The Gift of Fire (8 page)
On that day as I led the parade, I didn’t feel the strange “surge” that I’d felt earlier in my life, but I did feel something close to it—and that was a sense of accomplishment and acceptance. I was no longer a target of discrimination; I was being embraced and accepted for who I was and celebrated for my achievements. Sitting on top of that float, I felt like the king of the world for a day—and that was truly incredible.
Soon after, I was made an honorary major in the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. How life turns out! Harry Lee, the sheriff at the time, became a friend and went on to ask me to be in several Mardi Gras parades as his sidekick. There I was, dressed in a miniature police outfit and sitting beside Jefferson Parish’s top cop! Sheriff Lee was also a local celebrity, which made the entire experience even more meaningful to me.
But while recognition and public acclaim can be remarkable, many miracles are small and happen at moments we never suspect. The greatest wonder of my childhood, for instance, came out of the blue after years of frustration and constant persistence.
Sitting on a bench after one particular gym class, I found myself staring down at my unlaced sneakers. As you already know, at the age of five I’d made it my life’s mission to tie my own shoelaces. Now here I was years later, on the cusp of adolescence, and I had yet to master that simple act.
That day, alone on the bench, my most profound personal miracle occurred. I bent down and tied the pair of laces on my left shoe together into a bow. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was there, and there was no denying it. Then I repeated the act on the right shoe. I didn’t think or try—I just did it.
There was no fanfare or applause; what went through me at that moment was even bigger. Those few seconds of simple shoelace tying were the culmination, the embodiment, of every obstruction that I’d encountered up to that point in my life. So many years of struggle stopped cold as I looked down at my feet. Two tied shoes were staring up at me from the floor, and I’d tied them myself—a miracle of my own making.
Not long after I finally mastered tying my own shoelaces, I was ready for an even greater challenge. I was almost 13 years old when I asked my father if he’d help me find a musical instrument I could learn to play.
Dad looked at me and smiled, as though he’d been waiting my whole life for me to ask that very question.
As I’ve mentioned, I come from a very musical background. Dad had been a professional trumpet player before he got married, his parents had both been musicians, and my older brothers each played an instrument— Johnny played trumpet like our dad, while Scott had taken up the trombone. And not only was it in my blood, it was in the air around me. Since I’d grown up in New Orleans, I’d been surrounded by music from the time I drew my very first breath. The city has spawned some of the greatest American musicians of all time, and the rhythms of Mardi Gras—the concerts, parades, and jazz festivals—were part of my very being.
When I was a kid, Dad always had an album spinning on the record player at home, usually a big band or a group with a huge horn section. I was weaned on Tower of Power and Blood, Sweat & Tears; and I knew who the members of the band Chicago were before I could even locate the Windy City on a map.
In addition, I can remember being very little and sitting on my father’s knee as we watched TV in the living room. Whenever a show came on with a musical intro, such as
Bonanza,
Dad would use his fingertips to tap out the rhythm of the show’s theme on my back or arm. Because he was a musician, the tapping he did was fairly intricate.
I’d always ask, “What are you doing on my back, Dad? What’s that called?” He’d answer, “Oh, those are sixteenth notes, Danny,” or “Those are what you call triplets.” It didn’t really matter
what
it was, though—I was fascinated by it. I’d make him explain how he did what he was doing, and then teach me how to do it myself.
Obviously, I’d been learning to play music from a very early age. Yet the thought of actually mastering an instrument with my burned-up hands had always been too intimidating for me to entertain—that is, until I tied my own shoes. Once I’d accomplished that, I felt I could do anything. If becoming a musician was what I was destined to do, as I believed it was, then looking down at my neatly tied laces told me I was now ready to fulfill that destiny.
So when I asked my father if he could help me find an instrument, we began the search immediately. The first thing we tried was the trumpet, as it had become a bit of a family tradition. However, like all other brass instruments, it came with a mouthpiece that required the player to shape his or her lips in a specific way to blow a steady stream of air into the horn.
My
lips had mostly burned away, and what was left or had been reconstructed simply wasn’t up to the task. The same held true with forming a proper seal around the delicate reeds of woodwind instruments like the saxophone and clarinet, two instruments I loved listening to and desperately wished I could play.
Then our attention turned to the piano. My family had always had a beautiful, ornately carved piano in the house with gorgeous ivory keys that I’d fooled around with a million times. But when it came to sitting down and actually playing music, I was hopeless. Without fingers, I couldn’t manipulate the keys in a way to make anything other than noise. There was the possibility of the guitar, but again, how would I form a decent-sounding chord without fingers? It quickly became obvious that any stringed instrument from the cello to the electric bass was, quite literally, beyond my grasp.
Dad and I spent hours trying to figure out how I could make music in a way that didn’t require fingers or strong lips. Then he remembered how I used to ask him about the rhythms he’d tap out when we watched television. His eyes kind of lit up as he reminded me of this: “Danny, not only did you always want to know how I made different kinds of rhythms, but you used to bang on the pots and pans whenever you helped unload the dishwasher. Maybe we should get you a snare drum!”
And that was it.
T
HE NEXT
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, my father and I climbed into the car for what turned out to be one of the most significant days of my life. It was a beautiful fall morning as we pulled out of the driveway and headed downtown.
Dad pulled up in front of the same pawnshop we’d visited a week or two before when we’d gone shopping for a used trombone for my brother Scott. The store owner recognized us right away and ushered us in, pointing out a few different drum kits after Dad told him why we’d come back. While my father was highly enthusiastic about my taking up an instrument, he was cautious and frugal, too. He wasn’t about to splurge on an entire drum kit, secondhand or not, until he knew if the drums would be a good fit for me and I’d take playing an instrument seriously. That day, he bought me a single snare drum and two drumsticks.
Dad didn’t have to wait long to discover just how serious I was, though. From the minute he carried the snare to our den and set it up, I spent every spare minute I had banging away on it. I wouldn’t call what I was doing at first making music, but I
was
making a connection with an instrument that would become part of my soul and express my thoughts and feelings as well as, or better than, words ever could.
But the very first time I whacked a drumstick across the taut skin of that just-purchased snare drum, I’m sure I looked more like a lumberjack hacking into a giant redwood than a fledgling drummer trying his best to emulate a percussion giant like Buddy Rich, or one of my other musical heroes. The trouble, as you might imagine, was this: I had no fingers or thumb to speak of on my right hand, and the thumb the doctors in Boston had constructed on my left hand had very little strength, certainly not enough to hold on to a drumstick with the necessary grip. Not all drum playing is beat and rhythm; it’s also the technique with which you hold the sticks. I was swinging with all my might, but it didn’t matter.
Pretty soon I gave up on the idea that I was going to play like a “normal” two-handed drummer—obviously I wasn’t normal. As I’d done when I was learning to button my shirts, use utensils at the dinner table, or shoot hoops on the basketball court, I tossed out the regular playbook everyone else used to get through life and made up my own rules. I vowed that I would master the drums, just as I had mastered tying my shoes. It took me more than seven years before I tied my laces; thankfully, it took me less than seven weeks to figure out a way to play the drums without hands!
I began with my left hand, which had the reconstructed thumb. Actually, I had no problem gripping a drumstick between my engineered thumb and the remnants of my left hand. But as soon as I hit the drum itself, the stick would tumble out of my hand and go spinning to the ground. At first that was it—one hit, or two at the very most, and the stick was bouncing off the tiled floor.
Okay, that’s not a problem,
I thought.
If I can just hold on to the stick and make at least one complete swing, then all I have to do is practice. Sooner or later, I’ll build up enough strength in my thumb to complete two full swings. And if I can do two swings, it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be slamming that stick against the drumhead 2,000 times in a row!
The big issue for me was what to do with my right hand. No matter how many hours of physiotherapy I put in or how much I exercised it, there was basically no muscle on that hand for me to develop. There was no way I’d ever be able to use that nonhand and nonthumb to wield a drumstick. But somehow I had to make it work for me. If I was going to play professionally, I needed to use two drumsticks … so I had to get creative.
I put down the sticks and dedicated many long hours of thought to solving the problem. The most obvious solution was to somehow fasten the drumstick to my right wrist. The first thing I tried was a leather bowling glove. The glove fit over my wrist snugly, and the leather was rigid enough to keep the stick pressed against my lower arm when I hit the drum. I used the glove for about four or five days before I ripped it off in frustration.
It turns out that most of the stick would get buried in the glove, and the part that was exposed was too rigid to be of any good—the stick didn’t move at all when I brought it down to the drumhead, and was about as flexible as a steel pipe. I’d quickly learned that to make a decent sound on the drums, the stick had to move freely in the drummer’s hand. So, back to the drawing board I went.
The origin of the next idea I came up with stemmed from a childhood image of my mother standing in our kitchen attempting to repair a broken vase using Super Glue. Mom had accidentally spilled some of the adhesive on the inside of her arm and then somehow managed to get a large wooden stirring spoon stuck to her wrist. I remember watching her swing her arm around in the air to try to shake the spoon loose, but no matter how hard she tried to get rid of it, that spoon stuck to her like it was an extension of her arm. Eureka!
I headed off to the supermarket to buy myself a tube of Super Glue. Big mistake. While I did manage to adhere the drumstick to my wrist, a huge chunk of scar tissue and skin was ripped from my forearm the first time I hit the drum. My next idea, using heavy-duty duct tape, was as big a failure as the glue idea and just as painful. I also tried string, rope, and electrical cord.
After three weeks of trial and error, I was sitting in front of the snare drum when my dad noticed an old tennis wristband lying on the floor. He suggested I give it a try, which I did immediately. I found that the stretchy cotton was too flimsy to keep the drumstick in place— but it felt good on my arm, and that gave me the idea that would change my entire musical future.
I leapt up from my chair and ran to a drawer where we kept a bunch of rubber bands. I then hurried back to the snare, winding a couple of the rubber bands over the top of the tennis wristband as I went. When I sat back down in front of the drum, I slipped the drumstick under the wristband and swung my right arm up just past my ear, and then I brought my arm down to the drumhead with all my might. The drumstick hit the skin and made a sound, a beautiful musical note, which I’ll never forget.
I hit it again and again and again:
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
My father let out a loud cheer, and so did I. We’d just found the method that would allow me to make music and eventually become a professional drummer.
The rubber-band-and-tennis-wristband technique worked so perfectly from the very start that I haven’t modified it at all since the day I discovered it. I’ve had some of the top orthopedic and plastic surgeons in the country suggest other methods, and even had several occupational therapists design prosthetic devices to try to improve my drumming technique, but nothing has ever worked better than a cheap cotton wristband and rubber bands from the kitchen drawer.
Once I had my right-handed problem solved, I launched into playing with both hands every single day. I practiced hour after hour, until my shoulders ached and my arms felt as though they’d fall off. Each morning I could tell that the thumb the doctors had built for me on my left hand was just a little bit stronger than it had been the day before. And sure enough, when I started playing that day, I’d be able to hit the skin of the snare drum another five or six more times than I had the day before. I was on my way!