The Gift of Fire (16 page)
I never heard those words.
In the end, it didn’t matter if the band director apologized or not. The only thing his apology would have done was stroke my ego, and I was starting to realize how much my ego could hold me back. Instead, I accepted his offer to sit in, and I played with the jazz band without credit for the first year.
That year was amazing for me musically: I built up a solid reputation as a jazz drummer at the school, had a lot of fun, and was invited to be the lead drummer of the jazz band the following year.
But music and schoolwork made up just a part of my education that year. Thanks to my drumming student Al, who turned the tables of prejudice on me, I learned to look beyond my own ego and get to a place where I hoped I’d find peace of mind and maybe even happiness.
My musical career took off like a rocket at Southeastern Louisiana University, and I was suddenly finding myself in demand as a drummer. Not only was I playing with the three top academic bands at SLU, I was also gigging with at least three bands off campus. I found that I just couldn’t say no when I was asked to perform, taking all the gigs that came my way. I was so busy some weeks that my classes became an afterthought.
More and more, I knew that music was where my heart was, and my heart was becoming lighter the more I played. That pesky depression I’ve talked about had finally begun to lift; in fact, most days I wouldn’t even think about my personal problems. I was happy just practicing and playing music (and, when time allowed, studying).
But while my heart was often happy, my soul still craved answers. Since wandering away from Catholicism, I’d been searching for something to fulfill me spiritually. For a long while, I was certain that fulfillment could come solely from music. Yet as I ventured deeper into the world of the music industry, I began understanding what the word
industry
meant, and that I didn’t exactly fit industry standards. It was a harsh lesson that began innocently enough while I was earning a little cash playing weddings and corporate parties with a jazz trio during my sophomore year.
At one of these events, we were approached by a woman who worked for a very large hotel/casino in Las Vegas. She came over and chatted the three of us up during our breaks and told us how much she liked our music. Before she left that night, she promised that she’d put in a good word for us with the entertainment promoter at the casino. Since he was a friend of hers, she told us there was an excellent chance he’d book us to play there.
I was excited, to say the least. I mean, I was just 19 years old and was almost assuredly on my way to play Vegas! A few weeks later, the casino promoter indeed called my bandmates and me and offered us an amazing gig. The deal was for a one-month booking at $2,000 per week, with all expenses paid. Not bad for a teenager!
We were faxed a contract and asked to send in a glossy photograph of the band that could be posted on the casino’s marquee to promote our act. We didn’t have a picture of us together as a group, but we were so excited to be asked for one that we rented tuxedos and hired a professional photographer to take our promo shots. We sent the pictures off to the promoter and waited to hear back regarding our travel arrangements. And we waited … and waited.
When the casino promoter finally called, I was given my first business lesson in big-time showbiz.
“Thanks for the photos,” this guy said to one of my bandmates. “We still love your music and really want you guys to come out here and play, but we’ll supply a drummer for you when you get here. Your drummer doesn’t fit our image.”
Until that moment, I’d naïvely believed that the music profession was about the music. How wrong I was! Once again I was being judged by how I looked, not by who I was or how well I played. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been the greatest musician in the world; it seemed that the industry was all about looks and image. I cursed the casino, I cursed Las Vegas, and I cursed the words
business
and
industry
.
I was so upset that I vowed never to pose for promotional photographs again—if a promoter or club manager ever insisted on a picture again, I’d hire a model to sit behind my drum kit for me.
The best part of this experience was that my bandmates refused to take the gig and go to Las Vegas without me. It was an act of friendship and loyalty I have never forgotten.
That Vegas rejection was like a wasp’s sting, and the poison of it revived many of the old wounds I’d buried from years of insults and discrimination. As I kept discovering, though, it’s impossible to bury past pain. What I’d eventually learn is that the only way to permanently deal with inner darkness is to open it up to the universe and let the light of positive energy shine on it.
But as a teen, I wasn’t there yet. I still had demons dancing in my subconscious that pounced on any and every opportunity they could to resurface. So for a few months after the Vegas setback, the blues from my early teens made an unwelcome reappearance. Now, instead of being excited about landing gigs, I could only focus on being rejected, and I’m sure I sabotaged several musical prospects without even knowing it because of my negative energy.
W
HEN
I
W
ORKED WITH
A
L
at Randy’s music store and dealt with the jazz director at SLU, I became aware of how energies—both positive and negative—could affect the creative impulse that drove the human spirit. Not long after the whole Vegas episode, I knew it was time to be done with any feelings of doubt and gloom. I was hungry to expand my world beyond the physical plane … I was ready to learn a better way. And because I was ready, because I was now a willing student, a teacher again appeared to me. One day I looked up, and there was Wolf.
His full name was “The Grey Wolf That Lives in the Corn That Not Even the Wind Can Touch,” but his friends called him Grey Wolf, or just Wolf. He was married to a woman named Pale Moon, and the two of them were always in this coffee shop I liked to frequent. They were both Native American—she was Cherokee, and he was Choctaw. In fact, Wolf was once the leader of the Louisiana band of Choctaw Indians. He was also a Vietnam vet, a 25-year veteran of the local police department, and an incredibly well-rounded and in-depth man.
One day while I was waiting to get some coffee, Wolf nodded to me. Although we didn’t speak to each other, I sensed an amazingly intense yet peaceful energy radiating from him, which I could feel from several feet away.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m pretty sensitive to the energy people give off, but I’d never encountered anything resembling the positive vibes I was picking up from Wolf. I was drawn to him right away and wanted to strike up a conversation, but I could see that he was busy chatting with his wife. Plus, I was running late for a rehearsal.
The band I was playing with at the time had a few out-of-town gigs, and several weeks passed before I went back to the coffee shop and saw Wolf again. This time he was sitting by himself, and his lovely wife was nowhere in sight. The memory of our brief encounter had stayed with me, so I went over and asked if I could sit with him while I drank my tea.
“Pull up a chair, my brother,” he replied. His dark eyes were so deep and penetrating that it was if he were drawing me into his mind. He didn’t even seem to notice my scars and instead looked right into my soul. When he talked to me, I felt that he was speaking to my heart, not my face.
“So tell me about yourself, Dan,” he said as I took a seat across from him.
“You know my name?” I was surprised, as we’d never spoken before.
“Sure. I see you all the time, and it’s kind of like family in here. I’ve asked about you from time to time, since I haven’t seen you for a while. I was curious to meet you, but I didn’t want to be intrusive, so I waited for you to come to me.”
“Oh,” I replied, surprised again. I told him that I was a musician and had been busy working, and I wondered why he’d been asking about me. “I’m sure you want to know what happened to me, right?”
Wolf looked me in the eye and said that while he was interested in what had happened to my body, what he really wanted to know was who I was as a spirit.
A spirit?
I’d never heard of anyone wanting to know about someone else’s “spirit” before. The whole idea intrigued me. I knew that Wolf was Native American, but whatever limited information I had about his culture had been gathered from the movies or glossed-over history books— which is to say, I had no factual information whatsoever. My new friend was going to change all that.
As I told Wolf about my accident, I could feel his energy flowing through me, carrying me to a place in my mind I’d never explored before. He put me at ease while he brought out the deepest of my inner thoughts and beliefs, rough and jumbled as they may have been. He listened without judging, and he looked at me in the same way—he never averted his eyes from my face.
Later in the conversation, I asked about the spiritual element of his heritage. I knew I’d just stumbled upon something worthwhile, something that was now resonating loudly in my head and in my heart.
“Indians are spiritual in the sense that we have an appreciation and reverence for our environment,” Wolf explained. “We give thanks for being alive, and we thank the ‘Great Spirit’ for providing us with food and shelter. The Earth has a spirit that she shares with us, so we are grateful for that.”
I was quite intrigued by what Wolf said. During our many talks about spirituality over the years, I came to learn that most religions have the same core belief system and are more or less aligned with each other. Except for terminology and ritual, there isn’t a great deal of difference between the heart of Christianity and the spiritual wind of the Choctaw—a great spirit drives and inhabits us all. When I discovered that, my mind opened up like a spigot, and all of these amazing thoughts and feelings began flowing through me. My spiritual self was awakening, and I saw my life in a new light. This light was so intense that my self-doubts, insecurities, and depression could no longer find a place to hide.
Wolf was what you might call my first guru. He taught me new ways to look at the world and, in many ways, helped me liberate my spirit.
I
N MY NEWFOUND FREEDOM
, I found the courage to once again open myself up to a young lady.
I met Ariel at a café near the SLU campus. I was settling into one of its coveted window seats when I noticed an exotic-looking girl across the street. I was daydreaming about what it would be like to meet such an attractive woman when she ran across the road, came inside, and started chatting with the people at the table next to mine. A couple minutes later she was somehow sitting across from me and asking me about music.
“My friends tell me that you’re a musician and your name is Dan. So, Dan,” she said with a big smile, “all day I’ve been trying to figure out who sings the song ‘Cat’s in the Cradle.’ Any idea?”
I was flustered by both her openness and the way she was so immediately at ease with me. I managed to respond, “Harry Chapin, I think.” Although I was trying my hardest to sound calm and cool, I knew that I must be coming across as a little nervous. Yet within a couple minutes, I realized there was absolutely no need for me to be nervous around this girl.
Ariel was an SLU student as well, and different from any woman I’d ever met. She was sweet, funny, and easygoing; and she made me feel right at home in her company. In some ways, she reminded me of my friend Matt from high school, a person with no pretensions who just wanted to be friends with me for friendship’s sake.
Ariel and I spent the entire afternoon together discussing the music of the ’60s, life at SLU, what we wanted to accomplish in our lives, and a thousand other topics that young people who really like each other talk about just so they don’t have to say good-bye.
We became good friends, and pretty soon we were inseparable. Our romance blossomed, and it was everything I’d hoped my first relationship would be. I often thought about those long, lonely nights I’d spent in my room convinced that I’d never find anybody. It amazed me how a seemingly simple shift in attitude (from negative to positive, which I’d made with Wolf’s help) could make such a profound difference in a person’s life. As my parents would say, I was “over the moon in love,” and it was definitely worth the wait.
A
RIEL AND
I
REGULARLY ENDED UP
at the home of her best friend, Linda, whose family was fairly wealthy. What I learned during those visits was that money truly can’t buy happiness, nor does it make someone a good or decent person. These are all lessons I learned thanks to Linda’s dad.
On one particular afternoon, Ariel and I were chatting with Linda and her stepmom in their kitchen. The four of us were having a great conversation, but it was hard for us to hear each other over the loud voices and raucous laughter coming from the adjoining room. Linda said that her dad and one of his buddies were having a few drinks and settling in to watch a football game.