Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  Even so, you cannot listen to Copland’s music without thinking it does articulate something real and true about small-town America, something that expresses cultural complexity in a musical language that is more precise and accurate than the spoken word. And you’ll learn that Aaron Copland—whom you’d always assumed was born on some ranch in Kansas—was born in Brooklyn. He was Jewish, an outspoken Communist, and gay. He was hounded for years by McCarthy, and like most gay people of his era, was unable to openly proclaim his sexuality. You’ll marvel at his generosity, his giving America something it would have never given him: a chance to be heard as its full, rich, complex self.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Los Angeles

  “Have you considered wearing an adult diaper?” your friend Nicole asks you in the ladies’ room of the Skirball Center. It’s your fifth trip to the bathroom in ninety minutes; three times before the concert, once during The Composer’s halftime speech, and now again after the concert has finished. Nicole watches all of this with increasing worry. A year after you searched for apartments together in New York, she left for L.A. She hasn’t seen you in six months and is shocked by the changes she sees in you.

  Nicole was your smartest, most ambitious college friend, a hard prize to claim in the land of the hypersmart and hyperambitious. She triple-majored in philosophy, economics, and creative writing (“I had to petition the dean to take more than twenty-five credits a semester,” she told you the first time you met her, in a literature class freshman year). You bonded over your unnamed workaholism and the fact that you both fought to go to Columbia—you because your parents couldn’t afford the tuition, her because she had gotten into Yale and had to convince her parents to let her go to a lesser-ranked school (“Do you think I’d be working for Scorsese right now if I lived in New Haven?” is how she explained it to you). She aced her heavy course load while interning full-time for famous movie directors and running five miles a day and babysitting for extra cash and taking noncredit art classes just for fun and volunteering for third-world charities. She was the person who knew where to find the best moules-frites in Manhattan at three o’clock in the morning and pointed out celebrities while you chewed obliviously on your frites. And when Nicole returned from working for the Cannes Film Festival at the end of your junior year, she brought you back a full-length vintage ball gown in sparkly maroon fabric, a dress with such a unique cut around the breasts that it would only look good on a very specific body type, the exact body type you happen to have. “It cost nothing,” she said when you stammered out some question about how you could possibly reimburse her. “I know where the deals are, even in France.”

  In short, Nicole is someone who you work very hard to impress (you have mentioned your PBS appearance and upcoming Carnegie Hall concert to her at least three times that day), and because of this, through no fault of her own, she is someone who you can never become as close with as you’d want. You also sometimes have a distinct suspicion that she wants to make you the subject of a documentary film about Appalachia.

  But Nicole is a good friend to you, going above and beyond what most friends would. She has spent the entire day shuttling you around the hipper parts of Los Angeles, trying to nurse you back to sanity with vintage shopping and artisanal vegan meals. Nicole is a macrobiotic vegan who has never once tried tobacco or illegal drugs. She drinks rarely and only in moderation and chastely dates successful older men who bring her flowers and expect nothing from her but her company. You, on the other hand, have smoked and wined and chicken-gizzarded your way through America, and at this point in the tour your standards in men have lowered to the point where you’ll sleep with anyone who isn’t directly involved in the making of pennywhistle music. You work very hard to impress Nicole because, at the end of the day, she has somehow found a way to be an artist (she makes films—gorgeous, critically acclaimed films on important topics) while also living a sane, healthy life, the kind you desperately wish you could lead but somehow cannot. And now she is asking whether you might benefit from an “adult diaper,” a paradoxical term if there ever was one.

  “Nothing like that will help,” you say curtly. You refuse to repeat the phrase adult diaper.

  “But maybe, if your fear is peeing on stage, maybe wearing an adult diap—”

  “It wouldn’t help!” you all but scream at her, your sweaty hands clenching the gauze of your concert dress. “Please, let’s just not talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone.”

  Especially not you, Nicole, is what you don’t say aloud. Especially not you.

  Making a Living

  A few years later you’ll return to Los Angeles to visit Nicole, and you’ll realize something that, in retrospect, seems so obvious you’re ashamed it didn’t occur to you earlier. The wear and tear of making a living—following her dreams, making her films—is evident, despite the macrobiotic diet and the exercise regimen and the healthy glow of an L.A. tan. The dishes in her kitchen are dusty, she has a heap of dirty laundry on her bedroom floor, and it dawns on you: Things don’t come easy for her either.

  And over the years you begin to see that this is true for everyone, that even the most privileged, the most talented, the most destined-for-success of your classmates are all, in one way or another, struggling. Nicole belonged to an elite group of students who possessed extreme natural abilities. You used to think of this group as the Genius Club, though they had no official designation. Their level of achievement was shocking, making the rest of the students—run-of-the-mill high school valedictorians—seem dim-witted by comparison. There was the guy you lived with sophomore year who would become a world-famous neuroscientist by the age of twenty-two. There was the knockout improv comedienne who soon joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. There was the future congressman who played jazz piano and had a black belt in karate, despite being blind. There was your roommate Ariel, with her internationally acclaimed cello skills, and Nora, your friend from Philadelphia who had all the top law schools fighting over her. And many others, including students in your courses who arrived via Hollywood, already famous.

  But a few years after graduation, visible holes begin to appear in your notion of the Genius Club. The famous neuroscientist is caught plagiarizing articles in the New Yorker. The gorgeous comedienne accidentally drops the f-word on live television. Ariel’s cello goes silent. Nora is laid off from her law firm. Nicole makes acclaimed films, yet she still struggles to make a living, which is not the same thing, you know now, as making money, not the same thing as winning praise, but more the rich, complex connotations of that word, living. Connotations that include the certainty of failure.

  Any living that sounds too perfect to be true, any living that appears not to include failure, any living that seems easy and unsmudged by shadow, you know now, is fake.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  San Francisco to Portland

  The RV’s air-conditioning is broken, and the cabin is sweltering with the heat from the engine and the asphalt and the sun radiating off the wide Sacramento Valley. Harriet and I are both horizontal on the foldout couch, which, until today, we didn’t realize folded out. But now we’ve unfolded it and try to lie as still as possible in the heat. We try to nap or listen to music, but mostly we gaze listlessly upward at the hot California sky as it passes. Sometimes I glance over at Harriet and she looks like she is praying—she isn’t asleep, but isn’t quite in this world.

  Kim is sitting up in the passenger seat alongside Patrick, who is in a particularly good mood, what my mom would call a fine fettle. Patrick’s birthday was a few days ago, and, along with a cake, The Composer bought him a six-CD set of Irish music. We have been listening to “Oh Danny Boy” and its many variations (female solo vocal, pennywhistle only, fiddle only, chorus of men, chorus of women, all together now, etc., repeat, repeat, repeat) through the hot valleys between San Francisco and Redding. We listen to “Oh Danny Boy” while ascending through the shadows of the magni
ficent Mount Shasta. We listen to “Oh Danny Boy” in the cooler valleys of lower Oregon, where the game of shadow tag between sun and mountain and valley and river reminds me of the Shenandoah. We listen to “Oh Danny Boy” all the way to Eugene, where we stop at a Target to get supplies. And then we listen to “Oh Danny Boy” all the way to Portland, where the leaves are red and yellow, like on the East Coast, I think, surprised. We have finally left the summer; it won’t find us for the rest of the tour. Gone are the rattle-dry valley deserts. Gone are the palm trees and the hot sandy smell of the Southwest and the hot vegetable smell of central California. The pipes, the pipes are calling. They’re calling Patrick, mainly, Patrick of the broad shoulders and teary twinkle in his eye and the omnipresent God Bless America Tour jacket, the only person in our RV who is working for no pay, the only person whose love of the pennywhistle is pure and true. Patrick’s love of the pennywhistle is an unwavering, undying love, and we do our best to tread lightly on it, though sometimes we fail.

  True Life

  New York City, Spring 2004

  Your internship ends at the company that is not the New York Times. You are still hoping to find a permanent job or at least a paid internship that has something to do with the Middle East or the two bloody wars your country is in the process of losing. But you cannot find anything. So you sign the contract to go on the God Bless America Tour, thinking that, among other things, the tour will be a way for you to earn enough money to ship yourself off to Baghdad or Beirut or Jerusalem or Cairo to work as a freelance reporter.

  A few months before the tour starts, a college friend calls you out of the blue to offer you a well-paid temporary research job at MTV. You don’t even need to interview, you just show up. For the first time since you moved to New York, you experience what it’s like to be given a job that you aren’t even remotely qualified for, because you know the right person, because you went to the right college. You know nothing about working in television, and less than nothing about MTV. The channel wasn’t available in your town growing up; the family that owned the local cable company had banned it, citing its bad influence on the youth. Some kids with satellite dishes were able to get MTV, but the network didn’t have the cultural influence on teenagers in your rural town as it did in other places. The teenagers in your town overwhelmingly preferred country music.

  But now you work at MTV, for a show called True Life. You are given a desk beside a wall of TV screens where MTV’s top ten videos play on an endless loop. As you work, Britney Spears struts behind you in stewardess lingerie, serving up “Toxic” again and again.

  Your first assignment, your new boss tells you, is to find young teenage girls who are pregnant and interested in appearing on what is beginning to be called “reality television.” You have no idea that the research you are about to begin is MTV’s toe-dip into what will become not only a True Life special, but also an entire series called Teen Mom. No one knows this, not even the MTV executives, for no one has yet realized the potential for profit in the desperation of poor pregnant teenage girls. All MTV has done so far is hire a temporary researcher to see whether such a show would be possible, and if so, what it might be like. And that temporary researcher is you.

  The casting call goes up on the MTV website, and your inbox fills with emails from pregnant teenage girls around America. They write from midwestern suburbs, from coastal cities, from poor urban neighborhoods just a few miles from where you sit in MTV’s headquarters in Times Square. They write from the Appalachian South, in a grammar you recognize. You write back to some of them, ask them to tell you more. And they respond with stories about their lives, big and small. They write about being kicked off their sports teams for being pregnant, about boyfriends who are committed to them, about boyfriends who have already left. They write about failed birth control, religious views against abortion, their shame and excitement and uncertainty about being pregnant. They write about prom, volleyball, their failed algebra course, their dreams of college. They send you photos of themselves in what you will come to recognize as the universal pose of the American teenage girl: half-sassy, half-pleading.

  And you can’t help but think of yourself at their age: 14, 16, 18. Of your terrible choice in a high school boyfriend: Fernando, who called you stupid and cheated on you. And yet, as you read the stories of pregnant girls all over America, you remember that Fernando had been your only emissary from a different world, the elite Northeast. And you recognize in the pregnant girls’ stories something in your own—the utter dependence on a high school boyfriend. You realize that if you had not slept with Fernando in high school, he would not have introduced you to the idea of a life in New York City, which means you wouldn’t have applied to Columbia, and you would not now be sitting at your own desk at MTV, Times Square, New York City, America, the World, the Universe.

  When you were a sophomore in high school, an older girl who already had her driver’s license drove you to the county health department, which, unlike so many other places in America, offered free birth control to underage girls without parental notification. The health department nurses knew your parents, knew everyone’s parents, knew that gossip is gold in a small town with more churches than stoplights. And yet, to your knowledge, they never revealed the names of the underage girls seeking their clandestine services. The entire visit, including the mandatory precounseling and pelvic exam, took less than an hour and you left the clinic with a year’s supply of pills that didn’t cost you a cent.

  It’s magical to think about it now, how an hour in a dingy, three-room clinic determined the course of your life. But you didn’t feel any magic at the time. What you felt was terrified. What if the pills didn’t work? For the nurses—big-bosomed Southern women who called you “Honey” and told you to relax while they inserted a speculum into your vagina, women who gave birth control and STD tests, confidentially, to hundreds of underage girls in your small town so that you could all have a fighting chance—these women had been very clear on this point: Birth control pills could fail. Condoms could fail. It could all fail. And then you would fail. Everything—your years of hard work, the top grades, the good test scores, the violin concerts—everything would be fucked. You would be fucked. Doomed. There would be no college and no big city and no making a living. (No one ever mentioned abortion, perhaps because they were ideologically opposed to it, or perhaps because the money and transportation and logistical planning needed to travel hundreds of miles to the nearest abortion clinic, all without letting the adults in your life know, seemed impossible, probably was impossible.) You had already thought about it and decided that if you were to find yourself pregnant, you would climb the nearest mountain and jump off one of its many gorgeous cliffs. No reason for suicide seemed more compelling, no reason was more black-and-white, case-closed, than pregnancy. The ultimate curse of life in the body would be accidentally getting someone else’s life literally inside your body.

  But unlike many of the girls you grew up with, whose luck was worse, you never found yourself pregnant, so you were granted your life. And you are living it now at MTV, speaking on the phone with less-lucky girls all over America. These calls go on for hours. They tell you about their preeclampsia, their fear of the pain of labor, the logistics of renting a tub for water birth. They tell you about their tattoos, their favorite outfits, the new haircut they want to get. They tell you about their towns, how much they want to get out of them, how their parents are driving them nuts, how they envy you because you live in New York City and work at MTV. They tell you they want to become actresses, musicians, doctors, veterinarians. They tell you about their boyfriends’ jobs, how sweet the boyfriend is, how terrible he is, or, most often, how the boyfriend’s behavior, whether bad or good, has become overshadowed by the bigger picture that is taking shape in their bellies and their minds, the realization that there is (fuck!) another person growing inside of them, a person who will be here soon. The sudden, inescapable realness of that.

  And so
you begin to draft a report, a list of profiles of ten or so girls out of the hundreds of responses you’ve received. You choose the girls carefully, based on how interesting they are. The most interesting girls, to you, are the ones who have their shit together. The ones who had it all—grades, talent, ambition—but decided not to throw themselves over a cliff when they found themselves pregnant, instead resolving to work even harder. You choose the ones who, despite incredible odds of pregnancy and poverty and chaos, are taking AP courses and applying for college, the ones who run for student government while visibly pregnant, the ones who have already researched which colleges offer housing for families. The ones who are smart and capable and well-spoken and mature. The ones who will probably “make it.” You find the determination of these girls nothing short of amazing, their will to live in a country that wants to shame them and shove them out of sight or off a cliff to be nothing short of miraculous.

  You bring your list of profiles to your boss, who looks them over. You meet with MTV executives. And everyone tells you the same thing: Can’t you find girls who are more . . . interesting?

  At first you don’t know what they mean. But these girls are interesting, you say. They are not letting their pregnancies ruin their lives! They are facing tremendous obstacles head-on! They are trying to disprove that whole “biology is destiny” thing! They are capable and mature and it will be thrilling to watch them as they work hard, harder than anyone else their age, to achieve their dreams!