Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  But so what? Why do I care so much? I’m not interested in exposing his “fraud,” if that’s even what it could be called, to the world. I’m not keeping my journal as some part of an undercover investigation.

  I look out onto the Atlantic. There’s something else. Something more here. Something bigger about The Composer and his music. Something I’m missing. Something I have to keep going in order to find.

  I use my journal to do some God Bless America Tour math: 2 months, 3,000 miles, 37 cities, and 27 concerts from now I will reach the Pacific.

  PART II

  Asea

  If you put a musical instrument in a kid’s hand, he or she will never pick up a gun.

  —Dr. José Antonio Abreu, founder of Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed Youth Orchestra program

  The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage. I’ve tried everything within my power to appreciate it (and I do, God, believe me I do, but it’s not enough). I appreciate the fact that I and we have affected and entertained a lot of people.

  —Kurt Cobain, in his suicide note

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Charlotte to Jacksonville

  We sail into the whirling hem of Hurricane Charley, rain and wind buffeting the sides of the RV. We are under a tornado watch and I search the skies. Kim reads her Left Behind book, her Pilgrim face unconcerned with mortal peril, secure in Jesus. Harriet finds solace in her headphones, listening to an odd mix that she describes as therapeutic: Digable Planets, Jefferson Starship, and Barbra Streisand. The Composer sits in the front with Patrick and rolls down the passenger-side window. He sticks his head out into the hurricane’s stinging rain, looking backward at the road already traveled. His tongue hangs out of his mouth slightly and he wears the same expression that dogs do when they hang their heads out of car windows. The expression that says, This is great!

  Late at night, when I’m in bed and Harriet is still awake watching TV (she likes MTV’s The Real World: Philadelphia), I try to read On the Road, because that’s the book I think I should be reading. But I can’t get into it, maybe because by page three some guy is already telling a female character to make breakfast and sweep the floor and calling her a whore. The same guy name-drops Schopenhauer into casual conversation, and the narrator thinks this guy is the coolest. I have no patience for this bullshit, not now, not while actually on the American road. And so I try to go to sleep but the TV is too loud. I begin to put a pillow on my face each night in an attempt to muffle The Real World.

  The Composer doesn’t eat meals after noon, and he works all night in the RV composing the Christian musical—or “worship and praise music,” as Kim calls it—for some small-town theater. This poses a problem: the rest of us are hungry—we want to eat supper. But we are confined to whatever restaurants are within walking distance of the hotel. And because our hotels are usually Hampton Inns or Howard Johnsons or Ramada Limiteds in suburban strip malls (because these are the easiest places to park an RV), our meals have a depressing similarity to them, whether we are in Maine or in Maryland or in Georgia.

  “This entire nation is a goddamn Ruby Tuesday,” I write in an email back home to friends (Subject: RV There Yet?). I am becoming agitated with the monotonous landscape of suburban sprawl. I am “in a despair,” as my mom would call it. We are in rural Georgia and I want it to feel like rural Georgia. I want to go to a local diner where a woman named Pam calls me “Honey” and serves me up a fresh slice of homemade peach pie. Instead, I’m at a Ruby Tuesday. I’m eating something called Louisiana shrimp. I can taste the microwaves still radiating off of it, and anyway, I don’t want Louisiana shrimp in Georgia because I can have Louisiana shrimp when we get to goddamned Louisiana. I want peach pie. I want sweet tea. I want Pam.

  And music is being piped into the Ruby Tuesday dining room, an endless loop of rock music, offensive in its innocuousness. I become alarmed that this music has been hand selected by corporate executives at Ruby Tuesday’s headquarters in an elaborate psycho-musical ploy to get me to buy an extra appetizer, but perhaps I am overly sensitive to the dangers of elaborate psycho-musical ploys. I hurl curses at Harriet and Kim.

  “I didn’t go on this goddamned tour to see every goddamned Ruby Tuesday in America,” I huff, stabbing at a stiff shrimp.

  “Do you want some of my ribs?” Harriet asks.

  “No, I want to see America,” I say.

  “This is it,” Kim says.

  New York City

  1999

  After you inject yourself with the hormones—a small needle in the top of your thigh and a large needle in the side of your butt cheek, each shot given twice per day—you drop the spent syringes into an empty Sunny Delight bottle so they won’t stab the dormitory janitors. Your freshman roommate, Ariel, eyes the syringe-filled bottle, along with the black and blue bruises ballooning on your body, with increasing alarm and disgust. In addition to the usual things freshmen roommates have to negotiate to get along, Ariel has an additional challenge: How to handle a roommate from Appalachia who is clueless about everything from city life to hip-hop music to the canon of Western literature. A roommate who wears clothes that border on corporate business attire because prior to arriving in New York her idea of what New Yorkers wore each day came from newsreels of bankers walking down Wall Street. A roommate who is so desperate for tuition money that within just a few weeks of arriving in New York City, she has answered an advertisement in the college newspaper (Help a woman become a mother! Earn $5,000!) and become an egg donor.

  Having no concept of your parents’ finances, you have no idea why you haven’t qualified for more financial aid. It will be a decade before you understand what really happened, because it is only then that it becomes a national news story: Your parents, who were loving, generous, and fiscally responsible, saved for their three children’s college tuitions for years, only to find out that you, the oldest kid, could deplete the entire savings account with a few semesters in the Ivy League. Because this was 1999, years before the tuition crisis garnered media attention, no one in your family realized that the same problem was about to be faced by the entire middle class, even the upper-middle class, and not just at private universities but at state schools as well.

  Your parents begged you to turn down Columbia and go somewhere cheaper. But you were determined. You had a semester’s worth of scholarship aid and you could take out the maximum in federal student loans. With the money your parents had saved for you to go to state school added to the mix, all you needed to do was earn around $8,000 per semester, plus living expenses. You could do that, you told them with confidence, figuring that in New York City, anything was possible.

  “Why Columbia, is what I want to know,” your dad said in April of your senior year, the deadline to send a tuition deposit days away. “Until Fernando got in, who had ever heard of the place? Do you know anyone who would pay that much for a kid’s college education? Besides Fernando’s parents?”

  Fernando was your high school boyfriend. His Jewish, biracial, New York City–native parents had moved to your town a few years earlier for reasons unclear to everyone; your rural Appalachian town was not known for welcoming the non-Christian or the nonwhite. It was a town in which even you, with your Italian heritage, were seen as foreign, your black hair marking you an obvious outsider, a teacher describing you as “urban” in a recommendation letter even though you’d never lived in a town with more than three thousand people. When Fernando had his bar mitzvah, the local Hallmark had no bar mitzvah cards, so they ordered one box and everyone in town gave Fernando the same card. But for whatever reason, Fernando’s family had chosen your town, and in doing so they changed your own geographical destiny. For it was Fernando who introduced you to the Northeast, a region that you had hithe
rto thought about only in literary terms, in eleventh-grade English class, as you dissected nineteenth-century transcendentalist poems. Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere. All of these poems seemed to involve snow, or death, or death by freezing in the snow. The works of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickenson, and Frost were all cut from the same ice cube: The Northeast, as you imagined it, was a society of neo-Pilgrims who spent long winters contemplating God, looking for their souls in a spiderweb, philosophizing on boring, uncontroversial subjects. You much preferred the fiery Louisiana nights of Robert Penn Warren, the biscuit-hot Arkansas of Maya Angelou, the rabid Everglades of Zora Neale Hurston.

  Until you began dating Fernando in the eleventh grade and traveled to New York City with his family, it never occurred to you that the Northeast was a region of outsize importance. You had no clue that the Northeast was—150 years after the transcendentalists—still the place to go if you were young and aspiring to one day become a contributor to American literature, music, or art (not to mention politics, science, and finance). Before you met Fernando, you had no idea that the Northeast was the place where rich important people determine what the rest of the country will read and listen to and think about. You were under the mistaken impression—common among rural teenagers outside of the Northeast—that American culture was like American land, underneath everyone’s feet, available for anyone to cultivate and harvest.

  But all of that changed with Fernando. He was a year older than you. His parents had sent him hours away to a private school near D.C. for his elementary and middle school years. At your public high school, he became the first person ever to be accepted to an Ivy League university: Columbia. Fernando’s parents were the only people in town who thought highly enough of Columbia to be indignant when you were accepted a year later (“How did she get in?” his parents asked).

  During Fernando’s first year he called you long distance on his dormitory phone to brag about his life in New York City, from the art museums he visited (“Do you know anything about da Vinci? Of course you don’t”) to the concerts he attended at Lincoln Center (“So I just met Yo-Yo Ma.” You met him? “Well, I saw him.” That’s so cool!) to the opportunities for employment (“I just made $200 modeling for Dockers khakis.” Wow!) to what he was reading (“Having Kenneth Koch as a poetry professor makes me realize how bad our education system is in Virginia. Do you know ‘Leaves of Grass’?” Is that one of the Pilgrim poets? “No, it’s Walt Whitman. Like the most important American poet ever. Jesus, Jess”) to the food (“I ate sushi last night with this guy Dan who is Korean but speaks fluent Mandarin and is a chef at Nobu. He’s actually from California. His major is Russian literature . . .” Isn’t sushi raw fish? “Jesus, Jess. You’re an idiot”). And so you became determined to go to New York City, too. Perhaps living there would inoculate you against future accusations of idiocy, cleanse the cow pie stench of countrified ignorance that Fernando smelled on you. Though your teachers and parents worried that you were following Fernando, whom everyone, including you, knew was a profligate cheater, the truth was that he was no longer the point of the operation, only the means by which you could gain information about an inaccessible world that now seemed crucial to your future.

  As you inject yourself with the egg-stimulating hormones, you tell yourself, with a teenager’s self-importance, that you have only one chance at this, the elite Northeast. You will do whatever it takes. You know that many people you grew up with were smarter than you, more naturally gifted, and yet they won’t be given this chance, or any chance at all. Most of them are not at college but in the military or working—at the chicken plant, Walmart, the truck stop. You aren’t about to squander this rare lucky break, this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  But just two months into your freshman year of college, you lie on the cool tile floor of your dorm in a warm puddle of your own green vomit, a side effect of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. The egg donation process has distracted and sickened you to the point that you have failed all of your midterms. Your roommate, Ariel, who studied cello at Julliard precollege, has won the prestigious university-wide concerto competition, has won it as a freshman. You have failed to make last chair of the student orchestra. Your violin professor—an Eastern European woman who screams Calm down! while you’re playing, and asks, Why are you playing like that? So exaggerated! So loud! Are you trying to make everyone hear your mistakes more clearly?—has suggested that her time would be better spent hammering nails into her forehead than it would be teaching you how to play the violin.

  And of all the failures that you contemplate as you lie on your dorm floor retching out green bile—your midterms, your relationship with Fernando (which never made it past the first week of classes), your inability to blend in with the other students (who go out for drinks in the East Village while you set your alarm for dawn and then take a crosstown bus to a Madison Avenue fertility clinic)—it is this, your failure at the violin, that is most painful. You are beginning to realize, with a certainty you never had to face while growing up in a small town and being told you had “a reeyell gift,” that you will never make a living as a violinist. Despite everything your family did to get you an instrument, to get you over the mountains to a violin teacher, despite ten years of lessons and practice and orchestra rehearsals and music camp and your real, true, genuine, passionate, heart-brimming love for the sound of violin music, music that you played in your head for years to stave off mountain fog, it’s all come to this: You simply aren’t good enough, and you never will be.

  And if you aren’t a violinist—you who clung to your violin like it was a life preserver, like a prosthetic phallus, like a shield and a sword with which you battled the feeling that you were just an average-looking, unsubstantial, nothing-special girl, a girl who could be thrown under the bus of American culture with all the other girls—then who are you?

  What You Wish You Could Tell the Girl Lying in Green Vomit

  Ariel, you will find out years after college graduation, hated playing the cello. Her Julliard teachers were abusive. One called Ariel “fat” every time she missed a note. Another threw a music stand across the room during one of her lessons. “It was psychological torture,” she will tell you, and you will be shocked because it had seemed like Ariel loved playing the cello. But you had mistaken her success for happiness, which turns out not to be the same thing. After she won the concerto competition, Ariel stopped playing her cello.

  And you—a violinist who couldn’t play all the high notes, who didn’t make the cut for the college orchestra, whose college violin teacher expressed a desire to fill her ear canals with cement rather than hear another note you produced—you will spend half of your twenties touring the country and the world as a professional violinist.

  And yet even this success—for that is what, at the beginning at least, you will think it is: an unqualified, simple triumph that you could write home to Appalachia about—will reshape itself in your mind, until you see it as something less like a trophy or a prize and more like a long, circuitous road in which the intended destination disappears upon arrival. An imperfect journey that nonetheless yields unexpected rewards. What you wish you could tell the girl lying in the green vomit is this: The least talented violinist in the orchestra—the one in the last chair of the back row—gets to sit closest to the drums.

  Mall Music

  2002

  Yevgeny and Debbie’s recommendation must have worked because a few days after your first gig in New Hampshire Becca Belge calls to ask whether you can work the following weekend. And this time, instead of a seller-trainee, you’ll be working as a violinist.

  “Who will I be working with?” you ask.

  “The awesomest person in the whole Ensemble,” Becca says.

  “Who is that?”

  “Me.”

  Becca, it turns out, is almost as new to The Composer’s Ensemble as you are. As assistant production manager, she hires musicians, schedules gigs,
and books travel and lodging for The Composer and his multiple groups of roving minstrels (you later find out there are as many as twelve “Ensembles” working at a time, so that concerts may be “performed” at multiple craft fairs and malls on any given weekend). The head production manager, Jake, thinks Becca might benefit from going on a weekend gig where she can learn the ins and outs of the business while selling CDs. And so you meet Becca at the office on the Upper West Side and begin the journey to the concert venue: a shopping mall in Natick, Massachusetts.

  Becca is tall with a cherubic face and bobbed hair dyed a punk shade of red. She jams herself into the driver’s seat of the rental car without bothering to adjust it for her height and slams the door. The car feels much smaller and hotter with her inside it.

  “Look at this!” she instructs you, throwing a scrap of paper into your lap. It appears to have directions scribbled on it, but you can’t make out a single word. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  You stare at her for a moment, thinking she must be pulling your leg. She isn’t.

  “Not exactly,” you say apologetically. “But I have a pretty good sense of direc—”

  “Motherfucker!”

  You freeze, but she isn’t yelling at you. She is yelling at the car stereo, which is rejecting her CD. With a forceful shove, she finally gets the CD to go in and twirls the volume dial to full blast.

  “Do you like AC/DC?” she asks.

  “WHAT?”

  “DO YOU LIKE AC/DC?”

  “YEAH I GUESS!” you answer, reaching to turn down the volume.

  “Badass. I’ve also got Eminem.” She waves the rapper’s CD close to your face. Becca hits the gas and your head hits the back of the seat. You are off.