Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  We want girls with more “conflict,” is how the executives put it, but what you soon realize is that they want girls who are the most naïve and the least self-aware. Girls whose personalities are so bombastic and unpredictable that they are likely dealing with undiagnosed mental illnesses. Girls whose lives are disasters. So you go back to your inbox and look for the most brazen portraits and the worst grammar. And you type up a new report.

  Your new report is a list of caricatures, each profile accompanied by a sassy-pleading portrait. It is a list of stereotypes about young women in America. Here is the New Jersey slut. Here’s the once-wholesome Iowa gal with a heart full of gold and a belly full of sin. Here’s the trailer trash, the ghetto queen, the princess. Here is the beauty queen and here is the party girl. Here is the aspiring model and here is the aspiring porn star. Here is the Madonna and here is the whore.

  This list of girls is not what you consider True Life. It is not an accurate or complete list. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter anyway: Your research is preliminary, the production shoot is months away, and none of the girls you interviewed will actually appear on MTV. And yet, you feel that your final list of girl caricatures does matter, for it is a testament to a certain cultural desire to make American women, yourself included, seem simple, stupid, slutty. You know this desire well, for you spent your own teenage years swatting it away with a violin.

  You are not yet sure how you could, in the face of pressure from a massive corporate television empire, write a different list of girls, not sure how you could shape the world in a way that might mean such a list is never again written. You turn in your list of girl caricatures and the executives praise you for it. You get a hearty paycheck. And a few days after you turn in the list you leave MTV to go on tour with The Composer, in search of your own dreams, your own America.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Portland to Seattle

  Mount St. Helens and its surrounding area have been evacuated; the volcano is shooting a plume of steam and ash nine thousand feet into the sky. Ash spits onto the RV’s windshield like smoke-colored snow.

  Kim eyes you over the cover of her Left Behind book and you eye her back over your copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Every once in a while you pause to copy a quote from the book into your journal in different color Sharpies, as if you are in Azar Nafisi’s forbidden literature class and taking notes:

  In green: Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

  — Vladimir Nabokov

  In blue: The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s home.

  —Theodor Adorno

  In red: A good novel makes a space that is seemingly comfortable suddenly uncomfortable.

  —Azar Nafisi

  “What is that book about?” Kim asks, startling you. She is looking at the book’s cover, which has a photograph of two Iranian women. Their heads are bent downward, as if they are reading a book together, and their black chadors are draped in such a way that the two heads seem to be of one body.

  There is something alarming in Kim’s tone, an undercurrent of sarcasm, perhaps, or accusation. You feel the need to defend the book, and the irony of doing so—defending a book that is about defending books—is not lost on you. You try to explain the book’s premise as innocuously as possible: It’s a nonfiction book about a women’s book club in Iran. The women are oppressed by their families and the society in which they live, but they are able to come to a deeper understanding of this oppression and the possibilities for liberation by reading works of banned Western literature. You say something like this. But this is not the answer Kim is seeking.

  What she really wants to talk about is something else, something more local, more immediate. What she really wants is to have the angry conversation that so many Americans are having these days, at their dinner tables, at their watercoolers, at their church picnics and family reunions. Even before it starts, you know what conversation this is, and that the chances of it going well are slim.

  “Tell me something,” she says. “Why does their religion say it’s okay to kill us?”

  Tell me something, Kim. Are you not reading a Left Behind book that fantasizes about the day when all non-Christians will suffer tortuous, Book of Revelations–prophesied deaths while you and all the other Christians are raptured up to heaven where, what? Do you get seventy virgins as well?

  But you don’t say that. Because you’re scared. But what are you afraid of? You do not, like Azar Nafisi, live in postrevolution Iran. You do not live in mortal terror of the Ayatollah or the Secret Police. At best, you fear jeopardizing your job, but if you’re being honest, what you really fear is awkwardness. You fear that Kim will become angry with you. You fear that she won’t like you.

  So you say something meant to be conciliatory.

  “I think acts of terrorism have more to do with politics than religion,” you say, cautiously. “But I agree with you that the terrorists themselves might have religious motives. Like the 9/11 hijackers probably thought they were doing something good for God’s sake.”

  “But Muslims don’t believe in God,” she says.

  “Of course they do,” you say, shocked by this, though you know you shouldn’t be. “See, that’s actually kind of an offensive thing to say. ‘Allah’ is just the Arabic word for God. Most Muslims are really good, religious people, like religious Christians. The Quran actually contains a lot of the same stories as the Bible—”

  “He’s not God!” she yells, furious. “Allah is not God! He’s just not!”

  She throws down her book and stomps to the back of the RV, slamming the door of The Composer’s room behind her.

  A few hours later, when you are parked beside the PBS station in Portland, you try to reconcile with her. You don’t know why you do this, other than you just want your own small world to be peaceful and comfortable. No need for the Iraq War to expand into the RV.

  “Hey, uh, Kim?” you begin in your most apologetic tone. “I wasn’t trying to say Allah was God . . .”

  You think that somehow this statement coming out of your mouth is okay because what you’re really trying to say is that you didn’t mean to disrespect her Christianity, even though you don’t feel like you have. But she interrupts you midapology.

  “I hope not,” she says curtly. And she turns on her heels and walks away again.

  By this point you are in a rage. You are about to blow your top, explode, shoot ash, annihilate. And not only because you think Kim’s views are ignorant and bigoted, but because you feel she’s not even playing by the rules of her own game. You were trying to do the “Christian” thing here, you think, extend the olive branch, and she is setting the branch on fire.

  You sit on a park bench beside the public television station in one of the most liberal cities in America. You know it is politically incorrect to hate someone. You know it goes against your polite secular humanist principles to hate another human being. (“Never say hate,” your parents said when you were growing up. “You can never hate anyone,” said the nice Wiccan lesbian vegetarian Sunday school teachers at the Unitarian Universalist Church your family attended. Enlightened liberal progressive secular humanists are free, to think or do or feel anything. Except for hate.)

  But your hand shakes as you scribble Kim’s words into your journal.

  Like most people who find themselves in a blind rage, what you really feel, beneath the anger, is helplessness. Americans, you now realize, are no better at sniffing out bullshit propaganda about weapons of mass destruction than they are at detecting bullshit musical performances. The war you protested has exploded into daily mass killings. Hometown pals are losing their limbs and their minds and their lives. And if the polls are correct, the president who started it all (Why? For what?) is about to be reelected because people like Kim think all Muslims want to kill her. She is no better, you think, than the Egyptians who said to your face that September 11th was cause for celebration, that all Americans deserve
to die for supporting military dictatorships and oil kingdoms. But unlike those Egyptians, whom you never got to know well, Kim is a visible and precise target for your rage. She’s worse than Bush, you think, because he wouldn’t have been elected if not for Kim and others like her. Ignorant America. Ugly America.

  Though you don’t realize it at the time, you are holding Kim—a nice woman and talented musician who, despite not liking you, has done plenty of nice things for you on tour—personally responsible for the Iraq War.

  No, it’s worse than that. You are holding Kim responsible for American indifference to the war, and the effect that indifference has had on you, personally. For your failure to get any job in which you could play a small role in helping bridge the deepening waters of misunderstanding between America and the Middle East. For the way that this failure, compounded on top of other failures, has literally driven you crazy, to the point where you can no longer tell whether or not your body has to pee, no longer tell what is real and what is fake. You think you hate Kim, but what you really hate is the fact that in the middle of two catastrophic wars, it is easier to hold a job fake-fiddling, playing calming music for Americans while Baghdad burns, than it is to get a job reporting from the middle of the blaze.

  (Years later, in a New York City graduate-level writing class full of Ivy Leaguers whose politics and sensibilities are the exact opposite of Kim’s, you will spend months writing about the Middle East. Then, one week, you will turn in a piece about being a fake violinist in America and everyone will say, This, oh this! This is so much more interesting! This is what we want to read about!)

  After your fight, you and Kim never again share more than a few words. Unlike the women in Reading Lolita in Tehran, you and Kim have no brilliant professor to save you, no one who encourages you to see things from the other person’s point of view. You don’t share an experience of reading a great work of literature together and then come to a better understanding of the anger you feel toward the political situation in your country. You don’t come to respect each other’s different religious beliefs. You don’t do anything except become silent and hostile toward each other. Even your shared love of music cannot save you.

  And as for you—the person who once thought she’d be a good war correspondent, the person who now can’t stand on stage playing her violin without thinking she’s going to pee on herself and die—you blindly copy quotations with your colored Sharpie pens while the earth rumbles and the sky rains ash. You do not question why you’re doing so. You do not interrogate your own anger to see whether it is the righteous kind born of injustice or the selfish kind born of personal failure. You do not wander past the prideful boundaries of intellectual detachment to notice what the words might imply for you, personally:

  In purple: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  PART IV

  The Sound

  We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

  —Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

  and all the children,

  all of them,

  waded into the music

  as if it were water

  —David Lee Garrison, “Bach in the DC Subway”

  West Virginia

  1989

  All of the children in your elementary school assemble in the cafeteria, which is also the gym, which also has a small stage. It is Christmastime, and there is a Christmas star hanging above you, and you will perform “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which happens to be the only song you know how to play. This was all your idea, inserting a violin solo into the school Christmas pageant, and your teachers, who know you well enough to know that once you want to do something you will pester them until you can do it, have said, Oh, yes. A violin song for the Christmas pageant. How nice. Sure, you can play your violin, honey.

  You are not nervous about playing your violin in front of the whole school, but your dad is. As he tucks you into bed the night before your performance, he issues gentle warnings. He says you’re doing a great job with lessons and practicing, but it’s just that, well, you still kind of squeak and scratch a lot. The other kids might be mean and laugh. Kids can be cruel, he says. Uh-huh, you say. They won’t laugh, you tell him.

  So you stand in front of the hundreds of other kids and play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” You play each note very slowly, because you cannot yet play the violin any faster than note by tortuous note. You screech. You scratch. You sound God-awful.

  Just as you expected, no one laughs. Instead there is dead silence, stillness so unusual for a gymnasium full of children that years later you will remember how deep and powerful that quiet is. You scratch out the last note and the cafeteria-gym-auditorium fills with the sound of small hands clapping. You take a bow, triumphant, but are not surprised. You expected everyone to think you were great because in your eight-year-old head, a head that has not yet learned to doubt itself or feel guilty about being too showy, a head that has not yet encountered life in the body, you think your ability to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” speaks for itself. You think it’s great, and so it’s no surprise to you that the other kids think it’s great, too.

  But later you do overhear kids saying something bad about you, something very surprising. You are in the girl’s bathroom after the pageant, and two older girls who you don’t know are talking about you.

  “Was she really playing the violin?” one girl asks.

  “No way,” the other girl says. “It was a tape player.”

  “Yeah, it was a tape player,” the first girl agrees.

  You are so shocked by this conversation, so angry, so determined to set the record straight, that it doesn’t occur to you that this is a twisted sort of compliment—these girls thought your scratchy squeaky playing was too good to be believed. You had been warned that the kids might laugh at you; you had never considered they’d regard you as too good to be real. But many of them did. They came up to you on the playground, in the lunch line, on the school bus, and asked, “Were you really playing?”

  Yes, you say. Yes, yes. It was real. It wasn’t a tape player. Yes, I can prove it. Yes, yes, it was real, it was real, it was real. Yes, I was really playing. Yes, it was really me.

  Who Is The Composer? III

  What The Pirate says:

  There are actually two pirates, Good Pirate and Bad Pirate, both played by The Composer. The VHS tape—a thirty-minute demo of a children’s television program—opens with Good Pirate wearing a tricorn, wig, and mustache. He has three mates on his ship: a parrot, a fish, and a small purple dinosaur that appears to be Barney, but whom Good Pirate calls Diney. Diney is cradled in Good Pirate’s arm, for Diney is first mate.

  It is almost impossible to make out what Good Pirate says because he mumbles in an accent that can only be described as cockney meets surfer dude, though it is possible to ascertain that the phrase “great thundering pirates” is used at least seven times in thirty minutes. Good Pirate and his stuffed animals are on a ship. They have a map that grants wishes. The bird wishes to find his long-lost bird parents, so Good Pirate intones, “Oh ye map, oh ye map,” and the ship sails “straight to the North Star.” But not nautically, as in the direction of the North Star. No, the ship actually goes to outer space.

  But then! The screen splits. Bad Pirate appears. Bad Pirate, played by The Composer with his hair slicked back, steals the show. He is the video’s only comprehensible character, speaking in the hyper-articulated vowels stereotypically assigned to gay men. Bad Pirate’s accent is consistent and convincing. Bad Pirate holds a mirror up to his face as he talks. He is surrounded by gold coins and empty wine bottles. Whenever Bad Pirate appears, the music changes from the pirated sounds of the Titanic soundtrack to the pirated sounds of smooth jazz.

  “Tag! You’re it!” says Bad Pirate to
Good Pirate.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Seattle

  “Fuck The Composer!” Harriet yells.

  We are a Seattle postcard: Space Needle. Pouring rain. A shared umbrella. Both of us too drunk on the beer from a grunge-deco bar to hold the umbrella properly.

  “Fuck him!” she yells again. She hands me the umbrella and runs away, toward the Space Needle.

  “Where are you going?” I yell after her.

  “Fuck him!” she yells as she runs farther and farther away.

  Harriet has never acted like this before. Before this moment, she has traveled across America while keeping her normal composure—a cheery, faith-based serenity so unshakable that at times I wonder if she is actually an eighty-year-old Midwestern church lady trapped in the body of a cover girl. We joke about The Composer on a regular basis in private. But yelling “Fuck The Composer!” and running around in the rain under the Space Needle marks a new level of dissatisfaction.

  Years later, I ask her what she was so upset about and neither one of us will be able to remember the specifics. Our suspicion is that something pissed her off at the concert that night. Harriet had graduate degrees in violin performance from good conservatories, but each night, The Composer introduced her as the woman with “the biggest, most beautiful smile.” Perhaps, after dozens of concerts, she was sick of smiling, sick of carrying the weight of beauty for a musical imposter who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) appreciate her actual talent. Or maybe it was the fact that The Composer had five boxes of apples FedExed to Seattle from Maine, and there was nowhere in the RV to stand or sit. We’ve been replaced by fruit, I can hear her saying. Maybe he can just put those apples on stage during the concerts and we can go home.