Heart and Soul

Book by Mandel Sally

When I turned eleven, my major goal was to grow bigger breasts than Pauline Sabatino. At that point, I could still ignore my need for music, and what was definitely not on my list was the notion of performing in Carnegie Hall with the great David Montagnier in front of 2,802 people, not counting standing room. If you had told me it was going to happen, I would have said you had your head stuck someplace where the sun didn’t shine and we all would have had a good laugh, except for Pauline who didn’t know what Carnegie Hall was. Anyhow, the media is always wanting to know how I got from a crummy neighborhood in Nassau County, Long Island, to a world-famous two-piano partnership. Being Bess “the Mouth” Stallone (no relation), I used to hand out the old flip response: “Practice.” But given the way my life has turned out, I decided it’s time to try to make some sense out of it all.

First of all, I never thought of myself as some kind of girl wonder, unless you count a genius for dreaming up creative excuses for why my report card didn’t show up in my parents’ mail, or how come the family laundry—my responsibility along with the rest of the housework—had blue stains all over it. But there was always this thing inside me that made me different. When I was little, I thought everybody had it, but once I figured out it had to do with the piano, I knew I was really on my own. I mean, there was nobody else in Rocky Beach who flipped out over Mozart, or if they did, they sure as hell kept it a deep dark secret. I know it’s supposed to be impossible to run at something just as fast as you’re running away from it, but that’s the way it was for me with music.

My earliest memories are of sound: my mother’s voice singing “Bela Bambina” in the darkness as I fell asleep; the opera of dogs yapping to each other on the street outside my window; sirens, car alarms, and always, always music. I can give you the theme songs of every TV show all the way back to 1968 when I was two years old. My visual impressions of childhood are pretty hazy, but the sounds stuck with me.

Then in sixth grade there was a recital at school. Mostly, it was selections by the band which sounded pretty much like a bunch of elephants with intestinal distress. Ray Zilenski kept pulling my hair from the seat behind me and Pauline was crying because she got gum stuck on her new blouse. I was cranky from the pain in my ears. But then the band clattered off and Amanda Jones sat down at the piano and began to play “The Happy Farmer,” by Robert Schumann. Talk about being bonked over the head. Nobody was paying attention except for Amanda’s parents and me but I’ll never forget that first clumsy little classical ditty. I hung around after everybody left the auditorium and went to the piano. It was a beat-up old baby grand with dirty yellow keys but to me it seemed like a holy relic. I started fooling around until I’d figured out more or less how the keyboard was organized and then I worked out the tune I’d heard Amanda play. Bess Stallone Meets the Piano—it was like being born.

My parents didn’t quite see it that way. When I pleaded for lessons, my father said, “Sure, Liberace. I’ll just hand you the mortgage money and you can serenade us when we’re living out on the street.” Nobody in my family knows from a simple yes or no answer. There always has to be drama.

I kept my mouth shut, but all the time I was scheming. I’d saved over fifty dollars from doing chores in the neighborhood, which I figured was good for a couple of lessons, and a few times a week I snuck into the music room at school and tried to reproduce stuff I heard on the classical radio station. I was eleven years old when Mrs. Fasio caught me trying to work out Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, which I liked even more than Wild Cherry’s number one tune, “Play That Funky Music.” Mrs. Fasio was the chorus teacher who also gave piano lessons. The kids called her Olive Oyl behind her back on account of her having popped-out eyes and being so skinny.

“Who are you?” she asked me as I was trying to make a run for the door. She was quick, and grabbed hold of my elbow before I could squirm away. I remember noticing that her panty hose hung off her ankles, she was that thin.

I slumped back down on the bench, knowing I was in deep shit—(a) because I had given the gym teacher a phony excuse about being sick so I could practice the piano, and (b) I’d figured out how to pick the lock Mrs. Fasio attached to a clamp on the piano lid.

“Your name,” she said.

“Bess Stallone.”

“How old are you?”

It’s funny how I remember every detail of that first meeting. It’s like when I first met David. Even at the time, I must have sensed how important it was. Anyway, I told her I was eleven.

“Good.” Mrs. Fasio sat down beside me. “Then maybe it’s not too late.”

I had my first lesson right there in the music room that had the sharp metallic smell of spit from the brass instruments. We didn’t hear the bell that signaled the end of gym class and the next thing I knew the assistant principal was banging on the door. The way he looked at Mrs. Fasio, I was scared she’d get fired.

“I’m not going to gym anymore,” I told him. “I’m doing this instead.” Not the most sensible remark I could have made to a guy who thought sports was what God did on his day off, and it didn’t sit well, especially when Mrs. Fasio backed me up. The guy was on my butt for months after that, sending demerit slips home to my parents and docking my privileges. Funny thing, he showed up backstage at Lincoln Center years later and asked me and David to sign his program. I was thinking, okay, Bess, here’s your chance: Dear Asshole, If I’d listened to you, I’d still be bagging groceries in Rocky Beach. But I took the high road and even though I spelled his name wrong on purpose, I scribbled Best regards.

I finally got my parents to pay for lessons by agreeing to baby-sit my sister every Saturday night. Mrs. Fasio found me an old junker upright piano. It lost a few of its keys right away when my cousins fell through the top screwing around but I was crazy about it and called it Amadoofus. Nobody wanted to listen to scales and when I played Chopin, my father would start yelling, “What the fuck is this, a fucking funeral? Can’t you play something with a fucking beat?” I loved the guys at the firehouse where he worked, but the vocabulary was kind of limited. Anyhow, Dad finally took an axe to Amadoofus, but I don’t want to talk about that.

So Mrs. Fasio taught me some pieces that I was supposed to play at her semiannual recital. That’s when I learned about fear. One time when I was little, my cousin dangled me by the ankles over the side of a bridge. I thought that was pretty scary at the time, but it couldn’t compare to the way I felt about Mrs. Fasio’s recital. I phoned her the night before, pretending I was my mother with some bullshit story about how Bess couldn’t attend the recital because she’d come down with pernicious anemia, a disease Pauline found in the encyclopedia. Naturally Mrs. Fasio double-checked, so not only did I have to show up for the recital but I caught hell from my mother for lying. Since I was slated for last, I had to sit there sweating through my party dress and tasting Fruit Loops from breakfast in the back of my throat while everybody else waltzed up and did their thing without so much as a twitch. Anyhow, time marched on and it was my turn. When I sat down on the bench, my right knee started bouncing and my fingers were slimy and cold. All I can remember thinking was Oh, God, somebody kill me kill me kill me. I must have stumbled through my Mozart Sonata because I somehow arrived at the last chord, but when I stood up, everything went black. Well, no, not black, everything but black. Every color exploding at once in front of my eyes. I passed out and broke my nose on the keyboard.

After that experience, it didn’t matter if there were ten or ten thousand in the audience, I was scared shitless, and that is a reasonably accurate term, I can tell you. I didn’t realize it then, of course, but right there in Mrs. Fasio’s living room I had taken the first step on my journey to David Montagnier.

So after that I became a teenager with this totally weird need to be listening to the local classical music station twenty-four hours a day. There was only one person in the world who didn’t seem to think I was nuts and that was Mrs. Fasio, which was pretty scary in itself. If I followed her lead, I figured I’d wind up a lonely old maid who was half-fermented from the buckets of bourbon she started guzzling about four o’clock every afternoon.

I suppose most adolescents feel alone, like nobody understands their own special problems. On the one hand, I was ashamed of my obsession and felt like there was something seriously wrong with me and I should just study computer technology like my father said. On the other, there was a tiny kernel of conviction way down deep that God had slipped a special gift into my packaging and I’d damn well better honor it. Talk about confused. I tried distracting myself with things like sex and drinking, but the bottom line was I still couldn’t stay away from the keyboard. It’s like the piano was a person to me. The way Pauline was hung up on Billy Joel, our Long Island piano man, I was mooning over a photo of Vladimir Horowitz that I kept hidden under the junk beside my bed. I’d get it out just before I turned out my light and stare at it despite the fact that even in the picture he was probably at least a hundred years old, listening in my head to the passionate pyr...