A curious incident on the subway

I was studying music in New York City: saxophone with the late, great Joe Allard, arranging with John Carisi, taking piano lessons, sight-singing and dictation at the Manhattan School of Music. Practicing my horns five hours a day: scales and chords, Bird solos, atonal etudes, Bach flute sonatas.

It was finals day in December. I had three exams, then had to catch a plane to Chicago. After downing a cup of espresso for breakfast, I hiked three blocks to the sight-singing exam. Trooped back down the block for another espresso, then back up for dictation. (They play a four-part tune and you have to write it down.)

Down the block again, another cup of espresso, and up the block for the piano test. (Bach’s Two-Part Invention in C Minor.)

Scoot home, pick up my tenor sax and hustle to the subway stop at 125^th and Broadway. Where, as usual, I got on the wrong train: to Madison Square Garden, not Grand Central Station. Damn. So I had to transfer at the Garden.

The crosstown train was full, toward noon, jammed with sweaty New Yorkers smoking cigarettes (this was 50 years ago). Crushed in that swaying sardine can, all that espresso, and no breakfast, demanded to express itself. What it was saying was, “Let me out!”

My sentiments exactly. I had to let that espresso express itself. If you see what I mean. But dare I abandon my beloved Selmer Mark VI to the cruel mercies of the crosstown subway? I dare not … but I did.

I abandoned my horn and sprinted to the door between the cars, threw it open and puked up that espresso onto the tracks as they flew backward beneath me.

It was the best thing I could have done at the time. The only thing. Trust me on this. At least I didn’t give it up in the car.

As I lurched back toward my saxophone, I may have looked a bit pale. Ashen. Sweaty. Smiling a bit? Sure. After all, the pain was gone. The unease. And there ahead of me was my Mark VI — unstolen.

However — and here is my point — I knew, as I staggered through the moiling masses, that every one of them was looking at me, knowing what I had just done, and thinking: “Another junkie musician. What a disgrace.”

Well? That’s what I woulda thought. Y con razỏn, my timbale player would have said.

As I bestrode my horn, the people in the bench next to it arose and got as far away from me as fast as they could. Allowing me to sit down.

Let’s face it: Longhair white boy, sideburns, bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, saxophone, puked it up on a crosstown train.

As I sighed, slight smile on my puss, swaying faces boring in on me through smoke, I wanted to rise and tell them all: “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not a junkie! I’m a grad student! I can play Sebastian Bach! I can blow over the changes to ‘Confirmation!’”

But no. In that moment, when everyone was against me, I knew I had done the right thing, all along.

OK, maybe not all along …

I admit, or acknowledge, or concede, that that’s the only time in my life I found myself in that situation: knowing I was right and everyone else was wrong. And I confess, off the record, that I have done many other bad things that I never got caught at. Not that puking up espresso between subway cars on the crosstown express was bad … .

But hey, who’s writing this column, me or them?

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