by Sarah Vowell
Dad shoots the cannon again so that they can see how it works. The other hiker says, “That’s quite the machine you got there.” But he isn’t talking about the cannon. He’s talking about my tape recorder and my microphone—which is called a shotgun mike. I stare back at him, then I look over at my father’s cannon, then down at my microphone, and I think, Oh. My. God. My dad and I are the same person. We’re both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. What’s worse, I was liking it.
I haven’t changed my mind about guns. I can get behind the cannon because it is a completely ceremonial object. It’s unwieldy and impractical, just like everything else I care about. Try to rob a convenience store with this 110-pound Saturday night special, you’d still be dragging it in the door Sunday afternoon.
I love noise. As a music fan, I’m always waiting for that moment in a song when something just flies out of it and explodes in the air. My dad is a one-man garage band, the kind of rock ’n’ roller who slaves away at his art for no reason other than to make his own sound. My dad is an artist—a pretty driven, idiosyncratic one, too. He’s got his last Gesamtkunstwerk all planned out. It’s a performance piece. We’re all in it—my mom, the loneliest twin in history, and me.
When my father dies, take a wild guess what he wants done with his ashes. Here’s a hint: It requires a cannon.
“You guys are going to love this,” he smirks, eyeballing the cannon. “You get to drag this thing up on top of the Gravellies on opening day of hunting season. And looking off at Sphinx Mountain, you get to put me in little paper bags. I can take my last hunting trip on opening morning.”
I’ll do it, too. I will have my father’s body burned into ashes. I will pack these ashes into paper bags. I will go to the mountains with my mother, my sister, and the cannon. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so that he doesn’t take anyone with him. I will light the fuse. But I will not cover my ears. Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt.
Music Lessons
IT WAS AUTUMN IN AMERICA, a fine hot Indian summer day. Pretty high school girls sat on bleachers with the sun shining in their pretty hair, watching handsome high school boys play football. And then, it was halftime, which is where I came in.
I was standing in line in my silver spats down past the end zone waiting to go on. I was in marching band. I had a foot-tall, fake fur black hat, with the vaguely processed food name “shako,” strapped under my chin. The shako’s purpose is to make a scrubby assortment of adolescents look magisterial. But it not only prevented me from breathing, it rendered me and my comrades in the horn section unstable, so that even though my job was to march around as some kind of sick metaphor for teenage military precision, I moved through time and space with the grace and confidence of a puppy walking on a beach ball.
Because of my double shortage of strength and coordination, I barely passed gym. But somehow, I was supposed to lift a baritone horn that measured twice my body weight, blow into it while reading microscopic sheet music, step in a straight line while remembering left foot on beats one and three, right foot on beats two and four, and maneuver myself into cute visual formations, like the trio of stick figures we fashioned when we played the theme from My Three Sons.
Halfway through the halftime program, I had to break formation, drop my baritone horn on the field, and sprint to the fifty-yard line—a long haul—with everyone in the band, the pretty girls in the bleachers, and the football players on the sidelines all watching and waiting, silent and still. At midfield I picked up my mallets and—this is what they had been waiting for—I pounded out a xylophone solo on a little Latin-flavored number called “Tico Tico.”
My polo shirt–clad nemesis Andy Heap stood up in the stands screaming, “Vowell! Vowell! Whooooo! Whoooo!”, as the laughter of his friends, at me, drowned out the horn section. This was the same Andy Heap, I might add, who earlier in the week in music history class had delivered an oral report on Tchaikovsky’s lady friend, calling her Mimi throughout (even though her name was Nadya). Andy Heap was apparently smart enough to publicly humiliate me during “Tico Tico,” he just wasn’t smart enough to know that the abbreviation “Mme.” stands not for Mimi, but “Madame.”
I only had a second to stick out my tongue at Andy when I finished “Tico Tico,” because I had to let go of the mallets, rush over to my baritone—again, the freeze-framed spectators, the loneliness of the long-distance runner—and I’m back in formation with the low brass for the finale.
I was getting academic credit for this, to wear that uniform to play those songs. I was getting graded. Which begs the question: What exactly was I supposed to be learning? What was marching band supposed to teach me? Because marching isn’t a particularly applicable skill in later life. Here then, some lessons—actually useful ones—I accidentally learned while pursuing music.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON #1: MARXISM FOR TENTH GRADERS
Once a week, the best band kids played with the orchestra. I played the bass drum in orchestra, which meant that I never got to play. My participation ratio was something like seventy-five measures of rest per one big bass wallop. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the class warfare of the situation. Here’s what I figured out: Orchestra kids wear tuxedos. Band kids wear tuxedo T-shirts.
The orchestra kids, with their brown woolens and Teutonic last names, had the well-scrubbed, dark blond aura of a Hitler Youth brigade. These were the sons and daughters of humanities professors. They took German. They played soccer. Dumping the fluorescent T-shirts of the band kids into the orchestra each week must have looked like tossing a handful of Skittles into a box of Swiss chocolates.
But nothing brings kids together like hate. The one thing the band kids and the orchestra kids had in common was a unified disgust for the chorus kids, who were, to us, merely drama geeks with access to four-part harmony. A shy violin player wasn’t likely to haunt the halls between classes playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any more than a band kid would blare “Land of 1000 Dances” on his tuba more than three inches outside the band room door. But that didn’t stop the choir girls from making everyone temporarily forget their locker combinations thanks to an impromptu, uncalled-for burst from Brigadoon.
Andy Heap: chorus.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON # 2: WHERE’S WALTER?
My junior high had an electronic music lab. We made tape loops and learned words like “quadraphonic.” In my spare time, just for fun, I checked out all the books on electronic music from the library. My favorite records for a while there were Walter Carlos’s concept albums Switched-On Bach and its sequel, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which offered what I thought were hilariously witty covers of Bach classics performed on (get this) a Moog synthesizer. What kind of madcap visionary was capable of turning eighteenth-century fugues into machine-age mongrels?
In my readings on electronic music, something puzzled me. Every time I’d look into Walter Carlos, the information would just stop and someone named Wendy Carlos would turn up. I got to school early one morning to ask my electronic-music teacher what happened to Walter and was Wendy Walter’s wife or daughter? He didn’t answer for a long time. Then he blurted out, “Uh, Wendy is Walter.”
What did he mean?
“Walter had a sex change operation and changed his name to Wendy.”
What’s a sex change operation? I had just started eighth grade. I knew absolutely nothing about sex. We didn’t talk about it in my family and sex ed wasn’t scheduled until spring. I was a wholesome, smalltown Christian kid engaged in what I thought were wholesome, smalltown Christian pursuits. It’s Bach for heaven’s sake. Suddenly, bam, I’m standing at the corner of Sodom and Gomorrah and where’s my street map?
That Walter Carlos. I hadn’t even recovered from the shock that Bach could be messed with.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON # 3: BIOLOGY
AS DESTINY
In seventh grade, I started band. I wanted to play the drums. My parents, who lived with me—as was the custom in Montana—did not want me to play the drums. So I picked the next loudest instrument instead—the trumpet. How I loved my trumpet, the feel of it in my hands, its very volume and shine. I especially loved the illicitly named spit valve.
In eighth grade, a teacher told me about this good old trumpet player I might like so I went out and bought one of his records. And every night, for over a year, I went to sleep listening to it, the same songs over and over, trying to figure out why Louis Armstrong was so moving, so funny, so good. I got caught up in this superstar talent of his right around the time I was beginning to suspect that I didn’t have it, talent that is.
There was another problem which I discovered about three years into my trumpet career. I found out that the reason I had shoddy tone and trouble hitting the high notes was because of the shape of my jaw. I felt my life was more or less over. I was outraged that a person’s fate could depend on something as arbitrary as the angles of her teeth. And not only that, I had to switch to a brass instrument with a bigger mouthpiece—the baritone horn. The baritone horn. Like, trumpets are played by Miles Davis and baritones are played by nobody.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON #4: HE’S SCHROEDER, I’M CHARLIE BROWN
One of the reasons I knew I wasn’t God’s gift to music was that I went to school with him—the living, breathing personification of entertainment—Jon Wilson. Jon Wilson could play the piano. Like REALLY. PLAY. THE PIANO. He knew all the crowd-pleasing keyboard favorites. Kids would come up to him and request the Charlie Brown theme song or Van Halen’s “Jump” so often I’m surprised he didn’t roll a baby grand with an empty milk carton on top into the junior high cafeteria and play for tips during lunch.
The thing that bothered me about Jon Wilson, who was actually a pretty nice guy, was that people loved him! Loved him! And our friendly competition heated up when we both got serious about writing music. By fifteen, I was composing orchestral scores which went unperformed for the most part, and justifiably so. They were difficult, unlistenable, and wildly pretentious, though, thankfully, I didn’t learn the word “pretentious” until I was eighteen, thereby freeing me up to be unbearably guilt-free for most of my adolescence. My compositions were informed by the repetitive minimalist tendencies of Philip Glass. The Glass method, which, I read in a magazine, he called “the additive process,” involved developing a melody rhythmically. He’d start with two notes within a beat, then up the ante to three, then four, and so on. I loved the idea, and I loved the name. But I also thought, Why wait? Why waste all that time developing an idea over an extended period of time when you could encapsulate the entire concept in one big, loud, twelve-second piece! Why not just have every instrument in an ensemble play every kind of note grouping simultaneously? That way, you could make even the sappiest string section sound almost as good as a hair dryer.
Jon Wilson, on the other hand, wrote sentimental, professional-quality love songs à la Lionel Richie and sang them after school in the band room to his fan base of swooning females. Pishposh, I thought, alone in my two-by-three soundproof practice module that was more than roomy enough to accommodate my admirers. I was convinced that real artists were the kind that nobody understood, much less liked, which was pretty reassuring since nobody liked me. Or my music.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON #5: WHEN DOVES CRY
From the time I was twelve until I finished high school at eighteen, my poor parents’ calendar was blackened by an ambitious roster of concerts and recitals averaging at least one per month. They were always so gushy in their support, it never occurred to me that they might have preferred to avoid junior high school gymnasium performances of the theme from Rocky. They acted as though their world revolved around my sister and me, so that’s what we believed.
I remember one night, after an eighth-grade band concert, I caught a glimpse of pencil marks on my father’s rolled-up program. He told me that he checked off each movement of each piece as it ended. Obviously because he was counting the seconds until he could go home. At the time, I took it badly. I was offended that he had so little regard for the seriousness of our thoughtful, well-rehearsed interpretation of “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor.” Now, I see those pathetic little checkmarks as heart-shaped symbols of his love.
Everyone says that love requires the utmost honesty, but that’s not entirely true. Once I knew that my father was suffering for my sake—really suffering—I learned that love, especially the parental kind, requires the heartwarming sacrifice that can only accompany fake enthusiasm.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON #6: BIRTH OF THE COOL
So: I was doomed at the trumpet. I was also acceptable at the baritone, shaky on the xylophone, and putrid on the piano. But there was one instrument for which I had an innate knack, an instrument I could play with some semblance of grace. It was, unfortunately, an instrument already on its way out of fashion during the lifetime of J. S. Bach: the recorder. I taught myself to play it, and by fourteen, I was perhaps the youngest member of the American Recorder Society, reading their journal, American Recorder, and practicing the Elizabethan and baroque music I special-ordered with my baby-sitting money.
I found out about an amateur ensemble that met once a week in my town, playing mostly Elizabethan standards like “It Was a Lover and His Lass” at a tempo marked on the metronome as Post Office Slow. The members of the Bozeman Recorder Ensemble, as we were called, included a retired high school music teacher, two Montana State University math professors, and a number of housewives, one of whom had a daughter in my grade. I was the only member under the age of forty and most of them would have been eligible for the senior citizen discount at the music store. I played with them for a couple of years, until my pals Margaret and Leota—the wives of the dean of the College of Arts and Architecture and a physics professor respectively—and I broke off to form our own trio. The three of us just liked each other, liked playing. At school, in all those actual hours of actual classes with actual teachers, music felt more like a job. Playing with Leota and Margaret was the first time—the only time—I actually enjoyed playing music.
We played gigs, too, at the library, at street fairs. Imagine playing an Elizabethan ballad such as my favorite, a sad wail called “Willow Willow,” on the street with your two friends who happen to be older than your parents. You might look up from your music stand and notice one of your schoolmates staring on in horror. Andy Heap, for instance. But you know what? You don’t care. You might even smile at him. And this is the most important lesson of marching band, of public displays of recorder. To withstand embarrassment. Maybe even seek it out. To take nerdiness to its most dizzying “Willow Willow,” “Tico Tico” extremes, and stand before my peers with my head held high. To stick out my tongue at the Andy Heaps of the world, run back to the baritone horn of life, and blow mighty and proud.
The End Is Near, Nearer, Nearest
WHEN THE PLANE IS GOING down, you suddenly feel the urge to hug that smelly, snoring person in the seat next to you. Because nothing brings people together like doom. And I should know. I’ve been to more potlucks, picnics, and get-togethers organized around the idea that we’re all going to die than I care to count. Not that I’m trivializing the Apocalypse; I’m sure the actual end of the world will involve a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. But in my experience, talking about the end of the world is a proven way to make friends.
APOCALYPSE 1: MARK OF THE BEAST
I’ve had this recurring dream since I was six years old: My mother’s gone. She is not running-errands gone, not at-a-friend’s-house gone. She’s gone for good, vanished. My sister’s still here. My dad’s around. In fact, all the kids and dads in town are present and accounted for but all the mothers have vanished overnight. That’s how I figure out the rapture’s happened. Only the women are worthy enough of God’s grace to get whisked off to heaven. The wicked men and wicked children are left to t
ough out Armageddon on our own.
That means my sister and I will have to suffer through the lake of fire, the rivers of blood, and our father’s cooking. Once I get sick of puking up his specialties—spaghetti sandwiches and a greasy tinfoil concoction he liked to call Boy Scout potatoes—I go to the supermarket, Gibson’s in Muskogee. I fill a cart with food. At the checkout counter, I line up vegetables on the conveyor belt by the cash register. The clerk informs me that in order to pay for the food, I must take the mark of the beast. She stands ready to attach a “666” price tag to my forehead. I refuse. Soldiers with machine guns appear. They gun me down, my blood spattering all over the salad fixin’s. Then, poof, I’m in heaven, dead, harp in hand.
I still have that dream sometimes. And thinking about it now, as an atheistic adult, I realize how many things are going on in it, that it is a microcosm of my childhood world. At my Oklahoma church, Braggs Pentecostal Holiness, the sermons were about the Book of Revelation when I was in first grade—the year I learned to read. So Revelation, the Bible’s final chapter and the one that chronicles the end of the world, was the first book of the Bible I ever read myself. That loophole about not accepting the mark of the beast being a viable way for rapturemissers to get into heaven comes from Scripture, as does the grocery store setting. According to Revelation 13:17: “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” And that number, of course, revealed in verse 18, is “six hundred threescore and six”: 666. The other reason I refuse the mark in the grocery store is tied up in the fundamentalist uproar over bar codes in the 1970s; bar codes were thought by many to be the mark of the beast.