and memory of his great predecessor, the mighty Hadrian, himself the adoptive father of the first Antonine emperor whose domains the present ruler had inherited.

The hush one might have expected in such semi-sacred precincts was disturbed by a distant murmur, like the voice of a sea conch held close to one’s ear. At their officer’s word of command, the Praetorians moved apart and stood easy, leaving the emperor unencumbered in their midst.

“Are we not alone in this house of worship?” Marcus asked, giving ear to the susurrus that rose and fell faintly amid the war trophies littering the spacious confines of the memorial. “There seem to be intruders in the cella.”

“No doubt the Green charioteers,” young Cornelius informed him. “If you recall, sire, the Senate granted them the freedom of the city at your recommendation several months ago.”

“Ah yes, a reward for their shutout victory over the Blues at the circus maximus during the last Saturnalia games. The people clamored for such recognition.”

For time out of mind, the city had been plagued by feuding factions arising from fanatic loyalties to the athletic clubs known by the colors they assumed. Throughout the last decade, only the Greens and Blues had survived the savage clashes on the race track and in the arenas. Now the Greens were in the ascendant. Faustina herself had been an ardent supporter of the faction. For this reason, Marcus had a soft spot in his heart for them and had backed the legislation giving these daredevils free access to every quarter of the city, no matter how sacrosanct, at any time of day or night.

Following his lead, the little band of night travelers approached the staircase leading to the cella, a barrel vaulted chamber decorated with pilasters. Their short climb and cat-footed entry into the enclosure went unnoticed for several seconds by its occupants, a hard-faced crew of roughly dressed men in their prime, somewhat the worse for drink and squatting in a circle into the midst of which one of their number had just tossed a pair of dice.

The fellow with the bones, a stocky, well-muscled Thracian by the look of him, with close-cropped hair and a three-day stubble on his cheeks, uttered a hoarse cry of elation at the “Venus” he had just thrown. He swept his winnings between his knees and then raised his eyes. His upper lip curled in a feral snarl when he caught sight of the uninvited visitors, much like a wolf warning off competitors from a fresh kill, and his right hand dropped to the dagger secured by the rawhide thongs that laced in spirals from his sandals up his hairy calf.

“Trespasser’s on Poseidon’s turf, lads,” he announced in gravelly, strongly accented Greek to the assembled company.

Poseidon was not only god of the sea but of horsemanship as well, and thus the natural patron of charioteers. Growls of anger from every throat made it clear that no interference with their pleasure would be tolerated. Suddenly, worship of the goddess Fortuna was diverted to the altar of Bellona, embodiment of conflict.

The Thracian gamester bounded to his feet and advanced menacingly on Marcus, blind or indifferent to the purple trimming of his toga which proclaimed membership in the imperial house. For his own part, Marcus showed no fear but smiled winningly at the man’s indignant demeanor. Whether a soft answer would have turned away wrath was never put to the test, for the Praetorian tribune, sword drawn, stepped between the two.

“Cool down, citizen, before you decorate a cross. This is Augustus you’re threatening.”

The charioteer halted in his tracks and grew visibly pale under his deep tan. His sinewy hands, bunched into fists, relaxed and opened to display their palms in the universally recognized gesture of appeasement. He slid to one knee and brought the hem of Marcus’s robe to his lips.

“Forgive, Majesty. The brightness of your glory blinded this worthless scum.”

“No doubt it was the brightness of your winnings that blinded you with impatience for a presumptuous guest,” Marcus replied jovially if with a hint of dry irony. “As for ‘worthless scum’, no charioteer for the Greens, as I assume you are by the emerald in your earlobe, can be that. The people of Rome would rise up against me if I used such words to describe a champion of the hippodrome. And the divine Augusta, the late empress Faustina, would send Cerberus himself from the Land of Shades to tear me to pieces for such blasphemy. She was your most fervent admirer.”

The Thracian could not suppress a self-congratulatory grin. “I believe I did have that honor, sire. The Lady Faustina was very gracious to me, especially after my victory in the races celebrating the birth of your heir, the young Caesar Commodus.”

“No doubt she won a tidy sum in wagers on that occasion,” Marcus said with a smile. “She too was enamored of the Goddess Fortuna. Yes, I recognize you now. One-wheel Dorbinter, isn’t it, who won the palm with half an axle torn away in the last lap. What say we throw a round of dice in her memory?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” his interlocutor said, showing yellowish fangs in a grin of pride. “A stool for His Divinity,” he ordered one of his comrades.

“Not necessary,” said Marcus, “I am an old soldier who can squat on his hams for hours beside the fire for councils of war in the field before the morning’s battle. Now what shall we play for, sir? I carry no gold on my person and the imperial mint is closed down for the night. What say you to this thumb ring of silver and onyx? It was a gift from a Parthian noble, though he may have regretted his generosity when it did not easily slip from his finger.”

“I am too lowly for such marks of distinction,” the Thracian demurred, though a greedy light shone in his eyes.

“Nonsense, man. That emerald in your ear is at least its equal in value. Put that up for your stake and let us hear no further false modesties.”

Both men squatted around a clear space on the tiled floor while all the others gathered around them. Marcus made a show of examining the dice before passing them back to their owner.

“Your Divinity is satisfied?” Dorbinter asked, sycophancy lubricating his voice.

“Eminently,” said Marcus. “And all the more that you will wear my ring at your next appearance on the track should I lose this throw.”

But he did not lose the throw.

“As always,” said Dorbinter with a hollow laugh, “Your Divinity is a favorite of the gods. What am I saying? Your Immortality is one of their company himself.”

With a show of indifference that belied his sour expression, he unpinned the emerald from his ear and handed it over to the winner.

“It is a greater pleasure to lose to Caesar than win from any lesser mortal.”

“Very prettily said,” Marcus complimented him with a nod of approval. “You are obviously a man of delicate instincts.” He inspected the emerald with a discerning eye. “But this is a stone of immense value, not the mere marketplace bauble I took it for at a casual glance from some distance.”

The charioteer inclined his head respectfully. “As always, His Divinity penetrates to the heart of the matter. It was a reward given to me by a very special admirer.”

“A very wealthy admirer, no doubt,” the emperor added with a smile. One eyelid drooped in the merest suggestion of a wink. “Perhaps one who sings soprano? And I do not mean a eunuch.”

The athlete smiled in his own turn, a vainglorious smile though sheepish as well. “Far be it from me to call Your Olympian Immortality mistaken. As all others in the pantheon, Augustus is superhumanly farsighted.”

Marcus pondered the jewel a moment with an abstracted look, held it close to the blazing head of a Praetorian-held torch and scrutinized it from various angles.

“No,” he said at last, “I cannot allow you to part with this on a single toss of the bones. It is far too precious. I once gave my beloved late empress a brooch set with a stone very similar to this, remarkably similar. It is a wonder that two so alike in size, quality and brilliance, even in cut, could exist in the same city.”

“But Rome is the center of the world, Divinity,” the other said, eyeing him with a strange expression, cringing and assertive at the same time. “All the treasures of the earth flow to this spot.”

“True,” the emperor conceded, refocusing on his interlocutor, “But you must allow me to reimburse you for your loss. I would not feel comfortable keeping an ornament like this without paying for it.”

“As Augustus wishes,” the other said. His eyes gleamed in the torch light.

“Call at the palace the day after tomorrow. One and a half talents in gold will be awaiting you.”

“Divine Augustus is most generous.”

The emperor turned to his secretary. “Take a memo, Aemilius, this emerald is to be interred in the tomb of the empress. I gave her something identical on our wedding day and years later she misplaced it and was inconsolable. Her shade will be grateful for its return.” He gave the Thracian an enigmatic half smile. “I mean for its replacement by this twin.”

The fellow seemed to shrink in size. His coarse features worked spasmodically. Before anyone could stop him, he flung himself to the ground and groveled before the emperor.

“Mercy, my lord! Have mercy on a poor, innocent outlander. I never touched her, I swear I never touched her. Do not toy with me so cruelly.”

Marcus looked around the assembled company, an expression of mystification and disgust on his face.

“What is this addled creature gibbering about?” he asked. One pair of eyes, then another, finally all, refused to meet his as he surveyed the room. Finally, a bandy-legged Briton with long red hair and a patch over one eye stepped forward, trembling visibly.

“If Your Divinity will permit,” he quavered, “My stable-mate sometimes has these spells in the presence of the high-born. As a young lad, he was once brought to trial for taking liberties with the daughter of a shaman. Though he managed to escape from confinement and fled the country, the fear of punishment has never left him, and the gods cause him to relive the moment at odd intervals.”

“Strange,” Marcus mused, “Passing strange indeed! When he appears at the palace to collect his payment for the emerald, let him seek out the court physician with whom I will leave word. Perhaps there is a treatment for his malady. And now, my friends, good night. Dorminder, I wish you a swift recovery from this fit.”

With the regal dignity that was second nature, Hadrian’s grandson led the way from the heart of the temple, then slowed his pace to let the rest of the entourage catch up and pass him. As Milo of Thessaly drew abreast, he reached out and caught a fold of the old man’s himation.

“A moment, colleague,” he whispered to ensure that no eavesdropper could overhear.

“Caesar wishes a word in private?”

“I have no choice. Your eyes revealed the realization of my secret.”

“Caesar speaks in riddles.”

“I think not. The emerald spoke to you as plainly as it did to me.”

“A follower of Zeno and Epictetus will pay no heed to its voice, my lord. They who belong to the stoa may never allow themselves to be overawed by the trash of the world.”

“It is not the stone itself that bothers me, Milo, but its provenance.”

“That too is trash, Caesar!”

A terrible groan escaped the emperor. “You know as well as I do where that gem came from. That lout who wore it in his ear like a trophy as good as confirmed his illicit connection with my Faustina. I ignored his virtual confession to avoid the shame of public disclosure, just as for years I turned a deaf ear to the stories that reached me about her self-indulgences while I was on the other side of the world fighting rebellious wild men. I had my philosophy to comfort me, that nothing external to my own soul could injure me or raise me up.”

“That is what we Stoics believe, my dear Marcus. As long as your heart is pure, the misdeeds of others cannot harm you.”

His imperial friend burst into tears and covered his face with his hands until the fit of weeping had passed.

“I mourn for myself as much as for the infidelities of the late empress, Milo,” he confessed. “She only debauched herself with charioteers and other sweepings of the gutters, whilst I masquerade as the noblest of mortals, a philosopher. I am no Stoic, Milo. I am an impostor. If I had the courage, I would mount to the highest point of my own column and test my wings like that wretched Vestal.”

“Yes, Caesar,” the other consoled him, “It is hard, very hard, to cast out the corruption of those closest to us. Your wife let down roots into your heart. The work of eradication will take the rest of your life.”

“Well, we shall see,” said the philosopher-emperor. “I have no trouble scorning the glories of the earth, but disasters like the discovery of a soul-mate’s betrayal may be endurable only by the gods whose hearts are of marble. The common folk from the marches of the empire call me divinity, but that is imposture as well. I have feelings like any other man and suffering is our lot. Anyone who denies the sharpness of destiny’s lance is either a fool or a liar.”

He put an arm around the old philosopher’s shoulder to support his own drooping frame, dried his eyes with a fold of his toga, and together they shuffled off in the wake of the soldiers and bureaucrats.

“Try not to forget, Caesar,”Milo reminded him, “That the Spartan boy never murmured when the fox gnawed at his vitals. If you cannot numb yourself to the pain, at least bear it with honor.”

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.”

One Chance

by Brock Meyer

I remember the story.

How could I forget? This was the first time, and the last, I ever met my real grandfather.

It was a hot, Northern Minnesota mid-summer day. The family reunion was in the middle of the woods at a campground with clouds of campfires and mosquitoes. The family was not mine; I did not know anyone except for the people I had rode in with, my parents and my brother in the seat next to me.

On the three hour drive from the Twin Cities, my brother and I had played numerous games of blackjack; the remnants of those games lay on the floor in a mess of unshuffled cards.

The gravel road had started to make my brother car sick, which made the ride seem even longer. My father complained every few minutes about the gravel dust ruining his newest car wash, but I had stopped listening. I chose instead to watch tree after tree pass by my window, forming an indiscriminate forest.

Once we found a parking spot, the saturated air hit us as soon as we opened the doors. The heat was almost unbearable, so we tried to quickly find somewhere cool. But I could tell my parents were trying not to draw attention to themselves as we walked by tents and campers full of new, but vaguely familiar, faces.

We landed in a building where lunch was being served. The inside was air-conditioned, which made it an even more desirable meeting spot for adults, children, and the elderly.

We were all most likely starving, but I could tell my parents did not wish to stay long. Rather than letting their children get food, they held us back.

Someone called out to my mother from across the room. She was a tall, blonde lady. My mother smiled, and we all moved toward the woman, past the table of food. Sitting beside the woman was an old man in a wheelchair. Strapped to the back of the chair was a green tank and a plastic tube draped around his face into his nose. A network of wrinkles crisscrossed his tired face, filled with beads of sweat forming from under his trucker cap. His gray hair stuck out of the tiny holes in his hat, which I could tell used to be blonde just like mine.

My mother hugged the woman, my father shook her hand. I could not hear what they were saying over the commotion in the room. After a while, the adults moved us all outside, back into the sweltering heat.

They rolled the old man along a stone path away from the small lunch building. The adults engaged in small talk while my brother and I walked behind in silence, each wondering what we were doing here. Soon enough, my brother found a football game of boys his age. He ran off to join them, leaving me alone walking down this path.

I contemplated joining him for a moment. But I decided against it. I thought I might take a chance to see where this path led.

After a few minutes of walking, my parents stopped. They put the old man in the wheelchair to rest next to a park bench. My mother looked back to me. She said, “Brock, do you mind staying here with Darrell for a little while?”

I shook my head with my characteristic shyness.

“What a good boy,” the blonde woman said. She and my parents walked back the way we had came, leaving me alone with the man. I sat down on the park bench and tried to avoid looking at him. When I did glance over, he continued staring off into the distance, either caught in profound thoughts or asleep with his eyes open.

I looked off into the distance, trying to find where my brother had gone. I could no longer see him.

“How are you?” The old man asked with a hoarse voice. He cleared his throat.

I returned my attention back to him. What do I say?

“Good.” I said without elaborating.

“That’s good.” He said, pausing for a moment. “What is your mother’s name?”

“Kim.” I said.

He thinks for a moment. “What is your grandmother’s name?”

“Jean. Grandma Jean.”

His face lights up. “Jean!” He says. “Is Jean here?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t want to come. I’m just here with my mom, my dad, and my brother.” I keep looking for one of them to rescue me.

“Oh, I see.” He said. Disappointment filled his face. He kept looking off into the distance with that look of serene idleness. It matched the evenly spaced sounds of his breathing through the oxygen tube. “Jean,” he whispered.

I said nothing in return. I did not know how he knew my grandmother.

“You know how I met your grandmother?” He asked abruptly after a long silence. “No” was the obvious answer, so I did not speak it. I could tell he was about to begin a story by the way he cleared his throat again, and adjusted in his seat to a more upright position. For the first time, he looked right at me.

“I met her when I was a young man. I worked the docks in Duluth with the Hallett Company, loading and unloading. One day I decided to eat lunch off-site, so I went into town to eat. Well, that day, I walked to Canal Park, to a little diner on the lake-shore. Jean was there, working as a waitress.”

He stopped for a moment, and swatted a mosquito from his neck. Once he had remembered where he was, he continued. “I didn’t talk to her at first. I was too scared. She was so beautiful. So, I left. But I went back every day for a week just to get a look at her. One day, I dropped my coffee mug on the floor. She was the one who had to clean it up.

“She wasn’t happy, of course. I said I was sorry, but she ignored me for the most part. She must have thought I was just like the rest of them, the dock workers who came in during the day for lunch, part of the raucous sort that didn’t care about anyone else.” He laughed. “The first time we really talked, it was about Buddy Holly. I know that because her parents hated that music.

“We started meeting up after her parents had gone to bed. She would sneak out her bedroom window. We would drive up to Enger Tower and look at the harbor, with its lighthouses and ships. We had been going out for about a year when I got fired from my job on the docks. I took it hard, not knowing what to do or where to go. I wanted to spend my days with her, not breaking my back at a job I hate. I decided that I would chance it all on a trip somewhere else, wherever I could find work, but I wanted her to come with.

“Jean was upset. At first she must have thought that I was leaving her. Instead, I was inviting her to come with. But she was not ready. She came back with every excuse in the book—her parents, her dreams of college. But I could not leave without her.”

He looked down to his lap. “I could not leave without her.”

“So, I made her a promise. I had very little money saved, but what I did have saved, I would spend on building a new life for us both, whether or not we were together.

“I said that I would wait by the train tracks by her house that night at midnight, to wait for her. If she showed, I said that we would drive until we could not drive anymore. If she did not, I said that I would leave my money for her to take and have enough to find her own place and live her own way.

“I waited there at midnight. But after each passing minute, I realized that Jean was not going to show. I do not remember what time it was when I drove off; I left my money in a paper sack by the train track where I said I would be.

“I could not blame her and I do not blame her. She wanted a life she could be proud of. I gambled, left my chips on the table, and I lost. She did not break my heart. I lived my life without Jean, and I never spoke a word of her again. When I went to Vietnam in 1964, a couple months later, she was everything I thought about. When I left in 1967, I had forgotten her face.

“I started a new life, son. It takes time to lose something you worked so hard for, and in only one night. But the sooner you stop thinking about it, the sooner you can move on and start again. It is kind of late for me to start anything new, my boy. So, I hope you remember what I have said.”

I nodded in agreement, not understanding.

He continued, now in the louder tone of a command, “Risk things when things ought to be risked. You might regret it if you lose, but life is not worth living unless you take a chance.”

I nodded again.

He paused, looking off into the distance again. He whispered, “Is Jean happy?”

I shrugged in the way children shrug to questions they do not comprehend. “I think so.”

“That’s good. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy.” He said, looking back down into his lap. I did not recognize his shame at the time. He simply folded his hands and drifted back into a silent daze left only with his thoughts.

That night, he did gamble his future and his happiness. And he lost both. He said he never thought about it—never second-guessed his gamble. Yet, there he sat: reminiscing on a past that never was; reliving memories that precede a false ending to the story.

Years later, I would learn the truth. But the truth is not important here. What I have with my true grandfather is a story, a story he told me eight days before he passed away from pneumonia. It is not a story he shared with my mother, or my father, or my brother, or my grandmother. In truth, no one cared to listen to him, no one except for me.

My mother, father, and the blonde lady return from their walk. They say hello to the speechless old man in the wheelchair. My father ruffles my hair appreciatively for spending some time with him. My mother grabs the back of the wheelchair and begins moving him back toward the air-conditioned lunch building. The adults keep talking while I trail behind, looking at the families playing and eating on the picnic tables. They are all blonde too—tall and skinny. Each family has small children, adults the same age of my parents, and older grandmothers.

Shortly after, we leave the campground, retreating back into the cool respite of the car’s interior. My brother is tired from playing an aggressive football game with the other boys, who I would later find out were my half-third cousins; individuals that now I would not recognize on the street except for their resemblance to my real grandfather. The cars in the parking lot have license plates from a collection of different states.

I will find an old picture of him in a collection of old photos, taken from that day. My parents must have had a camera; they took a candid shot of me sitting next to him on that park bench, each of us looking in opposite directions. No one else knows from that picture or from that day what he shared with me—a snippet of a memory that I never had but nevertheless lives vividly in my mind.

“Did you talk about anything with Darrell?” My mother asked from the front seat.

“He talked a lot about grandma.” I said. My parents responded with silence.

The blackjack cards were still sprawled across the backseat floor. The trees still merged together as we drove past into a continuous forest. I was no different leaving this place than when we arrived.

Once again, I will not be allowed to speak his name, or to talk about my real grandfather. We all lost him that night he drove off. His risk was not just his loss. And none of us can breathe a word of it around our grandmother.

Geriatric Mischief Makers

by Anne Vuxton

If I hadn’t been bored spitless that day in my room at Cascade Park Senior Living, nothing would have changed.   Maybe, I had thought, I should take up painting, or scrapbooking, or knitting.  One of my friends puts together rosaries for the missionaries in her spare time.  A wonderful, charitable hobby, but not for me.

The days are very long and very dull here, you see.  In my younger, harried days, I dreamed of being able to take a nap in the middle of the day.  Now everyone fusses because I sleep too much.   I used to have so many things to do that I had sticky notes all over to remind me of important things.  Now the only thing I have to remember is that I’m allergic to peaches.  I used to say that I didn’t have time to make new friends because I didn’t even have time to spend with my old friends.  Now I’d like to have a few new friends because most of my old friends have passed away.

You think it is easy being 83 years old?   The staff here at Cascade Park is kind and cheerful and talks of pleasant things.  My children when they visit are kind and cheerful and talk of pleasant things.  But sometimes, the unflagging genial demeanors really get to me.   I’ve noticed that most people speak to geriatrics this way.  I get so, so tired of talk of the weather or how’s my health.  Do people think that older folks have forgotten how to handle sadness, or insecurity, worry, or anger?   I want to tell them, please, tell me about your bad day, I might be able to cheer you up.  Please fuss a little.  Please sometimes ask me for advice.  I was solving problems before you were even born and maybe I can help you.

Occasionally, someone will visit who’s having a bad day and will share it with me – what a treat!  Wonderful!   That’s when I feel the most useful and alive.  At my age, what most people think is showing respect, I’ve found to be quite the opposite.  Respect is not pacifying me with pretty platitudes or trying to solve my problems with meds.   Respect is allowing me to see you sometimes not at your best, as you allow others to see you.  And instead of the flowers or candy when you visit, bring me the latest bestseller or a decent cup of coffee.  That would be far more appreciated.  Or invite me to the movies, or your home for a visit, or an outing to a nice restaurant.  Have you eaten in our dining room lately?

Believe it or not, I keep knowledgeable of current events and still, mostly, have a lucid head on my shoulders.  When you visit, treat me as you would a friend, warts and all.  I can handle it, I’m a big girl.

I’m just complaining.  I know that.   I’m being ungrateful for the many blessings that I have.   I know that.   I’m just grouchy and unsettled.   I know that.   I’m just bored.

Life seems like one big snooze-fest.

With a big sigh, I push myself up from the recliner by my bed, tired of watching Dr. Phil deal with a balky teenager and his parents.  But when I try to exit my room, my roommate, Gladys, is blocking the door with her wheelchair, fast asleep.  This is getting annoying.  I have asked her repeatedly to go to the lounge to take her nap but Gladys likes to sit in the doorway and watch people pass down the hall.  All for about five minutes before she falls asleep, I’ve told her.  Gladys isn’t a bad sort, she’s just stubborn as all get out.  Once something is in her head, it’s not in her foot, as a crazy old great-aunt of mine used to say.

Okay, Gladys, I mutter to myself, I’m going to fix your wagon.  I put my hands on the handlebars of her wheelchair and stealthily push her a short distance down the hall to the fire exit sign leading to the parking lot.  I leave her facing the wall and hastily slink away.  Maybe next time, I think, she’ll take a nap elsewhere.  No one has seen me so I stroll down the hall to the employees’ lounge with its stocked refrigerator.  The “Staff Only” sign on the door does not deter me.  Almost every afternoon, I sneak down and help myself.

With grapefruit juice in hand (I’m not supposed to have grapefruit juice, so I enjoy it each afternoon), I go down to the lobby to see if anything interesting is happening.  Anything has to be better than Dr. Phil and the recalcitrant teenager.

The first person I see is Mrs. Withers.  She’s watching Dr. Phil so I bypass her and head for Mr. Jimmers standing by the front desk annoying Administrator Billings, who when he sees me quickly takes the opportunity to escape.  Mr. Jimmers looks like a turtle today with his bald head poking out of his green turtleneck.  I appreciate his irreverent, snarky sense of humor.  He and I have gotten into some lovely, heated discussions.  We had asked to share a room but this seeming impropriety had shocked everyone.  For goodness sakes, I had told Administrator Billings, Mr. Jimmers is in his eighties, too.  We’re practically human antiques!

Mr. Jimmers beams when he sees me.  He’s probably been itching for a nice argument.  I pull on his sleeve and surreptitiously point to Gladys snoozing by the fire exit sign.  Mr. Jimmers’ bushy eyebrows shoot up and he stage whispers, “You did that?”  I nod and start to giggle.  Mr. Jimmers starts howling and residents are now staring at us.

“I’m just sick of her blocking our doorway,” I tell him.  Mr. Jimmers chuckles and pulls me down the hall, looking left and right.  Surprisingly, all is quiet.  Staff must be on break and everyone else engrossed in Dr. Phil.  When we get to the end of the hall, Mr. Jimmers looks furtively around and whispers, “Get ready to run.”  “ What? ” I whisper back.  He shoves the fire exit door open and pushes Gladys a few inches out of the door.  Then he grabs my hand and races with me to my room.

Mr. Jimmers has a good pair of legs for 85 years old and he is barely out of breath.  I, on the other hand, immediately start rubbing the cramp out of my calf.  I’m not used to sprints anymore.  But the pain goes away when I look at Mr. Jimmers.  We start laughing like two schoolchildren.  The next second, the fire alarm sounds loud and shrill and I can hear Gladys screaming.  The P.A. system automatically announces:  “Attention!  Attention!  The fire alarm you hear is probably a test but you need to evacuate the building immediately.  Please go to the nearest exit and into the parking lot until you are advised of the all-clear sign.  For those of you not mobile, someone will come and assist you” and the hallway begins to thunder with foot traffic.

“Look what you did!” I tell him.

“Yeah, isn’t it great?” Mr. Jimmers chuckles.

It’s the most fun we’ve had in a long time.  We exit my room and join the line of walking and wheeled people into the parking lot.  Gladys looks confused as she is being interrogated by Administrator Billings.  We can hear her protestations and can see the doubtful look on Administrator Billings’ face.  I feel a little guilty but Mr. Jimmers looks totally unapologetic.  Eventually, all is restored to normal and people start returning to their rooms and their normal routines.

When Gladys returns to our room, she tells me that she has no idea how she got into the parking lot.  “Maybe you were wheeling in your sleep.  Like sleepwalking!  I have no idea really,” I say, “I was interested in the Dr. Phil show today.”  Gladys looks at me skeptically.  I don’t know if she believes me or not but I hope she thinks of this the next time she blocks our room’s door.  Or she might be facing the Dumpster tomorrow.

Gladys’ adventure is the talk of the dining room at supper.  After the requisite teasing, Gladys actually starts to enjoy the attention and laughs along with everyone else.  But for some reason, Administrator Billings is giving me and Mr. Jimmers the hairy eyeball.  Mr. Jimmers almost busts a gut trying to stifle himself and he winks at me a few times.  The few people who catch this, assume, I’m sure, that he and I have something going on, you know, since it’s common knowledge that we’d wanted to room together and been denied.

While coffee (nasty stuff here) and apple pie slices (slightly better) are being served, the ever effervescent entertainment coordinator, Miss Rafferty, announces that those interested can stay and participate in a little after-supper entertainment.  I hate these stupid games.

“Okay, everyone,” Miss Rafferty says, clapping her hands together for attention, “This is a good question (for whom, I think) for anyone who wants to answer.  Here it is!  If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”  And Miss Rafferty looks around expectantly.

Immediately, Mr. Jimmers’ hand shoots up as though he’s in the third grade.

“Oh, oh,” I think, “This won’t be good.”

Mr. Jimmers says, “Well, I’d prefer to have dinner with a live person, wouldn’t you?”

Everyone bursts into laughter.  Miss Rafferty looks annoyed.

“Mr. Jimmers!” she scolds.

“Well, really, who wants to have dinner with a dead person?” he persists.

I get up and tug on his arm to get him out of there.  Miss Rafferty’s smile has faded.   I pull Mr. Jimmers out into the hall.

“Stupid woman,” he grouses.

“She doesn’t mean any harm,” I remind him.

“Can’t abide stupidity.”

“You know,” I tell him, “You and I are getting to be grumpy old people.  We need a new attitude.  Maybe we need something to look forward to.  I’ve been trying to think of a new hobby.”

“Rats,” he says.  “The only thing I’ve enjoyed lately is pushing Gladys out the fire exit door.  We need to have more fun like that.”

So fun we had.  In the next few weeks, we morphed into geriatric mischief makers.  It helped to relieve the boredom.  Foil in residents’ pillowcases, and pinholes poked in ketchup packets, and the dining room menu board changed to “Sweat and Sour Chicken with Fried Lice.”  One morning while everyone was at breakfast, we taped “Out of Order” signs on everyone’s bathroom door.  We were highly amused.  Not so Administrator Billings.  We were politely and firmly asked to cease and desist.

One afternoon, Mr. Jimmers and I walked along in companionable silence to a bench in Cascade Park’s garden.  A nice little breeze ruffled my curly white hair and autumn leaves blew on my sneakers.  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.  It’s just a new phase of life, I told myself.  Everything is scary until you figure it out.  And I’ve done phases before.   Single life to married.  Married to parenthood.  Parenthood to widowhood.   Now geriatric.  I just haven’t gotten the hang of being old yet.   I haven’t developed any internal bullet point instructions.  I didn’t have a course of action.

That’s why I’m unhappy, I told myself.  I’m afraid of the path I’m on because I don’t know where it’s leading and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.   I glanced at Mr. Jimmers and he looked lost in thought, too.

“I need,” I finally tell Mr. Jimmers, “To figure out what will make me happy now.  Obviously what I’m doing is not working.  I need a bucket list.  Things to look forward to.   Like a cruise.  I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise.”

“So go.”

“My children would think I’m too old and worry the whole time.”

Mr. Jimmers looks thoughtful and glances at his watch.  I know he doesn’t want to miss our afternoon movie and popcorn so we get up and stroll back into Cascade Park.

The next few weeks pass until one afternoon, the Heally and Jimmers’ children receive a frantic call from Administrator Billings telling them that their parents have been misplaced.

“Misplaced?” they all shout.

“Well, we can’t find them,” admits Administrator Billings, “But don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry??”

By the time both families arrive at Cascade Park, Gladys has found the note left in her denture glass.  It says: “Dear Kids:  Mr. Jimmers and I are running away to the circus—no, sorry, just kidding!  We are in full possession of all of our marbles.  We have packed our meds and have paid our monthly bill here and added extra for the salt and pepper shaker chaos that we caused.  Don’t worry.  We will write to you as soon as we’re settled.  We love you all very much.  Mom and Mr. Jimmers.”

A few weeks after their escape, the two families received an e-mail forwarded from the Sunshine Sparkle cruise ship.

“Dear Kids:  We’ve finally figured out this phase of our lives.  Here it is:  Make peace with quiet; don’t confuse happiness with stimulation; learn to establish a new routine at every phase of life; and ride each bump with determination that you’ll figure it out.  We got married shipboard and are going to live onboard.  A permanent room for two here is cheaper than Cascade Park and more fun.  Join us when you have vacation time.  We cruise to Jamaica in November.  Love, Mom and Dad.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” said each of Mrs. Heally’s (now Mrs. Jimmers) and Mr. Jimmers’ children, though they all phrased it in different ways.  And each one worried, though in different ways, what mischief their geriatric parents would get into on the cruise ship.

by Patricia Florio

If I could only understand life the way she understood life,

I’d live in a better world.

If I could only understand death the way she understood death,

I would have a chance to live in paradise.

It’s been well over fifty years but I remember the first day my brother introduced me to his girlfriend.  My father drove a 1951 maroon Plymouth to Coney Island, Brooklyn’s play land, where the sweet smell of cotton candy made my stomach growl.   We were headed to meet my brother on a side street near Bay 17.

My mother fussed with her fly-away-straggly hair worried about how she’d look meeting Theresa for the first time.  I was ten years old, all arms and legs, embarrassed to meet a girl who recently won the heart of my only brother.

My brother Joe, no slouch in the looks department himself, especially decked out in his Air Force uniform, held Theresa by the hand.   It must have been an awkward situation for her.   She looked nervous trying to brave a smile.  Her lips were glossed, her eyes twinkled, her skin smooth as a porcelain doll.  She wore bright colors, a yellow silk blouse that had ruffles down the front of her petite frame; she wore a full multicolored skirt hiding her chunky derriere.  The yellow scarf tied around her neck captured me.   She looked as elegant as Elizabeth Taylor in an era of poodle skirts, bobby socks, white sneakers and silk scarves.  She looks sooo feminine I thought to myself.  Being a consummate tomboy, I knew femininity when I saw it.

“This is my sister,” my brother said with his “Joe smirk” pointing me out in the back seat of the car.  I clutched my legs pulling them against my chest covering my flat masculine body.

Over the next 50 years I grew to love Terry in spite of her taking my only brother away.  She had a way of saying the word beautiful that made her brown eyes pop wide open and her lips stretch clear across her face: BEE-U-TEE-FUL; everything was BEE-U-TEE-FUL in life according to Terry.

Terry was everything I ever wanted to be in a woman, a natural beauty, stylish, soft, cultured, and most of all spiritual.  She graduated from a Catholic girl’s high school in a swanky part of Brooklyn where people had landscaped lawns and beautiful rose gardens.   We lived several miles away in the “downtown” section of Brooklyn with concrete fronts on a block that buses spewed their black smut on to our street.

The first three years of their marriage, my brother and Terry had two precious daughters to add to our family, Judith Mary and Christine Mary.  The girls smelled wonderful from creamed sachets and honey drenched shampoos.  Terry primped them in frilly dresses and tied ribbons in their hair.   I began to find things out about the virtues that made up the woman.

Terry loved life; she loved my brother and her daughters; she loved to keep house and she really loved to cook.  I’d see her puttering around the kitchen humming or singing a song, sifting flour, rolling dough, thrilled and contented to be a mother and wife.

Terry had a deep devotion to the Blessed Mother.   We spoke often about Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and about praying the rosary daily.  “If Mary was good enough for Jesus,” Terry said, “she’s good enough for me.”  Terry helped me become a believer.

I, too, attended an all-girls’ Catholic school for my junior and senior years in a good neighborhood in Brooklyn where I attended Mass every morning that I got to school before classes started.  I did my share of praying, but I never quite prayed like Terry.

After raising their two daughters, my brother Joe and Terry became preaching ministers within the Catholic Church.   They were the parish Pre Cana couple, sharing stories of their marriage, the struggles, the joys, the hopes and the dreams.

They became Montfort Missionaries, part of a preaching team for well over thirty years, certified by the Abbot of St. Louis De Montfort from the mother house in France.

Terry and Joe devoted their lives to their children, their grandchildren, their extended family, and the people of the church; the men in the local prisons, the women in nursing homes, hospitals, wherever and whenever somebody needed spiritual guidance.

It would not be odd to see Terry sitting out in the car in dead of winter wrapped in a blanket praying so she wouldn’t get comfortable in bed and fall asleep.  Maybe Terry was a modern day saint.  Maybe she was just a person who cared about other people’s needs.

Ten years ago Terry fell ill.  First, she had an inoperable brain tumor.   Radiation for a year kept the tumor from growing.  She came back to her usual family chores and to the Montfort community even stronger than before.   I’ve seen her excited to talk to parishioners.  She always made time in her busy schedule, even when there wasn’t any time.

“Pray for me, Terry, for my son, for my brother, for my uncle, my kids are in trouble again. Terry, you won’t forget, will you?”  Terry never forgot to pray for someone’s special intention.   Sometimes she prayed two, three, four hours a day.  Even when worn thin, Terry always prayed.

I believe Terry was chosen.  Out of all the people I know, some really good ones, Terry was chosen to be God’s messenger.   She did His job, and she did it well.

For over fifty years I’ve watched this woman of faith, I’ve seen the expression on her face when she received Holy Communion; a glow emanated from her body like she knew something we didn’t.

Terry left us last year on a hot summer day in August at only seventy-three years of old.   Fr. Fitzsimmons from the Montfort Preaching Team knew Terry the best.  He told the attendees at her funeral Mass, “Terry didn’t want what God could give her, Terry wanted God.”

Father Fitzsimmons celebrated her funeral mass at the Montfort Spiritual Center in Bay Shore, Long Island, along with twenty other clergy on the altar.  Terry was the only woman to have such an honor.   In a Chapel that seats over seven hundred people, there wasn’t an empty seat to be found.   Terry’s Funeral Mass booklet proclaimed “Theresa Prato, given to us on July 10, 1937 returned to God on August 16, 2010.”

Terry will always be alive in my heart as the beautiful girlfriend my brother couldn’t wait for us to meet.

The origin of Happy the Man dates back to mid-1972, when guitarist Stan Whitaker and bassist Rick Kennell met at a U.S. Army base in Germany.  Rick was a member of Happy The Man during the ’70s. After the band broke up later in the decade, he worked Stanley and his new band, Vision, until the mid-’80s. He eventually moved into the management end of the business and was involved in the reunion of Happy the Man.

ATI:   You met Stanley in Germany. How did that happen?

RK:   I went in the Army in December of 1971. It took me about six months to get through basic training and what they call AIT, which is advanced training for your skill—whatever you’re going to do. I was a clerk typist like Radar O’Reilly in M*A*S*H—just an administrative guy, basically. I got to Germany around the last week of May, and I had only been there a short time, just a matter of days. It was June 2, 1972.

I was walking to the PX, and I saw these long-haired guys unloading a van and thought, “What’s going on over there?” So I walked over there and started talking to them. It turned out they were in a band. They were playing that night on my base at the service club there. We struck up a conversation, and I saw Stan over in the background. He had his guitar and he was playing some Yes stuff. Back in Indiana, the band I was in with Mike and Cliff played a lot of that stuff. And we were into the really, really unusual progressive music that had just come out, and it wasn’t even popular yet.

I saw Stan playing that and I was, like, “Wow, what kind of stuff do you guys play?” When he started telling me, I was ,like, “Holy cow, this is unbelievable.” We spent some time as they were setting up their gear just talking, and I befriended his brother, Ken. Ken actually ended up coming over to the barracks to see my record collection, because he didn’t believe it. He said, “We haven’t been to the States in years, and we don’t know what they’re listening to.” And I said, “Don’t go by me because I’m a little pocket of humanity that’s into this music, and I’m not sure anybody else is or not.”

After we looked through the record collection, Ken went back and told the guys “This guy’s unbelievable. He’s got all this stuff, and he’s into all the same bands.” About that time their bass player had wandered off to go get something to eat or something, and they said, “Hey, why don’t you play? Pick up the bass. Play something.” I said, “Well, what do you guys want to do ?” And he goes, “Do you know ‘The Knife’ by Genesis?” And I said, “Yeah.”

As part of their sound check, I played bass with them on “The Knife” by Genesis. And then we all went their separate ways.  I came to see the show that night and, after the show Stan, came up and said, “Look, we’re all going back to Virginia in a few months to go to school, and we’d like you to be in our band.” And I said, “That’s all well and good, but I’ve got a year and a half left over here. and I’m not going to be available.” And they said, “We don’t care. By the time we get settled in, get the songs written and all that stuff, it’ll be fine.”

They left and that was it. Of course I kept pinching myself and going, “This didn’t really happen. This isn’t going to happen. This is a joke. Things like this just don’t happen.” It was just too cosmic. And sure enough, about the third week, I got a nine-page letter from Stan and a cassette tape with some of the roughs of the original music that was starting to happen, and it said basically, “Start learning your parts. We’re here.”

I waited a short time and went on leave. I got a prisoner shipment so I got a free trip back to the States, because I couldn’t afford to do it any other way. I was flying back from Fort Leavenworth, but I changed my ticket to go through Indiana and grab Mike [Beck]. We popped in his van, drove down to Virginia and spent several days just jamming and rehearsing and trying to get a feel for whether or not it was all going to work.

Then Frank [Wyatt] came to Indiana for a visit in the spring of ’73, and he convinced Mike, and at that point we were talking about Cliff [Fortney], who wasn’t at the original sessions, to join the band as well. Frank pretty much twisted their arms and, the next thing I know, I get a letter that says, “Hey, Mike and Cliff are already here. We’re working on stuff.”

They did one show without me in December of ’73, which was at the student center at Madison. My wife, Leah, was actually there, and it was an interesting show because the fire alarm went off and they didn’t stop playing. They just started jamming to the fire alarm.

I got out of the service like the first week of December and spent a few weeks at home with my parents. By the time I got out there it was probably the last week of January in ’74. That’s when we all were finally together, and everything started from that point.

ATI:   Your friend Dan Owen was vocalist for a short time for Happy the Man, correct?

RK:    Dan was actually one of my heroes, as far as on the local scene goes, back in Indiana. He was a bass player and a singer, and he had a pretty strong influence on me back in the early days as far as his bass playing. Dan was a friend. Cliff and Mike knew him, too, and we used to all hang out together occasionally. When Cliff left the band, we decided to make another go of a singer, so we called Dan. He wasn’t with the band long, but he’s an amazing singer, and I’m still in touch with him. An amazing guy. For the record, Stan considers Dan Owen as his biggest influence vocally, because Stan has developed into quite a vocalist himself.

It’s a little bit unfortunate that Stan never spent any time on his voice back in the day when we got signed. He was thrust into the role of the singer, and you know Stan. He’s a meticulous guy. He rehearses. He works on his craft.  But there was really no time. It was, like, “Okay, we need to have a couple of vocal songs on the record, because the record company wants them.” Stan was just thrown into this thing, and he did the best he could at the time. I know from talking to him over the years that he was very unhappy with the quality of his voice at that point. Of course, he’s spent many years getting it up to speed, and it’s a great voice now.

Stan really didn’t enjoy singing back then much. It was a chore for him because he was this incredible guitar player and his voice just wasn’t up to that level. I know that always bothered him.  I guess he got really driven after he met Peter Gabriel to work really hard and get his voice up to par. And God bless him for that. It’s a beautiful thing.

ATI:   Talking about Peter Gabriel, how did that whole situation in ‘76 go? What’s your recollection?

RK:   Through Dale Newman and my contacts with the Genesis organization. Dale, Dan’s partner, went to work for Genesis, and he was Mike Rutherford’s guitar roadie for a number of years and, eventually, he was their studio manager. He called me and said, “Hey, there are some changes going down in Genesis, and it looks like Peter’s heading out, and you guys came up as a possible thing.”

I put the managers in touch and, sure enough, there he was, hanging out with us and playing volleyball and swimming. We were in the rehearsal studio for a long day working on some of his stuff.   Peter wanted us to be in his band. We were thinking maybe we could open for him, and then he could come out and join us. He definitely wasn’t into that idea either, so it was a mismatch—and then Arista caught wind of it.

We were already being considered by a couple of labels and when they heard that Peter Gabriel was interested, that pushed it over the top. I think Arista’s interest grew quite significantly when they found out Peter was interested in us and rehearsing with us.   I always thought that, if we would have hooked up with Peter at that point, it might have been a whole different story, as far as our success goes, but you never know. How do you know that?

ATI:    After the band broke up in ’79 when Kit Watkins left—you, Stanley and Rocky Ruckman played together in a band called Vision, correct?

RK:    Yes, we moved up to New York and put a rock band together. We had met Rocky—he opened for one of the Happy the Man shows—and Stan and I were both just blown away by his voice. Stan was, like, “Look, let’s try to go a little more vocal and a little more rock and see what happens.” So we moved up to New York and put the band together and went from there.

ATI:    Tell me a little more about that band? What’s your recollection of the history of that band.

RK:    In the early phases of it, we moved up near Woodstock, which was really remote. We were at a place called Lexington where there was a conservatory theatre during the summer and, during the winter, there were a lot of empty buildings; some were heated and some of them weren’t. We rented the whole complex, because there were the band members and the wives and the road crew.

We all broke up in little groups and lived in different houses and rehearsed a lot and eventually got a deal with Michael Kleffner’s front-line management—almost. We weren’t signed. We were courted by him, and he was drawing up the papers, but, in the eleventh hour, Dee Anthony, who was managing Peter Frampton and Humble Pie, stole us away from Michael Kleffner.

Around ’79 or ’80, we were gearing up for this one show we did at the Ritz, which was a showcase for nine or ten different labels. We had been together for about a year. Through the relationship with Dee, we were turned on to Eddie Kramer, who handled Hendrix and Zeppelin. He took us over.

There’s a little studio which was really more of a rehearsal studio—it was equipped as a recording studio, but it was small and a little bit awkward for really big projects. Bands like Foreigner and Hall & Oates used to rehearse there all the time. Eddie knew the owner really well—a guy named Mike Scott—and he made a deal with him on spec. We went in and recorded like—I don’t know—eight songs or ten songs in like a day.

It was a one-day thing. Eddie went in the next day and mixed them.   He actually might have even mixed on the fly the same day. It was crazy. We were so well-rehearsed that we could just do one or two takes and he’d go, “Okay, fine. Next.” We’d do the next one. He might have even done the whole thing in one day. if you listen to it, you can almost tell he was mixing on the fly. It doesn’t sound like a finished record here and there, like the fades aren’t quite right—if you’re really being critical, you’ll hear that it was done very quickly.

Then we had this big showcase set up, and we put all of our eggs in one basket. We did this big showcase, and all the labels passed. It’s hard to describe. It was an orchestral rock thing with heavy metal vocals over it and it didn’t work.

When I go back and listen to it now, I understand why it didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great. I can see why record labels were shying away from it, because it wasn’t commercial enough to be commercial, and it wasn’t heavy metal enough to be heavy metal. It wasn’t in a nice, neat category, which is what they liked, especially at that time.

The very next day we found out that we didn’t get signed, and everybody was looking for Rocky, who went to the flea market. Eddie had bought him a pair of riding boots for riding horses, and they were really expensive—maybe $1000 or something.  Rocky was at the flea market selling his boots. He literally had his car packed up, and he was going to be on his way to Florida the next day. It was like, “If I can’t do this, then …” In the meantime, we were doing another showcase at a club for Lindsay Wagner. She’s a movie star, and there was a movie called Nighthawks with Sylvester Stallone that she was starring in. She was very friendly with Dee, and they came up to see us in a club because they were thinking of getting us to do the music for the movie.

Rocky completely blew his voice out. We don’t know exactly how it happened, but we were on the third song and, all of a sudden, he had no range. We literally stopped playing and took a break. Dee Anthony came back to the dressing room, asking “What’s going on? What’s going on?” And we’re like, “We don’t know. We don’ know.”   We went back out, and Rocky was rewriting all the melodies on the spot because he couldn’t hit any of the high notes. And I honestly don’t know, to this day, what happened, but he lost probably six or seven half steps on his range in that one night.

I know he wasn’t feeling great before the shows. I don’t think he actually had like a virus or a cough or a cold, but he just wasn’t feeling up to par, and I think there was actually something physically happening with his throat. When he strained it like that, and he kept singing and pushing it, I think he did some damage. I think that, combined with the fact that we didn’t get a record deal, made him head down to Florida. I guess he’s been in cover bands pretty much since then.

ATI:    He’s an interesting character. Even now he sounds pretty darn good.

RK:   Yeah. He always had a great voice. It was a shame because he had such a high range. He was probably one of the top ten rock ‘n’ roll singers ever until that happened to him. But the bottom line is we replaced him, and we replaced the keyboard player at that point.

We got David Bach back in the band, and we got David’s friend from Texas, Brad Busby, and we kept doing original stuff. But as the band started moving toward being a cover band, to be honest with you, I lost interest. I’d rather work at the post office. I’m not in music to play somebody else’s stuff. It’s just not me. I’m not cut out for it. I hung in there for awhile, but as I saw all the changes coming and I saw what was going on. We ended up doing a Styx show and a Journey show, and it just turned into this cover thing that I just wasn’t enamored with.

After that, all the bands I was trying to cope with wanted to do covers, and it eventually deteriorated into me not wanting to be there. My music career was definitely on hold, but I was very successful, in my own way as a producer.

A few years later, I was in LA, and I was hanging out with Fred Brown. It was when Stan was living out there.   We went out to see Stan play a solo gig, and it was all original. Stan did an hour of all original tunes, standing up with his acoustic guitar. His voice was great. Fred kept saying, “The songs aren’t quite there yet, but what a great voice and what a great thing.” Stan was working at an insurance company during the day. He had a band called Spirit Noise, a trio he was doing a rocking thing with, and he was writing all these acoustic guitar songs.

To be honest with you, I think it was the most productive period of his life. He was writing great stuff. He was healthy. He was happy. He was working during the day. He wasn’t out there playing cover tunes. You know what I mean? To me, that’s the quintessential Stan. He eventually moved back to Baltimore, I loaned him the money to get a little sound system, so that he could start playing gigs. I didn’t realize he was going to do a cover thing, and I was really disappointed when I found that out. He’s got so many originals, and he’s so intriguing and interesting to listen to.

But you know what? He probably couldn’t get a lot of these gigs without playing the covers, and I understand that. There was just something about seeing him in LA. It was eye-popping. It was eye popping for me. I had never seen him that healthy, that happy, that well-adjusted. He wasn’t scrambling for money because he had the insurance gig. He was really in a good place, and I like to think about that a lot when I think about Stan.

ATI:   Interesting. According to Stan, he wasn’t all that happy during that period of his life.

RK:    Is that right?

ATI:    He felt that as things didn’t work well at all, probably because he was in a very difficult situation. He couldn’t make enough money just playing music, and because he had to do something other than the music, he considered it a defeat.

RK:    Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think that was probably one of the most productive writing periods in his life. I think there were also some very productive periods back in the Happy the Man days, but he was just cranking out song after song after song during that period, to the extent that he’s still going back and dipping into those songs and updating them for some of his current work.  I’m simply saying, even though he was experiencing a lot of frustration and he considered that to be a down period, he wrote a lot of good stuff then. He really did.

Stan’s band, Happy The Man, and their music still have fans around the world, though the band hasn’t been together for almost a decade. The highs and lows of Stan’s existence have given him an experientially wealthy perspective on life. His highs came from making the music he loved and the thunderous applause from appreciative audiences. The serious lows kicked in when Stan learned he had a rare form of cancer.

Triumph and Disaster. What makes Stanley’s story so affecting is how he faced them…

ATI: First things first. Tell me about your parents and your relationships with them, and, I’m just curious, was religion a big part of your family life?

STAN: No. Religion was not a big part of our family life. I have vivid remembrances of going to Sunday school and some of that, but we never went to church past that. I don’t know if it was because we moved around a lot—each tour of duty was a 1-1/2 to 2 years. The stint in Germany was three years but that doesn’t happen too often. It was usually a 2-year stint, and then you moved somewhere else.

ATI: Because you were an Army brat.

STAN: Yes. Both my parents were from Missouri. They were from farmer families, and my Dad joined the Army very young, went through all the ranks and ended up a full colonel in the Army. He served in three wars (WWII, Korea and Viet Nam) and had a very strict upbringing. Pretty typical for a lifer in the Army, as they called the veterans there, but it was good. They filled me with good, “Leave It to Beaver,” type morality, and that was probably my favorite show when I was a kid was, “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” too. I adored those shows. There was something charming about them—something just charming about that era–they instilled their own morality, and that’s pretty much what I grew up with.

ATI: Did you have difficulty making friends, or were you afraid to make friends because you knew you would be gone?

STAN: It was hard to make friends, because you knew you’d make them, and then you’d move somewhere else; partly because of that, I developed a really bad stutter. Whenever I would be in a brand-new school, and they’d have me stand up in front of the class, I’d get stuck on my middle initial, which is E, and I have vivid memories of “Stanley E. E. E.” I would get caught on the E. I put it to the fact that I was somewhere different. I was very uncomfortable—I had to make new friends every 1-1/2 to 2 years, and I was very shy.

ATI: How long did the stutter stay with you? Did you have to take any kind of speech therapy or anything?

STAN: It lasted until I moved to Germany and, around 11th grade, it pretty much had stopped. Basically, my brain was going faster than my mouth was able to keep up with, so I just learned to slow the thoughts down a little bit and think about what I was saying, and then I didn’t have as much trouble with it. Every once in a while I’ll still get stuck on something. But, it was a big deal all the way through 11th grade.

ATI: You were born on June 27th, 1954 in Monett, Missouri. Was there an Army base in Monett, Missouri?

STAN: There is an Army base real near there. Both my parents’ families were from that area—Monett and Joplin. Joplin’s the place that got hammered by all the hurricanes (2011). That’s where my father was from, so I was actually grateful that he wasn’t alive to see that devastation when it happened. That’s where they were from, and they would go back there to visit. They probably just went back there to visit family, because my remembrances are more Army bases throughout the state of Virginia and in Germany.

ATI: How do you think your good fortune (at least, to us) to be able to experience life in other cultures like Spain and Germany affected you and the way you grew up?

STAN: A whole lot. Spain wasn’t as earth-shaking as Germany, but the two years in Spain, I was 8 and 9 years old. Spain was actually kind of scary to me; I remember there weren’t too many Americans over there at all, and the Spanish kids were not very nice to us, and I remember having rocks and dirt clods thrown at us.

The two years we lived in Spain were not really very pleasant, but my Dad was good about taking us around all the sights, and we’d go visit southern Spain and Valencia and Segovia. He was a real historian kind of a guy, so that was a really cool thing about him as a Pop. When we were kids we thought we were being dragged to a lot of these places, but now I have a much greater appreciation for all the places he took us, especially when we lived in Germany. That was from ’69 to ‘72. Living in Germany for three years was probably the most evolutionary time of my whole life. That particular tour of duty was absolutely life-changing

ATI: Did you learn how to speak Spanish and German?

STAN: A little bit of Spanish, but not a lot. It was required in the little American school we attended, and in Germany, it was the same thing. You had to take German, and I seemed to be much more adaptable to German than I was to Spanish, so I did speak German pretty fluently while I lived over there. It was a good time to be there, because the music there was so different than what was over here. To hear bands like Yes and King Crimson in 1969—it was very revolutionary for that time. And I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to that genre of Progressive music if I had not been over there or, at least, I would not have been exposed to it for 2-5 more years if I had stayed in the states. I just remember concerts being really cheap in Germany, and we would go see bands just because they had a cool name. That’s how we got exposed to Vander Graff Generator and Gentle Giant and a lot of those Progressive bands that aren’t as popular as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and King Crimson. I got to see the very first Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert ever, their very first performance. They showed up with Keith Emerson and walls and racks of synthesizers and stuff; it took them three hours to set up all his insane, early synthesizer stuff while the crowd is out there. They were three hours late, but they came up and said, “This is our first ever show.” I got to see a lot of monumental events over there—Pink Floyd with full choir and orchestra—stuff that just didn’t make it over here, unfortunately.

ATI: And, at the time, your relationship with your parents was good?

STAN: It was good, but it was also strained, because my Dad wasn’t around a lot. My Mom was, so she raised us much more so than he. We mostly saw him on the weekends or late at night. He was the one that brought my first guitar home when I was 8 years old, and he was the one a few years later that would say, “God, you are always playing that damn guitar. You know you can’t be a musician.” And my mother would say, “Well wait, you know the kid’s got a little bit of talent here. Let him play the guitar.” She always stood up for me and my brother on the music and art side of life. My father later resented bringing the guitar home, because it was “damn hippie musicians” and that whole scene. He didn’t quite realize what he had brought home and started.

ATI: You spoke about your brother Ken. What type of relationship did you have with him growing up?

STAN: Ken and I were really close. He was two years older than I and, in a lot of ways, he was my mentor musically and artistically. He was quite an artist even though he didn’t get much support for that from my parents. He was a very unique, very original artist, and I really looked up to him. He was always on top of all the best new Prog bands. He just had to pull from what was hip and what was new coming out, especially while we lived in Europe. Yeah, we had a good relationship. He played the bass and sang a little bit. The final summer we lived in Germany, the summer of 72, I graduated. Ken had graduated two years before me, but we got to travel to all the Army bases. There were 48 of them throughout all of Germany, and he joined the band (Editor’s Note: Shady Grove—more on this later) because my Dad was actually [sent back to the US] and my parents felt a little better about me staying over there with my older brother there to watch over me. So we got to tour all these bases the whole summer, and that was a wonderful, magical time, too. He would stand on stage and sing and, while he was singing, he would paint pictures.

ATI: Why did he do that?

STAN: He was just a really strange, eclectic fellow; it was nothing we ever talked about. One night, he brought an easel onstage and, while he sang, he doodled on this thing. It was just him being an eclectic arty guy, and we let him do it.

ATI: Wow. Describe your introduction to music. When did you first even notice?

STAN: I had a great-aunt named Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae Henbest lived in Washington, D.C. and was married to a wonderful man named Lloyd. Lloyd was an archaeologist/geologist kind of guy. He was always interesting and had all kinds of wonderful stories and slide shows of his most recent visits to Africa or wherever. He was a curator at the Smithsonian during the fifties and would take the whole family around for private tours. He also worked for National Geographic. He was a really cool guy and his wife, Fannie Mae, was a wonderful classical pianist. I remember going to their little apartment in Georgetown; they had two huge turn-of-the-century, nine-foot Steinway grand pianos side by side in one room, and I would always wonder how they got those pianos in there. They told us they had them put in when the building was being built during the 30’s or 40’s, so the pianos were “flown” in through the side of the building. It didn’t make sense to me, but they were real interesting.

She was a brilliant pianist and would set me on her lap or next to her on her little stool and play classical music. That was my first true love of music and why, to this day, I just adore classical music. Especially Debussy. He’s my all-time-favorite composer in the whole world, and she was the first to play his music for me. For the first five years of my life, we would visit them a lot, because we were usually stationed somewhere in the state of Virginia. We would drive the few hours up to D.C. and visit them; it was always a delightful mix of music and archaeology.

They were wonderful. She even actually played for a couple of presidents when they would hold dinner parties, and she was John Kennedy’s pianist for his short reign, and 2 or 3 president’s before Kennedy. I don’t know if it was Truman or Roosevelt or another president, but she was his on-staff pianist.

ATI: You were also into puppets around this time. What was it about puppets that intrigued you?

STAN: I don’t really know what first intrigued me with the puppets. I think as a little kid I remember seeing something I think was called Thunderbolt It was a really horribly done, almost sci-fi themed, rocket puppetry thing, but it was marionettes. I remember seeing that as a little kid and being fascinated with the string puppets, and it was like, wow, what the heck is that? And so we bought a few string puppets, and I just fell in love with them, and I had a few hand puppets. The marionettes were made by a British company called Pelham Puppets, and the hand puppets came from a German company called Steiff, which is famous for teddy bears. For me, it was a good escape. I didn’t really like talking; I knew I stuttered and was a shy kid, so using the puppets was another way for me to express myself. It has always been a fascination for me. Then, when my Dad brought the guitar home when I was 8 or 9 years old, I found a new love of those strings over the marionette strings. The puppets went to the wayside.

ATI: But you’re still into puppets. You and your wife, LeeAnne, are working on a project together.

STAN: LeeAnne and I have formed a company called Mother Nurture Fairy Tales, and our intent is to do some wonderful little 3-5-minute fairy tales with a wonderful, good old, “Leave It to Beaver”/Andy Griffith-kind of morality to it, but with some “Fractured Fairy Tales”-type of humor thrown in. One of my favorite cartoons as a kid was Rocky and Bullwinkle. Man, they were brilliant, because they really were written way above what we as kids were able to grasp; there was some very intelligent writing for that show—even musically. I think the music on that show is some of the coolest music ever from that whole period. Our intent is to do these wonderful little fairy tales with cool music, cool messages, do the whole production here at our house, put them out on You Tube and just have fun with it. Hopefully, it will be a viable product so we can make a living.

ATI: Let’s go back to your first guitar. You’ve said it made your Dad crazy later, so why do you think he brought it in the first place?

STAN: I don’t know. I think it was because we were in Spain and because the Spanish guitar is big over there. He was probably at the PX (the Army post exchange), and they had a cheap guitar there. For whatever whim, he just got it. It wasn’t something that I had expressed any interest in. For him to do something like that was monumental. He never brought stuff home, never unless it was a baseball or a football or something, so this was way out of character for him. It was a Stella acoustic guitar, and I remember the strings being a good half-inch off of the neck, ridiculously hard to play, but as soon as I picked it up, I just fell in love with it. I think it was a three-quarter-size guitar. It wasn’t a full size, but I’ve got pictures of me as a kid sitting on the couch with this little guitar and my puppets on either side of me. So it’s interesting—these are the loves of my life as a 4 and 5 year old.

ATI: Nothing like first love!

STAN: That got me introduced to and in love with the guitar, but I didn’t play it long before it was “Dad, Mom, this thing is really hard to play.” When we moved back to the states from Spain, I was 10 or 11 years old, and they bought me my first real guitar, which was a Goya Range Master; it was a really bizarre electric guitar that had all these weird split pick-ups and tons of buttons and knobs, but it was wonderful for me to learn on–much easier to play. I went through two years of guitar lessons with that guitar. A few years later, I bought a Gibson Les Paul, which was what I had been dreaming of and striving towards. The Goya went by the wayside, until an old friend said, “Man, I’ll buy it, because I don’t have a guitar.” I sold it to him and didn’t even think twice about it. The blessing is that he showed up some 40 years later at one of my shows down in northern Virginia, and said, “Hey, man, I brought your guitar back to give it to you.” I was floored. I now have back my original Goya Range Master.

ATI: Great story! So, were you a quick study at the guitar as a student?

STAN: Yeah, I was. I had a really good ear, or so I was told, and so I felt also. I went through this whole Mel Bay modern guitar method. It’s a 7-book course. It’s supposed to be a 3-5-year course, and I went through the whole series in two years. My teacher was quite astonished and realized that I was a cut above his normal student, and he told my parents that, too. So I had good support. They brought me to my lesson every week, and it was later that I think that my Dad really regretted it—“Oh, damn he is going to be a fucking rock musician.” He shouldn’t have brought that first guitar home, because as soon as I heard Jimi Hendrix in 1967, I was, like, “Okay, this is definitely what I want to do!” He was the first guitar player to really turn my head around to where “Oh, man! Okay! Gee! This is what I want to do!”

ATI: How did you feel when you played the guitar?

STAN: For me it was meditation. I could just practice for hours on end–and I did. I would practice 3-4 hours every day, really regimented. Some of it was just practicing scales, but a lot of it was letting the guitar sort of play me, and that was that was how I learned it and loved it.

ATI: Tell me about The Impostors and the talent contest?

STAN: That was my and my brother’s first little rock band. I was 11 or just turning 12, and we did a song called, “Little Black Egg.” It was one of my favorite songs. I don’t even remember hearing it much on the radio, but that was one of the songs I distinctly remember playing. There was a local talent show in some school auditorium, and our band won the talent show. The announcer saw the little blurb about the band, told the crowd the guitar player is only 12 years old, and the place went crazy. I was up there just smiling and, “Holy crap!” I thought, “I can do this!” It was my first little rock band and my first taste of people clapping for me, and I loved what I was doing.

ATI: What did you win?

STAN: I think we won some little plaque in a frame. It was nothing major, that’s for sure; oh, and the adoration of our schoolmates.

ATI: Okay. We’re huge Beatles fans around here. Tell us about the influence the Beatles had on you.

STAN: I didn’t like the early stages of the Beatles as much as from Rubber Soul on. I remember, as a kid, I was always having arguments with little girls and other people who just gushed. “Oh, the Beatles! I Want To Hold Your Hand!” I hated that era of the Beatles for whatever reason. As soon as Rubber Soul came out, which I think was in ’65, I went right out and bought it. Actually, the first album I ever bought was the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension—the one which had “8 Miles High” on it. That’s the first record I remember actually going out and physically buying. I think Rubber Soul would have been the second record I was ever allowed to go out and buy. To me, that record had transcended all the previous Beatles stuff to where I don’t know if they had started smoking pot or what. I think it probably coincided with them waking up consciously, because, to me, that was such a monumental jump from the record before that to Rubber Soul. To me, the Beatles were the first Progressive rock band, and I’ve had lots of fun discussions with other Proggers about that. “The Beatles? What are you talking about?” Well, to me, Progressive rock is and means, literally, music that can Progress and evolve from record to record, and the Beatles did that. What other band can you look at from record to record that had such monumental growth and evolution? And George Martin [the Beatles’ record producer] was a huge part of that for them. From Rubber Soul on, I believed they were the greatest band on the planet and absolutely my biggest inspiration and influence in all of music.

ATI: We concur. What did you have in mind when you began developing your own guitar technique? It must have been pretty intense.

STAN: Besides Jimi Hendrix, probably the first really Prog guy that I loved was Robert Fripp in King Crimson and also Steve Howe from Yes. I made a real point of actually learning every little lick that Steve Howe played; he was probably who I was emulating most at that point—somewhere between him and Jimi, which is an interesting spectrum. I wanted to do stuff that was along the lines of what Yes was doing, and then I heard Gentle Giant. Gentle Giant was, and still is, my all-time favorite Prog rock group. I think they were the most talented and gifted Progressive rock band on the planet and, unfortunately, did not get near the notoriety as Yes and Genesis and others.

Genesis was the other band that I saw early on. I saw them on the Trespass tour (1970), with a very young Peter Gabriel, when he was doing all the costume changes and all the really elaborate stuff. That was all tied into that Germany—a period of three years where I was seeing all those bands live, and that was the music that I wanted to emulate—a hybrid of Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Genesis, Vander Graff Generator. Those were the bands that really spoke to me the most. Jethro Tull took Gentle Giant under their wing and did many, many years of tours with them as their opening band, because they really loved them, too, and were trying to get them much more exposure. Gentle Giant was the band that probably had the most influence on me, writing-wise. I wanted to write music like Gentle Giant wrote, because of the instrumental passages more so than the vocal passages. Somewhere in between was the classical music stuff, the impressionistic, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky; to me, those composers were Progressive rock composers, and they go way before the Beatles as far as the first true Progressive composers. These guys were writing stuff that, if you did it with a rock band, would absolutely be called Progressive rock. I always have an interesting discussion with the Proggers about that one, too. The dichotomy for me was, in the same breath, loving all this heavy Prog stuff. I’d also go to see bands like Free and Humble Pie when I lived in Germany, and I adored Paul Rogers [Free, Bad Company]. I thought he and Steve Marriott from Humble Pie were two of the best rock ‘n’ roll singers on the freaking planet. And early Deep Purple! I got to see them with Ian Gillan. During that whole era, I loved edgy rock stuff, too, so I would clash with some of the Proggers about that as well.

“How can you like Free and Humble Pie!?” And I was, like, “What? Are you kidding? This is great ball-busting rock and roll! How can you not like this?”

“Well it’s not Prog.”

“So fucking what if it’s not Prog? It’s good music. It moves me, and that’s it. So end of discussion.”

ATI: Like most of us. back then, you got into the hippie culture. Where did you smoke your first joint?

STAN: That would have been Germany. We moved there the summer of ’69, which would have been the start of my 10th year of high school. We lived in a little town called Oberursel, Germany, on an Army base called Camp King, which was about 20 miles outside of Frankfort. My dad was the Commander of that post. I think he was a Lieutenant Colonel then, or maybe he was a full Colonel by then. We had been there only one or two days, and on my second day there, I was walking around the post, and a couple of GI’s said, “Hey, man, you want to hear some Led Zeppelin?” I was, like, “Led Zeppelin? What is that? I never heard them.” GI: “This album just came out, man. We just got it. Why don’t you come in and check it out?” First they pulled out the record (the first Led Zepplin album!), put the record on, and then found out I was the post Commander’s kid, and they were, like, “Oh really? Okay. You want to get high?”, and I was, like, “Yeah, what is that?” So, in the background, there’s the first Led Zeppelin album playing, and they break out a bowl of hash. I had never smoked pot or had anything at all to do with drugs. This was my first encounter with hashish, and, yeah, it was a monumental earth-changing evening to get stoned for the first time with these guys, who were getting a kick out of it because I was the post Commander’s kid, and they were turning me onto drugs and Led Zeppelin all in one fell swoop. That was my wake up call to Germany, drugs and some good, hard-rock music.

ATI: Well, let’s talk a while about Germany and high school. How did that experience influence your life?

STAN: I would say having the opportunity to go to high school over there was a gift, a wonderful gift, because I was living in and learning a different culture. I had the good fortune to hear and know the people, see the museums and see all the really cool architecture. I loved doing that, but on top of that, I attended Frankfurt American High School; they had a handful of serious college professors who had been at universities in the states and were fed up with the Vietnam War. These guys were basically radical college profs who got tired of the states and said “Fuck it. We’re moving to Germany to teach over there.” A teacher named Mr. Minette was my biggest mentor in high school.

From 10^th grade on, these guys were turning me onto the coolest books to read. I remember, on the first day of class, Mr. Minette handed out The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe—the first book I read in 10th grade in 1969. I never heard of these guys. It looked like fun. Over the next three years, we read everything by Kierkegaard, Camus—every existential writer. These guys were just out there, and they were subversive, and I loved them. To me, they were brilliant. You’ll love this. I think I was in 11th grade for this test given by Mr. Minette. Final test of the year, and the essay question is “Who is the greatest rock band in the world?” It had absolutely nothing to do with our year of English and reading study, but that was the final essay question. Mr. Minette was a huge Rolling Stones fan, so if you didn’t answer the Rolling Stones, you basically flunked the test. I and another friend, Tony Brown, were in Minette’s advanced class, and we always had wonderful back-and-forth with this guy. He loved it because we were both smart and would have some intelligent discussions with him. We answered with the Beatles. I went into a three-or-four-page dissertation as to why the Beatles just absolutely blew the Rolling Stones off of the face of the earth when it came to being the greatest rock band. It was a brilliant little essay, and he gave me and my friend Tony both an A+ on the test.

There was a really cool mutual respect, and these were heavyweight college professors who weren’t used to teaching kids that didn’t have the ability to have their roots shaken. Mr. Minette liked to shake people by their roots; and he was a bit abrasive and a bit abusive. I remember kids getting destroyed by him and crying and leaving the room in tears. “What are you, an idiot?” He didn’t pull punches, yet there was something that I admired about him even though he was a bit abusive. They were my mentors, and they woke me up to all types of religion and philosophy and stuff that I never would have got at any other high school in the US. That’s for sure.

ATI: So what is your philosophy of life now that you’ve had a chance to live?

STAN: It’s a mish-mash of a lot of stuff but I’m universal. I believe in a force called God, and I believe that there’s a flow in the Universe, and that you interact with that flow however you choose to. I believe that life is a gift, be nice and be good, and there are lot of Jesus’ teachings that I take into account. I think we are all children of God. We all have to and should be in touch with that part, and that part is innately within all of us. I believe it’s a place of purity and of good, and I try to live in that place as much as I can. If there are forces and people around me that are not of that same ilk, I simply remove myself or those people from the equation. Life is short, especially at this stage of my life, so I live with a good heart and with good intent and hope to be treated the same way.

ATI: Sounds good to me. Okay. Switching gears. Ulysses was actually your second band after The Imposters. How long were you with Ulysses?

STAN: Ulysses was 10th grade in high school, and 11th grade was another band, Shady Grove. Ulysses was my first band in high school, and I still keep in touch with some of those same guys. Some of them are still around in the D.C. area. That was a real fun band, because we did some of our own songs. It was really my first experience with writing some of our own music, and we wrote pseudo-Progressive stuff. We played a lot of Jethro Tull, and it was a very artsy Proggy band.

ATI: Let’s talk about the music you wrote and any lyrics that you wrote. What inspired you?

STAN: Lyrics, unfortunately, were not my strong suit. My brother was great with lyrics so, at that point in time, there was usually other people tasked with writing lyrics. I was responsible for writing music. I was always really good and quick at writing music. That was a natural gift and, even to this day, writing lyrics is a bit of a chore for me. I do it ass-backwards. Actually, I do it the way I just discovered Paul Simon writes a lot of his songs, which floored me. I think he’s a wonderful song writer and lyricist, and he writes the same way I do, which is to write all the music first. I even write the melodies of what I think the vocals should sound like, and then I fit words to the melodies. It’s an ass-backwards way of writing lyrics. I don’t recommend it to most songwriters. If you have the ability, write your lyrics first and then put the music to the lyrics. Lyric-writing has never been my gift. My wife can write some really good lyrics. She and I are working on some of our own music. When I do write lyrics, I attempt to tap into something of the spiritual realm and beliefs that we chatted about earlier. I figure, if you’re going to say something with lyrics, you might as well say something that’s going to touch somebody and hopefully help them grow in some way.

ATI: Absolutely. So here we are at your first tour. What was it like? Was it everything you dreamed it would be?

STAN: Yes and no. We did a lot of college tours with Happy The Man, and those were a lot of fun. For whatever reason in that period of time, there were a lot of very receptive colleges and college audiences, so we got to do a lot of wonderful shows in that regard. Arista Records would line us up little short stints. We did an 8-10-day tour with Hot Tuna, which was not a good mix musically. I remember those guys actually coming backstage to us on a few of the shows and saying, “Well it’s pretty ratty out there guys. You might not want to go out tonight. You’ll still get paid, but how about you just not even go out?” That happened on at least two of those dates.

I remember at the Commack, Long Island Arena, in front of 10,000 people, we went out and got through maybe forty-five seconds of our first song before the whole crowd was chanting “Hot Fucking Tuna” at the top of their lungs and throwing beer bottles and shit up on the stage. And we’re saying, “Oh my God, okay, they don’t like Prog rock here.” That was one big farce of a tour. Some of them were in much smaller places and some of those were actually pretty good. We would get through three or four or five or six songs, but it wasn’t a fun thing. Then we got a little leg on the first Foreigner tour ever. It was a much better match-up musically, but I think we only did three or four dates with them, and that was pretty cool. We did a lot of one-off shows in a lot of theaters. We opened for Renaissance, Stomu Yamashta and The Go Band—anything that was a regional East Coast thing with Progressive rock-type of band. We lucked into a lot of cool shows that way. But those were all just one offs. We never did any bona fide, two-or-three-month tours. Never had that opportunity.

When Happy The Man was around, everybody, including us, knew that our audience was in Europe and not over here. It was 1978 or ’79, just before the band broke up, when we got signed, and our records came out. Disco was alive and well in the United States and just kicked our ass. We didn’t stand a chance over here. It was like, “man if we could only get to Europe,” but we didn’t have the means and didn’t know at all how to do that. I think, if Happy The Man would have been able to figure out how to get to Europe, it would have drastically altered our whole career. In later years, after we re-formed, Frank and I did a lot of interviews with a lot of European magazines, and all of them—across the board—were telling us, “Man, Happy The Man, you guys are in the same breath as King Crimson and Yes and Genesis. And we were, like “What? Are you kidding?” Being the humble, little Proggers that we are, it was hard to believe we had any kind of that fan base, but apparently, we do still have quite a fan base throughout Europe. We’ll never know. We never had the opportunity to play over there.

ATI: Let’s travel back a few years from there. Tell me more about your college life at James Madison, and how it led to the birth of Happy The Man.

STAN: I graduated high school in ’72, finished that fun Army base tour, and came back to go to Madison College in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A friend of mine from the band Shady Grove, David Bach, came back with me and was to be the keyboardist for Happy The Man. We didn’t even have the name yet, but while we were touring the Army bases, we met one of the Army guys at one of the first shows we did. A guy named Rick Kennell, who had just joined the Army, had a two-year stint to do before he got out. He was a bass player, met us backstage and played a Genesis song called, “The Knife.” We were, like, “Wow! This guy knows Prog, he plays, he’s very cool, and we hit it off so well that I said, “We’re going back to the states to go to school for a year or two, but when you get out of the Army, why don’t you look us up? You’d be a perfect bass player for this project we’re putting together.” That’s how we met Rick. We came back to the states to Madison College. David Bach didn’t work out keyboard-wise within the first couple of months. Then I met a guy named Frank Wyatt in one of my music composition classes. He and I hit it off. He played sax, tenor sax and alto sax, and he had a jazz band I ended up joining. Frank was also a brilliant pianist and composer. He moved into my room, and we became roommates. We ended up rehearsing and making music in the dorm instead of being serious about school. While I was stilI in Germany, I had signed up for Madison as a music major only to find out when I got there that they don’t have a guitar major. They said I had to change my instrument, and I said, “Oh wonderful. You’re telling a music major that he has to change his instrument? Okay. I guess I’ll play violin because it’s got strings.” I made it my major even though it was a joke, because I couldn’t play violin for the life of me.

At least I got to stay there as a music major, and there was the jazz band. At least I could play the guitar with them. That’s how I met Frank, and we started Happy The Man. Rick was on leave from the army and went to get his drummer Mike Beck in Fort Wayne. The two of them came to Madison and stayed in our dorm room. We cleared all the furniture out of the dorm room and set up a whole band, rehearsed for the whole weekend and jammed. During that period we discovered this keyboard player from Harrisonburg, VA. His name was Kit Watkins, and both his parents taught piano at Madison College. To this day, I think he’s one of the greatest keyboardists on the planet. He’s a brilliant, gifted pianist—plays like nobody’s business. He had actually heard about Happy The Man, and he put up posters inviting anyone into Prog rock to come see his band—he had a little Prog group playing at the student union. He saw us come in, and he played Hoedown by Keith Emerson, played it flawlessly, and then he played some King Crimson. We were, like, “Oh, my God! Who is this guy?” Met him, fell in love with him and he became the keyboardist for Happy The Man. Kit was a real big part of the band’s sound, because we didn’t have any vocals, and the mini-Moog became the voice of the band. That’s how we all met, but we didn’t stay in school for the whole year. I think we both quit in the second semester, but still managed to live in the dorm for the rest of the year. We all took jobs around town, got a band house, where the band and the crew lived together.

ATI: Real jobs, you say? What did you do?

STAN: Oh, man. I worked in a hospital for a few years as an orderly—Rockingham Hospital in Harrisonburg. I was an orderly, and the nurses loved me. I was on the late night shift from 11 to 7 in the morning, and they would let me bring my guitar in and practice back in the orderly room. They were just wonderful. That was my main job. Before that, I was in construction, which I hated; cleaning up a Dunkin Donuts in the morning, which I hated. Frank worked at a paint store. All of us had crazy jobs, and there was a ton of work. There were a lot of factories around and a lot of chicken plants. I think Frank worked in a chicken plant. We worked at a place called Maphis Chapman, and we sucked soot all day in this factory setting for a few weeks. The orderly gig was the only thing that stuck with me—and that I stuck with. “Okay, this I can do. It’s a cool gig. I am helping people and the nurses love me. They let me bring my guitar to work, so I can practice.” I did that for 3 or 4 years.

ATI: When you were picking a different instrument at James Madison, why did you pick the violin over the piano? Wouldn’t somebody who was into Prog rock have opted for the piano?

STAN: Probably because I knew we had Frank, and we were looking for a lead-type keyboardist. I knew how to play a bunch of Beatle songs that I learned by myself, but I didn’t feel capable enough to make it a major. Part of me had always wanted to play the violin, so I thought it would be a wonderful challenge. I found a new respect for all violinists after trying to learn how to play it. It is a very tough instrument, but I still had fun learning it. I figured, if I had to go with another instrument, I would at least remain the string family.

ATI: We hear theatrics made your performances more than just a concert. How so?

STAN: Frank had a wonderfully brilliant mind for staging and coming up with wacky stuff. We all would feed it. “Let’s have clowns jump out. Oh, yeah! Clowns! Clowns would be great!” It would fill in for our lack of vocals. We flirted with a couple of vocalists early on in Happy The Man, but they didn’t work out. We knew our musical side was much stronger, felt we should remain just music and treated it like an orchestra. It was image-evoking music so it made sense to have slide shows and movies going on, as well as theatrics with dancers coming out occasionally. We would push the envelope. We didn’t care. We were pretty fearless in our youth—that 18- to 21-year-old period—and did some very adventurous stuff. We did a dinner-theater production called, “Death’s Crown,” which was a 45-minute piece Frank had written. It was a full-blown stage production with sets and dancers all the way. Usually, when we played live, we would just have a light show behind us. We had a three-man light crew doing the light show, film, slides and everything else. We thought the images helped with the feeling we were trying to put across—sort of a full-sensory experience. We knew a lot of our audience was high.

ATI: Let’s talk about that, because you mentioned pushing the envelope. How far beyond pot and hash did you go?

STAN: It was an experimental time, and we tried everything—everything there was. I had no interest in powders like cocaine and heroin. I flirted with cocaine a couple of times, but didn’t understand why people liked that drug. I was already so buzzy, I didn’t need to do the speed-up thing. Heroin was just a ridiculous down, so I never had any flirtations or love for that stuff. It was mostly just marijuana and hash at that point, and then a few flirtations with LSD, which was something Frank and I did explore quite freely in the early 70’s to maybe ‘75. We explored on that realm because of our spiritual upbringing and all the reading we were into. Reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 10th-grade English awakened me to that world, and we read a lot of Carlos Castaneda. That side of life always intrigued Frank and me. We were the experimenters out of the whole band. Frank and I delved into that for maybe 2 or 3 years. We learned all we needed to learn on that drug, and it has since fallen to the wayside, which is probably good. I can’t imagine getting anywhere near that drug now.

ATI: Describe some the venues where Happy The Man performed?

STAN: Our favorite venues were the Warner Theater, which is a wonderful theater in Washington D.C. We opened up for Renaissance there. We played at the Ritz in New York City—a wonderful place. In Atlanta we played at the Agora Ballroom. We played there many moons ago. I remember that being a wonderful room. We played a couple of rooms in New Haven, Connecticut. Toad’s Place was a big room. Our favorite venues were the 2000-seats-and-below theaters. If it were any bigger, we just didn’t feel the same connection and we felt a little out of our element. The only time we played in bigger rooms was with Hot Fucking Tuna, and it wasn’t a great experience.

ATI: What was your offstage life like at the time? Where was home? Who did you hang out with?

STAN: We mostly lived all over Northern Virginia for that whole duration, moving between Virginia and Baltimore. Then there was a period when we lived in upstate New York up in the Catskills, which was after Happy The Man broke up and the band Vision was first formed.

ATI: How were you introduced to Paul Reed Smith and where did that relationship take you?

STAN: It was 1975. Rick and I were with Happy The Man, doing a concert somewhere in Annapolis. We were strolling down West Street when someone recognized us. They were coming to see us that night, and they asked if we’d heard of Paul Reed Smith. We’re, like, “No. Who’s that?” Turns out, he’s this young kid who builds guitars. “He’s up on the third floor of this little building here. You can just go right up to his shop.” So, Rick and I walked up to this guy’s shop. Here’s this little skinny kid, maybe 20 years old, carving on a guitar. We hit it off with him and couldn’t believe he was making these guitars by hand. He had only built a handful, maybe 3 or 4 guitars at that point, but he was one of these eclectic, gifted guys. It was kismet. We commissioned him to build a couple of guitars for us. He built Rick a bass, and he built me a double-neck guitar with a twelve- string on top and a six-string on the bottom. We were two of the first guys to commission guitars from him. He had built one guitar for Peter Frampton, and he had built one for a guy in a band called Artful Dodger, but those were some of the only ones he had built, and he gave those to the guys. We were the first guys to actually buy guitars from him, and he was ecstatic. We developed a wonderful relationship with him. He’s since become one of the greatest guitar builders on the planet and still builds a wonderful product to this day. I recently got both of my guitars back from him; I had them both refinished. They came out with a new color called” black gold” that I fell in love with, and I said, “Okay, you have got to do this to my guitars.” Paul’s a gifted guy who took the best of Fender and Gibson and made his own out of it. He’s stayed true to his craft and his principals, and he’s a good guy.

ATI: When did you move to D.C., and what happened there?

STAN: D.C. has always sort of been a home base, so I’ve always been around the northern Virginia area. Even now, we’re within an hour and a half from D.C. and northern Virginia. I’ve always had a lot of connections in this area from Happy The Man, and it seems a lot of the people from Germany ended up back in this neck of the woods. The whole East Coast region has been a good hub.

ATI: I’m going to go off on a tangent here. Why do you think Progressive rock is better received in Europe than it is in the U.S.?

STAN: I think European audiences have a better attention span. It’s more in their traditional bone to sit and listen and appreciate music, and then go nuts after the songs. In this country it seems that you go nuts during the whole song and after the song. The listeners over here don’t know how to sit and listen to what’s really going on. That’s the essence of the whole thing, and I noticed it especially after being in Europe all those years, seeing so many concerts and then coming back to the states to one of my first shows. Immediately, when the band comes out, the whole place stands up and stays standing up for the whole show. I’m, like, “What the hell is this? Sit down! Sit down and appreciate the music and, at the end of the song, stand up and go nuts.” That’s my analogy of one of the main differences, Maybe Europeans have deeper listening roots because of all the classical music roots that started in Europe. I think it’s in their DNA somewhat more. Music of a more sophisticated nature requires attention on the part of the listener. People in this country have a short attention span. A lot of Prog music has long, epic pieces, though Happy The Man did not necessarily ascribe to that. We broke with the Prog rock format by having some 3-4-minute-long pieces. But you still had to pay attention to appreciate what was going on in that 3-4 minutes. You’ve got to pay attention. You’ve got to focus on it.

ATI: Now we come to The Cellar Door. Why was it a great music venue, and what happened there to further the band’s career?

STAN: The Cellar Door was just a wonderful little venue. It maybe held a hundred people at the most. Right there on M Street, it was probably the coolest room in Washington D.C. The ownership really loved us, so we got to play there a lot. We almost became the house band there. I think there was a period when we were playing there every month. That’s where we really got our roots in the D.C. area and became quite notorious. It was a prestigious room to play, and we played it so often, it helped get us well known in a short period of time. Real artsy, real dark, and they always had national acts. We were very fortunate to play there, because we weren’t a national act yet.

ATI: It was around that time you performed in front of iconic record mogul Clive Davis? What was going through your head when you played and what was his reaction?

STAN: I knew a lot about Clive Davis, so I was in awe of meeting him and playing for him, because he had just formed Arista Records. They brought us up to New York to do a showcase in a little rehearsal studio. It was very exciting. It was us up on a full stage with 7-10 chairs in the audience. Clive sat dead-center in the front row, relaxed back, closed his eyes, put his hands behind his head, his legs straight out, and that’s how he was for our whole 45-minute set. No real reaction or anything from him. A lot of the people around him were showing much more reaction and flipping out and clapping. He didn’t clap. He didn’t do anything. We had never done any showcases per se for any major record label, so this was our first experience. I think we did what we were supposed to do, because he came up afterwards, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Wow. I don’t really understand this music. It’s way above my head, but my head of A&R, Rick Chertoff says you guys are incredible, and we should sign you, So welcome to Arista.”

Thank God Rick Chertoff was there, because we wouldn’t have gotten signed if Rick hadn’t been there.

ATI: Why did you go to all instrumental just before you signed with Arista?

STAN: During the whole D.C. period, we had been an all-instrumental band, and that’s how we made our nut—doing full symphonic, instrumental shows with a cool light show. That’s what we were known for. That’s how Arista saw us. The showcase did not have a single vocal tune in it. So we got signed off on that, but when it came down to actually negotiating the contract, it became a sticking point. They said, “If we knew there was going to be hope down the road that there would be some vocals, we’ll sign you right this minute. But it’s a sticking point for us, because we don’t think an all-instrumental band has a shot in hell of making it.” Blah, blah, blah. Everybody in the band was looking at each other—“You want to sing? I don’t want to sing. Do you want to sing?” And I said, “Well, shit. I sang in choir. I’ll sing.” That’s how I started singing.

ATI: What was that like for you singing after all that time?

STAN: I didn’t care for it. I was the reluctant front man. I had always considered myself the anti-rock star. I had no interest in being a front man vocalist. I didn’t think I had that in my persona. I agreed because it was going to get us signed. They were going to sign us if someone sings a song, so we had to work up a couple of vocal tunes to be on that first album. That’s why there are only two and, on the second album, there’s only one. It was not our strength. Our strength was full-instrumental, symphonic music.

ATI: It was about that time Peter Gabriel showed an interest in Happy The Man. What happened?

STAN: Yes, it was at this same period. We had a really cool connection, because our bass player, Rick Kennell, had 2 or 3 dear friends who worked on the road crew for Genesis. Dale Newman and Dan Owen handled the guitars, and the main sound man for Genesis was a fellow named Craig Schurtz. He was Rick’s good buddy, and during the early period of Happy The Man, Rick had been passing cassette tapes to these buddies of his, and they had been playing them for the guys in Genesis. That was how they knew of us. In the spring of ‘76, Peter Gabriel had left Genesis, and he got into touch (or his management got in touch) with our management. Cellar Door loved us so much that their booking agency management firm took us over. They said they had five bands they were checking out to be Peter’s back-up band–two in England and three in the states—and we were one of the bands being considered. We were absolutely very interested, and we’d heard horror stories of all these other bands; Peter had walked in and spent 10 or 15 minutes, got frustrated and left. We were, like, “Oh, my God, he saved us for last probably because, having heard some of our music, he felt that we were going to be a little more of what he was looking for.” And we were the last band he checked out.

Peter was absolutely my favorite rock star hero in the world, because seeing him with Genesis—there was nothing like that. It was such a theatrical production that you left those shows altered, changed. They had affected me, and this guy was one of the biggest rock stars I had ever met. Peter came in, met us and sat down at the piano. He said, “Let me play you a little bit of what I’m working on,” and he closed his eyes, played a few chords, sang 1 or 2 lines, and then just stopped still with his eyes closed. I remember us in Happy The Man standing around kind of nudging each other. We’re thinking, “What? Are we supposed to say something? What’s he doing?” Then, out of nowhere, he just started singing again. It seemed the stuff was so new for him, that he was trying to think of where it would go next. It was the embryonic stage of the music, and we proceeded—over the next 7 1/2 hours—to work with him extensively on two of the songs. He used a lot of the arrangements we–especially Kit and me—came up with for two of the tunes on that first record.

It was a wonderful experience. God, here we were playing music with Peter Gabriel—pretty powerful stuff—and he left very excited. He really liked the band. He told our management he wanted us exclusively. But, God, we had worked about six years to get a deal on the table from Arista Records. We really didn’t want to give that up, but we were willing to give his project top priority. I was staying at the manager’s house during this period of time, a fellow named Bob Steinem, and I can remember Peter calling almost every day to chat with me, to see if there was any way at all that he could get just Kit and me? We were the two of the band that he wanted. He would take the whole band, but he loved Kit and me. I said, “We’re flattered, but no. It’s the whole band or nothing, because this is family. We’d been together six years, and he understood that. We spent a good couple of weeks going back and forth, trying to figure out if we could do it, even with us giving his project top priority.

We ended up with no deal because he wanted us exclusively, and we weren’t willing to give up our record deal. But Peter’s wanting us so bad actually helped kick Arista in the ass to sign us quicker, so it was a blessing in that way. We did get signed to Arista, even though they dropped us two years later. In ’79, Peter’s management found out about Happy The Man breaking up and got in touch with me to see if I was interested in coming to England to work with Peter on or, at least, put some stuff on tape for Peter, because he was starting his third album and hadn’t gotten David Rhodes in the band yet. I was, again, extremely flattered.

If I have any regrets at all in my life (though I’ve tried to live life with no regrets), that’s the only one I can think of. I probably should have hopped on it, because it was a wonderful opportunity. Even my mother said, “Peter Gabriel. Isn’t that a fellow you like?” I said, “Yeah, he’s probably my favorite Progressive rock singer–period. And she said, “Well, don’t you think you should do that?” It was kind of cute hearing her think she knew about Prog.

At that point I had discovered this singer, a fellow named Rocky Ruckman, who I knew in my gut was a star. The guy just had a four-octave voice of full balls, like the most ballsy rock singer. Rocky was a cross between Steve Marriott and Ian Gillan, and he was a brilliant songwriter. He was interested in working with me, so that was the end of the Peter Gabriel story for me. I turned him down and went another route with my band Vision and Rocky.

ATI: Let’s talk about your time with Arista. How did you know to request Ken Scott the Producer at Arista?

STAN: Arista asked us who we were interested in producing our first album, and Ken was our top choice. He had just done Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. We felt a kinship with the record and, with our style, we knew he was the guy we wanted. When they approached him, we learned he loved our music so much that he was willing to cut his normal production rate just to be part of it, because we didn’t have the budget to pay him his normal rate.

ATI: What was it like to work with him?

STAN: It was glorious working with Ken Scott. He was a living legend as a producer, having worked with the Beatles and Supertramp. He had done both Supertramp albums; Crime of the Century and Crisis? What Crisis? came out at that same time too. Ken’s list of credits was sick—Elton and David Bowie—he did all the early David Bowie stuff. He had stories like crazy. He was a story-teller, so we’d just sit and listen. It was part of his British personality. He would come into the studio every day with a scent of, what was it…not B.O. but some kind of scotch. He had an affinity for J&B scotch. He would come in every day with a fresh bottle and plop it down. By the end of the day, he would have gone through that whole bottle. I don’t know how he could drink that much; it was his poison of choice, but he was such a wonderful, gifted engineer/producer to work with—it was like going to school. We learned so much making those two records and heard so many wonderful stories about the Beatles, Elton, Ziggy and Jimi. He had great “war” stories, as we liked to call them. He developed such a love for us that, after some of the sessions, we would go back to his house and spend time with him and his wife in their backyard in the pool and Jacuzzi. It was a very friendly and warm relationship. It was a great gift working with Ken Scott.

ATI: Speaking of gifts, were you meeting any of your personal rock idols along on your journey? Do you have any stories?

STAN: One story in particular affected me when I was fifteen and a budding guitarist. Steve Howe (Yes, Asia) was my favorite guitar player on the planet. I knew every lick he did. It was one of my first times seeing him. Security was nothing in Europe. It was so easy to get backstage at shows over there, it wasn’t even funny, so we went back and talked to the guys in Yes. I remember Jon Anderson being sweet as can be and taking us up on stage, showing us the Mellotrons and all the gear. He was really spending quality time with us and it’s, like, “Wow! Here’s a really wonderful, gentle, pure spirit, just like his voice. This is cool. I want to be like this guy.”

Then Steve Howe emerges from the downstairs dressing room, and Jon said, “Steve, come here. You’ve got to meet this kid, man. You’re his hero. You’re his favorite guitar player. He knows every lick you play.”

I’ll never forget it. He looked at me, eyeballing me from head to toe. Granted, he had his coat on, he had his guitar, and he was ready to go. He literally looked me up and down, said, “Later, mate,” and walked away. It affected me so greatly that, from that day forward, I never heard Yes quite the same way. Wow, really? There’s a guy in your band who couldn’t be sweeter, who’s spending intimate time with us, and you can’t come over and say hello? You can’t even shake my fucking hand? It affected me so greatly that, on that day, I decided I’ll never be like this guy. It’s such a shame because he’s such a great guitarist, and the thing is, I’ve heard similar tales about him from other respected guitar players more recently who said, “Wow. That happened when I met him.” To me, if you’re in a profile position like he is and you don’t have the time to say hello to one of your fans, I think that’s fucked up. There’s something wrong with that. You owe that to your fans. I didn’t buy anymore Yes albums after that. The last album I bought was Close To the Edge.

ATI: They say should never meet your idol because, more often than not, you’ll be disappointed.

STAN: It was very true in this case. I want to put it out there to any and all aspiring musicians—man, retain your humbleness. Remember who you are because it’s going to come back and haunt you, if you don’t. I believe in being kind and nice. It’s pretty simple for some people, but difficult for others, I guess. I think it’s real smart to stay humble. Simple as that.

ATI: Now I’d like to hear more about Rocky Ruckman and Vision.

STAN: Rocky was in a band called Skywalker that opened up for Happy The Man in Cumberland, Maryland at a college. I heard this guy belt this stuff out, met him and said, “Man, if Happy The Man ever breaks up, I’m calling you,” and he said, “Man, I’d be honored.” Here was a guy with a gruff exterior and an 8th grade education who could sit down and write lyrics to a song in an instant. He just channeled it. He never crossed anything out. He would hear a piece of music—I’d play a little lick—and he would write lyrics. “Okay, finished!”—and they were brilliant. His lyrics were wonderful. He was a gifted fellow with an amazing voice.

We did a project with Eddie Kramer, the producer who did all the early Led Zeppelin and Hendrix albums, so he’s another hero of mine that I got to meet and work with. We did a brilliant eight-song demo with Rocky, and we actually got record companies interested; we performed in a showcase at the Ritz in New York for around 12 record companies. They came ready to sign that night, but Rocky went out and tried to be a sexy front guy, which was not his style. He was a gruff, rough-and-tumble, AC/DC-type of front guy. I don’t know why he did it, other than I think he was so uptight and nervous about all these record companies, and he had heard comments like, “He’s not a great looking guy,” and “Boy, he can sure sing, but, yeah, he is not real great to look at.” So he tried to be a sexier, Rod Stewart-like performer, alienating and turning off every single record company, so that was that.

We continued a little bit longer and actually had fun with it, but it became more of a half cover band and half original band after that. Until then, it had been all our own music but after that we decided to start doing covers, too, so we could play out and earn a living. Vision gave us a very successful livelihood around the Baltimore and DC region for 5 or 6 years. We opened up for a lot of major bands, but the band had run its gamut at that point. So David Bach and I did an offshoot of that band called One by One, which did mostly original music.

ATI: What was your life like when you were part of One by One? Were you fulfilled and happy?

STAN: Yeah, I really was. We were doing almost all original music, and it was a real fun period because 80’s music was in full swing. We had a really good rhythm section and could pull off a lot of the hipper 80’s music, as well as doing our own stuff. We were very successful in the northern Virginia/Baltimore region, but only that region.

ATI: So is that why you took Paul Reed Smith’s offer to take his place in the Band of 1000 Names?

STAN: Yeah. I knew about the Band of 1000 Names, which was the band Paul had played in for years. He was getting so busy with the growth of his factory he just didn’t have time to do it. The band had really great bass player named Carey Ziegler, who called me and said, “Man, I wonder if you’re interested in doing this thing with us.” I thought it would probably be fun; they were an all- cover band, but it was more rock—Eagles, Rush, Bad Company and other classic rock stuff. I joined and had a lot of fun for a couple of years. There were only 1 or 2 opportunities when Paul sat in, and we were able to play together. Paul is actually quite a tasty guitar player.

ATI: How did that lead to Avalon?

STAN: That would have been the very next thing. One of the keyboardists, a good friend of ours named Bill Plummer, is a gifted sound man (he did sound for Happy The Man during a lot of its hey-day). He did sound on one of the first Whitney Houston tours and for Anita Baker; he’d done a lot of major tours as the front house PA guy. He was also a very good keyboard player, especially on mini-Moog, because he took lessons from Kit Watkins back in the early- to mid-70’s. He had a lot of Kit’s mojo in his playing. Bill and I had toyed around with putting a cover band together that did nothing but hip cover stuff and did none of the standardized covers. We formed Avalon around 1990. We did Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Beck and some King Crimson, basically picking our coolest, favorite proggy stuff over the years, and the band became very successful. We did it to fight against all the standardized rock played in all the clubs, and we honestly didn’t think it would be that successful. We were just doing it for ourselves, and a lot of times that seems like the best thing to do. If you do something for yourself and think it has value, hopefully it will have value for somebody listening. This band really took off. People just adored it; it was a lot of fun, and we made good money with it.

ATI: Eventually, you moved to L.A. Why?

STAN: I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and wonder, “What if I had moved out to L.A. and given it a shot?” So, the week of my 40th birthday in 1994, I moved out to Los Angeles.

ATI: With Merlin the Parrot, I’m told. Tell us about Merlin.

STAN: I had always been into birds, and he was the only pet I had at that point. Merlin was a yellow-headed Amazon parrot—a sweetheart of a bird. I rented a big Penske truck; I had a perch with a suction cup on it, and I stuck it on the passenger side window. He sat on his perch, and we drove across country. We got a third of the way across, got to a motel, and I put him in a tiny travel cage to sneak him in my room with me. We’d wake up the next morning and drive some more.

ATI: Did Merlin talk?

STAN: Oh, yeah, he talked a bunch. He had quite a vocabulary, mostly standard stuff. “Hi, how are you?” “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” He had a couple of great laughs, and he had some loud squawks too. I had to get rid of him later because, in his old age, he got way nasty and very aggressive with anybody and everybody. People told me it was because he never had a girlfriend, and he was just frustrated. Whatever it was, he was biting the flesh of too many people.

I found a wonderful home for him with a lady who just adored him and he adored her. I knew he had a good home.

ATI: Where did you live?

STAN: North Hollywood. I lived with a dear friend of mine named Fred Brown. I went to high school with him in Germany. His older brother Tony and I were musical buddies. Tony played drums in Ulysses. Fred was Tony’s younger brother and a wonderful, wonderful friend–probably more of a friend than Tony at that stage in my life. We hung out all the time, and Fred invited me to live with him. Fred was a heavyweight lawyer for Warner Brothers Records for many years, and staying with him ended up being quite the gift.

ATI: Why’s that?

STAN: It’s a tough nut to crack out there. My buddy Fred made it much easier for me than someone moving out there fresh and cold. He knew the music scene and everything in that area, so I had the best tour guide I could possibly have. I wanted to go the singer/songwriter route; I had never done any solo acoustic and singing. They had a lot of rooms out there for it, and Fred told me about all the hip rooms. One in particular called Ghengis Cohen which was probably the most notable singer/songwriter room. I’d write music and go there to play it. I’d do my 15-to-20-minute set, which was as much as they’d let you play, and then they would shuffle in the next guy.

L.A. was the way I thought it was going to be; I presumed it to be an image-oriented place and that’s what it was. Everybody was either a musician or an actor or a model, but they were all working in restaurants, trying to make a go of it out there. It’s very much touch-and-go. I had to get other work, and there were a lot of temp agencies out there. That work was really cool, because I didn’t know where you would be from day to day. When I got a call, sometimes I’d be at Hanna Barbera, sometimes at Disney. Those were cool gigs for me because I was around cartoons I loved, seeing original cells from Bambi and some of the old classics. Then I got with one temp job with The Entertainment Coalition; it was insurance underwriting for the film industry. They offered me a full time position, and I became the manager of the file room there. That was my gig for most of my period out there.

ATI: Did you like working solo?

STAN: Yeah. There was something I liked about it. There’s something really scary about it, too, so I ended up putting together a little three-piece band called Spirit Noise for a short stint. It was very short lived, because the band scene out there is insane. It’s worse than the singer/songwriter scene if you want to play the Whiskey and the Troubadour or any of the main rooms out there. At the Viper room, you have to buy 200 tickets and sell them on your own, so you’re already out money before you even played the place, and then it’s the same thing—you get on and play twenty minutes, thirty, if you’re lucky. Time’s up. They cut the power on you if you go past your slot, and there’d be five, six or seven bands a night. It was literally like a cattle call. You were just on and off. The thing I discovered was that the industry was so different than it was back when I got signed. Record-industry execs don’t go out and frequent those places like they used to back in the 70’s, so the odds of getting seen by a major label and getting signed, that dream part of the music world is long gone. It’s a fluke if you make enough stink at a room that the industry will hear about you. “So and so is back at the Troubadour. Let’s go check him out.” They weren’t interested in anyone over 40 for the most part. They’re still very image-oriented, and I didn’t work well at all with the whole image- making machinery of Hollywood. Part of my anti-rock star consciousness, I guess.

Luckily for me, I bumped into this other band called Ten Jinn, a progressive rock band that put a little ad in the local music rag: “Progressive rock band looking for lead guitarist. Must be able to cover…” I said, “Well, this is interesting.” I called them up and spoke to John Strauss, who hadn’t heard of Happy The Man, but everybody else in his band had and were, like, “Are you kidding? You got a call from a guy from Happy The Man? Call him back!” I checked these guys out and it was interesting stuff—had some good Prog tinges to it. They took me in the band and, shortly after, we went to the Baja Prog Festival in ‘97 or ‘98. It’s a wonderful progressive rock festival held in Mexicali, Mexico. The main festival was Saturday and Sunday. We were the Friday night pre-show band for all the acts playing the weekend and all the promoters and people affiliated with the festival. So there I am, playing with Ten Jinn on this Friday night, and word gets around that the lead guitarist is from Happy The Man. When we leave the stage, I’m inundated by thunderous applause and people surrounding me. I’m like, “Wow, man! What’s going on? What are these people doing?” It was my first encounter ever, or at least since Happy The Man had broken up, with people who not only knew who Happy The Man was but held it in high reverence. These guys from France literally went down on the floor and started bowing to me. It was crazy.

They invited us to play the festival the following year, and we actually played during the afternoon on Saturday. It was there promoters (a fellow named Rob LaDuca and his partner Chad Hutchinson) from a festival called Nearfest® [the largest progressive music festival in the United States, and has been called "the most prestigious" in the world] approached me. Nearfest® is held at Lehigh University up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These two guys came up to me and said,

“Man, if you’d put Happy The Man back together, even with just 2 or 3 of the original guys, you could headline next year’s Nearfest®.”

I was like, “Yeah, right. You guys are blowing smoke up my butt here. What are you talking about?”

And they said, “No, no, really. We’ll make you a bona fide offer.”

I said, “Man, nobody knows who Happy The Man is,” and they said, “A lot of people know who Happy The Man is. Have you gotten on the Internet and searched?”

When I said “No, I don’t even have a computer,” they proceeded to break out a laptop and pull up all these Happy The Man fan sites that had been put up by fans all over the world. I was blown away. Oh, my God. They showed me one site after another and convinced me that, maybe, there was a market there. They said, “We’re going back to our business planners, and we’re going to make you a bona fide offer.”

They came back with a really sick offer of money, more than Happy The Man had ever seen before. It was enough to make me want to move back to the East Coast. I immediately called Frank and Rick. They were the only two I called from Happy The Man to make sure they were interested. They couldn’t believe the amount we were being offered for a 90-minute set either, so they were all aboard. At that moment, we said, “Hey let’s do this as long as it stays fun, which was also our thinking back in our heyday, but as soon as it stops being fun we’re out of here. I moved back to the East Coast in 2000. I moved in with Frank Wyatt in Galax, VA, and we started writing new Happy The Man music.

The reunion gig was wonderful, because a lot of people who never saw Happy The Man in the old days, and didn’t think they would ever get to see Happy The Man, finally got their chance at Nearfest® 2000. People flew in from all over the planet for that show; lots of them came up to us and said, “Man, we flew over here, and we can’t believe Happy The Man is back together. We thought we would never get a chance to see it, and that’s why we’re here.” It was pretty amazing.

ATI: During that incarnation of HTM, the band put out an album titled The Muse Awakens, released in 2004. Not long after, you and Frank put out another album, right?

STAN: That was called Pedal Giant Animals. The songs were rejects that Happy The Man wasn’t interested in doing, so Frank and I said, “Screw it. Let’s put out our own album.” A couple of HTM people weren’t thrilled with the idea, and we said, “Hell, you guys didn’t want to do these tunes, so we’re going to do them.” They said, “We might have eventually have gotten to them,” and we said, “Well that’s too bad. We’re doing them.” It was right around the same time period where Happy The Man was winding down. We had done The Muse Awakens album, and there was talk of a second record, but I wasn’t interested in continuing, because it had stopped being fun. Pedal Giant Animal was the transition to the next project for Frank and me. It was the first stage of what eventually became the Oblivion Sun band, which is the band we have to this day.

ATI: Why was it important for you to play live with Oblivion Sun?

STAN: For us, it was the magic of being able to pull off intricate, sophisticated music, and to pull it off live was always a bit of a challenge. We knew our audience was a captive audience, because they already knew who we were. They knew our roots from Happy The Man, and it was pretty much the same as Happy The Man. People came to hear our music the way it was on our album. Our only real taste of “rock stardom” was doing shows with Happy The Man and having a couple of thousand people on their feet screaming. It was the only experience in my whole life with true adoration. Oblivion Sun carried the same torch as Happy The Man but did a lot more vocals with a bit more of a rock ‘n’ roll guitar-oriented edge as opposed to the mini-Moog, which was the main voice for Happy The Man.

ATI: Let’s talk about your band names. How did Happy The Man get its name, and what is Oblivion Sun?

STAN: Happy the Man was actually my brother Ken came up with Happy The Man, and his main inspiration was from Goethe’s Faust.

O happy the man who can still hope though drowned in a sea of error!

There’s a Happy The Man quote in the Bible also [Proverbs 3:13].

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.

We just loved it. We thought it was interesting and different and “Wow, what the hell is Happy The Man?” A lot of people thought we took it from a Genesis song titled “Happy The Man” (released as a single in 1972, and later appeared on Genesis compilation albums). It wasn’t, but it was a fun little Prog tie-in for us. Oblivion Sun is a book of poetry and prose which Frank had written. We were going to call the band Pedal Giant Animals, which I still love to this day. It was between those two names, and we ended up going with Oblivion Sun.

ATI: At the age of 51, you met and married LeeAnne. How did you meet? What attracted you to her and what do you think attracted her to you?

STAN: She was in a rock band that was playing local Baltimore rooms. One of the guitar players is a friend of mine, and he couldn’t make it for a couple of gigs, so their keyboardist got in touch with me to see if I was interested in filling in on a couple of these gigs. I said, “Yeah sure.” It sounded easy enough so I filled in for extra work, met her and was immediately attracted to her—a very vivacious brunette woman. She could sing as well but, through the whole show, I could see her having a lot of trouble hearing herself. I told her I just started doing some acoustic work around town, and I’m doing it solo, but I’ve had a lot of rooms ask if I had a duo. Would you be interested in playing some of this stuff? I guaranteed she’d be able to hear herself much better than she’d ever heard herself with a rock band. It intrigued her enough to try it out, and we started singing. Our voices blended great together. That’s how we met and started and, a few years later, we got married. We started the acoustic thing, and that’s mostly what we’ve done for the past ten years. We earned our livelihood as a duo, though I still do gigs by myself, too, in northern Virginia, where I’d worked for many years.

ATI: Does the duo have a name?

STAN: Stan and LeeAnne—nothing real clever. Our names rhyme, it’s nice and simple, and people will know who we are. We put out a CD of some of the cover tunes from one of our live gigs, and we’ve sold that at our shows for many years. One of the projects we’ve had on hold for years is putting out a CD of our own music, and now we finally have the time to concentrate on it. We’ve earned our livelihood singing for our supper.

ATI: In a way, LeeAnne saved your life when you told her about your friend Fred Brown’s cancer. Tell me about that ordeal.

STAN: My left tonsil had been a bit swollen for a period of time when we were working a lot—at least 4 or 5 nights a week. I was singing a lot of solo gigs for 3-4 hours a night in northern Virginia and, for at least a year or two, she noticed this lump and said, “You should probably get this thing checked out.” I don’t consider myself much of a typical guy but, in this regard, I guess I was, because I shrugged it off as nothing. It’s just a swollen tonsil. I was singing a lot. No biggie.

It took my friend Fred Bown calling me four years ago to tell me that he had esophageal cancer. When I got off of that particular phone call, LeeAnne looked at me. She said, “Okay, do you need a barn to fall on you or what here?” That got me off my ass to finally go get it checked out and the doctor said, ”I don’t know what it is, but it shouldn’t be there, so we’re going to do surgery, remove it, and do a biopsy on it.” He thought it was probably just a big calcium deposit that’s been there for years, and it’s no big deal. He also said there’s an ever-so-slight chance that it could be a very rare cancer called Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, but there are barely 5,000 cases of it worldwide, and I’d have a better chance of getting hit by lightning.

The week of my birthday, the doctor calls us back and, lo and behold, it is a dreaded stroke of lightening, Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma. We scheduled a second surgery to go back in to remove any and all lymph glands that could have been compromised, because this thing likes to jump through the lymph glands and can even reoccur in your lungs. Fortunately, Maryland is a pretty good state to get cancer in, if you’re going to get cancer. They have a lot of wonderful hospitals here, including Johns Hopkins. For the second surgery, I was extremely fortunate to find a Johns Hopkins doctor who had a grant to study Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, and this guy knew his shit with this cancer. He did the second surgery, and LeeAnne asked him to do a nice, clean cut when he put me back together. He cut right near my old-man crease, so [the scar] is hard to see. But it’s a good five-inch cut from behind my ear to the center of my throat.

Then I followed that up with 36 radiation treatments. No chemotherapy. Just radiation treatments to annihilate it. When they did tests afterwards, they said I still have a high white- blood-cell count, so they did further tests and discovered I had CLL [Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia], which is a common type of leukemia a lot of men over forty get. Thankfully, both of my cancers are very slow-moving cancers. They said the leukemia is something you can have10, 15, 20 years before you have to do anything for it, so every six months I get a barrage of lab work done to keep track of the numbers. There’s nothing they can give me for it. There are no medicines, no dietary stuff. If it ever moves to a higher stage, I’ll probably have to have chemo or something for that. The main cancer, Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, has been in remission now for three years, and after five years, they can say I’m cured, but even that’s iffy, because they don’t know enough about this cancer, and it could still rear its ugly head again in some other organ. For the time being, all is well.

ATI: What were the radiation treatments like for you?

STAN: The radiation thing is actually a cute story. You’re strapped to a table with this wet, plastic mesh thing they form-fit over your entire head and shoulders. You’re pinned down flat on the table for about 20 minutes. Most people need a Valium or some kind of sedation to do this thing, and I would go in there every day, hop up on the table and say, “Strap me in, ladies!” They loved me, and they wondered, “Why can’t more people have your attitude?” I don’t know what made me have that attitude, but it is just who I am.

ATI: Were you writing songs in your head while you were sitting there 20 minutes?

STAN: Nah. I was meditating and breathing during the 20-minute session, because you literally cannot move one iota. It’s imperative that you stay stationary, because it’s a precise treatment. The side effect from radiation is a loss of energy. There are days that are worse than others–sometimes I feel like I have to nap all day. That’s my only side effect from the radiation, other than the area where the radiation was focused. I have a whole patch of skin where the hair will never grow back, so I have a weird beard. They said I wouldn’t get my taste buds back, but, miraculously, they came fully back to me. They said I would have a tough time with my salivary glands, and those are okay now. They said I wouldn’t have feeling in that area of my neck or behind my ear, and, ever so slowly, I’m feeling sensation in those areas. The energy drain is a side effect I’ll always have from it

ATI: Wow. So what’s going on in your head at this point in your life? What are you thinking and what are you feeling?

STAN: It’s a pretty big distraction, that’s for sure. What’s funny is that during the 2 or 3 months while I was driving to and from all the radiation treatments, I wrote music. I have a tough time sitting down with a guitar and consciously making a song happen. Ever since Happy The Man and onwards, I hear the stuff in my head, and I’ll work out the whole thing in my head until I’m ready to grab the guitar. I wrote a lot of music in my head on these drives back and forth. There are a couple of those tunes on the Oblivion Sun record, and another one will be on the upcoming Oblivion Sun record sends my thanks and love to all the friends and fans who helped support us during the whole period—a lot of people stepped up.

LeeAnne put on a big benefit for me at the Maryland Fairgrounds. Eight-hundred people and several bands showed up, including Crack the Sky, a big prominent Proggy band from this area. They headlined the benefit. Paul Reed Smith came and played, and he donated one of his guitars. That benefit got LeeAnne and me through that whole period, because we didn’t have good health insurance. The bills were just killing us. Those people came through in a really big way and helped us get through a tough couple of years. The song called, “March of the Mushroom Men,” is my thank-you for their love and support. It will actually say that on the CD.

ATI: You sang at the concert. What was it like to get back on stage and perform after all that?

STAN: It was very cool. LeeAnne and I sang a few songs together. I sang one song called “Everything” by myself. It’s a poignant little song which is on the Pedal Giant Animals record, and a new version of it is going to be on the new Oblivion Sun CD. A wonderful group of Prog rockers that have a lot of love in their hearts, folks I had gone to school with at Madison College–people we hadn’t seen in 20 years—flew into town for this benefit. It’s very humbling.

Oblivion Sun did a 45-minute set, too. Very cool. A heartfelt event. Baltimore School of Rock was there and performed one of my songs from the first Happy The Man album. It was very touching. I got to go back and talk to all these 13-, 14- and 15-year-old kids and tell them what that meant to me. I told them my Steve Howe story to impress upon them that they should stay kind, stay humble. Keep your ego out of shit, because no matter how good a player you think you are, someone else is going to come along and smoke you. Be the best musician you can be, and let the rest of that game go, because people remember–especially in the niche market of Progressive rock music. I asked the kids—if I had burned bridges through my life, do you think there would have been over 800 people here? They were, like, “Yeah, there are a lot of people here,” and I said “Yeah, and if I was a dick during all my years, these people would not be here.” That really hit them.

ATI: Now, for your recent projects. What drew you to Six Elements and how does the band’s message resonate with who you are, and how do you feel about the music you make?

STAN: One of the bass players from the Oblivion Sun band, Dave Demarco, called me and left a message on my cell phone about a year and a half ago saying, “Hey, I just did this project for this guy from Russia. He’s down in Georgia. It’s kind of like the old Genesis vibe, and he wants a Genesis/Peter Gabriel-type voice, and you’re the guy for that. I’m calling to see if you’re interested.” I called him back and said, “Yeah. I’d love to talk to the guy.” So he gave me Michael’s number, we chatted, and he said he had searched on the Internet for people singing Peter Gabriel stuff. He’d found a video of me singing “Carpet Crawler.” It was shot and posted by the mother of a kid from the School of Rock. You can barely hear me, like I’m singing it in the background. You mostly hear glasses clinking and people talking. But he was able to dig through that tape and hear enough. He said, “I heard this voice, called Dave DeMarco and said ‘what about Stanley Whitaker’?” Dave said “I just called and talked to Stanley. He is your guy. If you want someone who can sound like Peter Gabriel, go no further.”

He sent me a CD of the music and copies of all the lyrics. A couple in particular that stood out from the eight tunes; “If” and “Childhood Books,” were the two that struck a chord with me. The rest, I felt I’d have to really work on to make them my own, because they just weren’t, as Michael likes to say, quite as adventurous as the music I was used to. I had also never been hired just to sing on anyone’s record. Usually, if someone calls me to play on their record, it’s to play guitar. I was flattered and challenged by the concept. “Wow! This guy wants me to sing and do all the vocals myself. That’s pretty cool.” So it was, and it was also a good time, because we were still paying off some cancer bills; he took pretty good care of me on that front.

It was lucrative in a lot of ways, but I had trouble with some of his melody ideas. He had sent a very pedestrian version of what he imagined for a lot of the melodies. I called him back and said, “If I have a lot more leeway on these melody ideas, then I’ll do it. But if you really want me to sing every single thing just like you’re playing it on here, I’m not your guy, because it is just too stiff. It’s too ‘dah, dah, dah, dah.’ There are no breaks; there’s no flow like a regular singer would have.” And he said, “Oh, no, no. Those are just little guidelines. I want you to make it your own, because, you know, do what you do with it.” That made me want to do it—having that freedom to phrase stuff and move it the way I want it. That, and doing all the vocals—coming up with all the harmony parts myself—was a nice, intriguing challenge, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

I was able to do it in my studio up on the top floor here. I have a closet I set up as a vocal booth. At that point in time, I didn’t have computer stuff. I just had an old Roland digital 1680 I’d had for 15 years that I did all my recording on. I would literally be running into the main room, hitting “record,” running into the little vocal booth as quick as I could, slamming on the head phones and hope that I had given myself enough time to get to the vocal line. That’s how I did the whole record. As I dug into it, I had more and more fun with it because Michael’s a really good storyteller. I attribute that to his Russian background. I loved the lyrics on almost all the stuff and felt I could get behind it and put some personality to it. I liked his eagerness, and his enthusiasm was charming.

ATI: The CD is amazing. So now, you’re working on your music with LeeAnne, you have another Oblivion Sun album coming out and the Six Elements CD, Primary Elements, is finding its way in the Prog world. Anything else going on for you?

STAN: I think the “Mother Nurture Fairy Tales” is going to be a little gold mine for us. We’re both very excited about that. We’re taking this year off from the bar-and-nightclub gigs so I can have a stress-free year to do other projects we want to do. Over the past few months, I’ve acquired a lot of music software I’ve never had the opportunity to dive into—part of my dream is to score films, TV and video games, which brings back my love of full-orchestra, symphonic music.

Right now, I’m inundating myself with about 30 books and manuals on everything from mixing and mastering to Q-base to orchestration and just learning all of the tools that I’ve amassed over the past six months. My mother, God rest her, passed away back in June, four days away from turning 90 years old, and my father had passed three years ago at 88. As a full Colonel in the Army, the man had made some pretty shrewd investments in his life and darn if, in death, he wasn’t able to take pretty good care of me and my brother Ken. We’ve both been able to get out of debt, pay off a lot of bills and get some tools that we had desperately needed. My only regret is that he didn’t help us out while he was still alive to be able to share that gift with us. He was from a different generation, ‘them’ folks from the depression era. We didn’t have a clue that he had put all this away, so we were both happily surprised to find out that we were able to pay off all of our debts and be pretty comfortable for a little while.

ATI: Finally, referring to you, is the man happy?

STAN: The man is very happy. I can say I am probably happier at this stage of my life than I can ever remember. My wife and I have a wonderful place to live. We are way out in the country. We rent, but we’ve been here 6 or 7 years; it’s a glorious piece of property with old willow trees and old oak trees and its own little pond. This is where we got married. It’s so lovely out here, and we both feel very fortunate to have this gift of time and to be able to take some time off and work on the things we love and be with the ones we love and be producing music and projects that we love. So life is a gift.

Stan’s most illustrious band is Happy The Man—instrumental progressive rock so amazing that music icon Peter Gabriel acknowledged their incomparable skills with a once-in-a-lifetime offer. You’ll find out whether it ended in Triumph or Disaster in his story.

When you read his story, you’ll see names you recognize, and you’ll share the journey of a man who became one of the most revered guitarists in the progressive rock world. Stanley got cancer in his forties and now lives with a form of leukemia—a fate he’s taken in the same even stride as he takes his Triumphs—musical and otherwise.

He’s a man who bases his choices on the right thing to do and accepts the consequences, good or bad, with equal self-possession.  His latest album Primary Elements (with the symphonic rock band Six Elements) features Kipling’s poem “If “ set to music, with Stan on vocals. He sings it with the triumph that could come only from the man who has lived it.

All Things If has produced a video to illustrate this song and honor the classic Kipling’s poem that inspires this magazine (yours truly had the honors of being the producer). Today, we premier this video to celebrate the latest Triumph of Stanley Whitaker–a man who has lived many the ideals of Kipling’s “IF”.

Susan Hawkins,

Senior Editor

ATI:  We know you met Stan through Rick Kennell, who convinced you to travel from Indiana to the East Coast to check out a new band that needed a drummer. How did that go down?

MB:    When Rick and I moved there, they were in a dorm. We jammed in the dorm and eventually moved into rehearsal houses together, with everybody living in their own little room and practicing in the basement for as many hours as we could slip in every day. It was wonderful.  I mean we just lived and breathed it.  That was all we did.

I was mostly the drummer percussionist. I came up with a huge percussion rig built in with the drum kit. It was bigger than anybody was using at that time, just a concept that I took on.  It fit what we did perfectly at that time, because it was very orchestrated and I used all the timpani, the chimes, all kinds of unusual percussion along with the drum kit.  It was one of those chemistry melds. Everything fell together.

ATI:  What did you think about the playing level and the skill level of the band in general and Stanley’s guitar playing in particular?

MB:    It was great.  Frank was a great writer at that time. Stanley had more of the rock edge than the other guys did.  He was a little ballsier, a little more rocking, a used a little odder time signature.  Stanley was the glue of the band. As far as I am concerned, Stanley put the band together and Stanley ended the band.

I’ve always had camaraderie with Stan. I admire him and respect him, and I find myself standing up for Stanley more than any of the other guys just because of the way I feel about him.  He’s who he is, and he says what he believes in, and he is not afraid to speak up. He’s always honest and true—a real human being.

ATI:  How did the band work together?

MB:    We worked as a unit more than most bands would ever dream of. We all had our individual style, and it fit like a glove, beautiful.  It was an incredible experience, and I could never have asked for anything more than what we did together, the friendship we had and the camaraderie—especially musically speaking.  It was just on. Frank was very big composing classical-type pieces.  Kit was more out there with beautiful melodies, but very different.  Kennel held down bass in a real percussive type manner, and Stanley just added that edge.  Back then Stanley really didn’t sing.  He always wanted too.  He loved it, but we were primarily an instrumental band. Until we got signed by the record company, and they wanted some vocals on it, that’s when we dabbed into it a bit. Stanley was the only one who had a voice that could cut the muster.  He has come a long way since then as a singer.  He always wanted to sing.

I remember years ago, a good friend of ours, Dale Newman was a personal roadie for Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford and had been for years. Dale and I were old friends from back in Indiana. Dale came out and camped out with us for a while. He was also a singer/songwriter musician. He and Dan Owens used to open up as an acoustic singer/songwriter group for Happy The Man in several gigs.  Dan sang beautifully.  He has a beautiful voice, and Dale had a nice voice that would work for the stuff he wrote. I know Stanley always loved what they did and was a real supporter of them opening for us.

ATI:  Just today Stanley told me that Dan was his inspiration for singing, nothing less nothing more.  Seeing him sing actually got him going.

MB:    Dan was an incredible singer, still is. I remember Stanley really locking into that vocal end of it, because we were primarily instrumental, and everything was built around that. When Dan and Dale opened for us, I could see Stanley was turned on by that, and he found that he had a voice. He just had to develop it like anybody would, because he wasn’t a singer at that point. It was pretty cool to see that develop. I know he went on to sing, and, once he got into his cover band Vision, I’m sure he took on a lot of vocals at that point. Years of experience have toned him up to what he is now; he could be classified as a singer for sure.

Stanley used to sit around with his acoustic guitar, knock out tunes by Supertramp and sing up in his room and at parties we’d have for fun. He’s come a long way.

ATI:  Dale Newman and Dan Owens seemed to be the connection to Peter Gabriel. Our understanding is that just as Arista was about to sign you guys, Peter was interested in working with Happy The Man as his band?

MB:    Yeah.  That was a really cool time because we really admired Peter and Genesis and all the European bands. There are all kinds of stories from that. I don’t know who has the right one but I can tell you my perspective.

I’m not exactly sure how Peter found out about us. It probably would have been through Dale, who worked for them.  When we were pretty close to signing with Arista, Peter found out about us. It was right after he had left Genesis and was going to do a solo album, his very first one.

We lived in Washington D.C., together at that time, and he flew over and spent four or five days camping with us, swimming and hanging out, and we also rehearsed a rehearsal studio.

We worked on “Slow Burn”, “Here Comes the Flood”, “Solsbury Hill” and all that stuff.  We were doing what we do and did at that time, which was orchestrating music.  We weren’t a rock band slamming it down doing a four/four kind of thing.  I had all my percussion gear, and I remember Peter coming into our studio, walking through my set up going, “Whoa, man, this is wild.”  He was amazed by who and what we were and what we had laid down so far.  We listened to his tunes, and then we worked on them with him. I remember he wanted more of a rock feel and, if you remember the first CD he put out, it’s pretty straight-ahead rocking.  I remember him taking me aside and playing a demo Phil [Collins] had played on. He said Phil had done those tunes, and that’s what he was going after.  Long story short, he didn’t choose to go with us as his back-up band or touring band, but he did want to use Stanley.  I believe he asked Stanley later on to be his guitar player.  I don’t think Stanley took it because he was pretty wrapped up in his Vision band and thought that might be the better way to go.

That might be something he looks back and goes, “shoot,” you know?  What a bummer that was, but knowing Stanley, probably not.  Stanley makes decisions and stands by them. I think Stan stood out to Peter more than anybody in that unit, not only because of his musicianship and because he was such a nice person, but because he had the sound Peter wanted at that time. Stanley was giving a bit tiny more than the rest of us, who were a little too much orchestration and avant-garde. We were outside the lines of what he wanted so Stanley scored a lot of points on that episode.

ATI:  Are you still in touch with Dan Owen and Dale Newman?

MB:    Yes.  I talked to Dan about four months ago. Not many people do. Dan’s kind of a hermit. Same with Kit.  Kit is even more of a hermit now. I talked with Dale probably a year ago and he was still running The Farm. That’s Genesis’ place,  and Dale is in charge of their studio, just keeping things in the groove, well-kept and working. He’s done it for years.

ATI:   Did Gabriel or other artists give you any feedback about the music you played?

MB:    I don’t think Peter would have come over if he wasn’t knocked out by what he had heard at that point. Happy The Man was an unbelievable band. Live, we were just amazing. Our live tapes are almost better than the [studio] records. There wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. We could do fade-outs, and we could nail all the parts we did. The musicianship was at a super-high level. Once we started playing, everybody was so emotionally wrapped up in what we were doing that we’d forget there was a crowd in front of us half the time. It was just an amazing group of players that scored an amazing chemistry and had everything there to do what we did. It all got buried up in over-budgeted production, punk music coming in, disco, and everything else. Aside from working with Peter, we almost got to do the score for the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Lots of “ifs”, “ands” and “buts”, and none of them materialized to take us over the top. It led to some internal disputes and problems like every band has.

Different members, including myself, left for various reasons at that point, so it kept moving on in different configurations, mostly in the drummer’s seat.

ATI:  I heard Geddy Lee, bassist, keyboardist and lead vocalist from Rush, contacted Bobby Baker [former President of Cellar Door Management] to express how impressed he was with the music. Do you know anything about that?

MB:    That’s a new one to me, but I think anybody that heard us back then was knocked out.  You couldn’t help but be.  It might not be your cup of tea, but the musicianship level and what we had executed was so marvelous,  how could you not appreciate it?

Personally, I believe the albums are still relevant today, even though the instruments are outdated. We opened for a lot of different acts, and everyone we played for and in front of always was blown away.  I remember playing with Larry Coryell [guitar player] once at a show; He was a pretty big name at that point and a masterful player. He opened up by himself; then he sat and watched our show in the front row and was just knocked out. We were kind of the band that “should have made it”, and “why didn’t they?”

ATI:  Could it have been the lack of vocals?

MB:    Well, vocal bands have an easier time making it. Look at King Crimson. They added vocals later on.  We were one of the more instrumental bands, but I personally feel that our compositions and the way we played them and formed them outdid most of the progressive bands.

ATI:  No question the music was very powerful, very out there and very complex.

MB:    Exactly. There’s melody, and there are beautiful parts with all the emotion you would want. I was real proud of our compositions. Progressive bands at that time would go in and out of different time changes, three/four to five/four to seven/ four, whatever it may be.  It was very obvious.  It was, “let’s go with this now, and let’s do this because this is cool, and this will be hip.”  Ours would just flow.  You could hardly tell what time signature we ran if we went into another one, because it was the way the piece was written and when. The majority of the tunes were written by Frank and Kit. In rehearsal, those guys would work in either pairs or a trio, structure a piece and bring it in. Rick and I would inter-flux our creativity into what they had, and then we would bring everything together and make it one piece. Everybody equally contributed after the fact as far as putting the whole thing together. If we’d had one part of the puzzle missing, it wouldn’t have been what it was at that time. We worked our butts off, and it was just a magic thing that happened.

ATI:  What are you doing musically nowadays?

MB:    I still do music for a living.  I own a music booking company with a partner, and we book regionally mostly out of Indianapolis—everything you can imagine.  And I play professionally all the time so between having my own booking company and playing everything you can imagine, I’ve done fine.

ATI:  Do you compose?

MB:    I write all the time. And I’ve had several bands. I had a band for about thirteen years here called Dog Talk that was a world-beat, crazy, wacky band. We did great, and I wrote all the music for that. I haven’t had anything as grand as Happy The Man since that happened. I’m really happy with what I do—and did.