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on first hearing horowitz leaves crunched under my shiny leather shoes. i pulled the overcoat closer around my scratching serge-cloth uniform shirt. a cold fall day in 1982, and i was 17. i was on a few hours' weekend liberty from military school - had been entombed there since seventh grade; this year was my last - twelth grade. the wider world beckoned, but i couldn't see it or hear it; it was not real to me. my world was the Academy. there were brief escapes on liberty walking out in town, or weekend trips home, or that far-off and golden-glittering paradise of summer vacation. but the leaden, overriding reality was the Academy. my first priority: survival. my next priority: escape. i had walked north from the Academy, out of the town of pine beach, along the torn-up railroad right-of-way, then into tom's river, walking north through downtown then further, aimlessly, enjoying the motion of my young body and the crisp fall air under steely-grey new jersey skies and, most of all, the freedom from the Academy. even a random, aimless walk to tom's river was anything but aimless and random. it was pure enjoyment of life. no spit-shined shoes, no arising to a jangling electric bell, no memories of sexual abuse my first year there and the silent tense denial of it on the Academy's part (i never told my step-father - my mother only a decade later). a garage sale was going on by the side of the road, in someone's red-brown-gold leafy yard. boxes of old classical music albums out in the open air. i loved classical music - my step-father collected reproducing pianos so my ears had been filled for a few years already with the paper-roll-unrolled sounds of paderewski, rachmaninoff, hoffman, scharwenka, rosenthal, zez confrey, ethel leginska ... as i flipped album covers forward, looking for anything old and loved or new and interesting, i thought idly that if raindrops began to fall from the grey sky those album covers would be ruined. one album, thicker than the rest, came to my fingers - a two-disk album. i read the cover... historic return ... bach-busoni organ toccata in c major ... who was busoni? ... a small fuzzy photograph on the back of a golden-lit carnegie hall and a black piano and a dimly-visible pianist seated at it ... "and then the great pianist began to play" ... i had discovered a copy of "atlas shrugged," dusty and unread in the middle-of-the-alphabet-fiction-writers section of the military school's library, when i was 12. ayn rand's 1,168 pages had been my lifeline to an utterly other, vibrant world for six years, so i was on the alert for any candle-flickers of greatness, anywhere. i received five dollars a week in allowance money from the Academy bookeeper, little marks made in a green ledger as the new bills were counted out. two of those bills to the garage sale lady in the lawn chair and the album went with me under the overcoat back on the road. monday came, and a few free minutes to go to the Academy music department. disk out of album cover and onto phonograph, needle dropped in groove ... good surface, not many scratches ... applause came from the speaker, then sudden quiet ... a sudden overloud fistful of notes, lurching, weird sounding ... a sweep down the keyboard, strong and clear ... and then a c major scale began. that was how, where, when, and why i first heard the sound of vladimir horowitz.
michael r. brown
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