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“Fatboy” with my dear and gorgeous sisters, Alice Anne and Janice—Oceanside Miami Beach—Cavalier Motel, 1955.
My parents made me take piano when I was seven. God, did I hate practicing! Mr. Ulrich was my unfortunate tutor. He was ancient and smelled like mothballs. I was never prepared with my lesson and one day he finally looked me straight in the eye.
“You really don’t want to do this, do you?”
“Uhh, not really, Mr. Ulrich,” I stammered.
When my Uncle Raymond would visit, my mom would say, “Show your uncle what you’ve learned on piano.” I would reluctantly play my scales, but when he started yawning I realized that this wasn’t cool. Then Alice Anne would launch into “Clair de Lune” and Uncle Raymond would be all smiles. Piano lessons were a chore. I wanted to play songs!
Just like my dad before me, I’m an ear person. I never liked reading those ants on the page called “notes.” Never cared about theory or avoiding parallel fifths (apparently a no-no in classical composing). I quit piano lessons after one long year at the ripe old age of eight. By that point, I knew enough to work out the chords and simple melodies on my own. Soon I began to fashion those chords into primitive songs. I would perform those four or five simple chords mimicking another of my early rock ’n’ roll heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis, which included standing up and kicking away the piano bench as I’d seen him do on TV.
I developed a style that is known as a “writer’s piano.” For me the piano is mainly a tool for writing songs. The keyboard for me has always been more about mood than technique or fast runs. A few years later I’d use the guitar in a similar fashion to bring out the rock side of my songwriting.
There’s something so peaceful about sitting down at the piano because it speaks to my soul and inspires me to write about romance and beauty. When I want to rock, though, I crank up the guitar through a Marshall amp and feel a different kind of majesty.
Janice and Alice Anne were polar opposites. Janice was the popular girl in high school. Even though I was twelve years younger, I kind of sensed that she was hot stuff. Very attractive, very happening, and smartly dressed in her form-fitted skirt and cashmere sweater, Janice collected a closet full of the latest styles and a dazzling array of boyfriends. She actually modeled dresses for fashion shows for the upscale Wieboldt’s department store in Oak Park, Illinois, where she also sold ladies’ hats.
Not that Alice Anne wasn’t popular, but she was more conservative and perhaps not the trendsetter that Janice was. For some reason Alice Anne did not really resemble the rest of the family. Once when we grouped together for a family photo in Miami Beach the photographer shooed her aside shouting, “You, at the end. Just the family, just the family!”
Janice had a mad crush on a high school dropout named Al Kovarik, a slick-looking, James Dean type of guy from the tough Chicago suburb of Cicero. He was my favorite of all her boyfriends because he looked cool and drove a ’56 chartreuse and black Mercury Monterey convertible complete with spotlights, blue-dot taillights, and power windows. He would take me and Janice out cruising, some nights stopping at Big Boy, a burger drive-in on the main drag on Ogden Avenue in Berwyn. He’d let me order a double Big Boy and a chocolate milkshake… once he even took us to the drive-in movie way out on Cicero Avenue to see Apache. I drove them both crazy putting the power windows and power antenna up and down all night long as they were trying to make out.
Sadly, Janice made decisions with her heart, not her intellect, and her boyfriends tended to be left of center, nontraditional types.
She married the last in that line, a burly trucking magnate whose name could be seen silk-screened on the gravel trucks going to and from the local limestone quarry in Lyons. One of his big Mack trucks bore the name “Miss Janice” on the hood. But things were far from rosy between them and Mother and Dad had to intervene when Janice wanted a divorce. (In my parents’ day people mated for life! Divorce was a sin.)
Perhaps because of the marital discord, Janice became a closet drinker, hiding bottles of wine all around the house and spending time in rehab centers. I remember as a child feeling powerless at calming the battles that raged between them. Even though her husband loved her and funded her every whim (archeological digs, her vast collection of African art), money could not make up for a certain emptiness and growing aggression between them.
A lifetime chain smoker, Janice finally found peace on December 20, 1994, when she succumbed to emphysema-induced heart failure at age fifty-seven, leaving behind a heart load of precious memories.
She came to me in a vivid dream the day after she passed. “Jimmie, don’t worry about me. It’s wonderful here.” In my reverie she was restored to the teen queen Janice in her cashmere sweater and pearls long before life got the best of her. From that dream on I felt totally at peace.
Poor Alice Anne (nicknamed “AA”) was often the brunt of my mother’s sharp-tongued sarcasm, saying she looked like an Indian squaw while Janice would always come out unscathed. If Mom’s tactics created competition between the two of them, I sure never saw it. All I saw was a lot of love between them.
The contrast between Janice and Alice Anne was never more apparent than on the family 8-millimeter movie clip where Alice Anne couldn’t stay upright for even a millisecond on her water skis. She kept falling hilariously right back into the water, being dragged along helplessly by the speeding boat. Next, the grainy film showed Janice, tan in her bikini, flashing her all-American smile as she glided effortlessly across that same pale, blue lake, skimming the crystal-clear waters with bulletproof confidence, casually waving her free hand.
But Alice Anne is a true gem if perhaps a rough diamond, and to this day my closest friend and soulmate. When Janice passed away in 1994, AA and I closed ranks—a lot of our time together consists of reminiscing and remembering the shimmering spirit that was Janice and those dear old days when it was the three of us just enjoying all life had to offer.
Besides the huge influence of my sisters, my Catholic upbringing had a profound effect. My parents were not extremely religious around the house, but they made sure we went to St. Odilo’s Parish for Sunday school. (He must have been kind of an off-brand saint—I have never heard of a St. Odilo then or since…)
When my family went to church, I would tag along. It didn’t mean much to me; the priest was just some guy in a black suit droning on about who knows what. At first, the Mass was in Latin. Clear as mud. In Sunday school, I experienced the austere nuns. Their very glance could wither you. It’s as if they were taking their whole miserable life out on you.
Sunday school was all about the memorization of the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and the Act of Contrition. After my first communion and confirmation I became defined by guilt. I took to heart that “if you thought about committing a sin, by God, you sinned!”
If I had “impure thoughts” about Laura Strama, that fantasy girl in grade school who always sat in the front of the class, I knew that I was going to Hell. Until, of course, I came clean with the man behind the curtain.
Masturbation was a huge no-no. I knew that if I happened to “fall off the wagon” it felt good, and then I felt bad! At that point, of course, I had to fall on the sword and go to confession. If you did masturbate, here’s what you had to say:
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession and these are my sins: I talked back to my mother, I disobeyed my father, I stole a silver dollar from Jerry Kmen’s parents’
