The things that bring back memories, and the memories that expand from there…
Among the Christmas music on my computer is this collection: “Music of the Medieval Court and Countryside for the Christmas Season.” Performed by the New York Pro Musica, it was just one of a string of astonishingly beautiful albums of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance selections produced by Pro Musica founder and director Noah Greenberg in the 1950s-‘60s.
But this note isn’t about the music itself, it’s about my friend Dave Liberman – who died way too young in the 1990s – and his odd inability to deal with the world despite his brilliance.
Dave, one of the original members of “The House” on 34th St. in Philly that I’ve written about often before, gave me several reel-to-reel tapes while we lived there in 1963. They were a wonderfully odd collection of stuff he’d recorded; some I could trace, others came I don’t know from where.
One of those tapes included my first exposure to this Christmas collection, which he must have taped from an album, because a short but rollicking piece, “Riu Riu,” had the distinctive catch and repeat that was the bane of so many attempts to record scratched LPs. For some reason, whenever I played the collection, I waited for that defect with a weird glee, scooting the tape along to pass the worst of it, hoping I could reconnect at just the right place to make it a complete entity.
Later, I found and bought the record, which I taped to a cassette many years further along, then, later still, digitized to my Mac. Now I get a sad letdown when “Riu Rui” plays wholly unmolested. But hearing it the other day brought Dave back to me.
Dave was a gentle, delightful human being with an underlayment of intense anger, which I don’t think was induced by mistreatment or evil incidents, but part of his basic nature. A budding math genius, he was in his senior year at Penn when me met, graduating first in his class while spending much of that year lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. He could have been, should have been, almost anything. (One thing he did become was the character Dorsal in my novel No Bike.)
Somewhere in that year I was removed from affection by my girlfriend Marcia, which affection she transferred to Dave. It was painful as hell for me, but there was no fault in Dave attached to it.
Marcia and I had reserved ship space for a European trip that summer, but after the rejection I switched to flying over. Was this decision to leave my ship space for Dave? Something like that, though the details are misty. At any rate, we were all to reunite in England.
Instead, Dave decided to ingest some heavenly-blue morning glory seeds, rumored to be a Mighty Hallucinogen. In Dave’s case, they brought on the worst of bad trips. He didn’t make it to Europe, and I didn’t get together with Marcia until Greece.
I should note, here, that Dave, though generally mild, non-threatening and probably no more than 5’9”, was a compact mass of muscle, immensely strong. One time I saw a trio of tall, lunking frat boys confront him, not sure why. That usually hidden anger settled on Dave like a canopy. Fortunately, nothing physical transpired, because I think he would have broken bones.
At any rate, the morning glory seeds (or something internal) drove him psychotic, and from what I later learned, it took five cops to restrain him. He ended up institutionalized for a short period. I’ve never figured whether that mad experience was a cause for later problems or an illumination of an underlying warp.
I was best man at his wedding a couple years later. The wedding was great fun, but marriage soon turned sour. I don’t recall what he was doing for a living then, but when I visited him some time later while he was living alone in Boston, he was driving a taxi and using that incredible mind to figure out how to steal from the fares he picked up. That was the last tine I saw him.
About a decade ago, I tried to track Dave down online. Alas, there is a surfeit of David Libermans and Liebermans in the wide world. All I could find about his later days was his funeral notice, which I didn’t copy – fool! But while checking for his background, I stumbled over a site listing the annual prizewinners for best math paper presented by a freshman at UPenn.
Not surprisingly, Dave had won in 1960. I also noted that five years previously that freshman prize had been given to Robert Cantor, perhaps the best teacher I ever had for any subject.
Cantor came to a far sadder end than Dave, as detailed in a past rumen.
* * * *
Leftovers Supreme:
North Korea should be encouraged to continue its missile tests. What better gift to nuclear non-proliferation than the Dear Leader shooting all his unarmed missiles into the ocean?
* * * *
Song of the Week
tune: “Till There Was You”:
There were turds on the hill,
But I never smelled them stinking,
No, I never smelled them at all…
Though they were poo.
* * * *
Finally, there appears to be, in actuality, an archaeologist at Cardiff University named Flint Dibble.
lickhaven 