Except, that is, for the one public situation where you are able to be a full human being. Even throughout the brutal years of middle and high school, you have been able to keep this one idea intact: The other kids won’t laugh at you when you’re playing the violin. They just won’t.
You take your place at the front of the gymnasium and adjust your music stand. You don’t feel nervous. You feel pumped, amped-up. Years later you’ll marvel at the small yet profound difference between adrenaline-fueled focus and adrenaline-fueled panic. Your accompanist—the eccentric town piano teacher who generously volunteers her virtuosic skills whenever you need them—takes her seat at the school’s piano that has been rolled into the gym from the sports equipment closet. You plant your left foot so your toes align with the scroll of your violin. You lift your violin to your chin and nestle the chinrest button into the soft flesh of your neck. You align the five fingers of your right hand into the correct bow position—thumb curved under like a claw, forefinger slightly jutting out, middle and ring fingers arched gently, the pinkie perched on top. You take one sharp breath and begin.
The praeludium’s slow tempo makes it seem easy to play. The piece starts off in the lower realm of the violin, where any beginner can hit the notes. But then, slowly, it marches upward, toward the highest notes, the nose-picking section. If the violinist loses focus, the piece becomes a shrieking mess. And yet, the greatest challenge of the praeludium is not the high-pitched notes. It is the violinist’s knowledge that the allegro—The Holy Shit Allegro—is coming up next.
When you reach the last note of the praeludium you barely pause. You don’t want to give anyone the chance to clap between movements, but most of all you don’t want to have time to think about what you’re going to do next. You take another sharp breath, you stop thinking, stop being. You are just doing:
Already two lines deep because it’s that damn fast. So fast the fingers can’t be seen. They blur in the silver horizon above the left hand. Arpeggios. Waves of notes. Hundreds more coming up, already past. Double-stops: Two notes, three notes, four crashing notes at a time and the bow goes from down up down to da-down-da-down-up-up da-lift-da up, lift, lift, plant da-down. Bow hairs breaking under the strain. And now here is The Holy Shit. The piano accompaniment drops out and plays one deep rumbling. Your fingers fly up the neck of your violin. You dangle on the highest note like a mountain climber clinging to the summit by a fingertip. It is never about conquering the mountain. It is always about conquering the fear of the fall. Six years of practicing these sixteenth notes one note at a time at 60 beats per minute. Then 90. Then 125. Now at 168. In the background, beyond the notes, there is the silence. The deep, profound silence of an audience that has stopped moving. There is nothing on earth like it. A moment—this moment—is no longer life in the body. You are outside the body. No one, not even you, is thinking about your body. Now the descent down the violin’s fingerboard, a knotted downward ladder, a cat’s cradle of notes, some repeated, some not. A countermelody: it sounds like two entirely different songs, on two different violins, coming out of one. Sweeping arpeggios. Bow hairs breaking from both ends with puffs of rosin smoke. Last line: Adagio. Slow down. As if to say, there you have it, ta-da, hold the last note all the way to the frog, vibrato, Holy Shit, done.
It was far from the best performance of “Praeludium and Allegro” that the world has ever heard. There were mistakes. I missed notes in the double-stops, flubbed several arpeggios. I doubt I maintained a pace of 168 beats per minute. But it was the best violin performance of my life, the best that my body and my violin would ever allow me to produce. And everything about it—from the technical aspects like the power needed for the praeludium, to the mental concentration required for the allegro, to the eventual transformation of deep silence to a thunderous standing ovation that lasted even longer than I expected (I knew they wouldn’t laugh), a standing ovation that people mentioned to me years later after I had left for New York to become a “professional violinist”—everything about the performance was real.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Chicago
A few days after the Carnegie Hall concert is canceled, the Ensemble performs in front of the largest audience yet on the God Bless America Tour. Nearly five hundred people wearing semi-formal attire arrive at a glittering concert hall in Chicago. When the ushers open the auditorium’s grand doors, the crowd enters with hushed reverence, checking their tickets and finding their places in the dizzying rows of red plush velvet seats. The large stage is almost bare; there are three microphone stands and an electric keyboard. A large mustachioed man wearing an official God Bless America Tour 2004 jacket does crowd control, answering questions, selling CDs, manning the film projectors, a teary twinkle in his eye.
Enter The Composer stage left, bouncing toward the keyboard with childlike exuberance, waving and beaming at the cheering audience. He wears a blue suit jacket with black pants and black running sneakers. Two violinists and a flutist follow him onto the stage. The Composer presses the Play button on a portable Sony CD player he bought at a Walmart back in Philadelphia for $14.95.
One of the violinists—the short girl with glittering rhinestone barrettes in her long dark hair, the one who is younger than the other musicians—this violinist flees the stage while The Composer talks to the audience about The Hollywood Celebrity. She returns a few minutes later, just as The Composer tells the audience he is praying for them to keep safe, as if they are in mortal peril, as if right after the concert the audience will leave their seats, exit the glittering concert hall, and storm the beaches of Normandy. If anyone in the audience turns to the person beside him to whisper, “Well, gee, guess that one violinist gal had to pee!” they are wrong. She does not have to pee, which she knows even as she sprints to the bathroom.
Her brain is scrambled. She will die (but not before peeing herself), her legs breaking, her mouth vomiting blood. Will she knock out her teeth when she faints headfirst onto the stage? Or will she fall backward and smash the back of her skull? Will the force of her body hitting the floor cause the stage lights to loosen from the rafters and fall down on top of her, electrocuting her and setting her on fire? Or will her ribs pop loose from her rib cage while her lungs slowly deflate? And at what point in this process will she stop smiling? Will her violin be crushed under the weight of her falling corpse, or will it survive intact? Will her parents donate it to some ambitious youngster in Appalachia? Some kid who loves the sound of the violin and thinks if they practice—very hard, every day—they can become anything they want to be, because hell, this is America?
Somewhere in the back of her disaster brain—the brain that is firing the wrong signals, that tells her she is not running from a bear but already being devoured by it—she is learning something important. And the lesson is this: There is something in the world far more terrifying than humiliation or failure or death. And it is just like FDR said: Fear itself. And if she doesn’t murder the bastard, this archvillain called Fear, she’s going to be toast for real. She doesn’t yet have a plan for vanquishing him. She has yet to learn about psychiatric remedies. She doesn’t yet know why Fear has chosen this moment in her life to make his sudden entrance, licking his chops. For the early twenties, a particularly cruel age to be struck down by fear, is a stage in life when tremendous bravery is required of a woman—the bravery to discover what she wants, what she cannot abide, what she needs to make a living and be among the living.
But she knows this: A million times more than any other emotion or experience, fear has the strength and ability to mangle her into something different from what she truly is, something phony and fake and cowardly. And now, surprised and twisted and disoriented and broken as she is by fear’s sudden arrival, she realizes that she needs to fight it, fight for her life.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Cincinnati to Kent
The volunteers at the Cincinnati PBS station meet our RV at the loading dock and beg us to hurry a
s fast as we can. There was a drive-by shooting of the station the week before, they say. It’s not safe for us to be out here with the equipment and the instruments. Who does a drive-by shooting of a PBS station? I ask, hoping the answer is “Muppets.” Oscar is the obvious culprit, but my money is on Burt. It’s always the quiet one with obsessive hobbies.
The real answer is less exciting: “Gangs,” the PBS volunteer says. “Gangs.” After the concert we hightail it out of Cincinnati, leaving behind a hotel where the only thing louder than the drunken sex workers stumbling down the corridors were the cockroaches scuttling off to the side to make way, cockroaches so numerous that Harriet and I kept our hotel room light on all night to prevent cockroach parades across our sleeping faces. Good-bye, Cincinnati, we say. Good-bye and good luck.
We drive on a secondary road through rural Ohio. It is late at night. I sit up in the passenger seat with Patrick. Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” plays at low volume. Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home. We pass through rural town after rural town, some so dark they seem less like towns and more like hallucinations in the night. The skeletons of dark Victorians, their lightless windows like hollow eyes, watch us as we go by. The one stoplight in each town casts a green glow on an empty world. Driving through these towns at night is like driving through a memory of someone else’s dream. When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
The next day, somewhere in the countryside outside of Canton, Ohio, we stop at a Blimpie sandwich shop. There is a two-dollar special going on for the meatball sub and the place is packed, the line out the door. I wait in line, too. I know everyone here, or feel like I do, like I grew up with all of them. There is the sweet-looking teenage waitress with a butterfly tattoo on the back of her neck, the potbellied truck driver with his thumb in his belt loop, the nurse’s assistant in the teddy-bear–printed scrubs, the frail elderly couple leaning on each other as they look up at the sandwich menu. These are country people, I think. Small-town people. I know it is so because I was once one of them. But I don’t know if I’m one of them anymore. The only reason I can recognize small-town, country people—the only reason I see them as distinct—is because I left them behind.
I can see, as the small-town people greet the Blimpie sandwich workers by name and ask about their families, that they (we?) know something that suburbanites and city dwellers don’t. There is a unique wisdom of the small American community, the isolated rural hamlet, and it is this: Everyone matters. Not in some clichéd humanistic sense, but in a literal, practical sense. For in a town of a few thousand people or less, the person who makes your meatball sub at the Blimpie is the same person who raised you at the day care, will raise your kids at the day care, the same person who will arrive with the volunteer Rescue Squad and perform CPR on your unbreathing body, the same person who will empty your bedpan in the nursing home, the same person who will cremate your bones, bake a casserole for your funeral, auction off your worldly possessions when you are gone from this earth.
A sudden gust of wind blows through the open door of the Blimpie and a great roar comes from the sky. We, the country people, turn away from the sandwich counter, our hair blowing back, the truck driver losing his hat. There, in the field in front of the Blimpie, is Air Force One, touching down in America’s most contested swing state a few days before the election. We stare and gape at the plane. But then the wind dies down and we all turn back toward the two-dollar meatball subs and the smoothie machine and the rack of potato chips. We only have a few more minutes to procure our lunches before getting back to work—at the school, the hospital, the nursing home, the funeral parlor, the fake violin tour. And then, after work is done and the kids are put to bed and the town goes silent and dark except for the green glow of the one stoplight, there will be time for dreaming.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Kent, Ohio
That night in Kent, The Composer says he wants to talk to us before the concert begins. He is concerned, very concerned, about our lack of smiling. Some people out there have cancer, guys! Everything is riding on us smiling, it is life and death, and here we are, not doing it enough. (We aren’t smiling, I think, because we trained for years to focus only on what music sounds like, not what it looks like, and smiling widely with a flute in the mouth or violin under the chin prevents the best sound. Smiling is no virtue to sound. It is silent. It gets in the way.) We smile and promise him we will smile.
I usually respond to The Composer’s smile lectures by mocking them later with Harriet, in the privacy of a hotel room. But now, in Kent, I feel something different, something like the old me, the girl who once stormed the small-town stage and played the violin for real, the girl who once thought she could be a war correspondent, because she was brave and kept a cool head and never worried about whether or not she had to pee.
And so, when we step on the stage I smile. Like a lunatic. I smile my fake smile with an overenthusiasm that would appear insane even to the most hardcore fan. When The Composer turns to look at me so we can share smiles in the middle of the opening song, he recoils in horror. For a brief but memorable moment he stops smiling and the ever-present terror in his eyes becomes the singular, pronounced emotion on his face. Then he wrenches his stage smile back on and tries to avoid looking at me. But he can’t help occasional furtive peeks. Each time he glances at me he sees me smiling back at him, but my smile is too wide, too over-the-top, too fake. I am giving him the velociraptor.
After the concert, he doesn’t know what to say to me. “Wow . . . um . . . you were really smiling!” is what he says. But we both know I have beaten him at his own game, have used his own weapons against him. We both know he’ll never ask me to fake smile again. “Smile!” said the teachers in middle school, a time of life when everyone is universally miserable. “Don’t y’all respect yourselves? Have some pride!” “Smile!” said the Denny’s training video you watched in high school to become a ranch- and syrup-covered server of pancakes making less than minimum wage. “No one wants to get food from someone who is unhappy!” “Smile!” command the men gathered on street corners in New York City, the ones you pass at sunset on your way back from the subway or the grocery store or the laundromat. “You’d be a whole lot prettier with a smile on that face . . .”
It’s only then, after the hardcore fans have left and we’re packing up and The Composer says, “Wow . . . um . . . you were really smiling!” that I realize, for the first time since Little Rock, Arkansas, I didn’t have a panic attack during the concert. My rebellion of over-the-top fake-smiling saved me. I didn’t flee the stage at halftime. I didn’t think once about having to pee or my impending death. Not once.
Who Is The Composer? IV
What he says, when Harriet asks him to give his thoughts on the God Bless America Tour:
The Composer: We met a lot of really, really nice people. We had a really, really good time. It was really fun just saying, “Hi, everyone!” And meeting them. They were really nice. Weren’t they nice? They were nice people. It was great! And you know sometimes, sometimes, sometimes we didn’t sell CDs. So it was burgers tonight, you know what I’m saying? But at other times it was okay . . . I guess all I want to say is that it really never ends.
Harriet: That’s for sure.
The Composer: All my life’s a circle from sunrise to sundown.
Harriet: The circle of life? Is that what it is?
The Composer: No, that’s when people eat each other and stuff.
Harriet: Oh my.
The Composer: No, this is like, a circle, a sunrise, like to give you hope . . .
Harriet: Okay.
The Composer: The circle of life is more like if you eat something like a fish, well . . .
Harriet: You poop it out and something else eats it?
The Composer: Yeah, no. This is something different. Like this is my circle. Your circle ends at the end of the tour. I’m eating you. I’m sorry. It’s kind of like a bad way of saying
sorry. You know, so you don’t have to feel guilty? You know what I’m saying?
If It Sounds Like Titanic
2005
I worked for The Composer for nearly four years. In all of that time, there was only one concert in which my violin was truly audible. It did not happen in Blessed America. It happened in China.
After the God Bless America Tour ended, I hid in my parents’ basement, dodging lethargic wasps that fell out of the rafters onto my foldout bed. I became skilled at Mario Bros. while worrying whether my sessions with the town psychiatrist would work if I took too many bathroom breaks. It went on like this, day after day, waking up, winning the princess from the dragon, and wondering whether I would ever be able to make it a few hours in a public setting without having a full-blown panic attack. How would I ever get a real job? The Middle East was now out of the question. I didn’t even know if I could make it through the day as an office assistant, let alone a war reporter.
Then one day Jake called me to see if I could do a gig: a three-week, eight-city tour of China. I don’t care how crazy I am, I thought. I’m going.
When I look back at the Ensemble’s tour of China, what strikes me is how much confusion there was. There was the usual bewilderment of being in a foreign country and not speaking the language, but that wasn’t enough to explain the bizarre scenarios that the Ensemble found itself in on a daily basis. For there was also the confusion of bringing a fake musical performance to a foreign country, and the confusion of being in China with The Composer—a man who did plenty of confusing things in his own country, a man who was generally confused no matter what the setting, a man who believed that everything would be okay if we all smiled—even though smiling at strangers in China can be misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted depending on your point of view) as foolishness.
Sounds Like Titanic Page 20