I wrote this essay in 2003 and never liked it. It's too neat, too tame, too invested in trying to make sense of things. But it's about my dad, and it's about the sax. It belongs in the labyrinth.

The labels we bestow on ourselves—doctor, artist, activist, Libertarian—are shorthand for complex mathematical formulas of obligations, expectations, and privileges. I have always called myself a saxophone player (a tenor man, to be precise), despite the fact that I no longer read music and have not played in anything resembling an official band in twenty-six years. But the things that calling myself a saxophone player meant to me as a child—unruliness, lack of respect for authority, occasional out-and-out rebellion—have remained a core component of my self-conception despite the fact that the only saxophone I own sits unused in a corner of my writing studio, gathering dust under a fading blue fabric cover. 

Blame my father for this conundrum. The man loved the saxophone, and some of his favorite albums featured great sax players such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Cannonball Adderly, Gerry Mulligan, and Sonny Rollins. Many times I watched my father hold an imaginary instrument to his chest and wildly flail his fingers, watched mews and moans and grunts and bursts of staccato emotion burst from his mouth. So when I had the opportunity in second grade to pick up my first saxophone, I grabbed hold of it and never let go. I learned to make the sounds my father mimicked, and he beamed every time he saw me play. It was a perfect arrangement: he got the vicarious thrill of playing the instrument he loved, and I got fatherly approval. 

I also got pretty good on the sax for a suburban kid from the wrong side of the Hudson River, and played in every jazz band or marching band my school system had to offer. It helped that I was big for my age, and that I could sight-read; those facts allowed me to play with older kids, as well as in my own age group. I became fanatical about the saxophone, and planned to make music my career. My father said I would become the “white Charlie Parker,” and amateur prognosticators predicted that I would end up at Julliard School of Music in Manhattan. Every penny I earned delivering the Paterson Evening News and the Bergen Record went to purchasing my first saxophone: a brand-new Bundy tenor, bought on layaway in 1973 for the absurdly low price (by today’s standards, at least) of $400. 

Shortly before my eleventh birthday, my father had a stroke, went into a coma, and died. In the tradition of shell-shocked children everywhere, I ruthlessly persisted in pursuing my path to saxophone glory despite the fact that the person I truly played for was no longer around to hear me. With my father’s death, the unruly growl of the saxophone faded and allowed itself to be tamed by a ruthless technical proficiency. I practiced even more than before, but with less flair and passion. The joy of music slipped out of my lungs, and other prospective self-affixed labels beckoned me to explore them: primatologist, hockey player, writer. At thirteen, while holding down the bottom of my junior high school orchestra on the baritone sax, I fainted from the noise and never participated in organized music again. 

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My father’s death explains why I dropped the saxophone as a teenager; it does not, however, explain why I consistently fail to pick up the instrument today. My sax sits seven feet away from me in my studio as I write and polish this essay, easily accessible and constantly reminding me of my failure to heed its call. I do not lack for musical partners, as several friends have expressed interest in setting up impromptu bands. The simple explanation for my continued avoidance of the saxophone is that, since I can’t read music, I can no longer play it with the same technical perfection I once had. As a responsible adult accustomed to some degree of proficiency at whatever task he takes on, I am presumably unable to lose myself in a form of expression I can’t master. But this explanation hardly holds, as I’m able to lose myself in dance and song despite lacking any proficiency whatsoever. And besides, a professional musician friend has offered to teach me to read music again in two hours. Clearly, something beyond my perfectionist tendencies holds me back from giving myself permission to fail at playing the instrument I once loved.   

In the past year, since this essay began to crystallize in my mind, I have spent more time wondering why I don’t play my sax anymore than I have spent holding it to my chest and making music with it. The more complex answer goes beyond permission to the shadier world of deserving; my mind has somehow configured itself to believe that I no longer deserve to play the instrument. As I take the cover off my sax and consider honking around on it awhile, or even wet a reed in my mouth before chickening out and putting it back in its sleeve, I am forced to realize that this undeserving feeling derives from my relationship with my father. In the transition from childhood to manhood, I have lost the unruliness that the saxophone symbolized for both of us, and become unworthy of the instrument. I have civilized myself to the point where I no longer deserve the rebellion it promises. 

This wasn’t an easy conclusion to draw, since it paints me in a light I’d rather not subject myself to. Most of the labels I’ve bestowed on myself—saxophonist, proletarian, hockey player—entail a certain rough-and-tumble glamour directly connected to my childhood romanticization of my father, which was accentuated and made permanent by the fact that he died in my youth. The labels bestowed on him by history—tough guy, ex-con, alcoholic—fall squarely into saxophone territory; if either of us deserved to play the instrument, it was him and not me. But to my knowledge, he never played one—not the saxes I took home from school, and not the sax I bought with my paper route money. 

Yet somehow the man forged a connection with this instrument, and in his connection I can find the root of my own. The histories of most deceased family black sheep are difficult to verify, so when I try to understand my father’s history I must satisfy myself an amalgam of fact, fantasy, and memory. In this imagined history, my father picked up his love for the saxophone not in his childhood, but in his late teens and early twenties, while he was a guest of the New Jersey state prison system on charges of armed robbery. It was the 1950s, when jazz mattered. I can picture my father picking up a love of jazz from his black friends in the pen—prison being one of the few places a white man could even have black friends at that place and time. Along with a love of the saxophone, my father picked up radical leftist politics and an affection for Malcolm X, whose poster adorned the wall of his basement den when I was a child. In this imagined history, the saxophone becomes a symbol of rebellion and protest against the poverty, mental slavery, and rotten luck that lands men of all races in prison. 

I loathe the concepts of “black music” and “white music,” or “black instruments” and “white instruments,” but also believe that the saxophone occupies a space beneath and beyond those distinctions. Invented by white men (the Sax family from Belgium) in the 19^th century, and primarily utilized in marching bands in its youth, it found its truest and bravest sounds in the hands of black jazzmen, who revealed to us all its raucous, untamable, rebellious romance. By the time I picked up my first saxophone, I was picking up a kind of weapon—a dissident tool of protest that proclaimed freedom on behalf of the unlucky and the downtrodden everywhere, regardless of race or creed. 

Or so, at least, runs my post facto reconstruction of my and my father’s relationship to the saxophone. It is a convoluted explanation with many moving parts, but as I search for reasons why I don’t play the instrument anymore, this one sticks. When I call myself a saxophone player, part of the mathematical formula I invoke is a desire to liberate those who have been imprisoned by their societies—call it my Spartacus Complex. The battle call of my saxophone would rouse the cheated and the underprivileged to action, would force them to demand more from themselves and their government than the familiar squalid mire that leads them time and again to drink, hopelessness, poverty, and prison. I could stand at the top of a hill, overlooking a dank, anonymous city, and start a new American revolution with a single note from my tenor. A note of unbelievable purity that would reach deep inside the guts of the masses and force them to rise, that would deliver them from their political weakness and the timidity of their dreams. A single note from my tenor sax that would, I am sure, have reached my own father in time for him to avoid both the physical incarceration of prison that he lived through in the 1950s and the psychological incarceration he carried with him for the rest of his life. 

But I never sounded that note. I abandoned the proletarian battle, traded work-hardened hands for thin, almost delicate fingers that glide seamlessly over a computer keyboard. I betrayed the cause that the saxophone would have allowed me to take up, and in so doing lost my right to deliver that single, pure note from the hilltop. 

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This imaginary history, for a moment at least, satisfied my curiosity over why I have stopped playing the sax. I keep doubting its accuracy, though, given the fact that my father spent years doing thankless menial labor in the hope that his sons would be delivered from any need to follow his proletarian example. In short, I don’t think he intended me to go to prison or become downtrodden; he supported my “book learning” all the way, and no doubt would be proud to see me teaching at a big-name university. But I can’t help thinking—and this, as always, is where the child of the dead father gets into trouble—that he would have wanted me to do more for the world I live in. Volunteering my time at homeless shelters and food banks, using my talent for words to benefit those who can’t help themselves, protesting against our lying, cheating government. Replace the word proletarian in the central part of this essay with the phrase social activist, and you’ll see a whole new set of reasons for me to beat myself up over my failures and retreat, full of self-doubt and unworthiness, from the saxophone. Instead of liberating me, as it liberates the downtrodden masses in my imagination, the instrument has become a reminder of everything that I am not. 

Is this what my father would have wanted? Would he have condoned my use of the instrument he loved to berate myself over everything I have failed to become? I doubt it. I can see him now—his body hunched and beaten at what would be 71, but his sense of rebellion straight and steadfast—telling me to just Shut up and play the goddam thing. No matter how clearly I hear that voice, I am unable to follow his advice. Instead I mutter excuses to him in a voice I don’t even understand myself half the time. All the possible explanations I’ve mentioned in this essay come out whenever I am temped to pick up the instrument. I can’t play the sax because I started playing to make my father happy, and how he’s dead; I can’t play the sax because I’m not a tough guy like him, and haven’t spent enough time in the school of hard knocks to deserve it; I can’t play the sax because I’ve bought into the suburban American dream, and abandoned my responsibilities toward my fellow man. When this essay is done and published, I’m sure I will come up with more excuses that I haven’t yet written. 

Somewhere in the mathematical formula of my relationship to the saxophone there is a contradiction, an irresolvable internal loop, an eternal spin cycle familiar to left-behind sons and daughters everywhere. We wonder whether or not we measure up to our dead parents’ expectations, and since no live measuring stick is available, we let our sense of grief and loss answer that question with a resounding “No.” Yet as we do this, we’re vaguely aware that we are fooling ourselves—using our dead fathers (and whatever other dead we may find convenient) to play games with our psyches, to assign control of our wills to some external force so that we can abnegate responsibility for our own decisions. 

If the dead father is holding us back, what can we do? It’s a brutally self-defeating game, easy to play whenever self-defeat is the easiest way to avoid the self’s fundamental challenges. And if I admit that I play this game with the saxophone, I must also admit that I play it with other aspects of my life that I’m too embarrassed and ashamed to mention—or even consider—on this page. Nothing can create a short-circuit of intention quite like the absent fatherly measuring stick, which sets the source of will outside the self in a place that, because of death’s distance, can never be reached. As long as I feel the root of my love for the saxophone in my father, and not in myself, I will never be able to truly take up the instrument with a free enough heart to enjoy it. The same would be true if he were alive, telling me to Shut up and play the goddam thing until I found the connection again and learned to honk with impunity. 

I’d like to tell you that I’m certain to overcome all of this internal confusion. I’d like to write you a triumphant American self-help story about overcoming our old, self-imposed obstacles. But in truth, I’m not sure I’ll ever play my sax again. By this time I have spent as many years berating myself for not playing it as I spent believing it would be the center of my life. A connection has been broken, not simply with my father but with myself. I am nearly as old now as he ever lived to be, and the time has come to stop blaming his death for my failures. His absence certainly helped my resistance to the saxophone calcify on my soul, but ultimately I am the man who looks at it every morning and fails to pick it up. I am the man who takes the blue fabric off, looks at the shiny gold metal, and declares himself unworthy.