Perseverance embodied
Music’s the only reason Pat King says he’s still here
Self-taught musician Patrick King has battled a lifetime of challenges
His parents generously brought him into this world with two middle names. But the loving ended there.
“They were drunks,” says Patrick Rory Allen King. Mother died 35 years ago, at 41. And father is probably long gone too. “I don’t know for sure,” Pat says, “and I don’t care.”
Pat is 56. He lives — clean and sober — at the top of a long, steep flight of stairs in an 1800s building downtown.
Maybe you’ve seen him around. He’s just a pinch past five-feet tall. Weighs 98 pounds, sometimes a little more. His eyes are clear, his face unlined, and on this day he’s sporting a fresh $10-with-tip flat-top.
A good place to spot Pat is at Pam’s Coffee, just inside the King and James entrance to Jackson Square. If you’re lucky, it’ll be on a day when he brings along his banjo or mandolin.
He sits in the corner, near the pop machine, and plays the tunes softly. Pieces like Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here or Neil Young’s Old Man.
Pat listens to these songs on the radio (no CDs, no TV, no computer at his place) and he can play them. He can’t read music, never had a lick of instruction. His childhood didn’t come with piano lessons. It often didn’t come with dinner.
Pat grew up on the old York Road, before urban renewal scraped it clean. The family lived above a store. Pat had arrived with a stillborn identical twin. And he had one older brother, who followed his parents’ path to an early death.
Pat is sure his parents had kids for the baby bonus cheques, which went to the waiters at nearby taverns like the Regal.
“At home they always called me dummy,” Pat says. “I was a dummy at school too. And hungry most of the time.”
That’s not to say Mom never fed him. One day it was tomato soup. Pat wasn’t eating it. Mom slammed his head to the table, broke his nose, kept him home from school a couple of days until it healed a little.
Pat has epilepsy, and some of the seizures at school were severe. He would convulse and wet himself. That doesn’t help make friends on the playground. It was Hess Street School first, then Ainslie Wood vocational. Then out, at 16.
But Pat did not follow his family to the bottom. In his early 20s, he went to a job training program at Mohawk and confessed, “I’m a bit illiterate.”
And they taught him how to read and write.
He had some work along the way. Restaurant duty, roofing, etching tombstones, carpentry, painting signs. But he still lives with epilepsy.
And walking can be hard. His middle toes on each foot cross over each other — the result, he says, of wearing the same evermore-cramped shoes for years in boyhood.
Pat’s challenges bring a slim government stipend each month. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t eat fast food. He starts each day with an Ovaltine.
In the ’90s, Pat bought a mandolin and learned to play it. He then searched out jam sessions around town and joined in. He got to know some musicians and they got to know that Pat is a handy guy.
He has a hobby now, repairing autoharps, zithers, violas, mandolins, guitars. He spends hours bringing an instrument back to life. For instance, if a guitar comes in for repair with a plastic bridge saddle, he replaces that part with bone. He gets a beef shank at the market and cuts it and shapes it.
He doesn’t make money at this, just charges his musician friends the cost of the materials.
But life is lonely. There were two women. Diabetes took one, when Pat was 26. A brain aneurysm claimed the other when Pat was 42. He’s not looking anymore.
It’s just the music and the instruments now, he says. “That’s the only reason I’m still here.”
I was a dummy at school too. And hungry most of the time PAT KING