Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  And if your grandchildren ask you “What were Americans doing while the snake was slithering toward them?” you have an answer. For you saw them, thousands of Americans, in New York and Connecticut and Arkansas and Florida and Virginia and Vermont. Rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black and white, women and men. You saw them all right, watched them for hours, and they were all doing the same thing: listening to music. They craved it, were charmed by it, hypnotized, soothed. Couldn’t get enough of it. Bought twelve CDs at a time. Millions of albums. Music that sounded just like a movie about an entire society—rich on the top deck, poor on the bottom—headed for disaster.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Nashville

  Harriet, Kim, and I call a taxi. A plump blonde pulls up to our hotel, sandalwood incense smoke billowing out the windows of her cab. She is pretty, but when she opens her mouth, several of the more important teeth are missing.

  To the honkytonks, we say. You got it, she answers.

  She is from Nashville but doesn’t go out much anymore. You might be a redneck, she says, if you go to church before you go barhopping.

  “It’s fine to go to church and then barhop,” Kim says, “as long as you don’t bring anyone home afterward.”

  I am tempted to ask Kim which passage of the Bible mentions barhopping, but tonight I’m on my best behavior. For the first night in nearly a week, we are no longer in Cartersville, Georgia. I ate a delicious dinner of steamed vegetables that were not toppings on a Supreme pizza. The night is warm. The Nashville sky neon-lit.

  The might-be-a-redneck driver takes us to Printer’s Alley. We choose a place that looks suitably honkytonk and are enveloped by smoke and sweat and loud live music. A crusty middle-aged man in a cowboy hat stumbles up to me, his mustache speckled with flecks of beer foam. You look upset, he says to me, and for a moment I believe him, until I realize this is just his line. Tell a woman she’s upset and maybe she’ll believe you, seek comfort in your beer-soaked mustache.

  He asks if he can buy me a drink. No, I’m fine, I say. But he brings me one anyway, a pink watermelon vodka shooter in a test tube that looks like something a middle-schooler might imbibe if she wanted to get drunk at a science fair. Thanks, I mumble, examining the tube in my hand like a chemist.

  Meanwhile the band is taking requests. We play a mix of rock and country, they announce, but they don’t actually play any country. They play the White Stripes and Godsmack and Led Zeppelin. They play “You Shook Me All Night Long” three times, until it does feel like all night long. I ask the band’s leader if they could play “Chattahoochee.” We crossed the Chattahoochee River earlier in the day and it made me think of middle school dances, which in my neck of the woods always involved Alan Jackson singing, It gets hotter than a hoochie-coochie.

  “Chattahoochee,” the bandleader repeats, spitting the word back at me.

  “Yes?” I reply.

  “Naw,” he says, looking disgusted. “We wanna have fun tonight. No Chattahoochee.”

  “Oh, okay. Sorry,” I say, taken aback by the firmness of this refusal. “I understand.”

  It’s true. I do understand. I know what it feels like to hate a song so much you never want to hear another goddamned note.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Memphis

  At our concert in Memphis, fifty expected audience members manifest as twenty, and most appear to be asleep. Almost all are in their eighties or nineties (Um . . . guys . . . some people out there are dying . . . so you need to smile!) and they are unusually unreceptive to the lure of the pennywhistle, or perhaps just hard of hearing. They sit motionless in their seats, staring at us with mouths agape. After the songs end Patrick has to get the applause going from the back; a few times even this doesn’t work and Patrick is the only person in the room clapping. And no one could mistake Patrick as unaffiliated. He is wearing his official God Bless America Tour jacket, his arms crossed over his wide chest, tears twinkling in his eyes.

  Then, right in the middle of The Composer’s halftime routine (The Hollywood Celebrity is a really cool guy!), an elderly man arrives. I can see his black-and-white checkered pants all the way from the stage. A PBS volunteer guides him to his seat, but once there, he won’t sit down. He is doing a little dance.

  “WHERE’S THE MUSIC?” he yells at the top of his lungs in the middle of The Composer’s speech. It’s as if he thinks that if he dances, the music will follow. “WHAT’S GOING ON?”

  For the first time all tour, I am genuinely smiling—a huge, honest, cancer-curing grin. The volunteer finally gets the man to sit down, just as The Composer says he worries about everyone and is praying for us all, praying for everyone to “stay safe.”

  “GOOD!” shouts the man.

  We begin to play and the man leaps up from his chair again and begins to dance. The volunteer tries to get him to sit down but he won’t.

  “WOW,” he yells after every song. When the concert ends, he becomes the first person in the history of The Composer’s concerts to yell “WHOOPEEE!”

  We leave the stage and the man bounds after us, following us into the green room, shouting after The Composer.

  “YOUNG MAN, I WANT YOUR CARD!”

  “Okay,” The Composer says, smiling for real.

  “YOUNG MAN! I WANT YOU TO COME PLAY FOR MY ROTARY CLUB!”

  “All right,” The Composer says, smiling not for real. Then the man begins to dance again, a little jig.

  Meanwhile, another fan is following me around the backstage area. She is wearing a purple dress with a pink hat, pink purse, and pink high heels. Her eyeglasses are cat-shaped with rhinestones on the ends.

  “I’m eighty-six!” she shouts at me as I pack up my violin.

  “Wow!” I say.

  “I’ve lived in my house for seventy-four years!” she shouts.

  “Wow!” I say.

  “Have you been to the zoo?” she answers.

  “Yes!” I say, trying to keep up with the swift pace of this conversation.

  “I like the pandas!” she shouts.

  “That’s nice!”

  “They eat bamboo!”

  “That’s right!”

  “I like music!”

  “Me too!”

  We extricate ourselves and load the equipment into the RV. We are ready to go, but three PBS volunteers run after us. They are carrying large aluminum trays.

  “It’s barbeque,” they say. “From the best place in Memphis. Here are the ribs, and there’s the brisket, and the pulled pork, and there are sides . . .”

  Harriet and I lose our minds. We have been begging The Composer all day to stop somewhere for Memphis barbeque, but his facial expression suggested we were destined to eat a microwaved Louisiana shrimp at a Tennessee Ruby Tuesday or, more likely, a box of chicken gizzards from the Flying J, gizzards being the only hot food left at truck stops late at night.

  But now an entire container of Memphis pulled pork has materialized. And green beans. Potato salad. Fresh icebox rolls, their brown tops shining with salted butter.

  Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Harriet and I shout. This is so great! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

  We are so excited that everyone else on the RV becomes excited as well, even The Composer, who won’t eat any of it.

  “We wanted you to have a good memory of Memphis,” the PBS volunteers say.

  Harriet and I strap the barbeque containers down to the countertops with duct tape. As the RV pulls away from the curb, we wave good-bye to the volunteers, our hands already dripping with BBQ sauce.

  “AMERICA!” I yell at Harriet, waving a victory rib.

  She laughs, and in perfect imitation of the old man, yells back “WHOOPEEE!”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Memphis to Little Rock

  It’s the first time I’ve seen the Mississippi River from the ground level, as opposed to spotting it from a plane window and using it to calculate the remaining time till landing in the West or the Ea
st. But now we’re in The Middle, and the Mississippi looks like I expected it to look: big and brown. What I didn’t expect is how different the country is on the other side—a flat green carpet, low and dark and wet. In America, an entire landscape can disappear in an instant.

  Our final concert at Carnegie Hall is less than two months away, and my email account is full of revised contracts from The Composer’s head manager, Jake. Instead of our bare-bones touring ensemble, the Carnegie Hall concert will feature all of the musicians who played on the televised God Bless America PBS special, including Yevgeny. This way it won’t be so obvious that the Ensemble can mix and match musicians like socks.

  Shortly after I receive my Carnegie Hall contract from Jake, I get an email from Yevgeny. It says, simply: I quit. Below it is a forwarded message:

  Dear Jake,

  I have been looking forward to the Carnegie Hall concert ever since you told me about it; but . . . my feelings have changed.

  The sole purpose of this contract is to ensure that you have all the original “God Bless America” DVD musicians performing at the concert. . . . [I]t would look really bad if you pulled the usual Composer-switch—hiring all the different people to do the different type of venues.

  What I’m wondering now, is: does the promoter know that none of the musicians he saw on PBS were actually playing and that the whole thing was over-dubbed? And what would he think if he found out? What would he say if he knew that The Composer didn’t even play his own piano solo?

  Bottom line is this: I can no longer be a part of a company built on lies and deception . . . I am only now fully realizing how much I hated the environment I was forced to work in, and how much I’d have to disrespect myself . . . to perform at this concert.

  Yevgeny

  After reading this in a Memphis hotel room, I call Yevgeny, but he doesn’t answer. Months later we’ll meet for a drink in midtown Manhattan. He will tell me about his new job—at an advertising company—which he likes. He works normal hours and earns a good salary with benefits. It’s creative work, he will tell me, as if anticipating my doubt that the job is good enough for him. When I begin to tell him about the more absurd moments of the God Bless America Tour, he will stop me and say he doesn’t want to talk about anything related to The Composer. He doesn’t even want to talk about anything related to the violin. He’s left all of that behind, he will say, and is a much happier person now.

  A Single Job Offer

  New York City, May 2003

  Despite what could be fairly described as an enormous effort undertaken by someone not unaccustomed to getting and holding down jobs, you are not able to find a paying job in the Middle East, nor as a journalist, nor in any capacity that would put your hard-won, expensive education to work for the society that had helped to fund a large portion of it with government-subsidized student loans. In the last months of your senior year, despite sending dozens of applications to a variety of employers, you fail to receive a single job offer, a single interview, a single phone call back. A few weeks before graduation, there is a final blow: the Fulbright grant rejects you during the final round. But before you can wallow in the utter despair of all of this, there is a more pressing crisis—within just a few weeks you will have nowhere to live. The school housing system doesn’t allow graduating students to stay through the month of May. Like a wayward tenant being evicted, you have twenty-four hours after graduation to vacate the campus.

  And so begins one of the most challenging quests that one can undertake in New York City: the quest for affordable housing. At first you search with friends, traveling to Chinatown and the Lower East Side with Nicole, a Los Angeles native who, at the age of twenty-two, is already a successful filmmaker. Nicole knows what’s up in a way you never will, and you follow her around as she sets up appointments with brokers who meet the two of you in graffitied alleyways and lead you through the rain showers of late spring to one-roomed lofts over fish markets ($3,000/month). You follow her into cramped offices where Orthodox Jewish women with gorgeous, glowing faces and long flowing skirts introduce you to the last point of civilization on Avenue D in the East Village, where a vacant four-bedroom apartment that smells of cats can be yours (if you share it with four other people) for $5,000/month. You don’t get very far in this process before realizing that you—with your lack of money, and parents unaccustomed to signing guarantor statements—are the one holding things up. So you excuse yourself from the group search, and Nicole finds someone else to live with, an investment banker.

  Every single one of your college friends is entering similar territory: apartments that require brokers fees, four months of security deposits, and parental guarantees requiring proof of an annual income that is, in at least one case, the total annual rent multiplied by sixty (“That’s like, two million dollars,” you say, before realizing you should have kept the math to yourself, after one of your friends explains the process she went through to land her apartment). Your college friends snatch up apartments at a dizzying pace—some palatial, some dingy, most unimpressive given the rent—on the Lower East Side, the Upper West, the Meat Packing District, and even, in one case, in the same building as the Stock Exchange. And so you reenter the rental market again, this time alone. You have $800 in your bank account, which makes the math simple: You can pay $400 for rent, $400 for a security deposit.

  No one tells you that you’ll never find an apartment in New York City for four hundred dollars. Hasidic brokers show you lofts in the far outreaches of Brooklyn where you could, theoretically, live with five other people if you all built your own walls. Recently divorced fathers on the Upper East Side display the empty rooms their children once inhabited, the floors still strewn with abandoned toys. A pot-bellied, middle-aged man wearing a wife-beater shows you a bedroom with a stained mattress in his midtown railroad apartment and casually explains that he will have to walk through your bedroom to reach the bathroom. A Portuguese woman who doesn’t speak English communicates to you in gestures in a one-room basement near Lincoln Center, showing you how a bedsheet could be hung to separate her mattress from yours.

  No one tells you that you can’t rent an apartment in New York City for four hundred dollars, and it’s lucky they don’t, because in this quest, at least, you will be blessed with a stroke of such incredible luck you will shock New Yorkers at dinner parties for years: a sunny, three-bedroom apartment with a large living room and kitchen (shared with two recently arrived female immigrants from Brazil and Romania) with hardwood floors in a neighborhood that is un-chic and full of drug dealers but relatively safe. No broker’s fee, no guarantor forms. Your room, large for New York, has an actual closet where you can hang your clothes. It is a room of your own, like Virginia Woolf’s (although hers also came with an annual stipend and no need for employment). And it’s a room that you have found on your own, with no help from anyone, which makes it seem doubly yours. All for the rent-stabilized price of $383/month.

  As incredible as this is, it doesn’t register with you at the time, for now you have handed over all but thirty-four dollars of your money in cash to a handsome Trinidadian super. You still have no job, other than your weekly gigs for The Composer, which will pay the rent for now but could end at any moment.

  And so you start again, not as naïve as the young girl who first arrived in New York City. For you now know your Penn Station from your Grand Central, your express train from your local, your indoor face from your outdoor face—the “Don’t fuck with me” expression every young woman in New York City eventually learns to wear.

  You spend your first days in your new apartment sitting on the floor (you don’t yet have any chairs) in the sun-filled living room, drinking coffee out of a new cup, applying for jobs. And it is on one of these mornings, as you sit behind a borrowed laptop, one window open to job listings in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Middle East, another window open to the latest news out of Baghdad, that Becca Belge calls you to see if you are available for a performan
ce the following week. But this time, she’s not calling about a weekend gig to a mall or a craft fair. She’s calling for something much bigger. Something much better paid.

  “How would you like to be on national TV?” she asks.

  PART III

  Watertight Compartments

  You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  All right boys, like the captain said, nice and cheery so there’s no panic.

  —First violinist Wallace Hartley, Titanic

  National Television

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 2003

  As you play your violin, fourteen PBS cameramen operate seven high-definition cameras—including one that swoops back and forth over your head from a jib—getting wide-range shots of the two-tiered auditorium of the historic Portsmouth Music Hall, a venue where Mark Twain once read his work and “Buffalo Bill” Cody once performed his Wild West Show and Wynton Marsalis and Joshua Bell and David Crosby once performed music that was presumably live.

  The auditorium is filled to capacity with nearly a thousand fans who are, as The Composer says, “hardcore.” They are eager to participate in a televised concert special that will soon be broadcast by every major PBS station in the country and sold on DVD: God Bless America. The special, featuring narration by The Hollywood Celebrity, will become a nationwide PBS hit and, a year later, spark a fifty-four-city tour of America. PBS will be so pleased with the special that they will commission similar specials from The Composer in the future.