The long sustaining chord evaporated into the thick summer air, dying away slowly, exactly as the written instructions on top of the last bar indicated: morendo poco a poco. And as the final rhyming strains of the etude faded away rhythmically, rolling off the guitar like a tennis star’s name off the tongue: Evonne Goolagong…Evonne Goolagoong…Evonne Goolagong…I opened my eyes and quickly scanned my teacher’s face for a clue as to what he thought.

Did he like it? Did it move him? Was his heart beating as fast as mine? Oh wait! He just lifted an eyebrow! Didn’t he? Was that an eyebrow lift? Maybe a sign that he liked it. Maybe a sign that he didn’t. Or maybe just a sign that he’s holding in the urge to urinate, like I sometimes do when I have to.

Pat said nothing as he got up to turn the tape recorder off. But then, as he turned and faced me, I noticed a luminous twinkle in his eyes and a tight, broad smile on his gaunt face that, I hoped, signaled something big.

Ripping me out of my chair, my guitar teacher kissed me on the left cheek, the right cheek, and then with his right hand, slapped my left cheek stiffly and shook my jaw in his grasp, like something out of The Godfather. Indeed, the whole scene, playing out there in Martino’s tiny, cluttered studio (one room in a South Philadelphia row-house) had the makings of some classic movie or other, though my version was decidedly more Woody Allen than it was Coppola.
Owww! I wanted to scream. What the hell? That hurt!

And it did. In fact, I think his fingernail drew a little blood on the side of my hairless chin. But I said nothing—partly out of shock, but mostly out of respect for the Master.
Ding! Coppola: 1, Woody Allen: 0

Your Main Characters

Pat Martino: then forty-one years old, a former Heavy Weight, the Italian Stallion of Bebop, on the mend from a debilitating brain aneurysm, forgetful and long-winded, slowly relearning the instrument that brought him worldwide fame in the 1970’s.

Me: a star struck seventeen year-old with a dorky mullet and tinted prescription glasses that were only slightly smaller than a snorkeling mask. A high school student, a Feather Weight, eager to please my teacher. So eager that I took a rather simple “Etude” he’d given me during our third lesson and spent the entire week dissecting it, embellishing it, cuddling it, nudging it, orchestrating it, and finally recording it with emulated orchestral sounds on my guitar synthesizer.

“Umm, like, so…you liked it?” I asked, my voice shaky, still startled by all the hugging, kissing and cheek slapping.
Pat laughed and nodded his head. “Man, I gave you an exercise and you turned into a fucking symphony!” he groaned, his words dark and always slightly slurred, possibly from some medication, possibly from the operation, possibly from growing up in South Philly near a chemical plant, I never had the guts to ask.
“Well, you didn’t tell me what you wanted me to do with it,” I said honestly. Because again: the truth was, he hadn’t.

Pat Martino had a Zen-like approach to teaching guitar: You showed up at his house, you were ushered up a dimly lit staircase by an old, exceedingly fragile looking man who I always assumed was the butler (later there’d be a foot-in-mouth moment when I discovered the diminutive stick-figure was actually, oy! Martino’s father). Pat opened the door, shook your hand and told you to take a seat. Then he’d play various recordings he was working on, there, on his 4-track. Or he talked about his music as it related to Walt Whitman. Or he’d show you far-out sketches he’d made on his Apple computer and then talk endlessly about Charles Ives or Samuel Barber (like you knew who they were).

If, perhaps, you took away something you could use in your improvisations, great. If you learned something about music as an art form, even better. But if you gleaned something about Pat Martino’s philosophy—how music and nature were intertwined, how theory and harmony were the same as the rings in a tree or the waves on the ocean—well then you really got your money’s worth.

“Why are we plunking down fifty dollars a week for you to sit there and listen to him pontificate about the Fibonacci Sequence?!” my father would vent over my mother’s burnt casserole.

I didn’t have an answer. Not once in the four lessons I took from him did either of us ever open a guitar case. We just sat and talked and listened and talked some more, all the while breathing in the fantastically strong aroma of sausages frying in the kitchen downstairs (apparently the butler was on a strict diet of them). Then, at the end of the lesson, Pat would give me a small ream of etudes he’d written, I’d thank him, hand him a check, and be off on my way.

Later, at home, I’d look over the etudes—really nothing more than interesting chord progressions printed out from his Macintosh—and arpeggiate them over and over again trying to figure out what on earth to do with them. I mean, yeah, they were beautiful in an odd, sophisticated kind of way, but what good were a lot of chord progressions to a seventeen year-old with a dorky mullet and tinted prescription glasses that were only slightly smaller than a snorkeling mask who wanted to learn jazz guitar? My father was right: What was Martino trying to teach me?

“I dint tell you what to do wit dem, but man you show’re god-it,” Pat howled in imitation jive-talk before slapping me on the cheek again and falling into a deep belly laugh.
I’d never heard him laugh so much. Was he stoned, I wondered? Or just sincerely surprised to the point of mirth, like my parents sometimes were when I brought home a straight-A report card.

Whatever the reason, he was suddenly a changed man. Instead of talking about poetry or philosophy, he wanted to know how I made the recording. He wanted to know who made my guitar synthesizer and how could he get one.

The hour lesson turned into a two and a half-hour marathon conversation about Roland guitar synthesizers and the volume pedal as a sustaining device. By the time I left, he was on the phone with a Roland sales rep who’d later ship him a brand new 707 free of charge. But more importantly, by the time I left, the dynamic had shifted drastically. I was no longer his student; he was no longer my teacher. And while I would continue to play the protégé to his Master, in many ways we were now two artists meeting somewhere near the middle. Coppola had cut most of the pork out of his diet. Woody Allen had developed a taste for gorgonzola (albeit with the help of a lactose pill).
Ding! Coppola: 1, Woody Allen: 1

At Martino’s suggestion, we continued to meet, sometimes more than once a week, but he never charged me a penny. From that day on, we continued to speak about music, there, in his sausage-scented studio, but we spoke the way friends did, naturally and candidly.

In the months that followed, a low budget film was shot about Pat’s life. Both Tal Farlow and George Benson were interviewed and spoke nostalgically about their old friend, the improv legend, Pat Martino. Next came me with my dorky mullet and tinted prescription glasses that were only slightly smaller than a snorkeling mask. Nervous under the hot lights, I sat in front of the camera sweating like I was in a sauna rather than my bedroom studio, blathering on about “love for all natural things” with a thick Philadelphia accent and poor grammar.

I am so out of my league here, I thought, as the makeup woman blotted my forehead for the sixth time, struggling in vain to mop up the perspiration with a small cloth. I mean me in a movie with these cats?

Up until then, my biggest problem in life was figuring out how to open the pack of LifeSavers when the little red string broke. Now, suddenly, on account of that little etude, I had to figure out how to speak eloquently about a man I barely knew while a short-tempered, disgruntled director shot take after take.
“For fuck’s sake kid! Who do you think you are, Richard Nixon?! Come on. Retake! Retake! Retake!”
Ding! Ding! Ding! Coppola: 1, Woody Allen: 2

The following week, Pat, who’d recently received his Roland GR-707 guitar synthesizer, decided he wanted to create the same kind of sustain as I had on the etude tape.
“Well for that you’re going to need a volume pedal and a digital delay machine,” I explained.

Pat looked at me for a moment and again with the mock jive-talk said, “Git yo’ar jackit brutha.”

Thirty seconds later we were walking the streets of South Philadelphia, headed to a local music store owned by a friend of his—a man whose name escapes me, but quite honestly could have been the fattest living person ever to sell anyone a volume pedal. And, on top of that, he had a monkey. Yes, a real, live monkey in the store named Cosby, who I could only assume was named after the African-American actor, Bill Cosby.

“Go ahead,” Fatso said to me as Pat paid for the volume pedal. “You can pet him. Any friend of Pat’s is a friend of Cosby’s.”
“No, I’d rather not,” I said, eagerly anticipating our eminent departure from the store.

“Aww come on kid, whaddaya scared of? He’s a friendly monkey. Aren’t you Cosby?”

Cosby chirped a few times the way small monkeys do and jumped from the cash register to the back wall where he then hung from a rack of guitar strings as if he were hanging from a tree branch.

“Yeah, Cosby’s a very friendly little fella,” Pat echoed, snapping his fingers for the monkey to come down off the wall and give him some affection.

And indeed they seemed to be old friends because Cosby swooped right down to Pat’s side and nuzzled up to him like a cat might.

“Go ahead pet him,” Blubber Ball repeated, as if we were playing Truth or Dare and I had elected a dare.
“Really, it’s okay. I’m sure he’s a very nice monkey, it’s just that I’m allergic.”

I really didn’t know if I was allergic to monkeys or not but I was allergic to dogs and certain types of birds so I tossed that out there. But the simple truth was, I just didn’t feel like petting the stupid monkey. I mean who keeps an un-caged, unchained, quite possible untamed monkey in a music store? Name me one other person. Just one.

Now it was Pat’s turn to dare me: “Come on man, pet the little guy. See, he wants to say hello to you.”

It was true: Cosby was walking away from Pat and headed in my direction. In another moment I was going to have to either pet the jungle creature or walk out of the store and risk insulting Enormo-Guy, which certainly wouldn’t look good in front of Pat, who’d just gotten an enormo “preferred client” discount on the volume pedal.

So I nervously reached out to give Cosby a tap on the head. But before I could reach his little furry face, the bastard lunged for my leg.

Never had I felt pain resembling that before—and I’m including the time I caught my girlfriend in the backseat of her Toyota Corolla with the muscle-head college kid who lived across the creek.

But it wasn’t just a quick bite. No, the monkey now hung from my leg by his teeth as I screamed maniacally, running around the store in circles trying to shake him loose.
“Ahhhh! Get him off! Get him off! Motherfucker! Get him off! Ahhhhh!!!!”

A few hours later, having endured a tetanus shot, and a few others for diseases apparently only monkeys living in music stores in South Philadelphia are known to carry, I sat in my parent’s living room with an icepack on my bandaged leg popping yet another Tylenol into my mouth.

“So what did you learn at Pat’s today?” my father inquired sardonically when he got home from work.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!