Marc

When Ted was about 13 or 14, he got interested in music. In true Ted fashion, that meant he was in head first. Early in the morning on November 13th, 1976, Ted suited up in his space suit and my dad brought him to a music store in Rockville, Maryland called Veneman’s, which had agreed to open early in order for my brother to shop for guitars, free of stares. The Veneman’s guy appointed to the task of showing my brother around, guitar-wise, was Marc Cherry.

Marc was (and is) a musician. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard him play in person, but I remember just…the fluidity of listening to him. His sound is elegant. I’m not sure how else to say it. He worked at music stores in the Maryland area while playing gigs with various bands at nightclubs and clubs in the DC area, including Blues Alley and the Maryland Inn.

He now lives in Arizona, and still plays beautifully (here’s a link to his recent album, Strings Attached, which also features a song called The Empty Room, for the book I wrote about losing my brother). He also invented something called in MBrace stand that basically hold yours your guitar safely in place, allowing the performer to walk away from it, and back to it, so that they can play more than one instrument during a song. (It also alleviates fatigue and neck pain if you use it in the studio for recording sessions, per his website.)

When I spoke to him recently, he wanted to make sure that I also noted that he was still devilishly handsome. So please, take note, so I don’t get in trouble.

I know the actual date that he met Ted, because Marc said the movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” that was, in part, based on my brother, had aired the night before on his (Marc’s) birthday, November 12th. And I know the movie aired in 1976.

I love specifics…and they’re sometimes hard to come by in recollected anecdotes that unfolded decades ago.

“He wanted to get a new amp,” says Marc. But he couldn’t test them out, because the suit, which was made out of some sort of thick fabric, covered his fingers. (I remember the suit hand pieces not even having five fingers built into them, in fact, but I might be mis-remembering that.)

“So, I did the playing and talked to him about the amp,” said Marc, who also, somehow remembers that it was a Music Man amplifier. “He had the face mask on, so you couldn’t see his face. But it was just kind of strange talking to him. Like I said, I had just seen the movie, and I didn’t know how much of a farce it really was yet.”

It was fortuitous that Marc was the one playing that day, really, because Ted was impressed with him. And he liked him. A few days later, my mother called him and asked if he’d be interested in being Ted’s teacher.

One thing I’ve learned, over the last few months, talking to Ted’s friends, is that he picked them carefully. He was not a kid so desperate for connection that he’d take any friend. He picked people who were authentic, who did not talk down to him, and who managed, somehow, to see around his sterile room, and his spacesuit, and see him.

Ted recognized all of that in Marc, and the invitation was proffered. Marc said “Sure.” And he quickly became part of our extended family, and the “salon” that gathered regularly, in different formulations, in the non-sterile half of my brother’s room.

“I remember the first lesson,” he said. “I just asked him to learn what I showed him first. And this is the thing, I only had to show him once. I started in the key of A, A major and A minor scales, two octaves, ascending and descending. And I was just trying to see what his hand position was like.”

Next week, when he came back, he says, he was doing the scales perfectly. “It was pretty impressive because it wasn’t just learning the scale. It was just great hand position. All the little things that I talked about, that I forgot that I even said, he got completely.”

After that, he said, they started working…after a fashion. Sometimes they’d do a three- hour lesson. Sometimes half an hour, if other people showed up—anyone from me and my parents to other friends, doctors, and nurses, who usually hung round for a while, as well. Medical care sometimes interfered, but not for long.

“I remember one time, George [a male nurse] brought in the EKG machine. And he says, ‘Do you want to know how this thing works?’ I was like, okay. So, he was holding this thing up and showing me what buttons to push.”

“It wasn’t so much like I was trying to teach him how to read music, because I don’t,’” Marc said. “I was just trying to talk to him about, ‘This is a way to think about it.’ If you see a piece of music, and it has a D chord or two bars of four bars, don’t play the same one. Play in D and then do a second inversion and move it around a little bit. And he got that very easily.”

By the end of what he calls their “formal” lessons, he said Ted was jamming along to the likes of Chick Corea. (Though I remember him being more of a classic rock fan, myself.)

“He definitely had a gift,” said Marc. But he noted that it was not just music. It was more that he was an artist by nature. “Like when everybody found out that he could draw. It was more than just sitting down and doodling with a pencil.” (He specifically mentioned a self-portrait we found among his things, and that later was printed in the program handed out at his funeral.)

“He excelled in music and chess and he loved Shakespeare and a lot of things that you don’t really think of for a teenager. He was able to talk to you on your level, more than the other way around.”

I asked him what he thought got Ted through, how he survived as well as he did. “He always had a great sense of his own identity,” he said. “He knew the things that motivated him. His likes and dislikes. And he was aware of his abilities. I think all of that helped galvanize his spirit.”

Marc remembered going to the Capital Center in our DJ friend Norm (aka Kevin James’s) van for concerts, and the concert that resulted in Ted getting his second Les Paul. “We went to see Loggins and Messina. And Kenny Loggins had a natural Les Paul Custom. And was like ‘That’s a really nice one,’ and we talked about it for a little bit.”

Ted already had a Les Paul, a Gibson gold top, that he loved. “That was his baby,” said Marc. (Agreed…I’m currently contemplating getting a tattoo of it…that’s how strongly I associate that guitar with him.)

Marc had a connection at the Washington Music Center and convinced them to open up early for Ted one day. He had gone up two days before and picked through the Les Pauls and picked out one he thought Ted would like. Ted brought home Les Paul number two, but it never displaced the gold top as his favorite.

We talked more about the old days, including a dark day in which Marc came to visit, and found Ted in the midst of a rage, because his blood counts, which had been elevating in such a promising fashion that there was talk of him getting out, had plummeted again.

“I passed Vince (my father) in the hall when I was walking down the hallway and he said ‘It’s not a good night.’ And when I got there, he had thrown all the furniture out of the room, into the outside area.”

Marc, not entirely getting the situation right away, said he said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? Why are you doing all this stuff? Don’t you know everybody’s trying to help you?”

Marc said Ted looked at him in disbelief.

“I got it pretty quickly,” said Marc.

I tell that story—though it’s clearly a painful one for Marc to remember—to illustrate that Ted was not some Buddha kid that was never perturbed by anything. He was faced with a lot. And he dealt with it. Sometimes, as in this night, it wasn’t pretty. But who would have taken the news of liberty removed any better?

When Marc came back the next time, he said, Ted was fine. “I don’t know anyone else that could have dealt with that,” he said. “He was just a combination of some incredibly strong characteristics and traits.” He later tried to enumerate those traits. They were ones that get mentioned a lot in reference to him: resilience, hope, humor.

There was a lot more in this interview. But the thing that slayed me, was him telling me about he and Norm (aka Kevin James) visiting in the days after Ted collapsed from heart failure, and was literally clinging to life. “At night, before we would go, we would sit outside of the floor, backs against the wall. We’d call it sending good vibes. We would just sit there for a while and do that, every night.”

As I said, my brother picked his friends carefully, and well. If good vibes could have cured him, he’d still be with us.

The last time Marc saw Ted, he said Ted said, “Thanks for being around.”

“I remember saying, ‘Well, where else would I be?’”

The next morning, he got a call from my father telling him Ted was gone.